(urth) Long Review Essay on Wizard Knight
Stephen Frug
sfrug at post.harvard.edu
Tue Sep 18 10:45:03 PDT 2007
Greetings Urthlings. I've read this message list before, but never
posted to it. (Unless this message is itself a duplicate... the
first time seems to have gotten lost...) But I just wrote a long
review of Wizard Knight which I posted to my blog
(http://stephenfrug.blogspot.com), and I thought that readers here
would be interested in it -- and I am definitely interested in
responses -- so I am cross-posting it. Hope that's okay. If my
links & block-quote formatting don't come through, you can go to the
blog-version to get them.
I just finished reading Gene Wolfe's two-volume novel, The Wizard
Knight, made up of The Knight (2004) and The Wizard (2005). The
following is a long essay reviewing (in some sense) the work,
focusing on what I found problematic about it, rather than the (quite
considerable number of things) I liked in it. This review-essay will
have spoilers -- not major ones, but existent ones -- for the
entirety of the work. Now, I'm not spoiling, I don't think, any of
the Big Secrets from the book -- certainly not from the second half,
where the cluster. So, in my opinion, there's nothing here that would
really "spoil" a first reading of the work if you haven't read it
yet. But if you want to approach it with no knowledge whatsoever, you
should stop reading here. (Oh, and I guess there are spoilers for The
Lord of the Rings too.)
I think my most basic reaction is that it's good but not Wolfe's best
-- not up there with The Book of the New Sun or The Fifth Head of
Cerberus, say. That it's well written is not in doubt: it's by Wolfe,
after all. But I had some problems with it -- some of which are
probably in my head, some of which are in the work, and some of which
are in the chemical mixture of the two.
It's hard to criticize Wolfe, though, because of his reputation as a
trickster: if you present a negative opinion of anything the man
writes, you instantly lay yourself open to the charge that you just
didn't get it. And not infrequently the charge will be valid. But it
won't always be valid: Wolfe is human, humans are imperfect, and even
Shakespeare wrote some clunkers. And while a lot of aspects of
Wolfe's fiction are far more complex than they appear even at third
glance, other aspects are, finally, not: they are straightforward,
despite the efforts of Wolfe's more serious fans (an overlapping but
not identical group to Wolfe's more serious readers) to try and make
them so.
And, for me at least, it's even more intimidating when the backs of
the books are filled with breathless praise from some of my other
favorite writers: Neil Gaiman! Kim Stanley Robinson! Everyone seems
to agree that this is the very best book since Wolfe's last very best
book, and you just have to love it!
Well, I didn't. I liked it, but also had some real problems with it.
So at the risk of derision for missing the point, I'm going to begin
with some straightforward critiques of a writer who (in John Clute's
apt words) "has never in his life told a straightforward tale".
I think the first half of The Knight was slow. There were a number of
places where, if the book hadn't said Gene Wolfe on the cover, I
would have given up. Partly this was because the book, while being
slow, presented itself mostly as an adventure book: it was not slow
in the good way that, say, Proust is. It was slow where it shouldn't
have been. For me, at least, this lessened as I went along, and by
the end of The Knight I was fully gripped, and stayed so through The
Wizard.
In a related criticism, the book was unevenly paced. This is related,
not identical, because I'm not just referring to the first half of
volume one. The rest of volume one and the first two-thirds or so of
volume two, while never (for me) dull, proceeded at a stately pace
through the events of the tale -- leaving the ending to be told at
breakneck speed and with more-than-usual abridgement. Parts of this
are due to Wolfe's habit of telling the most serious parts of his
stories by indirection -- but only, I think, parts.
Wolfe's uneven pacing is actually habitual for him -- there are
traces of it in The Book of the New Sun, and it's a more serious
problem in The Book of the Long Sun. And at this point I'm coming
around to the belief that while this is partly due to careful
authorial craft, it is also partly a failure of it: Wolfe simply gets
too wrapped up in the early stages of some of his adventures and
tells them at (at times) tedious length.
Wolfe, as has been frequently noted, writes puzzles, works which hint
at stories and cosmology and theology which are only partly and
obscurely visible on the surface. But he also writes (and clearly
likes to write and, from what he's said of his reading tastes, likes)
adventure stories which form the surface under which those puzzles
move. And while Wolfe is a genius at writing puzzles, he is, I think,
uneven at writing adventures. He likes it more than he's good at it.
