Thea and Thecla

DAVID STOCKHOFF · 10 Jan 2011, 17:27 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (DAVID STOCKHOFF)
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:27:00 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) Thea and Thecla
Message-ID: <147251.50853.qm at web84103.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Mon, 1/10/11, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Thea and Thecla
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Monday, January 10, 2011, 11:32 AM

On 1/10/2011 6:30 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> On 1/10/2011 4:59 AM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> On 1/9/2011 6:26 PM, Jordon Flato wrote:
>>> I guesa what am trying to say is at a very basic level, at best Severian
>>> can only aproximate that pre nosh youth, because botns isnt a journsl,
>>> but memiors written after nosh and after hes been autarch for a time.
>> 
>> But that is where the superlative memory comes in, isn't it?
> True. However, Severian the autarch probably considers Severian the
> youth to be too naive to be allowed to take over, if that were even
> possible.

It seems to happen despite the writer's stated wishes. He might let "Appian's" POV mingle with his in CITADEL to show how he is not entirely over the effects of the analeptic and is still finding his mental sea legs, but Thecla's memories seem to intrude where stimulated, possibly even into the pre-nosh passages, making the narrator's sentences appear nonsensical or counterfactual:

"I played again with pebbles in the courtyard beside the fallen curtain wall, as Thecla dodged the hooves of my father's mounted guard."

-- Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

Yeah, the narrator's intentions regarding "ordinary" problems of false or recreated naivete, which are already bad enough given the depth and breadth of memories available to him, are subverted by a particular and "extraordinary" identity problem that results in an acute dislocation that this passage captures very well. This only emphasizes the original problem.

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