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?”

By Scott Wowra

Michael Andre-Driussi is a courageous sort. After all, only a handful of brave scholars gleefully plummet into the literary mazes of science fiction’s Daedalus, American author Gene Wolfe. In this endeavor, Mr. Andre-Driussi has few peers. Michael’s painstaking research produced LEXICON URTHUS, the Rosetta Stone of Mr. Wolfe’s award-winning tetralogy THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN and coda THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN.

For the uninitiated reader, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is full of bizarre and seemingly counterfeit words like omophagist (an eater of raw flesh) and cherkaji (Persian light cavalry). In the early 1980s, frustrated readers accused Mr. Wolfe of deliberately fabricating unusual words to confuse them. Nothing could be further from the truth. All of the strange words that appear in THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN are real. And they remind us just how odd language can sound without science fiction authors inventing new words that lack inherent meaning.

In response to his critics, Mr. Wolfe produced the essay “Words Weird and Wonderful” in THE CASTLE OF THE OTTER (1982) to demonstrate that, in fact, all the words he used in THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER were genuine. The brief essay was an incomplete dictionary covering the first book in his tetralogy. Mr. Wolfe wisely left the rest of the work up to the reader.

And that leads us to Michael Andre-Driussi, the lexicographer of THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN and a science fiction writer in his own right. What sort of person tirelessly tracks down the definition of obscure words, creating hundreds of 3×5 index cards in the process? Undoubtedly, the same sort of person crafty enough to pen them in THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. In a series of email interviews, I set out to learn more about Michael Andre-Driussi, a leading Lupine scholar.

SW: Who were some of your favorite authors growing up?

MAD: I read a ton of science fiction, and my favorites included Burrough’s Barsoom books, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, and Herbert’s Dune series. The first author whose work I liked beyond the one set was Samuel R. Delany, and then Jack Vance. Outside of genre, I liked James Joyce, but I never read FINNEGANS WAKE. I still haven’t!

SW: Who are you currently reading?

MAD: I just finished THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO (2007), which isn’t genre, but the eponymous character is a fanboy steeped in science fiction, fantasy, pen and paper gaming, anime, etc. It was okay. The details on genre, gaming, anime, etc., were very impressive, hard nuggets of true expertise. I only found two errors in that regard, and both might have been simple typos.

I’m in the Gene Wolfe Book of the Month Club, so I’ll be starting SWORD OF THE LICTOR today. Yay!

I’m still tracking down Jack Vance mysteries that I haven’t read yet. These are hard to find, but I discovered I can get many through the interlibrary loan system. In the last few months I’ve read BAD RONALD, then THE MAN IN THE CAGE, followed by THE VIEW FROM CHICKWEED’S WINDOW, and most recently THE DARK OCEAN.

SW: Tell us about your short story, “Under the Moons of Jizma.” Can we expect more stories recounting the adventures of Dr. Lee?

MAD: I don’t have anything planned, but I could do that if there were any interest. I have a new story, “The Gray-haired Girl,” coming out soon in “Doorways” magazine.

SW: Congratulations! How would you characterize your short stories? Do you find that your stories are influenced by other science-fiction writers?

MAD: Thank you! My stories vary. “The Gray-haired Girl” is similar to the last one that was published, “Old Flames in New Bottles,” in being set in the local area (East Bay Area) and local time. Sort of Twilight Zone or slipstream, I guess.

Whereas “Under the Moons of Jizma” was a literary trick of making William Burroughs look like Edgar Rice Burroughs. I guess it didn’t work very well, since people just take it as an Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche! But anyway, that was a clear case of modeling a story after two different authors. A bad habit I haven’t shaken yet.

Sometimes I try to write something like Burrough’s Barsoom, Asimov’s Foundation, or Herbert’s DUNE. Not in that voice or style, but reworking that substance. Likewise, I don’t try to write in a Gene Wolfe style, nor even the substance.

SW: Tell us about your writing process. Where do your ideas come from?

MAD: That’s a difficult question. Depends on the story. “Jizma” came from a line in Delany’s THE JEWEL-HINGED JAW where he compared the two Burroughses as a study in contrasts. I took it as a challenge, thinking that the two were a lot more alike than ol’ Chip was stating for the point of his argument. I knew that Farmer had done “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod,” so I thought I’d go the other way.

