<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> Lee Berman <severiansola@hotmail.com><br><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></b></font><br>[Principle of parsimony in fiction]<br><br>>>Jerry Friedman: There has to be one. We don't worry about whether all the characters in BotNS <br>>>are Talking Beasts that Severian misleads us about, or Holmes's deductions about <br>>>his clients are false and the clients confirm them just to be polite, or Helen <br>>>of Troy was a male transvestite.<br> ><br>>The Occam's Razor principle demands that the simplest answer which
accounts for all the evidence<br>>must be the correct one. Its absence (in understanding fiction) does not demand we pick the most<br>>outrageous, unsupported answer, of the kind you suggest above.<br> ><br>>Occam's Razor is a principle useful in science and detective work to counter the human imagination's<br>>tendency to find an infinite number of false patterns in naturally occurring phenomena.<br><br>But of course the human imagination can find false patterns in human-created phenomena too, and if we<br>care about avoiding them, parsimony will help.<br><br>>When I use the<br>>term I mean to imply Isaac Newton's definition: ""We are to admit no more causes of natural things than <br>>such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."<br> <br>Okay. When I use "parsimony" I mean that we don't have to look for elaborate or poorly supported explanations when we have simple or well-supported
ones.<br><br>>My point is that fiction is not like science. It is like religion. There is a Creator. Our study and our<br>>goal is not to make sense out of some riotous chaos. We are trying to understand the intelligent <br>>purpose of the work of a single, human intelligence. <br> <br>>>Parsimony in fiction may not work the way it does in real life, though.<br> <br>>We can agree on this, at least.<br><br>For instance, maybe principles like the Gricean maxims apply--though not exactly like.<br> <br>>>We can be certain of one thing, though: There are no rules of story-telling.<br> ><br>>I suppose, but Geen Wolfe and I agree on something: there are rules to GOOD story-telling. From the<br>>Nick Gevers interview:<br> ><br>>>GW: There's a wonderful bit in the Roger Rabbit movie nobody seems to get. Roger goes around with >>handcuffs on his wrists for half an hour. Then he pulls one hand out of the cuffs and
does something with<br>>>it, and sticks it back in. Bob says, "You mean to tell me you could get out of those whenever you wanted<br>>>to?" And Roger says, "No, only when it's funny." That is a profound expression of the law that governs<br>>>all writers and performers. The audience doesn't have to think about that, but writers are bound by it. If<br>>>there's a gun on the wall in Act I, it must be fired before the end of the play. Etc. <br> <br>And yet, as I said, he wrote "Under Hill", where the gun specifically isn't fired. I wonder whether he was<br>thinking about the Chekhov quotation.<br><br>In any case, I disagree with you and him. He's justifying his decision to have Silkhorn meet Severian,<br>one of his few decisions that to my taste were totally lame.<br><br>>This is what I am suggesting. Aunt Jeannine and Aubrey Veil are "arguing" over whether Veil's<br>>hypothesis about the replacement of all
humanity in the system is true. Veil didn't suggest SOME<br>>people had been replaced. Even David and Number Five debate that abos are *all* dead. That's<br>>the gun that Wolfe placed on the wall in Act I. It can't be partially fired as a satisfying conclusion to<br>>this carefully crafted story. <br><br>There's no accounting for taste. A conclusion that SOME people had been replaced would satisfy me just fine.<br><br>Jerry Friedman<br></div></div>
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