Gene Wolfe Read online

  ———, Empires of Foliage and Flower, manuscript, 1987 (?)

  ———, The Urth of the New Sun, Tor Books, 1987

  ———, “The Boy Who Hooked the Sun,” Weird Tales #290, Spring 1988

  ****

  Afterword to “A Closer Look at the Brown Book”

  This piece was published in 1993, ahead of the first edition of Lexicon Urthus (1994).

  The use of a Science Fiction Book Club edition raises some eyebrows. At the time I was more focused on citing volume and chapter to better serve all editions. The Lexicon first edition also used SFBC, and a later chapbook had a table converting SFBC page numbers into page numbers for Simon & Schuster and Orb editions.

  Gene Wolfe at the Lake of Birds

  As everybody knows, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is heavily layered with symbols, each highly charged with hidden significance. The somberly baroque landscape is cluttered with curios, some grotesque and others fanciful, but even against this background of symbolic radiation some sections are so highly charged that one’s hair begins to stand on end.

  These supercharged areas undoubtedly mark very important spots for readers to take note (at various levels) and for treasure hunters to dig. The three chapters (ch. 22-24) of The Shadow of the Torturer dealing with the Lake of Birds is one of these supercharged sections — the preceding chapters introducing the Botanical Gardens of Nessus set the pace by cranking up the dream-like quality by several degrees.

  But before we get to the Lake of Birds, a very brief gloss on books outside and inside TBNS.

  The main narrative thread of TBNS is something like the Great Expectations of I, Claudius on The Dying Earth. That is to say, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth provides the landscape; I, Claudius by Robert Graves gives the political and religious structure, as well as the whole “backing into the throne” theme; and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations adds the bildungsroman and the hidden family relationships. There is, of course, a lot of detail work tracing from Borges: The Book of Imaginary Beings with its collection of creatures; the story “Funes the Memorious,” whose hero has a photographic memory not unlike Severian’s; the story “Library of Babel,” so similar to the Library of Nessus; and so on, into seemingly infinite regression.

  But setting aside outside sources for the moment, there are two works within TBNS that seem to be blueprints for the whole: one is the fabled brown book; the other is the play “Eschatology and Genesis.” I have already written an essay on the brown book (NYRSF #54, Feb. 1993) and I may yet write one on the play, but here they are in a nutshell:

  The brown book offers stories that contain the five-fold pattern of the hero’s life, a structure written about by Robert Graves in The White Goddess. Those five stages are: (1) Birth, (2) Initiation, (3) Reign, (4) Repose, and (5) Death. The main stories of the brown book presented in TBNS (“The Tale of the Student and His Son” and “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog”) have this structure, and for Severian himself these stages are each covered in the five volumes of his narrative.

  The play “Eschatology and Genesis” is trickier. As the title suggests, it deals with the transition from one creation period to the next, a mixing of endings and beginnings. As a result, the Armageddon of the old creation is simultaneously the Eden of the new: the graveyard of death is also a garden of birth. In vanilla-Christian terms, the main characters of the play are Adam, Eve, the Serpent (Demiurge or pretender to the throne), and Lilith (the first Eve and/or consort to the Demiurge). These characters must battle to determine the fate of the new creation.

  That’s enough for now. Just remember the graveyard/garden bit, and the characters.

  Now we are back on the main trail, the Lake of Birds is just around the next corner. But before we get there, just one more tangent, a very brief gloss on themes and threads leading to those three chapters in The Shadow of the Torturer.

  We begin The Book of the New Sun with scenes and scenarios from Dickens’ Great Expectations — Severian is like Pip, drawn from a graveyard into helping a criminal; Thecla is one version of Estella (the higher class girl he expects to marry), Agia is another (the more vicious Estella); Valeria is Biddy (the same class girl Pip should marry); the grounded starships forming the Citadel of the Autarch, referred to as “hulks” in Urth of the New Sun, echo the prison-ship hulks of Great Expectations. And in the course of this version, Pip will marry Biddy in the end.

