This is an amended version of an article I wrote almost twenty years ago for the British BSFA magazine Vector.  The original version was entitled Looking Behind the Sun: Religious Implications of Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun” and was published in the August 1991 edition.

The Book of the New Sun is one of science fiction’s greatest achievements, and it is generally recognised that the book conceals rather more than is initially apparent. Wolfe, a Catholic, uses his faith to underpin a monumental work. This article looks at some of the religious implications, and hopes to draw comment from other readers.

If Severian is the Conciliator, who then is the Conciliator? Christ seems to be the answer, the Christ of the parousia. There are several clues. The first Conciliator is described as having a shining face, as Christ had during the Transfiguration; one of the Conciliator’s attributes is that he will return to Urth, as the Bible says Christ will; the Conciliator performed healings and miracles in the manner of Christ. Severian’s name may also be a clue to his nature if it is a future corruption of Steven, the name which comes from the Greek word stephane, meaning a crown (the stephane was a fillet of silver or gold worn on the forehead). The crown which the undines saw on Severian’s brow, and which is implied by the hierodules’ use of the term “Liege” to address him, is perhaps mirrored in his name. The name Severian does have another history however, and is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary thus:

“A member of the Encratite or Gnostic sect of the 2nd century which condemned marriage, etc.”

The dictionary goes on to note that the name may be derived not from a founder called Severian but from the austerity of the typical Severian’s life (i.e. from the Latin severus).

There are also clues in Father Inire’s effusive letter to Severian at the close of volume four. Father Inire refers to Severian the Autarch as Surya, the Indian god of the sun, as Helios, the charioteer who pulled the sun on its course, and as Hyperion, the father of Helios. Severian’s nature is also revealed at the end of the fever dream in the lazaret, golden rays pouring from him as he stands with the Cumaean and Master Malrubius, light which falls on all the Earth and gives it new life. There is also a “missing” name in the holy trinity; we hear of the Increate (Holy Ghost) and the Pancreator, but never of any son. The Conciliator, “the greatest of good men,” must be this figure.

During his wanderings across Urth, various mystical events occur around Severian. The most remarkable is the appearance of blood on his forehead when, in the House Absolute, he looks into the mirror-leafed book bound in manskin. It seems that Severian has experienced a book bound metaphorically with his own death; he blurts out that he saw his own dead face in the leather. The eclipse carved in the cabinet door that holds this book refers to this death, the hiding of the sun, and Severian’s blood is then that produced by the Crown of Thorns. Earlier, when drinking with Jonas, water becomes wine. When he drinks with Dorcas, as she is about to leave him, wine becomes water. He carries a sword with a blunt end on his travels – a cross.

Two of Severian’s personal symbols, acquired when a child in the Necropolis, are significant. The ship refers to his voyage to Yesod, but the other two may have religious implications. The fountain, although it seems to correspond to that laid in the House Absolute, is also an ancient symbol of life (sometimes depicted as a waterfall), while the rose is a symbol of Christ dating from the Middle Ages.

Wolfe, then, wrote a parousia in which Severian was either Christ or an equivalent figure (there are in him echoes of the Greek god Apollo, the god of the sun). But if Severian is such a figure there are other figures to account for, most importantly the Antichrist (the Beast) and the False Prophet. It would seem that Baldanders is the former and Dr Talos the latter.

Baldanders, who experiments on the world and spends the proceeds on himself, is an ideal Antichrist, for, despite his brutal nonchalance, he embodies an aversion to humanity; understated, but an aversion nonetheless. He is a direct opposite to Severian. The pair duel at the end of book three, as was foreseen in an underwater dream of Severian’s. Baldanders is the narcissistic boy for whom the world and all its inhabitants are merely constructions of his own imagination, lacking reality, while Severian is the man fully connected with people and the world, who does not need to place himself at the centre of the universe to live sanely. Baldanders is his own greatest work, and his only work; but Baldanders has nothingness within him, desiring power, money and facts, while Severian epitomises all humanity.

Dr Talos seems to be the False Prophet. It is interesting that several times Severian is reminded of a stuffed fox when Dr Talos’ face appears; if the letters F-O-X are taken according to Cabala traditions they make 6,15,24, i.e. 666, the Number of the Beast. This is perhaps the means by which Dr Talos is marked in Severian’s imagination. Meanwhile, Dr Talos’ main task seems to be wandering the Urth performing his ignoble play; that is, misinforming the people about the Conciliator. For example, at the very end of the play it is Baldanders who breaks his own bonds to achieve freedom.

The Claw of the Conciliator is itself steeped in the Roman Catholic tradition. Severian refers to the blue shell as a pyx when he finds the Claw wedged between rocks. A pyx is the box or container in which the consecrated host, the Eucharist, is kept, and it can also mean the container in which supplies of wafers for the Eucharist are kept. Meanwhile, the Pelerines wear scarlet in the Catholic tradition (“Pelerine” derives from the Latin for pilgrim). Angels and archangels make appearances too – Hierodules (holy slaves) are angels and hierogrammates are archangels. The hierodules wear angelic white. Of the latter class, there are two explicitly referred to, Gabriel and Tzadkiel, perhaps paralleling the only two angelic figures referred to in the Bible, Gabriel and Michael. Tzadkiel appears extensively in the final volume showing his shape-changing ability, while in the fourth book there is Melito’s story about birds and an angel who clearly has the same transforming ability.

It is also possible that Wolfe worked the Wandering Jew into his book, although this figure is an invention of later centuries and does not appear in the Bible. According to legend the Wandering Jew taunted Christ as he dragged his cross to Golgotha. Christ responded, saying he would wander the Earth until the time of the Second Coming. Could Hethor correspond to this figure?

Then there is the problem of Mary. Wolfe intentionally presents the reader with an enigma here; there are various candidates for Severian’s true mother, but is it correct to assume that there was one mother? There are two Severians. Using the scene at the end of the fourth book at the Inn of Lost Loves, it seems that Dorcas is related to Severian because of the facial likeness – she is the grandmother of the first Severian. However, she cannot be the mother of the second Severian, the carrier of the Claw; that title perhaps goes to Cyriaca, a.k.a. Catherine, who recognised Severian even though his mask was on, then tried to cover her tracks. Incidentally, Catherine means “pure,” which could be translated as Virginal.

A curious parallel occurs when the Cumaean is considered. This figure seems to echo the sibyls of Roman times, for like them the Cumaean is a prophetess, a seer. But there is a further point, since the Cumaean is “sleekly reptilian” when seen by Severian from his extended temporal perspective; that is, serpentine. In the days before Judaism and Christianity had destroyed the ancient matriarchal religion, that of the Goddess, the snake was the symbol of female potency, wisdom and prophetic ability. Even today, pythoness means prophetess. So it is significant that the acolyte Merryn refers to the Cumaean as “Mother”.

In the fall of 1987 I found myself with a new job in a rural town, where one Sunday I visited the local shopping mall, and there in a dump of used paperback books I found a copy of The Shadow of the Torturer. It was auspicious, I thought, to find an old friend in a new place, especially since it was a Japanese edition. But then again, I was living in Japan at the time.

To be clear, I couldn’t read Japanese very much at all, but I could spot the “Sci Fi” symbol on the book’s spine (a planet Saturn), and I could read the phonetic writing they use for foreign words and names, such that “Jiin Urufu” is Gene Wolfe.

I opened the book at random. (I should mention that Japanese books are “reverse” to Western standards–their front cover is where our back cover is. In addition to this, the text runs vertically, from top to bottom, from right to left.) So anyway, I opened the book and my eye alighted upon bits of phonetic writing contained within brackets–in other words, a parenthetical note on the text. I believe it was a gloss on “amschaspand.” (You were guessing it would be “graven.” That would have been neat, but no.) I flipped through the book and saw a few others, probably “Nilammon” among them.

“Ah-ha,” I thought to myself. “How clever! They have taken notes from Wolfe’s article ‘Words Weird and Wonderful’ in The Castle of the Otter and incorporated them as footnotes. I’ll bet they don’t have any such notes in later volumes.”

I bought the book (for 250 yen, about $2 then and now) but didn’t search out the others during my two years living there. I brought the book back with me to the States and it remained a curio as I embarked on writing my Lexicon.

Nineteen years later, I returned to Japan for a summer job, and it seemed like an opportunity to fill out my set of the Japanese edition of The Book of the New Sun, so I did. Contrary to my earlier theory, the other volumes did in fact have word glosses. This meant that it wasn’t the easy thing I had thought it was, and that the Japanese translators had, in effect, worked up their own lexicon!

This long-winded and self-aggrandizing introduction is just a prelude to the real thing, the wordlist of the Japanese lexicon for The Book of the New Sun. One strategy would be to spread the “Words Weird and Wonderful” glosses out among all four volumes, but that does not seem to be the case here–it seems like the translator did most of the work himself, only asking Wolfe directly about two chapters in the fourth volume.

In annotating the words, I trace some to the words defined in the appendix to volume II (marked *), many to “Words Weird and Wonderful” (marked †), and a few to words defined in other articles in The Castle of the Otter (marked ‡).

Volume I (68 notes)

1. League (measurement) *
2. Exultant †
3. Amschaspand †
4. Arctother †
5. Erebus ‡
6. Matachin tower †
7. Cubit (measurement) *
8. Saros (“period of 6,600 days,” i.e., the modern sense of the word. Here the translator made an error, since I believe the ancient sense of the word is required at this spot.)
9. Urth †
10. Cacogen †
11. Chain (measurement) *
12. Minim (measurement) †
13. Half-boot (torture)
14. Ophicleide †
15. Diatryma †
16. Thylacodon †
17. Triskele †
18. Glyptodon †
19. Smilodon †
20. Nilammon
21. Megatherians
22. Graven
23. Drachma
24. Ell (measurement) †
25. Saffron
26. Pantocrator †
27. Hypostases †
28. Quadrille (card game)
29. Urticate †
30. Salpinx †
31. Bordereau †
32. Cabochon emerald †
33. Omophagist †
34. Span (measurement) *
35. Moira †
36. Stride (measurement) *
37. Externs †
38. Ophicleide †
39. Ascians †
40. Baldy
41. Paduasoy †
42. Balmacaan †
43. Surtouts †
44. Dolman †
45. Jerkin †
46. Jelab †
47. Capote †
48. Smock
49. Cymar †
50. Onager †
51. Dulcimer †
52. Lamia †
53. Hesperorn †
54. Oreodont †
55. Cloisonné
56. Fearnought
57. Simar †
58. Succubus †
59. Abacination †
60. Defenestration †
61. Estrapade †
62. Burginot †
63. Verthandi †
64. Coal Sack Nebula
65. Alzabo †
66. Merychip †
67. Teratornis †
68. Pandour †

The article “Words Weird and Wonderful” has around 230 entries for unusual words found in The Shadow of the Torturer. The Japanese edition of The Shadow of the Torturer gives 68 glosses, so there are less than a third of those given in “Words Weird and Wonderful.”

Volume II (23 notes)

1. Scylla
2. Demiurge
3. Baluchither
4. Kestrel
5. Phorusrhacos
6. Tribade
7. Hierodule
8. Notule
9. Jennet
10. (A note to explain that the White Knight bit mentioned by Jonas in the antechamber is a quote from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass.)
11. Faille (fabric)
12. Naviscaput
13. The three fates
14. Khaibit †
15. Megatherian
16. Capote †
17. Ushas
18. Petasos
19. Tyrian purple
20. Water moccasin (snake)
21. Eclectics (people who fold other cultures into their own–”this refers to Americans”!)
22. Glamour
23. Spelaeae

Volume III (25 notes)

1. Rosolio (wine)
2. Coronas lucis
3. Remontado
4. Sangria (wine)
5. Sanbenito
6. Sikinnis
7. Cuvee (wine)
8. Saros (“18 years,” which is about equal to the previous definition of 6,600 days.)
9. Barghest
10. Caloyer
11. (Re: old man in Casdoe’s cabin, Palaemon wears glasses.)
12. Notule (“message from Notus, God of South Winds”!)
13. Galleass
14. Gegenschein
15. Squanto
16. Verthandi
17. Amschaspand
18. Xebec
19. (Complication over English word “toadstool,” to explain the poisonous, loathsome aspect of something that looks like a yummy shitake mushroom.)
20. Pele tower
21. Hellebore
22. Skuld
23. Catamite
24. Logos
25. Estoc

Volume IV (31 notes)

1. Caitanya
2. Bowspirit
3. Narthex
4. Arsinoither
5. Apeiron
6. Schiavoni
7. Bushmaster (snake)
8. Anpiel
9. Merychip
10. Cherkaji
11. Coryphaeus
12. Cuir boli
13. Onager †
14. Phenocod
15. Ophicleide †
16. Ziggurat
17. Calotte (cap)
18. Ransieur
19. Uintathier
20. Platybelodon
21. Acarya (science)
22. Samru (King of Birds)
23. Jupe (female clothing)
24. Aquastor
25. Mandragora
26. Piquenaires
27. Pilani
28. Capote (cape, hood) †
29. Chechia
30. Lugsails
31. Pandour †

A summary of the numbers is in order, which calls for a table. The first column shows the total number of notes per volume, while the second column gives the number of those notes that appear to be from original research rather than being simply copied from The Castle of the Otter.

NO.     ORIGINAL
68          13
23          21
25          24
31          27

Volume I has the lion’s share of notes, nearly half of the 149 that is the total, and it also has the lowest percentage of original notes (18%). But in subsequent volumes the percentage of original notes is quite high, so that in the end there are 85 original notes, which amounts to 57% of the 149 total.

In fact I have no certain knowledge that the translator used The Castle of the Otter at all, it is just my long-held hunch. He might very well have done all the research on his own.

At the end of Volume IV, the Japanese translator gives three endnotes about a single sentence in chapter 38, specifically about the mysterious séance at the stone town. I’ll give the English sentence he is footnoting:

I know now the identity of the man called Head of Day[1], and why Hildegrin, who was too near, perished when we met[2], and why the witches fled[3].

Here are his endnotes:

1. “Head of Day” is one of Severian’s future shapes.
2. Hildegrin’s disappearance was caused by the energy released at the union of old and new Severians.
3. The witch was a member of the temple slaves, and realizing that she had interfered with a very important matter, she withdrew.

In addition, the translator writes that he got help from Gene Wolfe on chapters 37 and 38, and thanks him for that.

–0-0–

What is the moral of this story? “Every curio you collect has a deeper meaning that will come to you in the fullness of time”? Maybe.

It is funny, nearly haunting, that I thought the annotations to the Japanese edition of volume I were a simple work of cribbing notes from “Words Weird and Wonderful,” when in fact it is not. I have no doubt that its presence in my collection, or my awareness of its existence, was another obscure milestone on my path to creating a Lexicon. Which is to say, years before Lexicon Urthus was even a twinkle in my eye, months before I had even laid eyes upon The Urth of the New Sun, my investigative gaze fell upon a narrow spine whose alien, angular letters proclaimed Jiin Urufu, so that I caught my breath, smiled, and said, “What have we here?”

Jeremy published 2 issues of the fanzine, focussing on Wolfe’s two books about Latro, SOLDIER OF THE MIST and SOLDIER OF ARETE. There’s some really interesting commentary on Latro, which nicely supplements the articles Jeremy has written for Ultan’s Library.

We published the PDF versions of the fanzine on our old site, but ran into problems when we upgraded Ultan’s Library to WordPress. Thanks to the sterling negotiating skills of my co-conspirator, Nigel, we’ve resolved these difficulties and are now able to make both issues of THE BOOK OF GOLD available once more.

You’ll need the Adobe Acrobat reader to open the files.

• Issue #1
• Issue #2

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.

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

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 notion of who is, and who is not, authentically human. The most problematic artefact is ‘”A Story” by John V. Marsch’. Who produces this text? Is it Marsch or Marsch-Trenchard? If it is Marsch, then it becomes another piece of colonial fakery, the white interpretation of a barely comprehended alien culture. If it is Marsch-Trenchard then it may be an authentic myth retold, passed down the generations for two centuries by a culture with an oral tradition. As the reader vacillates between each possibility, the theme of authenticity is dynamically re-emphasised. Ironically, this narrative is the contextualising document of the collection, whose authenticity can be validated from the clues Wolfe weaves into the text. Importantly, the reader can determine that the author of the story is Marsch-Trenchard (if s/he has noted Marsch-Trenchard’s contempt for ‘secondhand information, fraud and pure imagination’ ¹⁵ and his resolution to produce ‘a novel [which] would only confuse’ his case ¹⁶. Although he resolves to destroy the work, it seems likely that the manuscript was confiscated before it could be burned and is reprinted as ‘”A Story” by John V. Marsch’ from the collection of papers described in ‘V.R.T.’). Identifying the author, and recognising the authority of the document only serves to illustrate, however, that those believing themselves to be authentically human are, in fact, amnesiac aborigines, populating both Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix as near-perfect mimics rather than hybrids. Although subtle, Wolfe’s clues lead the cautious and reflective reader to that inevitable conclusion. The reader begins to see the irony of the situation on the twin planets, where the difficulty of apprehending the authentically human is compounded further by the absence of a coherent discourse that constitutes a reality for both Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix.

The two worlds exist in a colonial system lacking a colonial discourse. In most colonial situations, the colonial discourse structures the reality for coloniser and colonised by establishing a complex of codes and practices that organise colonial relationships. It assumes the superiority of the coloniser’s culture, history, language, political structures and social conventions and imposes that vision on the colonised through colonial government and ideology. Whilst there is evidence of a colonial hierarchy between the French and the later colonists at all levels of society on Sainte Anne, such is not the case on Sainte Croix. Here, although the government preserves intraracial slavery, it integrated the French colonists into the colonial administration – in a sense it was a hybrid government. This integration is, perhaps, emblematic of the French colonists’ assimilation by the Annese, providing Veil’s Hypothesis is accurate. More important, however, is the lack of a colonial discourse existing between the Annese and the human colonisers. Throughout the novellas, the possibility of a colonial discourse is rendered impossible because no one (except perhaps the reader) can be certain whether the Annese are extinct or living on by playing out their unwitting, masked existence as the descendants of the French on Saint Anne and Sainte Croix.

This is not to say that various characters do not try to construct a colonial discourse. David, Number Five’s son-come-brother, remarks how it is imperative to see the aborigines as human because, ‘If they were alive it would be dangerous to let them be human because they would ask for things, but with them dead it makes it more interesting if they were, and the settlers killed them all.’ ¹⁷ In other words, if the aborigines are believed to be extinct, it is safe to consider them as human. However, if they are deemed to be still extant, to advocate their humanity would be to admit they would ‘ask for things’, that is be humanly materialistic, and demand a basic level of human rights. We see this attitude repeated by East Wind in his treatment of the Shadow Children, by Mrs. Blount and Dr. Hagsmith, who see the Annese as animals. ¹⁸

Nevertheless, because of the aborigines’ ambiguous status – they are, at one time or another perceived as animals, as humans, and as mimics, the binarism that sustains a colonial discourse is impossible to maintain, resulting in the welcome collapse of a coherent racist ideology. All of the binary opposites common to colonialism are denied by Marsch-Trenchard’s character, which leads to a corresponding denial of a stable, ideologically constructed reality. For example, the binary pairings of coloniser/ colonised, civilised/primitive, advanced/retarded, human/bestial, teacher/pupil, parent/child and doctor/patient are all undermined, deconstructing notions of difference and of fixed, stable identity.

It appears, then, that Wolfe is dismantling conventional modes of Western imperial thought in favour of a cultural and racial uncertainty designed to provoke the reader into reflecting on how contemporary ideologies structure both the world and our perceptions of that world. The puzzle he sets us to solve reminds us that we are constantly looking for modes and means of distinction, of separating out ‘them’ from ‘us’ in order for us to define ourselves in opposition. In The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Wolfe’s treatment of mimicry, hybridity, binarism and colonial discourse defeats that quest, leading the reader ultimately to understand that there is no ‘them’ to be found; ‘they’ have become ‘us’ and ‘we’, in turn, have become ‘them’. Their cruelty is our cruelty; their repressive regimes are our repressive regimes; their biological experiments, their constant shifts in employment, and their plastic surgery are desperate and tragic attempts to recapture what their contact with humans has deprived them of – the knowledge or memory of their capacity to change shape. Only Marsch-Trenchard, more Annese than human, more anthropologist than tribesman, stands separate: intellectually acute but isolated, estranged, and victimised. This is the final tragedy of the collection: the solitary hybrid, untrammelled by contact with other individuals during his sojourn on Sainte Anne, understanding more than any other character about society, governance and individual and interracial interaction, is denied. His incarceration is the imprisonment of a free spirit enchained physically, spiritually and emotionally by those who suspect and fear difference. The captive John V. Marsch/Victor Trenchard, alone in his benighted cell, is the final, emotive image Wolfe provides of the actions of a species whose poisonous character holds them, like the successive clones of Mr Million’s personality, on a becalmed ship, fearing to embrace the possibilities of an empowering personal and cultural transformation.

