Dragaera

Question about Devera

Thu Mar 6 14:12:21 PST 2003


On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Jag wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 19:47, Philip Hart wrote:

> > ... but I thought at the time that the passage showed authorial (?)
> > intervention.  Vlad is a sophisticated storyteller (see _Taltos_ or
> > _Dragon_ for similarly interwoven books) but one with a verbal bent -
> > and I can't see anyone speaking the lines from that passage even
> > having had the experience in question.
>
> I'm AFB at the moment, but from what I remember of the lines, I can see
> someone saying them as part of telling their own story.  It'd be the
> kind of thing where its a really powerful memory and the storyteller
> gets lost in the memory while recalling it and starts mumbling out
> phrases about what they remember.  In some ways it'd be like someone who
> just experienced a very traumatic event, where they just mumble
> fragmented pieces of what happened.


Vlad isn't mumbling - his grammar is correct and he rotates from thread
a->b->c->a mid-sentence without mistakes, although the experiences
described in each thread are hard to follow individually (he's not
describing sharpening a knife while talking to Kragar while getting a
foot-rub from Cawti).  This just doesn't seem like a verbal performance.

Anyway, the Vlad books are not pure dramatic monologues - just look at the
chapter titles.

Incidentally I like the Vlad-as-God-to-be hypothesis (not that I believe
it).  It has a lot of echoes with Severian's apotheosis in the New Sun/New
Urth books - Vlad is already in some sense a tripartite being containing
Vlad, Loiosh, and Teldra.  He'd be the god of unified Dragaera - part
Easterner, part local fauna, part Serioli, part Dragaeran; part witch,
part sorcerer, part Eldersorcerer; an old soul and a new one.