Subject: (urth) Wolfe's textual Catholicism

From: Nicholas Gevers <potto at webmail.co.za>
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 05:29:04 +0000

In response to Ori Kowarsky's interesting and emphatic recent posting,
denying any necessary religious reading of Wolfe's work:
Certainly many different interpretations of Wolfe, religious or
secular, are sustainable; but some difficulties arise with an
insistently secular approach:
1) Wolfe's known Catholicism is ignored: the major flaw in Peter
Wright's Wolfe articles.
2) The logic I've cited previously is ignored: as a Catholic writer,
Wolfe feels free to be very catholic in his deployment of literary and
symbolic materials. As Catholic missionaries have done over centuries
- incorporating "foreign" rituals, beliefs, and philosophies into the
Christian mix as additional masks that God may wear - so Wolfe adopts
Darwinian, Hindu, and other components into his texts, as conveniences
of garb, serving the still Christian purposes of God and author. In
the process, the "foreign" elements serve Christianity, and so are
deprived of their original, non-Christian force. This is the essence
of parody, the literary technique at which Wolfe excels: the borrowing
of cultural forms in order to use them in capacities utterly opposed
to their customary ones.
3) The secular emphasis ignores the PROCESSES of religious belief: in
particular, Faith. Expanding a point made in my posting of a couple of
days ago: I recently remarked to Peter Cash that Wolfe's texts are, in
a lit-crit sense, analogues of Faith: that is, they show us a world of
apparent darkness, of countless clashing signs, but a subtle divine
pattern is there to be discerned if we are willing (and able); this is
how one comes to Faith. This is not easy: one can spend many years
teasing out Wolfe's meanings; and Wolfe, a deeply perverse writer,
presents us with apparent paradoxes, such as a creator God who is
willing to remake the world (Urth) by exterminating its people, whom
He made in the first place. But Catholicism has always been capable of
perversity, and of reflecting the cruelties of the Christian concept
(martyrs, the Inquisition, etc.)
//--------------------------------------
Nicholas Gevers
potto at webmail.co.za
_______________________________________________________________
 http://www.webmail.co.za the South-African free email service

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Alex David Groce <adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu>
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 12:15:16 +0000

On Apr 25,  7:29am, Nicholas Gevers wrote:
> Subject: (urth) Wolfe's textual Catholicism

	Or to put it differently, Wolfe reflects the paradoxes of the God of
the Cross.  It's not that it's impossible to interpret BOTNS in a purely
materialistic light, as a commentary on colonialism or what-not, but it's
surely ignoring the form and patterns of many of the events.  When an avowedly
Catholic writer writes a book that contains what are clearly versions of events
portrayed in the Gospels, and even titles the first chapter "Death and
Resurrection," surely the burden of proof in offering convincing
interpretations is in the lap of purely secular readings.  It is a case, in
part, of "separating what you want to see from what is actually there."  But if
there's a strong indication the author wanted it to be there too, that does
tend to create "more privileged" readings.  Joyce's ULYSSES could be read
without examining the parody of the Odyssey, but it probably isn't the
preferred way of looking at it.

-- 
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." - John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu)
Senior (Computer Science/Multidisciplinary Studies in Technology & Fiction)
'98-99 NCSU AITP Student Chapter President
608 Charleston Road, Apt. 1E (919)-233-7366
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~adgroce

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 10:09:36 +0000

> 1) Wolfe's known Catholicism is ignored: the major flaw in Peter

Using the author's biography and alleged intent to interpret a novel can
be interesting, but I prefer interpretations that stand on their own
support from the text.  

You may end up dismissing some interesting questions if you assume that
because Wolfe is Catholic, Tzad is an angel and therefore a good guy. 

I really agreed with Alex's observation, that while the text of Wolfe's
books have me pretty convinced that Tzad is an angel, that the Outsider
really enlightened Silk, etc., I'm not absolutely sure. I can enjoy
thinking through a "secular" interpretation of the book.  And, for me, it
only ruins it if Wolfe says in an interview, "the Outsider is real."

So I think it's much more interesting to try reading through the book and
seeing if Ori's secular interpretation can be sustained (or if, as I
suspect, it leaves too much unexplained) than to just dismiss it by
saying, "Wolfe is Catholic."

-Rostrum

---

From: Nicholas Gevers <potto at webmail.co.za>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 05:01:34 +0000

In response to Ori Kowarsky's recent defence of his non-Christian
reading of the Urth Cycle: eloquently argued, Ori, but I detect a
major inconsistency in your posting. Initially, you describe the
Christian allusions in BOTNS as detritus from past ages, part of the
eclectic symbolic soup of Wolfe's posthistory; then, you maintain that
there's no sign that Christ has been present in Severian's universe,
that Christian salvation can apply there, etc. But surely the survival
of Christian iconography and theology into Severian's age means that
Christianity has been present on Urth, but has faded into abeyance
over time? There is plenty of textual evidence to support the
existence of the Bible as a text familiar in some respects to the
people and hierodules of Briah: the presence of Christian missionaries
who can read from Exodus in the Jungle Garden; copious references to
Genesis in Dr. Talos's Play; the fact that the religion of Typhon's
time was analogous to Catholicism, and as such parodied by the gods of
the Whorl in LONG SUN. Surely, Severian is a reiteration of a
messianic pattern encountered previously on Urth or Earth, not only in
Apu-Punchau and the Conciliator, but also in Christ.
As for the Urth Cycle not enacting the pattern of Revelations, etc.:
how literally should Biblical prophecies be taken? In any case, as
I've argued previously, the God described by Wolfe is a highly
perverse being, at least from a mortal perspective; His Plan is vast
and complicated, entailing cruel manipulation of humanity, to the
point of genocide; in my view, the Increate's behaviour is a warning
to the reader that the actions of God (and his counterpart the Author)
are best not taken for granted. If Severian's cosmos is not ours, it
emanates from the same Creator, and any variations it presents on the
pattern of our universe are deliberate and elegant, if often
inscrutable, variations performed by that Artist.
//--------------------------------------
Nicholas Gevers
potto at webmail.co.za
_______________________________________________________________
 http://www.webmail.co.za the South-African free email service