Subject: (urth) ATTENDING DAEDALUS

From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:38:43 +0000

Last spring I argued, largely with Adam Stephanides, in large part about the
role of the Hierogrammates in the Increate's designs for humanity. Simply
put, I contended that the Hierogrammates were doing the Increate's bidding
when they did whatever they did to or for Urth's sun, and therefore to that
branch of humanity affected by the coming of the New Sun. By "Increate" I
meant God, more specifically the Judeo-Christian God, as I believe the term
has been commonly understood, aka "Pancreator" and "Outsider".

Recently I received and read Peter Wright's _Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe,
Artifice and the Reader_. The book was written by 1999, but wasn't published
until 2003, so the SHORT SUN books were not discussed.

It is unfair to the author to summarize a whole book in a few lines, but it
seems to be his contention that the Hierogrammates were selfish manipulators
of humanity, that Severian was a hapless, rather foolish puppet, sans
divinity in his orchestrated role as Conciliator. He believes that Wolfe
wrote the Urth Cycle to be understood this way, that Wolfe played an
elaborate mind game with the reader, playing on reader expectations to
hoodwink the careless reader into believing otherwise. He even holds that
"Increate" doesn't refer to God; it refers to the Hieros.

Wright goes further, suggesting that the LONG SUN and SOLDIER series, and
even PANDORA, serve as "metafictional commentary" on the Urth Cycle. If
Wright is right, then I've been wrong. Surely others of you have read
ATTENDING DAEDALUS. Nigel? I would be interested in hearing other's
comments.

-Roy

---

From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 12:14:48 +0000

It has been a little while since I read that book, but it was interesting 
and thoughtfully put together regardless of questions of whether Wright's 
interpretation is "right". My general opinion was that he was overly fixated 
on a particular theme, and proceeded to force all of the data to fit his 
theory, which in a couple of places led to almost self-contradictory 
results.

But one place to start in the way of critique, as I recall, is that Wright 
leans on a couple of premises pretty heavily:

1) Wolfe intended his meaning to be clearly understood and so planned from 
the beginning to provide all the keys necessary for understanding;

2) Some of the most crucial elements for understanding the series as a whole 
are provided in the fifth book, UotNS.

The first premise by itself might be unobjectionable, but putting the two 
together causes obvious problems. As far as I know Wolfe did not intend to 
write that fifth book when he published the first four, and furthermore I 
seem to recall that Wolfe's take was that UotNS didn't add anything at all 
to the original theme, just added an additional perspective.

And I wouldn't bring this up just to nitpick, because if anything I'd want 
to encourage people to read Attending Daedelus. But in context - and I would 
be hard pressed at this point to explain specifically why - his main 
argument relies so heavily on this picture of UotNS that it doesn't hold 
together very well without it.

I'd be interested in discussing it further, though. It is a short enough 
book that I could dig it out and look up the passages in question. And I 
recall bookmarking a couple pages where Wright adds some really 
thought-provoking quotes from Wolfe that I hadn't seen anywhere else; those 
might be worth a post, if I didn't already do so a while back.

Chris

>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

---

From: Stanislaus <sbocian at poczta.fm>
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2006 12:46:42 +0000

Hello Roy,

> divinity in his orchestrated role as Conciliator.
    ....
> -Roy

First, I wouldn't say that Increate is specifically Judeo-Christian
God. He isn't usually called that, for one thing. I would say that He
(or It - Uncreate is usually not personal) is most similar to the
Neoplatonic One. Uncreate therefore is impersonal, unknowable and
unintelligible. According to Neoplatonical doctrines of hierarchy
and mediation (transmitted to Christianity by Pseudo-Dionysius
Areopagite) a higher and a lower being can meet only through the
mediation of a tertium quid, an intermediate. Between God and Man
there is the whole celestial hierarchy (the nine choirs of angels of
Dionysius). Each of the levels communicates only with the next higher
level.

