theories

Lee Berman · 24 Oct 2011, 14:50 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:50:08 -0400
Subject: (urth) theories
Message-ID: <SNT123-W3044D909B3B3BC90C997DCCFEF0 at phx.gbl>

>Sergei Soloviev: What I don't like in these theories, it is the complete disregard to 
>Gene Wolfe many times proclaimed Christian message. Is he lying when he says that he is
>a Catholic? Is he in fact trying to pass a "diabolic" message (or at least trying to play
>with this interpretation as equally probable) like Polyanski? Where are the proofs?

Proofs? In literary interpretation? You can't really mean that.

Anyway, let me ask what I hope is an illustrative question: How can a Christian writer justify
writing fiction which contains elements of diabolical horror?

There are some WOlfe quotes about stories other than BotNS which I think might reveal 
his mindset. Yes, he is deeply Christian (but in his own way; he thinks the ancient pagan
gods were real). He thinks the value of Jesus Christ is undervalued. So he creates stories
(often in quasi-pagan settings) in which Jesus Christ is absent. It is through this absence 
that he hopes to illustrate how important Jesus is to us, how much more horrible things would 
be without him. 

I think this principle probably applies to Fifth Head of Cerberus and to the Sun Series, 
the Soldier Series, There Are Doors and Wizard/Knight at a minimum. Perhaps others can 
suggest other candidates from Wolfe's work. 

>Gene Wolfe: We vastly underestimate the importance of Jesus. We think we don't. We have 
>all these churches and we say how can we be underestimating Jesus? We don't until we start 
>trying to figure out what it would be like if he had never lived. When you really start trying 
>to figure out what it would be like if He never lived you realize that He is a much more pivotal 
>figure than we give him credit for. All of these people, everybody at this convention is in that 
>sense a Christian although most of them would tell you that they are not and some of them would 
>tell them quite truthfully that they were Jews who practice Judaism in one of its various forms 
>and so on and so forth. Nevertheless they have been influenced by Christ much more than they 
>realized. We are very lucky to have had Him. We are very fortunate. A friend of mine learned to 
>read Turkish. And he got hold of a Turkish joke book and read it. And I said, "What were the jokes 
>like?" He said it was horrible. They were all about ugly tricks that were being played on blind 
>people and things like that. This is what we have escaped from..

I find the bit concerning presumably non-Christian Turkey to be rather revealing.

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