Described as “Lovecraft meets Blade Runner”. You can purchase it from Amazon UK using the link below, although Amazon UK seems to think it’s coming out in November. It’s the same ISBN, so this may just be an error, and not a different edition.

This essay was written for John Clute’s proposed book of essays on Gene Wolfe’s fiction. Back in the early 90s, before the Internet as we know it existed, I was posting messages on the Gene Wolfe topic at GEnie (it was a message board system). Before long, Gregory Feeley kindly suggested that I write an essay for John Clute’s proposed anthology of Wolfe criticism. It seemed at the time that the book would be published by 1994. It may well be that my essay killed the whole project with its leaden prose. I once read it aloud at a bookstore and literally put people to sleep–good people, I might add. [Jeremy Crampton's essay, Some Greek Themes in Gene Wolfe's Latro novels, was also written for Clute's collection of essays]

The publication of Lexicon Urthus (1994) was still in the unknown future when I wrote this, but the Lexicon did exist in manuscript form and was looking for a publisher. So in many ways, the essay was intended to be an overture for the Lexicon, showing a bit of the work ahead of time.

Now it serves to celebrate the publication of Lexicon Urthus, Second Edition (2008). In preparing the essay, I initially thought I’d insert commentary in the Clute style, using square brackets, pointing out details where my thoughts in 2008 are different from those in 1992. But upon looking it over, warts and all, I find I’d rather not clutter it up more than it already is. Instead I will put that energy into a new Wolfe essay altogether.

So without further ado, allow me to present the essay itself: hidden for sixteen years, a “lost overture” to lexicons past and present.

Catherine has been getting a lot of attention of late, not merely as the most-likely mother of Severian the Great, but also as the secret identity of the Old Autarch himself, according to John Clute (1986) and Gregory Feeley (1991). Clute and Feeley devised the epithet ‘the Weal’ for this hypothetical autarch Catherine, a term which I will borrow for my own purposes.

One cannot quarrel with the notion of Catherine as mother of Severian, and the family tree now seems fairly clear and straightforward: Dorcas and “Charonus” (if one can label anonymous characters by their role in the text) begat Ouen, Ouen and Catherine begat twins Severian and Merryn, or Severian and the mandragora (if this last is not actually the mandrake root its name suggests), or, least probable, all three. On the other hand, the notion that Catherine is the Old Autarch appears less likely, in spite of the fact that it would seem to solve a central mystery of The Book of the New Sun: the name of the autarch and the motive for keeping it secret.

In the middle of such a quagmire, it is good to go back and re-examine the source of the controversy. From whence springs Catherine the Weal? Largely from the combination of: 1) textual evidence pointing to a biological relationship between Severian and the Old Autarch, and 2) textual evidence that a monial named Catherine is Severian’s mother. Does the evidence regarding the Old Autarch suggest he is Severian’s mother? No, it suggests that the Old Autarch is Severian’s father, but this is a theory shattered for most readers by the later evidence regarding Ouen, so the ‘Old Autarch as mother’ idea puts on an extra twist to maintain the theory of a biological link. Is it necessary that the Old Autarch be a biological parent of Severian? No, a spiritual parent would be sufficient.

That Catherine occupies a central role in The Book of the New Sun is attested to by the original title Wolfe gave to the work (which he supposed would be a novella): “The Feast of Saint Catherine.” In Castle of the Otter, he outlines the original plot:

Severian, an apprentice torturer, meets a lovely prisoner, Thecla, and falls in love with her. He becomes a journeyman . . . but continues their relationship. Eventually, she pleads with him for the means of suicide, and he leaves a knife in her cell. When he sees blood seeping from under her cell door, he confesses what he has done.

Eventually . . . he becomes a master . . . The guild has been forced to forgive him, and he has almost forgiven himself. Then he receives a letter from Thecla. The suicide was a trick, permitting her to be freed unobtrusively. Soon she will be exonerated and restored to her former position in society. She says that she still loves him, though it may be that she only feels guilty about using him as she did. She invites him to join her.

What is he to do?

As an honest man and a patriot–and he is both–he should denounce the whole affair; but if he does so, he will be disgraced again, the guild will be disgraced, and Thecla will almost certainly die. If he does as she asks, he will be reunited with her; but he will be a pariah . . . and he may well make her a pariah too, in which case she will probably come to hate him. If he simply burns her letter and ignores her, she will only come to hate him much sooner, and she will be in a position to exert great political influence, and to blackmail the other masters of the guild as well. (Needless to say, I had a solution–but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader.) (4).

A solution which would tie in with the proposed title would be for this Severian to kill and eat Thecla, using the analeptic alzabo to preserve and imprison his beloved within the citadel of his own flesh. She would ‘live,’ but only inside of him. He would take on this terrible burden to protect her, his guild, and himself. (It is also a nasty thing to do to her, which seems appropriate.) Most importantly, just as the Feast of Saint Catherine marks the elevation of torturer from apprentice to journeyman to master, so does the cannibalism of Thecla represent a further stage, wherein the figurative ‘feast’ becomes grotesquely real: the mystery of communion made concrete. At the moment she is consumed, Thecla becomes Catherine, rendered immortal by her killer, enshrined within a torturer’s cells.

However, that story was never written, and the mystery of Catherine was driven further beneath the surface, to mingle with the other mysteries, the most prominent being the identity of the Old Autarch, and at first glance, ‘Catherine the Weal’ seems like a most fitting answer to the autarchial question. But the keystone of the Autarch Catherine theory would appear to be a deeply rooted prohibition against dynastic autarchies, as Clute notes: “Autarchs . . . are forbidden to found dynasties” (Clute, Strokes, 171). This, then, is the dark sin Severian’s narrative covers up: that Catherine is autarch and her son inherits the throne. But a passage in The Book of the New Sun rules out this dynastic prohibition, for the Malrubius aquastor tells Severian, “If you fail, your manhood will be taken from you, so that you cannot bequeath the Phoenix Throne to your descendants” (IV, chapter 31, 214), that is to say, if he refuses the test, he can bequeath the throne to his offspring. An autarch can either stay on Urth and hand down the throne to his or her children, or an autarch can take the test, but the punishment for failure is desexing. Malrubius’s threat makes no sense in a world where dynasties are prohibited. Given that the position of autarch is open to either gender (most of the autarchs have been ‘common men and women’ [IV, chap. 34, 236] and then there is the term ‘autarchia’) dynasties in the thousand-year Age of the Autarch have probably been the rule rather than the exception.

Perhaps this reading of the supposed prohibition is a bit too literal, i.e., it is not that all autarchs are forbidden to found dynasties, but only those who fail the test. In this case the prohibition comes from Yesod rather than the Commonwealth, and Catherine has merely hedged her bets by cheating and having a child before taking the test. The Urth of the New Sun seems to discredit this notion:

“Sieur,” I said, “I can remember the examination of my predecessor.” . . .

Tzadkiel nodded. “It was necessary that you recall it; it was for that reason he was examined.”

“And unmanned?” The old Autarch trembled in me . . .

“Yes. Otherwise a child would have stood between you and the throne, and your Urth would have perished forever. The alternative was the death of the child. Would that have been better?” (Urth, chap. 21, 153).

The Hierogrammate Tzadkiel (whose name is that of a Kabbalistic Angel of Justice) alludes to hereditary autarchy, and also suggests that the relation between Severian and the Old Autarch is not one of child to biological parent. It seems unlikely, in a universe where Hierodule agents backtrack through the corridors of Time seeking verification, and even human high priestesses such as those of the Pelerines possess the ability to detect falsehood, that Tzadkiel has been duped.

So then why the big mystery?

To begin with the obvious, there are a few practical reasons why the Autarch is never named. As the top of the power pyramid in the Commonwealth, an autarch should be so distant from the common people as to be faceless. One need only remember Emperor Showa (Hirohito) of pre-War Japan to find a recent case where citizens were forbidden to look upon the face of their leader, in person or in picture, because to see the emperor’s face is to recognize him as human, and he is not human; rather, he is at the very least the embodiment of an institution. In the Urth Cycle, this lofty distance is reflected in the very mountains themselves, each of which has been carved into the likeness of an autarch, such that they border every horizon, ubiquitous yet far removed.

Another point is that names themselves have a great deal of magic: to know a person’s name is to have power over him, and fairy tales are full of cases where this alone is enough to undo a character, or slay a monster. Between text and reader, or ruler and populace, a name gives an immediate sense of mystery-dispelling familiarity, the difference between ‘His Majesty, the King’ and ‘King Mark.’ By knowing the ruler’s name, a pauper becomes a peer of the realm, in a sense. A third point is that names often disclose gender, and gender mystery is one of the main attributes of the Autarch. This mystery hints at the alchemical ideal of the hermaphrodite, where opposites are united, and sets the stage for the alzabo-induced chemical hermaphroditism of Severian (at which point it is seen as an abomination) as well as the Autarch (where it is revealed to be a prerequisite of leadership). The anthropological importance of this notion is clear, as such a revelation is usually the climax of ‘primitive’ male initiation rites around the world, wherein the headman, for example, proves that he has a ‘vagina’ (subincision of his penis) which bleeds when he re-opens it, simulating menstruation and the female-power associated with it. That this institutional position of autarch be faceless, nameless, and genderless is very important to the story, as Severian must first serve it as a torturer, then rebel against it as a Vodalarius, and finally come to terms with it by becoming it. And in the end, the name is nothing, the title (and the myriad lives it contains) is everything. ‘Here Comes Everyman,’ indeed.

Some readers (including Feeley) have made pointed reference to the use of the term “Old Autarch” in Urth as an uncharacteristically clumsy attempt to maintain the mystery of the autarch’s name. To this way of thinking, Severian is the one who should be called the Old Autarch, as Valeria has sat upon the throne for forty years. However, the period in question is still Severian’s reign. While this might seem to be merely a technicality, Valeria does not know the words of power, and there is no doubt that even the common people know this, as Eata tells Severian: “your autarchia, she was Autarch. People talked about it . . . and they said she didn’t have the words” (V, chap. 46, 328). So despite Valeria’s forty years on the throne, her marriage to Dux Caesidius, her title of Autarch, and the presence of Severian’s cenotaph, Valeria is still regent, Severian is still autarch, and his predecessor is still the Old Autarch.

