"My father's mounted guard"

Jeff Wilson · 09 Oct 2008, 05:14 · from 2008-October.txt.gz

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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:14:55 -0500
Subject: (urth) "My father's mounted guard"
In-Reply-To: <W851743061236441223485653@webmail23>
References: <W851743061236441223485653@webmail23>
Message-ID: <48ED934F.4010208 at io.com>

Bennewitz wrote:
> In Claw chap XXV, Severian is having life memories before he falls asleep.
> while there is obviously the potential for Thecla memories to intermix here, this following passage is still confusing:
> 
> "I played again with pebbles in the courtyard beside the fallen curtain wall, as Thecla dodged the hooves of my father's mounted guard."
> 
> Who's Father?
> 
> Do any of the other 'interruptions' from Thecla's memory happen mid sentence like this?  I searched the archives and found that this was suggested.
> I find it problematic that the narrative voice would change in mid sentence. 
> Even if the memory is Thecla's why would she be dodging the feet of her father's guard?

I think it's likely that Thecla here is a typo for her sister's name 
Thea.  But the really interesting thing is not only is Thecla's memory 
roused to the first person at the time of the original reverie, but 
apparently manifests once again years later during the writing of the 
manuscript.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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