Subject: Gene Wolfe: Another New Sun question

From: Curt Wiederhoeft <curtw at euler.jsc.nasa.gov>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 1994 20:58:45 +0000

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

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From: Mark Andersen <manderse at nmsu.edu>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 1994 22:23:40 +0000

curtw at euler.jsc.nasa.gov (Curt Wiederhoeft) writes:
>SPOILERS HO!
>
>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.

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

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From: David Duffy <davidd at qimr.edu.au>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 1994 06:08:06 +0000

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

---

From: Greg Slade <gslade at yvr.cyberstore.ca>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 1994 08:21:28 +0000

> 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.

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...

---

From: Pekka P. Pirinen <ppp at pirinen.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 1994 00:26:29 +0000

> for Jonas' "patch job," and that Severian has it completely backwards.

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

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From: Chun-Wai Chan <chan at alfrothul.uchicago.edu>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 1994 15:22:29 +0000

Mark Andersen <manderse at nmsu.edu> wrote:
>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.

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

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From: Peter Stephenson <pws at s-a.amtp.liv.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 1994 15:27:27 +0000

manderse at nmsu.edu (Mark Andersen) writes:
> _re_ other influences, particularly Nabokov, Faulkner, and Chesterton,
> are also welcome.

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