barrington interview

Lee · 06 Oct 2014, 02:15 · from 2014-October.txt.gz

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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee)
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2014 22:15:46 -0400
Subject: (urth) barrington interview
Message-ID: <BLU175-W10D6888870883549B6F32CCFA50 at phx.gbl>

>Jeffrey Wilson: I believe Wolfe's stated in at least two previous interviews that he 
>doesn't give that information out because it would cheat the careful 
>reader of the pleasure of discovering it for himself. But that doesn't 
>mean he finds the necessary consequences entirely satisfactory.

That sounds reasonable on the surface. But consider the real world results.

We have a few published analysts and many on this board who are more than 

careful, and often excruciatingly exacting in their detailed reading of Wolfe's 

work.  Yet each one still seems to come to quite differing and individualized

understandings.

I have full respect for the intelligence of all avid Wolfe readers, so how can this

divergence in understanding be explained? Either Wolfe is deliberately making

his work ambiguous and subject to individualized understanding or he is doing 

it by accident. I think one of these is more likely than the other.

Some might argue that Wolfe's latest work is less ambiguous than his previous 

work. I'm not sure. I'd be interested in the opinions of others on the overall

trend.

Just in regard to the 12 volume Sun Series, written over the course of some 10-15

years, I'd have to say with some confidence that the writing became more ambiguous

as it progressed. I find the WTF moments in Return To The Whorl to be far more 

frequent than they were in reading Shadow of the Torturer.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net