Making sense of Castleview

Tony Ellis · 07 Dec 2000, 18:34 · from urth-v0030.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: "Tony Ellis" <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Subject: re: Re: (urth) Making sense of Castleview
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 18:34:49 +0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0163 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0163.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Rostrum said:

> I'd love to see you're "straightforward" summary of how it ends.
>

:-)

> I remember one reviewer writting something like "Gene Wolfe stands at
> the
> bridge as the critics come by one by one to try to figure out
> Castleview,
> and all are knocked into the moat."

LOL!
No mere summary of mine can hope to create such an amusing mental
picture as that, alas.

But surely =E2=80=9Chow it ends=E2=80=9D is just your good old-fashioned pa=
gan fertility
ritual, as documented in everything from =E2=80=98The White Goddess=E2=80=
=99 to =E2=80=98The
Wicker Man=E2=80=99? Winter (old king Geimhreadh ) kills the year (the Green
Man) so that it can be reborn in the spring. Shields is the
fool-hero-king who had to be sacrificed to bring this about.

If it seems confusing, it=E2=80=99s because we=E2=80=99ve approached it thr=
ough the
medium of (mostly) Arthurian mythology. At the last moment the Arthurian
battle between =E2=80=98good and evil=E2=80=99 is revealed as the cyclic my=
stery of the
seasons. But there=E2=80=99s actually nothing revolutionary in this - the p=
agan
fertility ritual subtext of the Arthurian story =E2=80=98Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight=E2=80=99 has been the subject of a thousand undergraduate Eng.=
 Lit.
essays.

--
Tony Ellis
On-line Editor, PC Format magazine
01225 442244 x2349
http://www.pcformat.co.uk

*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