Taking a few days off after Easter I began a long-hungered for read: The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe.
One of the signs of the poverty of our culture is how few people who “like science fiction” have neither read nor heard of Wolfe. Dark is the hour and terrible the omens over that people who fill shelves of the “Fantasy and Sci-Fi” section with Y-A pulp and leave no room for Gene Wolfe.
I remember my first time reading Wolfe, I picked-up the far darker Book of the New Sun and frustratingly whorled my way to the end of the first book and returned it to the library exhausted, terrified, and deeply moved. I later found-out that Gene Wolfe had been a delight of Jim Jordan, and about whom Jim had not only written extensively but also had interviewed at some great length. Wolfe was, as Jordan still is, a polymath.
And so I’ve come back to Wolfe time and again finding it always deeper than I remember. His work is the kind that the more you understand the more questions you find yourself asking. Which brings me to my point in this slightly hagiographic entry: reading Wolfe is like reading the Bible. As the hosts of the podcast Re-Reading Wolfe suggest in their title, to read Wolfe is to necessarily re-read Wolfe. A few noteworthy ruminations, applicable to Wolfe’s work generally and applicable to the Bible eternally. Where it is generally true of Wolfe, the Bible is the consummation of the truth:
When you think you’ve found a mistake, you’re probably wrong. Even when you’re positive it’s a mistake, you’re probably wrong.
Take, for instance the famous “error” on the first page of the first chapter of New Sun, where the same quote is assigned to two distinct individuals. It must just be a copy error, right? Wrong. Perhaps both men said it, or, as is often the case in Wolfe, perhaps they are not distinct individuals. When the Scriptures say Judas both hanged himself and that he fell headlong in the field, the scriptures aren’t wrong. Perhaps both happened and only one was effective, or, as is often the case in the Bible, perhaps they are not distinct actions.No name, number, color, or item is ever unimportant. You can interpret these things wrongly or correctly, but you’ll always be wrong if you assume “this means nothing.” The fact that Vodalus’ sign is the two-faced Janus is more than a useful mechanic. And the 153 fish that the disciples catch in John 20 carries far more weight than a mere exact reckoning of freight.
Time is important. Only then can one play with time in ways that are important. No date in scripture or in Wolfe’s literature is meaningless. Keep it, remember it, count it, do the math, figure-out what day of the week it fell on, discover how many years it has been since the previous thing. Vistas unheard of open for us. And, only once these vistas are opened, then the authors get to do crazy things. Wolfe gets to send the green time-travelling man to an antecedent “future”, and St. John gets to write the gospel that bears his name.
Symbols are more than signifiers. Symbols are not merely a kind of stylistic shorthand. Symbols are real, symbols beget people, events, things, etc. As Severian reflects in New Sun, “We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges” (14). The wedding band I wear on my ring-finger makes me what I am… it literally has shaped and warped the density of my finger over the past decade. When I take it off, you see that I have been shaped by it. Wolfe’s stories are shaped by the symbols, not the other way around. So also, the “symbols” in the Bible do more than “mean” something, they do things. The prophet’s oil, the shaved head, the unblemished lamb, the bread and wine on the table, the words confessing Christ as Lord, they invent us.
To read Wolfe is to re-read Wolfe. To read the Bible is always to re-read the Bible. Brothers and sisters, dearly beloved of God, go treat your Scriptures with at least the same level of study and devotion we nerds afford to Gene Wolfe.