(urth) Silk or Horn?

Marc Aramini marcaramini at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 1 09:17:00 PDT 2013


In OBW, the character index indicates Horn is the protagonist.  In IGJ, he is no longer listed as such, though Incanto is called the former Rajan of Gaon.
 
Silk is capable of EXTREME denial to avoid guilt.  The astral projection is to some degree idealized - as he gets closer to "home" he looks less and less like Horn and more like Silk.  Babbie becomes human looking, like Oreb with Scylla inside him.  Clearly Horn is mostly in Babbie at the end of OBW - the shift in tone is simply obvious.  Horn is a violent man.  Silk is a positive but preachy one.  At the start of IGJ the preaching starts, heavily.  The shift from emphasis on the past in OBW to present in IGJ, where Horn's story on Green is even told in the third person, gives his "goodbye" even more of an impact.  there is always a fragment left behind, but narrative voice, tone, and mechanism, as well as the fulfillment of the prophecy, "I see you, Horn, riding a beast with three horns", all conjoin there to indicate that the vanished god/tree has really let Horn say goodbye when he mentions all of his family and gives them his final orders,
 before the positive Silk takes over, talking about reading over everything and how he should have emphasized Hari Mau's smile and how HE caught the ball and won the game.
 
Of course there is a fragment, but OBW is Horn's 1st person account of the past.  He leaves, and then Silk begins his 1st person PRESENT tense narrative, the story of Horn on green told in 3rd person.  There is even a mechanism for Horn to leave - the tree he sits under.  The narrative really does, and always has, supported the majority of Horn sacrificing himself at the end of OBW - read again the way Babbie treats Horn's sons in the sections on Urth in RTTW chapter 17 - once you see it, it is unmistakable
 

________________________________
 From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>
To: "urth at urth.net" <urth at urth.net> 
Sent: Sunday, September 1, 2013 8:11 AM
Subject: (urth) Silk or Horn?
  

>Marc Aramini: but the first book of long sun ends with Horn imitating 
>Silk, and the last book of short sun ends where Silk finally stops 
>imitating and pretending to be Horn.

Marc, I get the feeling this has been debated before, so I apologize for
any rehash.

I wouldn't discount any of the evidence you present but its just that I 
see counter-evidence (or perhaps doubled evidence). I already mentioned
that there are scenes in (old) Viron where Silkhorn acknowledges that he
looks like Silk but declares, in deeply heartfelt fashion, that he is 
really Horn. I find it hard to believe that this is Wolfe beating us over
the head with what we already (think) we know about Horn being Silk. I
see it as a redirection for the reader.

There is, as you mention, the scene where he kicks Jahlee to death after she feeds on Nettle. You find this to be an emotionally shocking act for Silk. 
But I find it more parimonious to interpret this as a quite understandable 
action from Horn. 

Moreover, when they dream travel, Silkhorn ends up looking more like Horn than Silk. Since the inhumi who dream travel end up looking and being entirely human
when they dream travel, how should we interpret Silkhorn's appearance?

Perhaps your interpretation is that the inhumi pretend to be human so Silk
appearing like Horn in dream travel is evidence that the narrator is really
Silk pretending to be Horn?

I take a different interpretation. I get the sense that Wolfe is saying that
when inhumi partake of the blood of a human, they absorb some of the essence
and become truly part-human. Thus I see SilkHorn truly as partly Silk
and partly Horn.

I have previously mentioned also that I get a sense of "card shuffling and
redealing" between Long and Short Sun. Gods and other characters get mixed
up and reformed into new combinations.

I see all this as allegory for the passing of family traits from father to 
son via "blood" sharing. And perhaps also allegory for the eucharist, where 
one gains some of the essence of Christ through ingesting his blood.

Does a son only pretend to be partially like his father?  Is the absorbtion 
of Christ-essence by a Catholic only a pretending?

I get the impression Wolfe does a double-cross on us. We are first slowly led
to understand that the narrator is really Silk, but by the end of RttW, I feel
he wants us to understand there is a truly new blending or combination of Silk
with Horn.  Father-figure blending with Son-figure via spirit.                           
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