Category Archives: Books


The Dream of the Red Chamber

I received today the first volume (of five, for a total of 2500 pages, give or take) of “The Story of the Stone”, better known as “The Dream of the Red Chamber”. One of the four great Chinese classical novels and the one most known and famous among those four. All these four being “epics” in their own right, especially in size (but not just) since they all exceed the thousand pages.

This Penguin Classics edition has a good 40 pages introduction and it is the reason why I’m writing this. It presents an interesting case of “unreliable narrator” embedded in the book. Actually THREE unreliable narrators that existed for real and only known for their suggestive nicknames: Red Inkstone, Almond and Odd Tablet. With a fourth called Gao E who actually delivered the final edited work and got called liar by the majority of the critics. Obviously the original manuscript was lost, only 80 chapters on the total 120 were finished, and it’s not even sure if those 80 chapters were also rewritten and adjusted, or if the remaining 40 chapters were done from scratch, or followed an outline of the original author, or were instead written by the original author but before said guy went to rewrite and polish the first 80 (“All the evidence suggests that he finished the novel long before he died and was merely revising and correcting during his final years.”).

Essentially it’s a mess, made worse by the fact that there are allusions of it being an elaborate riddle to solve, or even a satirical commentary, but all so buried and successively adulterated that it’s now impossible to get the “true story” out of it. This all explicitly teased right in the text:

Pages full of idle words
Penned with hot and bitter tears:
All men call the author fool;
None his secret message hears.

In fact in China they are all over this like a national sport, writing every years piles of books whose only purpose is to reinterpret, redefine and speculate, over this one book, its history, its hidden meaning, its allusions, its author(s) and so on.

The other fun fact is about timeline problems and similar mistakes:

But the problem of inconsistency which troubled Gao E and continues to trouble translators is by no means all due to the anonymous author of the last forty chapters. Cao Xueqin himself must be held responsible for quite a few of the novel’s minor inconsistencies. This is partly due to the elaborate devices he used for distinguishing the facts of his family history – switching generations, substituting Peking for Nanking, and so forth – which make him peculiarly susceptible to slips about ages, dates, places, and the passage of time.

I guess this is the kind of necessary evil when an author embarks for something truly “epic” and recklessly ambitious, without the guarantee to see it through (in fact, considering the incompleteness, this is more a case of Jordan-Sanderson).

Let’s forgive Erikson for his similar slips, and remember that someone like George RR Martin, who expressly admitted of obsessing over these sort of things, is more likely to succumb than succeed in the process.

Trystero

A relevant quote from “The Crying of Lot 49” (that is, depending on what chapter you hit, great or infuriating):

“You don’t understand,” getting mad. “You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but-” a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head-“in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also…”

Literature and reality: The Language that Comes Before

I stumbled at random on a Youtube link that ended up full of interesting suggestions. There are a number of class sessions at Yale on American literature that are public.

I started from the one about “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer. I haven’t read the book but I knew it was kind of controversial, so I thought it could be interesting to hear about it. Listening through the lesson was indeed very interesting since the teacher makes many links about other writers and styles, especially explaining some notions of post-modernism. I noticed for example how Franzen essentially copied David Foster Wallace’s intent (trying to put together the formal play of the post-modern novel and wrestle it so it can submit to the service of the human sentiment), or the internalization within the novel of a double for the reader, in order to cue or even trick and mislead (Nabokov), the alternate endings of Roth, or putting himself within the novel, or writing about writing (a form of “thinking about thinking”) and certain other “inversions”. And also this ideal of literature as “both sentiment and formal play”. Then when she talks about the themes of the novel she seems to describe Kabbalistic ideals (“desire”, “light”, “connectedness”), which suggests me that when a writer sets to an ambitious journey the themes end up being quite the familiar ones. Each writer adding his own perspective and particular slant, but the core has an idea of stability and constancy, as constant is the pretense of Kabbalah to describe humanity.

Then I moved to listen about “The Crying of Lot 49” (that I’m reading) and this is even more interesting because she goes through a number of literary movements and their position in regard to the perception of reality (within the context of language), and it seems that more than talking about that novel she’s now actually talking directly to me.

