Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?

David Stockhoff · 23 May 2011, 12:07 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 08:07:49 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?
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On 5/23/2011 1:35 AM, Jason H wrote:
> 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? :)
>
>
I think you're right: Wolfe's puzzles are fairly in the open. Hidden 
puzzles that are purported to exist, IMHO, just don't.

As an example, I think the current discussion attempting to relate 
various 17s, while perfectly understandable, logical, and even laudable, 
is a dead end. The theory of the "Identity of 17s" assumes way too much 
interest on Wolfe's part, as well as counting on his own assumption that 
his reader is all that interested in this kind of mystery. It's all 
future secret history, not a plot point, so there is no need for a 
puzzle to be there at all.


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