(urth) Severian on trial

[maru]

Chris wrote:

> An exchange:
>
>> Allow me to draw a parallel with WK; does it not seem to you that 
>> Urth, dying Urth, is more than a little uncanny and bizaare?  What logic
>> is there to it, what substanial reality?  it seems almost a dream of 
>> madness, or a warped parody of what should be (everything decaying 
>> and in
>> ruins.)  We pass from place to place with little propelling plot, in 
>> picaresque manner, though it feels intuitively that there is a vast 
>> hidden logic
>> webs of meaning (I thinking of the ambience of "Foucault's Pendulum" 
>> here, but less factual and explicit).  Does not Old Urth seem unreal, 
>> as unreal as the angel in the Knight would have seemed in Muspell?
>
>
> In short, YES. It has always seemed surreal to me, from the first time 
> I layed eyes on it. And the more I learned, the stranger its elements 
> became.
>
> I have always also found it strange that some of the veterans here 
> avoid discussing this surreality like the plague. I do not know 
> whether to attribute this to the idea that it is all old hat to them, 
> now... or whether they simply weren't sure what to make of it. It 
> becomes even more perplexing when people who I would expect to know 
> the best seem to approach the story in a very literal sci-fi narrative 
> fashion.
>
> But riddle me this, those who know: why, when choosing his whole 
> qabbalistic naming scheme in BotNS, did Wolfe choose to ground the 
> realm of Urth under the name of "Yesod"? This is a level too high for 
> any literal story. Shouldn't it be "Malkhut"?
>
>> Urth in TBOTNS is lit by an old sun; its inhabitants seem unreal- we 
>> know this by how many of them turn out to not be- even Agilus, a 
>> basic scammer is suspected of otherworldly origins- and it doesnot 
>> seem unreasonable!
>
>
> Again, YES. Wolfe produces a state of practical paranoia when it comes 
> to generating connections between characters. If this is accidental 
> then it is a mark of poor, poor craftsmanship. We have good reason to 
> believe that this is not due to poor craftsmanship. On the surface 
> such a scenario could not produce an intelligible story. And yet one 
> hazy level removed from this, is it not true that such connections 
> seem to pass unnoticed?
>
It is interesting to note that at around BOTNSs writing, the paranoiac 
style was begining to develop.

> It is precisely the shadows that reside in the *higher* levels, and 
> the more material bodies in the lower. Perhaps we mourn for the 
> slaying of the shadows because in a way all the slayings of all the 
> "real people" are just the physical manifestations of that single 
> slaying of shadows, represented over and over in the lower realms.
>
In Platonism, the lower are imperfect, nigh-disgusting parodies and 
apings of the higer abstractions

> But it is the nature of such a structure to make it difficult to 
> distinguish the higher from the lower. I feel I'm being cryptic here, 
> but I've thought of 5 different ways to say this as I sit here and 
> every one of them only works if you already *apprehend*, in some way, 
> what I'm trying to say. Perhaps the only way to express such a thing 
> is to write a story, in which people won't be able to isolate the 
> elements in an intelligible way but may still be able to convey 
> something that everyone intuitively understands yet is unable to 
> explain...

"The Ascian said, 'All who speak Correct Thought speak well. Where
then is the superiority of some students to others? It is in the speaking.
Intelligents students speak Correct Thought intelligently. The hearer knows
by the intonations of their voices that they understand. By this superior
speaking of intelligent students, Correct Thought is passed, like fire, from
one to another.'
    I think that none of us realized he was listening. We were all a trifle
startled to hear him speak now. After a moment, Foila said, 'He means you
should not judge by the content of the stories, but by how well each was
told. I'm not sure I agree with that- still, there may be something in 
it.' "

It is my sincere belief that the Acian would have won the story context-
the best story is one the reader helps invent.


~Maru

An analogy I often think of is differentiation from calculus: It 
abstracts vital information regarding the rates of changes, and is utterly
necessary, and makes much plain- but it irretriviably loses much 
specific information.  Generality at the cost of  context.