Typhon & Whorl

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 23 Dec 2007, 09:52 · from 2007-December.txt.gz
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From: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2007 20:52:03 +1100
Subject: (urth) Typhon & Whorl
Message-ID: <20071223095204.5D500D0038 at mailserver10.hushmail.com>



On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:57:40 +1100 "Roy C. Lackey" 
<rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
>
>I don't know if Wolfe really thought SS would be "lame" without 
>the visit to
>Urth or if he was just bowing to pressure from readers, 
>particularly those
>on this list. I think LS/SS was confusing enough without muddying 
>the waters
>even further with the NS link.

LS/SS was surely more confusing than it had to be, peaking at 
something not far off maximal confusion in RTTW. 

Would Wolfe really be influenced by his audience in that way? If 
so, I doubt he'd simply give the crowd what it thinks it wants. But 
I can see him messing with people's expectations (as he does, I 
think, in PF). That might bring you back to wondering if the 
inconsistencies are deliberate.

I've said before that I think the visit to Urth is actually a very 
important event. Sev's story after it will not be the NS story. The 
Outsider has come inside, fixing a unique reality, ending no doubt 
the depressing and futile Hiero/human cycles.

I want to go over this again, from a different angle. Start at the 
beginning: Sev saving Vodalus in the necropolis. Sev presents this 
as the kick-off event for the whole story. Without it, everything 
would have been different.

But meeting Vodalus actually relied on a slightly earlier event: 
Sev's near drowning. Without that, the apprentices wouldn't have 
been late coming back from Gyoll, and the meeting wouldn't have 
happened. 

No near-drowning means no Vodalus meeting and no NS story. 

I think that Juturna actually caused the near-drowning. Her 
motivations: to cause the delay and hence the meeting with Vodalus, 
Abaia's ally and servant - and presumably also to influence Sev to 
be well disposed to her.

Evidence? Never before had Sev encountered a tangle of nenuphar 
roots as dense as that which he believes trapped him. He describes 
the roots as "black ... as fine and strong as hair". In fact, the 
tangle *was* hair - Juturna's. She tangled him in her hair, and 
then freed him & shot him to the surface.  It's a large, green mass 
of hair, in the UOTNS scene where he tells of her of the incident. 
In Gyoll, her hair seemed black, not green, because it was 
underwater (ref the scene in UOTNS where Sev prepares to torture 
Idas). 

But if the incident only happened because Juturna caused it, then 
no NS story means no near-drowning and no Vodalus meeting. 

When Juturna says, "It hasn't yet occurred. It will, because you 
spoke," I believe it's not really a matter of Juturna going back in 
time and causing things to happen. Instead, I have an image of 
Juturna et al as beings conscious of the whole quantum-ish many-
worlds-ish manifold of potential universes. Sev as New Sun has the 
power to collapse the manifold into his chosen reality, which 
includes the Gyoll incident. His Word is Reality, if you like - at 
least over his time span.

If that part of my story is wrong, and Juturna actually does go 
back in time to cause the Gyoll incident, you still have the same 
conclusion: Sev has to become the New Sun for the near-drowning in 
his past to have occurred. (It's just that in this picture, it's 
harder to discern a clear set of motivations for Juturna. Mainly: 
why would she go into the past to promote an outcome which is 
evidently sub-optimal from her point of view?)

So my first conclusion is that there was no near-drowning for 
"Sev1". What was Sev1's history? Sev has some guesses at the end of 
Citadel, but I think we can also add something to these. 
Specifically: Triskele. 

Sev says, "I felt that [finding T] could have and should have 
changed everything, but it was only the episode of a few months 
..." When those few months were over: "I like to think [T's new 
owner] was someone who took him away with him in the spring, 
perhaps north to ... the campaigns among the mountains."

I think Sev here is "remembering" a Sev1 who formed a closer 
attachment to Triskele which led him to leaving or being ejected 
from the Guild and following the armies. Imagine what Gurloes would 
do if & when he found out about Triskele, and what effect that 
might have had on Sev1. 

Our Sev is ambivalent towards Triskele. The key event occurs on the 
first night after finding him: he has a dream in which "I walked 
the fourth level again, and found a huge friend there with dripping 
jaws. It spoke to me." The next morning, Sev is hoping T had died 
during the night.

I think this dream comes from Abaia etc, and it's purpose is to 
block a true bond from forming between boy & dog. (Or perhaps it's 
from the Hiero-dudes: both sides want him on the same track, at 
least up to this point, and that track doesn't include him running 
away with T.)

The result is that Sev seems to take only cursory care of Triskele, 
who runs away afer a week. 

Turn now to SilkHorn's Urth visit at the end of RTTW. As I wrote a 
while ago, the timing is not consistent with NS. In RTTW, Sev has 
Triskele on both the occasions SilkHorn meets him, and those 
occasions are surely more than a week apart. Also, the RTTW Sev 
seems more attached to Triskele - his rather odd insistence that 
SilkHorn see the dog, the nest he's made for him. I think this 
isn't a slip by Wolfe. The RTTW Sev has kept Triskele for longer, 
and cared more for him.

I think, in fact, that the RTTW Sev is Sev1. SilkHorn's visit is 
the event which causes him to leave the guild with Triskele and 
presumably follow the armies north. No New Sun, no encounter with 
Juturna in Gyoll, no meeting with Vodalus, no Triskele nightmare 
....

As I've said before, I can't believe that Sev could go on being a 
Guild apprentice after the events of SilkHorn's last visit. Gurloes 
flees from what he takes to be Malrubius' ghost, in Sev's presence; 
Sev's allowed strange people into the oubliette; after Gurloes 
flees, Sev ignores him and goes to show SilkHorn his dog ... If he 
doesn't run away after that, he'll be lucky if Gurloes kicks him 
out with all his limbs intact.

And then Wolfe piles it on. The Merryn incident, which makes it 
impossible for this Sev not to recognize her if a meeting with her 
in Apu Panchu's ruined town does lie in his future. What stories 
would the crew of the Samru have to tell after the Scylla incident, 
of which we hear nothing in NS? 

Sev saying that he's not going to write about any of this, because 
nobody would believe it - I think that might be the biggest tell-
tale. At his worst, I can't imagine Wolfe being that artless, if it 
is to be taken at face-value. And the Sev of the NS describes many 
events which are no more believable than SilkHorn's visits, 
including the earlier encounter with Juturna in Gyoll (which of 
course did not happen for the RTTW Sev, on my reading).

So I see a kind of wrestling to choose the "real" reality and Sev's 
fate, between SilkHorn on the one hand and the Hiero-dudes plus 
Abaia et al on the other. SilkHorn has the really-truly God on his 
side, and so of course wins. The dreary, brutal, obscene, pointless 
Hiero/human cycles are broken. The NS story with its blasphemous 
non-god and possible anti-christ, Sev the New Sun, dissolves back 
into the quantum soup. 

(As a footnote, you could say it all comes down to a boy & his dog, 
which I vaguely recall as the theme of Gaiman and Pratchett's "Good 
Omens" published some years after NS but before LS/SS. I wonder if 
that's just a coincidence?)
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