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

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

I've always wondered about that phrase, "unwashed Philistines." Is there
any reason to believe that Philistines bathed less frequently than their
neighbors?

Inquiring minds want to know.

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
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