Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

David Stockhoff · 18 Dec 2011, 02:53 · 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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:53:48 -0500
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
In-Reply-To: <8101814B5E9B4CB18A26CADF6D32487E@Rover>
References: <SNT123-W50A9FF8908A2C4EB5FA2CACFA30 at phx.gbl><37C4859FAD55407DBA8779047C8C609B@Rover><4EEAA211.7070705 at verizon.net><6A0F475423584142B0FA666A0E93F682@Rover><4EEAB8C6.100 at verizon.net><5054BA56E99A4B28A66D90C447EEEE44@Rover><4EED2143.9010706 at verizon.net><B313F102F2A041C7A3735F37FC4B34E4@Rover><4EED3115.20902 at verizon.net><D443B595307C4CB79D5809B6C766449C@Rover><4EED383D.2070000 at verizon.net><9DC7581DE8B242049D6A8A31A25F9185@Rover>
	<4EED46F9.8080601 at verizon.net>
	<8101814B5E9B4CB18A26CADF6D32487E@Rover>
Message-ID: <4EED55BC.4040200 at verizon.net>

On 12/17/2011 9:15 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> *From:* David Stockhoff <mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> On 12/17/2011 8:04 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> > > Sure, but you seem to be saying that it IS what happened too. If
> > > you?re not, what?s the point in your fix? What exactly is the status
> > > of this ?other narrative? you mention, and what are Severian?s powers
> > > like in it?
>
> > Yes, it IS what happened "too." The first read/surface story is that
> > Dorcas was never dead and Severian has no powers (but may have the role
> > of a fairy-tale hero to whom lucky things like this happen). The second
> > read/understory is that Dorcas was dead and Severian raised her.
> The first read is that a mystery woman appears at the lake. The second 
> read is that Severian raised her. Neither read involves an 
> enchantment. There is no read that she was enchanted and never dead: 
> there is a vague resonance with the story of Sleeping Beauty, and the 
> idea that she was enchanted and never dead comes from taking that 
> seriously. That idea interferes destructively with character and 
> narrative, and so it fails to exist in the story. To put it another 
> way, it didn?t happen, any more than Talos stabbed Baldanders in the 
> back when he was about to kill Severian. Just because I thought of 
> that last thing doesn?t mean it?s really there.

Exactly! You're a fine student. Of course, we must be careful, since 
neither is really "there" at all.
>
> > As has been said a million times, BNS draws from and subverts dozens of
> > genres and narrative modes. Identifying those is part of the analysis.
> > To some degree they cloak (as in "hide" but also "dress up") the
> > understory. But they also tell us what's being subverted and thus a 
> clue
> > as to why. It's not a question of "if Dorcas is Sleeping Beauty, then
> > who's the witch"? There is no poisoned apple. But if there is a witch,
> > it's Severian.
> The story of Sleeping Beauty involves witches and poisoned apples now? 
> It only remains for Lee to propose that Father Inire is all of the 
> Seven Dwarfs. But anyway, that error is not important, but it points 
> to the real error: you neither know nor care whether you are talking 
> about Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, because you are just riffing on 
> stuff in your head which has completely lost contact with the text.

You keep getting stuck on this, Gerry. There is no poisoned apple in 
BNS, therefore there is nothing to clearly reference either story. The 
witch and the sleeping woman are the key parts. There is no 1:1 
relationship.
> To say Dorcas reminds you of Sleeping Beauty is one thing. But you 
> have to recognise that the correspondences that would justify a real 
> connection simply aren?t there. And so ?they also tell us what's being 
> subverted and thus a clue as to why? is meaningless. Because only 
> things with real connections tell us that.

Gerry, do you perhaps write technical documentation for Windows users 
for a day job? Because I think you've got the aptitude for it.
>
> > But he is still a "lucky Fool" to whom things happen---otherwise, 
> how to
> > swallow the coincidence that his first Lazarus is his hot grandmother?
> Actually, his first Lazarus was a bit of a dog.

And therefore no Lazarus at all, since Lazarus was human, but have it 
your way.

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