Ascians' Thematic Purppose (was ATTENDING DAEDALUS)

Adam Thornton · 30 Jan 2006, 19:32 · from 2006-January.txt.gz

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From: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 13:32:15 -0600
Subject: (urth) Ascians' Thematic Purppose (was ATTENDING DAEDALUS)
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On Jan 30, 2006, at 1:17 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

>  It becomes necessary to create a new
> level of grammar where, rather than fitting words together
> to form sentences, preset sentences are fitted together
> to form ... I don't know what you'd call them, because
> the significance of each sentence is allowed to vary
> hugely with its context, in two senses: the circumstances
> of utterance and the preceding/following sentences.
> What Wolfe has done, albeit sketchily, is proposed a
> working language where no signifier has a well-defined
> signified. Really astonishing stuff.

There's something else that everyone misses about the storytelling  
contest.

As Wolfe loves to do, we get the story through various layers of  
intermediaries.  We do not get the Ascian's story as such.  Or  
rather, we do, but we get it presented with a commentary that turns  
it from a string of Correct Thought phrases into a coherent narrative.

Why should we believe that Foila is both knowledgeable and  
trustworthy?  We really have no way of knowing either the story Foila  
interprets for the Ascian is the story he meant to tell, and if it  
isn't, we don't have any way of knowing whether Foila was unable to  
interpret his story correctly or whether she received one story and  
told another.

Adam

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