5HC: Shadow Children in the Lupiverse?

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 06 May 2002, 17:25 · from urth-v0205.mbox · original

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From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) 5HC: Shadow Children in the Lupiverse?
Date: Mon, 6 May 2002 10:25:24 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0205-876 at digest.urth.net>
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Josh G. points out that the "brown book" stories...

> ... are not just fiction: they are myth. They express patterns
> of history in easily understood and transmissible terms.

Well, yeah. I guess my point is that they are not _factual_ within
the universe-of-discourse. And, naturally, one of the running=20
theories regarding "A Story by 'John V. Marsch'" is that it's a
mythic account of the coming of the settlers, from an Annese
point of view.=20

With an ambiguity fairly typical of the book, the story, seen as a=20
myth, credits non-human (non-abo) local beings - the Shadow Children=20
- with having caused the settlers to find and arrive at Ste-Anne;=20
but such myths frequently provide some culturally meaningful=20
explanations for events and objects otherwise incomprehensible from=20
within the cultural context. We cannot know whether the Shadow=20
Children ever actually existed on Ste-Anne; nor, if they did,=20
whether they were responsible for the non-discovery of the two worlds
until that time; nor whether this is a 'real' Annese myth of the
invasion, or something "John V. Marsch"/VRT has made up from whole
cloth, or some combination; nor, whatever it is, why he's done it.
This list has by now offered any number of speculations as to why
VRT might have written a mythologized autobiography, transcribed a=20
real myth, or created a synthetic myth; each explanation creates
further problems with other aspects of 5HC.=20

The Le Guin "uncertainty" analogy is good. I think an even better
analogy might be to Godel ... any reasonably consistent set of=20
postulates you come up with regarding 5HC will leave some "unprovable=20
truths," i.e., aspects of the book that you can't explain without
invoking further postulates, and ultimately you need to bring in=20
postulates inconsistent with ones already in place.

> 'The Story Of The Student And His Son' is (among many other
> things) the story of the Monitor and the Virginia (the Merrimac:
> from the US civil conflict of the 1860's) overlaid upon the story
> of Theseus.

Yes, we discussed this a few weeks ago. I observed that the loser
ruled over a Land of Virgins, i.e., Virginia.

> The one about the wolves and 'Fish and Frog' is (again, among many
> other things) an interplanetary war overlaid on the founding myth
> of Rome.

Not to mention the stories of Mowgli (whose name, Kipling tells us,
means "naked frog") and Moses...

> And in what we are please to call 'our world' the story of
> Alexander gets overlaid upon the story of Gilgamesh.

I'm afraid I'm blanking on this.

--Blattid

--=20

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