Subject: (urth) Ziggurat spoilers, or "The good company you keep"

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at sirius.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 13:25:19 +0000

IIRC, it was none other than luminary Michael Swanwick, whose reading of
"The Ziggurat" included a significant nod to the sense of incest at the end
. . .

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

I have no hardcopy of the online discussion, so if anybody wants to follow
up on this you will have to talk to Swanwick by correspondence or at a
convention.

Point one: Where does Gene Wolfe's sympathy lie in the story?  Swanwick
says to use the standard "find the wolf" trick.  The wolf in this story is
the coyote.  Who killed the coyote?  Emory did.

Point b: Who killed the son?  Emory did.

Question Marquess: Why does the final scene seem like incest?  Because it
is incest--the "alien" is one of his daughters.  The allegations of incest
for the divorce were probably a lie, but as is so often the case in Wolfe
fiction, the lie has a terrible way of coming true in the end.

All together, iirc, this paints a feral picture of Emory: destroying his
better self the coyote, killing the rival his son, and marrying his own
daughter to "start over, doing it right this time."  Not unlike Baldanders,
in cutting himself off from the outside world (and/or God) in order to
persue megalomania; or the pirate scientist of 5HC; but in detail more like
several heroic Greek horrors all at once.

Granted, some may have a knee-jerk rejection of this reading on the grounds
that it applies the (flawed) "mass murderer" reading of PEACE to a
different Wolfe story.  But before you reject it too quickly, think again
on Swanwick, who is wise among Wolfe fans.  (I really wish he would write
some essays on Wolfe.)

=mantis=

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

---

From: Alex David Groce <alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 17:07:04 +0000

Hmmm...  Yeah, I caught the Tamar reference--I hadn't thought of the
daughter-of-the-future possibility--but this is a clone of a step-daughter if
so, which IMO makes Emory considerably less responsible for incest than, say,
Severian.  I simply don't think the story presents things so as to suggest
that the incest (with the daughters) is real.

Yes, Emory kills the coyote--but acknowledges his own guilt, if you look
closely.  Certainly he's a <vastly> more ambiguously bad figure than
Baldanders (not that Wolfe doesn't give even Baldanders his devil's due).

It seems to me that Emory IS quite Weer-ish:  they share a kind of curiosity
that can lead them into error/disaster, yet also seems to serve as a redeeming
element (consider a Weer who DIDN'T hunt for the treasure with Lois, or an
Emory who said "hell, I'm not going back to my cabin with those crazies, let's
find a motel, son").  Both have a kind of wisdom that they often seem unable
to apply to themselves (note Weer's comment re: testifying about the abuse
to the "good twin"--his reference here to God makes me have trouble seeing
Emory as a cut-off-from-creation figure like Baldanders).  Emory's certainly
flawed, and his curiosity gets his son murdered, but he also seems to me to
have a considerable amount of author sympathy (in this sense I disagree with
Gardner Dozois' comments in the intro to whichever Year's Best SF he didn't
print "The Ziggurat" in as well as with Swanwick--Wolfe hardly ever portrays
a protagonist without massive, potentially deadly, flaws--but Emory has as
much underlying author sympathy with him as, say, Number 5 or Weer, I think).
In fact, I think one thing this story does is set up a situation where it
seems to be a possibility of a "lone man defending his cabin against invaders"
and then turns it inside-out--neither the man nor the invaders are purely
evil or wrong--both are trapped by misunderstanding and human nature--but the
end indicates that even in these cirumstances, after blood and pain, there may
be a possibility for something else, even if that's ambiguous, too.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce