On Third Rate Readers of Wolfe; or, "Stupid Cretinous Cancer Boy!"

The folks on the Gene Wolfe discussion list continue to berate Rich and I for daring to speak ill of their beloved Wolfe.  Granted, I don't want to discount the obvious differences between casual readers of Wolfe and those who would subscribe to a listserv devoted to his work, but I still think there's a whiff of excessive fanboyism to some of their criticisms:

The beauty of the langauge alone in many of the scenes screams out for admiration.

I was constantly amazed at the classification of Wolfe as a second rate, one trick pony writer on that blog.  Second rate?  [emoticon excised]  Only to third rate readers.  Long Sun, Short Sun, and New Sun are completely distinct in voice.

Both of these complaints come from Marc Aramini, about whom I know nothing and therefore will refrain from speculating as to his motivations.  That said, I think the manner in which these claims are pressed without evidentiary support points to the difference between the sorts of debates devout fans wish to have about authors versus the sorts of debates which yoke casual readers.  Because I agreed with the first statement from the beginning—I noted that Wolfe "refines [his prose] further with everything he writes"—and did not call Wolfe a "one trick pony" but a "brilliant-one-trick-pony."  Intense fandom seems to suffocate nuance.  Now I admit that I did not, myself, present evidence from the entirety of Wolfe's corpus to back my claim, so I leave myself open to being beat down by pot/kettle/black.  But I've done what I should've done for Wolfe to the works of DeLillo.  (Given my respective feelings for those two, I much rather would've done this for Wolfe.)  Two last interesting notes on that exchange:

First, Rich mentioned Yves Meynard's The Book of Knights as a possible source for some of Wolfe's The Wizard Knight.  Yves Meynard disagrees.

Second, the first list member to respond to Adam Stephanides' original linkage said

I can barely stand to read half of these posts. And the most cretinous ones (if that is a word, and if I am using it correctly) don't seem worth responding to, because they reflect opinions held by people so certain of their own infallible faculty of interpretation that they are impervious to correction.

I find this amusing on a number of counts—foremost among them that I suffer delusions of omniscience and believe myself impervious to correction—but the most entertaining one is that he calls me "cretinous."  Meynard responded to the parenthetical questions thus:

It's a real word, but you're only technically correct if their authors suffer from severe thyroid defiency.

I'm 100% certain that isn't intended as the insult it could be construed as ("Thyroid Cancer Boy!  Thyroid Cancer Boy!  Stupid Cretinous Cancer Boy!"), but it amuses nonetheless.

Comments

[Jonathan]

I should point out that the textual evidence you provided regarding your claim about Delillo was James Wood and three quotes from the first seventh or so of one book. But it's not that kind of question.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Yes, but it's from three different narrators, alive in three different decades, at entirely different stages of emotional and intellectual development...I thought I had made my point. I could continue to comb through the book, pulling quotations from throughout, but if he can't differentiate these three basic demands of characterization, there's really no point, is there? I could've, because I believe it will prove my point definitively, but I thought you'd at least give me a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of the benefit of the doubt you preach I should provide all others.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

And actually, if you count the quotations from Cosmopolis Wood provides and those from Underworld I do, at the very least that could start a conversation about late-DeLillo, no? I mean, should a maverick day-trader who spends his days playing the market in a limo. sound like a poor kid from Brooklyn in the '50s?

[Rich Puchalsky]

I thought their remarks were fairly mild, considering. Fans are fans. To mention just the issue that they are most annoyed by, Adam Roberts, Henry, or Jonathan can discuss the undeniable torture bag-and-baggage as an examination of the image of "Christ with a whip", and we can debate whether this is really what the book does at any level but that of authorial intention, but they pretty much have to fall back on resentful denial fueled by insistant overreading of what was written. I just hope that no Lacanian critic, or worse, a critic who has extensively read the theorist known as "Z" ever writes up something on _The Book of the New Sun_ where they can see it. (What would the likely angle be? Approval of the authentic urge towards power, perhaps? The worn-out world of Urth as metaphor for the neo-liberal order, waiting for the
revolutionary whip-wielder?)

As for the Yves Meynard comment, I wouldn't characterize it as disagreement that his book was a "possible source" -- he pretty much says that it was in some respect, though not to the extent that I claimed. I hadn't known that Wolfe had started writing _The Wizard Knight_ before Meynard published, and given the similarities between the two, the acknowledgement of Meynard in Wolfe's book, and the order in which they appeared (1998 for _The Book of Knights_, 2004 for _The Knight_), I assumed wrongly that the basic idea for one had been taken from the other.

