Okay, but Rue d'asticot, staff like and stork like legs on the girls on st croix and a heron like walk to Abos, the name port mimizon (sounds like mimicry)<br>Which just happens to be organized after a hand with fingers and a thumb, the talk of a bite possibly switching eastwind and Sandwalker in a story by stuff swimming in their veins and Marsch also being bitten on the last possible friday/rogation day before Easter Sunday when the journal starts up again don't seem like coincidence to me. <div>
<br>On Saturday, August 16, 2014, Gerry Quinn <<a href="mailto:gerry@bindweed.com">gerry@bindweed.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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On 16/08/2014 21:08, Marc Aramini wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I should stop, but I just can't.<br>
The story also tells us Victor falls to his death ... I actually believe what the story tells me there.<br>
You see how you have to admit that some scenes are fabrications or unreliable to proceed, and even you aren't immune from dismissing whole scenes that are clearly depicted in the text?<br>
You are likely to say that is the ONLY scene because it serves a narrative purpose. I believe that the tree reaching for Victor, the mites that infect people, the shadow children riding up from the mud in currents, the damaged legs of the young firl and the paralyzed legs of Aunt Jeanine, the climactic bite in A Story, and the symbolism of shadow children riding the shoulders of Marsh men all serve a narrative purpose too.<br>
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But we have clues right from the start. The handwriting in the journal changes (the last line written by the real Marsch was "I think I would shoot them both"). The journal relates that Marsch was bitten by the cat. The officer compares the writing with Victor's school composition book right *before* this point. A few enties later, Victor admits he has been lying about the dates, in the very same entry that he claims the boy is dead.<br>
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Item: The green eyes of the Marsch who visits No. 5. Marsch earlier claims in his journal that Victor has "startling green eyes" (and he doesn't say "greener than mine"). We see green eyes later as an abo signifier in "A Story" - the point is veritably hammered in.<br>
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Item: "I needed only to make my voice like his and look older."<br>
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Item: When (in prison) he writes of his bad handwriting, he says "my mother would take my trousers to the river, walking upstream for hours to get away from the sewers, leeaving me ashamed and afraid, with an old blanket or a torn piece of sail wrapped around me". Who can be writing this other than the boy Victor?<br>
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The thing is, these are all 'hard' clues that point towards a specific interpretation. The clues you cite are heavily interpreted by you, and some of the leaps you make seem to be of questionable foundation. Consider "the damaged legs of the young girl". Phaedria had a broken ankle, which was expected to heal in the normal way. She played a cripple in the play the children put on, "[because her] ankle would not be mended in time four our performance". Other girls - including Marydol - acted in the play, and presumably did not play cripples. Subsequently, Phaedria was agile enough to participate in a burglary.<br>
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You have to assume that Wolfe's characters are completely delusional even when conscious, and that the story is told, like that of Loyal To The Group Of Seventeen, in terms of symbology with no causal attachment to the overt meaning of the text. The problem is, we can easily generate a storm of such symbolism from any text.<br>
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I don't think such symbolism works if it contradicts the text.<br>
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- Gerry Quinn<br>
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