Father Inire

don doggett · 25 May 2006, 22:11 · from 2006-May.txt.gz

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From: kingwukong at yahoo.com (don doggett)
Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 15:11:58 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Father Inire
In-Reply-To: <BAY107-F2976779A2A828A6C7D7E3CD8990 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <20060525221158.62828.qmail at web32401.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- mournings glory <mourningsglory at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Plunking on the honkytonk of his brain, bsharp
> improvises the following 
> cadenza about the pansimianess of Father Inire:
> 
> <The most telling clue is when Rudesind first comes
> down from the ladder 
> "like an aged monkey, seeming all arms and legs and
> wrinkled neck; his hands 
> were as long as my feet, the crooked fingers lined
> with blue veins". Why 
> would Wolfe use almost all the physical descriptions
> of Father Inire for 
> Rudesind unless he really was him?>
> 
> In his essay on the onomastics of the New Sun, Gene
> Wolfe writes, "In this 
> piece I'd like to go into names a bit more deeply,
> beginning with the rule 
> of naming I used: Everything is just what it says it
> is."
> 
> Rudesind, of course, is a saint's name, a convention
> used over and over 
> again by the author to differentiate humans from
> Other -- a rule however 
> bsharp violates in favor of ape's blood and
> gerontica. 

This does not necessarily negate bsharp's argument -
that Inire is possibly  disguised as the human
Rudesind. It would be natural for him to take a human
rather than a Hierodule name. To disguise oneself
successfully is to "become" the other in a sense. I
realize that the naming conventions are a device of
the author to convey metatextual clues to the reader,
but they also represent true differences in naming
conventions between cacogens and humans. I think
bsharp's idea still has legs.

Don

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