The Shadow of the Torturer: Chapter I

Resurrection and Death

A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

And so we begin Gene Wolfe’s monumental The Book of the New Sun.

Today is the first post in this slow read of The Book of the New Sun. If you would prefer not to receive emails for this slow read, you can adjust your settings by going here: radicaledward.substack.com/account.

Anyway, let’s briefly go over the events of the chapter:

Severian, our narrator, tells us he nearly drowned just moments ago, and he and his friends are heading back home. They come to a locked gate with no guard. When a volunteer is spotted and hailed, he opens the door a crack and Eata sprints past them, which allows all of them entry. The volunteers are worried about grave robbers. And then there’s an eruption of violence and our narrator gets separated from his group of friends and the volunteers and witnesses a man named Vodalus robbing a grave. Vodalus is caught and must fight the volunteers. Here, the narrator helps him and then names himself a follower of Vodalus, who then gives him a coin and leaves on a flying ship.

Simple enough, yes?

But that’s not why we’re reading this together. If a book was only about what happens, you could get all that by yourself—mostly, at least for now—but we’re here to dig into the book.

So let’s return to that poem that begins the novel.

It comes from Our God, Our Help by Isaac Watts. Despite this being my third time reading this, I never before bothered to see who wrote that. Since it goes uncredited, I suppose I assumed Wolfe wrote it.

What we need to know about Watts, to the extent we need to know anything, is that he was a very prolific and famous writer of hymns. You may have even sung one of them at church at some point in your life. Like many men of letters in the 18th century, he was also a logician, and apparently a very influential one.

Now, the question must arise, Why did Wolfe include this hymn, uncredited?

I’ll say this: nothing in the book is accidental. More than that, everything between the covers of the novel is part of the novel. We’ll talk about that more when we get to the appendix in a few months, but just know that the text of the novel has already begun, even before this first chapter.

But, again, we’ll discuss this more when we get to the Appendix.

What strikes me each time I read this novel is the atmospheric hook of these first few chapters. The world seems both enormous and shrouded in darkness. We have names thrown out here, a whole world and society implied, with stratifications and roles, yet we understand nothing yet, and our Severian isn’t telling much until it’s relevant to him.

There are several schools of worldbuilding, but they can largely be boiled down to those who teach us about the world upfront or as we go and those that use more of a sink or swim method.

Wolfe is the latter.

And so information is only doled out when our narrator, Severian, believes it matters. Because he’s narrating this story, too, and he’s a person living in this world, he sometimes doesn’t explain things, because why would he? If you were telling a story, would you digress to explain who the president is and how he came to be president? Would you explain the history of where you live when you bring up your hometown in conversation?

Severian is a person in this world and so many of the questions you have are about things that are so common that he sees no reason to even spend a moment explaining it, even in the briefest detail.

But let’s return to the beginning.

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.

What a way to begin a novel! Especially since this whole first chapter is full of foreboding. There’s an ambient dread and danger to the whole chapter. At least for me. It reminds me—and many others—of playing a game like Dark Souls or Bloodborne or Elden Ring, where you’re stepping into an unfamiliar, dark, dangerous world.

But he continues.

The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, the wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer’s apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.

Just bathe in the luxury of this prose, babies. We go from the rusted gates to the fog to metaphor to symbol of exile. And so Severian is telling us a lot here, but he’s rushing past it, dropping details of his future even as he’s telling us of his past. Also, curiously to us, that he was a torturer’s apprentice.

He’s also explicitly explaining that he is constructing this narrative. He’s not telling us that he’s beginning his story at the beginning or even the most important moment in his life or even the moment that set him on course to have the live he had. Instead, he’s beginning with a symbol of his exile.

This tells us something important about Severian. Not only is he constructing this story for an audience, but he’s constructing it with a mind to metaphor, with presentiment to where he will eventually go.

To jump, now, to the end of the chapter:

It was in his fashion that I began the long journey by which I have backed into the throne.

So we begin with an intuitive feeling or foreboding about the rest of his life and we end this first chapter with him telling us that he now sits upon a throne.

So consider this as we read.

Severian is constructing a story for his audience that explains how he came to his throne.

Which is to say that Severian is telling this story for a very specific purpose and with a goal in mind for the reader, and that reader is a person within the world of the novel.

We continue.

We meet, briefly, Roche, Drotte, and Eata, and these volunteers who are prowling a graveyard to keep graverobbers away. We come to protect our own dead, says the leader of the volunteers.

Such a curious construction. Our own dead.

Perhaps this becomes clearer when we first see Vodalus and his crew, who Severian describes as exlutants. A word, as yet, without contextual meaning. But we can assume there’s a social stratification here by simply looking at the word. Too, Severian uses this term to highlight the man’s accent, which further demonstrates some social stratification.

