The God & His Man / Authors

Alex David Groce · 17 Dec 1999, 13:29 · 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: Alex David Groce <Alex_Groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) The God & His Man / Authors
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 13:29:32
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0644 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0644.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

mantis says:

>Speaking of authorial context, if this story was written by Michael
>Moorcock my interpretation of it would be relatively cut and dry--I have
>read enough Moorcock work that is a variation on this theme, so that I
>wouldn't give it a second thought.  Elric and Arioch, that sort of thing:
>we might call it "Elric's Revenge."  When Moorcock takes a swipe at Big
>Religion it is often targeted at Roman Catholicism, but sometimes all of
>Christianity.  The name of the god seems rather close to a swipe at the
>Jews, which seems uncharacteristic of Moorcock, so I'd transfer this to the
>early Christian church (and we're back to Catholic bashing).  (I can't
>think of a case where Moorcock writes positively about any religion.)

I tend to think of "Behold the Man" as being less anti-religious than a lot
of Moorcock that seems less directly critical of religion.  Certainly not
positive, per se, but more nuanced than a first reading indicates. =20

In general, the author is alive and kicking until the day people cease to
use information about what the author has written/said/claimed to desire/et=
c.
in the past to help them shape their conception of anything he writes/says
afterwards.  Since we automatically do this with other people, and unless we
all become Latros are probably going to keep doing so, I suspect the author
will be in good shape for many years to come.  Certainly the "author" of
publishing/etc. is a "new" thing, and different with the changing media of
the ages (insert random mandatory Marshall McLuhan observation) but the=20
creating force behind a text/story is a very old concept--it's not as if
post-Gutenberg thinkers made up Homer.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce

*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