It is best exemplified in the fable of the cock, eagle and angel in
"The Citadel". The Angel says there: "The Pancreator is infinitely far
from us, and thus infinitely far from me, though I fly so much higher
than you. I guess at his desires - no one can do otherwise." I would
say that is the situation of Hierodules, or even Hierogrammates.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/

P. S.

To be precise - I would say theology in TBoNS is more Dionysian
than classical Neoplatonist. Eg the Pancreator (a typical Eastern
Christian epithet of God) created the world directly, not by
mediators.
-- 
Best regards,
 Stanislaus                           mailto:sbocian at poczta.fm

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Kobiety i samochody... piekne! >>> http://link.interia.pl/f18f5

---

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:38:52 +0000

I looked at _Attending Daedalus_ a few months ago and wasn't impressed. As best as I can remember, these were my main objections:

1. I really would like to accept Wright's reading of UotNS, and by extension the first four volumes, that the whole religious aura with which the Hierogrammates surround themselves is a conscious deception. Doing so would render UotNS much less frustrating. But I can't. The religious elements in UotNS just don't read like they're a fraud; and if they are, too much of UotNS doesn't make sense or becomes irrelevant. (This may seem to contradict my position in the argument with Roy he refers to, but it doesn't. I argued that there was no evidence they Hierogrammates had any direct or privileged access to the Increate's will or commands. They still believe themselves to be carrying out the Increate's will, just as believers in the real world believe themselves to be carrying out God's will.)

Subsidiary to this, in Wright's discussion of short stories by Wolfe which he views as guides to interpreting the New Sun series, he mentions (iirc) several stories where religious symbols are used to manipulate people, but ignores the more numerous stories where the religion is real.

2. Why would the Hierogrammates go through all this rigmarole? Surely they have the capacity to place a white fountain in the Sun without Severian's help. If their only interest is the reproduction of their species and they don't believe in their "religion," why bother to put a black hole in the Sun, spend a thousand years trying to "uplift" the humans of the Commonwealth, and only then recruit Severian as their "Conciliator," after first arranging for him to become autarch? Wright doesn't have a good answer to this. Iirc, he suggested that the Hierogrammates did all this so that the religion of the Conciliator would be passed down to the Ushasites. But, as we see at the end of UotNS, it isn't: the people Severian meets have forgotten it, and Severian makes no effort to enlighten them.

To be sure, the Hierogrammates' reasons are mysterious in any case. But if they believe in their religion, that at least can explain why they act so mysteriously.

3. This is a lesser point, but I didn't buy Wright's claims for the great influence of evolution (in the biological sense) on the New Sun books.

--Adam

-----Original Message-----
>From: "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey at stic.net>
>Sent: Jan 28, 2006 1:38 AM
>To: urth <urth at urth.net>
>Subject: (urth) ATTENDING DAEDALUS
>

---

From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2006 20:40:22 +0000

With respect to #2 below, I believe he wasn't so much talking about the 
first couple of generations of Ushasites so much as the later (or earlier?) 
people who would read the Book of the New Sun. Of course I find this equally 
implausible, in that the Hierogrammates would not need Severian just to 
write and distribute a book, they could have done that themselves. And this 
would actually be a more natural interpretation than Wright's based on his 
premises: even within the context of the world of BotNS, there is no 
Severian and the BotNS itself is fictional.

This would be a somewhat consistent, if unappealing, reading of the series. 
But Wright doesn't especially stick to it; there would be no sense in trying 
to psychoanalyze Severian (or even talk about him as a figure to be 
manipulated) if this were the case.

And I do think that it is interesting that he runs into so much trouble 
dealing with Severian as an author, in general. For the most part he ignores 
Severian's authorship, and treats it as if Wolfe is attempting to 
communicate directly with the reader. But Wolfe has placed a narrator in 
between, and this adds an extra dimension that simply *cannot* be ignored no 
matter who you take that narrator to be.

To this I would add a fourth point. Wright spends some time talking about 
Wolfe's stories that focus on issues of control - overwhelming, stifling 
control of the "1984" variety. On Wright's interpretation Severian is 
completely controlled beyond any hope of free choice. But this is far too 
simplistic. Wolfe may believe that a sort of complete control is possible, 
at a mass level. But when it comes to individuals, there are plenty of 
examples that make it clear that this is not what Wolfe had in mind, even in 
BotNS. The case of the Ascian translator is the clearest allusion to past 
fiction on the subject, with the Ascians speaking a sort of Newspeak. Yet 
Wolfe cleverly and simply shows why a project like Newspeak cannot succeed 
as a means of thought control at the same time. The Ascians, at least some 
of them, have subverted the language in order to find ways to convey things 
that don't fit within the framework of approved thought. The fact that this 
episode appears within the BotNS itself makes it seem extremely unlikely to 
me that we are meant to see Sev as hopelessly manipulated.

