Subject: (urth) Re: (whorl) Untrustworthy Narrators?

From: Alex David Groce <alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 12:35:53 +0000

I'm sending this to both lists, since the general issue of narrative
reliability seems to be coming up on both lists.  I'll try to avoid OBW
spoilers, which shouldn't be too hard--I assume everyone knows (if you haven't
read LONG SUN don't finish this sentence :) Horn and Nettle wrote "The Book
of Silk."

(1)  Wolfe and his narrators make it tricky enough for the reader to figure
out everything that's going on as it is.  I generally assume Wolfe's narrators
may be leaving out things that I would really like to know, either because they
are not interested in them or because they wish to avoid thinking about them
(Severian does more of the first, Weer in PEACE does a lot of the second),
but that if they tell me something, it is true, although perhaps not true in
the sense that I originally took it to be (indeed, New Sun in general is a
multifoliate opening of new levels of meaning to Severian's narrative--and
Severian famously says (I paraphrase) "have I said that the universe has a way
of making all of our lies come true?").

Even Nardan (assuming it's him writing!) in "Seven American Nights" does very
little apparent LYING to the reader--he deletes some things, of course, but
his fundamental narrative honesty is notable in that we _can figure out that he
left things out, and even what those things might have been_.

In the absense of an external source of information or massive internal
inconsistencies, it seems to me that narrator unreliability is undetectable,
and the safe assumption where there isn't this strong whiff of madness or 
misleading intent on the narrator's part is that the narrator intended to
convey the truth.  Success depends on the access of the narrator to the full
truth, of course, and so varies.  I assume Severian is basically telling the
truth.  Inconsistencies in Severian's narrative have always seemed to me to be
either (A) in some cases mistakes on Wolfe's part or (B) hints that Severian is
not living in only one time-line.  I'm curious as to instances of Severian
actually lying (as opposed to being mistaken) that people have found?  That
Drotte/Roche thing is weird, and I've never noticed it...  Maybe with 
Severian(1) it was the other one?

"Unreliable narrator" is tossed around too often, I think--even old Humbert
Humbert in LOLITA tells us mostly the truth.  I think Wolfe has very few, if
any, narrators, who are not _attemtping_ to give us the straight scoop, 
occasionally failing.  Severian is open to more intense questioning than most
in that his "perfect memory" should give him an advantage in doing this, but
the fact that Severian walks the Corridors of Time, returns from the dead, has
a head full of Autarchs, and may have existed in several alternate time-lines
where he failed that have some impact on his present time-line complicates the
question of when he's actually mixed-up, and when he's telling the truth but
the truth is "inconsistent" or weird.

(2)  Sure the uncertainty priniciple is involved in the LONG SUN narrative, at
a meta-level.  I agree that Wolfe is absolutely correct to leave the Dr. Crane
hypothesis open, but hard to swallow (if we talk about these as being real
events, I think that if a sceptic I'd find the recurrence of so many parallels
with the Exodus and the Gospels in a world seemingly without either to be 
pretty convincing evidence that something very strange was going on) from our
perspective as readers--but perfectly open to those experiencing the events.
Also, this leaves open how much Horn and Nettle made up--and how much what
they made corresponds to the real deal.  What I'm saying is that Wolfe is
definitely making this somewhat like the composition of the Gospels/the
Exodus story.  So, although you are certainly not constrained to think 
otherwise by the text, I suspect that we will find, if we see Silk again (be
quiet, people who've read OBW) that the sayings/feelings/events of LONG SUN
match the Silk we see in any less suspect context very closely.  And that it
is safe to use even events/words that Horn and Nettle could not have verified
in arguments about "what really happened" and what's likely to happen in OBW.
I doubt this argument can really go anywhere, in that the only evidence we'll
get is internal evidence from the text (unless we have another LONG SUN type
"revelation" from Wolfe, but then he also squashed the Dr. Crane hypothesis
from that one, as we could have forseen--the danger of revelation) and that's
unlikely to really verify things one way or the other (unless Silk says "Horn,
what were you making up that nonsense for?" but I'm guessing we won't see 
that scene).

