Subject: (urth) Re: Weer's Death, and J.L. Borges

From: CRCulver <crculver at aol.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 06:34:17 +0000

William Ansley said:
<I read the book three times before I realized that Weer was dead.>

That's common with Wolfe's books. I read the BotNS three times before I came
to grasp basic plot structure. I'm sure most of the people on the list can
testify to similar occurences. <g>

And he continued:
<Another thing that adds to my interest in _Peace_, after reading much of
Wolfe's other work, is how many germs of ideas that appear in many of his
novels and short stories can be found in _Peace_ (or so it seems to me).>

Peace includes a great deal of Jorge Luis Borges' influence, and seeing it
here can illuminate how it was later used in the Book of the New Sun.
One Borgian influence I think is particularly strong is the labyrithine
symbolism of Weer's house (which I'm assuming is part of his postmortem
imagination and doesn't actually exist).
Mr. Gold's writing of books that don't exist reminds me of Borges' tendency to
make up books and authors to validate the claims of some of his characters.
The story that comes immediately to mind is "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

Christopher R. Culver <crculver at aol.com>
http://members.aol.com/crculver/index.html
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*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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From: William H. Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 00:38:56 +0000

>imagination and doesn't actually exist).

I prefer to believe that the house does/did exist and it did have "museum
rooms" replicating important rooms in Weer's life. But, I think the real
house certainly wasn't the shifting thing Weer describes in the book, with
rooms moving about and appearing and disappearing. Building a house with
museum rooms would be a peculiar thing to do, but Weer was a peculiar guy.

William Ansley

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 09:41:18 +0000

> museum rooms would be a peculiar thing to do, but Weer was a peculiar guy.

I don't know.  It seems too obviously a reference to the ancient method of
enhancing memory by creating an imaginary house or castle in which each
room represents a time period or category of knowledge and the objects in
each room represent the specific things you are trying to remember.

I guess that doesn't rule out Weer literally building such a house (in
fact, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea--but I'd like it
more in a story about some character consciously doing it as an
extravagant mnemonic device--but then, what is a museum but an extravagant
mnemonic device?), but I think the shiftiness implies that at a minimum,
the house in the story has imaginary rooms/qualities in addition.

-Rostrum

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From: William H. Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 00:08:46 +0000

Rostrum (Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>) said:

>> rooms" replicating important rooms in Weer's life.

>the house in the story has imaginary rooms/qualities in addition.

I really don't think we disagree very much here. I think there was a "real"
house Weer built before he died that had museum rooms in it. I think the
house his ghost inhabits is imaginary and has all sorts of odd properties
that no real building could have but had as its starting point in Weer's
(ghost's) mind the original house the living Weer built.

I agree that the house described in _Peace_ could be wholly imaginary, I
just don't think it *necessarily* is.

(Of course, I mean imaginary within the world of _Peace_ when I use the
word above.)

William Ansley