|
|
Post by El Juanico Diez on Mar 12, 2020 20:06:22 GMT -5
Cynthia Vane is a character in the novel The Vane Sisters, where anagrams and secret codes formed by selecting the first letter of each word of paragraphs in literary texts are a constant theme. The narrator of this story is a character, and is defined as an unreliable narrator because he is mistaken about the reality of the universe in which he lives. I chose to start this text in this way because of its simple similarity to what I intend to write and the fact that Cynthia Vane is the name of one of the patients at Heimlich Hospital. I just think it's good to highlight that the novel The Vane Sisters may have been one of Daniel Handler's influences in ASOUE, since in TVV (which precedes THH) Isadora's couplets have secret messages in the form of acrostics, similar to the codes studied by Cynthia Vane in the book The Vane Sisters. Quoting Reba , "it just proves that Daniel Handler read this before writing ASOUE. Well, you're right, he did." Well ... I'm not trying to prove anything right now. I'm just saying that it helped me to see anagrams in THH in a different way. Previously, I defended the idea that Lemony, in ASOUE, purposefully lied in some parts of the narrative. But as I have already explained in some other texts, I no longer believe that this was the kind of unreliable narrator that Daniel Handler chose for Lemony to be. Lemony may be the kind of narrator who can deceive himself in a non-intentional way, but he is not the type who intentionally lies to the reader. These unintentional mistakes can even be justifications for changes that Daniel Handler decided to make in the story as it was being written. At the moment, I believe that Daniel Handler somewhere between the publication of TAA and TCC decided that Beatrice would have survived the fire at her mansion, and that this should be some kind of plot twist. I believed the anagrams were just Lemony's lies. But now I realize that these anagrams were actually Foreshadowing from this Plot Twist. Note: Carrie E. Abelabudite is an anagram of Beatrice Baudelaire. However, the name Beatrice Baudelaire had not yet been revealed by Lemony Snicket. In other words, readers did not yet know Beatrice's full name, so that they could form this anagram. But Daniel Handler's plan was that after he finally revealed who Beatrice was, readers might have realized that she had been quoted in this book through the anagram. But more than that, in preparation for the plot twist that she had survived the fire, there would be evidence that she had been cited earlier as being convalescing in the hospital. And this would be a good explanation to explain why she didn't go looking for her children: she was hurt. I thought that these names were simply created by Lemony Snicket, but he had no reason to call attention to these anagrams. Lemony may have discovered these specific names that formed the anagrams due to the fact that he himself was in the hospital, and that is why we found the anagram Monty Kensicle.
Wisely, Daniel Handler included the anagram Ned H. Rirger. (Red Herring).
This anagram makes everything intensely confusing. Would this list of anagrams be a Red Herring in itself? Or has a character created this anagram to attract or draw the attention of some other character, similar to what happened in TEE?
I have always believed in the first option, that the anagram list itself is a Red Herring itself. But, now I open my mind to other options.
After all, a Red Haring needs to attract and cheat to function. But how could we be attracted to an anagram of a name that we didn't even know which one it would be? Then in TGG, Lemony wrote a sentence that seemed to differentiate the Baudelaire parents from the woman he loved. (Of course, you can interpret the sentence in other ways, but Daniel Handler's intention to deceive readers who had begun to realize that Beatrice was the mother of the Baudelaires is explicit. After all, Lemony does not want to deceive the readers of his universe, but Daniel Handler wanted to deceive the readers of our universe ... And he succeeded.) So, using Beatrice Baudelaire's anagram at that moment, it just doesn't seem to have been aimed at attracting and deceiving the reader, simply because it failed to attract almost anyone.
Following the principle that I now believe and going wherever this principle takes me, I must believe that Lemony Snicket would not insert these anagrams to deceive the reader. This actually puts Beatrice and Lemony in the hospital during the events recorded at THH. And the fact that Beatrice was injured, most likely innocent of my accusation that she is Bertrand's murderer. (What is a shame). If she was injured, it is possible that she was incommunicable during the events recorded between TBB and THH, and she would not have contacting her children or trying to look for them because of her injuries.
Of course, these are just possibilities. Lemony must have thought that Beatrice died in some other fire, other than the fire at her mansion, which is why she referred to the death of a beloved woman in the afternoon. But I still believe that Beatrice survived yet another fire, since (as I argue), years later she was still alive to be able to go to the Masked Ball where Lemony was captured.
