Wolfe on PEACE

Adam Stephanides · 06 Nov 2000, 11:44 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Wolfe on PEACE
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 11:44:02
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0088 at digest.urth.net>
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Robert Borski wrote:
=20
> Wolfe: Weer is dead. In spirit, he is reliving his life, which he confuses
> with the house he built during his final years. Note that at the end of t=
he
> book Miss Bold asks permission to plant a tree on his grave. It is the fa=
ll
> of that tree, at the beginning of the book, that has freed his ghost--an =
old
> superstition.

Many thanks for posting this, Robert.

It's a bit difficult to reconcile what Wolfe says here with his
statements re the house in the Jordan interview that I cited earlier.=20
The best I can do is to say that he did build a house, but didn't put
"memory rooms" in it.  The other alternative, of course, is that Wolfe
was mistaken in one of the interviews.  (Although I tend to regard
Wolfe's exegeses of his own work as authoritative, I've never been
completely at ease about it.  That part of the People On-line Chat where
Wolfe is asked whether Weer is a mass murderer, and has to pause and
think before saying "no," suggests that has memory of the book may have
become fuzzy over the years.)

Assuming that this interview is indeed reliable, we can also infer that
Weer is not actually haunting his house, which means that we don't have
to place his grave in his backyard.  I'm unclear as to how to reconcile
the statement that Wolfe's ghost was freed at the start of the book with
Weer's memories of having been "sick" for some time before the book
begins.  Are we to take these memories as doubly unreliable--false
"memories" of hallucinatiions that were never hallucinated, so to speak?

--Adam

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