On Terrible Neologisms, Gene Wolfe & Stylistic Consistency

Someday I'll write an impassioned defense ("necessitated" by some "recent" comments) of The Atlantic Monthly via an analysis of William Langewiesche's work.  But not today. 

Today's fancy has been struck dumb by something that needs a better name (or an agglutinative one) than brilliant-one-trick-pony syndrome.  What I mean is a stylist who employs the same breathtaking style in every single thing he or she writes.  Some would accuse David Foster Wallace of being one such stylist.  But his novels, shorts and essays are focalized through a variety of characters.  Because each of his characters speak with a unique voice, his overall style remains heterogeneous despite his penchant for footnotes and sentences of Faulknerian length and complexity.  (Brief Interviews With Hideous Men works as a perfect litmus test: no one "interviewee" sounds like any of the others or,  for that matter, Hal from Infinite Jest.) 

Gene Wolfe, however, suffers mightily from brilliant-one-trick-pony syndrome.  It doesn't influence my impression of any one, two or three of his novels, but once some critical point has been passed the cumulative effect of his prose stylings begins to falter before the law of diminishing returns.  As keen readers of my sidebar already know, I recently finished The Fifth Head of Cerebus Cerberus.  [Thanks John.  Screw you Mr. Sim!]  Quite the collection of novellae.  (Novellae?  It scans better than "novellas.")  It begins when Severian...

...kidding, kidding.  Severian isn't in this collection.  But he could be if you judged by narrative voice alone.  I could explore this in sufficient detail to prove my case, but because the three novellae intertwine in such surprising ways that I don't want to ruin them for you (should this post inspire you to read them).  Suffice it to say that the collection thematizes the very issue I've raised here as it dances around the consequences of one man populating a planet with clones and the possibility that an aboriginal race of physiological mimicks have replaced the settlers of a colony so long ago that they now believe themselves to be (and have always been) humans.  That's all I can say without ruining the collection, but that's enough to make my point: Wolfe seems to want to perfect (and in large measure has) a single narrative voice through which he can write all his novels, novellae and short stories.  (I haven't read many of the latter but, despite my aversion for the form, I intend to.)

He refines it further with everything he writes.  (I realize I should date this discussion, or at very least ground it chronologically, but my point's sufficiently "meta-" to avoid what could reasonably be considered "work.")  I can think of other writers (some of them former speechwriters for Republican Presidential candidates) who also fall into this category but am solliciting the expert advice of my erudite readership instead.  (Not because I'm lazy, however, but because I've been so friggin' responsible a dissertator the past two days I want to pretend I am.)

Comments

[Jonathan]

It's a shame you've resorted to farce, as this had been very enlightening.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Farce? If Severian's costume can be an abstract metatextual argument in a way that precludes it from being at a more basic level a fetishization of torture, then my Adam Warren quote can be a spot-on criticism of your tendency to make Wolfe's books into your own movie without also being farce.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Rather than just respond to Jonathan, I should say what I think of Wolfe directly (although I'll probably be repeating myself from earlier in the thread). It's not that he's a bad writer. He's a second-rate writer, because he sets up expectations that he does not fulfill. Certain aspects of his books are good enough so that I am jolted out of the mindset of reading yet another work of commercial fantasy, and once I am, I discover that too much of the work remains inflected by commercial fantasy. With regard to the New Sun books, commonly regarded as his best series, I've already gone into the problems that I see in it: the classic and transparent plot devices, the puzzle-box authorial fiddling, the careless use of torture fetishism as a character booster.

I think that Scott is right that Wolfe has a single tone for many of his works (I haven't read them all -- just the five New Sun books, some of the short stories, the Swords books, and the Wizard Knight books), and it's a tone that enables him to indulge himself in his weaknesses. I'm sure that he really is interested in heroes who lose their memory, who have died and come back, who aren't who they think they are, and so on, but these characteristics of his protagonists also allow him a free hand with stage management, which he really should avoid allowing himself.

A writer should be judged on his best work, I suppose, and there are certainly writers who I think are first-rate (such as PKD) who have churned out some very inferior hackwork. But when PKD did hackwork, it always seemed like he was at least trying to be worthwhile, and I can't always say that for Wolfe. Case in point: the Wizard Knight books.