This paper was first presented at the Gene Wolfe conference held at the University of Birmingham on Saturday 26th August 2000. It is reproduced with the permission of the author. Peter’s book, Attending Daedalus was published in 2003 by Liverpool University Press. He is also the editor Shadows of the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe.

Notes

1. Bruce Gillespie, ‘Gene Wolfe’s Sleight of Hand’ in Australian Science Fiction Review, March 1986, p. 15.
2. Joan Gordon, Starmont Reader’s Guide 29: Gene Wolfe (Washington: Starmont House Inc., 1986), p. 20.
3. Ibid., p. 27.
4. Ibid., p. 28.
5. Pamela Sargent, ‘Lost Peoples: A Review of The Fifth Head of Cerberus‘, Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association, May-June, 1973, p. 18.
6. Gordon, p. 25.
7. Albert Wendland, Science, Myth, and the Fictional Creation of Aliens Worlds (Ann Arbour, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 130.
8. Ibid., p. 131.
9. Ibid., p. 136.
10. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 139.
11. Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (New York: Tor, 1994), p. 31.
12. Ashcroft et al, p. 139.
13. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 86.
14. Wolfe, p. 73.
15. Ibid., p. 207.
16. Ibid., p. 240.
17. Ibid, p. 21.
18. Ibid., pp. 130, 154, and 159

Abstract

This document briefly examines the use of torture and confession in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and how it both differs from and reflects actual historical practice (at least in Europe and America). It is not the purpose of these notes to provide a full or sustained argument, merely to outline some possible ways of proceeding.

I am concerned here with “judicial torture” and confession, that is, official torture sanctioned and indeed performed for or by the state. As a summary of what I am going to say these are the areas of overlap and difference between Wolfe and historical practice:

1. Wolfe includes prisons and places of confinement within his judicial system (the torturer’s Matachin tower, the antechamber at the House Absolute and the drainage channel in Thrax). As was historical practice, these are really jails (ie., places of temporary confinement until trial or punishment) until the development of the prison qua prison in the early modern period (prisons per se were a separate and much later development historically).

2. Historically torture was used to elicit confessions and has been bound with confession for millennia. Wolfe gives some examples of this (eg., in Dr. Talos’ play).

3. Torture was inherently a public spectacle historically. Wolfe shows this very well in Morwenna’s torture. However, he also creates both a mythical guild of torturers and a hidden zone of torture within their building. This differs from most historical practice. Why did Wolfe invent the guild of torturers, with a private zone of torture?

4. Furthermore, most use of torture in Wolfe is for punishment alone. The torture of Thecla is the standout example of this. Wolfe underplays the connection between torture and confession. Why?

5. What were subjects of torture called? Wolfe calls them “clients” whereas they were actually called “patients”. Both terms indicate that subjects of torture were to be treated or cared for, but Wolfe’s more metaphorical term lacks the notion that patients were to be corrected or normalized (that is, that a patient can be “ill” and in need of reform). As we shall see, the judicial system in TBotNS is not at all concerned with reform of the prisoner, but with punishment for transgression of the rule of law.

In the first two points therefore Wolfe clearly establishes the judicial system in TBotNS as that of Europe up to say the early modern period, before the prison reforms introduced by thinkers such as Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Beccaria’s 1764 book marks the intoduction of the idea of reform of the prisoner rather than their punishment or retribution. In the last three points however, Wolfe interestingly diverges from historical practice for reasons of his own. It is not my aim in these notes to speculate why this might be, preferring instead to leave this for others more familiar with Wolfe.

Introduction: Definition of terms and historical practice

How was torture employed as a historical practice? Since the earliest societies torture was used to elicit confessions and the truth.

Definition and history.

1. Article 1 of the United Nations Declaration against Torture (1975): “Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed, or intimidating him or others persons.”

2. Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Torture was apparently commonly practiced in many ancient civilizations. The ancient Greek practice of torturing slaves to obtain information influenced early Roman laws, in which torture gave the testimonies of slaves and those of low social status more validity.”

3. OCD: (Oxford Classical Dictionary) entry on torture: “slaves might be tortured in order to extract confessions of their own guilt or evidence against other persons (the unreliability of this second kind seems to have been recognised in practice at Athens). At Rome the investigation by torture was called quaestio; the evidence of the tortured was not testimonium.” (p. 1535). It goes on to point out that during the “Principate” the emperors urged some restraint, only in cases of seriousness should it be used, and its evidence was “fragile”, but that this is no indication of what went on in practice (ie., that torture continued as an actual practice).

4. Foucault notes in his History of Sexuality Vol I that in 1215 AD codification of the sacrament of penance by the 4th Lateran Council led to the development of confessional techniques and, he argues, the “resulting development” of declining importance of accusatory methods, sworn statements, and the rise of methods of interrogation and inquest (Foucault, 1978, p. 58). Foucault’s point is that ways of finding the truth changed. Previously societies had used accusations which could be defended if enough upstanding people swore you were innocent. Now the emphasis was on tests and inquiries of the evidence. Torture could be an important part of this inquest, and its practice was therefore renewed in medieval times.

5. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) glosses the 4th Lateran Council adoption of: “Canon 21, the famous “Omnis utriusque sexus”, which commands every Christian who has reached the years of discretion to confess all his, or her, sins at least once a year to his, or her, own (i.e. parish) priest. This canon did no more than confirm earlier legislation and custom, and has been often but wrongly, quoted as commanding for the first time the use of sacramental confession.” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09018a.htm).

6. Enc. Brit: “A renewed interest in Roman law, the dissatisfaction with earlier modes of securing reliable information, and the development of strong political authorities contributed to the increased use of torture in Europe beginning in the 12th century. Prior to this period oaths, ordeals, and combats were common ways to resolve judicial conflicts, but by the 13th century confession became, along with the testimony of eyewitnesses, the means of determining guilt in most of Europe…By 1800 most European countries had legally abolished the use of torture, but in the 20th century it reappeared in unexpectedly high proportions. The political pressures of the modern state were blamed for this increase, particularly its use by armies during wartime and by intelligence agencies. It was in countries that used law as a means of imposing ideology, however, that torture became most widespread, for example, in the fascist countries of Italy and Nazi Germany and the communist government of the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. In Nazi concentration camps, doctors became involved in creating gruesome tortures and in sustaining individuals so that they could be tortured again…Although torture has been universally condemned, it is still widely practiced in many regions, including Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.”

Characteristics of Judicial Torture & Confession

Foucault notes three essential features which are required for punishment to be torture:

1. It must produce a certain degree of pain. This pain should be quantifiable and calculated.

2. Torture must be regulated and in proportion. It is in proportion to the gravity of the crime, the standing of the criminal, and the rank of the victim.

3. Torture is part of a ritual, a liturgy. First, it must mark the body of the criminal, or through public humiliation, to brand them with infamy. Second, torture takes place in public as a grand spectacle, almost of excess. “The fact that the guilty man should moan and cry out under the blows is not a shameful side-effect, it is the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force” (Foucault, 1977, p. 34).

This is why torture often continued after the death of the criminal (with drawing and quartering or burning the body to ash, etc.). Therefore no blame or guilt attaches to the executioner (“torturer” in Wolfe’s language). He is merely “revealing” or providing an outlet of the prisoner’s guilt. He is a shepherd, and no more guilty than a priest whose penitent sinner has difficulty or pain in confessing the sin. In fact the more difficult the confession, whether by a priest or torturer, the more valid the truth produced, and the greater the rewards for those who confessed (though not, of course, in this life). Both the priest and the executioner provided an authoritative supervision of the confession. As Catholics know, a confession cannot be made to a layman, but to a priest or bishop only. The confession was not made under a chaos of pain, such as the one Severian teases himself with, where all the arts of the torturer would be applied to him “all together in a revelation of pain” (Volume I, Chapter 13, hereafter I, 13). There were formalities and techniques to be employed, especially the circumstances under which one confessed. “In medieval law” observes Foucault, “the confession was valid only when made by an adult and before an adversary” (Foucault, 1977, p. 310). And because the confession had to be “spontaneous” and given with the participation of the tortured, sometimes you were tortured twice, once before the executioner, and again before the judge. Only the confession produced truth–it was “the Queen of proofs” to the medieval officers who used it (Peters, 1985, p. 41).

The Cath. Enc. makes this connection explicit between the confessor and the doctor with his patient by quoting St. John Chrysostom (d. 347): “Be not ashamed to approach (the priest) because you have sinned, nay rather, for this very reason approach. No one says: Because I have an ulcer, I will not go near a physician or take medicine; on the contrary, it is just this that makes it needful to call in physicians and apply remedies. We (priests) know well how to pardon, because we ourselves are liable to sin. This is why God did not give us angels to be our doctors, nor send down Gabriel to rule the flock, but from the fold itself he chooses the shepherds”. Origen (d. 154) goes further and says that confessing is like vomiting, but you’ll feel better afterwards.

Torture then should produce pain, but the torturer has no guilt. Torture and confession are intimately integrated. But how much torture should be applied? The answer to this depended on the perpetrator, the crime, and the victim. The severity was applied in proportion to a whole knowledge apparatus, a “biography” of criminality. There were degrees of torture (the first degree was simply to show the accused the instruments of torture. Often this was sufficient, especially for children or the elderly. Thecla was subjected to this as the first stage of her torture). This knowledge of the individual’s criminality was derived in various ways, especially from the evidence against you. If this evidence was weak (eg., from rumors or your manner when questioned) you would receive a lighter punishment than if the evidence was strong (you were seen by two independent and reliable witnesses with a bloody sword; Foucault, 1977, p. 36). There was no binary division between “guilty” or “not guilty.” You could be partially guilty. Thus in I, 3, where we first see the influx of new prisoners brought in their coffles (chain-gangs), they are each carrying a “copper cylinder” which contains all their information–their biography of crimes. So important are these papers that the tortures cannot proceed without them, and if they have swapped the cylinders, they will receive that person’s punishments instead. The knowledge they contain trumps any other knowledge (eg., the Guild surely knew that Thecla had committed no crime). Wolfe’s brief description of this scene is completely justified historically.

Of course, the chain-gang itself was part of the punishment. To be publicly paraded as a criminal spectacle was meant to be part of a whole “branding” process that was quite extensive, for apart from the humiliating walk in public to the scaffold or place of detention, there were other rituals involved. These included the fixing on the body of the iron collars and chains. The prisoner’s head would be thrown back on an executioner’s block and the executioner would strike the iron, whilst contriving to miss the prisoner’s head: “it takes three men to rivet an iron-collar” notes one early 19th century observer, “the first holds up the block, the second holds the two branches of the iron collar together and, with his two outstretched arms, secures the patient’s head; the third strikes with repeated blows and flattens the bolt under his huge hammer. Each blow shakes the head and the body” (quoted in Foucault, 1977, p. 258).

During the walk itself, the prisoners would be subject to the ridicule, and sometimes physical attacks of the onlookers. Others came to try and determine the profession of the convict from their facial characteristics or clothing, in a manner closely related to that of phrenology. Sometimes the prisoners played up to this crowd, displaying tatoos of gallows, or re-enacting their crimes. This spectacle of the chain-gang was finally ended in France in 1837 and public execution by guillotine was stopped after that of Weidmann in 1939, but it continued in private, ie., in the prison courtyard, until the very late date of 1977 (Abbott, 1994) before being abolished by President Mitterand in 1981.

The executioner (torturer) himself plays an interesting role. As the representative of the ruler, he was the “king’s sword” in a way, but he did not have the ruler’s power or even respect. He was somewhat infamous himself. His relative lack of power is demonstrated in the fact that the ruler could send a letter of pardon up until the very last minute (as Severian worries, I, 30). If the executioner botches the process, they themselves could be punished or set upon by the angry crowd (Severian feared he “would have been finished for life” if he had made such a mistake with Morwenna, III, 5). When they were given their orders, the letters were not placed on a table, but thrown on the ground in front of them (Foucault, 1977, p. 52, compare I, 31, where Severian has to tell the chiliarch to cast his fee at his feet). On the other hand, as Wolfe shows (I, 30), the executioner could pick up significant tips by allowing the public, especially women, to get blood on their handkerchiefs (Abbott, 1994, p. 202).

In summary, we see historically a constant equation between the use of torture for confession, and for punishment. Torture was a public spectacle, and the nature of the torture or other punishment was often altered to fit the crime. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries reformers proposed a whole series of alternatives, of which imprisonment was only one, and one which had a difficult birth (among other reasons, it was criticised because it provided only a standard punishment despite the variety of crimes committed). Confession was an integral part of torture because it supposedly produced a deep truth which needed to be “freed” (either of your accomplices, or your sins).

Juridicality in Wolfe

We can now examine some juridical examples from Wolfe. The first passage I have selected is the leg-flaying (I, 3) of the maidservant. Here indeed is a deliberate and measured application of torture. It is also one of the few times Wolfe is explicit about torture being used for confession. “The client was put to the question last night” says Master Palaemon (emphasis added). As they are leaving she says “I don’t know. Only, oh, can’t you believe I wouldn’t tell you if I did?” (from information we learn later she seems to have been asked for the location of Thea and Vodalus). But this incident is noted by the Master as an unusual case, perhaps because she seems to have held out against the questioning (“I wouldn’t tell you” etc.)

Wolfe tells us that the torturers are the executors of a sentence decided elsewhere by the judicial process. During Thecla’s torture Master Gurloes observes “We carry out the sentences that are delivered to us, doing no more than we are told, and no less, and making no changes” (I, 12). The “instructions of jurists” are also mentioned in I, 7, implying trials; “sentences” and “an order” for Thecla’s torture are mentioned elsewhere in I, 12. Severian himself states outright that “we obey the judges, who hold their offices because the people consent to it” (III, 2). As we have seen, this corresponds to historical practice, where the ruler abrogated power to themselves or their judges as their representative, and reserved the right to issue pardons if necessary (although in practice such pardons were rare, as it still is today in capital cases in the USA).

The torturers are also trained to blatantly ignore what clients say: “nothing said by a client under questioning is heard by you [Severian]” (I, 3). While one could easily read this as applying not to the torturers as a whole, but to apprentices and journeymen, for Palaemon goes on “once the journeymen of our guild were deafened” (emphasis added), nevertheless, it seems fairly safe to distinguish the torturers from other parts of the legal process (in Dr. Talos’ play we see both an Inquisitor and a torturer, Severian plays the torturer). If Severian’s comment quoted above can be believed there are at least three levels of judicial power: the people, the Autarch-appointed judges, the Guild. In fact, as another passage shows (that of Morwenna discussed below) there is also the religious arm (a “caloyer,” for Morwenna, or a “hieromonach”-attendent monk in III, 1). The silence of the torturer also emphasises that the confession is not there for the benefit of the torturers, but to produce penitence in the accused, or to produce truth for the authorities (be it judge or priest).

A second example is the name of the guild which Wolfe invents, ie., the Guild of Seekers for Truth and Penitence. Under this name they are practically a guild of confessors; admitting truthfully to your transgressions and being truly penitent. They also provide the necessary authority figure (as Catholic doctrine points out, you cannot confess and be absolved by a layman. This placed the church figure in a position of power and reaffirmed his authority-it made them special in the same way a psychiatrist hears a patient and elicits the truth). Their private zone of torture however has no historical counterpart, unless you count contemporary state executions in the USA-but even here these are witnessed, eg., there are seats for five journalists at every execution in Texas, relatives of both the victim and prisoner regularly attend. Wolfe’s “Guild” is therefore a notable departure from historical practice, which Wolfe seems to accept in the parallel case of private execution which is ordered by the archon of Thrax (III, 4). For this Abdiesus suffers notable guilt and embarrassment due to its departure from the norm.

A third example is the detailed scene involving the torture and execution of Morwenna. Morwenna’s husband, Stachys, and her child Chad have both died from some sickness. She is to be tortured and executed in public (in fact during the height of a country fair). It is worth looking at this incident more fully as it is one of the few scenes given of Severian officially performing his duties.

On the same scaffold is a cattle thief, but Wolfe says almost nothing about his torture, or any others, ducking instead behind a concern that the narrative will be overlong (II, 4). Wolfe is historically accurate however in placing a criminal who has committed a property crime on the scaffold. As more and more wealth was tied up in property, transported around through ports and across the country, stored in warehouses and workshops, so more crimes took place against property. According to one contemporary estimate the port of London lost £500,000 per annum to theft in 1797. Many of these thefts were thought to be committed by the workers themselves (even today the retail industry fights assiduously against “shrinkage” which forms a far larger part of theft than by customers). Consequently new legislation was introduced, as well as more checks (observation and surveillance) upon the workers.

Morwenna is confined, not in a jail (which were uncommon), but down by the river. Severian visits her beforehand and observes another woman, Eusebia, insulting her. Eusebia (Gr. “piety” or “reverence to the gods”) was also in love with the husband, perhaps even before Morwenna (she says Morwenna “stole my Stachys”, II, 4). Severian calls Eusebia “Morwenna’s accuser” (II, 1) although it is interesting that she has “been exposed by the authorities” (II, 4) for poisoning her child and husband.

Severian collects his sword and mask from his room at the inn, and proceeds to the scaffold “at the very center of the festivities” (II, 4). Again, this corresponds with pre-reform practice of the “spectacle of the scaffold.” As I have noted, punishment was a highly visible public practice (unlike imprisonment in later historical time periods). Wolfe correctly places two figures of authority next to the scaffold (besides Severian), a caloyer and the alcalde, or head man of the town. Now, a caloyer is an interesting figure. He is actually a monk (specifically of the Greek Orthodox church) whose name comes the Greek “kalos” beautiful and “geras” old age. A caloyer also attends a whipping administered by Palaemon (IV, 12). So the three figures at the torture are a religious authority, a political authority, and a judicial authority. This again was very typical. This is not to omit the crowd themselves, who were in a real sense, another authority at the scene, and they too verified that the punishment had taken place properly.

As the prayers are finished the prisoner is brought up and given a chance to speak. This last-minute confession or “gallows speech” is part of a historical tradition, which may or may not have been based on real speeches (Foucault says that a lot of them seem highly improbable, with highly dramatic and contrite confessions at the last minute, Foucault, 1977, p. 66). It is also significant that Morwenna is encouraged to speak to “the children” ie., to warn them against turning into a bad person like her. Foucault quotes one improbable gallows speech by a woman which was set down in the mid 18th century: “fathers and mothers who hear me now, watch over your children and teach them well; in my childhood I was a liar and good-for-nothing; I began by stealing a small six-liard knife…” Such speeches, if given, were sure crowd pleasers. Again, Wolfe is tapping into a rich historical vein at this point.

Morwenna actually denies her guilt. She says she has been accused of “horrible things” and that she loved her family. This does little for the crowd, which would prefer a contrite and confessional prisoner. The crowd are actually are more disturbed by Eusebia’s curse as she hands Morwenna a bouquet of flowers. Severian begins the torture by seating Morwenna and taking a branding iron to her cheeks. This iron will have some appropriate letter inscribed upon it; perhaps, if Morwenna is guilty of poison, the letter “P” (regicides in France would be branded with an “R”, a thief with “V” [for voleur] and those who were to be put into forced labor a “T” [for travaux forcés], see Morris & Rothman, 1998, p. 48). Severian mentions some other punishments here too, especially blinding. Amputation of the hands, ears, nose or breasts was also inflicted. These were all roughly the same level of punishment (a middle one between whipping, the least severe, and capital punishment, the most).

