gene wolfe's book of the NEWSUN!!!!! reading club

I'd urge you to remember that New Sun is being written/narrated by an insane torturer, who often obscures his own shitty actions (i.e. rape of Jolenta) and has no real understanding of women, raised solely among men and boys. THAT SAID, I do think there is criticism warranted PRIMARILY because part of Newsun hinges on the Thecla/Severian duality, and in that respect, Narrator Severian, being both man & woman, should probably possess more insight into women than he does.

kinda funny thinking of it that way. there's not really any way in which i'm a "man" but i guess i've had experiences with gender that a lot of people (wolfe certainly included) haven't.

I'd be curious to know what in the text makes you think Wolfe hates women, rather than Severian. He has very conservative views (Catholic innit) for sure, so I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. I'm just curious. In Book Of The Long Sun, several of the strongest and most powerful characters, and are not written in the one-dimensional way that they are sometimes written in New Sun.

- ian, Saturday, January 6, 2024 3:41 PM (two hours ago)

it's been a while so i can't say precisely, and i don't want to make it sound like a rhetorical argument... like you say, wolfe was a catholic. not just a catholic, but the particular strand of catholic with which one should _not_ get into a rhetorical argument, lol.

mainly it's character voice. it's one of the most challenging things about writing... i've noticed a tendency when writing to fill in the lacunae in character experience and voice with my own experiences. this quality was, if anything, even more pronounced in my writing pre-transition, when i had a false universalist conception of human nature.

that is the interesting thing to me... not the question of wolfe's misogyny, but my complete failure to notice it pre-transition. i don't think of myself as ever having been a man, and i don't think it's hormonal. if anything i'd say it's lived experience. looking at things from multiple perspectives. wolfe was extremely intellectually gifted but it is fundamentally an intellectual framing. that i look at things differently now isn't a matter of intellectual growth, just lived experience.

what i remember is the way severian, as narrator, describes women's bodies... from the way severian describes his own life, his own experience, the way he describes and treats women seems like something of a non sequitur. they're ways in which women are treated in _our_ world, under conditions that don't seem to apply in severian's... in particular, i had the impression that severian finds women's bodies to be in some way indicative of their _character_, particularly in a moral sense. i don't remember reading anything in his descriptions of his world that would justify that approach. it's a very catholic way of looking at things. very catholic in a specifically highly patriarchal way. there's very much a sort of "male gaze" to how severian looks at things - again, in my memory. he observes and judges the bodies of the women in a way he doesn't with the bodies of the men.

i think this is something of a failure of thomist and post-thomist intellectual catholicism in general... there's a sort of misrecognition of the ways we're shaped by somatic experience.

if i can get really personal here... one of the most profound experiences i had relating to catholicism was subsequent to my genital reconstruction surgery. without wishing to get too into detail, it is a complex surgery and one does wind up bleeding for quite a long time. to someone from the outside, to me before i had the experience, i didn't understand what the true impact of it would be. one can't until one experiences it. there's something sort of very mystical and spiritual about that, in a way that's aligned with scholasticism, i feel. the thing is that the anatomical and physiological changes are, comparatively speaking, nothing. anatomy textbooks will tell you that there's just not that much difference between male genitals and female genitals, and my lived experience bears this out.

the difference is in having this new perspective, a new way of understanding oneself. after a few days i was able to step into the shower and wash myself. it's out of necessity a gentle, tender experience. i'm not a parent, but i had a very strong sense of treating this new creation as i would a newborn child, with the love i would show to my own newborn child. it seemed profoundly maternal.

i washed myself, and i saw and felt the blood... being raised catholic, i was taught there was something beautiful in blood, and i felt that strongly at that time. i recall seeing and feeling myself and saying "this is my body, this is my blood". and it felt as if it was true for the first time in my life. that for the first time in my life i truly understood myself that my body was _my_ body.

