Urth & Earth (was "Travelling North aka miscellaneous thoughts on Wolfe")

James Wynn · 04 Jun 2010, 19:29 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:29:08 -0500
Subject: (urth) Urth & Earth (was "Travelling North aka miscellaneous
 thoughts on Wolfe")
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Well, the concept of  needing to confess to a priest as a path to 
absolution is pretty Catholic, I'd think.
If Wolfe only wanted to play with familiar motifs, why include the plot 
element that the Chapter was founded as a parody of another specific 
religion?

> Well, no, obviously not...I guess what I'm asking is, do that 
> parallels between the Chapter and the Catholic Church rise to the 
> level that within the fictive universe there must be a 
> cause-and-effect relationship between them, or can they be 
> interpretted as merely have a metafictive causal relationship, i.e., 
> the author is a Catholic with something to say and playing around with 
> ideas that are familiar to him?

>
>     You could just as well ask "How Catholic is the Catholic Church?"
>     Obviously there are parallels with other religions in this or that
>     aspect. It's the whole package that is at issue. I can't imagine
>     that any reader has said, "Oh! You think the Chapter seems like a
>     twisted version of Catholic Church? I hadn't thought of that."
>
>>     How Catholic is the Chapter, really?
>>
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