TWK: Mag?

StoneOx17 at aol.com · 28 Feb 2005, 11:51 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

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From: StoneOx17 at aol.com (StoneOx17 at aol.com)
Date: Mon Feb 28 11:51:46 2005
Subject: (urth) TWK: Mag?
Message-ID: <17E2EAE8.3651DEB2.0299E010 at aol.com>

"Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey at stic.net> quotes (with regard to Mag)

"... it came to me that if I were to lie upon
> the ground, and she to bend over me, I would see her in the way I had just
> recalled her. Then I understood that she was the fairest of women."

and then writes

> A memory was triggered in the short time it took her to say those few words,
> a specific memory. If Wolfe is playing fair with us, that recollection
> should be somewhere in the text.

> I found two possibilities, both of which confuse me even further. The first
> is at the beginning of the book when Art is lying on the hill looking up at
> the "pictures" in the clouds, one of which is "a beautiful lady who smiled
> down at me".

I'm really confused here, as well.  I do remember that somewhere Wolfe implies
that the Valfather is a stand-in for everybody's father.  If that's true, maybe 
the Lady of Skai is in some sense everybody's mother, in which case having 
Mag remind Able of her would be fair.

I'm also confused about whether Mythgarthr really exists, or is just an 
internal construction of Able's (while he's really being whisked off in an
ambulance).  If everything is internal, then the identification of the
Lady with his mother makes more sense.  Do any defenders/opponents of 
this interpretation want to weigh in?  In fact, is Mythgarthr necessarily
either internal or external, or could it somehow be both at once?

-- 
Stone Ox (Peter)

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