GENE WOLFE AND THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
History is essential for all speculative fiction; it surrounds the creation of the text and exists within the text itself. In the twentieth century, when Fantasy and Science Fiction commenced their development, influential authors in the genre began to acknowledge their borrowing and adapting of historical sources. Following the footsteps of Tolkien, Gene Wolfe produced complex genre texts that actively engaged with historical sources, although the historical aspects of his texts are virtually ignored in the critical literature. Wolfe is a challenging author, who holds philosophical views seldom articulated. When they are articulated they show the influence of schools of thought that illuminate his choice of historical elements in The Book of the New Sun.
There is a precedent for engagement with history set by some of the most influential authors of Fantasy and Science Fiction genre literature. In 1966 Gene Wolfe wrote a fan letter to JRR Tolkien seeking the sources of the words ‘orc’ and ‘warg’ as used in The Lord of the Rings. In his reply Tolkien provided the historical roots of the two words, interpretations of their meanings by historians, and detailed how he had changed each word to conjure meaning within his text. In only a few lines the most influential Fantasy writer of our time described the dual presence of History in Fantasy and the historical sources used by the author and his distortion of those sources to produce meaning within the ongoing history of the text in its time.
Just over a decade later, Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun took its place beside The Lord of the Rings as a genre text admired for its literary style, its contribution to the genre of Fantasy and Science Fiction and its explicitly historical content and intent. Long after Tolkien presumed Wolfe was more interested in the historical sources of the words in The Lord of the Rings than he was in their etymology within the story, Wolfe was also in direct discussion with his readers, examining the influence of the historical record on his own text.
In his collection of essays The Castle of the Otter, Wolfe discussed the historical sources he used to create plausible cavalry charges in the text(30) and in another essay described the sources of the archaic words he used throughout The Book of the New Sun.(31) Wolfe’s critics and fans have never doubted his engagement with the historical record; Michael Andre-Druissi published the 280 page Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary of the Urth Cycle specifically to document the historical sources of the esoteric language used in the text. Wolfe explained in an interview that he made use of his reading of ‘some history, particularly specialised history’(32) to create his text and nowhere is that more apparent than in the use of arcane words from our own historical record to create a fantastic element in the text. The historical sources used and re-imagined in genre literature go far beyond the etymology of words, however. A fully imagined world in the genre requires the manipulation of every aspect of the historical record: politics, religion, class, race, gender, environment and science. An accomplished author must understand the historical consensus reality in order to re-imagine the elements that can be placed askew in the text, but once within the speculative text the permutations are limited only by the imagination.
The more skilled genre authors create a truly exceptional text from the raw material of the historical record, and one of these authors is without doubt Gene Wolfe. Wolfe was born in New York in 1931 and raised in Texas. A combatant in the Korean War, on his return home he completed a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Houston and started writing in 1957 while pursuing a career as an engineer. Wolfe published his first science fiction short story in 1965, became editor of the engineering journal Plant Engineering in 1972 from which he retired to take up writing full-time in 1984.
Wolfe’s oeuvre of twenty-four novels and nine collections of short stories have amassed accolades from his peers in the Fantasy and Science Fiction community. The first two books of The Book of the New Sun won the Nebula Prize for Science Fiction in 1981 and the World Fantasy Prize in 1983, and the tetralogy was voted the greatest fantasy of all time after The Lord of the Rings.(33) Wolfe was described in The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction as ‘quite possibly the most important author in the SF field today.’(34) He has won the Campbell Memorial Prize, the Locus award four times and the Nebula and World Fantasy prizes once each in addition to his prizes for The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe has been nominated for the Hugo Award eight times and given the World Fantasy award for lifetime achievement.
None of this, however, fully communicates the complexity of Gene Wolfe or The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe is as elusive as the meaning of his texts, notorious for refusing to clarify ambiguities in texts that are unarguably difficult to decipher. His interviewers and his critics are so effusive in their praise and so imitative in written critique that a challenging author and text becomes even more difficult to discuss after wading through their hyperbole. The critical literature is focussed mainly on Wolfe’s ‘baroque style’(35) and interviews focus on obtaining answers from the man himself as to the literary ambiguities and intricacies of the text. In an interview conducted by fellow genre author Neil Gaiman, Gaiman observed that modern literature gave up all the answers to the reader and by comparison Wolfe was not so user-friendly. Wolfe’s response was ‘I don’t know everything to give it up. You’re going to see things in there that I don’t see consciously. I like those things.’(36) It is this challenge that drives Wolfe’s readers to closer and closer readings of his texts, searching for Wolfe’s unconscious, allowing almost unlimited speculation on what is unsaid.
