From: James Jordan <jbjordan4@home.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Re: Horn dies
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 09:24:38 

At 12:23 AM 2/27/2001 -0500, you wrote:

>The characters are themselves, but they also act in the patterns of
>the Christian story (and, though it's less thematically central, they
>go about taking on the roles of Ulysses and Odin and others as
>well...)  I suspect that Wolfe doesn't even see this necessarily as a
>literary device.  If certain historical events are also the essential
>story of the universe, it is not a stretch to expect a God who acts in
>history to "retell" echoes of that story throughout time.  Or, as
>Chesterton says about God being "young enough" to enjoy telling the
>Sun to rise every day, not getting bored with it as we would*, Wolfe
>believes the Outsider could go on telling stories about exodus, the
>blind seeing, the lame walking, and death and resurrection.

This is called "typology," and it is the way Christians read the Old 
Testament: various events and sequences of events anticipate by analogy the 
events in Jesus' life. Similarly, events after Jesus' life reflect 
backwards the events of His life. No surprise that Wolfe sees things this 
way -- he's doubtless heard many homilies in church along these lines -- 
especially in a series of novels that are fairly explicitly "Biblical."

Pat. Nut. 


*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request@lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth@lists.best.com