The Shadow of the Torturer: Appendix

I wanted to just take a moment to discuss the Appendix to The Shadow of the Torturer because it is part of the novel. As in, it’s part of the narrative and not simply an appendix to the novel.

If your novel doesn’t have the Appendix immediately after The Shadow of the Torturer, it’s okay to skip ahead to the Appendix, wherever it appears in your volume.

Here, Gene Wolfe, the author, becomes a character as he inserts himself into the novel.

In rendering this book—originally composed in a tongue that has not yet achieved existence—into English, I might easily have saved myself a great deal of labor by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so.

And what a way to give a conceptual explanation of the book! Here, Gene Wolfe is no longer really an author, but a translator, making Severian, yet still, the narrator, transposing the audience he wrote this account for beyond time to meet us here millennia in his past.

And so we discover that all of these words, no matter how unfamiliar, are, in fact, English. When necessary, he uses an approximate term for what it represents in that future (quite standard practice for translations). When he describes an extinct creature, he is not saying that that creature was resurrected but that the creature being described is similar to that extinct creature. He uses Latin to stand in for some other dead language of the far distant future.

But I find the concept of this Appendix most interesting. Wolfe even acknowledges all those who helped him translate this and even showed him sights of that yet nonexistent world, who have artefacts from it.

And here we meet aspects discussed in the gardens that Agia and Severian go to. In there, they meet people who seem to be from the 20th Century and those people from the 20th Century are speaking to someone either in the past or future, and Severian, who is far in their future, witnesses this.

Thus and so, Gene Wolfe enters the world of the New Sun as not only a translator but an agent, a character.

It’s the kind of thing we might expect from Philip Roth or some other postmodernist literary writer, where they inject themselves into the narrative as a character while also being the narrator. But I can’t think of any time a science fiction novel has done something similar.

We will return in August with The Claw of the Conciliator.

See you in a few weeks.