Interpreting the elaborate prose of The Book of the New Sun is notoriously difficult, the text literally needs to be deciphered before any meaning can be extracted.(37) Wolfe uses archaic language, an unreliable and overconfident narrator, obscured characters and looping time to create a text described as ‘paradoxical, labyrinthine, allegorical and numinous.’(38) The existing critical literature on The Book of the New Sun is mainly focussed on literary techniques such as time, memory and literary influences, and includes interminable studies on narrative elements including familial relations and naming conventions.(39) Critics, fellow writers and the general audience expend energy on unknitting the parts in looking for the whole, generally proving Greg Feeley’s belief that ‘pursuing the minutiae of detail in an imaginative work is one of the legitimate pleasures of fantastic fiction, although as a critical method it is neither necessary nor sufficient.’(40)
Wolfe’s critics seem intent on looking for the literary elements used to create his towering fiction, but do not engage in any meaningful way with the political or historical elements of the text. Peter Wright suggests that ‘Wolfe has transformed his intertexual allusions until they serve a specific, and independent, function within the narrative. It is unnecessary to determine their sources to enjoy and understand the Urth Cycle.’(41) Despite this averred independence of the reader’s enjoyment from consciousness of the provenance of the text, Wolfe’s critics are brave enough to wade into the depths of Wolfe’s writing looking for complex and obscure literary sources but are unusually silent in analysing the presence and context of the political and historical elements within the text.(42) It is the content of the text that takes the reader beyond the literary speculation possible on any chosen textual element to the ideologies within the text that intrigue ‘the astute reader [who] may be able to notice echoes of other writers and ideas that Wolfe has assimilated and transmogrified into his futuristic narrative.’(43)
The Book of the New Sun is an unmistakably Christian, particularly Roman Catholic, allegory.(44) Wolfe was a Catholic convert(45) and is a professed Thomist.(46) His Catholicism is made much of in each interview; Elizabeth Counihan for instance assured Wolfe that he was famous for his Catholicism.(47) The only philosophical writers Wolfe has acknowledged as inspirations are Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,(48) and in an interview with James Jordan, Wolfe mentioned that one of the many authors who influenced him was David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, which Wolfe observed was ‘a marvellous example of someone expressing his theological beliefs in a novel.’(49)
Combined with Wolfe’s Catholicism, the inarguably philosophical preoccupation of The Book of the New Sun also inclines the text towards the expression of theological themes. The philosophical elements are highlighted in an interview during which Elliott Swanson asked Wolfe if The Book of the New Sun, when stripped of its ‘narrative material and redoubts,’(50) would be a book of the Philosophy of Gene Wolfe or the Philosophy of Severian the Torturer. Wolfe, speaking as a fiction writer, does not assume the death of the author, for in other interviews he describes his texts as taken from his experience: ‘my whole life experience feeds into my writing.’(51) Insofar as Wolfe is willing to admit, The Book of the New Sun can be assumed to be the philosophy of Gene Wolfe as much as Severian the Torturer.
Wolfe does not dissemble when asked about his faith, and he is happy to discuss the philosophy of his novels in the light of his faith. He admits more than once that The Book of the New Sun and his other novels ‘began with the idea of writing about a good man in a bad religion.’(52) Wolfe and his critics privilege this prominence of philosophy as influenced by Catholic Christianity in texts and literature. Wolfe describes one of his main themes as the distortion of good into evil(53) , particularly when he is creating his political commentary. As a writer Wolfe believes that ‘the most important thing is that [the text] assure the reader that things need not be as they are now,’(54) but his speculative political states, nearly always an America of the near future, are pessimistically sketched as ‘in a state of terminal decay.’(55)
The Book of the New Sun is not an America of the terminally decaying near-future, however, but a far-future vision intended to intervene with an alternative political vision for the terminally decaying present. Wolfe’s explicit Catholic philosophy and marked interest in the collapsing political state have influenced his view on liberal democracy. In an interview with Elliot Swanson Wolfe offered this most explicit explanation of his personal political views. Swanson observed that The Book of the New Sun was set in a recognisably Byzantine world and asked if Wolfe perceived history as cyclical and repetitive in producing political ideas.(56) Wolfe’s reply betrayed an interest in, although not a dedication to, democratic theory,
Writing in 2000, Michael Novak in Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions sums up the position of American Catholics when he observed that it was ‘an odd experience for an American brought up to admire liberal institutions and liberal values to learn of the bitter struggle waged by the papacy against liberalism in the nineteenth century.’(58) In America, as on the Continent, in the nineteenth century Catholicism was deeply anti-liberal(59) and in turn the Protestants in America regarded their religious heritage as the foundation of American liberalism and saw the Catholic Church as the old regime against which liberalism was arrayed.(60) In contrast to the hierarchical inclinations of the Catholics, the radical individualism common of the Protestants and the liberals produced a moral doctrine that, from a Catholic perspective, valued authority too lightly and produced a preference for republican institutions,(61) republican institutions with which Wolfe, in the Swanson interview, seems unimpressed.
