(urth) The Wizard

Sat Mar 10 08:44:18 PST 2012

Lafferty and O'Connor seem like perfect analogues on this point. There's something in both of those writers that makes faith a very dark and dangerous and uncertain thing. That matches well with the sense I get from Wolfe. Sometimes I feel like discussions of his religious attitudes neglect that dimension in favor of teasing out something like a straightforward cosmology or theology behind all the allusion/puzzles rather than seeing them as precisely "dark glasses" through which the characters and readers are trying to understand what's happening to them. The point isn't to unravel it all in order to achieve certainty. The point is that the puzzles go all the way down (at least some of the most important ones), but you have to live and make decisions anyway. That's what makes the characters in all the Sun books so fascinating to me. They HAVE to figure out the real story because it's their story, and the consequences are ultimate. But they can't, at least not completely. That's a dilemma that would make O'Connor proud.

In Lafferty, it often seems to me that the truth is often absent. Some of his stories are horrifying because things have gone desperately wrong in a fallen world. The apparent humor on the surface leaves scars.

(And thanks for the fan club...you can keep 40% of the dues...)

On Mar 10, 2012, at 3:14 AM, Daniel Petersen <danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok, Craig, at the risk of sounding sycophantic, I just have to shout an 'amen!' yet again to your perceptive observations.  I guess I'm the president of the Craig Brewer Fan Club.  Folks can send me a S.A.S.E. for their newsletter and decoder ring.  I've been thinking what are (I think) similar thoughts about this over the past few days and I doubt I could have explicated them as clearly.  What matters in the Solar Cycle (and some other major and minor works, including Wizard Knight) is the 'feel' of the theme of a world that is haunted by a hidden/long-forgotten/yet-to-come Christ and God (be that through pseudo-Christs and pseudo-Gods, whatever:  the real ones are back behind it all somewhere, somehow).  I think Wolfe was intentionally enfleshing the (in some ways) post-Christian world of his day in the fictional removes of his work, letting the literary echoes his fictions created very slowly and obliquely find their way back into our conscious minds and actual cultures as his readers.  
> 
> Wolfe wasn't the first Catholic to do this.  Flannery O'Connor tackled her fiction in this exact fashion:  she said that so few people believed in the Church's 'Dogma' anymore that she couldn't assume it as a shared understanding with her readers when writing her stories.  Yet she knew she had no choice but to write from that perspective since those were her convinced convictions.  So she wove Catholic themes of Creation, Fall, and Redemption obliquely into her work by the back door.  It's not dishonest, by the bye - it's humble (and yes, sly - I would say wise.)  Walker Percy explicitly used phrases in his novels like 'our Christ-haunted USA' - Wolfe, I think, in his saying the same thing in his tortuous, devious, ludic way.  R. A. Lafferty too (whose work Wolfe admired and whom Wolfe thought was an actual genius) did similar things in his fiction that I won't go into here.
> 
> Comparison with his contemporaneous Catholics in writing would probably go a long way toward helpfully interpreting Wolfe.
> 
> -DOJP
> 
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I forget which interview it is where Wolfe says that Silk is a member of the "Order of the Seekers of Truth and Penitence" ... which I think a lot of people (me included) interpreted as saying not that he's secretly a torturer, but that he and the Seekers are actually members of "The Church."
> 
> But the logic here can be taken in a weak and a strong sense.
> 
> The weak sense is that they're all touched by a "real God' in some vague way: for Silk, it's the Outsider's revelation; for Severian, it's whatever motivates him to try to act like Christ (the whole Christ-figure, not actual Christ thing). But it's a very generally spiritual and admittedly vague connection of membership in a spiritual or religious "community."
> 
> The strong sense, though, suggests that the Guild is actually the Church. I mean, I once thought the Guild was an actual forgotten descendant and corruption of the Catholic Church. (That was before the list had me worried about multiple universes, and I just assumed that the story was about "our future".) If both characters receive some kind of direct revelation, and both are actually part of "The Church," how much does it really matter that this might be occurring in a universe without a historical Christ or in an iteration of a universe before there was an actual Christ (our own)?
> 
> My point is really that I don't quite understand the significance of the argument over whether the Christian symbolism which we all agree is one way or another "there" in the book must be read as pre-Christian or forgotten-Christian. I assumed that the whole setup basically sets an actual awareness of "true theology" at a vast distance from these characters, and their revelations and moments of grace are always both frustrating and illuminating because they're in a culture that both needs and resists those moments. In other words, when thinking about what Severian or Silk actually experience and about their narrative arcs, does it matter whether or not this world actually had a Christ? Either way, these characters know nothing about the historical events, and that's what really matters. It's their distance from the truth (no matter which direction in time) that gives their stories a real spiritual tension and urgency.
> 
> From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>
> To: urth at urth.net 
> Sent: Friday, March 9, 2012 12:10 PM
> Subject: (urth) The Wizard
> 
> 
> >Gerry Quinn: So I don’t see how you can argue that Christianity is not mentioned.
> 
> Because it isn't. Quasi-Christian symbols and concepts can be found from pre-Christ
> times on earth. Notably in the Egyptian and Roman cultures from which the Whorl society
> is most closely modelled upon.  
> 
> I don't think the presence of Christian-like symbols in ancient times means that means 
> Christianity existed before Jesus Christ. So I don't think similar symbols in the story 
> need indicate Christianity in the Sun Series.
> 
> In a previous post I agreed with the possibility of the scenario Dan'l recently 
> posted: That Silk's vision of a Jesus-like guy was in fact Jesus Christ of earth
> and the Outsider draws the image from across universes to provide that vision. Like 
> Dan'l, I don't see much evidence of a Christ on Urth. Postulating a secret, hidden, 
> society of Christians somewhere on Urth and unmentioned by the author just isn't very 
> convincing.
> 
> If you are unwilling to acknowlege that quasi-Christian symbolism existed before
> Christ on earth I could sorta see how the "sign of addition" might appear as proof 
> postive that Christ existed on Urth. Still I would think the presence of haruspicy
> (divination via animal entrails) and augury (divination via flight patterns of birds)
> by the priests of Viron would at least hint that this is a pre-Christian, pagan sort 
> of religion.
> 
> 
>                           
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