{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1252", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "whorl", "thread": { "id": 1252, "subject": "Authorship of RTTW third-person sections (spoilers)", "messages": 2, "voices": 2, "first": "2001-03-06T00:08:05+00:00", "last": "2001-03-06T08:55:43+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Adam Stephanides", "address": "adamsteph at earthlink.net" }, "date": "2001-03-06T00:08:05+00:00", "subject": "(whorl) Authorship of RTTW third-person sections (spoilers)", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "on 3/1/01 8:21 PM, Michael Andre-Driussi at mantis at sirius.com wrote:\nAdam wrote:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "Unlike Wolfe's narrative games\nin other works, I can't see that the children's authorship of the\nthird-person sections is anything more than a device to increase Wolfe's\nmystification of \"Horn\"'s identity." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "What I meant by this comment was not that the children's authorship should\nnot affect our interpretation of RTTW. Rather, I meant that I don't find it\nbelievable that the children wrote these sections, although I am compelled\nto accept it as \"true\". [1]\n\nAs I said in an earlier post, the children are from a poor colony, and three\nof them are from not-well-off families, while one is a servant. It is quite\nunlikely that they would have received an education which would develop in\nthem sophisticated literary tastes, or skills; nor is there any indication\nthat any of them have such interests, iirc. I find it hard to believe,\ntherefore, that they would write prose like \"from time to time ... some\nmotion of Pig's evoked the soft speech of foliage. A faint and liquid music\nsucceeded it, waking his tongue and lips to thirst.\" (50) (Compare this\nwith the sections written by Hoof and Daisy individually.)\n\nMoreover, as Nutria pointed out in the post that started all this, the\nchildren employ narrative strategies which are typical of Wolfe. The\nconcealment of \"Horn\"'s identity I have already discussed. Another example\nis the \"'Seen me h'ears'\" passage. We are given these words of Pig's but no\ndescription of his ears, and left to make the correct inferences ourselves.\nThis is quite typical of Wolfe; why the children should be playing coy in\nthis manner I have no idea.\n\nAdd to these the absence of any discernible difference between \"litSilkhorn\"\nand \"real Silkhorn\" as seen in his own narration. All in all, to me the\nthird-person passages read as if Wolfe had originally written them as\n\"objective\" third-person narrative, and only after the fact decided to\nattribute them to Hoof, Hide, Vadsig and Daisy. (I have no way of knowing\nwhether he really did this or not, of course, and in fact I doubt that he\ndid. But there's nothing in the experience of reading the passages to\ndisprove this that I can see.)" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "The kick of all the Whorl stuff being written by people who have never\nactually been on the Whorl, and never are going to be on the Whorl . . .\nwell. It is somewhat like having the fictional framing of \"`A Story' by\nJohn V. Marsch\" (an anthropological reconstruction/romance) eroded and put\nthrough the pretzel machine in the course of \"V.R.T.,\" only much moreso.\nBecause we read those Whorl chapters as being \"true,\" \"from the Narrator\nnamed Horn by his mother,\" \"based upon firsthand experience,\" etc. Just as\nOBW and IGJ had been.\n\nThe poignancy of N meeting Horn's father; the intensity of the dark; the\nsacrifice of the eye; visits by \"ghosts\" from the beginning (Remora) to the\nend (Crane); N's sense of what any of it means; all vppppt! Gone into a\ndifferent plane." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I'm afraid that I personally did not get a \"kick\" from the revelation of the\nchildren's authorship (both in the sense of enjoyment, and of a jolt). I've\nread a few books, not by Wolfe, in which large portions of narrative, which\nwe have accepted as true, are suddenly revealed to be fictional. I did get\na jolt from these. The difference with RTTW, I think, is that there is no\nalternative account of the events on the Whorl; on the contrary, the\nchildren tell us that the account is as accurate as they could make it, and\nwe have no reason to disbelieve them. Nor does the revelation of the\nchildren's authorship lead us to reevaluate the characters of either\nSilkhorn or the children. [2]" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "This particular fanfic angle might also lead to some of the more tricky\n(\"potentially destabilizing of a given reading\") questions inspired by John\nCrowley's ENGINE SUMMER, since the same can be said of it in its entirety.\nTo the same sort of reader disappointment/thwarting, etc." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "(Spoilers for ENGINE SUMMER)\n\nPresumably by \"potentially destabilizing\" you mean the revelation at the end\nthat Rush's story is not only being narrated by an artificial copy of Rush's\nmind (which we've guessed), but by this mind projected into a living person,\nand that different \"projectees\" tell Rush's story in different ways; and by\n\"thwarting\" you're referring to the fact that we never find out what\nhappened to Rush after he was copied. There is indeed a formal similarity,\nwhich I hadn't noticed. I can't be sure, without rereading the book, why my\nreaction to ENGINE SUMMER was so different. But at a guess, and without a\ncopy at hand, I would say that the revelation in ES serves to fulfill a\nmajor theme of the book, so that when it comes it has a resonance that the\nrevelation in RTTW doesn't. Similarly, because of its thematic role, we\nrecognize that it is an appropriate \"completion\" of Rush's story, nice as it\nwould be to know what happened to the flesh-and-blood Rush; while I have a\nmore difficult time accepting the conclusion of RTTW as a satisfactory\nconclusion of BOTSS (and it's even harder if you believe, as I don't, that\nHorn's spirit is still present at the end). But, as you say, either you\nlike it or you don't.\n\n--Adam\n\n1) To repeat, just so there's no misunderstanding: I am not arguing for an\ninteprertation of the book in which the children are lying about their\nauthorship of these sections.\n\n2) With one exception: although I hate to admit it, one could make a case\nthat the children have, consciously or unconsciously, planted evidence that\nSilk's spirit was in \"Horn\" from his \"arrival\" on the Whorl and that his\ngiving an eye to Pig had nothing to do with collecting Silk-in-Pig. But I\nstill don't think this reading improves the book.\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun." } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "James Jordan", "address": "jbjordan4 at home.com" }, "date": "2001-03-06T08:55:43+00:00", "subject": "Re: (whorl) Authorship of RTTW third-person sections (spoilers)", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "As long as we're on this topic, I personally found the revelation that Horn \nhad written the LS books, and that the children had written the 3rd person \nparts of RTW, annoying. Wolfe has done this kind of \"switchback\" (or \nwhatever you call it) in many short stories, so that at the end we learn \nthat things are not what they have seemed and are impelled to re-read the \nstory (if we want to). Well, that's okay for a short story, but IMHO not \nfor a 1000+ page narrative. It feels to me like a stunt, and little more; \nand to me it diminishes the narrative. It's not as if we have any \"Real \nSilk\" to measure \"Horn's Silk\" by. Re-reading the narrative is not going to \nget us any more than we already have, unless we get some kind of kick out \nof trying to figure out how Horn and Nettle came by each bit of \ninformation. And, as Adam and I have both pointed out, the children's parts \nof RTW just read like plain old Wolfe, and that is not credible.\n\tWell, Wolfe has always done this kind of thing. It's clever in short \npieces, but I find it very annoying and rather pretentious in these long \nnarratives. But to each her/his own, I guess.\n\nPatera Nutria\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun." } ] } ] }