Digest whorl.v012.n133Whorl

Nww that you mention it, I can see a parallel between the two events, but I'm still loooking forward to your showing any other kind of connection.

It's unfounded in the sense that I don't know of any positive evidence for it. There's just an event without an apparent cause right next to an event without much apparent effect. I was hoping someone would find more definite evidence for (or against) my speculation. ...

Well, it doesn't seem that settled to me, but let me rephrase the question in line with Rostrum's point, which I should have considered in the first place: Does Severian by his mere presence contribute to healing Silk? What's the next-best reason to find it dubious?

True, but does he ever perform a miracle that takes effect at some point in the next few days?

You're right, and I don't know how I was overlooking that, but I wasn't joking. I think there still might be something special about the Claw and those bushes. Should I subscribe to the Urth list to discuss this further?

... so am I. This is a case where I am looking at a repeated pattern and saying, in nerdish tone, "This means something," but am not yet clear on just what it means. I haven't quite started building models of the Whorl out of mashed potatoes. Yet.

Actually, when you put it at that level of abstraction, it sounds much more convincing. (Odd; normally lower levels of abstraction convince me better. Somehow, with Mr Wolfe's work, this gets reversed.) Since I have -- somewhat prematurely, perhaps -- determined to take the position that tBotSS does in fact make some kind of coherent sense, but that it is up to us to tease it out of the text, I suppose I'm likely to jump at anything that looks promising.

Phrased that way, without an unnecessary and doubtful resurrection, I find it far less dubious. I'm inclined to agree that the Narr, at the story's end, is a being like Severian-and-Thecla[-and-sometimes-a-whole-lotta-Autarchs-too]; but I'm disinclined, modulo something very concrete, to believe that there is any meaningful way in which Silk is "dead" at the beginning of OBW but alive at the end of RttW. Whatever exactly happens so that the Narr can finally be called "Silk" openly after his interview with Remora, it seems to be less a resurrection and more a revelation of something that the Narr has been avoiding admitting to himself since page one. That said, tBotSS offers the prettiest Lupine problem in time- of-narration since PEACE. Some of the events narrated by the Narr are told in a near-present first-person, shortly after they occur; some in middle-past tense; some in fairly-distant past tense, gradually catching up (?) with the present. And then the whole document is, apparently, subject to at least light "editing" and significant supplementing by up to four other persons, at an unknown distance of time after the departure of the Narr. While we seem to have fairly clear indications of which bits fit into which category, the presence of the editors makes it somewhat ambiguous -- we know that the editors do not object to inserting a few obvious editorial comments into the text; have they made any less obvious comments? Any fictionalizing? Any tonings-down or deletions? Can we even begin to guess? And to what extent are their "reconstructions" of events on the Whorl to be trusted, anyway? How much did the Narr really tell them, how much do they make up? This is the problem of tBotLS grown up and turned very nasty.

How would he know? --Dan'l *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.