It seems that all writers, past and current, end up engaging with this (she expressly calls “the history of literature’s forms and ambitions”). It also seems that more than adding new angles they merely describe different faces of the same thing, in a surprisingly coherent way. I’m wondering here if Scott Bakker really got it and encapsulated the struggle of centuries. I kind of smirk when she (teacher in the video) goes with “the relationship imagined between those visions of language and what is happening outside of fiction, in what we might call the real world”.

For example she says that beginning with O’Connor “embodying a new critical craft of fiction imagining that that craft is reflective of a transcendental order in the world”. Then the Beat Generation and how they did instead reject formalism, or the language mediating with reality. Then passing to the idea (of Nabokov, she says) of the literary work (of art) so autonomous from the world that it could become something like a form of life (and the conceit of author’s immortality, which I guess today is replaced by the “death of the author”). Then to Salinger, believing that the formality of language could lead to communicate the truth of human soul (as in opposite to the Beat Generation, and that I interpret as a kind of solipsistic bliss). Then to Barth who did not believe in the possibility of reaching an unmediated reality, and in this moving closer to Bakker’s perspective and language as a “cage”. She says: “Barth’s idea of language as preceding human understanding”. As a form through which we understand reality, and so not merely mediating, but shaping and “walling” our understanding. Or (and she kinds of quotes this):

The Language That Comes Before

Which also lead me to a pattern of thought about “truth as disabling”, since we always see at the opposite, truth as enabling. What if truth breaks the toy, and what if many writers, in discovering that, recoiled?

This is your cage.
No, you can’t escape.

Yesterday I was reading again Von Foerster’s book and there were certain fascinating parts.

The problem I have with Bakker’s theory is that I cannot fully grasp it in its entirety. It’s kind of elusive and frustrating. It’s like every time I manage after a struggle to focus on one aspect I lose everything else. Every step in a direction makes me lose track of progress I previously made. Despite all reductions and simplifications I’m always lost and every problem seems to exist on its own without letting me use a constant frame of reference.

The first idea is that, in Constructivism theory, there’s no “confirmation” of reality. No certainty of it. What you do instead is “correlate” your sense experiences. “I see the pencil and I hold the pencil”. So “my sensation of touch, in correlation with my visual sensation, generates an experience”.

This simply to say again that we only construct a world we perceive, but we can’t say how much or how faithful is our model. Or not at all.

Quote from Physicist Sir Arthur Eddington:

Consider how our supposed acquaintance with a lump of matter is attained. Some influence from it plays on the extremity of a nerve, starting a series of physical and chemical changes which are propagated along the nerve to a brain cell; there a mystery happens, and an image or sensation arises in the mind which cannot purport to resemble the stimulus that excites it. Everything known about the material world must be inferred from these stimuli transmitted. . . It is an astonishing feat of deciphering that we should have been able to infer an orderly scheme of natural knowledge from such indirect communication.

Or maybe an astonishing pretense. A lack of humility.

The interesting aspect is that the book addresses the problem of “science” as we discussed it. Why believe in science? Because it works. That’s one of the postulates that sustains Bakker’s theory and that make science “authoritative” over religion, spirituality etc…

Constructivists say:

1- Knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, IS USEFUL IF it allows us to predict, i.e., to bring about or avoid a certain phenomena.
2- When knowledge no longer serves the purpose it becomes questionable and eventually devalued.

And it all sounds like an act, a choice that is made like a political opinion to me. As if we don’t believe in what is true, but in what is “convenient”. Maybe science has the same place of every other self-serving delusion? Well, as long the delusion doesn’t come crashing down on you.

But then the book goes also to explain some experiments about how perception develops after we’re born.

“Newborns do not have object constancy, the capacity to distinguish stable objects. They cannot compute equivalence, a logical operation that must be performed to perceive an object which changes its structure or position in space as the same object.”

“Developmental studies of children, conducted by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, show that we learn to perceive object constancy. It takes about 18 months.”

