Paging the Slithy Toves: A Complaint About Gene Wolfe
Jason Kuznicki on Aug 14th 2006
With the long commute from our new house, I’ve taken up reading again in a way I haven’t for a long time. I devoured Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum two weeks ago as an appetizer before tackling Gene Wolfe’s four-volume series The Book of the New Sun. It’s so erudite it hurts.
Now Wolfe certainly deserves much of the formidable praise that has been heaped upon him. Yet I have to dissent in part. And I may be called a philistine for what I am about to say, so I should make perfectly clear that Gene Wolfe is, generally speaking, a truly great writer. There are not just flashes of genius in his work; there are whole great wide swaths of it. At times I stand perfectly in awe; I think of Dostoyevsky and Hugo and Proust. And then, alas, there is the rest.
Some months ago, I greatly enjoyed Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and this inspired me to continue reading Wolfe’s work. But The Book of the New Sun seems to be a lot heavier on intellectual noodling and a lot lighter on solid writing. Consider the following sentence:
And so I trudged along under stars brightened by the wind, no longer a torturer in the eyes of the few who passed me, but only a somberly clad traveler who shouldered a dark paterissa.
It is far from clear to me how wind can make stars brighter or dimmer, except perhaps in that it blows the clouds away. But this strikes me as a strained relationship, a bit of obliquery that requires the reader to think rather more than should be necessary for a trivial observation. And it took me quite some time to find a reasonable definition for “paterissa.” It certainly isn’t in the Oxford English Dictionary. An off spelling — paterisa — yielded the definition “a croizer or staff,” which I guess is reasonable enough. But should I really have to work this hard?
Not one hundred pages into the first volume, and it is already clear to me that Wolfe cares far more for his words than for his readers. “Paterissa” is just one of a largish class of Wolfe-words, nonces that he apparently coined solely for the purpose of seeming Smarter Than You. To this list we may add — with but a little effort — “gowdalie,” “thalamegii,” “onegar,” and “khetan.” Not one of them appears in the OED. I am quite sure that there are others, but already I grow tired of writing them down and of memorizing their outlandish phonemes.
Let me make it perfectly clear, too, that I am no linguistic conservative. I applaud coining a new word when it describes a fantastic new thing, and Wolfe does so marvelously at times. Consider the avern, an alien plant of deadly poison whose etymology recalls both “aversion” and the pit of Hell, avernus. Lovely.
But it’s downright silly to coin a new word for describing a mundane item or an unimportant bit of scenery. Thalamegii, for instance, appear to be yachts, and they are mentioned just once in the text so far. The gowdalie — I trust it is singular — is also mentioned but once. In context, it may be either a net, a gig, a fishing pole, or some other device not yet invented that aims at similar ends. It hardly matters. Whatever the case may be, I am tempted to say that using words like these isn’t even writing: It’s a default on the promise of writing. Can the slithy toves be far behind?
Is Wolfe perhaps trying to use a dialect? Sadly, no: At the end of the first volume of The Book of the New Sun, he boasts — a quaint, 20th-century boast typical of the genre — that he did not in fact write the present work, but that he merely translated it from an unknown language of the far future. (His editor would have done well to point out the places where he left the translation unfinished.)
Wolfe also seems to overstep a certain line even when he confines himself to genuine English words. He is seldom content to plant water lilies when he can have nenuphars; judges may not judge when alcaldes may serve in their places; and city guards will never do — nor even gendarmes — when peltasts may be pressed, somewhat doubtfully, into service instead. All are genuine English words. And all are sheer intellectual vulgarities.
Oh, and wouldn’t this just figure, too: The only concordance to his work is out of print and sells from $150. It is also apparently riddled with errors. One wonders if Mr. Wolfe is taking a cut of the proceeds at eBay.
A further irritation is that the narrative voice in The Book of the New Sun is so very similar to the one Wolfe employed in The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I have not read the rest of Wolfe’s writing, but I have to wonder: Do all of his narrators write like a thesaurus with an inferiority complex?