The "Stupid Cretinous Cancer Boy!" thing -- well, yes, it sort of is amusing, given that I'm sure that they didn't know about your history.

[Jonathan]

"Should" is where we disagree. You feel confident that you have the answer to that and that's it's lack of art and poverty of imagination. I'm not so sure that your grounds at arriving to that conclusion are sound. I've never denied--or didn't mean to--the similarity in the passages you quoted.

[John Phelan]

I think we're all often too fairly certain of our infallibility. The people on the Wolfe list seem rather sure of their infallibility - and most blogs project an air of infallibility.

I try to be balanced and open to change like most good academics do, but in most cases I've learned (with myself and others) it's more an ideal than a lived reality.

However, while I think Wolfe is an underappreciated liteary genius (I wrote my Master's thesis partly on Wolfe), the people on the Wolfe list are often open to their own criticims of the posters here.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Scott, I see that in addition to being "Stupid Cretinous Cancer Boy" you have recently received a more important accolade -- you embody "the worst form of Evil".

So, I was wondering, are you the Antichrist? According to Falwell, there are only 4.5 million candidates, and you are one of them, so embodying the worst form of Evil gives you rather an advantage. I figure that even if you don't seem to have magical powers or uncanny charisma at the moment, you still might be on the short list of replacement candidates just in case something goes wrong.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I am "the worst form of Evil." That I've been outed so soon may put Falwell's folks on to me. I wonder, though, why he just doesn't tack on some other evils to the list of "Jewish" and "male." Why not gay, too? How about flaming? Doesn't that seem appropriate?

And what are you doing reading Long Sunday? Are you suffering from low BP? Because I hear there're some lovely pills for that now...

[Rich Puchalsky]

Oh, they've got gay covered (...so to speak). The Antichrist "will have no regard for women", according to the Bible. But if you're really eager for the job, you could always convert, or hope that it's a mistranslation and that it really means that the Antichrist will have no regard for *all other* women [except his wife]. Being detected as embodying the worst form of evil by the Pope (well, *a* Pope) certainly should keep you in the running, whatever your other deficiencies in the Europe-leading and spooky-black-wearing categories.

I read Long Sunday and its blog constellation occasionally. Sometimes they're funny in a sort of ineffectual capitalism-is-worse-than-Stalinism, liberalism-is-the-worst-Evil way.

[marc aramini]

Wonders never cease. As I sat staring at my blank screen, some paranoid delusion of importance caused me to search for my own name. And lo, here it is - quite unexpectedly. My biggest complaint about categorizing Wolfe as being a rather brilliant one trick pony is the fact that he deliberately abandoned many of the most successful parts of New Sun for his future projects. His preoccupation with eidetic memory is reversed in the Latro books, and the highly elegiac prose of New Sun is completely abandoned for countless bits of dull dialoge in Long Sun, narrated by a character completely outside the main scheme of the action rather than Wolfe's previous 1st person forays. I would love to defend Wolfe, but I don't find his use of a torturer or its tropes as a weakness.

[marc aramini]

that should be dialogue, sorry for the typo.

[marc aramini]

I don't know exactly what kind of evidence you want to appreciate Wolfe - most of my admiration comes from a structural standpoint. I apologize for the length of this post. Let's take his most famous work, New Sun. It is written by a monarch (or autarch) who is engaged in quelling not only the hostile powers to the north but who also must contend with the elite, genetically engineered exultants who he holds in thrall by keeping the women of prominent families in his harem where he can easily destroy them. His entire scheme in writing the story of his rise to the throne serves to promote several complex motives: to show that, even though he was not in any line of succession, he had no choice but to assume the throne. He was a pawn of powers beyond his control. But at the same time, he wants to assert the natural order by positing the ideal relationships between servants and masters: Malrubius' portrayal of a love between a dog and a man as the highest form of love because it mirrors the love between god and man ultimately serves the narrator's purpose in creating a picture of events in which he was both completely powerless but at the same time completely right in assuming power and ruling with an iron fist. To further gain the sympathies of the exultants,he even claims to have an exultant living inside of him, and to have been a strong supporter of the most dangerous insurgent working against the old autarchy. The text works both as a perfect political document as well as a symbolist work of religion: water and healing are constantly intermingled whenever a healing occurs, Severian's sword is planted in the ground at key points to become a cross, etc, etc, so that in the end water and purification become synonomous with rebirth - and that is exactly what happens in the text. These subtle structural nuances are what makes Wolfe's works so compelling - but they are complex enough to work against their obvious religious interpretations, too.

