(urth) The eyes of a clone

[James Wynn]

The actual reference:
******************
There! Two men and two women. He blinked and stared and blinked again.
     "Oh, Silk! My son! Oh, son!" She was in his arms and he in hers,
melting in tears of joy. "Mother!" "Silk, my son!"
     The whorl was filth and stink, futility and betrayal; this was
everything--joy and love, freedom and purity.
     "You must go back, Silk. He sends us to tell you."
     "You must, my lad." A man's voice, the voice of which Lemur's had been
a species of mockery. Looking up he saw the carved brown face from his
mother's closet.
     "We're your parents." He was tall and blue-eyed, "Your fathers and your
mothers."
The other woman did not speak, but her eyes spoke truth.
     "You were my mother," he said. "I understand." He looked down at his
own beautiful mother. "You will always be my  Mother . Always!"
     "We'll be waiting, Silk my son. All of us. Remember."
***************************

I said:
>>a) Only one man (it seems) speaks. He has "the carved brown face
>> from [Silk's ] mother's closet." He is also tall and blue-eyed.

MSG responded:
>I don't agree with your parenthesis above. Or maybe I should say I 
>understand why you believe it to be so. But there's also at least one
>other valid interpretation that can be made since Wolfe quite shrewdly
>fails to attribute all the dialogue in the passage you cite.

It's feels awfully nice to have someone disagree with me while
acknowledging I'm not making things up to fit a cock-eyed theory.

>...isn't it equally possible that this could have been said by the tall, blue-
>eyed man? Because otherwise the next two paragraphs, it seems to me, 
>are artificially broken and should actually read as one, at least if all the 
>dialogue is spoken by the same person--as you contend. [shouldn't the paragraphs have >been constructed like this instead]:
>
>"You must, my lad." A man's voice, the voice of which Lemur's had been a 
>species of mockery. Looking up he saw the carved brown face from his 
>mother's closet. "We're your parents." He was tall and blue-eyed. "Your 
>fathers and your mothers."

[Rather than:
     "You must, my lad." A man's voice, the voice of which Lemur's had been
a species of mockery. Looking up he saw the carved brown face from his
mother's closet.
     "We're your parents." He was tall and blue-eyed, "Your fathers and your
mothers."]

Hmmm.

1) It is not at all uncommon for Wolfe to present dialog in which the same
person speaks in two separate adjacent paragraphs. I'm not prepared to list
them, but I always take note of them because I have to slow down and pay
careful attention to who is saying what. However, it is not grammatically
incorrect to do that. It is also not uncommon for Wolfe to identify a speaker
once from the context of the dialog and then leave it to the reader to keep
track of who is saying what from the context.

I can’t think of another example where Wolfe has unattributed dialog without
providing any real pointers as to who is saying it, as you suggest Wolfe
has done with "You must go back, Silk. He sends us to tell you."

2) Here is where I throw it in the faces of those people who said my English
degree would never be of any use. ;-) If the proper reading is as you say, that
the man with the "carved brown face" from Silk's closet *is different* from the
tall blue-eyed man, then Wolfe *is* guilty here a true grammatical error: a
pronoun without an antecedent (that is, "He was tall and blue-eyed" does not
identify even vaguely who "he" is). "He" might just as well refer to the Outsider
(to whom I suppose is being referred when Silk's mother says "He sends us to tell
you.") -- but it is a different thing to do that in dialog rather than in narration.
On the other hand, if it is the man who spoke just previously and is described in the
previous sentence, then "he" is identified. 

3) You say Wolfe has quite shrewdly failed to attribute all the dialogue in the
passage I cited. I don't think so, but I could be moved in your direction if I could be
convinced of the *reasons* you believe Wolfe had for his shrewdness. I can't
imagine why Wolfe would deliberately confuse who is speaking unless he had
some purpose in confabulating who is speaking. And that brings me back to
*my* theory. 

If my reading is correct, then the text is grammatically well-constructed but confusing
in exactly the way Wolfe's dialog so often (deliberately) is. If you’re reading is right
(and it *does* require an intuitive leap to assign "He was tall and blue-eyed" to a
hitherto undescribed man rather than the one described in the previous sentence), the
passage dialog is seriously flawed, either deliberately or not.

>One last follow-up question: do we ever learn (or can we figure out) what 
>Silk's foster mother's name is? I can't recall if it's ever mentioned and 
>she seems too important a character to go deliberately nameless.

I believe she is only called “Mother,” like Seawrack’s mom. Incidentally, Hyacinth’s
mother whom she meets in the Mainframe and whom she did not know was dead is
also unnamed and seemingly unidentified.

>msg (who has no dog in this fight, but still wants to point out that
>South Korea today announced it had successfully cloned a dog—
>after only 1000 failed attempts, all of which might be had for the
>cheap somewhere on the streets of Port Mimizon.)

Were any of the failed attempts, six-legged dogs? ;-)

J