And I find that my favorite Wolfe works are often those where he
doesn't try -- in his short stories, for instance, in which he is
often simply doing something else.
There are a lot of interpretive puzzles in The Wizard Knight, as
there are in all of Wolfe's work. Some of them I got the first time
around. Others I didn't; still others I probably even missed the
existence of. And I feel that if I reread it -- particularly, if I
reread it right now, with the first reading fresh in my mind -- I
would probably get a lot more of them -- might understand, to pick
one example out of many, what the complex relationship between
Mythgarthr and America was supposed to be, a relationship (along with
the relationship of parallel or crossing characters) which Wolfe
hinted a lot about but did not make clear -- at least to me -- on the
first reading.
But, frankly, I didn't like it enough to want to reread it --
certainly not now. (Other Wolfe works I have liked enough to reread
them, whether I found time to or not.) I'd rather read something else
-- even something else of Wolfe's. Wolfe's puzzles are marvelous, but
if the supporting structure isn't good enough, I don't want to take
the time to figure them out. And at least in the case of The Wizard
Knight, I didn't.
On to other topics.
I think Wolfe's writing of Abel's voice was profoundly uneven.
Usually in a high and archaic register, it would lapse at times into
slang -- into (to my ear) outdated slang, slang that uneasily mixed
contemporary life (macs) with some sort of parody of fifties usage
(swell!). The slang itself was jarringly inconsistent; and the
mixture of slang into otherwise unbroken pages of high-register
speech (both dialogue and the narrator's voice) was frequently
awkward in the extreme. Wolfe has said in an interview that he didn't
have any trouble writing a modern teenager, since he knows them and
lives near them; but I think there was a real failure of tone here.
Now, maybe, this is all part of some complex Wolfean trick, some
deliberate mixture of tone which served some thematic, portraiture or
other purpose... but I sure didn't see it. Until someone convinces me
otherwise, I think this is simply a failure on his part.
I should perhaps mention that there was a lot to like here, since
I've so far been mostly negative. It is, as I said, well-written
(save for the -- thankfully not all that frequent -- lapses in tone
just noted); it is mostly exciting. The cosmology was fascinating,
the magic mysterious, many of the characters quite interesting. The
reinvention of by-now standard fantasy elements -- the Norse mythos,
elves, and lots more -- was refreshing and fun. There's a lot to like
here.
But I think my biggest complaint -- my biggest stumbling block -- was
a pair of intertwined issues: the character of Abel, and the ethics
(even, politics) of the book.
First off, I found Abel frequently insufferable. Pompous,
self-righteous, frequently a bully, he also came off as a Mary Sue
(at least in one sense of that polyvalent term of fan critique): not
only was he the most courageous and noble person about, but he also
had the writer stacking the deck for him at every turn. He had more
magical allies, artifacts, assistants, companions, than you could
shake a stick at: an invisible ogre doing his bidding! A sky-wolf who
happened to be totally loyal! Elves (called Aelf) who were his slaves
(yes, not always reliable, but often enough). A magic sword, the
blessing and friendship of Odin, various other magic devices he got
at the end (the helmet, another sword). Heck, he even becomes a god
halfway through the work! Talk about favoritism!*
This sort of stacking the deck is hard enough to take when the writer
has some self-consciousness about what he's doing, but I didn't see
any sign that Wolfe did. He simply loved his creation, and showered
him with so many cheats and advantages that any honor he might have
accrued felt like a cheat.
Abel adjusted with damning speed to the hierarchy of a medieval
society. Here his American origins were least convincing, if not
downright morally foul. It's natural for those raised in a profoundly
hierarchical society to accept it as normal, to expect deference from
the lower-born and give it to the higher. But it's inexplicable for
an American -- even an American boy. It makes Abel seem like a deeply
immoral man -- in a way that no one else in the novel seems immoral,
since after all, no one else in the novel ought to have a cultural
grounding in notions of equality and the malevolence of fixed class.
