Subject: Re: Extended Meditation on Rorschach Novels (was RE: (urth) Coldhouse Banshee)

From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 19:32:35 +0000

>The question that I asked above then 
>breaks down, in this terminology, into three separate but
>deeply interrelated questions, as follows: (1) For a given 
>lacuna, or a given _type_ of lacuna, can we reasonably assume 
>that Wolfe himself had some specific content in mind? (2) If 
>so, can we reasonably assume that he expected his readers to 
>extrapolate something similar to what he imagined? And if not,
>was he even aware of the lacuna when he wrote?

Is "And if not, was he even aware of the lacuna when he wrote?" your 'question
number 3' or have your supplied us with a lacuna of your own? <G>

William Ansley

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From: Andy Robertson <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 17:08:29 +0000

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
> I looked a post about the coldhouse prank and the Banshee
> story, and saw a correspondence I'd never seen before -- that,
> to the best of my knowledge, nobody had ever seen before. Did
> Wolfe put it there? Consciously or unconsciously? How could we
> even know? Wolfe wrote the book thirty years ago; chances are
> he doesn't know at this point.

Writing is like all other ways of dealing with reality.

Ultimately, you know, we write our own narrative of life:  we create our own
book, as we live,  perceiving this and ignoring that.   We form our own
reality.

Which is why, I think, we are able to read books at all.

Writing good stories is a matter of *subtracting* everything unnecessary
from the tale.   But so is remembering.  So is understanding.  So is
perceiving, even - in this whirlwind world we are endlessly forced to filter
out all but the core elements of reality.

And so a story that is written down may consist *only* of those core
elements and may work very well.

This is how a thread of ink conjures up a universe.

How does Wolfe attain his unique effect?   By going just a little furthur
than others.

In his stories, the process of memory and storytelling (they are the same
process, actually, they are the thing we all do)  has gone on a few steps
furthur, a few layers deeper.

It has become dream, metamemory, vision . . .   Wolfe.

But it is still organically  the same thing.  recognisably the same thing.
It feels right.  It is what we all do, all the time.

And this is why he is so good.

    hartshorn

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