Catholic anti-liberalism was originally along religious lines, as when the Presbyterian John Breckinridge declared in the 1800s that the ‘Roman Catholic Church in America is anti-American, anti-liberal’(62) and much later in the 1920s the Catholic church played a further role in dividing Catholics from Protestants by drawing a line between Catholicism and liberalism.(63) But while the Catholics and the Protestants despised each other, the agnostic or scientific materialist sectarian liberals regarded the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Catholic Church as abhorrent.(64) The anti-liberalism of the Catholic Church placed American Catholics in a difficult relationship to their state.
From the 1930s to the 1960s in America Catholic projects emerged trying to dismantle the Church’s conservative, anti-liberal alliances,(65) but it was at the Second Vatican Council in 1965 that the Catholic Church, after a hundred years of resistance, began to integrate liberal and modernist ideology into Catholic theology.(66) Pope John XXIII and the Council adopted a method of historical criticism to recover primary Catholic traditions in pastoral education that reflected an encounter with modernity that was more appropriate to the times.(67) The liberals within the American Catholic church were particularly successful in overturning the ‘intellectual guardian of orthodoxy, neoscholastic Thomism.’(68) Wolfe often emphasises his Thomism, a stance that signals a clear rejection of the Second Vatican Council and it’s embracing of liberalism.(69)
While the anti-liberal bias of the Catholic Church was being dismantled in the 1970s, American liberalism was suffering an identity crisis. Emerging from the 1960s America liberals began to believe that liberalism had lost its ‘ideological resolve or the institutional power to be truly revolutionary.’(70) In 1968 the liberal community had all but collapsed in the face of a resurgent right(71) and by the end of the 1970s resurgent conservatism was bringing moderate liberals into the neoconservative camp.(72) Conservatives in American felt that liberal policies were ‘eroding the very foundations of the country.’(73) Graham Thompson in American Culture in the 1980s details the intellectual context of the 1980s as a move to the right in reaction against the liberalism of the increasing numbers of new lifestyles, family units and political ideologies in American society, quoting Richard King as saying 'with Reaganism the conservative Kulturkampf had been successful.'(74) This climate of mutual uncertainty in Catholic conservatism, to which Wolfe belonged, and in its main opponent, liberalism, creates a context for The Book of the New Sun and its engagement with the historical record.
Philosophically a Catholic conservative and Thomist, Wolfe composed The Book of the New Sun at a time when the Catholic Church was opening the door to liberalism in the Church but the liberal consensus in America was faltering. Wolfe, by identifying strongly with the Thomist tradition, was committed to the ultra-conservative cause, and the political discussion within The Book of the New Sun reflects this commitment to ultra-conservative ideology, especially when illuminated by the political theory composed by Carl Schmitt, a theorist of similar inclinations writing within a similar political background as Wolfe.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER TWO: CARL SCHMITT, POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL
NOTES
(29) G. Wolfe, The Best Introduction to the Mountains, http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/wolfemountains.html, (accessed 14 February 2007).
(30) G. Wolfe, ‘Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch’ in The Castle of the Otter, Connecticut, Ziesing Brothers, 1982, pp. 48-56.
(31) G. Wolfe, ‘Words Weird and Wonderful’ in The Castle of the Otter, pp. 25-42.
(32) N. Gaiman, 'When Worlds Collide: an interview with Gene Wolfe', Borders, http://bordersstores.com/features/feature.jsp?file=gaimanwolfe, (accessed 14 February 2007).
(33) Reference needed.
(34) Reference needed.
(35) J. Gordon, ‘The Book of the New Sun’ in Gene Wolfe, Washington, Starmont House Inc, 1986, pp. 73-99.
(36) N. Gaiman, 'The Wolfe & Gaiman Show', Locus, Vol. 49 No. 3, September 2002.
(37) J. Clute, Strokes, Serconia Press, 1988, p.156.
(38) N. Gevers, ‘A Magus of many Suns: an interview with Gene Wolfe’, The SF Site, January 2002, http://www.sfsite.com/03b/gw124.htm, (accessed 14 February 2007).
(39) There are several critics such as Clute, Andre-Druissi and Borski who are very prolific in the field of literature on Wolfe. While Michael Andre-Druissi specialises in literary influences, Richard Borski considers naming conventions and familial relations in R. Borski, 'Masks of the Father: Paternity in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun', New York Review of Science Fiction, vol. 138, Feb 2000, pp. 1, 8-16; R. Borski, 'Catherine and Beyond: A Search for Maternal Roots in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun’, New York Review of Science Fiction, vol. 128, April 1999, pp. 6-7; R. Borski, ‘Swimming with Undines: Sex and Metomorphosis in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.’ The Internet Review of Science Fiction [online journal], vol. 1(1), January 2004. The books by Joan Gordon and Peter Wright on Wolfe’s work are even more extensive.
(40) G. Feeley, 'The Evidence of Things Not Shown: Family Romance in The Book of the New Sun', New York Review of Science Fiction, (part 1) Vol 31, Mar 1991, p. 1; and (part 2) Vol 32, April 1991, p. 8.
