(urth) A quick summary of Wright's Attending Daedalus

[Craig Brewer]

This is a longish post, but I wrote it because I wanted to make sure that Wright 
doesn't get short shrift. As I've said before, his book is really worth your 
time, even if you don't ultimately agree with exactly how his readings end up. 


I think Wright's argument is actually a bit more robust than those who haven't 
read him might think. It's not that he would be surprised by the religious 
reading of New Sun that predominates in this list. On the contrary: his book 
starts by recognizing that such is the more common way of reading Wolfe, and 
he's out to show why it's not necessary wrong, but rather an insufficiently 
critical way of reading Wolfe on Wolfe's own terms.

I actually pulled out the book (it was buried in a box...took awhile to find), 
and re-read skimmed parts last night. Some random but appropriate quotes:

First, right at the beginning, Wright addresses Wolfe's religion:

"Wolfe's interest in [themes of religious faith and moral choice], which recur 
throughout his career but most notable in BotNS and BotLS, has led several 
critics to cite Wolfe's Roman Catholicism as a key element in his composition as 
a writer. However, while it is true to say that Wolfe has written at least one 
Catholic story, "The Detective of Dreams," (1980) - a pastiche of Poe - it is 
unwise to accept Wolfe's incorporation of religious themes, symbols and 
narrative patterns at face value. As Wolfe himself explains: 'I am a Catholic in 
the real communion-taking sense, which tells you a lot less than you think about 
my religious beliefs ... I believe in God, in the divinity of Christ and in the 
survival of the person ... Like every thinking person, I am still working out my 
beliefs.' Wolfe's self-portrait is typically evasive, yielding little definitive 
information about someone who understands that there are no easy or unequivocal 
answers to any of the questions that may be asked, of ourselves, or of the world 
at large. Importantly, though, the fact that Wolfe is still 'working out' his 
beliefs should alert the reader to the danger of any preconceived notions of how 
Wolfe will treat religious material. Just as it is imperative to read in the 
context the allusions, intertexts and references that inform and suffuse Wolfe's 
ficiton, so it is vital to recognise how Wolfe appropriate and recontextualizes 
elements of religious practice, symbolism and belief in his fiction, especially 
in BotNS." (p. 11)

Wright's book is then not to suggest that Wolfe's books have atheistic messages, 
if by that you think that he means to suggest that BotNS, say, promotes atheism. 
Rather, Wright's position is ultimately that even when Wolfe is writing 
something that seems to be atheistic, he's ultimately not putting forward a 
particular theology at all, but, instead, is really just thinking about how 
complicated it is to think about religious and mythic matters when they're all 
filtered through symbols, stories, accounts, memories, and even lies. Wright's 
point, then, would be that Wolfe's writing is less about what *IS* on the other 
side (it's not putting forth a systematic theology); instead, it's a rumination 
on the ways in which we simultaneously know and distort whatever we think of as 
true because of all the ways truth has to be mediated to us.

Here's a quick summary of how I think Wright sees that.

In one passage, after previewing his reading that all "supernatural" events are 
actually manipulations of the Hieros, Wright says:

"There is, however, an inescapable religious aspect to the Urth Cycle. This 
quality does not depend on Wolfe's Roman Catholicism, as some critics have 
suggested [a note listing a wide range...pardon me for not typing it all out], 
but on his recognition of the power of myth to shape humanity's secular and 
spiritual life." (p. 59)

Wright spends his Chapter 7 outlining how he sees Wolfe working out this idea of 
myth. It is more cynical than I think many people would like to think of Wolfe, 
but I think it's still appropriate. Here's Wright's summary of his chapter:

"In the Urth Cycle, the context is obscured by the source material, a fact that 
leads the reader to perceive what the text resembles rather than what it 
actually is: Wolfe uses mythology, he does not create it outside the fictional 
environment. He is, in effect, toying with the reader's susceptibility to the 
transcendental visions of existence offered by mythical narrative. His 
employment of the monomyth [Campbell and others] exploits the primary 
psychological character of the human species [as Wright thinks Wolfe sees it]: 
its need for myth. Wolfe thereby disarms both the reader's desire and his or her 
ability to uncover the disturbing biological reality [that ultimately lies 
behind the supernatural story of the Urth Cycle]." (p. 124)

I think it's important to note that Wright is not saying here that Wolfe thinks 
that all myths are lies. Rather, he's suggesting a point that's ultimately 
compatible with a more religious reading of Wolfe, and one that he's talked 
about in many interviews: myths can be both manipulative AND constructive, even 
illuminating, of deeper concerns. Wright simply believes that, in much of his 
writing, Wolfe is concerned to show how myth can often be misunderstood and 
misperceived, even when they're also saying something true.

For example, Wright enjoys the story "How the Whip Came Back" (from Book of 
Days) because it essentially shows both the positive and negative capacities of 
myth. And Wright is always interested in the way that Wolfe mixes myth and 
religion in his books and suggests that, even when they're doing good, they're 
also being manipulative (perhaps even manipulating us to be good):

"The story is important for its attention to two forms of interconnected 
manipulation: while it implicitly condemns the human tendency to subjugate 
others, it also recognies the potential of organised religion to recruit and 
operate among a people in need of emotional or spiritual comfort." (p. 33) He 
then notes how the story, which includes a Pope of a dwindling future RC Church 
who sees an opportunity to renew his flock among a new slave class, actually 
employs mythic manipulation for higher and even laudable ends. As he says: "'How 
the Whip Came Back' contains two principal features that are central to an 
understanding of Wolfe's fiction and of the multi-volume novels in particular: 
his recognition of the existence of systems of control and constraint, and the 
mitigating effects of religious faith." (p. 33)

What Wright wants to say, though, is that Wolfe's writing is primarily 
interested in exploring how that manipulation actually works. Wolfe's 
stories-within-stories are ways of teaching readers to see how any myth, even a 
true one, can be used all kinds of deceptive ways. But not all deception is 
necessarily evil. Wright just isn't comfortable coming right out and saying 
that, behind all of the complicated puzzle-solving and misdirection in Wolfe's 
work, there is a straightforward claim of either faith or of which myths are 
simply true and which are simply false.

Wright is ultimately always concerned with the difficult and always potentially 
misleading ways that Wolfe tells stories, emphasizing the difficulty of getting 
things right. For Wright, BotNS is not ultimately "just" a story about atheism 
because it says that the Hieros were just manipulating Severian the whole time. 
Rather, it's a story about the ways even deeply held religious beliefs, even the 
possibility of actual miracles, can still be manipulated for other ends. I tend 
to think that Wright would say that, ultimately, Wolfe is silent about what's 
"really" going on behind the Hieros. Rather, telling that story would be yet 
another story, capable of being mis-told, mis-appropriated, and even turned on 
its head. In the end, no story is true because the truth always comes before and 
after the story. Wright just wants us to pay attention to the ways that Wolfe 
makes us pay attention to how the stories in which we're stuck work in all kinds 
of misleading ways.