“Sensorimotor intelligence organizes reality by constructing broad categories of action which are the schemes of the pertinent object, space, time, causality…”

The book continues explaining that if you show rows of coins to a five year old, all rows having the same number of coins but with one row more widely spaced, and so longer, the kid will say that the longer row contains more coins.
But if you then repeat this experiment with a kid at seven he would say the question is stupid, as it is very obvious that all rows have the same number of coins.

“The older child takes a self-evident, or a priori, what only a few years ago he did not know existed. Once a concept is constructed, it is immediately externalized so that it appears to the subject as a perceptually given property of the object and independent of the subject’s own mental activity. The tendency of mental activities to become automatized and for their results to be perceived as external to the subject is what leads to the conviction that there is a reality independent of thought.”

Toward science, this is the defying stance of Constructivism:

The technological advances show “one” of many possible ways to bring about a result or make a prediction. A proven scientific theory is a successful means for reaching a goal.

It merely means we know one viable way to a goal that we have chosen under specific circumstances in our experiential world.

“A key fits if it opens the lock. It describes the capacity of the key, not of the lock.”

“Scientists rely heavily on mathematics, a system constructed to generate necessary answers to its questions. Necessary answers generate certainty.”

Although here I’m lost because it’s where Constructivism goes metaphysical:

“Radical constructivism maintains that operations by means of which we assemble our experiential world can be explored, and that an awareness of this operating can help us do it differently and, perhaps, better.”

“We can invent keys that unlock our problems, but these inventions only tell us about the key, not about the lock. Although certainty is lost, choice increases.”

But to me ALL this only flows very naturally and coherently into Bakker’s theory. That’s maybe the scary part.

The key (science) really only tells more about us than the world. We strain to see, but we can only see our own reflection. Our science only explores and describes the limited horizon that we see (are), but nothing of what’s outside.

And this seems telling if one considers that:

“only living organisms qualify as observers”

“Scientists obeyed to this rule of separation because, under certain circumstances, when the observer included himself in his description (observations) it led to paradox, like the paradox one finds in the statement: I am a liar.”

Now THIS specific pattern of “paradox and recursion” IS the very thing that “Gödel, Escher, Bach” describes as the ORIGIN of conscience, or the difference that triggers it as emergent.

So it’s as if EVERYTHING simply leads back to this kind of loopy paradox that defines both reality (within the blind box) and ourselves (the loop of conscience, and the limited horizon).

Happy New Year.

Black Glass

I was reading some Malazan to welcome the new year and so decided to write an handful of comments about the “poetry”, an aspect that is quite controversial. Readers don’t usually have a so positive reaction to these poetry pieces scattered through the books, and I also have mixed feelings about them, but in most cases they are at least interesting and offer some ideas to think about.

Here’s the one I just read:

Black glass stands between us
The thin face of otherness
Risen into difference
These sibling worlds
You cannot reach through
Or pierce this shade so distinct
As to make us unrecognizable
Even in reflection
The black glass stands
And that is more than all
And the between us
Gropes but never finds
Focus or even meaning
The between us is ever lost
In that barrier of darkness
When backs are turned
And we do little more than refuse
Facing ourselves.

Preface to The Nerek Absolution
Myrkas Preadict

What jumps to the eye and that some readers find quite irritating is that there are no familiar structures like rhymes or metrics (that often make poetry more palatable to a public, see The Name of the Wind) and that instead it reads like abstruse prose made worse by the removal of punctuation and lines broken in the middle (see for example “gropes but never finds / Focus or ever meaning” that obviously has meaning as one line). So it can tick off the reader as it seems just an attempt to be pretentious without earning it, or requiring an effort to the reader without paying it off (one wonders: “why should I bother?”).

I’m not an expert or a fan of poetry in general, but it seems that Erikson surely isn’t the only one appreciating that kind of structure. I noticed for example that Tomas Tranströmer, the 2011 Nobel Prize, writes in a way that, to my superficial attention, resembles Erikson quite a bit and that could fool me quite easily if I were to find one of his own in Erikson’s books. See the first one I was able to find:

Evening-Morning

Moon – its mast is rotten, its sail is shriveled.
Seagull – drunk and soaring away on currents.
Jetty – charred rectangular mass. The thickets
founder in darkness.