Morwenna is in fact to receive that last level of punishment. She is to be beheaded. This would be classified as a “merciful” death, especially as it is done with the “noble” sword. According to the Oxford History (pp. 48-51) the rankings in early modern Europe were as follows:

1. Whipping and flogging with rope or branches. This is the penalty which had long ago been inflicted on Winnoc, the Pelerine slave, by Palaemon (IV, 12) for stealing. The discussion turns on the relative lack of permanent damage this punishment involved (Winnoc claims he could have walked back to his cell afterwards), and how it successfully served as a deterrant (we might take that discussion with a pinch of salt of course).

2. Branding with irons or sword.

3. Mutilation, such as amputation, especially of the ear.

4. Capital punishment. There were two levels, the “merciful” involving beheading, hanging, garroting and burying alive and

5. “Prolonged” execution, including burning alive, and breaking on the wheel, followed after death by exposure of the body (eg., on a stake). See Abbott (1994) for a wide variety of methods.

Morwenna receives a harsh punishment, but is ultimately given a “merciful” level death. After the branding (intended to humiliate and mark the body of the condemned with the symbol of authority) her legs are broken. As she totters on the execution block Severian strikes off her head with a horizontal blow (see below).

Above: Contemporary (German?) illustration of a woman’s execution by sword while seated

Severian does not describe what happens to Morwenna’s body but he does for Agilus. “The headless body” says Severian, “must be taken away in a manner dignified yet dishonorable” (I, 31). The body must be secured, and in the case of nobles, yielded to his family.

What were the range of practices performed for confining criminals? As already noted, prisons were a later development in the history of punishment (early 19th century). However, there was a longer history of jails as places for temporary confinement while the prisoner awaited punishment. Wolfe gives us the ultimate expression of this in the antechamber of the House Absolute, a place of temporary confinement used in the distant past, but now forgotten and effectively turned into a prison (II, 14). The antechamber is not juridically all that interesting, except for one notable reason. This is the nocturnal visits by the “young exultants” (II, 18) who come to sport with the prisoners. These exultants have a secret doorway into the chamber, through which they can pass unobserved, whilest at the same time they can observe the prisoners. This ability of the authorities to observe and not be observed marks the entry of a new and fascinating subject in judicial systems, that of surveillance.

Surveillance is of course a central component of regulated punishment (Foucault devotes a whole section of his book to it, where he calls it “panopticism” after the work of prison reformer Jeremy Bentham who promoted surveillant prisons. Pentonville in London was partly inspired by his theories). Surveillance was part of a whole regime of “disciplining” of the body, that is, of control and the putting into power relations of people. During the early 19th century reformers in America suggested a new model of punishment based on confinement in prisons. These prisons would allow the prisoners to be extremely regulated and observed. For example, the model prison in Philadelphia was the Eastern State Penitentiary (built 1829) which inspired what is known as the “separate system”. In this implementation prisoners were confined to their cells without interaction with other prisoners. Even the architecture of the prison reflected the ideals of observation: it consisted of a central rotunda and five radial arms of cell blocks. (The prison still stands today, though it was abandoned in 1971. One may tour the site, and as I write this in October the Halloween celebrations have been installed. For further information and pictures see my Website http://monarch.gsu.edu/jcrampton/foucault/, which provides a link to the official Website and discusses the prison in the light of work by Foucault.) Eastern State is said to have inspired the designs of about 300 prisons worldwide (Johnston, 1994).

The name “penitentiary” also indicates that the prisoner will become “penitent” or sorry for his crimes, and repent (penance, penalty, repent, penal etc. are all related words). Indeed, the architectural design and spatial arrangement of the prison was conceived as a way of implementing the Quaker ideals of leading Philadelphians at the time (such as Roberts Vaux and Caleb Lownes). These men prized self-examination, away from the interruptions of the mundane world, as a way to find “that of God in every man” (George Fox, founder of Quakerism). Solitude can therefore get you more in touch with your inner penitent self. Because it is hard to implement, perpetual surveillance was required (even the heating pipes at Eastern state looped out of each prisoner’s cell and into the corridor so that guards would hear any communication if prisoners banged on the pipes. In practice of course this complete separation was not possible to maintain, and the Philadelphian system was eventually a failure.

The prisons we know today, with each prisoner confined to a cell, or sharing one, has only existed in a systematic way for about two hundred years. It did not arise as a “natural” or undisputed solution. The degree of the separation was a matter of intense controversy in the early 19th century, with the Philadelphian model of complete separation for the entire sentence pitted against the “congregate” system associated with Auburn and Ossining. Prior to this, prisoners would be confined (often only temporarily to await trial) in more communal spaces, such as the antechamber in the House Absolute. Before the prison in Europe, castles were often used, as they were no longer needed for security, and had not yet acquired the historical or antiquarian value they have today.

In another instance of confinement, prisoners might be secured in underground chambers. We see this briefly illustrated in Wolfe by the prison of the magicians, where you enter from above (III, 20). Penitent monks were sometimes confined in underground cells like this (penitence was a state rather than an act, you were a penitent).

Severian gives us his commentary on punishments in III, 3. First, he states very clearly that punishment is a necessity to an ordered society: “no one could feel safe and no one could be safe, and in the end the people would rise up-at first against the thieves and the murderers, and then against anyone who offended the popular ideas of proprietry.” This is the idea of punishment as bulwark against chaos. But Severian recognised two problems with this: who is to be punished, and how? To the first, Severian points out the difficulty of deciding guilt unless it is done by officially appointed judges, for if others were to do it, they would be “setting themselves up as judges over the judges appointed by the Autarch, judges with less training in the law and without authority to call witnesses”. Hence the need for a system of authority to be deployed, an authority held in the hands of a small set of experts rather than the people. To answer the second, Severian suggests and rejects four options: forced labour, imprisonment, equal punishment for all, and exile.

The problem with forced labour is the cost of the guards and restraining equipment, which might otherwise go to pay honest workers. Imprisonment is also problematic because when people are confined “in comfort and without pain” it again will be very costly as it is likely that such prisoners would live a long time. This time Severian points out that the money might be better spent on troops in the war. If all were equally punished this would produce gross inequities, and the punishment would not fit the crime-as the early writers on penology recognised. As for banishment, this might be an option during peace but now during war would surely lead to those who were banished to work for the enemy.

Is Severian convincing? The force of his argument lies not so much in logic as in our ability to find examples of just what he describes. For example, during the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, after the Spartans had beaten Athens and imposed the rule of the Thirty Tyrants (404-3 BC) a reign of terror existed in Athens. At first informers and obvious criminals were arrested, but soon this extended to political opponents who were tried en mass. During this time too Alcibiades was banished from Athens (415 BC) and worked for Sparta.

Severian finds imprisonment actually the most problematic. He characterises prison as comfortable and painless, a view which today we would find very surprising indeed. For Severian it is a “soft option.” He also cites the high cost of prisons, which we would certainly be able to agree with, but without considering the “benefits” of prisons which today we would be quick to cite, such as removal of dangerous persons from society, the political need for deterrence (cited by both this year’s US Presidential candidates as the only possible reason for capital punishment despite the fact that there is little statistical data to support this position), that prisons are more “humane” than torture and so on.

What is noteworthy in this very informative section is that Severian is not at all concerned with punishment to reform the criminal, but with punishment as the legal retribution for transgression of the rule of law. He expresses throughout TBotNS the position that punishment is necessary in order to stave off disorder and chaos in society (see quote above or at I, 14, where he agrees with the lochage that order and peace are required in society).

By contrast, as we have seen, the early prison reformers, such as Beccaria, Vaux, Bentham, etc. were completely concerned with the penitent prisoner, the one who confessed and was repentent about his sins, or rather with constructing spaces which would produce repentence. To them, prisons were a more humane and advanced method of punishment, free of the barbarities associated with arbitrary trials, torture, and the whims of the monarch. Foucault, of course, disagrees, judging that prisons are just another form for regulating behaviour in those targeted as bad and deviant. For example, after considering at length whether prisoners should be put to work in prisons such as Eastern State, the early reformers clearly decided that they should be (and passed an Act so stating), thus taking advantage of inexpensive and highly controllable labour. The “pure” idea of criminal reform was therefore eclipsed right from the beginning by the state’s desire to exploit those in its power. The judicial system in TBotNS can therefore be very safely dated prior to the prison reform of the mid-18th to early 19th centuries, to a time when torture and confession were the primary means of juridicality. Wolfe chooses to halthis model of juridicality before this development.

Wolfe’s failure to link torture and confession

Since Wolfe follows very closely the juridical practices up to the period of early modern Europe it is more than a little surprising that a major component of that juridical apparatus is omitted, namely the use of torture to elicit confession. This is very strange in such a richly imagined book. Talk of punishment and confession is extremely rare in Wolfe. The major occurrence is in Dr. Talos’ play (II, 24):

“Inquisitor: I now most solemnly adjure you to confess this sin, and if you have so sinned, what power aided you to accomplish it, and the names of those who taught you to call upon that power.

Meschiane: The soldiers only saw I meant no harm, and were afraid for me. I-

Familiar: Silence!

Inquisitor: No weight is given to the protestations of the accused unless they are made under duress. My familiar will prepare you.”

This is a clear equivalency between confession to produce information through torture (“confess…the names of those who taught you”) and that truth is produced only through torture (“No weight is given to the protestations of the accused unless they are made under duress,” the subject cannot just give the names of the accomplices, they have to be validated through a properly elicited confession). This is also remarkably like the Catholic “sacrament of penance” which the Catholic Encyclopedia points out “is a judicial process in which the penitent is at once the accuser, the person accused, and the witness, while the priest pronounces judgment and sentence.” As with gallows speeches, the patient, or sinner in this case, should be truly penitent and there is disappointment if not. Whether one is confessing to an executioner (or torturer) or a priest the relationship is the same, the power relations are the same and the desired effect is the same.

In fact, it emerges that Wolfe situates this example within a laughably incompetant process, which includes mistaken identity, torture of the clearly innocent, and defective equipment. The scene is comedic rather than illustrative of punishment techniques. Furthermore the scene takes place within a play, drawn broadly for a variety of audience members, which acts to further decrease the chances of our taking this seriously. We might enquire therefore why the major scene in Wolfe to overtly link torture and confession is subverted through comedy.

There are only a couple of times Wolfe uses torture in this way, the vast preponderance is on torture for punishment and not to elicit confession. The standout example of this is Thecla’s torture, which she clearly undergoes as punishment for her (remote) association with Vodalus. During her torture she is not asked any questions, nor is any confession sought from her. There is also no evidence that she ever stood trial or was found guilty of any crime. Why does Wolfe do this? I would prefer to leave this as an open question, perhaps for others more familiar with Wolfe than me, and merely to conclude by examining one of the ways that confession has been thought of historically as a positive action. That is, that confession frees. I would suggest that Wolfe wishes to keep confession for this special purpose of emancipation.

The Purpose of Confession

Confession is supposed to be a release, a free circulation of true information:

a. in religion, unburdens you, it is a necessary step for a faithful condition, a union with God. Cath. Enc.: “The grace conferred is deliverance from the guilt of sin and, in the case of mortal sin, from its eternal punishment; hence also reconciliation with God, justification.”

b. it produces true knowledge: “the confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth” (Foucault, 1978, p. 59).

Does confession free?

Foucault’s analysis of sexuality (Foucault, 1978) indicates that we should be careful with associating “freedom” with information which “wants to be free.” In his keynote discussion of the confession, Foucault shows that it is a mistake to think that confession frees the truth against power’s attempts to silence it: on the contrary truth’s “production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this” (p. 60).[see note 1]

Foucault’s brilliant discussion of the confession proceeded as follows. For Foucault, the arresting concern was to show how truth was produced; in this case through a multiplication of discourses on sex rather than a repression. Foucault doubted what he called the “repressive hypothesis”, that is that following a period of relative openness about sex in the 17th century, the 19th century was marked by repression, rarety of talk about sex, and general lack of acknowledgement. Opposing this, he wanted to argue that in fact sex was very widely discussed; there was a multitude of discourse concerning it, and that furthermore this discourse had the effect of producing truths about sex: he wanted to write the history of “discursive production…of the production of power…of the propagation of knowledge” (p. 12).

Foucault was indeed aware that there had been periods of censorship and repression at different times with regard to sex. This was not the point. What he wanted to cast doubt on was the idea of repression as the means and principle through which to understand the history of sexuality. What he kept returning to, as with his examination of the confession, was the production of discourse and the “will to knowledge” (la volonté de savoir, the book’s original French title).

But Foucault was not just concerned with religious confession, although he cites the codification of confession in the Christian pastoral during the Lateran Council of 1215. The practice of confession is much more widespread. As I noted in the Introduction the 4th Lateran Council merely codified existing practice. Confession was used in family relationships, love, justice, medicine and many more (p. 59), and took many forms, including letters, interrogations, narratives and consultations (p. 63). Foucault does not hesitate to speak of a “great archive” being consituted, and although for a long time this archive “dematerialized as it was formed” and disappeared, soon medicine, psychiatry and pedagogy began to record and use it. Foucault’s point is that ways of finding the truth changed. Previously societies had used accusations which could be defended if enough upstanding people swore you were innocent. By contrast society moved to one where there were tests and inquiries of the evidence (a more “scientific” approach versus throwing people into the water to see if you floated [guilty] or drowned [innocent-the water "accepted" you], the idea being that the water was a metaphor for the flood).

This surfeit of confession marks a transition to new literatures and philosophies concerned with extracting the truth from the depths of oneself: “it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation” (p. 60). It seems, so Foucault says, as if confession frees and power silences. But this is a ruse which is taking us in. On the contrary, truth is “not by nature free-nor error servile-but…its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power” (p. 60).

Foucault then goes on to document in more specific terms how the confessional discourse on sexuality was scientifically approached. For example, the inducement to speak was clinically codified through questionnaires, hypnosis etc. The method of interpretation was also given a justification as follows: the truth was not latent within the subject just waiting to be revealed through the confession; it was first present but incomplete and “blind to itself” (p. 66) and only secondarily could it be completed by the interlocutor’s abilities to verify, decipher, forgive, and to demand the confession in the first place.

Foucault had earlier discussed how confessions were performed under duress, or even torture in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977). Around the time of the 12th and 13th centuries in Europe confession, the queen of proofs, became the dominant mode of finding the truth in judicial cases (not coincidentally at the same time as the 4th Lateran Council).

Why was torture used for so long in the production of truth in criminal cases (say until the criminal reforms of the late 18th century in Europe)? Again, we can look to the circulation of power to explain this. Torture “revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured…the procedure of the investigation on the operation of the confession…it also made the body of the condemned man the place where the vengeance of the sovereign was applied, the anchoring point for a manifestation of power” (Foucault, 1977, p. 55).

The effects of the confession were given a scientific rubric; the confession was not just a documentation of sins, but was adjudged as either normal or pathological, and, if the latter, could be used within therapeutic treatments: the truth could heal (Foucault, 1978, p. 67). It can be seen how this would bring into play the expert, who could act as gatekeeper in a process of normalization. In the case of penal torture, this gave rise to the person of the inquisitor, in the case of psychiatric medicine that of the psychiatrist.

Summary.

The juridical system depicted by Wolfe is mostly that of the pre-reform movement from late medieval to early modern Europe but probably best typified by the 17th and 18th centuries. It includes torture, confinement for holding prisoners (ie., jails not prisons), a system of authority that handed down sentences to be carried out by executioners, validation of truth-seeking through confession and so on. Of course Wolfe is free to mix and match juridical systems from any and all time periods. It is all the more interesting therefore that his system should approximate so closely that of Europe up to the early modern period.

Wolfe’s system of juridicality is clearly prior to that of the reforms suggested by Beccaria, who argued that punishment should be focussed on the reform of the criminal rather than for purposes of vengeance. Clearly, reform is not possible if the criminal is executed. If the criminal is not executed it is not in the interests of public safety to allow them their freedom; hence the development of the prison in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In Wolfe’s system, there is an absence of such reform, so we can safely date his model as prior to say the mid-18th century.

Nevertheless we can identify one significant departure from this historical development, the more remarkable because so much else does conform to historical event. In Wolfe, confession is highly problematic, not to say, silenced. Historically it underwent a transition from penance to the production of truth and the attendant placement of truth within relations of power. In other words, the development of the prison went hand in hand with the production of the penitent prisoner who confessed his sins and worked on them (similarly for religious confession which also falls within this ambit). By stopping his model of juridicality historically prior to the development of prisons and their penitent function Wolfe again erases the link between confession and punishment. Most critically, we can see that historically, confession has been used to validate one’s individuality by producing a set of discourse about oneself (truthful confession)–one became “authenticated” in the face of power. Historically this took place with the idea that prisoners were “patients” who were ill and in need of a penal “cure” ie., solitude in a penitentiary (giving rise to the need for complex and ubiquitous surveillance). Wolfe avoids this historical designation by choosing to call them “clients”, which again separates the use of torture for a (self-)healing confession. As I have done here we can read Wolfe against Foucault to show that Wolfe privileges confession for reasons of his own.

A second departure from historical practice lies in Wolfe’s invention of a guild of executioners, the Guild of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence. Historically torture was carried out in public, not private. The private zone of torture never occurred historically. Again, Wolfe may have reasons of his own for this.

Finally, we can use Wolfe’s book to discuss the nature of confession. Although we are a “confessing society” now more than ever (think of Jerry Springer, Oprah, “real TV” etc.) we can see that the truth produced through confession is one which operates within power relations. It is a mistake therefore to think that such truth is a “free” one, or that confession frees the deep truth from within you.

Jeremy Crampton, October-December 2000.

“Tenir un discours sur la science fiction ne me séduit pas. D’elle je ne connais rien. Absolument rien. Il ne me vient-et ne me viendra jamais, je le pense-aucun discours” Michel Foucault, 3 June 1977.

Sources

Abbott, G. 1994. The Book of Execution, an Encyclopedia of Methods of Judicial Execution. London: Headline Books.

Catholic Encyclopedia. Online edition. Orig. pub. 1913. .

Encyclopedia Britannica. Online edition.

Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. 1978. The History of Sexuality An Introduction. Volume I of The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. 2001. Fearless Speech. Boston: MIT Press.

Johnston, N. 1994. Eastern State Penitentiary, Crucible of Good Intentions. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press.

Morris, N. & Rothman, D.J. (Eds.). 1998. The Oxford History of the Prison. New York: Oxford University Press.

Peters, E. 1985. Torture. New York: Blackwell.

Notes

1. Foucault’s discussion of “parrhesia” or truth-telling is another example. In parrhesia, an ancient Greek conception of speaking the truth to authority, we see Foucault’s concern for the discourses within which truth is constructed. See Foucault, 2001.

Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun (1993-6) is a deeply complex expression of momentum: the momentum of faith, of history, of escape, of understanding. Science Fiction is replete with texts that involve such accelerations of vision and concept; but Wolfe, with his penetrating and parodic understanding of the conventions and purposes of the genre, carries this technique of escalation to levels of subtlety not frequently encountered. In so doing, Wolfe achieves two grand purposes: first, he is able to demonstrate once again the extraordinary arsenal of irony, of resonant symbolism, and of subliminal implication that has fuelled his extraordinary career; and second, he is able to affirm the absolute primacy of religious faith – specifically, of his own idiosyncratic Roman Catholicism – by way of a work superficially characteristic of a thoroughly secular genre. The four volumes of The Book of the Long Sun are exponentially progressive secular leaps into the surrounding realm of Faith; this article, by means of close reference to the opening and concluding passages of each volume, explores how Wolfe structures this cascading, apparently inadvertent but in truth inevitable, march closer to the Divine.

