(urth) Horns abilities

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes danldo at gmail.com
Wed Oct 26 10:05:58 PDT 2011


Daniel Petersen wrote:
> The Catholic writers (and other
> non-reductionist writers) aren't committed to a view of reality that knows
> no difference between text and world.

Remember that for us (I too am an adult convert to Catholicism, among
other things) the wor(l)d was spoken -- is in itself a kind of text.
The Word of God was made flesh, and indeed has its point-of-origin in
some sense in the flesh; it is always already _incarnate_ (i.e., not
merely spoken but written). The spoken word of God is the Act of
Creation: Let there be <foo> and there was <foo> .

> It's just that we are best to bet
> there's usually an open door of possibility for even the wildest phenomena
> of the text to be extra-textual phenomena too.

What I am saying is that there _are_ no extra-textual phenomena: all
phenomena are in some sense textual. I think that to understand what
Wolfe is doing here we must understand not only the textuality of the
text but the _radical_ textuality of the "internal" reality of his
stories.

Also, Wolfe messes with unreliable narrators. Now, when a narrator
inside a story told by an unreliable narrator tells a story, is that
story (and that narrator) reliable? Why or why not? What _is_ there
for us to interpret, but the text and its intertextuality?

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes



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