Subject: (urth) PEACE: Fool's Gold?

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2001 16:19:34 +0000

I was rereading the "Gold" chapter of PEACE, and in the light of the recent
discussion of RttW, a disturbing suspicion came to me.  Briefly, I suspect
that the conversations between Gold and Weer, or at least the second one,
never happened, but were invented by Weer.

While this may seem a completely off-the-wall idea, there are a number of
indicators pointing in this direction:

1) Is it really likely that a world-class forger would be living in
Cassionsville, and then boast of his exploits to a man who has tried to
expose him?

2) The unreliability of ostensibly factual accounts is a major theme of the
chapter: there's the diary itself; the account of the encounter between Mrs.
Doherty and Quantrill's gang (209, Harper hc), which seems to be an
objective third-person account, but turns out to be either an excerpt from
the diary or, more likely, Weer's improvisation on the passages read to him
by Lois; Blaine's memories, which contradict Weer's; and Gold's claim that
many old books are actually forgeries (226).

3) Gold refers to himself as "an artist, shaping the past instead of the
future," (231) which could apply equally well to Weer.

4) The main plot of the chapter is a search for gold which turns out not to
exist.

5) Gold lives on Mulberry St.  If you've read your Dr. Seuss, you'll
remember that the narrator of AND TO THINK THAT I SAW IT ON MULBERRY STREET
elaborated progressively more fantastic accounts of what he'd seen on that
street.

So I suspect that the second conversation between Gold and Weer, and
possibly the first one as well, was invented by Weer as an apologia for his
own methodology in writing the manuscript of PEACE (which implies that he's
lied elsewhere as well).

For that matter, the treasure hunt plot is itself implausible when you think
about it, not to say melodramatic: Lois pulls a gun on Weer, when nothing in
her earlier behavior suggests she is likely to do this.  Weer spots the gun
("in a spot of moonlight" (218), takes it from her, and sleeps with it under
his pillow, presumably in case she should return at night to take vengeance.
When Sherry asks him about the gun, he tells her only that he's had it for a
couple of weeks and will get rid of it tomorrow, and this non-explanation
seems to satisfy her.  Moreover, the whole chapter draws heavily on the
hardboiled detective genre, as I wrote earlier.  To be sure, Smart's story
in "The Alchemist" is equally melodramatic and implausible, and dependent
upon literary/cinematic models, but that is presented as a story, while the
treasure hunt is presented as something that happened to Weer (the Doris
story is also told by someone else, and there is a hint that it's
fictional).

Make no mistake: I'm a believer in Dan'l's principle that a narrator should
be assumed to be reliable unless there's good reason to believe otherwise.
But in this case I think there are too many clues pointing in the opposite
direction.

--Adam

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

---

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2001 21:18:16 +0000

>never happened, but were invented by Weer.

I would've sworn we kicked this one around, alot!  But maybe it was just in
private email with Roy.

My main question would be: why is Weer fabricating?  What is the "this
really happened" that Weer is making more comfortable by fictionalizing?
Or what is the necessary thing that didn't happen in real life that should
have happened (i.e., if this is wish fulfillment, then what specifically is
the wish and how does it heal the wisher)?

For examples: it might be that the main point is to have Gold make his "you
are an unquiet spirit" speech.  The gold hunt has so much of the Olivia
spirit in it, it might be a continuation of her story . . . it certainly
allows Weer to have incest-free relations with a woman rather like Olivia!

>Cassionsville, and then boast of his exploits to a man who has tried to

Well, except that both are conventions, too!  And Gold probably thinks he
has blackmail material on Weer.

>many old books are actually forgeries (226).

Yes, but when Wolfe starts to insist =this= much, I start to wonder if
somehow, some magical way, more is true than we would normally believe.

>her earlier behavior suggests she is likely to do this.

Weer seems surprised, too.  Is that because it is not something that Olivia
would do, and he has been seeing her through "Olive tinted glasses"?

>Weer spots the gun

Take vengeance for what? <g> And if that unspoken crime, whatever it was,
didn't happen in the real world, then what is being covered by this action?

That is to say: we approach the episode as a dream, a dream in which the
dreamer (Weer) is "fixing" things that happened in the real world to better
suit his own desires.  The section is a Treasure Hunt: Lois is looking for
gold (following a counterfeit map), Weer is looking for love (following a
counterfeit Olivia; bedding a counterfeit Lolita).

>story is also told by someone else, and there is a hint that it's

Right, and the Doris story is the biggest head-scratcher of the novel,
since it is very difficult to see how it connects in any way, shape, or
form, to Weer's life and/or the lie of Weer's life.

>But in this case I think there are too many clues pointing in the opposite

Well yes, but it seems to me that your next stage, if you can accept that
it is a lie, is to start looking for motive beyond the simple "learning
that he is dead" (or not: maybe that really is the answer to all questions
about PEACE).

Here's another quick one: FEAR and LOVE.  It may be that the whole point of
the cold house prank is to show how Weer is in fear of the other person (a
vengeful ghost) who seems to be inside the empty house with him in the
frametale.  In the final page, in one reading at least, the other person is
revealed to be Olivia, the loved one (whose death was so crushing to him).
(Thus: Weer is dead; yet death is an illusion.)

In fact, wait a minute: it is "simple," but it is obviously very central,
very important, both that Weer is dead and is resisting this knowledge (for
a number of reasons--because it is a difficult thing to accept under any
condition <g>, and it doesn't seem to be whatever it was he was expecting,
or as we were saying before, "If this is =dead=, then what is death?").

So the meta-answer is something like "Weer is getting used to being dead
and the fact that death, as he envisioned it throughout his life, does not
really exist, because in this state he finds he does not have a cessation
of being, only a partial freedom from physical existence."

The next meta-answer, also simple but I think also important, is something
like "Weer spent perhaps too much of his life reading books rather than
living life directly, and as a result his afterlife experience is a journey
like that of Don Quixote/Walter Mitty/Gumby; as he experiences his own
AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD he cobbles together a text from the various texts
he read and loved throughout his life, texts which, ultimately, might have
little or no relation to "real" history, but intimate relation to the
essential dream history (his psyche, his spirit, his whatchamacallit); his
is an apology (or a working out, or a therapy, or a regurgitation) for
having read too much."

=mantis=

Sirius Fiction
Has Moved To
http://www.siriusfiction.com/