(urth) Urth Digest, Vol 56, Issue 37

[John Watkins]

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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