The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind

David Stockhoff · 05 Jul 2010, 18:10 · from 2010-July.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:10:15 -0400
Subject: (urth) The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned
	by	Rudesind
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinIRyOI7_UlHMzY8PWy_vaToybqDEpBcZWRnKG9 at mail.gmail.com>
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To be fair, Inire's importance-to-visibility ratio is quite high. That 
is, for a character so vital to the plot---to the plot, not the 
story---to be so rarely and only indirectly seen is remarkable.

However, I think that itself rules out Rudesind. Wolfe likes to let 
characters unfold themselves through their speech. Rudesind is right 
there in plain sight, folksy ways and all. If he were Inire, our only 
glimpse of Inire's speech and manner when he's not talking to little 
girls is Rudesind and his letter to Severian. They don't match, and 
Rudesind doesn't match with Thecla's tale. Inire would have to be an 
actor, of which there are plenty others. But he's not an actor, and he's 
got other things to do than risk giving himself away to Severian.

Also, Inire is described as being of middling height or similar. 
Rudesind is quite tall.

John Watkins wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 8:00 PM, Ryan Dunn <ryan at liftingfaces.com 
> <mailto:ryan at liftingfaces.com>> wrote:
>
>     The appearance of the Autarch at House Azure opens the gates to
>     other unannounced, unnamed characters appearing. He did it with
>     Hildegrin as well, and a handful of other characters. Why not
>     Inire, perhaps the most talked about yet never seen character??
>
>  
> But he isn't never-seen.  It's fairly clear that he's the tiger-shaman 
> guy.  Now maybe he's one or more of the other candidates mentioned as 
> well, but I can't see why he needs to be all of them.
>  
>  
>
>     You sort of proved my point for me.
>
>     Why go to the trouble of giving Rudesind monkey-like description?
>     Why have Eata say Inire looks like a monkey? Why have a red,
>     wizened monkey who could be a man were it not for the hand-feet
>     watching over Severian from the jungle above? Why, why WHY?
>
>     Because Inire has a clear motive to make sure Severian's journey
>     goes just so, and that he and his eidetic memory make their way to
>     the war with the proper "experiences", for the inevitable trip to
>     Yesod.
>
>     No? Not sure that is as speculative as it may seem.
>
>     ...ryan
>
>
>     On Jul 4, 2010, at 3:40 PM, Ant?nio Pedro Marques wrote:
>
>     > Father Inire is never mentioned as appearing but there is at
>     least one time someone appears who may be he (at the old Autarch's
>     accident). I really don't think any more connections are called
>     for. Where's the added value in positing that FI is, say,
>     Rudesind? Unless it is conducive to a richer reading, I think
>     speculation on any Gene Wolfe material is to be seriously avoided.
>
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