Extended Meditation on Rorschach Novels (was RE: (urth) Coldhouse Banshee)

William Ansley27 Aug 2002, 19:32original as archived

↰ answers Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · by quotation

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The question that I asked above then breaks down, in this terminology, into three separate but deeply interrelated questions, as follows: (1) For a given lacuna, or a given type of lacuna, can we reasonably assume that Wolfe himself had some specific content in mind? (2) If so, can we reasonably assume that he expected his readers to extrapolate something similar to what he imagined? And if not, was he even aware of the lacuna when he wrote?

Is "And if not, was he even aware of the lacuna when he wrote?" your 'question number 3' or have your supplied us with a lacuna of your own? <G> William Ansley

Andy Robertson27 Aug 2002, 17:08original as archived

↳ follows William Ansley · by subject

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From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com> I looked a post about the coldhouse prank and the Banshee story, and saw a correspondence I'd never seen before -- that, to the best of my knowledge, nobody had ever seen before. Did Wolfe put it there? Consciously or unconsciously? How could we even know? Wolfe wrote the book thirty years ago; chances are he doesn't know at this point.

Writing is like all other ways of dealing with reality. Ultimately, you know, we write our own narrative of life: we create our own book, as we live, perceiving this and ignoring that. We form our own reality. Which is why, I think, we are able to read books at all. Writing good stories is a matter of subtracting everything unnecessary from the tale. But so is remembering. So is understanding. So is perceiving, even - in this whirlwind world we are endlessly forced to filter out all but the core elements of reality. And so a story that is written down may consist only of those core elements and may work very well. This is how a thread of ink conjures up a universe. How does Wolfe attain his unique effect? By going just a little furthur than others. In his stories, the process of memory and storytelling (they are the same process, actually, they are the thing we all do) has gone on a few steps furthur, a few layers deeper. It has become dream, metamemory, vision . . . Wolfe. But it is still organically the same thing. recognisably the same thing. It feels right. It is what we all do, all the time. And this is why he is so good. hartshorn