The Wolfeman
I wanted to write an essay about PEACE but I had to write this first...
Gene Wolfe is a tricky writer to discuss.
For a certain type of reader (generally but not exclusively a reader of science fiction), he is The Author. He is axiomatically intelligent and referential. His texts are not merely without flaw—they are without accident, each element load-bearing. If any piece of text (or elision) in a Gene Wolfe novel could be read to suggest vast churning implications invisible to the casual reader, it has definitely been read that way by someone on the internet. The terrifying thing is that many of these readings are not wrong. They’re not even generous. They are sometimes, even often, the readings that most account for the facts of the text.
And this is why talking about his books and stories feels dangerous. To discuss, say, Wolfe’s PEACE, which I recently finished re-reading, one must put forth some theories about what PEACE is, what’s happening both in the book and between the lines of this book. This raises two risks.
First, one risks short-circuiting another reader’s tremendous and eerie process of discovery. (Even as I write this very general description, I worry: am I doing the literary equivalent of recommending a movie by saying it “has a great twist”? But PEACE isn’t about twists. It’s about the experience of realizing how much attention one should pay. More on this in a bit.)
Second, when one puts forth a theory, one risks being wrong. Wrong is a hard thing to be—even harder when you’re risking being wrong in front of the kind of people who pore through Gene Wolfe books, building theories by rubbing together two sentences two hundred pages apart.
I wonder if I’m alone in this feeling; I wonder if that difficulty—not the difficulty of the text itself but the difficulty of talking about the text, will cause issues with Wolfe reception down the generations, as we see in martial arts schools where masters limit their true transmission to their innermost disciples—a slow xerox decay. Another way of thinking about it, of course, is that the mystery is the point—that the only way to understand the woods, is to get lost in them.
Wolfe’s a master of unreliable narration—but that term seems inadequate to describe what actually takes place on, and between, the pages of a novel like PEACE. We’re used to ‘unreliable narrators’ like Corwin of Amber: voices we trust to be self-interested and self-defensive, but also to relate the facts of the circumstances in which they operate, accurately and with a degree of context awareness. Or like Megan Whalen Turner’s Gen, punctiliously exact in every point of narration but not complete in significant ways. Or like the narrator of The Secret History, who is, even still, profoundly in love with his murderous, all-front-all-the-time crew of college buddies, and unable to see their abundantly-clear limits. An unreliable narrator might be a narrator with an agenda, or a narrator who doesn’t know what’s really happening, or is mistaken about it, or someone who’s lying to us.
Wolfe’s narrators are unreliable in all of these ways, all at once, and in more. They assert their eidetic memories and perfect recall and utter honesty, and then straight-up lie, or forget things, or have their memories edited out from under them. Their manuscripts are revised without their knowledge, or finished by other writers, or, at least once, by a robot. And yet—they’re all we have. We rely on the text, and the text alone, to understand the narrator’s world and their place within it, even as the text screams out, ‘do not trust me!’ We fumble through darkness, trying to assemble clues by touch.
We cannot even trust what clues we do find to be relevant to our project of figuring out what the heck is going on. Wolfe loves to include winking asides between author and audience. When Alden Dennis Weer, the narrator of PEACE, reads a fairy-tale as a young boy, and the fairy tale describes a crooked old storyteller dressed in wolf-skins, are we not to read Wolfe-skins? Are we not to see the writer’s inky fingerprint? When a circus dog boy appears later in the narrative, are we not supposed to think ‘werewolf,’ and then ‘where Wolfe’?
As readers steeped in the ‘reading protocols’ of science fiction, we’re drawn to use all available clues to assemble a working model of the narrative world of the text—but some of the clues Wolfe provides are not indica of ‘what’s really going on’, but rather fingerprints, or the signature, of the author. However: isn’t that the actual answer to the question? ‘What’s really going on?’ We are reading a novel.
What parts of a Gene Wolfe book are there for Wolfe’s own amusement, or ours? What parts are in service to what we would think of as the story? Is what we would think of as the story even the point? What is, after all, a story, but a set of utterances presented for our amusement? What is the point, after all?
We are encouraged to challenge the text, to investigate it deeply. But if we press our questions too far, the text itself begins to disintegrate. If the narrator lies to such an extent, what’s to say they’re not lying about everything? On some level they are, because the only person actuallyspeaking here is the writer: Gene Wolfe at his typewriter. And the writer lies. Don’t they?
I used to wonder at the tension between this textual uncertainty and Wolfe’s own religious convictions. Wolfe converted to Catholicism upon his marriage, and took his faith seriously. Assumptions are dangerous where faith is concerned, but the notion that Wolfe himself had a certain conviction as to how the world worked, seemed to tug against the textual treachery of your average Wolfe novel. But I’ve come around, slowly, to the position that his fiction is most deeply religious in its textuality.
We are faced with an unreliable text. We are left to deduce the nature of the world this text presents. And as we deduce, we are left with powerful questions. What is the point of all this? Does it lead to any higher purpose? Am I merely being given a cereal box maze of unerring complexity, to while away my slide toward the grave? Is the author, after all, trying to say something? And if so, what? Do I like it? If I don’t, what then? And what if I do?
The text is unreliable? So’s the world. The author is parted from us? So is God, and any meaning That Ultimacy may offer to those of us who stumble through the unfolding. Is the Author cruel? Is the Author vindictive? Did the Author make a mistake? Some may claim to know for certain, but the choice of whose advice and whose reading to trust is as fraught as the choice of whether to trust the Author Themselves. More, perhaps, as the Author can make at least the claim of Authorship. We must move forward with absolute, crystalline care. And, as we begin to know—or believe we know—the shape of this thing in which we are enmeshed, that gossamer comprehension, cobweb more than framework, becomes the faith in which we clad ourselves as we advance. Which is not to say that we move forward blindly, or with any certainty. We move forward, at best, puzzling. Always ready to be wrong. Always seeking further signs.
The text lies before us. We know only that it was given to us to read. Within it, if we take time, if we pay attention, we may find the marks of a creator’s hand and will. Wishful thinking? Apophenia? We may tell ourselves that we have seen no more than the smudge of a million monkeys at a million typewriters. But also, perhaps, the signature of a wolf.
Events update! Tonight, Friday October 14, at 6pm, I will be at Copper Dog Books in Beverly, MA for a conversation with Neon Yang about their new Joan-of-Arc-meets-Evangelion novel, Genesis of Mercy. If you’re in the area, come by and hang out! Details here.