(urth) themes, one sentence solutions etc

[Gerry Quinn]

I think if the Short Sun trilogy has a one sentence theme, it is man's inhumanity to man.  That, after all, is the condition on Blue, and it underlines the secret of the Inhumi.

As for things that are "obviously the truth", for me one of those things is that Urth and Green orbit different stars.

- Gerry Quinn



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Marc Aramini 
  To: The Urth Mailing List 
  Sent: Monday, December 27, 2010 3:28 PM
  Subject: Re: (urth) themes, one sentence solutions etc


        Let me just defend something really quickly, and then I want to move on to more fruitful discussions, because I am a bit taken aback by the consistency of throwing away ambiguous statements as meaningless  or statements with words like "I believe" in the text as certifiable definitive disproof of one claim or another.

        For me, Wolfe's novels have an explicit main idea that can be concisely stated for the most part, a main idea that explains a whole lot of the recurring motiffs and themes and mystery of the work and transforms it.  For example, John Marsch is an abo, Number Five is a clone; Weer is dead, etc.  These understandings transform the text but are usually a straightforward identity acknolwedgement, with the important caveat that the narrator really doesn't know it or doesn't want it known.  So the hints are logical but scattered and somewhat intuitive  

        One more example, I have had the feeling that Latro is Pleistorus, who has been missing from the pantheon, who is Ahura Mazda, who is like a stand in for God, and that the God of War's disillusionment with war as a Roman avatar will herald in the coming of Christ with the Pax Romana (ie - the Old testament God gets fed up with blood through the experiences of the avatar of the God of War, and heralds the death of Pan).

        I always thought what brilliant interpretations people had made the first time I read Peace, then I realized ... when I read Shadows of the New Sun, Wolfe admits Weer is dead there, and explains the mechanics, too, and I thought, wait a minute, did we get that or did he give it away?  So I always aproach his books with a look at "what don't I understand?"  "do any words seem supercharged with amiguity or symbolic resonance?"  "Do patterns repeat in the stories (as in the ghost stories of Peace)?"  "What is the theme and how can that help explain the mysteries?"  "What do the narrators know and what are they inferring?"

        So anyway, when I had read Short Sun I was sure the theme of the book was "you can't go home again."  Home has changed, and so have you.  Silk doesn't believe he is Silk, Horn is shunted off in some poor beastie, but I was POSITIVE that the theme applied in general, that the people of the whorl had come back to their home world and where simply unable to recognize it because they had forgotten who they were.  This does say something very negative about Severian's rejuvenation, but, as I said, the reason I could not prove that Blue was Urth and knew that I did not have that proof was that Wolfe operates by rules.  There had to be a way to prove either Blue was Urth or a parallel between them that would explain the mistaken translation across time and space.  And there wasn't one!  I looked everywhere,  There was no mechanism.  But as soon as "green is urth" came up, lo, there it was, the mechanism, Silk was thinking of Green and wanted to take his people there, the city of Nessus is compared to the city on Green, and know I can't see that city as anything but Nessus.  It's so obviously the truth, just as Horn is in Babbie, that to argue about horns versus tusks seems so unbelievably asinine and to assert the text says he rode a beast with three horns on green robs it of its mystery and its ability to explain Babbie's later actions that I am shocked.  Its just obviously the truth.    

        The problem I addressed to Gene, that I can't find a mechanism for why they wound up on Urth in the past of Blue, was instantly solved by his three words, so it is obviously the truth.

        So the waters receded and the heat allowed these protoforms of the green man to arise.  All this refutation is like bad comedy to me.  I'm sorry Roy, your fundamentalist and encyclopedic approach to Wolfe is fabulous for shutting down incorrect theories, but it does not allow ambiguities to attain any kind of solvent cohesive explanatory power that the ambiguities in Wolfe point to, and it seems to shut down correct readings, too. (Horn in Babbie under a neighbor tree at the end of OBW explains WHY Horn says goodbye, where he ends up, why Babbie says huh huh huh and reacts violently when Horn's son threatened, the narrative shift to positivism, why Silk says I won the game, why the text of IGJ has almost no flashback, and against all that expositive power we have, "the text says he rode that beast on Green."  and "Babbie has tusks, not Horns." For real??????  Are you serious?)

        I know that I am right, from the stage of my comprehension of the text at the time I ran into my barrier, and the fact that three words overcame the barrier to my satisfaction.  

        Marc 




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