Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- A Note on Editions
- Abbreviations
- Part I Initiations
- Part II Investigations: The Urth Cycle
- 5 ‘The Toy Theatre’: Uncovering the Story of The Urth Cycle
- 6 ‘The Last Thrilling Wonder Story’? Intergeneric Operations
- 7 ‘How the Whip Came Back’: Directing Reader Response
- 8 ‘Cues’: The Function of Unfamiliar Diction
- 9 ‘There Are Doors’: Memory and Textual Structure
- 10 ‘A Solar Labyrinth’: Metafictional Devices and Textual Complexity
- Part III Conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - ‘A Solar Labyrinth’: Metafictional Devices and Textual Complexity
from Part II - Investigations: The Urth Cycle
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- A Note on Editions
- Abbreviations
- Part I Initiations
- Part II Investigations: The Urth Cycle
- 5 ‘The Toy Theatre’: Uncovering the Story of The Urth Cycle
- 6 ‘The Last Thrilling Wonder Story’? Intergeneric Operations
- 7 ‘How the Whip Came Back’: Directing Reader Response
- 8 ‘Cues’: The Function of Unfamiliar Diction
- 9 ‘There Are Doors’: Memory and Textual Structure
- 10 ‘A Solar Labyrinth’: Metafictional Devices and Textual Complexity
- Part III Conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
By changing generic codes, subverting traditional literary conventions, employing an unreliable narrator and exploiting the deflective effect of unfamiliar diction, Wolfe creates a text organised specifically to be understood, or at least appreciated, only by those readers who are willing to question their own literary assumptions, pause, reflect and reread.
As a result, The Urth Cycle shares its systematised oracularity with the parable stories, which were constructed ‘with the express purpose of concealing a mystery that was to be understood only by insiders’. In effect, Wolfe is behaving in the manner of Mark's Christ, who explains to his disciples:
To you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven. (Mark 4:11–12)
Although Wolfe is not attempting to propound a religious doctrine, his adoption of the parable form's surreptitiousness results in the pentalogy constituting an intellectual and interpretative labyrinth, a term often applied by critics and reviewers of the text. He can, therefore, be seen as an analogue of the Borgesian character Bioy Cesares, who
talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel.
Severian is just such a narrator: unreliable, intensely subjective and seemingly incapable of analysing his experiences. Equally, The Urth Cycle is, itself, the product of Wolfe's ‘great scheme for writing a novel [which] only a handful of readers … would be able to decipher’.
Many of the difficulties that the reader experiences in deciphering the text arise from Wolfe's appropriation of traditional metafictional strategies. These devices are used to create a confusing series of connections between the text itself and what can be termed its ‘hermeneutic circle’, ‘which represents the dynamic process of interpretation in terms of a continual interplay of interpreter and the text, of whole context and individual parts’, and between the action of its heavily intertextual embedded stories and that of the main narrative.
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- Information
- Attending DaedalusGene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader, pp. 166 - 182Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2003