academic commentary

Craig Brewer · 01 Dec 2010, 17:25 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 09:25:43 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) academic commentary
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I generally agree. Or rather, I absolutely agree about things internal to the 
text.

When it comes to the author's stated intentions or explanations of a text, 
though, I'm more conflicted. That's particularly true with Wolfe. Personally, I 
have to say that any text that can only be understood in relation to something 
outside of it (an interview, a conversation with the author, etc.) is a flawed 
text. With Wolfe, if there are some "puzzles" that can only be answered when 
Wolfe tells us the answer, it's his fault for creating a puzzle that's too 
obscure.

But the opposite extreme can also be a difficulty when people impose 
biographical information on a text. So, Wolfe is Catholic. Must every single one 
of his stories, novels, and poems then be completely consistent with Catholic 
theology? That assumption sometimes operates in our theories on this list, and 
it's not necessarily warranted. (I'm guilty of it, too.) I think this is a 
special problem when dealing with speculative fiction since it's not just the 
physical world that a genre writer can play with, but the 
philosophical/theological/ideological world as well.

Wolfe makes the problem of the intentional fallacy particularly...problematic. 
He demands more of his readers than many writers, but he also writes in such a 
way that implies intense authorial control of even the tiniest details. Reading 
Wolfe is often a difficult exercise in navigating between puzzle-solving and 
interpretation. With puzzles, the author is always right. With interpretation, 
that's less always the case. But with many of Wolfe's stories, it's difficult to 
tell when we just haven't understood the clues and when we're dealing with an 
ambiguity that requires an act of interpretation on the reader's part. When it 
comes to the scope of an author's authority, they have every right to speak 
definitively about how to solve one of their puzzles in an interview, say. But 
their interpretation of their work is ultimately one among a larger 
conversation. An author has every right to tell us we're wrong about what 
happens; he has less right to tell us we're wrong about what it means.

The difficulty with Wolfe is that it's often hard to tell where the one stops 
and the other begins.

(To make this relate to Wright, I think he's has every right to read New Sun 
*against* the religious meaning many of us might assume Wolfe intended. If 
that's the reading the text ultimately supports - and, granted, that's the point 
of the debate with him - then that's what it supports. It doesn't matter at all 
what Wolfe thought he was writing or what we'd like it to mean if the text 
ultimately goes in a Wright's direction. Lot of *IF*s there, of course, but I 
think it's just really bad logic to say that Wright has to be wrong, a priori, 
because Wolfe is Catholic or because he's said in interviews that the book has a 
"true" religious meaning, or what have you. It always has to go back to the best 
reading of the books as we have them.)

----- Original Message ----
From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Wed, December 1, 2010 11:03:03 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) academic commentary

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Thomas Bitterman <tom at bitterman.net> wrote:

> Wright's thesis stands or falls on its internal logic and ability to shed
> light on the material.  It is not dependent on what he didn't do except in
> so far as a different theory might be better, and that is a separate
> argument.  It certainly doesn't depend upon any imagined reasons for why he
> did/didn't come to different conclusions.

I don't have a dog in this race, I haven't read Wright, but speaking
in terms of general theory -- if there are important facts (internal
to the text or _maybe_ about the author) that a theory does not take
into account, then that theory is deeply flawed. IMO.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
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