Fallible Readers and Unreliable History

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 18 Jun 2001, 16:46 · from whorl-v0012.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: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (whorl) Fallible Readers and Unreliable History
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 16:46:18
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0851 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0851.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Jerry Friedman, you wrote:

> Here's the difference between reading the Whorl books
> and reading the Gospels, imo.  If you could learn the
> reality behind the Gospel narratives, you'd have the
> answer to a question that's been crucially (pun not
> intended but noticed) important to billions of people.
> On the other hand, if you could learn the fictional
> reality behind the Whorl books, all you'd have is
> another story.

Well ... yeah. That's the point, innit?

What I've been trying to convey: I "think" Wolfe's text offers a=20
(willing) reader some sense of the experience of trying to get=20
at the "reality" behind an ancient text, with multiple authors,=20
questionable provenance, and no guarantee that N generations of=20
copyists have managed the degree of accuracy we'd like, -- in
short, an experience roughly analogous to trying to determine
the historical "facts" behind the Gospels -- in a context that=20
feels "safe" because, after all, "it's just a story;" and that=20
it does this without repsect to (a) the story Wolfe has chosen=20
to tell, (b) Wolfe's intentions in telling that particular story,=20
and (c) whether or not Wolfe actually intended the text to offer=20
such an experience-by-analogy.

--Blattid

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

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