{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2287", "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": 2287, "subject": "The Ziggurat again. Sorry.", "messages": 4, "voices": 4, "first": "2000-06-21T13:01:23+00:00", "last": "2000-06-24T10:43:27+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Tony Ellis", "address": "tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk" }, "date": "2000-06-21T16:13:46+00:00", "subject": "(urth) The Ziggurat again. Sorry.", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Once again, apologies for resurrecting another topic everyone else go\nbored of five months ago.\n\nSkimming hastily past any reviews or posts on Strange Travelers, I\nquickly got the impression that The Ziggurat was the most controversial\nstory in the collection. Now that I’ve finally read it, I almost feel\nlet down. Relieved, certainly. My feelings on the key issues:\n\n1. Misogyny. Emery’s assertion that men love unconditionally, women\nconditionally, is at best simplistic and at worst patronising, but if\nwe’re going to start calling this misogynistic we’re going to have to\ninvent a whole new word to describe all the other, far worse, things\nthat misogeny used to mean.\n\nThe same applies to Wolfe’s portrayal of Jan: it’s an unsympathetic\ndepiction of an unsympathetic woman. That’s not misogyny.\n\n2. Emery the child abuser. Nothing in the way Emery thinks or behaves,\nthroughout the story, backs up Jan’s accusation.\n\nThe clincher for me is the scene where Emery makes the girls turn around\nwhile he undresses. Wolfe has one of the twins, scolded for peeking, say\n“but I’ve seen Daddy in his underwear before” or words to that effect.\nIf she’d said “but I’ve seen Daddy with no clothes on before” that would\nbe pretty ominous, obviously. But she doesn’t. Y-fronts good, no\ny-fronts bad. That is the law. Are we not men?\n\n3. Emery killed everyone, imagined the aliens and the ziggurat. Eh? What\nclues does Wolfe *ever* give us that this might be the case?\n\nMore to the point, why on earth go to the trouble of writing such a long\nstory about aliens, space ships, and encounters in snowy woods if we’re\nsupposed to assume, at the end of it, that everything that happened was\njust empty fabrication? There’s a length for stories that end up by\nsaying “haha, for you see, it was all a dream!” and that length is\nshort. Super short.\n\n4. Emery’s attraction to Tamar is incestuous, or implicitly incestuous,\nor in some other way disturbing. I suspect that people’s feelings here\nare shaped by how they already feel about Emery. If you feel that there\nis something unhealthy about his attitude to either women or children,\nsurprise surprise, you feel uneasy about the story ending with him\nhaving a childlike woman in his power.\n\nI felt that Emery was an embittered, probably quite hard to live with,\nguy, but a good man and certainly a good family man, so for me this\nscene wasn’t disturbing.\n\nI would really like to know what the significance of the Lion Inn biro\nand “God Save The Queen” is. The idea that it’s the Lion of Judah seems\na bit of a leap for a woman from 500 years in the future to make. It\ndoesn’t help that I was rather under the impression that in America the\ntune we Brits know as God Save the Queen was known as “My Country Tis Of\nThee.”\n\nWhy doesn’t Emery think that is what she was humming?\n\nWhy does the lion emblem make her hum it?" }, { "kind": "sig", "depth": 0, "text": "Tony Ellis\nOn-line Editor, PC Format magazine\n01225 442244 x2349\nhttp://www.pcformat.co.uk" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi", "address": "mantis at sirius.com" }, "date": "2000-06-21T13:01:23+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) The Ziggurat again. Sorry.", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "And nobody ever says anything at all about \"The Haunted Boardinghouse.\" I\nshould like to complain.\n\n=mantis=" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Adam Stephanides", "address": "adamsteph at earthlink.net" }, "date": "2000-06-22T09:53:39+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) The Ziggurat again. Sorry.", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Tony Ellis wrote:\nIt\ndoesn’t help that I was rather under the impression that in America the\ntune we Brits know as God Save the Queen was known as “My Country Tis Of\nThee.”" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "We know it as both (or at least I do), having heard you Brits sing \"God\nSave the Queen\" in films and such.\n\n--Adam" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Jim Jordan", "address": "jbjordan at gnt.net" }, "date": "2000-06-24T10:43:27+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) The Ziggurat again. Sorry.", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "At 05:13 PM 6/21/2000 +0100, you wrote:\nI would really like to know what the significance of the Lion Inn biro\nand “God Save The Queen” is. The idea that it’s the Lion of Judah seems\na bit of a leap for a woman from 500 years in the future to make. It\ndoesn’t help that I was rather under the impression that in America the\ntune we Brits know as God Save the Queen was known as “My Country Tis Of\nThee.”