Subject: (whorl) Nightside again, chapter one

From: Jonathan Laidlow <laidlojm at hhs.bham.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 12:28:49 +0000

Stephen Witkoswksi inspired to begin rereading Long Sun again, and 
I'd be grateful for your input folks:

Nightside chapter 1 - two things I noticed:

1. the word 'clockwork' is used three times in the first three pages. 
Patera Silk is 'that absurd clockwork figure' in the parenthesis in 
the second paragraph, and he watches the game 'outside a clockwork 
show whose works had stopped'. This is where Silk has his first 
theophany (love that word!). The Outsider gives him an out of body 
experience and reveals how he is merely a mechanical creation 
(figuratively) who does what he has been programmed to do?
Then again on p11 at the end of the vision: 'a wind that blew ever 
stronger and wilder as clockwork that had never really stopped began 
to turn again'. This then suggests that all is artificial, created - 
the wind is unnatural, but guided by the clockwork maker.

I'm wondering how to reconcile this with Silk's assertion later in 
the chapter that the Outside will not help save the Manteion, Silk is 
the help that is being provided.

2. And another thing,back to  the first paragraph: 'he said that it 
was as though someone who had always been behind him and standing 
(as it were) at both his shoulders had, after so many years of 
pregnant silence, begun to whisper into both his ears'
This echoes TS Eliot's Waste Land: 'Who is that who walks behind you' 
(Eliot's note refers to polar explorers, but that's a red herring). 
Both refer to some passage in the Bible, presumably after the 
Resurrection where Jesus is seen by various people, but where? And 
why?

Jonathan
********************************************************

Jonathan Laidlow
Dept of English - staff pigeonholes
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT, England
0121 414 5976

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---

From: Patri10629 <patri10629 at aol.com>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 13:18:02 +0000

Nice work, Stephen.

In a message dated 12/11/98 8:36:44 AM, LAIDLOJM at hhs.bham.ac.uk writes:

<<Nightside chapter 1 - two things I noticed:

1. the word 'clockwork' is used three times in the first three pages. 
Patera Silk is 'that absurd clockwork figure'<<

Not sure what this means. Perhaps, that Silk, as you say is a puppet of the
Whorl and his church? Or does it refer to his odd tall carriage and somewhat
awkward manner?

 >>in the parenthesis in the second paragraph, and he watches the game
'outside a clockwork 
show whose works had stopped'.<<

Pretty sure this refers to the winding down entropy of the whorl. It has
stopped. But it is also a cue for Silk's Theophany. He is transported out of
time, so to speak, by this Holy Revelation.

This is where Silk has his first theophany (love that word!). The Outsider
gives him an out of body experience and reveals how he is merely a mechanical
creation (figuratively) who does what he has been programmed to do?<<

Silk is a loyal obedient servent of the church. "A good man following a bad
religion," as Wolfe has said.

Then again on p11 at the end of the vision: 'a wind that blew ever 
stronger and wilder as clockwork that had never really stopped began 
to turn again'. This then suggests that all is artificial, created - 
the wind is unnatural, but guided by the clockwork maker.>>

I take this as something like, "After the theophany, time resumed and the
apparent order of the whorl continued.

The clock work imagery, I believe refers to an outdated mode of looking at the
universe--Ptolemy? The old Gods and the constructed artificial whorl. False
gods, false paradigms.

The Outsider is from a whole other realm of being--a transcendent God. Silk
through his revelation is his intervention. Christ, obviously.

Forgive if all this is obvious.

Patrick O'Leary

<A HREF="http://members.aol.com/patri10629/index.html">Patrick O'Leary's Home
Page</A>

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From: Jason Voegele <voegele.6 at osu.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 11:48:00 +0000

>Resurrection where Jesus is seen by various people, but where? And

This reminds me of the passage in PEACE, in which Aunt Olivia is speaking to
Katie and says:

"Who's that behind you?"
"It's just little Den, Katie.  He's been there before."
"Yes, but there's another, dimmer yet, behind him."
"I can only see the one behind me, Katie."

I think mantis cited the Eliot reference when I first mentioned this.  In
fact, straight from the archives:

<mantis>
I have to admit that this rings bells
in the literary dept. of my brain--T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland,"
wherein the same haunting question is derived from the journals of
English adventurers climbing Mt. Everest and having hallucinations
from lack of oxygen.  (It also evokes the missionaries in the jungle
garden of Nessus sensing the presence of Severian and Agia.)  But, to
get back to PEACE, I suspect that the dimmer one is the reader."You."
</mantis>

I don't have anything new to add to the discussion, since (sigh) I've never
read The Wasteland, but I thought I'd throw something out there for you all
to chew on.

Jason Voegele
voegele.6 at osu.edu

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From: Alex David Groce <adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 11:58:40 +0000

> Resurrection where Jesus is seen by various people, but where? And 
	Road to Emmaus, Luke 24:13-31.  I think it's in there same reason Eliot
used it--an explicit reference to Emmaus, probably here to indicate (in part)
the "resurrection" of the true church, through Silk, in the Whorl..
-- 
"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: William H. Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 01:40:53 +0000

>read The Wasteland, but I thought I'd throw something out there for you all

I'm afraid I just can't let this pass, even though I suppose I am picking
nits. In the passage quoted above from _Peace_, the person speaking to Katy
is not Aunt Olivia, it is Hannah, Weer's mother's (and grandmother's) cook,
as a girl. This passage occurs when Weer is remembering when Hannah told
him (when he was a boy) a story that her (Hannah's) mother's
maid-of-all-work, Katie, had told her. Katie can 'see' Weer listening to
the story and "another, dimmer yet, behind him." Hannah can tell her that
Weer (little Den) is there because she 'knows' that she is telling him the
story. (Why can Katie see Weer and the one behind him? Because she is Irish
and has second sight?) The "dimmer" one is, I agree with mantis, the
reader, who is reading the story that Katie told Hannah who told Weer who
wrote it down for us to read, thereby telling it to us.