These two books are a pastiche, and he attempts to get around this by saying over and over that he knows it's a pastiche, he's doing it on purpose, it's a homage! But, just like Grunge in my quote above, that doesn't really make it any more than what it is. The rest of this comment will take the Wizard Knight books as an example; I don't think there are many plot revelations that you don't encounter early in the first book, but you have been warned.

The basic conceit of the books is taken from Yves Meynard's _The Book of Knights_ (a much better book). Wolfe credits Meynard in the acknowledgements. There is, as with the New Sun books, a creepy element added to increase that reader fascination that Jonathan talks about. In this case the protagonist is changed directly from a pre-teen into an adult so that he can make love to an elf queen, an act that would too obviously turn readers away in revulsion at child molestation if the protagonist was female. The gods are pastiche Norse; the nobility are pastiche Arthurian.

The first book is a mad scramble for plot tokens, collect them all: a bowstring, armor, a sword (it's Moorcock's Sword of the Dawn), a magical dog (it's Glen Cook's Toadkiller Dog), a magical cat (Gaiman), a magical flying horse (Wagner), and a large supporting cast of servants, allies, enemies, and lots of oaths so that the whole second book can be spent fulfilling them and answering people's questions.

And the politics, as always with Wolfe, are bad. It's the boy destined for greatness, the good (though manipulative) guys from above, the celestial and mundane hierarchy.

Basically, every major author has failures. But the very attempt at the Wizard Knight books is a sign that Wolfe isn't really trying.

[Jonathan]

Rich--the basic problem with your notion about the costume is that it's hard to tell if you didn't read the books carefully or if you insist upon projecting upon author widely acknowledged for subtlety a miserable crudity for some other reason. Probably a little from column A, etc. The oft-repeated post-coital ablutions are more fetishized, but you have to extend him at least that credit. Well, you don't have to. The book means whatever you think it means at some level. The difficulty comes later.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan, you're still doing the same old thing, paraphrased as "You're being crude -- everyone knows that Wolfe is sophisticated." It's an argumentative device that does no better no matter how often repeated, especially since your support of your own arguments has been poor, as in the slippage from "Wolfe has said" (that Severian is the Antichrist), introduced as if that is that, to "Wolfe gives answers to interviewers that are often contradictory and tailored to what they seem to want to hear." Your own answers are vastly contradictory, as when you say that Wolfe wrote Severian's costume because he wanted a character that it would be easy to dress up as, and then act shocked that someone might consider this to be crudity. I suggest instead, as I have before, that you are projecting upon Wolfe your own interests.

[Jonathan]

One of the folks who conducted the interviews you googled wrote on the urth list that "that
this was a closed gnostic universe, and that Severian was an antichrist." He then said that when he wrote to Wolfe about this that Wolfe objected strongly to that interpretation, saying instead that he was a "Christian figure." So this gets a little more complicated than Damien in The Omen. What does Wolfe's statement mean theologically? Why was he perturbed at the antichristian suggestion?

If we weren't discussing the specific case--your claim that Severian's costume reveals s/m stylings on the level of those of a mouth-breathing adolescent--then the mere fact that many knowledgable observers of contemporary science fiction (Clute, Dirda, Hartwell, Nielsen-Haydens, Gaiman, Crowley, Wright, etc.) have concluded that Wolfe is major and subtle writer would mean that your argument requires more evidence and force than it would if we were discussing an unknown writer--that is, if it's meant to be an argument, about which I'm doubtful. As it is, then, I feel safe in concluding that your refusal to extend to Wolfe no more courtesy than something you would read on Slashdot is reflective of a (perhaps) deliberate crudity.

Wolfe has related (in The Castle of the Otter), and this is also googleable, the Severian's costume/convention idea. The interpretive value of this remark is hard to assess--though I doubt that he was listening to Rush when he came up with it. Any reader projects the entirety of his interests and thoughts upon the text, which is inert until activated by the reader's presence

[Rich Puchalsky]

So now, instead of "Wolfe has said" that Severian was the Antichrist, it's come around to "Wolfe objected strongly to that interpretation". You realize that you have a certain problem here, don't you?