(41) P. Wright, Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2003, p. 61.
(42) Greater emphasis on the influence of the literary tradition on the genre, and not the tracing of historical change in speculative fiction, is often highlighted by the critical literature, see Clareson, 'Science Fiction, Literary Tradition, and Intellectual History', Teaching Science Fiction, pp. 44-51.
(43) G. Strickland, 'Author Profile: Gene Wolfe', The Templeton Gate, http://members.tripod.com/templetongate/genewolfe.htm, (accessed 25 June 2007).
Commentators have observed that Wolfe has ‘a fascination with paganism and the rise of Christianity that eclipsed it, [The Book of the New Sun and its related series are] one of the most complex religious allegories ever set to paper.’ Gevers, ‘A Magus of many Suns’, The SF Site.
(45) See ‘An Interview with Gene Wolfe’, Balticon Podcast, Episode 28, http://balticonpodcast.org/wordpress/?p=56, (accessed 14 February 2007); N. Gevers, M. Andre-Driussi, J. Jordan, 'Some moments with the Magus: An interview with Gene Wolfe', Infinity Plus, http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/
nonfiction/intgw.htm, 2003, (accessed 14 February 2007); J. Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview', http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/wolfejbj.html, 1992, (accessed 14 February 2007); E. Counihan, ‘A Picture of Gene Wolfe’ Interzone, No. 119, May 1997, p. 20-21.
(46) Thomism describes the adherents to the theological style of St Thomas Aquinas, see Gevers, Andre-Driussi, Jordan, 'Some moments with the Magus’, Infinity Plus; Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview'.
(47) Counihan, ‘A Picture of Gene Wolfe’, p. 20.
(48) Wolfe, The Castle of the Otter, p. 15; Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview'.
(49) Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview'.
(50) Swanson, 'Gene Wolfe', p. 39.
(51) Gevers, Andre-Driussi, Jordan, 'Some moments with the Magus’.
(52) Gevers, Andre-Driussi, Jordan, 'Some moments with the Magus’; Counihan, ‘A Picture of Gene Wolfe’, p. 21.
(53) Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview'.
(54) Gaiman, 'The Wolfe & Gaiman Show'.
(55) Counihan, ‘A Picture of Gene Wolfe’, p. 21.
(56) This part of the interview is similar to the discussion of politics in Science Fiction in Histories of the Future -‘A tentative beginning might circle around the preponderant influence of cyclical conceptions of history in SF. The notion that humanity has a mere handful of available political forms, each viable but unstable and tending to collapse into the next, reaches from the Politics of Aristotle to the latest release of Sid Meir’s popular computer game Civilisation. Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, anarchy, tyranny, monarchy … define the state orbits, with only isolated freaks (Sparta) and Communism – fanciful utopia or episodic plebeian frenzy – wandering the darkness beyond.’ K. McLeod, 'History in SF: What (hasn't Yet) Happened in History', in A. Sandison and R. Dingley (eds.), Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction, New York, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 9-10.
(57) Swanson, 'Gene Wolfe', p. 39.
(58) M. Novak, Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions: Freedom with Justice, 2nd edition, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Transaction Publishers, 2000, p. 22.
(59) Novak, Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions, p. 17.
(60) R. B. Douglass, D. Hollenbach, Catholicism and Liberalism: Contributions to American Public Philosophy, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 46.
(61) Novak, Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions, p. 23.
(62) P. Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 211.
(63) B. Cooper, A. Kornberg, W. Mishler, The Resurgence of Conservatism in Anglo-American Democracies, Duke University Press, 1988, p. 418.
(64) Douglass, Hollenbach, Catholicism and Liberalism, p. 46.
(65) C. Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 14.
(66) A. E. Radcliffe (ed), J. H. Newman, Selected Writings to 1845, New York, Routledge, 2002, p. xviii.
(67) Douglass, Hollenbach, Catholicism and Liberalism, p. 80.
(68) M. J. Weaver, R. S. Appleby, Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 39.
(69) T. Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition After Vatican II, London, Routledge, 2003, p. 2.
(70) J. D. Hoeveler Jnr, The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s, New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, p. 159.
(71) K. Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism: 1945-1968, New York, Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 235.
(72) Hoeveler, The Postmodernist Turn, p. 159.
(73) C.W. Dunn, J. Woodard, Conservative Tradition in America, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, p. 9.
(74) G. Thompson, American Culture in the 1980s, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, p. 9.
The etymology of words and names in my story has two sides: (1) their etymology within the story; and (2) the sources from which I, as an author, derive them. I expect you mean the latter.(29)
LETTER TO GENE WOLFE
JRR TOLKIEN
History is essential for all speculative fiction; it surrounds the creation of the text and exists within the text itself. In the twentieth century, when Fantasy and Science Fiction commenced their development, influential authors in the genre began to acknowledge their borrowing and adapting of historical sources. Following the footsteps of Tolkien, Gene Wolfe produced complex genre texts that actively engaged with historical sources, although the historical aspects of his texts are virtually ignored in the critical literature. Wolfe is a challenging author, who holds philosophical views seldom articulated. When they are articulated they show the influence of schools of thought that illuminate his choice of historical elements in The Book of the New Sun.