The other two stories I’m talking about here, hmm. Dreams, local events, urban legends, and my observation on youth culture in Japan. Sometimes a story is like a movie in my head–Old Flames was like that.

SW: In addition to your work in science fiction, you have reviewed a variety of anime films. What attracts you to anime?

MAD: That’s a long story. In a nutshell, I’ve been interested in animation all my life, and I used to watch the international animation festival anthologies every year.

I wasn’t particularly interested in the material coming out of Japan, and at a certain point, specifically the anthology “Robot Carnival” (1987), I decided I simply didn’t like anime. “Robot Carnival” to me was too much about surfaces, not enough about story. One or two of the segments were great, but the rest . . . well, it broke my desire, after a long string of misfires. I mean, I had seen the sneak preview of “Metamorphoses” (1978)! (And I’d gotten those passes while standing in line to see “Star Wars” for the first time.)

So anyway, about eight or ten years after swearing off anime, I watched a Miyazaki movie on VHS. I thought it was good. My daughter, who was two or three at the time, liked it a lot, so over weeks and months we watched it again, and watched other Miyazaki movies as well. In the repetition I began to see how very good the work really is (remember, I knew animation already!), so then I set out to explore new worlds and claim them in the name of genre.

That is, I look for true genre content–the same things I love in science fiction, fantasy, etc. And I find it because the anime industry went through a transformational boom in the late 1980s which has raised the bar for quality and content.

The most recently viewed anime I would recommend is a short series called “Rocket Girls” (2007). It is in the “hard sf” tradition of “Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise” (1987) and “Planetes” (2003-04). This is very rare in anime!

SW: Given the commercial success of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, I recently read that Michael Moorcock is producing movies for his character Elric. Do you think Severian will ever make it to the big screen or perhaps in an animated version?

MAD: No, I don’t, but I’d like to see what is already in the can–a short film version of “The Death of Doctor Island” is in post production. If anybody tries something else, I wish they would film “The Fifth Head of Cerberus”–just the first novella. If that does well, they can make a trilogy by filming the other two.

SW: What gravitates you to Mr. Wolfe’s oeuvre?

MAD: He has just the right blend of style and content for my tastes. I liked it from the first book I read. The variety and the mysteries play a part.

SW: Onomastics is one approach to unraveling Mr. Wolfe’s texts. Have you traced the onomastics of your name?

MAD: Yes, but I’d like to learn about yours!

SW: Okay, let me try again. What are the meanings Michael, Andre, and Driussi?

MAD: Michael is overly abundant, Andre is fairly common, so the nut of the question is really the outlandish “Driussi.” It turns out that it means the same as Andre (Interviewer’s Note: “Andre” and “Driussi” are from the Greek “Andreas” meaning “manly,” “courageous”). Which is funny, since you can kind of see it there, in the letters. But still, it is rare enough that Italians will say it is not Italian. (This in turn leads to questions of “What is Italian?” Like, what language did Garibaldi speak, and who could understand him?)

The origin point is in Northern Italy, the city of Udine, north of Venice. I found out the meaning too late to have any effect–instead of becoming a “manly man,” I became the slinking scavenger that I am. Ah well!

My mother’s uncle was the B-movie film star, Morris Ankrum. What I want to know is, where did he get that Ankrum from? We had it, obviously–it is like a family heirloom, a trunk of traditions, and reaching into that mathom full of names, he pulled out the one best suited for the role. Then they set up the Ankrum Gallery in Los Angeles to show the art of my famous uncle, Morris Broderson (who was named after his uncle).

SW: “Michael” appears as a character in Mr. Wolfe’s THE WIZARD KNIGHT. Is this a coincidence or recognition of your friendship with Mr. Wolfe?

MAD: That has nothing to do with me, and it is not a coincidence–that’s the archangel, appearing as himself.

Granted, some readers have spotted me in PIRATE FREEDOM. (I’m flattered by the theory!) Others have followed a certain trail of roman a clef associations and think I’m in the Long Sun series. (I’m honored by the supposition!) If I were in any of these works, that’s how it would look–not as anybody named Michael. Not likely.

SW: Speaking of onomastics, is “Gene Wolfe” a pseudonym?

MAD: Nope.

SW: If I recall correctly, Mr. Wolfe indicated in an interview that he is in some way related to Thomas Wolfe.

