(urth) Urth Digest, Vol 76, Issue 82

[Andrew Mason]

>
Lee Berman wrote:

 Severian CAN be both a virgin and non-virgin. The reason is because
> he is not a material being. His substance is a product of text and mental images. Since the
> main text suggests he is a virgin and the sub-text suggests he is not, we can have two
> contradictory mental images formed. Which is right? That's the point. Neither or both!
>
> I am not engaging in silly sophistry. I believe Wolfe writes with the exact principles I just
> outlined in mind.


Ah, OK.  Well, then...

I think that _in general_ the distinction I made still holds. A work
can have an allegorical meaning, or a mythic resonance, or a reference
to the author's biography, or whatever, without this in any way
subverting its literal meaning. While if a work has another literal
meaning, distinct from the surface one, this will _normally_ subvert
the surface meaning.  In discovering what really happens, we discover
that we were wrong about what seemed to happen. I now know (because
you have explained) that this is not what you were claiming about
Wolfe. But I suspect that some interpreters of Wolfe - Peter Wright,
perhaps, or Robert Borski - have been trying to show that normal ways
of reading him were wrong. Certainly it's not obvious that they were
not doing that.

Now, an author definitely can do what you describe - intending more
than one literal meaning without intending either to be the right one.
Does Wolfe do so? Almost certainly he does. I think that _The Fifth
Head of Cerberus_ is probably meant to be radically ambiguous  about
who, if any, are the indigenous people and who, if any, are the
colonists. But them I'm not sure that _Cerberus_ can really be said to
have a surface meaning - whatever the truth is, it's hidden. There are
some statements that all readers can agree on, like 'There is a
character called Number Five', but they aren't really enough to tell
us what the story is about. So what you are positing in _New Sun_ is
something rather different, I think.

I take it that on any reading there are going to be some stable facts
- things like 'Severian is a torturer', or  'Typhon has two heads'.
These aren't going to become matters of dispute. But I think there are
also things which may become matters of dispute, but to which there is
a right answer. This is because, as I've said before, Wolfe
overestimates his readers' intelligence; he expects things to be clear
when they aren't. Often when asked about such things he is quite ready
to clarify them. For instance, when asked who Blood's father was he
said, quite straighforwardly, 'Patera Pike' - and once he has said
that, you can look at the text and see things which do indeed indicate
it. Before he said that people may have had different views on who
Blood's father was, and those turned out to be wrong.  it's not clear
where to draw a line between cases like this and the kind of radical
ambiguity you're suggesting, where no one needs to be wrong.

Now, I'm going to bypass the God stuff, interesting though it is
(though I do think that not everyone who believes in God will accept
the way you describe the question - and especially not all Catholics)
because I think even if you are right there  I can still make my
point. Even if there is some kind of radical contradiction in the
nature of reality, you can't accept that _everything_ is true. (It is
a principle of traditional logic that from a contradiction everything
follows, but those philosophers who accept contradictions reject this
principle.) .When I believe something I don't automatically also
believe the opposite. And the same applies to literature (and indeed,
I would say, can be applied rather more comfortably to literature than
to reality); even if I accept that a work has more than one reading,
incompatible but equally real, this does not mean that I will accept
every reading of it. So I need some test of plausibility to decide
what I will accept and what I will reject.  This may not exactly
follow the canons of traditional logic, but it's still a standard of
rationality of some kind.

(If you could resume virginity after a year, that would have made
quite a difference to life on the Whorl.)