Category Archives: spirit

This week I have to return its first two volumes to the library, so I figured I’d write about Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. It’s a fantasy series and (now that I’ve read them twice, I can probably fess) one of my favorite sets of books. Set on a dying future Urth, under a dimmed sun “with a worm in its heart,” New Sun is the story of an exile from the guild of torturers, Severian, and his journey to becoming the Autarch, the master of Urth’s biggest kingdom.

There are countries and literary climates where genre literature is just literature. America now isn’t, quite, despite the spate of “post-genre” writing from MFA programs and from writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, China Mieville, Jonathan Lethem, and Margaret Atwood. Anyway, Wolfe seems too happy in wide-angle high-genre writing (and probably too big a G.K. Chesterton fan) to ever be read as a forerunner to the hip style now called “New Wave Fabulism.” His subtle, somewhat Modernist, allusive and fantastically inventive fiction—like that of Joanna Russ, maybe, or Cordwainer Smith—exists in a funny in-between environment, the space reserved for “writers’ writers.”

(This isn’t to say Wolfe is an academic. Wolfe—admirer of Proust and Borges, Korean War veteran, and one-time Buckley conservative—couldn’t quit his day job as a plant engineer (he spec’d out the machine that made possible the Pringles potato chip!) until the success of this series.)

By repeated exposure, readers like me have gotten used to stories that are long and fantastical also being epic—stories whose hearts are in heroism and world-shaping deeds. New Sun has both, but it’s fundamentally a weirder narrative than that, bigger and smaller than the epic. It’s a story about stories. Severian is a chilly, emotionally guarded and occasionally unreliable narrator—a Nabokovizing of, say, Aragorn or Conan—and readers will miss major shares of the story if they don’t attempt to see past his misdirections and oversights. His backwards-to-the-throne journey depends on coincidence, intervention, and divine do-overs: it’s more “Garden of Forking Paths” than The Golden Compass. A dozen chapters of New Sun are given over to folktales, legends, plays, and symbolic dreams.

New Sun’s shape is also not that of the epic: Severian’s journey differs from that of the usual chain-breaking liberator. At the book’s conclusion, we’re left with a world whose stagnation may simply have to continue. Fully self-creating spirits, in Wolfe’s cosmogony, are dangerous; they’ve harmed us humans in the past and would again. It’s the fate of most humans to labor for forces whose heart and motives are not intelligible.

If this theological bent is starting to sound familiar: Wolfe has identified himself in the past as a Thomist Catholic, a philosophically rigorous branch of the church that concerns itself with the essential mystery and oneness of God, and with the possibility of salvation through knowledge. Yet, whatever our learning, we humans express a will that we can’t understand. “He is thy being,” wrote one Thomist mystic, “but thou are not His being.” The concluding revelations of the series’s final volume, The Citadel of the Autarch, are more exegetical than fantastical. Behind Wolfe’s torrent of new-old coinages, the terms for the divine entity—“the Increate,” “the Pancreator,” “the Panjudicator”—would be recognizable to most Christians.

Wolfe’s prose is often beautiful, and his sense of invention felt as magnificent on re-reading (I’m saying it!) as do my childhood memories of Tolkien’s or Lewis’s. There’s a magic sword, godawful-looking creatures from another world called cacogens, a big reveal of a secret mad scientist (not who you’ll expect), cruel kings from Urth’s forgotten past, and a creature called the alzabo that eats memories along with bodies.

The cultures of Urth are also refreshingly complex. Rather than the usual endless-Europe-plus-dragons, Wolfe’s world is in parts Byzantine, Orwellian, and Tang Chinese, ways of life that feel lived in from inside. In his world, it’s a historical curiosity that humans used to be divided by skin color. Several characters are descended from Korean spacefarers; Severian, tall, dark-haired and with light brown skin, doesn’t seem to be a typical white sword-swinger. Nonetheless, was it necessary that the natives (sorry, “autochthons”) of his continent—probably South America, by narrative clues—be “squat, dark,” and savage? Or that female character after female character (of fantasy-standard flowing hair and heaving breast) swoon ripely for Severian?

