Fiction and Wolfe's personal beliefs

Craig Brewer · 23 Jan 2009, 05:38 · from 2009-January.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: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:38:51 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) Fiction and Wolfe's personal beliefs
References: <mailman.10963.1232665712.2909.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<49790517.9010300 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <605169.92936.qm at web37601.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

So a lot of the theological discussion raises certain questions for me:

Certainly Wolfe is a Catholic. Must his fiction also be Catholic?

And if it is theologically orthodox, where are we to find that orthodoxy?

A case in point is Peter Wright's interpretation. For Wright *all* of the New Sun basically boils down to an exercise in religion-as-conspiracy. In sum, for Wright, New Sun ultimately has no religious aspect at all. Rather, the Hieros create a conspiracy in which everything *looks* orthodox but is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Severian is manipulated through and through, even (and especially) when he thinks he's finally in direct contact with the divine. Throughout, according to Wright, he's simply a tool. And, what's more, all of the evidence that we are given that Severian is in fact part of a larger mythological story is not transcendence, but, in fact, further evidence of the thoroughness of the cosmic conspiracy.

My point is that Wright never tries to claim that Wolfe, himself, goes against his own beliefs. But he points out how it's possible to read his fiction as not at all straightforwardly an expression of personal faith. Rather, one might say that Wright's interpretation gives a story in which Wolfe shows how his own faith could be used in a very false way, inspiring faith but without any real substance.

My real question here is whether invoking Wolfe's faith is really a kind of master-key to his texts. Certainly it *informs* his fiction in countless ways, but does every one of his works ultimately have to be an allegory of his own beliefs?

Craig

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