I came to this conclusion myself, long ago, after reading _Peace_ for the
3rd or 4th time and puzzling over this passage. The realization that Wolfe
was, in effect, talking about *me* here hit me with the force of revelation
at the time. I found it a much more effective trick than the one Wolfe used
in _Exodus from the Long Sun_ where the alert reader discovers that the
person telling the story is Horn (when he refers to himself as "I" at one
point). (I have to admit I wasn't a very alert reader; I didn't really
notice this until it was pointed out to me in this list.)

I won't claim that my interpretation of the passage is the only correct
one, but to me it the only one that makes sense.

William Ansley

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From: Kevin J. Maroney <kmaroney at crossover.com>
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 14:50:34 +0000

At 01:40 AM 12/13/98 -0500, William Ansley wrote:
>I found it a much more effective trick than the one Wolfe used

I noticed it and assumed that it was a copyediting mistake until I got to
the end! I don't know what that says about me.
Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at crossover.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html

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From: Derek Bell <dbell at maths.tcd.ie>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 20:20:36 +0000

>the end! I don't know what that says about me.

	Me almost three - when it was pointed out on the list, I
realised that Wolfe was up to some very sneaky things. I had to admit
that at first I was a bit disappointed in the Long Sun series,
thinking at first that Wolfe's talent had diminished. I was delighted
to discover that though he was chanting plainly, he was still up to
his old tricks. (Leaving clues and indirect implications in the text;
making philosophical & theological arguments in the text.)

	Hmmm... Is it just me or has anyone else resorted to religious
imagery in describing Wolfe's strategies?

	I suppose Wolfe's least satisfying work was _Pandora, by Holly
Hollander_, but even there he had a few subtle references[1] & jokes, but
nothing comparable to _TBoTNS_ or _TBoTLS_. Wolfe also wrote it as an
allegory; or at least it's capable of being read as an allegory about
love, the different kinds of love.

	Derek

[1]I think I caught a couple of musical references related to Chicago.

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From: Kevin J. Maroney <kmaroney at crossover.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 15:57:45 +0000

>love, the different kinds of love.

I seem to recall someone mentioning that one of Wolfe's contemporary novels
includes, among other things, an elaborate and almost completely invisible
analogy/allegory of the War of the Roses. Was that _Pandora_? 

(Yes, I know that question should go onto the Urth List.)

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 08:36:28 +0000

On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Jonathan Laidlow wrote:

> show whose works had stopped'...The Outsider gives him an out of body

Interesting.  I don't know if I've ever heard to someone say that if the
universe is a created thing, then it is "artificial" or "unnatural."

Of course "clockwork" may just be Silk's metaphor for how everything
seemed to stop suddenly and how he saw himself in relation to Everything. 
Not necessarily an assertion that all is mechanical, but an attempt to
describe the oddity of everything behaving mechanically for a moment. 

A fourth instance you don't cite is Silk's impression that the "shining
clockwork had gone some trifle awry."  This might imply Silk or Horn
interpreting the vision in light of their later knowledge of the Whorl's
manufactured nature.  Is it the Whorl that is clockwork or the whole
universe?

Then again, "clockwork" might be a carryover from Silk's pre-enlightenment
cosmology about Pas creating the Whorl.

Note also that the first paragraph identifies the enlightenment narrative
as the way Silk "talked about it afterward" -- so that tells us where Horn
gets it, and is a very subtle clue that everything we read about Silk's
inner life may be from how he related it to others. 

> the help that is being provided.

You seem to be saying that if the universe were artificial clockwork, then
the Outsider would be able to control it.  That seems backwards to me. 
Classically (as Alga pointed out) the idea of a "clockwork" universe was
meant to imply that God winds the universe up and then never interferes
with miracles or theophonies.  So maybe the theophany shows the universe
is a bigger, weirder place than the "clockwork" of the Whorl and you can't
rule out the possiblity of divine intervention.  Or maybe theophanies that
happen between the ticks of the clock don't count.  Or maybe Silk just had
a small stroke.

The Outsider, by the way, doesn't say he won't help save the Manteion, he
says he already has helped save the Manteion by sending Silk.

> Resurrection where Jesus is seen by various people, but where? And 

In Silk's words I hear neither Eliot (who asks "Who is the third who walks
always beside you"--much closer to the passage in PEACE than to this) nor
the road to Emmaus (in which a stranger is met along the road and is
revealed as Christ in the breaking of bread), but Isaiah:

"He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when he hears
it, he will answer you...and when you turn to the right or when you turn
to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, 'This is the
way; walk in it'" (Isaiah 30:19b, 21).

Note that the voice is heard in the context of answer to prayer, as Silk's
enlightenment (and Silk himself) was an answer to Pike's prayer.

-Rostrum

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From: Derek Bell <dbell at maths.tcd.ie>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 19:15:49 +0000

>analogy/allegory of the War of the Roses. Was that _Pandora_? 

	It might be - I'm afraid that I'm a bit weak on that part of
history. (That was the war between the houses of Lancaster & York,
right?)

	Maybe I'm reading too much in to _Pandora_, but there seem to
be two puns referring to the same genre of popular music.

	Derek