Genre writing would seem, by its nature, to expose to high contrast the knobs and pitfalls in an author’s imagination. We notice, say, a sexist trope more quickly in a world that’s largely invented. Likewise, the more detailed Wolfe’s theologoumenon (see the quote introducing this site), the more a disaffected atheist reader finds to irritate her. But New Sun’s inventions aren’t all high-drama, clash-of-kingdoms stuff. The books are full of casual, eerie details. Iron is a precious metal in this dug-out planet, the Moon is green with cultivation, rats and wolves can read and write, and the mountains are all carved with faces of forgotten rulers. And did you know, mentions one character, that the sun used to bright enough that the stars weren’t visible during the day?

The book bears—demands, maybe—re-reading. (Some questions that hung from one reading and got clearer, maybe, in the next: Who is Severian’s mother? What’s going on between Hethor and Jonas? Who was Apu-Punchau? What is the Autarch’s name? Why introduce a little boy also named Severian? What is being guarded in the mine at Saltus?) I can think of only a few novels—At Play in the Fields of the Lord, maybe, or The Sheltering Sky—that gave me so much more on a second time through.

Any fans or skeptics out there have a thought?

Jupiter up, higher and more southerly the last few weeks, and Rigel and Betelgeuse, the winter stars you forget, through the thinnest of clouds. Cait’s very pregnant now, her belly button half-out and belly taut; I help her out of chairs. I haven’t been publishing here in part because my energy is other places: activist work has me thinking about how I can teach through service instead of opinions. Striving to be alert, show up, be humble, sit with my feet closer together, modulate. When I feel the most hopeless—the week of Obama’s shit debt-ceiling deal, the night the cops klieg-lit Westlake Plaza and dragged the Occupiers out of their tents—I think of what my dad told me, “the new society is being born inside the old one.” Activism as creating the beloved community, not in some emerald-lit down-the-line time, but in moments and encounters here and there in this very life we’re living now. And my own child, quiet then busy in Cait’s body, motions only now volitional, able to hear me play Lester Young and Jherek Bischoff records and maybe wake up to my voice, born in a world of Tumblr feeds and topsoil erosion and soldiers fertilizing the desert. Dear commitments. Sara Grant, RCSJ,—I was put on to her by Fanny Howe’s prose book Winter Sun—says Catholics should admit not knowing what God has in store. They must no longer take for granted “as still sufficient for us today the myths and symbols which satisfied older and less scientifically sophisticated generations than our own, who moreover recognized them for what they were—myths and symbols which had to be transcended.” Theology which isn’t “reborn in every age and culture in terms of contemporary human experience” isn’t theology; it’s necrophilia and Odin-talk. “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard.” Salvation through knowledge: my baby doing somersaults, a flooded field, my hairline receding and this rind of moon catching light. In “Of Soul and White Folks,” Mabs Segrest calls whiteness an anesthetic—a chosen inability to feel and connect that numbs even our connections with other whites—and racism a form of paranoia, an externalizing of an internal unease and terror. We live this way and are unable even to mourn. To share in the world’s self-knowledge will bliss and break us, says the vinegar-smell of my block’s rotting apples. The last lines I loved, Whitman: “If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore, / The nearest gnat is an explanation and a drop or the motion of water a key, / The maul the car and the handsaw second my words.” I’m waiting for a poet who won’t simply repeat the horror and disorientation of the world to me, but will take them as the givens to underline a poetics of joy. Or a poetry of the encounter with Mystery that invites us to join the encounter rather than to worship it. Jupiter like a friend you run into at the grocery story, a book by firelight: Sara Grant says what “rivets” modern readers of the Upanishads is their sense of “me now,” with all history scraped out. Who wouldn’t see their own son in their arms when they read a sentence like “the knower of Brahman enjoys all delectable things simultaneously, as amassed together through a single moment through a single perception which is eternal, like the light of the sun,” blind cavefish and aggregates of stellar dust?