American Nights Forgery -- more evidence

Dave Tallman · 15 May 2008, 12:05 · from 2008-May.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: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Thu, 15 May 2008 06:05:14 -0600
Subject: (urth) American Nights Forgery -- more evidence
Message-ID: <482C26FA.6080402 at gmail.com>

Roy C. Lackey writes:
> If, as you contend, the last three pages of the notebook were forged, and
> if, as you also contend, they were forged by an automated writing machine,
> then the climax of the story is a Farsi farce. The most pivotal incident of
> Nadan's life is nothing but a machine-generated fiction, which trivializes
> what, for Nadan, was a soul-shattering event. And it makes for a much less
> interesting story.
>
>   
In my version, Nadan will have the same soul-shattering revelation, but 
it will be an epiphany of psychological horror. He will learn before he 
dies that the woman he loved was a moral monster, lying to him from the 
beginning, part of a plot to cause destruction on a massive scale.

I find this more interesting than the original, a mere werewolf story. 
There are layers of abstraction; the story is told by a foolish man with 
his own agenda, embellished here and there to make him look good, 
redacted out of fear of the police, and capped with a false ending. In 
spite of all that, we can still catch a glimpse of the truth at the 
core. It is not a closed curve.

> I don't see Wolfe attempting to map a week in the life of a Moslem to the
> events of Holy Week. As you said early on, this story is a perverted rehash
> of the story of Cupid and Psyche, but with a reversal of gender. Instead of
> Psyche's light revealing the naked glory of a god, Nadan's light revealed
> something that was not merely ugly to behold, it was something that crossed
> a moral or spiritual boundary from which there was no return. He had
> embraced that something, loved, or at least lusted after it, and saw himself
> as irrevocably polluted by his contact.
>
>   
I expect Wolfe believes that every person must ultimately face the 
transcendent truth of Christianity. There is an inversion of Cupid and 
Psyche, but I think the inverted passion story is the big picture. 
Here's another parallel. In the final paragraph Nadan wrote, he says "I 
will" three times. He will "grapple the trend" and force things in the 
direction he wishes. In other words, "not Thy will, but mine be done," 
an inversion of the Gethsemane prayer. It won't work -- things will be 
taken out of his hands and the ultimate result will be a Black Easter 
when an American bomb comes forth from its tomb to bring death and 
destruction.

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