(no subject)

Greene, Carlton · 02 Nov 1999, 15:08 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Greene, Carlton" <CGreene2 at hunton.com>
Subject: (urth)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 15:08:16
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0347 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0347.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Daniel Fusch wrote:

There is a technological level, a metaphorical level, a=20
mythological level, and a spiritual level to all these things. I think what=20
whoever-started-this was trying to point out was that the symbolic level of=20
analysis is more important (or higher, to use a Miltonic concept) than the=20
scientific level or analysis. In other words, it is more important that the=20
reader understand what Typhon is doing on a symbolic level than it is for=20
the reader to understand the anatomical knowledge that went into putting=20
Typhon together.

I agree with you.  My point is simply that we should not cease seeking
technological explanations for the wonders in TBOTNS simply because the
metaphorical associations they create are more important than the physical
wonders themselves.  This is because the consideration of possible
technological explanations for these events enhances the power of their
corresponding metaphorical associations.

Following your Typhon's head example -- if there was no convincing
scientific explanation for Typhon's surgery ("and the magic man decided he
needed a second head, and poof!  He had one!"), then Typhon's story becomes
a arbitrary, transparent fairy tale vehicle designed simply to get across
the *moral of the story*.  In contrast, by suggesting that Typhon's
aquisition of a second head is an explainable scientific event bounded by
physical laws, Wolfe creates a very powerful association between the
explainable physical world and the divine not present in fairy tales (or
science fiction of the Arthur C. Clarke variety, for that matter).

C/

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net