(urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Sun, 5/22/11, Sergei SOLOVIEV <soloviev at irit.fr> wrote:

> I noticed that Cas and Dorcas means
> the same person at the first reading,
> but of course I didn't guess that she is the grandmother of
> Severian until
> the end of the 4-th book.


Just a real quick point, I think Cas as dorcas is such a huge part of wolfe's typical technique I am surprised it is considered non-wolfean: IDENTITY reveals plot deatils over and over, and is often hard to identify things that are really tied together by simple factual statements.

ie - eleanor bold planted a tree over weer, Mrs. Porter plants trees on the graves of her dead friends.  Figure out Miss Bold is Mrs. Porter and that identification makes the narrator dead.

Pleistorus is Aries is ahura Mazda: figure out that connection and it makes a lot of sense if Aries, as per the poem, becomes tired of war.

The same in fifth head of Cerberus: identify the abo and the inmates and it makes more sense.

Also, Short Sun: Mostly Horn in volume 1, mostly Silk in volumes II and III, Pig as Silk to give the eye and get the reboot of Silk into his body at the end of book III - once you make the identity connections, the 1st and 3 rd person sections make perfect sense but are confusing before that.

So once you figure out the identity of two seemingly disparate characters or can identify them accurately, suddenly the whole story starts to make more sense, and this is so typical of wolfe one of the most important questions to ask of every character is "Who is this, really?" because those identifications reflect on the plot and structure of his work.

More than style, this is his most important theme: the ambiguous but centrally important mystery of identity.