In place of Catherine, consider the autarch Appian of “The Cat” (1983) as the autarch of The Book of the New Sun . He reigns during the scandal which sends Lomer into the antechamber; and since Lomer yet lives when Severian comes to the House Absolute, it is certainly possible that Appian might still rule. (See timeline.)

The informant on this tip is none other than Odilo II, the servant of the House Absolute whom Severian meets on his first visit, an insider who would be privy to all the secrets. His tale “The Cat” mentions no other autarch, yet it covers seventy-odd years of life within the House Absolute. As all of the Odilos seem to have a great love for the pomp and glory of the House Absolute, it would seem strange and out of character for him to neglect mentioning the ascent of a new autarch. Catherine the Weal, had she been autarch, would have to have gone to Yesod and been desexed sometime after the birth of Severian (roughly 20 years PS, or Prior to Severian’s reign) and before Thecla comes to the House Absolute (around 9 PS), since Thecla knows the Old Autarch, but again, Odilo II mentions nothing of the kind in recounting his early years as servant (beginning 16 PS).

It has been established that the Old Autarch spent his childhood in Famulorum village (Latin ‘famulor’: to be a servant), near the House Absolute (V, chap. 40, 284), that he served under the honey steward Paeon, and that he gained the throne by chance rather than design. (I use the male pronoun under the assumption that domestic service jobs are usually gender segregated, at least for novice and supervisor. Another small doubt against Catherine.) One likely motive for his anonymity is that his name harkens back to his humble origins, thus servants and residents alike would look askance at him, remembering him as a lowly servant. As the Autarch says, “I was a servant once . . . That is why they hate me” (IV, chap. 25, 176).

As Urth makes clear, the Old Autarch’s function, both in the story and in the world, is to prepare the way for Severian. His career and his trial mark the road the New Sun must follow. So Appian is a fittingly evocative name for him. ‘Appian’ is close to the Latin ‘apia’ (bee), an apt name for a servant under the honey steward, but it is closer to the Appian Way, the oldest and best preserved of all Roman roads, commenced by Appius Claudius, the censor, during the Roman Republic. There are also two saints Appian, and all three of these Appians can be said to have paved the way for others to follow.

There are a few weak points to the candidacy of Appian. While there is no doubt that there is an Autarch Appian, the question is the length of his reign: he is either ‘Appian the Lesser,’ reigning from 66 to 31 PS, succeeded by an as yet unnamed autarch; or he is ‘Appian the Elder,’ reigning from 66 to 1 PS. A sixty-five year reign might seem impossibly wrong (despite Hirohito’s reign of 64 years) but for the apparent natural longevity on Urth (Odilo I serves for more than 50 years, and even lifelong prisoner Lomer is 95 years old), possibly augmented by stellar-level technology available to the autarch, and the time distortions caused by riding a ship to Yesod. In addition, a long reign makes it more reasonable to think that, by the time of Severian, his name might have been hidden or forgotten, such that nobody in the country could know it but the senior (and needless to say, discreet) servants.

The crisis point in 30 PS, the point at which Appian is decided to be Elder or Lesser, is alluded to in Dr. Talos’s play, Eschatology and Genesis:

Prophet: “I know you for a practical man, concerned with the affairs of this universe alone, who seldom looks higher than the stars.”

Autarch: “For thirty years I have prided myself on that” (II, chap 24, 202).

The theatrical autarch, based in part upon Dr. Talos’s surprising knowledge of the reigning autarch, seems to indicate that he has ruled for thirty years–or that he has been a changed man, a man unconcerned with Yesod, for the same period. The latter suggests the time of the desexing. Another curious little mystery in or around 30 PS is the exile of Journeyman Palaemon, and it is intriguing to consider how this scandal could be related to the autarch’s failure in Yesod, or to the original idea for “The Feast of Saint Catherine.”

Palaemon is an odd duck: his name is both that of a saint and that of a classical god. This is an important signal, because throughout the Urth Cycle, followers of the New Sun are named after saints, while Enemies of the New Sun (Abaia, Erebus, Typhon) are named after mythological figures. Saint Palaemon is rather nondescript, but Palaemon the god bears some looking into: he was originally the mortal Melicertes, and became the marine god Palaemon when his mother Ino cast herself with him into the sea. Ino became Leucothea, the White Goddess who figures so prominently in Wolfe’s Soldier novels and There Are Doors. In any event, like Appian’s way to Yesod, Journeyman Palaemon paves a way for Journeyman Severian, a precedent for having him exiled rather than executed.

As solid as the evidence may be, Appian the Elder in no way addresses the particular elusive mystery of why the Autarch’s name is never written in Severian’s narrative, as Catherine the Weal at least attempts to do by answering “what is being hidden?” with “Severian’s mother is autarch.” Rather than assailing that vast and nebulous region, this paper will now endeavor to speculate upon a few minor mysteries, in the pioneer spirit of both Clute and Feeley, in an attempt to ascertain the hidden identities of Catherine, Thecla, and Juturna.

Catherine the teenage Pelerine

To begin with, let us assume that Catherine was born an exultant (if there is an exultant in Severian’s family tree, this appears to be the most likely spot), perhaps of the same family as Thecla and Thea. The historical Saint Catherine was also said to have been an aristocrat.

At a young age she joins the aristocratic Pelerines (’professional virgins’ who accept primarily exultants), and travels with them, much as Cyriaca did (III, chap. 5, 37).

At the age of thirteen or fourteen she meets Ouen in Nessus, probably through the by-then defunct cloisonne shop which had sold crucifixes to the Pelerines (as Feeley proposes). Dorcas’s side of the family had made the crucifixes, and the doubtlessly had connections to the Order. Ouen’s mother Cas (aka Dorcas) had apparently died giving birth to him, but when her husband dropped her into the Lake of Endless Sleep, her eyes opened, an event both of them remember. This suggests that Dorcas was a victim of foul play on the part of the Enemies of the New Sun, who saw that her grandson would become vitally important and tried to interfere by putting Dorcas into a deathlike trance. So Dorcas died by drowning, and her husband was an unwitting murderer. The event made a Charon out of him and gave her an intense fear of water.

Catherine either leaves the Order for some unknown reason (as Clute and Feeley suggest), or she becomes pregnant by Ouen and then leaves under threat of expulsion. We are reminded throughout the Urth Cycle that an exultant teenage girl has the stature of a woman: Severian’s fever dream of Thecla at his height (around 6′1″) when she was thirteen or fourteen (IV, chap. 4, 24), and the scandal involving Chatelaine Sancha (14 years old) and Lomer (28 years old) provides a parallel for what might have gone on between Catherine (13 years old) and Ouen (20 years old).

She is taken into custody in order to protect the unborn Severian from the Enemies of the New Sun (who had so nearly gotten Ouen), rather than for any criminal activity on her part. She gives birth in the Matachin Tower, one of the most heavily guarded and secure places on the planet, which also happens to have easy, permanent access to the Atrium of Time. (The Atrium is as much a time traveling building as the Last House is.) The mother of the guild becomes the mother of the man.

After giving birth, Catherine lives in the Atrium of Time complex, coming out once every subjective ‘year’ for the feast day. This is why she is never seen on any other day, and why she never changes: she never ages, and while tall for a commoner she is perhaps below average height for an exultant teenager (in fact, she might be a khaibit). Valeria, Severian’s future bride, is unquestionably living in the Atrium complex, safe from enemies. Severian says of Valiera, “There was an antique quality about her . . . that made her seem older than Master Palaemon, a dweller in forgotten yesterdays,” and then that her family “had waited, at first, to leave Urth with the autarch of their era” (I, chap. 4, 34). Valeria’s family is likely to have entered the complex around the time of Ymar’s successor, a thousand years earlier.

Finally, when the deluge transforms Urth into Ushas, it is quite possible that Catherine takes to the corridors of Time, becoming the Holy Katharine tortured by Autarch Maxentius early on in the Age of the Autarch. She becomes her own sainted namesake, just as her son Severian goes through various ‘incarnations’ as Apu-Punchau, Conciliator, Autarch, and New Sun. The mother of the man becomes the mother of the guild.

While Catherine is the most elusive of all the women in Severian’s life, her namesake St. Catherine is one of the most popular saints of all time, despite the fact that she probably never existed. Like Palaemon, Catherine is a figure with Christian as well as pagan roots. Catherine of Alexandria is said to have been a maiden martyred in A.D. 310 under Maximus Daza, and legend has it that she argued with fifty pagan philosophers before she was to be put to death by means of an engine fitted with a spiked wheel. (She overcame them all, and on this account she is considered the patroness of philosophers.) Then the wheel broke (legend adds roses bursting forth) and she was beheaded instead. Her alleged relics have been enshrined for the last thousand years in the Orthodox monastery of Mt. Sinai, but in 1969 her name was dropped from the liturgical calendar.

For the pre-Christian Catherine, a closer examination of the rosy/fiery Catherine Wheel is in order. Roses and fire are iconically nearly identical (a fact that Wolfe is well aware of: note how Frog calls fire ‘red flower’ [III, chap. 19, 136], and at the original center of Catherine’s cult in Sinai, the Asiatic Goddess was once depicted as the Dancer on the Fiery Wheel at the hub of the Universe. In the 8th century A.D., a Greek convent of priestess-nuns at Sinai called themselves kathari, meaning ‘pure ones,’ but this name is also akin to the kathakali temple-dancers of India, who performed the Dance of Time in honor of Kali, Goddess of the Karmic Wheel. A group of medieval Gnostics known as Cathari had great reverence for the wheel symbol, and considered St. Catherine almost as a female counterpart of God. Catholic prelates made efforts to have St. Catherine eliminated from the canon in the 15th and 16th centuries, after the Cathari were exterminated. So if Saint Catherine has a hidden name, it might well be ‘Kali.’

Thecla the nocturnal huntress

Allusions have been made to the correspondence between Thecla and St. Thecla, but no note has been made of the fact that St. Thecla is one of the most spurious saints in the canon. The legend of St. Thecla comes from an apocryphal document, the Acts of Paul (c. A.D. 170). It says that she was converted to Christ by St. Paul. She broke off an engagement to marry and dedicated her maidenhood to God, whereupon she was subjected to much persecution, in the form of attempts to kill her by fire and wild beasts. She retired to a cave where she lived for many years (recall the mine at Saltus). At the age of ninety she was again persecuted, by local medicine men who were jealous of her healing powers; she was saved from their hands by being swallowed by her cave, ending her martyrdom.

