(urth) interview questions/ weak theories

[Marc Aramini]

This blue bar I have when quoting you won't let me write under it, otherwise I most assuredly would.  I feel doomed forever to be a top poster, in bad taste.
 
But in regards to the paragraph far far below, I do believe there are correct explanations and solutions to a puzzle that are created by the author.  I don't think we can say with certainty who Severa is, but I'm sure Wolfe wanted close readers to figure out Weer is ghostly.  Some solutions can explain dream like statements and other asides that cannot otherwise be accounted for.  Why do the neighbors get mad when someone walks toward a tree with an ax?  I can tell you in a way that makes sense, so I think it is correct, and that mechanism explains some other mysterious comments in the text, like Horn saying goodbye, so consistent re-inforcement leads me to believe it is correct.  There are blatantly incorrect inferences that can be made, but these will generally have little to no strength textually.  
 
Let's take the two worst cases, most likely to enrage the masses, one my idea that Latro is Pleistorus.  How can I explain his human life, then?  Pleistorus is missing, and Latro exhibits extremely demigodlike powers.  Is he possessed by the God?  Does Aries show up in the text?  Maybe.  It explains some comments by the Sphinx in his little memory palace, but does it even make sense for the entire book?  I don't know yet, but I had a whole bunch of reasons for thinking it plausible the last time i read it.  The second case, against the obvious facts that Green and Urth are separate I have a lot of vague comments in the text that are otherwise inexplicable: the ignorance of the narrators "I don't understand ... no one does.", Krait's statement that paradoxes explain everything, the claim of the narrator to ignore his words when thinking about setting, the fact that he thought about Green and wound up on Urth, and other textual juxtapositions
 between the city on Green and Nessus.  If I became obsessed with Pas being Auk because both names had three letters, one the same,   u one letter from s, and only two letters between K and P,  1,2,3, then I am clearly losing my mind, because there is nothing in the text to even suggest that except a pattern I created out of nothing.
 
One tactic Borski employs frequently that I think is a huge wasted effort is the embedded names, because its one too many god for Wolfe to serve in his creative process.  He has to chose a saints name for its implication, write his own story and keep it good, and embed everybody's name for cryptic and hidden relationships? Extremely unlikely in the process of creation that is not crippled in Caballah, and one that could work against his naming scheme.  It might be possible for one or two characters, but to do it for every character would be the biggest waste of Wolfe's time imaginable.

So yeah, I think there are right and wrong answers SOMETIMES.  But 5hoc is one of those times when its hard to come down as saying, no, humans on the planet way back in the day are absurd before the French colonization, because there is an underlying current of previous colonization running through the book that is not sufficiently and categorically disproven except by some vague "common sense" that it would be impossible to textually prove.  So I think that is a mystery that is intentionally and categorically indeterminable, but that more specific things can be gleaned from the text.

--- On Thu, 1/6/11, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:



Amazon showed me that chapter of Borski's book.  Borski certainly has a talent for coming up with ingenious hypotheses; the fact is though that those he comes up with here ultimately collapse, as he himself concedes. Disgruntled, he tries to assert that there is no correct hypothesis, which has the convenient effect of boosting the relative value of incorrect ones. I can well believe he agrees with you.




      
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