>I looked at _Attending Daedalus_ a few months ago and wasn't impressed. As 
>best as I can remember, these were my main objections:
>
>1. I really would like to accept Wright's reading of UotNS, and by 
>extension the first four volumes, that the whole religious aura with which 
>the Hierogrammates surround themselves is a conscious deception. Doing so 
>would render UotNS much less frustrating. But I can't. The religious 
>elements in UotNS just don't read like they're a fraud; and if they are, 
>too much of UotNS doesn't make sense or becomes irrelevant. (This may seem 
>to contradict my position in the argument with Roy he refers to, but it 
>doesn't. I argued that there was no evidence they Hierogrammates had any 
>direct or privileged access to the Increate's will or commands. They still 
>believe themselves to be carrying out the Increate's will, just as 
>believers in the real world believe themselves to be carrying out God's 
>will.)
>
>Subsidiary to this, in Wright's discussion of short stories by Wolfe which 
>he views as guides to interpreting the New Sun series, he mentions (iirc) 
>several stories where religious symbols are used to manipulate people, but 
>ignores the more numerous stories where the religion is real.
>
>2. Why would the Hierogrammates go through all this rigmarole? Surely they 
>have the capacity to place a white fountain in the Sun without Severian's 
>help. If their only interest is the reproduction of their species and they 
>don't believe in their "religion," why bother to put a black hole in the 
>Sun, spend a thousand years trying to "uplift" the humans of the 
>Commonwealth, and only then recruit Severian as their "Conciliator," after 
>first arranging for him to become autarch? Wright doesn't have a good 
>answer to this. Iirc, he suggested that the Hierogrammates did all this so 
>that the religion of the Conciliator would be passed down to the Ushasites. 
>But, as we see at the end of UotNS, it isn't: the people Severian meets 
>have forgotten it, and Severian makes no effort to enlighten them.
>
>To be sure, the Hierogrammates' reasons are mysterious in any case. But if 
>they believe in their religion, that at least can explain why they act so 
>mysteriously.
>
>3. This is a lesser point, but I didn't buy Wright's claims for the great 
>influence of evolution (in the biological sense) on the New Sun books.
>
>--Adam
>

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2006 23:53:53 +0000

On 1/29/06, Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> with the Ascians speaking a sort of Newspeak.

...sigh, here we go again...

Folks, the Ascians are _not_ speaking "a sort of Newspeak."
They're speaking a parody of Chairman Mao Thought, the
logical end-result of people running around quoting from the
Little Red Book. The Ascians are a resuscitation of the
"Yellow Peril" of the pulp stories Wolfe is generally revivifying
in the New Sun books.

Yes, I _know_ it's pronounced "uh-SHAY-yun" and I know
what it's supposed to mean, but if you really believe that
Wolfe didn't consciously intend us to think, at least glancingly,
of "Asians," you're not giving him enough credit for deviosity
or deviousness or whatever the nominal form of "devious" is
supposed to be. Making it uh-SHAY-yuns is a way to dance
around being called racist, in a book all full of hypostasized
racial theories.

--Dan'l

--
I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
                        -- St Teresa of Avila
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060129/176e2981/attachment.html

---

From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 00:22:09 +0000

> around being called racist, in a book all full of

Well, that went right by me until now, big surprise. 
It brings up an interesting shadow of the Korean War,
don't you think?  Doubly interesting since GW fought
in that war.  Not that I'm saying it's an allegory,
just a strange impression.

As for Attending Daedalus, my problem with it is not
with Wright's interpretation of facts, but with his
conclusion as to Wolfe's ultimate meaning.  Severian
is a liar and he is probably being decieved by the
Hieros (I still have a strong feeling he is the
antichrist, a feeling made stronger by the appearance
of the "true" christ like figure in the sun cycle,
Silk) but to my mind Wolfe is not reenforcing a
humanist viewpoint, he is continually undermining it
by revealing its bleakness.  In addition, Wright
ignores the fact that the stories Severian tells work
on many more levels than just a repetition of the main
narrative.  In short, Wright's book has too narrow an
argument for too broad a book.

Don

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com

---

From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 01:49:05 +0000

I was of course aware of the references to communism in these passages, and 
even caught the references to Mao's little red book. Apparently my 
historical knowledge is inadequate, though, because I hadn't been aware that 
the Chinese had attempted to force their population to communicate *only* 
through these little sayings in order to ensure correct thought and total 
control.