And note that I never said anything about "s/m stylings on the level of those of a mouth-breathing adolescent". You are the one who keeps insisting that the idea is crude and can not be thought by any sophisticate. One of your justifications for the costume was that it might be a "slightly more abstract metatextual argument about the audience's inevitable fascination/disgust with torture", and if you take away the "abstract metatextual argument" verbiage, I largely agree -- it's a way of appealing to the audience's fascination/disgust with torture. That this is done in part through a depiction of a blacker-than-black cloak with no shirt underneath, a black mask, and a huge sword is a textual fact that Wolfe is responsible for, not me, and it's too bad that you find it crude to point this out.

As for the bandwagon effect of calling down all those critics -- you aren't them. I happen to think that those critics would understand my critique, even if they didn't agree with it, and would be able to argue against it if they thought this to be worthwhile without deploring my crudity as a dodge.

[Adam Roberts]

I'm a bit tentative about sticking my head in here between these battling knights (Mr Acephalous wouldn't be tentative; although of course he has no head to be bitten off) ... but interesting though this discussion is, I think it's starting to repeat itself. Difficult to deny that Wolfe as a writer has flaws: I'm with Rich that there is an ineluctable aspect of Wolfe's writing that is unattractively male-adolescent. For me it's not so much the S&M gear, it's the way every one of the 'beautiful women' in Wolfe's imaginary cosmos has enormous breasts, to which attention is rather lubriciously drawn. But I'm with Jonathan that to see no further than those limitations is, kind of, to miss the point of Wolfe's writing. Dickens after all had a fetish for little-girly doll-like women; but if you allow that to get in the way of reading Dickens (which it might well) then all you're doing is missing the many other extraordinary aspects of his genius.

I was very struck by Mr Sans-tete's original point about stylistic monotony. It's not that Wolfe is a bad writer, but that he is a writer incapable of changing (or perhaps disinclined to change) his writing style. There is a flatness to reading long stretches of Wolfe; and I don't just mean late Wolfe, the Long Sun and Short Sun books where he falls lazily back on endlessly elaboration couched in the form of dialogue. The whole corpus: it's all so stylistically monologic. I can see why Mr. Nyet-Tete brackets Vance in with Wolfe in this respect, although I don't agree ... because Vance's style is so much cooler, so much more stylish (so much less contorted and grotesque) it doesn't grate on my sensibilities when I read him -- quite the reverse, in fact, I think it achieves a very effective tonal distanciation.

Maybe this is a point about fetishisation after all ... the problem with a sexual fetish, it seems to me, is not that there's anything inherently wrong in getting your rocks off dressing up in a blacker-than-black cloak and metal-studded codpiece (no puritans here; consenting adults can do what they like); it's that the fetish overrides the multiple possibilities of sexual connection and enjoyment, so that the individual can only get their rocks off that way. Perhaps Wolfe's style has indeed become a fetish. It works so well in book A (let's say, Fifth Head), but by book M (let along book Z) it's getting in the way of Wolfe doing anything but grinding away again at his old crotchets. You could say the same thing about, oh I don't know, late Henry James.

[Adam Roberts]

A correction: it was Rich, not Mr Ace Phallous, who bracketed Vance in with Wolfe. The point remains the same; I can see why he does, but I disagree.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Interesting ideas, Adam. I think that I did make a comparison to Dickens earlier on.

I don't question that evaluative judgements are in the end personal, and that someone else might find that Wolfe's strengths so far outweigh his defects that, for them, he is one of the best SF/fantasy writers. I do object to the attempt to sweep Wolfe's defects under the rug by classing consideration of them as being insufficiently appreciative of someone who "everyone says" is a great writer. The proper response if you want to make it, as with Dickens, is "Flat characters? So what?", not "Flat characters? How dare you."

As for Vance, yes he's good, but... there comes a point at which when someone has written the same book enough times, you start to question whether they can write any other book. It isn't a case like PKD's, where a writer's output is wildly varying in quality, it's a case of all of their books being too much the same. And again, Vance just isn't the best picaresque writer, prose stylist, or, um, affected universal-motivation personal universe creator. He is unquestionably the best at writing a Vance book.

[Jonathan]

Adam--if you alphabetized the "beautiful," or at least attractive, women in just the New Sun, you wouldn't go very far before finding a counterexample. The one woman in those books with oft-mentioned large breasts is a creatus.

