(urth) Fairies and Wolfe
Lee Berman
severiansola at hotmail.com
Fri Mar 30 19:31:41 PDT 2012
>Jeff Wilson: What/where does she mention it? [Juturna's kiss giving Severian underwater
>breathing]
It is during their first real meeting at the end of Claw, at the river at Ctesiphon's Cross.
She doesn't say it will be a kiss that does it. But once you know of the legend of underwater
breathing conveyed by a mermaid's kiss, you pretty much have to acknowledge the allusion.
Just rereading the passage and admiring (for the nth time) Wolfe's cleverness and subtelty in
writing. Severian calls her "breathtaking" and notices her parted lips as she anticipates
Severian joining her in the water. But Wolfe won't slap us in the face with the mermaid legend
by outright mentioning the kiss. He just elbows us under the table, daring us to figure it
out for ourselves (or with the help of a discussion board :- )).
Juturna also mentions Baldanders a few times during the conversation and this (along with the
Lake Diuturna/eel connections) is supposed to be enough for a reader to connect the dots and
figure out the underwater breathing connection. Once again, I think Wolfe makes the puzzle a
bit too difficult. I haven't seen the "mermaid's kiss" connection in any published scholarly
analysis. I think it was figured out exclusively on this board and that within the past few
years.
A debate on whether "magic" is used seems sophomoric. The conversation with The CUmaean and
Merryn warns us against falling into that trap. Magic is that which cannot be explained by
science. And hopefully none is so narrow sighted as to think that science is the only possible
explanatory mechanism that will ever be available, be it the long ago past or far future. We
happen to live now in a time period which is the Age Of Science, but it seems obvious that will
not be the case forever.Some of the limitatons of science are already starting to show.
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