Oh, sure, this is not absolutely true: Abel makes no effort to hide
his peasant ancestry, and seems to think it doesn't matter, so he's
certainly less class conscious, more egalitarian, than most of the
people he meets. But he also expects an enormous level of deference
from his "inferiors", and seems to regard his "superiors" has being
due a great deal of it. And yes, he was frequently kind, even
generous to those below him -- but in such a way that their status
was perfectly clear.
For me, the incident that stuck with me was the one early on in The
Knight where Abel went to get a sea-berth on a ship. Quoted a price
by the captain, he insisted on having the best cabin (turning the
captain out) at less than half the price quoted... and to get it, he
literally threatened the man's life. He acted, in short, like the
brigands whose thievery he used to justify their slaughter not a few
chapters before, taking what he wanted because he wanted it, and --
and in some sense this was, to me, even more damning -- because he
clearly felt that it was his due as a knight.
Again, if there was any sign that all of this that Wolfe was
presenting a critique of Abel, that would be fine. If he was being
presented as a boy who hadn't learned better, or a man trying but
failing to be good... but while Wolfe's reputation as a subtle writer
might make one reach for such an interpretation, I didn't see any
real signs of it in the text. I got the impression that we were
simply supposed to think Abel was a good and admirable person, that
Wolfe certainly thought so, that he was blind to all his (quite
damning) flaws.
Adam Stephanides, who hated The Knight (which, I hope I have made
clear, I didn't), nevertheless has a passage in his self-described
"rant" about it that strikes me as sadly on the mark:
Sir Able of the High Heart, the Uberknight who his inferiors
willingly submit to (if not, they're treacherous curs, whom he
rightfully punishes), not any of the other characters, not the world,
and not the plot, such as it was. Able doesn't behave like an
adolescent, magically given an adult body or not: what he does behave
like is an adolescent boy's fantasy of how he would behave if given a
powerful adult body. Nor does he sound in the least like an
adolescent, contemporary or otherwise. When Able talks to other
characters, he sounds like the generic Wolfe Competent Male; when
he's narrating, he mostly sounds like Hoof, except when Wolfe throws
in some incongruous "poetic" passages, or remembers that Able is
supposed to be a modern teenager and tosses in a reference to Macs or
baseball.
Overly-strongly put. But not, I think, fundamentally mistaken about
the problems of the book.
And Wolfe's apparent (and, I believe, genuine) fundamental admiration
for Abel connects to the deeply problematic ethics of the work as a
whole -- and, finally, to its politics.
One of modernity's powerful cultural changes was the rotting of the
chivalric code. It's crucial to remember that this happened, not due
to our inability to live up to, but to historical events' revealing
of its essential malevolency -- at least in the context of a
(technologically, socially) modern society, if not in general. The
most famous articulation of this point, I believe, is Hemmingway's,
in A Farewell to Arms:
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were
obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the names of roads,
the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
What I found most profoundly disturbing was the sense that what Wolfe
was ultimately trying to do was to redeem words such as glory, honor,
courage or hallow -- words that, for inescapably important moral
reasons, have indeed become (if indeed they were not always) obscene.
And this, at least, I don't think was my simplifying the work of a
complex writer. (Rather, I think this was my (liberal) reaction to an
essentially very conservative writer.) For Wolfe said as much in an
interview he did with Neil Gaiman. -- True, he can be as cagey and
mysterious in interviews as he is in fiction... sometimes. But not
always: and I submit that anyone who sees the following as other than
straightforward is probably over-reading. Here is the exchange (I've
abridged Gaiman's question):
Gaiman: [A] hundred years from now... a teenager [reads The
Wizard Knight]. Where do you hope The Knight and The Wizard will take
her?
Wolfe: To a country where honor, courage, and fidelity actually
mean something. The whole knightly ideal came into being because the
fighting was so close. Ordinary people saw who defended the castle
and who hid in the wine cellar, who went for the enemy while his
followers, well, actually followed instead of doing all the fighting
for him. Communities were small; everybody knew how everybody else
behaved. I want her to see what those qualities can mean to the
person who has them and to those around him.
Gaiman: That's really cool. And, for want of a better word, noble.
Actually, I don't think it's cool. And I certainly don't think it's
noble. I think it's, at a minimum, profoundly disturbing... arguably
even, in Hemingway's word, "obscene".