I believe that when he wrote LSTUA, Daniel Handler still had Beatrice's survival in mind. That is why Beatrice's name is associated with a conspiracy and a photo burned in the LSTUA index. This was a plot twist. Did he abandon that idea in TSS?
Well, I hope not.
|
|
|
|
Post by Uncle Algernon on Mar 13, 2020 14:05:02 GMT -5
Carrie E. Abelabudite is an anagram of Beatrice Baudelaire. However, the name Beatrice Baudelaire had not yet been revealed by Lemony Snicket. In other words, readers did not yet know Beatrice's full name, so that they could form this anagram.
I mean, you can spot the conspicuous "d", "r", "a" and "u" in the name, and figure out that it's [Something] Baudelaire. From there, there's only so many first names you can form with "Carie E. b t" |
|
|
|
Post by El Juanico Diez on Mar 13, 2020 14:38:41 GMT -5
But I ask that the one who noticed this anagram as soon as he first read THH without having received spoilers in advance, raise his hand.
This anagram is so subtle that it applies more to foreshadowing than red haring.
Misconceptions
Foreshadowing is often confused with other literary techniques. Some of these techniques include:
A "red herring", is a hint that is designed to mislead the audience. However, foreshadowing only hints at a possible outcome within the confinement of a narrative, and purposely leads readers in the right direction.
|
|
|
|
Post by Hermes on Mar 13, 2020 17:37:29 GMT -5
*Raises hand.*
We know it is a list of anagrams, and it's clear that some of the anagrams other than Violet's are significant. Once we know that it's easy to decipher them (except Ruth Dercroump, which took many years to decipher - I was the first person to solve it at 667, but apparently someone else had previously done so at Wikipedia).
I don't think, though, that this can be a list of people who are actually in the Surgical Ward. If it were, we would have to believe that not only Beatrice and Lemony were there, but also Daniel Handler, Brett Helquist, Lisa Brown, Alison Donalty, Rupert Murdoch, and several people whose names strangely resemble Violet's. (One of them, Volt Baudelaire, later had his life chronicled in Watt Really Happened, by Willis.) The list seems to have been created by Olaf in order to conceal Violet; it is he, not Lemony, who is lying to us in saying that these people are in the hospital.
So I think the hidden clue is not to Beatrice's survival, but simply to the fact that there was a Beatrice Baudelaire. Dante will know the details of this better than me, but as I understand it the idea that B was the Baudelaires' mother was already being debated at the time (the first clue being in TEE, where Jerome seems to be describing the same incident with the eagle that Lemony has earlier referred to). So this was seen as an important clue, not to Beatrice's survival but to her identity.
As for Ned H. Rirger, it could mean simply that the anagrams on the list, except one, were red herrings. But it could refer to Carrie E. Abelabudite, and suggest that this was a red herring - i.e. that B was not the Baudelaires' mother; and, as I understand it, many people read it that way at the time (since at one time there was a lot of opposition to the Beatrice-as-Mother theory, strange though that may seem now). If so, it turns out that 'red herring' is itself a red herring - and we are, of course, later to get some definite red herrings, the masked ball letter in TUA, and 'the Baudelaire parents, the Snicket siblings, and the woman I heppened to love' in TGG.
