DOORS: Green's intelligence
The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 21 Jan 2003
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3789

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Michael Andre-Driussi — 21 Jan 2003, 17:18

> Adam Stephanides wrote:
> I have to admit, when I last read TAD (several years ago, at least) it never
> struck me that Green was lacking in intelligence (or courage, or
> enterprise).  And rereading the confrontation scene with Lara (chap. 31),
> Green seems no less intelligent than Wolfe's other protagonists.
> 
> Actually, now that I think about it, Wolfe's main male characters in his
> novels written after TBOTNS all seem to me to be more or less the same
> person, except for Horn in OBW (and possibly Latro in the Soldier books, my
> memory of which is sketchy).

Respectfully I disagree.  The intriguing "Viridian" passage at the
beginning of the book might at first seem like a Wolfean lexical exercise
-- "Typical," one might say.  Erudite.  But I find it very interesting that
Green has this color vocabulary because of the appliances and computers
that he sells: these are words used by the manufacturers and has picked
them up.

This fact, that he is a computer/gizmo salesman, feeds well into my growing
sense of Lara the techno-goddess.

Notice what happens when Green has been forcefully rehabilitated: he is put
into Furnishings, a retro-world, a non-electronic world.  He starts selling
a lot, and reading up: he learns a new lexicon, this time related to
furniture.  You know what happens next: Love crashes through his new world
in the form of a seaman's desk!

No matter where he is, White Goddess Love is going to ferret him out.

=mantis=

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Adam Stephanides — 26 Jan 2003, 15:11
  follows, by subject match Michael Andre-Driussi

> on 1/21/03 11:18 AM, Michael Andre-Driussi at mantis at siriusfiction.com
> wrote:
> Adam Stephanides wrote:

> > I have to admit, when I last read TAD (several years ago, at least) it never
> > struck me that Green was lacking in intelligence (or courage, or
> > enterprise).  And rereading the confrontation scene with Lara (chap. 31),
> > Green seems no less intelligent than Wolfe's other protagonists.
> > 
> > Actually, now that I think about it, Wolfe's main male characters in his
> > novels written after TBOTNS all seem to me to be more or less the same
> > person, except for Horn in OBW (and possibly Latro in the Soldier books, my
> > memory of which is sketchy).

> Respectfully I disagree.

[snip]

I'm not quite sure what you're disagreeing with.  But if it was the
assertion in my final paragraph, I probably expressed myself more strongly
than I'd meant to.  I didn't intend to say that the protagonists were
identical in all, or even most, respects.  What I meant was that they all
seem to me to be the same basic personality type: what I think of as
"idealized middle American male" (even when they're not American).  They're
not intellectuals, but they know how things work, and how to do things,
without boasting about it.  They have a tendency to despondency, but are
otherwise psychologically "normal" (unlike, say, the various protagonists of
5HC).  And they're fundamentally decent, without being priggish.

--Adam

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