If you've read Short Sun, here is a link to an essay I wrote on the topic, which cements why I admire Wolfe's gnostic, architectural use of symbols to create real meaning:
http://www.urth.org/whorlmap/chras-writers/marc-aramini1.htm

[Rich Puchalsky]

Marc, I hate to reopen this thread at this time, but I suppose that I should answer your piece. I think that it's an example of overinterpretation, and that many elements of it are not very plausible. The purpose of this overinterpretation appears to be to move some of the artistic flaws of the books from Wolfe to Severian.

First, why it isn't plausible just at the level of plot. There is no such thing as a "monarch (or Autarch)", and Severian is not a king. He is the recepient of an artificial memory which gives him command words that operate the machinery of Autarchy, and that is the base of his power. In particular, the Autarchs do not have a line of succession (as descent) in the way that monarchs do; most people do not know why a new Autarch is the Autarch or even who they are, and there is no suggestion that there is a usual line of succession that deviance from would require a justification. Most of the elements that you cite are doubtful in whether they would have the effect on exultant opinion that you propose: why would they be more likely to support someone who "had an exultant within them" due to the distasteful practice on cannibalistic memory-eating? Would there really be enough Vodalis supporters left so that Severian would have to placate them by inventing a connection?

If Severian had written the whole thing as political propaganda, he is a very bad propagandist. Better to hush up certain events, and definitely better not to tell people the exact manner in which they too could be Autarch if they had Severian's corpse. Of course, this last could be a lie. But here we get into completely unfalsifiable speculation, because Severian's unreliable narrative is our only source of information. It is at least suggestive that Severian brings the New Sun, something that he knows will lose him at least some of his power, and a risk that the Severian you describe would probably not take.

So let's look at the function of this interpretation for you. It means that every part of the text that you may dislike -- Malrubius' portrayal of the highest love, for instance -- can be blamed on the character instead of the writer. I would not find this portrayal of the highest love as between god and man at all out of keeping with Wolfe's general themes. And Severian being a pawn of powers that he can not control is hardly the only Wolfe book in which this occurs. The rather obvious set of religious symbolisms are consistent with other Wolfe works.

So, can your interpretation be conclusively disproved? Probably not, but it doesn't matter. The qualities of the book are the same whether Wolfe wrote as Wolfe or Wolfe wrote them as Severian. If you think that, e.g. puzzle-piece writing is bad art, then you will think so whether Wolfe did it or "Severian" did it.

Lastly, of course you don't find "his use of a torturer or its tropes as a weakness" if your favored interpretation constructs a Severian that instead of being moved around in more-or-less human fashion is instead "ruling with an iron fist." That fantasy power element supports exactly the point I was trying to make. (And of course it is entirely inconsistant with the "Christ with a whip" interpretation of why the torture motif is there. Christ never wrote self-serving political propaganda.)

[marc aramini]

Rich, all valid points. I'm merely saying that it is possible to look at the narrative as political propaganda if one were inclined to do so, and that this reading is obviously directly in contradiction with the religious elements of the text. I think there is enough richness of character (Severian's treatment of the younger apprentices when he is raised to journeyman, when he abruptly beat up his young friend to keep him in order and catch the apprentices by surprise, for example) to indicate that Severian is indeed trying to rule with an iron fist without seeming to do so. But I think it is a veritable richness of Wolfe's writings that both the religious connotations and the political ones obviously cannot both be true, but both seem to be if certain facts are examined and given more weight than others.

Here I will open myself up to criticism - I rather like the whole Malrubius/government scene, and the idea of Severian as a christ-like savior who just happens to effect a parousia of rebirth. On one level, Severian escapes the "evil" of his upbringing, but on another, he succeeds in becoming the most successful killer of all time.

Yes, I think Wolfe is sophisticated enough to have a narrator with ambitions that are quite different from Wolfe's. And in considering art, I don't particularly care which political views are expounded by the artist, or it would be impossible for one person to like Ezra Pound, Upton Sinclair, and Dante. Yet considering only the products they produce, their art, it is possible to find something aesthetically pleasing in all of them. I just think that the aesthetic aspects of Wolfe's work are being sold short because people don't agree with some of his perceived philosophy. Your characterization of the text as puzzle piece writing ignores the richness of allusion and cultural myth that Wolfe consistently employs. If it were merely puzzle piece writing, one could certainly make the same claim about Joyce, resorting to cheap tricks like the Man in the McIntosh.