Subject: Re: (whorl) Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible Copyists: a

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 09:10:41 +0000

On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> Now, I didn't really get that kind of shock out of the revelation 
> that "I, Horn, wrote this years later, with some help." What I 
> _did_ get out of it was a weird sense that Wolfe had patterned 
> this whole thing somehow after model the Catholic church
> uses to describe the formation of the (written) Gospels.

I didn't get into that specifically, but, yes, this is exactly what I had
in mind too.

One of my favorite parallels:  Luke and Acts are thought to have been
written by the same person (arguably, "Luke").  Luke is all third person,
and Acts is almost entirely third person until about 2/3 of the way
through (in the fourth part if you divided the two books into four parts)
the narrator suddenly says, "and then we got ready to leave for
Macedonia" (Acts 16:10).

> Now, when Rostrum writes, "Perhaps Wolfe is being a gentleman; he
> doesn't insist that you accept the existence of God in order to 
> enjoy his story," I disagree rather vehemently; to deny Silk's 
> enlightenment is to make the whole LONG SUN (and, by transference, 
> SHORT) fall apart, meaningless and incoherent. 

I strongly disagree.  Horn believes that Silk was enlightened, and perhaps
Silk believed it.  But I don't think Silk's story is completely incoherent
or unexplainable without it.  It's certainly possible Silk simply had some
sort of moment of inspiration in which he decided he ought to try to save
the manteion (or decided that the Outsider wanted him to save the
manteion).   People point to Silk having received otherwise unavailable
knowledge from his enligtenment, but its nothing Horn would not have known
at the time he wrote the story.  It's not like Horn even uses this as
"proof" that Silk was enlightened, so it wouldn't necessarily have been
bad faith if he just added those parts because he believed Silk must have
had some sort of revelation.   

Did Jesus really predict the fall of Jerusalem, or is that something the
gospel writers added in later?  

Now I agree that the most satisfying reading of Silk's story involves
trusting Horn and his descendents and accepting Silk's enlightenment, but
I still say that Wolfe (1) doesn't cheat by saying "yes, it's true, I know
because I'm omniscient" (interviews excluded) and (2) still gives you a
good, if more tragic story should you choose to think Silk and Horn were
mistaken.

But then I'm the guy who thinks "Westwind" may be a sinister story.

> Still, I agree that "[t]here is a sense in which telling a story 
> from a third-person, omniscient viewpoint is cheating." 
> 
> There is. And there is another sense in which all stories are
> told from that viewpoint, even those told by a limited and
> unreliable first-person narrator. The reader (well, all but the
> most childlike and passive reader) sits outside the universe of 
> discourse and, if not omniscient, is at least outside the 
> viewpoint of the narrator, judging it. Without that basic fact, 
> the concept of an unreliable narrator would be entirely 
> meaningless.

Sure that happens, but I'm not sure that means it's a good idea.  I'm not
sure, but I have the suspicion that allowing ourselves to really believe
in that feeling of having an outside, objective viewpoint is the source of
many evils.  "Unreliable narrator" may in fact be a meaningless, or at
least tautologous concept.  Or rather, it's the idea of a completely
reliable narrator that is a fallacy.

> Again: "We never know the world that way."
> 
> No, we don't. But somehow we _conceive_ the world that way. We have
> a sense that there is a single, coherent reality, even if our own
> limited knowledge can never get at it. 

This is a good point.  We're always telling ourselves 3rd-person
omniscient stories about the world.  Is that a mistake?  I don't know.

-Rostrum

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---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 15:43:40 +0000

On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Alex David Groce wrote:

> Blish was Catholic?  Somehow I'd gotten the impression he was, at some
> point, an atheist and at another point (I forget the ordering) an
> Anglican, and that heresies and theology were to a large extent more a
> hobby to him than a matter of faith.  Was I off-base?  Google doesn't
> quickly confirm either hypothesis for me.

You're right.  Blish was not Catholic and I don't think he did a very good
job capturing Catholic thinking in Case of Conscience.  I seem to remember
him saying that in the book's universe the Church had only recently
accepted Darwinism, when in real life the Church has never really opposed
it.

But the real oddity is the book's central dilemma (SPOILERS ahead!).  I
was completely unable to believe that a Jesuit would assume that because
they'd discovered aliens with no discernible knowledge of God or sin, that
the whole planet must be an illusion created by Satan.  Since when do
Catholics believe Satan is capable of such a thing?  I think there's some
fringe fundamentalists who have suggested the fossil record is some kind
of trick by Satan, but Jesuits?  And it's extremely anthropocentric to
assume that just because we don't understand how this race is related to
God they can only be some sort of delusion by Satan to trick us.  The
whole thing just rang completely false to me.

