The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind

DAVID STOCKHOFF · 07 Jul 2010, 17:23 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (DAVID STOCKHOFF)
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2010 10:23:09 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by
	Rudesind
In-Reply-To: <4C34ADD5.6010905 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <576549.3598.qm at web84104.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

"- Rudesind must be FI in disguise because Fechin is a ranga - but what does that gain us?"
No one has made that argument, as far as I can tell
As for the (ultimately, failed) theory I built concerning Agia, I made the narrative implications very clear. That was indeed the point of the exercise---to take the perceived possibility of a connection between Agia and the doll and test it against the principle that it must add meaning. But it required making up too much stuff---more than it explained---which is a different principle entirely.

--- On Wed, 7/7/10, Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Wednesday, July 7, 2010, 12:39 PM

Tim O'Donnell wrote (07-07-2010 17:13):
> From: Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com
> <mailto:entonio at gmail.com>>
> 

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.
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