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Thought I would post this here. Despite some denigration of the urth list, I have enjoyed it at times, you just have to separate the nonsense from things that are legitimately subsumed in the text. This is on Fifth Head of Cerberus. spoilers abound, so if you haven't read it just skip all this. SPOIL SPOIL Cast your eyes past all this, and the next post as well. The Fifth Head of Cerberus I want to start by saying that Borski’s Cave Canem, now on the Wolfe-Wiki, constitutes his best work, and is well worth considering. I will gloss over some of the information that he fleshes out more thoroughly, but there are a few things I want to emphasize in light of later Wolfe works. (Though some of this may re-treat or recapitulate his observations, I have researched the allusions again myself wholesale as I saw fit). In some part this is a response to Borski’s, Wright’s, and others comments on the book. I quote them extensively towards the end of this analysis. This is such a complicated work that involves so much that there are probably a few important details and themes that are simply mentioned in only a sentence or two or not at all. First, my philosophy on Wolfe’s stories: repetitive symbols and theme are key to interpreting the actual surface level of “what happened”. In his novels after Peace, juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated things is also of absolute importance, though I do not think this is yet as stylistically prominent in Fifth Head of Cerberus. I think that many repetitive internal symbols are ignored by critics and interpreters, and this confounds me. Borski latches onto repetitions quite a bit but too often throws in everything but the kitchen sink to force a pat conclusion. I tend to force pat conclusions when the theme warrants it (For example, in The HORARS of War, our main character is both fully human and fully machine because the religious symbol of the star at Christ’s birth resonates with that theme, but in” Trip, Trap”, the spiritual world is unambiguously the real world and more objective than the physical world – the blade has a point in the physical world, but our troll is not pierced, only slashed, because in the spirit world the point is broken and the two protagonists have formed the third billy goat of objective reality instead of subjective prejudice – objective outside detail is usually, in my opinion, at the heart of getting to the bottom of things in Wolfe). FREQUENT REPETITIONS IN FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS: CIRCULAR COLUMNS IN DREAMS: a circular column of pillars or trees that suffuse ALL THREE NOVELLAS. The dreamer is surrounded by this column that extends to the sky. This appears to be the “natural” temple that appears in V.R.T., made up of trees that our narrator (at that time Marsch) insists could never occur naturally, as there is one tree for every day of the Annese year. THIS IS IMPORTANT!!!!!! Equally important is the slab of stone where supposedly God can’t see what happens, and this is where Eastwind/Sandwalker are born and probably where Marsch dies (or at least, where he claims the boy V.R.T perishes), and the magical cave near the river of time. 47 AND THE PIPES: prisoner 47 had been knocking on the pipes in prison in VRT … and there are 47 old pan pipes above the door frame in our opening scene. #47 is a political prisoner who states he is “Fifth of September” – lots of things happened on that date in history, but probably the French revolution is implied, as the French have now been repressed. PROPHYLACTIC SHOWERING/ NONSEXUAL REPRODUCTION/SALIVA: There’s something weird in the saliva in Fifth Head, and in the third novella, our officer has sex with a girl and then bathes “prophylactically” to get her saliva off him – in VRT a girl who paints a no and yes on her breasts leaves the imprint on the man she favors, but then goes and washes in the river – “that’s for forgetfulness in the tales, you see.” Number 5 is formed parthenogentically, as is the part abo/part human girl grown from an arm by Cinderwalker. Additional nonsexual reproduction occurs in the experiments of number 5: “I was stimulating unfertilized frogs’ eggs to asexual development and then doubling the chromosomes by a chemical treatment so that a further asexual generation could be produced. “ ( 23) SENTIENT TREES, LEAVES OF GODHOOD: Trees that move around and act in sentient fashion, with holy connotations, including impregnation: “They mated with trees and drowned the children to honor their rivers. That was what was important” (FHOC, 11) “Sandwalker greeted the tree ceremoniously, … a murmuring of leaves answered him, and though he could not understand the words they did not sound angry. (98) “it isn’t good to sleep where a tree is for more than one night” (100) “I am not, you comprehend, a Christian, but may your generosity to my poor boy be blessed by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, or in the eventuality that you are Protestant, Monsieur, by Jesus only and by God the Father and the Holy Ghost. As my own ten-times decimated people would say, may the Mountains bless you and the River and the Trees and the Oceansea and all the stars of heaven and the gods. I speak as their religious leader” (VRT, p.198) … ”many animals and birds, trees that were alive, just as you and I have traveling, … though this is still not the back of beyond where one sees gods come floating down the river on logs, and trees gone traveling, the gods with large and small heads, and blossoms of the water hydrangea in their hair, or the elk men whose heads and hair and beards and arms and bodies were like hose of men, whose legs were the bodies of red elk, so that they needed to mate with the cow-woman once as beasts and once as men do” (VRT, p. 173) and, when the “boy” is captured with the current, according to Marsch’s journal (after he VRT begins writing for him: “Downstream a long way, a big tree stood grasping the rock, with water at his feet, and had thrust out a root to catch my friend.” (VRT ,p.261). The hybrid Shadow Child who claims to be a mental combination of the “man” Sandwalker and the other Shadow children says ”We had no names before men came out of the sky … we were mostly long, and lived in holes between the roots of trees.” Then there is this odd explanation for what the herbs of St. Anne do when chewed: “Once between the full face of sisterworld and her next, a man may take the fresh leaves and folding them tightly carry them in his cheek. Then there is no woman for him, nor any meat; he is sacred then, for God walks in him. … When we die at last we have been greater than God and less than the beasts. . . when the phase comes again we find new wives, and are young, and God.” The herb is described as wide, warty, and yellow, the seed pink prickled eggs. At the culmination of “A Story”, the shadow child bites Eastwind and says, “That which swam in my mouth swims in his veins now” – this allows the switching of perception between Eastwind and Sandwalker. Borski implies in his explorations that the abos mimic the trees, but I am sure these trees are the masterminds of the Shadow Children, though their actual life cycle is mysterious. THE RIVER AND THE STARS: The Tempus body of water seems somehow associated with something mystical, it is in this water that many of our characters drown or disappear, whether it be Marsch (or the boy VRT, according to his unreliable journal), Last Voice, or Sandwalker. It is associated with time and the sky above is also somehow associated with the Shadow Children and their ability to “hide” the planet from terrestrial colonization. As soon as their protection is no longer offered, the French land. These shadow children have a different name depending on the number present, and often their numbers are not subjectively real, as they are mental projections. DREAMS: In the drugged dreams of Number 5, he actually remembers foreign experiences that must have been from his “father” or further back in time. Eastwind and Sandwalker, twins, dream of the other awake when they are asleep, and the aborigine who has replaced Marsch, though he is attempting to pass himself off as Marsch, relates dreams of his mother and red-bearded father that are clearly of his previously life as the boy V. R. Trenchard. SANDWALKER’S FEET: A few more things: every time Sandwalker appears , his feet are shown hitting the ground: “ The second came not as they are ordinarily born – that is, head foremost as a man climbs from a lower place into a high – but feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lower place. His grandmother was holding his brother, not knowing that two were to be born, and for that reason his feet beat the ground for a time with no one to draw him forth.” ( 84) Then later, “feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lower place, climbed into Thunder Always” (86). This is important for determining who dies at the end of the story, for the characters feet are swept out from under him before he descends to a lower place. REPETITION OF THE NAMES WALKER AND WOLF: Number Five is a Wolfe, and later when the five shadow children are only one, their name is Wolf. Oddly, the Old Wise One who is a figment of the mental reality of the Shadow Children is also called “The Group Norm”. They have names like Firefox and Swan, and a fire-fox shows up again, along with a ghoul-bear and tire-tiger, in the hunting sequences of V.R.T. The aborigine of the Free People, Sandwalker, has a name that is echoed later in Twelvewalker (I believe the name Trenchard