Gene Wolfe Read online

  Perhaps the pun-that-transforms would be “Romulus and Uncle Remus,” remembering that the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris also featured anthropomorphic animals as characters. Considering The Book as an expanded version of “Frog,” Severian plays the part of Frog, the Old Autarch takes the part of Fish, the ritual sacrifice, and the “city” Frog will build is none other than Ushas, the Urth of the New Sun. And the war against the Other Lords is a war against slavery, as the intent of Abaia, Erebus, and the others is not to destroy the inhabitants of Urth but to enslave them.

  The Shorter Tales in Brief

  Of course, not all of the stories in the brown book are made up of five distinct parts, nor are the various hooks (where they exist) always so deeply encrypted. “The Boy Who Hooked the Sun” (Weird Tales, Spring 1988), for example, is ostensibly set on the emerald-studded coast of Atlantis, where a boy (whose father trades with the barbarians of Hellas) hooks the sun while fishing and several people try to talk him into letting it go (the richest man, the strongest man, the cleverest man, the magic woman, the most foolish man) before he finally does so at the urging of his mother, but even then, he reasons “the time must come when I live and she does not; and when that time comes, surely I will bait my hook again” (WT, p. 22). The boy obviously resembles Severian dragging the New Sun across space, the others are perhaps Vodalus, Baldanders, Typhon, the Cumaean, (no guess for “most foolish”), Earth as the mother, and Urth as the dead mother. The structure is seven-part, suggesting the seven planetary bodies of the week, but otherwise the history and mythology seem right up front in the form of “Atlantis” and “Hellas.”

  “The Town that Forgot Fauna” (Urth, p. 232) tells of nine men who travel up a river “when the plow was new,” searching for a site to build a new city. They find an old woman with a garden and try to buy her land with copper, silver, and lastly gold. She finally agrees on the condition that they keep a garden in the center of the city, and erect a statue of the woman in precious material. They keep their promise with a small garden and a statue of painted wood, but years later a merchant buys the plot and burns the statue. Before long the town became a ghost town, uninhabited save for one old woman who keeps a garden at its center. Again, the mythology is right up front: the old woman is Fauna, also known as Mother Nature. “When the plow was new” points to Triptolemos, who, according to Greek myth, invented the plow and (quite significantly) started the Eleusinian rites of Demeter, the Great Mother Goddess. The nine men are a cipher, and might be the Nine Worthies (Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabaeus; Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar; Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon), but it is difficult to be conclusive. As for American history, the buying of land smacks of the purchase of Manhattan Island for trinkets, and the existence of Central Park strengthens the allusion. (The Statue of Liberty might stand-in for the statue of Fauna.) Unmistakably this is a story about the resiliency of Mother Nature, and marks the transformation of Earth into Urth, and Urth into Ushas.

  Empires of Foliage and Flower

  Published only in hardcover by Cheap Street, Empires of Foliage and Flower is both the longest story from the brown book and the most difficult to come by. It is a story of two empires at war, one Yellow, the other Green, and its main characters are an eremite called Father Thyme and a female of variable age known only as the child. The text of Empires is composed of ten unnamed sections, and the story covers a period of six days (objectively speaking).

  1) Thyme meets the child, an infant playing with peas as soldiers, and takes her along with him in search of peace. As they walk west, they both age dramatically.

  2) The next day they continue west to Vert, capital of the Green Empire. The child is now a young woman.

  3) Prince Patizithes, enamored of the child, arranges for her to meet the Green Emperor, and then seduces her.

  4) On the third day the child is given a green dress for her meeting with the Emperor. The meeting goes badly, but when a general asks Thyme how to win the war, Thyme answers, “‘You may win ... when your army is dressed in yellow.’”

  5) Thyme and the child continue west, into the mountain range. She gives birth before dawn in a bush near a battlefield. She names her son Barrus, after her brother. A passing soldier gives her his gray cloak, which had once been green.

  6) As they continue through the mountains, they watch a battle at a distant pass.

  7) They camp that night near the enemy army.

