Memorare

Gwern Branwen · 04 Apr 2007, 15:37 · from 2007-April.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: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 11:37:00 -0400
Subject: (urth) Memorare
In-Reply-To: <20070404135141.NRBL23423.eastrmmtao101.cox.net at eastrmimpo02.cox.net>
	(James B. Jordan's message of "Wed, 04 Apr 2007 08:51:47 -0500")
References: <20070402065008.A9226DA82D at mailserver7.hushmail.com>
	<20070404135141.NRBL23423.eastrmmtao101.cox.net at eastrmimpo02.cox.net>
Message-ID: <86ejn05exv.fsf at elan.rh.rit.edu>

"James B. Jordan" <jbjordan4 at cox.net> writes:

> I've been away so much that I may have missed it, but have we 
discussed "Memorare"
> here yet?
>
> Spoiler space
>
> I was struck by the fact that Wolfe makes himself the godplaying 
dead man. It
> would be easy to have the statue be that of "Richard Nixon" or 
"Hitler" or someone
> else, but Wolfe takes upon himself the role of god-playing 
tyrant. He seems to be
> saying that he's as potentially evil as anyone else. Salvation 
is only by grace,
> as the prayers and title indicate.
>         Which raised to me another question/dimension of the 
story: the persons
> sent back to earth by the Wolfegod. Are these the readers of the 
story? Is Wolfe
> suggesting that his own readers move back into the world to do 
good (he hopes),
> but that any anti-Wolfe would also be sending readers back into 
the world for evil
> purposes?
>         Anyway, I thought this was excellent vintage-Wolfe 
          novella,
> multidimensional and fully textured. Anybody want to talk about 
  it?
>
> Nutria
>
> James B. Jordan

To be facetious for a moment, doesn't it make perfect sense for 
the godplaying dead man to be Wolfe, the author of the story? 
After all, the story will be read long after he's dead; the author 
has the power of a god (sort of); and there is no acceptable 
theodicy for the inhabitants of a story - any evil done to them is 
fully purposed, thought through, and carried out by the author.

-- 
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.

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