FSF, April 2007 Page 10
You see? I've left you with no picture at all of the man or of his work. Worse, I'm treading on the edge of the great fallacy that Wolfe's admirers so often fall into: That of making him sound so elevated that there's no hope of a mere mortal enjoying his work. It's an easy mistake to make, though. Cresheim Creek, near where I live, flows into the Wissahickon creating a deep spot that's called the Devil's Pool because, so the folklore goes, it has no bottom but goes all the way down to the devil. A Gene Wolfe story can be like that—even the seemingly simplest can turn out to be potentially bottomless.
Take “A Solar Labyrinth,” first published in this magazine in 1983, which at first glance seems barely more than a whimsy. A Mr. Smith builds a labyrinth of isolated objects—lamp posts, statues, a retired yawl canted on its side with masts jutting overhead—scattered about a lawn, so that the walls defining its passages are not physical but shadows. It's a puzzle that can only be solved, moreover, by realizing that the shadows shift with the sun, opening and closing lines of escape. The vignette explores the differing reactions of adults and children to the maze and ends with Mr. Smith and one solitary child chasing each other down its lanes in the waning afternoon.
Lovely, I thought on first reading it. But later, looking back over my metaphorical shoulder, I felt the shadows lengthen and darken. The imagined shrieks of the child sounded less like laughter and more like terror. I could not help but think of Lewis Carroll, who was from one perspective the best friend a child could ever have, and from another a very frightening man indeed. I could not help but think that the child's predicament was a lot like life itself.
From this point, the analysis can go on and on. Google the story and you'll find that many think it's a Christian allegory, while others prefer to interpret it as a key to the reading of Wolfe's masterwork, The Book of the New Sun. For those who care to do so, the exploration can be followed as deep as human ingenuity will take it. Gene Wolfe is notorious for never explaining his stories, so there's no telling at what point interpretation ends and invention begins. A lot of people have gone to the devil, trying to track this particular wolf through the labyrinth of story and back to its lair.
There's nothing wrong with the critical impulse, of course. But it's a very big mistake to think that simply because a story has deeper levels, its surface meaning can be ignored with impunity.
I'm thinking here of the response to Wolfe's recent novel The Wizard Knight (for reasons of length, lightly revised and published as The Knight and The Wizard) in which a teenaged boy finds himself transported to a beleaguered fantasy world and into the body of a physically powerful adult, and in convincingly short order makes himself into the perfect knight. The world creation is a brilliant conflation of Norse mythology and Christian medieval theology, with just a touch of Relativity thrown in for seasoning. Many readers have gone haring up and down the levels of invented reality, gleefully identifying sources and hidden implications, while completely ignoring the central concern of the novel. Which is: What qualities make somebody a good knight? This is an interesting question even before you've given it serious thought. But by the time Wolfe is done examining and expanding upon it, it's revealed as one that has serious applications for how you and I should lead our lives. The Wizard Knight is one of Wolfe's wisest books, and one I know I'll return to often.
Some time ago, in a short essay titled, with disarming modesty, “What I Know About Writing (in no particular order),” Wolfe wrote that “Almost any interesting work of art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says.” Which is almost a Zen koan in how straightforwardly it can be stated and yet how complex it is in application. But it helps to remember that Wolfe is a practicing Catholic, and that to a Catholic all human beings are engaged in an ongoing struggle for salvation. There is good in the worst of us and evil in the best, and nobody knows which side will land uppermost when the final coin is tossed. Which can make Wolfe's characters unnerving in the way that real people are unnerving, and unpredictable in the way that all good literature confounds our expectations. There are no heroes who can be trusted unequivocally, no villains beyond redemption, and nine times out of ten, the difference between a tragedy and a comedy is crucial but slight and occurs in the final pages.
