From: "Jonathan Laidlow" <LAIDLOJM@hhs.bham.ac.uk>
Subject: (urth) Utter agreement
Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 12:39:21 GMT


Ah Nigel, as I'm off to join the Ascians on Sunday and will not be on 
Urth again until June, I thought I'd offer a revision of my last 
comments to you. 

Don't worry - I haven't been driven off by the frightening reaction 
to my 'infamous' posts. not really. I just need a holiday.

I don't think you need to refute my posts on modernism/. I'm entirely 
in agreement with you. I don't think that modernism suggests a 
disassociation with the 'real' in any way. Rather, it's an attempt to 
reconnect with it in a new and interesting way. 'Realist' fiction 
presupposes an easy connection with exterior reality. Modernist 
fiction sees that any connection with reality is problematic, and 
attempts to find a new solution.

By stating that he was a Modernist I really wanted to draw the 
discussion away from analysing the cryptic surface details (important 
though they are) and towards the implications of these details on teh 
greater story. When I stated that I couldn't picture Severian I was 
trying to argue that the actual details of his appearance are less 
important than the resonances of the way he is described, and the 
things he actually does.

I think one of the mistakes in Peter Wright's Foundation essay 
(despite my agreement with him on many points) on Wolfe's God-Games 
is that while proposing that the BotNS plays with metafictional games 
he then approaches the hieros family behind those games in a 
quasi-realist way: they are JUST aliens messing with Urth's 
collective head. He can't accept the implications of the religious 
imagery, or the story about the cock and the archangel (who is closer 
to God, but knows no more than the animals what his intentions are): 
that, as you so correctly say 'the possibility remains that it may 
still serve a greater, divine, purpose.'

I intend to write some kind of longer essay for the website or 
elsewhere on what I really mean by Wolfe's Modernism. i seem to have 
been so misunderstood because of my ill-chosen words that I ought to 
clarify it with a full examination of theories of modernism in SF.

Have a great May everyone, talk to you all in June.

Jonathan

Carry on Torturer
Frankie Howerd IS the Autarch

********************************************************

Jonathan Laidlow
Modern Languages Office - Muirhead Tower 408
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT, England
0121 414 5976

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