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 01:30:10 +0000

First of all, welcome to Daniel Fusch! Most of the questions you raised have
been addressed elsewhere in the archives. Note that I didn't say they had
been answered. <g> Actually, for all the smart people there are on this
list, there is relatively little consensus about *anything*, but the
"miracle" you mentioned is one of them. Short answer: the eclipse was caused
by the massive sails of the Hierodules' ship.

Re: the unreliable narrator: Alex and I are not often on the same page about
most things, and we are at antipodes on religious matters (I'll be down
there in Hell, with alga <g>), but I think that on this issue he is, by and
large, correct. The testimony of the narrators can, for the most part, be
relied upon to be truthful--in so far as they give it. And that is the
problem with Wolfe's narrators. Overt lies are relatively few, but there is
more than one way to lie, if we count as lying the broader concept of simply
not telling the whole truth--the sins of omission. This kind of
untruthfulness is where Wolfe's narrators--with a lot of help from
Wolfe--often fail, just as Alex indicated, because they are not interested
in what is happening (when they obviously should be), or because to tell the
whole truth would put them in a bad light (and there is a lot of that). Most
of the discussion on this list is not about what we are told by the
narrators; it's about what we are *not* told by the narrators. And I'm not
talking just about the perhaps minor details of the plot that some here
decry as trivial, unworthy of discussion.

To confine my comments just to the Urth cycle, Severian leaves out so much,
so many critical plot details about major events, that it's hard to conclude
that his omissions are anything but deliberate. Most of this, of course, is
due less to the narrator's deliberate disingenuousness than to Wolfe's
chosen writing style, but not all of it. Is it Sev's fault that the
cliffhanger at the end of SHADOW, the Piteous Gate affair, is never
explained? He was there; he ought to know what happened, but it is never
explained, and there has been a lot of speculation about it--but not in the
text. Why doesn't he question, once he is autarch, the masters of the guild
about his origins, about Holy Katharine or many other things which are
mysteries to him, but need not be? Or Ouen about Catherine? These questions
seem so fundamental, so obvious to me, that if Sev, when he wrote his
memoirs, didn't know the answers to them already and just didn't elect to
reveal them, for whatever personal reasons, then he is just too stupid to be
believed. So, which is it? Is he that dense, or does he have reasons to hide
the truth?

For another, clearer example of his lack of forthrightness, take the case of
Valeria. Within the fiction of the fiction Sev wrote two manuscripts, the
first ten years after he became ruler. Valeria gets little mention in
either, but in that first manuscript she is portrayed as a wistful, lovely,
but lonely wallflower waiting for Prince Charming to come and sweep her off
her feet. Instead, she got Severian. In the second manuscript, written at
the conclusion of the events described in URTH, Sev doesn't want to talk
about her at all, but from the little he does it is clear that his attitude
towards her has changed radically; she's a pompous, unfaithful, conniving
bitch. This change of heart came about, apparently, once he found out from
Odilo and Eata that Valeria had wed another in his long absence.
She was no Penelope to his Odysseus. But his feelings for her must have
changed even before his trip to Yesod, because he was quick to bed other
women when he had the chance. This probably played a part in her taking the
thrust of the poisoned assassin's blade, just as he was complicitous in the
deaths of Thecla and Casdoe, and could so easily turn his back on Dorcas
once she remembered her past. Sev is definitely not one to turn the other
cheek; he never forgets--or forgives--what he perceives as a slight. So, his
reticence about Valeria says more about him than it does her, yet it was his
courting-call on her at the end of CITADEL which concluded his first memoir,
ten years later. Any hypothetical reader of both manuscripts could and would
expect that the second one would take up where the first left off, or at
least elaborate on the conclusion of the first. But it doesn't, at least
with regard to Valeria.

