The Sorcerer's House Questions (Major Spoilers)

Craig Brewer · 19 Apr 2010, 15:14 · from 2010-April.txt.gz

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From: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 08:14:27 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)
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I'm with you on this.

I think a big part of it has to do with how the last few chapters start to talk about the nature of what a sorcerer does. Earlier, I mentioned how similar Martha's description of magic words are to Bax's description of lying. A lot of it comes down to controlling context and influencing how people will receive what gets said. (I.e., Bax has no idea what the magic words mean, but he can "sell" them, and that makes him a powerful sorcerer. Even the triannulus seems to come down to interpretation (the pictures are quite abstract, apparently, and Emlyn and Bax see either a fox or a wolf, depending on what they want...and Emlyn even suggests that sometimes it's hard to tell when the spell is finished since it often depends on symbols).

But if being a sorcerer is being a powerful story-teller, so powerful that you can make lies (or at least empty words) have real power, then perhaps it is possible that the story could be both true and false at the same time. And that's an idea I really like.

----- Original Message ----
From: Eugene Zaretskiy <eugene.zar at gmail.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Mon, April 19, 2010 9:58:23 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In the end, I'm not convinced that the entire thing was a total fabrication.
> But I am convinced that Wolfe means us to think that it's a possibility
> since, otherwise, I have a hard time understanding why Bax should ever have
> been a con man at all, unless it was just an easy way to get the character
> into (and then out of) jail.

This is what I think, too. Craig, earlier you said it made sense for
Wolfe to write a novel where the fantasy elements are fabrications.
Similarly, maybe his objective is more nuanced than that (Wolfe?
Nuanced? Crazy, I know) and he wants to "con" readers into believing
whatever they want about Bax's story. If there's a level to this book
where Bax is the compiler and made everything up, I don't think it's
the ONLY path to understanding the book as a whole, but I agree with
you that Bax's being a con man and other such details are placed by
Wolfe to add to this particular reading. I'm amazed that the "debate"
has gone on for so long, though; you either believe it and toss away
any hope of understanding the book as a puzzle box (this approach
being understandably labeled "lame" by some) or you don't believe it.

I get this feeling GW would be highly amused by all this. (Does he
read this list?) Can't the "Bax made it all up" theory co-exist with
the puzzle box version?

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