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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7) Both men have scholarly, scientific minds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

14) Both men are served barley soup while imprisoned.

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

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

- December 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

reviewed by Robert Borski

“When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were tired or not.” So begins, with its Proustian echo, the titular novella of Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, first published in 1972. Since then, of course, author Wolfe has scribed a number of additional masterpieces, and his reputation as sf’s most accomplished writer seems guaranteed for some time to come, but it was in Fifth Head (after a rather unremarkable tyro novel) that Wolfe first consolidated his literary bones and astonished readers with a novel that is not only boldly and complexly different, but resonant with many of the themes and preoccupations that would later come to dominate his work. It was and remains a must read and should rank high on everyone’s favourite Top Ten list of genre classics; it also has everything it needs to commend itself to lovers of fine literature in general–so don’t be afraid to recommend it to your non-genre friends.

Taking place on the sister worlds of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, Fifth Head consists of three semi-linked novellas–besides the opening piece, there is the oddly-titled “‘A Story,’ by John V. Marsch” and the closing “V.R.T.” Characters met in the first novella reappear in the third, while the fictional constructs encountered in the second–an extended faux fable about what life might have been like for the native Annese (or abos) before their world becomes colonised by the space-faring French–have real-life counterparts in the pieces that bookend it. This interrelatedness, in fact, epitomises much of Fifth Head‘s unique structure; it’s tripartite to be sure, but holistically so, being, as the book’s various narrative, tonal and thematic skeins wind in and out and back amongst themselves, recursive to the nth degree, like a specular Moebius strip. And if this isn’t challenging enough, while the story-telling thrust in the first two novellas is relatively straight-forward, “V.R.T” is told anachronically, with the reader left to piece everything together from a fragmentary, disjointed narrative, with at least one startling paradigm shift not everyone catches on his or her first time through. And so: for the intrepid reader willing to pursue something more substantial than “sci-fi” lite (and I assume that’s why you’ve come to Ultan’s Library), Fifth Head offers much pleasure.

Looking a little bit more now at the various novellas: while “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” opens up the book, much of it actually takes place after events in both “A Story” and “V.R.T.” Like Proust’s Marcel, “Fifth Head’s” first-person narrator is actually reflecting upon his life and its vicissitudes, describing from the perspective of an adult what it’s been like for him to have grown up at 666 Saltimbanque St., in Port Mimizon of the planet Sainte Croix. And so we’re introduced via flashback to the narrator’s half-brother David, their robotic tutor Mr. Million (who is also their grandfather), the scientist/brothelmaster Maitre (who is their father) and crippled Aunt Jeannine, who is also a respected anthropologist named Aubrey Veil. Maitre soon enough emerges as the novella’s most sinister figure, retrieving and subjecting his young son to disorienting sessions of drugs and hypnosis, and it’s also he who provides our narrator with the only name he’s identified by in the book: Number Five (though both his first and last name are eminently decodeable). In the course of Maitre’s investigations, Number Five’s sense of reality becomes more and more skewed, but eventually we learn that he is a clone of Maitre, who is seeking to determine why his once-so-promising-family has failed to rise socially and intellectually among the elite of Sainte Croix (indeed, it now seems to have entered a Buddenbrooks -like decline). How Number Five exacts his revenge upon Maitre for his stolen childhood you must read for yourself, but know that it does not occur before we meet Terran scientist Dr. John Marsch, who comes to the bordello hoping to discuss Veil’s Hypothesis with its originator (Aunt Jeannine’s contention is that the shape-changing abos of Sainte Anne have killed and replaced the original French colonists). Know also that the last sentence of the novella is as chilling as any written in all of science fiction and effectively encapsulates the mindset of all incipient tyrannical figures, from petty to broad-scale.

If called anything else, “‘A Story,’ by John V. Marsch” would still be an intricate and deft piece of fiction, but it is the inferences in the title that give Fifth Head‘s second novella its soupçon of delicity as well as its pivotal link to the rest of the novel. We’ve met John Marsch by now, of course, and know who he is (or think so), and later, in “V.R.T”, it’s implied that “‘A Story’” has been written while the good doctor has been incarcerated on Sainte Croix. Thus his expertise about the self-described Free People seems plausible, he being, after all, an anthropologist who has made it his life’s mission to learn everything he can about the native Annese. And so we marvel at his depiction of abo folkways and meet the thirteen-year old John Sandwalker, who is about to undertake a walkabout that will bring him into contact with many strange figures (significantly, all three novellas feature young men on the cusp of manhood, making Fifth Head very much a rite of passage novel). Among these are the shadow children, cannibalistic pygmies that keep to the dark and whose names differ according to how many their group numbers, as well as the Old One, who may be their mind-generated, consensual spokesgeist. But encountered too is his own natural clone (twinship being another of Fifth Head‘s leitmotifs), John Eastwind, who has been washed away in a river shortly after childbirth and adopted by a rival tribe, and it is during their fratricidal re-encounter that the skies open up and the first French landing party touches down on Sainte Anne. The stage is now set for their swift decimation by the technologically superior Terrans, and by the time of Number Five several centuries later it’s even argued that the abos have been entirely wiped out.

Only in “V.R.T.” do we learn differently. The story, however, is anything but straightforward. This is because “V.R.T.” is told in mosaic fashion. Framing everything is the present-time narrative, wherein an unnamed junior military officer is seeking to adjudicate the case of John V. Marsch, who has been arrested as a possible murder suspect, but is also suspected of being a spy (there has been a war between Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, which the latter has won, and tensions remain high). Much of what the officer examines takes the form of extracts. Among the materials he samples during the long night that encompasses his task are taped interviews by various interrogators of Marsch, the field journal made by Marsch as he journeys through the Annese outback with a young man who claims to be half-human and half-abo, and Marsch’s prison diary, written as he awaits his still-to-be-determined fate. Little is told chronologically, and often mundanities from the present-time narrative intrude, but we learn in short enough time how graduate student Marsch has come to Sainte Anne hoping to achieve his doctorate in anthropology by studying the allegedly extinct abos. Marsch conducts his own series of interviews with older people who claim to have seen living abos, and in the course of so doing meets a local con artist named Trenchard, who brags of fathering a child on an Annese woman–the very same V.R.T. of the title–with whom he soon sets off into the Annese outback in search of abo sacred places. I will not disclose the crucial events that happen here, saying only that the Dr. Marsch we meet earlier in the opening novella eventually returns to civilisation, achieves his doctorate, goes to Sainte Croix, where he mingles with the inhabitants of 666 Saltimbanque, only to wind up running afoul of the law and being arrested. As for his final disposition within the military justice system–well, let us just say that it’s apposite, if for all the wrong reasons. And so the novel ends, but not without a repeated image from the first few pages, implying its cyclity of events–which is more than germane to a big chunk of Fifth Head‘s thematic crux.

But like most Wolfe novels, this signals not so much the end of events, but the rebeginning, because now you’re free to go back and attempt to solve many of the encrypted puzzles GW has buried within the narrative. What, for example, is Number Five’s real name? Can we decode what the R in V.R.T means? (The V and the T are easily solved.) And who is the unnamed junior officer who decides John Marsch’s fate, and the lady in pink, and Number Five’s sister? I will always contend that for a novel whose central theme involves the search for identity, no one is quite who or what he/she seems. In other words beware of early conclusions, and keep in mind that on occasion even mythical three-headed dogs may bark at shadows–especially in this much-treasured early and seminal work by Gene Wolfe.