The Narrator's mistakes

Adam Stephanides · 22 Jun 2001, 15:06 · 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: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) The Narrator's mistakes
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 15:06:30
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0893 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0893.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

on 6/22/01 8:16 AM, Michael Straight at straight at email.unc.edu wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Adam Stephanides wrote:
>=20
>> 2) Narr says that "I cannot correct all or even most of them [his mistak=
es]
>> without tearing the whole account to shreds and starting again."  If Nar=
r is
>> not just being humble, his original manuscript had a lot of mistakes.  We
>> may wonder how many of them the editors caught (there's no reason to thi=
nk
>> they were in a position to recognize all the mistakes) and how many of t=
hem
>> the editors missed and we are also unable to catch.
>=20
> The fact that he felt like he would need to tear up the whole account made
> me think he was referring more to the way things were written, the things
> he focused on, the things he left out, than specific "factual" errors.
>=20
> "Mistake" is a broader word, encompassing, "I should have started telling
> about this, skipped that, gone into detail about this other, and done a
> better job of explaining these things."  He's not necessarily saying that
> there are lots of false statements.

Narr begins the paragraph by saying that he has confused Seawrack's ring
with Oreb's.  He goes on to say "I should go back and line out my mistake, I
suppose, but I hate lining things out--it gives the page such an ugly
appearance.  Besides, to line out is to accept responsibility for the
correctness of all that is let stand.  To correct that or any other error
would be to invite you to ask me (when you read this, as I hope you soon
will) why I failed to correct some other." (184)  He goes on with the
sentence I quoted above.  It seems to me that he is indeed talking about
specific factual errors.

--Adam

*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