# For Adam and James: Literary Devices, Authorship,

*The Whorl list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 06 Mar 2001*

<https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1254>

> 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.

---

### James Jordan
*06 Mar 2001, 13:11*

My Dear Blattid,
	You've certainly advanced the discussion with fine Points To Ponder.
	Thanks.
	As to your essay question, well if I grasped what you're asking the answer 
to the first half is kind of obvious: Wolfe seeks to show us the 
clumsiness/skill of his narrators at every point. Your observations on the 
seeming Wolfean clumsiness of the collective-children's 3rd person sections 
are helpful -- I guess we can hypothesize that the Narrator lived among 
them for a year or so before leaving for the Whorl, and that much of 
"their" style is drawn from transcripts of "his" narrations.
	And perhaps we can also note the various storytelling episodes in the SS 
series as well as in Citadel of the Autarch, and see the last parts of RTW 
as analogous: various voices telling stories.
	It is rather interesting how on the one hand Wolfe praises traditional 
story-telling and literature (i.e., that much great traditional literature 
is "fantasy"), and on the other hand Wolfe uses a kind of hyper-modern 
meta-narrative technique in much of his own writing, which has the effect 
of putting the reader at several removes from the story, and subtly 
undermines it.
	Oh, well, that's our Gene. You have to take the "sweet" along with the 
"bitter," the wonderful story along with being impelled into literary 
criticism at the same time!

Patera Nutria


*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

---

### Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
*07 Mar 2001, 16:20 · follows James Jordan*

Rather busy & don't have time to reply in detail -- but -- Adam,
you seem to be barking up a very odd tree indeed here:

> I may be missing something, but I don't get your point here. 
> Is it stated that Nettle read the book while "Horn" was present?  

Ummm... when else _could_ she have read it? The _only_ time
for her to read it (and for the children to know she has 
read it and say so) is after "the Narrator" arrives but before 
he departs -- because she departs with him. Ergo, he was in
New Viron long enough for her to read it.

Gotta scuttle,

--Blattid of the Lupine Vermin Patrol


*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

---