Fallible Narrators and Even More Fallible Copyists: a Textual Con sideration of the "Book of Silk"Whorl

This will wander a little off the Lupine track, but trust me, it's heading straight back there. Some points of Rostrum's screed got my head working, and I've got a basic thesis on what Wolfe is doing and why. The first of Rostrum's remarks that I responded to was this:

I remember feeling this way at the end of tBOTLS, the idea that some of the wonderful things Horn had told me about Silk might have been exaggerations or wishful thinking gave me a certain (fun) chill, but I never felt we have enough evidence to try to go back and sift and somehow uncover the "real" Silk behind Horn's story.

Now, I didn't really get that kind of shock out of the revelation that "I, Horn, wrote this years later, with some help." What I did get out of it was a weird sense that Wolfe had patterned this whole thing somehow after model the Catholic church uses to describe the formation of the (written) Gospels. Briefly, for non-[Catholic-Bible-scholars]: The basic idea the Catholic church endorses is that the Gospels were formed in three "layers": 1. The events that actually occurred in the greater Jerusalem metropolitan area ca. 4 BC - 33 AD. 2. The memories of those events carried by eyewitnesses and the communities founded by those eyewitnesses. 3. The setting-down of those memories by the communities, probably late in the first century. The Catholic answers to questions like "Yeah, but how do we know it's true?" and "Well, what about the way they [seem to] conflict with each other?" are deeply entrenched in that model, but it gets pretty complicated at that point. Now, what I think we have in Horn's "Book of Silk" is something similar: Horn was, admittedly, an eyewitness to some of these events -- a fairly small proportion of them. He's gone around interviewing people, filled in the details as best he can, and freely admits he made the rest up to complete the narrative. It isn't good historiography, but it suffices; it gives the sense of someone who isn't a historian doing the best he can. The made- up stuff, while perhaps not accurate, isn't a lie, in the sense of an untruth meant to deceive; it is intended to convey a sense of the probable truth. So we have all three stages compressed into one text: 1. We have Horn's own authentic(?) memories of Silk. 2. We have the community's memories of Silk. 3. The "Book of Silk" as written by Horn & Nettle collecting and collating their own memories with those of the community. Unfortunately, there's an implicit Stage 4, which is also implicit in the Catholic model: The copyists get hold of the text, and a long time later, scholars try to trace the provenance of textual variants backwards and determine the "true" original text of Stage 3. In the case of the BOOK OF THE LONG SUN, we feel like we have the product of Stage 3, but the Narrator's comments in SHORT SUN lead us to wonder whether we might actually have a corrupt copy, and how corrupt? Nor do Horn's comments at the end of LONG SUN make it any easier to determine; compare them to the first four verses of the Gospel according to Luke, and then find out how much work goes into preparing a good textual "edition" of that Gospel. Assurances by the author of the text's accuracy do not greatly help when the text has been hand-copied many times. Which leads me to another of Rostrum's points:

It's not that Wolfe leaves things ambiguous because he doesn't care whether you believe in Silk's enlightenment. Rather he's giving you the same kind of evidence that we have in the real world--do you trust the people who claim to have had an encounter with God and (equally important) the community of people who have told and retold their stories? Can we hope that, though mediated though our own fallibility and the fallibility of others, we can still have some genuine knowledge of God?