For those who are still feeling intimidated (and, looking back, I see that I haven't done a very good job of allaying your fears), all of the above can be boiled down to three simple rules for enjoying his work:
* * * *
1. Look for hidden implications.
2. Remember Poe's purloined letter, and pay serious attention to the obvious.
3. Never forget that people are human.
* * * *
"Memorare,” in this issue, is a good example of everything I've said so far. The surface story, sufficient in itself, is an extremely good science fiction adventure. Note the careful engineering of the suits and cenotaphs. Note the craftsmanship. Nearing the end I thought for sure there was no way Wolfe could wrap it all up satisfactorily in the little space left. But of course he did.
So read the story first for the excitement of the ride. Then, if that's your bent, you can look deeper. I personally think (but you should be aware that I have a long history of creating clever theories that turn out to be wrong, so take this one with a grain of salt) that on a symbolic level Kit and Redd and even Kim, who pops up near the end, are all aspects of the same woman, so that the entire history of March's marriage is folded through the story. Fiction can do that, you know. There's nothing that says it has to limit itself to a literal reading of what's on the page. But you don't have to accept my version of what's going on. Wolfe always leaves room for multiple interpretations in his work. Feel free to roll your own.
Or don't, if that sort of thing gives you the pip. But you should definitely reflect on the moral significance of the story. I don't mean that it has a “moral,” a tidy little platitude that you can reduce it to and maybe embroider on your handkerchief. Wolfe is too good a writer for that. But almost all serious fiction is about how we human beings live and, if only by implication, how we ought to live. When a story is titled “Memorare” (I suggest you look up the prayer to see what Wolfe left out) and is played out pretty much literally in the shadow of the grave, you know that it's not about trivial matters.
A minute ago, I reduced this essay to three rules for appreciating Wolfe. But if I had to boil it all down yet further, into a single guideline, it would be: Most of all, have fun. Disgruntled writers confronted by a bad review are fond of quoting Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism that “A book is like a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.” But the reverse is true as well. If you're a good reader, as I presume you are, sometimes the image that peers murkily from a badly written story is unworthy of you. It as good as calls you an ass. Which insult, thrown in your face when you expect it least, is where the anger comes from when you find yourself flinging a book or magazine at the wall. But you don't have to fear that here. You're in good hands with Gene Wolfe.
He tells the very best lies.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Gene Wolfe: The Man and His Work by MICHAEL ANDRE-DRIUSSI
John Clute has called him “quite possibly the most important” author in the contemporary sf field. Ursula K. Le Guin has called him “our Melville.” Michael Swanwick has called him the greatest living writer in the English language. Who is this mild-mannered man named Gene Wolfe, and how has he won these accolades?
Through a lot of hard work, it turns out.
Gene Wolfe came to writing after returning home from the Korean War (1954), completing his college education at the University of Houston, and getting married in 19561.
Looking for a way to supplement his salary as an engineer at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, the twenty-six-year-old newlywed began writing stories in whatever free time he could find.
His first sale came eight years later, in 1965.
To put this into perspective,
at that point he had three children (of an eventual four), with the eldest already in second grade. That's a long time in “parent years."
His first novel was published in 1970, and since then he has written twenty-three more, some of them singletons, most of them set in one of several series (The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, The Wizard Knight, and the Soldier series). His novels have won awards: the Nebula, World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, British awards, among others. Although he is primarily a novelist, Gene Wolfe has never abandoned the writing of shorter works and he has seen more than 210 of them published.
His stories cover a broad spectrum of science fiction and fantasy, ranging from high-brow literary puzzles to low-brow tabloid realism, with several odd tangents in between. He has a knack for taking a genre staple and turning it on its head. For example, an early space adventure titled “Alien Stones” (collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories) in which the starship's empath thinks like a child and the rugged captain can solve the first-contact mystery only by thinking like an engineer, seems like a topsy-turvy version of Star Trek.
There's some Horror, there's some Mystery, and there's some Humor. Looking across it all, certain trends become apparent in each of four decades: the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and the present.