Rich, I think you're taking my calling your intepretation "crude" too personally. How is it, by the way, that you know that "Severian the Lame" wasn't always that way? The Book of the New Sun is Severian's narrative. This is not a trivial point. The ambiguities, aporias, and inconsistencies suggest that a different sequence of events can be constructed from his own. The other critics/editors, etc. I mentioned are just some who have found enough art in Wolfe to demonstrate that your "critique"--bathetic though that self-description may be--would not apply. As your citation of "Adam Warren" suggests, it only works at the black-lit Blue Oyster Cult level.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan, you haven't said word one about why the unreliability of Severian's narration favors your interpretation. As far as I can tell given that you steadfastly don't defend any specific ideas of your own, you have an overstrained dependence on unreliability in which you think that certain important plot events, such as the encounter with Typhon, did not really occur, or were far different. Well, maybe so, despite the authorial energy that Wolfe put into the scene. And maybe Severian simply made the whole story up, and is lying, dreaming, in his bed. But I certainly don't trust your judgement about which inconsistencies indicate that "the real story" is quite different, and which indicate that Severian is an ordinarily confused or self-aggrandizing narrator with various mental problems.

I do think that the thread between you and I has gone on long enough, and is now repetitive. Frankly, I think that you're just lashing out as someone who criticized one of your idols, as your language -- "bathetic", "black-lit Blue Oyster Cult level" -- indicates.
My citation of Adam Warren was intended to call a mirror up to you, not to Wolfe.

[Jonathan]

That language I think describes the unfortunate position from which you ascribe the mentality of a dull adolescent boy to a middle-aged man, an accomplished and erudite author. The failure to seek the immediate explanation in favor of the maximally discrediting seems only explainable by irrational bias. And averse personal reactions to a book are fine and interesting to hear about, don't get me wrong. It's just when you make value-judgements based upon them that it becomes difficult

The authorial energy that who puts there? My point is that you can't assume that Wolfe/Severian are the same entity and that unwarranted assumption supports your claim that he's fetishizing torture. We should probably also particularize what is supposed to be meant by "fetishizing." I think you're employing a folk-sense.

Another point worth mentioning here is between Scott and Rich, you really haven't read that much of Wolfe's total work. The more you read, the more you'll see that the stylistic or (vague to the point of meaninglessness) "tonal" consistency originally proposed is not accurate. Even just one of the major story collections would help here.

From what I can tell, Wolfe's views on political and social matters are radically different from mine. I think there's good evidence of chauvinism and at least mild authoritarian tendencies. So he's far from an idol, though I admire his style and imagination (and lack of grammatical hypercorrection).

[Adam Roberts]

Said Jonathan: Adam--if you alphabetized the "beautiful," or at least attractive, women in just the New Sun, you wouldn't go very far before finding a counterexample. I stand corrected, I'm sure.

The one woman in those books with oft-mentioned large breasts is a creatus. So the woman sexually objectified in Wolfe's imaginative cosmos is, er, literally an object. That reflects great credit on Wolfe's thinking about women, no question about it.

Don't get me wrong: I'm in the 'Wolfe is a Great Writer' camp. But I think we're barking up the wrong tree trying to defend the erotics of his fiction. There are other, far more interesting and less limited things going on.

[Jonathan]

From what I can glean about Wolfe's attitudes towards feminism, I suspect that he views it with a traditionalist alarm, an attitude completely opposite to mine.

What you write here, however, is not giving him much credit. A woman elects to have particularly disastrous and distorting plastic surgery to have a career in the theater. It ends very badly. This may be anti-feminist, but it's more subtle than you suggest above.

[Nathan Spears]

I'd like to agree with Rich on at least one point. I'm a subscriber to the Urth list mentioned here and I'm something like 400 messages behind in the reading, because I get tired of words like "metatextual." The main contributors to the list are intelligent people, but unfortunately there is often a tendency to try to make arguments seem weighty through vague references, when clarity of language and exactitude would be more appropriate. Although, sometimes there are posts that are so clear and interesting that they make wading through the intellectual masturbation worthwhile. The last couple I remember reading had to do with Severian's wife Valeria being a personification of Urth, in much the same way that Severian is the personification of the New Sun; before that there was a bit about plant lore and symbolism in the Book of the New Sun that was so bizarre that I loved it.