In a previous article (“Five Steps Towards Briah”), I set out some ideas as to how Long Sun is designed. Briefly, I suggested there that Long Sun is a formal tetralogy in the same manner as The Book of the New Sun (1980-3): that is, that its volumes form a sequence of four very deliberately differentiated stages of a developing argument. Long Sun‘s wild twists and turns of plot, its multiplicity of characters, and the bewildering variety of voices that those characters assume, all contrive to conceal a highly linear momentum of the protagonists towards escape from their generation starship (an illusory world, a false creation) into Briah (the true universe, a part of God’s Creation); caught up in the toils of immediate events, Wolfe’s dramatis personae and his readers can only glimmeringly or retrospectively perceive how and where the God-ordained torrent has carried them. Along the way, each volume has tested and invalidated an important secular option and related literary genre: Nightside the Long Sun (1993) dismisses detection and detective fiction; Lake of the Long Sun (1994) similarly deconstructs espionage and thus the spy story; Calde of the Long Sun (1994) demolishes the revolutionary war story; and Exodus From the Long Sun (1996) discredits political utopias (by means of a disillusioning delineation of the Amazon matriarchy of Trivigaunte). By the end of the final volume, the merely physical, gods-ruled but Godless secular domain of the generation starship has been castigated as a depleted wasteland, an island of perplexing wrongness which no program of practical action can redeem; the souls who have been Cargo must relinquish their temporal concerns, and step outside their ship, into new worlds where the writ of God, known in the text as the “Outsider”, runs with complete, if inscrutable, authority (just how inscrutable will only be known with the appearance of Wolfe’s sequel, the trilogy The Book of the Short Sun). The secular concepts and rhetoric of SF have been employed, very cunningly, as the proofs of a religious teleology. What must now be investigated is how Wolfe’s authorial strategy works in detail.

One of the numerous formal devices of The Book of the New Sun is the conceit that its text is like a hologram: any fragment contains the essence of the whole. Although Long Sun has a more casual manner than New Sun, a more relaxed style and fewer gestures towards the narrative sleights of modernism and postmodernism, it conforms in many ways to the same ideal of each chapter as the totality’s microcosm. Generally, as mentioned above, a Babel of eccentrically voluble characters, their identities often fluid or ambiguous, articulates in every part of the text the Fallen confusion of the cast. The Whorl, Wolfe’s generation starship, is described so that its wrongness, its duplicitous misuse and misrepresentation of religious truths and symbols, is evident in every passage: its Chapter (or Church) is a systematic parody of Catholicism, abusing such elements as the Cross and the Eucharist, while the ship’s governing pantheon of deities, their Mainframe computer, and its servants, the Fliers, function as a burlesque of God, Heaven, and Angels. Usurpations of sundry kinds pervade Long Sun; these resonate with each other, summarising the illegitimacy of the Whorl. Also repeatedly present are motifs implying the necessity of escape from the Whorl: the wind that blows constantly through the city of Viron, and sometimes in dreams, a gusting intimation of the pressure for the inmates to depart their prison; the image of birds, both those held captive and those indulgently set free, a reminder that souls are in bondage where they should be at liberty to rise high into the Light; and the remarkable prevalence of imprisonment in Wolfe’s plotting (the hero, Patera Silk, is repeatedly captured by sundry enemies, only to be freed, and all the major characters spend considerable time in baffling underground tunnels, seeking egress). But an especially noteworthy device is Long Sun‘s emphasis upon prophecy, or to be more precise, augury: frequently, characters divine the shape of the future from entrails, from chance events, from dreams. This keeps the longer-term shape of the narrative always in view; but a more profound purpose is simultaneously served: Wolfe encourages his readers to exercise the augur’s interpretative acuity of vision; often in his text, augury is a metaphor for, and instruction in, the demands of incisive reading. Long Sun‘s purpose is clear on every page – to the reader willing to be augur.

Because the worship of a pagan pantheon is the official religion of the city of Viron, and because Patera Silk is an augur at a temple or “manteion”, scenes of formal augury are found in each volume of Long Sun. While pagan superstitions are often interrogated by Wolfe, he accords augury a genuine prophetic function – most likely so that it can summarise the virtues of close reading. Considerable insight into the further course of the narrative is available in those scenes where Silk and others sacrifice, and read the entrails of, animal victims: notably in chapter two of Lake and in chapter three of Calde. But most significant is Silk’s address to the children at his palaestra near the start of Long Sun, in chapter two of Nightside: here, he selects a passage at random from a book of prophetic writings, emphasising that any page will do, and finds words of immense significance. This is an initiation of the reader into the sort of intensive and ingenious textual decoding that Wolfe expects, and a warning that such alertness to symbolic implication and nuance must be exercised at all times, as every paragraph, however incidental seeming, reflects the whole. But a further warning is offered at the same time: whatever his virtues, Silk is quick to misunderstand the evidence of his eyes, and of his senses generally; the conclusions he draws from divination and more secular investigations are frequently mistaken, both in content and in emphasis. The Whorl is a domain of illusion, of false representation, and close reading must compensate for the obscure and the misleading elements playfully deployed in all of Wolfe’s major works.

Although every section of the text repays scrutiny, it is possible to identify a range of passages in Long Sun that are especially responsive to augural interpretation. Chapter two of Nightside implies much: Silk visits the marketplace to buy a sacrificial victim, a signal that divination is imminently necessary; the fact that animals and vegetables, their names corresponding to the human nomenclature of Viron (men have animal, and women vegetable, names) are on sale suggests that a struggle is on for the ransom of souls; Silk rejects the purchase of a catachrest (which speaks distortedly, as its name implies) in favour of that of a night chough, which speaks clearly, if brokenly: he (and we) should heed whatever signs are honest in a world of deception (pp. 33-42). Later in this chapter, Silk has an imaginative vision in which images of birds and the theatre anticipate quite clearly the eventual abandonment of the Whorl, and return visits to it by its people (a proleptic glimpse of Short Sun) (p. 49). By the fourth chapter of Lake the reader is in a position to assess the rich implications of Silk’s dream of death, imbalance, and outward momentum (pp. 104-6). Calde contains passages whose dense, resonant prose invites intricacies of comprehension (the prophet Auk’s underground wanderings, the sacrificial scene in chapter three, and Silk’s hotel visit and dream of the Outsider in chapter seven). Exodus, the longest and most demanding volume, constantly tests the reader: a conundrum of augury is posed when General Mint, interpreting her own dream, understands it fully only while again dreaming (pp. 102-7); in chapter seven, Silk’s interview with the director of the factory that makes taluses (fighting robots) entails discussions of slavery and exploitation that will surely acquire great significance when the dealings between humans and the alien “inhumi” are related in the colonial context of Short Sun; and Silk’s ruminations in chapter fifteen are of extremely complex implication. In all of these sections, the augural faculty is imperatively summoned.

But the clearest indication of Wolfe’s challenge to the reader is found in his structuring of the beginnings and endings of the four volumes. As stressed earlier, these volumes are the stages of an argument; each must begin with some instruction of the reader as to how this stage is to be analysed and understood; at the same time, Wolfe must declare the conditions of ludic narrative disguise that will complicate the process of understanding. To this end, each opening passage features a dialogue between a more-or-less naïve individual and a figure possessing privileged information, which he will only yield up in oracular or otherwise obscure form. The information and the precise character of its obscurity amount to guidance, to terms of reading, for the remainder of the volume. When the volume concludes, a schism occurs: old and new states diverge, laying a basis for the next stage of the argument, in what Kim Stanley Robinson and John Clute term a “slingshot ending”, an ending whose momentum of implication carries well beyond the confines of the text it terminates. In this manner, the text’s weight of significance escalates, until in its closing pages Exodus rushes outside the Whorl, prefiguring the shape and themes of the ultimate phase of Wolfe’s religious thesis, The Book of the Short Sun. A detailed examination of Long Sun‘s interlocking beginnings and endings can reveal much about the intentions behind the tetralogy, and about Wolfe’s subtleties of narrative technique.

The oracular speaker in the opening passage of volume one, Nightside the Long Sun, is God Himself: the Outsider. He enlightens Patera Silk, who is playing a basketball-style game with the boy pupils from his parish school. The first irony here is that the teacher is being taught: “all that had been hidden was displayed” (p. 9). As subsequent episodes where Silk acts as teacher indicate, he has difficulty conveying his lessons with any speed or accuracy; in the same way, he will need a long time to absorb the true import of the lessons the Outsider has imposed upon him with such magisterial urgency. He is a mere pupil now. Thus, his enlightenment is a stream of images, their significance yet to be decoded – Silk will think about them long and hard afterwards, “whispering to himself in the silent hours of the night as was his custom”. And they are conveyed from behind Silk, by two voices, which must be heeded simultaneously, and which may speak to contradictory effect; and the voices whisper, as Silk does to himself, a mark of obscurity as well as of confidentiality. And the voices interrupt the game just as the boy Horn reaches “for an easy catch”, substituting difficulty for ease. From the start, Wolfe emphasises that revelation is a challenge.

For the reader as for Silk, the content of revelation is hard to parse. Although “hidden” things are “displayed” at the end of paragraph one, they are still qualified as “hidden” in the first sentence of paragraph two. They make little sense, and come in a rush. Wolfe additionally makes clear that what is being revealed is only the workings of a “clockwork show”, in the additional context of the basketball match: if Silk and his people inhabit a game, what higher realities must lie beyond the Whorl and the scope of Silk’s enlightenment? Within that scope, signs are presented to those augurs, Silk and the reader. Horn’s grin is “frozen in forever”, an ironic tribute to his craftily concealed and long-term function as Long Sun‘s narrator. Dead Patera Pike, the former senior augur at Silk’s manteion, is seen praying mumblingly for the Whorl‘s salvation while he sacrifices a rabbit “he himself had bought”, an intimation of the efficacy of humble prayer but also of the need for personal sacrifice, a balance kept throughout Long Sun. Silk sees a “dead woman” in an alley, and the “people of the quarter”, an equation implying that all those people will die unless he saves them. Silk is shown the stars, but juxtaposed with Pike’s sacrifice (pp. 9-10): the Whorl can be escaped, but only at great cost.

The panorama continues: proud houses (that will soon be abandoned); the very different characters of the manteion’s three sybils, who all will be central to later developments; the inefficacy of Maytera Rose’s pagan prayers; the boy Feather falling, a first glimpse of the wider text’s crucial bird symbolism; Horn shoving him aside, a hint at Horn’s status as the one who will relate (and so usurp) Silk’s life; the deterioration of the Whorl‘s environment, which is so much more serious than Silk presently believes. Wolfe is at pains to emphasise again how obscure this burden of enlightenment is: Silk beholds a bewildering mingling of colours, including some “he had never known”, unlike the more predictable “Holy Hues” of the pagan gods; the Outsider has more than two voices, but Silk cannot hear these others; the Outsider makes of the Whorl both “an empty show” and something “precious”, a warning of necessary ambiguities of perception; and we are told that Silk will later try to push away the Outsider’s “bitter lesson” and “fell words”. Before Silk returns from the eternity of his vision to the ordinary world of time, the images of the vision run together (pp. 10-11): they have a united meaning, but what is it? Many small answers are needed, so that a greater one can be formulated; Long Sun will be a long amassing of evidence.

By the end of his enlightenment, Silk knows that it is his destined task to set his world to rights, feels the blowing of the wind that will carry him through this destiny and the text, and seizes the initiative in the ball game from Horn (pp. 10-11), showing his awareness of the need for action. But this awareness is very vague, symptomatic of an ill-informed or partial reading of his vision. Silk spends the rest of Nightside in attempts to fulfil merely the letter of the Outsider’s instructions: to save his church, or manteion. This leads to short-sighted conflict with the criminal gang lord who is acquiring the property on which the manteion stands; encounters with the underworld, a bizarre break-in at the crime boss’s mansion, an injury to Silk’s leg, an exorcism at a brothel, and other events not seemingly much to the point follow. Silk blunders, like a man lost in a maze. In retrospect, the reader realises that all of this has, willy-nilly, served the Outsider’s deeper purpose; but this is in retrospect only. The opening passage of Nightside has been a warning – from God or Wolfe – that great care must be exercised in interpreting divine or authorial evidence, and that the cost of inattention can be high. These are the first volume’s terms of reading.

The function of Nightside‘s conclusion is to hurl Silk and the reader into volume two, into another phase of the plot, another set of textual conditions. Silk returns to his manteion somewhat uncertainly (he hobbles, p. 330) but also definitely (he locks the gate carefully behind him, pp. 330-1). He will proceed, however erringly. He now hears voices, one “harsh”, the other his own. In these few apparently surreal or supernatural moments of standing outside, listening to his own voice deliver a talk, Silk realises he has undergone a schism, been “split in two” by the Outsider (p. 331), between the old, habit-bound, and gentle Silk and a new, part-criminal Silk, who is open to the temptations and hatreds of the world (pp. 331-2). He is unsure which Silk is better (an uncertainty the reader may share). Although Silk is wrong to fear that the old Silk may literally be inside the manteion, by some magic waiting and speaking there, he is symbolically and psychologically correct: he has left his unenlightened self behind. The pagan sermon his doppelganger is speaking no longer articulates his true beliefs.

As he prepares to open the door (to the manteion, to the new volume that is his next phase), his weapon ready, Silk reflects on how dark the goodness of the Outsider may be (p. 333). This sums up the techniques and perils of Nightside, which as its title implies has ventured into the gloom of morally uncertain, criminal territory: the simultaneous obscurity and potency of divine knowledge, the imperative to interpret this knowledge correctly, so that however grim its implications, it informs and transforms one in the proper way. The practical reading of his enlightenment, although it has been erratic and hard, has prepared Silk for change, changed him into a hardier version of himself: this schism is the slingshot that propels him into the different dangers of Lake of the Long Sun.

The reader accompanies him, and encounters an opening passage that calls at once for augural insight. The first pages of Lake are significant in a highly devious way. Silk discovers that the speakers in the manteion have been his bird, Oreb (the harsh voice) and Horn, the same boy who featured so prominently in the basketball game. Horn has been mimicking Silk’s oratorical style. What follows is a prolonged dialogue in which Silk discusses with Horn various issues, which helpfully sums up and further contextualises the events of volume one. Silk has no literal doppelganger; he settles comfortably into his old role of teacher; this seems anti-climactic after the sinister tone of Nightside‘s final pages. But Wolfe is simply offering a climax of a subtler sort. The tone for this is set by Lake‘s first words: “Silence fell, abrupt as a shouted command” (p. 13); silent implication can convey as much as any violent confrontation. There are two silent but vital clues here: Horn, a relatively minor character, is again present at a volume’s inception; and Horn, not Silk, is the teacher in this scene.

Once more, Wolfe structures a volume’s initial pages as a didactic encounter. But what seems to be a series of principles and ruminations addressed by Silk to Horn is in reality a silent lesson administered by Horn to Silk. Horn’s mimicry of Silk’s speech, which he again demonstrates for Silk (p. 20), is a warning that Silk is going to be narrated by others: ultimately, by Horn, who as the author of Silk’s biography will reconstruct his life in the text we read; but also by others, the individuals, factions, and manipulative agencies that will make Silk their instrument even as they make him the calde or ruler of the city of Viron. As Silk becomes a public figure, he becomes whatever others desire him to be. At the start of Nightside, Silk learnt from God; now he can learn from his “author”. But again, the clues are subtle, best understood in retrospect; Silk will move through Lake as uncertainly as through Nightside. Nevertheless, Lake has declared at the outset its terms of reading: that the Silk presented by the text must be seen as a construct by others, a simulated or estimated Silk, prone to being incorrectly quoted (p. 22) or quoted without proper comprehension (p. 20); that as such, his nature may shift as the narrator, or the Outsider, or other manipulators require; and that in general lessons must be interpreted with great attention to Wolfe’s characteristic slipperiness of nuance.

Accordingly, Silk moves very changeably through Lake. He first plots to repurchase his manteion from the crime lord, Blood, by blackmailing the Trivigaunti agent, Doctor Crane; later, held captive by his own city’s tyrannical rulers, he realises perforce that they are worse than any foreign power, and forms an alliance with Crane. Meanwhile, his capacity to attract theophanies from the gods and his selfless charisma have combined to make him the general choice to fill the caldeship, the presidential office long rendered vacant by Viron’s usurping junta; to deities like Kypris and Scylla, to the political and criminal underground, to the dictatorial Councillor Lemur, and to the spies of Trivigaunte, Silk is a figure to be used, moulded or narrated into convenient shapes. He veers between these misrepresentations in a highly fluid plot, encountering ghosts and gods, spies and soldiers, revenants and revolutionaries. By Lake‘s close, Silk is clearly on the route to becoming calde, but what will this mean?

The volume’s concluding scene provides definite clues as to what Silk’s caldeship will bring: civil conflict and the triumph of the Outsider. At this stage, some members of the Vironese military are turning against the ruling Councillors, and are prepared to support Silk’s claim to be calde. This is a promising development; but as Lake ends, it leads to a farcical tragedy. One set of mutineers, under Captain Serval, escorts Silk and Crane from the town of Limna towards Viron, pretending that they are prisoners to avoid official interception. This entails Silk riding bound on a donkey (p. 347), a likening of his progress to Christ’s into Jerusalem, but a sign also of the constricting, ambiguous role his messiahdom will impose on him. Unfortunately, a second troop of sympathetic Guardsmen, believing Silk’s captivity to be in earnest, ambushes the first party, “freeing” Silk but killing Crane in the process (pp. 349-352). This is prophetically significant in two ways: it warns that as a consequence of Silk’s rise to power, friend will fight friend (as duly happens, with Viron plunging into civil war and the Vironese rebels eventually fighting their allies the Trivigauntis); and it shows the price the Outsider exacts for his favour: Faith. Crane has been the text’s foremost advocate of rational scepticism, dismissing the gods and Silk’s enlightenment as delusory. His sudden death, while seemingly a random event, is in fact a toll: merely secular Reason must be left behind by Silk and the reader, who must accept the Outsider’s difficult, even treacherous, guidance. Rain begins to fall in Lake‘s final scene, ending Viron’s drought; but even as it revives and cleanses, it brings death and divine “wrath” (p. 350). Premonitions of Viron’s civil schism are the slingshot propelling Silk into the battlegrounds of volume three, Calde of the Long Sun; and the arduous demands of Faith and of Wolfe’s narrative have been amply emphasised.

Gene Wolfe the trickster is fully on display in Calde‘s first scene, perhaps the most teasingly challenging in the entire tetralogy. By now, a rising revolutionary tide is forcing Viron’s public institutions to choose sides; the head of the pagan Chapter of Viron, Patera Quetzal, and his deputy, Patera Remora, converse, considering how to react to the crisis. As in the other opening passages, Wolfe makes this dialogue didactic: the venerable Quetzal instructs and tests the much younger Remora. But all is not as it should be: unknown to Remora, Quetzal is in reality a disguised alien inhumu, a vampirical being native to the Whorl‘s target solar system, who has infiltrated human society for inscrutable reasons. The clash between Quetzal’s apparent clerical benignity and his true nature as a mischievous predator lends this passage a disorienting ambiguity, which is compounded by Quetzal’s alien cast of thought. In theological terms, Quetzal is additionally uncategorisable: a vampire (or an alien) might be supposed to have no soul, but Quetzal’s image is visible in the mirror of a silver teapot (p. 15), implying that he is no true vampire, having a reflection, tolerating silver, and presumably possessing a soul. He is a part of the Outsider’s Creation; but his actions and speech will have to be exhaustively scrutinised for any reliable clues as to how he can fit into the divine scheme of things. As he gulls and manipulates Remora, he is deviously measuring the reader’s augural mettle.

Before sending Remora out of the room, Quetzal delivers a few initial hints as to how this scene (and the rest of the volume) will have to be read: he is “a careful man” (p. 15), not apt to let secrets slip; vision is relative, so that two observers can see quite different things (p. 16); and knowledge is rooted in reading (p. 16), as direct an observation as Quetzal will ever utter. Calde will require close and alert perusal, with full awareness of ambiguities. Unfortunately for Remora, he lacks much talent for this, being a cautious and complacent bureaucrat. When he returns with Quetzal’s beef tea, Remora is subjected by Quetzal to a barrage of tantalising hints and bizarre logical leaps, and is mystified. Quetzal leads Remora on a verbal chase from topic to topic: from “the nature of humour” (p. 18), to the inability to swim (p. 19) to the story of the temptation of Adam and Eve by the Serpent (pp. 19-20), to the doings of Silk (p. 20), to the long-lasting “jokes of gods” (p. 20), to the practicalities of the Chapter throwing its support behind Silk and the rebels (pp. 21-25). The story that Quetzal is telling, in fragments that the reader must piece together, is of profound significance: the Whorl is a centuries-long joke by the Outsider, a baiting of secularism and paganism to which the sardonic Quetzal is apparently privy; from their pagan innocence, helped along by Silk’s ascendancy, the people of the Whorl will presently ascend a tree of divine knowledge, as they swim from the false realm of the starship into the truer worlds outside. As in Eden, that knowledge is deeply ambiguous; it can be seen as a temptation leading to a Fall, especially as the ones who wait outside, the inhumi, are Serpents for whom trees are “a fount of joy” (p. 25). Quetzal, like the pagan deity Pas, is a part of the Outsider’s Plan inducing the human exodus from the Long Sun to the Short Sun; this is a not very reassuring reminder that the Outsider combines beneficent light and perilous darkness, in an inscrutable mixture.

