From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (urth) PEACE
Date: Mon, 12 May 97 15:12:00 GMT


[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

Reply:  Item #9570055 from URTH@LISTS.BEST.COM@INET01#

Jason Voegele,

Welcome aboard!

Re: Wolfe's "solipsistic tendency," I'm pretty sure I know what you
mean (even though I'll admit that I'm imagining this whole
conversation while caught in a daydream about being a human being . .
. <g>), but I would argue or qualify the solipsism in each text.  In
some Wolfe stories, like "Melting," sure, that one is 100% pure
solipsism.  "Toy Theater" is much more ambiguous.  But I find I disagree
with readings of New Sun that veer too far into solipsism--not that
you've done this, mind you.

Re: is Weer aware that he is dead?  Interesting question.  I have a
sense that if/when he finally comes to grips with that fact he will
cease his haunting.

Re: "Who's that behind you?"  I have to admit that this rings bells
in the literary dept. of my brain--T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland,"
wherein the same haunting question is derived from the journals of
English adventurers climbing Mt. Everest and having hallucinations
from lack of oxygen.  (It also evokes the missionaries in the jungle
garden of Nessus sensing the presence of Severian and Agia.)  But, to
get back to PEACE, I suspect that the dimmer one is the reader.
"You."

(And what does =this= reading do to the solipsistic mode?  It opens
the "one alone in universe" into that literary construct of "reader and
author alone in universe"; feeding the stream of fictions that
self-reference their own fictitious nature; etc.)

I am not aware of any discussion or archive thereof focused on THE FIFTH
HEAD OF CERBERUS.

=mantis=