From: "Ori Kowarsky" <orik@sprint.ca>
Subject: Re: Re: (urth) Messianic
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 18:31:29 

Ron Hale-Evans wrote:

>If you believe us to live in that sort of universe, then your quarrel is
>with God, among others. But if you do not, then your quarrel is with Wolfe
>himself.

I think my quarrel, if you can call it that, is with people who invert the
plain meaning of a text without providing a cogent analysis which supports
their view.  Interviews with Gene Wolfe are proof of nothing except the
strings of words that came out of Gene Wolfe's mouth in the course of the
interview.  If an author said "I wrote this book to be a masterpiece" are we
therefore bound to accept his word above all of our critical faculties and
declare it a masterpiece despite the self-evident qualities of said book?
If Wolfe wrote TBOTNS to show how God works through suffering, then that
might have been his intention (or his intention ex post facto;  I remember
his original intention being to write a book about blackmail), but I would
argue that in that case he has failed, because he has failed to provide
within the text a through-line which connects the sufferings of the people
of Urth with any divine power;  perhaps he was being too coy, or assumed
that each reader would provide his or her own bridge to cross that river and
so failed to provide one within the book itself (a mistake which he perhaps
recognizes in Urth of the New Sun where he throws in a variety of broad
hints which serve to muddy his own theological waters and make the book less
interesting to boot).  My argument, therefore, is that if Wolfe did indeed
have these intentions while writing the four books of TBOTNS, and, as I
argue, failed in doing so, in the process of that failure created a superb
work about the exact opposite -- perhaps that's where all the mirrors come
in.




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