Gene Wolfe

by Michael Andre-Driussi

  Hildegrin has Agia sit in the bow of the boat, Severian and Dorcas in the stern, and he himself sits in the middle where he can row. Like Dante, Severian has two guides now: Dorcas takes the Virgil part, replacing Agia; and Hildegrin speaks for the centaur Nessus. In pointing out the sights, Hildegrin shows them the Cave of the Cumaean, which harkens to the opening of Graves’ I, Claudius and also foreshadows the fact that the next time when they meet, Hildegrin will be in the company of the Cumaean at the Stone Town.

  The name of this chapter is “Hildegrin.” That the previous chapter would be called “Dorcas” makes obvious sense, but Hildegrin seems like such a minor character. Except that when Hildegrin attacks the newly raised Apu-Punchau in the Stone Town he reveals himself to be the “anti-Apu-Punchau,” and thus the “anti-Severian.” So, to return to the Dante track, Hildegrin really is the centaur Nessus to Severian’s Heracles — he just hasn’t made his assassination attempt yet.

  So on the “Eschatology and Genesis” track, Severian is Adam, Dorcas is Eve, Agia is Lilith, and Hildegrin is the Demiurge.

  Hildegrin gives reasons for the name of the lake: “Because so many’s found dead in the water, is what some say ... There’s a great deal said against Death ... But she’s a good friend to birds, Death is. Wherever there’s dead men and quiet, you’ll find a good many birds, that’s been my experience.”

  •

  Our last chapter at the Lake of Birds is titled “The Flower of Dissolution,” which suggests the lotus of Buddha and the illusion of reality called the Veil of Maya. Yet the first sentence has Dorcas drawing a hyacinth from the lake as if by magic, causing Severian to wonder “Is it possible the flower came into being only because Dorcas reached for it?” That the flower “materializes” stands in stark opposition to the “dissolution” of the chapter title.

  In true Proustian style, the observation of this simple act (a young woman plucking a flower from the water) sets off in Severian a meditation on opposites, the nature of light and darkness, and the illusion of reality. Such thoughts add to the Buddhistic mood.

  Hildegrin interprets Severian’s detachment as a contemplation of his own death. Dorcas seems to think so too, and tries to talk him out of dying. It would appear that Dorcas plucked the plant of life from the water, whereas the avern Severian must get is unmistakable the plant of death.

  On the King Arthur track, where would we be now? Crossing the misty waters, heading for the farther shore of Avalon — this is the “Death of Arthur” scene, the dissolution of Logres. With Dorcas as the Lady of the Lake, Hildegrin as Morgan le Fay, and Agia as the Lady of Avalon.

  When Severian actually picks his avern we see not only Gilgamesh picking the Gray-Grow-Young plant (a key of eternal youth) at the climax of his otherworld quest, but also Aeneas plucking the Golden Bough of Proserpina (a key to the underworld) at the beginning of his otherworld quest, as well as the famous rites at the Lake of Nemi, where every aspirant to the priesthood had to break a certain branch as challenge and kill the priest of the sacred grove.

  The avern plant looks something like a cross between an artichoke and a white rose. White roses in the Sand Garden (next door to the Garden of Endless Sleep) are linked to the white roses on the beach at the end of Citadel of the Autarch, which in turn are linked to the artifact known as the Claw of the Conciliator, which restores the dead to life, but the leaves of the avern are poisoned deadly daggers. Life and death, paired again. Scattered at the base of the avern are the bones of birds, alluding no doubt to the “no birds” sense of Avernus.

  Shortly after getting his flower, Severian leaves the Lake of Birds in the Garden of Endless Sleep and returns to Nessus.

  Looking back over these three chapters, we can see both the intricate layering and the hologrammic nature of TBNS. In many respects, Severian’s adventure at the Lake of Birds parallels various literary and mythological underworld adventures in the afterlife. We glimpse Aeneas with his golden bough; Gilgamesh with his eternal youth plant; Dante touring hell; Heracles and Nessus; King Arthur receiving Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, and perhaps being borne off to Avalon. Severian’s experience here also prefigures his larger journey to the “real” heaven and hell of the hyperspace worldplanet Yesod, where the white flower becomes the big blossom at the birth of a new universe.

  Life and death. Graveyard and garden. A vibrant new work created from the fossilized remains of World Literature.

