(urth) Thea and Thecla

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Mon, 1/10/11, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

> > 
> "I played again with pebbles in the courtyard beside the
> fallen curtain wall, as Thecla dodged the hooves 
> of my father's mounted guard."
> 
>  

I do agree with one point, and that is that Wolfe often does do plain straightforward stuff like the quote above but somehow makes it exceedingly ambiguous, such that it is mentioned in a dream, or trapped in metaphor that seems merely figurative, or in this kind of sensory overload situation where it is not clear who is talking.  ie Kypris saying "this woman is a spy" talking about the body she possesses.

At the end of Obw, the narrator says, I caught the ball, I won the game.  We know that is Silk, but there is so much "white noise" around it that even straightforward statements like that become infinitely complicated until a mechanism is found to explain them logically.  So yes, these kind of ambiguities need explication.  They are begging for it.  

I don't know if Wolfe became more concrete in his solutions as he got older or my reading style changed, but the child who first read New Sun is still puzzled by the same stuff that puzzled me as a kid, whereas the texts I have come to as an older man, including Latro, seems to me much more solvable to some degree with the slippery symbolic word association Wolfe employs (tree/death in Peace, for example).  I think New Sun has some very important elided parts that simply can't be filled in as neatly as the elided portions of Latro (we KNOW why Latro is depressed in Arete - the Spartan's incredible cruelty and the death of his amazon woman, and there seem to be other explanations as to why he can succeed in pushing Sysiphus' boulder to the top when a demigod can't do it, too. 
We know that one guy is a goat like satyr or faun, the puzzles seem to have solutions.)  

Long Sun and Short Sun seemed the same way to me, imminently solvable, with the Plan of Pas dominating much of the conflict in the Whorl and the mystical trees controlling much in the Short Sun, but I have not been able to find the satisfying kinds of statements like "kypris who was mother was was Hyacinth" out in the open in New Sun.  Instead I have this vague fear Severian is a bastard not from his own descriptions but in the way he uses people and does not seem to acknowledge it.  Sometimes I think he only spares Agia because of some presentiment that she will save him later.  

I would be more likely to say Wolfe thrives on that purposeful inexplicable Heisenberg uncertainty in his earlier fiction like 5hoc and New Sun but his later stuff seems to me more like Peace, very very very clever obfuscations.  There is a reason Weer our narrator turns away from certain facts, but we can read between the line and reach his own refusal to explore the evil he has done in a life that is for all intents and purposes long over.