But Rich is right . . . Jonathan never actually comes out and states one or two points that defend his statement that piercing Severian's fallible memory is a key component of understanding tBotNS. I wish I could do so for you, but I'm still trying to work through that myself. I can give you a couple reasons that make me think his memory is very fallible, if you like, but I don't have the cohesive defense you're looking for.

In fact, almost every time I read a 'piece' on Wolfe, I find that the author concentrates more on describing the type of games that Wolfe plays, rather than saying outright, "Here is the puzzle and here is my solution." It gets tiresome. But I still enjoy reading Wolfe, and apparently Rich is not as impressed. C'est la vie.

"In the Book of the New Sun, for instance, the Claw of the Concilliator gem is a classic MacGuffin, an object whose only importance (as you find by the end of the series) is that people have found it important."

I can try to address this. Severian eventually finds that the gem itself was just a housing for an organic thorn, which was thought to be a flaw in the heart of the gem after the years had clouded the story of its origin. Severian eventually drenches the thorn in his own blood, and takes it back in time. Because Severian is (becomes) the Conciliator, he infuses the Claw (thorn) with his own power. This, at least, is one possibility.

Now, Rich, I'd like to critique you with your own words. You said that there are far better books than tBotNS, but you never said what they are. I'm not asking because I want to debate their merits; I like to find new books to read.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Nathan: "I can try to address this. Severian eventually finds that the gem itself was just a housing for an organic thorn, which was thought to be a flaw in the heart of the gem after the years had clouded the story of its origin. Severian eventually drenches the thorn in his own blood, and takes it back in time. Because Severian is (becomes) the Conciliator, he infuses the Claw (thorn) with his own power. This, at least, is one possibility."

It's not his power, really, it's the power of the white hole connected to him by the machines of the Heirodules. As far as I remember the books, the gem doesn't do miracles outside of Severian's presence, so there's no particular reason to think that it has picked up some kind of innate power through its association with him. Rather, it appears more probable that it appears to do miracles because Severian can (through his time-spanning connection with the white hole), and because he believes that these miracles will come through the gem.

I don't remember the bit about him drenching it in his blood offhand. Isn't that taking the True Cross bit a step perhaps too far? I find this kind of reworking of Christian myth as SF tiresome, frankly. Christianity currently has two major interpretive styles for the miracles in its tradition. The first is that they literally happened. The second is that they didn't literally happen (most of them, in any case) but that they symbolically did, thus reconciling the tradition with a world in which events happen according to natural laws. Wolfe wants to keep the second, thus the white hole and all the rest of the SF material, yet reintroduce the first. It's a rather tawdry version of religious faith.

For other issues, Severian's memory may well be fallible, but my point was that his narration is the only source of information we have on Urth. Unless discrepancies can be found that are *not* convincingly due to ordinary narrative fallibility, a grand theory that Severian is making up critical events is not proveable. So the question becomes one of what did Wolfe, the implied author, want the reader(s) to think.

Far better books -- I posted on this before in one of these Wolfe threads, didn't I? Let's see: the best books of Iain Banks, James Branch Cabell, John Crowley, Philip K. Dick, Mervyn Peake (in alphabetic order). I think that you could also make a case for, depending on taste, Butler, Delany, Harrison (M. John), LeGuin, Lem. That's not that *many* SF/fantasy authors who I think might be described as far better, so Wolfe is still doing pretty well in my opinion. Still, I think that he's one of the most highly overrated SF authors, because so many people seem to think that his puzzle-box complexity and ability to write override some of his otherwise poor and manipulative authorial choices.

[Gerrit VanCoevering]

wow its funny how people who cant write books make web pages slamming those that can. if you cant understand Gene Wolfe, try reading him a couple times, like he intends, if you still cant understand him, maybe stop slamming him, people more intelligent than you enjoy his stories, as he intends. he doesn't cater to McDonald's level readers...

[Chris Pearce]

Just found this post and completely disagree with the original premise.
If Wolfe is to be accused of being a one trick pony, it should not be for the narrative style employed, but rather for the reader not being able to trust that the narrator is being truthful or understands what is happening around him to the extent required to make it clear to the reader. By not being trustworthly in the narrative, the reader must resort to Wolfe's cleverly placed clues to decipher the larger picture.