MAD: Yep. (Interviewer note: Michael appears to be channeling his inner Gylf).

SW: You have already produced some insightful essays on THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN based on your work for LEXICON URTHUS. Do you plan on releasing more critical essays on the Urth Cycle?

MAD: Thank you! Yes. There are a couple of them working their way toward publication right now.

SW: Will these essays be released in some sort of collected form?

MAD: Eventually, I suppose. I don’t have anything like that planned at the moment.

SW: Can you tell us a little bit about the projects you are working on now?

MAD: It is probably better if I don’t. I mean, I don’t know why it gets so complicated, but it does. For example, I promised a book on the LONG SUN (LS) series a long time ago. That’s a whole complicated story I can’t get into right now, but there is no book yet, even though the thing was promised. That promise has weighed upon me, believe me!

Okay, so when I saw Gene Wolfe at Seattle in 2007, I told him about LEXICON URTHUS, SECOND EDITION (LU2) being near completion. (See, I don’t keep him in the dark.) And yet, from what he said at the time (which I thought was just enigmatic joking around), and the fact that when LU2 came out, he was genuinely surprised, I have come to believe that he thought this project I was talking about (LU2) was really the long-promised LS book.

Anyway, I’m =finally= working on the LS book, which is actually the LONG SUN/SHORT SUN book. But before that comes out, suddenly THE WIZARD KNIGHT book came along, and that will be published next. Then the LS/SS book. Maybe. Thank you, everyone who has been waiting, for all your patience!

In addition to that, there is the updating the John Crowley book now that the Aegypt series is finally completed. So there, that’s three, or four, if we add this book of collected essays and whatnot, and I should have stopped at one.

SW: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, Michael.

MAD: You are very welcome! Thank you for the opportunity. And now I must get back to work, reinvigorated by this refreshing recess!

Fans of THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN are encouraged to visit Michael’s website at http://www.siriusfiction.com/ for information on LEXICON URTHUS, SECOND EDITION, which contains over 1,200 entries of words weird and wonderful.

Master Ultan: Let’s start at the beginning. Where and when you did first encounter Gene Wolfe’s writing and what did you read first?

Michael Andre-Driussi: In a chain bookstore at the Santa Monica Place. I was in high school and I had a part-time job there. I saw the paperback covers for The Shadow of the Torturer and I said, “Oh great, just what we need–more blatant sadism in science fiction.” I was not at all interested in it, since it looked like it was out-doing the Gor books in that department.

But I was reading a lot of Jack Vance. While I was hunting for more Vance, somebody told me, “Well then, you ought to try Shadow–it is like The Dying Earth. The tower is a rocket ship.” This must have been at a used book store–probably the one on Wilshire in Santa Monica.

So I started reading. Then I had to wait for the other books to come out, so in the mean time I read The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. When the New Sun books came out I read copies from the Santa Monica Library.

The Science Fiction Book Club offered four books for $1 or something when you join, and they were listing something called The Castle of the Otter. So I joined and requested four copies of Castle. Then I bought the whole New Sun set from them, and that fulfilled my obligations to the SFBC.

I gave one of my copies of Castle to the Santa Monica Library, as a way of paying back to the house of books and paying forward to other Wolfe fans.

Master Ultan: What did you think of The Book of the New Sun when you first read it?

Michael Andre-Driussi: I thought it was pretty good. It grew on me, obviously.

Master Ultan: When did you first start working on the Lexicon Urthus and what originally inspired you to undertake the project?

Michael Andre-Driussi: The Castle of the Otter has that article “Words Weird and Wonderful.” That one in particular seemed like a blueprint, or a sponge-dinosaur in a gelatin capsule – just add water and the thing grows into an earth-shaking thunder lizard.

Because Castle came out so early, I figured that somebody must be writing such a thing, and I was patient enough to wait. Years went by and nothing was happening, so I wrote to Gene Wolfe in 1989 or so and asked if something was being written, because if not, then I would. He wrote back that nothing was being written, as far as he knew, so I could go ahead.

I like good guidebooks. I was a kid reading Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom books when I found John Flint Roy’s A Guide to Barsoom (1976), which is good in many ways but there are things about it that I would do differently. For example, that book is divided into nearly a dozen sections (Geography, Biography, Flora/Fauna, etc.) rather than being a straight alphabetical listing for most of it and appendices for longer things. So if you have a Barsoomian word, but you don’t know if it is animal, mineral, or vegetable, then you have to look it up in various sections.