  Agia as the more vicious Estella, indeed! She is one of the most powerful characters in TBNS, and her story reads like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Consider:

  One morning while she was opening up the rag shop, Agia saw Severian approaching and assumed that he was an armiger in costume for a party. Her merchant senses told her that both his costume and his sword were far more elaborate than most (perhaps historical relics), and her streetwise senses told her that he was in unfamiliar territory. She probably thought he was a newly arrived armiger from the provinces.

  In any event, she and her twin brother Agilus quickly set up their pattern for a con job meant to fleece the naive of their heirlooms: as Agilus bargained over the cloak and sword, Agia donned the armor of a Septentrion Guard, entered the store and delivered the challenge to a duel with averns at the Sanguinary Field. They hoped that Severian would be so frightened that he would sell the cloak and sword for a small fraction of their real value. (They had done such things before, albeit for much smaller stakes.)

  The plan began to go awry, however. Severian accepted the challenge, even though he didn’t understand it (he assumed that it had something to do with Thecla). Agia tried again to scare him off by getting them into a reckless fiacre race, which ended when their cab crashed into the tent-cathedral of the Pelerines. Again, Agia was quick to size-up the situation and seize the opportunity by stealing the priceless Claw of the Conciliator from the ruined altar. She planted it in Severian’s sabretache without him knowing.

  This gem was enough to buy a palace. Suddenly the con-job on Severian was for a paltry sum, and besides, in the course of talking with him she had decided that he really wasn’t a naive armiger from the outlands; he was in fact a professional torturer. And he seemed to have ties to Vodalus, the exultant rebel. Sensing that they were in over their heads, she began to fear for Agilus, but there was no way to contact him. Agia grew edgy and began jumping at shadows — at the Inn of Lost Loves she tried to use her sex appeal to seduce Severian and snatch back the Claw (which he still didn’t know he had) but she failed. At the Sanguinary Field she shouted out Severian’s name and title of torturer as a potential warning for Agilus, but it didn’t work; she urged Severian to refuse the combat on a technicality, but this also failed. Agilus won the duel by cheating, but then a miracle occurred and Severian was resurrected.

  As sordid and Dickensian as it is, our sprawling city is not Victorian London, it is post-historical Nessus — named after the centaur who treacherously killed the solar hero Heracles. And the river running through the narrative is not the Thames, it is the River Gyoll — the river of death from Norse mythology. Which means that we are reading about a trip through some kind of hell; which reminds us of Dante.

  Dante’s Inferno is in there, all right. If we don’t suspect that Nessus, with its superabundance of death imagery and sorrow, is some form of the infernal city Dis, there’s always that sign on the doorway of the worldship Yesod in Urth of the New Sun which Gunnie reads as “No hope for those who enter here,” a nice paraphrase of the inscription above the gate to Dante’s Hell, but Apheta corrects Gunnie’s reading as “Every hope [for those who enter here]” (ch. 23). So what one sees as hell, the other sees as heaven.

  Remember: Dante is going through hell and heaven to get a rose in the end.

  •

  Which brings us, at long last, to the three chapters at the Lake of Birds.

  “Dorcas” is the name of Chapter 22 that introduces us to the Garden of Endless Sleep. This garden has a dreary marsh, a lake (the Lake of Birds) that serves
as an aquatic graveyard, and a farther shore of death that combine to form a netherworld “wasteland” (hellish imagery) that is paradoxically called a “garden” (edenic images). Severian enters this dead Eden with Agia as his guide (as Virgil stood to Dante, and in a sense as Sibyl stood to Aeneas) in order to pick up a flower to use as a weapon in a duel (another fine paradox). The quest to pick a plant reminds us of The Aeneid where Virgil writes of Aeneas retrieving the golden bough for a trip through Avernus to the underworld, as well as the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh where that hero gets the rejuvenating plant (from an island or the bottom of the sea).

  Lake Avernus is a small crater lake in Southern Italy near Cuma. In ancient times its intense sulfuric vapors (caused by volcanic activity) supposedly killed the birds flying over it, hence the name “Avernus” from Greek meaning “without birds.” Against this folk etymology, Robert Graves argues (Greek Myths, section 31.2) that the etymological root for Avernus is, like that of King Arthur’s Avalon, the Indo-European abol meaning “apple.” Phonetically there is a great similarity between Avernus and Avalon, which is only odd because one is a kind of hell, the other a kind of heaven.