The Seventies: Literary Tricks
This is a trick question, but an easy one.
—Number Five
Gene Wolfe first gained attention in the 1970s through two different series of linked stories: the three novellas of The Fifth Head of Cerberus and the “Island” stories. His technique was to take an initial story, shift it dramatically for a second story, and then shift it again for a third story. This literary gambit paid off handsomely: the second “Island” story, “The Death of Doctor Island,” won both a Nebula and a Locus award.
In 1972 Wolfe left Procter & Gamble to become a senior editor at Plant Engineering, a trade journal located in Barrington, Illinois (a job he would stay with until he became a full-time writer in 1984). That year also saw the publication of The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972). Set on the distant twin-worlds of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, these three novellas appear to be sequels sharing a common location, timeframe, and characters. Yet below this surface the reality is shifting from story to story.
The first novella, titled “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” is the memoir of an established citizen looking back with a certain Proustian tone—it is the coming-of-age story of a young man searching for identity in a baroque world of clones, shape-shifting aliens, and hybrids. His planet, Sainte Croix, while the more developed of the twin worlds, is still something of a backwater. The general technology is nineteeth century, complete with slavery, and yet his scientist father uses profits from his brothel to conduct experiments in genetic engineering.
The second novella is “'A Story,’ by John V. Marsch,” written by an anthropologist from Earth who is a minor character in the first novella. The story reads like an anthropological reconstruction of the shape-shifting aliens and their world, Sainte Anne, as it existed before the humans came. It is a gripping coming-of-age story about a young man in a stone-age tribal society who visits other tribes who seem at times to be as fantastic as fairies, goblins, and trolls. There is an implied tension between the anthropology and the recreation of a lost culture so strange as to seem a total fantasy—that is, between science and fiction. How much of the story is real, and “real” to what degree? How much of the story is a projection of the anthropologist's life and/or dreams?
The third novella, enigmatically titled “V.R.T.,” reveals that the “John V. Marsch” who wrote the previous story is a political prisoner held by a corrupt and authoritarian regime. He might be insane. He might not be a real anthropologist. He might not even be from Earth. The text itself is a hodgepodge of taped interrogations, snippets from his journal, scribbled notes, and the everyday distractions of the officer reviewing his case.
These novellas together form a dazzling, multifaceted whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. It was considered Wolfe's major work until the arrival of The Book of the New Sun.
Wolfe wrote a second linked-story series (starting before The Fifth Head of Cerberus, yet finishing after it), this time revolving in a freewheeling style around three words: Island, Doctor, and Death. (These three stories are collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. A fourth one appeared in the eighties, but that's another decade.)
In “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” (1970), a lonely young boy lives with his mother at an isolated house on the coast, a house sometimes surrounded by water at high tide. His mother has two suitors: one a man her own age who drives a sports car, and the other an older physician. The woman is addicted to drugs, but the boy is addicted to genre fiction to a degree that might be worse: he identifies with the first suitor as a flashy, heroic character and thinks of the other man as “Doctor Death.” As reality begins to break down, the story partakes of the “psychological thriller” or “magical realism” schools of fiction, depending upon reader interpretation.
Some years later came “The Death of Doctor Island” (1978), in which a psychologically disturbed teenage boy seems to be on a tropical island, but the place is actually an orbital mental institution run by a computer, and there are other patients who are, perhaps, more important. This time the boy is inside of a love triangle, rather than just observing. What follows is a tug of war between reality and illusion in the gray area between torture and treatment, through what might be high tech “magic” performed by Doctor Island or simply the boy's hallucinations.
The third story is “The Doctor of Death Island” (1978). Its hero is Alan Alvard, inventor of speaking books, who is in prison for killing his business partner to keep control of his singular invention. He works as an orderly in the prison hospital where there is an old doctor with a terminal ward at the seventh floor—Alvard thinks of this ward as Death Island, the tip of a submerged mountain that is the rest of the hospital, and has recurring nightmares about the doctor coming for him.
