Pike's ghost

Lee Berman · 01 Dec 2011, 13:36 · from 2011-December.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 08:36:13 -0500
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
Message-ID: <SNT123-W5EF003121831DFF305358CFB10 at phx.gbl>

>larry miller: I think thats part of it yeah.  Obviously theres got to be more to to
>the story than that.  What do think about Inire?

Quite a bit, actually. And it can get complicated. As Severian is the central character
of the main narrative, I think Inire is the central character of the subtext (perhaps
we can frame it as Autarch Severian inhabiting the public House Absolute while mysterious
vizier Inire inhabits the Secret House).

I can provide whatever details you are interested in, but my view of Inire is based on 
the principle that when Wolfe uses a mythological name in the Sun Series and leaves out
crucial information regarding that character, the gaps can be filled by studying 
mythology. And in the past 10 years Gene Wolfe has forced me to do a lot of studying.

If it is understood that the name "Inire" is derived from an epithet of Faunus (Pan),
the resulting connection to Dionysus provides a connection to the whole Sun Series
story and a mythological framework which stretches from the primeval Greek gods to the 
gnostic precursors of Christianity.  That's my view, anyway.

>Jerry Friedman: ...Unless you're just saying you're certain that it refers to Typhon, 
>which I can't argue with.

Yes, that's really what I was saying. Not "only" to Typhon.

>If your posting history shows that you've seen other reasons as well, I'm afraid I'd forgotten 
>them (or never saw them--I've been skipping lots of posts lately and have at other times too)..
>..Not offended, though I dislike statements that can be greatly improved by qualifying them.

Understood and agreed, Jerry. I am currently in a phase of posting fairly frequently so perhaps
it can be understandable to you why I might inadvertently lean toward taking a short cut and skip 
statement qualifications I have made so many times in other recent posts.

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