teleological principals as a dualistic paradigm

Marc Aramini · 31 Mar 2012, 19:25 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 12:25:00 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth)  teleological principals as a dualistic paradigm
Message-ID: <1333221900.55487.YahooMailClassic at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>

As I was finishing up the commentary for the rather straightforward "The Largest Luger", I just wanted to mention exactly where I think Wright oversimplified in "Attending Daedalus".

Wolfe is that rarest of individuals as a creator: educated as an engineer who served in the military, yet likes to read mysteries, fantasies, and literary classics; he is also a spiritualist.

His mysteries are so "detail" oriented that they are clear reflections of his engineering background - how is this constructed?  What material is it constructed of?  How would that work?  What physical properties would it have under these conditions?  Thus the study of cause and effect and the grounding in simple physics is overwhelming in these early stories, and Wright has picked up on this teleological design scheme in New Sun.

Yet beyond elided cause and effect, there is the true dualism and the idea of free will that Wolfe sometimes stresses - that there is a separate and equally valid "reality" - possibly one free from the senses and our interaction with the physical world.  Wright, I feel, ignores the equally strong strain of dualism and its implications in Wolfe's most complex creations.  

I think this is what makes interpreting Wolfe so very very hard at times: there is the seemingly opposite pull of a non-scientific dualism but also the insanely ordered feeling of cause and effect, sometimes reversed, inexplicable, or hiding underneath the perceptions of our narrators, that seem to be pulling in somewhat opposite directions - yet in Wolfe, they might sometimes point the same way eventually.

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