{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2104", "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": 2104, "subject": "Ziggurat--several readings, including my own", "messages": 3, "voices": 3, "first": "2000-01-30T11:48:13+00:00", "last": "2000-01-30T17:00:16+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi", "address": "mantis at sirius.com" }, "date": "2000-01-30T11:48:13+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Ziggurat--several readings, including my own", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "SPOILER WARNINGS (I guess)\n\nSpeaking of guesses, I guess a lot of the various readings have to do with\ntwo key elements:\n\n1) How Emory is perceived by reader (as basically heroic; as basically\nvillanous; as mouthpiece for Wolfe; etc.)\n\n2) How the ending is perceived (as basically happy; as basically creepy; as\nbasically tragic)\n\nSo the \"Cry Sexist\" crowd, including but not limited to Dozois (tip of the\nhat to Alex David Groce for reminding us of that factoid), and Ken\nHoughton, and others: it seems they see it as \"mouthpiece\" and \"happy for\nthe John Normanoids, including Gene Wolfe, but tragic for the more\nenlightened.\"\n\nI will call this thing they decry the \"Cave-man-ifesto.\" Since in the end\nit looks like \"Me strong Tarzan, you weak slave\" stuff. The Cavemanifesto\nmeets a certain crude political position that cannibalism, insanity, and\nincest cannot: one can reasonably say, \"There are people like that, people\nwho propose or dream of that as a eutopia.\" Then there is the assigning of\nWolfe to that category of people, because if the ending is \"happy,\" then\nWolfe must be agreeing to it; if it is a \"tragic\" ending, then it is a bit\nharder (but of course nothing is impossible ).\n\nOne of the twirling tigers actually compared \"The Ziggurat\" to Heinlein's\n(controversial) FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD. This seemed out of the blue for a long\nwhile to me (and I had already read FF years before), but in trying to\npuzzle it out, I formulated the Cavemanifesto mentioned above. (For those\nnot familiar with FF, for our purposes it is basically about a Competant\nMan (tm) who is shunted to another dimension along with family and friends;\nin the strange new world they find themselves in, social mores and\nconventions no longer hold--the wife/mother leaves with the teenage son to\nform their own microsociety, the Competant Man mates with the college girl,\nand everything for Competant Man works out in the end as a cross between\nBiblical Patriarchism and Frontier Life in the Old West. Unambiguous happy\nending: new young bride, new babies, hearth, home, and rifle.)\n\n(These elements were not what make FF controversial, I don't think--FF is\ninflammatory for racial issues.)\n\nI don't mean to make any of these readings sound monolithic; I don't think\nthey were. And as is often the case, as more details emerged, there was\nmore divergence of opinion even among those who had been on the same\n\"side.\" But the tigers seemed founded upon a bedrock of \"Cry Sexist.\"\n\nOn to my own reading.\n\nAs I've said before, it was and remains largely unformed. I didn't notice\nanything about the wife, so I guess that brands me right there; but there\nwere other little details that seemed so strange--so dreamy, or surreal, or\npartaking of dream-logic. Yet still on the edge of realism. And that an\nengineer was having this frankly science fictional experience (rather like\nan ERB novel) added to the sense of a dream being dreamed by Emory (sf\nbeing the dreamstuff of engineers).\n\nFWIW, I thought that Emory's reaction to his son's death was\nacceptable--that wasn't one of the surreal bits for me. (I don't know if I\nvoiced this disagreement at the time or only thought of muddying the\nwaters. It did really bug me for a while, but I also wanted to see where\nthings were going before I derailed it.)\n\nI didn't read the ending as happy. I thought it was chilling; and I\nthought that Wolfe had not intended a happy ending (that is: I didn't think\nI was reading between the lines, seeing something Wolfe had not intended,\nlike a consequence he was not aware of, etc. Such is usually the hubris of\nany reader, whether said reader thinks she is reading what the author wrote\nor what the author let slip). I saw the suggestion of incest, but didn't\nfollow it very far; I saw the child-bride of Tarzan thing, and that was\nspooky, but I didn't follow it back to \"A Solar Labyrinth.\" I didn't make\nthe leap to \"Dial Em-4-Murderer,\" but the creepiness, the spookiness, the\nweird confusion/association of daughters and aliens, all that was\ngroundwork preparing my mind for the notion. I thought of it as being like\nCASTLEVIEW, but with \"A Cabin on the Coast\" (certainties of UFO-fairies)\nremoved, crossed with PEACE: a rebus?\n\n(CASTLEVIEW ends [and begins?] with a mock-combat human sacrifice that\nseems necessary for the seasons to change. I read this as creepy, not as\nsomething that Wolfe thinks should be immitated in the real world; but\ntruly something that was done long ago for countless chiliads.)