The National Letters: Self-Help and Cheap Thrills (Part II)

What exactly is a “thriller”? The question is a deceptively simple one. For “thriller” is one of those words (“novel” and “poem” and “essay” are others) which is universally understood yet eludes exact definition. Everybody knows a thriller when s/he sees one, but nobody can say just what it is s/he sees.

Funk and Wagnalls reports that a thriller is “an exciting book, play, or motion picture.” But this is no help at all. What excites one reader is almost certain not to excite the next. Ask me to name the most exciting book I’ve read during the past decade, and I’ll probably name Philosophy in a New Key by Susanne K. Langer, or maybe Introduction to Metaphysics by Henri Bergson, neither of which is likely to qualify in most people’s minds as a thriller. Ask David Stockman the same question, and he’ll probably name George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty, which most people wouldn’t think of as a thriller either. It takes all kinds and there’s no accounting for tastes and one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an exciting book; there are only excited readers. And what excites you doesn’t necessarily excite me.

So forget Funk and Wagnalls, and look to literary critics for guidance. Go ahead. What you’ll find is that most of them have nothing at all to say on the subject and that those who do are in disagreement about it. Take two examples of the latter. Ayn Rand has written in The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (World, 1969) that “Thrillers” are detective, spy or adventure stories. Their basic characteristic is conflict, which means: a clash of goals, which means: purposeful action in pursuit of values.” The prototypical thriller plot, she writes, is one which portrays its main character “fighting for a vital goal—overcoming one obstacle after another—facing terrible dangers and risks—persisting through an excruciating struggle—and winning.”

Contrast this view of things with the one offered by the English critic Jerry Palmer, who wrote in his 1978 book Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold Ltd.) that “it is the element of conspiracy which is, in the ultimate analysis, the distinguishing feature of the thriller as a genre. In its absence, we are left with a hero who is confronted with obstacles and opposition of various types.... The specificity of the thriller is that the hero averts a mysterious conspiracy: a conspiracy that springs up from nowhere, which produces events whose source is incomprehensible.” Palmer doesn’t require that the hero or heroine of a thriller enjoy complete success, that s/he “win,” as Ayn Rand puts it. He is perfectly willing to accept as legitimate what he calls “the negative thriller,” and cites Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as “a perfect instance” of this type. At the end of The Maltese Falcon, Palmer writes, the conspiracy is scotched, to the extent that Sam Spade finds out that it is the girl he has been protecting throughout the novel, and with whom he has been sleeping, who was responsible for murdering his partner. He turns her over to the police, and the sensation of bleakness that pervades the closing pages floods the whole barren landscape that the hero inhabits. The ending is climactic, but the climax operates, so to speak, as the inverse of the climax of the positive thriller: instead of taking the reader up, it brings him right down.

For Rand, then, it is only necessary that the hero or heroine of a thriller be involved in conflict; for Palmer it is necessary that the conflict be with a mysterious conspiracy. For Rand it is necessary that the hero or heroine win; for Palmer it is only necessary that the mystery be resolved and conspiracy unmasked—it need not be defeated. These differences are far from trivial. If we accept Rand’s definition, we will be forced to exclude authors like Hammett and Raymond Chandler and John Le Carre from the ranks of thriller writers; and such exclusions would doubtless strike most thriller readers as passing strange. If we accept Palmer’s definition, we will be forced to exclude books like Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, in which the hero is the chief conspirator (Palmer himself excludes this book, in fact, using it as a good example of one of the “forms of writing that are capable of displacing the thriller”), and we will also be forced to exclude books like Jaws, in which the hero’s nemesis is a wild animal (unless perhaps Palmer would say that a fish can lead a conspiracy)—and again, most readers of these books would probably be surprised to learn that they were not thrillers.

Perhaps more tellingly, regardless of which of these two definitions we accept, we will be forced to exclude books like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca from the thriller category, along with every other book of their respective types — the types commonly known as the crime thriller and the gothic thriller. It would seem best, then, to accept neither Rand’s definition nor Palmer’s, but propose one of our own instead, one which better reflects the reality readers have in mind when they use the word “thriller” to describe a work of fiction: A thriller is a story of violent, action-packed conflict, often but not always involving the solution of a mystery, often but not always taking place in exotic or unusually dangerous locales (some thrillers, of course, depend for their thrills on the introduction of some menace into what would ordinarily be considered a hotbed of normality). Such stories are “exciting” to their readers because they are full of suspense and surprises.

But they are also exciting for another reason. The world of the thriller is a world in which the individual is on his or her own, in which the only organizations are either ineffective or The Enemy, in which, win or lose, it is up to an individual to see that what needs to be done is done. “The view of the world . . . that is proposed by the thriller,” Jerry Palmer asserts, and rightly, is “competitive individualism.”

Of course this is a phrase which might be interpreted in a number of possible ways, so it is worth looking into exactly what Palmer means by it. “The formal postulates,” he writes, whose fulfillment is required to develop the concept of competitive individualism are these:

The individual must be conceived of as radically autonomous. Society must therefore be conceived of as a collection of individuals, and dependent upon them; social structures can have no autonomy. All links between individuals are therefore contractual, entered into by the free will of the individual.

These individuals must be thought to exist in a state of scarcity—otherwise there would be no source of competition. The scarcity may of course be a scarcity of anything. The importance of “success,” as the focus of the ethical system, is clear: “winning” (the form it takes in the thriller) is by definition scarce, scarce to the point of exclusiveness.

