JBarach at aol.com wrote:
severiansola at hotmail.com <mailto:severiansola at hotmail.com> writes:
I think the only manipulator who actually counts is Mr. Million. All the other clones are his test subjects. Note that Auntie Jeanine died rather precipitously after she began acting as though she owned the house.
An interesting perspective! I had tended to think of Mr. Million as a kindly great grandfather with a true soft spot for his boys (David too, yes?) who perhaps regretted the process he set in motion and was concerned for the self-clones which had been sold around the city as slaves. I guess that kindly aspect is perverted by the fact that it is a monstrous sort of conceited self-love.
If you are correct that Mr. Million remains a manipulative, murderous person I guess that is hardly a shocker, given the details of the plot. Thanks for a new perspective.
Why have a robot raise the children? It seems to me that it's to ensure that the education they receive is exactly the same. After all, "Gene Wolfe" wants to make sure that all the other Gene Wolfes that follow him are not only Gene-etic (a pun I suspect Wolfe had in mind, given the focus on his name throughout the story: we think he's only talking about wolves in stories, but I suspect he's also talking about genes) replicas but also replicas in every other way, especially education and upbringing. Of course, he can't control everything but as many things as he can control he is controlling in order to make sure that every cloned son is as like him as possible until he/they finally achieve/s his/their full potential.
Our own Jim Jordan (aka Patera Nutria) has pointed out the similarities between cloning and incest in one of his essays, and he mentions /Fifth Head/ (and the movie /Chinatown/) in this connection. Both cloning and incest exclude the other -- cloning more dramatically, of course. Cloning, as Maitre practices it, is designed to keep "yourself" intact, to keep exactly the same genes instead of mixing them with the genes of others and thereby "debasing" them. Mr. Million allows you to give your clones and their clones and so forth
exactly the same upbringing, with no pollution from outside. But the result is that there can be no growth. The result is stagnation.
The same is true, mutatis mutandis, with incest: The family is idolized, and to keep the family going and staying the same, you have children with your daughter (idolatry in particular of the father: "I father my children, my grandchildren, and so forth") or your son marries your daughter (that is, a girl with exactly the same upbringing, same family traditions, etc.). After all, you've developed your traditions (e.g., opening gifts on Christmas Eve, not on Christmas Day) but if your son marries some girl outside your family, he might change all those traditions. He might not even come home for Thanksgiving. You have your family secrets, but if your daughter marries some guy outside the family, she might tell him your secrets. And so on. To "keep the family strong," the family is restricted to its own bounds ... and the result, instead of strength, is weakness, stagnation, and debasement.
Change and growth and maturity and glorification require interaction with and intermarriage with the Other, with someone outside. (There are some profound theological reasons behind this, which Jordan explores in his essay, as does Peter Leithart in a forthcoming essay in a festschrift for Jordan). You have to marry someone different, someone outside your own family. You don't clone your children; attempting to "save your life" (your genes) in that way will result in losing it and losing the world. The only way to "save your life" and gain the world is to lose it, to give it away, to care not at all about preserving your genes. If you're concerned about your Genes, you become a Wolf.
John
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