Notes Toward an Analysis of the Book of The New Sun
I’ve been thinking a lot about Gene Wolfe’s sci-fi/fantasy masterpiece The Book of the New Sun (BoTNS) (1980-1983). In particular, I’m fascinated by the ways in which the narrator and protagonist Severian, the torturer, builds a text in ways that contrast with the similarly divergent and unreliable narrative voices and characters in Moby-Dick, Ulysses, and Lolita (If you’ve not read BoTNS, it is absolutely on par with these texts’ complexity, breadth, and level of craft).
In Ulysses (1922), the narrative style changes radically by chapter in a precisely structured contrapuntal movement that’s a big part of the Ulysses project; the characters compose that narrative voice with a similarly wide variance, but their interiorities nevertheless feel basically naturalistic, Stephen slightly less so. By contrast, I suppose you could say the narrative voice in Finnegans Wake (1939) becomes fractallized, but that may be less relevant here since Wolfe isn’t quite so radical (or is he?)
In contrast, Moby-Dick (1851) is more explicitly presentational and aesthetic: the narrative voice periodically becomes highly structured, not only in terms of expositional voice (the famous “whale facts” chapters) but also prosodically, when chapters such as “Sunset” are written in iambic pentameter (see also “Sirens” in Ulysses). In other words, Ishmael comes in and out of focus, and when present often chooses to talk about whales and Bible stuff instead of himself or the events of the narrative.
Lolita (1955) to some extent synthesizes these two tendencies and its publication yielded the most interesting and troubling unreliable narrator in English literature for at least the next 25 years (the first book of BoTNS, Shadow of the Torturer, was published in 1980). Like Ishmael, Humbert is volatile and highly aestheticized, constantly shifting focus and style depending on who or what he is talking about. Like Joyce’s meta-narrator he is concerned with a fundamentally structuralist project, constructing a self-consciously literary, that is to say textual, representation of himself and the world (“Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity”).
After all, it’s your adult intelligence Humbert is trying to flatter, your adult sense of the Lacanian “lalangue” (the sensuous pleasure of language) that he is appealing to: “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo-lee-ta.”
That’s why, like BoTNS, it’s important to reread Lolita, because advance knowledge of who Humbert is gives away the game from the start. (Admittedly, this prior knowledge now usually comes about through cultural osmosis). In that light, sentences like the above are no longer merely flowery but rather the site of a sexual violation by proxy, yielding a visceral revulsion that is something like Asuka’s in the final scene of End of Evangelion (1997): “kimochi warui” (“yuck”, “how disgusting”, etc.)
The first thing I noticed about Severian in BoTNS is that he sounds an awful lot like Humbert, and I mean that literally. His prosody is similar, he has the same facility with language, the same intelligence, the same overt (if not unsuccessful) attempts to charm You, the reader, to get you on his side in spite of the horrors he freely admits responsibility for.
The difference here is it’s much less clear what Severian wants from this whole performance. What are his motives for going to all this trouble, why write a book that he claims simply to toss into “the cold of interstellar space” as Joyce terms it?
The major contrast, the elephant in the room and Wolfe’s radical departure from all of the above except maybe Joyce, is that Severian — if he is to be believed in this matter — is writing in the role of the autarch, meaning that he is many, an amalgamation of hundreds if not thousands of historical consciousnesses. Deleuze and Guattari say: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.” They’re being cute but also making a serious claim about the multiple and contingent nature of the self, bolstered by a century of psychoanalytic and critical theory articulating that perspective.
So I think in one sense Wolfe is being a good Deleuzian here (which also raises a number of interesting, if tangential, questions about the politics of BoTNS). We can read Severian as a body without organs — a site of lines of flight that serve at turns to legitimate and destabilize his own claims to (narrative, psychic) self-consistency, perhaps we should say autarky.
Put another way, Severian goes to great pains to show us that his book is narratively consistent, even finally going so far as to assert that he’ll rewrite the whole thing from memory, as if that’s what it will take to convince us he’s telling the truth. But simultaneously, the claim his narrative is most clearly meant to legitimate — his role as Autarch of Urth — embeds a multiplicity that undermines the basis for any such claim to singular authority.
Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as simultaneously exhibiting two contradictory tendencies: the first toward deterritorialization — what we might today call “disruption”, the atomization of community, the rupture of traditional ways of being, the erasure of political, cultural, and geographic borders that would restrict the free flow of capital and labor. The second toward reterritorialization — the inscription on the (social, psychic, physical body) of ideological and material structures that legitimate and entrench capital.
It seems that Severian is a site for the same type of movement (and why shouldn’t he — capital also tries to make a singularity out of something that is irreducibly multiple). The revulsion with which Severian regards the cultural fascism Ascians belies his own disavowal of the great magnitude of interior fascism required to marshal a singular narrative voice out of innumerably many subjects.