Subject: RE: (whorl) Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible Copyists:

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 09:42:24 +0000

Rostrum, again:

> 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 ;*)

> 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).

Luke/Acts is a special problem, imo, in this particular flavor
of Scripture scholarship. While the other three Gospels try to
give the character of an eyewitness narrative (and "John," in 
my opinion, actually possesses that character & may well have 
actually been written or dictated in its earliest form by the
John who followed Jesus around), Luke makes no such pretense.
Those first four verses I mentioned have a queerly _modernist_
historiographical sense: they are the preface of a historian
saying, in effect, "I've done my homework, I've researched,
I've gone to original sources and interviewed the remaining
witnesses," that sort of thing. This is weird because that sort
of historiographical concern doesn't really become common until
the Enlightenment or thereabouts; is Luke being defensive, or
is he just out of his time, or what? At any rate, it gives me
a kind of confidence in the historical facticity of Luke's 
account that I don't really have for Mt and Mk.

All of which I mention because the first draft of the note I
sent off yesterday under this title went into great detail
about that subject; it was in fact the launching place for
my thesis that Wolfe is recreating the experience of 
encountering the Gospels, albeit in a fictive context.

May I analogize? _One_ of C.S. Lewis' motivations for writing
the "Narnia" books the way he did, was to present some of the 
ideas of Christianity in a "safe" context -- that is, in a
cognitive environment freed of affective authority, with nobody
telling you how you "ought" to feel about Jesus and God and
all that. By allowing children to respond to these ideas and
events in such an environment, Lewis reasoned, he could perform
a sort of guerilla evangelism; the responses, once present in
the children, might freely associate themselves with their 
proper objects when those objects were re-cognized.

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. 

Given the way the Gospels      | Given the way the Books of Silk
were written,                  | and Horn appear to have been written, 
and the way they have come     | and and the way they appear to have 
down to us, can we believe     | come down to us, can we believe
that we know anything about    | that we know anything about what
what really happened in        | "really" happened in the fictive
Jerusalem ca. 4BC-33AD?        | lives of Silk and Horn?

******

I wrote: 
>> ... to deny Silk's enlightenment is to make the whole LONG
>> SUN (and, by transference, SHORT) fall apart, meaningless
>> and incoherent. 

Rostrum responds:
> 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. I'm not just talking about the
infamous "madman, devil, God" trichotomy (which, btw, I think 
has more force than most people credit); I'm saying that given
the different apparent provenances of the four accounts, and 
especially the radically different provenance and character of 
John's from the others, I find it extremely unlikely that any
coherent explanation of these texts can be produced that does
not involve at least some of the miracles, the Last Supper,
and the Resurrection actually occurring. I find it equally 
unlikely, given the nature of the movement, that there are no 
contemporary accounts of anyone saying "I was there and it 
didn't happen that way at all" -- the closest things being 
Josephus, who skirts the issue entirely, and some of the 
earliest "apocryphal" Gospels, which vary in detail but which
actually do support the general outline -- unless there was
nobody to say it. (One can conceive of a vast clerical
conspiracy to suppress and destroy all such documents, of 
course, but I'm extremely skeptical of conspiracy theories.)

The point of which is not to try to convert anyone out there,
but to give some sense of what kind of response I think the
Gospels, and analogously the Books of Silk and Horn, demand.

> 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...

... which is another example of the BoS having something of
the character of the Gospels. While the evangelists do in fact
go out of their way at times to show how Jesus' actions fulfilled
this or that prophecy, they don't seem particularly concerned to
"prove" that Jesus was the Son of God; they just tell you so and
you take it or leave it.

> 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. Given 
the nature of Scripture in this understanding -- the written 
preservation of a community's response to its encounter with 
the Divine -- the question actually becomes meaningless. 
Given the model of "inspiration" used in the same school of 
Scripture study, it simply does not matter whether or not 
Jesus "actually" said a given thing (that is, whether the
statement "Jesus said X" has historical facticity); what 
matters is that His having said it is preserved for our 
edification (lit. "building up"). It is perfectly consonant
with this model of truth to believe that, on a certain occasion,
Jesus said something -- X -- which was ideally suited to the
needs of His audience, while the evangelist, years later, 
wrote down a somewhat different statement, Y, which marks
not only the evangelist's imperfect memory, but the movement
of the Holy Spirit in the evangelist to set down the statement
which would most generally benefit two thousand years and more
of believers and potential believers.

So to ask "Did Jesus really say X"? becomes something rather 
other than moot -- it becomes an almost Clintonesque inquiry 
into "well, that depends on what 'really' means."

