(urth) interview question

[Jerry Friedman]

From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>


>>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.

> Sigh..this is so difficult.. Gerry I think you are continuing to treat a 
>fictional world as though it
> were the real world, where parsimony and Occam's Razor are valid principles.

There has to be one.  We don't worry about whether all the characters in BotNS 
are Talking Beasts that Severian misleads us about, or Holmes's deductions about 
his clients are false and the clients confirm them just to be polite, or Helen 
of Troy was a male transvestite.

Parsimony in fiction may not work the way it does in real life, though.

> In fiction they are not.
> You know, for years there were debates here over whether Dr. Marsch was 
>actually replaced. I introduced
> the Wolfe quote you cite in the middle of one argument and there hasn't been a 
>debate since. But it shows 
>
> that some people are so intent on "weighing evidence" they forget the purpose 
>of writing a story.

> Why would an author (who tends to horror) introduce Veil' Hyphothesis then 
>write this novel full of clues
> twists and turns to reveal... nothing.  Or one case of replacement. Or maybe 
>just some minority replacement 
>
> of the population. Where is the horror in that?

The horror is in human beings are being deceived.  You lose that horror if all 
the deceived beings are also deceivers (though you might gain a different 
horror--I don't remember 5HC well enough to argue about this).

> Aunt Jeannine and Dr. Aubrey Veil throw down the gauntlet early: either Veil's 
>Hypothesis is 100% false or 
>
> 100% true. None of this namby-pamby partial stuff. I'm not sure how to explain 
>it other than to say that a 
>
> weak realization of Veil's Hypothesis would violate a rule of story-telling. If 
>stories were as boringly
> ambiguous as the real world, with partial resolutions and half-baked 
>conclusions, we wouldn't write or 
>
> listen to fiction stories.

Spoilers follow:

We never know whether there's a ghost in "The Turn of the Screw" or whether 
Timothy Archer transmigrated or how "Prot" escaped from the asylum in K-Pax.  
Nothing is resolved in "The Metamorphosis".  Many posters on NABOKV-L treasure 
the ambiguity of Pale Fire and prefer to doubt obvious clues that, for instance, 
there's an afterlife in the novel; some even doubt there are ghosts in "The Vane 
Sisters".  We never find out what happens to the main character of The Fixer.  
We don't know what it means that Milkman learned you can fly in Song of Solomon.

We can be certain of one thing, though: There are no rules of story-telling.

> Cinderella doesn't do the magic pumpkin, ball and slipper routine just to go on 
>a 
>
> few dates with Prince Charming then decide he isn't Mr. Right and go home to 
>live with her steps. That 
>
> story would simply suck (except as parody). Or be "lame" as Gene Wolfe put it.
...

And yet he wrote a story where the victorious hero gets an astonishing weapon 
and throws it away without using it.

In the Amber books, Corwin pits worlds against each other to make his crowning 
of himself come true, and then puts the kingship on the back burner and 
eventually leaves the decision to someone else.  I'm sure I've read other good 
examples of this, maybe closer to "Cinderella", but I'm not coming up with them.

Jerry Friedman



      
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