May 2014 Wolfe interview in _Technology Review_

António Pedro Marques · 11 Aug 2014, 12:18 · from 2014-August.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?utf-8?Q?Ant=C3=B3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 13:18:20 +0100
Subject: (urth) FW: May 2014 Wolfe interview in _Technology Review_
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No dia 10/08/2014, ?s 16:33, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> escreveu:
> 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:
>> 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"?

I don't think so. He's referring to his own line of analysis. I doubt he would criticise anyone who'd try to go in a different direction. 

> 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? 

No, I think people go overboard with the whole 'unreliable' thing. I take exception to that labelling for the same reason that I agree with 'so-called realistic fiction leaves out too much'. What Wolfe does is create realistic narrators, they are realistic because they're not some preternatural transparent omniscient churner of facts. No real story we know has such a narrator, and no real story we know gets to us unless by first hand experience or real narrators. And real narrators are unreliable not because they're pathological liars but because they're human. Even when they are trying to be completely honest, they're limited by all sorts of factors. 'Unreliable narrator' is pleonastic. And the reason I dislike it so much is that just because Wolfe - following a long tradition that doesn't have to justify itself - creates narrators that leave lesser literature in the dust, that is considered a 'feature', the 'unreliable narrator'. Much as if roofs were features in houses just because lesser builders sell you houses without.

Wolfe's stories have the particular that there is something interesting which the reader can descry behind the narration. I don't think the devices for that need follow special criteria - thematic symbolism is in principle not worse than mystery detection, tho the latter can be more fulfilling. Of course, writing a whole new story that has little to do with what we're told is another thing. But I'm not even opposed to that, only to the attitude of trying to shove it down our guts. 

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