(urth) Wolfe's Attitude toward his Readers
Jeff Wilson
jwilson at io.com
Sun Aug 15 12:50:53 PDT 2010
On 8/15/2010 5:03 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> I think that we cannot, just because Wolfe is the author, assume that
> some elements of a story are not merely 'colour'. It would be very
> restrictive for Wolfe. Every time a character booked a hotel room, Wolfe
> would be constrained from saying "he was given the key to room 167", for
> fear that readers would waste time searching for some numerological clue.
This can be a valid complaint, but as far as I can tell, Wolfe *likes*
this sort of restriction, and takes it as a challenge. How many of his
characters does he go leave visibly anonymous? And then there's the
whole doctor/death/island exercise.
Conversely, the specifics he does use almost always *are* important
clues, like every proper name in every story he's ever written. The
strings of digits are essentially the name for that storage area, and
there's no reason that this one among all the other storage area numbers
not given in the story shouldn't have the a special meaning the way that
666 Saltimbanque has a special meaning despite the zillions of other
addresses not given in that story.
--
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >
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