On The Banks of the Gyoll

Apologies, Dear Readers, for the lack of posting last week.  Just as the swallows return to Capistrano and the bankers to the Hamptons, so to does the summer mark my return to my ancestral stomping grounds in the Sunny South.  Unfortunately, divers distractions and a desire for a bit of unproductive, unhurried leisure kept me from my customary literary pursuits and robbed you of new content from your no-doubt favorite blog author.

Of course, the primary issue with free time is finding something to fill it.  And surely you know enough of  your host by now to guess that many long Southern afternoons would find me in tearing through the pages of a good book.  And in the spirit of summer's beachside paperback thrillers, I too turned from my usual academic fare for a rousing tale of action and mystery: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe.   Set in the incredibly distant far future of South America where the Sun has turned red and begun to die, the story follow Severian, a journeyman of the Torturer's Guild, as he unknowingly becomes a key player in a series of events that will save or damn the world.

Pictured: The Dying Sun.  Not Pictured: Surviving Life

Of course, the proof of the tale is in the telling, and the above could be the basis for a plodding sequence of pointless melodrama.  But Wolfe is a master of his art and know how to make the alien world really feel alien.  One technique that is particularly effective is Wolfe's word choice, which instead of taking the usual path of the genre writer and simply inventing terms for a story's monsters, mythology, and the like, pulls from the obscure vocabulary of prehistoric behemoths, medieval armaments, and classical mythology, frequently even leaving your humble correspondent reaching for a dictionary. For instance, rather than the world being infested with ogres or orcs, it is wild smilodons and megatherium stalking the hinterlands of Severian's world.  




To be sure, other writers in the field of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror have also used odd wording to set the mood of their writing.  One example that immediately springs to mind is Lovecraft, who never met an indescribable creature that wasn't squamous nor any lantern that could resist being made into a lanthorn.  Yet in Lovecraft's case the sense created by this diction is of the inherent wrongness of  an encounter with his various cosmic abominations.  Faced with the spawn of Yog-Sothoth or the like, Lovecraft's heroes pile on layers of archaic adjectives in an attempt to convey the nature of a horror that lies outside the confines of normal life, before finally conceding that the thing is in fact indescribable. Lovecraft's diction serves as a sign of the incommensurability of the mundane world and the horrible and unknowable nature of Cthulhu and his ilk.

Cosmic Horror, now in a recyclable bottle!

A different game is being played by Wolfe.  While Lovecraft's heroes, and by extension, his readers, are being thrust into a world beyond their comprehension, Severian, Wolfe's narrator, is a native resident of his far-future world.  Thus, when the book uses antiquated terminology, Severian is merely describing the features of his world as best he understands them.  To extend the above comparison, whereas in Lovecraft narrator and reader are united in lack of understanding towards their suddenly inexplicable world, in Wolfe it is the reader who is in continually left befuddled as Severian describes his comings and goings.

Of course, such confusion of terms can nowadays be remedied through a quick Google search.  But even so, Wolfe's verbiage helps keep Severian's narrative attractively hazy.  In the first place, having to stop reading the book to perform etymological research every few pages of necessity creates a slower, more contemplative pace in the reader than would be necessary in many other works.  And even after a word has had its definition uncovered, there then comes the realization of just how much more bizarre the world of the novel is now than previously suspected.  

A good example of this is the previously mentioned use of prehistoric animal names.  After one has looked up what exactly a megatherium is, the initial satisfaction of discovery gives way to the realization that this world somehow has 20 foot tall sloths that have been extinct for tens of millions of years.  This image is further complicated by Wolfe's note on his "translation" at the end of Shadow of the Torturer, where he states that his choice of names for animals and other things must be treated as merely suggestive rather than definitive.  The prehistoric species, for instance, are not necessarily living fossils but also creatures "resulting from biogenetic manipulation or the importation of extrasolar breeding stock." Even the mounts used in something as mundane as horseback riding are not quite the animals the reader at first imagines them to be:  "The nature of the riding and draft animals employed is frequently unclear in the original text. I have scrupled to call these creatures horses, since I am certain the word is not strictly correct."  

The cutest thing that is also 20 feet tall

I fear that my exegesis will make this seem Wolfe's book seem like one of those puzzle box books constructed by MFAs to give Comp Lit PhDs material for their theses.  It is anything but.  While certainly requiring more investment than the standard potboiler, the language and the setting of the work combine to create an atmosphere that can't be found anywhere else.  The adjective "dreamlike" is so overused as to become meaningless; nevertheless, it is what first comes to my mind when trying to articulate the appeal of this book.  Just as in a dream, the events of the book are by turn hazy and crystal-clear, just like in a dream there are moments of beauty and terror, just like in a dream one can sense a logic at work, one ultimately that we reach out to grasps even as it escapes us as we wake.