(urth) Pike/Oreb

[Jerry Friedman]

>From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>

>
>> >Well, what of Malrubius? If we have a repeated pattern in which someone
>> >meets a character for the first time and mistakes him for someone he knows
>> >quite well....not everyone, mind you, only in two very specific
>> >instances...well, why should we not conclude that he looked unncannily
>> >like each of those persons. And if A = B = C then A = C. In other words,
>> >why is not simplest explanation to conclude that if Severian had met
>> >Patera Pike, that he might also have mistaken him for Malrubius as well.
>> On 11/4/2011 6:29 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>Two reasons.  One is the lack of people saying the physical Silk resembled Pike.
>
>No. They don't say it. I expected them to, or at least a proffered theory as to why Silk and Severian mistook the Rajan for someone else. I can't remember right now, does Severian or anyone else recognize Severian's face in Apu-Punchau in the first four volumes? I know Severian proferred an incorrect theory regarding his identity and gave us no more information about his identity.  (I could search the text for the answer but not finding anything would not be a confirmation and maybe someone knows.)


I don't remember anything like that, but then I might not even if it were there.

>But Remora's conversation with Silk about the embryo that Tussah bought has always made me sense that he knew Silk was such an embryo and might be THE embryo. That might well be because he saw he similarity between Silk and Pike. But then Remora was an older man as well. I the reason Silk was assigned to the poorest quarter was to hide him from the attention of the city's elites. I suppose there are other ways the could have found out (Tussah told them for instance). But that he had a face they had seen before is another possible way.
>
>As for others, well, it is not true that Silk and Pike were the split image of each other. Pike was a good deal older.

I gave examples below of people who should have seen them at the same age.

>Additionally, Wolfe seems to lean more to Nurture rather than Nature in the development of personalities. In "Home Fires" Chenille sees her mother in the body of a similar but by no means identical woman. She recognizes her immediately because she sees her mother's expressions and gestures in the body.

(I haven't read /Home Fires/, but I think an extra "en" got into a character's name.)

>Pike has lived a different life. He grew up in a different world. He had different parents. I think Wolfe would find that significant in addition to the age difference between them.


But according to your idea, Silk's older self does look identical to Pike.

>> Rose knew Pike quite well in his younger days.
>
>There is an interesting conversation (for me) that Rose-in-Marble has with Silk about why she hated him. She says it was because she could see in his face that he found her unattractive. Imagine how it would be to see such a thing in the face of the one you loved.


A common experience, unfortunately.  But we're in Rose's point of view near the beginning, and she thinks about the filthy things Silk could do to Marble (!), without thinking that he looks very much like her lover in his youth.

>> Marble knew him, though the files might have gotten corrupted, and no doubt older people in the quarter knew his appearance. Yet unless I'm missing something again, we never hear of anyone saying that the new augur is the spit and image of the old one.  When we see Rose's point of view, she doesn't think it, though you'd expect it to be quite disturbing to her.  Likewise Mint knew Pike when he was old (she was at the manteion before Silk), and she sees Silk in RttW and discusses his appearance (which is like Silk, not Horn), but doesn't mention any resemblance to Pike.
>
>Marble might have noticed that they were similar. But who cares? They weren't the same person.
>On the other hand, Mint used to run from Silk's face.


When she gets brave, and even when she talks about his appearance, she doesn't mention anything.

And imagine if a young augur joins a manteion and looks strikingly like the old augur when he was young.  Isn't that going to be the first thing all the older people are going to say?  "My, sonny, I mean Patera, don't you look just like Patera Pike when he was a sprat!  Are you related, by any chance?"

I don't resemble my father more than I resemble my mother, but the summer I worked for him, customers would often ask whether I was his son.  (It reached the point where I wondered whether word was getting around.)  I was twenty and he was in his fifties.  "Ah, no; the years, the years..."


[snip a part that Andrew Mason answered]

>> So maybe the simplest explanation is that only the astral Silk resembles other people.
>
>Wouldn't we expect Hoof and Hide to think the astral Rajan looks like their father then?

I'm not sure what you're getting at specifically there, since they do.  One might ask, though, whether we'd expect random passersby on Green or in Nessus to think the astral Rajan is a ghost.  I don't have a good answer to that, but there's much less opportunity for them than there is for people who knew Silk and Pike.

Maybe this is a good time for a quotation from the interview that Larry Miller reminded us of.

"There's a wonderful bit in the Roger Rabbit movie nobody
seems to get. Roger goes around with handcuffs on his wrists for half an hour. Then he pulls one hand out of
the cuffs and does something with it, and sticks it back in. Bob says, 'You mean to tell me you could get out
of those whenever you wanted to?' And Roger says, 'No, only when it's funny.' That is a profound expression of
the law that governs all writers and performers. The audience doesn't have to think about that, but writers are
bound by it."

So maybe the answer is that Silk looks like Pike or Malrubius, or he's Pike's clone brother but the resemblance comes up, only when it's funny.  But that's a heck of a thing to do in a book that also has puzzles we're supposed to solve.


Jerry Friedman