(urth) Urth Digest, Vol 56, Issue 37

Thu Apr 16 11:31:06 PDT 2009

Hmmm.  Besides Silkhorn's ruminations, I can't see any evidence at all that
Oreb would not be Oreb.  Certainly, there are changes because of Scylla, but
it would make very little sense to me that Oreb was another bird imitaing
Oreb.  As a connecting Avatar between Silk and Silkhorn, he makes a great
deal of thematic sense to me.

As an imitation of the orignial Oreb, it has far less resonance to me, even
with your good analysis of the siginficance of imitation above.

I've always seen Oreb, like Mucor, to always see the 'soul' of the person he
is seeing.  His change of seeing Jahlee from Bad Thing to Good Girl being a
prime example.

Oreb, like Mucor, is above the trickery and confusion of the multiple
identiy crises.

Except, of course, he isn't.  Because he's Scylla.  WTF?

*implodes*

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 11:26 AM, John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Of course, there's another layer of complexity here.
> I'm currently midway through Return to the Whorl, where SilkHorn makes
> several references to his theory that the Oreb of SS is not the Oreb of LS,
> despite their apparently identical behavior except when Scylla is acting
> through Oreb.  This bothered me the first time I read it, but I took it as
> just another layer of uncertainty, melancholy, and alienation--maybe even
> the beloved pet from the first series is an imposter.
>
> Well, I now think that was wrong.  To me, it always comes back to the idea
> that by imitating someone, you become them--Incus was the first to spell it
> out, but the Outsider later seems to confirm it to Silk, which indicates to
> me that Wolfe thinks it's very important--important enough to repeat and
> important enough to have the One True God say it.
>
> Horn's skill of imitating Silk allowed him to write Silk's story.  It also
> allowed him to almost become Silk without noticing it--SilkHorn's insistence
> that he is really just Horn acting like Silk convinces no one except, at
> times, himself.
>
> I think the character I'll call "Oreb(?)" is a reflection of that.  In
> RttW, when SilkHorn first meets Oreb(?), he asks if he "knew" the original
> Oreb, and then asks "Did he teach you how to talk?"  What I think Wolfe is
> trying to flag in that scene is that, in a sense, it doesn't matter if
> Oreb(?) is Oreb or not--he's functionally Oreb because by imitating Oreb,
> he has become him.  The soul, in LS/SS, may be almost as simple as diction
> + habituation.
>
> Obviously this also explains the somewhat lazy use of exaggerated diction
> (Patera Incus, Patera, that, is, um, augur, hey? Remora, d'yeh remember
> Pig?  Yeh do!, and all of the Dorp people.)  Wolfe is good, but the
> challenge of writing people's souls into their diction and vice-versa is
> tough unless characters have idiosyncratic modes of speech.
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 2:09 PM, Jordon Flato <jordonflato at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Having just read through both LS and SS, one of my favorite aspects, minor
>> though it may be, is that in LS we have Horns voice, which we think is Silk,
>> and in SS we have Silks voice, which we think is Horns.  They tell each
>> others stories, and the style of their narrative voice greatly affects the
>> telling.  There is something so resonant in this for me.  Just a brilliant
>> stroke.
>>
>> I'm still on the fence about the Nettle/Vadsig/Hide voice of the Whorl
>> narrative in RttW.
>>
>> Also, I guess in fact in LS we don't JUST have horns voice, but Nettle's
>> too.  Which makes here the only common narrative voice between the two
>> works.  (Holy spirit?)
>>
>>   On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 11:04 AM, David Stockhoff <
>> dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Doesn't the style of narration depend entirely on the narrator and
>>> his/her circumstances? That is, how else should the narrator of LS have
>>> narrated?
>>>
>>> That scene-by scene style, without introspection, was certainly a shift
>>> after Severian's many-layered and discursive account. But Silk doesn't
>>> narrate LS.
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
>>> Message: 4
>>> Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:26:51 -0700 (PDT)
>>> From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
>>> Subject: Re: (urth) Weekly blog links
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> And we didn't need LS to consist entirely of dramatic
>>> scenes, in the sense of "The Cat in the Starfleet's
>>> Attic".  I'm glad that in NS and SS, our narrators get to
>>> ruminate occasionally.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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