We have, in THE BOOK OF THE LONG SUN, one of the following: a) Horn and Nettle's "Book of Silk" b) one of many possible variant texts c) someone's "edition" of same -- and nothing to help us which. We are, in fact, in the precise position of a non-scholarly reader of the Bible, or perhaps (given that this discussion is happening at all) a medieval scholar with no access to modern textual studies. So: paraphrasing Rostrum, can we hope that, though mediated though our own fallibility and the fallibility of others, we can still have some genuine knowledge of Silk? I think the answer is, and has to be, "Yes," because the possibility that it's all made-up (within the Lupine universe of discourse) is too drab to be worth discussing. All this brings me to my basic thesis. What Wolfe has reproduced, here, is the basic problem of putting faith in a written Scripture. The following paragraph refers equivocally to the Bible (for us, or at least those of us to whom the Bible represents something more than a reactionary symbol of patriarchal oppression) and to The Book of Silk (for a representative inhabitant of the Lupiverse, modulo similar concerns). "What can we believe about this text or its contents? By itself, it is completely incapable of witnessing to its own veracity, and we are not even capable of coming to certainty on what the text actually does say in some places; yet many have believed and do believe that it is a true account of the most important thing that ever happened in this world. To believe that it is completely made up by its author or authors seems impossible; to believe that it is accurate, on a word-by-word, factual basis, seems even more impossible (though there are some extremists who in fact believe each of those things)." ----------------------------- Now, when Rostrum writes, "Perhaps Wolfe is being a gentleman; he doesn't insist that you accept the existence of God in order to enjoy his story," I disagree rather vehemently; to deny Silk's enlightenment is to make the whole LONG SUN (and, by transference, SHORT) fall apart, meaningless and incoherent. He even sets that possibility up as a straw man (Crane's cerebral accident theory), and doesn't provide us with arguments about it, because it is ridiculous prima facie. There is, I think, no way to take the supernatural element out of the SUN books in any kind of "good faith" (in the existential sense). Still, I agree that "[t]here is a sense in which telling a story from a third-person, omniscient viewpoint is cheating." There is. And there is another sense in which all stories are told from that viewpoint, even those told by a limited and unreliable first-person narrator. The reader (well, all but the most childlike and passive reader) sits outside the universe of discourse and, if not omniscient, is at least outside the viewpoint of the narrator, judging it. Without that basic fact, the concept of an unreliable narrator would be entirely meaningless. Again: "We never know the world that way." No, we don't. But somehow we conceive the world that way. We have a sense that there is a single, coherent reality, even if our own limited knowledge can never get at it. Living in a universe run by quantum mechanics doesn't really change that; it defines the limits of how much we can know about it. (If there is an omniscient and omnipotent Creator, Heisenberg's Law is a clear and present "No Trespassing" sign.) -------------------------------------- Enough. --Blattid/Dan'l *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

This will wander a little off the Lupine track, but trust me, it's heading straight back there. Some points of Rostrum's screed got my head working, and I've got a basic thesis on what Wolfe is doing and why. The first of Rostrum's remarks that I responded to was this:

I remember feeling this way at the end of tBOTLS, the idea that some of the wonderful things Horn had told me about Silk might have been exaggerations or wishful thinking gave me a certain (fun) chill, but I never felt we have enough evidence to try to go back and sift and somehow uncover the "real" Silk behind Horn's story.

Now, I didn't really get that kind of shock out of the revelation that "I, Horn, wrote this years later, with some help." What I did get out of it was a weird sense that Wolfe had patterned this whole thing somehow after model the Catholic church uses to describe the formation of the (written) Gospels. Briefly, for non-[Catholic-Bible-scholars]: The basic idea the Catholic church endorses is that the Gospels were formed in three "layers": 1. The events that actually occurred in the greater Jerusalem metropolitan area ca. 4 BC - 33 AD. 2. The memories of those events carried by eyewitnesses and the communities founded by those eyewitnesses. 3. The setting-down of those memories by the communities, probably late in the first century. The Catholic answers to questions like "Yeah, but how do we know it's true?" and "Well, what about the way they [seem to] conflict with each other?" are deeply entrenched in that model, but it gets pretty complicated at that point. Now, what I think we have in Horn's "Book of Silk" is something similar: Horn was, admittedly, an eyewitness to some of these events -- a fairly small proportion of them. He's gone around interviewing people, filled in the details as best he can, and freely admits he made the rest up to complete the narrative. It isn't good historiography, but it suffices; it gives the sense of someone who isn't a historian doing the best he can. The made- up stuff, while perhaps not accurate, isn't a lie, in the sense of an untruth meant to deceive; it is intended to convey a sense of the probable truth. So we have all three stages compressed into one text: 1. We have Horn's own authentic(?) memories of Silk. 2. We have the community's memories of Silk. 3. The "Book of Silk" as written by Horn & Nettle collecting and collating their own memories with those of the community. Unfortunately, there's an implicit Stage 4, which is also implicit in the Catholic model: The copyists get hold of the text, and a long time later, scholars try to trace the provenance of textual variants backwards and determine the "true" original text of Stage 3. In the case of the BOOK OF THE LONG SUN, we feel like we have the product of Stage 3, but the Narrator's comments in SHORT SUN lead us to wonder whether we might actually have a corrupt copy, and how corrupt? Nor do Horn's comments at the end of LONG SUN make it any easier to determine; compare them to the first four verses of the Gospel according to Luke, and then find out how much work goes into preparing a good textual "edition" of that Gospel. Assurances by the author of the text's accuracy do not greatly help when the text has been hand-copied many times. Which leads me to another of Rostrum's points:

It's not that Wolfe leaves things ambiguous because he doesn't care whether you believe in Silk's enlightenment. Rather he's giving you the same kind of evidence that we have in the real world--do you trust the people who claim to have had an encounter with God and (equally important) the community of people who have told and retold their stories? Can we hope that, though mediated though our own fallibility and the fallibility of others, we can still have some genuine knowledge of God?

