S&C: Fractal pattern

[Al]

I'm (re)reading Shadow & Claw in extreme slow motion. I just hit a small part that seems to me to be a minature version of one of the main techniques Wolfe uses in the book. I thought I might mention it and see if folks think I'm all wet. (An appropriate metaphor, I guess.)

In a chapter called 'The Shadow of the Torturer' in the book of the same name (good fractal wind up here) Severain recounts his first job as an executioner. He provides a narrative of the act, it complications, and then as he was 'cleaning off his boots' being summoned for payment, receiving it, and then waiting until dark and departing.

On the way out of town with Dorcas we find...

"Dorcas seemed to draw the brown mantle closer about her. “I was hoping you wouldn’t have to practice it again at all. At least, not for a long time. You were so ill afterward, and I don’t blame you.”"

...a comment which Severain dismisses but which seems to me to contain the heart of the matter at least emotionally. Yet being ill is something Severain doesn't mention and perhaps even fails to recognize as significant.

Given his sketchy description of other matters that would generally be deeply felt, I started thinking that perhaps we see the same pattern used in chapters and, in fact, the arc of the whole story: a set of emotional puzzles to match the other types of puzzles the books pose and perhaps a comment on the impact of Severain's upbringing on its practitioners.

[Jlawrence, S&L Moderator]

That's an excellent example and I agree with your interpretation of it - there are repeated cases of him letting something slip that reveals he omitted something else earlier. We touched on the omission you're talking about it in Severian as an unreliable narrator thread.

With the help of various posters here I caught more of these "revealed omissions" during this re-read as opposed to my first read, but I still didn't notice many in Sword & Citadel, so I think there's part of this pattern I'm still missing.

[Al]

Yeah, I'd read the thread but missed that I was citing exactly the same passage as Adrienne. And, I think, to illustrate much the same point.

Beside her post, I'm not sure I've seen much discussion of the underlying mechanic that cues what Severain recounts and what he doesn't. My sense is that gaps might be created not by Severian being defensive or even trying to spin events to picture himself in a favorable light but that he might be simply a bad interpreter of his own emotional life even to the point of missing significant events in it and not understanding his own motivation. He's a bad interpreter of his own inner life.

So we have the puzzle of the worlds history, the puzzle of alien science, etc, pieced together around the arc of a tale of love, rupture, departure, and return described by someone who's not aware that he's living that story.

Kinda fits with Wolfe next book about the man who's lost his ability to form long term memory and starts each day anew trying to piece together just what it is that he's about.

How do we interpret events when we're a deep mystery to ourselves? What parts of ourselves need to be there to allow us to figure out who we, in fact, are and what we're up to.

[Jlawrence, S&L Moderator]

I agree that the gaps probably arise from Severian being such a "a bad interpreter of his own emotional life" that he omits things that are quite significant (his feeling of revulsion after performing Agilius' execution you mention; Thecla sometimes trying to claw his eyes out when enraged while imprisoned -- for that matter, the exact nature of his relationship with Thecla). I believe the omissions are in line with various elements that are meant to make the reader approach what Severian says critically, so as to start puzzling out what's really going on.

I'm still undecided on which puzzles in the books are solvable, but I think the 'nature of Severian's true feelings' / 'why he omits what he does' might be the most difficult. First of all, because of the very murkiness of the defining someones 'true motivations', as you've noted ("we're a deep mystery to ourselves"). Then you have Severian's omissions and his possible insanity (the possibility of purely imagined incidents). And finally, the fact that we're stuck inside his viewpoint. We get pieces of other people's viewpoints when he chooses to recount them -- like Dorcas mentioning his getting ill that sparked your thoughts on this -- but that's very different from some kind of consistent external viewpoint (extra puzzle pieces) that would help shape a fuller portrait -- eg, if Wolfe had constructed the novel so that chapters from Dorcas' or Jonas' viewpoints alternated with Severian's. But instead it is Severian's tale solely.

Any first person narrative invites this tension between "what really happened" and the narrator's subjective viewpoint / story-telling choices. But this tension is certainly highlighted in Severian.

[Jlawrence, S&L Moderator]

Adrienne wrote: " wouldn't have appreciated the books as much if the viewpoint switched around...

Oh yeah, I was just toying with the idea of alternating first-person accounts, but as much as I'd like to read excerpts from a Diary of Dorcas, I agree that the singular first-person viewpoint of Severian is essential to the nature and method of these books.

Also, after Citadel and especially after Urth, I'm thinking the "madness" aspect of our unreliable narrator is actually a bit of a red herring. There seems to be no real pay-off for it -- no scene, as far as I can tell, that is presented as completely real one place and later revealed to have been completely imagined. And it otherwise becomes a kind of wily-nilly "X or Y was all a dream!" thing. I think its real purpose, given how Severian relates it in those early Shadow chapters to possibly wishing Vodalus into being like an "eidolon", is to foreshadow how important the concept of eidolons / aquastors become later (spoilery further discussion of that in the Corridors of Time thread).

[Al]

Very interesting comments.

I wonder if it might be useful to divide the puzzles into:

a) those that Wolfe had 'solved' and is revealing (or partially revealing) in fragments as a literary device, e.g. towers are spaceships, the technologies of time/space travel and/or communication, etc. (This includes the age and history of Urth. I mention that because it is the reason I loved the books on my initial read: they were the first that really communicated a sense of wonder to me about 100,000s year old human culture. Other books had it but Wolfe made it live in my mind. This happened, I think, because the way he displayed it in fragmented details. Keep in mind, I'm reading the books as a series as spread out over time as they came out. Spoilers were impossible.)

b) puzzles that Wolfe is trying to solve by writing the book. Do we know the essentials of our own story? What key parts of our nature are opaque to us? Ok then, let's give a character eidetic memory and emotional blindness and then have him tell his story and see what he makes of himself.

(The way I approach some books changed quite a bit after hearing Elmore Leonard say he wrote his books by finding interesting characters and then following them around to see what they did.)

I believe his next book was Latro in the Mist which seemed to ask similar question but which I found much less compelling as a read.

[Jlawrence, S&L Moderator]

Yes, I believe that's a useful distinction. I would add that the puzzles that fall into b) are essentially unsolvable "big questions" -- but that's what makes them excellent subjects to explore through fiction.

However, the line between a) and b) is also fuzzy and shifting, since some things that appear to be "explorations of unsolvable puzzles" upon a first read can resolve into jigsaw pieces of a solvable puzzle upon a re-read. Because of the richness of these books, I'm betting the line would shift again with a third read. But I would also agree some things, especially those dealing with the slippery nature of Severian's "true" self and "true" memory, would remain in category b).