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Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 00:10:42 -0700 From: maa32Subject: (urth) blood, clute, beckett This message is going to seem random, but oh well. Hopefully the well-read literary types will answer my question in the last paragraph. First comment - it seems to me that when Silk goes to the market to thank the Outsider for enlightenment, the suitable sacrifice he finds in not Oreb, but Blood. Oreb is the wrong one; Silk must expiate the sin of the augur he emulates, Patera Pike, by erasing Pike's old errors. Notice that he actually does cut Blood, as he intended to cut Oreb. Myabe that's been commented on before, but it struck me as quite obvious this time. It is also interesting that from the very beginning we know that Patera Pike also received enlightenment. Some on the list may think that Silk was programmed to get that big burst of prescience when he was frozen; I don't know. If so, that might say something about Pike as well. So anyway, it became quite clear to me this time that Blood was Silk's sacrifice and he even met him at the market where he was looking for a suitable one. Now 180 degrees to Mr. Borski's assertion that John Clute was sharp - perhaps so. I never liked the part in his large encyclopedia when he said "perhaps Wolfe has never had an original science fiction idea, but that isn't where his importance lays". I don't understand how Clute came up with the idea that the Autarch was Severian's mother (I think that was Clute, wasn't it?!). Otherwise, I guess I agree. Now, speaking of absurd interpretations, this was the question I was hoping someone on the list could answer (I just don't know who else to talk to!). It's kind of a Wolfe-like case of enlightenment, similar to the one I got in Peace when I first realized the narrator was dead. Has anyone read Beckett's Trilogy "Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable"? First, as I read The Unnameable, it made no sense. Then I realized that the narrator was a penis, perhaps Malone's penis, who mythologized his existence by claiming that he used to have limbs, but now only cries out of his one eye while he sits rigid until a terrible darkness descends on him, when he isn't covered by an awful tarp. I have looked online everywhere, but no one seems to agree that the narrator (Mahood, or The Worm) is in fact a genital organ. Am I the only person in the world who thinks so? I looked it up in the encyclopedia and they had the biggest BS about it being a metaphysical comedy similar to Dante's Divine Comedy blah blah blah. Bunk. They said "Mahood" was the name of a friend of Beckett, but I preferred the elided "Ma[n]hood". It's a wang. The odd part about it is that everything that happens in the book then makes sense and serves a real purpose to the higher level being that the Unnameable doesn't know about - and this makes me think that Beckett is not the negative writer that I at first thought him to be, since it implies that the absurdities of the first two volumes actually serve a purpose at a higher level of understanding. Just thought if anybody would have read it and received the same Wolfe-like revelation, they would be on this list. Marc Aramini --