|
|
|
|
Post by El Juanico Diez on Mar 13, 2020 17:58:43 GMT -5
*Raises hand.* We know it is a list of anagrams, and it's clear that some of the anagrams other than Violet's are significant. Once we know that it's easy to decipher them (except Ruth Dercroump, which took many years to decipher - I was the first person to solve it at 667, but apparently someone else had previously done so at Wikipedia). I don't think, though, that this can be a list of people who are actually in the Surgical Ward. If it were, we would have to believe that not only Beatrice and Lemony were there, but also Daniel Handler, Brett Helquist, Lisa Brown, Alison Donalty, Rupert Murdoch, and several people whose names strangely resemble Violet's. (One of them, Volt Baudelaire, later had his life chronicled in Watt Really Happened, by Willis.) The list seems to have been created by Olaf in order to conceal Violet; it is he, not Lemony, who is lying to us in saying that these people are in the hospital. So I think the hidden clue is not to Beatrice's survival, but simply to the fact that there was a Beatrice Baudelaire. Dante will know the details of this better than me, but as I understand it the idea that B was the Baudelaires' mother was already being debated at the time (the first clue being in TEE, where Jerome seems to be describing the same incident with the eagle that Lemony has earlier referred to). So this was seen as an important clue, not to Beatrice's survival but to her identity. As for Ned H. Rirger, it could mean simply that the anagrams on the list, except one, were red herrings. But it could refer to Carrie E. Abelabudite, and suggest that this was a red herring - i.e. that B was not the Baudelaires' mother; and, as I understand it, many people read it that way at the time (since at one time there was a lot of opposition to the Beatrice-as-Mother theory, strange though that may seem now). If so, it turns out that 'red herring' is itself a red herring - and we are, of course, later to get some definite red herrings, the masked ball letter in TUA, and 'the Baudelaire parents, the Snicket siblings, and the woman I heppened to love' in TGG. You really are an excellent Dante. The possibility that Olaf had created these anagrams had not crossed my mind. However, attributing this to Olaf does not seem to have a clear purpose (in the reality of Lemony's universe) The first (and only) question I ask is simple: Why couldn't these people be in the hospital? I mean Daniel Handler, Brett Helquist, Lisa Brown, Alison Donalty, Rupert Murdoch ... They can also be characters in the Lemony Snicket universe, can't they? In fact, LSTUA confirms that Daniel Handler and Brett Helquist are names of characters from Lemony's universe, and they may be in the hospital too. Haruki Murakami is the name of a real person in our universe, who was reportedly in hospital H. Mikhail Bulgákov is also a name of a real person in our universe, but it is also the name of a character who was reportedly admitted to hospital H. So ... Why are these people mentioned in anagrams not really characters that have the same names as real people? And thanks for raising your hands ... Congratulations. |
|
|
|
Post by Hermes on Mar 14, 2020 9:13:50 GMT -5
Well, if Olaf did not create the anagrams, who did (in story)? The purpose of the anagrams is to conceal Violet's whereabouts, and it's Olaf who has a motive to do that: Olaf clearly knows about them, since he calls Violet 'Laura V. Bleediotie' while, obviously, knowing who she really is. I'm not sure just what the overall strategy is - as so often, DH is working in a rather impressionistic way here - but I guess if just one person had a name that was clearly an anagram, it would be too easy to spot, so he has added some others.
It's true that Handler and Helquist, at least, exist in the world of ASOUE (and as THH comes just before TUA, where they are introduced, it may well be that DH already knew this). And it may be that the others also exist in that world - perhaps Murdoch is the owner of the Daily Punctilio? It would explain some things. So it's possible that Olaf has anagrammatised the names of some other patients in the hospital. But the names which are variants of Violet Baudelaire, e.g. Ed Valiantbrue, are clearly invented, and so is Ned H. Rirger, so I think it's more likely that Olaf has created some anagrams from names of people he knows or has heard of.
|
|
|
|
Post by El Juanico Diez on Mar 14, 2020 10:59:11 GMT -5
It really makes sense. But there is another possible explanation, which is what came to mind when I wrote this text. After all, Olaf uses anagrams because he received specific training in VFD to use anagrams. That's why Lemony Snicket at LSTUA, Daniel Handler and Brett Helquist use anagrams. They are all members of VFD, and have received training in using anagrams. They could have reported false names when they checked into the hospital. The fact that Albert E. Deviloeia and this name is not an anagram is evidence that there were real patients in the Surgical Ward, and Albert is not a member of VFD. The other names may be of patients who are members of VFD, after all the Hospital is evidently linked to VFD.
|
|
|
|
Post by Hermes on Mar 15, 2020 8:51:04 GMT -5
Albert E. Deviloeia is an almost anagram of Violet Baudelaire - it comes to Violet Baedelaire, which is actually closer than most of the others. I had always supposed that O had added these almost-anagrams of Violet to the list to make it harder to find the correct one.
|
|
|
|
Post by El Juanico Diez on Mar 15, 2020 10:58:57 GMT -5
That makes sense. The more we talk, the more I realize that this list of anagrams is actually like a break in the fourth wall. Daniel Handler added these anagrams for us to study them with, and to find Beatrice's anagram. There is apparently no meaning within the story. What is a shame. Dante did not participate in this conversation, but he still seems to be right ... How strange.
