(urth) Urth Digest, Vol 56, Issue 37

Thu Apr 16 12:18:51 PDT 2009

I see.  Yes, that is a good reading of it.

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM, John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Oh, I agree--I think he's definitely still Oreb.  On the level of mere
> plot, SilkHorn doubts Oreb(?) is Oreb because 1)  he's suppressing Silk's
> memories of the last 20 years, which may have involved continuous
> association with Oreb, and 2)  the Horn side has no idea how old night
> choughs can get.  But I think his instinct, that Oreb is another bird
> perfectly imitating Oreb, is still supposed to tell us something about the
> movement of souls in the book and about SilkHorn's understanding of
> himself--I think there's a bit in On Blue's Waters where SilkHorn says he
> isn't Silk but has done his best to imitate him for his entire life.  This
> is wrong, but it's his justification of himself.
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Jordon Flato <jordonflato at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>>> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>>>>> Message-ID: <925508.79653.qm at web50710.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
>>>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 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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