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On 3/15/2012 7:46 PM, Craig Brewer wrote:
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cite="mid:1331855173.81013.YahooMailNeo@web121002.mail.ne1.yahoo.com"
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<div><span>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.</span></div>
<div><br>
<span></span></div>
<div><span>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.</span></div>
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</blockquote>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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 <i>within the text</i>, 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?<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
Now we know there WAS more information, were the first four books a
<i>conscious </i>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?<br>
<br>
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?<br>
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