(urth) Short Story 58: The Rubber Bend

[Marc Aramini]

The Rubber Bend
“The Rubber Bend” first appeared in
1974 in Universe 5 (according to the copyright page on Storeys
from the Old Hotel, anyway … … …).  This is a sequel to “Slaves
of Silver” from 1971.  Gene Wolfe’s mysteries are easy because
there is a detective there to solve them, so you don’t have to! 
This one is not serious, but still has many allusions and even
personal references, but there are almost no elided details that
require a super close reading. 
SUMMARY:
Dr. Westing is sent by his
roommate, the Sherlock Holmes based March B Street, to assist the
Nero Wolfe derived robot Noel Wide in his capacity as bio-mechanic. 
Upon arriving, he meets the client of Wide, Alice Dodson, whose
“father” has disappeared in the midst of his studies, but whose
ghostly figure haunts her at certain times in his laboratory when she
goes in to clean it.  After threatening the normally  housebound Wide
with litigation, they journey to the massive Groan building and
Dodson's laboratory.  March correlates the appearances of the ghost
and its relative posture with dates and times, and determines Dodson
has created a device to change his perception of space and time such
that he now perceives time as a height.  Standing up and sitting down
thus cast him forward and backwards in time.  After utilizing a
powerful fan to pluck Dodson's notes into his time, Street stands on
his head so that the relative position of his own perceptions allows
him to communicate with Dodson.  Dodson returns to a lower level at
the end to give himself a call and thus stop the entire displacement
before it ever occurs.

Comments on this as a sequel to “Slaves
of Silver”


In “Slaves of Silver”, there was
much more attention paid to the set up of declassed humans who
actually had to work for a living or accept being euthanized after
either a century of life or in the case of asexual reproduction, but
this one abandons that rather heavy social backdrop in favor of
straight pastiche and light humor.  “The Rubber Bend” is perhaps
one of Wolfe’s easiest and least serious stories in the 1970s, in the midst
of his super dense novellas.  The social implication of upper and
under class which plays out so strongly in stories like “The Hero
as Werwolf” is very far off-screen in “The Rubber Bend”.

CULTURAL AND LITERARY REFERENCES:
The Wolfe Wiki has done a pretty good
job on picking up on the references, but there are still a few more.
Most are obvious. 
MILFORD, PEIRCE, DAMON KNIGHT, ALICE,
AND PULP
Westing is a member of the Peircian
society which argues that Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is
actually Damon Knight (1922-2002) due to the Milford, Pennsylvania
and heavy beard association.  Peirce's logical
pragmatism/pragmaticism would without a doubt appeal to Wolfe: the
idea that words, language, and thought do not at all serve to
represent reality but must actually accomplish something in practice. 
The backdrops of his position are that absolute truth can be
discovered independent of opinion, and that argument and thought
should follow the scientific method.  (This is the same general
approach I take to Wolfe's texts, for what it is worth.)  Knight was
actually from Oregon, but the Milford Writer's Workshops of peer
critique operated there until moving to the UK in 1972.  In the
story, Milford and that portion of the United States are underwater
after a disastrous deluge.  This Peircian society does seem to echo
many of those ridiculous revisionist groups who will maintain that,
for example, the Queen wrote Shakespeare's plays rather than some man
named William Shakespeare. (The wolfe-wiki notes that this is a
parody of the Baconians in particular.) Of course Damon Knight was
the editor who re-worked Wolfe's story “Trip, Trap” and thus grew
him from a bean.  At the 2013 Nebulas, Wolfe commented that
originally his design for “Trip Trap” was about as asinine as
anyone could imagine, with the two stories running next to each other
in columns, and that Knight's redesign could not have been improved
upon when he tried.

The scientific oddity that represents
Dodson's experiment is based on a quote by Damon Knight “If all
four space-time dimensions are equivalent, how is it that we perceive
one so differently than the rest?” Dodson's Peircian pragmatic view
that ideas which cannot be put into practice have no worth spurred
him to experiment with time as a measurable distance, switching in
his own perceptions vertical distance and duration.