assumes) and Cinderwalker, a very magical aborigine who takes “a cattle-drover’s woman [who] had her arm cut off by a train” and uses the arm to “[grow] a new woman on that so that the drover had two wives. Naturally the second one, the one Cinderwalker made, was abo except for the one arm” In each tale we have a doubling, followed by incarceration: the clone number five is imprisoned for murdering his father, the twin Sandwalker is born on the slab where foul acts are invisible to God, is eventually cast into a pit “The Other Eye” to be sacrificed, and will attempt to murder his brother Eastwind before a Shadow child bites and switches their perceptions. In the final tale our anthropologist is imprisoned as well, perhaps indefinitely. BRIEF SUMMARY, with interpretations: Our narrator Number Five lives in a Brothel called the Maison du chien on the blue planet St. Croix in Port Mimizon. He and his brother, actually a genetic son, live with their father, called Maitre, and their robotic tutor, M.Million, a neural copy of the original man who bore their genetic code. It turns out that Maitre is actually a key spy for the government, which may be facing a probably French revolution. (who has colonized the French?) The play that Number Five, David, and Phaedria star in is later mentioned in VRT as a reference to letting the French maintain some infrastructure thanks to slavery on St. Croix. The dream of our narrator seems to echo events from previous iterations of his genetic code, and he also sees the column of pillars/trees that is found in all of the dreams throughout the novellas and is the temple on St. Anne. His aunt, Jeanine, or the black queen, is Aubrey Veil, who has postulated the idea that the abos have replaced the colonists, but she also undercuts it. Number Five recognizes that Marsch is an aborigine, and Marsch recognizes that Number Five is a clone, who repeats the murderous pattern of his father, even down to the crippled monkey. Many of the slaves are failed clonal experiments of the Maitre, and the whole planet seems to have stagnated with very little genetic diversity. Number Five kills his father and moves back into the compound to restart the same pattern. His father said that he made the experiment to see why no clone ever becomes greater than this – talk about a cycle of degeneration. In A Story by John V. Marsch, Eastwind is born of Cedar Branches Waving, followed by the breach baby Sandwalker. Eastwind is taken while being bathed in the river and his grandmother drowned, and he is trained to be an acolyte of Lastvoice, his beard ritually plucked. Sandwalker knows little of his brother save in his dreams, where they each perceive the other, and grows to seek out the sacred cave of a priest (who is there, but apparently awake, as Sandwalker feels his feet and withered legs and then leaves his sacrifice for the priest (it is not clear that the priest is at all like the man of the Free People, Sandwalker)). He meets with Seven Girls Waiting under a tree and they develop a relationship. His mother has been taken by Eastwind’s people, and along with some Shadow Children, who seem to cast a glamor into the sky that keeps St. Anne from being detected by colonizers, Sandwalker is eventually cast into a pit called “the other eye” to be sacrificed to the holy river. He discourses with the shifting shadow children. The end involves beating Lastvoice to death as sacrifice, then Sandwalker decides to kill his brother, but a Shadow Child disappears, and with a “magic” bite, switches their perceptions. It is pretty clear that Eastwind is the one who survives, as he kicks Sandwalker’s feet out from under him, and, later in V.R.T, the rumor is that the landing of the Frenchmen about to occur at the culmination of this tale and at the removal of the Shadow Children’s perception filter, that Eastwind greets them. Dr. Marsch, in the third section, goes to find traces of the aborigines on St. Anne and it leads him to a fraudulent man named Trenchard who actually does have a half-aborigine son. The son and Marsch go into the wilderness, to the back of beyond together, to find the same sacred cave and temple of trees that played so prominently in the imagery of A Story. They are followed by a lot of strange creatures, including a cat that is probably the boy’s lover, a ghoul bear, and a tire tiger. At one point, the boy is weeping when a creature is killed. Perhaps this is his mother or some other aboriginal familial association. Marsch is eventually replaced by the boy, the cat lover also killed, and VRT goes to St. Croix, and is arrested when Number Five kills his father, for the murder. The authorities keep him contained because they think he might be a spy, and set up Celestine Etienne to watch him, supposedly simply the nearest woman present at the time of his incarceration. Given that Maitre is a spy for these individuals, she is almost certainly the woman in pink who is occasionally in his library at the beginning of the book, as it appears to be her favorite color. His files are haphazardly looked over by an officer called Maitre, before “Marsch” is condemned to what will certainly be a very long, perhaps terminal, incarceration. PLACE NAMES IN THE TEXT/ RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM: Our planets are St. Croix of Number Five and the first novella and St. Anne of the aborigines and the second section. St. Anne is the mother of the Virgin Mary, and obviously the name Croix implies cross. Interestingly, this covers a very particular part of history, from the Immaculate Conception of Mary that sets the groundwork for God’s enfleshment, and the moment in time when that flesh will be put to death. More disturbing are the street names: Rue D’Asticot – the street of Maggots, and Rue D’Egouts – street of sewers Port Mimizon is not the word for mimicry, but it may very well be resonant with it, and mimi does mean a mime or mimic. The address of the Maison du Chien, the dog house: 666 Saltimbanque – Charlatan/Fraud and the number of the devil In any case, Cerberus guards the gates to Hades and sits in their front yard. When you live in the House of Dogs, nicknamed Cave Canem (beware of the dog), on Charlatan street near Maggots and the sewer, then pretty clearly this is some hellish imagery, and number five’s parthenogenetic inception is kind of a nasty turn on the normal order of things. He is bred to repeat the same murder his father and his father before him have – this really is something like a hell, and even M.Million is not free, as his creation was something akin to a self-destruction that led to an eternal half-life. When confronted with the Four Armed man, David spins off the first lines of Virgil’s Aeneid: arms and the man I sing who forc’d by fate … interesting in that this is a story of the founding of a second great empire after a defeat, thematically joining the Greek and Roman art and history … something that is contemplated about the aboriginal culture as a group of cast out Greeks rather absurdly in the opening sections of the book. Interesting echo, nonetheless, though it is the four arms of their adversary that prompts David to recite the lines. The Aeneid is about one hero who escapes the shambles of the Trojan war to eventually found a new Empire, and I think that the myths of colonizers from Gondwanaland or some other primitive earthern culture coming to St. Anne long ago and then turning into the aborigines is in some way summoned by the Odyssey/Aeneid presence in the book. St. Anne – the mother of the Virgin Mary, intimately associated with the immaculate conception, which is actually the inception of Mary without sin. There are several secular allusions: “When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow, and the owlet whoops to the wolf below, that eats the she-wolf’s young” is the opening quote, and it is not clear if it is the wolf which is eating the she-wolf’s young, but in light of the story I rather fancy so. Later, the Maitre is called an “owl” – perhaps another link between the opening scene with our narrator and David plucking pan pipes to play with – if Maitre of VRT is David, then perhaps the slave standing under the tree is a cast off clone of his brother/father, creating a nice circular situation. (Number Five often sees his own face in the slaves for sale in Port Mimizon). Both Sandwalker and Number Five experience life as someone else when they sleep: “In my dreams that night I saw the little boy scampering from one activity to another, his personality in some way confused with my own and my father’s so that I was once observer, observed, and a third presence observing both” On Number Five’s Name: The volumes in the library: the volume on the murder of Trotski was probably The Great Prince Dies by Bernard Wolfe, though alternatively, there is a play by Peter Weiss, Trotski in Exile (Mosley’s book The Assassination of Trotski was not published until 1972) that would satisfy our W requirement for the last name, Monday or Tuesday was by Virginia Woolf, a mis-filed book by V. Vinge filed with the W’s, and interestingly “The Mile Long Spaceship” oddly identified as a misplaced astronautics text by “some German” – Kate Wilhelm – and that story is about telephathic communication between a man and aliens whose ” dreams” are real. Yes, Number Five was looking for some Wolfe books, clearly his father’s name is Wolfe. THEMES: There are two very interesting and, to my mind, opposite things at play here: Maitre WANTS to change and succeed, but his experiment always fails – his perfect copies are stuck in the same loop as himself and wind up in exactly