That bugged me.

I wanted there to be a book like that (but better!) for the New Sun. I wanted it to be done by an expert. Alas, I had to do it myself!

Gene Wolfe gave me the go-ahead while I was still living in Japan. I did a certain amount of work using paperbacks (ugh), but I didn’t really get going until I returned to the States in the Fall of 1990.

Master Ultan: How did you go about compiling the Lexicon? What was your method and how long did it take?

Michael Andre-Driussi: Writing words down on 3″ x 5″ cards. Looking them up anywhere I could. Early on I would go into a library and the books were practically jumping off the shelves, but then it became a trickle, and finally a desert marked by an occasional oasis. I found “Madregot” in a book in a shop in London while on my honeymoon.

I had a solid work in progress when I met Gene Wolfe in person for the first time at the 1991 World Fantasy Convention in Tuscon, Arizona. Our plan was to sit down with David Hartwell and convince him to take it on for Tor. That was Gene’s idea. Kind of a knight and squire deal, I guess. (It didn’t work out, obviously. But we tried!)

Anyway, first we saw Kathryn Cramer. She asked me, “So how are you doing this project? Is it like each word is a game of twenty questions with Gene?”

It took me a split second to see the semi-truth in that, so I said, “Yes.”

But Gene Wolfe was already saying, “No, not at all – he looks things up!”

Master Ultan: How did you come up with the name Lexicon Urthus?

Michael Andre-Driussi: Whimsy, I guess. I thought it was okay, Gene Wolfe thought it was okay, but John Brunner tried to talk me out of it. “Why not ‘Lexicon Urth’? That’s perfect German.”

“But I don’t want German.” (And I didn’t want perfect, either, but that is more difficult to explain. Anyway, perfect German was simply out of the question.)

What to call it? “Words of Urth” sounds like Whitman. (As it stands, we had a number of order requests for something like “Lexicon Urethra,” which sounds like a highly specialized medical dictionary. Now that’s where the money is! Why didn’t I think of that?)

For what it’s worth, some people early on gave me a hard time for coining “Urth Cycle.” That seems to have gone away.

Master Ultan: When did you realise that all the words in the Urth Cycle were real words and not Wolfe’s coinages?

Michael Andre-Driussi: That’s what all the fans were saying, that the words were real, and then that’s what Wolfe himself said in “Words Weird and Wonderful.” So pretty early on I had that information. I naively thought that I could find all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary – the work of a weekend! The main task would be assembling all those cards.

Master Ultan: How soon did you uncover the various naming schemes Wolfe uses in the Urth Cycle, like naming people in the Commonwealth after Catholic saints? Were there any surprises once you started looking into the meaning of the names of people and places?

Michael Andre-Driussi: The saints clue was given in Castle. Still, nobody had published the results of tracking them all down, and a few of them, like Yrierix, were really quite difficult to find.

But The Urth of the New Sun came out after Castle, so I got to figure that stuff out on my own – the “iron” names of the sailors, the star names of the people in Yesod. People on GEnie were spooked that I figured the iron thing, but that one was easy for me – I happened to have the perfect reference book for that! (The Concise Dictionary of 26 Languages.) They were also spooked about my figuring the Proust angle for “Suzanne Delage” (a short story in Wolfe’s Endangered Species), and yeah, that one was spooky. I started getting a reputation.

But really, it is easier if you have read Gene Wolfe before you go on to read all the literature you’ve been meaning to read. So when you read, say, The Pickwick Papers, and you see those guys with the big keys, and you say, “Hey, look at the clavigers!” And you read Proust, and you say, “Suzanne Delage, Suzanne Delage, now why does that name sound familiar?”

Master Ultan: Why does it sound familiar? What is the connection between Proust and Wolfe’s story “Suzanne Delage”?

Michael Andre-Driussi: It sounded familiar only because I’d already read Wolfe’s story. Suzanne Delage is a minor character who is mentioned in Le Côté de Guermantes, the third book in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The context is the funny part: the context of my reading a book at random (but it is known that Gene Wolfe really likes Proust) and seeing an unsuspected link to a Wolfe story; the context of Suzanne Delage within Proust’s monumental work, wherein she is only a name, only mentioned in one part! She has far less impact than a number of unnamed background characters.