On the other hand, if that's the case, I can still accuse Beatrice of being a murderer and arsonist, which makes me happy.
|
|
|
|
Post by Dante on Mar 15, 2020 16:44:27 GMT -5
I must apologise for not posting in this thread sooner, Jean Lucio. I have been very busy lately, and I never want to devote anything more than my full attention to your posts, as I know they will demand it. It seems this particular theory has mostly been resolved without my intervention. But I certainly wish to make some contributions nonetheless. Cynthia Vane is a character in the novel The Vane Sisters, where anagrams and secret codes formed by selecting the first letter of each word of paragraphs in literary texts are a constant theme. The narrator of this story is a character, and is defined as an unreliable narrator because he is mistaken about the reality of the universe in which he lives. I chose to start this text in this way because of its simple similarity to what I intend to write and the fact that Cynthia Vane is the name of one of the patients at Heimlich Hospital. I just think it's good to highlight that the novel The Vane Sisters may have been one of Daniel Handler's influences in ASOUE, since in TVV (which precedes THH) Isadora's couplets have secret messages in the form of acrostics, similar to the codes studied by Cynthia Vane in the book The Vane Sisters. Quoting Reba , "it just proves that Daniel Handler read this before writing ASOUE. Well, you're right, he did." Well ... I'm not trying to prove anything right now. I'm just saying that it helped me to see anagrams in THH in a different way. Interesting, valid approach. You thought about Daniel Handler's literary influences and used textual evidence to point to how they might be relevant. Good work. At the moment, I believe that Daniel Handler somewhere between the publication of TAA and TCC decided that Beatrice would have survived the fire at her mansion, and that this should be some kind of plot twist. This is a good position to situate your theories. Handler's original contract was only for four books and he sincerely didn't think they would sell enough for him to get a full thirteen-book run. It's extremely evident that it was from the fifth book onwards that he was developing a more ambitious metaplot which would link the series together as more than simply a series of episodic misfortunes. My own theory as to his ideas on Beatrice are a little bit different to yours. I actually think that the presence of both "Beatrice Baudelaire" and "red herring" on the patient list is part of a trend also present in the U.A. (where they are also paired); that of giving Handler breathing room. He had ideas for where he wanted the series to go, but he wasn't sure if he would actually go through with them; or else, he simply didn't want the correct answers to be too obvious, even as he foreshadowed them. So for every legitimate hint he dropped (into, or in some cases from, the narrative), there are also red herrings which gave him leeway to change the truth, or at least to make life more difficult for the fans. I think the ultimate expression of this is the line you cite in TGG in which Snicket appears to identify the woman he loved and the Baudelaire mother as separate individuals - though the really important hint in TGG which goes nowhere and shows for sure that Handler changed his plans is this one: -TGG, p. 120 Following the principle that I now believe and going wherever this principle takes me, I must believe that Lemony Snicket would not insert these anagrams to deceive the reader. This actually puts Beatrice and Lemony in the hospital during the events recorded at THH. And the fact that Beatrice was injured, most likely innocent of my accusation that she is Bertrand's murderer. (What is a shame). If she was injured, it is possible that she was incommunicable during the events recorded between TBB and THH, and she would not have contacting her children or trying to look for them because of her injuries. I wondered if this would be the tack you would take. You're not the first to interpret this anagram as indicating that Beatrice was present in person at the hospital; indeed, I recall some have even proposed that she ultimately died in the Heimlich Hospital fire - which seems to render the whole business of her survival rather pointless, to my mind. *Raises hand.* We know it is a list of anagrams, and it's clear that some of the anagrams other than Violet's are significant. Once we know that it's easy to decipher them (except Ruth Dercroump, which took many years to decipher - I was the first person to solve it at 667, but apparently someone else had previously done so at Wikipedia). And fair play to you, Hermes; the rest of us were distracted by the admittedly tempting alternative "torch up murder". Jean Lucio, will you attempt, as some have done, to find a meaningful anagram in pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity? (And remember, you're not a true Snicket fan unless you can spell it perfectly from memory!) What was it someone proposed - something silly along the lines of "Violet dies, I cry help me, I may lie, car tot ax"? Good effort, but the more letters you have available, the more possible solutions there are, so finding anagrams in a long text is generally taken as a fool's errand. (See also: Honorificabilitudinitatibus.) The list seems to have been created by Olaf in order to conceal Violet; it is he, not Lemony, who is lying to us in saying that these people are in the hospital. I would have to see a pretty convincing