DisingenUous Gene

My bad on initial subject misspelling. Actually I feel priggish and petty for pursuing this thread futher but..well..maybe it is useful. Dan'l quotes from Castle of the Otter:

I think it requires interpretation and no, the exception is not only for naming worlds/universes. I've already noted how Wolfe makes little attempt to match a BotNS characters' saintly name to the namesake Catholic saint. He doesn't choose any old saint name though, only archaic names. This says to me, if he is following his onomastic rule, that the names denote this population as an ancient group of humans with a special relationship to a Jesus-like character. A world where names like Robert and Marie and Kim Lee Soong don't fit. Let's take monsters; Wolfe says that in BotNS he gave monsters monster names. So, take Typhon, the hundred headed, fire belching Greek monster, son of Gaia and Tartaros, nephew of Erebus, brother/husband of Echidna. Is that Typhon our Typhon? Or were the names Typhon, Erebus and Echidna picked from mythology as a nice match? I don't know if Briah and Yesod were meant to be parallel or in series but I like whichever fits the broader pattern of the text. Kaballah says parallel, the text (to me) says series but perhaps this is not a crucial question. It is this part of Dan'l's post which really perturbs me:

I can understand Wolfe not wanting to give answers away but why would he deliberately mislead readers to a false answer? Perhaps you are suggesting it isn't intentional? That he is so vigilant on avoiding disclosure that he accidentally goes too far the other way? This next Lawrence Person interview clip offers contrary evidence (and is germaine to Ori's post I think): When asked how he fit into the "New Wave" of SF writers, Wolfe responded:

This seems a very candid revelation on an ambiguous text issue. If he misleading us about the shadowchild replacement all I can ask is.... Why? So those who aren't sure will guess wrong? So those who guess correctly will doubt themselves? I just don't get it. - bsharp

Agreed.

I suspect that he does but that we haven't worked out the relationships yet. I'm certainly not familiar enough with the ancient saints to do this.

Well, yes, but also because he is deliberately choosing names that will be unfamiliar to us, just as he deliberately uses perfectly good but unfamiliar English words to create a sense of alienness (a technique used rather differently by Stephen Donaldson in his "Covenant" books).

No; but he's certainly go thte extra head, and is certainly a monster and the father of monsters. I suspect that an argument could be made for "fire belching" also being symbolically significant. Brother/husband of Echidna? Well, husband certainly, and sibs in that they share the same electronic womb on the Whorl. Which creates an interesting question regarding his other relations, doesn't it?

A nice match, yes, but a symbolically significant one as well. In other words, it says more about "what the thing is" than simply "it's a monster." And by that logic, "Briah" and "Yesod" say more than "these are universes" (or sephiroth or whatever).

That is exactly what I am suggesting. As I said, he does not deliberately lie. To deliberately mislead with the truth is a kind of lie, unless of course you're a Jesuit; but to tell a partial truth in hope of leaving something ambiguous can have unintended consequences. I suggest that is what is going on, nothing more. Thus when you quote:

I agree that:

I don't believe there is any deliberate misleading going on here. It is barely possible that, speaking in a casual and relaxed format (as he clearly is here) he may have slipped (as indeed he couldn't remember the title of the story, other details may have slipped his mind), but a serious substantial argument would have to be made to convince me. Besides, it makes more thematic sense for the shadowchildren to be real; one of the many things 5HC is about, after all, is colonialism and postcolonialism.