Typhon's nature

Gerry Quinn · 17 Oct 2011, 11:51 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:51:38 +0100
Subject: (urth) Typhon's nature
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	<4E9B2AC6.1030207 at verizon.net>
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From: David Stockhoff 
> But here we have kindergarten mythology leaping out at us. Echidna is 
> well know to be the mother of monsters. Typhon's and Echidna's family is 
> a veritable pantheon of divine monsters. The onus is on you to deny a 
> theory of how this situation came about and what it means in New Sun and 
> Long Sun. You'll need to do more than sit back and yawn if you wish your 
> denials to be taken seriously.
Sure, they are given the names of divine monsters, and that accords with their behaviour, or at least the behaviour of some of them.

> Why should Wolfe care if he recasts a father as a son to create this 
> debased and pagan Olympus? You say yourself that allusions don't matter! 
> Wolfe is already necessarily picking and choosing among disparate 
> mythologies. I see Milton's Satan in there plain as day, because Satan 
> raped his daughter to produce all the sins of the world. I could go on.

I never heard that myth, and I also don?t know that Typhon raped Cilinia.  Maybe he did, but I don?t see it in the book, and Wolfe does not write the sort of modern literature in which it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman who is in the possession of a fucked up nature must have been raped by her father.  Also in Long Sun, as distinct from New Sun, Typhon is a Demiurge perhaps, but he is not Satan.

> But incest couldn't possibly happen in New Sun! No, Wolfe would avoid 
> this topic, the bread and butter of half the mythologies (and ancient 
> dynasties) of the world, to avoid upsetting Gerry Quinn with the 
> covertness of its secret histories.

There IS incest in New Sun ? at least two major instances - and we are told about them in the story and in what characters say.  Wolfe doesn?t hide silly clues in peoples? names by naming Agia and Agilus after Van and Ada, say.

Tell me where the story is advanced by Echidna being Typhon?s sister.  And tell me why nobody, even people who knew Typhon, remarks on it ever.  And tell me why, if Wolfe wants to indicate that Typhon?s family are going through the motions of replicated characters in an ancient myth, or at least one selected version of it, he spoils it by giving Typhon?s son the name of his father? 

- Gerry Quinn

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