(urth) "Sci-Fi’s Difficult Genius", Peter Bebergal

Marc Aramini marcaramini at gmail.com
Fri Apr 24 13:05:55 PDT 2015


Looks like the day is rapidly approaching when I won't be able to snicker
at the unwashed philistines at the New Yorker.

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:

>
> It's a nice article IMO.  Might not bring him readers unverrsed in SF, but
> that's probably a good thing.  If someone is  unfamiliar with SF tropes,
> Wolfe's SF will be beyond them.
>
> - Gerry Quinn
>
>
> On 24/04/2015 16:34, Gwern Branwen wrote:
>
>> "Sci-Fi’s Difficult Genius", Peter Bebergal
>> http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sci-fis-difficult-genius
>>
>>  On the phone from his home in Peoria, Gene Wolfe explained to me
>>> recently that Latro’s memory loss does not make him an unreliable narrator,
>>> as many critics assume. Instead, Latro might reveal only the truth that
>>> matters. Latro must ask himself, Wolfe said, “What is worth writing, what
>>> is going to be of value to me when I read it in the future? What will I
>>> want to know?” These are questions that Wolfe has been asking himself, in
>>> one form or another, for decades. His stories and novels are rich with
>>> riddles, mysteries, and sleights of textual hand. His working lexicon is
>>> vast, and his plots are unspooled by narrators who deliberately confuse or
>>> are confused—or both.
>>>
>>> ...Moments like this have turned many of Wolfe’s fans into something
>>> like Biblical exegetes, who dig deep into his texts in the hope of finding
>>> clues not only to the plots and the characters but to Wolfe’s larger
>>> intentions. Partly what readers are excavating is Wolfe’s Catholicism,
>>> which he is quick to say figures into his writing. “What is impossible is
>>> to keep it out,” he told me. “The author cannot prevent the work being his
>>> or hers.” Flannery O’Connor, in her essay “Novelist and Believer,” cautions
>>> novelists to use religious concerns in ways that do not alienate the
>>> reader, to render encounters with the ineffable so that even those who
>>> might not understand or care for a particular metaphor—Aslan the Lion as
>>> Christ, for example—can still be moved by it. Many critics have speculated
>>> that Severian is a Christ figure: he brings the New Sun and puts an end to
>>> the cruelty of torture. But Wolfe wraps his Catholicism in strange language
>>> and cryptic images. Truth of any kind, no matter how closely you read, is
>>> hard to come by in Wolfe’s books. And yet, over time, it does seem to
>>> emerge.
>>>
>>> During his journey, Latro is accompanied by another soldier, a black man
>>> whose name he doesn’t know. Though Latro keeps forgetting what they have
>>> gone through together, their friendship builds. “The heart remembers,”
>>> Latro says, “even when no trace of face or voice remains.” This man comes
>>> running up to him, “shouting, his arms in the air,” and though Latro does
>>> “not know where we met or why I love him (though no doubt those things are
>>> written somewhere on this scroll),” he can’t stop smiling. “Without
>>> thinking at all about what I should do,” he tells us, “I embraced him as a
>>> brother.”
>>>
>>> This passage comes to mind when Wolfe, over the phone, tells me about
>>> grappling in his own life with the complicated questions of memory and
>>> truth that he has long been thinking through in his novels. His wife,
>>> Rosemary, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease; she died in December, 2013.
>>> “There was a time when she did not remember my name or that we were
>>> married, but she still remembered that she loved me,” Wolfe recalled. His
>>> narrators may be prophets, or liars, or merely crazy, but somewhere in
>>> their stories they help to reveal what Wolfe most wants his readers to
>>> know: that compassion can withstand the most brutal of futures and exist on
>>> the most distant planets, and it has been part of us since ages long past.
>>>
>>
>
>
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