Typology, etc.

Nigel Price's statements seems to be dead-on-target. Jonathan Laidlow's elaborated presentation of Wolfe's modernism also rings mostly true. Wolfe isn't writing a 19th century novel (although the text does, in fact, as Wolfe intends, pull us into an imagined world). So, arguing about what the furniture is made of may be pointless at times--but arguments about the metaphysics of the fictional reality, and in particular the theology and "economy of divinity" is crucial to understanding the text. A purely materialistic "interpretation" seems to both violate the realistic narrative and the metafictional use of story--it tries to "untell" what seems to be the central story. If ULYSSES is a "re-telling" of Homer's Odyssey in any sense that matters, surely BOTNS is a kind of "re-telling" of, well, the Bible (with an emphasis on the New Testament). To "untell" these central stories is to distort their embodying works.