Short Story 48: Peritonitis

Lee Berman · 14 Aug 2013, 12:37 · from 2013-August.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 08:37:05 -0400
Subject: (urth) Short Story 48: Peritonitis
Message-ID: <BLU175-W26632C0C396D1E28058F37CF450 at phx.gbl>

>Marc Aramini: For me, my recent work on Fifth Head of Cerberus makes this a 
>clear example of the kind of stuff that Wolfe wasup to in ?A Story by John V. Marsch?.  
>We have an entire anthropomorphized history and a singing bunch of symbiotic organisms 
>that perhaps ultimately destroy their host but are completely unaware of their actual 
>nature.

Great analysis and comparison, Marc. I agree that similar literary principles are at
work with Shadow Children, along with Neighbors, Inhumi, Abaia/undines, Tzadkiel/Apheta,
the gods of the Whorl and maybe the gods Latro encounters.

We, as humans, take our gender and our individual identity as fixed constants. But that
is not going to be the case for non-human characters. What does it mean when we are given 
the gender and individual name of a bacterium, a Shadow Child, an Abo, a giant asexual sea 
monster, an angel, an electronic god or dreamy, plural goat people?

In most Wolfe stories involving non-human characters, we must see gender and naming as 
conventions which are assigned only as a matter of translation and interpretation for 
dealings with humans, including us, as readers. (e.g. Apheta and Pig don't have names
until one is needed. The Green Man never gets one).

Ostensibly, assigning a name and gender to a budded off piece of a giant sponge is
supposed to clarify things for us. But we know Wolfe uses the same principle to confuse 
his readers too. Part of the enjoyment is trying to figure it all out, I guess.

>Gerry Quinn: I think we are intended to think of it as two 
>separate interpretations of the same events [the human interpretation is 
>implicit, as the human audience needs less help with that]. The events 
>themselves are fully understood by neither the bacterial narrator nor the 
>host's doctors.

I agree. The doctors in this story are (supposedly) vastly superior beings to infectious
bacteria.  But the doctors would be more effective in their treatment if they knew what 
Greylock knew.

I think there is a similar dynamic between Tzadkiel and Severian. The angel is a being
orders of magnitude superior to humans. Yet there are some aspects to Severian
which he/she is unable to understand or duplicate. The deference Tzadkiel shows Severian
is surprising. But in the context of the whole story and the body of Wolfe's work, it
makes sense.

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