Gene Wolfe, ‘The Book of the New Sun’ (1980–83)

I’m not sure it was obvious to readers in 1980 that Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer was inaugurating the most significant Fantasy series of its era — some would say, of all time. After Shadow came The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1982) and The Citadel of the Autarch (1983). I say Fantasy, although a fifth volume in the sequence, The Urth of the New Sun (1987) transitions the continuing story — carried-through into the four-volume The Book of the Long Sun (1993–96) and the three-volume The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2000) — more manfestly into science fiction. Still, and despite various SF touches, it seems to me that the first four volumes in the sequence are Fantasy in the mode of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, iterating a baroque dynamic of death and rebirth.

The story details the life of Severian, a journeyman torturer who travels through the fantastical landscapes of Wolfe’s ‘Urth’, carrying his executioner’s broadsword Terminus Est — ‘it is the end.’ Severian wears clothes of ‘fuligin’, a darker-than-black fabric the mere sight of which inspires terror among the common folk (early in his travels he buys a cloak from a rag-shop to cover this gear and so disguise himself.) It is not immediately clear after what he is questing although, as the series goes on, a world-redeeming end-point comes into view.

The plot of the books is intricate and involves many digressions and side-quests, stories-within-stories: at one point the text shifts into playscript, and the characters put on a theatrical performance. Severian meets and re-meets many different characters, so much so that a full summary here would be dense, overbusy, baffling. Nor would it capture the texture of Wolfe’s four-part novel, which is detailed to a purpose, fluently rendered, baroquely iterated and patterned. Wolfe pays attention to the details, none of which are merely arbitrary, all of which have a place in the larger pattern of the book’s construction, narrative and symbol, theme elaborated in small as well as large.

The setting is a far-future Earth. The sun is dying, and civilisation is in decay. Severian, an apprentice in the guild of torturers, falls in love with Thecla, a noblewoman. She is a prisoner of the state, caught-up in political machinations of the Autarch, the absolute ruler of the Commonwealth of Urth (‘she’s a pawn in the Autarch’s game,’ we are told. ‘Her sister, the Chatelaine Thea, has fled the House Absolute to become his leman. They will bargain with Thecla for a time at least’ [Shadow of the Torturer, 58]). She is sentenced to be executed in a particularly cruel manner: tortured with a suicide-provoking device that will drive her to mutilate herself with her own hands until she dies. Severian, out of pity, smuggles a knife into her cell, allowing her to abbreviate her suffering and gifting her a quick death. In doing so Severian has violated his oath to his guild. Severian, expecting to be executed for his disobedience, is instead sent to the remote city of Thrax to act as public executioner. On the way to his new appointment he fights a duel, and connects with an ambiguous woman called Agia, who steals a magical thorn, ‘the claw of the conciliator’, from a religious sect and hides it amongst Severian’s things. Severian wears this thorn around his neck as a talisman.

Severian falls into a lake of death and is rescued by a young woman called Dorcas, who has also come, somehow, from the lake. They travel on together. Severian executes various criminals, meets a green-skinned man who claims to have travelled from a future in which the sun has been renewed and humans live by absorbing sunlight directly into their skin. To balance this hint of a redeemed future, later in his adventures Severian meets a different future time-traveller, who has come from a dead world overtaken by ice. Severian develops feelings for Dorcas. He encounters a revolutionary agitator called Vodalus and enters his service. He fights savage man-ape creatures in a cave.

Either because of a magical substance he encounters on the way, or because that’s just how he is, Severian is incapable of forgetting anything. The absolute nature of Severian’s memory is the basis of the first-person narration that constitutes the whole book-series, although his memorious perfection does not mean that he is necessarily a reliable narrator. He fights alien shape-shifters, witches and bat-monsters. Eventually he arrives at Thrax and takes up his duties as torturer and executioner. Dorcas, now his lover, grows doleful, shunned as the partner of so reviled and feared a figure. He encounters a terrifying monster called the Alzabo, which acquires the memories of those it devours. He discovers that the ‘claw of the conciliator’ has the power to heal wounds and even to revive the dead.

In the final volume there is war: northerners called Ascians (the name means ‘shadowless’) are invading, and soldiers of the Commonwealth, Severian among them, are resisting. It is revealed, after the manner of Walter Scott, that the Autarch, the supreme ruler, has been in the novel for a while now, disguised as someone else. The Autarch is fatally wounded, and instructs Severian to consume his flesh such that, with the help of the blood of the Alzabo (previously harvested) he will be able to absorb his Autarchian memories — for Severian, we learn, is to be the new Autarch of the Commonwealth. Severian does this and discovers that the Autarch’s mind contains hundred of consciousnesses, acquired this way, which Severian now absorbs. He wanders along the coastline, and has a spiritual epiphany:

What struck me on the beach — and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow — was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, then it might rest in anything, and in fact probably did rest in everything, in every thorn on every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground. [Citadel of the Autarch, 258]

Severian makes his way back to the city and assumes the role of Autarch, reforming (perhaps abolishing) the torturer’s guild and making plans to renew the dying sun (which task he accomplishes in 1987’s The Urth of the New Sun). Where as torturer he had worn clothes of fuligin, he now dons a robe of argent, ‘the color that is more pure than white.’

