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Spectacled Bear wrote:
5) My final question is one that probably only Wolfe can answer, though the answer may be in some interview. We know that Urth of the New Sun was not part of Wolfe's original intention, but was written as a compromise with his editor.
I hadn't heard that. What happened?
I gave the citation earlier, but I'll quote what Wolfe says about it, because it's brief: "David [Hartwell] felt that I should add one more paragraph saying, Okay, Severian went to the universe next door and borrowed the white hole and fixed the sun and everybody lived happily ever after. I, on the other hand ... felt that a paragraph wasn't going to be enough." (Castle of Days, pp. 416-417) He goes on to say that they reached the compromise I quoted earlier.
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You took the words right out of my mouth! It seems to me that any puzzles in BotNS ought to have answers in BotNS, subject only to modification by things we find out later in UotNS.
OTOH, Urth is evidence of Wolfe's intentions in writing BotNS, just as interviews with Wolfe are (although neither of these sources are infallible). So if we allow the interviews as evidence, as we usually do on this list, we should allow Urth as evidence also, even if we're only interested in BotNS.
And it seems clear to me that many puzzles in BotNS don't have answers in BotNS. For that matter, many of them don't have answers even in BotNS plus Urth, as far as I can tell (e. g. who is the extraterrestrial mind whom the Cumaean contacts? Who lives on the other five continents of Urth? Who lives on Lune?)
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Final Ignorant Question: what is Texas A & M, please?
A university. The A & M stands for "agricultural and mechanical."
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Rostrum wrote:
Getting back to Adam's comments, I'm reminded of Borges, who was very interested in the idea of how our reading of a text changes because of what else we've read. (See especially "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and "Kafka and his Precursors"). I think Wolfe very deliberately and successfully created with Exodus a book that almost rewrites the earlier books in the Long Sun series and am fascinated by how different a re-reading of them is after finishing Exodus.
Reading this list has convinced me that what Wolfe has done with Urth does in fact make BotNS more interesting than my original reading, and I'm way overdue in re-reading BotNS, but I'm also still interested in BotNS as it stands without Urth. I'd be interested in alternate interpretations of events in BotNS that Urth rules out.
This raises an interesting philosophical (and very Borgesian) question: can the meaning of BotNS by itself be different from the meaning of BotNS as part of the five-volume "Fictions of the New Sun" (Peter Wright's useful term, IIRC) including Urth? The answer is yes if we go by the asumption that the author's intention determines the meaning and if Wolfe had in fact changed his mind about certain things between BotNS and
Urth. It could also be yes, I think, even if Wolfe hadn't changed his mind, if we don't regard the author's intention as determinative.
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Is it certain, for instance, in the
first four books that Severian himself will one day become the Conciliator?
I would say there is no hint in the first four books that Severian was/will become the Conciliator. But I could be wrong.
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Are there any reviews or discussions of BotNS I could get my
hands on that predate Urth?
All the book review of the original volumes will of course predate Urth, and I'd assume some can be located in Book Review Digest or Book Review Index, if you have access to those; there are also some in Foundation, if you can get hold of that. The problem with such reviews is that by their nature they will only be based on a superficial reading of the book(s). I believe Clute's essay in which he puts forth his controverial theory about Sev's mother was written before Urth; I don't remember in which of Clute's books this essay was included.
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A fascinating, but at best difficult exercise! Some might argue it is impossible, that having read Urth, there are some possibilities we just won't be able to see in BotNS anymore. I can't imagine, for instance, pretending anymore that the Urth is so old that the Sun is dying of natural causes, even though I read the whole series without catching on about the black hole.
Actually, that particular fact was established in BotNS, although it certainly was easy to miss. The clearest evidence is in Dr. Talos's play: the Prophet's description of the "cancer" at the old sun's heart is quite clearly a black hole, though he doesn't use the term.
--Adam