And along with honor and glory and fidelity come hierarchy, and
servitude, and subservience, and caste: all right there in Wolfe's
book, just like the world. Along comes all the horrors of pre-modern
society that were destroyed by it, even as it introduced new horrors
of its own.
Now a great deal of fantasy -- not all of it, but a lot of it -- is
written in a spirit of nostalgia for the pre-modern world. This
nostalgia takes different forms and has different (moral, literary,
personal) meanings. But I must admit I've never found it as
disturbing as in Wolfe's Wizard Knight. For comparison, let me talk
about Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, not only the inescapable point of
comparison for almost any high fantasy work (at least in a basic
sense, i.e. a fantasy work set in a world different from our own),
but as a book which Wolfe and I (and half the reading world) share a
love for. Because, despite Tolkien's clear nostalgia for pre-modern
times, I didn't, and don't, find it nearly as problematic as I did
Wolfe's Wizard Knight. Why?
Well, first off, Wolfe brings a purportedly modern voice and
perspective into his pre-modern times... and has it swallow them
whole. Tolkien, of course, sets his work wholly within a different
time, so the lack of a modern ethical perspective is reasonable, even
essential. But for Wolfe not to confront these issues implicitly
ratifies things that Tolkien needn't deal with.
More importantly, for Tolkien, the good is more complex than it is
for Wolfe, at least for Wolfe here. While Tolkien's characters strive
to do right, The Lord of the Rings is above all about the corruption
of power, the corruptibility of good intent, and the terrible dangers
for even those who strive to do right. I don't see any of that in
Wolfe's Wizard Knight. As my favorite reader of Tolkien, T. A.
Shippey, has noted, the ring and its thematic motif of the corrupting
nature of power bring into Tolkien the one modern element in an
otherwise pre-modern work. That is, Tolkien brought into his work
some of the complexity from the pre-modern world -- and it made his
work as rich as it is. Wolfe brought in a modern element, seemingly
just to show that nothing from America really needed saving or really
had any valuable perspective lacking in the pre-modern world.
Similarly, for Tolkien, the evil seems far more evil than it does for
Wolfe -- and far more tied to the basic issues of war and power. It
is the desire for control, for gain, that is fundamentally wrong in
Tolkien's work... and we see, quite powerfully, their result in
things such as the powerful, Great War Trench-influenced depictions
of the broken land of Mordor, and in the vivid depictions of the
scouring of the shire.** Now, we see, at the end of The Wizard, some
of the ruinous effects of war... but not with anything like the
vividness and power in Tolkien. More to the point, Wolfe doesn't
portray this as the outcome of war, but the outcome of the good guys
loosing: you don't see any sense that if the humans had simply beat
the Osterlings (and we are told very specifically that this begun
with a raid on their lands for gain, something presented as
straightforward and not at all morally troubling) that there would be
anything wrong. In Tolkien, war is shown as something necessary due
to a fallen world, something which is itself part of the corruption
even of the good: in Wolfe, it's only too bad when you loose, and all
the jousting and ridiculous fights of honor he portrays are simply
something it would be jolly good to have back. (I exaggerate, but not
as much as I wish I did.)
And finally, of course, Tolkien was writing long before our time --
before my time. The Lord of the Rings was written, in significant
part, during the Second World War; The Wizard Knight was written, in
significant part, during the so-called War on Terror. The world is
different now. And that means I experience the works differently.
And here we get to something which is probably more my failure than
anything else.
You see, I am far, far more suspicious of "words such as glory,
honor, courage, or hallow" in the present -- say, the last six years
-- than I am from before. And I think that is because so many
Americans experienced the attacks of September 11 as an immediate and
unproblematic redemption of them. Yet it seems to me that one crucial
component of the horrible mistakes and unforgivable evils that our
country has committed in the past six years was precisely that
redemption: of our thinking, far too much, about glory and honor and
courage -- not to mention "evil doers" -- and far too little about
the names of villages.
The truth is, I read The Wizard Knight with these words -- Wolfe's
reaction to the 9-11 attacks -- ringing in my ears:
We will be told that the perpetrators (and only the perpetrators)
must be punished, and that the greatest pains must be taken to make
certain no innocent person suffers. That sounds much better than
saying no action should be taken, but it comes to the same thing. The
perpetrators cannot be punished. They died in the planes they
hijacked and are beyond our reach. It is not possible to fight a war
(not even a losing war) without causing innocent people to suffer.