Out on doorstep. Morning is beating, beats on
ocean’s granite gateways and sun’s sparkling
near the world. Half smothered, the gods of summer
fumble in sea mist.

But you can look and pretty much every example would fit.

One difference that Malazan has from that, and a positive one, is that the piece of poetry you’re reading is at least “in context”, and so you have a frame of reference to append to your ideas. My approach to these poems is rather straightforward, I usually look for recurring themes and meaning-charged words. Then just see what sticks.

See the example above. “Black glass” is something that I think is related to the plot in some way. I’m not sure what kind of theme it is bound to, but there’s mention here and there of sand (often T’lan) that turns to glass, and I think in MoI Toc awakens amidst broken glass. In any case, it may be related to something about these ancient wars involving both T’lan and Cha’Malle. “This thin face of otherness”, otherness I interpret here as something marking a difference (other than me), so alienation. It’s a “thin face” because it continues the first line (it’s a glass), but it’s also suggested that it’s something like a veil, weak. Something that may be just perception. “Risen into difference” separates the line above and below. So the “black glass” is a dividing barrier, “otherness” and “difference” go together.

“These sibling worlds” is the line charged of meaning that I’m very likely to misinterpret due to all the external “cosmology” discussions these past weeks. I simply see it as two words, like mind and body, reality and dreams, real world and magic, science and spirituality. Or, the category that spawns all of these: what is perceived, and what is real. Or “Cartesian dualism”. The suggestion works well because even in the poem the two worlds are separated by a thin veil but that “you cannot pierce through”. It also reminds me the closed perspective, the fact that the veil is the limit of perception, so suggesting a world beyond that one can’t see or achieve. But this is cosmological as it is personal. Other “worlds” are also other people. You can try to understand them, but you can never be there, they’ll always be worlds closed to you, opaque. A barrier, between you and others, that you can’t cross and that makes possible that you have an identity and a thought. A barrier that let’s you recognize yourself.

As the poem continues the glass dividing the world acquires another function. It doesn’t just separate without letting one see through (it’s “dark”, so negating the “glass” properties). It’s not just a barrier of otherness and distinction, but it also becomes a reflection, a mirror. One cannot see what’s beyond, but can see his own image: knowing the world as an extension of one’s own image. This also is charged with cosmological and spiritual implications, but once again I jump over to the personal level. The barrier “risen into difference” marks an “otherness” that may as well be consequently indifferent, because detached and remote. Not us. Indifferent means not just different, but with an added sense of morality, of choice. And the idea of indifference is suggested toward the end (“In that barrier of darkness / When backs are turned”). Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but this gives me an idea of deliberation and betrayal.

Finally there’s the obvious theme of Light and Darkness that is specific and even literal (metaphor made real) in the series, but that I can’t pinpoint here. Darkness in the poem is described as what’s in the middle, the barrier itself, the threshold. When instead Light/Darkness stand in opposition, so representing the (literal) “sibling worlds”. Not divided by Darkness, but by Shadow (Edur). “The between us (that) is ever lost”.

The poem seems attributed to the Nerek, whom I can’t pinpoint correctly yet. They seem to have an association with the Azath, also linked to Mappo and the mysterious people that gave him his task. But the poem being titled “The Nerek Absolution” gives it yet another spin…

(all this simply to show how one can have fun extricating those pieces of poetry in the books)

Entropy – Thomas Pynchon

I randomly stumbled on a .pdf link with a short story titled Entropy written by Thomas Pynchon, one of his early works. I usually avoid reading on a screen but it was just about 20 pages and I was curious since entropy is something that surfaces often lately (see the recent blog themes on cosmology and such).

Well, it’s an amazing, lovely short story. Something of its style makes me think of David Foster Wallace more than other stuff I read by Pynchon. Looking up the publishing date it seems that he was merely 23 at latest when he wrote it. See, this is the kind of talent that doesn’t require to be nourished or care to develop. It’s all right there in plain sight. An infuriating (because of envy) ease with words. The complex, measured and rich style, but it all comes off as… effortless.

