(urth) interview questions

[Gerry Quinn]

I think it is wrong to think of Aunt Jeannine as an unreliable narrator in 
this instance.  The full quote is: "Veil. who wants a dramatic explanation 
for the cruelty and irrationality he sees around him, has hung fifty pounds 
of theory on nothing."

Essentially, this is all basically true, except that "nothing" is an 
exaggeration.  Veil's Hypothesis, in its strong form, is obviously 
incorrect.  There has been no wholesale replacement of humans by the native 
Annese; this is plain from such diverse indications as eye colour, tool use, 
and the stories of Marsch's interviewees.  The world of Saint Croix is 
indeed cruel and irrational, and there is no reason to doubt that Jeannine 
has at least wondered whether her motivation in coming up with this theory 
was to explain it.  The subject of man's inhumanity recurs in Wolfe; I 
consider it a major theme of the Short Sun trilogy.

Wikipedia defines 'unreliable narrator' thus: "An unreliable narrator is a 
narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has 
been seriously compromised."  Jeannine does not fit this definition. 
Although she hides her identity, there is no credibility issue - in fact one 
could say it makes her *more* credible as a judge of Veil's motivationsa 
than the third party she pretends to be.

Of course, Veil's Hypothesis is not wholly false; we do have one incident of 
an abo replacing a human, after they had been travelling alone together for 
a long period.  And clearly the shapechanging aboriginal Annese have entered 
human society to some extent - but equally clearly they have not killed and 
replaced the human colonists en masse. Indeed we may assume they are 
outcasts for the most part - VRT thought to escape this fate, but failed due 
to an unlucky encounter with the Saint Croix police.

As for the bit about calling Marsch an abo, that is certainly intriguing. 
Wolfe himself has said in an interview that "the specific interrelations 
that you see [in 5HoC] were developed as I went along.".  We know Wolfe 
wrote 5HoC first - does anyone know whether he revised it before publication 
in the light of the other works?  If so, of course there is no mystery in 
the narrator's calling Marsch an abo; the various bits of evidence that 
Marsch is a fraud could have been inserted at any time.

Here is something else that Wolfe said in that interview
<  http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm >
M: All this "showing" in "V.R.T." is made intriguingly ambiguous by the 
confusion about who "Marsch" really is.
Wolfe: In the end, of course, it's important that the reader not be confused 
about this, although part of the fun is supposed to be figuring out what's 
happened. I leave a number of clues as to who the narrator actually is. For 
example, both V.R.T. and the narrator are shown to be very poor shots, 
whereas Marsch is a very good shot, and there's other hints like that. If 
you hire a shape changer as a guide, there's a definite possibility that 
he's going to change into your shape at some point. Which is what happens.

The first sentence is the important one: "It's important that the reader not 
be confused about this."  Wolfe does NOT write stories in order to create 
confusion in the reader for the furtherance of some higher mystical purpose. 
Of course, every author inadvertently introduces minor errors and 
inconsistencies, and there may be cases where ambiguity arises because 
readers have failed to follow the author's clues, or, conversely, have 
thought of possibilities that the author faild to consider.  The idea that 
Wolfe purposely includes contradictions is of course attractive to those who 
themselves like to hang fifty - or five thousand - pounds of theory on 
nothing, and are discommoded when others point out that their hypotheses are 
vastly at odds with those portions of the text they choose to ignore.


----- Original Message ----- 
> As you [Marc] suggest, unreliable narrators are a trap for text evidence 
> detectives. I'll use my recent
> example of Aunt Jeannine who firmly asserts that Dr. Veil has hung 50 
> pounds of theory on nothing
> in hypothesizing that abos have replaced humans. Then we find Aunt 
> Jeannine IS Dr. Veil. How much
> more unreliable can one be than that? And all that was just in 5HoC the 
> novella.
>
> You'd have to be a super-hyper genius or something to conclude that Veil's 
> hypothesis is actually
> correct from the information Wolfe gives us in 5HoC the novella. All we 
> get is that Number Five is
> able to scare off Dr. Marsch by calling him an abo. Who the hell could 
> figure that out, especially
> as we are distracted by the clone/Mr Million story. Wolfe had to write the 
> full novel before we could
> figure it out, and even then, only toward the end.
>
> I liken it to a jigsaw puzzle. WOlfe throws all the pieces into the text 
> and we are supposed to find
> them and sort them into a picture. BUT he also throws in contradictory 
> evidence. Basically these are
> puzzle pieces that don't fit into the big picture. Wolfe ALSO expect us to 
> identify these as false
> evidence and discard them (like Aunt Jeannine's 50 pounds). This is where 
> the skeptics are fooled
> over and over again. They hold onto the false pieces, ignoring the big 
> picture, and using the fake
> evidence to discredit the big picture.