Silk's origin

James Wynn · 13 Oct 2011, 01:32 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:32:15 -0500
Subject: (urth) Silk's origin
In-Reply-To: <CAM3O41LG+ogrJdhmT-v+n4+gP0Z6aDRPGHe3E8atyZ8CZEtRxQ at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAM3O41LG+ogrJdhmT-v+n4+gP0Z6aDRPGHe3E8atyZ8CZEtRxQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4E963F9F.2050000 at gmail.com>

>> James Wynn wrote:
>> And it is troublesome in what sense Tussah considered himself Silk's
>> "father". If they ever met, Silk didn't remember it--only having seen a
>> bust of him in a closet. Tussah never married Silk's mother, and he
>> never officially adopted Silk.
> Andrew Mason wrote:
> Well, the other inhabitants of Viron don't seem to have had a problem
> with it. When Tussah died, leaving the message that 'my son, not of my
> body, will succeed me', they set out to look for this 'adopted son'.
> The fact that Tussah wasn't married and had no child living with him
> didn't worry them. So I'm guessing adoption in Viron is a legal rather
> than a familial matter. We don't know there was no legal adoption -
> the papers would presumably be hidden somewhere.

Tussah's murderers assume he procured an embryo and intended that the 
child would preceed him. But they must surely have assumed he made some 
sort of make a supposition that Tussah has laid some kind of groundwork 
so that when the heir was revealed, he would have some proof of who he 
was. No doubt, one of the methods to seek for the heir was to seek for 
precisely such groundwork. In fact, we know after the fact that he made 
no such preparations. We know it from Horn's conversation with Silk on 
the airship. He was depending on Kypris and whatever allies she procured 
to accomplish it. Or perhaps there is some added layer of inevitability 
Wolfe did not detail.

"He said he had an adopted son, and this son was going to be the next 
one. What Nettle says is he didn't say to make it happen, he just said 
it would."

> There's something in RTTW, isn't there, which refers to carefully
> controlled matings in Typhon's workshops? And Crane's remake about the
> Petri dish fits in with this. Of course, this doesn't prevent a few
> clones being slipped in among them, but I think the presumption should
> be that they are selectively bred rather than cloned.

"And some he sent as frozen embryos, the products of carefully 
controlled matings in his workshops.?

I think the reference to "workshops" means that we should not take 
"matings" too literally. I'm sure that the production of embryos 
included matching eggs to sperms. I also think we are clearly signaled 
that Silk is a clone. I'll explain in a bit.

>> If Typhon is one of the fathers, he didn't *die* on the Whorl.
> That may not matter if the vision isn't from Mainframe, but from the
> Outsider. On the other hand, that produces a new problem, in that
> Typhon, one would think, is not the sort of person the Outsider would
> choose as a messenger.

Well, Quetzal isn't the sort to be assigned the job of saving the people 
of the Quarter from the Trivigaunte. That's an underlying message in the 
novel. Still, we aren't told who "he" is that sent them.

>> While we aren't forced to think that both fathers speak, it seems
>> likely to me that they do, since it's specifically said that one of
>> the mothers does not speak, suggesting that the other three parents
>> all do.

Hmmm...I don't find that compelling. Actually I suspect the speaker is 
unclear because they were identical. So I don't think it would matter if 
they *did* both speak.

On 10/12/2011 4:29 PM, Andrew Mason wrote:
> [very cogent argument]
> So I think there is a way here for Silk to be, in a sense, Pas, 
> without any genetic identity.

Good point. I'm unsatisfied with it but I'm unsatisfied with my own 
explanations.

>> I still want him to be a son of Typhon somehow to have a hope of
>> explaining the two parents Silk meets on the Aureate Path.
> Well, yes. I agree that his father should be someone significant, or
> at least someone identifiable, which would give us the satisfaction of
> seeing how things fit together. But I'm worried that if the only
> reason for thinking it's Typhon is 'who else could it be?', that still
> isn't a satisfactory answer.

As you know, there moments in all good literature that are purely 
ironic--in which the author silently tosses the reader the ball and the 
reader is expected to catch it. There are lots of these in Wolfe novels. 
But, of course, in a Wolfe novel the balls are often thrown with special 
curves or high over head.

For example, when (early in Nightside as he is headed for the market) 
Silk called Blood "son" and spent pages and pages ponder over WHY he had 
done that, even though the reader and any characters listening would 
have had no problem with it. As the story progresses we are expected to 
deduce that Silk is special embryo like Mucor and that Blood is Pike's son
(which I did from the names Pike-Rose-Blood, but Wolfe must have thought 
it was no great mystery because when asked, he casually answered).
It is not until well into The Book of the Short Sun that the reader 
comes in contact with dream-travel and can deduce that it can involve 
dream-travel, and THEN can understand that Pike's Ghost whom Silk meets 
in "Lake" is actually the Rajan and Oreb passing through. Then the 
question of why Silk thought he saw Pike must obviously occur. Then he 
must realize that there has to be a lot of "twins" running around. And 
so we understand that at least some--maybe all--the embryos are clones.

I think it is the same with Typhon and Silk. Silk is fatherless. This 
issue of Silk's "father" is an important plot-point in the story. The 
are lots of references equating and associating Silk with Typhon. In the 
Aureate Path he meets to=wo men claiming to be his father. One has 
Tussah's face. The other is not described. At that point, "who else 
could it be" is a valid argument.

J.

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