Thus, Quetzal’s remarks offer rich insight into the further course of Wolfe’s plot, and state volume three’s operating instructions to the reader: the necessity of assembling the meaning of the text from numerous seemingly disconnected clues, the need to trust the narrator no further than necessary, to read without a moment’s complacency. And Calde is duly a volume more demanding than its predecessors. Its pace is more rapid, its range of viewpoint characters is greatly expanded, and its portrayal of war involves an escalating chaos that renders the narrative jerky and fragmented. Silk is repeatedly captured by government forces, only to escape; his political goals are clouded by his naïve quest for the beautiful courtesan, Hyacinth; the increasing prominence of other characters, notably Maytera Mint, the thief Auk, and the pompous Patera Incus, adds to Long Sun‘s prodigious Babel of voices; there is much confused wandering in Viron’s underground tunnel system. In respect of belief, Silk is coming to doubt the pagan gods, in a spiritual version of the general fog of war that the sundering of Viron’s polity has brought. By the close of Calde, the rebels have won major victories, driving the tyrannical Council into the tunnels; but the problems and implications of the plot are ramifying. These are adumbrated in volume three’s curious Epilogue.

This Epilogue is unusual in that it is not continuous with the previous action; rather, it is a flash-forward, to the earlier part of the parade scene in volume four, chapter four, in which Silk, now largely victorious in the uprising, stands ready to greet the approaching army of his allies from Trivigaunte. This may be read as a concession to the reader impatient for Exodus From the Long Sun, which after all was published quite long after Calde; whatever the case, the Epilogue functions as a collection of omens of the content of Exodus. The augural eye can perceive the “hastily erected” “triumphal arch” (p. 379) as a sign of the generally makeshift nature of the revolutionary regime of which Silk is now calde. The wind that gusts across the Alameda is the same wind that (symbolically) will soon blow Silk’s people out of the Whorl. The “long streamer of coloured paper” that the wind blows from the arch resembles “a flying jade snake”, a fair representation of the alien inhumi the humans will later encounter. Silk’s failure to co-ordinate his communications with those of the Trivigauntis (pp. 379-380) does not bode well for his understanding of them. The appearance of a flock of Fliers in the sky points to the imminent arrival of Fliers in Viron in volume four, and Silk’s daydream of following them to their home base directly anticipates the plot of Exodus. The apparent fading of the Long Sun (p. 381) is prophetic of the failure of the Whorl‘s life-support systems. And Silk’s uncertainty concerning whether the first sounds of the foreign army’s approach are “a good sign”, although seemingly a trivial worry about how soon they will arrive, concludes the volume on a note of justified doubt as to whether the Trivigauntis should be welcomed at all.

But the Epilogue also identifies the schism that determines Silk’s path into the final part of his story. As in Nightside, this is a fission in Silk himself, this time between the old Silk, the holy thief and fugitive rebel, and the new Calde Silk, the recognised leader of Viron, its Caesar. Wolfe clearly suggests this imperial transition just before the Epilogue, when mutinying soldiers acclaim Silk in an echo of the ritual of the later Roman Empire, when the army created so many Caesars. Now Silk wears “the Cloak of Lawful Governance” (p. 380): he is projected into a phase in which the problems of holding and wielding power will beset him. The ground is laid for Exodus.

Exodus From the Long Sun is a title declaring an inevitable outcome. But this volume’s initial passage is crafted to suggest the difficulty the inhabitants of the Whorl experience in perceiving the need to depart their home: they know no other world, and their immediate, mundane conflicts preoccupy them fully. In chapter one, the rebel commander, the former Maytera Mint, and Patera Remora have entered the ruins of the now deceased Blood’s mansion in order to negotiate an end to hostilities with the remnants of the old regime, the Ayuntamiento. After some exploration, they are greeted by Councillor Potto, the junta’s intelligence expert, whose arrogance is well known. Once again, Wolfe arranges his opening scene as a didactic dialogue, but perversely it is the deeply obnoxious Potto who is the instructor here. It is possible to read this passage as a dark parody of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, with Potto as the Mad Hatter, Remora as a reluctant March Hare, and Mint as a victimised Alice. Potto offers the two envoys tea (p. 26) in a highly menacing fashion, and later employs the kettle of boiling water as an instrument of torture against Mint. He poses sardonic riddles, his object being to force Mint around to the Ayuntamiento’s point of view (pp. 34-38). This lesson is a case of diabolical misdirection, warning the reader that false perceptions will complicate the narrative of Exodus.

Potto’s argument is that Mint and the other rebels must see Trivigaunte as their true enemy, a false ally using them to divide Viron against itself. Potto is correct; the Trivigauntis’ intentions are unfriendly. But his “advice” is fundamentally misleading: he is urging another petty reconfiguration of the power politics of the Whorl, whereas the only important concern is leaving the Whorl behind. Potto is a devil’s advocate, miring others in the affairs of a world that no longer matters, and distracting them from higher, essentially spiritual purposes. In this he is successful; although Mint later escapes her captivity, she continues fighting empty temporal battles to the end, and is comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Potto in them (pp. 312-317). Chapter one states Exodus‘ terms of narration and reading very clearly: the text will present worldly entrapments and fascinations, enthralling complexities of plot, that Silk, Silk’s allies, and the reader must avoid or navigate, so that the closure of exodus, from the Whorl and the text, can be achieved. False prophets must not be credited; Potto and his assistant, Spider, weave a fatal web for the unwary.

Volume four’s plot is indeed complex. As the temporal realm of the Whorl disintegrates, its fragments diverge and recomplicate. Mint and Remora engage in a long battle of wits with Spider in the tunnels, spinning a moral web that eventually entraps him. Auk and Incus are involved in a succession of sacrifices and theophanies, which activate the Plan of exodus. Silk struggles to manage Viron’s government, a constant feat of balance. The arrival of the Fliers is the catalyst for war between the Vironese rebels and Trivigaunte; the rebels must reach a bitter-tasting rapprochement with the Ayuntamiento. Silk and others are brought as captives aboard the Trivigaunti airship, and hijack it to Mainframe, the Whorl‘s control centre. Subplots and intrigues multiply; beliefs and loyalties shift wildly; Wolfe’s narration becomes spare, unexplanatory, a minefield of hints and implications, both practical and symbolic. Eventually, the exodus begins, with Auk, Horn, and others escaping the toils of the Whorl for the uncertain pastures of the planets of the Short Sun. But Silk has not heeded the moral of his own story: on the point of departure, he decides to stay in the Whorl for love of his unfaithful wife, Hyacinth (pp. 369-370). A carnal lure draws him back, and, like Moses, he does not enter the Promised Land. However good his heart, he has been an inattentive reader, and so becomes one of the text’s many victims.

Exodus concludes with the customary schism and slingshot. After Horn has identified himself as the narrator of Long Sun in the section entitled “My Defense” (pp. 370-382), thus forcing the reader to re-appraise the whole of the preceding text, a two-page “Afterward” repeats the technique of Calde‘s Epilogue. An unnamed narrator tells of events many years after Exodus, on the planet Blue, where Horn has settled with his family, and has just completed the writing of Long Sun. This is prolepsis, a foretaste of The Book of the Short Sun. The schism here is one between worlds: the Whorl and Blue. Horn remarks in his final paragraph that he lives “on Lizard Island, toward the tail” (p. 382); if the Lizard is the Whorl, it has discarded its tail, the people who have departed it. This schism is also particular to Horn: in completing his Book, he hopes “the ghost of the boy he had been” in the Whorl will “leave him in peace (p.383). Like Silk, he leaves old selves behind, and a different, mature Horn will feature in Short Sun. The passage of years, changing selves: these are the slingshot into Wolfe’s next series; but some other hints are offered as to the concerns of Short Sun. The narrator of “Afterward” mentions that the setting of the Short Sun creates an “Aureate Path” similar to the imaginary celestial road to the Whorl‘s Heaven, Mainframe; but this Aureate Path leads to a “new Mainframe” that almost certainly does not exist. This may imply that religious doubt will be central to Short Sun. The home world of the inhumi, Green, is “almost a second sun, yet baleful as a curse” (p. 383); as Horn looks up to the Whorl, something dark and stealthy, presumably connected with the inhumi, passes in front of his old home, a reminder of the schism. The conflict (or reconciliation) of humans and inhumi, of colonists and indigenes, will surely dominate the new Trilogy. As others have observed, this, and the motif of sister planets, brings Wolfe back to the territory of The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972).

As this extended analysis of beginnings and endings in The Book of the Long Sun has shown, Wolfe’s mastery of the craft of narrative remains undimmed. The volumes of the tetralogy are not merely pieces of a long novel split up for commercial convenience; they are different in emphasis and texture, designed as stages of an argument, each starting with a distinct body of instructions to the reader, each concluding with a surge of momentum anticipating the following instalment of the story. Further, Wolfe’s technique of narrative momentum and his requirement that the reader exercise the critical and predictive capabilities of an augur combine to mirror his subject matter: the nature of paganism, the inexorable movement from paganism to Christianity, the flight from a Fallen, carnal world to a higher, more spiritual one. A magisterial marriage of content and form, Long Sun is a work of genius.

EDITIONS CONSULTED:

1. Nightside the Long Sun (New York: Tor, 1993)
2. Lake of the Long Sun (New York: Tor, 1994)
3. Calde of the Long Sun (New York: Tor, 1994)
4. Exodus From the Long Sun (New York: Tor, 1996)

This article was composed in 1998, before publication began of The Book of the Short Sun. It is a sequel article to Five Steps Towards Briah, and makes its first appearance here.

The title is a multiplex pun, so typical of Gene Wolfe. The Book of the Long Sun (1993-6) can only closely follow, or mirror The Book of the New Sun (1980-3). And just as Severian, the narrator of the first Book, is the New Son of God, a man becoming Christlike if not Christ himself returned, so Patera Silk, Wolfe’s new protagonist, is the Long Son, the product of a virgin birth, long (tall) in physical and moral stature. And the renovation of the Sun is again implied; and the story, in four volumes, is very long, and is not over yet. Thus Wolfe in six words summarises his second tetralogy; and the critic can add that The Book of the Long Sun is, very likely, the most significant work of SF to be published in the 1990s – the most precise, the most sustained, and the most profound. It is a tale of physical, religious, and philosophical exodus; and, as such, it interrogates, and dismisses, the material world. The result is devious, eccentric, and charismatic, an old story rendered utterly, weirdly new.

The old story revivified here is, of course, that of the obscure youth rising to the positions of king and messiah. This was the path of Severian; Patera Silk repeats it. But it is a mark of Wolfe’s achievement that, while the biography or Book of Silk (as the narrator thought of terming it) consistently echoes Severian’s autobiography, the differences between the two texts are as striking as the similarities, so that they are always in complex, probing dialogue. Parallels are also contrasts: Severian’s Urth is the natural, God-created world facing the extinguishing death of its Sun; Silk’s generation starship, the Whorl, is an artificial, blasphemously constructed world whose demise will occur through the failure of its life-support systems, including its huge central light shaft, the ‘Long Sun’. For salvation, Severian and his people can look directly outward to the stars, dwelling as they do on their world’s outer surface, and thus they expect a New Sun to come to them; as inhabitants of the inner shell of a cylindrical craft, Silk and his followers must escape outward even to see the stars, and they can only attain a New (or Short) Sun by travelling to one. This generates a further decisive difference: the coming of the New Sun to Urth is a natural catastrophe, in which almost all of Urth’s people must die by flood or earthquake; the folk of the Whorl reach their Sun and its planets by their own efforts, in commonplace spacecraft, so that many, if not most, of them will survive. Severian outlives his people, having betrayed them to extinction; Silk is left behind to his own likely death on the Whorl, having ensured his congregation’s escape. Severian lives, to complete his solitudinous, irony-choked first-person narrative on the new, depopulated Urth, Ushas; the story of the lost Silk is related by another, who allows many viewpoints and voices to be heard, in a teeming, multifarious, democratic third-person polyphony. The Book of the New Sun is grand but bleakly closed; The Book of the Long Sun is humbler, more accessible, more hopeful, more open. It leads the many into wider vistas.

Long Sun is, one might say, the tale of the inmates trying to get out of prison. The entire long tetralogy, made up of Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Calde of the Long Sun (1994), and Exodus From the Long Sun (1996), is an account of how the pressure to depart mounts inside the vast container that is the Whorl, although its inhabitants initially mistake aspects of this pressure for more mundane indicators, of the need to rescue a church from developers, or overthrow a corrupt junta. The Whorl was dispatched 330 years previously by Typhon, the two-headed tyrant of Urth twice encountered by Severian, to colonise a distant (?) solar system (which may turn out, in the forthcoming The Book of the Short Sun, to be a version of Urth’s own system; we know that ‘the world of Severian’s childhood’ is somehow involved). The Whorl is governed by a great Mainframe computer, within which, as directing ghosts in the machine, Typhon and his monstrous family live on in digitised form. They have assumed the identities of a pantheon of gods, worshipped by the millions inhabiting the Whorl‘s many city states; they behave like standard pagan deities, yet have the demonic names, and many of the demonic attributes, of the family of Typhon in Hellenic myth: Echidna, Typhon’s mate, his daughters, including Scylla and Sphigx, and his sons, Hierax and Tartaros. Typhon has attempted to cloak his horrid nature by naming himself Pas, the god of everything, and assuming some benignity; his Plan entails the departure of the Whorl‘s people when its destination is reached. But Pas has, after three centuries, been wiped out of Mainframe’s core by his family, who, led by Echidna and Scylla, maintain the status quo even while new worlds await outside. The Whorl remains a hopeless prison for its multitudinous Cargo; but a backup program for the Plan of Pas is being initiated by rebellious elements, to ensure that evacuation occurs before life support breaks down…

The above is simply the Secret History behind the primary story of Long Sun, implied by Wolfe, and only dimly apprehended by his characters, in the same way that the truly explanatory activities of the ‘powers above the stage’ are merely guessed at in the New Sun cycle. Wolfe’s foreground narrative, the complex tapestry that shrouds and is shaped by the drama of the gods, is located almost entirely in one of the Whorl‘s many city states, Viron; the events described are the concentrated, transforming ones of a few weeks (in the first three volumes, a few days). The climax of a centuries-long process, these events build like a crescendo, escalating steadily from level to level and from scale to scale, implications mounting exponentially, an outward explosion of pressure contained for too long. The temporal and spatial intimacy of most of Long Sun is compressive, a preparation for the sudden expansion of vision that the final exodus brings; the flight to the outside is a sort of Big Bang, in which the false, blasphemous universe of the Whorl gives way to the true, God-inspired cosmos of Briah. With such momentous stakes in ultimate view, how is Silk’s story constructed in detail?

Like Severian, Silk is a torturer; but his victims are sacrificial animals, ritually offered to Pas and the other gods in fulfilment of Silk’s priestly function. He is a good and pious man, an authentic saint in an evil setting, predisposed by these qualities to excesses of moral and religious earnestness; in this he is a triumph of characterisation, exemplifying the flaws as well as the strengths of virtue. As an augur of the Chapter, working in a poor district, he seems obscurely ordinary; but circumstances in Viron and the wider Whorl will, in escalating fashion, call forth his extraordinary qualities. Viron is governed by a corrupt Council, the Ayuntamiento, which twenty years ago removed from power by assassination the city’s legitimate ruler, the Calde. This breach of constitutional law engendered a more general lawlessness, with the Councillors imposing their coercive and arbitrary will on Viron’s citizens and allowing all manner of abuses by their allies in organised crime. The Outsider, who presumably is an aspect of God Himself intervening from his truer realm Outside the Whorl, enlightens Silk, directing him to save his manteion (church) and perhaps other things as well. The clergy must step in when secular authority is found wanting; for a while, Silk must become a temporal leader, respected for his personal charisma as much as for his spiritual qualifications. This interaction of the religious and the worldly is the major concern of Long Sun, as will be seen.

Thus Silk, enacting a vague divine mandate often at odds with the pagan convictions an augur should profess, undertakes an involuntary rise to power. He schemes to prevent the take-over of his manteion by the crime lord, Blood, who has purchased the property. Confronting Blood and then having to reach an accommodation with him, he consequently encounters a foreign agent, Crane, who draws him into espionage, and the goddess of love, Kypris (a fugitive from the gods who have eliminated Pas), who begins to involve him in the Plan of Pas, the imperative to flee the Whorl. Becoming ever more entangled in the complexities of the secular world, which he faces with a naïve but firm resolve, Silk meets the dominant Councillor, Lemur, who before Crane kills him is shown to be a monster of hubris; Silk, whose popular standing is ever on the rise, is clearly the only candidate to become the restored Calde and return Viron to her proper order (he is in any case, secretly, the old Calde’s nominated successor). He is acclaimed Calde; the populace rises against the Ayuntamiento, and civil war ravages the city; Silk, who in his humility would rather remain a humble augur, is confirmed in office with the help of the head of the Chapter, Patera Quetzal, as well as of a strong faction of the Vironese military and the advanced guard of the armies of the neighbouring city of Trivigaunte. By the beginning of volume four, Exodus From the Long Sun, a just political revolution appears to be triumphing in Viron.

But matters rapidly go awry. Victory starts to slip through Silk’s fingers, and Wolfe’s plotting demands, ever more peremptorily, whether such a victory is desirable in any case. A mysteriously revived Pas, in alliance with Kypris and Tartaros, commands from within Mainframe that his Plan of evacuation be activated; Quetzal seconds this; and Fliers, the winged human agents of Mainframe, bring to Viron the urgent tidings that natural disasters will follow if an exodus from the Whorl does not at once begin. Silk’s forces find themselves at war with Trivigaunte as well as with the Ayuntamiento; Silk himself is temporarily held captive by the Trivigauntis; when he returns to Viron, it is being ruined by war, and flight to the Short Sun beyond the Whorl is the only option remaining. Many Vironese depart for the worlds known only as Blue and Green, whose nature is glancingly revealed as the tetralogy ends. Silk, of course, has been left behind.

This bare outline of an extraordinarily rich and complex novel, indicating only Silk’s particular perspective on events, may begin to hint at Wolfe’s deeper agenda in Long Sun. The entire 1400 page text, with its hundreds of characters, scores of voices, and countless veering twists of plot, is an exhaustive proof by Wolfe of the need to obey a simple injunction: transcend the material world. As a very subtle but also very emphatic Roman Catholic propagandist, Wolfe is commanding us to perceive our bodies and our physical surroundings for the pale mortal envelopes that they are, and rise into the divine light. Any godless secular world, he declares, is Hell, a place where any solutions are temporary, partial, empty. The Whorl is a reflection of contemporary Earth, that fallen spiritual wasteland. The name Whorl, mirroring the catachrestic diction of the minor character Tick, is a distortion both of World and of (Divine) Word, which should inform the World. World and Word have been lost; in their place, a corruption or catachresis of the world, created by the false god or satanic demiurge Pas, has come to be. It is a false Earth, as seen in its inverted or inside-outside shape. It has a false Heaven, a supposed place of the afterlife, Mainframe, whose servants, the Fliers, are false angels, their Celtic names (Iolar, Sciathan) and language suggesting that they ought properly to be seen as Fairy Folk, illusory trickster beings. False deities govern the Whorl, their worship, Lemur tells Silk, designed as a parody of an older, truer religion. Monstrous tyrants like Viron’s Councillors abuse temporal power. And as its life-support mechanisms decay, the Whorl is doomed, a short-lived exercise in hubristic blasphemy. The way out is not fruitless secular endeavour, but rather an ascent back towards God, an exodus into His Creation, a stepping into Briah.

