From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (urth) Greetings and a thought
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 99 00:27:00 GMT

Hello and welcome Cliff Drane.

Right, most (all?) of our arguments (<ahem>, "discussions") revolve
around the appropriate degree of "reading between different texts" in
interpreting the Urth Cycle as a whole as well as individual
sentences.  From the relatively early (and with hindsight rather
simple?) question of "Who is Dorcas, anyway?" (which the most
literal/least heuristic reader can honestly, truthfully, and with
full text support answer: "Just some girl--no blood relation to
Severian") up to the latest mind-boggling investigation-of-the-day.

And some people, full of distrust to begin with, or despairing of the
way that the text wiggles around with "creative ambiguity," some
people, I say, feel that the whole thing is a form of "torture" or
bullying being perpetrated by author (Gene Wolfe) on readers who are
gullible enough to fall for the joke.  "There is no =there= there" is
the common sort of dismissal among these people (as well as those
readers who simply have a blindspot with regard to Wolfe's work); the
sense being that the text has no real depth, no real substance, it is
all an illusion created with literary tricks of allusion--"smoke and
mirrors," if you will.

=mantis=

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/