Introduction and Breath

Antonin Scriabin · 15 Apr 2011, 16:48 · from 2011-April.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: kierkegaurdian at gmail.com (Antonin Scriabin)
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:48:02 -0400
Subject: (urth) Introduction and Breath
In-Reply-To: <526475.52363.qm at web37607.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <BANLkTik_4w2RyPg-_cSBwYYPO68HEkA55w at mail.gmail.com>
	<2287.2.6.15.19.1302728897.squirrel at websecu.irit.fr>
	<6C450A90F88D4BA997DF9DCF98FAAF33@jill>
	<4DA6EFD6.5010307 at gmail.com>
	<526475.52363.qm at web37607.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <BANLkTimqnEO1A3qTuLGdCBKAyDPTKnUaow at mail.gmail.com>

Possible Urth of the New Sun Spoilers!

Good points concerning the nature of Severian's "unreliable narration".
That was one thing that struck me while reading New Sun (I have only read it
once) ... Severian's perfect memory seems selective.  There are moments
where seems to say "I have a perfect memory, except for when I don't".
Furthermore, once the time travel elements in Urth of the New Sun are
revealed, it seems clear that his memory being perfect or not is secondary
in narrative importance to the fact that there are multiple versions of him
running around through time, with various other minds trapped in his, etc.
These seem to make him a problematic narrator more so than his tendency to
lie / mislead (although that too is important).

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I've always assumed that, in Severian's case, he gets the "unreliable
> narrator"
> tag for reasons other than outright lying. There are a number of reasons he
> might not be exactly reliable:
>
> 1) He's a (or an ex-) political leader writing his memoirs.
> 2) He's got multiple peoples' memories running around his head, and the
> narrator's "I" isn't always the same person's.
> 3) The cultural differences and "translations" that "Gene Wolfe" made from
> the
> manuscript mean that we don't share the same common cultural context. Thus,
> a
> "steed" or a "mount" isn't always a horse. Or "people" might not always be
> human, or humans as we know them. The tower is a rocket, but he doesn't
> explicitly mention that because he doesn't need to explain it to the
> audience he
> thinks he's writing for, etc...
> 4) The obvious point that he claims to have a perfect memory but
> occasionally
> mentions not remembering (or at least not having paid attention to) certain
> details.
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Sent: Thu, April 14, 2011 8:00:06 AM
> Subject: Re: (urth) Introduction and Breath
>
> Gerry Quinn wrote (14-04-2011 00:48):
>
> > One thing I've noticed on various boards is people confidently asserting
> > that Severian is a liar, then clamming up when asked for examples.
>
> I think that's chiefly because the inconsistencies in the narrative are so
> obvious that asking for them is kind of a breach of social contract.
>
> But the problem imo is that, like 'fantastic', 'unreliable narrator' is yet
> another label people attach to a thing, when in fact the author's purpose
> was
> just to write it the way he sees it. Just as Gene Wolfe points out that
> characterising parts of literature as 'fantastic' is but an artifact of
> being
> used to view 'naturalistic' literature, a comparatively recent fad, as the
> default or only kind of literature, so the 'unreliable narrator' concept is
> an
> artifact of being used to an omniscient, unerring, objective, transparent
> narrator, which in itself is a very questionable idea.
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20110415/8f6191fb/attachment.htm>

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