Agilus' mask

m.driussi · 02 Jul 1997, 14:00 · from urth-v0002.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: m.driussi at genie.com
Subject: Re: (urth) Agilus' mask
Date: Wed,  2 Jul 97 14:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: <urth-v0002-0133 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0002/0133.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

Reply:  Item #1388846 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET#

bee and r.,

The line in question: "The ribbons that held your mask," I said.
"They're still there."

We are taking this as literal.  But it can also be Severian's laconic
way of saying, "Look, you are still play-acting as though I were not
the simple torturer that I am."  (Agilus is acting, but he doesn't
really grasp that Severian is a genuine torturer--Agilus assumes
Severian to be an armiger or armiger-wannabe in costume for a party.)

And it can be metaphorical, saying that Agilus's real face is as much
another mask as Doctor Talos's face is that of a stuffed fox.

But it cannot be literally true that Agilus is wearing a second
mask--since the face Severian sees looks like Agia and the face he
will later see when Agilus is a prisoner in the cell.  Or if Agilus is
wearing a second mask, it is unusual in that it looks exactly like his
face, which leads back into the laconic and metaphorical readings.

=3Dmantis=3D

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net