  Posthistory 101

  Gene Wolfe’s Urth Cycle (composed of the four-volume Book of the New Sun, the novel The Urth of the New Sun, the novella Empires of Foliage and Flower, and the short-stories “The Cat,” “The Map,” “The Boy Who Hooked the Sun,” and “The Old Woman Whose Rolling Pin Is the Sun”) takes place in a future so far removed from the present as to be deemed by Wolfe himself a posthistory, balancing against the eons of unfathomable prehistory. There is a strong tradition of future histories in SF: in The Time Machine (1895), Wells explores the world of A.D. 802,701 and beyond, to a landscape lit by a dying red sun; and Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) gives a mind-boggling view of eighteen species of man evolving and devolving across two billion years, all of which is only a footnote to his later, galactic-scale Star Maker (1937). There is also a tradition of science fantasists, a hybrid of science fiction realism with the trappings of quasi-medieval fantasy. The Zothique stories of Clark Ashton Smith, published between 1932 and 1948, pick up the thread of stellar death established by Wells and Stapledon with a new twist of the “future past” where mankind lives on a southern continent and dabbles with necromancy while the red sun grows cold. This notion is further honed by Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth (1950), where the forgotten magic and superscience (nearly indistinguishable from each other) are sought after by sardonic and cunning magicians and rogues. Wolfe seems to have applied Clarke’s Law to Vance’s world, insisting that superscience is magic, and vice versa, and while Wolfe has openly acknowledged Smith and Vance as providing the impetus for the Urth Cycle, there is also a certain amount of Wells and Stapledon present as well. Though Wells provides dates for his future history and Stapledon gives charts of ever-increasing scale, Wolfe is much more subtle in his approach.

  There are a lot of terms relating to large time scales and historical periods floating around in the Urth Cycle, and some are rather flexible. For example, the term “saros” (the Babylonian name for the number 3600, or a period of 3600 years; adopted by modern astronomers as the name of the cycle of eighteen years and ten and two-thirds days, in which solar and lunar eclipses repeat themselves) is used in both its ancient sense, by Severian (“The decades of a saros would not be long enough for me to write” [I.ii.12]) and its modern sense, by an unlettered old woman near the Stone Town: “‘once or twice in each saros one of those he [Apu-Punchau] has called to him will sup with us.... You will recall the silent man.... You were only a child, but you will remember him, I think. He was the last until now’” (III.vii.51). The appendix article “Money, Measures, and Time” gives definitions for a few of these terms: “a chiliad designates a period of 1,000 years. An age is the interval between the exhaustion of some mineral or other resource in its naturally occurring form (for example, sulphur) and the next” (II, app.). All well and good, but what on Urth is a “manvantara”? What is the relationship between the various named ages (Monarch, Autarch, Myth, Ushas) mentioned in the Cycle? And what do these ages have in common with the definition given?

  Severian uses the term “manvantara” for the lifecycle of a universe from Big Bang (or “Big Bloom,” as he describes it [IV.xxxiv.241]) to the “Grand Gnab” (Otter 69) — the final collapse of matter into itself. This is appropriate, since a manvantara is a measure of time in Hindu cosmology, composed of four “yuga” or ages of the world. These four yuga correspond to the Classical Ages of Man (Gold, Silver, Copper, and Iron), which in turn brings us back to Wolfe’s oblique definition connecting ages with minerals. (The reference to “sulphur” would seem to be a red herring.)
For the ancient Romans as well as the ancient Hindus, the transition from a Golden Age to an Iron Age reflects a decline from a highly spiritual Edenic state to one of gross brutality. In the first age, the Krita-yuga, mankind possesses natural virtue, and there is no sadness, malice, or deceit; in Treta-yuga, duties are no longer spontaneous, they must be learned, and sacrifice and ceremony are invented; by Dwapara-yuga, disease, desire, and disaster have become commonplace, and the Rig Veda (the earliest of sacred Hindu texts) appears; and finally, in Kali-yuga the world enters a dark age of strife and warfare, where love and sex are separated, few know truth, material possessions confer rank, and outer trappings are confused with inner religion.

  Posthistory, or the history of Urth, seems to be divided into four phases: the Age of Myth, the Age of the Monarch, the Age of the Autarch, and the Age of Ushas. Furthermore, there is a marked similarity between the four Hindu yuga and the four ages of Urth.