And, yes, I do think we are operating at that level of 
uncertainty in dealing with the LONG/SHORT SUN texts; and,
no, I am _not_ completely comfortable with that. And so I
return to my response to your statement that "[t]here is a 
sense in which telling a story from a third-person, 
omniscient viewpoint is cheating." At another level, I want
so say that there is a very real sense in which _not_ telling
a story from that kind of viewpoint is cheating: it is 
cheating the reader of a coherent narrative. If I want
uncertainty, I'll read fact; when I read fiction, it is 
usually because I want the pleasure of a coherent narrative.

"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.

> > 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.

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

--Dan'l

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
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---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 12:57:13 +0000

> 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?  

Actually, you were right on target. Blish was an atheist through
the fifties -- but one of those atheists who _wants_ to believe,
if you know what I mean? 

And, like most rationalists with an attraction to religion, he
was particularly attracted to the Roman Catholic church and Thomism.
His trilogy "After Such Knowledge" (consisting of the historical
novel DOCTOR MIRABILIS, the contemporary fantasy BLACK EASTER 
[its second part, THE DAY AFTER JUDGMENT, should be included here],
and the SF novel A CASE OF CONSCIENCE) collectively presume the
literal truth of Catholicism at one level or another. The ending
of ACOC looks a _lot_ less ambiguous if viewed in the light (or,
rather, the darkness) of BLACK EASTER.

After moving to England in the late '60s, Blish was received 
into the Anglican church. I'm aware of only one bio of Blish, 
and I read it more than ten years ago; but from what I recall,
Anglicanism was a sort of compromise because for some reason
(possibly the fact that he was a divorcé?) he could not be
accepted into the Catholic church.

--Dan'l

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 17:14:24 +0000

> 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.

Nor do I; but I think even more that it doesn't much matter.

> 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.

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_.

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.
2. A general approach to how religious persons approach their
   sacred texts. It has, as noted, a very strong sense (to me at
   least) of relation to Luke; but it might be applicable to the
   Qu'ran or the Rig-Veda or God wot what all; the point being that
   we have various "scriptures," documents which, to their 
   respective communities of faith, describe the most important
   events or facts or truths in the world, but which by their
   very nature _cannot_ be backed up in any factitious way. I 
   could as easily say "Oh -- is _this_ what it's like to 
   believe the Book of Mormon, despite all the evidence against 
   it?": but for all I know, there may be a member of the LDS
   Church on this list, and the last thing I want to do is give
   offense.

> > 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.

I tend to agree while disagreeing. I believe that he tried to 
write something that you could do a Crane on -- explain everything
away -- but to write it so that these explanations would sound
contrived and improbable. I also believe he succeeded at this.

> 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.  

Well, "if you don't believe that the evangelists believed that 
Jesus was divine." That phrasing leaves separate (as it ought to 
be) the question of whether they were right about this, and 
separate from both, the question of the historical facticity of 
the Gospel accounts. It's when the three questions are laid end
to end that I come to my claim that the whole thing becomes
coherent only if 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.  

I have a great deal of difficulty with this, but only because of 
the interaction of these three questions. Why would there be a
false-but-coherent presentation of a divine Jesus? If it was a
deliberate plot to defraud the masses (as some have claimed), I
think the plotters would have done a better job of getting their
stories straight. Allowing for Luke and John to be later texts by
dupes, the inconsistency between MT and MK are enough to cast
serious doubt on this; on the other hand, they have exactly the
kind of inconsistency that grows in eyewitness accounts handed
on orally but _carefully_. On the other hand, if the evangelists
were themselves all deluded (that is, they believed but falsely),
a whole set of questions about the lack of contemporary challenge
to the core of their claims seems to arise.

> 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.  

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.

> Horn doesn't jump in and proclaim that Crane's hypothesis was
> nonsense.  

Right. To do so would be to problematize it; to simply portray
Silk's reaction (including his actually considering it as at 
least a possibility) allows it to reduce itself to absurdity.

> Horn's not completely convinced himself of the Outsider's
> existence.

But this has something of an "I believe; help thou mine unbelief"
feel, doesn't it?

> 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.

Haven't read this. Probably won't; live's too short.

> > 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?

Subjectivism itself collapses under its own weight (as the question
of whether we can ever have access to any certainty drags on and
becomes a certainty that there is no certainty), and ultimately
becomes the de-valued worldview of postmodernism. I am afraid that
I simply reject that worldview as useless for living.

--Dan'l

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 15:32:28 +0000

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.

While you're right, you are right in a way that, well,
sort of misses my point. 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 --

-- specifically, the question "How the hell are we supposed 
to know what actually _happened_?" How are we to make 
(narrative) sense of this welter of provenances and possible 
provenances, this scribbling of narrators and editors, 
interpolators and (maybe) copyists, any one of whom _may_ 
be almost-arbitrarily unreliable?

