{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1436", "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": "whorl", "thread": { "id": 1436, "subject": "Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible Copyists: a Textual", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2001-06-10T15:39:30+00:00", "last": "2001-06-10T15:39:30+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com" }, "date": "2001-06-10T15:39:30+00:00", "subject": "(whorl) Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible Copyists: a Textual", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "This will wander a little off the Lupine track, but trust me, \nit's heading straight back there. Some points of Rostrum's \nscreed got my head working, and I've got a basic thesis on\nwhat Wolfe is doing and why. \n\nThe first of Rostrum's remarks that I responded to was this:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "I remember feeling this way at the end of tBOTLS, the idea that\nsome of the wonderful things Horn had told me about Silk might\nhave been exaggerations or wishful thinking gave me a certain\n(fun) chill, but I never felt we have enough evidence to try to\ngo back and sift and somehow uncover the \"real\" Silk behind\nHorn's story." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Now, I didn't really get that kind of shock out of the revelation \nthat \"I, Horn, wrote this years later, with some help.\" What I \n_did_ get out of it was a weird sense that Wolfe had patterned \nthis whole thing somehow after model the Catholic church\nuses to describe the formation of the (written) Gospels.\n\nBriefly, for non-[Catholic-Bible-scholars]: The basic idea the\nCatholic church endorses is that the Gospels were formed in \nthree \"layers\":\n\t1. The events that actually occurred in the greater\n\t Jerusalem metropolitan area ca. 4 BC - 33 AD.\n\t2. The memories of those events carried by eyewitnesses\n\t and the communities founded by those eyewitnesses.\n\t3. The setting-down of those memories by the communities,\n\t probably late in the first century.\nThe Catholic answers to questions like \"Yeah, but how do we know \nit's true?\" and \"Well, what about the way they [seem to] conflict \nwith each other?\" are deeply entrenched in that model, but it\ngets pretty complicated at that point.\n\nNow, what I _think_ we have in Horn's \"Book of Silk\" is something \nsimilar: Horn was, admittedly, an eyewitness to some of these \nevents -- a fairly small proportion of them. He's gone around \ninterviewing people, filled in the details as best he can, and \nfreely admits he made the rest up to complete the narrative. It \nisn't good historiography, but it suffices; it gives the sense \nof someone who isn't a historian doing the best he can. The made-\nup stuff, while perhaps not accurate, isn't a lie, in the sense \nof an untruth meant to deceive; it is intended to convey a sense \nof the probable truth.\n\nSo we have all three stages compressed into one text: \n\n\t1. We have Horn's own authentic(?) memories of Silk.\n\n\t2. We have the community's memories of Silk.\n\n\t3. The \"Book of Silk\" _as written by Horn & Nettle_ \n\t collecting and collating their own memories with \n\t those of the community.\n\nUnfortunately, there's an implicit Stage 4, which is also\nimplicit in the Catholic model: The copyists get hold of \nthe text, and a long time later, scholars try to trace the\nprovenance of textual variants backwards and determine the\n\"true\" original text of Stage 3. \n\nIn the case of the BOOK OF THE LONG SUN, we feel like we have\nthe product of Stage 3, but the Narrator's comments in SHORT\nSUN lead us to wonder whether we might actually have a corrupt\ncopy, and how corrupt? Nor do Horn's comments at the end of \nLONG SUN make it any easier to determine; compare them to the\nfirst four verses of the Gospel according to Luke, and then\nfind out how much work goes into preparing a good textual \n\"edition\" of that Gospel. Assurances by the author of the \ntext's accuracy do not greatly help when the text has been \nhand-copied many times.\n\n\n\nWhich leads me to another of Rostrum's points:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "It's not that Wolfe leaves things ambiguous because he doesn't\ncare whether you believe in Silk's enlightenment. Rather \nhe's giving you the same kind of evidence that we have in the\nreal world--do you trust the people who claim to have had an\nencounter with God and (equally important) the community of\npeople who have told and retold their stories? Can we hope\nthat, though mediated though our own fallibility and the\nfallibility of others, we can still have some genuine knowledge\nof God?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "We have, in THE BOOK OF THE LONG SUN, one of the following:\n\ta) Horn and Nettle's \"Book of Silk\" \n\tb) one of many possible variant texts\n\tc) someone's \"edition\" of same\n-- and nothing to help us which. We are, in fact, in the precise\nposition of a non-scholarly reader of the Bible, or perhaps (given\nthat this discussion is happening at all) a medieval scholar with\nno access to modern textual studies.\n\nSo: paraphrasing Rostrum, can we hope that, though mediated \nthough our own fallibility and the fallibility of others, we can \nstill have some genuine knowledge of Silk?\n\nI think the answer is, and has to be, \"Yes,\" because the \npossibility that it's all made-up (within the Lupine universe \nof discourse) is too drab to be worth discussing.\n\nAll this brings me to my basic thesis.\n\nWhat Wolfe has reproduced, here, is the basic problem of putting\nfaith in a written Scripture. The following paragraph refers \nequivocally to the Bible (for us, or at least those of us to\nwhom the Bible represents something more than a reactionary symbol \nof patriarchal oppression) and to The Book of Silk (for a \nrepresentative inhabitant of the Lupiverse, modulo similar\nconcerns).\n\n\"What can we believe about this text or its contents? By itself, \nit is completely incapable of witnessing to its own veracity,\nand we are not even capable of coming to certainty on what the\ntext actually does say in some places; yet many have believed \nand do believe that it is a true account of the most important\nthing that ever happened in this world. To believe that it is \ncompletely made up by its author or authors seems impossible; \nto believe that it is accurate, on a word-by-word, factual \nbasis, seems even more impossible (though there are some\nextremists who in fact believe each of those things).\"\n\n-----------------------------\n\nNow, when Rostrum writes, \"Perhaps Wolfe is being a gentleman; he\ndoesn't insist that you accept the existence of God in order to \nenjoy his story,\" I disagree rather vehemently; to deny Silk's \nenlightenment is to make the whole LONG SUN (and, by transference, \nSHORT) fall apart, meaningless and incoherent. He even sets that \npossibility up as a straw man (Crane's cerebral accident theory), \nand _doesn't_ provide us with arguments about it, because it is\nridiculous _prima facie_. There is, I think, no way to take the\nsupernatural element out of the SUN books in any kind of \"good\nfaith\" (in the existential sense).\n\nStill, I agree that \"[t]here is a sense in which telling a story \nfrom a third-person, omniscient viewpoint is cheating.\" \n\nThere is. And there is another sense in which all stories are\ntold from that viewpoint, even those told by a limited and\nunreliable first-person narrator. The reader (well, all but the\nmost childlike and passive reader) sits outside the universe of \ndiscourse and, if not omniscient, is at least outside the \nviewpoint of the narrator, judging it. Without that basic fact, \nthe concept of an unreliable narrator would be entirely \nmeaningless.\n\n\nAgain: \"We never know the world that way.\"\n\nNo, we don't. But somehow we _conceive_ the world that way. We have\na sense that there is a single, coherent reality, even if our own\nlimited knowledge can never get at it. Living in a universe run by\nquantum mechanics doesn't really change that; it defines the limits\nof how much we can know about it. (If there is an omniscient and\nomnipotent Creator, Heisenberg's Law is a clear and present \"No\nTrespassing\" sign.)\n\n\n--------------------------------------\nEnough.\n\n--Blattid/Dan'l\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun." } ] } ] }