\n\nWhy doesn’t Emery think that is what she was humming?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "\tI don't know, and I'm not going to read it AGAIN now, and what I'm going\nto write here is definitely a stretch, but maybe someone can do something\nwith it. So here it is. One of Wolfe's favorite stories is \"Westwind,\"\nwhere he allegorizes the Church as an inn. Similarly, in *There Are Doors*\nthe Italian Restaurant, which is one of the doors back into a pagan world\n(the really ancient world of earth-goddess worship), is the Roman Catholic\nChurch -- again, an inn of sorts. Of course, this runs back to the\ntraditional understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Jesus as\nthe Samaritan; inn as the church, innkeeper as the pastor, etc.). Wolfe is\nunquestionably working with this symbolism.\n\tThe Church is Daughter Zion, the Bride of Christ. Again, that's not just\nin the Bible, it's all over Wolfe as well. So it is part of his stock\nsymbolic vocabulary. (Think of Hyacinth and Silk.) [I'm trying not to\nimport or impose anything onto Wolfe that cannot be found there.]\n\tTamar is a bit of daughter and bit of bride. She comes from a world of\nwomen. In terms of what I've brought before us above, the Queen MIGHT be\nsomehow analogous to the Church, and thus the Lion's Inn also to the\nChurch, as the kingdom presided over by the Lion of Judah (Jesus). In\nWolfe's conservative, Roman Catholic mind, the Church is definitely\nthreatened today by secular humanism. Perhaps he has in mind that in the\nfuture, the Church/Bride/Women have been threatened by Humanism/Men, and\nthis accounts for their hostility to Men. \n\tThis thesis, of course, requires a re-reading of the text to see if such a\nsymbolic substructure might work. But it is extremely typical of Wolfe to\ntoss in something odd at the end of a story that forces the reader to\nre-read the story in a different way. This seems to be that \"surprise.\"\n\tI point out that a Ziggurat is a religious shrine, and in the Bible, the\n\"ladder to heaven\" seen by Jacob in Genesis 28 is the \"true\" version of the\nTower of Babel in Genesis 11. The same language is used. Jesus alludes to\nthis at the end of the first chapter of the gospel of John, where He says\nthat His disciples will see angels ascending and descending on the Son of\nMan (the New Jacob) as the \"gateway of heaven,\" the base of this true\nziggurat. \n\tRecall that Severian is not a Christ-figure, but a Christian figure, a man\nwith a horrible past on the way to something better. Silk is similar, but\nmore obvious. Is Emory the same type of character? The Ziggurat descends on\nhim, and he becomes a new base of a better truer ziggurat/ladder that might\nmake for a better future. \n\tIn terms of symbolism, the Zig descends from above into water. This could\nwell be an allusion to baptism, or to the waters that covered the original\nworld, out of which a new world might grow. The old Zig needs to be\nabandoned and destroyed, that a new, and true, Zig might be erected. The\nold Zig is already starting to flood (compare Noah). The snow falling from\nabove might also be a baptismal image (compare the windy snow in Frost's\n\"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening\" in the \"darkest evening of the year\"\n[Christmas Eve] -- though Wolfe might not have Frost in mind). \n\tConsider that in Emory's world (our world) men and women are estranged.\nThat's because men are cruel, and women have become identitarian feminists\nas something of a reaction to men. Wolfe does not approve of identitarian\nfeminism (women as basically the same as men). He does approve of a\nfeminism that seeks to restore women as true equals, though as different\nfrom men. The resolution of the story, thus, might point not only to a new\nopportunity for Emory as an individual, but also point towards a new and\nbetter kind of future. The original future, from which the women come, is a\ndevelopment of present trends, estranging women from men. A better future\nis now possible, with Emory as the Lion (Christian figure) who protects and\nnourishes the Queen. \n\tConsider also the snow-filled world of Emory in another way: as a symbol\nof the frozen alienated situation in the present times (in Wolfe's view, of\ncourse), and link it to the frozen world of Master Ash, which is the evil\neschatology (ragnarok) that is avoided when Severian floods the world,\nmaking possible the good eschatology of the Edenic Green Man. If my\nhypothesis is right, then the marriage of Emory and Tamar would be the\nbeginning of such a new and positive better future. \n\tAs always, the trick with Wolfe is to figure out whether he is \"building\"\non a Greek myth, on some other writer (SF or mainstream), or on the\nBiblical material, or some mixture of all of these, or writing something\nbrand new. \"Queen and Lion,\" as well as the overall thrust of the story,\nhint to me that the Biblical material is in the background of this\nparticular story. \n\tGrist for your mill.\n\nNutria (JBJordan)" } ] } ] }