Zoetics

But my point was this: Kevin Maroney put forth the following hypothesis:

So the idea here is: Alzabo - replacement for hyenas (I have my doubts about this, but...) Destrier - replacement for horses Now you'll notice that by this hypothesis the replacement animals do not have the same names as the originals. What then, are we to make of references in the text to animals that do have the original names, e.g. dogs. I suggested that according to the Wolfean Naming Convention (put forth in CASTLE OF THE OTTER I believe) of "everything is exactly what it says it is" and so perhaps, if the text refers to a "dog" we should assume that this is indeed a dog (a rather large one). Now, given these observations, what then are we to make of the Salamander being called a Salamander? Obviously it's not a Salamander as we know it, rather it seems to partake of the "mythic" or Borgesian Salamander. This observation suggests that perhaps the Wolfean Naming Convention, at least as I have applied it, may not actually hold, at least not in the strict sense that I am suggesting here. So the basic question then is this: what animals other than humans (if any) are still around? We are told that the Beast-Handlers take a sow in marriage (though I have argued in the past that this might just be a misinterpretation by the uneductated people of Severian's time of the term "animal husbandry"), and so what is this sow? D

Wolfe has explicitly stated that the Alzabo was the replacement for the hyena because it was an animal that laughed. I don't remember if this was in Castle of the Otter or in some other work.

Difficult question: Are the rats in the library actually "writing", or is this a metaphor? If the former, they are no longer terrestrial rats; if the latter, "everything is exactly what it says it is" doesn't hold. Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at crossover.com Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html