The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapter XXIV

Dr Talos's Play

Many people will tell you that this play is the key to the entire Book of the New Sun. Probably they’re right, but you can’t possibly know that now. And while I simply agree, I also just don’t see everything. Maybe I can’t properly hold the whole work in my head at once, but I don’t really think you’re meant to. Maybe when you finish, you can go back and reread this and tell me if it feels like a question answered.

There are curious elements here though. For one, Severian says this is a recreation, not as Dr Talos wrote it, but as he remembers it.

Is his memory not a perfect recreation though?

If not, what are we all doing here!

There are a few ways to read this distinction.

The first is simple sloppiness on Wolfe’s part. He forgot for a sentence to stick with what he already established.

Another is that Severian is telling us, maybe accidentally, that his memory is not the same as what actually happened. There’s room for distinction and fragmentation between what Severian tells us and what actually happened.

Which is it?

Maybe it doesn’t matter or maybe it matters a great deal.

Maybe it’s the most important piece of information in the whole chapter, the whole book, the whole series.

But what can be said about the play? Well, it’s allegorical, metaphorical, metatextual both as a play but also in the context of the physicality of the book held in your hands.

You are reading a book written by Gene Wolfe called The Book of the New Sun about a man named Severian writing a book about his life and in that book is the recreation of a play called The Book of the New Sun where women are tortured, where a new sun is literally born from the extinction of the old, dying sun. It’s the story of Genesis, or at least of a Genesis. It’s all quite biblical but also full of Sumerian and Greek gods and also mirrors much of Severian’s life as we’ve known it, and, perhaps, the parts of his life we have not yet seen.

And then Baldanders rages and abruptly ends the play, just as he has before.

Which is also strange. What is it about this play that drives the giant mad?

The play is quite fun and silly and farcical and plays on conventions of staged theatre. Characters are said to look alike. This is because the cast of players perform as multiple characters. It’s a bit of a visual pun, if you will. A metatextual joke that makes more sense if you’re visibly watching a play where the same person shows up under different names and costumes at different times.

There’s a greater focus on this play, incidentally, in Urth of the New Sun, though we won’t ever be discussing that book here.

But this is a bizarre chapter to read, no matter what you might think of the content of the play. Just a few chapters ago, Severian was trapped in the House Absolute. He met the Autarch who is also Vodalus’ spy who also told Severian to kill the Autarch.

Now we detour to a play, which is the longest single chapter of the book.

The play is obviously important. Important to Wolfe and Severian, but is it important to us, the reader?

Honestly, I think it can’t be. At least not yet. Not on first read. Not the way we encounter it.

So why include it?

Well, I think from reading it you get a sense that Wolfe just likes theatre. He likes the comedic elements available to a stage play that aren’t as available to a novel. The visual gags, for one. And so I do think he just wanted to write a play and shove it in here, possibly for no reason beyond his desire.

As I said way back in the intro to this entire slow read: Wolfe is often discussed like some grand architect of this novel. Everything is in its right place, constructed and calibrated with a clockmaker’s precision.

But the sense I have always gotten from the book is that Wolfe is just winging it. Yes, much of the novel and series coheres and feels extremely sturdy, like it must have required great forethought to produce, and I think that’s a testament to Wolfe as a writer.

The actual process of reading this series, however, really does feel like you’re reading someone tell a story on the run, making it up as he goes along. Which he obviously is because how else can a story be told?

I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, mind. I think Wolfe just kind of did whatever felt right in the moment. It’s why these novels are structurally insane. Severian still isn’t at Thrax! That’s where he’s been heading for like 500 pages! We’re nearly at the middle of the series and the quest he was sent on has barely begun.

He spent most of this book separated from Dorcas!

Why?

We didn’t even get to see why they split up!

Instead we have this strange sequence of events with Jonas, who just recently disappeared into mirrors to travel worlds away.

There are points in the series where it feels like Wolfe is drawing from a deck of cards with each card representing some event. He pulls them at random and then just rolls with it.

So what are we to make of this play?

I honestly cannot say. I don’t rightly know. I know it matters and I know the echoes of what’s to come can be felt here, but trying to use this play as a skeleton key for the entire Book of the New Sun is just an unnatural approach to me. It might truly be that skeleton key, but I have never found the utility of such a thing, of such a reading.

The best way, I think, to read this is as a play. Have fun. I hope you did, anyway.

We’ll be racing towards the end of this book now.