interview questions

Lee Berman · 03 Jan 2011, 11:05 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2011 06:05:23 -0500
Subject: (urth) interview questions
Message-ID: <SNT123-W13138ED8762D8F81574B8BCF070 at phx.gbl>

>Jerry Friedman: There has to be one.  We don't worry about whether all the characters in BotNS 
>are Talking Beasts that Severian misleads us about, or Holmes's deductions about 
>his clients are false and the clients confirm them just to be polite, or Helen 
>of Troy was a male transvestite.

The Occam's Razor principle demands that the simplest answer which accounts for all the evidence
must be the correct one. Its absence (in understanding fiction) does not demand we pick the most
outrageous, unsupported answer, of the kind you suggest above.

Occam's Razor is a principle useful in science and detective work to counter the human imagination's
tendency to find an infinite number of false patterns in naturally occurring phenomena. When I use the
term I mean to imply Isaac Newton's definition: ""We are to admit no more causes of natural things than 
such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."

My point is that fiction is not like science. It is like religion. There is a Creator. Our study and our
goal is not to make sense out of some riotous chaos. We are trying to understand the intelligent 
purpose of the work of a single, human intelligence. 

>Parsimony in fiction may not work the way it does in real life, though.

We can agree on this, at least.

>We can be certain of one thing, though: There are no rules of story-telling.

I suppose, but Geen Wolfe and I agree on something: there are rules to GOOD story-telling. From the
Nick Gevers interview:

>GW: There's a wonderful bit in the Roger Rabbit movie nobody seems to get. Roger goes around with handcuffs 
>on his wrists for half an hour. Then he pulls one hand out of the cuffs and does something with it, and sticks 
>it back in. Bob says, "You mean to tell me you could get out of those whenever you wanted to?" And Roger says, 
>"No, only when it's funny." That is a profound expression of the law that governs all writers and performers. 
>The audience doesn't have to think about that, but writers are bound by it. If there's a gun on the wall in 
>Act I, it must be fired before the end of the play. Etc. 

This is what I am suggesting. Aunt Jeannine and Aubrey Veil are "arguing" over whether Veil's hypothesis about 
the replacement of all humanity in the system is true. Veil didn't suggest SOME people had been replaced. Even 
David and Number Five debate that abos are *all* dead. That's the gun that Wolfe placed on the wall in Act I. It 
can't be partially fired as a satisfying conclusion to this carefully crafted story.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net