(urth) Typhon's nature

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Sun, 10/16/11, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:






Why would Wolfe engage in a complicated, arbitrary, pointless scheme such as this?  He is writing his own stories.  Science fiction stories.  Yes, he enriches them with classical references, but he is not rewriting the classics.  Yes, he loves to place keystones of his story in a subtle and understated way, but they are always there in plain sight and they are NOT in general found in proper names.  [To place them in proper names would in fact be a gross dereliction of artistry, excluding the reader who is attentive but lacks a particular literary background.  I will allow that they can be in proper names as well as in the story proper, and that exceptions could be made in certain circumstances.]
 
Gerry, in general I agree with you on this, but I do think Wolfe DOES at times perform this "gross dereliction of artistry" for the reader with a particular background (not necessarily literary).
 
For example, the short story Suzanne Delage - her very name is pulled from a book about a narrator who eats something and involuntarily remembers things he had completely forgotten from his childhood that COMPLETELY changes how he perceives the world and the people he knew.  In this case, Wolfe is clearly saying the narrator has involuntarily forgotten something with that allusion, in addition to invoking the Spanish Influenza offhandedly (called the forgotten illness) etc etc.  The point is these things point to forgetfulness of extraordinary events, and the premise of the story itself is that extraordinary things will be forgotten.  So, yes, sometimes you are just out of the loop.
 
I don't think he just goes straight from one myth to his writing, it's too limiting.  He has his own agenda, this is why I can't lend any real credence in authorial intent in Typhon and Echidna as siblings are to mapping myths onto the stories unless they are just EXPLICIT in the text.
 
However, WOLFE DOES NOT SPELL OUT EVERYTHING or we wouldn't all disagree, and sometimes these inferences require outside knowledge, the "roman a clef" principal and play intertextually.  That's just the way it is.  Having said that, no, I don't think he maps mythology in terms of familial relationships this way since he created his own relationship scheme on the whorl through features and names (yeah, it makes sense that SOMEHOW [i posit "adoption"] Tussah and Silk are related because of their names)
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