I apologize for my ignorance in making the comparison.

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 06:12:43 +0000

On 1/29/06, Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Apparently my historical knowledge is inadequate,

though, because I hadn't been aware that the Chinese had

attempted to force their population to communicate *only*

through these little sayings in order to ensure correct

thought and total control.

Um, no, they didn't actually do that; but if you read up on
the "re-education" camps, it came pretty close at times.
Wolfe simply takes it to satirical extremes.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060129/f19fbb98/attachment.htm

---

From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 07:18:31 +0000

extension the first four volumes, that the whole religious aura with which
the Hierogrammates surround themselves is a conscious deception. Doing so
would render UotNS much less frustrating. But I can't. The religious
elements in UotNS just don't read like they're a fraud; and if they are, too
much of UotNS doesn't make sense or becomes irrelevant. (This may seem to
contradict my position in the argument with Roy he refers to, but it
doesn't. I argued that there was no evidence they Hierogrammates had any
direct or privileged access to the Increate's will or commands. They still
believe themselves to be carrying out the Increate's will, just as believers
in the real world believe themselves to be carrying out God's will.)<<

Then we are largely in agreement that the Hierogrammate's actions were
religiously motivated. The only real difference is whether or not they in
fact had the Increate's ear, so to speak. I had argued that I didn't think
they would have been allowed to intervene so drastically in human destiny
unless it was by the will of the Increate, and I took that position because
of Wolfe's known Christian proclivities. As a Christian, he necessarily
believes in a Judeo-Christian God who takes particular, even unique,
interest in humanity.

As such, I find it incredible that Wolfe would write a pentalogy with an
overt religious theme, then go to great lengths to disguise a secular alien
agenda underlying that religious veneer, as Wright contends.

he views as guides to interpreting the New Sun series, he mentions (iirc)
several stories where religious symbols are used to manipulate people, but
ignores the more numerous stories where the religion is real.<<

And in his attempt to explain away Severian's miraculous powers, he invokes
the theory put forth by Dorcas, that time was somehow bent back to a time
when the resurrected person was still living, or bent forward to a time when
wounds were healed. The time twisting he lays at the feet of the
Hierogrammates. But in the case of Herena's withered arm, that was a birth
defect. There had never been a time when the arm had been normal.

have the capacity to place a white fountain in the Sun without Severian's
help. If their only interest is the reproduction of their species and they
don't believe in their "religion," why bother to put a black hole in the
Sun, spend a thousand years trying to "uplift" the humans of the
Commonwealth, and only then recruit Severian as their "Conciliator," after
first arranging for him to become autarch? Wright doesn't have a good answer
to this. Iirc, he suggested that the Hierogrammates did all this so that the
religion of the Conciliator would be passed down to the Ushasites. But, as
we see at the end of UotNS, it isn't: the people Severian meets have
forgotten it, and Severian makes no effort to enlighten them.<<

There is much too much to quote, but Wright's answer, such as it is, in
Chapter 5, is to the effect that humans have an innate need to impose order
and meaning on the universe by creating religious myths to live by. The
Hierogrammates exploit this need by creating the cult of the Conciliator to
pacify mankind and secure its cooperation in the death of Urth and the birth
of Ushas, a necessary step in the evolution of man to Hieros, their
creators.

The Conciliator cult didn't survive the transition to Ushas because it was
no longer needed. Rather, as Wright notes (p. 79, trade paperback) when he
quotes the text of URTH , in the post-diluvian world "that the House
Absolute and our court had become the frame for a vague picture of the
Increate as Autarch."

I agree that Wright seems to pick the textual evidence that best supports
his theories, to the exclusion of anything not convenient to them, but he's
hardly the only one to do that. He even denigrates some of Borski's
theories, but isn't above using whatever parts of them that help his case.
While I appreciate scholarly books with lots of notes (alas, endnotes), too
many of them for my tastes appeal to general authorities that have nothing
to do, directly, with Wolfe or his work. That makes it difficult to quote
his text without having to do too much explaining. Nevertheless, learning of
other opinions is often interesting and sometimes enlightening.

-Roy

---

From: Bob Miller <bob_bageera at hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 11:38:19 +0000

To comment on only a small portion of the below:
The communists, in both Red China and 1930's and 40's Union of Soviet 
Socialist Republics, did not attempt to make everyone communicate straight 
from the book.  They did require that all technical commentary, whether 
social or hard sciences, offer a paean to the party line.  This did make the 
introductions to papers in physics and engineering journals seem a little 
strange.  Fluid mechanics and "right thinking" don't seem to be comfortable 
bedfellows.

