“What do you mean by that? And why do you keep
looking out that window?”
Quite slowly, the man turned to face us. For a
moment he looked at Agia and me, then he turned away. His expression was the
one I have seen our clients wear when Master Gurloes showed them the instruments
to be used in their anacrisis.
Like that? It’s a haunting scene, one from a weighty
tome of haunting scenes, capped as a lyric with a couplet by that edgy comment
about the countenance of those wretches who see the “instruments” whom the
“Master Gurloes” – the reader at this stage of the novel knows Gurloes to be a
Master Torturer of the Guild of Torturers – reveals to his “clients” about to
suffer their “anacrisis”, a term from the Ancient Greeks referring to the
torture used when, in a law case having interrogation and inquiry, torture was applied.
And lift a tip of an interior ear to that “You have eyes,
but you do not see” echo from the Gospels. But it is cast in a semi-pagan way,
too, that line, cast as it is with the very modern, “I think he’s lost his
mind” coupled with it in a dynamic and very conjugal way. Something is askew
here, a mismatch, hints of the Christian Faith and instruments of torture. Or
maybe not? One could easily picture this scene in the sunny background of the
High Middle Ages, in an office of some Star Chamber court. But in fact, it
takes place on a far-future Earth almost (not quite, there are hints!)
unrecognizable.
This vignette is taken from page 190 of volume 1 of my
Fantasy Masterwork edition of the late Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun
multi-tome epic. All four volumes, on every page, have scenes word-woven on
such a level. Ursula K. Le Guin said of Wolfe that: “He is our Melville” –
maybe so, but he strikes me as more an Old Testament author (whom Melville
himself hoped to “channel”, perhaps?). Wolfe strikes me as a Master Chronicler
of the Guild of Haunting Unsettlements, or he would do so if the Prophet
Ezekiel had ventured into essaying a Science-Fiction novel. Wolfe haunts; he
unsettles. One just doesn’t “read” such an author. Does one “read” Shakespeare?
One spends a lifetime carrying Shakespeare about, and one does that with Wolfe.
It is a gift very few writers achieve at all, and fewer still on a sustained
level. Besides the Avon Bard himself and Wolfe, I can name two others: Tolkien
and Homer.
Gene Wolfe died on April 14 of 2019 at the age of 87. Having
survived both polio and the Korean War, he became an engineer – and if you have
a taste for Pringle potato chips, Wolfe helped create the machine that forms
them. His wife Rosemary, born the same year as Wolfe, died in 2013 after long
illness, including Alzheimer’s. Wolfe has a quote about her recorded in The
New Yorker in 2015 that, “There was a time when she did not remember
my name or that we were married, but she still remembered that she loved
me.” After a long life as a melancholy observer of Earth’s all-too human
scene, I have to say that is a poignant line; indeed, there have been few such
loves.
With this essay, I stand here before the Assembly of
Readers as Wolfe’s Advocate. He deserves to be read, whether a particular
writing of his is Science-Fiction or whether it is Fantasy. Wolfe deserves to
be read because all of us deserve the mystery he conjures. Justice is giving
something its due, and Science-Fiction itself is due the gift of seeing reality
as something that can act on us as much as we think we can act on it. Sci-Fi – the art, relying as it does on building imaginative narrative
architecture based on the empirical sciences – more than deserves mystery: it needs it desperately, for all
Creation needs a return to the sense of mystery – and of course in the heart of
mystery resides beauty. Or terror. Yet beauty is allusive, non-capturable – and
in that peculiar oubliette in the Mansion of Meaning, Wolfe is THE master
“mystery” writer, “mystery” in the Catholic Sacramental sense. Wolfe himself
was a Catholic, a convert who initially studied the Faith to marry his beloved
Rosemary, and much speculation orbits that question as to what extent his
religion influenced his writings. Wolfe himself averred that it did. As he
converted in the 1950s, before the controversial changes in the Church, he thus
experienced an older, more transcendental theology than those whose Catholic
experience dates from the 1960s or later.
Do a writer’s personal religious beliefs color his oeuvre?
Enlarge it? Or restrict it? It’s a common enough question when discussing where
authors cultivate their ideas, and how they wrestle with the concepts they
create, yet Science-Fiction (nor most of the rest of Modernity) often doesn’t
have the “religious gene” that way; at best, reality is matter to manipulate and
we’re Descartes’ Ghosts in the Machine – pure matter ourselves, yet oddly “haunted”. The natural world in
which we live in our technological bubble is not considered that type of
mystery, not a Mysterium requiring awe and contemplation but a material
reality needing exploitation for profit. Though an author of more than 25
novels and twice that many short stories, no reader of his can believe Wolfe
wrote with much of an eye for profit. His fiction is not “pop” fiction, written
to sell high volume, though Fantasy is a huge seller in general, compared to
“literary” works.
Wolfe’s fiction is instead a wondering, a cosmos-wide
pondering on whether it is reality that is a player in the game, whether it can
exploit us, or transform us, as in his Fifth Head of Cerberus, a
three-novel combo asking the question of whether the long-settled human
colonists of a planet haven’t actually been replaced by the aliens native to
the place. Who does the haunting? (Or is it more like possession?) The humans
who have replaced the natives or the natives, haunted by what happened to the
humans they have altered themselves to pantomime? In the Fifth Head, Wolfe
also asks whether a machine can hold a human’s mind, and whether a clone can
continue the life of its original, whether prostitution offers a greater
freedom and whether suffering is…. Well, one doesn’t just “read” Wolfe, one
interacts with Wolfe, and one does so sacramentally, for as the Catholic
Sacraments are physical channels of invisible, divine grace; in Wolfe’s art, his
characters experience the worlds he creates as believers experience the drama
of divine life in such a sacramental metaphysic.
Alien that is, of course, to our present world, and it
is fitting an author of Science-Fiction engages in it; but that raises another
reason for Wolfe to be read: he’s work. He takes effort. As suggested here, his
form of storytelling is quite different from the norm. And he can be more work
than Tolkien, more than Homer, for he has an anti-Mysterium world to work
against. And that’s Sacramental too. From his unsettling reflections on who we
are and contemplation of what we might be, even if unbeknownst to ourselves, to
his wonderful, exquisite prose and his penchant for creating words – one often
finds oneself looking up a word only to realize Wolfe has made it up – in all
of that, Gene Wolfe is a transcendent author, or perhaps, suggested by the
unsettling questions raised in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, he is Ezekiel
come again; an ancient phantasmagoric, a prophet of the supernatural imperiously
striking itself through the natural world, an extraordinary visionary who sees a
higher reality our world in itself can only dully reflect –
perhaps the prophet has indeed replaced the potato chip
machine maker.
Read Gene Wolfe, and you’ll wander in these wonders, and over time, bit by bit – perhaps – garner that most elusive of graces: wisdom.
An essay on interstellar pidgin languages in fiction, by Mina.
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