Wolfe's Attitude toward his Readers

Lee Berman · 14 Aug 2010, 14:00 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 10:00:31 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's Attitude toward his Readers
Message-ID: <SNT123-W4850CAA5969E603A6F8EF5CF990 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn- 
>I posted on this before: I suggested that the apparent low entropy of the 
>numbers may be in order to add verisimilitude without inplying any specific 
>meaning assigned in the text.  

I'm sorry Gerry, I don't understand what you mean by "low entropy of the 
numbers. Could you explan?

>"Ora faltig teru dres, ent oru klen rebalen tafru."  That looks like a 
>sentence in a foreign language (either originating in or transcribed into 
>the Latin alphabet).  It is not entirely random: I made it to seem 
>pronouncable.and have a plausible distribution of word lengths etc., even an 
>echo between 'ora' and 'oru'.  But it means nothing!  

I must confess that I am one who becomes quickly annoyed by authors who invent
alien languages for their text (yes, even you, J.R.R., though you are redeemed 
a bit by basing Elvish on Suomi (Finnish)). One of my true pleasures in reading
Gene Wolfe is that he instead takes pains to use extant words (albeit sometimes 
nearly extinct words). 

If Wolfe wants to depict an undecipherable word he does not tend use our alphabet
to do so. He finds a way to describe the undecipherable symbol with color and/or
shape and/or descriptors like "gnostic" or "terratoid".

As an engineer, I assume Gene Wolfe finds numbers to be almost as important,
symbolically, as letters. I would be unpleasantly surprised to learn he has invented
a fake paragraph of numbers when he is so averse to doing that same thing to words.

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