mind body problem in the sun books

James Wynn · 03 Dec 2004, 18:38 · from 2004-December.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: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Fri Dec  3 18:38:58 2004
Subject: (urth) mind body problem in the sun books
References: <20041203012723.F41E83955 at sitemail.everyone.net>
Message-ID: <006e01c4d9aa$66c1ef70$4c1e4b0a at vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>

>>There are certain portions of "The Long Sun" that I don't think are
>>comprehensible until you've read "The Short Sun". The inhumi are
<obviously
>>one aspect, but IMO Pike's ghost is another. Wolfe's choice in making
<Horn
>>the primary narrator of the LS and his mimicking Silk are a couple
<others.

>Of course there are portions which are incomprehensible without
>reading the other novels, but that is true of reading Grendel without
reading
>Beowulf.  The question of the single novel to a certain degree is a formal
>question.  After TBOTNS how much does Wolfe want us to look at all of the
>Sun books together.  I do not know if it is that much, considering Silk is
a
>reiteration of Severian partly because of the fan base's reading of
Severian
>as Christ which bothered Wolfe. So my answer would be no, they are
different
>novels.

Well, we have a difference of opinion here. If this were a "normal" writer I
don't think I would have any problem showing that the 7 volumes of Long
Sun/Short Sun were envisioned as one story. When Horn becomes popular with
his classmates by mimicking Silk, it is because Wolfe knows that by the end
of the story he will "become" Silk. When Quetzal attempts to lead the
quarter's citizens to Green Wolfe intended us to find out why. When Silk
meets Pike's "ghost" who vanishes in a rather ungothic ghost-like way, Wolfe
knows we're going to meet ghosts just like that eventually.

The problem is that Wolfe leaves so much unrevealed or obscure in the LS/SS
after the whole thing is over that it is hard to argue "See, Wolfe didn't
intend for us not to know that".

>>Silk's enlightenment with the world freezing in time is a recreation of
>>Joseph's experience in the apocraphal Gospel of James at the moment of
>>Jesus' birth. Do I think Wolfe believes God talks to people? <absolutely.

>Yes, but I mean in the way it is described, like an event outside of time
in
>which a large amount of information is encoded into the subconscious of the
>reciever, which is something that also happens to Severian when he takes
the
>alzabo and eats Thecla or when he eats the Autarch.  God seems to be
>uploading information to Silk in a similar fashion to the way Scylla
uploads
>information into Chenille.  I do not know what you mean by "Wolfe is not a
>gnostic".  I mean, how are you defining gnostic.

One who believe the world was made by an evil created Demiurge and that
Jesus was sent by the Increate to rescue from Demiurge's world through
enlightenment. You know. The basic story of "The Long Sun". I doubt Wolfe
believes that but then the way the NS though SS stews in this sort of
philosophy...well, I don't know. But

>What I am asking if Wolfe thinks revelation is concerned with the
>transformative power of information.  I haven't read the apocryphal
>Gospel of James, what happens?

Right. I doubt he believes that in a theological sense although he probably
does accept that information is transformative and that revelation occur
along with information. Something else that is hardly classically orthodox
that Wolfe probably believes: he certainly seems to believe that the Bible
doesn't have to have been originally inspired to *become* transformative
scripture. That is surely what he is showing when Horn becomes so "inspired"
while meditating on "The Book Of Silk" on his boat in "On Blue's Waters".

Heres a link to The Gospel of James:
http://www.gnosis.org/library/gosjames.htm

~ Crush

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