TDTCB, Ch. 4

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« Reply #15 on: April 19, 2013, 10:48:37 am »
Quote from: lockesnow
Some quick notes:

Esmenet is smarter than Akka and Inrau.  She sees the contradictions and the meanings behind the information Inrau brings that Akka never realizes, she makes connections he should make when he even has more information than her.

Akka is again compared to a whore by Bakker, and Bakker makes the deliberate point that sorcerers are 'stoned' just as whores are stoned, but for sorcerers the stone is a chorae.  Hello giant fucking waving flag to everyone on the misogyny train, because in the first few Akka chapters Bakker constantly diminishes him and elevates Esmenet.  Akka believes himself clever and intelligent and this makes him dumb and blind, Esmenet figures everything else out for him.

Inrau's perspective is just filled with flag after flag after flag--particularly note the invocation of water and its inherent holiness--are the Cishaurim and Tusk so far apart?  Also note that Inrau has the same background as Achamian.  Could the boy be his bastard son?  Do the Mandate sustain themselves by using the Cants of Compulsion on the Nroni women to impregnate them? is this why Akka's father was so abusive?

Like the Prologue, every paragraph seems to be riddled with landmines of this ilk.  I'd argue that this section and the prologue was one of the most rewritten pieces of TDTCB, could there be any sections more crucial than the introduction of Kellhus, nonmen, and Sranc (prologue), or the first onscreen action of the gods(onkis), skinspies, and inchoroi?   True Geshrunni saw a skinspy, but Inrau gives us a really detailed description of the monster.

Question, are Sranc onscreen at all inbetween the prologue of TDTCB and the prologue of TJE?

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« Reply #16 on: April 19, 2013, 10:48:52 am »
Quote from: lockesnow
grabbing from an earlier post, I was struck on my read by this passage.

Quote
“Through the wash, he could hear the supplicants wail. Arched into shapes of pain and sorrow, their song ran across the wet stone and cupped his thoughts in stretched notes. Hymns of suffering. Two voices: one pitched high and plaintive, asking why must we suffer, always why; the other low, filled with the brooding grandeur of the Thousand Temples and bearing the gravity of truth–that men were at one with suffering and ruin, that tears were the only holy waters.”
The bolded part foreshadows Inrau's death, it is in the heights of the Hagerna that he encounters suffering and it is gravity that brings him back down to ruin.  There's also quite a nice bit of philosophy in there that ties in/explains the commentary on suffering that the synthese mocks Inrau with, I also sort of feel like this passage somewhat explains another possibility for why Inrau chose suicide, because it is a spiritual revelation he received before he ascended the heights to face the Consult.

Also this passage on suffering also seems to tie into the slave/master dialectic proposed in the chapter header quotation.  And that same dialectic also seems to apply to Esmenet's mastery of knowledge despite Achamian's greater possession of knowledge.  Akka has the capital but he doesn't know how to use, Esemenet knows how to use it, but doesn't have it.

I mentioned above, the invocation of water as holy, this is the passage I was thinking of, 'tears are the only holy water'  has an obvious context within this quotation, but I don't think it supports my above suggestion that there is a connection between Cishaurim and the Tusk, rather it's a repudiation of the Cishaurim holyness of water by articulating tears--rather than the oasis mentioned in the chapter header quote--as the water that is holy for the Tusk.

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« Reply #17 on: April 19, 2013, 10:49:03 am »
Quote from: Wilshire
Quote from: Church
What really struck me about this was the narrative structure of the Inrau passage - tell me if I'm getting a bit over interpretative here, but it seems to me like Bakker is using what happens to Inrau as a microcosm of one of the major themes of the series - how faith appears subjectively to be the most desirable state possible, but how it actually leads to people being manipulated by others.

...

So faith takes over the doubt, leading directly to his manipulation and death - we know a parallel process (though not resulting in death) happens with Cnaiur when he initially meets Moenghus, we wonder whether the same thing is happening with the Three Seas as a whole and Kelhus (depending on what his ultimate aim is).

Not much to say other than I like this line of thought. Seems to fit nicely into my puzzle of TSA.

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« Reply #18 on: April 19, 2013, 10:49:12 am »
Quote from: Mog Kellhus
lockesnow we see many sranc at the end of TWP when Aurax(Aurang?) interrogates the unlucky humans about the Dunyain.