do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

James Wynn · 21 May 2011, 04:54 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 23:54:00 -0500
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
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> Gerry Quinn:
> It is an ancient history, and it could just as easily have been about 
> sea monsters as rock stars.  The thing is, though, people know about 
> the sea monsters.  But they don't ever call them megatherians, not in 
> the Commonwealth anyway.   One may somewhere else be called a similar 
> thing in another language.

No. In the Commonwealth they call them "great beasts".

>> I've tried to argue this before in the case of The Story of Frog. 
>> [...]Ymar (king = raja = frog)[...]"Mars-Typhon"[...]"Spring Wind".[...]
>
> But when you propose that something like this was intentionally 
> designed into the story, don't you need to have some criterion for 
> detecting false positives?  I mean, in principle one can make 
> infinitely many random flights of fancy based on any text, but not all 
> of them can have been intended, and even if unintended meanings may 
> sometimes be better than the intended, we must impose some criteria or 
> there is no point in art at all - we might as well listen to white 
> noise and see what patterns we create in our heads from it...

Um...It's tougher than recognizing the Silver Surfer as Jesus or the 
Soviet Union in 'Animal Farm', but not that terribly hard after "Urth of 
the New Sun". As I said before, seeing "Spring Wind" as associated with 
Typhon (who makes his appearance just after Severian includes the story) 
was obvious. Anyone, then, trying to put together a timeline of 
Commonwealth rulers has Ymar the Just and his association with the 
Torturers handy in SotT. So once the connection between the word 'frog' 
and 'ymar' is identified, well, there it is. "White noise" would be if 
this original story with obviously twisted names is just so much random 
clutter.

Obviously, ambiguity is built into Wolfe's novels. There's no false 
positive test. I'm pretty comfortable that I'm right about this. Maybe I 
should get serious about locating Fish.

J.

J

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