Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 09:18:21 -0800
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: (urth) DOORS: Green's intelligence

Adam Stephanides wrote:
>I have to admit, when I last read TAD (several years ago, at least) it never
>struck me that Green was lacking in intelligence (or courage, or
>enterprise).  And rereading the confrontation scene with Lara (chap. 31),
>Green seems no less intelligent than Wolfe's other protagonists.
>
>Actually, now that I think about it, Wolfe's main male characters in his
>novels written after TBOTNS all seem to me to be more or less the same
>person, except for Horn in OBW (and possibly Latro in the Soldier books, my
>memory of which is sketchy).

Respectfully I disagree.  The intriguing "Viridian" passage at the
beginning of the book might at first seem like a Wolfean lexical exercise
-- "Typical," one might say.  Erudite.  But I find it very interesting that
Green has this color vocabulary because of the appliances and computers
that he sells: these are words used by the manufacturers and has picked
them up.

This fact, that he is a computer/gizmo salesman, feeds well into my growing
sense of Lara the techno-goddess.

Notice what happens when Green has been forcefully rehabilitated: he is put
into Furnishings, a retro-world, a non-electronic world.  He starts selling
a lot, and reading up: he learns a new lexicon, this time related to
furniture.  You know what happens next: Love crashes through his new world
in the form of a seaman's desk!

No matter where he is, White Goddess Love is going to ferret him out.

=mantis=



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