pale face

Roy C. Lackey · 01 Apr 2002, 05:26 · from urth-v0204.mbox · original

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From: "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey at stic.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) pale face
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 23:26:11 -0600
Message-ID: <urth-v0204-525 at digest.urth.net>
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Date: Sunday, March 31, 2002 4:15 PM
Marc wrote:

>>Roy commented that the pale face under water in chapter 6 might have been
seawrack.  Wasn't he already with Seawrack by then?  Is that a flashback? He
should know that she plumbs the depths in her swim - I don't know.  Seawrack
seems to be such an odd answer to an event that disturbs the narrator a
great
deal.  He reacts strongly to the face and thinks it might be driftwood,
providing a weird rationale when he already has an excuse in the form of
Seawrack.  Why would she scare him so much?<<

No, Horn was not with Seawrack then, and it's Chapter 5, not 6. (OBW, 139)
The next day he and Babbie encounter the bat-fish, then meet Seawrack when
they get back to the boat.

>>Any comments about the stuff I said about the "scarcely" business in IGJ
and
how the narrator can't believe that a creator would make two related species
in two different places?   Wasn't that important to the context: if you can
posit a direct relationship between the vanished people and normal people,
then the narrator is in effect saying they would not have sprung up in two
different places, when one would do.  This is the sentence immediately
preceding the one you quoted on p 349, I believe. Right?<<

Sure, "scarcely" could in some contexts be intended as ironic, but I don't
think that was intended  in this case. Hide had, in effect, just posited a
direct relationship between humans and the Neighbors:

    "Aren't they people like us, only four arms and four legs?"
    "I doubt very much that they looked exactly as we do, Hide. No doubt the
Outsider made them from the dust of this whorl, just as he formed us from
the dust of the Short Sun Whorl [ . . . ] Besides, the dust of that whorl
can scarcely be identical to the dust of this one."

Silkhorn was correcting Hide; he was making a fundamental distinction
between humans and the Neighbors that was more than cosmetic. At least,
that's how I read it.

-Roy

--=20

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