Thanks,
Bob

From: "Chris" <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Reply-To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Subject: Re: (urth) ATTENDING DAEDALUS
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 01:49:05 +0000

_________________________________________________________________
On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on how to 
get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement

---

From: James Wynn <thewynns at earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 14:12:43 +0000

Even if Wolfe *did* intend the Ascians political structure and language to
be a reference to Maoism and Buck Rogers (and the connection, it must be
admitted, is only inferable -- I am not aware of any other references in
TBOTNS to Ming or Buck Rogers), yet that does not make the make the analogy
to Newspeak invalid. Calling the Ascian language "a sort of Newspeak" does
not even imply that Wolfe intended a narrative connection to "1984".

J

---

From: Los Arboles Del Frio <losarbolesdelfrio at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 17:30:26 +0000

> "Yellow Peril" of the pulp stories Wolfe is generally revivifying

What other aspects of pulp do you think he using in his books?

 Making it uh-SHAY-yuns is a way to dance
> around being called racist, in a book all full of hypostasized

I recall the conversation between Severian and the Pelerin's servant in
which they mention that in the past 'the darker your skin was the more
enslaved you were' but the books didn't seem to be that big on race to me.
Am I missing something?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060130/ad95c370/attachment.htm

---

From: James B. Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 17:53:35 +0000

A point or two.

1. Wolfe is his ancient interview with me makes it clear that Severian's 
God is the Christian God, and that he is a "Christian figure," a person 
seeking by grace to grow out of a horrible background, still deeply flawed 
for all that, but becoming more Christlike, which is what grace is supposed 
to do.

2. While Wolfe uses the heirarchy of angels notion, the God at the top is 
not that of pure neoplatonism. Remember that the "real" conciliator is the 
Theoanthropos, who set salvation in motion. Severian as conciliator is 
carrying forward but an aspect of His work.

3. Not that this is all that obvious. As I've mentioned before, the first 
time I read the original quartet, I figured Severian to be an antichrist, 
like Number 5.

Nutria 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060130/807f7332/attachment.html
-------------- next part --------------

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.14.23/243 - Release Date: 1/27/2006

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:17:32 +0000

> not even imply that Wolfe intended a narrative connection to "1984".

h'mmm. I guess the point, for me, is that Newspeak is
both more and less radical than Correct Thought. More
radical in that it attempts to limit the vocabulary (and to
a lesser extent the grammar) of an existing language,
so as to limit what the speakers can say and, by logical
extension via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, think.

Correct Thought is more radical, however, in that it
attempts to remove "language" in the usual sense from
the plate entirely. If Correct Thought were implemented
at the deep psychological level it would require to succeed
(and we see from Loyal to the Group of Seventeen's
utterances that it has _not_ succeeded), it would be
no more a language than the hootings of chimps; it
would cease to have any generative capacity at all.
In Loyal to the Group of Seventeen, however, Wolfe
demonstrates the cleverness and flexibility of the
human language-organ in generating new meaning
from what would seem a fixed set of possible
utterances. It becomes necessary to create a new
level of grammar where, rather than fitting words together
to form sentences, preset sentences are fitted together
to form ... I don't know what you'd call them, because
the significance of each sentence is allowed to vary
hugely with its context, in two senses: the circumstances
of utterance and the preceding/following sentences.
What Wolfe has done, albeit sketchily, is proposed a
working language where no signifier has a well-defined
signified. Really astonishing stuff.

--Dan'l

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060130/8202637d/attachment.html

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:31:54 +0000

On 1/30/06, Los Arboles Del Frio <losarbolesdelfrio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The Ascians are a resuscitation of the

Please tell me you're kidding?

Huge, Lovecraftian monsters under the sea, in caves, and
in the Antarctic. The fated hero with the magic sword who
rises to become King of the Universe. The whole "Dying
Earth" scenario. The mix of forgotten technology and weird
magic. Swords and rayguns, horses and flying saucers,
mixed on a single battlefield.

Need I go on?

Heck, even Severian's inability to stay dead reminds me
more than a wee bit of van Vogt's heroes, especially the
archetypical Vogtian hero, Gilbert Gosseyn.