And I thought a lot of things about them. For example, I thought that
with only the smallest tweaking, they could sound like the
justifications that the 9-11 attackers might themselves have used:
oh, unlike what Wolfe is saying, the "perpetrators" that they would
have been talking about were probably not doing crimes that I would
say were clearly such. But the argument would have been the same: we
can't fight a war without causing innocent people to suffer. If we
aren't willing to kill the innocent, then we can't do anything. The
actual perpetrators (say, the government of the U.S.) are beyond our
reach, but that doesn't mean that no action should be taken. And so
forth.***
(I don't want to get too sidetracked here, but of course Wolfe's
comment makes an assumption, the basic mistake that has been at the
root of so much of our national crimes and mistakes and lost
opportunities in the past six years: assuming that "action" means
"war", and that no war means no action. After all, in the legal
prosecutions of criminal gangs, it is quite possible to make sure
that only the guilty suffer -- or, at least, far, far more sure than
in any war. That if we had responded to Al Queada not by comparing
them to the Nazis, but by comparing them to the Mafia, all might have
been different.)
But hate it or not, the politics clearly effected me here. I'm sure
that the complexities in Tolkien that were lacking in Wolfe's Wizard
Knight are a large part of my reaction to it. But the fact that
Wolfe, a conservative writing in my time, a time when conservatives
have done so much horrible damage to our country and the world, was a
big part too.
And I hate this. I hate that my experience of what is, after all, a
fantasy story unconnected to the present day, is colored by politics.
I hate that my experience of the writer who, for all his failings, is
one of the best writers working today (in fantasy or out of it), is
colored by my knowledge of his politics.**** I hate that I can't just
see the dragons and The Knights, but instead see the calls for
further U.S. crimes and blunders and wars.
One of the personal things I blame Bush and his followers for is that
they have created such a terrible, poisonous, and down-right evil
atmosphere that I am far less capable of seeing things in political
terms than I used to be -- far less capable than I would like to be.
I suspect that even in happier times I would have found The Wizard
Knight flawed -- for its pacing, for its main character, and, yes,
for its deeply problematic medieval ethics. But only nowadays would I
experience this as finding it flawed for its politics.
In this sense, and this sense only, I guess I, too, wish I could go
back to simpler times.
_____________________________________
* Other writers have complained about the split focus in The Wizard
between Abel and Toug. I, actually, felt that that was one of the
things that The Wizard had going for it: it spent more time focusing
on people who were more complex, less Blessed by The Gods (i.e.
Wolfe), and thereby were, to me, far more sympathetic and
(ultimately) admirable characters.
** Not in the films: to me, this was the single least excusable
change in Jackson's adaptation.
*** Well, if he was worried we wouldn't kill enough innocent people,
Wolfe can rest assured that we have done a bang-up job of it.
(/political bitterness)
I don't mean here to say that any support of a war is equivalent to
terrorist thinking; I'm not a pacifist. (Why do we always feel we
have to say that? That must be one of the most repeated sentences in
the country in the last few years.) I don't think war is always
wrong. But I don't think war should be used to punish; I think it
should be use to defend. And the latter involves not killing
civilians. I'm not talking about anything more complicated than just
war theory here -- a theory that the Catholic church has done a lot
to develop, mostly (from what little I've seen of it) along extremely
sensible lines. Wolfe, famously, is a Catholic; but I don't see the
influence of Catholic thinking about war in this statement.
**** Wolfe has said (I don't have the reference handy) that he used
to be a Bucklean conservative, but that now his politics are unique
and personal. Of course, there are a number of political positions in
this country -- minority positions, but ones with millions of
followers -- whose adherents frequently view themselves as possessing
unique, personal, non-partisan politics which they alone have the
objectivity and distance to see. Many of these are some variety of
conservative; and I think there's plenty of evidence that Wolfe fits
into one of these camps. If someone wishes to correct me -- not by
saying I shouldn't use his politics to judge his works (I agree), but
that I've gotten his politics wrong -- then please do so.
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