(urth) Tales of Silk and Horn

James Wynn thewynns at earthlink.net
Sat Dec 11 10:39:30 PST 2004


>From the complex (C) view:
> As he lays dying, Horn's psyche is transferred to Silk's body. Silk
>effectively ceases to exist and Horn takes his place;
>(C1) Over time, these submerged elements of Silk's psyche begin to play a
> larger and larger part and "Horn" slowly starts to become "Silk"
>(C2) Over time, Horn's attempts to imitate Silk, strengthened by the
> remnants of whatever remnant of Silk's inclinations biologically remain
> within his body,
>
>Simple view, variant 1 (S1):
>The Neighbor transfers Horn's soul and psyche into Silk, and Silk's soul
>departs (along with most, but possibly not all, of his psyche). >
> Simple view, variant 2 (S2):
> The Neighbor transfers Horn's soul and psyche into Silk, but Silk's soul
and
> psyche both remain as well.
> Simple view, variant 3 (S3):
> The Neighbor transfers Horn's psyche, but not his soul (which is moving to
> the great beyond) into Silk's body.

>The question I am interested in is, given the rest of the novels, are
> any of these stories particularly incompatible with Wolfe's overall theme,
> and if so what makes them so? Or alternately, do any of the above
Silkhorns
> fail to live up to the Silkhorn in BotSS, and if so, can we identify what
it
> is that they lack?

I don't have any reason disbelieve that Wolfe might have told any one of
these varients. However, I don't think any of them fully explains what is
going on. I am ready to elaborate on my explanation of what is going on
there based consideration of matter previously and on this recent
discussion. The truth, I believe,  involves the complex and simple varients
in equal measure:

Horn on the ruinous island sees a Neighbor in the form of a greenbuck. He
chases after it, falls in a pit, breaks his neck and dies. The reason I say
he breaks his neck (aside from being a likely way to die instantaneously in
that circumstance) is that Babbie and Seawrack see him in that pit and know
he is dead without having to go down there. The Neighbor feels guilt at
having caused Horn's death (in a sense).

This is the guilt that haunts our Narrator throughout the story, and this
guilt is the reason that he is adamant on being Horn instead of Silk....if
he declares himself Silk or neither Horn nor Silk, it would mean that he had
killed Horn and that there was no way to truly repair it.

At the end of the story, he is reported to say:
*********************************
RTTW (HB) pg 411
"We will sail tonight...Would you be willing to make my farewells to Hoof
and Hide?...I've been dreading it--in a sense, I have killed their father,
though the Outsider surely knows that I never meant him the least harm. I
don't want to have to face his sons..."
********************************

The Neighbor revives Horn by inhabitiing his body as his soul and repairing
the damage. It takes three days to do that. Now the "new Horn" is Horn's
psyche with the Neighbor's soul or perhaps more acurately with the Neighbor
*as his soul*.  He-Pen-Sheep and She-Pick-Berry seem to have a lot of
discourse with the Neighbors and recognize on sight Horn's dual nature,
calling him "Neighbor-man" OBW (HB) pg 261&262

Later our Narrator meets with Neighbors who give him a ring and the deed to
Blue as a representative of his people. They choose him because he is a
mixture of Neighbor and human. One of the Neighbors shakes Horn's hand and
they "share blood".

**********************
On Blue's Waters (HB) pg 272
"My name is Horn." I offered him my hand.
He took it, and this time I felt his hand and remembered hard, and seemed to
be covered with short, stiff hairs. Beyond that I will not say. "My name is
Horn also, " he told me. I felt that I was being paid an immense compliment,
and did not know how to reply.
**************

The "short, stiff hairs" Horn remembers are those that covered his body when
he was a greenbuck. Now I don't know if the Neighbor he clasped hands with
was his spiritual self or if the Neighbors are a communal intelligence or
what. But when he shares blood with this Neighbor who afterward calls
himself "Horn", the Narrator has access to some of his former psyche or that
of the Neighbor. But it is clear that "Horn" has ceased to be merely that
boy who arrived from the Whorl.

The Narrator says a few pages earlier that he does not remember this event
merely in fairly accurate terms, but precisely as it occured. This is
because he remembers it simultaneously from two separate points of view:
himself and the Neighbor with whom he clasped hands. This suggests that the
Neighbors might have a loosely communal consciousness.

Later on Green, as the Narrator lays dying he uses his ring to summon help
to heal him again.

*******************
IGJ (HB) pg127
"Through the ring a Neighbor saw him, and she came to him in his agony. He
told her what was in his heart; and when he had finished, she said, "I
cannot make you well again, and if I could you would still be in this place.
I can do this for you, however, if you desire it. I can send your spirit
into someone else, into someone whose own spirit is dying. If you wish, I
will find someone in the whorl in which you were born. Then there will be
one whole man there, instead of two dying men, one here and another there."
*******************

>From what she says, the Narrator's agony is not just in that he is dying but
in that he is going to fail his mission. The Neighbor's solution solves both
those problems: giving him a workable body and putting him on the Whorl. She
complicates matters in some ways by choosing the object of the Narrator's
mission. Her reference to a "spirit that is dying" suggests, possibly, the
psyche since one presumes the soul is immortal.  But I think it means that
Silk's soul has lost its will to remain with the body much longer and he
will soon die by his will or by self-inflicted violence.

She sends the Neighbor-in-Horn (and here is the weakest part of my
explanation) along with Horn's psyche that he has assumed into Silk.
Possibly since Silk did not have to be brought back to life, but only his
soul released, the Neighbor-in-Horn can retain his further identity. Or
perhaps this was a special detail performed by the rescuing Neighbor since
otherwise the mission could not be completed. But the Narrator definitely
asserts:

**************************
IGJ (HB) pg 122
"Was this you for real Incanto? Were you on Green? By Echidna's babies, I
think you were!"

I shook my head and told him it had been someone else, a man whose name I
have forgotten, a man who wore a ring with a white stone. My own name is
Horn, no matter what Oreb may say.
***********************

So by the time he starts writing the Book of the Short Sun, the Narrator is
Horn's psyche and Silk's psyche and a Neighbor's soul and by the end of his
story he ultimately realizes that he is neither most truly Horn nor Silk,
but the soul inside or, perhaps,  something entirely different from all
three.

~ Crush




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