Subject: (urth) Making sense of Castleview

From: Tony Ellis <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 14:48:32 +0000

Adam Stephanides wrote:

> after all, he's written one novel and
> a number of shorter works which nobody, AFAIK, has yet made any sense
> of).
>
And when questioned, clarified:

> CASTLEVIEW (I had expected that would be obvious).
>

Hmm. Anyone else a trifle surprised by Adam's choice? Obviously the book
has its fair share of opaque passages, but I had always put the lack of
discusion of Castleview down to its relative straightforwardness.

--
Tony Ellis
On-line Editor, PC Format magazine
01225 442244 x2349
http://www.pcformat.co.uk

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

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 10:39:37 +0000

> discusion of Castleview down to its relative straightforwardness.

I immediately thought of Castleview when I read Adam's post.

I'd love to see you're "straightforward" summary of how it ends.

I remember one reviewer writting something like "Gene Wolfe stands at the
bridge as the critics come by one by one to try to figure out Castleview,
and all are knocked into the moat."  (The reviewer's sentence was much
better than that.)

-Rostrum

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From: Tony Ellis <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 18:34:49 +0000

> I'd love to see you're "straightforward" summary of how it ends.

:-)

> and all are knocked into the moat."

LOL!
No mere summary of mine can hope to create such an amusing mental
picture as that, alas.

But surely “how it ends” is just your good old-fashioned pagan fertility
ritual, as documented in everything from ‘The White Goddess’ to ‘The
Wicker Man’? Winter (old king Geimhreadh ) kills the year (the Green
Man) so that it can be reborn in the spring. Shields is the
fool-hero-king who had to be sacrificed to bring this about.

If it seems confusing, it’s because we’ve approached it through the
medium of (mostly) Arthurian mythology. At the last moment the Arthurian
battle between ‘good and evil’ is revealed as the cyclic mystery of the
seasons. But there’s actually nothing revolutionary in this - the pagan
fertility ritual subtext of the Arthurian story ‘Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight’ has been the subject of a thousand undergraduate Eng. Lit.
essays.

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From: Peter Westlake <peter at harlequin.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 23:17:47 +0000

At 18:34 2000-12-07 +0000, Tony Ellis wrote:
...
>fool-hero-king who had to be sacrificed to bring this about.

Fair enough (I found out that Geimhreadh meant Winter and felt
very pleased with myself, though all I did was a web search),
and the idea of rebirth explains what that's for nicely.
But the details are still somewhat obscure. Is Shields really
killed? He does wake up, after all, and there's no mention of
him being a ghost or zombie like Jim Long. Admittedly the text
does say that the connection between the fairies and the spirits
of the dead is obscure.

But what about the rest of the details? Who is Liam Fee, and
why does he want to buy the house? Is he really an alien or
monster, as he appears to be when Hwan Lee stuns him?
At least we know that he killed Tom, and his immediate
reason, if not his ultimate motives.

Are Jose Balanco and Hwan (which sounds a lot like "Juan") Lee
the equivalent of Balin and Balan? There's the names and the
killing of a brother.

Who is Lucie? Why is she pretending to be French, or if she
really is French, why does she sound American for a while
to Sally? Do we agree that she appears and disappears a lot,
and doesn't show up in mirrors? She's afraid of water too,
like a cat, and her name, Carabas, is from Puss in Boots.
I can't buy Robert Borski's theory that she is the same as
G. Gordon Kitty, though!

G. Gordon Kitty is great fun, and one of the most explicable
figures. I take him to be just what he seems, Judy's cat
transformed by the magic of the fairy realm.

What's all the business with the organ playing in the museum?
There are hints in it of trolls, which tells us who took the
diary, but why? Why play the music?

Viviane Morgan appears to be Vivian *and* Morgan le Fay.
How does she manage to be both?

Does Sally really take up with von Madadh at the end?
How does Mercedes feel about that, if he killed her father?

Von Madadh is King of Hounds or Wolves, and he's the dog
that Sally thinks is Rexy. But what's he doing? Is he just
there to lure everyone to the Castle?

Is all the trouble at Meadow Grass to do with the attempts
to kill Wrangler? It all seems rather indirect if so. If
not, what is it about?

What is Sally doing in the wagon with the wild horsemen?
We see Sissy join them and enter Castleview, but it isn't
clear how Sally comes to be there.

There were probably other questions too, but that's all off
the top of my head. Castleview is one of my favourites, and
probably the book of Wolfe's I've read most often, simply
because it's very easy to read, makes sense bit by bit (if
you see what I mean; it's only when you try to work out
why things happen that you realize the simplicity of the
style is so deceptive!) and is chock full of unanswered
questions. There's also some remarkably good characterisation,
which is particularly clever given the almost comic-book
surface style. I'm halfway through reading "Idylls of the King",
but it hasn't been much help so far :-)

Spectacled Bear.

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From: James Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 21:56:35 +0000

the it was to a large extent about perception. Note the title: Castle VIEW.
The same objects are perceived in different contexts at different times by
different people: A winnebago is a spaceship is a castle, e.g.. The same
people have different names. The situation may be SF one minute, Dracula the
next, Arthur the next, Charlemagne the next, something Chinese the next,
ancient Egypt the next, etc. (I don't mean all these specifically; I don't
recall which I thought were there and which weren't. But you get the idea.)
    My thought was that *Castleview* is not SF or fantasy, but "mainstream,"
but that the events were being constantly cast/perceived/described in mythic
terms, shifting mythic terms. Thus, the key would be to figure out what
actually is happening at the everyday-world level, and then explore how
these mundane events might be also "participating" in those mythic
archetypes which the narrator has superimposed on them. As with the Emerald
City (in the Baum book), Wolfe is giving us colored glasses with which we
are looking at quite ordinary events, so that the ordinary world becomes a
"castle" in this "view." Thus, something ordinary is going on in the "wild
ride" sequence, but various people see different "wild rides" going on; one
sees cowboys, as I recall.
    But I may be COMPLEATLY WRONG about this. I've never returned to it for
a later reading.

Patera Nutria

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2000 14:10:29 +0000

> sees cowboys, as I recall.

As much as I like this idea, I don't think it's the book Wolfe wrote.  
I've seen a couple interviews with him about it and he always talks about
the joke of Morgan seeking an heir of Arthur and it turning out that
everyone alive is an heir of Arthur.  I'd think if what you suggest is
true he would have at least hinted that everyone seems to be missing the
real-world mundane thing going on.

-Rostrum