(urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

[Gerry Quinn]

From: David Stockhoff 

> On 12/15/2011 2:23 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:

> > What we have learned of these things from fairy-tales doesn’t really 
> > help us here. They don’t mirror their fairy-tale counterparts. BotNS 
> > really isn’t a fairy-tale in any strong sense. Or so it seems to me.

> What strikes me about the perspective amply revealed in this post is 
> that when others try to make one-to-one correspondences between Wolfe 
> and myth this approach is derided, but when it's done to prove a 
> negative, it's OK. Look, 1:1 logic fails to work 100%, so there must be 
> nothing there.
That’s not what I’m saying at all.  I’m saying that fairy-tale logic seems to work in the region of 0%.  That’s the opposite of one-to-one correspondence.  

 
> You'd have to be blind not to see it. Terminus Est DOES have "magic" 
> powers that are clearly defined in the text. 

What powers?


> Dorcas IS a sleeping 
> beauty---so what if we don't understand what she is until long after we 
> meet her? 

What does a purported correspondence between Dorcas and the Sleeping Beauty tell us, or add to the story?  Dorcas was under no enchantment, Severian did not set out to find her, there was no wall of briars.  She was beautiful, she got resurrected – that’s not enough to equate the stories.


> Fairies live underground in barrows, just like the House 
> Absolute, indicating otherworldly power. 

And that’s nothing to do with anything.  Man-apes live underground.  And miners.  And worms.  And who says all fairies live underground, or that fairies correspond to kings?  You can’t just point to a random correspondence and claim it is significant.  You need correspondences with meat on them.  


> If it seems that "the logic of fairy-tales will be of limited 
> application" in BNS, then perhaps one's grasp of that logic and its uses 
> is to blame. I totally sympathize with the feeling that fairies are 
> "clinically insane" (see _Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell_) and accept 
> that apparently-insane fairy logic is stronger in obviously fairy-driven 
> Wolfe stories like _Sorcerer's House_, but knowing this is not much help 
> even in those cases. We barely understand fairies, if at all, except to 
> know that they are bound by absolutes. And that IS the point.

No, that’s not even *a* point, unless you can point to a real correspondence in the particular story at issue.


> The demonstrable facts remain that BNS uses fairy tale elements 
> (alongside S&S and many others derived from fairy stories) and its 
> universe, like Faerie, cares little for what individual humans think of 
> it and its modes of reasoning. This is the essence of "otherworldly."

It uses elements of bakery too – Severian and other characters eat bread.  That doesn’t mean that bakery is particularly relevant to understanding it.  Even if mould on bread cares little for what humans think.  

All I’m saying is that if you want to make a viable case for fairy tales, you need to do more than say there is a girl in the story who was dead, which is a bit like being under an enchanted sleep, and she looked okay, and therefore it’s about the Sleeping Beauty.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer was also pretty and blonde and dead and got resurrected – so was Series 6 of Buffy about the Sleeping Beauty too?  No more so than BotNS, in my opinion.  It’s too easy to find endless random coincidences of that sort in any large work.

- Gerry Quinn






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