(urth) Introduction and Breath

Daniel Petersen danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com
Mon Apr 18 13:58:47 PDT 2011


Man, talk about unreliable narratives/narrators!  I've totally got snarled
in trying to decipher who's said what in this exchange!  Anyway, I'm largely
rooting for the minority that are saying 'unreliable narrator' is not such
an appropriate and distinctive label for Severian.  (I'm almost certain
Gerry Quinn is one person doing so and I'm sure there are some others with
him.)

However, Roy's (I think) last post there about Sev's recurrent claim to
perfect memory mixed with his own comments about how his emotions affect his
view (and it might be added that he says eventually our minds turn
falsehoods into truths, or something like that) have me thinking.  Roy, can
you link to your list you made?  (I know someone said making a list of
errors/inconsistencies 'misses the point' but I don't see how.)

Again, most of what's being argued is that Wolfe is a clever, indirect,
complex writer (who's yet clearer than we give him credit for, especially in
the fog of the built-up pre-aura from blurbs about his devious authorial
ways) and/or Severian's a very complex, thoughtful character who only gives
out certain information when he feels he's ready and given enough back story
(or who just sometimes thinks 'oh! I should mention this too' or 'did I ever
give that detail?' etc.).

Not convinced that's 'hard' unreliable narrator material (and yes, I think
'hard' and 'soft' are a useful distinction, the latter being what tons of
authors do with the inherent trickiness of narration - we need something
much more to name it as a main trope that Wolfe is allegedly [in]famous
for).

-DOJP

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 8:26 PM, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:

> Gerry Quinn wrote:
> > For me, the term 'unreliable narator' implies that the author is telling
> us
> > another, different story disguised behind the overt story the narrator is
> > telling is; either the narrator is lying or he doesn't understand what's
> > going on.  I really don't think that either is the case with Severian.
> >
> > A narrator who simply makes mistakes or who doesn't know everything isn't
> > unreliable in this strong sense.  Maybe we could define 'weakly
> unreliable'
> > and 'strongly unreliable' - but I personally feel that the expression
> > 'unreliable narrator' should be reserved for the strong sense. [snip]
>
> In general I agree with you, but Severian is a special case because of his
> self-vaunted perfect memory. There are mistakes in his narrative (I once
> posted a list of them), most of them minor, but it's hard sometimes to
> decide which are his and which are Wolfe's. If Severian did not go on so
> much about his perfect memory, most such errors could be overlooked. There
> is one however that is not so easy to dismiss.
>
> In the first chapter of SHADOW, Severian says that Vodalus handed his
> pistol
> to the big man we later learn is named Hildegrin. Thea then took the pistol
> from Hildegrin. But near the end of the first chapter of CLAW, while going
> on again about his memory, he recalls that night in the necropolis and says
> that Vodalus had given the pistol to his mistress. In the Appendix to
> CITADEL, Wolfe wrote that Vodalus had handed the pistol to Thea.
>
> Which of the two Vodalus handed the pistol to is not in itself really
> important; Thea ended up with the pistol either way. But I find it a little
> hard to believe that Wolfe made this blunder because there was otherwise no
> point in having Vodalus first hand the pistol to Hildegrin, unless the
> detail served Wolfe to demonstrate that Severian's memory is not quite so
> reliable as he believed.
>
> Severian was a teenaged boy at the time of the necropolis incident. What
> impressed him at the time was what he perceived as something of a heroic
> gesture; Vodalus declined to use his superior weapon against poorly armed
> rabble. He handed off the pistol and drew his sword to perform a rearguard
> action against superior numbers, thus putting his life in jeopardy. That
> act
> of perceived gallantry is what stood out in Severian's memory of the
> incident.
>
> When he recalled the incident a couple years later, in another context in
> Saltus, he still admired Vodalus for that action. When he wrote about both
> occasions, ten years after Saltus, his opinion about Vodalus had changed
> but
> he still remembered the emotional impact of that first meeting in the
> necropolis. It seems to me that his emotions can and do sometimes distort
> his memories. In the case of the pistol, his admiration for the gesture
> seems to have colored his recall of the details of what had actually
> happened. As he wrote at the end of the first chapter of CLAW, "And in any
> case, the old, recalled emotions were too strong. I was trapped in
> admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the
> captive of some long-vanished pine."
>
> -Roy
>
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