{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1593",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1593,
    "subject": "historical/literal or figurative consistency in the Urth cycle",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-04-29T11:54:47+00:00",
    "last": "1999-04-29T11:54:47+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0026-0055@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Jonathan Laidlow",
        "address": "laidlojm at hhs.bham.ac.uk"
      },
      "date": "1999-04-29T11:54:47+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) historical/literal or figurative consistency in the Urth cycle",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "The recent discussion about the presence of Christianity in BotNS has \nbeen very interesting. I think it is correct to draw on textual \nevidence over and above evidence from Wolfe the author - authors are \nnotorious for changing their minds and changing their intentions. \nWhat Wolfe says and thinks of the BotNS now may be very different to \nhow he thought of it both before it was written and after. This also \nmakes it interesting to look at 'Long Sun' as a reworking of some of \nthe themes of BotNS.\n\nOn a more serious note - the debate has centred on making Urth into a \nconsistent fictional world by attempting to locate our own history \ninto an early stage of the time frame. This posits a realist \ninterpretion of the book which I cannot agree with. I have always \nread the Urth sequence as a kind of metafiction - a book about \nstories and the way stories are told. Last month Robert Borski \npointed out in an 'Undine' post that the tales from the Brown book \nare all conflations of familiar stories. The same is obviously true \nof the sequence as a whole, with Christian mythology as another 'old' \nstory that is part of the fabric of Urth.\n\nI feel that the SF Encyclopedia is right to suggest that Wolfe is \nsome kind of modernist writer - one of the effects of Severian's \nnarrative stance (his supposedly infallible memory) is to point out \nthe unreliability of narration to actually create a realist world. \nSev is a storyteller, and the Urth cycle is, in the words of Clute/ \nNicholls and the other Encyclopedists, ' a fabulation is any story \nwhich challenges the two main assumptions\n of genre sf: that the world can be seen; and that it can be told. We\n have chosen to use the term \"fabulation\"' [And a note against \nconfusion - this doesn't mean that Wolfe is some kind of \npost-modernist who doubts everything - as a modernist Wolfe perhaps \nbelieves that the world cannot be adequately reproduced in textual \nform in any literal sense]\n\nI don't believe that Urth can be seen - it is not a realist narrative \nin the sense that it creates a realistic image in your head - I don't \nbelieve I can picture Sev or anything else from the cycle in my head \nin any pictoral sense. What it does is play with old narratives, \nconflating them and changing them to present something new. Perhaps \nwhat I'm saying is that Sev's world is figurative rather than literal \n- it represents something, it does not present something.\n\nWhat that something is, to my mind, changes every time I read it. I \nnoticed two days ago the passage in Urth where Sev as Autarch reminds \nus that his name is 'Legion'. We have here conflation at work - for \nSev is also the Conciliator - a christ figure, but he is in some way \nalso a devil and a destroyer. While this cannot map exactly onto any \nstrict Christian reading of the text, we have instead a reminder of \ntwo of the major figures in Christian theology, where Sev is put into \nsimilar textual positions to both Christ and Satan, without being \neither....\nAs Nick Gevers said last time, 'Sev is a reiteration of a messianic \npattern encountered previously on Urth or Earth'. I would add that \nthe whole cycle is a reiteration of the stories (history, myth, \nfiction, theology) of Earth.\n\nSo, the discussion over whether Christianity every existed on Urth is \nto me, a non-starter. Urth is never presented as a literal \ncontinuation of Earth history, but a post-historical, mythological \npoint where Earth's stories retell themselves in exciting ways.\n\nJonathan\nVisit Ultan's Library - A Gene Wolfe web resource\nhttp://members.tripod.co.uk/laidlow/index.htm\nJonathan Laidlow\nUniversity of Birmingham, UK"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}