Subject: (whorl) Oh That Hy!

From: Alice Turner <al at interport.net>
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1998 01:33:51 +0000

>  Well, she is beautiful and passionate, a combination that is pretty
>attractive.  If you want a more literary interpretaion, I figured that
>it was related to the allegory of the church as the bride of Christ
>which is also tied up with Mary Magdelene imagery ("whoring after false
>gods" sort of thing).  Silk is a redemtive figure (though not exactly
>Christic) and Hy seemed to me to be the worldly person who is loved, for
>all of their faults and failings.  Certainly Silk is on a mission to
>save her - especially at the very end of the book.

My goodness, that seems a bit much. My own opinion simply is that Hy is No
Better Than She Should Be and also Big Trouble, and that we haven't heard
the last of her--she's much too devious and useful a character to abandon
(alga crosses her cilia and hopes).

>  I'm still not sure I understand the change in Silk that takes place
>after he and Hy sleep together and he has a second illumination from
>the Outsider.  (It's also been a while since I read that part.)  Silk
>certainly seems changed to me.  But the storyline also seems to get
>murkier.

This is so (both the change and the murkiness). That's why I'm hoping very
much that Wolfe doesn't simply pitch us forward by decades, leaving our old
friends in the past. That would be sadistic.

-alga

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1998 08:39:01 +0000

> (alga crosses her cilia and hopes).

I don't know.  Even I who reject a lot of the allegorical interpretations
that get passed around on this list thought that the "flawed bride of
Christ" stuff was as blatant as Silk having a lame foot, his "death" and
resurrection. 

Of course, I think the Bride of Christ is also Big Trouble and maybe even
No Better Than She Should Be.

-Rostrum

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From: Alex David Groce <adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu>
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1998 12:06:21 +0000

> No Better Than She Should Be.

Which seems to be a fair description of the church at various times, so it
works very well on both the self-sacrificing God-like love and the "silly nice
priest falls for treacherous but hot lady..."  As to the second Enlightenment
after the honeymoon, it seems to imply that the Outsider approves of Silk
wedding Hy (by the way, who else thinks that ONLY Wolfe would have a massive
four-volume series and put a double wedding involving the four major characters
offstage!).  Thus giving the allegory a big boost.
	I'm still betting on Hy as head of the Trivigaunti spies, as well.
Although how important (if it's true) that will be in Short Sun (assuming she
shows up) I don't know.
	Another thing, that just struck me today--I suspect this is pure
coincidence, but doesn't Hyacinth actually work fairly well as being named
after the Hyacinth girl in "The Waste Land?"  Thus tying to Vivian Eliot,
another marriage that was lots of trouble (at least Silk can be sure Hy won't
be sleeping with Bertrand Russell, unless things get very odd...)
-- 
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." - John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu)
Senior (Computer Science/Multidisciplinary Studies in Technology & Fiction)
'98-99 NCSU AITP Student Chapter President
608 Charleston Road, Apt. 1E (919)-233-7366
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~adgroce

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From: Alice Turner <al at interport.net>
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1998 18:50:30 +0000

A letter I read today in the New York Review of Books can be seen as support
for the theological reading of Silk. It responds to an essay by Simon Leys
entitled "The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote" by quoting a letter from
Doestoevsky to his niece about the novel he is writing:

"The main idea of the novel is to present a positively beautiful man. This
is the most difficult subject in the world, especially as it is now....There
is only one positively beautiful man in the world, Christ, and the
phenomenon of this limitlessly, infinitely beautiful person is an infinite
miracle in itself....I'd only mention that of all the beautiful individuals
in Christian literature, one stands out as the most perfect, Don
Quixote...Wherever compassion toward ridiculed and ingenious beauty is
presented, the reader's sympathy is aroused. The mystery of humor lies in
the excitation of compassion."

The novel D. was working on was, of course, -The Idiot-, which features
Prince Myshkin (as this letter-writer, Lev Loseff, states) as his own
variation on "Christ as Don Quixote" or "Christ Ridiculous." Leys responds
generously and warmly, calling the association between Quixote and Myshkin
"apposite and illuminating."

As I hope this post might be.

-alga