From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy@siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v012.n133
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 14:49:17 

> Nww that you mention it, I can see a parallel between
> the two events, but I'm still loooking forward to your
> showing any other kind of connection.

... so am I. This is a case where I am looking at a repeated 
pattern and saying, in nerdish tone, "This _means_ something," 
but am not yet clear on just _what_ it means. I haven't quite 
started building models of the Whorl out of mashed potatoes. 
Yet.


> There's just an event without an apparent cause right next
> to an event without much apparent effect.  I was hoping
> someone would find more definite evidence for (or against)
> my speculation.

Actually, when you put it at that level of abstraction, it
sounds much more convincing. (Odd; normally lower levels of
abstraction convince me better. Somehow, with Mr Wolfe's work, 
this gets reversed.) Since I have -- somewhat prematurely,
perhaps -- determined to take the position that tBotSS does 
in fact make some kind of coherent sense, but that it is up 
to us to tease it out of the text, I suppose I'm likely to
jump at anything that looks promising.

> ... [L]et me rephrase the question in line with Rostrum's
> point, which I should have considered in the first place:
> Does Severian by his mere presence contribute to healing
> Silk?  What's the next-best reason to find it dubious?

Phrased that way, without an unnecessary and doubtful 
resurrection, I find it far less dubious. I'm inclined to
agree that the Narr, at the story's end, is a being like
Severian-and-Thecla[-and-sometimes-a-whole-lotta-Autarchs-too];
but I'm disinclined, modulo something very concrete, to
believe that there is any meaningful way in which Silk is
"dead" at the beginning of OBW but alive at the end of RttW.
Whatever exactly happens so that the Narr can finally be
called "Silk" openly after his interview with Remora, it
seems to be less a resurrection and more a revelation of
something that the Narr has been avoiding admitting to 
himself since page one.

That said, tBotSS offers the prettiest Lupine problem in time-
of-narration since PEACE. Some of the events narrated by the 
Narr are told in a near-present first-person, shortly after 
they occur; some in middle-past tense; some in fairly-distant 
past tense, gradually catching up (?) with the present. And 
then the whole document is, apparently, subject to at least 
light "editing" and significant supplementing by up to four 
other persons, at an unknown distance of time after the 
departure of the Narr. While we seem to have fairly clear 
indications of which bits fit into which category, the presence 
of the editors makes it somewhat ambiguous -- we know that the 
editors do not object to inserting a few obvious editorial 
comments into the text; have they made any less obvious 
comments? Any fictionalizing? Any tonings-down or deletions? 
Can we even begin to guess? And to what extent are their 
"reconstructions" of events on the _Whorl_ to be trusted,
anyway? How much did the Narr really tell them, how much do
they make up? This is the problem of tBotLS grown up and
turned very nasty.


> True, but does he ever perform a miracle that takes
> effect at some point in the next few days?

How would he know?

--Dan'l


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