(urth) Father Inire Theory cont.

[Lee Berman]

David, at the risk of sounding condescending or arrogant I would like to try to explain something 
before specifically responding to your polite and insightful post.
 
Are you familiar with this optical illusion? http://images.braingle.com/images/illusions/26745.gif
 
Most people look at it and see a young woman looking backward. But if you look at it the right way
it shifts to becoming an old crone looking downward. I think Gene Wolfe writes the way this artist
has drawn. Most of his books and ALL (I think) his stories told from First Person have such a 
perceptual twist built in. The twist is not minor but profound (global, as Jeff Wilson might put it)
and affects almost every aspect of the story.
 
I can remember reading 5HoC for the first time (I had read the novella previously) and sorting through
the addition of a Native American sort of tale and then being annoyed and bored with the pointless, 
disjointed diary entries of some unimportant prisoner, then suddenly toward the end, "Holy Crap!" I 
got it! And everything else fell into place from there.
 
As a man of faith, I think Gene Wolfe rewards those moments of gestalt, holistic insight in his books
and punishes those who rely on logical detective work and conscious assemblages of evidence. LIke the
optical illusion, one is rewarded with a stunning revelation and doubled vision, while the other is 
punished with a singular, simplistic vision only of a young, pretty woman.
 
The problem is this: If you are able to see the old woman, how do you get someone else to see her too?
You can try using words: "well, young lady's necklace is old crone's mouth, young lady's ear is old crone's
eye", etc. Maybe, if your audience wants to see the old lady, these clues will help them see her. But if
an audience member is determined to be skeptical there is nothing you can do- *"that doesn't look like a mouth;
that looks more like an eye than an ear. It is just an eye. It is just a young lady. I find it highly unlikely 
the artist would put an old crone in there when there is a perfectly nice young pretty lady to see"*
 
And that's just for a simple drawing. Wolfe's work is much harder to translate. IMHO the thing
to remember is that the best Wolfe insights are not the product of arguments. They are VISIONS. The evidence
is consciously collected to support the vision later, but it is the vision which comes first.
 
Part of the process involves Wolfe's demand for a leap of faith. The first leap to take is accepting that
pretty much every one of his stories will contain a complete paradigm shift which is even more masked and
disguised than the one in 5HoC. Another is that Gene wolfe is just smarter than anyone in his audience, at
least in the realm of puzzle making/solving. So, when I see signs that someone else has gotten a gestalt
vision that completely shifts perception of a Wolfe story I pay attention. They might be a delusional,
misled, misinformed psychotic inventing things from their own head. But they might onto something. I am not
the smartest WOlfe fan but I can admit that. I don't want to be stubborn and petty and vain and risk being 
left out, missing the reward/old crone my smarter compatriots are willing to share with me.
 
I think Robert Borski is very good at gestalt insight. I never thought Latro was just a simple soldier wandering
through ancient Europe, losing his memory every night. I didn't figure out a paradigm shift but my assumption is
that there was one waiting to be found. And Borski's werewolf insight will be hard to surpass. I can't speak for 
James Wynn but I have the feeling his theory on Horn-as-Neighbor, which turns the whole story upside-down started 
as a gestalt vision and all his supporting evidence was consciously collected only after the fact.
 
Where I think Borski went wrong with BotNS is latching on too tightly to his "Moses" metaphor for Father Inire. Is
it possible he was misled by being jewish? Perhaps it has taken a "fallen" jew to see what Father Inire really is.