‘Thecla’ (meaning ‘famous one’) was a title of the Maiden Moon Goddess Artemis at Ephesus (now western Turkey), where she was worshipped in her second aspect as Nymph, an orgiastic Aphrodite with a male consort. Her shrine in Seleucia (Mesopotamia) was a popular pilgrimage center in pagan times, and remained so even after the goddess was Christianized as a saint. Tertullian (3rd century Roman theologian) knew she was nothing but an epithet of the Great Goddess, and he denied the legend connecting Thecla with St. Paul, hinting that Paul might have been honored by the connection. So Thecla’s hidden name might be ‘Artemis,’ and with this in mind, the unbelievable trials of St. Thecla can be recognized as the same sort of goddess rites that Inanna, to give an early example, had to perform.

So in Wolfe’s Thecla, with her memories of hunting both beasts and humans (the attacks on the prisoners in the antechamber), we find another disguised goddess.

Juturna of the deep

A third mother-figure for Severian is the undine Juturna, and hers is the name of a Roman water-goddess, responsible for putting out fires. Her name gives no pretense at being anything but an Enemy of the New Sun (a mythological name and a water-related one as well), and as concubine to Abaia, Juturna’s motives for sporadically helping Severian are obscure: she gives rebirth to him at the beginning of The Book of the New Sun, but later tries to lure him into drowning. She seems unique among her kind in being able to travel the corridors of Time, and she survives the deluge: these two points may form her motive (i.e., she has seen the future and is picking the winner). Aside from a cameo in a corridors of Time episode (IV, chap. 4, 25), Juturna appears four times in the Urth Cycle: 1) rebirth of Severian in volume one, 2) attempted drowning in volume 2, 3) her warning of deluge in Urth, and 4) pointing out the way to Brook Madregot in Urth. From her point of view as a time traveler, the order should probably be rearranged as 2-3-1-4.

Juturna is important for showing the link between what might be too readily termed ‘Good’ and ‘Evil.’ Just as the Djinni of The Arabian Nights can convert to the True Faith, so can the Other People of Urth come over to the side of the New Sun. The undines claim that they can swim between the stars, which is just what the Hierogrammate Tzadkiel does. This should come as no surprise: devils are just fallen angels, after all.

Goddesses of Urth

Thus, Severian’s mother-figures form a trinity of goddesses, each one an aspect of the Great Goddess: Catherine, or Kali, the fiery one, the absent mother; Thecla, or Artemis, the nocturnal huntress, the teacher (a little bit of Athene, here) who becomes the indwelling goddess; and Juturna, the frightful aquatic guide. One could take this further, and consider the nine women with whom Severian is intimate (Thecla’s khaibit, Thecla, Dorcas, Jolenta, Cyriaca, Pia, Daria, Valeria, and Gunnie–Apheta in Yesod is not human) as nine muses or aspects of the Great Goddess, or add them to the trinity to form a solar calendar group of twelve goddesses, with Agia as the spurned, unlucky thirteenth member (like Eris/Hecate).

But that would be another essay.

A Timeline of Events (Chart)

(PS = Prior to Severian’s reign)
(SR = Severian’s Reign)

Bibliography

Campbell, Joseph. Primitive Mythology, Viking Penguin, New York, 1987.

Clute, John. Strokes, Serconia Press, Washington, 1988 (paperback).

Feeley, Gregory. “The Evidence of Things Not Shown: Family Romance in The Book of the New Sun,” The New York Review of Science Fiction (#31 and #32), Dragon Press, New York, 1991.

Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Harper & Row, 1983.

Wolfe, Gene. The Shadow of the Torturer, SFBC edition, 1983.

–. The Claw of the Conciliator, SFBC edition, 1983.

–. The Sword of the Lictor, SFBC edition, 1983.

–. The Citadel of the Autarch, SFBC edition, 1983.

–. The Urth of the New Sun, Tor, 1987.

–. The Castle of the Otter, SFBC edition, 1983.

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1. The Strange Bear Man at the Threshold

The first time I read The Urth of the New Sun, one scene tantalized me more than any other. I could see just enough to know that there was a great deal I could not see yet. The symbols were there, I just could not understand them. It was in chapter 14, “The End of the Universe”, where, in the rigging of the starship, Severian has single combat with a mutineer who has claws:

I paused for a moment to look at him, with some vague notion that the claws I had seen might be artificial, like the steel claws of the magicians [in The Sword of the Lictor] or the lucivee with which Agia had torn my cheek, and if artificial, they might be of some use to me.

They were not…. The claws of an arctother had been shaped from his fingers — ugly and innocent, incapable of holding any other weapon. (p101)

The combatant he faces is a modified human who has bear claws instead of fingers, in contrast to the metal hand weapons used by both the magicians (at the foot of Mount Typhon) and Agia (at the jungle court of Vodalus). Severian triumphs against this bear-man and soon thereafter the starship passes from his home-universe of Briah into the higher-universe of Yesod. The bear-man is thus in some sense a guardian of the threshold, even though as a common mutineer he is not tagged as such.

For a succinct definition of threshold guardians, I employ J. E. Cirlot:

Just as the powers of the Earth must be defended, so, by analogy, must all mystic, religious and spiritual wealth or power be protected against hostile forces or against possible intrusion by the unworthy…. From the psychological point of view, guardians symbolize the forces gathered on the threshold of transition between different stages of evolution and spiritual progress or regression. The ‘guardian of the threshold’ must be overcome before Man can enter into the mastery of the higher realm. (Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, “Guardians” entry)

This definition captures much of what I saw in that first glance: while it is clear that throughout his narrative Severian is undergoing a process of change through which he evolves from a torturer into the Conciliator (and beyond), the combat with the bear-man marked a distinct threshold, beyond which lay the higher realm of Yesod (if we take Yesod to be a kind of hyperspace).

Identifying the threshold and the guardian was all I had initially. I did not know why the guardian in this case was a bear, or better, why it had to be a bear. So I began to investigate what “bear” means in the text.

2. The Atrium of Time Provides a Key

In tracking down the bears in Severian’s narrative, I found myself back at the beginning again, where I discovered an important clue.

In The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 4 (“Triskele”), Severian chances upon the Atrium of Time, an enclosed garden hidden deep within the Citadel complex. Emerging from the underground maze that had led him to the place, he takes in the scene:

Statues of beasts stood with their backs to the four walls of the court, eyes turned to watch the canted dial [of a multifaceted time piece]: hulking barylambdas; arctothers, the monarchs of bears; glyptodons; smilodons with fangs like glaives. All were dusted with snow. (p43)

Severian finds a garden where four types of statues are focused on a central clock that is tipped over and broken. All these statues are of animals extinct in our time: the barylambda was a cow-sized, primitive herbivore of Palaeocene North America; the arctother was the very large bear of North and South America; the glyptodon, which possessed a carapace like an armadillo, was a cow-sized herbivore of South America; and the smilodon was a sabre-toothed tiger. (A “glaive” is a pole-axe with a head like the blade of a sword.)

The placement of the statues suggests an opposition between arctothers and smilodons: while we do not know the orientation of the garden, opposing sides will be North/South and East/West. I tend to think that the bear/cat sides are North and South. Because the garden is literally focused on a timepiece, there is a hint that the four types of animal statues represent the seasons. As will become clear, I think that the bear represents winter and the cat summer.

The bear/cat polarity has already been alluded to just two pages earlier when Severian describes the beast handlers of the Bear Tower. Among them, “at some point in life each brother takes a lioness or bear-sow in marriage, after which he shuns human women” (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 4, p41). The big cat and the bear seem to be sacred animals, paired and yet in opposition.

3. Many of Severian’s Foes Are Bear-like

Initially it seemed as though the bear-man on the starship was the first bear-like opponent that Severian fights, but as I began to look closer, many intriguing details began to emerge: Severian faces a series of ursine opponents, nearly all of whom are killed.

The first bear is Agilus. Severian’s combat with him is at the Sanguinary Fields of chapter 27, but the build-up to this begins 10 chapters earlier: at the rag shop (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 17, “The Challenge”), Severian is challenged to a duel by a hipparch of the Septentrion Guard. (The challenge is given by Agia in disguise. Her twin Agilus later wears the same disguise for the duel.) Agilus is a bear in that he is disguised as a Septentrion Guard, where “Septentrion” is another name for the constellation of the Great Bear (it became a term for the North in general). Agilus cheats at the duel, but when the dead Severian rises up from the ground Agilus panics and kills several spectators in his attempt to flee. Ironically the magistrate orders Severian to execute Agilus for his crimes against the spectators, so while Severian kills Agilus it is a legally sanctioned execution.

The second bear is Hildegrin. Hildegrin is often referred to as “the Badger”, due to his digging up of corpses, but he is introduced in the first chapter of The Shadow of the Torturer as being like a bear: when Thea takes the laser pistol from Hildegrin it seems to Severian “as if a dove had momentarily commanded an arctother” (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 1, p14). So 22 chapters before we are given his name or his sobriquet, Hildegrin is described as being like a bear. At the end of The Claw of the Conciliator (chapter 31), Hildegrin calls for Severian’s aid as he wrestles with Apu Punchau in the revived Stone Town. As Severian enters the fray, the time-warp scene implodes (due to Severian’s physical contact with Apu Punchau) and Hildegrin is never seen again.

The third bear is the alzabo. This ghoulish monster animal of Urth is based upon medieval legends concerning the hyena, and yet when the alzabo appears in The Sword of the Lictor it clearly has bearish traits: “Its fur looked red and ragged in the firelight, and the nails of its feet, larger and coarser than a bear’s, were darkly red” (The Sword of the Lictor, chapter 16, p128). When Severian later sees the alzabo by daylight, he notes: “It was so large and moved so swiftly that I at first thought of it a red destrier, riderless and saddleless” (p135). The alzabo has a bear’s claws, a bear’s body mass, and bear-like fur that is red like the colour of the dying sun. Severian’s combat with the alzabo is complicated by the manoeuvrings of Agia (who wants to kill Severian) and Casdoe (the one whom the alzabo is after), so in the end Severian pledges a truce with the monster. The next day the alzabo is killed by zoanthrops (wild men), and Severian looks upon the corpse with some compassion.