and from a catholic perspective, well, others might dispute it but the catholicism i was raised in, i know full well that it was blasphemous of me to say that. not because i am comparing myself to christ or saying that my body is christ's body. it's not. it's more that under catholicism, under patriarchy, people - all people, but especially _women_ - don't have the right to their own bodies. our bodies are not our own. we are part of the body of christ. we eat of christ's body and drink of christ's blood, and that is the mystery and the sanctity of communion. the abomination. the cruelty. the dominion, of what they call "communion". my body is my body. not christ's. not any man's body. mine.

which i think puts me fundamentally at odds with wolfe's worldview and perspective, and the way he sees women in particular.

anyway. i hope that makes some sort of sense! kind of hard to put into words.

Makes tons of sense and I agree with a lot of it. In fevers I think you’re right - Severian writes about women as caricatures because he’s definitely a misogynist. That’s severian the fictional author of this fictional book of the new sun.

When I first read it, I thought along similar lines. “Why are all these women falling in with him all the time?” Oh yes, he’s the narrator, of course he’s going to tell it that way. I think the late great addresses this up thread perhaps too… it’s helpful to keep in your mind that the fictional guy writing that book is, yes, a misogynist by all modern standards, but also insane, and a liar (sometimes from his insanity I think and sometimes willfully, and he often omits.) Severian also loves to stroke his own ego. This is also a world in which the masters in the bear tower practice monogamous bestiality, so their whole worldview is kinda ducked by all of our modern standards.

None of this to discount your lived experience, but that one of the … things… for me when reading new sun is to Always keep in mind that Severian is a creation of Wolfe, and one whose moral worldview is intentionally fucked up, because it’s the product of an alien and fucked up place.

Sorry. I’m typing in my phone…

. If you have not read the whole series, it may also help to know the whole story, narration especially, becomes radically recontextualized by the climax of the fourth book.

Like… Severian sucks he’s not cool or fun. Sm

oh yeah for sure i don't look at him and be like WOW THIS GUY HAS A BADASS SWORD AND A CLOAK THAT'S, LIKE, BLACK, BUT IT'S EVEN MORE BLACK THAN BLACK, LIKE HE COULD PROBABLY ROUNDHOUSE KICK CHUCK NORRIS IN THE FACE haha

i do wanna push back on the "he's insane" though, i've dealt for most of my live with severe mental illness and i've found that it often is essentialized. it's like the whole "depression quest" thing where sometimes the right choices literally aren't open to us because of where we've been. it doesn't offer any kind of excuse or justification, though, and i think sometimes there's a tendency to do that. i don't see it as "he's lying because he's crazy". i don't see it as _lying_ at all, like, what he's saying doesn't accord with the facts but like you say there's a difference between saying something he genuinely believes and saying something he _knows_ to be false

either way he's responsible for his words and actions and their consequences. like if i'm gonna look at it from jolenta's perspective it doesn't really matter if severian _knows_ what he's doing

to me basically it's... particularly since i take a trauma-focused approach to mental illness, i look at the circumstances and environment severian comes from and, like, my critical approach is to try and see how those experiences have shaped his character

part of the gender essentialization here, i think, part of the misogyny, is that _wolfe_, not the character, mistakes toxic masculinity for manhood itself. being raised among men, being raised without real access to womanhood and women's experiences... that shaped me. it absolutely did. i don't see being a man in the company of men as something twisted and hateful, though. i guess it can be. i guess it depends on your point of view. again there's a lot of subtext i'm missing. is there a lot of pederasty in the torturer's guild? that sort of trauma would explain severian's perspective. because it's learned, it's a learned perspective, learned behavior

I think you should just read Long Sun, lol - completely different writing style and character work, it's interesting (and the main character is effectively raised by women)

