Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?

Sergei SOLOVIEV · 22 May 2011, 16:39 · from 2011-May.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: soloviev at irit.fr (Sergei SOLOVIEV)
Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 18:39:09 +0200
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTi=E8ODcn8gwzRq5_5-mgO7McEW6jw at mail.gmail.com>
References: <BANLkTikznBkQtjA5X7xkfGhngS0yON+9sQ at mail.gmail.com>	<4DD90215.4060000 at irit.fr>
	<BANLkTi=E8ODcn8gwzRq5_5-mgO7McEW6jw at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4DD93C2D.1060404 at irit.fr>

Dear Nathan,

I think, yes, it is valid inference. As far as I remember, something is said
on this subject later, not only by Hierodules - and there is also 
healing of Triskele -
and in the 5-th book Severian travels to the deep past, as Apu-Punchau,
and he is connected there already with his White Fountain -

Sergei

Nathan C. Tresch wrote:
> A question arising from Jerry's post...
>
> Later in the series the Hierodules inform Severian that the claw is 
> actually just a gem with no special powers, so from that I inferred 
> that Severian was already connected to the coming of the new sun and 
> the power he had was not connected to the claw at all.  Does this seem 
> like a valid inference?
>
> On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 5:31 AM, Sergei SOLOVIEV <soloviev at irit.fr 
> <mailto:soloviev at irit.fr>> wrote:
>
>     I noticed that Cas and Dorcas means the same person at the first
>     reading,
>     but of course I didn't guess that she is the grandmother of
>     Severian until
>     the end of the 4-th book.
>
>     - Did you realize what Hildegrin is doing at this lake?
>
>     - At some point I noticed that the Lake of Birds reminds very much
>     the Dante's Inferno
>     filled by water, there is even a hint that something can penetrate
>     into it from the other
>     side of Urth (the Hell in Dante's poem is connected by a channel
>     to the opposite side
>     of the Earth where the mountain of Purgatory stands). There is
>     also the
>     cave of the Cumaean. The space-time in Botanic Gardens is twisted
>     (remember
>     Jungle Garden - there the path is apparently going through time as
>     well).
>
>     best
>
>     Sergei Soloviev
>
>     Jason H wrote:
>
>         Did you know "Cas" was Dorcas right away?
>
>         I didn't. When I read these books the first time, I didn't
>         realize that Dorcas had been one of the lake's dead until it
>         was spelled out in the third book, and didn't realize she was
>         the sought-after Cas until the fourth book. I read these books
>         pretty carefully-- I knew the towers were rockets right away,
>         I picked up on little inconsistencies in the narrative... but
>         I missed this connection completely.
>
>         In retrospect, it's totally obvious! The chapter in Shadow is
>         called "Dorcas", for heaven's sake, and we're told someone is
>         looking for a "Cas", and then a mysterious Dorcas appears. How
>         can I not have immediately realized who she was? Of course,
>         the first time through, we don't even know he has the Claw on
>         him (let alone what it can do), and it's perhaps unintuitive
>         to mentally pair the old man with the young Dorcas.
>
>         So I'm really curious to know whether I was just being dense,
>         or whether Wolfe was being particularly brilliant-- and
>         audacious-- by setting up a connection which he somehow knew
>         people wouldn't make right away, despite its obviousness later on.
>
>         I'm therefore curious to know: Was this obvious to you back in
>         Shadow as soon as Dorcas appeared?
>
>
>         -Jason
>         ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>         _______________________________________________
>         Urth Mailing List
>         To post, write urth at urth.net <mailto:urth at urth.net>
>         Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     Urth Mailing List
>     To post, write urth at urth.net <mailto:urth at urth.net>
>     Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Per Aspera, Ad Astra
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

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