From: "Steve Strickland" <SSTRICKLAND@satx.rr.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible Copyists: a Textual Con sideration of the "Book of Silk"
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 20:35:11 

A nice piece of work, Dan'l, but I think Rostrum's remarks hit the mark
closest, especially when he said:

"Perhaps Wolfe is being a gentleman; he
doesn't insist that you accept the existence of God in order to
enjoy his story."

In short, I think it is deliberate religious ambiguity Wolfe is attempting
to generate, in much the same way that he generated ambiguity in "The Book
of the New Sun."

Somewhere, maybe it is in one of the "Castle of Days" articles or in an
interview I read somewhere, Mr. Wolfe wrote about the relationship between
his faith and his writing, particularly with respect to the Book of the New
Sun.  (Conveniently) I don't remember exactly what he said, but my
impression from the piece was that he was deliberately ambiguous on the
question of religion, that TBOTNS was not a religious work, but a secular
work, and that, thus, Mr. Wolfe was careful to preserve a certain ambiguity
in that regard.

Where is the religious ambiguity in TBOTNS?  Well, for instance, I think,
almost certainly, that Master Ash's bleak and scientific outlook depicted
part of that ambiguity.   Maybe, too, the notion visited in "Sword of the
Lictor" that, if the universe had existed for an infinite time, all things,
including angels, would have come into existence by logical necessity.  And,
from my religious perspective, it's hard to imagine a more terrifying story
than Melito's story from the "Citadel of the Autarch" of "The Cock, the
Angel, and the Eagle", especially as that story was revisited and affirmed
as true in "Urth of the New Sun."   The point is that within TBOTNS Mr.
Wolfe himself generates an alternative religious interpretation of the world
in which his story takes place, something that an atheistic would be much
more comfortable with than a priest.  (Though there's also plenty of room
for the priest's interpretation.)  To me, this ambiguity is most excellent
and makes the work, not only uplifting (as would be a purely religious
work), but also subtly frightening.

In Long Sun and Short Sun, I think there's a similar principle and purpose
at work (same author, after all).  The technique here is to raise a question
about the veracity/accuracy of the storyteller.  It is thus possible that
the story has an entirely naturalistic interpretation, that, for instance,
the divine visitations, Silk's goodness, could be written in after the fact.
It is again subtly frightening.

Yikes!  I just read what I just wrote.  It probably doesn't make any sense
at all.  Sorry.

Imperator




----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy@siebel.com>
To: <whorl@lists1.ba.best.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 5:39 PM
Subject: (whorl) Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible Copyists: a
Textual Con sideration of the "Book of Silk"