The fourth bear is Decuman, one of those sorcerers alluded to in the quotation about the bear-man.  Shortly after the death of the alzabo, Severian encounters the sorcerers (The Sword of the Lictor, chapters 20 and 21), and finds them to be unmodified human males who use steel talons as hand weapons. The sorcerers kidnap Little Severian and Severian enters a duel of magic to ransom them both, but his opponent Decuman is killed by a monster (sent by Agia’s agent Hethor to track and kill Severian).

Up to this point, the bear traits have been physical (claws, fur, size) or in the name (Septentrion). But bears are famous for hibernating, for going into their caves to sleep out the winter. With that hint, perhaps you will not be as surprised as I was to recognize the fifth bear in Master Ash and his Last House in The Citadel of the Autarch.

Severian takes on a mission from the Pelerines to force Ash from his hermitage (allegedly to save him from the advancing Ascian forces), but once there, Severian discovers that the house is a time portal, with different ages visible from different floors, and that Ash is a man (perhaps the last human on Urth) who is watching the final ice age (“winter”) from the safety of his house (“cave”). Severian sleeps in the Last House, a detail that locks in with the hibernation theme. Severian has to use force to get Ash out of the house, and when that is accomplished, Ash fades away. The next person Severian meets reminds him that it is New Year’s Day.

The final bear in The Book of the New Sun is an unnamed “ursine man” who sets up Severian for the horse-taming test to join the military unit (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 19, p151). Severian does not kill this man, though it is quite possible he dies in the battle against the Ascians in chapter 21.

The prominence of these bear guardians diminishes as the narrative of The Book of the New Sun progresses. Agilus is the central foe of The Shadow of the Torturer, and his victory would have kept Severian from the Gate of Nessus. In order to triumph, Severian must die and resurrect himself. Hildegrin is trying to kill the promise of the Past in the form of Apu-Punchau, yet he is a lesser opponent than Agilus in that he is not the primary obstacle in The Claw of the Conciliator. The threshold that the alzabo is guarding is Fatherhood, while the sorcerers guard Sacrifice at the base of Mount Typhon, yet in The Sword of the Lictor Typhon himself is a much more imposing monster, as is Baldanders after him. Master Ash of The Citadel of the Autarch is an unarmed hermit who offers little real resistance, but beyond his threshold lies the threatening Ragnarok future. The destrier-trainer guards the awful world of War, but he himself, while literally marked as “ursine,” plays a slight role compared to all the other “bears”.

When the bear-man appears in The Urth of the New Sun he is diminished to the point of being a mere mutineer who is more bear than man, but the threshold he guards has grown to be the Universe itself, and for the first time Severian knowingly kills his ursine opponent.

4. Severian’s Dealings with Cats Are Compassionate

Having established this pattern regarding bears, I turned my attention to the big cats in the text, searching for a possible pattern there. The cats are more elusive, their presence often showing only through a distant roar or a recent track: Severian hears a smilodon’s roar when he is with Agia in the Jungle Gardens (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 20, p179); near the war front, Severian finds fresh smilodon tracks (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 1, p11); in the Age of Myth, Severian hears a smilodon’s cough (The Urth of the New Sun, chapter 44, p345).

When a smilodon shows up in an embedded story, the protagonist (who is linked to Severian) twice avoids combat with the cat. In the mountains Severian reads a story from the Brown Book to his newly adopted Little Severian, and in that story, “Tale of the Boy Called Frog”, there is a confrontation between a smilodon and a wolf family that has just adopted the boy called Frog (The Sword of the Lictor, chapter 19, p153). Combat is avoided, however, and when the smilodon appeals to the Senate of Wolves to attempt to get the boy by legal means, combat is again avoided when another animal (a big cat) ransoms Frog with gold.

Two times in the text Severian encounters big cats face-to-face, and both times they are bound creatures: while crossing the pampas with Dorcas and the dying Jolenta, Severian frees an atrox (a type of ice age cave lion) that is tied to a tree to scare off other atroxes (The Claw of the Conciliator, chapter 29, p270); in Typhon’s Era on Urth, Severian frees a smilodon that had been tied to a post to torment a prisoner (The Urth of the New Sun, chapter 34, p276). When a wounded Severian encounters cat-people they are the women-cats of the Old Autarch, who act as nurses for him, and their hidden claws remind him of the Claw of the Conciliator (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 24, p195).

The contrast between Severian’s interactions with the “bears” and the big cats is plain: the bears are foes who must die, and the cats are foes to be avoided or friends to set free. In dealing with the bears, Severian shows severity; in dealing with the cats, he exhibits mercy and compassion.

It occurs to me that Agia may be a hidden cat. After all, I have identified her twin brother Agilus as a bear, which in the scheme I have sketched would make her a cat. In addition, Severian shows mercy in not executing her outside the Mine at Saltus (The Claw of the Conciliator, chapter 7), which ties into the mercy-towards-cats I have traced, and Severian first hears a smilodon roar while he is with Agia (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 20). Finally, while Agia uses an athame (poisoned witch’s dagger) against Severian at the Mine (The Claw of the Conciliator, chapter 7) and a crooked dagger against him at the widow’s house in the mountains (The Sword of the Lictor, chapters 15-16), she only scores a hit on him with the aforementioned lucivee (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 26), a type of metal “cat’s claws” (the name in French means “lynx”). There is also the chapter entitled “The Mercy of Agia” (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 25) wherein she rescues Severian from behind Ascian lines.

5.  The Meanings of This Pattern

I think this pattern of bear and cat has applications to both ecological niches and ice age mythology.

Habitual readers of Gene Wolfe have noticed that he often marks his protagonists as wolves or wolf-like, from the obvious example in the story title “Hero As Werwolf,” to the more subtle case of The Book of the Long Sun, where Silk’s pet bird is “Oreb”, a biblical name for a raven associated with a wolf.¹ It is well known that Severian is so marked: when Severian’s adoptive son asks him for a story from the Brown Book, he specifies that it must have “wolfs” [sic] in it; the story, as mentioned before, has the wolves adopting a human boy, just as Severian has adopted the new orphan; Severian later remarks, as he is trying to find his way out of the underground maze of the sorcerers, that, “My nose is by no means the sensitive one of the he-wolf in the tale” (The Sword of the Lictor, chapter 21, p167).

In writing about wolf-heroes, Gene Wolfe takes a number of different approaches, depending on the story. Generally speaking, his fiction paints hunters in an unfavourable light, in part a reaction, perhaps, to the hunters that kill the wolf in such stories as “Peter and the Wolf” and “Little Red Riding Hood”. Another approach is the wolf as predator in an ecological system, as in his “Hero As Werwolf”. There is also the beast fable, such as “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog”, where beasts or beast-men are relating to each other in satire of human society, that is, with little or no basis on ecological niches. In The Book of the New Sun as a whole, however, Wolfe seems to be taking an ecological approach at a deep level, in the same way that perhaps the Old English epic Beowulf is “really” about a bear (“bee wolf”) who goes into a cave to fight a fire-spitting monster (bee venom as “fiery”) and finds “gold” in the form of honey.

Bears are animals of the northern forests, from the temperate zone to the arctic. Wolves are also native to these areas, and in such ecological niches the bear (a large omnivore) is just above the wolf (a carnivore), sometimes preying upon it.  So in ecological terms the bear and the wolf are enemies, with the bear having an advantage in single combat.

In contrast, lions and tigers are generally found in the tropics, where they occupy a niche similar to that of wolves, but as they are not in competition with them, the big cats are not enemies of wolves. Severian’s reign as autarch begins with Agia as the new Vodalus, and thus she is twinned to Severian in a way that is not big cat to bear (as it was with her brother), but big cat to wolf (two equals who will keep out of each other’s sphere).

So it seems to me that in this pattern of bear, cat, and wolf, Gene Wolfe is exploring the wolf within an ecological niche, where the bear is a superior foe that threatens the wolf, rather than focusing on the wolf as a predator of creatures in the niches below itself.

In addition to this personal/ecological level there is also a powerful set of mythic symbols from the ice age period of around 30,000 years ago. In Primitive Mytholog, Joseph Campbell writes about an ice-age burial skeleton with necklace and girdle of lion teeth and bear teeth, discovered in the Landes region of southwest France:

The bear and lion teeth are interesting, because these two animals, in the northern bear and African lion-panther rites, respectively, are, as we have seen, equivalent in form…. A mythological association is thus suggested of the bear and lion with the sun, solar eye, slaying eye, and evil eye, as well as with the animal master and the shaman. This must have been for millenniums one of the dominant mythological equations underlying the magic of the Palaeolithic hunt. (Part 4, Section 4, p379)

The bear and the big cats are solar symbols, and despite the different geographical habitats of the animals (and their cults), it is fascinating to see that the cults did overlap in Europe to the point where the burial site would have both bear and cat represented. This clearly has some bearing on Severian’s narrative, with its central solar focus.

The bear and big cat cults come from the Magdalenian period of Cro-Magnon Man (circa 30,000 to 10,000 years ago), but the bear cult seems to be older, arising in the time of Neanderthal Man (circa 200,000 to 25,000 years ago). The Neanderthals also had the curious practice of ritualistic cannibalism in which they ate the brains of their human victims. This grisly detail is re-enacted in The Citadel of the Autarch, where the Old Autarch’s forebrain must be eaten raw by his successor, Severian (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 29). So Gene Wolfe is using mythic material that predates Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

But the rites for both bear and cats involved placating the spirits of the slain animals; that is, there was no pattern of killing one and sparing the other, as I have depicted in the text. This would appear to be a departure from what is theorized, and shows Wolfe working with ice-age symbols to tell a different story.

Speculatively, I offer the following interpretation. The bear, because it hibernates, represents the inconstant sun of the north; the big cats, because the winter is mild in their climes, represent the constant sun of the tropics. With a little magical thinking one can easily change cause and effect to determine that it is the bear going into a cave that causes the sun to grow weak (rather than the coming of winter that makes a bear hibernate), so that if one could only keep the bear from the cave, the sun would not weaken. Likewise, if the bear is already in the cave, if it can be driven out then a new sun/new year will begin (as seen in the case of Master Ash).