the same place. While the “perfect” mimicry of the abos leads us to question who is human and who is aborigine, there is something much more spiritual at stake – why does Number Five, the perfect copy, never seem to have free will to change? Is the parthenogenetic cloning process itself why the “ship” of his dreams never moves anywhere? Is M. Million a more perfect copy of the original human; does he evince true emotions? Individual perception verified by external observation, imitation, and the difference between those who conquer and those who are conquered are all on the table here. VITAL QUOTES: David on the abo’s tools: “If you could have asked them, they would have told you that their magic and their religion, the songs they sang and the traditions of their people were what were important. They killed their sacrificial animals with flails of seashells that cut like razors, and they didn’t let their men father children until they had stood enough fire to cripple them for life. They mated with trees and drowned the children to honor their rivers. That was what was important.” This is how Eastwind kills Last Voice at the end, with flails. The aborogines probably did mate with trees literally. What is the river that it has so much power? How do the Shadow Children obscure the perceptions of others, and are they truly able to communicate with the stars? Also, there is this one: Robert Culot says that his grandfather saw the aborigines, and that they looked, “sometimes like a man, but sometimes like the post of a fence. … or a dead tree … sometimes like old wood”. Pretty close relationship to the trees they were supposed to mate with, eh? Cinderwalker creates a whole new person from a dead arm. RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS: There is something very fascinating about the names of these planets, St. Anne and St. Croix, that really does deal with salvation – the onset of the immaculate conception that allows Christ to enter into the world through the conception of his vessel, the Virgin Mary, to his crucifixion (St. Croix), which is symbolic of the fully human, but fully divine Christ’s death in the act of salvation. It seems a far more sinister parthenogenesis is at work on St. Croix, designed not to save, but to drat. The river on St Anne as greater than God and its little place names are interesting – how does life on that planet really work? There are Free People, Marshmen, Shadow Children, and probably even more groups, some pretty distinct. It seems the composite animals described in VRT are aboriginal as well. CONNECTION TO OTHER WORKS: There really are a lot of motifs that are repeated in Long and Short Sun, from Tree hybrids to four armed men to a blue and green planetary system to parthenogenetically produced offspring, but, no, it isn’t the same as Blue/Green. This is explored further down below. The style of A Story is something Wolfe is very good at – that mythic but confusing dream prose that channels the savage mind without losing sophistication. It is very different than the first part of the novel, but I would have to say he does occasionally repeat this tone, in things such as “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” , “At the Point of Capricorn”, maybe even “Tracking Song” – where technology and mysticism lead to a primitive world. LITERARY REFERENCES: Michael Andre Druisi and Borski have long since catalogued these, but I want to say that the Puss in Boots reference is never taken far enough by Borski, it is EXTREMELY thematically important, as are the references to “The Mile Long Spaceship” (with its dreams as reality approach and the statement that it was an astronautics text misfiled - pretty interesting) and the opening lines mirroring of “Remembrance of Things Past”, with its exploration of involuntary memory and identity in all three stories – when the cat shows up and says that the gift is courtesy of the marquis of Carabas, this evokes not only a sentient cat but the surrounding mythos: the cat gives stuff to the king courtesy of a peasant lad who owns him. He convinces his master to bathe in the river naked and hides his clothes while the king comes by, then convinces all the country life to say that the land belongs to the marquis of Carabas. Next, he tricks an ogre to turn into a mouse and eats it, attaining its castle for his master. With a river and nudity and pretending to be something other than one is, this story resonates pretty well with the St. Anne portion of the tale.
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MORE SPOILERS FOR FIFTH HEAD DON'T READ THIS MASS OF TEXT ON BORSKI’S FAMILIAL CONNECTIONS: The lady in pink is clearly Celestine Etienne, because she is a spy mistress working for the government, and Maitre WAS an important spy for them, and she is also using her wiles on “Marsch” in prison. However, his essays on David and Phaedria as siblings and Celestine Etienne as their mother I find VERY unsound. There is no indication that Phaedria has not been naturally born. He also claims that David’s mother must have blue eyes, which is patently untrue – her eyes could be as Brown as Maitre – it only means that both would have to carry the recessive allele. Identifying her as the lady in pink is vital and of course proper. He also makes this claim on who the five heads are: BORSKI’S LIST “5. Number Five 4. Maitre (first cloned progeny) 3. Mr. Million 2. Gene Wolfe II 1. Gene Wolfe (founder, ur-patriarch) In this group, to incorporate David's maidenhead pun, Mr. Million is the virgin. As for our Gene Wolfe, the author of FIFTH HEAD, he would be Gene Wolfe 0. The horizontal configuration includes the current batch of Wolfes, the one Aunt Jeannine can't quite total to five (because she's unaware of who Number Five's sister is). 1. Maitre 2. Aunt Jeannine 3. Number Five 4. David 5. Phaedria” To which I say, the first list should have Maitre as the third clone and Number Five as the fourth, this cycle of cloning has gone on for a long time, thus why Maitre has become obsessed with SOMEBODY finally breaking out, though anyone too different is sold as a slave (which makes no scientific sense – you want to change, so the ones that might be unique you cast out as unsuitable, putting in your place someone who is sure to fail as you did). The second list needs Phaedria switched out with Mr. Million, I just don’t buy that she is related. One more claim that he is making that I must respond to, Borski’s essay “Dante and the House of Wolfe”, found here http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=CaveCanem.Dante In the level of suicides, the man trapped in a thorn bush, ignores the mechanistic reason our officer looks up the text of the Shrike: here, Marsch has miraculously escaped damage from a dangerous beast by being cut by thorns – it is that mystical foliage at work again. Borski has slightly misidentified why the bird impaled by the Shrike is brought up right there – whether it be a symbol of the punishment of suicides I leave up to the reader, but in some ways, yes, Marsch will ultimately kill himself. That being impaled by the thorn bush, in my opinion, is kind of inviting that vegetative life to take an interest in what is going on. Marsch is very soon after doomed to perish, possible on that slab of rock which is supposedly free from God’s scrutiny. PETER WRIGHT AND COLONIAL THEORY: Wright stresses the inability to differentiate between colonizer and colonized in his essay “Confounding the Skin and the Mask: “Disappointingly, it took twelve years for another critic to capitalise on Sargent’s reading and readdress the political dimensions of the text. Albert Wendland’s Science, Myth, and the Fictional Creation of Alien Worlds (1985) treats The Fifth Head of Cerberus as a narrative raising ‘questions over identity’ and ‘personal morality’ and, more significantly perhaps, concerning ‘methods of government’ which are ‘complex and impressive.’ Wendland’s argument not only focuses on ‘the reversed outlook of object [aborigine] onto subject [coloniser].but also the complicated interaction of object and subject, and the inability to untangle the two’ that Wolfe effects through his carefully balanced deployment of ambiguity. Importantly, Wendland recognises that ‘such ambiguity not only questions the certainty of most SF conclusions (the defining of the universe by the SF human explorers, the determination of the object by the subject), but also the whole concept of certainty itself, especially the assumed, self-contained and separate integrity of individual subjects.’ Although Wendland does not undertake a consistent postcolonial reading, he is aware that Wolfe’s examination of these admittedly ‘abstract matters’ is contextualised by setting – Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne are both Earth colonies – and by Wolfe’s treatment of the complex interaction between human colonist and aborigine. ‘The new regime’s domination is so strong that the old race, in order to survive must imitate the ways of the new rulers, become like them’, Wendland remarks, associating implicitly the physical mimicry of the Annese with the cultural mimicry found amongst many colonised peoples. Despite the pertinence of this observation, Wendland remains unwilling to apply a postcolonial critique to a text so clearly amenable to such discourse. Hence, there is a need to reconsider the narrative in the light of postcolonial theories in order to illuminate the possible purposes and consequences of Wolfe’s elaborate and mesmerising textual puzzle. However, even at this stage it is important to understand that the existence of the puzzle is more significant that its solution, since the puzzle is where the political arguments of the novel can be found.” MY RESPONSE To which I say, if we look at the interplay of all those interviewed in the text, the reason that this “impossibility” to distinguish is actually a farce. The difference between Sandwalker and Eastwind is empirically EASY TO SPOT – it does seem that a brief bit of dialogue indicates Eastwind has NO TESTICLES, when a girl points and laughs at him and then he claims that it is bound by woman’s hair until it putrefies, though the reference is not 100% clear and he might just be plucking his facial hair every day. The difference between Marsch and the boy who takes is place is also easy – those green eyes and a complete inability to use the rifle properly. The ambiguity comes in identifying who is the conqueror. The French come down to conquer and are soon repressed by some unknown force (is it English? Not sure). In the discourse of the Wise Old One who cannot distinguish between men as Shadowchildren, the Free People, or those colonists, it is pretty clear that the reason for this is ALL THE LIFE STEMS FROM A COMMON ORIGIN, save perhaps that of the pink seeds in the leaves. [I wonder if the mite that spins its weave and, if it winds up inside workers of the mat, is related to St. Anne life, as those aborigines are great with ropes and suck with tools – could the small mite be important? Dollo’s law is brought up (once a species loses the use of something it doesn’t come back, he has to adapt a new way to do the same thing) is almost certainly because the offhand colonization from ancient terrestrial stock and differentiation/regression/hybridity back to an animalistic place has happened. Both the stagnation of cloning in St. Croix and the interbreeding and hybridization of St. Anne has gone a long way to dehumanizing the worlds – St. Croix is a place that doesn’t change, nor does it move, St. Anne a place that is too changeable and fluctuates with no base into the animal kingdom, so adaptable that it lacks identity. I really like Wright’s point here: “Through the interaction of Mr Million, Number Five’s father, and Number Five who are, after all, one and the same person, Wolfe appears to be advocating hybridity, diversity, and cultural exchange by showing the stifled and stifling stasis that opposes it. In many ways Maison du Chien, 666 Saltimbanque, is a rambling metaphor for cultural isolationism, on the one hand, and imperialism on the other since the act of cloning and the process of hypnopaedia are symbolic representations of colonial occupation and re-education.” I also like his points on hybridity: “Hence, the biological chameleon becomes a cultural chameleon; the shapeshifter an ideal anthropologist, an individual possessing the intelligence and insight to understand cultures alien to himself. Accordingly, the menace embodied by Marsch-Trenchard takes the form of his ability to outperform the colonial figure – Marsch – at every level. His ‘development’ as a character is a consequence, then, not of his mimicry, but of an increasing hybridity, a furthering of his own racial heterogeneity.” In addition, he makes excellent points about “counting” the abos as human: WRIGHT: “This is not to say that various characters do not try to construct a colonial discourse. David, Number Five’s son-come-brother, remarks how it is imperative to see the aborigines as human because, ‘If they were alive it would be dangerous to let them be human because they would ask for things, but with them dead it makes it more interesting if they were, and the settlers killed them all.’ 17 In other words, if the aborigines are believed to be extinct, it is safe to consider them as human. However, if they are deemed to be still extant, to advocate their humanity would be to admit they would ‘ask for things’, that is be humanly materialistic, and demand a basic level of human rights. We see this attitude repeated by East Wind in his treatment of the Shadow Children, by Mrs. Blount and Dr. Hagsmith, who see the Annese as animals.” And finally, his conclusion: “This is the final tragedy of the collection: the solitary hybrid, untrammelled by contact with other individuals during his sojourn on Sainte Anne, understanding more than any other character about society, governance and individual and interracial interaction, is denied. His incarceration is the imprisonment of a free spirit enchained physically, spiritually and emotionally by those who suspect and fear difference. The captive John V. Marsch/Victor Trenchard, alone in his benighted cell, is the final, emotive image Wolfe provides of the actions of a species whose poisonous character holds them, like the successive clones of Mr Million’s personality, on a becalmed ship, fearing to embrace the possibilities of an empowering personal and cultural transformation.” Yet Wright’s excellent article is still ignoring something important – that both of these places, the mutable hybrid and the stagnant clone, still seem to be leading to a place of moral bankruptcy and murder. And this is where Borski strikes a very true note, in his article which responds to it, which I am quoting at length because it is just RIGHT: BORSKI’S RESPONSE: “[the original Marsch] does seem intrigued by the trophy-like nature of the carabao he kills, and takes a shot or two at a following farmcat, but in the latter case he desists when he sees how much this upsets Victor and tells the boy that if he can get the animal into camp he can keep it as a pet. Contrast this compassion and sensibility with the far more murderous tendencies of Victor, who kills not only human John Marsch, but the abo girl he has rendezvoused with in the back of beyond– who respectively represent each of the two worlds which he should be trying to understand and assimilate as tyro anthropologist, not reduce through violence. Victor, in addition, seems unusually hostile to women, at one point seeking in his prison diary to justify why men find well-endowed women more desirable than their scrawnier sisters, at another imagining Celeste Etienne masturbating with a candle. He also believes he was abandoned by his mother after she witnessed him having intercourse, and expresses no regret at having left his destitute father behind to fend for himself. Surely, with biases like this–no compulsions about murder, issues with female sexuality, toxic familial relationships–Victor Trenchard falls far short of the idealized observer Wright posits*, and actually deserves punishment for his more serious crimes, even if the authorities on Sainte Croix are imprisoning him for all the wrong reasons. At least–unlike another fictional intellectualized monster, Hannibal Lector–Victor is where he belongs. Then there’s also the signally high level of mimesis between Number Five and Victor Trenchard. Wright, of course, fails to mention this, and perhaps rightly so, given the operative paradigms and central thrust of his arguments. But the plain truth of the matter is that there are so many correspondences between the two men that it’s hard to believe Wolfe wants us to see them as different, being in fact, if not each other’s shadow, then nearly the same character. The following list is probably not exhaustive, but I think it clearly delineates this critical point–that Victor Trenchard and Number Five are symbolic twins, with life circumstances and ultimate fates irrevocably linked: 1) Victor is born to Three Faces, a sometimes prostitute, who later abandons him; Number Five, according to Aunt Jeannine, has probably been carried in utero by one of the house girls at 666 Saltimbanque, and also grows up motherless. 2) Both Number Five and V.R.T. have the number five connected with them. (V = 5 in Roman Numerals). 3) Both bear names that must be decrypted. Number Five’s real name is Gene Wolfe, and V.R.T. is Victor R. Trenchard. If the ‘R’ of his middle name is Rodman, as some people have suggested, this is an additional correspondence, being author Gene Wolfe’s middle name, furthering the autobiographical conjunction between the two. 4) Number Five is the physical clone of his father; Victor is the nominal clone of his, both père and fils bearing the aforesaid ‘R’. 5) Both Number Five and Victor declaim about the importance of fishing nets to the Free People. 6) Atop the pleasure garden of Cave Canem, Number Five spies on a patron** frolicking with a “nymphe du bois” in a private grotto; in the back of beyond John Marsch imagines Victor frolicking in secret with his own nymphe du bois. 7) Both men have scholarly, scientific minds. 8) Both men kill alternate versions of themselves–Number Five, his father, with whom, as a clonal son, he’s isogenetic; Victor, his mentor John Marsch. 9) Number Five plans on impersonating Maitre after he kills him (although we do not hear if he carries this out); Victor successfully assumes the identity of murdered John Marsch. 10) Number Five has a dream about confining Corinthian pillars in a paved court, the Annese equivalent of which (“woodhenge”) Victor sees in the back of beyond. 11) Number Five, in a detention camp, sees robot guards go berserk, firing upon prisoners; Victor dreams about the same incident, with berserk robots firing upon him in “a vast deserted courtyard surrounded by colonnades.” 12) Both Number Five and Victor Trenchard are initially arrested as suspects in the same foul deed–the murder of Maitre. 13) Victor Trenchard is being held by the authorities on the possibility that he may be a spy for Sainte Anne; Maitre (Number Five’s alter ego) is a spy. 14) Both men are served barley soup while imprisoned. 