-Rostrum

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 16:01:58 +0000

On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> > One of my favorite parallels:  Luke and Acts are thought to
> > have been written by the same person (arguably, "Luke").  
> 
> Well, either him or another Hellenized Hebrew of the same name ;*)

Inevitably, some scholars suggest there may have been a later writer using
Luke's name, but I don't think they make a very good argument.

> Now, Wolfe is not writing children's books, but I think it 
> possible and even likely that he is doing something analogous
> -- presenting to us, in a fictive and cognitively "safe" 
> context, the problem of teasing out the historical facticity
> that lies behind the Gospels. 

I sort of agree.  I think Wolfe is clearly inspired by the way the church
receives the Gospels, but I think he's making broader points that have
wider applicability than just an apologetic framework for considering the
Gospels.

> > I strongly disagree.  Horn believes that Silk was
> > enlightened, and perhaps Silk believed it.  But I don't think
> > Silk's story is completely incoherent or unexplainable without
> > it.  
> H'mmmm.  But then, I think the Gospels are incoherent unless you
> assume that Jesus was divine. 

Here's where I think you're making the connection too closely.  Wolfe may
agree with you about the Gospels, but that doesn't necessarily mean that
he intends the Long Sun/Short Sun books to be incoherent if you don't
believe in the Outsider.

Myself, I'd prefer to say that it's very hard to explain why the Gospels
were written as they were if you don't believe Jesus was divine.  
Coherence by itself doesn't mean a whole lot.  The Gospels could be
coherent in their presentation of a divine Jesus but false.  

And the Gospels are more active at debunking rival explanations.  They
denounce the claim that the disciples stole the body as a story made up by
the Jewish Temple establishment.  Horn doesn't jump in and proclaim that
Crane's hypothesis was nonsense.  Horn's not completely convinced himself
of the Outsider's existence.

> > Did Jesus really predict the fall of Jerusalem, or is that
> > something the gospel writers added in later?  
> 
> That is, of course, precisely the kind of question that the
> three-layered model I described makes almost unaskable. 

N.T. Wright takes a pretty good stab at it in _Jesus and the Victory of
God_.  He claims that Jesus could easily have predicted the fall of
Jerusalem as an inevitable consequence of continued defiance of the Romans
without requiring any sort of forknowledge of the future.

> "Truth is stranger than fiction," said Mark Twain, "because
> fiction is obliged to make sense." Wolfe is pushing the limit
> of that obligation, very hard, and I'm not at all certain
> that he hasn't violated it in SHORT SUN.

Interesting point.

> If it is a mistake, it is an unavoidable mistake. We are narrative
> beings.

But could our narrations be more modest?  More aware that they are always
from a particular vantage point and not a true objective model of the
world?

-Rostrum

---

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 20:16:12 +0000

on 6/11/01 7:14 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes at ddanehy at siebel.com wrote:

> Oddly enough, I wasn't thinking of this project as apologetic.
> Rather, I was thinking of it as experiential -- taking the
> experience of having this manuscript, with a certain kind of
> provenance, and just knowing that, however it may vary from the
> historical _fact_, it is in essence _true_.

And, clarifying his position later, he wrote:

> The issue here is _not_ how a
> hypothetical Bluish reader might respond when faced with
> the Books of Silk and Horn; the issue is how _we_ respond
> when faced with the Books of the Suns of Various Lengths --
[snip]
> My point (All together now... "and I do have one") is that
> the position into which Wolfe places _us_, vis-a-vis the
> events which hypothetically underlie the LONG/SUN books,
> is homologous to the position in which an engaged and
> thoughtful reader, even a skeptical one, finds herself
> when vis-a-vis the events which hypothetically underlie
> the Gospels -- "Layer 1 of Gospel formation," to use the
> RCC terminology: the actual events, _whatever they were_,
> that occurred in Judaea and the surrounding area ca.
> 4BC-33AD. (That "fairly unthoughtful" reader, in fact,
> would be in a position homologous to that of of a "every
> word of Scripture is literally factual" fundamentalist.)

I don't agree.  We "believe" in the accuracy of Horn's account because, as
you wrote in an earlier post, it is a literary convention to accept a
narrator as truthful and correct unless there is evidence that he/she is
lying or misled.  And we "believe" in Silk's enlightenment because it makes
for a better and more coherent book, in an aesthetic sense (this is not at
all the same thing as your argument that the coherence of four separate
accounts indicates the historicity of the Gospels).  I doubt that either of
these is the reason why a believer accepts the truth of the Gospels.  And
they have nothing to do with my response as an unbeliever to the Gospels.
If the "Book of Silk" had somehow actually come to us from the future, but
with no further indications as to its provenance, we would have no reason to
accept Horn's narrative as true in essence, or Silk as enlightened.  If
anything, the sophistication with which the book was shaped would tell
against taking giving credence to the narrative.

