The Best Introduction to the Mountains

Michael Straight · 09 Feb 2002, 20:07 · from urth-v0202.mbox · original

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) The Best Introduction to the Mountains
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 15:07:27 -0500 (EST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0202-115 at digest.urth.net>
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On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Adam Stephanides wrote:

> This is an ingenious argument, but I don't think Silkhorn is the
> representative of the Outsider on the Whorl.  To be sure, Silk was
> enlightened, and given a mission from the Outsider, but that doesn't make
> him equivalent to the Pope (if it did, he presumably wouldn't have shut
> himself up in a hut with Hyacinth for twenty years).  Nor are we intended=
 to
> take his words as divinely inspired a la an Old Testament prophet.  Silk
> certainly doesn't think of himself in these terms.  A fortiori this holds
> for Silkhorn.

The more I see those terms, 'Silk' and 'Silkhorn,' the more I think
they're backwards.  We oughta use 'Silkhorn' for the character named
"Silk" in the Long Sun books since he's a mix of the real Silk and Horn's
ideas about Silk, and 'Silk' for the narrator of IGJ who knows that he's
not the (nonexistent) hero that Horn was sent to find.

"Is that your real name? Silk?  Are you the man in the book?"
"I don't think so."

(IGJ, p. 207)

I am, of course, 3/4 kidding.  But once I finish rereading RTW, I'll post
my theories about how much about the varying Horn/Silk ratio in the
narrator...

-Rostrum

--=20

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