quotation for that one, Hermes. The patient list contains "hundreds of people", "organized by ward" (THH p. 143), is "very long" and runs to multiple pages (p. 146). It's also how the Volunteers Fighting Disease were locating, accurately, patients to whom they should be singing. So it seems clear to me that the list is the genuine article. As such, it may indeed contain other fabricated names so long as they correspond to a real patient. And providing a phony name to whoever compiles Heimlich Hospital's paperwork seems like it could not have been too difficult; we don't know what the process would have been, but it might have been as simple as - what the narrative gives us: -THH, p. 182 With which said, I otherwise agree with the suggestion that the other anagrams on the list are not in-universe anagrams, simply hints and jokes for our delectation. One shudders to imagine such an unbelievably improbable accident as could put Daniel Handler and Lisa Brown, Lemony Snicket and Brett Helquist, Alison Donalty, Rupert Murdoch, and Beatrice Baudelaire into the Surgical Ward of Heimlich Hospital on the very same day Olaf was attempting Violet's life there! So I think the hidden clue is not to Beatrice's survival, but simply to the fact that there was a Beatrice Baudelaire. Dante will know the details of this better than me, but as I understand it the idea that B was the Baudelaires' mother was already being debated at the time (the first clue being in TEE, where Jerome seems to be describing the same incident with the eagle that Lemony has earlier referred to). So this was seen as an important clue, not to Beatrice's survival but to her identity. It's worth noting that online ASoUE fandom only really came into being in around 2002, and I only joined 667 in 2004. I cannot say for certain what people's early, pre-THH and pre-U.A. theories were. However, it is absolutely true that Beatrice being the Baudelaire mother was always a major theory. There are all sorts of hints, some subtle and others enormous - there are the ones you cite, the fact that Esmé directly references Beatrice when explaining why she's tormenting the Baudelaires, one of the lines in the alleged R.'s letter to Lemony in the U.A. which also links Beatrice with Snicket and the Baudelaire orphans... The business of the anagrams on the patient list had already been wrapped when I joined the forum, but I'm sure people had been primed and ready to find "Beatrice Baudelaire" on there. As for Ned H. Rirger, it could mean simply that the anagrams on the list, except one, were red herrings. But it could refer to Carrie E. Abelabudite, and suggest that this was a red herring - i.e. that B was not the Baudelaires' mother; and, as I understand it, many people read it that way at the time (since at one time there was a lot of opposition to the Beatrice-as-Mother theory, strange though that may seem now). If so, it turns out that 'red herring' is itself a red herring - and we are, of course, later to get some definite red herrings, the masked ball letter in TUA, and 'the Baudelaire parents, the Snicket siblings, and the woman I heppened to love' in TGG. This is the retroactive explanation and the one proposed by people at the time, yes; that the only red herring was the red herring itself. Curiously enough, while at the time I'm not sure I understood why anyone would seriously oppose the theory that Beatrice was the Baudelaire mother, in retrospect I understand it all too well. The fact is that some people never want the obvious explanation to be the correct one; they want to be surprised, or else they want to stand out from the crowd and from decided fact. There were many who were also unhappy with the idea that V.F.D. might prove to be Volunteer Fire Department, for instance, for all that that was even more obvious; and so they proposed alternatives like Volunteer Fire Detectives, or Volunteers Forever Disguised. This principle also underlies the thought process of the latter-day theorists; people unsatisfied with the end of the series, who long above all else for a deeper truth, a more secret secret, a conclusion which above all else should suit their own biases. |
|
|
|
Post by Hermes on Mar 15, 2020 17:06:38 GMT -5
The list seems to have been created by Olaf in order to conceal Violet; it is he, not Lemony, who is lying to us in saying that these people are in the hospital. I would have to see a pretty convincing quotation for that one, Hermes. The patient list contains "hundreds of people", "organized by ward" (THH p. 143), is "very long" and runs to multiple pages (p. 146). It's also how the Volunteers Fighting Disease were locating, accurately, patients to whom they should be singing. So it seems clear to me that the list is the genuine article. As such, it may indeed contain other fabricated names so long as they correspond to a real patient. I meant specifically the list for the surgical ward. The list for the whole hospital clearly includes lots of real names, but the list for the surgical ward consists entirely of anagrams, of which the obvious purpose is to conceal Violet's whereabouts, and includes several names which are approximations to 'Violet Baudelaire'. So while it could be that the others are real people, I think that adds an unnecessary complication to things. In reality, I think JL is right; it's a fourth-wall breaking moment, a message from the author to the reader. But if we want an in-story explanation, it seems that the most straightforward is that Olaf invented all these names as part of his concealment strategy. |
|