Wolfe is also given to sidelong philosophical digressions that may or may not advance the plot at all. These are occasionally profound, but quite often they are fuzzy or simply banal. Consider the following, which seemingly aims at attaining some rare cosmic balance between the wooly and the trite:
We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life–they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
Okay, so 1) thoughts alone aren’t necessarily effective. I can buy that. And 2) things sometimes happen which we don’t know about or understand. This too is probable enough. But how does that lead to 3) symbols act on us without our understanding them? The example of the soldier’s coin doesn’t illustrate this point in the slightest: Obviously, the soldiers know of the symbol’s existence.
It therefore becomes most unclear what Wolfe is getting at. If the Autarch never gave his coin, would the thing still work “of itself” — or would it not work at all? If the latter, then we invent symbols even as they invent us. Eh, whatever.
Finally, all of this erudition seems out of character. While I could accept the erudite narrative voice in The Fifth Head of Cerberus — the narrator was naturally intelligent and had had an overweening android for a tutor — that very same voice simply doesn’t work here. Severian, the narrator of The Book of the New Sun, goes out of his way to emphasize his lack of learning, and nothing in the first two volumes suggests that this is a false modesty on his part. Indeed, it appears that apart from the rudiments of reading and writing, the whole of Severian’s education consisted of a single small volume of history and mythology. (Truly, Mr. Wolfe, you give historians way too much credit.)
If Severian is a man of minimal education, then it boggles the mind to think what a scholar of his world might be like — until, that is, we meet one, and he proves to be a dim bulb indeed. What gives? (Yes, I know, Severian does eat at least one other person’s soul during the course of the narrative. But by her own confession, she wasn’t much of an intellectual luminary herself. Either there’s a whole lot left unexplained that really should have been narrated, or else Severian eats an awful lot of souls in the next two books.)
So these are my impressions after the first two volumes of The Book of the New Sun. Should I continue reading? Is it worth the effort? I wish I knew, and if you have a recommendation one way or the other, I’d like to hear it.
I did have the distinct sense that the narration was hitting a soft patch in the second half of the second book: Wolfe seemed to throw in more and more digressions, a number of narratives-within-the-narrative, and even a couple of chapters that were more like stand-alone literary exercises with but a tenuous connection to the main plot (for example, one of them treats us to a story that one character reads aloud to another while they sit in a prison cell). The whole thing seems to be running out of oomph. Does it pick up later? Or are these various threads really all heading in one direction, and I just don’t know it yet?
Filed in The Bistro, The Bookshelf
The Book of the New Sun is my favorite longer work of fiction. Like you, I enjoyed Fifth Head very much, but It did not make me think any less of New Sun, which I had read before; or The Knight, the first book I read by Wolfe.
New Sun struck some chord within me which made me appreciate every little word in it, no matter how banal they might seem.
I now often feel less than myself when I’m not in the process of reading something by Wolfe.
People strive towards control over their own lives, i.e. the individual factors of it. When we encounter something which we don’t understand at once, the best direction is to make as much an effort as possible to expand our minds. Throughout life we learn it’s ways, or at least some socially acceptable basic understanding which we can get by with. We “learn how to learn it’s ways”. When you reflect upon the world, does it seem to you like most people, even those allegedly “in charge”, understand it? Do they act like they do, and do they show it?
While I read your article with care, I could not grasp whether you actually thought Wolfe were making some words up, or, as hinted in places, you *are* aware that not one single word, as far as I understand, was made up in his mind. Most strange words are obsolete, so you will have trouble finding definitions, but it is certainly possible (I have succeeded quite well). I read the books without looking every word up, and it did not disturb me as much as it seems you were. It inspired me to a point where I could make good enough guesses at most words to make the text flow.
You say you are offended by Wolfe’s use of words and hidden meanings. I am not. Not in the least. I do not feel, like you seem to, that he does anything to look smarter than anyone. Also keep in mind that the narrator (Severian) does have a perfect memory, like he often says, and seems to write mostly for himself. He does leave enough clues, but one has to be literally a genius noticing them all the first time.
Why should we be able to understand everything at first read? Does Wolfe, as a writer, have an obligation write in order to make everything easy to understand, just because many other writers do? The message in this can be interpreted as “we don’t use our brains as much as we could and should”!