Taking my hypothesis for truth, for the moment: Wolfe is 
enabled to do this precisely because his texts are located 
at a peculiar node of the textus of Western culture, a time 
when the authority of narrativity has been somewhat-
successfully challenged by relativistic narrative, 
unreliable narrators, subjectivism, and postmodernity; but
he is writing within a narrower tradition (science fiction)
where the objectivity of narrative has remained relatively
unchallenged. Using the tools provided by the larger 
cultural movements, he is writing, for an audience who
expects narrative to narrate an objectively-consistent
and determinable series of events, in such a way that the
seriese of events may be objectively consistent, but
whose objectivity remains beyond the grasp of that audience.

No. Let me take a step back from that position. It is much
easier to imagine a reader who accepts the events at their
face value, and believes that she has thus grasped the
objective flow of events, than it is (for me) to imagine 
one who believes that Crane's hypothesis is a plausible
(plausible from our, outside-the-narrative, hypothetically-
objective, standpoint) explanation of Silk's enlightenment.

But I believe that this would be a fairly unthoughtful 
reader, and not one likely to be a great fan of Wolfe's.

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 am not, of course, prepared to state that this was
Wolfe's intent. I do not claim to know his intent. I am
stating that this is an interesting homology, a use to
which the Books can be put, if you will; and that I would
not be surprised to learn that this was _one_ of Wolfe's
reasons for writing them the way he did, rather than some
other way. In an ideal world I should like to ask him 
about it, but this is not an ideal world, and I don't
expect the opportunity to arise any time soon.

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 10:15:20 +0000

Jerry Friedman wrote:

> Part of the reason for my lack of interest in the
> reliability of Wolfe's narrators is that this goes
> back a hundred years, to Henry James (at least).  I
> don't see much difference, for example, between the
> editorial comments in TBotsS and those in _Ada_.  

I must disagree on theoretical grounds. The discourse of
SF uses rhetorical devices -- and the tactics of the 
unreliable narrator, the "editorial" comment, and 
metafictional devices generally _are_ rhetorical devices,
that is, tools in the rhetorical toolchest of the writer 
(at least, the writer of narrative) -- in a fundamentally
different way than does the discourse of MF*.

------------------------
* MF: A term I've been using for some years, though I
  haven't had much call for it on this group. Just as
  the S in SF may refer to "Science" or "Speculative"
  [or "San" if you live in Northern California], so
  the M in MF refers ambiguously/ambivalently to 
  "mimetic" and "mundane," the latter _not_ intended
  as a faanish put-down term but as a descriptive term
  for "stuff that is about the 'real' world."
------------------------

The writer of MF is ostensibly writing about the world that 
is the case. (Elided: not only the basic fact that all fiction 
is about fictive worlds, but the more problematic question of 
whether _any_ narrative can reasonably be called "non-
fiction.") This is true even of the MF writer who wanders into 
bizarre fantasy -- Kathy Acker, say, or William S. Burroughs. 
These writers are writing about (their?) subjective experience 
of the objectively-"real" world; even when they seem to be
saying that there is no objective reality, that is still 
their experience or description of the consensus(?) reality.

The writer of SF, by contrast, is explicitly writing about a 
fictive world, which exists in a kind of dialogue with the
world that is the case. Every detail of the SF writer's 
fictive world in some way comments-by-contrast upon the "real" 
world: even the parts that resemble the "real" world, by their 
presence, announce that (in the mind of _this_ writer) these 
things remain stable even when these other parts of reality 
are destabilized. The most explicit statement of this I can 
think of is the end of Wells' THE TIME MACHINE:

     And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white 
     flowers - shrivelled now, and brown and flat and 
     brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength 
     had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still 
     lived on in the heart of man.

So how do editorial comments, etc., work in SF? 

Simply: The discourse of MF creates a fictional series of events
among a fictional set of persons set in an ostensibly-real world. 
A wide range of rhetorical devices add subjective depth to the
fictional persons. The particular devices under discussion function
in MF to destabilize/cast doubt (primarily) on the events and 
(secondarily) on the character of the persons.

The discourse of SF creates a fictional series of events among
a fictional set of persons set in an explicitly-fictional world.
Those rhetorical devices which add subjective depth to MF function 
primarily to add "objective" depth to the fictional world of the
SF text, as do a host of additional rhetorical devices evolved
within the stfnal tradition. The particular devices under discussion
function in SF to destabilize/cast doubt on the discursive reality
itself.

More grossly: an MF writer, using metafiction and similar techniques, 
may be suggesting (for example) that we cannot have any objective 
knowledge of "reality;" an SF writer, using metafiction and similar
techniques, is commenting upon the "real" world by contrasting it 
with a hypothetical world, but problematizing the contrast by 
denying us (the sense that we have) any stable knowledge of the 
hypothetical world.

