(urth) American Nights Forgery -- more evidence
Dave Tallman
davetallman at msn.com
Thu May 15 05:05:14 PDT 2008
Roy C. Lackey writes:
> If, as you contend, the last three pages of the notebook were forged, and
> if, as you also contend, they were forged by an automated writing machine,
> then the climax of the story is a Farsi farce. The most pivotal incident of
> Nadan's life is nothing but a machine-generated fiction, which trivializes
> what, for Nadan, was a soul-shattering event. And it makes for a much less
> interesting story.
>
>
In my version, Nadan will have the same soul-shattering revelation, but
it will be an epiphany of psychological horror. He will learn before he
dies that the woman he loved was a moral monster, lying to him from the
beginning, part of a plot to cause destruction on a massive scale.
I find this more interesting than the original, a mere werewolf story.
There are layers of abstraction; the story is told by a foolish man with
his own agenda, embellished here and there to make him look good,
redacted out of fear of the police, and capped with a false ending. In
spite of all that, we can still catch a glimpse of the truth at the
core. It is not a closed curve.
> I don't see Wolfe attempting to map a week in the life of a Moslem to the
> events of Holy Week. As you said early on, this story is a perverted rehash
> of the story of Cupid and Psyche, but with a reversal of gender. Instead of
> Psyche's light revealing the naked glory of a god, Nadan's light revealed
> something that was not merely ugly to behold, it was something that crossed
> a moral or spiritual boundary from which there was no return. He had
> embraced that something, loved, or at least lusted after it, and saw himself
> as irrevocably polluted by his contact.
>
>
I expect Wolfe believes that every person must ultimately face the
transcendent truth of Christianity. There is an inversion of Cupid and
Psyche, but I think the inverted passion story is the big picture.
Here's another parallel. In the final paragraph Nadan wrote, he says "I
will" three times. He will "grapple the trend" and force things in the
direction he wishes. In other words, "not Thy will, but mine be done,"
an inversion of the Gethsemane prayer. It won't work -- things will be
taken out of his hands and the ultimate result will be a Black Easter
when an American bomb comes forth from its tomb to bring death and
destruction.
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