Subject: (urth) Another tangent

From: Jim Russell <j.a.russell at exeter.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 10:21:41 +0000

Still writing my paper for the symposium and another 
question has occured to me that I don't really know the 
answer to (although I have some ideas).

Basically its this; What would you guys say is GW's 
political stance? What is he, where is he coming from?
Obviously he is not particularly left wing ('Particularly' 
is probably too tame a word, now that I think about it), 
but would you say that he is right, or rebublican or 
democrat or what, really?At the moemtn I only really know 
what he is against, not what he is for.

Also, how do you feel about the antipathy expressed towards 
Vodalus intentions - to send man to the stars again. Is 
Vodalus problem that his method is suspect, or is Sev (or 
GW himself) being completely negative about man's 
technology and space travel? I appreciate the 'bringing 
original sin to other worlds' argument, and the 'quest for 
balance' reading of the novel (which I tend to agree with), 
but nevertheless I find this desire not to succeed or 
achieve wierd. I can see that Vodalus intentions inevitably 
contradict the idea of acheiving balance between the 
natural (mythic, folkloric, etc) and the technological that 
Cyraicia talks about, but I am interested in how people 
think this works in relation to the rest of the work. 

Cheers,
----------------------
Jim Russell
University of Exeter

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

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From: Alex David Groce <alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 10:16:12 +0000

Wolfe's political views are probably not easy to peg.  Wolfe talks
about his political beliefs in Nutria's interview
(http://world.std.com/~pduggan/gwjbj1.html#pol).

I would suspect that the closest classifcation would be as a
"conservative," but not in the usual American sense of the
word--despite what he says in the interview about freedom, I suspect
that Wolfe is not a libertarian, and he certainly has strong views
about environmental conservation, which would seem not to suggest
that.  I've read the phrase "baroque conservative" used to describe
R. A. Lafferty (and Mark Helprin), with connotations of a complex,
non-ideological political approach based strongly in religious or
metaphysical belief.  That might roughly cover Wolfe as well.

Wolfe's opposition to Vodalus seems similar to the opposition to space
exploration in C. W. Lewis' three science-fiction novels: space
exploration isn't so much bad in and of itself, but it certainly is
bad if we go about it with dreams of galactic empire.  THE FIFTH HEAD
OF CERBERUS suggests how Wolfe thinks we would likely end up behaving
in a populated universe (and based on experience on Earth doesn't seem
too far out, I'd think).  Vodalus clearly wants to reestablish
something like Typhon's world-spanning tyranny, which would certainly
"pollute the universe."  Clearly all space travel isn't bad
though--Severian's travels are ok, and there seems to be a positive
element to the remaining space travel by humans on the ship (although
many sailors turn to the side of Abaia and co.)  The passage at the
end of the first chapter of CLAW, which we've quoted recently,
suggests that Vodalus' aims are sinful in that he is trapped in the
past mistakes of humanity--it isn't the future or growth that is
originally sinful, but the endless repetition of evil patterns and the
rejection of divine guidance to something better: "That we are capable
only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin."

--
"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

---

From: Jim Henley <supplanter at highclearing.com>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 10:57:09 +0000

> -----Original Message-----
> From: urth-errors at lists.best.com [mailto:urth-errors at lists.best.com]On
> Behalf Of Jim Russell
> Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2000 6:22 AM
> 

I would say Wolfe is a Catholic conservative in the mold of his heroes like Chesterton. Because he is a _religious_ conservative, he makes more conscious shows of sympathy for the poor than conservatives are assumed to have these days. Also, like his Savior, Wolfe seems to be comfortable in the (imaginative) company of whores and thieves. I've never been able to get behind interpretations that link any given prostitute in the Wolfe corpus to "the Whore of Babylon" or whatever, because it's so obvious that Wolfe _likes_ his (fictional) prostitutes, and makes them likable to us, too.

Worth noting as a token of Wolfe's _social_ conservatism: that story-whose-title-I-forget in Strange Travellers that people have compared to Delany - the story-within-a-story about the archaeological expedition that ends with the drug overdose. This story's style really _is_ Delanyesque - it reminds me especially of "We in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" and "Driftglass." And yet the action of the story amounts to a _critique_ of Delany's themes. (Wolfe's theme boils down to "Drugs are bad for you." The theme of a real Delany story would be "Drugs are good for you.")
 
> think this works in relation to the rest of the work. 

I don't think it can be that Wolfe's view is contra space travel per se. For one thing, he says that the future he imagined in the book began as "What happens if we just stay in place right here on earth and stagnate until everything runs down and runs out." At some point the background mutated into one where humanity is bottled up, but the original impulse is in line with the Dark Future If We Stay Put imagined by the most gung-ho space enthusiasts.

Best,

Jim
*********************
Jim Henley
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