(urth) Drotte-Roche mixup
Lee Berman
severiansola at hotmail.com
Wed Apr 20 07:38:35 PDT 2011
>James Wynn: "Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that the Roche/Drotte mix-up
>could be a typo..
I wouldn't go so far as to say it couldn't be a typo. But one reason I lean toward Antonio's
view and why Drotte-Roche might need a somewhat higher level of typo evaluation than the Maytera
Marble example is the obvious- Severian is (self-) purported to have a perfect memory. I would
expect an author to find ways to support and/or undercut the "perfect memory" assertion in the
first few chapters. So it could be purposeful.
Horn makes no such claim and Wolfe has openly identified the "Marble" mistake as a typo. If Drotte-
Roche was also a typo, why has he not made the same identification? It has received so much more
attention.
Perhaps a third possibility exists..that it was originally a typo but it was not corrected, being
seen as a happy accident that served Wolfe's purposes nicely. (Does an observed but purposefully
uncorrected typo cease to be a typo?)
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