Then, looking for other info about that story I found out this other page. It seems Pynchon doesn’t like at all this story and decided to use it to show aspiring writers what NOT to do:

He criticizes himself quite harshly, asserting that the work seems to have stemmed from the desire to “commit on paper a variety of abuses, such as overwriting.” He claims that the work is an example of a young writer’s mistake of forcing a theme onto the characters rather than having the former develop through the latter, that his concentration on the concept led him to “shortchange the humans in the story.” He offers budding writers the following words of wisdom: “Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.”

In fact, much of what Pynchon has to say in his Introduction concerning this particular story is in the form of advice to those of us who plan on writing short stories in the future. As though the publication of “Entropy” were a sort of public service to those in danger of writing similar-grade fiction, Pynchon tells us what he does about this story “only on the chance that others may. . . profit from my error.”

Yes, Pynchon is SO pretentious that he can ridicule a wonderful short story he himself wrote. Because, obviously, his worst thing is still better than every other writer (one assumes).

I’m bringing all this up because it’s related to my recent review of Gene Wolfe’s work. I consider Pynchon another blatant example of “esoteric” writing. His skill manipulating and articulating words is unbelievable, but what he writes is very hard to follow, dense, convoluted. More often than not you read, but you can’t understand what it is about. Pynchon’s writing is like a warp tunnel in the fabric of reality, or in that “artificial” reality that we represent (the subjective), and live. Everything is always set in an inextricable tangle of obscure cultural references. I always wonder what kind of magical device Pynchon uses to pack so much subtext. One thing is to weave together things you know, another is to appear omniscient. You open the door a crack and a whirlpool invests you, leaving you dizzy.

The interesting part in this is in the idealistic idea of literature: a thing living on its own. Literature as a golem. An artificial creation that contains its own, autonomous world. Pynchon idealizes all this because his writing is so skillful to appear more than real. A thing on its own, with its own rules. And then the obvious risk that Pynchon explained in that quote, and that I mentioned in Wolfe’s case. The risk that the story becomes completely detached and cold: “too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.” I was reminded of a discussion on Bakker’s blog about the “spandrel” (in that case in the context of biology). And these worlds made of words, like impossible bridges spanning the sky, seemingly without a support, if not the strength of their own spandrels. They don’t crumble merely because you believe. At the very least they provoke a sense of awe.

In this short story Pynchon does something with the structure that is typical of DF Wallace style too, the literary world contained in two rooms and whoever enters them. Then in dialogue and context he develops a theme (entropy, here) that starts as the object of attention, and then becomes the whole frame of the story. Pynchon calls this “forcing a theme onto the characters”, but the construction is so perfect that I can only watch in awe.

The thing is that this kind of very pretentious intent works great in a short story of 20 pages. Aimed and delivered. Its “esoteric” aspect is not as irritating as in Wolfe’s case (or other books by Pynchon) because the thing is “contained”. You read it in one go, and can grasp it. As if you can hold this, still very complex and dense, story on your palm. So you can observe it attentively, turn it around. You can wholly contain it and consider it. While instead with sky-spanning literary bridges you can’t do this, because you have to stay suspended like that for far too long and the signal is so strong that it becomes just noise. But in this short story it is a thing of beauty.

This kind of pretentiousness can definitely be tolerated in a miniature work where everything is gracefully placed in a perfect system. I really don’t care if the characters succumb to plot, as long they give even the illusion to extend off the page, suggesting more. It’s a brilliant, masterfully written short story, whatever Pynchon may say. I don’t think he could write it any better today.

The Claw of the Conciliator – Gene Wolfe

“There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”
(…)
“That is the wisest of all the books of men,” the Cumaean said. “Though there are few who can gain any benefit from reading it.”