Anyway, I realised that Wolfe had named his character after Proust’s and mentioned my discovery to others when we were discussing the story. Well, it took on a life of its own. It started on GEnie; it came up on the Urth List, years later; Damien Broderick wrote an essay about it for The New York Review of Science Fiction (where, if I recall, he gave me credit for my discovery – yay!); Robert Borski wrote an essay about it in The Long and the Short of It; and now there’s even an entry on it in the WolfeWiki (http://www.holkar.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Stories.SuzanneDelage) which doesn’t mention me (understandable), nor Broderick, nor Borski (both of whom really should be mentioned).

Master Ultan: You mentioned John Brunner just now and you also thank him for his help in the Acknowledgements at the start of the Lexicon. Is that John Brunner the English science fiction writer? How did he come to know about the Lexicon Urthus?

Michael Andre-Driussi: Yes, the same John Brunner. I already knew his work very well, having read those wonderful fat books Stand On Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and Shockwave Rider. Anyway, it turns out that he was something of a word nut, so after he read “Words Weird and Wonderful”, he wrote a letter about word definitions to Gene Wolfe, and Gene forwarded it to me. So then I corresponded with John Brunner for a while. I had plans on getting him to write a preface of some kind – I thought it would be grand to have one by Gene, one by me, and one by John Brunner, just load the thing up. But I stopped at just getting the one from Gene.

And then John Brunner died, making it all the more a pity that I didn’t get him when I could.

Master Ultan: Yes, it would have been interesting to read what he had to say, as a science fiction author, about the way a fellow practitioner used such an unusual vocabulary. As it is, though, the Foreword by Gene Wolfe makes fascinating reading. How did that come about? What did he think of the whole Lexicon Urthus project?

Michael Andre-Driussi: I asked him to write something, and I offered him money and copies. He knew I wanted to get John Brunner, too – maybe that’s what got him. He has always been very supportive, and patient, and generous with his time. He seems to like the Lexicon, but maybe he is just being polite! Or “always glad when it’s over,” that sort of thing. Actually I didn’t bug him at all this time round, he hardly knew the second edition was coming.

Master Ultan: Some of the entries in the Lexicon are relatively short, but there are some longer articles in there as well which give a lot of useful background about Severian’s world. You refer to them in the Lexicon as “special articles and tables”. Could you tell me a little about them?

Michael Andre-Driussi: There is one on calendar, which is really a week-by-week tracing of Severian’s life in The Book of the New Sun. The version in the second edition is much expanded from that in the first.

There is one on history, putting together all the posthistorical bits into one place. There is the synopsis at the end, which is pretty long. There is a part about prehistoric life forms, which have either been reintroduced on Urth or whose names have been given in the Urth Cycle to their posthistoric analogues, just to get a grip on that sizeable chunk of time and its parade of strange creatures.

Master Ultan: What sort of reception did the original Lexicon Urthus receive? How did it sell? (David Langford wrote a good article about the original edition of the Lexicon back in 1998 which is still available here: http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/odyss03.html.)

Michael Andre-Driussi: The reception was favorable, and early sales were surprisingly brisk. We sold 80 copies pre-release! That is, we made a brochure, and sent it out by snail mail to a list of Wolfe fans that we had assembled. Eighty people were willing to buy it, sight unseen, with no reviews out yet.

It was so energetic, in fact, that we thought we might have a second printing in a year. But after the first few months the sales were a bit anaemic. I mean, it took me eight years to sell all 1,000 copies!

This is mainly due to the niche-market nature of it.

Master Ultan: What prompted you to revise the Lexicon Urthus and produce a second edition?

Michael Andre-Driussi: In addition to fan mail, the readers kept sending in corrections and quibbles. I kept finding new tidbits. So I made a little booklet, a chapbook, of corrections and additions. Then I made another one, so it was a series. Then I made a third one, the fat one, to try and end it. But then I made a fourth one that was just a synopsis of The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun.

So all this revision and correction work was already done. It was just the matter of putting it all in. That drudgery would be the least I could do.

But I also wanted to rise to the challenge of catching all the characters. Plus there were a few new things I wanted to add. That is, I wanted to do some fun stuff to offset the drudgery.

Master Ultan: So what are the major differences between the first and second editions of the Lexicon? The second edition is a lot longer than the first. What have you changed? What have you added?