There is a precedent for engagement with history set by some of the most influential authors of Fantasy and Science Fiction genre literature. In 1966 Gene Wolfe wrote a fan letter to JRR Tolkien seeking the sources of the words ‘orc’ and ‘warg’ as used in The Lord of the Rings. In his reply Tolkien provided the historical roots of the two words, interpretations of their meanings by historians, and detailed how he had changed each word to conjure meaning within his text. In only a few lines the most influential Fantasy writer of our time described the dual presence of History in Fantasy and the historical sources used by the author and his distortion of those sources to produce meaning within the ongoing history of the text in its time.
Just over a decade later, Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun took its place beside The Lord of the Rings as a genre text admired for its literary style, its contribution to the genre of Fantasy and Science Fiction and its explicitly historical content and intent. Long after Tolkien presumed Wolfe was more interested in the historical sources of the words in The Lord of the Rings than he was in their etymology within the story, Wolfe was also in direct discussion with his readers, examining the influence of the historical record on his own text.
In his collection of essays The Castle of the Otter, Wolfe discussed the historical sources he used to create plausible cavalry charges in the text(30) and in another essay described the sources of the archaic words he used throughout The Book of the New Sun.(31) Wolfe’s critics and fans have never doubted his engagement with the historical record; Michael Andre-Druissi published the 280 page Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary of the Urth Cycle specifically to document the historical sources of the esoteric language used in the text. Wolfe explained in an interview that he made use of his reading of ‘some history, particularly specialised history’(32) to create his text and nowhere is that more apparent than in the use of arcane words from our own historical record to create a fantastic element in the text. The historical sources used and re-imagined in genre literature go far beyond the etymology of words, however. A fully imagined world in the genre requires the manipulation of every aspect of the historical record: politics, religion, class, race, gender, environment and science. An accomplished author must understand the historical consensus reality in order to re-imagine the elements that can be placed askew in the text, but once within the speculative text the permutations are limited only by the imagination.
The more skilled genre authors create a truly exceptional text from the raw material of the historical record, and one of these authors is without doubt Gene Wolfe. Wolfe was born in New York in 1931 and raised in Texas. A combatant in the Korean War, on his return home he completed a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Houston and started writing in 1957 while pursuing a career as an engineer. Wolfe published his first science fiction short story in 1965, became editor of the engineering journal Plant Engineering in 1972 from which he retired to take up writing full-time in 1984.
Wolfe’s oeuvre of twenty-four novels and nine collections of short stories have amassed accolades from his peers in the Fantasy and Science Fiction community. The first two books of The Book of the New Sun won the Nebula Prize for Science Fiction in 1981 and the World Fantasy Prize in 1983, and the tetralogy was voted the greatest fantasy of all time after The Lord of the Rings.(33) Wolfe was described in The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction as ‘quite possibly the most important author in the SF field today.’(34) He has won the Campbell Memorial Prize, the Locus award four times and the Nebula and World Fantasy prizes once each in addition to his prizes for The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe has been nominated for the Hugo Award eight times and given the World Fantasy award for lifetime achievement.
None of this, however, fully communicates the complexity of Gene Wolfe or The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe is as elusive as the meaning of his texts, notorious for refusing to clarify ambiguities in texts that are unarguably difficult to decipher. His interviewers and his critics are so effusive in their praise and so imitative in written critique that a challenging author and text becomes even more difficult to discuss after wading through their hyperbole. The critical literature is focussed mainly on Wolfe’s ‘baroque style’(35) and interviews focus on obtaining answers from the man himself as to the literary ambiguities and intricacies of the text. In an interview conducted by fellow genre author Neil Gaiman, Gaiman observed that modern literature gave up all the answers to the reader and by comparison Wolfe was not so user-friendly. Wolfe’s response was ‘I don’t know everything to give it up. You’re going to see things in there that I don’t see consciously. I like those things.’(36) It is this challenge that drives Wolfe’s readers to closer and closer readings of his texts, searching for Wolfe’s unconscious, allowing almost unlimited speculation on what is unsaid.