In all this, every element has its place in the larger patterning of the text: narrative elements, aspects of character, symbolism and moments of poetic beauty. Wolfe is fond of recherché vocabulary and formalisms of expression, but unlike Stephen Donaldson’s pretentious and distracting prose, littered with bizarre and archaic terms, Wolfe’s terminology is always precise, always appropriate. He is a consummate stylist. ‘Wolfe’s prose continually charms, amazes, and seduces us with its lyricism, its eccentric lingoes and vocabularies (as often drawn from arcane and ancient sources as from modern science), and its surprising use of metaphor.’ [Larry McCaffery, ‘On Encompassing the Entire Universe’, Science Fiction Studies 15:3 (1988), 335]

Wolfe has been called obscure by some critics. But obscurity is not really his idiom.*

[* note: the argument of Peter Wright’s Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader (Liverpool University Press 2003) is that a deliberate obscurity is the heart of Wolfe’s art: that he ‘confounds the reader’ by style, allusion and misdirection, ‘therefore enslaving the reader by coercing him or her into exploring a system of connectives’ [58, 44]. Wright’s book presents itself as a decoding of this alleged obscurity, to the effect that Wolfe’s books are actually ‘about’ the imperative of biological genetic transmission. I must say, I am not persuaded by this thesis. See also Joan Gordon’s rather hostile review of Wright’s book, Science Fiction Studies 32:1 (2005), 212–13.]

Wolfe finesses his meaning, preferring to signify by inflection and suggestion than direct statements. This means that some may find him obscure, although in fact he is rarely so: a properly attentive reader will decipher what things are and how things fit together. At the end of Citadel of the Autarch, Severian as narrator advises the reader still unclear about any aspect of the story he has just told to read it again; and rereading Wolfe is always an enrichment of his work, and world.

Part of the pleasure of reading a Wolfean text is seeing how different elements connect up, how the various characters are related to one another. Time is not linear, but whorls through various curlicues and loops: we learn, at the end of the fourth novel, that Dorcas, revived out of the lake of death, is Severian’s grandmother, that he himself has travelled forwards and backwards in time.

Memory and the workings of memory are at the heart of the novel: individual memory, and collective memory, the ways in which the past is apprehended by the present. Fantasy as a mode is about this, of course: a Fantasy kingdom, evoked in a Fantasy novel, is a way of creatively remembering history: Gondor recalls medieval Europe, Rohan recalls Anglo-Saxon England and so on — recalls in the sense not just of adverting to but in the sense of interpellating these worlds into now. Wolfe’s New Sun series are complexly apprised of this, and Wolfe explores what memory is, how it means. Having a narrator with a flawless recall sets the intermittencies of memory into sharp relief. Severian not only remembers what has happened, he remembers how he used to remember what had happened, and so sees the difference between the way he used to remember things and the way he remembers them now. For most of us memory is a decay, but it is also the reconfiguring of what is lost. Wolfe’s Urth is a Fantasy reimagining of Byzantium, with elements from other cultures and periods mixed in — it is, as it were, a 1980s memory of medieval Constantinople that is also a notional far-future’s memory of now. Towers might be traditional erections of stone, or they might be antique spaceships repurposed for habitation. Early in the first novel, Severian encounters a picture — we deduce, of Neil Armstrong, standing on the surface of the moon in 1969, although this is not specified — from his world’s deep past.

The picture showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of this figure’s helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more.

This warrior of a dead world affected me deeply, though I could not say why or even just what emotion it was I felt. In some obscure way, | wanted to take down the picture and carry it — not into our necropolis but into one of those mountain forests of which our necropolis was (as I understood even then) an idealized but vitiated image. It should have stood among trees, the edge of its frame resting on young grass. [Shadow of the Torturer, 49]

This image works, in the texture of the novel, to situate our present as the story’s distant past. But it is beautiful, its estrangement of the over-familiar image repurposing it, saying things about striving, adventure, the quest, about the hero, and about the desolation of a dead world and the springtime renewal of a renaissing one. (A detail cast into the novel: in Severian’s time the moon is green, terraformed, or lunaformed, we presume).

