The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 30: I Really Do Not See How I Can Ever Explain This

.

One thing I don't like to do here, but do often anyway, is write posts about writers about whom I know very little, or have very little experience reading. It gives me less to write about, which might seem like a blessing until you find yourself trying to write some introductory paragraphs, and instead find yourself staring blankly at the computer screen, making "Uuuummmmmmmmmm" noises. Eventually, you might find yourself writing about how it's hard to write this stuff sometimes, just as a means to fill space. One does what one must.

.

Anyway, that's the situation I find myself in today as I write this post about Gene Wolfe. 2010 was supposed to be my Year of Gene Wolfe, as I didn't so much plan as think there was a good chance I would read a fair amount of this heretofore unknown-except-by-reputation author of various science fiction, fantasy, and occasionally horror classics. The man is a giant in his fields. A critic for the Chicago Sun-Times once said of him "Gene Wolfe is as good a writer as there is today...I feel a little bit like a musical contemporary attempting to tell people what's good about Mozart." Ursula K. Le Guin said "Wolfe is our Melville." Gene Wolfe, meanwhile, might wish that these people would rein that shit in a little. But he's been around for decades, and can probably shrug off the good as easily as the bad at this point.

.

My Year of Gene Wolfe did not pan out, as the whole thing threw a rod after I'd read only a handful of stories from the recently published book The Best of Gene Wolfe. His writing -- and I'd sort of suspected this -- is rather dense, and for me at least doesn't lend itself to quick reading. I'd become intrigued, for some obscure reason, with the fact that over the years Wolfe had published a series of short stories and novellas with titles like "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (the title story of the wonderfully named collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories), "The Death of Doctor Island", "Death of the Island Doctor", and so on. I wondered what in the world these could all be about, and how they might be connected outside of their mix-and-match titles. I imagined some thrilling pastiche on pulp horror-adventure stories, with some cerebral who-knows-what playing around beneath it all. Of those, I've only managed to read "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", and in that case I was almost correct in my assumption of its contents, except for the thing about it being a pastiche, and the cerebral elements are inextricably linked with the emotional, and the whole thing was just very odd, turning out to be a story more about a boy's unhappiness than anything the title might imply.

.

Which might give you some idea of the nebulous, even fragmented relationship between Gene Wolfe and genre. I'm about to say something rather grand, considering my relative inexperience with the fiction of Gene Wolfe, but it seems to me that Wolfe will write whatever it is he feels like writing. You will then categorize it as you see fit, and you will sometimes have great trouble doing so. Basically, I don't believe Wolfe always gives a great deal of thought -- and why should he? -- about what genre he's about to write in, and the anthologists may sometimes have to scramble as a result.

.

This theory might have explained how, in 1980, Wolfe's rather un-horrific story "The Detective of Dreams" ended up in Kirby McCauley's seminal horror anthology Dark Forces, except that each of those stories was written specifically for that anthology. Part of the point of Dark Forces is its variety -- it features stories by everyone from Joyce Carol Oates and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Edward Gorey to Dennis Etchison, Stephen King and Karl Edward Wagner -- but I wouldn't think that variety would extend so far as to include a story that didn't belong to the genre in question. Because "The Detective of Dreams" isn't a horror story. How could it be mistaken for one? In his introduction to the story, McCauley says:

.

To the casual reader, it might seem a parody on a certain kind of nineteeth-century style and genre, but a closer look reveals a statement of deep personal belief and commitment, wrapped in the manners and atmosphere of another century, one [Wolfe] perhaps sees as especially significant to the close of this one.

.

The parody part I get (actually, I don't disagree with anything McCauley says here): "The Detective of Dreams" is, in structure and tone, a classic mystery -- a "spiritual mystery", if that's actually a genre -- in which our narrator, the title detective, is called upon by the powerful Herr D____ to "find and destroy the Dream-Master", and this being one of those stories where certain characters may not be named, Wolfe goes ahead and doesn't name anybody, or any place, so that you sometimes get passages like this:
.
I fell asleep that night with the descant of that icy purity sounding through the plainsong of the rails, and I woke in the station of I____, the old capital of J____, now a province of K____.

.

