Gene Wolfe: Another New Sun question

OK. Here goes. After volunteering to help Mark Andersen with his planned Book of the New Sun FAQ, I thought the least I could do is re-read the series and make sure that I haven't missed any of the mysteries mentioned on the net in the last few years. SPOILERS HO! I think I've now got a pretty thorough understanding of the tetrology, but before going back to Urth again, I have one nagging question concerning the characters of Jonas and "Miles." To refresh your memory, Jonas is (at the time Severian meets him) a cyborg, trying to become "whole" again. It is implied that Jonas' organic parts are foreign (although Severian doesn't manage to catch on to this at all.) Eventually, he leaves Urth through Father Inire's mirrors. In the opening of Citadel, Severian revives a dead soldier who retains no memories. Severian names him "Miles," but later makes the following statements: I don't know who you are-but in another sense I think I may. I think you're two people, and that I know one of them. ... He told me he would come back. He said, 'I will come back for her when I have been repaired, when I am sane and whole.' I didn't know quite what to think when he said that, but now I believe he has come. Now my question: Is Severian's interpretation correct? It seems to me just as likely that with all of the time travel going on in the series, it might just be the case that a dead Miles provided the raw materials for Jonas' "patch job," and that Severian has it completely backwards. Any enlightened folk out there? I'm going to be starting up on Urth of the New Sun tomorrow, and I don't recall this sub-plot coming up the first time I read it. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Curt curtw at euler.jsc.nasa.gov

curtw at euler.jsc.nasa.gov (Curt Wiederhoeft) writes:

I think you're closer to being right than Severian is. In fact, this whole topic of time-travel effects in the New Sun is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. At first, I thought that some of the time-travel effects were "closed loops" and some were "open", but now I'm beginning to think they're all "open". (I'm putting "open" and "closed" in quotes here because I don't want people to get the mistaken impression that I'm thinking of these things as equivalent to the "closed time-like loops" of wormhole theory. I'm also still trying to figure out why people abbreviate "closed time-like loops" as CTTL instead of CTLL; maybe I've just been seeing traditional propagation of a typo, I don't know.) Other examples: Ossipago, et al.; Gunnie and Burgundofara; The Claw of the Conciliator; Abaia's "girlfriend". All these characters (and artifact) are involved in timelines that move backward. I had another example in mind last night, but I was in the car and didn't write it down, so now, predictably, I've forgotten it. Maybe I should start carrying around a miniature tape recorder. Slightly off the main subject, but still relevant to discussions of Gene Wolfe: Has anybody out there read enough Proust to feel qualified to comment on Proust's influences on Wolfe's work? Want to contribute to the planned New Sun FAQ? I can handle the Borges influences myself; and tracking down the Lewis influence will finally give me an excuse to read the Perelandra trilogy (a.k.a Space Trilogy), but Proust has just never been within my literary mean free path. Comments and contributions re other influences, particularly Nabokov, Faulkner, and Chesterton, are also welcome. Mark Andersen Department of Fishery and Wildlife Sciences New Mexico State University

In Urth Severian is told that the events he thinks are results of the power of the Claw are in fact his own work - especially raising of the dead. That being the case, his misperception may have become truth the longer he knew Miles, something that Miles found more and more distressing. David Duffy Qld Inst Med Research Queensland, Australia

Egad. After all my bad-mouthing of Wolfe, a twist that never even occurred to me: not a RE-incarnation, but a PRE-incarnation, if you will. I had wondered if Severian had Jonas in mind, but that thread never seemed to go anywhere, so I didn't pursue it. But turning it on its head does make a fiendish kind of sense, if you write off Jonas' [INSERT AUSTRIAN ACCENT HERE] "I'll be back" as a red herring. Darn, darn, darn. Now I'm going to have to read the whole five books much more seriously, just like everybody told me. But I still think that "Go read some Star Trek novels" crack was a low blow...

curtw at euler.jsc.nasa.gov "Curt Wiederhoeft" writes:

I don't think so. Remember that later on, Ava says "There was another patient here like you, and they told me he came with you.", apparently referring to having two minds in the same body. Also, Severian seems to be basing his deduction on Miles' style of speech rather than physical resemblance, and his remark about "I lost it somewhere along the way. That's what the jaguar said, who had promised to guide the goat." makes it clear he thought Jonas had taken over Miles' body. Finally, Miles' description of his earliest memories fits the conditions of Jonas' departure from the House Absolute. Pekka P. Pirinen

Well, the most obvious parallel between Wolfe and Proust is that most of their female characters are courtesans of one sort or another. ;-) My opinion is that Wolfe and Proust may share a concern with memory and detailed recollection, but it is a commonality of device rather than content. Proust's recollections are concerned with social minutiae, detailed observations of human beings and their struggle to both conform and to free themselves from society. Wolfe's concerns are more metaphysical; I think Ursula LeGuin's comment that "Wolfe is our Melville" is on the mark. C. Chan Laboratory of Astrophysics and Space Research Enrico Fermi Institute The University of Chicago

manderse at nmsu.edu (Mark Andersen) writes:

I've thought about this over the last few years, but I've never come to any definitive conclusions. My impression, having read both a lot of Wolfe and Remembrance of Things Past (which is a lot of book) is that mostly the influence is rather indirect; probably Proust influenced his style more than anything else. The only explicit reference I know (apart from actually mentioning Proust in Peace, which doesn't really count) is in the Fifth Head of Cerberus: the opening sentence deliberately echoes Proust's. In Peace, too, Proustian memory seems to relate quite well to Weer's descriptions. At odd moments - Severian staring up at the sky after leaving Thrax springs to mind - Wolfe's descriptions recall Proust, but mostly the narrative is rather different, although the use of prose is similar in that both have an orthodox style which nonetheless manages some extremely deep resonances (I haven't read Proust in French more than a paragraph or two). Time is certainly a major theme in both works, but Wolfe's dealings with time are much more general than Proust's, who is mainly interested in its direct effects on human beings, and who deals with it by and large by inference: how characters have changed, how his narrator's memories have altered. Proust's Marcel's memories are much less explicit than Severian's: the whole import of the famous Petit Madeleine episode is that he has lost some experience from his memory, then recaptured it (I'm grossly oversimplifying, of course), something not really possible for Severian. The incredible synthesis of all the different sub-themes of time which takes place towards the end of Citadel of the Autarch is way beyond anything similar Proust attempted, but in its different way it is certainly about `Time Regained' - the title of the last volume of Proust's book. Other possible ideas which may be nonsense: - - the party in Thrax might have hints of one of Proust's long descriptions of social events; Severian describes himself as sort of Lorentz invariant (he's the only person there in his own clothes) while Proust writes about the period when relativity was discovered (tenuous, but in Wolfe's case it's hard to be over-detailed). However, I think this episode centres on the `paradox' theme which doesn't really relate well to Proust. - - Proust's last sentence, which I can't remember well, is to the effect that he'd like to write about people who have a wider experience of time. Perhaps Wolfe's work is in this sense a sort of sequel to Proust's? Anyone else got any views? I'd like to hear them: Proust and Wolfe are probably my two favourite prose writers of the century. One comment in re Faulkner: the social milieu of the places Severian passes through on leaving Nessus does recall Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, but perhaps that's inevitable. Peter Stephenson Department of Physics University of Wales at Swansea Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, U.K. P.Stephenson at swan.ac.uk