In the setting of Urth, the bear is unequivocally linked to the Old Sun, the swollen, red, dying sun that will finally go cold and leave the world in a permanent ice age, termed “Ragnarok the Long Winter” in the text. The big cat is identified with the revived New Sun, golden, strong, and undying.

With all of this in mind let us return to the Atrium of Time:

Statues of beasts stood with their backs to the four walls of the court, eyes turned to watch the canted dial: hulking barylambdas; arctothers, the monarchs of bears; glyptodons; smilodons with fangs like glaives. All were dusted with snow. (p43)

The arctother is the waning sun of Northern Winter, the smilodon is the constant sun of the tropics. The central time piece is broken, meaning that the solar “engine” is no longer working, the axis of time is out of alignment, the cycle of seasonal change is coming to a halt. There will no longer be a waxing as the Old Sun is really dying. That all the statues are “dusted with snow” points to the Final Winter that will arrive if the New Sun does not come. Contrast this with the second time Severian visits the Atrium of Time, in the final pages of The Book of the New Sun:

The snow I recalled was gone, but a chill had come into the air to say that it would soon return. A few dead leaves, which must have been carried in some updraft very high indeed, had come to rest here among the dying roses. The tilted dials still cast their crazy shadows, useless as the dead clocks beneath them [in the underground maze], though not so unmoving. The carven animals stared at them, unwinking still. (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 38, p312)

Before, the Atrium seemed locked in time; now it seems that the machine of seasonal change has been at least partially repaired; the Ragnarok Winter is not longer a certainty.

Severian is cast as a wolf fighting a series of bears, each guarding a different threshold. Most of these bears die, but Severian only knowingly kills one (the final one) in combat.

The bears are linked to severity, whereas their polar opposites the big cats are linked to mercy/compassion. Once its gem casing is shattered (The Sword of the Lictor, chapter 38), the Claw of the Conciliator is revealed to be a claw indeed, a claw which, by one account, appears to be that of a cat or bird (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 8, p63), even though it is ultimately shown to be a rose thorn, still there is this linking of Conciliator to cat. And when Severian becomes the Conciliator, he practices healing (like the Pelerines who carried the Claw and the women-cats who carried Severian) and mercy, with fewer outbursts of severity, thus becoming more catlike (as opposed to being just anti-bear).

Because Severian (the wolf) is becoming the Conciliator (the cat), it is fitting that each threshold guardian be a bear (the polar opposite of the cat and the superior enemy of the wolf). This bear threshold is less a station of the cross than a position on the clock: an “hour of the bear” that is repeated over and over again. But this repetition is not that of a closed circle of stasis, nor an inward spiral of regression, instead it is an expanding spiral of progressive evolution.

Starting from the resonances of one puzzling scene I have traced a hidden structure to the Urth Cycle, a series of bearish threshold guardians who recede into the background, yet continue to mark the personal growth of Severian. The inclusion of both the magicians and Agia within the initial quotation for this essay seems far more than merely an allusion to the bearers of claw-like weapons, rather, it is a powerful link to the polar opposites of bear and big cat.

Footnotes

1. “Oreb” is a biblical name originally belonging to one of a pair of Midianite leaders captured and killed by the Ephraimites in Judges 7.25. The other leader’s name was Zeeb. “Oreb” means “raven”, while “Zeeb” means “wolf”. (return to essay)

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph          The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology Viking Penguin, New York, 1976 [paperback]

Cirlot, J. E.                    A Dictionary of Symbols Philosophical Library, New York, 1962

Wolfe, Gene

The Shadow of the Torturer Simon & Schuster, New York, 1980

The Claw of the Conciliator Simon & Schuster, New York, 1981

The Sword of the Lictor Simon & Schuster, New York, 1981.

The Citadel of the Autarch Simon & Schuster, New York, 1983

The Urth of the New Sun Tor, New York, 1987.

Copyright © Michael Andre-Driussi 2003

Volume Two: Sword and Citadel (Millennium, 2000)

Reviewed by Peter Wright

Long before its inclusion on Millennium’s SF Masterworks list, Gene Wolfe’s densely allusive four volume The Book of the New Sun (The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1981) and The Citadel of the Autarch (1983)) was acclaimed as one of science fiction’s ‘masterpieces’. Universally praised, each volume won at least one of sf’s most coveted awards: The Shadow of the Torturer took the Howard Memorial Award and the World Fantasy Award in 1981, and the British Science Fiction Award in 1982; The Claw of the Conciliator brought Wolfe his second Nebula Award in 1981, whilst Locus honoured the novel with its Best Fantasy Novel Award in 1982; The Sword of the Lictor received the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1983; and The Citadel of the Autarch took the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1984.

Critics and reviewers were unrestrained. The Book of the New Sun was applauded in a variety of periodicals ranging from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine to The Library Journal and The New York Times. In short, it became a publishing event, the repercussions of which were felt in fanzines, journals and mainstream publications alike. It was acclaimed widely for its imaginative fertility, its formidable characterisation, its controlled and meticulous style, and the craftsmanship of its construction. Colin Greenland, reviewing The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator for Foundation provides a somewhat restrained endorsement when he considers the texts as ‘the next classic sf sequence, on a par with Earthsea, the Titus Groan Books or even…the Foundation Trilogy.’ ¹ However, embedded within this, and more extravagant praise, was a burgeoning paradox. On the one hand, critics like Michael Bishop were lauding The Shadow of the Torturer for being:

an immediately accessible book for anyone with moderate intelligence and the ability to read. (Certainly it does not present some of the problems of interpretation that The Fifth Head of Cerberus has posed for wary and unwary alike.) ²

Conversely, Algis Budrys was expressing a growing scepticism as the tetralogy saw print. Whilst recognising that the publication of The Book of the New Sun was a ’seminal event’ in the history of science fiction, Budrys gave voice to his growing suspicion that the narrative might not be as straightforward as it first appeared:

I am in the presence of a practitioner whose moves I cannot follow; I see only the same illusions that are seen by those outside the guild [of writers]. I know the cards are up the sleeves somewhere, but there are clearly extra arms to this person. ³

The image of Wolfe as illusionist and card-sharp is accurate and one which critics would adopt as they began to share Budrys’ sense of deception. Colin Greenland, in his tellingly entitled article, ‘Wolfe in Sheep’s Clothing’, observes:

Wolfe is subtle as well as bold, lavish with sly puzzles, mysteries and revelations that have had more than one reader waking up in the middle of the night saying, ‘My God, it can’t be!’ But it is. Second and third readings are indicated. ⁴

The feeling of having been duped by Wolfe led Baird Searles to suggest the origin of this critical discomfort and pose a provocative question:

The Book of the New Sun is too complex a work to evaluate on one reading. It will undoubtedly be considered a landmark in the field, one that perhaps marks the turning point of science fiction from content to style, from matter to manner. Mannered it certainly is, and stylish; [but] under all that glittering edifice of surprising words and more surprising events and characters, is there a story or a concept of any stature? ⁵

Twenty years after the publication of The Shadow of the Torturer and four years after completing a Ph.D. that attempted to answer Searles’ question, the reprinting of The Book of the New Sun provides me with an opportunity for a retrospective view. Indeed, everything about the new SF Masterwork’s edition invites retrospection, from the Jim Burns cover of Shadow and Claw - itself a homage to Bruce Pennington’s evocative, eroded image on the first UK edition - to the very term ‘Masterwork’ that appears several times on the jacket. Whilst the SF Masterworks imprint is just that, an imprint packaged to sell books under a grandiose banner, there is a strong case to be made for considering The Book of the New Sun as a ‘masterwork’.

Although Searles prophesied that The Book of the New Sun was ‘certainly the sort of novel that will provide a field day for critics, essayists, people who make lists, analysers, and academics’, his prophecy has gone largely unfulfilled, with the notable exception of Michael Andre-Driussi’s commendable Lexicon Urthus (1994). ⁶ Consequently, any claims made for viewing Wolfe’s tetralogy as a masterpiece are somewhat flimsy and subjective. Rather than engaging with the text to any meaningful degree, critics have tended to extol The Book of the New Sun for its fluidity of style, the conception of its enigmatic, alien Earth, and the depth of its characterisation. This conventional, narrow and unimaginative approach was unsatisfactory in 1983 and will remain so until readers take up the gauntlet Wolfe throws at their feet.

Clearly, it is impossible to provide satisfactory justification for considering The Book of the New Sun a ‘masterwork’ in the space of a short review or to anticipate Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader, my own study of Wolfe’s fiction to be published by Liverpool University Press in 2001. However, it is possible to suggest criteria that would enable critics to qualify Wolfe’s beguiling, manipulative text as a ‘masterwork’ - if they are prepared to face the intellectual challenge.

On a first, superficial reading, there is little to distinguish Wolfe’s tetralogy from many other sf and fantasy novels, with the exception of the aforementioned xenography, or world building, the credible characters and the polished, literate style. The plot itself is apparently unremarkable. Set on the ancient world of Urth, under the roseate glow of a dying sun, The Book of the New Sun is the memoir of Severian, an apprentice torturer exiled from his guild for showing mercy to a condemned ‘client’ with whom he had fallen in love. Leaving the sprawling and manifestly ancient city of Nessus, Severian begins his phantasmagoric journey north to Thrax, the City of Windowless Rooms, where he is to act as Lictor to the Archon. Once in Thrax, he refuses to murder a faithless wife for the Archon and must flee ever northwards. Eventually, he finds himself on battlefields scarred by the constant war between Severian’s Commonwealth and the armies of the northern continent, Ascia. It is here that he encounters the Autarch, ruler of the Commonwealth, who nominates Severian as his successor. The Citadel of the Autarch concludes with Severian awaiting judgement on the world of Yesod, where the Hierogrammates will assess his worthiness as the epitome of Urth. If he succeeds in his trial, Urth will receive a new sun; if he fails, he will be emasculated and condemn his world to entropic dissolution. Wolfe picks up the story at this point in the sequel to the tetralogy, The Urth of the New Sun (1987).

Throughout Severian’s journey, there are moments of creative brilliance: Severian’s unwitting ‘resurrection’ of Dorcas at the Lake of Birds; his bizarre duel with Agilus; the chilling execution of Morwenna; his incarceration in the House Absolute; Dr. Talos’ allegorical and metafictive play, ‘Eschatology and Genesis’; Severian’s encounter with the alzabo and, later, with Typhon, the two-headed tyrant whose legacy is felt again in The Book of the Long Sun; the apocalyptic battle between the Commonwealth and Ascia; the final meeting between Severian and the Autarch; and the revelations provided by the aquastor of Master Malrubius that recontextualise the entire narrative.