> I agree that it has wider applicability than the Gospels; I suspect
> that this experience has two general applications:
> 
> 1. A general approach to our reaction to ancient manuscripts -- to
> our only real source of knowledge of the history of the world
> before the modernist project of factual accuracy.

I would hope that historians do not approach ancient manuscripts generally
with the same assumptions that we approach the "Book of Silk" or believers
approach the Gospels.  And it's my impression that the better ones don't.
(And there are other sources of knowledge on the ancient world besides
manuscripts--archaeology and inscriptions.)

> Right. The only problem is that there doesn't seem to be any
> evidence, outside the one Gospel, that such a story ever
> circulated. Again: where are the contemporary challenges? For
> them all to disappear seems to imply their deliberate suppression,
> which in turn demands the conspiracy-theory of church formation;
> but that again seems to founder on the inconsistencies of the
> texts.

I could say some things in response to this, but I don't think anybody wants
a thread going that far afield.  I'll just say (since it doesn't directly
question anyone's religious belief) that contrary to what you imply above,
there was indeed "deliberate suppression" of works regarded as heretical and
anti-Christian (see Ramsay MacMullen, _Christianity and Paganism in the
Fourth to Eighth Centuries_).  And, apart from deliberate destruction, the
survival of ancient manuscripts was dependent (except for chance
archaeological discoveries) largely upon copying by Christian monks and
scribes, who would certainly not have copied anything challenging the truth
of the Gospels.  Several ancient anti-Christian treatises are known only
from quotations or discussions by Christian writers who were refuting them;
and until the Nag Hammadi discoveries, the same was largely true of our
knowledge of Gnosticism.

--Adam

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:41:52 +0000

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Jerry Friedman wrote:

> Whether skeptical explanations sound contrived and
> improbable is important when evaluating putative
> sacred texts (if that's something one is interested
> in).  In the Long/Short Sun books, I think the
> important thing is that that those explanations are
> literarily pointless (unlike the ambiguity in _A Case
> of Conscience_, which is a large part of the point).
> 
> It may be mildly amusing for us readers to note that
> a fictional reader on New Viron is in much the same
> position as a reader of the Gospels, but I don't think
> that means we readers get anything out reacting the
> same way as someone for whom the truth of the
> narrative is important.

I disagree on two grounds.

1.  I think this business of objective vs. subjective narration is an
important theme of the Long/Short Sun books.  Wolfe is asking us to
examine the assumptions we make when we read a story in third-person
"omniwscient" voice; contrast them with the assumptions made when told a
story from an individual's limited point of view; perhaps realize how
unreal and artificial third person/omniscient views are when they describe
what's going on inside other people's heads.  In real life, we never know
that.  We have to take it on faith that inner life inside other people's
heads even exists; we can never observe it for ourselves.  There's a big
difference between Wolfe telling us Silk thought such-and-such and Horn
telling us Silk thought such-and-such.

2.  Contrary to your opinion, I think this ambiguity is much more
aesthetically interesting (different tastes, I guess).  I thought it was
quite striking that Wolfe seemed to begin the Long Sun series asking us to
accept the existence of a God who enlightens Silk as an axiom.  Just when
I'd started to take it for granted, Crane invited me to re-examine it
(even if his explanation turns out not to be very plausible), which I
thought was very interesting.  And then Horn shows up and throws the whole
thing into question again--it turns out Wolfe himself doesn't ask us to
assume the existence of the Outsider for the story, he merely creates
characters who believe it.  Again, much more interesting.

I've said before, I was quite moved by Silk's inner life, by the prayers
he offers, particularly the progression, comparing the long prayers to the
Nine he makes in prison with the similar long prayer to the Outsider.  So
I was shocked when Horn revealed himself and I began to ponder how much of
that Horn could really have known, how much was the way Silk wished to
present himself to others, how much Horn's wishful thinking.  For me,
pondering those issues gave me lots to think about after reading the books
and upon re-reading them, and I think it makes the series much stronger,
deeper, and more interesting.

In a sense, I get to participate in the story.  If I believe in Silk's
goodness and Silk's god (and I do!--in the context of the story, I mean),
it's not just because Wolfe asked me to believe it so that he could tell
me a story based on that assumption, but because he created characters who
convinced me to believe in them and I've chosen to do so.

-Rostrum