Seven American Nights explanation wins "award"

For what it's worth, my forgery explanation for "Seven American Nights" (as posted on the WolfeWiki) has won a "2010 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary" on the waggish blog. He found it a most satisfying explanation. Here is the link: http://www.waggish.org/2010/08/10/gene-wolfe-challenge-won/

Congratulations! Too bad there's no grant attached. You've done some really good work here.

Congratulations.

Good stuff! Having watched closely as you gradually assembled the elements of the explanation, I moved from sceptical to pretty much convinced. Although I should probably now closely reread the story in the light of the explanation, to see if I can see any new problems :-) best, Mo # ~ # ~ # WolfeWiki -- a wiki about Gene Wolfe http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/

This is what Mr Waggish said about 7AN in Dec. 2009: "The multiplicity of interpretations of 7 American Nights suggests to me that no, it will never be figured out. There are too many 'clues' people are finding that Wolfe did not intend; or rather, the real clues are too obscure." ᚹ

Interesting that 5HoC is invoked on the theme of anti-colonialism. My first thought is that Dave's conclusion is similar to the generally acknowledged solution to the mystery of VRT.

Has Waggish read An Evil Guest? Also, Wolfe has always been a populist right-winger. Last year at this time I heard him say (as I reported then): "The form of government I favor is democracy. America is not a democracy and never has been. We have a republic. That means that every so often we choose people to rule over us. And once we have, you can believe, they know it." ᚹ

Mo Holkar wrote: Good stuff! Having watched closely as you gradually assembled the elements of the explanation, I moved from sceptical to pretty much convinced. Although I should probably now closely reread the story in the light of the explanation, to see if I can see any new problems :- Thanks to everyone. I give a lot of credit to the Urth list for challenging my ideas and helping me whip the theory into shape.

Well put. I'm not sure how SAN is postcolonial, exactly. If anything, it's postrepublican: the government that seizes Nadan no longer has any pretense to being even a republic. Nadan's presence in the US is more of a simple literary reversal of Orientalism. The story doesn't show the evils of imperialism except as practiced on one's own people, as dictatorship. If a foreign government were supporting that dictatorship, it might be different---but that doesn't appear to be the case. Nadan's tourism reveals those evils, not the evils of submission to foreign empire that allows such tourism as the British once practiced in, say Egypt, though they are superficially similar. --- On Thu, 8/26/10, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:

Has Waggish read An Evil Guest? Also, Wolfe has always been a populist right-winger. Last year at this time I heard him say (as I reported then): "The form of government I favor is democracy. America is not a democracy and never has been. We have a republic. That means that every so often we choose people to rule over us. And once we have, you can believe, they know it." ᚹ