{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3427", "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": 3427, "subject": "Extended Meditation on Rorschach Novels (was RE: (urth)", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2002-08-27T19:02:08+00:00", "last": "2002-08-27T19:02:08+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com" }, "date": "2002-08-27T19:02:08+00:00", "subject": "Extended Meditation on Rorschach Novels (was RE: (urth)", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "Jack stays in the barn haunted by the banshee three nights. " }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "...as does the coldhouse prank victim (Friday, Saturday, \nSunday nights)." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "That's wonderful. It's either a remarkable coincidence, or \nsomething very clever on the part of Wolfe." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Or (given the partial content of the interview you pointed out \n-- thank you!) something very clever on the part of Wolfe's \nunconscious or subconscious or whatever it is that does stuff \nthat he doesn't \"see consciously.\" \n\nQ: To what extent is a Gene Wolfe text a Rorschach blot?\n\nThat is, how much of what we get out of the text is put there \nby Gene Wolfe; how much is what we put into it?\n\nLACUNAE OF THE LONG SUN\n\nI'm inclined more than a little to the theory of reading as not \njust decoding, but creating -- so that writing is a game of \ngiving just the right details so that the reader fills in the \nlacunae between them, and so creates a vivid picture in her \ncortical theatre. SF, famously, uses a rhetoric that suggests \nfar more than it says, from Heinlein's \"The door dilated\" to \nDelany's \"The red sun was high, the blue low\" -- sentences that \nthe experienced SF reader not only \"decodes\" but uses as raw \nmaterial from which to extrapolate huge amounts of information \nabout the fictive world.\n\nHeinlein's sentence implies a social and economic and \ntechnologial landscape where people want and have doors that\ndilate; Delany's a physical vista that includes not only the \ntwo suns but a planet's surface, strangely mingled shadows of \ndifferent colors, the hints of the alien life that might \ninhabit it ... But the writer does not _put_ those things \nthere. Heinlein, explicitly, did _not_ write a treatise about \nthe socio-economic-technology behind dilating doors; Delany \ndoes _not_ describe the shadows, or even mention the planet on \nwhose surface the narrator is (we presume) standing. The reader \ncreates these things for herself.\n\n\nTHE DEVIL IN A DETAIL\n\nReading, and especially reading SF, is to a very large extent a \nprocess of filling in these lacunae, these gaps between the \nwords. The writer can choose his details to suggest content for \nthese lacunae -- to, as it were, select data points that \nsuggest a most obvious or most efficient way of extrapolating \nbetween the data points -- but the writer _can't_ control the \nreader's process of extrapolation. \n\nIf my imagination tends that way, I can imagine Heinlein's \ndilating door as he _probably_ intended, it, like a hugely \nblown-up iris from an old-fashioned box camera. But I might \nhave been reading a bunch of anatomy right before I pick up \nBEYOND THIS HORIZON, and when I come to that sentence, my \ncortex might throw up an image more like a heart valve -- and \nthen the social, economic, technological texts hiding behind \nthat door will be radically different. In a more conservative \nmode: when you imagine that door, do you imagine it as \nmetallic, wood, plastic? Is its mechanism electromechanical, \nmagnetic? \n\nDo you even bother to imagine those details at all? (I don't \nalways -- but then I am, in some ways, an intolerably lazy \nreader). The point is, though, that _whether_ you imagine them, \nand _what_ you imagine -- and all of us do fill in at least \nsome of the gaps, or we couldn't read SF at all -- greatly \naffects the experience of reading.\n\nI think that we can agree that Wolfe, in a lot of ways, leaves \nlarger lacunae, and leaves lacunae of a different _kind_, than \nmost SF writers. The question that I asked above then \nbreaks down, in this terminology, into three separate but\ndeeply interrelated questions, as follows: (1) For a given \nlacuna, or a given _type_ of lacuna, can we reasonably assume \nthat Wolfe himself had some specific content in mind? (2) If \nso, can we reasonably assume that he expected his readers to \nextrapolate something similar to what he imagined? And if not,\nwas he even aware of the lacuna when he wrote?