15) Number Five and Victor Trenchard’s lives are linked by the recurring image of the trumpet vine, mentioned at the beginning of the titular novella which recounts Number Five’s story, and referenced again at the conclusion of “V.R.T.”, which tells Victor Trenchard’s, in essence making of them a single tale. Now, given how Number Five’s life turns out–tragically, he repeats his father’s excesses, from patricide to imminent abuse of his own son (if this were a Greek tragedy, surely his name would be Teutamides (Greek:”Son of he who repeats himself”))–and how sympathetically resonant it has been with that of his shadow twin, Victor Trenchard–it seems very hard to find anything triumphal in V.R.T.’s demise.” What Borski has said in this super long quote is perfect – the two characters are mirrors of each other, even dreaming realistically in their “otherness”. I don’t’ see VRT at all as a positive character as Wright does. Both extremes, the capricious assimilation of all that they aborigines symbolize, and the frigid stagnation of St. Croix, both lead to the pit of hell. CONNECTION WITH SHORT SUN: We have a world of corruption and stagnation. Lots of similarities. Sentient trees. Hybridization. Confused Identities. Blue and Green binary planets. Different alien species that seem to rely on imitating or stealing identity from others (inhumi, abos). I think there is evidence that both Vanished People and Inhumi are the vestiges of humanity, as these Shadow Children and abos are as well. Man with Four arms. Differences: these abos don’t seem to ingest their “victims” as the inhumi and the trees do in Short Sun. Why am I so certain they are different? The resonance between Urth and the Blue/Green system is too strong for me. St Croix and St. Anne just don’t seem galactically important enough – their struggle is more individual than the theme in Short Sun of returning home only to find that it no longer suits you. The theme of Fifth Head of Cerberus is very different. The man with four arms is surgically created here. SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS: In general, these are my conclusions – the main character in every section dies in one way or another – Number Five kills himself in his father, but that ending, “someday they will want us” is ominous; there is every indication the cycle of fraudulence will continue in the maggoty sewers of the city of mimicry behind the doors to hell guarded by Cerberus. Sandwalker, with his feet on the ground, is the aborigine who is killed. The aborigines were actually once human and are trying to be that again, but Dollo’s law has made them adapt back in a different way to using tools. The shadow children are different – they are mental constructs to some degree, and the trees or projections of those leaves, I think, which are still somehow transubstantially hybridizing, perhaps mentally through the chewed leaves with their pink eggs. (The story of Cinderwalker shows him making a woman who loses her arm into two women, one with a human arm and an abo body, the other with a human body and an abo arm – this is some funky hybridization right here, and I think thematically similar to what Number Five is doing in creating viable frog generations from an unfertilized sex cell – those chewed leaves with their pink eggs MUST be something with that creative “godlike” force, because it was said, when they were being chewed, no more need for women and the chewer was “like God”. Demiurgic? Eastwind is the one who survives, as the later tale corroborates. There is a scene where the first Frenchmen at the landing site are supposedly greeted by Trenchard’s ancestor Eastwind (though Trenchard is obviously deluded about his origin and is merely imitating an aborigine and supplementing his income by making fake tools.) UNANSWERED QUESTIONS: WHO HAS COLONIZED AND SUBJUGATED THE FRENCH? Almost certainly not the aborigines. Given the confusion of the Wise Old One about who was a man and who wasn’t, and his confusion of past and present, this does seem as if there was an ancient colonization of terrestrial stock to the planet. How? [Eastwind is the twin who survives, I am sure) WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THE PLASTIC TOOLS OF THE ABOS M.MILLION ASKS THE CHILDREN TO DISCUSS? Trenchard tries to sell his forgeries, David and Number Five talk about how they weren’t important and nets and stuff were, but geez, can they even use tools? The boy VRT can use complicated ropes, the captors in the second novella use liana vines as ropes to lower their victims, and Number Five does imply that the nets and poisons would have been more important than tools, but why are there even tools on St. Anne if the abos couldn’t use them unless it implies earlier colonization from Gondwanaland? DOES VRT REALLY KILL HIS CATWOMAN OR IS IT MARSCH WHO DOES SO? In the final analysis, objective identification seems pretty easy, it is the individual who cannot know himself. The overwhelming negative imagery of Port Mimizon and the street names certainly indicates that something truly horrific and hellish has transpired, and is still transpiring. There are no happy endings in Fifth Head of Cerberus, both stagnation and imitation lead to an unsavory fate.
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Mar 24, 2013 14:37
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I have a much better final explication of the second and third parts now: the metaphor of place names as "eye" and "other eye" in "A Story" are a mythic mapping of what is happening in VRT as well - the shadow children chew these little pink eggs and spit out their white "wives". Indeed, these little eggy things ARE the shadow children in nascent form. Later, shadow children are described as "riding up in the bubbles and the foam from the springs", and Victor Trenchard says that he sees them, along with living trees and birds and animals. Marsch then goes out and sees huge worms the color of a dead man's lips. He also shoots a creature with a doubled pupil. The starwalker's leave from the pit called "the eye" and then sacrifices are made for the river in "the other eye" in "A Story". This is all a metaphor - the shadow children ride the marsh men by attacking their wounded eyes in the story as well. Are they an eye infection? The mites/larva in VRT are actually the shadow children - they are not anthropomorphic, but only made that way through the story and through infecting hosts. Their claim to be a space faring race is actually a metaphor for being airborne - they infect their host and then "become" them. Thus, when Sandwalker dies at the end of "A Story", Eastwind replaces him but thinks that he is Sandwalker (there are several reasons for believing this, including the pain in his arm and the claim that Eastwind met the French Landers, as well as the statement earlier when Eastwind said that he would outlive Sandwalker but that Sandwalker would live on in dreams, as well as all the foot imagery associated with Sandwalker). This is what happens to Marsh at the end: he is not the aboriginal VRT, but a shadow child who has "ridden" the Marsch man through the eyes. When Eastwind survives, this is the airborne nature of the shadow children in metaphor - it is not the landlocked aborigine VRT who survives, but a third creature who is neither fully Marsch nor fully VRT, but has come to be the group norm for them. The successive group approximation becoming validly human is a theme explored in the "relaxation" brought up by Marsch when talking to Number Five, an engineering idea that series of approximations will eventually solve a problem. Thus, Marsch in jail is a shadow child (I am still not sure if the larva actually goes through a metamorphosis or simply infects its host, but the microscopic nature of the Shadow Children coupled with the mites blown out to see who weave fabric presages the native life's great facility with weaves and knots.) Everybody only thinks that it is VRT pretending to be Marsch, but in fact the death scene of VRT in the river (and a tree reaching out for him) can play out as described, for Marsch was replaced earlier in the tale. Thus, both Marsch and VRT are dead. Sandwalker dies, but Eastwind lives, his atrophied testicles a symbol of the appropriated replication viruses and parasites must steal from their hosts to complete their life cycles. It is John Vector Marsch. felicibusbrevis fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 19:46
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I think this review is particularly bad spirited. I love Lawrence Sterne, Nabokov, Faulkner, Gene Wolfe, Zelazny, Proust (whose prose and sentence structure New Sun is in some part hoisted from - some lines are taken directly from in search of lost time) and the book stands up to reread and symbolic analyses. Attacking readers for what they like is a precedent you approach here so I don’t mind suggesting you are a mouth breathing plot driven philistine. Let’s be honest modern prose from the likes of Pynchon is either wooden or farcical and that is a matter of taste. Quoting finnegans wake would be far worse on readers than these Wolfe sections, but, much like Joyce, Wolfe is always doing something. Severian isn’t a bad writer his thoughts are metaphysically beautiful and resonant but he is not someone in tune with your zeitgeist so you label him as such. I don’t mind that the book isn’t for you but attacking the readers and the idea that there is scholarship on the book (though much of it is bad) makes your review pretty bitter and hamfisted. Tendentious tripe.