Michael Andre-Driussi: I added just about all of the material in the four chapbooks, so there are those additions and the synopsis. I added the rest of the characters – it turns out the first edition had the majority already, but still, it is nice to be complete. A new map.

Master Ultan: How long did the revision take? Did the process of putting together the second edition differ from that you used for the first? If so, in what ways?

Michael Andre-Driussi: The whole thing was delayed six or nine months because we spent the summer of 2007 in Tokyo. Still, I think it managed to come out on schedule – I said it would take a year or two and I got it to market in two years.

The process was different in that I had less help than the first time! So it was a slow developing nightmare in that sense – it was at its worst at the very end. But I’ve learned! The next book will be different.

Master Ultan: Are there any words or names in the Urth Cycle whose meanings are still uncertain?

Michael Andre-Driussi: Yes. There are some that seem tentative. I wonder about the second R in “Yrierix,” for example – it might be a typo, but it didn’t originate with Wolfe. There are entries that seem solid, yet in the future a reader will write in and point out some problem.

Master Ultan: What is your favourite name or word in the Lexicon, and which is your favourite entry?

Michael Andre-Driussi: I like “yurt” more than I should, to the point where I could not be argued out of including it.

I’m really enthused about the solid work in the calendar section. I should weep bitter tears that the moon symbols got all messed up – it seems like a curse, since they were messed up in the first edition, too! But despite this, the text part is still solid enough that it isn’t totally ruined.

Master Ultan: Some of the illustrations in the first edition, such as the drawing of the “achico” on page 4, are missing in the second. Why is that?

Michael Andre-Driussi: I had to remove most of the illustrations because the book was getting too big. The material from the chapbooks and the rest really added up!

On the other hand, I have a story about the new illustration on page xii, “Colossal Statue of Mount Athos”. I chanced upon this illustration in a used bookstore (in a district called Sawtelle, in between Santa Monica and West L.A., up by the Nuart Theater), back when I was in high school. I immediately recognized the connection to Mount Typhon, far more direct than any Mount Rushmore variation. I thought, “Man, this really needs to be in a book about The Book of the New Sun!” The illustration was in a book entitled Futuropolis by Robert Sheckley, and I bought it.

Of course I wanted the illustration when I created the first edition of the Lexicon, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. In the years between creating editions of the Lexicon, the Internet grew more powerful, so that when I got around to shaping the second edition I was able to find the illustration on line, and pay for it on line. That makes me very happy, since that illustration was such an early intimation of the Lexicon.

Master Ultan: What insights into the meaning and significance of the works in the Urth Cycle have you gained through all your work on the Lexicon?

Michael Andre-Driussi: I can’t tell you that now. It will have to come out in essays.

The good news is that I am still not sick of the text! That is pretty amazing, in itself – the fan runs a serious risk in working too hard on the subject of enthusiasm, such that what was once pleasure is degraded into a threadbare remnant, or worse, a chore.

Master Ultan: Well, we’ll certainly look forward to reading the essays. Meanwhile, has Gene Wolfe himself commented at all on the new edition?

Michael Andre-Driussi: Yes, he wrote to me that it is “a marvelous book to get lost in. I know you’re proud, and you have every right to be.”

Master Ultan: Tell me about the printing, publication and distribution of the new edition of the Lexicon.

Michael Andre-Driussi: The first edition was printed in the traditional way, so that we took possession of all 1,000 copies and stored them in our apartment, then put some in storage. As a result, I had the drudgery of all that – being my own warehouse, warehouse man, shipping guy. In addition to sales rep, etc.

This time we are going with Print on Demand, meaning that we do not have boxes of a book cluttering the place up – each copy is made when the order comes in. That is much better!

Plus this time we are offering hardcover, trade paperback, and also Kindle versions. This gives customers more choice. (First edition was hardcover only, and there were complaints about that.)

The distribution is about the same, with the book being carried by major distributors Baker & Taylor and Ingram. Online sales were strong for the first edition, and that continues.

Master Ultan: How’s it going so far? What sort of response have you had to the new edition – reviews, sales, readers’ comments? Do people still make suggestions for definitions, revisions or changes?