In the Cabbalistic scheme of universes employed by Wolfe in The Urth of the New Sun (1987), Briah was the plane on which Urth, Severian’s home, existed. Severian took one step up the hierarchy of divine Emanations or Sefiroth, arriving in the purer realm of Yesod. The inhabitants of the Whorl are less fortunate in their positioning: they are in a subcreation beneath Briah, and can only aspire to arrive where Severian began. But the effort must be made. The medium of this ascension is Silk; his story is in one respect that of the Good Pagan, whose gathering enlightenment allows him to become Christian even where Christianity has no physical presence. If Long Sun is read as an account of one man’s conversion to belief in the true God (the Outsider), and of how his example further inspires many others, much of the book’s momentum towards transcendence is explained: from a dark state of Graeco-Roman paganism, lit only by the feeble Long Sun, souls rise towards a brighter knowledge of the Divine, in the fuller light of the Short Sun. But in Gene Wolfe’s work, nothing is ever quite that simple.

For one thing, Wolfe is never as directly categorical as the above argument may suggest. He readily concedes to the secular, and even to paganism, some measure of cogency. They should be tried; indeed, as instruments of God’s Divine Plan, they can be quite useful. And if they are not tried, how can their fundamental emptiness ever be demonstrated? Their simultaneous usefulness (limited) and futility (absolute) should be confirmed through rigorous experiment, before the necessity of Catholic monotheism is asserted. This project Wolfe masterfully undertakes in The Book of the Long Sun. First a world without Christianity is thoroughly dissected; then it can be left behind. The experimental method of Science, incorporated into a work of Science Fiction, is used by Wolfe as a proof of Faith.

To Wolfe, paganism and secularism presumably are aspects of the same mentality. A person who does not believe in God will instead believe in anything; in that climate, faith readily attaches to the mere concrete things of this world, and to deities who personify the appearances, the natural phenomena, of that world. Wolfe constructs the Whorl to demonstrate the evil effects of this lawless secular mindset; he then challenges that mindset to remedy those effects. The problem that the secular must thus solve is usurpation: in the Whorl, the fundamental wrongness that is God’s absence has allowed all legitimate authority to be destroyed. This pattern emerges repeatedly and at many levels of scale: when Pas (Typhon) usurps the prerogative of God by fashioning his own world, the Whorl; when Pas and his family proclaim themselves the gods of the Whorl, relegating the God who made them to the status of the Outsider, a minor, little-worshipped deity; when Pas’s wife and children in their turn depose Pas, ‘wiping him out of core’; when the Ayuntamiento of Viron, echoing the gods, deposes the legitimate Calde, Tussah, and usurps power; when the Ayuntamiento Councillors, in a bid for immortality, usurp control of ‘chem’ or robot bodies that formerly had personalities of their own; when Patera Quetzal, in fact a vampirical alien, assumes human form and usurps the headship of Viron’s Chapter (Church); when Mucor, Blood’s daughter, rides the bodies of others by casting her mind into them. The Father, the Ruler, the Sovereign Soul: these are evicted again and again; even the city of Trivigaunte, at first seemingly sympathetic, comes to be seen as a matriarchal dystopia, in which the elimination of patriarchy (which Wolfe, as a conservative Catholic, defends) has given rise to an illegitimate and harshly chauvinistic feminist militarism. The entire pattern may stem from an ancient usurpation, described when Typhon was originally encountered in The Sword of the Lictor (1982): Typhon’s appropriation of the body of his slave, Piaton. But whatever the Original Sin, a chaos of illegitimacy prevails: something must set it right.

Wolfe’s large cast of characters is given the opportunity. They live in a version of Hell; they try hard to retrieve their situation. By enlightening Silk and setting him on the road to the Caldeship, the Outsider Himself provides some momentum towards a secular solution. But only heroic failure is possible: human frailty and confusion are too great. Wolfe’s narrative expresses, integrates, perhaps is that confusion. As in The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe acts as a literary torturer, compelling his characters and his narrative form to confess their inadequacies of perception and representation. His instruments, naturally, are plot, characterisation, and dialogue; these should be examined in turn.

Plot. As Wolfe’s narrator years afterwards reconstructs Silk’s story from his own memories and from much oral testimony, he effectively relays the confusion of the times. Sometimes events are related in great, possibly very significant detail; elsewhere, complex developments are told at second hand, or conveyed speedily and with gaping lacunae; in certain instances, only guesswork can reconstruct what has occurred. And the plot itself is a maze of twists and turns, moving mercurially about, new characters and implications incessantly emerging. All the leading characters must at some stage wander unpredictably through the tunnels under Viron, in what is simultaneously a hellish Underworld and the primary route out of the Hell that is the Whorl. Silk’s adventures result in his being taken captive, by various foes, at least six times. The tides of battle and the alignment of factions are always shifting. Long Sun seems, for much of its length, almost helter-skelter.

This facilitates Wolfe’s assertion of inherent secular confusion. But there is much deliberation in the disorder also. Unexpected connections are struck between characters, ideas, symbols. What at first seems an isolated implication may retrospectively acquire great significance: for example, Horn’s imitation of Silk at the start of Lake of the Long Sun is no longer incidental when one considers Horn’s role late in Exodus. And, again in retrospect, the twisting plot of Long Sun may be understood as Wolfe’s exploration and demolition of a succession of secular options, whose abandonment will leave God as the sole alternative.

There are four of these options, one per volume, each a stage of Wolfe’s argument, making clear the cause of Long Sun‘s structuring as a tetralogy. Each phase of the plot sees Silk and his allies undertake a strategy which, however courageously pursued, fails; they are catapulted, willy-nilly, into another phase as the volume ends. Thus, Nightside the Long Sun sees Silk attempt to protect his manteion, and the people that it serves, by means of dealings with the criminal, Blood; the conventions of crime fiction come into play, only to be exhausted. Silk breaks into Blood’s mansion, becoming a thief; but as he is caught, he must compromise with greater thieves, and is made their tool. He also plays the detective, investigating a murder at a brothel owned by Blood; but unlike his model, Chesterton’s Father Brown, Silk must entertain supernatural hypotheses, and the tight secular reasoning typical of the whodunit falls away. The permutations of the criminal method and genre are discarded; next comes espionage. In Lake of the Long Sun, Silk initially hopes to blackmail the Trivigaunti agent, Doctor Crane, into providing the funds needed to redeem the manteion from Blood; but this intrigue comes to nought when Silk finds himself a prisoner of the Ayuntamiento, along with Crane. Not only is Silk poor at the spying game; he ought rather to have acted against his own deeply unpleasant government in the first place. But a career as Trivigaunti agent or ally is rendered impossible when Silk’s new comrade, Doctor Crane, dies in an absurd skirmish with friendly forces. The espionage option and the spy genre recede from view; the war story beckons.

Calde of the Long Sun embraces the military option. Armed righteousness is now explored. The rebellious citizens of Viron, many defectors from the City Guard, and Trivigauntis arriving on an airship make Silk Calde in truth, and the Ayuntamiento, with its thousands of robot soldiers, is restricted to limited areas of the city and the underground tunnels. Wolfe enjoys describing armaments and strategy. But Silk would rather have peace; war merely devastates Viron and slays thousands. The sense grows that Silk is becoming a puppet of self-interested forces: his military commander, Oosik, Patera Quetzal, head of the Chapter, and Trivigaunte. Victory at this volume’s end is partial, threatening stalemate; Silk wonders in the final scene whether the arrival of further Trivigaunti troops is desirable. War may inspire and liberate, as it does Maytera Mint, the shy sybil from Silk’s manteion who is suddenly transformed into a charismatic general; but it is no lasting answer. This ambiguity fuels the next option, explored in Exodus From the Long Sun. The genre now is the utopia. Trivigaunte represents a radical alternative to the patriarchal oligarchy of Viron: a society of Amazons, an experiment in matriarchy. But the outcome is inevitably unhappy, a dystopia. Trivigaunte, like any revolutionary society, must arm itself; its militarism has become absolute. Its rulers treat men as badly as men have ever treated women. It wages constant aggressive wars. Its intervention in the Vironese revolution is that of an imperial power establishing a colony. Wolfe dismisses the hope that utopian formulas can restrain human excesses. And so things become still worse. The only choice left for Silk and his followers is the abandonment of the world, the exodus into Briah.

Four secular possibilities, four literary genres: all implode. This is the pattern underlying Long Sun‘s bustling plot. In God alone should trust be placed: the fifth option, that of religious transcendence, prevails. But the first four have been useful, as demonstrations of secular futility, as tests of the mettle of humanity, as upheavals that compel thousands to flee the Whorl. Every action fits into the Divine Plan. In the end, the four empty stages are four necessary steps towards Briah, towards God. They make possible the fifth step, leading to the planets Blue and Green.

Characterisation. A glance at the prefatory list of characters in Exodus From the Long Sun might suggest that their sheer numbers would add to Wolfe’s spectacle of secular confusion. This is not the case: even the more minor figures are skilfully differentiated from each other, and Wolfe choreographs the movements of all effortlessly. It is in fact perplexities within individual characters that advance Wolfe’s design. Almost all of the significant people he describes, whatever their intelligence or moral profile, are impeded in their actions and vision either by ambiguity of identity or by uncertainty of perception (very often both). As in so many previous Wolfe novels, it is difficult to be certain of the nature of others, and even more difficult to know oneself.

So many of the characters in Long Sun are not precisely themselves. Their programming can be altered. Patera Silk is not the same man after his enlightenment by the Outsider as he was before, and Wolfe repeatedly emphasises how his experiences change him yet further. The three sybils of Silk’s manteion all undergo metamorphoses: Mayteras Marble and Rose become one united being when the chem or robot, Marble, incorporates into herself the dead Rose’s prosthetic parts; and Maytera Mint, absorbing aspects of the goddesses Kypris and Echidna, moves from quiet shyness to martial inspiration as General Mint. Silk’s eventual wife, Hyacinth, may be nothing more than an avatar or vehicle for Kypris. Silk’s sister Chenille and her lover, the thief and prophet Auk, are possessed by gods and gain a foreign purposefulness. Blood’s mad daughter, Mucor, can readily possess others and often does: this violates the selfhood of Patera Remora (the chief ecclesiastical bureaucrat), the Trivigaunti General Saba, the flier Sciathan, and Horn, to name but some. The Councillors of the Ayuntamiento are physically moribund, and so direct stolen chem bodies: are they humans or chems? (The answer horrifies Councillor Lemur, and leads to his death.) Since chems can be reprogrammed, the soldier, Corporal Hammerstone, is made into a quite different person by the ‘black mechanic’, Patera Incus. And there are characters who are simply thoroughly disguised, like the alien, Quetzal, and the foreigner, Crane: only they know themselves. In the absence of reliable recognition of the self and of others, agendas of outward action become precarious.

This is especially true given constant misunderstandings of the nature of phenomena and events. Silk often fails, earnestly but utterly, to comprehend developments around him; his pet and companion, the night chough Oreb, is frequently more perceptive than his master (of which, more shortly). Silk has his expertise, but it is unworldly and narrow. Indeed, all of Wolfe’s characters are competent in their way, but they almost all (very realistically) only know very small parts of the total picture. Auk is a great thief, Hyacinth a great courtesan, Oosik a proficient soldier, Remora a superb office politician, but these are not wide horizons. Viron is only one city state of hundreds; the Whorl extends even beyond all these; the real universe is a hardly guessed at realm outside: in the face of this, how informed can anyone’s planning be? Wolfe’s intimacy of scale in most of Long Sun, combined with sudden expansions of scale as the story proceeds, makes clear how small a reach individual experience covers.

Again, secular solutions will not serve. But it should be noted here that two characters do seem to know very much more than the rest. Detailed textual analysis, of the kind all Wolfe’s works demand, suggests that the Outsider has two oracular mouthpieces deployed in Viron: Silk’s bird Oreb, and Patera Quetzal. Both are outsiders, Oreb from the Palustrian swamps quite far from Viron, Quetzal from the planet Green. Oreb, at first designated by Silk as a sacrifice to the Outsider, and later identified by Mint as indeed sacred to that God, provides a constant verbal counterpoint to Silk’s own remarks. He is Silk’s guide as well as his foil. Also a winged being, Quetzal is a more enigmatic figure, on the surface a venerable holy man, beneath that a vampire inhumu. Whatever his true intentions in entering the Whorl, which Wolfe never clarifies, he is not merely a shape-changing monster. He simulates benignity too well. He assists Silk’s political struggle; he would seem to be instrumental in both of Silk’s glimpses of spirits from the afterlife. His religious erudition appears very deep. Furthermore, the planets of his home system, Blue and Green, are, as others have pointed out, reminiscent of the twin worlds in Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972). If this parallel has any force, the humans of the Whorl, like the colonists in Fifth Head, are invaders, the inhumi their victims. Quetzal may well be an envoy. But whether he stands for the Outsider and the outside universe or not, Quetzal, like Oreb, can impart only obliquely helpful fragments of his special knowledge to the people of Viron. They must be allowed their own difficult path of errors to Briah.

Dialogue. One of the most impressive features of Long Sun is Wolfe’s differentiation of characters by means of their idiosyncratic speech patterns. Dialogue dominates the text of the series, a great hum of interrogatory and confessional voices; the variety and complexity of spoken language is one of Wolfe’s central themes here. Yet for all the vitality of communication and interpretation in this text, the question is posed once more: how can mere secular understanding decode such a Babel of dialects and subjectivities?

The assembly of Long Sun‘s countless fragments of spoken meaning into a coherent whole is impossible for any character, leaving even Wolfe’s narrator, who writes with the hindsight of years, in some analytical perplexity. Rich eccentricities of diction abound, retarding comprehension. Tick the catachrest sets the tone with frustrating distortions of words; Oreb, the other major animal character, speaks only in bisyllabic exclamations. The lower classes speak a specialised ‘thieves’ cant’, disguising their activities from the authorities; the lower-ranking soldiers are programmed to speak similarly, as this fits them for their tasks, Hammerstone tells Silk. The educated can be as obscure: Patera Remora haws his way to a scholarly precision, while Patera Incus is ridiculously orotund. The Trivigaunti elite employ an exclusive aristocratic tongue, and so struggle with the common language – for them a mark of their superiority.

Even those who speak a more standard English (or what Wolfe ‘translates’ as such) have their strategies of obfuscation: Quetzal and Crane are in careful disguise; the gods who speak from Mainframe via the ‘Sacred Windows’ must be opaquely oracular; Lemur and his Councillors declare with every word their mad calculating hubris. And so those who seek clarity – in particular Silk and Mint – are lost in thickets of conflicting signification. Their interpretive efforts are heroic; but in the end, the Whorl is a Hell of misrepresentation and deception, and true answers lie Outside.

* * * * * * *

The Book of the Long Sun is a masterpiece of subversive persuasion. It deploys SF’s genre props in all their glamour and iconic resonance, constructing out of them a narrative that is exciting, knowing, seductive, a summary of the virtues of traditional SF. And yet, this is the device by which Gene Wolfe draws his readers into the trap of Faith: SF’s characteristically secular descriptive vocabulary, the terminology and rhetoric of Science, is eloquent, and alluring in its promise of understanding. It entices the secular-minded reader into Wolfe’s text. Then, too late, the reader realises that scientific analysis will not serve, that a religious paradigm must take over. Wolfe persuades with all the formal subtlety of an Aquinas. Or with all the brutal ingenuity of an Inquisitor.

The process will continue further. Two questions remain to be resolved (or not) in The Book of the Short Sun. First: now that they are in Briah, how will the colonists from the Whorl confront the inhumi of Green, who may be both devils and angels? Will they make further spiritual gains, despite the religious doubts that must flourish in Silk’s absence? And second: what was Silk’s fate on the Whorl? Did he accept Kypris’ off.er to join her as a god in Mainframe? If so, was the offer a corrupting trap or an opportunity to redeem the Whorl from within? This last uncertainty, so provocative of conflicting readings of Long Sun, is a quintessentially Wolfean gift and challenge to the reader, and integral, one must hope, to Short Sun.

EDITIONS CONSULTED:

• Nightside the Long Sun (New York: Tor, 1993)
• Lake of the Long Sun (New York: Tor, 1994)
• Calde of the Long Sun (New York: Tor, 1994)
• Exodus From the Long Sun (New York: Tor, 1996)

This article first appeared in Nova Express 5.1, Fall/Winter 1998. Now out of print, we reprint it with the permission of its editor, Lawrence Person.

The moon is down
Taurus was in the sky before: it’s gone.
Time is passing.
It is midnight and I lie here alone.
Sappho.

“Who writes? For whom is the writing being done?” So Edward Said began his essay “Opponents, audiences, constituencies and community”, ¹ by asking questions he said were vital for a “politics of interpretation.” Said, talking about modern literary criticism, could equally have been referring to genre fiction. His questions are particularly relevant for an examination of Wolfe’s writing.

In the first part of this essay I take up the question of Wolfe’s narrative approach, what “fiction” means to him, as encapsulated by Said’s questions, and as seen in the Latro novels.

In part two I examine some of the more important Greek references in the two books. I wish to go beyond this “investigatory” reading, as it is available to anyone willing to invest time in the reading, and examine some of the major themes such as divine involvement, Apollo’s oracle, loyalty and arete, which translates as all that is excellent, virtuous and “manly” (the adjective is exact: this is essentially a male concept in a male-dominated society).

I.

Speak to the Silent City,
Saying that in her cause,
We begged no tyrant’s pity,
And fell obedient to her laws.

Simonides’ Epitaph to Thermopylae (as translated by Wolfe)

For whom is the writing done?

This question is asked in the context of a characterisation of Wolfe’s style which captures people’s overall attitude toward him rather well. The characterisation goes something like this: Wolfe’s writing is too complex, too literary and too unclear for the “common” reader (it sometimes has the rider that despite this, he writes beautifully). James Gunn’s comment is representative of this attitude when he notes that Wolfe’s earlier short fiction “was usually difficult, often ambiguous, sometimes obscure, and always skilfully written”.² In Lane, Vernon, & Carson his writing is described as “highly literary, fascinating science fiction that repaid careful reading. It [is] complex but approachable, new but old, psychological but concrete.”³ Even critics who are largely favourable towards Wolfe can take this stance. For example, John Clute has written in Strokes:

Perhaps what’s necessary with Wolfe’s work is to train ourselves in the kind of close critical reading of texts that serious critics of the Modernist and Post-Modernist novel assume to be absolutely mandatory just for starters, with understanding to come later, after some work has been done.⁴

This attitude implies that Wolfe can only appeal to and be understood by a minority of “expert” readers, who are willing to invest time and effort in analysing his texts: if we do not engage in a “close critical reading” we will not fully come to grips with the work. It could be argued, that Wolfe has “deserted” the common reader, and that the audience for whom he writes is more “literary” and elitist. This is exactly the point that Said is making in his essay. In a recent commentary in The New Republic Irving Howe observes that the common reader is in danger of being wiped out due to the current exclusionary attitude of critics:

[i]t sometimes seems almost as if that figure [the common reader] has been banished, at least in the academic literary world, as an irritant or intruder, the kind of obsolete person who still enjoys stories as stories and still supposes that characters bear some resemblance to human beings.⁵

Could this lead, he wonders, to a less democratic culture, especially since that culture is already in “decline” due to the influence of television, anti-intellectualism and the loss of “firm convictions” within the educated classes? And does this in turn lead to the “decline in both the presence and idea of the common reader” (p.30)?

Wolfe’s relation to these conservative comments is complex. First, of course, would be his agreement that stories are to be enjoyed. He has said in interviews, and often has his characters repeat, that stories are a powerful and important tradition (Severian, for example, remarks that stories may be the only truly worthwhile human creation). And he would presumably agree, that academics have conspired to sever the public’s connection with literature through obfuscatory techniques, as in the introduction to his Storeys from the Old Hotel 1985 where he remarks that there are only a few academics in their fields because they actually love their subject, the implication being the rest are in it for the power and prestige.

But as I pointed out above, Wolfe himself is not immune to charges of being unsuitable for the “common reader.” Two responses to this come to mind, one made by Wolfe himself. These responses do not fully answer our reservations about Wolfe’s work, but they do offer a way of dealing with it. Both admit that Wolfe is a complex, ambiguous writer – a necessary admission in my view, though not an alienating one.

Not necessarily alienating because first, such complexity is not a disadvantage, but an opportunity for readers to engage with the novel at the level with which they are most comfortable. In other words, it’s a hierarchical description: there is a “surficial” level, such as the adventure of (say) the picaresque Severian in The Book of the New Sun. But there is also a “chthonic,” underground level, where deeper religious or metaphysical elements find their expression (here we might cite Severian’s political agenda in writing The Book of the New Sun). Readers are able to engage with the work at either level.