At one point you write that Wolfe gives historians too much credit. The point is rather, what credit does he give History, and the importance of understanding of one’s own culture? One “book of gold” can be of so much significance as to play a crucial role in shaping a persons thinking…
I see Wolfe’s fiction as windows into other worlds. I thoroughly enjoy the process of discovering new worlds through hints made by their inhabitants, who may or may not understand it themselves. To fully understand some of Wolfe written work takes quite a lot of effort, and I don’t believe anyone has succeeded. Even Gene himself seems to like people discovering things he was not himself aware of. Do you believe that anyone has ever fully understood life? A simple question which I feel is ver much relevant to this.
The giving in the coin is not the point, it is the acceptance of it. In my eyes you are a blogger. I have not read anything else you’ve written but can still say this. When you decided to blog, “accepted the coin”, I doubt you were, or are, aware of *everything* it means to be a blogger. I am not trying to say there are rules to blogging, only that it has limits, hard edges, and that to me you are a blogger, since that is the side of you I have seen.
I am not a ‘native english speaker’, and I am only 22. My words are only as meaningful as my little experience in writing can convey. As I write this, I sincerely hope that I don’t scare you farther away from enjoying more Wolfe, and I that you don’t see me only as the geek that I may be.
[...] See, this is why I love Positive Liberty: politics, culture, and literary criticism as snarky as this: Do all of his narrators write like a thesaurus with an inferiority complex? [...]
Kettil –
Please don’t misunderstand me. I poured out almost all the complaints I had about Wolfe. I reserved the praise, which maybe I shouldn’t have done. I adore Wolfe’s world-building; for me, his vision of the distant future is more fascinating by far than Frank Herbert’s. It’s more believable than Cordwainer Smith’s (though I do like Smith’s ultra-clean sense of plot and narrative). It’s meatier than Asimov’s, with much more to think about besides. Wolfe is a truly brilliant author.
As to the words, though: I am not sure whether I believe him when he says, in the afterword to the first volume, that these words are all genuine.
Why do I not believe him? Well, in that same afterward, he also thanks all the people who let him photograph the buildings that haven’t been built yet. He claims knowledges that he could not possibly have, and he fills those few paragraphs with a startling number of insoluble time paradoxes. Therefore, not only is Severian unreliable as a narrator, but the parts of the book outside the narrative are unreliable, too. I therefore think I do have some reason to doubt Wolfe’s sincerity about the origin of his words. Yet I can’t really think of a good reason to write this way.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, and authors can be quite clever with double-unreliability at times. For instance, Stanislaw Lem put an unreliable text inside another unreliable text as a way of avoiding the censorship in his Memoirs found in a Bathtub, originally published in communist Poland: The introduction places the action in a totalitarian future American military base. But the introduction also says that the first twelve pages are now thought apocryphal. How long is the introduction? Twelve pages!
I can’t speak with certainty to all of the words in the Book of the New Sun, but I have never caught him coining a word therein. Most of them can be found either as obsolete words or variant spellings (here, the online OED is considerably more useful than the print version); a handful require further etymological investigation.
None of your cited examples are nonce-words. Gowdalie is a fishing spear; the word is of Australian Aboriginal origin. Onegar is a corruption of onager, a type of wild ass or a siege engine that kicks like one, from the Latin. Thalamegii is a plural of the Latin thalamegus, from the Greek thalame^gos, a type of Egyptian house-boat or state barge. Khetan is a variant of kheten, a name for an ancient Egyptian two-handed battle axe.
A little work with the online OED, an online dictionary for a relevant other language, or Google, and I have thus far always found that his words are not new, but rather old, rare, or unfamiliar.
Moreover, his systematic choice of names and words often (always?) contains allusions or jokes of its own; perhaps the most famous is the fact that all the ordinary citizens you meet have the names of saints.
Pardon the double post, if such occurs.
HC –
Thank you for the clarifications. There is of course a fuzzy line between words that “are” and “are not” English. I am not so pedantic that this escapes me. Yet in general, I don’t think it’s really worth my time as a reader if I must repeatedly go back to the OED, and if I repeatedly find that the word isn’t even in this, the ultimate guide to the language.
Moreover, the examples I cite are all quite precisely nonce words, at least as far as English is concerned: You will not find them used elsewhere within the language. At least so far as I can tell, a single author has used them each a single time. This is the very definition of a nonce word.
Now, nonce words are certainly defensible, and they do have their places. There are other ways, though, to occupy a reader’s mind, and I have to wonder if all these words have not proven a distraction rather than an aid in conveying the artistic vision Wolfe wanted to convey.