Michael Andre-Driussi: Sales are strong. We are now seven weeks in and over 330 have sold (mixing hardcover, trade paperback and Kindle versions). These are mainly to people who know what the book is and know they want it, people who have been frustrated for up to six years (the first edition sold out in 2002). They are an informed group, a crop of patient customers linked by word of mouth and their own Wolfe discussion groups. But they are a finite reserve, and I don’t know how long their sales can go on. (I mean, you look at 330 sales in about two months and you are tempted to think that you will sell 1,000 by the seventh month, or surely in one year. But no, that is not likely.)

The question of reviews is a tricky one. Many places don’t want to review a reference book; many shy away from reviewing a second edition.

And yet a review is one of the only ways to get the information to new people, potential customers. There have been a couple of online reviews so far (the BookSpot Central one is at http://www.bookspotcentral.com/2008/09/book-review-lexicon-urthus/ and there’s a nice one by Michael Swanwick at http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2008/07/blog-post.html - Master Ultan), for which I am grateful, and I hope that there will be one or three print reviews as well.

The readers seem to be very enthusiastic. I’ve received a number of very nice emails.

As for corrections and quibbles, yes! Darrell Schweitzer has already given me two. One was a phrasing problem on my part. In tracing down the other problem, I discovered on line that the book of saints I was referencing had a name typo (Eudoxia for Eudocia) that was cleared up in subsequent editions.

Master Ultan: Do you have any plans for further revisions to the Lexicon? Is there likely to be a third edition?

Michael Andre-Driussi: Never say never. Print on Demand offers the potential for easy revising, but I haven’t really explored that yet. For one thing, I’d like to put aside all essays and stuff just long enough to read An Evil Guest! It would be like a mini-vacation that I could stretch out to a whole week if only I could pace my reading . . .

Master Ultan: One last thing! Have you ever considered extending the scope of the Lexicon to include The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun? Or maybe writing a separate Lexicon Whorlus?

Michael Andre-Driussi: Interestingly enough, that was David Hartwell’s idea, to mix Long and New suns. I refused to even consider it.

However, I did publish a series of chapbooks on The Book of the Long Sun. And that was to be the opening move of a book called Gate of Horn, Book of Silk. So I’ve already made that promise, and look! The work is already done! (Well, The Book of the Short Sun hasn’t been integrated into the material, so maybe that’s the joy quantum to get me going.)

No publishing date has been announced.

Can I read An Evil Guest now?

Master Ultan: Yes, I’m sure you can! Michael, thank you for telling us about the Lexicon Urthus.

Disclaimer: Rumours have been circulating recently that an emissary from Ultan’s Library has travelled out to California to meet with Michael Andre-Driussi not once but on two separate occasions. A legal representative of Sirius Fiction has reluctantly confirmed that this is indeed the case, citing clandestine meetings in Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, in 2005 and in San Francisco the following year. He confirms that Mr Andre-Driussi received hospitality on each occasion (breakfast in Santa Rosa, supper in San Francisco) but denies claims that he was either offered or accepted financial inducements in exchange for his literary services on Master Ultan’s behalf. He goes on to admit, however, that Mr Andre-Driussi did accept the gift of a small coffee mug emblazoned with a science fictional motif on the occasion of his first meeting with Master Ultan’s representative. He confirmed that it had subsequently become “a favourite” but vigorously denied the claim that it had influenced Mr Andre-Driussi’s decision to contribute material of a literary critical nature to Ultan’s Library. When asked whether a third meeting had ever been planned (reportedly in Seattle and possibly including a meeting with a certain famous author), the Sirius Fiction spokesperson would only state that Mr Andre-Driussi had been willing to arrange child-minding facilities for Master Ultan’s emissary’s dependents on such an occasion but that, as discussions about the proposed meeting had broken down at a very early stage, this had never in fact been necessary.

Still frame from hidden surveillance camera footage of the meeting between lexicographer Michael Andre-Driussi and Ultan's Library co-editor Nigel Price in California in 2006

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

Volume Two: Sword and Citadel (Millennium, 2000)

Reviewed by Peter Wright

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

6. Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

12. Ibid., p. 17.

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

]]> http://www.ultan.org.uk/review-botns/feed/ 3 http://www.ultan.org.uk/torture-and-confession-in-wolfes-book-of-the-new-sun/ http://www.ultan.org.uk/torture-and-confession-in-wolfes-book-of-the-new-sun/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2001 18:57:04 +0000 Jonathan http://www.ultan.org.uk/?p=38 by Jeremy Crampton

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.