Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?

António Pedro Marques · 22 May 2011, 00:01 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?utf-8?Q?Ant=C3=B3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 01:01:04 +0100
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?
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No dia 21/05/2011, ?s 22:36, Jason H <beet31425 at gmail.com> escreveu:

> Did you know "Cas" was Dorcas right away?
> 
> I didn't. (...) Of course, the first time through, we don't even know he has the Claw on him (let alone what it can do), and it's perhaps unintuitive to mentally pair the old man with the young Dorcas. (...)
> 
> I'm therefore curious to know: Was this obvious to you back in Shadow as soon as Dorcas appeared?

To me, it was immediate. But there's probably a difference: you were reading the story wolfeanly, looking for wolfean structure and expecting a naturalistic process behind the fantasy. I was reading it without any such notion, it was my first Wolfe reading, and I didn't have any interpretative baggage in mind. (Even today I can hardly pay attention to such background when reading whatever I'm reading; in a way, I'm glad of it.) And the matter is that I don't think Dorcas is a Wolfean puzzle, even if it is a puzzle written by Wolfe.

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