When you send out the digest, do you think you could indicate whether any of the postings are about the New Sun series? Usually, they aren't, and what I'm really interested is discussions on that topic.
Many thanks from Deborah
Reply: Item #1324261 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET02#
Nutria,
I've been reading TBOTNS again, gathering up all sorts of strange new threads . . .
But to get back to your words on the Fish elements in the Botanical Gardens of Nessus.
First there is Severian's interrupted telling of Thecla's tale of Father Inire's Fish, the magic mirrors, and girlish Chatelaine Domnina. The girl is real (disturbed by her own reflections in the magic mirrors), the Fish is becoming real (image precedes existence), Inire is a master "fish hunter" and uses fisherman's terms in describing the process. Inire also points out that the Fish is the first creature to manifest in the mirrors.
(Tangent: when Severian enters the jungle hut he waxes philosophical about "changelings" being polar opposites--the hut being a bower of light compared to the Matachin's prison of darkness. This is important because it presages the Hildegrin/Apu-Punchau encounter, but it also gives a datapoint on what "changeling" means to Wolfe [re: story of that name].)
Second, the next chapter has Isangoma's interrupted tale of somebody else fish hunting. This time the Fish is real, the girl's face on the mirror-like surface of the water is illusory, the fish hunter is thwarted. Another angle (as in "angling"? <g>) of interpretation in comparing these two stories might be that "the next creature to manifest in the mirrors, after the Fish, has the face of a woman" (which certainly works well later on, when Severian opens the Book of Mirrors and sees the butterfly woman swimming through space).
We get one chapter to digest this, and then the third installment, very brief. Hildegrin refers to Dorcas and Severian as "the girl" and the Fish she caught. Whoa! Severian is the Fish; Dorcas is the girl; both are real; the lake is a mirror-like surface dividing two universes (living in air/dead in water; or living shore/avern shore); Dorcas' husband is the fisherman, this time clueless.
An interesting progression using very few elements.
=mantis=
Urth Net