  8) Barrus walks with them during the fourth day. They arrive at Zanth, capital of the Yellow Empire, and meet a meager man who leads them to lodging. This man turns out to be the Yellow Emperor, who rarely sleeps in the palace due to the threat of assassination. The Emperor holds teenager Barrus as hostage, and says that if he proves faithful, he may wind up on the throne of a conquered Vert. Thyme tells the Emperor how to win, then leaves the city on the fifth morning, heading east with the child.

  9) At a mountain pass the travelers find yellow flowered vines choking the trees they climb. The vines sprout from the skeletal remains of green soldiers, and green moss grows on the bones of yellow soldiers. Thyme says, “‘During the long years in which I have ringed Urth, I have seen that the more nation differs from nation, the more difficult it is for one to trust another. Thus I advised each empire to make itself more like its foe. Alas, they were too much alike already. Each saw my advice not as a road to peace but as a ruse to win’” to which the girl adds, “‘And now the laurels war with the vines.’”

  10) They come again to Vert where they see “soldiers in argent armor standing guard at its gates, and a silver flag flying above the battlements.” The child dwindles to an infant, and Thyme leaves her in the yard he had found her in.

  It is not difficult to see how these ten sections collapse into the five-part pattern of the hero: the first two give the unusual childhood of the child; the next two give her initiation into sexuality (where she wears “a green gown as any virgin nymph” might wear); sections five and six find her in her reign as mother in gray; in seven and eight she is a tired crone in the Yellow city; and in the last two she is returned to infancy, with the Green Emperor (if not both emperors) dying in her place as tanists, or more properly, dying for her, as the child has become an aspect of the Great Goddess.

  As for its mythic level, the title brings to mind the Celtic “Battle of the Trees,” a poem about the fight between the forces of Light (trees) and Death (serpents), but this does not seem to correspond to Empires. The motif of green and yellow points to the seasonal shift from Spring to Autumn, and the constant reference to plants (“Thyme” who is a “sage”; “peas” confused with “peace”; et cetera) reinforces this notion, so at one level the war is the natural vegetative growth cycle. It is also about the warlike nature of all life, even plants themselves, with the implication that as a higher life form, Homo sapiens has the ability to stop the fighting. That is to say, Nature is cruel. This cruelty goes further than the species-versus-species variety, descending to the battle of the sexes: recall Master Ash in the Last House, a figure from Norse mythology (the first man, carved from a tree) where he is paired with a wife named Vine. Very depressing, to have Adam and Eve killing each other before they even get out of the garden. (Master Ash also comes to mind with regard to Thyme’s habit of growing young or old as he walks, for when Severian first hears the tread of Ash it sounds to him like that of an old or sick man, but as Ash comes closer his steps become firmer and more swift.)

  A hint of Jack Vance’s “Ulan Dhor” is present as well, a story from The Dying Earth that features a city torn by centuries of civil war between two factions, the Green and the Gray.

  “Five thousand years and the wretches still quarrel? Time has taught them no wisdom! Then stronger agencies must be used ... Behold!”.... The tentacles sprouted a thousand appendages ... These ranged the city, and wherever there was crumbling or mark of age the tentacles dug, tore, blasted, burnt; then spewed new materials into place (Vance, The Dying E
arth, p. 104).

  The reconstruction of the city by its awakened immortal in “Ulan Dhor” is echoed by the resurrection of the Stone Town by its god Apu Punchau, which happens in The Claw of the Conciliator soon after the conversation between Severian and the Cumaean about Empires.

  Chinese legend includes a character named the Yellow Emperor, originally known as Huangti, the third of the Three Kings of ancient China, inventor of pottery and houses. Around 2600 B.C., Huangti’s people settled the “loess,” a land of fertile ground around the Yellow River, but before long, encroaching neighbors (led by Ch’ih Yu, who called himself the Red Emperor and worshiped the gods of Fire) caused Huangti to fight the first war. He crushed Ch’ih Yu and took the entire loess, then all the other tribes hailed him as lord. He moved his capital to Pingyang, central to the tribal lands, and ruled as the Yellow Emperor. Among other marvelous things, the Yellow Emperor is credited with winning the war against the mirror people who invaded Earth one night, imprisoning them and forcing them to slavishly mimic all the actions of men.