> And speaking of Nabokov, I don't see anything metafictional in
> any of the __ Sun books that compares to _Pale Fire_, 

I'm afraid I found it turgid. But I was a lot younger then; perhaps
I should give it another try.

> However, for those of you who like this sort of thing
> (that means you too, Dan'l)--well, you're probably
> aware of this but just haven't mentioned it--but I'll
> remind you that in _TBotNS_ there's also a fictional
> Wolfe who translates Severian's manuscript (and has
> seen some of the era's few extant buildings).  

Hadn't mentioned because I hadn't _thought_ about it. You're
quite right.

> Cf., by the way, not only "The Last Thrilling Wonder Story" 
> but also _The Lord of the Rings_, in which the fictional
> Tolkien explains some features of his translation.  

D'oh! And me a Tolkienologist. Well... to tell the truth, though,
I think Tolkien's intent is exactly opposed to Wolfe's; Wolfe,
as you note, casts doubt on his "translation" simply by _making_
it a translation; Tolkien seeks to grant his subcreation a greater
sense of historicity and "reality" by an apparently similar (but
functionally quite different) tactic.

> Why is there a k in "Duko"?

Because "Duo" would sound dumb?

--Dan'l

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 17:07:03 +0000

And more of Mr Friedman:

> I should probably mention that _Ada_ is alternate-
> history sf, with a little stefnal fun about the
> technology of "Anti-Terra".  (Pace Nabokov and some
> Nabokophiles who would undoubtedly say, undoubtedly
> have said, that _Ada_ is a parody of sf, far superior
> to [what they think is] the naive and limited genre it
> parodies, and does something quite different with sf
> elements from what [they think] the genre does.)

To respond to that I'd have to know (or at least make
an educated guess at whether Nabokov himself was familiar
with/skilled at the kind of reading SF requires. From
what little I know about him I can't begin to make a guess.

I'd be willing to hazard a guess, though, that most
Nabokophiles haven't that level of experience/expertise
with decoding SF rhetoric.

Regarding my term MF:

> Or "mainstream"?

Well, yeah. I used to include that. (And I also used to use
the longer term BLMF, for bourgeois literary MF, but I 
decided a long time ago that the first two terms weren't
very interesting to me.) I still do, sometimes, but I no
longer believe that the term "mainstream" has much meaning
-- it might be used to describe any of a number of things,
including "fiction approved of by literary academics,"
"fiction that doesn't go into any of the marketing categories
like SF and mysteries and, yes, fiction-for-the-literary-
academics," "highly-mimetic [i.e., 'realistic'] fiction," or 
even "bestsellers."

But that there is _a_ _mainstream_ is unlikely, just as there
is no longer _a_ _mainstream_ American culture -- if there
ever was. 

> "Cf." abbreviates the Latin for "compare and
> contrast". :-)  

Oh. Actually, that's one I _thought_ I had glerked
from context, and so never actually looked it up.
Apparently I hadn't glerked it all that well.

> I agree with you about Tolkien, but I'm not sure
> I agree about Wolfe.  Maybe he was locating 
> _TBotNS_ (et seqq.) in an sf tradition that I
> don't think began with Tolkien, 

Well, JRRT himself wasn't operating in any tradition
of the SF/F genre qua genre; I gather that late in
his life he read a bit of "that American SF," but 
don't believe he ever read enough to locate his own
work in any of its "traditions," and certainly not
as far back as the '40s. 

But, yes, Wolfe himself was certainly operating in 
the conventions of SF/F. That tBotNS is in part an
homage to Vance's "Dying Earth" is just a starting
place.

> and providing a socket into which we could plug the
> bit about sealing the manuscript in a coffer and
> casting it adrift on the seas of space and time.  

Possibly. I would tend to believe that, yes, that image
came before the "apparatus" of tBotNS, and that the
apparatus was intended to interact with that image.
Someone else pointed out "Wolfe's" claim to have seen 
some buildings of the post-historic period (what would 
you call that -- pre-ruins?). I suppose that the existence
of this "Wolfe" in tBotNS implies a translating "Wolfe" in 
the rest of the Lupiverse texts; assuming that Wolfe was
consciously aware of this and intended us to be (though,
if so, why he didn't make comments about translational
difficulties in _these_ texts is a question worth asking), 
this adds to the levels underlying the "what actually 
happened?" experience.

> *hands on hips* You know perfectly well what I meant.
> If those four cities have Italian as their high
> tongue, why a k and not a c?

I don't think it's Italian, I think it's "Italian," if you
see what I mean -- the same way that some of the words of
Vironese are Spanish and some are sorta-Spanish-ish? Or,
contrariwise, since some of the Vironese words turn out to
be South American Spanish, maybe it's some Italian dialect?
(Do, or historically did, Sicilians use a different 
spelling from Romans? Or Tuscans, maybe?)