The Claw of the Conciliator is the second book in the New Sun tetralogy. Or second of twelve if one considers the “Solar Cycle” as a whole. Since it takes me so long to finish a book, and since I don’t write about all books I read, I prefer to stick to the smaller unit available and comment as I move through. But, since I keep getting interested in other writers and series, it happens that quite some time passes before I return to something I begun (and these loops keep getting larger). So, looking at my blog, it’s been more than three years since I read the first part, The Shadow of the Torturer.

Most of what I have to say about this book is part of a general thought about Gene Wolfe. More than once in forum discussions I have defined him “esoteric”, in the original definition of the term. I tend to lump all writers in two groups: esoteric and generous. The difference is about the “intent” of the writer. Esoteric writers write books that are only accessible for a selected minority of like-minded, or sharing a certain status or cultural education, whereas generous writers are those that desperately try to make “communication” happen, whatever it takes. Generous books could retain all the complexity and ambition while taking time to teach the reader how to approach and extricate the work they are reading. They usually reward patience, but ultimately they reward it by letting you reach in and grasp their core. It’s not a matter of complexity, but of offering ways to access it. Esoteric works instead are “hidden knowledge”, they have high walls surrounding themselves and only those who have the password or know the secret sign are let through. Otherwise you’re left outside desperately trying to see through the wall and sometime feeling like you’re seeing some vague shape of what’s beyond. But you’re wrong.

Wolfe embodies this esoterism to its full symbolic value, to the point that what I described here with a rather negative connotation, becomes a positive one. This because, like the best works, the reader (and his re-action) is part of it. One thing that this work is doing is putting the reader out of balance and warp the space around him. It’s a dislocating effect, but not of the kind that prepares entering another world. Here the dislocation is the point, the message. Time, especially, collapses on itself, as if at the end of the world, before the New Sun arises, everything appears simultaneously.

This is relevant, specifically, to this book I was reading. It’s a kind of book that I loved and at the same time I wanted to hurl at the wall. Frustrating at the point of rage, but also possessing some brilliance that is right out of the corner of your eye, but that you absolutely know is not the kind that /just/ deceives. Imagine a calm sea in the night, the New Sun series is wholly contained below the surface. You see nothing. That’s my reaction starting to read it again from the first pages. On the surface there are characters, things happen, then you finish a chapter, begin another and there’s a new episode that seems to be only vaguely related to the one you just read. One uses to review books through certain patterns, so we examine characters, plot, pacing. But doing the same with the New Sun would end up in disaster. From my point of view and direct reaction while reading, this book has no sense of “plot”, or cause and effect. If one complains about arbitrary interventions (deus ex machina) here he could find them more than once within a single chapter, almost the sole force driving the plot. Characters do things seemingly without motivations, say things that make no sense, hypnotically dazed as in a movie by Werner Herzog. The scenes change from chapter to chapter as if part of unrelated episodes. This would really be a disaster, if it wasn’t that the problem is not in the material, but in the categories used on it.

Similarly, Severian is not the prime example of a character you can sympathize/empathize with. Quite the contrary. In fact I was thinking he may be the most horrifying character I’ve ever encountered. Early in the book there’s an episode where he has to perform a public execution. The horrifying part is not the execution per se and its gruesome description (“To be candid, it was not until I saw the up-jetting fountain of blood and heard the thud of the head striking the platform that I knew I had carried it off.“), but the reaction Severian has (“I wanted to laugh and caper.“). He GLOATS and parades grotesquely on the scaffold, showing proudly the severed head as he feels so happy that he was able to perform a tricky move with his sword. He continues to gloat even when it is revealed that the woman he just executed was innocent, victim of a machination. This gave me a profound feeling of amorality, of cold, alien detachment. Something entirely inhuman. It is horrifying but it also adheres to Severian the character, with his pragmatic, weightless mind that feels so alien to me. What is done is done, and very professionally from his perspective, everything else is simply not affecting him. He doesn’t even consider any other perspective. Which brings to a sort of salvation. His mind is so bent inward that he’s neither “good” nor “bad”. He seems unaware and unable to have a real, human existence because he has no experience of anything else. And so he’s also without guilt since he’s utterly naive and unable to make a choice (making him the embodiment of a pawn).