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Nov 4, 2018 13:56
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Cross post from another thread: You can laugh all you want you will be a philistine all the days of your life.
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Nov 4, 2018 14:33
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Phenotype posted:So I stumbled on this thread yesterday and wondered how I'd like this guy, and I borrowed Pirate Freedom off the Open Library and read through it in a night. It is probably wolfe’s simplest but he still has some tricky stuff going on. Spoilers of course. His father leaves him at the monastery and is a real “wise guy” - later he thinks that if he can find his father he can avert some of The disasters (see literal meaning of the name lesage - the wise guy). Also, Chris leaves the monastery to avoid being thought of as a homosexual and he falls immediately into being raped. When he almost dies at the end he is thrust back into the future and has the chance to make sure that his young self never goes back, but instead as Ignacio (fiery) condemns cristofero (follower of Christ) to follow his own desires rather than christ’s And even stands by and watches as the boy steals food when he could have bought the boy food and stopped it all. He chooses it at the end and condemns himself. The whole thing is moral casuistry. He had the chance to undo it (pirate freedom) but instead choose it again to get the girl as an old man, damning himself. Some passages make clear how awful the things the pirates did were, like twisting our guts and eyeballs etc. it isn’t necessarily the boy by himself who sins irrevocably but the old man whose lack of charity ensures it all happens just as it did, becoming the damned ignacio following his own will, that leads to the fire.
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Nov 7, 2018 15:14
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Many of the names in pirate freedom are also allegorical so when certain characters are killed or traded off it’s like a pilgrim’s progress to moral bankruptcy.
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Nov 7, 2018 15:16
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:How's the prose? Much more minimalist than New Sun he adopts different styles for different projects.
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Nov 10, 2018 21:11
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my bony fealty posted:finished Soldier in the Mist a few days ago ask me a question. Felicibusbrevis knows all and will clarify everything. From the immortals of Mardonius, with the golden apple on the spear equating them with the Persian Apple Bearers in chapter 1, to the appearance of Silenus and Asopus, to the conflation of Aphrodite with the fey tradition as that small moth on the anemone (also pertinent for its associations with not only the death of Adonis but in Christian imagery ... the earth deities Gaia, Hera, and Rhea are syncretized as the Great Mother of ancient Greek worship as in Graves mythology, juxtaposed against the moon Triple Goddess, Selene, Artemis, and Hecate (maiden, mother, crone - the waxing and waning of the moon influences whether the chthonic dark mother or the celestial huntress Artemis appears) ... the helots of the Ropemaker spartans want a return to their old worship and prominence, but the Great Mother reveals that she will help them ... by supporting the historical figure of Pausanias. There is a sublime moment in Soldier when Drakaina tells Latro his falcata is a kopis .... they are the same blade, basically, which arose in two different geographical regions ... thus the gods, syncretized between Egypt, Rome, Greece, and still the sense that this is a Miltonic presentation of the merciless pagan deities as the servants and fallen servants of a greater lord, in this case equated with the Persian all-good God Ahura Mazda. It is no mistake that Latro begins on the side of the Persians.
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Dec 22, 2018 00:03
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my bony fealty posted:finished Soldier in the Mist a few days ago Herodotus informs much of it, from his tale of the lycanthropic Neurians to little details that the name Oior means man (see the grave necromancy scene, when the girls says Man dug up her grave). Fabulous books. Those who can't appreciate Wolfe are true nincompoops.
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Dec 22, 2018 00:06
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my bony fealty posted:An Evil Guest is probably the weirdest book Wolfe has written. That doesn't make it good necessarily though, I got no clue what to think about that book. Its hosed up. Structurally it is a profound masterpiece. On the surface level it sucks because every scene is a mise en abyme. So Gideon means "destroyer" and so does "perseus". The mountain he takes Cassiopeia too actually serves as a cognate for Atlas as well as the doctorow reference, in which he and Cassie sit (Atlas is turned into a mountain by Perseus, and atop it the "stars" rest. The last chapter features a reformed dragon, past ambassador of Woldercan (he lost a bunch of weight) in his white house who gives a picture of Reis as ambassador to woldercan to Cassie at the start of his tenure ... the first chapter is Gideon in the White House who gets a picture of Reis at the END of his stay as ambassador, a mirror image ... with Gideon, future ambassador of Woldercan, in the mirror position of Klausner ... because HES A DRAGON WHO LOST A LOT OF WEIGHT TOO, with the timeline set in reverse. When Cassie goes into Gideon's car, he lets her drive and she takes off with it. She turns on Com Pu Ter, who SWITCHES RS AND LS in her speech. When Patty Gomez infiltrates R'lyeh, up turns down and left turns right, black turns white. Gideon is associated with Black. The description of Gideon's eyes and face like a mask are the same as the dead Pat Gomez and the assassin Diana Diamond who comes in to kill Cassie at the end on Takanga ... Perseus was born in a shower of GOLD and Reis beats Cthulhu by showering his city with gold ... which destabilizes things enough to allow infiltrated Pat Gomez to reform him by love, mirrored in the car takeover scene where Cassie turns on Com Pu Ter. Then a portion of Cthulhu, fallen in love with Cassie, or the fragment which remains (Gideon loses a part of his leg from a "good" medicine") goes back in time to fight himself - Great Cthulhu, G.C., is the reformed hero of this story, Gideon Chase, born in a shower of gold to goodness like Perseus - and every scene is metaphorical like this, from the fat fat India being mean to suddenly hugging Cassie when the fallen flowers are collected in a vase featuring dragons to the sunrise imagery associated with fruit and the inversion of black and white in the text (Gideon's black car, Reis' white limo, etc etc etc). Ridiculous how symbolic it is but all of that is lost on every single reader who ever picked up the book.
