The Enchanting Prose of Gene Wolfe
and the puzzles it leaves us with
This week I take us a little ways off the beaten path of capital-C Classic literature, into the world of speculative fiction. Specifically to the little realm of the writer whom The New Yorker called “Sci-Fi’s difficult genius.”
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Or Gene Wolfe, as he was more widely known. Sometimes called the Melville of science fiction, Wolfe occupies a very unique niche among authors: too genre to be treated as literary, too difficult to be read widely as a genre author. Nevertheless, he has a great many admirers, especially among writers of speculative fiction, some of whom insist he should be remembered as one of the great American writers period.
This is difficult praise to live up to. But live up to it he does, because if there’s one impression his prose creates, it’s that this dude could write. To make this case I’ll be working with a sample from the opening pages of The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which, forgive me, is quite long:
The iron shutter is (for I am writing now in my old dormitory room) hammered to resemble in a stiff and oversymmetrical way the boughs of a willow. In my boyhood it was overgrown by a silver trumpet vine (since dug up) which had scrambled up the wall from the court below, and I used to wish that it would close the window entirely and thus shut out the sun when we were trying to sleep; but David, whose bed was under the window, was forever reaching up to snap off branches so that he could whistle through the hollow stems, making a sort of panpipe of four or five. The piping, of course, growing louder as David grew bolder, would in time attract the attention of Mr. Million, our tutor. Mr. Million would enter the room in perfect silence, his wide wheels gliding across the uneven floor while David pretended to sleep. The panpipe might by this time be concealed under his pillow, in the sheet, or even under the mattress, but Mr. Million would find it.
What he did with those little musical instruments after confiscating them from David I had forgotten until yesterday; although in prison, when we were kept in by storms or heavy snow, I often occupied myself by trying to recall it. To have broken them, or dropped them through the shutter onto the patio below would have been completely unlike him; Mr. Million never broke anything intentionally, and never wasted anything. I could visualize perfectly the half-sorrowing expression with which he drew the tiny pipes out (the face which seemed to float behind his screen was much like my father’s) and the way in which he turned and glided from the room. But what became of them?
Yesterday, as I said (this is the sort of thing that gives me confidence), I remembered. He had been talking to me here while I worked, and when he left it seemed to me—as my glance idly followed his smooth motion through the doorway—that something, a sort of flourish I recalled from my earliest days, was missing. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what the appearance had been, eliminating any skepticism, any attempt to guess in advance what I “must” have seen; and I found that the missing element was a brief flash, the glint of metal, over Mr. Million’s head.
Once I had established this, I knew that it must have come from a swift upward motion of his arm, like a salute, as he left our room. For an hour or more I could not guess the reason for that gesture, and could only suppose it, whatever it had been, to have been destroyed by time. I tried to recall if the corridor outside our dormitory had, in that really not so distant past, held some object now vanished: a curtain or a windowshade, an appliance to be activated, anything that might account for it. There was nothing.
I went into the corridor and examined the floor minutely for marks indicating furniture. I looked for hooks or nails driven into the walls, pushing aside the coarse old tapestries. Craning my neck, I searched the ceiling. Then, after an hour, I looked at the door itself and saw what I had not seen in the thousands of times I had passed through it: that like all the other doors in this house, which is very old, it had a massive frame of wooden slabs, and that one of these, forming the lintel, protruded enough from the wall to make a narrow shelf above the door.
I pushed my chair into the hall and stood on the seat. The shelf was thick with dust in which lay forty-seven of my brother’s pipes and a wonderful miscellany of other small objects. Objects many of which I recalled, but some of which still fail to summon any flicker of response from the recesses of my mind…
The small blue egg of a songbird, specked with brown. I suppose the bird must have nested in the vine outside our window, and that David or I despoiled the nest only to be robbed ourselves by Mr. Million. But I do not recall the incident.
And there is a (broken) puzzle made of the bronzed viscera of some small animal, and—wonderfully evocative—one of those large and fancifully decorated keys, sold annually, which during the year of its currency will admit the possessor to certain rooms of the city library after hours. Mr. Million, I suppose, must have confiscated it when, after expiration, he found it doing duty as a toy; but what memories!
Phew. A lot to digest here. But this sequence contains everything I associate with Gene Wolfe: the dense prose, interjecting itself with parentheticals and complicating clauses; the acute attention to detail; the intensely psychological focus coming from an unreliable narrator, in this case one battling his imperfect memory. The detail, not just of the charming, semi-random items the narrator finds but of the particular childhood memory that began the search, and the slow breakthrough of recollection, creates a vivid and compelling effect. And, in even more Gene Wolfe fashion, the scene is peppered with clues to the larger story which is wrapped in mystery.
A central theme of The Fifth Head of Cerberus is the mystery of the self, which this excerpt presents a good taste of. The narrator straining and straining, for years in fact, to remember this tiny detail of his childhood is not only a compelling device for this scene, but reinforces the higher themes of the novel. The unreliable narrator is a favorite device of Gene Wolfe, who considered it much truer to life. In his words: “Real people really are unreliable narrators all the time, even if they try to be reliable narrators.” His expert use of the unreliable narrator is one of his greatest strengths as an author, layering what is already extraordinary prose with a fascinating psychological profile the reader is enticed to uncover.
Speaking of his prose, Wolfe’s Wikipedia page describes his style as dense and allusive, which I can hardly deny. The descriptors that come to my mind from the above sample are “sophisticated” and “mature.” It’s true that his writing style is complex, and likely this has prevented his work from being more widely read. But I find it strikes a very well crafted balance of complexity and punchiness. What would otherwise be unwieldy and overbearing sentences are made beautiful by careful word choice and a certain confidence of construction. One never feels he let a sentence get away from him; there is an aura of control throughout.
On storytelling level, the narrator’s offhand reference to spending time in prison injects a bit of mystery and anticipation into the book’s early pages.
One of Wolfe’s stated goals with his writing is to create a story “that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure.” With his masterful prose, endless layers of mystery, vivid imagination and fascinating psychological portraits, Wolfe creates a literary concoction that does exactly that. I think it’s a great shame that he remains a relatively niche author; anyone who cares to improve their own writing, or become a more “cultivated reader,” as Wolfe called it, must have something to learn from his writing.
This post christens the new year for this fledgling newsletter. If I have any New Year’s resolution it’s to stick to the prescribed schedule of one post a week for the full 52, until we find ourselves back on this side of the sun.
As always, hope it was worth your while. Wishing you all the best in this new year.
—Floyd
All my content is free. So if you like what you find here, why not subscribe?
His story "Forlesen" is one I keep coming back to. It captures the regimentation and idiocies of corporate life like nothing else I've read. It's like the movie "Office Space" compressed into a single day.