Sea monsters

Daniel Petersen · 29 May 2011, 12:33 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com (Daniel Petersen)
Date: Sun, 29 May 2011 13:33:44 +0100
Subject: (urth) Sea monsters
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> I feel Wolfe is engaging with that kind of cosmic
>horror in the background of the whole BotNS

<jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:I don't see that, though.  If you believe
in God as Wolfe and Severian do, you
don't have to worry much about cosmic horror, just about alien monsters and
things like that.  Though there might be some of Pascal's and Lovecraft's
horror
of the gulfs of space--the Empirical Bogey, I think C. S. Lewis called
it--in
the scene where Severian sleeps under the stars in the mountains (SotL,
Chapter
XIII).

Well, yeah, I guess if you mean 'you don't have worry about it' in the sense
that if Christian theology is true, then 'theocomedy' (as the theologian
Thomas Oden calls it) trumps cosmic horror in the end.  But that doesn't
mean you don't have to engage the *worldview* that all is horror and chaos
at the centre and in the end.  Which is what I think Wolfe is engaging with
throughout much of his fiction.  We're frail and finite beings and we have
to engage one another's 'ultimate commitments' in our art or it lacks
plausibility and persuasion and cohesion.  Anyone who wants to embrace
cosmic horror has to engage its possible opposite to be believable.  And
vice versa:  if Wolfe ultimately exhibits theocomedy in his art (as I think
he does as a whole), then he must engage its potential opposite(s) as
represented in things like Lovecraftian cosmic horror.  I think he does this
very well and interestingly in fact.  (As does Lewis in various places, e.g.
Perelandra.)

-DOJP
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