Gene Wolfe: Another New Sun question

Peter Stephenson · 27 Jun 1994, 15:27 · from sf-lovers.1994.mbox

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From: pws at s-a.amtp.liv.ac.uk (Peter Stephenson)
Subject: Re: Gene Wolfe: Another New Sun question
Date: 27 Jun 94 15:27:27 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v19-516-7 at digest.sf-lovers>
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manderse at nmsu.edu (Mark Andersen) writes:
> 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.

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

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