Digest whorl.v012.n042 (RTTW SPOILERS!)

Shannon Appelcline · 09 Feb 2001, 10:32 · from whorl-v0012.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Shannon Appelcline <shannona at skotos.net>
Subject: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v012.n042 (RTTW SPOILERS!)
Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 10:32:34
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0165 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0165.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

From: Dan Schmidt <dfan at harmonixmusic.com>
>OK, we're remembering the same text, but interpreting it differently.
>I took that to mean that he did write about his earlier time in the
>Whorl (e.g., meeting Pig and Hound) but the editors picked it up after
>he arrived in Old Viron.  Otherwise I would have expected them to
>write 'the Whorl' rather than 'Old Viron and the West Pole'.

It seems very unlikely that Hornsilk would suddenly change his entire=20
writing style as well as the method he's been using to tell his story ...=20
all for no particular reason. By Occam's Razor the third-person narrative=20
in RTTW was written by Horn's sons.

Another point on narrative style:

* The place in RTTW where I really started to wonder if Horn was Horn was=20
when he was speaking to Silk in Blood's mansion. It became blatantly=20
obvious that their styles of speech were very, very similar. That pedantic,=20
totally truthful style of speech that we've become so familiar with=20
throughout the Short Sun series.

I'm wondering if this is intended as a real clue or if it's just how the=20
Vironese speak. We have four books that are good samples of Horn's writing=20
(though edited by Nettle). We also have samples of his speech in those=20
books, which we probably can presume are less edited. How does Horn's=20
speech in TBotLS compare with his speech in TBotSS?

From: "Pat O'Leary" <poleary at cecom.com>
>1. Why was the farmer who gave Silk/horn the seed so=20
>fearful/hostile/violent toward him?

At least throughout his writing of TBotSS Hornsilk has a real persecution=20
complex. From Sinew to Marrow to Babbie ... then throughout the books ...=20
Hornsilk attributes to people the worst possible reasons for doing things.=20
By the end of the books I questioned Hornsilk whenever he said someone was=20
out to get him.

I'm not entirely sure *what* caused this persecution complex.

>That's sort of how I read them. If this is the case then each letter is a=20
>formal overture of the
>central narrative method: Impersonation.

And, that's actually the theme of both series of books as well, in mirror=20
images. TBotLS was a book about Silk written by Horn. TBotSS was a book=20
about Horn written by Silk.

From: BMeyer7 at aol.com
>5.  There has previously been a suggestion that maybe Horn/Silk was an
>inhumi.  It has been noted that one feature of inhumi is that they don't e=
at
>much.  On p. 361, it is said of Horn/Silk:  "sometimes it seemed like he w=
as
>just pretending to eat and drink, and this was one of them."  Wow!  This i=
s a
>Gene Wolfe red flare signal of something isn't it?

There was another pretty big hint in RttW. It's commented a few times that=20
inhumi have really bad legs. And who spends the whole series walking around=20
with a staff because he's partially crippled? Is this really a result of=20
his 20-year-old wound at Blood's or something more?

I don't think that we can guarantee Hornsilk isn't an inhumi just because=20
he *is* Silk, as that could be a result of a download going on top of=20
inhumi-memory-transfer-through-blood.

I *doubt* Hornsilk was an ihumi at this point, but the question is: why=20
would Wolfe offer so many hints that he might be?

Shannon

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net