(urth) Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Wed, 11/16/11, António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 7:51 AM
> Marc Aramini wrote (16-11-2011
> 15:29):
> > I don't know what you are saying here Antonio.
> 
> Isn't it clear? I'm pointing out an objective, textual way
> to determine who is who. It's one thing to posit that a part
> of Horn went into Babbie because that helps us make sense of
> the story, another to find mechanistic
> corroboration for it. It's one thing to notice Babbie
> springs to defend
> Hide, another to demosntrate why it can't be [just] Babbie.
> And along with
> that, a way to gauge how much of Horn is still present in
> the Rajan at
> various times later on. Does someone have the time to go
> through all the
> dream sequences to establish that? It might be useful to
> know, in order to
> understand his motivations.
> 
> ('Objective' doesn't mean uber-cool. It means anyone can
> apply the same method and get the same result.)
> ('Textual' doesn't mean superior. It means we'll be taken
> wherever applying the method to the text takes us, not the
> other way round.)
> 

The mechanism is the trees, linked over and over to the Neighbors, at the crux point where horn says good-bye at the end of OBW.  Of course a part of him is still in Silk, but it is only a fragment, as left behind by any possession.

This is why the "story of the man on Green" is in third person in IGJ, why there is NO listing of Horn as the protagonist in IGJ, why it is specifically OBW that is conflated with "Horn's book".  Look at the listings at the beginning of each volume, Horn's changes if I remember correctly.  The entire tone shift "I should have said how nice he smiled and how positive he was" in paraphrase at the end of OBW - it's very clear what has happened.  Horn was a negative unlikeable guy. Silk positive.  Silk had been reintroduced to his own body when Pig's eye was provided, but he could not really take over until Horn left and sacrificed himself.

Unfortunately, Silk couldn't accept that sacrifice and tried to hold on to the residue of Horn for a long time after it was gone.  The irony of OBW is where Horn says how much he loves nettle, then says, "Silk would never lie to himself like I have" ... but he DOES.