Subject: (urth) wright's book

From: Sam Keyes <skeyes at richmond.edu>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 16:05:04 +0000

> In other news, Peter Wright's book-length study of GW,
> Attending Daedalus, is due out in a few months, and
> I've put up pre-order links through Ultan's Library's
> association with Amazon UK at www.ultan.co.uk....

Interesting.  After searching through the archives of this list, it seems
to me that it's been a while since anyone talked much about the thesis of
Peter Wright's "God-games" articles (though I suspect it is in the
background).  Of course, I'm still quite new to all this--and, at the
moment, interrupting all sorts of other things--but I figured I'd ask: 
any new thoughts about it?

I, as would many others, appreciate many of the things Wright says, but
what bothers me in the Foundation articles (and I presume, the book) is
the idea that he is somehow demythologizing Urth, Severian, etc.  It seems
to me that this is largely a good thing to do (removing masks, etc.), but
the problem is that there appears to be the assumption (still) that,
having done all this deconstructing, we have finally arrived and can
understand that all the mythic, religious metaphor was only artifice.  And
that seems to me fundamentally opposed to the assumptions of the very
method used to remove these masks in the first place--there is no end to
interpretation, "nothing" (hello Derrida) "outside the text," which means
that though Wright might have removed one layer of mythology, he has only
succeeded in replacing it with another (his own?).

Remember, in relation to all of that, Master Ash's statement about
religion and science.

snk

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