(urth) Send in the Clones
Chris
rasputin_ at hotmail.com
Sat Jun 25 15:32:29 PDT 2005
Crush said:
>Even if the Whorl is a miniture Gnostic universe, Silk, Horn, and Horn!
>become
>the Rajan mostly OUTSIDE it. If Wolfe were *merely* trying to create a
>Gnostic
>set-piece then the Rajan Trinity confuses or devastates it. Horn, a clone
>of Typhon,
>is *ironically* the FATHER the Trinity. But he is neither Typhon himself
>nor Pas. He
>was reared in a vastly different environment than Typhon. Horn! the
>Neighbor is the
>Spirit. They become 3-1 on the Whorl when they join with the Son (Silk).
>Fine for our
>Gnostic story, although Silk has already been enlighten and so this event
>is out of
>order. But THEN the Rajan preaches the will of Pas to the Whorl!!! That's
>hardly the
>Gnostic story.
>
>If Wolfe were determined to avoid the chance of people thinking he was
>endorsing the
>Gnosticsm then he should have avoided making Silk so appealing or naming
>his hero
>in The New Sun after a Gnostic sect.
There is some sense to this, of course, but the thematic interpretation
still *feels wrong* in a way that's difficult to put a definitive expression
to. My intuitive reaction to this is that I could accept the proposed
trinity as ironic if it were a case of it being an *apparent* construction
whose meaning on further examination is called into question. In this case
the trinity analogy is not "apparent", not without considerable examination
and scrutiny (more so even than the average effort that goes into reading
one of Wolfe's stories). So even if on *further* further examination it
turns out not to be so, the reader's attitude on reaching the construction
you suggest is not one of surface appearances but one of having uncovered
deep secrets. So the ironic mode does not seem to drop into place entirely
naturally.
I can't say that it's an invalid reading, if there is such a thing (I think
there is, but that's just me), but the constellation of meanings and
insights that can be drawn here all just seem fundamentally "off" to me;
they also don't seem to represent an improvement over the meanings that can
be drawn from the story without the Typhonic trinity. I'm aware that this
seems a weak criticism, but at the same time I also think about half the
magic to textual interpretation consists in that intuitive feeling of
rightness or wrongness that leads you to settle on a meaning, or else keep
looking.
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