Wolfe and Teilhard de Chardin

Nigel Price · 09 Jun 1999, 19:11 · from urth-v0027.mbox · original

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: Nigel Price <NigelPrice1 at compuserve.com>
Subject: (urth) Wolfe and Teilhard de Chardin
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 19:11:30
Message-ID: <urth-v0027-0077 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0027/0077.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Following the recent discussion on the this list, I decided that it really
was time I got round to reading the copy of James Blish's "A Case of
Conscience" that has been sitting on my shelf for the last 25 years or so.=20
I'm about two-thirds of the way through so far, and enjoying it very much,
although I can't see much obvious thematic or stylistic connection with
Wolfe at this stage. =20

Seeking a little background information on Blish and ACoC, I consulted the
Grolier SF CD-ROM encyclopedia, where I found the following passage in the
essay on "Religion":

        The 1950s also saw a remarkable proliferation of images=20
        obviously allied to religious notions but shorn of their=20
        association with actual religious doctrine. Arthur C. Clarke=20
        has said that any religious symbolism or imagery in=20
        CHILDHOOD'S END (1950; exp 1953) is "entirely accidental",=20
        although the text itself refers to the climax as an "apotheosis"=20
        and the events described there are strikingly -- but=20
        coincidentally -- similar to Teilhard de Chardin's notion of the=20
        coming-together of displaced planetary "noospheres" at an=20
        apocalyptic "Omega Point". Clifford D. Simak's Time and Again=20
        (1951; vt First He Died) is similarly free of formal doctrine,=20
        although the alien symbionts which infest all living things are=20
        obviously analogous to souls (> ESCHATOLOGY). In later=20
        works by Simak -- particularly A Choice of Gods (1972) and=20
        Project Pope (1981)-religious ideas do become explicit, and=20
        here again there are strong echoes of a Teilhardian schema.=20
        Sf works explicitly based on Teilhard's ideas are=20
        George ZEBROWSKI's The Omega Point Trilogy=20
        (2 parts published 1972, 1977; omni, including 3rd part, 1983)=20
        and Gene WOLFE's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) and=20
        The Urth of the New Sun (1987 UK). The syncretic approach=20
        of these stories, which blends the religious and scientific=20
        imaginations, contrasts with uncompromising stories using=20
        TIME TRAVEL and other facilitating devices directly to confront=20
        the central symbol of the Christian faith: the crucifixion.=20

I've never read any Teilhard de Chardin, so I can't really comment. =20
(Though I borrowed one of his books from a friend this evening, and even
managed to find out what a "noosphere" was.  As far as I can understand, it
is that aspect of the human mind, considered from a developmental point of
view, which is devoted to the comprehension of abstract concepts.  So
there!)

Has his possible influence on Wolfe ever been discussed on the Urth list?=20
If so, what conclusions were reached?  If not, is anyone sufficiently well
read in this area to comment?

"A Case of Coscience" is an interesting, but strange book.  As others have
intimated on this list, Father Ramon's logic is more than a little odd when
it comes to assessing the Lithians.  It's partly that the book, though set
long post-Vatican 2, was, of course, written very much before Vatican 2, so
Blish's model of Catholicism, whilst it is intended to be futuristic,
nevertheless comes over as somewhat dated and anachronistic.  Other than
that, I can't make up my mind whether it's a peculiar twist in Blish's own
thinking, or the effect of the novel's technique, which is to set the main
characters against each other in a sort of chiaroscuro dialectic,
reminiscent in both its brilliance and its staginess of George Bernard Shaw
at his most argumentative.  (There are parts of the first book of ACoC
which are actually set out as dramatic dialogue, as if written for a play.)
 I like it, but it is odd.  An elegant book, but maybe ever so slightly
twisted.

Or is that just me?

Nigel Price
Minety, Wiltshire, England
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/nigelprice1/

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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