(urth) Some Pirate Freedom thoughts and questions

Matthew Groves matthewalangroves at gmail.com
Sat Dec 8 09:31:49 PST 2007


Fernando wrote:
> I'm not really completely convinced of the "Chris is evil" reading.  He
> strikes me as no worse than many other Wolfe characters.

He unquestionably has all of the good characteristics you list;
Wolfe's works frequently argue that there is good and evil in
everyone.  Pas could be Silk.

> I think it is significant that a lot of the "faults" we see in Chris are
> things that might well have not been seen as faults in the 18th century.

I think there's a similar situation here to the one some have argued
exists with Able in Mythgarthr.  Unlike most of Chris's fellow
pirates, Chris does not have the excuse of being a product of the time
and place he finds himself.  Even if we could excuse certain of
Chris's actions had they been performed by a 18th-century
contemporary, Chris has reason to know better, and Chris's own
testimony would indicate that he does know better.

> He cannot see someone who does not resist the attempt at sexual
> abuse as a "victim"; for him, rape is rape, but sexual contact that is
> not (physically) coerced is not.

Chris does not openly say that a non-resisting boy is therefore not a
victim ("The boys were the victims of those priests, I am not arguing
that they were not.") although that may be what he really believes.
What he says is that in such a case the priest had only one victim,
whereas the people who "taught the boys to be sheep" had two: the
priest himself was a victim of those people.  Therefore those people
"are at least as much to blame as the molester.  Maybe more."

> 6) What is the chronology of Chris's story? How long does Brother
> Ignacio wait?

This is an important point.  As Chris writes his confession, he has
not yet been Ignacio.

>> How long does Brother
>> Ignacio wait? I agree that it might be interesting to see if we get any
>> clues as to what he was doing. Of course, he may well have simply been
>> slaving away, doing the proper penitence for his acts at last, and
>> learning that patience, too, is a virtue.

to which thalassocrat at nym.hush.com wrote:
> Oh, surely not. It could only be a "proper penance" if he did
> everything he could to stop "Chris1" from turning into a murderer.
> But he doesn't do that; he wants "Chris1" to do exactly what he
> did.

I'm not sure this is fair to Ignacio, considering Wolfe as the writer.
 Remember what Severian told little Severian, in their conversation
about the zoanthrops, about what it means to be human:

"We may force a dog, sometimes, to act like a man - to walk on his
hind legs and wear a collar and so forth. But we shouldn't and
couldn't force a man to act like a man."

So there are limits to what Ignacio can do to change Chris.  He may
have done all he could.  Remember his weeping as Chris left the gates,
and remember that while young Chris is homeless in Old Havana, what he
misses most of all is "the work [Brother Ignacio] and I had done
outside--helping milk sometimes, herding the pigs, and weeding."  The
care of animals is a big deal for Wolfe, I think.  Later, Chris is
assigned to feed Señor's parrots, which he enjoys, and he says "It
brought me closer to Señor, and that soon paid off in a big way."
>From reading the end of chapter three, I feel like "Señor" is
important in some way.  He "shoots the sun at noon every day," and
Chris and he "were pretty good friends.  He was still Señor to me, and
I still touched my forehead and all that."  But I may be reading too
much into this.



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