Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?

Jason H · 23 May 2011, 05:35 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: beet31425 at gmail.com (Jason H)
Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 22:35:12 -0700
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?
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I might have a different take on Wolfe's difficulties. He does have identity
puzzles, yes. (In the Wizard-Knight, a less obvious one is: Who killed the
Giant King? The answer is strongly hinted, so it's not really that
debatable, but it's never explicitly stated.)

But I don't think the identity puzzles are the real reason why Wolfe is
difficult. I think he's difficult because he writes so obliquely about
puzzling things, like space travel with mirrors, and 20th-century people
trapped in Urth's Botanic Gardens, and Miles-as-Jonas. There is a sense of
wondrous revelation that you, as a reader, almost but don't quite get, and I
think that wonder is what Wolfe is really aiming at, and dealing with the
ambiguities and uncertainties of these partially-explained wonders makes
reading Wolfe hard and tricky. (And frustrating. And great!)

These, for me, are the real "puzzles" of Wolfe, and not the logistical
identity questions. I don't have much interest in mapping out Severian's
family tree (other than hints of the grandmother and the mother). In fact,
I've always thought the identity puzzles are either obvious by the end of
the book, or, honestly, non-existent and totally unsupported by the text.
Wolfe is smart and clever, but I don't think the way he shows his cleverness
is by leaving elaborate clues at that level of misdirection. At the level of
tower-as-rocket, yes. But more elaborate and obscured than that, I've never
seen evidence for. It just doesn't strike me as the kind of thing he's
interested in (based on reading interviews and Castle of the Otter).

Caveat: I'm relatively new to Wolfe, having only read the Wizard-Knight and
the Book of the New Sun (I haven't even read Urth yet).

But does anyone agree with me? :)

And does anyone know if Wolfe has ever voiced any opinion on the kind of
exegesis found e.g. in Robert Borski's book? I'd be very curious!

-Jason

On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 8:43 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Right, I got you, but I think he does that obvious answer stuff a lot too
> ("kypris who was hyacinth who was mother" type stuff, or "Garsceg who was
> Setr" (not sure if I remember that one right, but something like that from
> the Wizard Knight)  pretty straightforward identity statements but obviously
> somehow open to a whole lot of interpretations)
>
> --- On Sun, 5/22/11, Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > I didn't mean that the plot itself is not wolfean, I rather
> > meant the delivery - apparently the same name, obvious
> > questions with apparent obvious answers, etc.
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