wright's attending daedalus chapter eight

The Urth list — 3 messages, 2 voices, 22 Sep 2014
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6677

Marc Aramini22 Sep 2014, 19:36
I remember reading wright's work years and years ago and being left with the idea that his thesis was just wrong ... And in looking at it again I was more sympathetic until the end of chapter eight, where he pretty much says strange diction, extra-textual allusions, and mythological patterns are a never ending trap to entangle the reader when the text itself displays the Hieros' manipulation as the primary controlling factor. My goodness what a New Criticism "text alone" reduction to the absurd, coupled with a poststructuralist disregard for valid objective definitions. This is why lit-crit theory fails to shed light on anything except indeterminacy. The extra textual references are often confirmation and clarifications of textual ambiguities ... Why else have Gildas be the captain of apprentices when sev first sees Katherine (st Gildas restored a werewolf's wife to life after she was beheaded)? Wolfe used those unfamiliar words and structures for a reason - looking those and other references up is never a waste of time, as Wright seems to imply there. Wright's volume started out strong in its examination of Wolfe's short work and then became mired in a thesis inimical to Wolfe's entire belief system in its refutation of free will. I think the text probably misrepresents what Wolfe was doing with language in New Sun. The implication of chapter eight was similar to don't waste time looking up stuff.
Lee23 Sep 2014, 19:40

↳ follows, by subject match Marc Aramini

8 quoted lines
Marc Aramini: Why else have Gildas be the captain of apprentices when sev first sees
Katherine (st Gildas restored a werewolf's wife to life after she was beheaded)? Wolfe
used those unfamiliar words and structures for a reason - looking those and other references
up is never a waste of time, as Wright seems to imply there. Wright's volume started out strong
In its examination of Wolfe's short work and then became mired in a thesis inimical to Wolfe's
entire belief system in its refutation of free will. I think the text probably misrepresents what
Wolfe was doing with language in New Sun. The implication of chapter eight was similar to
don't waste time looking up stuff.
Good detective work on St. Gildas, Marc. I hadn't heard that before and given the werewolf angle it seems impossible that it could be an unintentional inclusion by Wolfe. I like it because it adds substance to Dave Tallman's theory about Severian's beheaded mother Catherine being linked to the Contessa Carina's maids, Solange, Cyneburga and Lybe, all beheaded saints. Regarding Wright's book, I agree that he leaves huge potential chunks of interpretive content out in fleshing out his own interpretation of Wolfe's work. But perhaps we all do? Wolfe is surely a mystery writer, but I strongly consider him to also be an artist and that he means to be an artist. Meaning that while he hopes some readers solve his mysteries, he also hopes and expects that each reader will interpret his work from their own personal framework of understanding, not just regurgitate Wolfe's own specific intentions. If Wright is an avowed atheist, hey, why not let him have a go at interpreting Wolfe's work from an atheist perspective. If it means leaving things out that he considers not-quite-so-important, more power to him. I suspect that Wolfe does not WANT there to be a "right" answer to understanding his work. (evidence- the as-yet unsolved mystery of the numbers on the Seal Of Pas. I've tried pretty hard to solve it and I think others far smarter than me have also. Perhaps it is meant to tell us that he includes unsolvable mysteries in his work. I hate to concede defeat on the Seal Of Pas; I may have another go at it someday. But insolubility remains a very plausible hypothesis)
Marc Aramini23 Sep 2014, 20:16

↳ in reply to Lee

Seal of pas - Number codes need a key. The talus says the opening code is "Thetis" and I tried to use a cryptologists decoding from that rotating key but I don't know enough about how to decrypt stuff. Try it with Thetis as the keyword - there's a type of common numerical encryption based on key words. That or pas/kypris.
44 quoted lines · 1–2 deep
On Tuesday, September 23, 2014, Lee <severiansola at hotmail.com <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','severiansola at hotmail.com');>> wrote: Marc Aramini: Why else have Gildas be the captain of apprentices when sev first sees
Katherine (st Gildas restored a werewolf's wife to life after she was beheaded)? Wolfe
used those unfamiliar words and structures for a reason - looking those and other references
up is never a waste of time, as Wright seems to imply there. Wright's volume started out strong
In its examination of Wolfe's short work and then became mired in a thesis inimical to Wolfe's
entire belief system in its refutation of free will. I think the text probably misrepresents what
Wolfe was doing with language in New Sun. The implication of chapter eight was similar to
don't waste time looking up stuff.
Good detective work on St. Gildas, Marc. I hadn't heard that before and given the werewolf angle it seems impossible that it could be an unintentional inclusion by Wolfe. I like it because it adds substance to Dave Tallman's theory about Severian's beheaded mother Catherine being linked to the Contessa Carina's maids, Solange, Cyneburga and Lybe, all beheaded saints. Regarding Wright's book, I agree that he leaves huge potential chunks of interpretive content out in fleshing out his own interpretation of Wolfe's work. But perhaps we all do? Wolfe is surely a mystery writer, but I strongly consider him to also be an artist and that he means to be an artist. Meaning that while he hopes some readers solve his mysteries, he also hopes and expects that each reader will interpret his work from their own personal framework of understanding, not just regurgitate Wolfe's own specific intentions. If Wright is an avowed atheist, hey, why not let him have a go at interpreting Wolfe's work from an atheist perspective. If it means leaving things out that he considers not-quite-so-important, more power to him. I suspect that Wolfe does not WANT there to be a "right" answer to understanding his work. (evidence- the as-yet unsolved mystery of the numbers on the Seal Of Pas. I've tried pretty hard to solve it and I think others far smarter than me have also. Perhaps it is meant to tell us that he includes unsolvable mysteries in his work. I hate to concede defeat on the Seal Of Pas; I may have another go at it someday. But insolubility remains a very plausible hypothesis) _______________________________________________

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.