Why write a memoir at all that purports to be a true and accurate account of
one's adventures, bring up wondrous and even momentous events, then leave
so many of them unexplained? In the context of the fictional memoirs it
makes no sense unless their author is hiding something, whether from the
reader or from himself, which is hard to do when you have a perfect memory.
In this sense, Severian is an unreliable narrator.

And he does lie. In SWORD he claims to be a Grand Master of his guild. Sure,
you can argue that the lie was not intended to deceive the reader, who knows
that the statement isn't true. But it does serve to show that he can and
will lie when it suits his purpose.

Roy

P.S.
Re: My use of "Caron" for the name of the old boatman in my recent Dorcas
post: For those who may not have been aware of it, that name was not of my
origination. It was advanced by Robert Borski. See Urth archives, Vol.25,
#31, for April 8, 1999. I would certainly not want to be thought taking one
of Robert's names in "vein", or even vain. <g>

Roy

---

From: Tony Ellis <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 15:19:03 +0000

Roy C. Lackey wrote:

> Is it Sev's fault that the
> text.

I have to quibble here and say that the Piteous Gate affair -is-
explained, see
http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0010/0151.shtml

But I agree that Sev's "sins of omission" are a good argument for
calling him an unreliable narrator. My rejoinder would be "...of
which narrative?"

Severian is telling the history of the events by which he "backed
into the throne". Any history has to omit some events, and if you're
someone with perfect memory the number of events you omit must seem,
to you, astronomical. I don't have the quote to hand, but at one
point Severian cheerfully admits to missing stuff out, explaining
that if he didn't his story would go on forever.

It's frustrating for us, because the narrative we want reliably
narrated is Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, but that's not
quite the narrative Severian thinks he's telling. Perhaps he did
later find out more about his mother, and/or Katherine: why should
he tell us, now that he's finished his story of backing into the
throne? Why record what went wrong between Valeria and himself in
TUOTNS, when that's personal, happened before the new story he's
telling, and in any case none of his readers are likely to have read
his previous manuscript?

People will argue that you can't glibly separate Sev's 'how I became
Autarch in my spare time and so can you' narrative from the broader,
GW narrative, and I agree. But I think from Sev's perspective, he's
just fast-forwarding past irrelevant events in a history that
already contains too many digressions, rather than going out of his
way to confuse or deceive us.

---

From: William H. Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 01:59:52 +0000

>way to confuse or deceive us.

Why should Severian tell us any of the things listed above? Because any
normal, reasonable person knows that those are the very things that the
reader of a tale wants to know!

It seems likely to me that Severian is not a reasonable nor a normal
person. He has not lead a reasonable, normal life, for one thing, so he has
plenty of excuses. But even allowing for that, he is one of the worst story
tellers I have ever come across in fiction! He leaves things out (so much
so that you wonder why he bothers to put anything in), he drops tantalizing
hints which he never follows up, he's inconsistent and he never explains
the things you really want to know. While I don't despise Severian as Roy
Lackey seems to, I don't much like him and I certainly find him irritating.
It is a measure of the spell Wolfe can cast as a writer that I come back to
his books again and again. I don't claim to understand how Wolfe does what
he does, but I understand even less the why.

The how, at least, seems to have a lot to do with leaving things out. All,
or most of us, who participate in this discussion group want to know all
the things that Severian (or Wolfe) doesn't [want to] tell us. We want to
know so badly that we sit here teasing out meaning from the hints scattered
throughout the text with tweezers made from the thousands of words that can
be seen in the archives of this mailing list. In some cases I think that
some of the hints have been teased to such an extent that they have long
since crumbled away to nothing, but there is no consensus on which hints
these are.