This is one reason why Wolfe, although dealing with some of the most traditionally “difficult” issues of literature such as love, death, goodness, evil and morality, chooses to frame them in landscapes and frameworks that are surficially exciting and unusual, such as the Commonwealth, or ancient Greece. Wolfe is sometimes asked why he chooses to write within the genre, and his plain man’s answer is usually that that’s what he would like to read himself, and that he doesn’t consciously write “to” genre (he once said he writes the “storyline,” not the “party line,” see the interview in Weird Tales, 1988). There is little doubt that Wolfe’s use of blatant stereotypes and clichés (such as giants, castles and duels), are resonantly attractive, presumably because they remind us of childhood fairy tales and stories. At the same time Wolfe pushes ever deeper into the complexities and ambiguities of real life. He uses the clichés of genre in order to transcend them and thus reinvest them with meaning.

A second response which can be made (and has been on occasion by Wolfe) is that the complexity and difficulty are there not for their own sake, but because complexity and ambiguity are aspects of life itself. In an interview in 1984 with the American Audio Prose Library Chris Merrick asked the question “Do you think you’re an ambiguous writer?” and was told,

I think I am often because I want to be. I think the writer should be clear when he wants to be clear, he should be ambiguous when he wishes to be ambiguous. But there’s a great deal of ambiguity in life, and if the idea of art is to hold up a mirror to life, then you’re going to get a great deal of ambiguity out of that art.⁶

Although these questions concerning an author and his reader are applicable to most of Wolfe’s work, they are most pointedly highlighted by his two novels set in ancient Greece. These books are where the separation between the surface level and the deeper structures is greatest, and where the need to be an “expert” reader is most apparent. When it came to The Book of the New Sun most readers were on the same starting line, and how far you delved into the book was largely an extent of your liking for the author and your own proclivities. With the Latro books, it is no longer so. Accusations, or at least warnings, have gone out (with justification), that if you want to go beyond the surface of these books, you have to know something about the Classical world.⁷ Herodotus seems to be a minimum requirement, particularly for Soldier of the Mist (hereafter Mist). It can be supplemented by modern commentaries on the Persian wars, cults and religion, Pindar’s Odes, Robert Graves on myths and legends, and for Soldier of Arete (hereafter Arete) a selection of writing about the ancient games and arete, with the entire works of Mary Renault thrown in for good measure.

Faced with such a list of required reading (the optional list goes on a lot longer) the reader is justified in balking at the task and picking up something less demanding and more entertaining. Isn’t the purpose of fiction, after all, to entertain? Even if we pare the list down to just Herodotus as the single most important influence on Mist, we’re out of luck when it comes to Arete, for it opens with the closing scene of that great historian’s work The History.

There is, in the final analysis, no escaping this condition. Nevertheless, I believe the more rewarding attitude to be not “why are these books so full of obscure references” but “look how the glory and squalor of ancient Greece is made accessible!” In other words, let us not remain at the surficial level, not matter how attractive it seems, but move “onwards and inwards.” That is surely Wolfe’s intent, and in Part Two I will go on to bring out some of those references, as well as highlighting some important themes in the books.

Who Writes?

“You are an advocate of the dead.”

“I am… nobody I ever heard talks about doing right by them … we ought to remember now and then how much of what we have we got from them.”

– Severian and Rudesind.

The Latro novels make us confront questions about the texts themselves. In front of us we have two writings that have “come down” to us, supposedly translated by Wolfe. This is a typical Wolfe ploy, and the reader will immediately be reminded of the same framing device in The Book of the New Sun, although this time the manuscripts come to us from antiquity rather than the far future. Other examples abound of Wolfe directly engaging with the text: in “The Last Thrilling Wonder Story” (in Endangered Species) for example, an author by the name of “Gene Wolfe” discusses the story’s events with the protagonist; in the sequence of stories under the general title of “Procreation” we see again a narrator called Gene literally creating a world (with an awful pun on genesis), and perhaps most remarkably of all, in The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), Number Five, the cloned narrator, turns out to have the hidden, chthonic, name of Gene Wolfe.⁸ Latro’s real name, Lucius, means ‘Wolf’ in Latin. These postmodernist feints remind us of Calvin’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Priest’s The Affirmation, or Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and serve the same purpose; to attract our attention to the process of writing itself and in particular the writer’s relationship to their texts.

There has long been an implicit conspiracy among authors that involves a double pretence, first that they have omniscient powers over their stories and characters, and second that they, the authors, do not exist; i.e. the story is “by” someone else, namely the narrator. Wolfe I believe would take issue with both of these. He has said a few times that authors do not always control their characters as much as they think. His most famous example is that of Dorcas popping up out of the swamp, “taking” the story in directions Wolfe had not anticipated. By pretending to provide manuscripts that he merely “edits” or “translates” Wolfe presents a more realistic rationale for having a story in our hands than is commonly attempted. Both of these moves seem to “disempower” the author by initially de-emphasising an author’s role, but they are gambits which only lose position in the short term: Wolfe’s objective is to emphasise the power of the Story: its tradition and importance in human affairs. And as the person responsible for revitalising Story, Wolfe is ultimately empowered again. (Though this may be a side effect he’s largely uninterested in.) Ironically, although Wolfe is often labelled an sf writer, these ploys make him more realist than the “realists” themselves, a comment that is applicable to most of Wolfe’s œuvre.

By framing the text as translation Wolfe is once again pointing to the question of language and its reliability. Indeed, we are warned against possible errors of translation in the preface to Soldier of the Mist. Is language the simple tool of the communicator, being moulded into expressions conveying information or is it more slippery, forever eluding our grasp? Wolfe has noted himself that one can make an error in dealing with language: “the error consists of deciding (without ever really looking into the question) that one knows what the words mean, that they actually mean it, and that they cannot ever mean anything else. All of which is seldom true”.⁹ This directly bears upon our question of “who writes?” Is it simply Wolfe writing, or is Latro more than just a figment of his imagination? We know Wolfe’s love of the story, but when a storyteller like Wolfe does tell one, he is partly, even greatly, reliant upon storytellers of the past, letting their voices and feelings be expressed through his own mouth, like the Alzabo. (Perhaps this also explains his belief that all things living ultimately derive from all things dead, as for example Rudesind argues in the passage above, or as the Queen of the Dead says in Mist, “[i]t is the dead – trees and grasses, animals and men – who send you all you have of men, animals, trees, and grasses” [p.120].) This derivation from the past, quite literally in the case of the Latro books, does not necessarily come without alteration or misinterpretation of course. Another example is provided by Valeria in the Atrium of Time. In Shadow of the Torturer she translates for Severian two mottoes on the gnomens. In fact she mistranslates them, but close enough so that the reader without Latin, or even a Latin- English dictionary will be deceived. Why does he do this, to trick us? I think not: he is being honest, honest that is to Valeria’s character, who probably does not know her ancient languages (her family is in severe decline). Who writes here? Wolfe or… Valeria? (In the same piece quoted above, Wolfe dismisses those who think characters are not real, and recounts the surprising appearance of Dorcas.) In Wolfe’s fiction although things can be what they seem, they are not just what they seem.

Names Again.

An example of this “character writing” is the naming scheme of Mist and Arete. As a Roman, Latro cannot read Greek, though he speaks it well enough. This results in the unique circumstance of Latro attempting to translate the meanings of the Greek words into Roman equivalents, so that Plataea becomes “Clay,” Corinth becomes “Tower Hill,” and Athens becomes “Thought.”¹⁰ Names have always been important to Wolfe, as readers of The Book of the New Sun know, but some critics have argued that it is unlikely that Latro would translate in this way. We do not, for example, call Mont Blanc the “White Mountain.”

There are two problems with this. The first is that Mont Blanc has acquired a certain fixity of reference, so that although its name does mean the White Mountain, by tradition we refer to it as Mont Blanc. Furthermore, we know that. Latro, waking afresh every day with twelve hour memories has no such fixity of referents. He does have a certain way of seeing things, and relating things to his childhood memories, (which he retains), and therefore winds up calling the same place by the same name over the months.

Second, it seems to me that Latro’s condition is more extreme than the difference between English and French; it’s fairer to think of English and Chinese. If we travelled through China keeping a journal, we would have two choices when we came to a new place. We could attempt to write down the sound of its name, or, we could attempt to translate its meaning into English. We certainly cannot write it in its Chinese characters. While the former approach is most often favoured, it is also liable to vagaries of hearing and cultural mores, as, in fact, the recent renaming of Chinese places has shown.

It can be argued nevertheless that writing down the sounds of the words gives you something more immediate to refer to when your Greek (or Chinese) companions mention it. But this is exactly what Latro does with people‘s names, a fact that has not been brought out thus far in such discussions. Therefore it’s Hegesistratus and not “Leader of the Host,” Xanthippos and not “Yellow Horse,” Cerdon and not “Cunning conman,” and Io and not “Joy,” even though he is well aware of the names’ meanings.

So we have an ancient manuscript in our hands. Unlike the rest of the writings that have come down from antiquity, which are derived from later copies, this purports to be an original. With its commentary on Greek life, and even a chapter by Pindar the Theban poet in Arete, the value of such a find would be inestimable. It would be quite literally the find of the ages. This is one point against falling in with Wolfe’s pretence: it is too unlikely.¹¹

In this section I have tried to bring into focus some central questions about Wolfe’s work that are necessary for a worthwhile interpretation; questions that I think are especially necessary in the two books we have in hand. Obviously, I have done no more than to put these questions on the agenda; there is still much that has to be done if we wish to fully engage with their implications.

II.

“The trumpets are blowing, and the heralds shout to advance. I try to keep our hundred together, but Medes with bows and big wicker shields press through our formation… we run across the plain, the swifter outpacing the slower, the lightly armed always farther ahead of the heavily armed, until I can see no one I know, only dust and running strangers, and ahead the shining wall of hoplons, the bristling hedge of spears.”

- – Latro describing the battle of Plataea

In this section I shall perform an “investigatory” reading to clarify the story by pulling out Wolfe’s Greek references. After briefly setting the larger scene in Greece, I shall place Mist and Arete within this context. Then I will go beyond the investigatory reading by considering several important aspects of the books: the role of the gods in Latro’s life, the oracle in Mist, and finally the concept of arete itself. Understanding the Greek context of these books allows us to move from what I have been calling the surficial level of Wolfe to the chthonic levels, and incidentally to get vicariously caught up in the glory and squalor of ancient Greece. Discussion of Wolfe’s themes will help us understand his “vision” of the world as put forward in these books, and our role in it.

The political and social context

In 479 BC, when the Latro novels begin, Greece (or Hellas as its inhabitants – then and now – call their country) was on the verge of entering its Classical period. It is probably this period that we most associate with Greece, a time when the great philosophers such as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle were to come, and when playwrights such as Aristophanes wrote their best work. Herodotus the “Father of History” was travelling around Greece and Egypt collecting material for his work The History (written circa 450 BC). In art perspective was being discovered, and Pheidias was sculpting the Parthenon (“the virgin’s place, i.e. Athena, goddess of the city).

But most of all, this was the time when Athens developed that system of government called democracy (from demos meaning ‘people’ and kratia meaning ‘rulers’) associated with the likes of Pericles, Cimon and Themistocles. It was not truly democratic, since large segments of the population were disenfranchised, namely the women, who were usually not allowed out of the house – hence their rather pale skins on Greek pottery, and of course the slaves, most of whom may not even have been Greek, being prisoners of war and the like.

This democracy was geographically limited too. Greece was not one nation, but a series of poleis, or nation-states loosely identifying themselves as Hellene. Each polis had its own government, issued its own coins and favoured its own gods. They might even, like Thebes during the Persian Wars, side with the “enemy” (the invading Persians). Sometimes government could differ widely from polis to polis. For example, the Lycurgan Spartan government has been called an “exercise in elitist communism”,¹² an image not normally associated with Greece. Spartans were Dorians, settlers from the North, displacing the original inhabitants of the Peloppenesus, those people responsible for the Mycenean civilisation, and bringing new gods (Artemis) to replace the old ones (Gaea). Spartans made Laconia a class-based society: only the Spartan elite (the homoioi or “equals,” about 8000 in 480 BC) were counted citizens. Below them were the peroioikoi, “those who dwell round about” (or “neighbours” as Latro calls them) consisting of the artisan class (no Spartan would ever be a merchant), and below them the helots or slaves. Sparta was nominally ruled by two kings (keeping each other in check, argues Pausanias) supposedly descended from Heracles, but the power resided in the Senate of gerousia or old men, advised by the ephors or judges.

How different all this is from the burgeoning “democracy” of Athens. Early on, in the seventh century, the monarchy was overthrown, and although suffering through long periods of “tyranny” it moved toward more democratic institutions, especially after Solon’s reforms (early sixth century). Here there were no reasons of class why you could not take part in the decision-making process of the Assembly (again, provided you were neither woman nor slave, and that you lived within one day’s travel of the city, all this amounting to less than real democracy, despite advocates such as I.F. Stone in an otherwise exemplary book).¹³ In the twenty-sixth chapter of Arete Wolfe, in a brilliantly sustained piece of imagination, introduces us to some of the political leaders of Athens, such as Cimon, Xanthippos and Themistocles. We see the two parties, the “shieldmen’s party” (the Aristocrats) headed by Xanthippos and Cimon, and the “naval mob” (the Democrats) headed by Themistocles. The latter plays an important part in Arete because he comes forward to sponsor the Amazon Hippephode in the chariot race. He also, according the history books, became associated with Pausanias at this time, and possibly colluded with him in negotiating with Xerxes. Gradually falling out of favour, and accusing of medism, he was ostracised in 470, fleeing to Persia where he later died. Another curious point is that he came from the family of the Lycomids, a word which may be related to lukios, meaning wolf.

His opponent in politics, Cimon, became strategus (magistrate), a position of power politically and militarily in the year Latro meets him. He was responsible for the downfall of Pausanias just two years later, though he was the kind of man to desire peace with enemies, rather than constant war.

Soldier of the Mist

We first meet Latro near “Clay” (Plataea) in 479 BC with the “Great King’s” (Xerxes) army, which has just been beaten by Sparta and Athens. This proved to be the decisive land victory for the Greeks (the decisive sea battle was at Salamis). Latro must take the word Plataea and relate it to platus, i.e. a plate – which are made of clay. A related word is platon, meaning broad (hence plateau).

The Persian king Xerxes has decided to deal with the uppity Greeks (Ionia, now Western Turkey, was rebelling under Persian control, or “satrapy”). Xerxes’ predecessor was Darius, who himself attempted to invade Attica, called the “Long Coast” by Latro. He sent his commander, Datis, to land at Marathon where he was soundly beaten by the hoplites (shieldmen) of Athens (490 BC). A hoplon is an oval shield carried by the heavy infantry. These shields allowed the Greeks to form their famous phalanx (a word possibly deriving from the bones of fingers and toes).

The Spartans arrived at Marathon after the hot work was over, but probably not on purpose – they were celebrating a festival – and they did actually set out before they received news of the victory. Spartans were very devout (they “well knew who ruled the land,” as Wolfe points out in the foreword) even if they were touchy about their tardiness. Wolfe has Pausanias the Spartan Regent say to his men, “you know how we were late to Fennel Field” (Mist, p.206, i.e. Marathon) and urges his men to aid the Athenians in the siege of Sestos: “I ask you, shall we let them say they took Sestos alone?” “No!” cry his men.

Eleven years later Xerxes is doing just as badly because he is losing at Salamis. He is sitting on a rock watching his ships smashed in the narrow channel. The Greeks loved this victory: it was apparently more famous in Greek history than the defeat of the Spanish Armada in English history (Simonides, the famous Athenian poet who appears in Arete called it “that noble and famous victory”). The standard story is given in Plutarch (Themistocles) and Herodotus. Latro hears the story from Hypereides the leather merchant and captain of the Europa in Chapter seven of Mist.

Although Athens and Sparta fought together in this battle and at Plataea, they were “foul weather friends”: they only talked to each other when their lands were in danger. This could lead to misunderstanding: at Plataea, for example, everything nearly went wrong when communications between the two allies became strained. The Athenians and their allies were pulling back, but Amompharetus, a Spartan general, didn’t want to retreat without even engaging the enemy (or perhaps he never got Pausanias’ message) and refused to comply. This event is described by Basias in Mist (pp.149-150). The Persians attacked the straggling Spartans who formed up and crouched behind their shields under intense enemy fire (which says something for their discipline). Then the Greek reinforcements came up and the retreat turned into an attack, just as if an animal at bay had turned on its pursuers. That must have made quite a strong impression on both sides as both Plutarch and Latro mention it: Latro says, “[t]hey were retreating — we had so many more than they – and it seemed as though a good push would end the war. Then they turned like an elk with a thousand points” (Mist, p.152).

We would do well to note that such comments indicate that Latro has not lost all his memory, as some reviewers have said,¹⁴ only his short-term memory. As Basias says, “[i]n the morning he remembers everything after we camped. But it goes. By noon he won’t remember anything before he woke.” (Mist, p.161.) Quite obviously he still remembers how to speak both Latin and Greek, as well as having memories of his childhood in Italy, and the battle of Plataea (although he doesn’t seem to recall Salamis, in which he also fought). In Arete, with the help of Simonides he even begins to overcome his loss of short-term memory through the use of mnemonics – Simonides being a well-known teacher of memory improvement techniques.

Soldier of Arete

After Sestos falls, Latro (who verifies on the first page that his name is Lucius) is still in the city. No appreciable amount of time has passed. Themistocles, the Athenian commander, decides that he Persian satrap Artaÿctes and his son should be put to death, as is recounted in Herodotus (9.120). However, Oeobazus, who had made the bridge of boats Xerxes used to cross from Asia into Europe escapes. Although the Greeks had broken down the bridge and captured its chains, they decided that having Oeobazus as a prisoner of war would prove even more popular at home. Themistocles sends Hypereides and Latro after Oeobazus, who has fled into Thrace. As they travel the group meets a small band of Amazons, who appear as their name suggests, missing the right breast where the drawstring of their bow would cross, as the Greeks themselves thought. Latro falls in love with one of their number named Pharetra.

The Amazons are on a mission to steal some of the famed horses of Thrace. The reason for this, we find out later, is so they can to win the chariot race in the Games at Delphi. Needless to say, the mission goes awry and Latro returns to Greece. In a manumission ceremony at Sparta he is freed, although he must take part in the same Games in an exchange arranged with the connivance of the Athenian leaders. Pasicrates hasn’t yet forgiven him for cutting off his hand, and his constant hate seems to drastically depress Latro, who is already grieving for the dead Pharetra. At the Games he is reunited with Pindaros and some Phoenician prisoners who know him. After winning his events in the Games, Latro makes off with the prisoners, gains their ship and sails for Rome. The last chapter of the scroll is written by Pindaros, who also becomes guardian of Io and another child they met along the way.

This is the surface story of Arete (or some of it). Of course much more goes on below the surface. For example, the other child, Polos, is in fact a centaur sent by Gaea, or so Wolfe tells us in the Glossary. Latro gets involved in political manoeuvres on his return to Athens: Themistocles and his party agree with Cimon and his party that Latro ought to go to Sparta to be freed by Pausanias. These manoeuvres are somewhat confusing, and because Wolfe keeps Latro’s entries in the scroll realistic, we only learn of their importance incidentally.

The Involvement of the Gods

It is clear from the outset that the role of the gods in the Latro manuscripts is central to the plot and the actions of some characters, especially Latro. In this section I shall examine some aspects of that involvement.