Each of these encounters provides the reader with an indication of the story that can be reconstructed from the plot. Reconciling plot with story, perceiving the text not as the religious document it purports to be but as the product of a manipulated individual caught in the Hierogrammates’ evolutionary machinations (something made explicit in The Urth of the New Sun) is the first step towards understanding Wolfe’s strategies and purpose. The gulf between plot and story, between the apparent and the real, alerts the reader to the fact that Wolfe is playing a complex and contrived textual game that facilitates a number of methods of interpretation.

Coming to understand The Book of the New Sun is like learning the rules of a game. If the reader succeeds in perceiving the rules of Wolfe’s literary game, achieves the reconciliation of plot with story, then the experience of reading becomes an educational one. By stimulating the reader to reject primary assumptions and existing preconceptions, Wolfe not only lifts the reader onto a level of alertness that allows for his most subtle effects, but also reveals to the more cautious reader how they ascribe meaning to a text. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental factor in any claim that The Book of the New Sun is a ‘masterwork’: it encourages the growth of the reader towards what Jonathan Culler terms ‘literary competence’.⁷ In short, Wolfe organises the text to be understood only by those readers willing to question their own literary assumptions, pause, reflect, and reread.

The literary game Wolfe constructs is most notable in terms of textual structure. Wolfe’s presentation of his rational sf novel as a non-rational fantasy, together with his subversion of the Campbellian heroic cycle, provide an insight not only into the possibilities of the genre but also into how habitual modes of reading inform and construct the reader’s reception of a text. Of course, there are a number of novels that achieve this synthesis and/or recontextualisation, which alone is insufficient to distinguish The Book of the New Sun. However, for Wolfe, the recontextualisation is little more than a starting point for his wider concerns. He is not necessarily preoccupied with demonstrating how proficient he is as a writer. Rather, by effectively concealing his narratological sleight of hand and constructing a puzzle for his reader, Wolfe attempts to alert that reader to the level of perception required. Hence, The Book of the New Sun does not invite the reader to marvel at how clever Wolfe can be, but to marvel at his or her own intelligence in perceiving one facet of the elaborate textual game the author plays. In this sense, Wolfe’s tetralogy is a masterwork in that it can be read as a paraliterary fantasy but demands to be read as a comment upon, and a reaction to, such narratives. In effect, it is a coolly intellectual denunciation of passive reading practices, a clarion call to readers dulled by formula fiction.

Similarly, Wolfe’s deployment of a first person narrator and the autobiographical form confronts the reader with familiar paradigms that oppose the reader’s reception of the subtle subversions Wolfe works on their conventions. As other critics have noted, without realising the implications of their observations, Severian is one of the most detailed and complex characterisations found in contemporary literature. He is also the principal means by which Wolfe distracts the reader from apprehending the story of his text. Despite appearances to the contrary, Severian is an unreliable narrator - and not only because he tells lies detectable by the cautious reader. Ironically, Severian is unreliable because of the very characteristic that makes him appear wholly reliable: his eidetic memory. Although Wolfe provides indicators of Severian’s fallibility, it is his status as a mnemonist that marks Severian as someone who cannot be trusted. As a mnemonist, he is characterised by a passive-receptive attitude that precludes organised striving, by limitations of intellect concealed behind his capacity for thought and imagination, and by his tendency to be a dreamer whose fantasies constitute another world through which he transforms his everyday experiences. Even the concealment of the story driving the plot of The Book of the New Sun is explicable in terms of Severian’s characterisation, given that mnemonists have a tendency to remember a wealth of detail (plot) which scatters meaning (story). Wolfe provides clues to Severian’s ‘inconscience’ - to borrow a term from Henry James - on a number of occasions, provoking the reader to see beyond the masquerade to what lies beneath. In this way, Wolfe not only asks his reader to question the narrator’s reception and interpretation of events, but their own reception and interpretation of the text.

Whilst the reader is attempting to decode what is actually occurring in The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe elaborates his textual games-playing by introducing significant levels unfamiliar diction, designed to ‘convey the flavour of an odd place at an odd time.’ ⁸ This apparently innocuous comment obfuscates the fact that despite the conceptual, allusive and thematic functions served by words like ‘peltast’, ‘optimates’, ‘carnifex’ and so forth, Wolfe is deliberately opening his text to post-structuralist analyses. In his appendix to The Shadow of the Torturer, Wolfe invests his diction with an enforced polysemy when he explains that the obscure nouns found in his ‘translation’ of The Book of the New Sun are ‘intended to be suggestive rather than definitive’. ⁹

In this appendix, which, in a typical inversion, reads more like an introduction, Wolfe destabilises the status of his language; previously concrete nouns have their unequivocal meanings subverted by his ‘translation’; they become indeterminate ’substitutions’. Accordingly, by destabilising the meaning of his signifiers, Wolfe ensures that his narrative can be perceived as a writerly text in the Barthesian sense of containing indeterminacy of meaning.¹⁰ Thus, The Book of the New Sun may appeal to a post-structuralist reading as it marks a shift from meaning to staging, from the signified to the signifier. It fractures the relationship between the stable sign and the unified subject. Equally, the text’s obscure diction invites any deconstruction-orientated approach by showing a limitlessness of linguistic play, a dérive or drift of meaning. Equally, reader response critics can invoke Wolfgang Iser’s gap theory to discuss the ’spots’ of indeterminism created by Wolfe’s indeterminate nouns.¹¹ These critical approaches, all of which were prevalent before and during the publication of The Book of the New Sun, are a part of Wolfe’s intellectual gamesmanship. The reader should not be fooled, however. As Severian states early in the narrative, ‘rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all’,¹² that is, they act in context, in harmony with their own nature, regardless of their name or terminology. Ironically, then, The Book of the New Sun can be claimed as a ‘masterwork’ because it both acknowledges and denies the validity of critical theory. Whilst it permits, and even invites, post-structuralist or deconstructivist approaches, which would provide one form of insight into the text, it undermines the potential of such analyses by indicating the contextualising story that reveals how ‘things act of themselves.’ Theoretical approaches, Wolfe seems to be suggesting, will generate interpretations, but a more holistic understanding will only follow from personal and untheorised reflection.

Similar observations could be made regarding Wolfe’s deployment of metafictional devices. Not content with changing generic codes, subverting literary conventions, employing an unreliable narrator, and exploiting the deflective effect of the unfamiliar, Wolfe manipulates traditional metafictional strategies. These devices are used to create a confusing series of connections between the text and its hermeneutic circle, between the action of its heavily intertextual hypodiegetic tales and that of the main narrative. Critics have largely overlooked the metafictional aspects of the text and the purpose they serve. This oversight, which would have exposed the text’s self-reflexive preoccupation with itself, arises from the fact that Wolfe and his commentators, including John Clute and Joan Gordon, have their creative and analytical powers concentrated in opposite directions. Where Wolfe turns his attention inward to fabricate a lengthy and involved puzzle for his reader, his critics have peered outwards from the text, searching for a point where The Book of the New Sun correlates with life itself. Accordingly, they have failed to appreciate that the metaphorical significance of the text (its examination of faith and deception) is sustained and deepened by the game Wolfe initiates with the reader. It is only by observing how s/he has been deceived and cajoled that the reader comes to appreciate more fully Wolfe’s vision of humanity as a helplessly subjective species attendant to the whim of manipulatory forces. This observation is encouraged by the self-conscious stress on deception, artifice and artificiality that permeates the text and which emblematises Wolfe’s textual game with the reader.

It could be argued that The Book of the New Sun is science fiction’s Ulysses. Like James Joyce, Wolfe has ‘put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep professors busy for centuries over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ ¹³ However, to do so would be to deny Wolfe’s determination to wed the reading process with his particular conception of existence through his games playing. From his other fiction, it apparent that Wolfe perceives the world as an ambiguous round of perceptions and misperceptions in which the individual struggles, and ultimately fails, to apprehend the precise nature of existence. The senses form a barrier to understanding; the memory an unreliable recording device to which the individual must return for clues to the conundrum of life; the world a system of manipulation where in people must live as best they can according to their physical, psychological and social restrictions.

Whilst it could be argued that the literary importance of Wolfe’s fiction derives from the thematic integrity by which this vision is conveyed, it is, perhaps, more pertinent to argue that the real strength of his work arises from his ability to make the reader experience this conception of existence during the reading process. Accordingly, throughout The Book of the New Sun, habitual modes of reading become metaphors for systems of manipulation and deception; unreliable narrators emphasise the reader’s own subjectivity; and unfamiliar diction calls into question the accuracy with which we can perceive the actuality of ‘the real’.

Like the constriction in an hourglass, The Book of the New Sun marks the point at which, and from which, Wolfe’s themes, techniques and preoccupations converge and diverge. To understand it is to understand Wolfe’s oeuvre entire. Yet, it is much more than that. The Book of the New Sun reminds us of our potential and our vulnerability as readers and, in so doing, it reminds us of our potential and vulnerability as individuals. Through each reading of the text we learn not only what it is to read, perceptively and critically, but also what it is to live, perceptively and critically, in the world. Every reading is, then, an individual resurrection. For that reason, if for no other, Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun deserves to be hailed as a masterwork and not just a masterwork of science fiction but a considerable achievement within twentieth century fiction itself.

* * * * *

Footnotes

1. Colin Greenland, review of The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, Foundation, 24 (1982), 82-85 (p. 85).

2. Michael Bishop, ‘Pitching Pennies Against the Starboard Bulkhead: Gene Wolfe as Hero’, Thrust: Science Fiction in Review, Fall 1980, pp. 10-12 (p. 12).

3. Algis Budrys, review of The Claw of the Conciliator, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1980, p. 49.

4. Colin Greenland, ‘Wolfe in Sheep’s Clothing’, City Limits, 21-27 October 1983, p. 17.

5. Baird Searles, review of The Citadel of the Autarch, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1983, p. 167.

6. Ibid.

7. Jonathan Culler, ‘Literary Competence’ in Reader Response Criticism from Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. by Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 101-117.

8. Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (New York: Tor, 1992) p. 236.

9. Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer (London: Arrow, 1981), p. 302.

10. Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’ in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. by Joshué V. Harari (New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 73-81.

11. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. by The Johns Hopkins University Press (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 24.

12. Ibid., p. 17.

13. James Joyce, cited in Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 64.

]]> http://www.ultan.org.uk/review-botns/feed/ http://www.ultan.org.uk/desanctifying-victor-trenchard/ http://www.ultan.org.uk/desanctifying-victor-trenchard/#comments Fri, 24 May 2002 19:26:45 +0000 Jonathan http://www.ultan.org.uk/?p=51 by Robert Borski

I’ve now had the opportunity to read Peter Wright’s “Confounding the Skin and the Mask” several times and it continues to generate much thought. Congratulations and thanks to Ultan’s Library for publishing this erudite piece on its e-site, and I hope Dr. Wright will be encouraged to submit further material as he sees fit. I also now look forward even more eagerly to his Attending Daedalus, which I hope will be published early in 2002 rather than late.

The political approach to Fifth Head of Cerberus, with its analysis of the Sainte Anne-Sainte Croix colonial and post-colonial milieus, has always been something that’s intrigued me, and Wright brings to the subject considerably more insight than I could ever bring to bear. Most of the points he makes, especially about the lack of discourse between colonizer and colonized, and the destabilizing effects such omissions have on reality, are well argued and apposite; indeed, they seem, as John Clute has argued about Wolfean ideaspace elsewhere, somewhat obvious in hindsight. But where Wright really steps outside the box is in his bold elevation of abo savant Victor Trenchard to heroically tragic status–it’s a conclusion that’s perfectly realized within the context of his arguments, mind you, but as it also draws upon what I feel are several spurious conclusions and takes place outside certain validating frames of reference (mimetic in quite another sense, ironically), I must take issue. I’d therefore like to offer a slightly alternate take on Wright’s semi-sanctified Victor Trenchard, although I will at times have to step outside the colonial/political context Wright employs to make his case, so it’s hardly the most scholarly or defensible of refutations. Rather, think of it perhaps, to use an engineering phrase of Maitre’s, as another attempt at relaxation–part of a successive set of interpretations. (Given the general dismissal of my work, the wag in me is tempted to call it Wright vs Wrong, but that’s for other people to decide.)

Much of Wright’s argument about V.R.T.’s passage from base scavenger to enlightened, detached, scholar is based on his assertion that Marsch-Trenchard has grown full-blown into his role of anthropologist, being much more sensitive to the nuances, ambiguities, and realpolitik of the culture he finds himself trapped in than is his counterpart, Earthborn John Marsch, with the native Annese. Given, however, V.R.T.’s biological roots (his father being human and his mother alien), this seems to me a far more natural consequence of his upbringing than of any personal effort that he’s exerted; we might just as well marvel at a child’s double fluency in French and English where each parent only speaks one or the other language, but not both. Wright also accuses John Marsch of Great White Hunter syndrome, but despite the trajectory tables in his Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte Anne, far from exhibiting any Francis-Macomber-gone-mad tendencies, he kills only to eat, in self-defence, or to put a gravely injured pack mule out of its misery (cf. Marsch’s remark to Victor, “Do you think the Free People are frightened of us just because I shoot game to eat?”). Now, granted, he does seem intrigued by the trophy-like nature of the carabao he kills, and takes a shot or two at a following farmcat, but in the latter case he desists when he sees how much this upsets Victor and tells the boy that if he can get the animal into camp he can keep it as a pet. Contrast this compassion and sensibility with the far more murderous tendencies of Victor, who kills not only human John Marsch, but the abo girl he has rendezvoused with in the back of beyond– who respectively represent each of the two worlds which he should be trying to understand and assimilate as tyro anthropologist, not reduce through violence. Victor, in addition, seems unusually hostile to women, at one point seeking in his prison diary to justify why men find well-endowed women more desirable than their scrawnier sisters, at another imagining Celeste Etienne masturbating with a candle. He also believes he was abandoned by his mother after she witnessed him having intercourse, and expresses no regret at having left his destitute father behind to fend for himself. Surely, with biases like this–no compulsions about murder, issues with female sexuality, toxic familial relationships–Victor Trenchard falls far short of the idealized observer Wright posits*, and actually deserves punishment for his more serious crimes, even if the authorities on Sainte Croix are imprisoning him for all the wrong reasons. At least–unlike another fictional intellectualized monster, Hannibal Lector–Victor is where he belongs.

Then there’s also the signally high level of mimesis between Number Five and Victor Trenchard. Wright, of course, fails to mention this, and perhaps rightly so, given the operative paradigms and central thrust of his arguments. But the plain truth of the matter is that there are so many correspondences between the two men that it’s hard to believe Wolfe wants us to see them as different, being in fact, if not each other’s shadow, then nearly the same character. The following list is probably not exhaustive, but I think it clearly delineates this critical point–that Victor Trenchard and Number Five are symbolic twins, with life circumstances and ultimate fates irrevocably linked:

1) Victor is born to Three Faces, a sometimes prostitute, who later abandons him; Number Five, according to Aunt Jeannine, has probably been carried in utero by one of the house girls at 666 Saltimbanque, and also grows up motherless.

2) Both Number Five and V.R.T. have the number five connected with them. (V = 5 in Roman Numerals).

3) Both bear names that must be decrypted. Number Five’s real name is Gene Wolfe, and V.R.T. is Victor R. Trenchard. If the ‘R’ of his middle name is Rodman, as some people have suggested, this is an additional correspondence, being author Gene Wolfe’s middle name, furthering the autobiographical conjunction between the two.

4) Number Five is the physical clone of his father; Victor is the nominal clone of his, both père and fils bearing the aforesaid ‘R’.

5) Both Number Five and Victor declaim about the importance of fishing nets to the Free People.

6) Atop the pleasure garden of Cave Canem, Number Five spies on a patron** frolicking with a “nymphe du bois” in a private grotto; in the back of beyond John Marsch imagines Victor frolicking in secret with his own nymphe du bois.

7) Both men have scholarly, scientific minds.

Both men kill alternate versions of themselves–Number Five, his father, with whom, as a clonal son, he’s isogenetic; Victor, his mentor John Marsch.

9) Number Five plans on impersonating Maitre after he kills him (although we do not hear if he carries this out); Victor successfully assumes the identity of murdered John Marsch.

10) Number Five has a dream about confining Corinthian pillars in a paved court, the Annese equivalent of which (”woodhenge”) Victor sees in the back of beyond.

11) Number Five, in a detention camp, sees robot guards go berserk, firing upon prisoners; Victor dreams about the same incident, with berserk robots firing upon him in “a vast deserted courtyard surrounded by colonnades.”

12) Both Number Five and Victor Trenchard are initially arrested as suspects in the same foul deed–the murder of Maitre.

13) Victor Trenchard is being held by the authorities on the possibility that he may be a spy for Sainte Anne; Maitre (Number Five’s alter ego) is a spy.

14) Both men are served barley soup while imprisoned.

15) Number Five and Victor Trenchard’s lives are linked by the recurring image of the trumpet vine, mentioned at the beginning of the titular novella which recounts Number Five’s story, and referenced again at the conclusion of “V.R.T.”, which tells Victor Trenchard’s, in essence making of them a single tale.

Now, given how Number Five’s life turns out–tragically, he repeats his father’s excesses, from patricide to imminent abuse of his own son (if this were a Greek tragedy, surely his name would be Teutamides (Greek:”Son of he who repeats himself”))–and how sympathetically resonant it has been with that of his shadow twin, Victor Trenchard–it seems very hard to find anything triumphal in V.R.T.’s demise. Perhaps even more tellingly, unlike Number Five, he cannot blame his own fall on a lack of free; to put it another way, Gene Wolfe might argue, hell has more addresses than 666 Saltimbanque. This may also help to explain why Victor Trenchard does not affect a final transformation while in prison, taking on the guise of, say, an off-duty guard, or a fellow prisoner, and then seeking to make his escape in the confusion. Like Number Five, he can only recapitulate what was happened before, having stalled in his personal evolution. All he can do forever, it seems, is become more like himself.

- December 2001

** Is it possible this patron is actually the original John Marsch of Earth? He’s described as “someone of importance,” heavy, and with a square face (as opposed to the planetary-wide, generic “sharply pointed” face of the Sainte Croix natives). Wolfe also uses, although in a different context, the adjectives “heavy” and “square” in later describing the visit of Marsch’s impersonator, VRT. Moreover, when Aunt Jeannine questions Number Five about his education shortly after she catches him in his voyeuristic enterprise (actually their first encounter), she asks him about Veil’s Hypothesis, as if it’s fresh on her mind.

Editorial Note: This piece was originally solicited as a response to Peter Wright’s article by Robert Borski, author of the superb website dedicated to The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Cave Canem. Since writing that website Robert has written two books on Gene Wolfe.

Since its publication in 1972, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe’s collection of three inter-linked novellas, has earned a reputation for being the author’s most perplexing single volume. Such a reputation is entirely justified since ambiguity is the watchword to the text. More significantly, it is also an organising principle of form, a means of confounding interpretation, and a fundamental theme associated with Wolfe’s defining authorial obsessions: the subjectivity of perception, the unreliability of memory, and the nature of identity. To draw attention to the presence of equivocation in The Fifth Head of Cerberus is hardly original as every critic and reviewer to approach the text has cited its influence as a source of their own puzzlement, their sense of inadequacy and, at times, their despair. ‘Hints, hints, damnable hints and clues! That’s all there is in Gene Wolfe’s stories: little pieces of the jigsaw and one is never quite sure that there is a pattern to the jigsaw’, declares Bruce Gillespie, making no attempt to disguise his exasperation at his subject’s abstruseness. ¹ However, few critics have recognised that the introduction of ambiguity in The Fifth Head of Cerberus has a political purpose engaged directly with colonial and postcolonial situations and concerns.

Joan Gordon, for example, observes how the three novellas deploy ’science fiction models, such as aliens and clones, to explore thematic issues of identity and humanity, and it uses ambiguity and lack of resolution to express the complexity of those ambiguous and unresolvable themes.’ ² She sees Wolfe’s treatment of his subject matter as largely philosophical rather than political, exploring ‘questions raised by.abstract and universal problems.’ ³ Unfortunately, by approaching the novellas in this way, she fails to apprehend that the themes she identifies, ‘humanity and humaneness, identity, and memory’, ⁴ are explored in a postcolonial setting through key postcolonial concepts, including mimicry, hybridity and binarism.