> enslaved you were' but the books didn't seem to be that big on race to me.

Well, one of the underlying theories, not mentioned but once
(and that may have been in one of the auxiliary pieces) but
clearly present, is Wolfe's peculiar idea that each continent
has its own racial "type," and after you've lived there a thousand
years or so your people tend to become that "type." Then, too,
there's the repeated note that the castes of the Commonwealth
have distinguishing physical features (including but not limited
to height), and Wolfe's own comments that _New Sun_ embodies
a certain amount of Lamarckian genetic theory.

Uhh... whatever. Either you see it, or you don't, or maybe you
don't one day and you do the next.

--Dan'l

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060130/02895ca7/attachment.htm

---

From: Adam Thornton <adam at io.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:32:15 +0000

On Jan 30, 2006, at 1:17 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

>  It becomes necessary to create a new

There's something else that everyone misses about the storytelling  
contest.

As Wolfe loves to do, we get the story through various layers of  
intermediaries.  We do not get the Ascian's story as such.  Or  
rather, we do, but we get it presented with a commentary that turns  
it from a string of Correct Thought phrases into a coherent narrative.

Why should we believe that Foila is both knowledgeable and  
trustworthy?  We really have no way of knowing either the story Foila  
interprets for the Ascian is the story he meant to tell, and if it  
isn't, we don't have any way of knowing whether Foila was unable to  
interpret his story correctly or whether she received one story and  
told another.

Adam

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:39:25 +0000

> interpret his story correctly or whether she received one story and

True as far as it goes -- but we do know that Loyal to the
Group of Seventeen understands the language of the
Commonwealth. He continues telling his story unperturbed,
without seeming to offer Foila any corrections or protests.

One could argue that Correct Thought is sufficiently well
embedded in his brain that he can't actually understand
Commonwealth-speak unless it's a translation of Correct
Thought, so he can't really criticize her; but on the few
occasions Ascians interact with others they don't seem to
have this problem.

I conclude therefore that two things are going on here.

First, that Foila does indeed produce an acceptable (at
least to Loyal to the Group of Seventeen) transmogrification
of his story.

Second, that Foila knows an awful lot about Ascians'
ways of speaking and thinking. There's something more
to her than meets the eye. I don't think she's an Ascian
spy, but she might be a traitor, or a Vodalaria.

--Dan'l

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060130/7d35efa5/attachment.html

---

From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:55:59 +0000

Well, let me be more clear about something. If Wolfe is calling anything to 
mind here with Correct Thought, it is unlikely to be *just* the phrases from 
the little red book or *just* something from 1984. That is not the way Wolfe 
works, especially in this particular series; the entire structure of BotNS 
relies on layers of overlapping allusions (which, incidentally, is something 
that I think Wright brings out fairly well). So we can expect a fusion of 
references, meant to recall all of them at once. When I made the original 
comment I took this to be obvious, so I was a little taken aback with 
Dan'l's objection: the connection to Mao's book does absolutely nothing to 
indicate that there is not also a nod to 1984, and furthermore the 
connection to Mao's book also does very little (by itself) to explain the 
particular features of the passage that are pertinent here.

But just to set something straight, someone directed me to an interview with 
Wolfe in which he addresses some of the points Dan'l makes (and looking at 
the archives, has been making for several years). The interview appears in 
"Across the Wounded Galaxies" - Amazon's search feature does work on this 
book.

p. 251 "What I didn't anticipate was that nine-tenths of the readers and 
reviewers would look at the word 'Ascian' and say 'Oh, these guys are 
Asians!'"

More importantly, on p. 241 (the bottom half of the page) Wolfe goes into 
detail making pretty much exactly the point that people attribute to him 
when they compare the Ascians to 1984; the only thing Wolfe does not do in 
that passage is mention the Ascians directly. But to paraphrase Hume, if any 
man wish to hold that (a) Wolfe has a view of language and control that he 
deliberately contrasts with Orwell, and that (b) that this view of language 
and control is presented in just this way in the BotNS, but yet still think 
that (c) the passage in BotNS has nothing to do with Orwell - then I must 
confess that I can reason with him no further.

Now with regard to the points about how the Ascian language works with 
regard to differences with Newspeak, I think that this is probably examining 
the issue a little too closely, mainly because if you attend to the 
mechanism of the Ascian language I am pretty sure that a linguist would tell 
you that the language wouldn't work at all. If you attend to the salient 
features as they pertain to the story, however, you do find that the Ascians 
attempt to eliminate incorrect thought by editing the vocabulary of an 
existing language - it's just that the 'existing language' is only taught to 
children, which they are supposed to discard later in life.