  Start with the foreground and the Age of the Autarch. The majority of the action in the Urth Cycle takes place in the Age of the Autarch, an age named most conspicuously in Wolfe’s article “Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch” (Castle of the Otter). This is the period of Urth in decline, ruled in name only by a leader of a continent in the southern hemisphere. Technology is so long forgotten that even its custodians are reduced to rite and ritual: the knowledge that the “towers” are actually rocket ships is so widely known that one begins to suspect that, despite all of Severian’s dreams of them lifting into the sky at the utterance of a secret word, the ships really have fossilized into mere towers. Nowhere is nature left untouched: all the mountains have been carved into monuments to long-forgotten autarchs. Religion, too, seems to have fallen off, and as a testament to brutality, the war between the Commonwealth and Ascia, ultimately a struggle between the Other Lords and the New Sun, has been going on for at least several generations. Watching over it all, the sun itself has grown so dim that stars can be seen during the day. This is the Kali-yuga, the Iron Age.

  Assembling the various hints and clues, one comes up with the following fragmentary history:

  • The age begins with the first autarch, Ymar the Almost Just. Ymar is an apprentice of the jailers (the prototype of the torturers) in the last days of Typhon, but nothing is known about his rise to power. He reforms the jailers into two guilds (witches and torturers), has Father Inire build the Second House within the walls of the House Absolute, and takes the test of the hierodules by going to Yesod. He dies circa 1000 PS (Pre-Severian’s reign).

  • Sometime between 1000 PS to 700 PS, the Yellow Empire and the Green Empire end their war against each other, possibly in that region of the northern hemisphere later known as Ascia, with the takeover of the Green capital by soldiers in silver armor who fly a silver flag, a strong suggestion that the Mirror-people of ancient Chinese legend have come again.[i] This period probably marks the introduction to Urth of the great monsters (Abaia, Erebus, et al.), the exultant clans, and the technology of the magic mirrors. (The dates are guesswork, based on textual details suggesting that the war lasts either a thousand years [Empires of Foliage and Flower] or a hundred generations [II.xxxi.265], that its end comes after the era of Typhon [a soldier in Empires says, “‘By the Book! ... What in the name of awful Abaia’” (CRANK! 2:27)] but before the brown book is published [as Empires is a story in the same].)

  • The Book of Wonders of Urth and Sky (also known as the brown book) is a standard work from 400 to 300 PS.

  • In 300 PS, Autarch Sulpicius sets aside a collection of books in the Library at Nessus. The torturers entertain a guest at Holy Katharine’s feast, an event that becomes a part of guild lore (I.xi.89).

  • Sometime around 210 PS (i.e., at least seven generations before Severian), the spaceship Fortunate Cloud crashes on Urth. Jonas is damaged in the crash, which perhaps occurred near the House Absolute, since the crew is imprisoned in the antechamber, a place reserved for people accused of committing crimes on the grounds of the House Absolute.

  • In 100 PS, the witches complain about the presence of the post (used for torture) in the Old Yard of the Citadel, so it is moved into the Matachin Tower (I.xii.99).

  • Circa 70 PS, Autarch Maruthas closes the roads to unauthorized traffic, giving the uhlans (a kind of highway patrol) the right to kill and loot offenders (I.xii.102). (This figure assumes that Master Palaemon is ninety years old in 1 PS.)

  • A scandal involving servant Lomer (twenty-eight years old) and Chatelaine Sancha (fourteen years old) sends Lomer into the antechamber during the reign of Appian in 66 PS (II.xv.113). Odilo I serves in the House Absolute.

  • In 62 PS, Chatelaine Sancha leaves the House Absolute for fifty years (Endangered Species 215). I assume her to be eighteen years old.

  • Paeon the honey steward dies in 50 PS.

  • In 42 PS, Dorcas dies in childbirth at age sixteen (I.xxxvii.176: husband searching for forty years, began the year after she died). (I.xxvi.205: she looks sixteen years old). (IV.xxxvii.264: she died in childbirth). (IV.xxxii.225: she had died forty or more years ago).

  • In 31 PS, Journeyman Palaemon is exiled from the torturers’ guild over a mysterious scandal (IV.xii.89), and at the same time something happens regarding the Phoenix Throne: either the “Old Autarch” (a nameless figure) begins reign, or Appian changes his ways, perhaps returning unmanned from his own trip to Yesod (II.xxiv.188).

