Typhon's nature

David Stockhoff · 17 Oct 2011, 12:32 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:32:44 -0400
Subject: (urth) Typhon's nature
In-Reply-To: <4FD249800FEF4873A0B0B84ABB1C56C9@Rover>
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	<4E9B2AC6.1030207 at verizon.net>
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Message-ID: <4E9C206C.50802 at verizon.net>

On 10/17/2011 7:51 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> *From:* David Stockhoff <mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> > 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.
But only the visible behavior, right? Nothing offstage, hidden from us?
>
> > 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,
What am I supposed to say here? Gerry, you need to read more of what 
Wolfe has read. Milton's Satan is a character in Paradise Lost. I won't 
cite it further.

No one said Typhon raped Cilinia, however orgiastic his inclinations. 
The Sun series is not a police procedural.
> 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.
Perhaps you have been reading too much of that literature, whatever it 
is. Stop.
> Also in Long Sun, as distinct from New Sun, Typhon is a Demiurge 
> perhaps, but he is not Satan.
The two are not so different as you suppose---certainly not mutually 
exclusive.
>
> > 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.
Has anyone argued that Wolfe hides silly clues?
> Tell me where the story is advanced by Echidna being Typhon?s sister.
The potential implications have been explained over and over.
> And tell me why nobody, even people who knew Typhon, remarks on it ever.
Would it advance the story?
> 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,
This is a classic straw man.
> or at least one selected version of it, he spoils it by giving 
> Typhon?s son the name of his father?
I suspect he needed another god, and allowed that the pantheon designers 
(since I doubt those are their real birth names anyway) were working 
with patchy information, like any student of mythology.


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