> This will wander a little off the Lupine track, but trust me,
> it's heading straight back there. Some points of Rostrum's
> screed got my head working, and I've got a basic thesis on
> what Wolfe is doing and why.
>
> The first of Rostrum's remarks that I responded to was this:
>
> > I remember feeling this way at the end of tBOTLS, the idea that
> > some of the wonderful things Horn had told me about Silk might
> > have been exaggerations or wishful thinking gave me a certain
> > (fun) chill, but I never felt we have enough evidence to try to
> > go back and sift and somehow uncover the "real" Silk behind
> > Horn's story.
>
> Now, I didn't really get that kind of shock out of the revelation
> that "I, Horn, wrote this years later, with some help." What I
> _did_ get out of it was a weird sense that Wolfe had patterned
> this whole thing somehow after model the Catholic church
> uses to describe the formation of the (written) Gospels.
>
> Briefly, for non-[Catholic-Bible-scholars]: The basic idea the
> Catholic church endorses is that the Gospels were formed in
> three "layers":
> 1. The events that actually occurred in the greater
>    Jerusalem metropolitan area ca. 4 BC - 33 AD.
> 2. The memories of those events carried by eyewitnesses
>    and the communities founded by those eyewitnesses.
> 3. The setting-down of those memories by the communities,
>    probably late in the first century.
> The Catholic answers to questions like "Yeah, but how do we know
> it's true?" and "Well, what about the way they [seem to] conflict
> with each other?" are deeply entrenched in that model, but it
> gets pretty complicated at that point.
>
> Now, what I _think_ we have in Horn's "Book of Silk" is something
> similar: Horn was, admittedly, an eyewitness to some of these
> events -- a fairly small proportion of them. He's gone around
> interviewing people, filled in the details as best he can, and
> freely admits he made the rest up to complete the narrative. It
> isn't good historiography, but it suffices; it gives the sense
> of someone who isn't a historian doing the best he can. The made-
> up stuff, while perhaps not accurate, isn't a lie, in the sense
> of an untruth meant to deceive; it is intended to convey a sense
> of the probable truth.
>
> So we have all three stages compressed into one text:
>
> 1. We have Horn's own authentic(?) memories of Silk.
>
> 2. We have the community's memories of Silk.
>
> 3. The "Book of Silk" _as written by Horn & Nettle_
>    collecting and collating their own memories with
>    those of the community.
>
> Unfortunately, there's an implicit Stage 4, which is also
> implicit in the Catholic model:  The copyists get hold of
> the text, and a long time later, scholars try to trace the
> provenance of textual variants backwards and determine the
> "true" original text of Stage 3.
>
> In the case of the BOOK OF THE LONG SUN, we feel like we have
> the product of Stage 3, but the Narrator's comments in SHORT
> SUN lead us to wonder whether we might actually have a corrupt
> copy, and how corrupt? Nor do Horn's comments at the end of
> LONG SUN make it any easier to determine; compare them to the
> first four verses of the Gospel according to Luke, and then
> find out how much work goes into preparing a good textual
> "edition" of that Gospel. Assurances by the author of the
> text's accuracy do not greatly help when the text has been
> hand-copied many times.
>
>
>
> Which leads me to another of Rostrum's points:
>
> > It's not that Wolfe leaves things ambiguous because he doesn't
> > care whether you believe in Silk's enlightenment.   Rather
> > he's giving you the same kind of evidence that we have in the
> > real world--do you trust the people who claim to have had an
> > encounter with God and (equally important) the community of
> > people who have told and retold their stories?  Can we hope
> > that, though mediated though our own fallibility and the
> > fallibility of others, we can still have some genuine knowledge
> > of God?
>
> We have, in THE BOOK OF THE LONG SUN, one of the following:
> a) Horn and Nettle's "Book of Silk"
> b) one of many possible variant texts
> c) someone's "edition" of same
> -- and nothing to help us which. We are, in fact, in the precise
> position of a non-scholarly reader of the Bible, or perhaps (given
> that this discussion is happening at all) a medieval scholar with
> no access to modern textual studies.
>
> So: paraphrasing Rostrum, can we hope that, though mediated
> though our own fallibility and the fallibility of others, we can
> still have some genuine knowledge of Silk?
>
> I think the answer is, and has to be, "Yes," because the
> possibility that it's all made-up (within the Lupine universe
> of discourse) is too drab to be worth discussing.
>
> All this brings me to my basic thesis.
>
> What Wolfe has reproduced, here, is the basic problem of putting
> faith in a written Scripture. The following paragraph refers
> equivocally to the Bible (for us, or at least those of us to
> whom the Bible represents something more than a reactionary symbol
> of patriarchal oppression) and to The Book of Silk (for a
> representative inhabitant of the Lupiverse, modulo similar
> concerns).
>
> "What can we believe about this text or its contents? By itself,
> it is completely incapable of witnessing to its own veracity,
> and we are not even capable of coming to certainty on what the
> text actually does say in some places; yet many have believed
> and do believe that it is a true account of the most important
> thing that ever happened in this world. To believe that it is
> completely made up by its author or authors seems impossible;
> to believe that it is accurate, on a word-by-word, factual
> basis, seems even more impossible (though there are some
> extremists who in fact believe each of those things)."
>
> -----------------------------
>
> Now, when Rostrum writes, "Perhaps Wolfe is being a gentleman; he
> doesn't insist that you accept the existence of God in order to
> enjoy his story," I disagree rather vehemently; to deny Silk's
> enlightenment is to make the whole LONG SUN (and, by transference,
> SHORT) fall apart, meaningless and incoherent. He even sets that
> possibility up as a straw man (Crane's cerebral accident theory),
> and _doesn't_ provide us with arguments about it, because it is
> ridiculous _prima facie_. There is, I think, no way to take the
> supernatural element out of the SUN books in any kind of "good
> faith" (in the existential sense).
>
> Still, I agree that "[t]here is a sense in which telling a story
> from a third-person, omniscient viewpoint is cheating."
>
> There is. And there is another sense in which all stories are
> told from that viewpoint, even those told by a limited and
> unreliable first-person narrator. The reader (well, all but the
> most childlike and passive reader) sits outside the universe of
> discourse and, if not omniscient, is at least outside the
> viewpoint of the narrator, judging it. Without that basic fact,
> the concept of an unreliable narrator would be entirely
> meaningless.
>
>
> Again: "We never know the world that way."
>
> No, we don't. But somehow we _conceive_ the world that way. We have
> a sense that there is a single, coherent reality, even if our own
> limited knowledge can never get at it. Living in a universe run by
> quantum mechanics doesn't really change that; it defines the limits
> of how much we can know about it. (If there is an omniscient and
> omnipotent Creator, Heisenberg's Law is a clear and present "No
> Trespassing" sign.)
>
>
> --------------------------------------
> Enough.
>
> --Blattid/Dan'l
>
>
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