As to saints’ names, I’m not all that impressed. I was raised a Catholic, and I’ve got plenty of obscure names in my family tree.
“Paterissa” is just one of a largish class of Wolfe-words, nonces that he apparently coined solely for the purpose of seeming Smarter Than You.”
Other posters have pointed out that these are genuine words, albeit obscure or obsolete. Gene Wolfe has an essay (in his collection _The Castle of the Otter_) in which he explains his motive in using them: his book is set in a distant future when many strange things are used, and he has used these archaic words rather than make new ones up: “to convey the flavor of an odd place at an odd time”. The book also has a list of many of these words and their meaning.
I don’t want to give away spoilers, but Severian had the assistance of many people when he composed his memoirs, some of whom were very learned. The paradoxes you’ve noticed are deliberate. When dealing with Gene Wolfe it is wise to assume that everything is deliberate. I’ve read the series several times and I am still astonished by it.
The point of using saint’s names (at least so far as I can tell) for ordinary people is not to impress with obscure names, but to provoke thought. Perhaps his choice was to show that Urth is, like the South America on which the portions travelled are geographically based, deeply influenced by Catholicism. Perhaps it is to imply that Urth is post-millenarian, or even nigh to Armageddon, or a third(?) coming. Perhaps it is to reflect Wolfe’s own religious beliefs, or perhaps the meaning lies in juxtaposition of these saint’s names with the Kabbalistic references in the rest of work - or perhaps something else entirely. It’s another puzzle layered in, there if you wish to play with it, or there to be ignored if your interests are otherwise.
If they were true nonce-words, entirely unused outside of his work, I would not have been able to find definitions for all of them with a few searches on Google. They are very rare indeed, but I believe your original complaint was that Wolfe created new words too often; so far as I can tell, he never does so in those books. Again, if searching out these words is not really worth your time, you need not. This, too, is an extra puzzle, there if you wish to play with it, or there to be passed over if you would rather derive sense from context.
I cannot say whether Wolfe’s practice of using obscure words is more distraction than aid; it does add considerably to the sense that Urth is an alien, half-familiar, world, and I have often found that reason guides his choice of obscure words. A gowdalie carries implications of being a primitive and exotic tool, as a fishing spear does not. A thalamegus has richer implications when you know that this is the very word Suetonius used to describe a besotted Caesar’s pleasure cruise up the Nile with Cleopatra. This knowledge can add richness to the reading experience, but is not necessary to enjoy it.
As far as Severian’s erudition goes, he does have great changes to undergo before the end of the series, and (as Joe says) is likely to have received assistance in composition. He is also, while probably always literally truthful, also probably lying in almost every significant way possible. He is in an ideal position to edit his disclosures by the time of writing, and possesses significant incentives to do so. In a very important way, we readers know almost nothing of the true character of Severian, and this is by his choice.
It is also a nonce word if it’s borrowed from another language, so I stick with what I said earlier. The ones I identified as nonce words are not to be found in English, so far as I can tell, before Wolfe. (OED would almost certainly have them if they were.) That they are foreign words does not — I repeat, not — save them from being nonces.
I agree, though, about the religious aspects of the work. They are one of the most fascinating parts of it, and I am still thinking almost nonstop about how we got from “here” (present-day Catholicism and other religions) to “there” (whatever it is that they believe). It’s a great puzzle, and I am indeed quite entertained.
My argument was more to whether they are neologisms - some, I think would also pass the nonce-borrowing test even if construed so strictly as to prohibit ratification by later authors. Anyway, it is a great puzzle. I cannot make head or tail of the Books of the Various Suns (yet?), but they are magnificent. Machines for generating a frenzy of interpretation indeed.
Have you read aught else of Wolfe, or is this (and the 5th Head) your introduction to him?
HC–
I haven’t read any of his other works yet. I’m just now finishing R. A. Lafferty’s collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, which was more to my taste in a lot of ways. It was, though, fundamentally unserious, from start to finish, and therefore a work of a completely different character.
