The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind

António Pedro Marques · 07 Jul 2010, 16:39 · 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: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:39:49 +0100
Subject: (urth) The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by
	Rudesind
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTim_yd-jrivJW6726OHKfNwH4O_XoHB6Zyb1pLct at mail.gmail.com>
References: <mailman.63890.1278518909.5093.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<AANLkTim_yd-jrivJW6726OHKfNwH4O_XoHB6Zyb1pLct at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C34ADD5.6010905 at gmail.com>

Tim O'Donnell wrote (07-07-2010 17:13):
> From: Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com
> <mailto:entonio at gmail.com>>
>
>> I'll have to ask yet again - clues to *what*, please? IF some of the
>> characters that appear throughout the book are Inire in disguise, then
>> what? What happens? What doors open? What new understanding of the
>> story is enabled? What's the net worth of such a knowledge? What is it
>> that we don't grasp about the book that we'd begin to grasp that way?
>> No one has answered this so far.
>
> Well, in the case of Inire, it depends on how much time travelling
> influence outer elements have had on Severian's life and specifically
> the difference between Sev1 (not optimised) and Sev2 (optimised). Was
> Sev1 almost but not quite the candidate for New Sun in which case he
> only needed a little gentle prodding or was he way off in which case he
> needed quite a lot of help? If he was close to being the New Sun then we
> can theorise that appearances by Inire are moments where Sev1 needed a
> little push perhaps and Inire wants to be sure that these moments occur.
> If the second option then do we believe that the forces of entropy are
> also interfering with Severian's progress in which case Inire's presence
> may be to ward off such negative influence?

What I don't see is how Rudesind and other characters being FI in disguise
has much to do with any of those questions.

> Far from having a single reading of these books (which I have reread
> many times now) I value the variety of interpretations that can be
> extracted from readings and rereadings. I don't want to go off topic but
> has anyone seen the film Primer?  If so they will know that a key scene
> is the bench scene, multiple viewings of the film have convinced me that
> there is no correct reading of this scene.

Yes - the pervasive idea that there must be correct readings of a given 
situation is wrong. Sometimes several readings are correct. Sometimes non is 
(rarer, but happens).

Thanks for the movie tip.

> I don't want to say more as we are getting into spoiler territory but I
> feel the same way about Wolfe - to reduce the books to a single correct
> reading is to cast aside the wonderful multiplicity of interpretations
> one can find within.

And that is precisely my beef with the drive to reduce characters to some 
specific trait that doesn't mean anything by itself.

- Agia must be a robot because blablabla - but at a certain point, what is 
the relevance of her precise nature?

- Rudesind must be FI in disguise because Fechin is a ranga - but what does 
that gain us?

If there is a common theme in the GW works I've read so far - I'm not 
fortunate enough to have done significant rereading already - is how 
characters break free from their native, starting conditions. Trying to pin 
down exactly what those conditions are, and trying to come up with (or 
outright invent) a definite answer, as if it had in itself a deep 
significance, is in my view misguided - and harmful when it blinds the mind 
to the rest. Their precise nature may be explanative of something else, but 
I just can't see that it can be an interesting fact all by itself.

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