The Wizard

Marc Aramini · 10 Mar 2012, 17:10 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 09:10:41 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) The Wizard
In-Reply-To: <9AFE414A-A43A-43BC-86DA-2B15B30429F7 at yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <1331399441.92179.YahooMailClassic at web161802.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>

This past year I defended Wolfe's elisions and "uncertainties" by talking about the fact that he is truly a spritual/mysterious writer: in reality, the most important information, the one that can give everything meaning, is not present; it can be seen in structure and in existence, but not overtly.? Thus my reasoning for most of his narrators not having the full picture of the most important details of their condition: we as humans don't quite have the full details just by looking at the facts we "know" with certainty, but those aren't the most important things that really make sense of everything.

--- On Sat, 3/10/12, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) The Wizard
To: 
Cc: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Saturday, March 10, 2012, 8:44 AM

Lafferty and O'Connor seem like perfect analogues on this point. There's something in both of those writers that makes faith a very dark and dangerous and uncertain thing. That matches well with the sense I get from Wolfe. Sometimes I feel like discussions of his religious attitudes neglect that dimension in favor of teasing out something like a straightforward cosmology or theology behind all the allusion/puzzles rather than seeing them as precisely "dark glasses" through which the characters and readers are trying to understand what's happening to them. The point isn't to unravel it all in order to achieve certainty. The point is that the puzzles go all the way down (at least some of the most important ones), but you have to live and make decisions anyway. That's what makes the characters in all the Sun books so fascinating to me. They HAVE to figure out the real story because it's their story, and the consequences are ultimate. But they can't, at
 least not completely. That's a dilemma that would make O'Connor proud.

In Lafferty, it often seems to me that the truth is often absent. Some of his stories are horrifying because things have gone desperately wrong in a fallen world. The apparent humor on the surface leaves scars.
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