(urth) academic commentary

[Son of Witz]

I agree with your notion that a "text that can only be understood in relation to something outside of it is a flawed text."  however, I don't think that's really the case here.

The ambiguity in the given cosmology supports Wright's reading as well as my (and most readers, I think) spiritual take, though not equally.

I think the person, (Antonio?) who implied that Wright mat be unable to overcome his atheism to see the spiritual qualities is onto something.  Perhaps Wright was THRILLED at the idea of exposing what he sees to be a great literary joke/hoax due to the very fact that it is obstensibly religious.  This is a standard thrill amongst those who don't believe the bible literaly. We love to poke holes and point out where any transcendental interpretation might be answered by more mundane concerns such as sun cycles or translation errors. (such as the Camel through the eye of the needle, which should actually read "rope" instead of camel)  None of this though, for my part at least, is to belittle Wright.  I just think he stops short due to philosophical blinders. 

But back to the text and whether it needs you to know GW's faith. I say NO.
This book is riddled with so much beautiful heartfelt hope for the future—faith that spirit transcends death — and thoroughly understanding of intensly difficult- to- swallow metaphysical ideas.  To write all of this stuff off as fraudulent, or simply misguided hope that Severian holds is to miss what this book has to offer.  If anything, knowledge of Wolfes catholocism makes this more difficult, as there seems to be a LOT of non catholic material here.  


~witz

On Dec 1, 2010, at 9:25 AM, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I generally agree. Or rather, I absolutely agree about things internal to the 
> text.
> 
> When it comes to the author's stated intentions or explanations of a text, 
> though, I'm more conflicted. That's particularly true with Wolfe. Personally, I 
> have to say that any text that can only be understood in relation to something 
> outside of it (an interview, a conversation with the author, etc.) is a flawed 
> text. With Wolfe, if there are some "puzzles" that can only be answered when 
> Wolfe tells us the answer, it's his fault for creating a puzzle that's too 
> obscure.
> 
> But the opposite extreme can also be a difficulty when people impose 
> biographical information on a text. So, Wolfe is Catholic. Must every single one 
> of his stories, novels, and poems then be completely consistent with Catholic 
> theology? That assumption sometimes operates in our theories on this list, and 
> it's not necessarily warranted. (I'm guilty of it, too.) I think this is a 
> special problem when dealing with speculative fiction since it's not just the 
> physical world that a genre writer can play with, but the 
> philosophical/theological/ideological world as well.
> 
> Wolfe makes the problem of the intentional fallacy particularly...problematic. 
> He demands more of his readers than many writers, but he also writes in such a 
> way that implies intense authorial control of even the tiniest details. Reading 
> Wolfe is often a difficult exercise in navigating between puzzle-solving and 
> interpretation. With puzzles, the author is always right. With interpretation, 
> that's less always the case. But with many of Wolfe's stories, it's difficult to 
> tell when we just haven't understood the clues and when we're dealing with an 
> ambiguity that requires an act of interpretation on the reader's part. When it 
> comes to the scope of an author's authority, they have every right to speak 
> definitively about how to solve one of their puzzles in an interview, say. But 
> their interpretation of their work is ultimately one among a larger 
> conversation. An author has every right to tell us we're wrong about what 
> happens; he has less right to tell us we're wrong about what it means.
> 
> The difficulty with Wolfe is that it's often hard to tell where the one stops 
> and the other begins.
> 
> (To make this relate to Wright, I think he's has every right to read New Sun 
> *against* the religious meaning many of us might assume Wolfe intended. If 
> that's the reading the text ultimately supports - and, granted, that's the point 
> of the debate with him - then that's what it supports. It doesn't matter at all 
> what Wolfe thought he was writing or what we'd like it to mean if the text 
> ultimately goes in a Wright's direction. Lot of *IF*s there, of course, but I 
> think it's just really bad logic to say that Wright has to be wrong, a priori, 
> because Wolfe is Catholic or because he's said in interviews that the book has a 
> "true" religious meaning, or what have you. It always has to go back to the best 
> reading of the books as we have them.)
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Sent: Wed, December 1, 2010 11:03:03 AM
> Subject: Re: (urth) academic commentary
> 
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Thomas Bitterman <tom at bitterman.net> wrote:
> 
>> Wright's thesis stands or falls on its internal logic and ability to shed
>> light on the material.  It is not dependent on what he didn't do except in
>> so far as a different theory might be better, and that is a separate
>> argument.  It certainly doesn't depend upon any imagined reasons for why he
>> did/didn't come to different conclusions.
> 
> I don't have a dog in this race, I haven't read Wright, but speaking
> in terms of general theory -- if there are important facts (internal
> to the text or _maybe_ about the author) that a theory does not take
> into account, then that theory is deeply flawed. IMO.
> 
> -- 
> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
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