Two years into his sentence, Alvard develops stomach cancer, so he is put into experimental cryogenic suspension. Forty years later he is awakened and cured, only to find himself in a future where everybody has immortality and he is still serving a life sentence. He discovers that the government has stolen his patents in the interests of its own security (a different sort of “national security"), but in his secret and methodical way he devises an elaborate plan for escape that involves bringing fictitious characters of Charles Dickens to life. The love triangle is tangled, complicated, and submerged, yet still at the mysterious heart of the story. Here the mature hero is active in fighting for his escape from the “Island,” but at the cost of making him less sympathetic than the boys of the previous stories.
Wolfe was known in the seventies for such highly structured literary tricks. He hasn't stopped, really, since he does that with novels, but in shorter works after the seventies he often uses art to conceal art.
The Eighties: Deepening Horror
Neal and Ted held her, and Jan put the sword through her belly—so she'd live long enough to know what was happening.
—Ming
It is a paradox that Gene Wolfe is not a horror writer and yet his stories very often have a strong thread of horror to them. In the early 1970s this horror was kept a step removed from the reader by narrative distance, which made the horror more cerebral, intellectual, or even philosophical. During the late seventies and through the eighties, Wolfe closed this gap, producing horror that is immediate, visceral, and gruesome.
"Silhouette” (1975, collected in Endangered Species) presents a starship in orbit around an Earth-like planet after a very long search from a ruined Earth. The captain wants to declare it ready for human colonization as soon as possible, and she is intolerant of dissenting opinion. Officer Johann has misgivings about the worl
d, but he also seems to be in some sort of dream-like first-contact with something down on the surface, a non-corporeal being that is a shadow and uses darkness. When hints of his strange condition spread through the ship, secret cults emerge from hiding in the hope of starting a new religion. The story takes on a frightening and ambiguous demonology within the context of a Star Trek-like space adventure.
"When I Was Ming the Merciless” (1976, collected in Endangered Species) is one side of a dialogue between a college student and his jailors. The contrast between the whimsical title and the opening scene is stark, and while a monologue might seem “distancing,” in this example it actually destroys distance.
"Redbeard” (1984, collected in Storeys from the Old Hotel) is a conversational story about a local man with a bad reputation in rural Illinois. This haunting tale touches on fairy tales at points and zigs when you think it will zag.
"Lord of the Land” (1990, collected in Starwater Strains) gives us Dr. Sam Cooper, an “Indy Jones” of folklore, visiting rural Tennessee to investigate a local legend about an unusual monster called a “soul-sucker” that a trio of shooters hit at twilight. Dr. Cooper spends the night at his informant's old farmhouse and discovers a Faulknerian dynamic to the family, but as the night deepens he is drawn across time and place to face the sort of cosmic horror that would make Lovecraft proud.
While horror has always had a place in Wolfe's work, during this period a visceral horror burst out, expanding the range and engaging the reader in new ways.
The Nineties: Blazing Emotional Core
I'd like to eat the hippos.
—Rex
During the nineties, Wolfe's short fiction developed a noir, almost hardboiled style, yet the emotional content was paradoxically more direct rather than being downplayed in tough-guy attitudes or cold intellect.
"The Ziggurat” (1995, collected in Strange Travelers) has a retired engineer going through an ugly divorce. Like a Hemingway hero he has been holed up in a remote cabin for several months, where his progress at taming a coyote has prevented him from committing suicide with a rifle. He feels used up and on the verge of being discarded, but when his wife arrives, expecting him to sign the divorce papers, he rises up with a new determination to refuse the divorce and save the marriage. When she tries to leave in her car she is assaulted by a bunch of boy-sized aggressors who make off with one of the children. The hero sets out to find her in the falling snow, and down by the lake he meets the fey alien creatures that have abducted her. It is solid science fiction, with elements of horror and fantasy, and traces of tabloid realism.