\n\n\nTHE WORDS AND THE LECTOR\n\nThese questions are nontrivial, and probably ultimately not\nanswerable with any real certainty. I think we can agree that \nWolfe, like (almost) any competent writer, imagines (most of) \nwhat he describes in far more detail than appears on the page. \n\nThe writer's process is one of selection and omission; the \nreader's process of extraplation is not a simple converse. A \nvery precise writer and a very precise reader, with very \nsimilar cultural and educational backgrounds, _might_ wind up \nwith very similar \"movies\" in their heads ... but I wouldn't \nbet on it. Ditto two very precise readers with similar etc. My \nSilk is not your Silk and neither of these is Wolfe's Silk.\n\nYet, somehow, we wind up with Silks, Latros, Severians, and\nNarrahornsilkpasthingies similar enough that we can at least \ntalk meaningfully about them ... which is (in my opinion) \nsomething of a miracle; we look at black marks on paper, each \nof us creates a movie in our heads, and, somehow, the movies \nare alike enough that we can talk meaningfully about them, \nargue, agree on what we're arguing about, and even, sometimes, \nreach a conclusion. \n\n(Suddenly, DNA doesn't seem all that amazing; suddenly, the \npossibility of encoding a human personality into a computer \ndoesn't seem all that improbable. Is LONG SUN -- in part, to be \nsure -- about the thermodynamic miracle of writing and \nreading?) \n\n\nTHE SUM OF THE OLD BOOKS\n\nI looked a post about the coldhouse prank and the Banshee \nstory, and saw a correspondence I'd never seen before -- that,\nto the best of my knowledge, nobody had ever seen before. Did\nWolfe put it there? Consciously or unconsciously? How could we\neven know? Wolfe wrote the book thirty years ago; chances are\nhe doesn't know at this point.\n\nAnd if he did, if he intended this correspondence as a great \nbig sign pointing the way to understanding these anecdotes -- \ndoes this noticing \"invalidate\" (partially or completely) all \nprevious readings of these anecdotes? Of the whole novel?\n\nObviously not. Ultimately, reading is a collaborative effort.\nAny competent reading is valid ... which begs the question of \nwhat constitutes a \"competent\" reading, but that is, I think,\na question that must be begged; or, rather, treated as open.\nA reading of PEACE as \"the story of how Ahab chased a whale\"\nis clearly not a competent reading; but cases can and have\nbeen made for wildly different readings of PEACE, and of (quite \na few) other Lupine texts.\n\nNor is it to say that all \"competent\" (and therefore \"valid\")\nreadings are \"correct\"; indeed, I think it calls into question\nwhether there can be a \"correct\" reading of a text with the\nnumber and kind of lacunae Wolfe typically offers. \n\nThere are different kinds of puzzles. Some, like jigsaw \npuzzles and crossword puzzles, have unique, \"correct\" \nsolutions; if you put all the pieces in the right places, you\nsolve the puzzle correctly. If you don't, then not.\n\nBut there are other kinds of puzzles -- those maddening \npuzzles from the '70s, for example, that had three dozen \nweirdly-shaped plastic pieces and big letters on the box \ntelling you that there were thousands of solutions, different\nways to make all the plastic pieces fit back into the frame\nonce you'd gotten them out. Any one of them would be \"right.\"\n(Though somehow, I was never able to find even one...)\n\n\nPIECE\n\nIn the end, then, I suppose that this meditation turns out to \nbe an argument for wide interpretive tolerance. \n\nFor example: maybe most of us don't see the trees-are-the-\ninhumi \"solution\" to Short Sun; but that doesn't mean that the \npeople who do are wrong. They are reading the text in good \nfaith, their solutions -- even if they seem torturous to some \nof us -- seem to fit the facts. But if their solution isn't\n\"wrong,\" there's no good cause for them to propound it as\n\"the right answer,\" either. \n\nBecause I think texts _do_ bear a certain resemblance to \nRorschach blots. There isn't a \"right\" interpretation, but \nthere are right interpretations, and there are clearly \"wrong\"\nones -- interpretations that ignore the ink that's actually\nthere to interpret." } ] } ] }