(urth) Drotte-Roche mixup

Sun Apr 17 13:28:00 PDT 2011

I have seen plenty of blatant errors in novels, including when a 
character's name is wrong, albeit usually in worse and cheaper books 
than Wolfe's. It is quite possible for an editor to simply miss the 
significance of what we regard as plain clues.

As an example, in the audio version of Calde of the Long Sun, the 
narrator (who does great voices even if he occasionally misses an easy 
pronunciation!) gives Blood a new voice at Maytera Mint's sacrifice, 
when Blood plainly appears as himself (his approximate age, weight, 
perfume, shorter dark young man with him) but is not named. It is clear 
that the narrator simply didn't realize this person was Blood. (Too bad, 
because his voicing of Blood is tremendous.)

And Tony is right that Drotte and Roche mean nothing to the reader at 
this point, perhaps especially because the chapter might have been 
insufficiently rewritten to make it serve as chapter 1.

It could have been worse: In one of the other such errors I have seen, 
there is a love triangle between two men and a woman. Man #1 is arguing 
with the woman in her house when suddenly his part of the conversation 
is taken over by Man #2. It's quite disorienting.

And it wasn't science fiction. I have thought many times since then that 
an experimental novel of creeping errors indicating the true chaotic 
nature of the universe (in the vein of /At Swim-Two-Birds/) might be fun 
to write, but this was not that novel.

I am not sure Wolfe would have had Severian say anything as plain as 
"Well, as I was saying before the chambermaid came to empty the 
chamberpot, Drotte said...." Severian's bona fides as having eidetic 
memory must be established before such games can be played, but even 
then he cannot be portrayed as being so easily thrown off as that. His 
errors are less easily discovered, and should be expected to be 
deliberate ones (on Severian's part), such as pretending he didn't know 
he was sleeping with his grandmother.

On 4/17/2011 3:18 PM, Tony Ellis wrote:
> Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> We do know that various office functions are still being expected of Sev
>> as he writes. Time passes, Dr Talos comes and goes. Sev could as easily
>> gone a final weekend trip, moved his bowels, and approved a dozen
>> executions between writing "Roche" and "Drotte".
> He takes a break on page *two* of his memoirs? In the middle of
> writing an exciting bit? I don't find that very persuasive. Moreover,
> the reason we know about these little interruptions is because
> Severian tells us when they happen. If Wolfe wanted us to think that
> Severian had made a memory slip across such an interruption, he could
> have written it that way.
>
> Antonio Marques:
>> This is the part I find unbelievable. A mistake such as this doesn't
>> happen on such a passage from such an author. First, it'd be much of a
>> coincidence; second, it's the kind of stuff I'm positive he cares more
>> about in his proof-readings; third, it's too conspicuous, I got it
>> outright, dense as I am, and absolutely not on the lookout for such
>> stuff at the time; fourth, it's right in the beginning of the book(s),
>> with all the spotlights on it.
> Wolfe is as fallible as every writer, and every writer makes mistakes.
> And it doesn't matter how much Wolfe cares about getting it right. You
> can't strap-on a larger brain just because you care.
>
> Vigilance will net you 99% of the mistakes in a manuscript. But
> doubling that vigilance will only net you 99.1%. Why? Because the
> mistakes you miss are the ones where your brain doesn't *see* a
> mistake at all. Wolfe spelt correctly all sorts of obscure and archaic
> words in TSotT, but he still got a basic one, 'onagers', wrong. Why?
> Because he *thought* it was the right spelling. Why did the
> copy-editor miss it? Because he assumed that clever Mr Wolfe knew what
> he was talking about. This is how mistakes get through.
>
> I proofread for a living, and you wouldn't believe the things I see,
> or the things that both I and the editor miss. I remember a writer who
> wrote 'inseminate' when he meant 'estimate', and I'm not making that
> up. Yesterday evening - and British TV viewers could back me up on
> this one - I heard a BBC 2 announcer inform us that in a few minutes
> we'd see a documentary in which Ernest Shackleton's ancestors retraced
> his fateful journey to the Antarctic. I watched, but there was a
> disappointing lack of zombies.
>
> The fact that the Drotte-Roche mixup is in chapter I doesn't impress
> me much either. Who are Drotte and Roche to us then but
> interchangeable cyphers, the Merry and Pippin of future-earth? Here's
> something else that's in Chapter I: a line that goes 'While he shifted
> his ground I saw Vodalus wrench the knife free and drive it into the
> leader's throat.'
>
> Except that in my copies of TSotT, the letter 'f' is missing from the
> third word. I kid you not.
>
> Again, British readers could back me up on this. I have the 1981 Arrow
> paperbacks, but I vaguely recall seeing the same mistake in later
> imprints. I assume this is a typesetter's error and not found in US
> editions, or someone would have mentioned it by now.
>
> Finally, purely as a point of interest, in the manuscript Wolfe
> submitted chapter I *wasn't* the beginning of the book anyway. It was
> chapter II. It was moved because it made for a punchier opening.
>
> So maybe everyone really was super-vigilant at proofreading the start
> of the novel, and the mistake was missed when they all kicked back and
> relaxed in chapter II.
>
> Only joking. :-)
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