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Mar 13, 2019 12:37
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Neurosis posted:https://ultan.org.uk/variance-reduction-techniques/ In a defense on Reddit (there is a Fifth Head Podcast on Fifth Head that has Aramini on as a guest - Gene Wolfe Literary Podcase) he adds a few things that I think are pretty compelling as well when someone says they like the podcast reading over Aramini's: "Very quickly, though I plan to let these episodes speak for themselves by and large, there are two basic principals I come to a Wolfe story with, and one is a variation of Chekov's gun - it is that, somehow, whether allegorically, symbolically, or literally, everything is true. Thus the death of the boy Victor, the statement that the abos mate with trees, or the claim Marsch makes that he cannot write because of the cat bite or that he knows that the cat is with the boy almost telepathically must all be true somehow - even if it is not how it first appears.He does know the cat is there because of the shadow child telepathic projection, and he also can't write because of the bite. The second principal is that Wolfe provides closure symbolically - the shadow children riding on the shoulders of Marshmen and controlling them means something, as does the page break 00--00, or having the epigraph of the third novella be narrated by a cat, (ultimately, in my reading, most of the third novella is narrated by the thing which controlled the cat) or having one shadow child have the name Wolf just like the narrator of the first part was ultimately named Wolfe. How do I know when I have arrived at a holistically accurate reading? When it makes sense of the otherwise inexplicable, like the epigraph narrated by a cat, or the final "dream"about five pages from the end, which I reproduce here, since I did not recognize its very literal significance when I recorded the episode: "For a moment I thought I saw my cat flying like a shadow in the dark, and I wondered if she were really dead though I broke her neck. The day before I found the burial cave for him, she brought me a little animal and laid it at my feet. I told her that she was a good cat and could eat it herself, but she only said, "My master, the Marquis of Carabas, sends you greetings." And disappeared again. The little animal had a pointed snout and round ears, but its teeth were the even, biting teeth of a human being, and it smiled in its agony." Here, the cat flies like a SHADOW (I equate in my reading Eastwind and the mite that floats on the wind with the Shadow Children, who float up in the bubbles from the Marsh) and it introduces Marsch to its master as well as the personification of the shadow children seen in A Story, diminutive humanoids with biting, biting teeth. The cat bite links them, and, in this dream, the cat literally introduces Marsch to a Shadow child, which has human teeth because, after Marsch's infection via bite, it literally becomes human. (though whether de-evolution has occurred from some previous wave of humanity to microscopic life might also be up for debate) The 00--00 breaks are also explicable as they occur when the cat is with the boy to create the shadow child mental gestalt with Victor and Marsch, allowing both of their memories to survive and the death of Victor to occur as written, especially with that tree branch reaching out. The page breaks are a literal illustration of that communion between individuals. The embedded stories provide symbolic closure that is quite literal once the lines are drawn, but the basic premise, that everything must be used to contribute to a holistic reading and that the parts ultimately cohere to the smallest detail even if they are symbolic, remains the primary method I use in determining whether my initial ideas for the reading are valid. The resonance of the bite in A Story influences the plot significance of the cat bite in V.R.T. "
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Jun 3, 2019 23:42
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Osmosisch posted:Yeah I wasn't complaining, sorry if that wasn't clear, I'm just used to such posts getting followed by the TED talk thanks. Here is Aramini’s take on it: a jungian dream in which the reality is actually the dreams communicated through the umbilical cord of parka’s boy string connecting him to mother, though really he is just a dream sent to her after he is absorbed by his chimeric twin, the b characters. Able was supposed to be named after being able to be born after a difficult pregnancy, but on the last pages he declares I’m not able and returns to bold “birthhold” what was lost in the pond at the start. The events are repeated: insemination like in the cave (plant a seed) doubling, being transported after fighting over food, dying - reset. Captain gets smashed in head over birth, next c character has a scar on his head. Gilling gets a helm on seven mules, able gets a helm on seven mules. Same events over and over culminating in can’t breath (even toug can’t talk in aelf rice) and the cloud dragon ge fights at the end is cloud - jungian symbol of endurance - has to stop enduring. Dreams of pregnancy and swimming with red and silver fish all sexual images, giant sperm walking around, idnn a chalice into which sperm poured, chalice morcaine drinks from in phantom knight scene etc etc etc https://pastebin.com/SHEVjTbR Able is the dream Michael sends to the mother who never knew him, a chimeric twin eaten by the b brother , and these dreams of the collective unconscious.
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Dec 13, 2020 03:30
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CommonShore posted:every time I see any psychoanalytical reading like that I go Yes Wolfe write of soil and climate in 2002 which featured a jungian therapist as the main character in jail, same time he wrote wizard knight.
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Dec 13, 2020 14:09
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Nakar posted:I have the opposite reaction to Aramini, I feel like he's full of poo poo but I have no idea how I'd demonstrate him right or wrong, but I know the GWLP guys' take on Fifth Head makes far more sense than anything he came up with. Wolfe has interviews that talk about the aliens in Fifth Head and Marsch. The dudes on GWLP says there are no aliens any more in their reading . They aren’t reading the book Wolfe wrote.
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Dec 13, 2020 14:12
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Gaius Marius posted:Oh,I'm pretty with you there, sometimes, most of the time, I'm pretty sure he's so far between the lines with his reading that he misses the actual text on the page, but I still find it interesting to listen to. Compare that to Borski whose not off in the corner doing a charlie day connecting all the non existent dots together. Alzabo soup are morons
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Dec 13, 2020 14:13
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Gaius Marius posted:Oh,I'm pretty with you there, sometimes, most of the time, I'm pretty sure he's so far between the lines with his reading that he misses the actual text on the page, but I still find it interesting to listen to. Compare that to Borski whose not off in the corner doing a charlie day connecting all the non existent dots together. Rereading Wolfe free associates too much. Stuff like first Severian as hethor is bullshit.,
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Dec 13, 2020 14:16
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Nakar posted:I have the opposite reaction to Aramini, I feel like he's full of poo poo but I have no idea how I'd demonstrate him right or wrong, but I know the GWLP guys' take on Fifth Head makes far more sense than anything he came up with. A Lawrence person interview corroborating the position Aramini takes LP: "'A Story,' by John V. Marsch." GW: "'A Story,' by John V. Marsch," yes, which is not actually written by John V. Marsch, but by the shadowchild who has replaced John V. Marsch. (laughs) That's New Wave. But belonging to a literary movement doesn't consist so much in using a certain set of techniques, as it consists in running with a certain set of people, and only to a very small degree did I run with that set of people. So as I said, I would be very peripheral as a New Wave writer. Then there is a different interview where Wolfe says an abo takes the place of Marsch (the standard reading) ... gwlp says there are no more living aliens. The standard reading is abo takes the place of Marsch and the other people are ambiguous, the aramini reading that the Abos took over ste croix and that’s why no new buildings on 200 years, but Marsch is a shadowchild, who is primarily a mental construct. So even if Wolfe is waffling in those interviews, there are aliens in fifth head in present day and GWLP says there aren’t??? That’s a lot of useless Chekhov’s guns on the mantle.
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Dec 13, 2020 14:31
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Gaius Marius posted:Oh,I'm pretty with you there, sometimes, most of the time, I'm pretty sure he's so far between the lines with his reading that he misses the actual text on the page, but I still find it interesting to listen to. Compare that to Borski whose not off in the corner doing a charlie day connecting all the non existent dots together. Reading the primary Wolfe is better than most of the commentary. Some of it is good and brings understanding, but one gets the sense the Alzabo guys are just social justice puritans judging in ways Wolfe never believed and rereading Wolfe sometimes don’t want to understand but instead just confuse themselves more and more with unlikely theories. Do the readings add anything to character or not? Do they add anything to understanding? felicibusbrevis fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 14:44
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Nakar posted:The interpretation makes sense, fits the text, is interesting on a more general level than a mere genre level, and doesn't need to pull from extratextual sources (which I don't fully trust and never have with pretty much any creator). Even if you were to definitively prove to me that Wolfe's books are hyper-complex referential puzzleboxes and that Short Sun is, per authorial intention, actually about the biological process of human-tree hybridization or whatever the gently caress Aramini states (and he has claimed that Wolfe kinda-sorta supported this notion in a reply to a Christmas card, of all things), that isn't what I think is compelling or interesting about Short Sun and I will happily ignore those intentions in favor of reading the books and enjoying the interpretation I find more meaningful and compelling. I think there are other themes of denial, redemption, and the divine plan as a repurposing of Typhon and the hiero’s schemes in Aramini’s reading that make it about more than the puzzle and thematically interesting. I don’t know that these readings have to go beyond the text either, really.
