(urth) This week in Google Alerts

[Gerry Quinn]

From: Lee Berman 


> I think Gerry is a good example of a warrior. Notice his recent invocation 
> of metaphor in doing battle against Marc's Green is Urth concept. Poetic and 
> literary interpretation are in his tool kit when they serve his purpose.

They always have been.   I try to apply the correct tools for a given task.  In both cases the purpose I attempt to serve is understanding and correctly interpreting Wolfe’s work, which necessarily means challenging misunderstandings and incorrect interpretations, which can be literal or literary.  

‘Green is Urth’ is not of course in the books – it is an observation of Wolfe’s.  It seems to me that it has a reasonable metaphorical interpretation.  Humans have failed in Urth, as the Vanished People failed in Green.  Both became to some degree hellholes of predation.  On the other hand I cannot see a reasonable literal interpretation in SF terms.

Elsewhere, though, Wolfe’s characters themselves use metaphors when they talk about cannibal trees and suchlike, and they dream dreams that are dreamlike, and not literal statements about reality.  I think Marc does not allow sufficiently for this. 


> But blunt, literal interpretations will be used when he feels they would are 
> the appropriate weapon- seen in the example of insisting Silent/Silver Silk 
> cannot allude to him being an aspect of a Dionysian-like god, The Outsider, 
> unless Silk is shown to have horns and cloven hoofs.

We have a blunt, literal interpretation that incontrovertibly works and is intended.  Then we have a proposal to overlay it with an extremely vague and ambiguous reference based on a few similar syllables.   Wolfe is a competent author.  Why would he do that?  In particular, why would he do it that way, which doesn’t really even work – the supposed references are not gods but fauns, and one was not associated with Dionysus at all.  

If Wolfe wanted to indicate that the Outsider has more Dionysian aspects than one might expect of a god with a Christian heritage, he would do so in a clearer and less cack-handed fashion.   Giving the Outsider some significant proportion of Dionysus-like attributes would have been a good start.  Why would he play silly puzzle games (and make such ill-designed puzzles)?
 

> How often have I been dragged into pointless discussions about monkeys when 
> the important concept on Urth (and the Whorl and Blue/Green) is the idea of a 
> larger god/being dividing him/itself into various smaller portions which are 
> distributed among lesser, smaller versions each with a different name or epithet 
> which reflects something about their unique aspect.

If you put forward theories based on monkeys, expect to get challenged on the subject.  And with the possible exceptions of Tzadkiel and the Mother, I haven’t seen you talking much about anything near the gods as such in this context.  

The theory (which I’ve never seen you propose in that form) seems at least at first sight to be back to front – the gods are often merging and ascending, being themselves redeemed, even.  It is the false human representation of them that fragments. 

- Gerry Quinn
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