We have, in THE BOOK OF THE LONG SUN, one of the following: a) Horn and Nettle's "Book of Silk" b) one of many possible variant texts c) someone's "edition" of same -- and nothing to help us which. We are, in fact, in the precise position of a non-scholarly reader of the Bible, or perhaps (given that this discussion is happening at all) a medieval scholar with no access to modern textual studies. So: paraphrasing Rostrum, can we hope that, though mediated though our own fallibility and the fallibility of others, we can still have some genuine knowledge of Silk? I think the answer is, and has to be, "Yes," because the possibility that it's all made-up (within the Lupine universe of discourse) is too drab to be worth discussing. All this brings me to my basic thesis. What Wolfe has reproduced, here, is the basic problem of putting faith in a written Scripture. The following paragraph refers equivocally to the Bible (for us, or at least those of us to whom the Bible represents something more than a reactionary symbol of patriarchal oppression) and to The Book of Silk (for a representative inhabitant of the Lupiverse, modulo similar concerns). "What can we believe about this text or its contents? By itself, it is completely incapable of witnessing to its own veracity, and we are not even capable of coming to certainty on what the text actually does say in some places; yet many have believed and do believe that it is a true account of the most important thing that ever happened in this world. To believe that it is completely made up by its author or authors seems impossible; to believe that it is accurate, on a word-by-word, factual basis, seems even more impossible (though there are some extremists who in fact believe each of those things)." ----------------------------- Now, when Rostrum writes, "Perhaps Wolfe is being a gentleman; he doesn't insist that you accept the existence of God in order to enjoy his story," I disagree rather vehemently; to deny Silk's enlightenment is to make the whole LONG SUN (and, by transference, SHORT) fall apart, meaningless and incoherent. He even sets that possibility up as a straw man (Crane's cerebral accident theory), and doesn't provide us with arguments about it, because it is ridiculous prima facie. There is, I think, no way to take the supernatural element out of the SUN books in any kind of "good faith" (in the existential sense). Still, I agree that "[t]here is a sense in which telling a story from a third-person, omniscient viewpoint is cheating." There is. And there is another sense in which all stories are told from that viewpoint, even those told by a limited and unreliable first-person narrator. The reader (well, all but the most childlike and passive reader) sits outside the universe of discourse and, if not omniscient, is at least outside the viewpoint of the narrator, judging it. Without that basic fact, the concept of an unreliable narrator would be entirely meaningless. Again: "We never know the world that way." No, we don't. But somehow we conceive the world that way. We have a sense that there is a single, coherent reality, even if our own limited knowledge can never get at it. Living in a universe run by quantum mechanics doesn't really change that; it defines the limits of how much we can know about it. (If there is an omniscient and omnipotent Creator, Heisenberg's Law is a clear and present "No Trespassing" sign.) -------------------------------------- Enough. --Blattid/Dan'l *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

-- presenting to us, in a fictive and cognitively "safe" context, the problem of teasing out the historical facticity that lies behind the Gospels.

I sort of agree. I think Wolfe is clearly inspired by the way the church receives the Gospels, but I think he's making broader points that have wider applicability than just an apologetic framework for considering the Gospels.

Oddly enough, I wasn't thinking of this project as apologetic. Rather, I was thinking of it as experiential -- taking the experience of having this manuscript, with a certain kind of provenance, and just knowing that, however it may vary from the historical fact, it is in essence true. I agree that it has wider applicability than the Gospels; I suspect that this experience has two general applications: 1. A general approach to our reaction to ancient manuscripts -- to our only real source of knowledge of the history of the world before the modernist project of factual accuracy. 2. A general approach to how religious persons approach their sacred texts. It has, as noted, a very strong sense (to me at least) of relation to Luke; but it might be applicable to the Qu'ran or the Rig-Veda or God wot what all; the point being that we have various "scriptures," documents which, to their respective communities of faith, describe the most important events or facts or truths in the world, but which by their very nature cannot be backed up in any factitious way. I could as easily say "Oh -- is this what it's like to believe the Book of Mormon, despite all the evidence against it?": but for all I know, there may be a member of the LDS Church on this list, and the last thing I want to do is give offense.

H'mmmm. But then, I think the Gospels are incoherent unless you assume that Jesus was divine.

