May 2014 Wolfe interview in _Technology Review_

Gerry Quinn · 10 Aug 2014, 15:33 · from 2014-August.txt.gz

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From: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 16:33:16 +0100
Subject: (urth) FW: May 2014 Wolfe interview in _Technology Review_
In-Reply-To: <AB4B1CAE-8A10-4AB5-9473-263866418B84 at gmail.com>
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Message-ID: <53E790BC.9080901 at bindweed.com>

On 10/08/2014 14:34, entonio at gmail.com wrote:
> No dia 10/08/2014, ?s 11:14, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> escreveu:
>
> On 10/08/2014 01:04, entonio at gmail.com wrote:
>>> Inasmuch as Gerry has said a lot of sensible stuff, the way he's applied it recently makes him more like the anti-Lee than anything else. Now, if I find Lee's stuff over the top, at least it's stuff (and my issue with Lee is more his tone than his content). Whereas recently Gerry has gone out of his way to say 'nothing to see here, move along'.
>> I would argue that in cases where I have been criticising proposed interpretations rather than proposing my own, I am merely arguing for some kind of consistency of approach and of interpretation, and for interpretations that are not infinitely malleable when critiqued.
> But that's not all you've been doing; you've gone far into saying some readings are all there is to a given story, implying that one shouldn't attempt to come up with an alternative. Even if none of the current ones is satisfactory, it doesn't mean one doesn't exist, and there is in principle nothing wrong in refining hypotheses. For instance, I find Marc's interpretation of Suzanne Delage falling short, but nonetheless a necessary first step.
Things can look different from the other side: Marc's post said:

 > I accept several principals at face value from the narrator as 
general guidelines:
 > 1)That an extraordinary event actually could be forgotten, so that he 
can?t be
 > trusted to reliably remember it. If he could remember it, then the 
premise of
 > the story is invalid. If we do not accept this premise, the analysis 
can stop right
 > here ? the extraordinary event in his life is that he never met 
Suzanne Delage.

Doesn't that, from my perspective, look like "nothing to see here"?

As for Lee's "scenario 1" he stated that it was in the text on an equal 
level with "scenario 2", and I asked him where.  In fact the scenario of 
two independent abo races, whether it's right or wrong or may be 
inferred, is not present in any kind of equivalent form. The Old Wise 
One forgets which race he is, but there is not a second independent 
series of events described.

My main issue, as ever, is with the frenetic chasing of 
'inconsistencies' (which need not actually be inconsistent) to the 
extent that the 'consistencies' are ignored.

Is there actually ANY story by Wolfe which can generally be agreed to 
take the form of a cryptic puzzle to be unlocked by way of extrapolating 
from symbolism we may associate (but which is never stated clearly) with 
cccasional words used by a preternaturally unreliable narrator, to the 
extend that his descriptions of actual events in the text are to be 
ignored?  _Soldier_ and _Peace_ may come the closest, but I don't think 
they fit the picture either. Alden Weir does not like to think clearly 
about certain events - but we do not have to infer them wholesale from 
random words he uses.

Rather, the narrator tells us what happened and we then interpret them 
in certain ways.  He leaves things out, but does not invent an unrelated 
build-up.  Wolfe does in fact tell us stuff, and it's hardly ever 
outright lies.  That No. 5 is a clone may be inferred by the cleverest 
in advance, but it is confirmed to us in so many words by the end of the 
tale.  'A Story' tells us the tale of how the humanoid abos came to be, 
and why the planets were not found for so long despite much nearby space 
travel.  'VRT' tells us the story of an abo who - unlike his mother - 
does in fact take a rare opportunity to steal the identity of a human.  
There's a whole lot to see here.  I don't get why people are chasing 
'symbolic clues' that erase the text and lead at best to a storyline 
that would not be intrinsically more interesting even if it had been the 
one written down.

- Gerry Quinn

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