(urth) Lupiverse(es)

[David Stockhoff]

On 3/15/2012 7:46 PM, Craig Brewer wrote:
> Yep. I'm not Catholic, but it doesn't really matter. I don't like 
> Wolfe because I *believe* him or have to share his worldview. I'm not 
> looking to have myself confirmed in someone else's fiction.
>
> But those who read him with a real eye for a kind of esoteric 
> knowledge or even for certain gnostic insights might. But those 
> readings also often overlook the story in favor of the background.

I wonder if there isn't a very good reason for the apparent fact that 
Urth inspires so much yearning for just that "esoteric knowledge" and 
insight in its interpreters. Wolfe is normally quite terse and oblique, 
but it's not The Ziggurat that keeps coming up again and again in this 
forum. I think few of us here have not felt the pull of that yearning to 
know another secret.

Severian's narrative shows any number of gnostic trappings. The culture 
that is its setting, beginning with the mysteries of the guild where he 
was raised, clearly values secrets over the sharing of knowledge. He 
repeatedly hides and reveals, hides and reveals in his own narration. 
Even when information is released, it is often in parable or garbled 
form. Consistently, Wolfe wraps tiny seeds of truth in layers of 
interpretation and interpolation. The writing of TUOTNS proves that as 
much was suggested as was revealed by releasing further information few 
of us could have guessed---though much of it presumably was created 
after BOTNS was finished, to make a fully-fleshed story out of this 
information.

Several purposes have been proposed for these multilevel tendencies, and 
most seem valid. For example, Wolfe plainly has theories about knowledge 
and history as well as of the divine and of literature itself, and 
therefore he plays with myth as a mode of creation as well as of 
communication, encryption, and enlightenment.

And he lays it on pretty thick. Regardless of intent, the form of the 
story fits its apparent function of pointing to bigger things offstage. 
But is that "yearning" more than just an accumulation of narrative 
effects effects and coincidences? Mystery is at the very heart of the 
story. Severian himself is a question, and he is a Seeker for Truth. 
Little of what we know about his story is known; much of what we think 
we know, we have guessed, and much of what we are told is suspect. The 
very universe he dwells in becomes matter for speculation /within the 
text/, and what is the big question that keeps coming up again and 
again? Why, the very one raised just a few days ago: is there a Christ 
in it? If so, who and where?

I used to think this suggestive silence was an attempt to hide or dress 
up the kernel of Severian's story as Christ figure, as well as any 
deeper layers. But the overall effect of it seems to go beyond that, to 
awaken exactly this yearning for hidden knowledge---the suspicion that 
there is more to the story than meets the eye, more to be revealed.

Now we know there WAS more information, were the first four books a 
/conscious /exercise in esotericism? Is this how Wolfe came to overdo it 
so much he had to write a fifth book to explain them---not just because 
his puzzles were too obscure, but because the whole puzzle aspect was 
planned top-down?

If so, then to go further: Was it a conscious attempt at encapsulating 
the human desire for divine knowledge? Not just who-are-we, 
where-do-we-come-from, where-are-we-going, but also 
what-is-our-relation-to-the-infinite?
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