The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapter XXIII
Jolenta
Why? Why does Severian tell us this story about spending an afternoon with Jolenta while everyone else works? Why does he tell us that he had sex with Jolenta and everyone knew, and Dorcas wept over it? Why does he compare Jolenta to Agia?
And you could say, Well, he’s telling his story! Why wouldn’t he tell this bit?
But he skipped over the time between leaving Nessus and arriving in Saltus with Jonas. Severian often hides or occludes or skips past information. For example, we didn’t hear about many of his experiences with Thecla until long after Thecla died. He tells us explicitly that he will no longer tell us about when he works as a torturer or executioner, but we are expected to know that he continues to do this throughout his narrative.
On top of that, Severian invites this kind of questioning of his motives. Or at least Wolfe does. So much attention is brought to the construction of the text that we must ask about motives, about emphasis.
The stories Severian chooses to tell matter because of the metatextual aspect of the novel.
So why does he tell us all this about Jolenta?
And why compare her to Agia?
I suppose one answer, among potentially many, is masks.
Agia deceives Severian and this deception makes up most of The Shadow of the Torturer.
He describes Jolenta in this chapter as a performance.
I know you want my body. I want just any body.
Jolenta is a performance. A performance of femininity. Of sexuality. Of desire. Her only desire is to be desired. She does not care for Severian or any of the other men it’s implied she’s had sex with. Severian believes that her deepest desire is for Dr Talos, the one man who seems indifferent to her sexuality. It is this indifference to sex that gnaws at her.
She must be desired.
That is her only goal.
But should we take Severian at face value here?
We could reach beyond the text. We could discuss Jolenta in the context of a world full of plastic surgeries, of instagram filters, of body dysmorphia and onlyfans models getting mainstream coverage. My wife, just this week, told me who Bonnie Blue is and now I must suffer for knowing of such a person. And I could write here about the relationship between someone like Bonnie Blue and Jolenta, and I think you could follow along and believe that we’re all making important points about Gene Wolfe, or about the world he was writing about.
But he wrote this in the early 1980s. While plastic surgery was certainly around, it was a different world back then. And you could say that Wolfe was writing predicatively about where society was heading. Such things are often spoken when discussing a science fiction author.
But I think the simpler answer is related to what we’ve known about Severian from the very start.
He knew no women. He existed in a world without women. The Torturer’s Guild was a masculine space where women were little more than a legend or an object to be bought beyond the Citadel.
Severian believes women are liars. Believes that their role is one of passivity.
To Severian, crying Dorcas is the proper feminine ideal, whereas sex positive Jolenta is nothing more than a mask, a lie, and though he will take his pleasure from her body, he will despise her even more for it.
And perhaps Wolfe was, instead, predicting the dangerous incels and how they view the world. Sometime last year I was sadly made aware of a man named Andrew Tate. If you’ve had the sad displeasure of knowing that name, you can see an ideological similarity between Severian and Tate.
And so in this chapter we can see a collision of sorts, between pornography and the men who hate women.
We can see the world around us and fit it inside Book of the New Sun.
And that’s the power of literature. We cannot help but experience life and have those experiences interact with the texts we read. The same is true of Wolfe. Everything he wrote was, in some ways, informed by or about the world around him. Not necessarily on purpose or in a polemical way, but because he was a man who was alive.
Even so, I don’t think any of these are exactly the right way to read Wolfe, to read Severian.
To me, the simple answer is the best one. And that simple answer is that Severian has quite a dim view of women. He was deceived by every woman he’s met, excepting Dorcas and Thecla, and so he cannot help but hate them. At the same time, he cannot help but desire them. To need them.
While Dorcas and Thecla may be two sides of an ideal, Jolenta and Agia and the masquerading whore in the Autarch’s brothel represent the devilish nature of women to Severian.
What of the rest of women?
Well, have you seen much of them?
There are the goddesses and there are the lying whores.
Some will claim that this is proof of Wolfe’s misogyny, but I think that’s a poor way to read books. To think that everything must be autobiographical or telling on oneself.
Regardless of what we might think of Severian and Wolfe in this chapter, it’s undeniable that this is a very strange chapter. A truly bizarre moment in the series. Because it also gives a strong amorality to Severian, at least with regard to matters of the heart.