Gene Wolfe’s 1986 novel “Soldier of the Mist” centers on a Roman mercenary named Latro. Having suffered an injury during the Battle of Plataea, a Greco-Persian War skirmish, Latro has no memory of his past. Each night, he writes the day’s events on a scroll; the next morning he reads the scroll to bring himself current. Latro has to carefully choose what he is going to write down: he is limited by time, because when he sleeps he loses his memory again, and by the medium, because there is only so much papyrus. It is hinted that Latro’s wound was caused by the meddling of the gods, and, like the blind seer Tiresias, whose affliction was also the result of divine vengeance, Latro is given another gift: he can see the gods, and even speak with them. It could be the case, however, that Latro’s wound causes him to hallucinate.
On the phone from his home in Peoria, Gene Wolfe explained to me recently that Latro’s memory loss does not make him an unreliable narrator, as many critics assume. Instead, Latro might reveal only the truth that matters. Latro must ask himself, Wolfe said, “What is worth writing, what is going to be of value to me when I read it in the future? What will I want to know?” These are questions that Wolfe has been asking himself, in one form or another, for decades. His stories and novels are rich with riddles, mysteries, and sleights of textual hand. His working lexicon is vast, and his plots are unspooled by narrators who deliberately confuse or are confused—or both.
Wolfe has published more than twenty-five novels and more than fifty stories, and has won some of science fiction and fantasy’s most prestigious awards. But he has rarely, if ever, been considered fully within the larger context of literature. His books contain all of the nasty genre tropes—space travel, robots, even dragons—and he hasn’t crossed into the mainstream on the strength of a TV or movie adaptation. Wolfe himself sees the trappings of science fiction and fantasy, the spaceships and so on, as simply “a sketchy outline of the things that can be done.” But even within fantasy fandom, Wolfe’s work presents difficulties. His science fiction is neither operatic nor scientifically accurate; his fantasy works are not full of clanging swords and wizardly knowledge. But ask science-fiction or fantasy authors about Gene Wolfe and they are likely to cite him as a giant in their field. Ursula K. Le Guin once called Wolfe “our Melville.”
Born in New York City in 1931, Wolfe grew up reading the Buck Rogers comic strip and pulp magazines like Thrilling Wonder Stories. After a stint as a combat engineer in the Korean War, he studied engineering at the University of Houston with the help of the G.I. Bill, and then got a job with Procter & Gamble, where he devised a means of frying molded potato shingles before they dropped onto a conveyer belt to be canned in what is now familiar as the Pringles cylinder. He later worked as the editor of an engineering journal. Wolfe grew up a Presbyterian, but began to study Catholicism in the mid-fifties so that he could marry his wife, Rosemary, in her church. During the course of his instructions, he found something that resonated; he converted, and his faith remains deeply important to him. He recently told the MIT Technology Review that, after the war, Rosemary “saved” him.
Though he began writing in college and had moderate success selling his work, Wolfe was in his forties by the time he published “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” the story that got him noticed by readers and editors, a tale of postcolonialism involving clones and travel to other planets. Soon after it first appeared, in 1972, it was published in a book of three connected stories. In 1980, Wolfe published the first volume of what would become his magnum opus, a tetralogy called “The Book of the New Sun.”
For science-fiction readers, “The Book of the New Sun” is roughly what “Ulysses” is to fans of the modern novel: far more people own a copy than have read it all the way through. A surreal bildungsroman, the book centers on a character named Severian. Trained as a torturer on the planet Urth, where torturers are a feared and powerful guild, Severian betrays his order by showing mercy, allowing a prisoner to kill herself rather than be subjected to his terrible ministrations. He then wanders the land encountering giants, anarchists, and members of religious cults. He eventually meets and supplants the ruler of Urth, the Autarch.
The four books that make up the series are sometimes vexing. A wise reader will keep a dictionary nearby, but it won’t always prove useful. Though Wolfe relies merely on the strangeness of English—rather than creating a new language, like Elven or Klingon—he nonetheless dredges up some truly obscure words: cataphract, fuligin, metamynodon, cacogens. The setting appears medieval, but slowly we tease out that what is ancient to these characters was once our own possible future. A desert’s sands are the glass of a great city, and the creaking steel walls that make up Severian’s cell in the guild dormitory is likely an ancient spaceship. Reading “The Book of the New Sun” is dizzying; at times, you become convinced that you have cracked a riddle, and yet the answer fails to illuminate the rest of the story. Wolfe doesn’t reveal the truth behind any of the central mysteries explicitly, but lets them carry the narrative along. At first, one hopes that they will eventually be resolved. Ultimately, they become less important than Severian’s quest for his own truth.
Unlike Latro, Severian remembers everything. But this does not make him a more reliable narrator. “The fact that he remembers everything doesn’t mean he won’t color the events through his own preconceptions and preferences,” Wolfe told me. Severian is free to pick and choose what he wants the reader to know—there are times when he loses trust in his own judgment, and at one point he even admits that he might be insane. In the early part of the first novel, “The Shadow of the Torturer,” Severian is given more responsibility in the guild and finds himself in chambers he was once denied access to. In one, he sees a dusty and faded picture he describes as “an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner.” Careful readers will realize this as a photograph of the first moon landing, but to Severian it merely evokes a deep nostalgia, as well as a desire to steal the picture and bring it outside, away from the stifling interior of the guild’s Citadel.
Moments like this have turned many of Wolfe’s fans into something like Biblical exegetes, who dig deep into his texts in the hope of finding clues not only to the plots and the characters but to Wolfe’s larger intentions. Partly what readers are excavating is Wolfe’s Catholicism, which he is quick to say figures into his writing. “What is impossible is to keep it out,” he told me. “The author cannot prevent the work being his or hers.” Flannery O’Connor, in her essay “Novelist and Believer,” cautions novelists to use religious concerns in ways that do not alienate the reader, to render encounters with the ineffable so that even those who might not understand or care for a particular metaphor—Aslan the Lion as Christ, for example—can still be moved by it. Many critics have speculated that Severian is a Christ figure: he brings the New Sun and puts an end to the cruelty of torture. But Wolfe wraps his Catholicism in strange language and cryptic images. Truth of any kind, no matter how closely you read, is hard to come by in Wolfe’s books. And yet, over time, it does seem to emerge.
During his journey, Latro is accompanied by another soldier, a black man whose name he doesn’t know. Though Latro keeps forgetting what they have gone through together, their friendship builds. “The heart remembers,” Latro says, “even when no trace of face or voice remains.” This man comes running up to him, “shouting, his arms in the air,” and though Latro does “not know where we met or why I love him (though no doubt those things are written somewhere on this scroll),” he can’t stop smiling. “Without thinking at all about what I should do,” he tells us, “I embraced him as a brother.”
This passage comes to mind when Wolfe, over the phone, tells me about grappling in his own life with the complicated questions of memory and truth that he has long been thinking through in his novels. His wife, Rosemary, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease; she died in December, 2013. “There was a time when she did not remember my name or that we were married, but she still remembered that she loved me,” Wolfe recalled. His narrators may be prophets, or liars, or merely crazy, but somewhere in their stories they help to reveal what Wolfe most wants his readers to know: that compassion can withstand the most brutal of futures and exist on the most distant planets, and it has been part of us since ages long past.
