interview questions

Jerry Friedman · 03 Jan 2011, 16:44 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2011 08:44:25 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) interview questions
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From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>


[Principle of parsimony in fiction]

>>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.

But of course the human imagination can find false patterns in human-created 
phenomena too, and if we
care about avoiding them, parsimony will help.

>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."

Okay.  When I use "parsimony" I mean that we don't have to look for elaborate or 
poorly supported explanations when we have simple or well-supported ones.

>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.

For instance, maybe principles like the Gricean maxims apply--though not exactly 
like.

>>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. 
>>

And yet, as I said, he wrote "Under Hill", where the gun specifically isn't 
fired.  I wonder whether he was
thinking about the Chekhov quotation.

In any case, I disagree with you and him.  He's justifying his decision to have 
Silkhorn meet Severian,
one of his few decisions that to my taste were totally lame.

>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. 

There's no accounting for taste.   A conclusion that SOME people had been 
replaced would satisfy me just fine.

Jerry Friedman



      
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