The volunteers speak the way Severian and his friends speak, which is why he makes no comment of it. Severian is an apprentice torturer and these men are volunteers protecting their dead, which seems like the potential bottom of a socioeconomic ladder.

The exultants are stealing a dead body from a grave and they’re willing to kill for it. Their accents also are noticeable enough that Severian comments upon it.

Severian spends the bulk of this chapter observing these exultants. Thea, Vodalus, and an unnamed third. Only when Vodalus is about to be killed does Severian shift from a passive agent in this entire chapter to an active one. And when he shifts, he kills one of the volunteers.

All this took place in dark and fog. I saw it, but for the most part the men were no more than ambient shadows—as the woman with the heart-shaped face had been. Yet something touched me. Perhaps it was Vodalus’s willingness to die to protect her that made the woman seem precious to me; certainly it was that willingness that kindled my admiration for him. many times since then, when I have stood upon a shaky platform in some market-town square with Terminus Est at rest before me and a miserable vagrant kneeling at my feet, when I have heard in hissing whispers the hate of the crowd and sensed what was far less welcome, the admiration of those who find an unclean joy in pains and deaths not their own, I have recalled Vodalus at the graveside, and raised my own blade half pretending that when it fell I would be striking for him.

He stumbled, as I have said. In that instant I believe my whole life teetered in the scales with his.

I find Severian’s narration intoxicating, honestly, and this will keep us all going or it’ll cause you to shipwreck against these sentences and amble off towards different writers with simpler, clearer styles. But I love the way time slips and flows and leaps back and forth for Severian, for it’s something that mirrors my own experience of being alive.

I’ve read that all time is now and I have felt that acutely often, and especially at moments like this, when I felt my entire world shifting, my entire life twisting towards or away from something.

For Severian, he gives us an explanation why the world feels this way to him.

It is my nature, my joy and curse, to forget nothing. Every rattling chain and whistling wind, every sight, smell, and taste, remains changeless in my mind, and though I know it is not so with everyone, I cannot imagine what it can mean to be otherwise, as if one had slept when in fact an experience is merely remote.

I’ve written about this aspect of memory in two places, which may be of interest to readers, here, of my own life and how memory has dictated the way I experience the world. Example One and Two.

But we must keep in mind that Severian is telling us all of this for a reason. And so it is worth asking why Severian wants us to know that he forgets nothing. Perhaps, to give weight to his own story and to stand as an impartial witness to his own life?

Who can say.

Upon saving Vodalus, telling him that he is a Vodalarius, One of the thousands of Vodalarii of whose existence you are unaware, he digresses.

We believe that we invent symbols. the truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

We learn much of the world here.

There is an Autarch and we can assume what that means from the word itself. We also see, in this acceptance of the coin, that Vodalus is some other political faction and possibly even a military faction rising against the Autarch or perhaps rivaling the Autarch.

We also learn through Severian that this acceptance of the coin from Vodalus has made him a Vodalarius, a Vodalarii, and this set him on the long journey to become, himself, the Autarch.

But what we see from Severian, at least in his narration, is a boy, an apprentice, who observes and follows. And then, at crucial moments, leaps forward and acts. First, to save Vodalus. Second, by claiming to be one of his followers, though he knows nothing of Vodalus.

Thus I knew nothing, as the coin dropped into my pocket, of the dogmas of the movement Vodalus led, but I soon learned them all, for they were in the air. With him I hated the Autarchy, though I had no notion of what might replace it. With him, I despised the exultants who failed to rise against the Autarch and bound the fairest of their daughters to him in ceremonial concubinage. With him I detested the people for their lack of discipline and a common purpose.

In an instant, he adopts all these attitudes, not out of some moral reasoning or even a logical one.

But by the brute logic that he saved Vodalus and so must now be a devotee to the cause.

And rather than declare and describe, with his perfect memory, what it means to be a Vodalarii or what Vodalus wanted, he describes the adoption of an attitude to life. He is not for something, here, but against the status quo under the Autarch, of whom he also knows nothing.

Now, there are hundreds of others things we could’ve spent time on with this chapter, like the physical moments, or the way Severian’s narrative digresses often to his interior beliefs and thoughts, but I think this will best serve us moving forward.

Now, as I said long ago, I am not an expert in Wolfe. I have read this series twice, though, so I’m at least familiar with the shape of this narrative.

But feel free to challenge my interpretation, not only here, but moving forward. Ask whatever questions you have about this or that, what stuck out to you, etc.

Next week, we’ll be discussing Chapters II and III, and we’ll learn more about Severian.