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
9 - ‘There Are Doors’: Memory and Textual Structure
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
The deflective effect of Wolfe's allusive diction is an essential element in the textual memory system that the author constructs using the dramatic action of his pentalogy. By recognising how Wolfe structures The Urth Cycle to produce this memory system, and by understanding how it functions, the reader learns how the text is designed to aid the recollection of its plot and of a range of extraliterary and intertextual information. Accordingly, the reader will also appreciate how the plot's patterning can oppose the recall of the novel's thematic nuances, how Wolfe creates a text planned (with perhaps little concern for success) to perpetuate his name, and how the author uses esoteric means to further convince the reader that Severian is a saviour invested with genuine holy power.
In the organisation of this memory system, as in Peace, Wolfe follows the principles of the Classical art of memory. As Frances Yates documents in her study The Art of Memory (1966), Classical mnemonic strategies
imprint on the memory a series of loci or places … The clearest description of this process is that given by Quintilian. In order to form a series of places in memory, he says, a building is to be remembered, as spacious and varied a one as possible, the forecourt, the living rooms, bedrooms, and parlours, not omitting statues and other ornaments with which the rooms are decorated. The images by which the speech [for example] is to be remembered … are then placed in imagination on the places which have been memorised in the building. This done, as soon as the memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these places are visited in turn and the various deposits demanded of their custodians.
Like the Classical orators, who used such mentally constructed architectural locations to site their mnemonic images, Wolfe arranges the narrative events of The Urth Cycle to form the architecture of a written memory system.
The Ad C. Herennium libri IV, an anonymous work on the art of memory, advises that the locations, or loci, in which the orator situates his mnemonic images, should be varied, since any resemblance between them will lead inevitably to confusion.
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- Information
- Attending DaedalusGene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader, pp. 145 - 165Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2003