Wolfe demands a different approach from the reader and different ways to carve “meaning” from it. The most important rule is the “dream” (and Neil Gaiman featuring on all covers and introductions isn’t casual). What is narrated in this series has the “dreamlike” quality. That’s why everything you “see” (surface of the water) is “not the point” and apparently doesn’t seem to make sense in a strict, logical way. Every image or character is symbolic, and its symbolic weight has priority on superficial appearance. As in dreams scenes change with a loose sense of connection and everything goes to build this eerie, magical and ephemeral atmosphere (and as in dreams “time” collapses on itself). Words carry not meaning, but fascination and hidden construction. Giving a sense of dizziness and, as said, dislocation. Not toward a different “environment”, but toward a different “fabric” of reality. That in this case is the fabric of the dreams, and the world built through this symbolic projection of hidden and obscure powers and mythological beings. Lovecraft’s monsters made into pure ideas.

The problem, if a “problem” exists, is in the consequences. Reading page by page that’s the way I was feeling. Understanding clearly that there was “more” to what I was reading, that Wolfe was describing factually an episode but “doing” something else, hidden. Neither showing, nor telling. He hinted and teased, keep luring you. Deceiving. The problem of the esoteric work is when you hit the wall, again and again. Feeling that there’s more to it but without ways to get through. So I’m very critical about “how” Wolfe does things, because I feel he WANTS to keep me away, he WANTS to bait me in this malicious game and its hidden, obscure rules. It’s like in the myth of Theseus and the minotaur (a myth he specifically uses in this book), with Theseus going in the labyrinth from where no one returned alive to kill the minotaur. You are Theseus, Wolfe is the minotaur. The problem is that in the myth Theseus is told how to get out of the labyrinth (he’s given a ball of thread), while you, the reader, are left to the Wolfe/minotaur’s mercy.

I am in the presence of a practitioner whose moves I cannot follow; I see only the same illusions that are seen by those outside the guild [of writers]. I know the cards are up the sleeves somewhere, but there are clearly extra arms to this person.

Even in forum discussions one tries to get help figuring out this and that, but in most if not all cases it seems like one only gets evasive explanations that stack together in some kind of misshapen structure, but that do not seem anchored anywhere. It’s always a game of smoke and mirrors (mirrors that play a symbolic part in the books). And it’s frustrating because at some point you begin squinting so much that you get the illusion of seeing something, with the omnipresent doubt that you’re only imagining it. Being so ephemeral and deliberately obfuscated, it encourages speculation, but one has to know that it only goes to feed the minotaur.

This is my opinion of the book. If I decided to read the whole cycle of 12 books (eventually) is not because I expected a fun, enjoyable adventure. It is instead because I’m interested in that “underworld” of meaning, hidden just below the surface. My problem with it is that Wolfe builds walls that I can’t get through no matter how hard I could try, and this leads to a frustrating experience. He isn’t interested to let me in as much as in throwing puzzles and riddles at me to solve, without giving me nearly enough pieces so that the solution is even possible. The whole paradigm is a paradox. It carries over to the prose style as he uses often a pattern of inversion. Things that are or behave inversely than how they appear. You are left solving a malicious, impossible puzzle that reassembles itself whenever you get close to something. And this would be indeed a “problem” if it wasn’t also part of the point.

The Book of the New Sun is too complex a work to evaluate on one reading. It will undoubtedly be considered a landmark in the field, one that perhaps marks the turning point of science fiction from content to style, from matter to manner.

I wonder if going from “content” to “style” is a worthwhile mission. Wolfe indeed has a dense, ornate and convoluted, I’d say elegant prose style that is often dull and hard to follow. It’s also not banal, so it keeps the attention on what he’s doing and how. It requires certainly a constant attention, similar to some eastern non commercial movies, where the pivotal moment can be one where no characters speak, not highlighted in dramatic music at max volume. You let go your attention in a moment that appeared as a mere transition nested between two more important scenes, and you miss everything.