Part of the why seems to be a love of puzzles or at least of setting them
for others. Wolfe's books can be justly considered as works that have to be
solved as much as read. This invites you to analyze the text in a way that
more ordinary books don't, but it tends to lead to the conclusion that
every mystery Wolfe sets has a solution. And this is certainly not correct.
While it can be argued that this is true to life, where some mysteries are
solved while many others are not and some may have no solution, sometimes I
think Wolfe just isn't playing fair with the reader.

Since I persist in reading Wolfe despite this (occasional) belief, I
suppose its my problem, rather than his.

Whether Severian is a reliable narrator or not, he is certainly an
unsatisfactory one by any of the usual standards of story telling.

William Ansley

---

From: Jim Henley <jlhenley at erols.com>
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 11:27:09 +0000

> -----Original Message-----
> From: urth-errors at lists.best.com [mailto:urth-errors at lists.best.com]On
> Behalf Of Roy C. Lackey
>
>
> reader or from himself, which is hard to do when you have a
> perfect memory. In this sense, Severian is an unreliable narrator.

It's important to remember that we are dealing with an author of a genre
work here. The author is Severian and the genre is, as Tony suggests, the
memoir by which a ruler justifies his power and authority. The BOTNS
particularly is, in one sense, Sev doing the same thing he later does
before Tzadkiel's dais - explaining why he deserves to be where he is. I
_think_ that historical examples of the genre can also be reticent in quite
arbitrary ways about their author/subjects' personal lives.

IOW, it makes sense even if the author is not "hiding something," except
insofar as one considers any omission to be a "hiding."

Best,

Jim
 *****************************************
"It ain't the knife thru your heart that tears you apart
  it's just the thought of someone sticking it in"
              -- Graham Parker, "Protection"

---

From: Ouroboros The Worm <ottofaij at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 12:13:11 +0000

This is my first posting here so please be gentle.
I've done a search of the archives and I didn't find
the following point discussed anywhere.
 
Regarding whether Sev is an untrustworthy narrator, of
course he is. It always bothered me that Severian
keeps telling us over and over and over again that he
never forgets anything. I read an interview of Wolfe
where he said that he never gave the same hint twice.
He said he hated it when writers keep bringing up the
same details over and over to make sure the reader
doesn't miss it when he felt perfectly capable of
catching it the first time. So why does Severian keep
droning on about his memory? Because it's a red
herring.
 
But Wolfe gives us a quick glimpse up his sleeve at
the end of chapter three of TSOTT. Here Severian
admits to being a habitual liar and suspecting his own
sanity, but that not the truely twisted part. He also
says, "...I who remembered everything could not be
certain those memories were more than my own dreams."
 
So the inconsistency between whether Drotte or Roche
says he sees pikes at the beginning of the first
chapter is probably not an error on Wolfe's part. The
one part of a book every writer is sure to get perfect
is the first page and that's where this occurs. And
Wolfe hands us another hint on the first page too:
 "In the recesses of my mind we stand shivering there
even now. Just as all that appears imperishable [like
Severian's memory?] tends toward its own destruction,
those moments that at the time seem the most fleeting
*recreate* themselves--*not only in my
memory*....*making themselves new just as our
Commonwealth reconstitutes itself each morning in the
shrill tones of its own clarions* <emphasis added>
 
Now unless this is a hint, it's lousy writing in the
context of the story and if I were his editor I would
have encouraged him to throw it out.  It drags down
the story, and as a mere florish, is un-Lupine. But
actually, Wolfe is telling us that Severian's memory
reconstitutes, recreates itself every day and so does
the rest of the world.
 
Wolfe further explored this concept in "Soldier in the
Mist": a soldier who forgets eveything that happened
to him the day before--all he has is his diary which
he reads and adds to every day, but which he can be no
more certain is true than we are. He can't even be
certain he wrote it, or if someone else added to it.
In SITM, Wolfe uses this concept as metaphor for myth
and history. I think he's doing something else with it
in TBOTNS. 
 
I think this would be a good point for some input in
the way Wolfe uses the theory of "quantum tunneling"
to investigate Being. Anybody?

-Ouroboros

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