Subject: (urth) Andrew and Marc and Silk and Horn and Babbie
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 09:38:55 -0700
From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 

The one thing we all seem to agree upon is that the weird scene
at the end of OBW is a major turning point, and key to any full
interpretation of _SS_.

I've never been quite able to buy Marc's Horn-into-Babbie=20
reading of this scene for practical reasons -- in fact,=20
the classic Lupine problem of authorship -- who _writes_=20
this scene? If we accept Marc's reading, by the time of=20
narration, Horn is "gone" from the Narrator's body. But=20
it's written from the point of view of the person who=20
primarily experiences ... whatever it is. Silk can not know=20
what Horn's departure feels like from Horn's point of view;=20
yet in this reading, that is exactly what is being narrated.

Andrew's reading has some merit. I'm particularly whacking
myself on the head over his reading of Evensong -- this=20
is so true to the basic Silk pattern; with Evensong, the
Narrator is (in a sense) going through the whole Hyacinth
experience all over again, in a kind of mirror-image.=20

I'm not going to dispute Andrew's reading at this point;=20
I think it warrants some time. It certainly answers some
questions, but it raises others ... in particular, I have
trouble seeing how the Babbie _persona_ could be extricated
back out from the Silk/Horn/? melange and put back into=20
Babbie. (But then, perhaps he carries some Hornishness=20
with him ... which would explain the astrally travelling=20
Babbie scene which Marc has indicated.)=20

Possible areas for investigation to support or deny
this reading:

o Is the Narrator's attitude toward Babbie significantly
  different when Babbie returns in RttW from what it was
  in OBW? If so, how?
o Can we disentangle the "I" references in the scene at
  the end of OBW in a way that makes some kind of artistic
  sense? Is there a pattern to who is speaking when?
o Why would the Babbie persona be necessary to save the=20
  Narrator at that point? By which I mean, why Babbie
  specifically? And what happened to Babbie while this
  was going on?
o Does this help to explain how Babbie got back to the=20
  Main continent of Blue?

--Blattid


--