(urth) PEACE

[Maru Dubshinki]

I just finished PEACE (and Watchmen, but everyone is still tired from
discussing that the last time 'round, so I'll forbear, aside from
noting that it appears to me to be far from clear whether the Pirates
tale applies to Rorschach or Ozymandias or the owl-dude) and I am a
bit confused.

My central confusion is over master-narrative:  which do I apply to
render meaning out of the shifting, kaleidoscopic pieces and fragments
of stories and anecdotes and ruminations?  I've narrowed it down to
two possibilities.

One, I take the taoist Tale of the Jade Pillow, and the whole book is
simply Den's imaging whilst his Aunt negotiates for the Egg (or
earlier.) This makes the book fairly straightforward, with none of the
more exotic possibilities I've seen mentioned in the archives, such as
Weer-as-mass-murderer, Weer-as-dead-narrator (which I didn't notice at
all.), Weer-as-single-murderer... etc.  That counts against it, but
Wolfe can write reasonable simple tales (Ex. There Are Doors struck me
as fairly simple, at least as compared against the Sun tales).

Two, I home in on the tale of the pharmacist, Julius Smart.  Weer
himself says that Smart is the central character when he is recounting
the tale of the alchemist^H^H^Hpharmacist, even though he appears only
obliquely in most of the novel.  This is, I sense, a vastly more
interesting avenue of approach. Weer early on claims that he will be
utterly honest- excepting that he will be omitting things.
Obviously something is being hidden, since we do not see anything that
would account for the inordinate importance Weer places on Smart
otherwise (assuming that we reject the Pillow hypothesis, since dreams
are but a variant of lies, which renders null Weer's promise not to
lie, to only omit.)
What exactly I am at a loss to say.  I have a vague intuition that
there was something less than licit about Weer's sudden restoration to
wealth (he mentions at least twice that the family fortune was lost,
and that he was poor in his fifties, but became even more wealthy than
ever in his sixties; why he does not say.), and this may be connected,
but there is no 'smoking pocket knife', to twist a phrase. Has anyone
else thought along these lines and hunted down a more satisfactory
conclusion?

Salaam,
~Maru