Waggish on The Book of the New Sun

I read Gene Wolfe's series The Book of the New Sun earlier this year, and I made a lot of noise about how I intended to write something extensive about it here. Well, alas, I don't see that happening. (Really, we'd all be a lot better off if I refrained from making predictions about what is or is not going to be happening around here.) But Mr. Waggish has now posted something of his own about the series. He was "less than enthusiastic"; he criticizes the prose as "clunky" and identifies various plot elements that remain problematic, but

where the book most seriously fails in its ambitions is on a more fundamental level, which is that in the stability of the text itself. We know that Severian is a liar quite early on. We also know that what he is writing is destined for public consumption by people in his world, and that Wolfe claims to be acting as a translator of Severian's manuscript which has traveled long and far, without knowing anything about that audience. These two facts cause the book to be underdetermined with regard to Severian's motives and to the purpose of the text itself. Because we do not know what intent may be behind Severian's lies, we can't derive from the whole what the meaning of any particular piece is, because we do not have the whole context. If Severian were known to be telling the truth, we could inductively grasp the meaning of his history in the world. But because both are uncertain, the book loses sense structurally. This is not a matter of obscurity; rather, it is an intentional choice that indicates a serious failure on the part of Wolfe to push his book past the realm of entertainment. Without our being able to grasp the deeper sense of Severian's words other than as a maybe-true story, he reduces the book to decontextualized apocrypha, a gnostic gospel without an accompanying authoritative text.

I don't really have much to say against this, except that I wasn't bothered by this kind of thing in my reading of the books. With respect to the plot-problems he lists earlier in his post, Waggish observes that "People argue that Wolfe can be enjoyed without answering these puzzles". I might say that I quite enjoyed the series without being terribly troubled by either of these (the plot-puzzles or what Waggish sees as the undeterminedness of the series). Why? Well, I liked having Severian around; I found his voice engaging and thoughtful (and, besides, I didn't think the prose was especially clunky). But then, I didn't really think of him as a "liar", though it was clear enough that his narrative was not altogether reliable (to say the least). I thought of the novel as a kind of Borgesian picaresque, the various set-pieces in the novel reminding me of some of Borges's stories, with Severian wandering among them. Certainly I tried to keep track of the events, to understand who the characters were and the role they played in the story, but I admit that I wasn't overly concerned if some things didn't seem to add up (though, in fact, I can't quite recall whether such a thing ever occurred to me while reading). I did ask myself what Severian's purpose was in telling the story he was telling in the manner he was telling it, and I wondered about the implications of his unreliability, but finally even these questions lost some of their urgency in the face of my enjoyment of his telling.

On Being Finished Clearing My Throat (I Hope)

I'm been clearing my throat about science fiction and genre and whatnot for some time now. All of this has been preparatory to a post about The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. That post is still forthcoming (which is not to say that I've been working on it all this time), but this post is here in part to say that I think I'm more or less through with all the genre-related posts--at least in the way that I've been approaching them. In the future, if I read an apparently "genre" book, if I write about it, I'll try to focus on what the book does or does not do rather than boring everybody with my confusing questions about what might or might not constitute genre. Unless of course I decide otherwise.

I felt the need to do the throat-clearing because I wanted any science fiction readers to know where I was coming from when I finally did write about Wolfe and his books, and because I intended to write something about what sorts of things I have been looking for at different times when I've read science fiction. I read with interest a post Dan Green wrote in January in which he said that he had been persuaded that science fiction "is inherently a kind of experimental fiction"; he thus decided to sample some science fiction

under the assumption it is a genre that seeks to provide an alternative to "realism" and other conventionally "literary" practices, not just by evoking speculative worlds and looking to the future rather than the past or present but also by creating alternative forms and experimenting with the established elements of fiction (plot, setting, point of view, etc.).

I was sort of surprised by this, because I have not come to science fiction persuaded of any such thing. No doubt unfairly, I tended to think of most science fiction as not really experimental at all. So I wasn't coming to it for this reason. And I certainly wasn't coming to it for its predictive powers. In a post on the occasion of the death of Baudrillard, k-punk wrote: "It is a commonplace that science fiction reveals more about the time it was written than it tells us about the future." I agree with this. And I'd agree that learning about "the time it was written" via science fiction could be interesting, especially as part of a kind of cultural studies, but it's also not the kind of thing I'm interested in for a reading experience, except as a byproduct.

In the end, I merely meant to be saying that what I wanted now from science fiction was, if possible, a "literary" experience--but, of course, I was anxious about appearing condescending toward the genre, or presumptuous about what such a literary effect might be. At least I meant to be clear that I did not mean that I want science fiction that finally ending up being little more than what passes for so-called "literary fiction" (damn, it really is tiresome, isn't it?). Hence, the several rounds of preliminaries.

So, then, to finish up with the throat-clearing exercises. In a comment to an earlier post of mine, I yet again wrote that I had a post Wolfe's books in the works (hey, maybe I'm trying to perfect the genre of the deferred blog post!). Replying to my comment, Scraps welcomed me to the "frenzy of interpretation". I take it that this means that Wolfe's series has been subjected to such a frenzy (I've read very little about it). In the event, I don't actually intend to do much "interpretation"--in this sense, the word implies to me an investigation into "what it all means", explanation of symbols, allegory, etc. I have no trouble accepting that these books are packed full of this stuff (certain Christian symbols seem hard for even me to miss), and may to some extent enhance my enjoyment of future re-readings. But I merely plan to explain why I think it's great and why I think it does provide a literary experience of the kind I felt I wanted from science fiction.

One wakes within us

I have removed the drab "superficial thoughts, etc" line from the description above, in favor of a passage from Gene Wolfe's tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun; thanks to Scraps (in a comment on this blog) and Lars (in, for example, these posts) for putting Wolfe and this series on my map. Since I will no doubt change the description again, I also reproduce the lines here:

The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, "I will," and "I will not," and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.