  Since Severian and Agia are a man and a woman alone in a garden, there is a hint of Adam and Eve to them. But since Agia is trying to trick and/or kill Severian, we can look ahead a bit and call her Lilith, the first Eve. We know that one of the models for Nessus is Byzantium, and the marvel of that city is a church called “Hagia Sophia” (meaning “Holy Wisdom”), and “Sophia” is sometimes considered a consort to God ... but I’m getting ahead of myself. Suffice to say that as Agia has wisdom and is acting as a guide to Severian she is in a sense “Hagia Sophia” (although perhaps not quite “holy”).

  Along comes the unnamed boatman. Now, when doing a crossword puzzle, if one finds the question “Name of underworld boatman” the answer is usually “Charon.” In Greek mythology Charon is the ferryman on the river Styx, but in Dante’s Inferno (canto 3) he works the river Acheron (river of Sorrows) between the vestibule and Limbo, the First Circle of Hell:

  And here, advancing toward us, in a boat

  an aged man — his hair was white with years —

  was shouting: “Woe to you, corrupted souls!

  Forget your hope of ever seeing Heaven:

  I come to lead you to the other shore,

  to the eternal dark, to fire and frost.

  And you approaching there, you living soul,

  keep well away from these — they are the dead.”

  But when he saw I made no move to go,

  he said: “Another way and other harbors —

  not here — will bring you passage to your shore:

  a lighter craft will have to carry you” (lines 79-90).

  Our nameless boatman, who is revealed much later to be Severian’s paternal grandfather, doesn’t shout like Dante’s Charon, but that detail about the boat rings as the boatman refuses to ferry Agia and Severian: “Too heavy for my little boat. There’s but room for Cas and me here. You great folk would capsize us” (Ch. 22). So on the Dante track we are now in the vestibule or antechamber of Hell.

  The boatman tells Severian that the dead wander in the lake, propelled by currents, but also that the dead rise and are stung back to death by the deadly avern plants. This is clearly wishful thinking on his part, since he longs to be with his wife, and it has the mythic ring to it (considering all the devices to keep the dead in their place, to maintain the separation between the worlds of the living and the dead), but it also hints that skullduggery is afoot in this placid garden. In this fantastic graveyard, murder might go unnoticed.

  Our boatman’s repetitive searching of the water echoes Rudesind the curator’s picture cleaning of chapter 5 — both aged men are searching for objects that connect them with their own pasts, but where Rudesind is narcissistically looking for the portrait made of him as a boy, the boatman is searching for his lost love, Cas (also known as Dorcas, which is the name of the chapter). This does not sound much like Charon: rather it invokes Orpheus, who journeyed to Hades to bring back his dead wife Eurydice only to lose her again at the last instant by looking back. Dante places Orpheus in the First Circle of the Inferno (canto IV, line 140), and Virgil writes in his Georgics that at the moment when Orpheus looked back, “Three times did thunder peal over the pools of Avernus.”

  And our boatman did look back, just as Orpheus did. When his wife’s body slipped under the brown waters he saw her eyes open, a vision which haunts him for the rest of his life. It seems likely that at some level he feels guilty of accidentally murdering her.

  The odd thing is, Dorcas herself later has a dream with a very similar scene:

  I am in a boat poled across a spectral lake.... It is not [Hildegrin’s] boat but a much smaller one. An old man poles it, and I lie at his feet. I am awake, but I cannot move. My arm trails in the black water. Just as we are about to touch shore, I fall from the boat, but the old man does not see me, and as I sink through the water I know that he has never known I was there at all. Soon the light is gone, and I am very cold. Far above me, I hear a voice I love calling my name, but I cannot remember whose voice it is.” (Claw, chapter 22)

  In mythical terms, Dorcas dreams herself on Charon’s boat, crossing the river separating the world of the living from the world of the dead. But before the boat can arrive at that far shore, she falls into the water and is lost in the limbo between worlds — half-alive and half-dead. The idea that Charon did not know she was on his boat suggests that she was not scheduled to be there, that is, she was not dead.

