{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/413",
    "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": 413,
    "subject": "Connections between Wolfe and Yeats",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-03-12T10:21:09+00:00",
    "last": "1998-03-12T10:21:09+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0008-0615@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Peter Stephenson",
        "address": "pws at ifh.de"
      },
      "date": "1998-03-12T10:21:09+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Connections between Wolfe and Yeats",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "As a fan of both Wolfe and W.B. Yeats, I've been struck by some\nparallels.  I could easily be convinced that they are simply\nparallels, and not direct influences, but they seem to be close enough\nto be interesting.  Here's what I've noticed.\n\nThe background seems to be that both Yeats and Wolfe are in some sense\nmystics.  For example, Wolfe says, in Nutria's interview, that he\nbelieves the pagan (pre-Christian) powers are real, just less worthy\nthan the Christian ones.  For Yeats it was perhaps more explicit:  the\nmore you look at it, the more it seems he believed in everything up to\nand including fairies at the bottom of the garden.  I mention this\nbecause, if the things I've noticed are simply parallels, it would\n(together with a shared interest in things like the Cabbala) give some\nkind of basis for that.\n\nYeats' mystic scheme, by the way, is detailed in a book he wrote\ncalled `A Vision', which I haven't read, so I'm relying on secondary\nsources.\n\nPoint one (the most tenuous, I would say) is oscillating universes.\nIt seems one of Wolfe's ideas is that our universe reappears again and\nagain in different forms, slightly different, and that that may\nexplain the apparent time-travel aspects in the Book.  This recalls\nYeats' `gyres', which were cycles of nature, alternately good and bad.\nThey weren't on anything like the same scale, though: in the\nwell-known poem `The Second Coming' (it was quoted on `Bablyon 5', so\nthat proves it :-)) he writes of the `rough beast' which is the\nequivalent (but antithesis) of Christ in the `contracting gyre' which\nbrings the current Christian era to a close.  I can't think of an\nexact Wolfe parallel for that, but it's clear that the plot is not\nexplicitly about Christ anyway.\n\nPoint two is Byzantium.  Wolfe's world, it is now official, is\nByzantine in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense.  Yeats\nmade much of Byzantium, too: two of his best known (and most\nbrilliant) poems are `Sailing to Byzantium' and `Byzantium' itself.\nHe thought of Byzantium as somehow the place where the soul reaches\nits perfection: the first poem describes the soul's journey, and the\nsecond its purification (this is a gross oversimplification, of\ncourse).  He also said that he thought of the Byzantium just before\nJustinian closed Plato's academy as in some ways the perfect world.\nIt's almost as if Wolfe has taken this up (though I certainly don't\npretend he would think of his world as perfect).\n\nPoint three is masks.  Yeats had a `Doctrine of the Mask', whose basic\nmeaning seemed to be that each aspect of a person was reflected in\nsomeone else who was his `mask'; the characters Owen Aherne and\nMichael Robartes who occur in his poems are masks for various aspects\nof Yeats himself.  He occasionally (but not so often) refers to real\nmasks; there is a poem called `The Mask'.\n\nIn Wolfe, we find plenty of literal masks.  Severian wears one as a\ntorturer; the hierodules wear masks; at the episode of the ridotto in\nThrax, everyone except Severian is disguised.  But one can think of\nall these moments when Severian is compared to other characters as\nshowing `masks' of him in the Yeatsian sense: apart from Christ, there\nis King Arthur in some of the Terminus Est references, Faust when he\nis tempted by the undine (with the quotation from Marlowe), and other\npotential masks in the characters in the stories in the brown book\n(Romulus/Mowgli, Theseus, etc.).  These seem to stand in a very\nsimilar relation to Severian to that in which Aherne and Robartes are\nto Yeats.\n\nOne final point: the world of Yeats has long seemed to me similar to\nUrth in one respect, that neither author makes the full distinction\nbetween symbols and the thing symbolised.  In Yeats, towers don't just\n*stand* for strength, for being solitary or pensive, for the\nattributes of night --- they actually seem to possess this as an\nintrinsic aspect.  Urth seems to be built in a similar way.  The\nBotanic Gardens, for example, don't just stand for various aspects of\nthe progress or non-progress of time, they actually embody it\ndirectly.\n\nAnyway, that's what's occurred to me. i) Clutching at straws;\nii) Interesting parallels; iii) something more?\n\nPeter"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}