Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 15 Dec 2011, 19:14 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

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From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:14:44 -0800
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
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Lee Berman wrote:

> The Bible (and Christ) are not typically a part of S & S. Like Tolkein and Lewis, Wolfe is a
> Christian writer. ?Why is his work so different from theirs? (I have some ideas but I'd like
> to hear those of others).

Here are a few quick thoughts from someone who is a huge fan of the Inklings.

* Tolkien built a massive world that existed independently of any
given story told in it, and labored to make it self-consistent,
Lewis's worldbuilding was slipshod (to the point where it offended
JRRT at times). Wolfe falls in between, building worlds solid enough
to stand as the understructure of his stories, but which don't live on
their own.

* Where Lewis explicitly included Christian "lessons" in his fiction,
Tolkien simply tried to keep his fantastic worlds from actually
contradicting Christian theology. Wolfe falls in between here also:
his worlds are inevitably in some way intended, ultimately, as
creations of the One True God, but He is rarely explicit in them;
contrariwise, his moral lessons are more explicit than Tolkien's but
less so than Lewis's.

* Here's a straightforward difference: Tolkien's worlds were born to
give his made-up languages a place to be spoken. Lewis's were born to
explain pictures he saw in his head. And Wolfe's seem to be built to
house his characters. (Of course, all these are grotesque
oversimplifications.)

* And here's another: Tolkien's and Lewis's characters are generally
(I except Lewis's later novels) "good" people faced with explicit
"evil." Wolfe's characters are more morally ambiguous, as are the
situations they are placed in.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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