PEACE: Death; lying (was Re: (urth) Grounded in the text?)

Adam Stephanides · 08 Dec 2000, 17:03 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: PEACE: Death; lying (was Re: (urth) Grounded in the text?)
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2000 17:03:35
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0177 at digest.urth.net>
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Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>=20
> So do I; but I think the evidence that Weer is dead is overwhelming,
> and will stand with that until and unless.

I, too, am convinced that Weer is dead, but I wouldn't say the evidence
is overwhelming, especially if you don't regard Wolfe's interview
statements as probative.  If somebody were to insist that Weer was
alive, there is no one passage in the book (even the elm-tree passages)
I know of that I could point out to him/her and say "See?  This proves
you're wrong."  Rather, it's that Weer's being dead ties together a
number of details which, while not contradicting his being alive, remain
unexplained in that case.

> > > I don't see any particular evidence of Weer's lying, except perhaps to
> > > himself, defensively. I'm not eliminating it as a possibility, mind, =
but
> > I'd like to see where you think he's lying and why.
> > >
> > I don't think that Weer has been definitively shown to be lying, which
> > is why I put in  that "perhaps."  The best candidate for his lying is
> > his account to Dan of the coldhouse prank, which I discussed in my
> > earlier post.
>=20
> My apologies; I should have said "lying in his account," as opposed to
> lying to one or more of the people in his account. This makes a great
> deal of difference.

If he lies to one of the people in his account, and he gives no
indication to us that he is lying or that he habitually lies in such
situations, then he is implicitly lying to us, I think.  This is not
just a convention of narrative, but of ordinary conversation.

Thanks for the very interesting post about book covers, by the way.

--Adam

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