(urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis

[Craig Brewer]

Price's book argues that's what's most interesting about Wolfe is the relationship he creates with the reader. He's more interested with the process through which Wolfe makes his readers come up with interpretations than he is with the actual content of those interpretations.

In other words, Price would probably be more interested in your excitement over thinking about Wolfe than he would be with whatever you come up with. The mythic dimension, on Price's reading, is less important for what it means spiritually/religiously/symbolically than it is as a source of allusion and narrative resonance on which Wolfe can draw.

Now, within that larger argument, he makes certain substantive interpretations about what's actually happening on both the plot and metaphorical level. But I get the sense that Price is less committed to the letter of those substantive interpretations than he is in the process by which Wolfe makes readers come to them.

Although I value it immensely, my difficulty with Price's book has always been something along the lines of this (overly simplified) dilemma: If a book creates a puzzle that the reader has to solve in order to grasp the real narrative, why does the "puzzle" (and the ways to figure it out) have to then be more important than the solution? Price almost always values the puzzle "form" over the "content" of the books, but I don't see why it has to be an either/or.

That said, Price's book is invaluable, I think because it tries to make a general argument about what we all initially find so attractive in Wolfe: the suggestive difference between perspective and actuality that underlies all of his concern with memory, identity, illusion, shape-shifting, etc. Even if you don't agree with him in the end, it makes Price's book much more valuable than attempts to offer single, reductive, and often idiosyncratic "solutions" to the Wolfean mazes.




----- Original Message ----
From: Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 6:49:20 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis



perhaps someone should pointed me to Attending Daedalus by Peter Wright.
I just skimmed a bit of it on Google Books, and he's making a thorough dismissal of the type of reading I'm suggesting here.
I'll have to read this book.

I'm guessing you've read it Craig?  the argument seems to be along the lines of your collapsing of priorities.

While I haven't grokked his argument, having only skimmed it, it would seem he's perhaps suggesting all of the mythic elements are just machination of the Heirogrammites, and are not divine in any sense.

again, I'm not sure of his argument, but if it boils down to that, I'd ask what do the Heirgrogrammites Heirodules symbolize if not Angels and Archangels or Djinn?  Are we to strip away the monomyth because the plot confines it to these sons of mankind engineering their own survival?

~witz



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