Lewis C Dodson and Alice are, as is
obvious, named after Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) and his Alice of
Wonderland fame. 

This pastiche of the pulp magazines
like Amazing becomes almost cringeworthy at times, as this dialogue shows: “The
culture medium [for Wide's mushrooms] is shredded paper pulp mixed
with sawdust and horse manure.” “Amazing.”  This fungi
is said to be from points as exotic as David Lindsey's Arcturus or as
homely as Lovecraft's Yuggoth.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HEIGHT AND
TIME: for whatever reason, the “temporal” sensing organ of the
brain and its relative height determine the time that Dr. Dodson will
appear.  This flitting through the dimensions is perhaps a less
confusing examination of the displacement in his Thag stories.  The
denouement is simply to have Dr. Dodson descend far enough to call
himself in the past and avoid the experiment all together … which
causes neither paradox nor time anomaly in this nice cozy pastiche
universe.  I feel that time's perception will play a central part in
the novel Peace which Gene might have been working on at the
same time as this shorter, less dense story. There is also the
hotel scene in the novel in which a Weer's aunt seems to switch
places temporally and temporarily with a future guest, disturbed by
the busy future traffic on the street while that guest calls to
complain about the floating candle lights in the room.
While it is science fiction, the bulk
of the reference are to fantasy and fantasists or famous mystery
characters, and at the end Street overtly admits he is in a story
written by a man named Wolfe.
THE GROAN BUILDING: no doubt this
massive building with thousands of floors references Gormenghast and
the stronghold of Titus Groan, who, when he descends into the real
world at last, finds that he is not actually in a medieval setting,
but transposed into a modern one.
NERO WOLFE STORIES AND RELATIVE TIMELESSNESS
Noel Wide is quite clearly based on Rex
Stout's rather hefty Nero Wolfe, and the title of the short story
adapted from the Stout novel The Rubber Band.  The reluctance
of Wide to shake hands and his girth, as well as insistence on
maintaining a rigorous schedule, are directly from Nero Wolfe. 
Archie Goodwin becomes Arch St. Louis, the cook Fritz becomes the
elevator/house cyberpersonality Fritz which responds to voice
command, etc.  There seems little connection between the plot of that
particular novel and this story.
Besides the name, there are several
attractive things to Gene about Nero: 
While the novels of Nero Wolfe by Rex
Stout are contemporary with their writing, none of the characters
ever age.  The brownstone house is a bastion of timelessness and
unalterable habit, which Nero Wolfe lords over.  He solves all his
cases through mental process completely removed from leaving his
center of control.  I think this “in time but out of time”
approach is attractive to Gene Wolfe.  Nero Wolfe's vocabulary is
also erudite and baroque.
In the Stout novels, Wolfe never leaves
his house unless something extraordinary prompts his egress.  Here is
the dialogue that prompts Wide to venture forth:
“'Mr. Wide, I've been paying you for
a week now, and you haven't gone to look at the ghost yet  I want you
to go I person.  Now. Tonight.'
'Madame, under no circumstances will I
undertake to leave my house on business.'
'If you don't I'm going to fire you and
hire a lawyer to sue for every dime I've paid you.'
'However, it is only once in a lifetime
that a man is privileged to part the curtain that veils the
supernatural.' Wide rose from his huge chair.”
The story does break the wall into a
slight metafictional moment at the end: 
“'There was some correspondence on
his desk, and one of the envelopes was addressed to Wolfe.' 
'That was intended for the author of
this story …. Don't worry, Wide will forward it to him.'”
Overall a simple pastiche, the story
bears little resemblance to the majority of Wolfe's heavier output at
this time.  The subjective/relative perception of time and the
relative ability to affect objects with which one interacts is
slightly interesting, but there are really no enduring mysteries or
unanswered questions in this particular text.
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