  This looks promising. We have a mythic hook for the Yellow Emperor, and the mysterious empire of silver (which would be the color for mirror people). Ascian soldiers wear “silvery caps and shirts in place of armor” (IV, 208), and the magic mirrors of Urth represent the highest technology, portals to and from the higher universe of Yesod, if not other universes as well. But what about the Green Empire? The fact that emeralds are the currency of the empire calls to mind the Emerald City of Oz, but goes no further. For the Green Empire we must turn at last to history.

  “Patizithes” is an unusual name in the Urth Cycle, where characters are named after saints (if they are on the side of the New Sun) or mythological figures (usually enemies of the New Sun) or both (in a few ambiguous cases), for Patizithes is, in fact, the name of a historical figure who was neither saint nor myth. In the ancient Middle East, Patizithes was a Median magus left in charge of Cambyses’ household when the latter went on his campaign against Egypt. Patizithes plotted revolt against Cambyses and carried it out in 525 B.C. by setting his brother Gaumata on the throne under the name of Smerdis. In 521 B.C. Darius killed Gaumata and founded the Persian Empire.

  This Middle Eastern connection is alluded to in Empires by one of the prince’s many titles: Margrave of the Magitae. (The Magitae were the people of Arabia Felix, or modern Yemen.) Following our historical hook, we must ask: if the Green Empire is Persia, then against whom do they war? The Persian Wars (500-479) were fought against the Greeks to a relative stalemate (similar to the war between the Green and the Yellow), but it is hard to imagine the independent city-states of ancient Greece being called an empire. A more likely candidate is the empire of Alexander (334-323), which conquered all of the Persian Empire before itself collapsing when Alexander died. From a historical standpoint Alexander’s campaign was a continuation of the Greco-Persian struggle, which ended, as in Empires, with both nations destroyed.

  There are a few curious references within the text that may act as a sort of carbon-dating for Empires, to wit: “though long lives might pass like a night and the New Sun sunder the centuries” and later, the good soldier says, “‘By the book! ... What in the name of awful Abaia are you two up to?’” None of the other brown book stories ever make reference to the New Sun, a concept dating to the era of Typhon at the end of the Age of the Monarch. “Frog” refers at points to the Pancreator, and while the naviscaput may allude to Abaia that name is never mentioned. All the other stories are firmly rooted in the Age of Myth (that is, our own history), but the brown book was published three or four centuries before Severian’s era (thus, by my calculations, around the seventh century of the Age of the Autarch), so it appear that the action in Empires takes place sometime after the era of Typhon, yet long enough before the printing of the brown book to become properly obscured by the passage of time. (One might argue that the text of the brown book has been corrupted by editors adding current theological references to old legends, which is a possibility. But since no other section, even the various fragments, ever mentions Abaia or the New Sun, there is little to substantiate the notion of theological corruption.) The posthistoric event that seems to be commemorated is the cataclysmic second invasion of the mirror people, the arrival and entrenchment of the Other Lords, and the transformation of the Green and Yellow Empires into Ascia.

  Empires reflects The Book and Urth in a number of ways; initially as an apocalyptic struggle that stretches on for generations and has no good or bad side, just a murky middle. Recall that the Ascians are not merely tools of evil, but want mankind to return to the stars as masters, and recall as well those sailors who valiantly fight against the death of Urth in the Hall of Justice on Yesod. It also points to the trials of transformation and eventual rebirth, not only for Urth but for Severian as well. And last but not least looms the five-part pattern.

  The Five Parts of the New Sun

  Zooming from micro to macro, consider The Book and Urth as stages of the sacred hero’s life.

  1) Birth: Severian is born at least two times in The Shadow of the Torturer, first by Catherine in her cell, then again years later by the undine Juturna who rescues him from drowning. In comic book terms, this second birth is the part where little Sev, drowning in the river, utters the magic word “SHAZAM!” and turns into Severman, able to walk the corridors of time (eventually, at least). The Severian who comes out of the river is not the same Severian that went into the river; somebody died, someone else was reborn.

