Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy

James Wynn · 16 Nov 2011, 15:28 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:28:32 -0600
Subject: (urth) Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy
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> *From:* James Wynn <mailto:crushtv at gmail.com>
>
> > Now, I want remind you that I now firmly believe that the Mucor
> > that stood over Silk in "Lake of the Long Sun"--the Mucor he sees
> > the night he sees both an astral Oreb and "Pike's Ghost" is actually
> > the Mucor that Horn visited in OBW and asked to psychically go to
> > the Whorl and find out where Silk is. This Mucor stood over Silk
> > that night because she had met the Rajan in Time-traveling in the
> > dream-travel and he took her with him to Silk's room at that very
> > night. It is the Rajan who tells her to tell Horn not try to come to
> > "where he is".
> This may seem a minor nit, but the Mucor who stands over Silk is 
> described as "skeletally thin".  On Blue Horn notes that she is still 
> thin, but not as thin as she was.

Gerry Quinn wrote:
It's certainly worth bringing up, but it is hardly a deal breaker.

The quote from OBW:
*******************
The witch had been described to me as being very thin. She was, but not 
as thin as she had been in the Cald?'s Palace and on the lander 
afterward---not as thin as the truly skeletal young woman I recalled.
She was said to be tall, too. The truth is that she is not, although her 
thinness and erect carriage, and her short, ragged skirt, combine to 
make her appear so.
********************

Everyone who describes her to Horn says shes is "very thin". Horn notes 
that she is not as thin as the "truly skeletal woman" she was before 
which implies that she is still skeletally thin. At the time Silk sees 
her in his room, he has only seen her once previously in a darkened room.

I had previously said that I knew of no instance in which Mucor did not 
travel as a visible disembodied spirit. But I remembered that there is 
one time. On the gondola in "Exodus from the Long Sun". However, note 
how she leaves:

***************
Mucor had begun to fade. For a second or two a ghostly image
remained, like a green glimmer upon a pool
****************

Now note how she does it in Silk's room:
********
she faded to mist and was gone.
**************

Later in a few minutes "Pike's ghost" will fade in to a silvery mist, 
exactly the same way.
> A bigger issue is that even if you believe the Rajan can travel in 
> time, it's surely a stretch that he can grab people who are 
> psychically travelling in some other mode, and bring them back in 
> time.  Furthermore, how would Mucor get back to her own time?

How does anyone get back during astral travel? They wake up.

> The Rajan doesn't seem to be around, unless he is Pike.

A flying Oreb is there. Of course he's Pike.

> Mucor does nothing when she appears anyway.  Surely the most 
> economical explanation is that she is just hovering around Silk as usual?

This is the exposition that Mucor encountered the Rajan and not Silk. It 
is simply not true (as is implied by what Mucor reports to Horn) that 
Horn coming "to where [Silk] is" would place them in any danger. 
However, for Horn to come to where the Rajan is...that would be perilous.

> *Again, an argument of a kind you dislike: but if Wolfe wanted to 
> write in these super-hidden explanations and leave subtle clues, he 
> had a great opportunity to indicate that the Mucor Silk sees here is 
> not so thin as usual.

Yeah. I really really hate this kind of argument. It's worse than lazy. 
It's an argument someone would only reasonably make if they had never 
read a Wolfe novel. When you can point to the clear, textual explanation 
of what is happening with the Horn-Babbie confabulation, or how the 
Rajan gains the power of dream-travel, or how the Rajan ended up in the 
grandmother's tale, or who is the barnacled man Horn encounters, or the 
nature of Seawrack, or what the shattered glass structure is that Horn 
and Seawrack encountered on the island, or  why Silk decided that he and 
Sand were "brothers" in some sense based on the vague similarity of 
their names...then you will certainly have cause to argue "Well, if 
that's what Wolfe intended, then why didn't he just *say* so?"

J.
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