Interpreting the elaborate prose of The Book of the New Sun is notoriously difficult, the text literally needs to be deciphered before any meaning can be extracted.(37) Wolfe uses archaic language, an unreliable and overconfident narrator, obscured characters and looping time to create a text described as ‘paradoxical, labyrinthine, allegorical and numinous.’(38) The existing critical literature on The Book of the New Sun is mainly focussed on literary techniques such as time, memory and literary influences, and includes interminable studies on narrative elements including familial relations and naming conventions.(39) Critics, fellow writers and the general audience expend energy on unknitting the parts in looking for the whole, generally proving Greg Feeley’s belief that ‘pursuing the minutiae of detail in an imaginative work is one of the legitimate pleasures of fantastic fiction, although as a critical method it is neither necessary nor sufficient.’(40)
Wolfe’s critics seem intent on looking for the literary elements used to create his towering fiction, but do not engage in any meaningful way with the political or historical elements of the text. Peter Wright suggests that ‘Wolfe has transformed his intertexual allusions until they serve a specific, and independent, function within the narrative. It is unnecessary to determine their sources to enjoy and understand the Urth Cycle.’(41) Despite this averred independence of the reader’s enjoyment from consciousness of the provenance of the text, Wolfe’s critics are brave enough to wade into the depths of Wolfe’s writing looking for complex and obscure literary sources but are unusually silent in analysing the presence and context of the political and historical elements within the text.(42) It is the content of the text that takes the reader beyond the literary speculation possible on any chosen textual element to the ideologies within the text that intrigue ‘the astute reader [who] may be able to notice echoes of other writers and ideas that Wolfe has assimilated and transmogrified into his futuristic narrative.’(43)
The Book of the New Sun is an unmistakably Christian, particularly Roman Catholic, allegory.(44) Wolfe was a Catholic convert(45) and is a professed Thomist.(46) His Catholicism is made much of in each interview; Elizabeth Counihan for instance assured Wolfe that he was famous for his Catholicism.(47) The only philosophical writers Wolfe has acknowledged as inspirations are Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,(48) and in an interview with James Jordan, Wolfe mentioned that one of the many authors who influenced him was David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, which Wolfe observed was ‘a marvellous example of someone expressing his theological beliefs in a novel.’(49)
Combined with Wolfe’s Catholicism, the inarguably philosophical preoccupation of The Book of the New Sun also inclines the text towards the expression of theological themes. The philosophical elements are highlighted in an interview during which Elliott Swanson asked Wolfe if The Book of the New Sun, when stripped of its ‘narrative material and redoubts,’(50) would be a book of the Philosophy of Gene Wolfe or the Philosophy of Severian the Torturer. Wolfe, speaking as a fiction writer, does not assume the death of the author, for in other interviews he describes his texts as taken from his experience: ‘my whole life experience feeds into my writing.’(51) Insofar as Wolfe is willing to admit, The Book of the New Sun can be assumed to be the philosophy of Gene Wolfe as much as Severian the Torturer.
Wolfe does not dissemble when asked about his faith, and he is happy to discuss the philosophy of his novels in the light of his faith. He admits more than once that The Book of the New Sun and his other novels ‘began with the idea of writing about a good man in a bad religion.’(52) Wolfe and his critics privilege this prominence of philosophy as influenced by Catholic Christianity in texts and literature. Wolfe describes one of his main themes as the distortion of good into evil(53) , particularly when he is creating his political commentary. As a writer Wolfe believes that ‘the most important thing is that [the text] assure the reader that things need not be as they are now,’(54) but his speculative political states, nearly always an America of the near future, are pessimistically sketched as ‘in a state of terminal decay.’(55)
The Book of the New Sun is not an America of the terminally decaying near-future, however, but a far-future vision intended to intervene with an alternative political vision for the terminally decaying present. Wolfe’s explicit Catholic philosophy and marked interest in the collapsing political state have influenced his view on liberal democracy. In an interview with Elliot Swanson Wolfe offered this most explicit explanation of his personal political views. Swanson observed that The Book of the New Sun was set in a recognisably Byzantine world and asked if Wolfe perceived history as cyclical and repetitive in producing political ideas.(56) Wolfe’s reply betrayed an interest in, although not a dedication to, democratic theory,
‘Yes, but not causeless cycles. The Greeks developed democracy because the geography of their country broke them up into small communities. The English revived it because the invention of the horse collar destroyed the Roman roads, breaking England into little communities. We revived it again because of the pattern of colonisation along our eastern seaboard. Not all the Greek cities were democracies, and not all their democracies were good, because small, scattered communities can produce other things as well. But whenever you have small, scattered communities, democracy is one likely result. We [The United States] no longer have it by the way – we have a republic, a system by which we elect our rulers, rather than ruling ourselves.’(57)Considered in the light of Wolfe’s professed political ideologies, this passage seems to emphasise the need to move on from democratic systems and a focus on the republican aspects of the American state, which leads us to the politics of America in the 1970s and 1980s.
Writing in 2000, Michael Novak in Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions sums up the position of American Catholics when he observed that it was ‘an odd experience for an American brought up to admire liberal institutions and liberal values to learn of the bitter struggle waged by the papacy against liberalism in the nineteenth century.’(58) In America, as on the Continent, in the nineteenth century Catholicism was deeply anti-liberal(59) and in turn the Protestants in America regarded their religious heritage as the foundation of American liberalism and saw the Catholic Church as the old regime against which liberalism was arrayed.(60) In contrast to the hierarchical inclinations of the Catholics, the radical individualism common of the Protestants and the liberals produced a moral doctrine that, from a Catholic perspective, valued authority too lightly and produced a preference for republican institutions,(61) republican institutions with which Wolfe, in the Swanson interview, seems unimpressed.