In one of the early chapters, Severian tells you straight up that he is insane and the jumble of memories in his brain are impenetrable even to him, he admits that he may not be lying intentionally, but i still think he often does. So i'm not trying to take mental illness lightly -- but it's something he acknowledges. He also contradicts himself in the text occasionally, usually in the manner of "I remember everything!" "oh, i don't remember what happened next..."

re: pederasty - there are allusions to this happening though iirc nothing super concrete. i'll look out for it during this re-read. here's a reddit thread on the topic - https://www.reddit.com/r/genewolfe/comments/bzerhz/severian_the_pederast_does_wolfe_not_situate/

Even w/o pederasty in the guild it's an incredibly fucked up environment. He never saw a woman until he was god knows how old (whenever he was old enough to go to the witch's tower i suppose) -- he has very little idea how to interact with the outside world at all and women in particular imo. Being raised in an environment where violence is cold and common and, in fact, your duty, is also very traumatic probably.

re: sanity,

"I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane … I had lied often … Now I could not be sure my own mind was not lying to me; all my falsehoods were recoiling on me and I who remembered everything could not be certain those memories were more than my own dreams.”

^ very end of chapter 3

damn that’s an airtight argument

incredible given that even ursula leguin was tricked by this snake

she called him “the melville of our time” by which i am
sure she meant damn this dude seems weirdly sympathetic to this killer whale and this killer whale killer prep the cancel culture harpoon

:shrug:

i’m not trying to be insulting. i’m just saying i agree that a person who is a literal torturer, trained to inflict pain — and more crucially to reject compassion, since he is told to think of the pleas and bargaining and begging of those under torture as like the squeaks of animals that signify nothing but pain — is going to remind us of people that treat us poorly

also he lives in a world where growth is stilled because the sun is corrupt and every mountain has been carved into the likeness of a murderous male autocrat obsessed with power, and this is normalized to the point where people call them mountains and not “the mountain that looks like the old autarch so and so” and the reader has to figure it out

i’m with you, it sounds like a shitty place to be and for that reason i try not to imagine myself as actually in the story or those ppl actually in my world.

but that’s a general reading tactic of mine anyway

if people want to get mad at a book about a decadent lunatic with a huge sword who destroys the world, that’s fine! the author wants that

and when you figure out what kind of “hero” he is you’ve (and remember it’s a bildungsroman so the story only ends when the narrator is no longer himself … and he has photographic memory and relives his experiences like an alzabo, so has no agency to retell his dark past as a better person) unlocked the theme of the book

so anyway yeah stories about these cursed sword dark
edgelord heroes are not for everyone, and its a bit embarassing how many postcolonial voices or whatever stan for him. maybe you’d like elric novels better, simpler guilty pleasure and also good reading

finally if you wonder why i might read like that … it’s so i can compare books like sundiver vs xenogenesis or foundation vs triton on merit of ideas first, since it is sci fi … and i don’t look to art for practical guidance, i have enough immediate accountability in my life (since i get publicly evaluated, by govt name, by children with microphones, in front of mayors and state assembly leaders for years and years now) … like just personally have enough to worry about without muddying the issue

that’s all i’m going to say on it and afaict that’s definite so i’m done for awhile. this is the only corner of this board i feel useful on anyway, and not at all on an affective or social emotional level, just a sliver of personal knowledge i’ve earned at ruinous cost to myself

definitive* not definite … and only fair since i kicked off this whole mess

do you think it's a mess? this is a book you love and you understand and here comes this weirdo who, like, openly admits to not understanding the book and interprets it through her own biased lens. idk, i know that's a flaw of mine, i come off as more authoritative and sure of myself than i actually am. to be honest i don't read a lot of fantasy novels at all - it's not a genre i'm familiar with. so it's not surprising that i'm maybe a bit ignorant of what's going on in this particular book! the next fantasy author on my to-read list is tamsyn muir and not moorcock. i heard tamsyn muir's books have more lesbians.

i mean, what can i do here, retract my opinions? does it even make sense for a person to retract their _opinions_?