Urth Net
Book and Urth
↰ answers adam louis stephanides
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On Fri, 19 Jun 1998 I wrote:
Spectacled Bear wrote:
You took the words right out of my mouth! It seems to me that any puzzles in BotNS ought to have answers in BotNS, subject only to modification by things we find out later in UotNS.
OTOH, Urth is evidence of Wolfe's intentions in writing BotNS, just as interviews with Wolfe are (although neither of these sources are infallible). So if we allow the interviews as evidence, as we usually do on this list, we should allow Urth as evidence also, even if we're only interested in BotNS.
I neglected to say that I basically do agree that the answers to interpretative questions about a work of fiction should ideally be deducible from that work itself. Thus I prefer evidence from the novels to evidence from interviews, and in interpreting BotNS I would prefer evidence from BotNS to evidence from Urth.
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This raises an interesting philosophical (and very Borgesian) question: can the meaning of BotNS by itself be different from the meaning of BotNS as part of the five-volume "Fictions of the New Sun" (Peter Wright's useful term, IIRC) including Urth?
I was thinking more about the relationship between BotNS and Urth, and came to the conclusion that this problem is not as serious as it might be, because BotNS and Urth are basically complementary. What I mean by this is that, IMO, the essential "matter" of BotNS is Severian's personality, as revealed both by the tale he tells and by the way he tells it; the setting of Urth and Briah-Yesod, while of great interest, is essentially background material. Thus, while Urth may contain information about the New Sun cosmos which contradicts the best inferences we could have drawn from BotNS, this doesn't change the basic meaning of BotNS. Conversely,
Urth is essentially about this cosmos, and doesn't tell us much that's new about Severian's personality (which may be one reason why some people find it a disappointment).
--Adam