In ‘Lost Peoples: A Review of The Fifth Head of Cerberus‘, which appeared in Vector in 1973, Pamela Sargent is more perspicacious. Sargent recognises from the outset that Wolfe’s novellas are political as well as philosophical, perceiving their colonial focus as indicative of their ‘plea for understanding those whose cultures are unlike our own.’ ⁵ Where Gordon mentions the association between the Australian and the Annese aborigines only in relation to Wolfe’s borrowing of ideas regarding the Dreamtime - ‘a period both very long ago and present now in the dream world, which explains the world and affects it’ ⁶ - Sargent understands very clearly that Wolfe’s focus is on the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised.

Disappointingly, it took twelve years for another critic to capitalise on Sargent’s reading and readdress the political dimensions of the text. Albert Wendland’s Science, Myth, and the Fictional Creation of Alien Worlds (1985) treats The Fifth Head of Cerberus as a narrative raising ‘questions over identity’ and ‘personal morality’ and, more significantly perhaps, concerning ‘methods of government’ which are ‘complex and impressive.’ ⁷ Wendland’s argument not only focuses on ‘the reversed outlook of object [aborigine] onto subject [coloniser].but also the complicated interaction of object and subject, and the inability to untangle the two’ that Wolfe effects through his carefully balanced deployment of ambiguity. Importantly, Wendland recognises that ’such ambiguity not only questions the certainty of most SF conclusions (the defining of the universe by the SF human explorers, the determination of the object by the subject), but also the whole concept of certainty itself, especially the assumed, self-contained and separate integrity of individual subjects.’ ⁸ Although Wendland does not undertake a consistent postcolonial reading, he is aware that Wolfe’s examination of these admittedly ‘abstract matters’ is contextualised by setting - Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne are both Earth colonies - and by Wolfe’s treatment of the complex interaction between human colonist and aborigine. ‘The new regime’s domination is so strong that the old race, in order to survive must imitate the ways of the new rulers, become like them’, Wendland remarks, associating implicitly the physical mimicry of the Annese with the cultural mimicry found amongst many colonised peoples. ⁹ Despite the pertinence of this observation, Wendland remains unwilling to apply a postcolonial critique to a text so clearly amenable to such discourse. Hence, there is a need to reconsider the narrative in the light of postcolonial theories in order to illuminate the possible purposes and consequences of Wolfe’s elaborate and mesmerising textual puzzle. However, even at this stage it is important to understand that the existence of the puzzle is more significant that its solution, since the puzzle is where the political arguments of the novel can be found.

The ambiguity characterising The Fifth Head of Cerberus is associated with one major theme: the nature of identity. Although the focus of the novellas is individual identity: what is the nature of a clone in ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’; how can identical twins - natural clones - distinguish themselves in ‘”A Story” by John V. Marsch’; and how can John V. Marsch/Victor Trenchard prove his identity and purpose to the authorities on Sainte Croix in ‘V.R.T.’, there is a more essential question underpinning the narratives: who is human? This question arises as a consequence of the uncertain fate of the Annese aborigines, who may have been shape-changers capable, as Veil’s Hypothesis suggests, of imitating, both physically and psychologically, the original French colonists, whom they killed and replaced, without even remembering their actions. Through this possibility, Wolfe draws attention to the likely psychological and cultural outcomes of contact between white human colonists and an aboriginal people, through the metaphor of the amnesiac shapeshifter, an individual capable of forgetting its own near-perfect mimicry.

The concept of mimicry is essential to postcolonial theory. The term is used to describe the ambivalent relationship between coloniser and colonised. It occurs when colonial discourse and ideology encourages the colonised subject to adopt the coloniser’s cultural habits, assumptions, institutions and values, resulting in a copy - often blurred - of the coloniser’s traits. ¹⁰ Since it is science fiction, The Fifth Head of Cerberus has the capacity to address the consequences of mimicry more starkly than mimetic or realist fiction.

Wolfe’s attitude to individual mimicry and, by extension, cultural mimicry, is a critical one. By using the character of Number Five, a clone by nature and nurture of his great grandfather, Wolfe suggests how ideologically enforced mimicry is self-defeating. Although he describes the act of cloning as ‘anti-evolutionary’ in its preservation and perpetuation of static aggregations of genes, it seems likely that he is also critiquing those opposed to conventional reproduction and, again by extension, miscegenation. Through the interaction of Mr Million, Number Five’s father, and Number Five who are, after all, one and the same person, Wolfe appears to be advocating hybridity, diversity, and cultural exchange by showing the stifled and stifling stasis that opposes it. In many ways Maison du Chien, 666 Saltimbanque, is a rambling metaphor for cultural isolationism, on the one hand, and imperialism on the other since the act of cloning and the process of hypnopaedia are symbolic representations of colonial occupation and re-education.

Wolfe develops his condemnation of mimicry through Veil’s Hypothesis which, in the text, is ironically discredited by the ‘veiled’ woman - Aunt Jeannine - who proposed it. She suggests that it arose as a result of Veil’s desire to find ‘a dramatic explanation for the cruelty and irrationality he sees around him.’ ¹¹ However, there is irony here, too, since, if the aborigines imitated humans, then the cruelty they (re-)enact in the place of the human is human cruelty. Nowhere is this more apparent than in ‘”A Story” by John V. Marsch’, where aborigine-mimics - Eastwind’s people - sacrifice members of Sandwalker’s tribe, who are themselves mimicking humans. Whatever way the reader considers Aunt Jeannine’s rebuttal of Veil’s theory, he or she must concede that Wolfe is drawing attention both to human ‘cruelty and irrationality’ and to the corruption of an alien culture compelled by human interference and their power of mimicry to re-enact it.

Significantly, postcolonial theorists have seen mimicry as bordering on mockery, ’since it can appear to parody whatever it mimics. Mimicry therefore locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance, an uncertainty in its control of the behaviour of the colonised.’ ¹² This is precisely what the shapeshifters of Sainte Anne effect: a mockery of white, Western colonial authority, which can be imitated, replicated and perpetuated by a pre-Dendritic culture any coloniser would term primitive in its full pejorative sense.

Homi Bhabha sees the simulation of the colonising culture’s behaviour, practices and values as ‘resemblance and menace’, ¹³ identifying how contact with a culture capable of mimicry can lead to the destruction of the coloniser, either literally in terms of its authority, or more ideologically in the sense of its valued superior self-image. This is the focus of ‘V. R.T.’, where Victor Trenchard mimics and replaces John V. Marsch, becoming both a better anthropologist and a man more sensitive to his environment. This becomes obvious when Marsch’s expedition on Sainte Anne is read in contrast with Marsch-Trenchard’s second appearance at 666 Saltimbanque. ‘An anthropologist is particularly equipped to make himself at home in any culture - even in so strange a one as this family has constructed about itself,’ Marsch-Trenchard explains to Number Five’s older self, drawing attention to an effective anthropologist’s ability to be a cultural chameleon. ¹⁴ Later, in ‘V.R.T’, parts of which are set chronologically earlier than this statement, the reader sees Marsch setting off into the Annese wilderness reminiscing about pith-helmeted Victorian explorers and approaching the native fauna with all the professionalism of a great white hunter. Marsch is clearly not ‘equipped to make himself at home in any culture’; Marsch-Trenchard is, as evidenced by his behaviour on Sainte Anne and his capacity to communicate in a number of ways whilst in prison on Sainte Croix. Hence, the biological chameleon becomes a cultural chameleon; the shapeshifter an ideal anthropologist, an individual possessing the intelligence and insight to understand cultures alien to himself. Accordingly, the menace embodied by Marsch-Trenchard takes the form of his ability to outperform the colonial figure - Marsch - at every level. His ‘development’ as a character is a consequence, then, not of his mimicry, but of an increasing hybridity, a furthering of his own racial heterogeneity.

When Marsch first meets Trenchard he is the offspring of an Annese mother and a human father. Where Trenchard’s mother is intelligent and sensitive to the importance of her son’s Annese heritage, his father, an inveterate wastrel, has little to teach his son but how to beg. Marsch, on the other hand, is an educated, if unsavoury, product of Earth’s culture. Marsch-Trenchard’s later hybrid status, the product of an educated but insensate human and a culturally-sympathetic Annese, results in a double vision which disrupts the authority of the coloniser and emphasises the flaws in the binary thinking characteristic of colonial discourse.

Like mimicry, hybridity is a central - if disputed - concept in postcolonial theory and must be approached with some caution. Marsch-Trenchard’s hybridity is not the result of ideological imposition but the absorption and synthesis of two cultural perspectives, two forms of knowledge, two patterns of behaviour, which leads to a new and altogether different perspective. In many ways, Marsch-Trenchard’s hybridity is both an acceptance and a rejection of the characteristics of the two cultures that inform him. Whilst it can be argued that his assumption of Marsch’s appearance, mode of dress and profession indicates the aborigine’s capitulation to the ways of the coloniser, it is also equally true to say that Trenchard’s aborigine heritage is preserved, restructuring Marsch’s psyche until he becomes, at last, a true anthropologist, someone capable of making ‘himself at home in any culture’ without influencing or interfering with that culture. The final image of Marsch-Trenchard, incarcerated, analysed, and disbelieved, for all its negativity is, in one sense at least, positive. Apolitical and powerless in a world where politics and power are shown as corrupt and corrupting, he exists without influence, a hybrid capable of detached irony and thoughtful reflection; a representation of the isolated intellectual Wolfe favours throughout much of his fiction. This strangely positive vision of Marsch-Trenchard is tempered, though, by the fact that his inhuman incarceration has - ironically - dehumanised him. When a fellow prisoner is beaten, he realises that the man means ‘nothing’ to him. Sadly, he has acquired a very human coldness together with his heightened understanding of culture.

Marsch-Trenchard’s hybridity and the reputed ability of the Annese to change their shape are the two main devices Wolfe employs in his assault on authenticity. The proliferation of fake tools and artefacts found in The Fifth Head of Cerberus are emblematic of how Wolfe destabilises the reader’s