Who is he? (RTTW spoilers)

Michael Andre-Driussi · 13 Feb 2001, 13:18 · 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: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at sirius.com>
Subject: (whorl) re: Who is he? (RTTW spoilers)
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 13:18:25
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0209 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0209.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

While we await Adam's model of Silk-in-Pig and why the narrator should want
to have it inside his crowded head, allow me to try again.  A different
approach, using Adam's previous post.

Adam wrote:
>So my current theory is that the Neighbor did send Horn's spirit into Silk=
's
>body.  There it did not continue existing separately from Silk's spirit, as
>in possession; rather, it merged with Silk's spirit, as is shown by the
>astral appearance. In this merger, the components deriving from Silk's
>spirit were dominant, although "Silkhorn" believed himself to be Horn, to
>avoid facing Hyacinth's death.  Between the next-to-last and last visits to
>the Red Sun Whorl, the remnant of Horn's spirit departed for some reason,
>leaving "Horn" wholly Silk.  I can't claim to be able to explain everything
>in this account, but it seems to me that it fits the text better than any =
of
>the alternatives that have been proposed.

Yes, well put.  However, Adam, wouldn't it be an even stronger case if the
world-weary Silk-who-saw-Hyacinth-dead was gone and replaced by a fresh
Silk-who-did-not-even-know-she-was-sick?  So that the only one in that body
who knew the complete truth about Hyacinth was the Horn spirit.

Thus, a new-Silk "coming up to speed on the events of the last few years"
rather than old-Silk being completely delusional.

Let us also put upon the table the literary Silk: this is the creation of
Horn and Nettle, this is the Silk known by most colonists on Blue; this is
the man Horn is sent to bring back.  Lest we forget, Horn and Nettle wrote
all of litSilk's dialogue.  The gap between litSilk and being inside Silk's
body, with one or more versions of Silk spirit as company, is bound to
cause some trouble for the Horn side of the equation.

=3Dmantis=3D

Sirius Fiction
Catalog and errata sheet at http://www.sirius.com/~mantis/

*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