{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1441", "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": 1441, "subject": "Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible", "messages": 2, "voices": 1, "first": "2001-06-11T09:21:16+00:00", "last": "2001-06-11T09:23:55+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "James Jordan", "address": "jbjordan4 at home.com" }, "date": "2001-06-11T09:21:16+00:00", "subject": "Re: (whorl) Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "At 08:35 PM 6/10/2001 -0500, you wrote:\nWhere is the religious ambiguity in TBOTNS? Well, for instance, I think,\nalmost certainly, that Master Ash's bleak and scientific outlook depicted\npart of that ambiguity. Maybe, too, the notion visited in \"Sword of the\nLictor\" that, if the universe had existed for an infinite time, all things,\nincluding angels, would have come into existence by logical necessity. And,\nfrom my religious perspective, it's hard to imagine a more terrifying story\nthan Melito's story from the \"Citadel of the Autarch\" of \"The Cock, the\nAngel, and the Eagle\", especially as that story was revisited and affirmed\nas true in \"Urth of the New Sun.\" The point is that within TBOTNS Mr.\nWolfe himself generates an alternative religious interpretation of the world\nin which his story takes place, something that an atheistic would be much\nmore comfortable with than a priest. (Though there's also plenty of room\nfor the priest's interpretation.) To me, this ambiguity is most excellent\nand makes the work, not only uplifting (as would be a purely religious\nwork), but also subtly frightening." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Imperator" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": " FWIW, this is exactly and precisely what Roman Catholic James \nBlish does in his classic *A Case of Conscience.* Wolfe shares Blish's \nThomism. Blish provides both a \"nature\" version of the story, and a \"grace\" \nversion of the story, and only the \"eye of faith\" can see which version is \nthe more \"ultimate\" explanation of events. It would not surprise me if \nWolfe, who certainly knows Blish's work, would do the same thing.\n\nNutria\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun." } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "James Jordan", "address": "jbjordan4 at home.com" }, "date": "2001-06-11T09:23:55+00:00", "subject": "Re: (whorl) Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I think you're basically right, save that as I wrote in a previous post, I \nthink Wolfe intends the Silk narrative to be a kind of lesser version of \nthe gospels, not equivalent to them.\n\nNutria\n\nDan'l wrote in part" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Briefly, for non-[Catholic-Bible-scholars]: The basic idea the\nCatholic church endorses is that the Gospels were formed in\nthree \"layers\":\n 1. The events that actually occurred in the greater\n Jerusalem metropolitan area ca. 4 BC - 33 AD.\n 2. The memories of those events carried by eyewitnesses\n and the communities founded by those eyewitnesses.\n 3. The setting-down of those memories by the communities,\n 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 1. We have Horn's own authentic(?) memories of Silk.\n\n 2. We have the community's memories of Silk.\n\n 3. The \"Book of Silk\" _as written by Horn & Nettle_\n collecting and collating their own memories with\n 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." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun." } ] } ] }