Subject: (urth) PEACE: the office of Dr. Van Ness (again!)

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 04:33:03 +0000

Roy and I, on this list, have discussed the big plate of spaghetti that is
PEACE.  The most tangled noodle of the whole thing is, I believe (well, for
the moment at least -- bear with) the visit of Weer to Dr. Van Ness's
office and alll the weirdness that follows.

In the past we have looked at the clear evidence of "bad splices," where
time-frames have been patched one on top of the other.  This is part of
what makes the Dr. V thread difficult to trace, because Weer has visited
this one doctor for 30 years, from a period when he was a skinny loser to
when he was a fat king of the town.  If Weer only had yearly physical
exams, that would be 30 visits to pick and choose from for the splicing.

For the purposes of debate, there must be two conflicting points of view.
Roy has volunteered to champion the view that Weer's situation is
nearly-solipsistic, and the ghosts he sees are puppets of his psyche:  Dr.
Van Ness, as the ghost who most interacts with Weer, is by this action the
most complete puppet of all.

I am putting forth the option of 0% puppetry and 0% solipsism.  The trade
off is 100% time travel.  (And unlike Billy Pilgrim of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE,
Weer's travel is =not= paradox free.)

Now then, getting down to the gist of it.  The text suggests to me that the
Dr. Van Ness thread is made up of at least three visits, each one in a
different decade: 1953, 1963, 1973.  Each visit had a crisis: the 1953
visit had Weer flustered/tormented by seeing Sherry again (and probably
fearing that she is pregnant by him); it is clear that the 1973 visit was
immediately after his stroke.

So what happened in 1963?  Our timelines get rather hazy there, other than
certain key facts: Weer became president; Weer had three visitors (Bill the
ad man, Eleanor the tree lady, and Charlie Turner the dog man).

The text suggests that Weer bounces around in time at the Doctor's office
(skeleton key: arranging "Life" magazines in sequence by cover, applies
especially to the doctor's office) before more-or-less stabilizing in 1963.

How is this perceived in linear time?  President Weer has had some type of
nervous breakdown, naturally!  Thus all that talk of a future stroke
=really did= happen.  The mirror test, the TAT cards: all real.  And what
did Dr. Van Ness think of it?  He seems to have decided that Weer was
suffering from overwork -- the sudden change in becoming president, moving
from apartment to mansion, etc.  Because note what his advice is: work is
not to be liked; Weer should find a hobby; Weer should walk around some,
and talk to people.  This advice is not really appropriate for "stroke
recovery," which is what Weer is asking about (and he takes it as adequate
for stroke recovery by puttering around in the garden and reliving
conversations); but it is perfect for helping a person out of an episode of
mental illness.

In this way, we see that "the madman is right," in the sense that Weer of
2274 invaded the Weers of 1953, 1963, and 1973 and spoke the truth (as much
as he understood it in a vague post-1974 sort of way) about his situation
(which amounts to "last man on Earth" stuff).  Hence the paradox: does Weer
recall the mental breakdown he had at Dr. Van Ness's office in 1963, or did
it not happen until he did it as a ghost, overriding the Weer of 1963 to
speak out (in a way that Scrooge and Billy Pilgrim cannot)?

(Or wait, have I already said all this before?)

=mantis=

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 04:52:04 +0000

>most complete puppet of all.

My senility is getting worse; I don't remember volunteering for anything!
<g> However, if I've been dragooned . . .

>Weer's travel is =not= paradox free.)

Halfheartedly I parry: didn't Wolfe write somewhere that PEACE was
originally published as a "mainstream" novel; that it was not labeled (or
marketed) as "fantasy", as is the case with my Berkley paperback? Is time
travel allowed in mainstream fiction?

>exams, that would be 30 visits to pick and choose from for the splicing.

I know I've gone over this before, so I'll give just the broad view. Those
"bad splices" you mention are, for me, what most clearly demonstrates that
Weer is *not* time traveling. He's dead. Whether his existence in the
frametale is purgatorial, hellish, cyclical, or whatever; *it's all in his
head*, and he is not entirely sane. He is powerless to alter his "reality",
wherever he is. (If people could get out of hell, or limbo, or even
purgatory just because they didn't like it, the vacancy rate would be quite
high. And he doesn't *like* being where he's at.)  He is unable to change
the past. If he could change *his* past, that would necessarily change the
pasts of everyone he interacted with after he made the change(s), causing an
exponential ripple effect in the lives of everyone in the world.

Whether Wolfe intended Weer's situation to be remediable or not, I don't
know, but Weer can't change it by an act of will alone. Perhaps Wolfe's
religious views allow Weer an eventual out, but in the short term all he can
do is think, to remember, and to rail against his fate. Weer's memories are,
by and large, not happy ones. Those he chooses to "write" down get altered
in the process of remembering. When he gets in his head the notion of his
dead-man stroke, and seeks medical advice for it down the corridors of time
from equally dead doctors, it's all imagination. His existence is defined by
his memories--that's all he has to work with. He is free to reconstitute his
memories any way he wants to, and he's only giving us a small part of them.

When he draws on the memory of a visit to Dr. V as the stage setting for his
inquiry about his stroke, and remembers a time when he was in a waiting room
full of people, he, childlike, wants to see the doctor right *now*. When the
nurse points out that he must wait his turn, he just moves ahead to another
memory of when he had already been admitted to the doctor. The "stroke" he
complains of in the frametale is imaginary (even if based on a real one he
had when he was alive), because he's dead. The spiritual dissatisfaction he
feels with his current state of being manifests itself--in his mind--as a
stroke. He wants relief, so he turns to a dead doctor he has known to find
it, which, of course, doesn't work.

When his frametale-self interacts with Dr. V (or Lois, or Sherry), so that
the doctor responds with comments that were never made when both were alive
(and which *couldn't* have been made in real life, like those to Dr. Black),
Weer is playing mind games with himself, revisiting memories like someone
daydreaming; variations on a theme, with what-ifs and might-have-beens.

I don't necessarily believe all this, but it is one solipsistic take on
Weer's situation.

>speak out (in a way that Scrooge and Billy Pilgrim cannot)?

*If* Weer were able to travel in time, then I would choose the second
option.

-Roy

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 17:17:31 +0000

Roy quoted Mantis ...

> >I am putting forth the option of 0% puppetry and 0% solipsism.  The 
> >trade off is 100% time travel.  (And unlike Billy Pilgrim of 
> >SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, Weer's travel is =not= paradox free.)

... and wrote ... 

> Halfheartedly I parry: didn't Wolfe write somewhere that 
> PEACE was originally published as a "mainstream" novel; that 
> it was not labeled (or marketed) as "fantasy", as is the case
> with my Berkley paperback? Is time travel allowed in mainstream
> fiction?

Pedantically I riposte: Time travel of the variety Mantis 
describes occurs in at least one mainstream novel, 
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, which, to the best of my knowledge, has 
_never_ been labelled or marketed as science fiction or 
fantasy. 

--Blattid, pedantic to the last hiss

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