Catholic anti-liberalism was originally along religious lines, as when the Presbyterian John Breckinridge declared in the 1800s that the ‘Roman Catholic Church in America is anti-American, anti-liberal’(62) and much later in the 1920s the Catholic church played a further role in dividing Catholics from Protestants by drawing a line between Catholicism and liberalism.(63) But while the Catholics and the Protestants despised each other, the agnostic or scientific materialist sectarian liberals regarded the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Catholic Church as abhorrent.(64) The anti-liberalism of the Catholic Church placed American Catholics in a difficult relationship to their state.
From the 1930s to the 1960s in America Catholic projects emerged trying to dismantle the Church’s conservative, anti-liberal alliances,(65) but it was at the Second Vatican Council in 1965 that the Catholic Church, after a hundred years of resistance, began to integrate liberal and modernist ideology into Catholic theology.(66) Pope John XXIII and the Council adopted a method of historical criticism to recover primary Catholic traditions in pastoral education that reflected an encounter with modernity that was more appropriate to the times.(67) The liberals within the American Catholic church were particularly successful in overturning the ‘intellectual guardian of orthodoxy, neoscholastic Thomism.’(68) Wolfe often emphasises his Thomism, a stance that signals a clear rejection of the Second Vatican Council and it’s embracing of liberalism.(69)
While the anti-liberal bias of the Catholic Church was being dismantled in the 1970s, American liberalism was suffering an identity crisis. Emerging from the 1960s America liberals began to believe that liberalism had lost its ‘ideological resolve or the institutional power to be truly revolutionary.’(70) In 1968 the liberal community had all but collapsed in the face of a resurgent right(71) and by the end of the 1970s resurgent conservatism was bringing moderate liberals into the neoconservative camp.(72) Conservatives in American felt that liberal policies were ‘eroding the very foundations of the country.’(73) Graham Thompson in American Culture in the 1980s details the intellectual context of the 1980s as a move to the right in reaction against the liberalism of the increasing numbers of new lifestyles, family units and political ideologies in American society, quoting Richard King as saying 'with Reaganism the conservative Kulturkampf had been successful.'(74) This climate of mutual uncertainty in Catholic conservatism, to which Wolfe belonged, and in its main opponent, liberalism, creates a context for The Book of the New Sun and its engagement with the historical record.
Philosophically a Catholic conservative and Thomist, Wolfe composed The Book of the New Sun at a time when the Catholic Church was opening the door to liberalism in the Church but the liberal consensus in America was faltering. Wolfe, by identifying strongly with the Thomist tradition, was committed to the ultra-conservative cause, and the political discussion within The Book of the New Sun reflects this commitment to ultra-conservative ideology, especially when illuminated by the political theory composed by Carl Schmitt, a theorist of similar inclinations writing within a similar political background as Wolfe.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER TWO: CARL SCHMITT, POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL
NOTES
(29) G. Wolfe, The Best Introduction to the Mountains, http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/wolfemountains.html, (accessed 14 February 2007).
(30) G. Wolfe, ‘Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch’ in The Castle of the Otter, Connecticut, Ziesing Brothers, 1982, pp. 48-56.
(31) G. Wolfe, ‘Words Weird and Wonderful’ in The Castle of the Otter, pp. 25-42.
(32) N. Gaiman, 'When Worlds Collide: an interview with Gene Wolfe', Borders, http://bordersstores.com/features/feature.jsp?file=gaimanwolfe, (accessed 14 February 2007).
(33) Reference needed.
(34) Reference needed.
(35) J. Gordon, ‘The Book of the New Sun’ in Gene Wolfe, Washington, Starmont House Inc, 1986, pp. 73-99.
(36) N. Gaiman, 'The Wolfe & Gaiman Show', Locus, Vol. 49 No. 3, September 2002.
(37) J. Clute, Strokes, Serconia Press, 1988, p.156.
(38) N. Gevers, ‘A Magus of many Suns: an interview with Gene Wolfe’, The SF Site, January 2002, http://www.sfsite.com/03b/gw124.htm, (accessed 14 February 2007).
(39) There are several critics such as Clute, Andre-Druissi and Borski who are very prolific in the field of literature on Wolfe. While Michael Andre-Druissi specialises in literary influences, Richard Borski considers naming conventions and familial relations in R. Borski, 'Masks of the Father: Paternity in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun', New York Review of Science Fiction, vol. 138, Feb 2000, pp. 1, 8-16; R. Borski, 'Catherine and Beyond: A Search for Maternal Roots in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun’, New York Review of Science Fiction, vol. 128, April 1999, pp. 6-7; R. Borski, ‘Swimming with Undines: Sex and Metomorphosis in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.’ The Internet Review of Science Fiction [online journal], vol. 1(1), January 2004. The books by Joan Gordon and Peter Wright on Wolfe’s work are even more extensive.
