Interpreting Peace

adam louis stephanides · 19 Apr 1998, 15:58 · from urth-v0009.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: adam louis stephanides <astephan at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: (urth) Interpreting Peace
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 15:58:05
Message-ID: <urth-v0009-0756 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0009/0756.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

On Fri, 17 Apr 1998 Paul C Duggan wrote:

> SPOILER WARNING if you haven't read Peace.
>=20
> The final story of the geese seems to be crucial for making sense of
> Peace. As Adam Stephanides already said Weer is the one who has
> dwindled. But if Christian Baptism is the only hope for Weer in the
> novel, one might ask where else is this intimated and does Weer ever
> receive it, or possibly demonstrate the "baptism of desire".

I don't know.  The idea just came to me when I reread the sidhe story
a couple of days ago, and it's been quite a while since I last reread
the whole book, so I just threw it out as a speculation.  But given
Wolfe's own religious convictions, which appear explicitly in several
other books and stories of his, it seems a reasonable surmise.

And I didn't mean to suggest that Weer had not been baptized, or
that if he had been baptized he wouldn't have become a ghost.  Rather, my
idea was that religious belief in general might have helped fill the void
that clearly exists in Weer's life, and in that way possibly have gained
him "peace" after death.

Incidentally, what is the position of the Catholic church on ghosts?  I
would think that the idea of all souls going to heaven, hell or purgatory
would be inconsistent with the idea of ghosts remaining on earth.  (While
I seem to recall reading an article stating that the Catholic church had
within the past few years declared purgatory no longer official church
doctrine, that would have been after the publication of _Peace_.

> [1] The Book of Gold in Peace are the books of Mr. Gold, including one

Nice.  There's also a reference to Louis Gold in _Bibliomen_.

--Adam

*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