  In detective terms (“no myths, ma’am, just the facts”), the same dream suggests that she remembers being put into the lake by her husband: and while there is a certain amount of “out of body experience” in TBNS, there is no evidence that the dead are capable of seeing their own funerals, this points again (perhaps tenuously) to the notion that Dorcas was not dead. Which would mean that yes, her husband did accidentally kill her. (“Book him, Danno.”)

  So our boatman is an Orpheus doomed to act the role of Charon, like a titan guilty of some terrible crime against the gods. The mythic picture is perfectly clear — we are in hell, simultaneously Dante’s antechamber and the Greek Hades.

  Suddenly the scene changes as Severian falls into the water and loses his sword. He dives deeper after it, again reminding us of Gilgamesh going to the bottom of the sea, but then something unexpected happens — at the instant that Severian grasps the sword, he also grips another hand, so that “it seemed the hand’s owner was returning my property to me, like the tall mistress of the Pelerines.” The lake, the lady, and the sword — this tableau comes from the Arthurian Cycle.

  Add King Arthur to the mix. Hardly a surprise, is it, since Avernus is so much like Avalon. As the chapter closes, enter the Lady of the Lake, Eurydice of Hades, and Eve of Eden, all in one body known as Dorcas.

  •

  “Hildegrin” is the name of chapter 23.

  Severian begins the chapter by coughing up water. This resonates with his near-drowning experience at the beginning of the book, where death by inhaling water and birth from expelling water are intertwined. It also ties in with the pattern of vomiting that comes just before threshold moments: in Shadow of the Torturer, Severian vomits on the Feast Day in chapter 11 and in the next chapter betrays his guild by giving Thecla a knife; in Claw of the Conciliator he vomits in chapter 10 before the feast of Vodalus, then consumes Thecla in chapter 11; in Sword of the Lictor Dorcas tells in chapter 10 of regurgitating the lead shot, and by the next chronological chapter (12) Severian and Dorcas have fled Thrax in opposite directions.

  The waters of Hades have special properties, the most famous being Lethe, the water of forgetfulness at which the shades drink to forget their earthly lives. While forgetting is nearly impossible for Severian, the experience of swimming in the Lake of Birds does give him a certain amount of disorientation.

  Switch back to Dante, who was just told that he couldn�
��t ride the punt with Charon. After hearing the bad news, Dante swoons and wakes up in the First Circle on the other side of the river Acheron.

  When Severian gathers his wits, it is almost as if he too is on a different shore — in addition to Agia, there is the nameless blonde woman (Dorcas) who helped him out of the water, and there is also “a big, beef-faced man” (who will turn out to be Hildegrin). “Beef-faced man” sounds like an allusion to the Minotaur, another figure of Greek mythology who also appears in Dante’s Inferno, as the first guardian of the Seventh Circle of Hell. One of the first things that Hildegrin says is “Who in Phlegethon are you?” and Phlegethon is the fiery river of blood which flows through the Seventh Circle, that region reserved for those who committed violence against others.

  So on the Dante track we have jumped from the antechamber to the Seventh Circle, a region of the Inferno which is also noteworthy as the section where the treacherous centaur Nessus appears and is forced to act as ferryman, carrying Dante and Virgil across Phlegethon. During this river passage, Dante has two guides: Virgil (the good) and Nessus (the bad). The bodies they pass among belong to terrible sinners — tyrants and murderers.

  To help the wet and shivering couple, Hildegrin offers them brandy from a flask in the shape of a dog with the bone in his mouth as the stopper — a reference to the sop for Cerberus, the guardian of Hades who appears in many tales of the underworld, including Dante’s Inferno, where Cerberus is in the Third Circle. Which sets off its own recursive loop-the-lupine loop with echoes of The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

  That Dorcas cannot at first remember her own name points to Lethe — she has drunk of the waters of forgetfulness. Hildegrin contributes to the skullduggery theme begun by the boatman by offering a theory that Dorcas was the victim of foul play and/or a coma from which she awoke. This is the operative theory until much later when the unsuspected presence of the Claw will offer another theory; that Dorcas was truly dead until the relic resurrected her. And in the Christian tradition, Dorcas was a widow resurrected by Saint Peter.