(urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis

Son of Witz sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org
Wed Nov 26 10:21:25 PST 2008


Fair enough.
that seems to be along the lines of what you said about collapsing the priorities of meaning, but not the meaning itself.
good stuff.


>-----Original Message-----
>From: Craig Brewer [mailto:cnbrewer at yahoo.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 10:17 AM
>To: 'The Urth Mailing List'
>Subject: Re: (urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis
>
>Just a note: I don't think Price wants to go full on postmodern with Wolfe. It's not that the book says "anything goes." Quite the opposite. It's just that deciding on the ultimate readings isn't what he's doing in the book. Instead, he's just FOCUSING on form rather than content -- not saying that one trumps the other.
>
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>
>----- Original Message ----
>From: Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 12:07:10 PM
>Subject: Re: (urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis
>
>that's very interesting.  I'd like to read it. now the hunt for a copy.
>I would guess he's right about Wolfe's formal games being on of Wolfes primary inspirations. 
>
>It seems a thoroughly postmodern view to embrace any and all readings.
>while a consensus on objective meaning seems philosophically impossible, and thus it seems "any interpretation is relevant". Which is fine in if you treasure that miasma of postmodern democratic mediocrity and endless relativity. I don't think all readings are truly equal or relevant or consistent. Some speak to the authors intentions, and some completely miss the point.
>
>So, while I think Wolfe IS injecting a huge dose of DOUBT into the work, I sincerely doubt he would favor a reading that completely flattened the Transcendental meanings.  Else why would he go to such lengths to point out the multiple levels of meaning?  
>as he wrote:
>"You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism
>doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final
>summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that
>matter."
>
>Perhaps I'm beating a dead horse, but this preference for Form over Content is a sort of modern psychosis.  I've been stricken with it myself, though I've tried to heal myself of it.  Has anyone read Charles Upton's 'System of Antichrist'?  Interesting work, if a bit pitched and paranoid.  But he makes a good case for the modern world's inversion of values and the mental & spirtitual sickness it's produced in us. Form over Content is but one example of this.   Which is not to say that Content should ALWAYS be privileged over form, but Content over Form is the traditional value that is inverted.   I love me some modern art, but look at the vast history of art that has valued content over form, then look at the modern abstract expressionism.  the Form is often QUITE devoid of worthy content. 
>
>~witz
>
>
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Craig Brewer [mailto:cnbrewer at yahoo.com]
>>Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 09:17 AM
>>To: 'The Urth Mailing List'
>>Subject: Re: (urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis
>>
>>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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