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Dec 13, 2020 21:05
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Nakar posted:The interpretation makes sense, fits the text, is interesting on a more general level than a mere genre level, and doesn't need to pull from extratextual sources (which I don't fully trust and never have with pretty much any creator). Even if you were to definitively prove to me that Wolfe's books are hyper-complex referential puzzleboxes and that Short Sun is, per authorial intention, actually about the biological process of human-tree hybridization or whatever the gently caress Aramini states (and he has claimed that Wolfe kinda-sorta supported this notion in a reply to a Christmas card, of all things), that isn't what I think is compelling or interesting about Short Sun and I will happily ignore those intentions in favor of reading the books and enjoying the interpretation I find more meaningful and compelling. Then we probably shouldn’t talk about right or wrong, but compelling then. The most interesting reading goes. Consensus will be pretty unstable on that criteria.
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Dec 13, 2020 21:12
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Sekenr posted:I listened to Alzabo Soup entire series about Sorcerer's House and it felt lika waste of time. They say things I already figured out and if you want deeper analisys - its not there. GWLP is a little dry in comparison but they dig deep. Spoilers for sorcerers house It should be clear by now whose readings I tend to like. Aramini’s reading I think is good: the Lamia of Corinth, a Greek blood sucker with the power to create a house and servants as an illusion to drain her victims, is actually what the Greek “torpedo” Nicholas and lupine are, and the gold Corinthian coin that doris sees as male and someone else as female linking the Lamia to the gold artifacts in the text. In myth Apollonius thwarted the Lamia but in this book she wins and strangles Apollonius, his stand in. She is “goldwyrm” the sorcerer as well. Lamia was associated with a stench and both lupine and Nicholas the Butler trapped in the trunk smell bad. The twins in the house are an illusion reflecting Bax’s internal state so bax is basically getting conned by two house spirits (the kikimora is also involved). felicibusbrevis fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 15:22
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Sekenr posted:I listened to Alzabo Soup entire series about Sorcerer's House and it felt lika waste of time. They say things I already figured out and if you want deeper analisys - its not there. GWLP is a little dry in comparison but they dig deep. gwlp is so much better. The only thing I haven’t been happy about was their Fifth Head take with them. Veil’s hypothesis and the ambiguous humanity of the people on ste croix are palpable artifacts of the text. felicibusbrevis fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 15:24
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Might as well continue the Aggro streak. Man of all the things I see bandied around, Gaiman’s how to read Wolfe essay gets brought up way too much. Wolves in the books wooooooooooo. Limited utility and even more limited cleverness.
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Dec 18, 2020 21:35
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my bony fealty posted:for someone who loves Wolfe and even collaborated with him I get the sense that Gaiman really does not understand the way Wolfe wrote at all You are definitely right. Gaiman is a pleb.
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Dec 19, 2020 12:28
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The text moves from solipsistic Gnostic gestures (the world as somehow unreal and a product of any loser’s mind) to Neoplatonic thought: the world as an extension of the One Source, not an illusory or arbitrary place at all. Symbols can work on us whether we know what they mean or consciously recognize it or not, transcending causality
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May 20, 2021 21:24
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Hammer Bro. posted:Does anyone have a copy of or working link to the Marc Aramini Wizard Knight reading? If you email him he will send it to you. His email is just his name marcaramini at gmail.
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Jan 22, 2022 15:34
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Sailor Viy posted:I'm making my way through Soldier of the Mist on Audible. Audiobook is not really the best format for Wolfe's writing - there are a lot of places where I wanted to go back and check something but couldn't because I was listening while driving. Oh well. Overall the plot seems a bit easier to understand than Book of the New Sun. The only part that I really don't get is what's going on with Eurycles and Drakaina. My best guess is that Drakaina is the serpent woman who appeared earlier in the book, and she somehow ate Eurycles' identity from the inside out? Is that a reference to some Greek mythical creature? Kind of. The triple goddess has Latro deliver the snake to eurykles who then yes transforms- she says she was a princess of Colchis (Medea) but she also seems to be like the gorgon creature that feared iron. So the snake introduced to his drink by the triple goddess.
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Feb 1, 2022 00:56
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Sailor Viy posted:Cheers, I almost forgot about the snake in the wine. Spoilers for soldier of the mist.. Latro learns his name and gets reunited with his Roman legion but they are dead. The neurian afflicted by the moon dies in symbolic combat with her while latro’s struggle with the earth goddess continues. So it is the fulfillment of persephone’s promise and the Greeks take Sestos.
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Feb 1, 2022 13:48
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CommonShore posted:I used a Gene Wolf quotation for introducing a concept when teaching Judo tonight Wolfe was a judo instructor for a while.
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Feb 5, 2022 22:17
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Nakar posted:Regarding Hyacinth: I think it's never adequately explained, even in Short Sun, because it's an aspect of Silk that Horn just doesn't get. He never liked Hyacinth, he doesn't understand what Silk saw in her, and so Long Sun goes out of its way to try to come up with some kind of vague excuse or explanation that "fits" Horn's image of Silk and reconciles why he'd basically throw away everything for her despite her seeming to not warrant it. In part we can say that Horn and Nettle's treatment of her isn't entirely fair, but on the other hand I think it might be going too far in the other direction to try to find the "real" reason Silk loved her so much, so quickly. At the same time it is pretty clear it is the kypris element that so captivated him, as when he is walking with hyacinth he keeps thinking his mom is around and even has dreams of being with her. Kypris as his instant champion, him the clockwork tool of Pas’s plan makes pretty clear she knows her role. His dreams are about his mom on auk’s big grey donkey (chenille) and then his own small donkey biting his ankle (hyacinth and the ankle imagery he hurt falling out her window) being lost in the yellow house make it clear they are both ridden, and the preprogrammed mom stuff is kind of all the explanation we need; he and sand were both to be sacrificed to bring back Pas.
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Feb 17, 2022 11:25
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my bony fealty posted:naw Sword has the hierodules at Baldander's Castle meeting Severian for the first time (from his perspective) and bowing to him as the savior of Urth, pissing off Baldanders and setting the stage for their big fight. In Citadel the eidolons of Malrubius and Triskele come out of a flying saucer on the beach and tell Severian there's a deus ex machine watching out for him. Yes that reading explains so much and gives closure to the fate of Urth, too with the city of the inhumi clearly Nessus, the story of the man in with the black sword and light who cuts up bodies to free the cataract and cause flooding a passion play for Severian, and the tower horn dies in being the matachin tower, fixed off screen by auk, whose ghost shows up in dorp on Blue, returning to the stars at last at the end when Silk leaves in a lander that happened to be around there. And the vanished people are on the way to being hieros.
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Feb 17, 2022 11:30
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Womyn Capote posted:Its amazing how much classic literature I read and think of how Wolfe must have read and been inspired by it. Like I just finished "The Idiot" which had a bit about the guillotine and how the prisoner feels leading up to the execution that really seemed like it could have been something Severian would have talked about. Maybe its just that the performer (Jonathan Davis) is the same for both novels. Wolfe read notes from the underground but not The Idiot. The long novels he was most familiar with were in English- shorter stuff in other languages, usually.
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Feb 24, 2022 20:06
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