Last week’s letter was a long-winded way of contextualizing the fact that I think “Resurrection and Death,” the first chapter of Book of the New Sun is both utterly marvelous and (from a slightly more limited perspective) sort of bad. It’s a jarring, strange piece of writing; if someone showed just that chapter to me and asked if I had any feedback, I’d probably tell them that, while there was a lot of obviously beautiful stuff going on, I couldn’t really follow.
But if you approach the introduction in the way I wrote about last week – that is, in good faith and with a willingness to overread – I think “Resurrection and Death” is a masterfully textured, rich opening chapter. Especially with the knowledge of what’s to come, it serves as a kind of musical and psychological prelude of what’s to come, introducing and intertwining various themes.
Still, the first time I read it, I had no idea what on earth was going on. Because I think, ultimately, that the book is really good, I think that the particular nature of this disorientation — what it does and what it gives us — is worth dwelling on.
Today is the shadow of tomorrow
Here is the first paragraph:
It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer’s apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.
The temporality of the story is already deeply chaotic. Everything is happening at once. The book is being narrated by a “present-day” Severian, reflecting in tranquility after the events of the book have already come to pass; we begin with this present-tense Severian reflecting on whether the Severian he used to be knew what was coming—which is to say, on those events which went on to become his future self’s past. Already, time is layered upon itself1, accreting in objects and psyches. (Note the chapter’s title, too—it’s in the wrong order.)
Quickly, we pivot to the gate: an image of the past, mentally frozen in time, imbued with the meaning of the exile to follow. Without having been introduced to the gate, narrator-Severian writes as if we are already familiar with both it and “us.” In the context of the book, this isn’t a completely alien move – Book of the New Sun frequently addresses an audience which knows things we don’t; this is the means by which its world gains its uncanny solidity – but usually these references are to a world one can imagine Severian’s contemporaries would know. They are not usually references to individual people, or details as minor as specific gates. (This strangeness is deepened by an uncharacteristic uncertainty: while he’ll go on to insist, again and again, that he remembers everything perfectly, he’s not sure if he had a presentiment of his future. More on this in a second.)
The third sentence purports to explain – “That is why I have begun this account” – but (and this is a classic Wolfean move) raises as many questions as it answers. To focus again on the time aspect: narrator-Severian seems to be saying that, because of what this gate will come to mean—a meaning I may or may not have glimpsed in the moment—I will begin in the “aftermath” of a totally different event: a swim in which I “so nearly” drowned. (He goes on to describe this event in the next chapter.)
All alone in the moonlight
This is sort of bewildering writing, but, I think, it illustrates one of the central problems narrator-Severian encounters throughout the novel:
Now I am come to a part of my story where I cannot help but write of something I have largely avoided mentioning before. You that read it cannot but have noticed that I have not scrupled to recount in great detail things that transpired years ago, and to give the very words of those who spoke to me, and the very words with which I replied; and you must have thought this only a conventional device I had adopted to make my story flow more smoothly. The truth is that I am one of those who are cursed with what is called perfect recollection.
(I’m actually sympathetic to the idea that Severian’s memory is, in some sense, perfect; still, the joke here is that by this point in the book we’ve heard so, so many times about this perfect memory—doesn’t he remember telling us?)
We cannot, as I have sometimes heard foolishly alleged, remember everything. I cannot recall the ordering of the books on the shelves in the library of Master Ultan, for example. But I can remember more than many would credit: the position of each object on a table I walked past when I was a child, and even that I have recalled some scene to mind previously, and how that remembered incident differed from the memory of it I have now.
The recursivity here is dazzling, although he contradicts it in the next sentence:
When I cast my mind into the past, as I am doing now and as I did then when I sought to recall my dream, I remember it so well that I seem to move again in the bygone day, a day old-new, and unchanged each time I draw it to the surface of my mind, its eidolons as real as I.
Now, instead of a memory which differs with each recollection, his memory is “unchanged each time.”
In any case, what is perfect is not his memory’s accuracy or fidelity – as this contradiction evinces – but its completeness. (Think “perfect score,” not “perfect replica.” Given the filtering presence of human subjectivity, what exists in his mind can’t be some kind of exactly duplicated objective situation—but it can be replete, as full and vivid as present-tense reality. Its perfection is its fullness, not its accuracy.)
Severian faces an extreme version of problems which face everyone who writes anything, especially those who write about things which happened to them: how to understand the distinction between what is important to write about and what isn’t, what we can assume the reader knows and what we have to explain. The writer must balance negotiate the tension between the unknowably intricate web of memory, with all its irrational attachments and arbitrary associations and half-complete repressions, with the imperative to communicate.
Coin bits
Like many issues of writerly “craft,” the question of where to begin a story is at once technical and philosophical. As a general principle, you want the reader to understand what’s happening such that they become quickly curious about what will happen. Are there reasons to not prioritize comprehension?
Wolfe has an answer for us, I think. One of the more famous (explicitly) philosophical passages in the novel comes near the end of the first chapter, after Severian is given a coin by the mysterious heretic Vodalus:
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.
As with all of the novel’s philosophical proclamations, it’s important to take them in context—this is penultimate paragraph of Severian’s attempt to explain why and how, as he puts it, “I began the long journey by which I have backed into the throne.”
Proust is the Big Book most cited when people talk about Book of the New Sun, but this whole section reminds me a lot of the first chapter of Moby-Dick, which also begins with a mysterious mononymic narrator musing on how weird it is that he did the things he’s about to describe himself doing:
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces- though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
Severian has been set down for a magnificent part; his position differs from Ishmael’s in this sense. Still, both narrators seem perplexed by the experiences their books recount. The beginnings of their stories feel disproportionate to where they wind up going: Severian’s hypothetical soldier doesn’t know what he’s signed up for; disguised forces induce Ishmael to set about performing the part he does. Ishmael thinks he can “see a little” of why he did what he did, and Book of the New Sun begins in uncertainty, too: it is possible he already had some pressentiment. He might not have had one; if he did have one, it might not have been much. The narrators’ experiences are, in some sense, opaque to the narrators themselves. Book of the New Sun begins in such disorienting perplexity in part because the narrator is disoriented and perplexed.
Ishmael describes himself as ultimately compelled by the white whale, an object whose meaning is at once symbolic and in excess of all symbolic explanation:
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
In the same way that Vodalus’s coin invents Severian, the white whale invents Ishmael. There is something in the world that draws me towards it; in the process, it forges me, forms my psychology in its shadowy image.
Even as I didn’t understand what was happening, “Resurrection and Death” has a kind of solidity to it. Like Severian’s coin, the chapter is set in our minds as a kind of symbol without clear symbolic meaning, a thing we feel and experience – and, more importantly, follow – but don’t understand.
And because the episode describes Severian’s acquisition of the coin, we are, in an important sense, being formed (“invented”) by the same thing that formed Severian. The same thing which framed and foreshadowed Severian’s life frames and foreshadows Book of the New Sun. We, the readers, are where he was: standing in front of the foggy gate, wondering what it all will mean.
[Minor spoiler alert for Citadel of the Autarch!]
This figurative vertical stratification finds literal expression later in the story: take, for example, in Chapter XVI of Citadel of the Autarch: Master Ash, the visitor from the timeline in which Urth is not saved, takes Severian upstairs to look at the frozen wasteland Urth has become; forced by Severian to go downstairs and exit, he vanishes.