So the detective travels through, I suppose, Germany, meeting with people Herr D____ has pointed him towards, people like Fraulein A____, Herr R____, and the Count and Countess von V____, asking them about their dreams, and of the man within their dreams, who seems to be controlling what occurs there, and who may exist in reality as well. All of the people who are having these dreams are frightened (the Count believes he and his wife are being targeted by assassins) and wish this Dream-Master to be stopped, and it is as they recount their dreams that you might see why "The Detective of Dreams" has been miscategorized by...who? Gene Wolfe? He wrote it for McCauley, after all. But yes, there is nightmare imagery in these dreams -- unknown creatures dwelling outside, blood, threatening statements by mysterious figures. But there is also judgment and forgiveness, and when I say that, you might remember that I called "The Detective of Dreams" a spiritual mystery, and that Kirby McCauley called it a "statement of deep personal belief and commitment". I'm not going to go ahead and give away the ending, but for a certain segment of the world's population "The Detective of Dreams" would be regarded as a beautiful declaration of faith. And also the blood in the dream was on a dude's palm.

.

Purely as a story, "The Detective of Dreams" works better for me this morning than it did when I read it late last night, and I am indeed sympathetic at least to the story's philosophy. One thing I admire so much about it is that it's undoubtedly true that nobody but Gene Wolfe would have written a story with this kind of pay-off, wrapped up not only like a 19th Century detective story, but a parody of a 19th Century detective story (which is not to say that the story is written to be a laugh riot, but you get the idea). In a brief note about "The Detective of Dreams" in The Best of Gene Wolfe, Wolfe mentions G. K. Chesterton, and this would seem to be the strongest single influence on on Wolfe's story. Says the guy who's only read The Man Who Was Thursday by Chesterton, but that vibe is certainly in "The Detective of Dreams". So I think it's a fine story. It's only the idea that it's a horror story that baffles me.

.

We're on much firmer ground with "The Tree is My Hat", written in 1999 for Al Sarrantonio's millennial horror anthology 999. This is the story of a man named Baden, an American, a government work -- what he does we're never told -- who suffers from some vague illness that could possibly cause him to hallucinate, and at any rate drives his temperature up as high as 109 at times. After being stationed in Uganda, Baden -- or "Bad" as he's called throughout-- has now been shipped to an obscure chain of islands in the Pacific rim, where he interacts with the natives and a man I have to assume is a Christian missionary named Rev. Robbins, though Robbins never seems to do much missionary-ing. Robbins will teach him much about the island, whose North Point is supposedly a sort of spirit land, and its people, who used to be cannibals. Baden will seek help for his illness from the tribal king, and from an American witch on the internet. He will also try, with apparent success, to reconnect with Mary, his ex-wife, who has been trying to find him during his travels for the government. He learns she followed him to Uganda, and hopefully will be joining him soon on the island. And he will meet a dwarf named Hanga, whose skin is whiter even than Baden's, and whose teeth are filed down to points, and who will become Baden's blood brother. Robbins will tell Baden that in the native tongue "hanga" means "shark".

.

"The Tree is My Hat", like "The Detective of Dreams" takes a classic structure, being in the form of Baden's journal. This will certainly invite many readers to question how much of what eventually happens in the story can be taken as fact (within the world of fiction) and how much should be chalked up as the hallucinations of very sick man who sometimes suffers from terrible fevers? You guys can do what you want, but if you've read these posts with any regularity over the past three years you'll know my preference is to regard it as all true. Baden's illness functions in ways besides just making us wonder about what's really happening, and besides that Baden questions his own sight more than once, before being convinced that what he's experiencing -- and doing -- is real. This is good enough for me, and the story would not carry the power it does without that conviction. Not for me, anyway, and what's so remarkable about "The Tree is My Hat" is how willing Wolfe is to throw in any idea, however crazy, or nasty, or sentimental -- and that's all there -- and instead of them sticking out like badly-hammered nails, he manages to pound them home, with the result that "The Tree is My Hat" is an amazingly rich and eventful piece of storytelling -- grand, even, though grandly bizarre and dark. Even hopeless, which sets it up as the direct opposite of "The Detective of Dreams". So perhaps Wolfe contains multitudes.