We might begin with Pausanias, the Spartan Regent, who, according to the history books had plans to collaborate with Xerxes (we see this firsthand in chapter twenty-seven of Mist). According to the Latro manuscripts Pausanias has been sent a dream by Kore that involves Latro. Pausanias has Mother Ge/Demeter’s favour because of this collaborationist line: recall the sacrifice scene in chapter thirty-one, where she promises to make him king of Laconica. He himself wants to rule that land until they came, bringing with them Artemis, their preferred goddess, who she calls the “usurper” (Arete, chapter sixteen). This also explains why Artemis is helping Latro: since her enemy took away his memory, by advancing his cause she wounds Demeter. Thus, for example, she tells Latro and Hegesistratus in chapter six of Arete that soon they will meet a queen, meaning the queen of the Amazons, who will ride a chariot at Delphi in the games, supported by Themistocles, “but when the moment comes, the slut must lose.” I believe this to be because of Themistocles (the boar she mentions) who will come forward to support Hippephode, who as a barbarian cannot legitimately take part in the games, and that he must be discredited (as Hegesistratus observes in chapter forty-one of Arete) before he allies with the Spartans. Artemis would like to see Latro win, on the other hand, because the Amazons, as priestesses of Ares are the “granddaughters of Demeter, which is why Hegesistratus is so upset later when he rides off to the Phoenician ship (chapter forty-three). It is not clear why, but Latro’s actions serve to elevate Pausanias’ cause (he is “twice a hero”) due to Latro’s desertion. Much of this is still unclear and may be elaborated if the long-projected Soldier of Sidon is ever completed..

Latro claims to be able see these gods. He provides many examples of conversations and encounters with them. While there is a “rational” explanation for this, the head wound he received at the battle of Plataea (e.g. Kichesippos the Spartan Healer speaks of “hallucinations”, Mist p.174), going beyond this is more interesting because it allows us to see what Wolfe is up to. In the foreword to Mist Wolfe notes that Latro “reports Greece as it was reported by the Greeks themselves” (p.xiii), i.e. complete with reference to the gods, The theological system means the gods are dependent to some degree on humanity, so that when the Great Mother appears to the helots in Mist for example, she is old, although she rightly points out that for others she is younger because they haven’t been worshipping her as long. The extent to which we worship the gods affects their power, and though immortal, they may disappear or be replaced by gods whose powers are waxing, This is very different from the monotheistic Christian perspective, with its all-powerful deity upon which we depend. Although some people may be offended by the theological system in the Latro manuscripts, not only is it faithful to the Greeks, but it could be very attractive to those who might currently describe themselves as atheists.

The reason for this is because it places humanity at the centre of the system, instead of being dependent on a deity whose intent we strive to understand. Greek gods represent an interesting approach to religion: that it is there when you need it. This attractive vision is supplemented by the fact that since there were many gods and goddesses, some of whom represent the earth, rivers and the sea, we would increase our respect for the environment. As I write this, for example, the Exxon Valdiz has caused one of the biggest oil spills ever in the Alaskan sound. Perhaps the Greek gods offer us a lesson in environmentalism we have too soon forgotten.

There are other versions of why Latro can see the gods. Apollo explains to him that only the solitary see the gods, and without friends, home or memory this certainly describes Latro’s condition. Long after he has forgotten Apollo, Latro is thrown into “water” (the Aegean) by Pasicrates, Pausanias’ message runner. There he meets Thoe, one of the daughters of Ocean. In events that echo those between Severian and the undines, she takes him headfirst down in to the blue depths, so that “the blue water was all about me, a darker blue above, a paler, brighter blue below, where a great brown snail with a mossy shell crawled and trailed a thread of slime” (Mist, p.224). She tells him that children too are permitted to see her, although men are not, unless they soon die, because “they forget the way you do” (p.225).

One of the most important and lasting encounters with gods that Latro has is in Mist, when he receives the oracle from Apollo. I wish to turn to that in some detail now.

The Oracle at Thebes

Soldier of the Mist begins with an encounter with Apollo, god of prophecy, wolves and light. The appearance of Apollo in Wolfe’s books should not be dismissed as trivial: Apollo’s epithet was Lukeios, which although ambiguous (it could mean “wolf-slaying,” “the Lycian god,” or “the god of day”) is probably derived from Greek lukos (wolf). In an essay on Greek wolf-lore, Eckels points out that Apollo was a pastoral god, and a “protector of the hers, and hence the enemy and slayer of wolves”.¹⁵. Apollo’s oracle is given twice, once by Apollo himself and once through the sibyl. Unfortunately space does not permit me to discuss all the references in the prophecy here but I will comment on the more important lines. First, here are Apollo’s words:

I am a god of divination, of music, of death, and of healing; I am the slayer of wolves and the master of the sun. I prophesy that though you will wander far in search of your home, you will not find it until you are farthest from it. Once only, you will sing as men sang in the Age of Gold to the playing of the gods. Long after, you will find what you seek in the dead city.

Though healing is mine, I cannot heal you, nor would I if I could; by the shrine of the Great Mother you fell, to a shrine of hers you must return. Then she will pint the way, and in the end the wolf’s tooth will return to her who sent it…. Look beneath the sun… (Mist, 10)

Apollo’s last line is recast by the sibyl (“Look under the sun, if you would see!”). Pindaros says it means the light of understanding comes from Apollo (the sun), but this may be too hasty. Latro is told later (by Demeter) to “look beneath the sun,” when he is to steal the Royal horses of Thrace (Arete, chap. 16). The sun is guiding him to something which will appear below it. Or again, Latro, standing on the walls of Sestos, sees the sun, not as a shining fireball, but as Apollo racing across the sky in his chariot (Arete, chap. 1). Seeing that it does not slow as it approaches the horizon Latro speculates that it passes beneath the Earth to come up on the other side: a brilliant deduction made nearly 140 years before Aristotle concluded the Earth was a sphere in On the Heavens.¹⁶ Latro has two explanations: that he ought to read his scroll, an activity best performed by daylight (Mist, p.13) and that he should look to the past, where he will indeed see (Arete, chap.seven).

The reference to wandering far from home does not appear in the sibyl’s version, but presumably refers to the vision of home that Elata gives him in the fifth chapter of Arete. While physically far away (in Thrace) he “visits” his home in Italy, seeing his father ploughing, and then speaking with his mother.

Apollo says, “Long after, you will find what you seek in the dead city” and since what Latro is seeking are his friends this must be the scene in Sestos at the conclusion of Soldier of the Mist. The Athenians besiege the city and murder the Persian satrap (Herodotus 9.120 and the opening scene of Arete). Latro finds his long-lost Roman friend that he was with in Xerxes’ army (his name may be “Cassius,” see p.231 of Mist). As Kore warned (p.121), Demeter has a finger in Latro’s decision, so he finds him only moments before he dies, but here, on the last page of the first scroll, he finally learns his name is Lucius.

“Though healing is mine, I cannot heal you, nor would I if I could; by the shrine of the Great Mother you fell, to a shrine of hers you must return.” (p.10) Pindaros says, “here, in my humble opinion, is the single most significant line in the whole business” (p.14). Apollo says that Latro can only be healed by the one who hurt him, that is, the Great Mother “whom we worship under so many different names, most of which mean mother, or earth, or grain-giver, or something of that sort”(p.14). This is correct so far, although at first Pindaros tries to guide Latro to the wrong shrine. Who is this Great Mother? In the thirty-first chapter of Mist the Great Mother is the goddess the Spartan helots want returned to the Pelepponesus and she speaks of her daughter Kore. Kore was Demeter’s daughter, described as Gaea’s daughter in the glossary. In chapter six Cerdon implies that Demeter bore the “Fingers,” i.e. the Dactlys, a set of dwarfish offspring, although again in his glossary Wolfe implies that it was Gaea who had them. The point is that Wolfe is showing us that two very old goddesses, Demeter and Gaea, who have very similar attributes (fertility, earth etc.) are actually aspects of the same divinity. We are reminded of this by the priest in chapter four, who tells us (by way of telling little Io) that the gods go by the name that is most appropriate to the time and place they are addressed, so that they can have many names. There may be “many gods, but not so many as ignorant people suppose” (p.19).

The “Great Mother” and the “Earth Mother”, Demeter (her name was thought by the ancients to mean that, from de earth and meter mother) and Gaea (Earth) are the same goddess. Pindaros says himself when he realises that Latro must got to Eleusis (Advent) and not Lebadeia, “[t]he Grain Goddess is the Great Mother, and the Great Mother is the Earth Mother, who sends up our wheat and barley” (p.109).

The last lines of Apollo’s prophecy are particularly interesting. The first part, “[t]hen she shall point the way…” (p.10), refers to the Maiden in chapter nineteen, who gives him the Lupine, the “wolf-flower,” which he rolls up in his scroll. By doing this he is sent to Sestos by Pausanias, so indeed the flower is acting as a pointer. Apollo continues, “…and in the end the wolf’s tooth will return to her who sent it.” Note Kore’s words later: “[h]ere is the wolf-flower for you, who bears the wolf’s tooth” (Mist, p.120). This may refer to Latro’s ancestry: as a Roman he is supposedly descended from Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a wolf.¹⁷ Alternatively, if the tooth is interpreted as a “mark,” or “sign,” it could be a reference to Latro’s real name, (Lucius), which as we have seen means “wolf.”

Demeter/Gaea has taken away his memory because of an as yet unidentified offence. At Plataea, the fighting came close to one of her temples (Latro remembers its white walls, Mist, p.153), and Herodotus notes (9.65) that strangely no bodies were found in its precincts. Herodotus though this was because the Persians had angered her for burning another temple and “would not let them in,” while modern writers note that the fleeing Persians were faced with the uphill lay of the land (with the temple at the top), guiding them around it in the stream valleys.

Latro at least may have gone into the temple. Kore the Maiden remarks that he is no longer as stubborn as he was with her mother (Mist, p.120) which seems to hint that he at least talked with Demeter, and perhaps insulted her. It is interesting to speculate that perhaps his comments had something to do with memory or forgetting, which gives his punishment a kind of divine justice. Latro is a proud early Roman, as we see when his heart nearly bursts when he sees the Roman Eagle in the battle of Sestos, although he doesn’t even know why, so it is possible that he denigrated some Greek ideal, or championed a Roman god. Wolfe uses a quote from Herodotus referring to the fight and the temple as his epigraph to Mist.

As I mention above, it is impossible to examine every aspect of Greek life that Wolfe refers to in these books, but through looking at the prophecy we can at least find some rationale for Latro’s more significant encounters with the gods and goddesses.

Loyalty and “Arete”

“Old Ares isn’t some kind of monster, see? Think of him as a plain man that wants to win the war and get back home to Aphrodite. He’s for training, discipline, and fair play with the men. And he whistles when he loses just like he whistles when he wins.”

- – Diokles

It is noticeable that some of the characters develop between the books. Sometimes this results in our examining motives and features such as loyalty, which appeared settled. A case in point is Hypereides. While apparently working for Xanthippos he promises to free Artaÿctes the Persian satrap of Sestos, and further, he knows him well. As a major trader Hypereides presumably has occasionally met Artaÿctes, and is the kind of person who puts personal loyalties above those of the state. Most states could probably do without this kind of “loyalty,” but Hypereides has been presented to us as such a gruff, likeable chap (like Severian’s father, he is a “stamping good man”) that we are obviously meant to sympathise, rather than condemn his actions (I sometimes think rather irreverently that Hypereides is the person Wolfe himself might most identify with). Hypereides is an independent thinker, who does not just take what is handed to him in life, but tries to work out for himself an acceptable system of justice. We can see this in his very fair treatment of Latro, despite his “slave” status, especially when he releases him from the prison in Corinth.

This raises the larger issue of loyalty as a concept in more general terms. For example, although a Roman, Latro is generally seen aiding the Greek side in Mist (sometimes against his will, as with Pausanias). In this section I shall examine the concept of arete as found in Greek writings, and see how Latro shows his arete in the face of memory loss.

The concept of arete taps into a strong Greek passion for the noble, excellent and “manly” virtues that are best exemplified in their athletic games. As Miller says “[I]t existed, to some degree, in every ancient Greek and was, at the same time, a goal to be sought and reached for by every Greek.”¹⁸ Such ideals were not limited to athletics however: as the word implies, arete can also occur on the battlefield (from Ares, the god of war), and in fact athletics often feature events useful for military occasions, such as running in armour (the hoplitodromos), the discus (originally throwing a rock at the enemy), the javelin, running various lengths, and so on. Plato occasionally uses athletic metaphors to illustrate military practices, as for example in Laws (830a-c) where he argues that the military needs practice for war like boxers need it before competing. Indeed, Wolfe defines arete as “the virtues of a soldier, ranging from cleanliness and love of order to courage in the face of death” (Arete, Glossary).

The word arete also means “achievements, acts of valour and gallantry and championship: aretas, related of course to aristos, and in English to aristocracy” which is itself related to the athletic event called the pankration, or “all-power,” consisting of boxing and wrestling.¹⁹ Latro competes in this event, as well as boxing itself and the chariot-race. When Latro wins in his events, he exemplifies the ideal Greek, at once strong, virtuous and self-aware, but he was not always so. In chapter nineteen of Mist for example, Kore reminds him that he was once more “stiff-necked”; perhaps the pride that got him into trouble with her mother, who ironically notes later that Latro is “learning wisdom” (Mist, p.191).

The concept of the ideal has found its most famous expression in the philosophy of Plato and his Ideas: generalised images and forms by which we are able to understand the world by being able to categorise it. Categories are essential to our thinking. If we had to use a specific word for each object language would become impossible so instead we express meaning through classes of objects (e.g. “table” can refer to all tables). The category itself is an ideal thing, not objectively perceivable, but real to thought. As Durant (1939) observes, “[m]en are born and die, but man survives”.²⁰ As the quotation from Miller above hints, we ourselves are not perfect (though as members of the category we do contain some arete) and we constantly aspire toward that ideal type of human so well expressed in Greek thought by the concept of arete.

Nevertheless, there were dissenters in Greece who thought that athletics championed the wrong attributes, that wisdom and “goodness” were better than the “dreadful struggle which men call the pankration,” as Xenophanes puts it.²¹ Euripides expresses similar concern a century later, calling athletics a Greek “evil”.²² Both these men were concerned that athletes were useless for defending the state, or in improving its lot. But Themistocles would argue that these dissenting opinions are at least democratic: as he says in Arete, the Greeks always make sure all sides have their voices fairly represented. (chapter twenty-six)

But the voice we hear most eloquently concerning the Games is that of Pindar, labelled by Wolfe as perhaps the best Greek poet after Homer (Arete, Foreword). Pindar was especially concerned with how athletic arete could exemplify the total commitment and toil necessary to succeed in life, as much as in the Games. As he says in Olympian, success without risk is not honoured” (6.9), or most forcefully in Nemean,

he who rates too poorly his strength,
Lets the honours within his reach
Slip from his hand,
Plucked back by his unadventurous heart. (11.31-2)

Effort must be made to overcome difficulty, like the story Diokles tells in Arete chapter thirty-nine about the cart in the ditch. As he says, “[t]here isn’t any god going to do that for you. Not the way you are.” Lee argues that in Pindar, “there is the crystal-clear perception of the human condition, of man who is mortal by essence… whose life is subject to the ups and downs of fortune.” He quotes Pythian 8.91-99:

In a brief moment, the happiness of men will grow, even so it falls to the ground. We are creatures of a day. What is man? What is he not? He is the dream of a shadow. But when the god sheds brightness, a shining light is on men and life is sweet as honey.²³

This viewpoint could account for the structure of Arete, in which Latro suffers from a deep depression caused by the enmity of Pasicrates, and possibly the unconscious memory of his dead lover, Pharetra. In the end, he overcomes his troubles, winning his events in the Games, and even plotting and escaping on the Phoenician ship. On more than one occasion Latro shows his arete by overcoming adversity and showing courage when things are bad, rather than just rolling over and accepting the difficulties.

But even in the glow of victory, one must practice sophrosyne, or moderation and temperance by which one avoids hybris. One of the most important ways this must be done is to recognise that the gods had a role in your success. As Lee says, “for the epinician poet piety demands that the gods be acknowledged”.²⁴ Again, this finds its place in Wolfe’s books, quite explicitly in the case of Artemis’ involvement, as well as generally throughout the story, where gods and goddesses seem to be as involved in human affairs as today’s politicians, and like them often have self-promotion at heart. Ignore the gods at your peril and exercise euergesia (munificence) in victory is the moral to be gained here.

These themes – the question of arete, the oracle at Thebes, and Artemis and Demeter’s role in Latro’s life have, in their turn, on common element. This is the presence of the divine in human affairs, but a presence that is predicated on continued human worship and respect, which if removed, causes the decline of the gods. As more eloquent atheists than I have put it, “there is something profoundly spiritual about it, and as a non-Christian critic I say this a little uncomfortably”.²⁵ So let us hope that our of our welcome discomfort we can, with the help of arete, celebrate further understandings.

* * * * * *

References to Books by Gene Wolfe:

The Fifth Head of Cerberus. New York: Ace, 1972.
The Book of the New Sun, four volumes:
The Shadow of the Torturer
The Claw of the Concilator
The Sword of the Lictor
The Citadel of the Autarch. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980-2.
Soldier of the Mist. New York: Tor, 1986.
Storeys from the Old Hotel. Worcester Park, Surrey, Kerosina, 1988.
Endangered Species. New York: Tor, 1989.
Soldier of Arete. New York: Tor, 1989.

* * * *

This article was originally written in the late 1980s (I think in 1988) as a contribution to a proposed book on Wolfe to be edited by the sf critic John Clute. At that time I had been reading Wolfe for some years (I remember the excruciating anticipation I suffered waiting for Volume 4 of the Book of the New Sun to be published, whilst I was an undergrad at Liverpool University, and in fact can still also remember reading that first page in the hardback where Severian talks about the importance of terrain in war). Clute’s book Strokes had come out a few years earlier which included some groundbreaking work on Wolfe, and as an active sf fan, I had bumped into Clute at a con somewhere and later shared a nice pint of beer in his neighbourhood in Camden. In the event, Clute’s project never materialised and this Web appearance is the first time the article has been published. I had a lot of fun doing it, and Wolfe was generous enough to ask his publisher to send me a photocopy of his manuscript for Soldier of Arete, which would not be published until after my deadline. Coming full circle, that manuscript was donated to the SF Foundation at Liverpool University. I’m glad to be able to thank Wolfe here

Footnotes

1. Edward Said, “Opponents, audiences, constituencies and community,” in H. Forster (Ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983.

2. James Gunn, “Science fiction: The Shadow of the Torturer,” in Book World – The Washington Post, May 25 1980, p.8.

3. D. Lane, W. Vernon & D. Carson, The Sound of Wonder, interviews from “The Science Fiction Radio Show.” Oryx Press, 1985.

4. John Clute, Strokes, Seattle: Serconia Press, 1988. p.159.

5. Irving Howe, “The Treason of the Critics,” New Republic, June 12 1989, p.28.

6. C. Merrick, [Interview with Gene Wolfe.] Columbia, MO: American Audio Prose Library, 1984. [Tape medium].

7. See Feeley’s review of Soldier of the Mist in Foundation, 37 (1986), 69-71.

8. First pointed out by John Clute in Strokes.

9. Gene Wolfe, [untitled] in R. Jackson (Ed.), Frontier Crossings, Conspiracy ’87, London: Science Fiction Conventions, Ltd, 1987. p.119.

10. The rationale behind “Thought,” and “Rope” at least was explained by Wolfe in an interview for Weird Tales, Vol. 50 (1), Spring 1988.

11. Wolfe would derive great pleasure in telling us that it is not impossible however, especially if the scrolls were stored in a dry place, such as Egypt, which seems to be the case here – - they are “possibly the stock of an Egyptian stationer.” But the media coverage and presumable sale through auction of such scrolls would be world news, and not all possible things are likely.

12. F.J. Frost, Greek Society. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath & Co., 1987.

13. I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988.

14. Feeley says in his review that Latro can “remember nothing”.

15. R.P. Eckels, Greek wolf-lore. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1937. p.60.

16. S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam, 1988.

17. Wolfe partially retells the tale of Romulus and Remus in “The tale of the boy called frog” in The Sword of the Lictor.

18. S.G. Miller, Arete. Chicago: Ares Publishers, 1979. p.105.

19. P. Levi, The Pelican History of Greek Literature. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975. p.122.

20. W. Durant, The Life of Greece. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. p.515.

21. Xenophanes, fr. 2, ca. 525 BC.

22. Euripides, Autolykos, fr.282. See Miller for these references.

23. H. Lee, “Athletic Arete in Pindar” in The Ancient World, 7 (1983), 31-37.

24. Lee, p.33 Original emphasis.

25. P. Nicholls, Review of The Urth of the New Sun, in Foundation, 41 (1987), p.96.