Re-reading, hoping for some discussion ;-)

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 14 Aug 2006, 22:58 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 15:58:52 -0700
Subject: (urth) Re-reading, hoping for some discussion ;-)
In-Reply-To: <20060814225413.GB23481 at dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
References: <20060814225413.GB23481 at dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
Message-ID: <1f7617370608141558u6b97dadaq8b32b114b396454 at mail.gmail.com>

On 8/14/06, Jonathon McKitrick <jcm at freebsd-uk.eu.org> wrote:
> First of all, after just reading a couple of today's posts about Severian's
> lineage... is there any reason to believe Gene Wolfe had this stuff
> planned out to provide all these details deliberately, and that he will
> take the final explanation with him to his grave?

I'm reasonably sure that Wolfe did not create this complex, beautiful
work without a clear idea of what it all meant (I don't mean symbolically,
at least not necessarily; I mean what was going on behind the scenes
to cause the various mysterious goings-on). I'm fairly certain he knows
who Severian's parents and grandparents were.

But ... I suspect that we readers sometimes spend a lot of ingenuity
coming up with solutions to mysteries Wolfe never intended to be
mysteries at all.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
"Shovels are essential to the fantasy genre.
However, they are primarily used by the authors rather than the
characters." -- Stephen R. Donaldson

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net