I might make one other complaint about Wolfe in the meantime: Is it just me, or is the character of Jonas not truly and desperately annoying? Spouting proverbs all the time does not make for any decent kind of characterization, and it is curious that Jonas should be drawn this way when the other characters are so much richer and more varied. For one character to be such a continuous source of bathos in an otherwise stately narrative can well acceptable — Falstaff and all — but that he would also be so pat, so trite… That got on my nerves. (And yes, I know his “secret,” which I won’t spoil for anyone else. Why that secret should matter is beyond me.)
To give just one example, I nearly threw the book against the wall and gave up on Wolfe entirely when Jonas offered the proverb about the butcher’s wife.
Yuck. I mean, really. Yuck.
The secret of his origin and the secret of his nature may both explain his character - or not. Like much of the rest of the book, I just don’t quite understand him.
I believe most sailors on Urth speak similarly, so that may explain his habit.
Some theories bandied about on the email list tie him to biblical Jonah, present-day Korea, Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew, the Tin Man of Oz (and therefore Mr. Million?) - and so forth. I’m hesitant to write him off without a better understanding - for instance, the Faerie sections of the Wizard Knight took on much more meaning after the cosmology became clearer. That said, he is not my favorite character either.
I have read these books so many times that I’ve nearly committed them to memory. They are not perfect but what is? There is a fifth book that ties the series up, “The Urth of the New Sun”. To me it’s amazing that he manages to hold all those threads together. If you want some truly aweful writing you should try and read “The Tommy Knockers” by Steven King. This stinker actually made me angry as I was wallowing through it but I had no choice but to read it as I was bored and miles from anywhere.
[...] An Entertainment Bleg: I’ve noticed that my reading lately (more Tocqueville, Mises, probably even more Mises when I’m done) is running toward the heavy and theoretical side. Can anyone recommend some good fiction? I give priority to thought-provoking “hard” sci-fi, as in… I’m thinking of a return to Gene Wolfe. I welcome your suggestions. [...]
Jason, thanks for this post. Wolfe, and this series, returned my sense of wonder to reading. For the first time in my forty-four years, after reading the first fifty pages, I stopped, and reread them, not because I didn’t understand, but because the sheer beauty of Wolfe’s writing compelled me to read again for the singular joy of reading words that I wanted to read out loud. Wolfe is an acquired taste and certainly not to everyone’s liking. I do appreciate your observations.
Jason, you need to do some research. Wolfe doesn’t EVER invent words.
And Severian is NOT erudite. He simply lives a million years after your death, so that time and spatial distance become meaningless—as Wolfe patiently explains—and not only speak a different language, but one designed by Wolfe to suggest vast gulfs of time.
“stars brightened by the wind” is obvious—it requires no thought whatsoever if you have ever walked at night away from a city.
It’s petty and asinine of you to accuse Wolfe of getting a cut from someone else’s book.
“Peltast” is an intellectual vulgarity? Yes, that Xenophon was a vulgarian all right, and Arrian.
Sir, you need to read more and blog less.
Baldie —
Your observations are neither interesting nor new to this discussion. See the commenters above you, and my replies to them.
Wolfe himself admits that he’s inventing words, or at the very least twisting old words to suit new purposes. And if I can’t find it in the OED, then I think it’s safe to say it’s only marginally an English word at all.
As to the “stars brightened by the wind,” did YOU read? As in, did you read the paragraph I wrote just afterward? I found the writing overwrought, but not impenetrable here. Overwrought is still worth a criticism.
And look, if Severian is not erudite, no one is. Now, all of this DOES get explained in the remainder of the work, but that doesn’t make him “not” erudite. He is. He’s absorbed the minds of the autarchs before him, soI can well expect it, and now that I know that he did this, it’s immediately clear to me why he would write as he does. But no one with the education he describes himself as having had in the first half of the work would ever write as he did, with all of that prodigious vocabulary.
Xenophon? Arrian? To them, the word peltast may have been perfectly natural. Not to anyone in the twentieth century. For us, it’s just showing off.
Now, I know I’ve stepped on some toes here. I’m sorry I don’t happen to be exactly as enthusiastic about Wolfe as you are. (I compared him to Proust, but I guess that wasn’t sufficient praise for you. My apologies.)
I suggest that you learn to take some criticism of your idols, though. It’ll do you good in life. Learn to take a joke, too, as with the offhand suggestion of Wolfe being on the take. Clearly that’s what was meant.