Neighbor + Inhumu + One?

John Clute · 23 Aug 2000, 12:19 · from whorl-v0011.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: jclute at cix.compulink.co.uk (John Clute)
Subject: Re: (whorl) Neighbor + Inhumu + One?
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 13:19 +0100 (BST)
Message-ID: <whorl-v0011-0158 at digest.urth.net>
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In-Reply-To: <200008230256.TAA15037 at lists1.best.com>
Nutria:
        To speak very broadly indeed, which I think is sometimes necessary=20
with Wolfe, it does strike me that the tonus (as distinguished from the=20
intellectual doctrinal structuring) of Wolfe's major works is anything but=20
Christian. Except maybe in certain parts of the book we are now=20
considering, the melacholia is profound: _In Blue's Waters_ , and many of=20
the later stories, are acts of heroism (it seems) against a very deep=20
sadness, which Christians (and others) might put a term to. I myself would=20
tend to cod gnosticism here: it feels like the occlusion or bondage of the=20
blinding world, to me.=20
        We may see _Return to the Whorl_ continue the transformations of=20
tonus audible (I think) in the current book; but I wouldn't exactly bet on=20
a triumph of THE comedy.
        But this is a topic without closure. And premature at this point,=20
though it is the sort of consideration all the decipherments must be a=20
road to.
        (I've just now noticed a later message from you which makes it=20
very clear you have some broadly similar thoughts about the subordination=20
of all schemas (even those we can legitimately pin on Wolfe himself) to=20
the summae which is the felt work of art, sort of thing.)

Best,
John C=20

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