(urth) interview questions

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

--- On Mon, 1/3/11, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) interview questions
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Monday, January 3, 2011, 11:44 AM

From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>

[Principle of parsimony in fiction]

>>Jerry Friedman: 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.
 >
>The Occam's Razor principle demands that the simplest answer which
 accounts for all the evidence
>must be the correct one. Its absence (in understanding fiction) does not demand we pick the most
>outrageous, unsupported answer, of the kind you suggest above.
 >
>Occam's Razor is a principle useful in science and detective work to counter the human imagination's
>tendency to find an infinite number of false patterns in naturally occurring phenomena.

But of course the human imagination can find false patterns in human-created phenomena too, and if we
care about avoiding them, parsimony will help.

>When I use the
>term I mean to imply Isaac Newton's definition: ""We are to admit no more causes of natural things than 
>such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
 
Okay.  When I use "parsimony" I mean that we don't have to look for elaborate or poorly supported explanations when we have simple or well-supported
 ones.

>My point is that fiction is not like science. It is like religion. There is a Creator. Our study and our
>goal is not to make sense out of some riotous chaos. We are trying to understand the intelligent 
>purpose of the work of a single, human intelligence. 
 
>>Parsimony in fiction may not work the way it does in real life, though.
 
>We can agree on this, at least.

For instance, maybe principles like the Gricean maxims apply--though not exactly like.
 
>>We can be certain of one thing, though: There are no rules of story-telling.
 >
>I suppose, but Geen Wolfe and I agree on something: there are rules to GOOD story-telling. From the
>Nick Gevers interview:
 >
>>GW: There's a wonderful bit in the Roger Rabbit movie nobody seems to get. Roger goes around with >>handcuffs on his wrists for half an hour. Then he pulls one hand out of the cuffs and
 does something with
>>it, and sticks it back in. Bob says, "You mean to tell me you could get out of those whenever you wanted
>>to?" And Roger says, "No, only when it's funny." That is a profound expression of the law that governs
>>all writers and performers. The audience doesn't have to think about that, but writers are bound by it. If
>>there's a gun on the wall in Act I, it must be fired before the end of the play. Etc. 
 
And yet, as I said, he wrote "Under Hill", where the gun specifically isn't fired.  I wonder whether he was
thinking about the Chekhov quotation.


---He certainly was, but in that story the paciforcer (if that's what you mean) does not appear until the end, where it is more like a prize that is rejected. 
Chesterton would have had the gun, and the gunshot, but would have changed everything else: the gunshot would come after the murder or something. But this is like the dog that didn't bark, which is another exception that proves the rule.


>This is what I am suggesting. Aunt Jeannine and Aubrey Veil are "arguing" over whether Veil's
>hypothesis about the replacement of all
 humanity in the system is true. Veil didn't suggest SOME
>people had been replaced. Even David and Number Five debate that abos are *all* dead. That's
>the gun that Wolfe placed on the wall in Act I. It can't be partially fired as a satisfying conclusion to
>this carefully crafted story. 

There's no accounting for taste.   A conclusion that SOME people had been replaced would satisfy me just fine.



---Me too. The limitation of the gun metaphor is that a gun is binary; it can only be fired (or misfired) though it can miss. An equally useful alternative might be "if there is an apple in Act I it must be at least partially or nearly eaten or at least offered to be eaten by Act III." 
To me, this is just another kind of parsimony. If Captain Nemo says in Chapter 1 that Martians built the Pyramids, then when we find a mummy deep inside a pyramid, it should be a Martian. Of course, one can play with the reader's expectations, but what I mean is that the rule runs both ways: a gunshot in Act III should be explained by the gun in Act I. If that gun was melted down in Act II, then there's another gun that's been there all along. (Perhaps someone called the police.)
Come to think of it, the whole idea of a macguffin is that it may well remain unfired and uneaten; it should only not be totally forgotten.
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