The main tale — of adventure, a quest, a hero’s journey — contains within it many embedded stories and tales, each a congeries of eventualities and fantasy detail that reflect upon and thicken the matrix of the larger Fantasy. One detail that has stayed with me, ever since I first read these novels, comes from an inset tale about a young man voyaging across the ocean who becomes trapped in a sea-maze. He learns from a princess, the daughter of an ogre, that the map that will enable him to escape the maze is the fingerprint from a digit of her father’s right hand.

‘It may be that you shall find my father. Should you find him, it may be that you shall defeat him, laying low even such prowess as his. Yet even so, you may be sorely vexed to find your way to the sea once more, for the channels of this isle are most wondrously wrought. Yet there is a way. From my father’s right hand you must flay the tip of the first finger. There you will see a thousand tangled lines. Be not discouraged, but study it closely; for it is the map he followed in webbing the water-ways, that he himself might always have it by him.’ [Claw of the Conciliator, 129]

What is it about that makes it so haunting? We carry, all of us, intricate mazes at our very finger’s ends; and like Theseus we must navigate the dangerous labyrinth of existence. The name Severian includes in it a kind-of pun, for his job as executioner requires him to ‘sever’ his victims’ heads from their bodies; but the Latin severus means serious and strict, attributes of the judge that Severian also is. The name ‘Theseus’, from θεσμός (‘that which is laid down’, ‘law, ordinance, rule’) essentially means the same thing. This fairy-tale-esque inset story repeats in miniature the larger logic of the whole series.

Wolfe is a baroque writer, and New Sun is a baroque Fantasy. I mean this in a particular sense: Wolfe folds future and past into his present, folds narrative into elaborate pleats, folds reference and pattern into his narrative. This is to return to something I discussed in my recent post on Crowley’s Little, Big (1981) — for though in many ways Crowley is a very different writer to Wolfe, they share, I think, this complex, crenulated approach to Fantasy. So, what Gilles Deleuze argues in The Fold (1988). For Deleuze (to quote Tom Conley’s summary)

the Baroque does not comprise what we associate with Bernini, Borromini, or Le Brun. “The Baroque state reveals identical traits existing as constants within the most diverse environments and periods of time. Baroque was not reserved exclusively for the Europe of the last three centuries any more than classicism was the unique privilege of Mediterranean culture.” ‘Baroque’ designates a trope that comes from the renewed origins of art and has stylistic evidence that prevails in culture in general. Under its rubric are placed the proliferation of mystical experience, the birth of the novel, intense taste for life that grows and pullulates, and a fragility of infinitely varied patterns of movement. It could be located in the protracted fascination we experience in watching waves heave, tumble, and atomize when they crack along an unfolding line being traced along the expanse of a shoreline; in following the curls and wisps of color that move on the surface and in the infinite depths of a tile of marble; or, as Proust described, when we follow the ramifying and dilating branches of leaves piled in the concavity of the amber depths of a cup of tea. [Tom Conley, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, Gilles Deleuze The Fold [1988] (University of Minnesota Press 1993) x-xi]

Everything is folded, infolded, and the art of the Baroque — the pleats and flexes of the painting, the curlicues and grace-notes of the music — captures this. More, according to Deleuze, ‘knowledge is known only where it is folded’ [Deleuze, The Fold, 49]. What does Wolfe know? Or we could ask: what does his fiction know? Something about the labyrinth of life; something about complexity; something about God. There are always multiple layers, or floors, to what Wolfe is doing. ‘The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity,’ says Deleuze.

First, the Baroque differentiates its folds in two ways, by moving along two infinities, as if infinity were composed of two stages or floors: the pleats of matter, and the folds in the soul. Below, matter is amassed according to a first type of fold, and then organized according to a second type, to the extent its part constitutes organs that are differently folded and more or less developed. Above, the soul sings of the glory of God inasmuch as it follows its own folds, but without succeeding in entirely developing them. A labyrinth is said, etymologically, to be multiple because it contains many folds. The multiple is not only what has many parts but also what is folded in many ways. A labyrinth corresponds exactly to each level: the continuous labyrinth in matter and its parts, the labyrinth of freedom in the soul and its predicates. If Descartes did not know how to get through the labyrinth, it was because he sought its secret of continuity in rectilinear tracks, and the secret of liberty in a rectitude of the soul. He knew the inclension of the soul as little as he did the curvature of matter. A “cryptographer” is needed, someone who can at once account for nature and decipher the soul, who can peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul. [Deleuze, 3]

Wolfe is precisely such a cryptographer; and cryptography is not the same thing as obscurity. The maze Wolfe has laid out for us, as readers, is long and complex, and its length and involution has been prevented from reaching on, all the way to infinity, only by the author’s death. But then, as Deleuze suggests, the maze is already layered, folded, in such a non-rectilinear way as to lead us towards the infinite, whom Wolfe calls God.