Academic commentary

Craig Brewer · 02 Dec 2010, 17:26 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2010 09:26:02 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) Academic commentary
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Antonio said:
>>but I don't see that a given (ir)religious framework absolutely stunts the 
>>analysis of any given work.

I agree. And, as I tried to say in the summary on Wright, I think his position 
is that either theological interpretation of Wolfe's stuff (as either atheistic 
OR religious) is actually a stunted way to interpret Wolfe. His point is, 
rather, that, whatever theological position lies behind Wolfe's fiction, his 
PRIMARY concern is how those (a)theological positions get mediated and distorted 
through stories, myths, memory, time, etc. According to Wright, Wolfe is 
ultimately concerned with the difficulties and potential pitfalls of how truths 
get transmitted, no matter whether that truth is atheistic or religious.

In fact (to throw one more quote up there), he says this is even true of Long 
Sun. (By the way, my memory of how Wright dealt with Long Sun was wrong in 
something I posted earlier.) Here's Wright's ultimate interpretation of LS:

"Wolfe's willingness to pervert his own religion, as he does other mythological 
systems, for the creation of a fictional faith should indicate to the reader 
that the Christian echoes found in the Urth Cycle must be examined in their 
context rather than being accepted as an indication that the text is some form 
of obscure Christian allegory. Indeed The Book of the Long Sun reads very much 
as a renunciation of the orthodoxy and paraphenalia of Roman Catholic worship in 
favor of the less formulated Christianity of the Apostolic Era." (p. 202)

In other words, Wright essentially says: Long Sun is a Christian work (while New 
Sun wasn't, exactly). But it's ultimately, for him, about how the Christian 
message can be misremembered and how difficult it is to get back to the original 
meaning. Wright is always going to get back to how he sees Wolfe being more 
interested in the difficulties of the medium than the message.

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