As a side note this is an interesting little additional detail that may or 
may not be deliberate, but that I have rarely seen commented on... If you 
follow one modern line of thought, children have brain structures that lend 
themselves naturally to the learning of natural language. 'Ascian' is not at 
all a natural language, as is pretty clear from what Dan'l already said. So 
the strange detail of how Ascians learn their language - sort of in two 
stages - may also be a nod to Chomsky.

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 22:09:00 +0000

Okay, Chris, you're right (and I should have remembered
the bit from Wounded Galaxies); certainly there's nothing
preventing the Ascians' speech from _also_ being a nod
to _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ (Orwell's actual title: _1984_ is
a collection of letters by Samuel R. Delany, he said with
pedantic irony, fully intending to continue calling Orwell's
book by the shorter title...). I suppose my point here is
that most of these things have a primary point of reference,
and I think Marxist-Maoist dialectical "thought" is Wolfe's
primary point of reference for the Ascians' Correct Thought.
Remember that when the _Book_ was written, Marxism was
still fashionable among American intellectuals...

--Dan'l

On 1/30/06, Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > Even if Wolfe *did* intend the Ascians political structure and
> language
> >to

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060130/fd1c3e5e/attachment-0001.html

---

From: Jeffrey Lefstin <jeff.lefstin at stanfordalumni.org>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:02:31 +0000

On whether "Ascian" is supposed to invoke "Asian":

While no doubt Wolfe's ideas of a totalitarian state were influenced by 
Maoist China and North Korea, I have always wondered what to make of 
the fact that the Ascians seem to come from NORTH AMERICA.

The Commonwealth, as I am sure has been discussed before, seems 
unquestionably placed in South America.  The Ascians come from the 
continent to the north beyond the equator ("the waist of the world.).  
Barring some serious continental drift, that puts them right here in 
the good old U.S. of A!

Besides, there are explicit Asian references in several parts of the 
book (see discussion in Lexicon Urthus) so implying one seems 
superfluous.  Didn't Wolfe claim a classical origin for the word 
Ascian?

---

From: James Wynn <thewynns at earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:35:23 +0000

>Didn't Wolfe claim a classical origin for the word
> Ascian?

Yes, Ascian means "shadowless". Since the Ascians work for Erebus (which is
the "darkness of Tartaros" according to Hesiod), they are ironically without
a shadow, because they are in total darkness. To review this discussion, see
here
http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0208/
http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0208/1509.txt.shtml
http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0208/1510.txt.shtml
http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0208/1512.txt.shtml
http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0208/1515.txt.shtml
etc.etc.etc.

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:48:28 +0000

What James said: plus, the idea that the Commonwealthers
thought that they came from equatorial lands, where one would
cast "no shadow" at noontime, when in fact they came from
northaway beyond the Equator.

Whether the Commonwealth is actually in South America has
been the subject of semi-heated  discussion. While I favor the
preponderance of evidence that suggests it is, Alga has made
a very plausible case that -- presumably after considerable
continental drift (which has since stopped as the centre of the
Urth solidified) -- Nessus stands on the former site of Byzantium.

---

From: mournings glory <mourningsglory at hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 01:09:51 +0000

>Urth solidified) -- Nessus stands on the former site of Byzantium.

"Insofar as I was trying to create any parallels with an actual historical 
period here on Earth--and obviously I wasn't aiming at developing an exact 
analogy--I was thinking of Byzantium. Incidentally, I also got into troiuble 
with some reviewers over my presentation of the Ascians, who were my 
equivalent of the Turks. If you read the book carefully, it's clear that the 
action takes place in South America and that the invading Ascians are 
actually North Americans."

>>From the Gene Wolfe interview in "Across the Wounded Galaxies."

---

From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 02:59:34 +0000

You could also think of them as slaves to ASCII, that
is, their computers and technology (possibly this
influences their language as well?).  A somewhat
prescient notion to judge from all the cel phone
lights that come on in the theater when my wife and I
are trying to enjoy a movie. :(

Just my 2cents and a half

Don

---

From: Stanislaus <sbocian at poczta.fm>
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2006 19:54:20 +0000

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060201/4d929d09/attachment.html