\n\nSo when \"Max Del\" came along it fit with some of my pre-existing notions,\nanother tool for looking at the text as not-entirely-realistic. Like any\n\"pure\" form, its single set solution is its largest weakness. I don't\nrecall how the artifact in the lake was interpreted by \"Max Del\" theory\n(downed dirigible?); I don't know that it came up.\n\nI remember the other readings because they were all so much more developed\nthan my own. Even more than the usual case: I'm just the messenger.\n\nMaybe the inclusion of insanity, pedophilia, and quasi-incest into the mix\ntook some of the wind from the \"Cry Sexist\" group, since these things are\nall strong taboos which cannot have political standings today, thus making\nit trickier to pin the tale on the Wolfe. It is much more likely that\nthings quieted down because the majority of the tigers had just moved on to\nother things (but whoever wrote that \"Publisher's Weekly\" review is clearly\na member in fact or by inclination).\n\n=mantis=" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Alex David Groce", "address": "alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu" }, "date": "2000-01-30T16:09:40+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Re: Ziggurat--several readings, including my own", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "So the \"Cry Sexist\" crowd, including but not limited to Dozois (tip of the\nhat to Alex David Groce for reminding us of that factoid), and Ken\nHoughton, and others: it seems they see it as \"mouthpiece\" and \"happy for\nthe John Normanoids, including Gene Wolfe, but tragic for the more\nenlightened.\"" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Thanks, but oops--I may have slandered Dozois if that's how it came across--\nunless he's spoken in another forum, I'm referring to his comments in the\nintro. to whatever Year's Best SF \"The Ziggurat\" _should_ have appeared in. :)\nDozois just says (in a nutshell) \"_Great_ story, as far as the prose goes--\ncontroversial, a lot of people think Wolfe is a sexist asshole for writing \nthis--I'm not so sure--I didn't like the protagonist, and I don't know if \nWolfe wanted me too. That Wolfe, he's a tricky one.\" Which is all in \nagreement with me, except I'm _fairly_ sure Wolfe wasn't setting Emory up\nas a straw man--nor as a paragon, of course. In fact, my guess is Dozois\ndidn't stick in in Year's Best that year (given it's the ONLY short story he\nmentions by name and at any length in the Introduction) because of length\nissues (I could name some candidates for him to have dropped, but...)\n\n\n\"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.\" John 8:32" }, { "kind": "sig", "depth": 0, "text": "Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)\nPh.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department\n8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066\nhttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Jim Jordan", "address": "jbjordan at gnt.net" }, "date": "2000-01-30T17:00:16+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Re: Ziggurat--several readings, including my own", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "At 04:09 PM 1/30/00 -0500, you wrote:\nDozois just says (in a nutshell) \"_Great_ story, as far as the prose goes--\ncontroversial, a lot of people think Wolfe is a sexist asshole for writing \nthis--I'm not so sure--I didn't like the protagonist, and I don't know if \nWolfe wanted me too. That Wolfe, he's a tricky one.\" Which is all in \nagreement with me, except I'm _fairly_ sure Wolfe wasn't setting Emory up\nas a straw man--nor as a paragon, of course. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "\tI really think this is a superficial analysis on the part of \"a lot of\npeople.\" If someone so much as hints that men and women might be different\nin any respect other than sheer plumbing, he is a \"sexist asshole\"? Well,\nfrom such a kneejerk PC position, Wolfe is always going to look like a\nNeanderthal! \n\tYes, Emory is alienated from women, to a degree. Not from his little girls\nthough, and there is nothing but fatherly affection in view here. To the\nextent that his comments reflect that alienation, the point of the story is\nto show the beginnings of healing. Emory might have just gone ahead and\nkilled the third future woman. Didn't you expect him to? Instead, he\nreaches out, and she accepts. Why this needs to be interpreted as dire or\nsinister completely baffles me. \n\tIn short, to the degree that Emory's understanding of women is imperfect,\nthe novella itself indicates this fact, and shows that Emory is not fully\nWolfe. (I mentioned that Emory thinks women look for fairytale love, but it\nis he who hooks up with a fairy at the end. So Wolfe does NOT share all of\nEmory's prejudices. Men and women are different, but not as different as\nEmory has come to think.)\n\tAgreeing with Mantis, then: we don't have to \"rescue\" Wolfe from being a\nNeanderthal by reaching for some arcane paradigm. The story itself, read\nstraightforwardly, rescues him.\n\nNutria" } ] } ] }