  • Around 20 PS Thecla is born; Catherine is in the Matachin Tower, and Severian is born; and the Old Autarch becomes a criminal, presumably by opening the Echopraxia brothel.

  • Around 19 PS, a silent man with a staff visits the Stone Town (III.vii.51). Or might it have been as far back as 30 PS, when it could be Palaemon on his way north?

  • Odilo II begins work at the House Absolute in the year 15 PS.

  • In 12 PS, Chatelaine Sancha returns to the House Absolute (Endangered Species 215).

  • In 10 PS, Thecla (assume around ten years old) sees Sancha alive (II.xv.112).

  • In 6 PS, Sancha dies at age seventy-five, “a series of incidents that culminated ... ten years ago” (Endangered Species 211) written by Odilo II in 5 SR (Severian’s Reign).

  • In 2 PS: Severian saves Vodalus’ life (autumn); Thecla is sent to the torturers (winter); Severian finds Triskele and meets Valeria; Drotte and Roche are elevated to journeymen; and Severian is taken to Echopraxia (spring).

  • In 1 PS, Severian has eight months as captain of apprentices, then he is elevated (winter) and eleven days later exiled to Thrax (spring), but later he flees further north, finishing the year at the Last House (summer). Jader’s sister (in Thrax) is around ten years old; and (by the above calculations relating to Sancha) Lomer is ninety-four years old.

  • In 1 SR, Severian fights at the Third Battle of Orythia, becomes autarch, and marries Valeria.

  • At some point early in his reign, Severian lives for a year among the Ascians (V. li.364), perhaps as a slave (Thrust no. 19:9).

  • Odilo II tells tale of “The Cat” on Hallowmass Eve (in the full of the Spading Moon) of 5 SR (Endangered Species 210).

  • In 8 SR, Eata is convicted of smuggling and sentenced to work as a sweepsman, but he escapes into Xanthic Lands (V.xlvi.327).

  • In 10 SR, Severian embarks on his journey to Yesod, rewrites his autobiography; Eata returns to Commonwealth, has adventure of “The Map.”

  • Dux Caesidus, Valeria’s second husband, dies in 49 SR (V.xlvi.329); an assassin dies within the Second House (V.xli.291).

  • Severian returns from his trip to Yesod in 50 SR. This figure is deduced from the fact that Jader’s sister is sixty or more years old (V.xliii.302) and Odilo III is serving in the House Absolute (V.xliv.313). Thus, Valeria is around seventy years old.

  So an unbroken chain of autarchs link Ymar and Severian across the thousand-year gap that separates them. But what came before?

  Step back a few chiliads to the Age of the Monarch. Although the House Absolute was originally bui
lt by the monarchs, most of the other details about this age are buried in legends and stories. Cyriaca’s tale of the lost archives, told in Sword of the Lictor, contains much about the Age of the Monarch. To paraphrase: the age begins when a starfaring people (probably Asiatic, if not Chinese) leave their “wild half” (emotions, fears, and feelings) behind and establish the First Empire upon Order alone. As the Empire expands to encompass one thousand stars, the wild half is sold to the “thinking engines” (computers) and “androids” (mechanical men), who then set out to ruin their makers. They do this by releasing artifacts and building whimsical cities (recall the league-high cliff Severian works his way down in Sword, and reconsider the “mountain” that had sunken as a long-forgotten supercity of this age) over “a thousand lifetimes” (seventy chiliads?), and eventually this return of the wild half destroys the empire. (These fantastic cities also bring to mind the incredible supercities built and abandoned by various races in Stapledon’s work.)

  As well as reintroducing thoughts of fortune, revenge, the invisible world, and the like, the machines also gave each man and woman a companion (i.e., an “eidolon” or “aquastor”), unseen by other eyes, as an adviser. But the machines grow weaker over time and become unable to maintain the aquastors or build any more cities — attaining that point of senility at which they had hoped that mankind would turn against them and destroy them. But when no such thing happens, the machines call the humans that loved them the most, teach them all the things that their race had put away, and then they die. Because the machines had each tutored only one human, the humans they had taught cannot agree on a thing among themselves, and eventually each becomes a sort of hermit scribe and writes out all that he or she had learned.

  After a long time, a monarch (most likely Typhon) with dreams of a Second Empire gathers up all the writings in newly built Nessus in order to destroy them. But he decides to shelter the books in case his Second Empire should fail, so the Library of Nessus is established.