(urth) Short Story 13: The Changeling

Fri Jul 18 14:26:52 PDT 2014

I'm working my way from the beginning of Marc's thoughtful posts on the short stories and have been thinking a bit about "The Changeling".
I think that the difficulty in interpreting "The Changeling" is the fact that it is fractured through at least three (perhaps more) interpretive prisms.  Each forms a layer that is necessary for the whole but insufficient on its own, creating together a rich thematic warp and woof that builds and reinforces itself in interesting ways.
First, you have the real-world interpretation that revolves around the 20 or so P.O.W.s from the Korean War that were captured by the Chinese, held in prison camps and brainwashed for three years.  After this torturous ordeal, and being "convinced" by the Maoists, many decided to refuse repatriation and remain in China.  Those that stayed went about setting up new lives in the People's Republic.  Pete Palmer is one of these individuals.  He mentions Panmunjom, the Korean town where talks were held that ultimately resulted in the release of the P.O.W.s on June 8, 1953.  There is a Wikipedia entry listing all those persons who refused repatriation.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_and_British_defectors_in_the_Korean_War.  Interestingly, several of the persons listed have biographies that are similar to Pete Palmer's.  Several of the listed individuals worked in paper mills in China before later returning to the United States.  One of those individuals is listed as Sgt. Howard Adams from Corsicana, Texas not too far from Houston and thus almost certainly a person Korean War veteran Gene Wolfe would have been familiar with.
When Pete Palmer finally decides to return to America, c. 1959, he is held prisoner by the U.S., undergoing detention and a trial at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.  Several of the real-life prisoners, Otho Bell, William Cowart, and Lewis Griggs faced trial but in 1955.  (See The Graybeards, Official Publication of the Korean War Veterans Association, Vol. 15, No. 4, July-August 2002, pp. 10-11).  In this real-world interpretation, several of the mysterious happenings that occur in the story (the unaging Peter Palmieri, the lack of records, his going crazy)  can be viewed as the understandable psychological response of a person who has been through a rather hellish experience only to return "home" and find that because of the choices made after undergoing intense indoctrination at a very young age (probably about 17 when he was captured) he has been consciously forgotten by everyone.  Rather than believe that one of their own would be a "red" sympathizer, they have chosen instead to act as though he doesn't exist.  Ernie Cotha and Papa Palmieri being examples of ones who have remembered and presumably forgiven Pete his "sins".  Which segues nicely to the second interpretative structure that can be laid over the proceedings.    
As Marc Aramini has already pointed out, James Jordan has put together an interpretation that saw the story as "commentary on the American
Catholic church changing its ways from its old roots, with Papa as the Pope and
Mama as the church and Maria as Mary etc. and Pete Palmer representing the
turning away from the old Italian way of being Catholic".  (For James Jordan's original analyis, see Urth Archives, Jim Jordan, July 16, 1997; Jim Jordan, July 22, 1997).  I think James Jordan's instinct was right here in playing up the allusions to religious personages central to the Catholic faith but I think saw it as symbolic of a too recent split in the Catholic church.  If one takes it back farther, to the Great Schism within the Catholic Church (c. 1054) that created the two great branches of Christianity (Eastern Orthodox and Catholic) the resonances with the split of North and South Korea along modern ideological grounds precipitating the Korean War become stronger.  The East-West Schism or First Great Schism was a division of the Church into East and West halves that was manifested not only in differing church doctrines (whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father through the Son or some other arrangement if I remember correctly), but also in actual political and geographical divisions that persist to the present day.
The Schism interpretation is hinted at through the name associations of the two people in town who remember Pete Palmer: Ernie Cotha and Papa Palmieri.  James Jordan's interpretation of Papa Palmieri as a stand-in for the Pope I believe to be correct and puts him on the Catholic (which corresponds with the Capitalist) side.  How about that marvelously curious name "Cotha"? Well if it is seen as an acronym rather than a word of its own it may refer to COTHA = Church of the Holy Apostles, a
church in Eastern Orthodox Constantinople.  Thus, Ernie Cotha (earnest church = true church?) is the Eastern side (corresponding to the Communist ideology).  The resonance here is what happens to individuals and communities when ideological differences result in massive upheavals in their lives, whether it be Communism vs. Capitalism in the mid-20th century or Eastern Orthodoxy vs. Roman Catholicism in the mid-11th.  The difficulty with any such either/or ideological battle is that it tends to have a stultifying effect on both sides, each becoming entrenched in an unchanging conservative form of itself, the better to highlight differences with its ideological counterweight.  Thus the Peter Palmieri who does not age is both the Roman Catholic Church after the Great Schism and Western Capitalism at the outbreak of the Cold War.  The Roman Catholic Church would eventually reap the harvest of this entrenchment when Protestantism started kicking at its rotten trunk and won hordes of converts.  The results of the entrenchment of Western Capitalism at the outset of the Cold War were still shrouded in uncertainty when Wolfe wrote "The Changeling" and perhaps still are but I doubt his belief was that any good would come out of it for either side. 
The third interpretative layer is the Peter Pan allusions.  At this point in the analysis it becomes obvious that Pan's refusal to grow up is meant to resonate with the entrenchment of the Catholic Church and the similar doctrinal orthodoxies adhered to by North and South Korea and on a more global level in the Cold War.  The frustration of Pete Palmer (when he ultimately goes mad and sets the skiff drift away from the island) and the error of Papa Palmieri is the fact that history repeats itself and even though we all know the adage, we are still all doomed to repeat it.  Pete Palmer thinks that he can change and still return to the place of his childhood and be accepted but he is not.  People don't want change, which is why the whole town is perfectly happy to go along with calling Peter, though unchanging, something new every few years.  Pete realizes that "Peter still has the same last name as always and I guess now he always will, but the boys don't call him by it much."  Peter, like the ideological splits of the past that are certain to recur in the future, are fundamentally the same, but human societies don't recognize them as proceeding from the same source very often.  Papa (the Pope) is wrong that eventually Peter (the conservative Catholic Church) will not be able to pass himself logically as a member of the family any longer (refuse rapprochement with the Eastern Church).  Peter manages to continue doing so and the Schism still exists.  Pope Paul VI attempted reconciliation to a certain degree in 1965 by nullifying one of the major acts that led to the Great Schism in 1054, but the Schism went right on persisting and probably always will.  Perhaps it is pessimistic but in 1968 it seems Gene Wolfe thought it was equally likely that we were witnessing a rift in humanity that might persist for a millennium.

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