…and The Folding

It is, in part, the folding that I love about DQ. The folding brings you back to coincidences again…(see Thursday December 22, 2005, “Folding; Or, Now as I have a taste for reading even torn papers lying in the street” and other varied postings on coincidences). Now the narrator has revealed that Cide Hamete, “the chronicler of this great history” has revealed that Master Peter, the puppeteer, is really Gines de Pasamonte, one of the galley slaves DQ freed in his earlier adventure (in Part I). (Wow, it’s tiring just recounting all that). In Part II, Gines tricks them again and goes his merry way. It’s just a brief reappearance. It’s interesting to me mostly because of his ape (he travels with a prophesying ape) and because of his puppets. I really didn’t pay much attention to Master Peter himself and in this way, I suppose, he conned me too (“he made apes of them all” is how the text puts it). But I’m wondering now about the ape. In the story, the ape is represented as highly intelligent but then revealed as merely having the ability to mimic intelligent behaviour. The ape has run away – fled to the inn roof. What does his running away mean, how do I read it? Do I fold in what I’ve already seen in DQ with the lions in Part II, Chapter XVII, do I include my own reading and response to the tiger in Life of Pi? (See Thursday January 19, 2006, “DQ Update”). Or is the ape folded in from some other fiction or reality outside of my reality or experience…perhaps while Cervantes was mowing Borges’ lawn (see Wednesday February 01, 2006 “comment from ‘a voice’”)?