(40) G. Feeley, 'The Evidence of Things Not Shown: Family Romance in The Book of the New Sun', New York Review of Science Fiction, (part 1) Vol 31, Mar 1991, p. 1; and (part 2) Vol 32, April 1991, p. 8.
(41) P. Wright, Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2003, p. 61.
(42) Greater emphasis on the influence of the literary tradition on the genre, and not the tracing of historical change in speculative fiction, is often highlighted by the critical literature, see Clareson, 'Science Fiction, Literary Tradition, and Intellectual History', Teaching Science Fiction, pp. 44-51.
(43) G. Strickland, 'Author Profile: Gene Wolfe', The Templeton Gate, http://members.tripod.com/templetongate/genewolfe.htm, (accessed 25 June 2007).
Commentators have observed that Wolfe has ‘a fascination with paganism and the rise of Christianity that eclipsed it, [The Book of the New Sun and its related series are] one of the most complex religious allegories ever set to paper.’ Gevers, ‘A Magus of many Suns’, The SF Site.
(45) See ‘An Interview with Gene Wolfe’, Balticon Podcast, Episode 28, http://balticonpodcast.org/wordpress/?p=56, (accessed 14 February 2007); N. Gevers, M. Andre-Driussi, J. Jordan, 'Some moments with the Magus: An interview with Gene Wolfe', Infinity Plus, http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/
nonfiction/intgw.htm, 2003, (accessed 14 February 2007); J. Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview', http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/wolfejbj.html, 1992, (accessed 14 February 2007); E. Counihan, ‘A Picture of Gene Wolfe’ Interzone, No. 119, May 1997, p. 20-21.
(46) Thomism describes the adherents to the theological style of St Thomas Aquinas, see Gevers, Andre-Driussi, Jordan, 'Some moments with the Magus’, Infinity Plus; Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview'.
(47) Counihan, ‘A Picture of Gene Wolfe’, p. 20.
(48) Wolfe, The Castle of the Otter, p. 15; Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview'.
(49) Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview'.
(50) Swanson, 'Gene Wolfe', p. 39.
(51) Gevers, Andre-Driussi, Jordan, 'Some moments with the Magus’.
(52) Gevers, Andre-Driussi, Jordan, 'Some moments with the Magus’; Counihan, ‘A Picture of Gene Wolfe’, p. 21.
(53) Jordan, 'Gene Wolfe Interview'.
(54) Gaiman, 'The Wolfe & Gaiman Show'.
(55) Counihan, ‘A Picture of Gene Wolfe’, p. 21.
(56) This part of the interview is similar to the discussion of politics in Science Fiction in Histories of the Future -‘A tentative beginning might circle around the preponderant influence of cyclical conceptions of history in SF. The notion that humanity has a mere handful of available political forms, each viable but unstable and tending to collapse into the next, reaches from the Politics of Aristotle to the latest release of Sid Meir’s popular computer game Civilisation. Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, anarchy, tyranny, monarchy … define the state orbits, with only isolated freaks (Sparta) and Communism – fanciful utopia or episodic plebeian frenzy – wandering the darkness beyond.’ K. McLeod, 'History in SF: What (hasn't Yet) Happened in History', in A. Sandison and R. Dingley (eds.), Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction, New York, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 9-10.
(57) Swanson, 'Gene Wolfe', p. 39.
(58) M. Novak, Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions: Freedom with Justice, 2nd edition, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Transaction Publishers, 2000, p. 22.
(59) Novak, Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions, p. 17.
(60) R. B. Douglass, D. Hollenbach, Catholicism and Liberalism: Contributions to American Public Philosophy, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 46.
(61) Novak, Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions, p. 23.
(62) P. Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 211.
(63) B. Cooper, A. Kornberg, W. Mishler, The Resurgence of Conservatism in Anglo-American Democracies, Duke University Press, 1988, p. 418.
(64) Douglass, Hollenbach, Catholicism and Liberalism, p. 46.
(65) C. Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 14.
(66) A. E. Radcliffe (ed), J. H. Newman, Selected Writings to 1845, New York, Routledge, 2002, p. xviii.
(67) Douglass, Hollenbach, Catholicism and Liberalism, p. 80.
(68) M. J. Weaver, R. S. Appleby, Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 39.
(69) T. Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition After Vatican II, London, Routledge, 2003, p. 2.
(70) J. D. Hoeveler Jnr, The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s, New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, p. 159.
(71) K. Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism: 1945-1968, New York, Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 235.
(72) Hoeveler, The Postmodernist Turn, p. 159.
(73) C.W. Dunn, J. Woodard, Conservative Tradition in America, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, p. 9.
(74) G. Thompson, American Culture in the 1980s, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, p. 9.
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