The “underworld” is certainly intriguing. It’s a big tangle of erudition, Wolfe taking all sort of mythic, religious and scientific notions from all known cultures, then removing their context and merging and transforming them till they become unrecognizable. A “decontextualized apocrypha”. But doing this he also realizes the transformation of culture through the ages, how the original meaning is lost forever, prompting something new. Many of these ideas touch cosmological arguments that I’ve hinted here and there on the blog (before I started to read this, it’s just stuff that intrigues me). There’s more than one reference to the Kabbalah and it’s interesting to track what Wolfe is doing with it since it’s what gives the larger framework. But he also leaves me with the impression that it’s all an elaborate labyrinth of misdirection. With mostly dead ends. For example when I read Erikson I can see the themes surfacing, reflecting on different perspectives, returning from different angles. But Wolfe is so busy hiding all meaning that he can’t also offer a discourse. He leaves things uncommented, simply stated or hinted, but never faced or directly experienced.

The gulf between plot and story, between the apparent and the real, alerts the reader to the fact that Wolfe is playing a complex and contrived textual game.

It’s a floating cathedral of meaning. It’s built on a artifice, risking of remaining detached and, so, irrelevant. But it’s from there that it also draws its undeniable qualities. The reader is a deliberate part of this game. The “purpose” of the series is not directly in the hidden message that keeps frustrating and irritating me, but in its effect on the reader. It’s strictly in the bleeding to death in front of the minotaur:

Rather, by effectively concealing his narratological sleight of hand and constructing a puzzle for his reader, Wolfe attempts to alert that reader to the level of perception required. Hence, The Book of the New Sun does not invite the reader to marvel at how clever Wolfe can be, but to marvel at his or her own intelligence in perceiving one facet of the elaborate textual game the author plays. In this sense, Wolfe’s tetralogy is a masterwork in that it can be read as a paraliterary fantasy but demands to be read as a comment upon, and a reaction to, such narratives. In effect, it is a coolly intellectual denunciation of passive reading practices, a clarion call to readers dulled by formula fiction.

It is only by observing how s/he has been deceived and cajoled that the reader comes to appreciate more fully Wolfe’s vision of humanity as a helplessly subjective species attendant to the whim of manipulatory forces. This observation is encouraged by the self-conscious stress on deception, artifice and artificiality that permeates the text and which emblematises Wolfe’s textual game with the reader.

From his other fiction, it apparent that Wolfe perceives the world as an ambiguous round of perceptions and misperceptions in which the individual struggles, and ultimately fails, to apprehend the precise nature of existence.

You try to understand, and the moment you feel like you can do it, taking up the challenge, is the moment you give the minotaur the vantage point to slay you.

What I continue to criticize, in opposition to that quote, is the fact that this game IS indeed indulgent, self-focused and self-serving. Sophistication bordering on narcissism. It is not a case that those who are passionate the most about this series are those that ascribe to it “literary” value, putting it one step above all other works of fantasy and Sci-fi (and so reiterating the same pattern). This “pretense” is for me very visible in the books and its style, not just its readers. And in the way it actively selects its readers, while rising barricades to those not “erudite” enough. The cold disregard. It’s not as much as being “sincere” and faithful to itself (“I thought them [the complex jargon] the best ones for the story I was trying to tell.”), as it is a deliberate will to create its elitist, esoteric group of like-minded who can properly perceive the subtext and savor the complex fabric. It’s the practice of literary snobbery and sophistication, secluded and removed. It doesn’t work by making the reader “feel” that complex experience, but actually failing at triggering ANY emotion, as long one is rejected and can only glide hopelessly on the surface. More often than not that’s the reader’s experience, and it will only be enjoyed by that selected elite that can ridicule that reader that tried to get in and failed miserably. Wolfe transforms the patient reader in one that can and should be taunted and laughed at.

So while there’s certainly a great value in this work. It is surely also very pretentious and written to gratify a certain public. A narrow public carefully selected to appreciate the sophistication, and that Wolfe had precisely on his mind when he wrote these books.

(if you’re interested, there’s a lengthy forum discussion that precedes this I’ve written here)
(and this is instead the insightful review that I quoted in mine)