  2) Initiation: in The Claw of the Conciliator, Severian is initiated into the cannibalistic ritual of the Vodalarii. As we have seen, the initiation stage is typically about the mysteries of life and death; in “Student” the focus was on the ripening and harvest of man (or “Corn Maidens”) as well as grain; the mysteries of birth are examined as Frog is adopted into a secret society, and initiated in their customs. What mysteries of life and death could possibly exist for journeyman Severian, who was adopted by the torturers, raised amid incredible pain and suffering, and taught the scientific techniques of excruciation, except that of experiencing as his own the life and death of another through the analeptic alzabo?

  3) Reign: Severian ascends the mountain and begins his trials in The Sword of the Lictor. He is stripped of all external trappings: his companion Dorcas, his sword Terminus Est, his relic the Claw. His sacred marriage (such as it is) with the widow (in mythic terms, she might be called “Isis”) gives him an instant family, but most of them are quickly stripped away. (Does the phrase “Who will help the Widow’s Son?” ring any bells? Cause Masonic feelers to quiver, or hackles to rise?) Little Severian, his newly adopted son and childhood self (call him “Severboy”) in a pastoral world he never knew, is vaporized in an instant. And through it all, Severian becomes master of himself, servant no longer to any person or institution, such that when he identifies himself as “Grand Master Severian” to the villagers of Lake Diuturna, he is not telling a simple lie, but one that masks a deeper truth.

  4) Repose: in The Citadel of the Autarch, Severian goes through the horrific mass combat of war, kills and consumes the minotaur/sacrifice, the Old Autarch, and prepares for the final journey. Some readers may balk at this depiction of the Old Autarch as Ogre, offering Baldanders as the most Ogre-like character on Urth. Here is conclusive evidence linking the minotaur to the Old Autarch, from a scene where Severian slips into the Corridors of Time while looking at the autarch: “A man with the horns and muzzled face of a bull bent over me, a constellation sprung to life.... He listened intently, turning his head to watch me from one brown eye” (IV, 189-190).

  5) Death: Severian dies (a few times, at least) and is reborn; Urth dies and is reborn as Ushas.

  It all looks so self-evident. If I had written this before the announcement that Wolfe was writing Urth, it would have been a penetrating insight, but even at this late date I hope that it is not without some worth. It seems that in creating a new mythos in the New Sun, Gene Wolfe has (
consciously or otherwise) incorporated not only the myths of several differing nations and times, effectively tapping into the Jungian “collective unconscious,” but also the five-part pattern of the hero, a structure that shows up in the large scale as well as the small. I say “consciously or otherwise” because, as Wolfe tells it in The Castle of the Otter, The Book was originally meant to be a novella, then a novel, then a trilogy, before finally becoming a tetralogy, yet even then there was an implied fifth part, just like in “Frog” and “Eschatology and Genesis.” But why end a tale at its fourth part? To end on the upbeat, for one, as well as to avoid the difficulties of death and first person past tense narration. It is almost as if the meme of the five-part hero was struggling to be expressed through Gene Wolfe, rather than a conscious blueprint or a happy “subconscious” coincidence. It is also possible that from the beginning Wolfe had some presentiment of his future.

  ****

  Works Cited

  Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Penguin, 1987

  Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, 1973

  ———, Primitive Mythology, Penguin, 1987

  John Clute, Strokes, Serconia Press, 1988

  Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Penguin, 1974

  Rudyard Kipling, All the Mowgli Stories, Doubleday, 1936

  Jack Vance, The Dying Earth, Pocket Science Fantasy, 1977

  Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer, Simon and Schuster, 1980

  ———, The Claw of the Conciliator, Timescape Books, 1981

  ———, The Sword of the Lictor, Timescape Books, 1982

  ———, The Citadel of the Autarch, Timescape Books, 1983

  ———, The Castle of the Otter, Science Fiction Book Club Edition, 1982