Fairies and Wolfe

Lee Berman · 31 Mar 2012, 02:31 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2012 22:31:41 -0400
Subject: (urth) Fairies and Wolfe
Message-ID: <SNT123-W27568AA533983B474DCDF0CF4E0 at phx.gbl>

>Jeff Wilson: What/where does she mention it? [Juturna's kiss giving Severian underwater

>breathing]

It is during their first real meeting at the end of Claw, at the river at Ctesiphon's Cross.

She doesn't say it will be a kiss that does it. But once you know of the legend of underwater

breathing conveyed by a mermaid's kiss, you pretty much have to acknowledge the allusion.

Just rereading the passage and admiring (for the nth time) Wolfe's cleverness and subtelty in

writing. Severian calls her "breathtaking" and notices her parted lips as she anticipates 

Severian joining her in the water. But Wolfe won't slap us in the face with the mermaid legend

by outright mentioning the kiss.  He just elbows us under the table, daring us to figure it

out for ourselves (or with the help of a discussion board :- )).

Juturna also mentions Baldanders a few times during the conversation and this (along with the

Lake Diuturna/eel connections) is supposed to be enough for a reader to connect the dots and

figure out the underwater breathing connection. Once again, I think Wolfe makes the puzzle a

bit too difficult. I haven't seen the "mermaid's kiss" connection in any published scholarly

analysis. I think it was figured out exclusively on this board and that within the past few

years.

A debate on whether "magic" is used seems sophomoric. The conversation with The CUmaean and

Merryn warns us against falling into that trap.  Magic is that which cannot be explained by 

science.  And hopefully none is so narrow sighted as to think that science is the only possible 

explanatory mechanism that will ever be available, be it the long ago past or far future. We 

happen to live now in a time period which is the Age Of Science, but it seems obvious that will 

not be the case forever.Some of the limitatons of science are already starting to show.

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