Subject: Re: (urth) Sev's not-so-perfect memory
From: matthew.malthouse@guardian.co.uk
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 08:09:34 +0100

On 13/07/2003 08:31:14 Andrew Bollen wrote:

>Josh says:
>
>> In a fifteen hundred page book?
>>
>> Without a computer?
>>
>> No one, as far as I know, is arguing that Gene Wolfe has a perfect
>> memory.
>
>FWIW, I agree with Josh. Roy's list of errors are easily explained as 
Wolfe
>nodding, IMO. Go through any series of large books by anybody, and you'll
>probably find the same. I'm reading Trollope at the moment - a similar
>effort for his body of work would probably fill a volume the size of one 
of
>his big, fat novels.

I wouldn't disagree with you were it not for Severian's persistant claim 
to a perfect memory.

Is that claim significant or just a throw-away line.  Throw-away lines in 
Wolfe?

If it's significant I don't find it credible that Wolfe would have allowed 
it to be diminished or negated by a number of textual "mistakes".

So we have a meaningful reference to the narrator's memory; a careful 
author (who is on record to the effect that he never says anything twice 
yet the matter of Severian's memory is repeatedly highlighted).  And in 
Severian we have a first person narrator who is not consistant.

And an observed correlation between some of the inconsistancies and claims 
for Severian's memory.

There has to be a reason for this although I confess that what that reason 
might be eludes me entirely.

Matthew

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