Here's where I think you're making the connection too closely. Wolfe may agree with you about the Gospels, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he intends the Long Sun/Short Sun books to be incoherent if you don't believe in the Outsider.

I tend to agree while disagreeing. I believe that he tried to write something that you could do a Crane on -- explain everything away -- but to write it so that these explanations would sound contrived and improbable. I also believe he succeeded at this.

--- Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu> wrote: On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Jerry Friedman wrote:

Whether skeptical explanations sound contrived and improbable is important when evaluating putative sacred texts (if that's something one is interested in). In the Long/Short Sun books, I think the important thing is that that those explanations are literarily pointless (unlike the ambiguity in _A Case of Conscience_, which is a large part of the point). It may be mildly amusing for us readers to note that a fictional reader on New Viron is in much the same position as a reader of the Gospels, but I don't think that means we readers get anything out reacting the same way as someone for whom the truth of the narrative is important.

I disagree on two grounds. 1. I think this business of objective vs. subjective narration is an important theme of the Long/Short Sun books. Wolfe is asking us to examine the assumptions we make when we read a story in third-person "omniwscient" voice; contrast them with the assumptions made when told a story from an individual's limited point of view; perhaps realize how unreal and artificial third person/omniscient views are when they describe what's going on inside other people's heads. In real life, we never know that. We have to take it on faith that inner life inside other people's heads even exists; we can never observe it for ourselves. There's a big difference between Wolfe telling us Silk thought such-and-such and Horn telling us Silk thought such-and-such. 2. Contrary to your opinion, I think this ambiguity is much more aesthetically interesting (different tastes, I guess).

I thought it was quite striking that Wolfe seemed to begin the Long Sun series asking us to accept the existence of a God who enlightens Silk as an axiom. Just when I'd started to take it for granted, Crane invited me to re-examine it (even if his explanation turns out not to be very plausible), which I thought was very interesting. And then Horn shows up and throws the whole thing into question again--it turns out Wolfe himself doesn't ask us to assume the existence of the Outsider for the story, he merely creates characters who believe it. Again, much more interesting. I've said before, I was quite moved by Silk's inner life, by the prayers he offers, particularly the progression, comparing the long prayers to the Nine he makes in prison with the similar long prayer to the Outsider. So I was shocked when Horn revealed himself and I began to ponder how much of that Horn could really have known, how much was the way Silk wished to present himself to others, how much Horn's wishful thinking. For me, pondering those issues gave me lots to think about after reading the books and upon re-reading them, and I think it makes the series much stronger, deeper, and more interesting. In a sense, I get to participate in the story. If I believe in Silk's goodness and Silk's god (and I do!--in the context of the story, I mean), it's not just because Wolfe asked me to believe it so that he could tell me a story based on that assumption, but because he created characters who convinced me to believe in them and I've chosen to do so.

--- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com> wrote: Jerry Friedman wrote:

Part of the reason for my lack of interest in the reliability of Wolfe's narrators is that this goes back a hundred years, to Henry James (at least).

I don't see much difference, for example, between the editorial comments in TBotsS and those in Ada. I must disagree on theoretical grounds. The discourse of SF uses rhetorical devices -- and the tactics of the unreliable narrator, the "editorial" comment, and metafictional devices generally are rhetorical devices, that is, tools in the rhetorical toolchest of the writer (at least, the writer of narrative) -- in a fundamentally different way than does the discourse of MF*.

------------------------ * MF: A term I've been using for some years, though I haven't had much call for it on this group. Just as the S in SF may refer to "Science" or "Speculative" [or "San" if you live in Northern California], so the M in MF refers ambiguously/ambivalently to "mimetic" and "mundane," the latter not intended as a faanish put-down term but as a descriptive term for "stuff that is about the 'real' world." ------------------------

And speaking of Nabokov, I don't see anything metafictional in any of the __ Sun books that compares to _Pale Fire_,

I'm afraid I found it turgid. But I was a lot younger then; perhaps I should give it another try.

Cf., by the way, not only "The Last Thrilling Wonder Story" but also The Lord of the Rings, in which the fictional Tolkien explains some features of his translation.

D'oh! And me a Tolkienologist. Well... to tell the truth, though, I think Tolkien's intent is exactly opposed to Wolfe's; Wolfe, as you note, casts doubt on his "translation" simply by making it a translation; Tolkien seeks to grant his subcreation a greater sense of historicity and "reality" by an apparently similar (but functionally quite different) tactic.

Why is there a k in "Duko"?

Because "Duo" would sound dumb?