(urth) Pike/Oreb

[Jerry Friedman]

>From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>
>On 11/3/2011 4:44 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> I read that passage quite differently from you.  What's your evidence for a
>> "struggle"?
>> 
>> I'd think it more accurate to say that he thing that Silk tries to explain to
>> himself is why he said "sir", not why he said "my son". In fact, he seems to
>> have been trained or to have worked out ways to address older or higher-status
>> men more respectfully than "my son".
>> The reason he comes up with for his
>> switch makes sense.  If we think he's hiding another reason from himself, one
>> possibility is that he switched from "sir" to "my son" after he went from begging
>> to doing an augur's job of explaining something about the Outsider to a layperson.
>> He might hide this from himself because it might feel like sinful pride to him.  I
>> don't see any hint that he unconsciously sees Blood as something like his son
>> in a physical sense or that Wolfe is inventing this to give us such a clue.
>
>I wish I had put it as succinctly as David. The exposition is peculiar. As is often the case, I think Wolfe has a remarkable ability to provide exposition on multiple channels at one. There are many times Wolfe has his characters chattering on about something that seems barely relevant and in an overly verbose way and suddenly I have an epiphany that as the character speaks, Wolfe is there, in the same spot. He is speaking the same words but he is looking at me, the reader, from the corner of his eye.

The difficulty, of course, is knowing when he's doing it and when he's not.  I see that several people have felt he's doing something unusual in this passage, which certainly strengthens your argument.
 
>> And what about Severian's mistaking Silk's astral appearance for Master
>> Malrubius's ghost?  There's no doubt about that, I take it.  I'd think that gets
>> priority as something needing explanation, and that the explanation for it
>> might shed some light on Silk's mistaking his future astral self for Patera
>> Pike.
>
>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.
 
Two reasons.  One is the lack of people saying the physical Silk resembled Pike.  Rose knew Pike quite well in his younger days.  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.
 
The other is that giving the Commonwealth the same practice of thawing embryos as the /Whorl/, without any mention, doesn't strike me as a simple addition to BotNS.
 
So maybe the simplest explanation is that only the astral Silk resembles other people.
 
>It's not like Wolfe has never peopled his stories with inexplicable twins (genetic or temporal) running around with seemingly separate agendas.

I'm not arguing that he'd never do such a thing, just that I don't see the reason to believe it in this case.

>I have some suspicions. They are are beyond my ability to even argue them. They just seem to fit on the overall horizon. I believe that Don Doggett was on track in his theory that Severian was in some way a descendent/relative to Typhon and Ymar. He was wrong at certain points, I think, but his concept was valid.  I think members of Typhon's family (such as it is) are to be found all over the Sun Cycle. What is missing is a valid tree and the role each plays.

I'm at the same point, or not as far along.
 
[snip the part that's been taken care of]
 
Jerry Friedman