Formulated in this fashion, there is a clear analogy between the notion of competitive individualism and the notion of the individual postulated in the political economy of the market.

Indeed there is. So it should certainly seem fitting that the thriller, at least in its most characteristic modern forms, the detective story and the science fiction story, should be a distinctively American invention — that it should be the product of a country founded by a libertarian revolution and blessed thereafter with a rich cultural tradition based in the notions of rugged individualism and self-reliance. The thriller derives from British traditions, of course, just as American political philosophy derives from John Locke. The Gothic tale was an English invention, as was the crime thriller (whose earliest examples would seem to be the popular seventeenth and eighteenth century volumes on the exploits of highwaymen like Claude DuVall and Dick Turpin). But it was an American, Edgar Allan Poe, who invented the detective story and, arguably, the science fiction story as well (Jules Verne, the most likely counternominee, was a student and avowed imitator of Poe). And it is these two subtypes which have dominated the thriller genre ever since, even in the hands of its English practitioners. Conan Doyle imitated Poe’s Dupin stories down to the smallest detail when he created Sherlock Holmes; and what is James Bond but an American hard-boiled detective inhabiting the high tech world of American science fiction and speaking with a British accent? The only decidedly English thing about him, in fact, is that he is not a lone individual: he is not only a representative of an organization, he is actually an employee of the government — something you will almost never find in the American thriller. It is significant, for example, that the Soviet police officer who serves as the hero of the current bestselling thriller Gorky Park by the American novelist Martin Cruz Smith only begins the book as an operative of an organization. By the time he has tracked his murderer to New York he has himself become a hunted man, wanted by the KGB, the FBI, and the Gotham police. Such is the inherent individualist logic of the thriller genre.

Needless to say, the thriller has never been taken seriously as literature by any member of the American critical establishment—unless, of course, it was written by a European. In the last century, Crime and Punishment and The Moonstone were literature, but The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and The Call of the Wild were not. In this century, the hardboiled thriller is literature when it’s done by Grahame Greene but not when it’s done by Horace McCoy, and the science fiction story is literature when it’s done by Aldous Huxley or Stanislaw Lem but not when it’s done by Theodore Sturgeon or Alfred Bester. “The thriller can be lit,” the literati seem to be saying, “but it almost never is. So when one of us, like Alfred Kazin, says that nobody ever reads anything any more except self-help books and thrillers, what he means is that nobody any longer reads anything that matters.”

Bosh. Piffle. Balderdash. Thrillers matter, fully as much as fiction of any other kind. And when a thriller of the first rank is published, a thriller of genius, a thriller which is a novel of character and a novel of ideas as well as a novel of action—and while such books are rare, they are no more rare (and no less) than works of genius among novels of any other kind—it is nothing short of a literary crime to ignore or contemptuously dismiss it as beneath the notice of serious readers.

And exactly such a book as this is now taking shape in our midst. That it should be doing so in 1981 seems poetically just, for the year is shaping up as a good one for thrillers. Already this year we’ve had Martin Cruz Smith’s aforementioned Gorky Park (Random House, 365 pp., $13.95), John D. MacDonald’s Free Fall in Crimson (Harper & Row, 246 pp., $10.95), and Arthur Lyons’s Hard Trade (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 264 pp., $10.95), and among the new novels expected this year is one by science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany called Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. But the thriller of genius I referred to a moment ago is none of these. It is a mammoth, 1200 page, nineteenth century style novel of the almost inconceivably far future called The Book of the New Sun, and it is the work of a fiftyish Chicago area trade magazine editor named Gene Wolfe.

Like the long nineteenth century thrillers of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, The Book of the New Sun is being published in installments, in four volumes to be exact, the first two of which, The Shadow of the Torturer (Simon & Schuster, 303 pp., $11.95) and The Claw of the Conciliator (301 pp., $12.95) are now available. Volume Three, The Sword of the Lictor is expected later this year, and the final installment early the next. (Volume One is also available now in paper, from Pocket Books, at $2.50.) But the nineteenth century character of The Book of the New Sun derives from much more than merely its length. It derives primarily from Wolfe’s narrative technique, which is straightforward, leisurely, crowded with vivid, eccentric characters, and packed with incident—the sort of story you can believe in and lose yourself in for hours or even (depending on your reading speed) days at a time.

But is it a thriller? Well, it certainly contains its share of violent action. Its opening scene is in a cemetery where grave robbery and murder are taking place. And before we have completed the second volume of the tale, we have witnessed scenes of torture, cannibalism, and savage, bloody warfare, we have seen a duel to the death, and we have looked on as the main character of the novel carries out a daring, audacious escape from a prison. And all this action takes place in a landscape which is decidedly exotic: the planet Earth (or “Urth,” as it has come to be called) at a time so far in the future that human beings have had time not only to develop a technological civilization capable of reaching the stars, but also to fall back from that zenith of development to a civilization which is practically medieval in character and which looks on those few existing remnants of high technology as “magic.” Centuries (millennia?) of contact with other civilizations in other star systems and other galaxies have changed Urth’s flora and fauna beyond recognition, and there are hints that its geography has changed as well — which raises the possibility that Wolfe’s story is taking place geological eons in the future.

Almost all the action of the first volume, The Shadow of the Torturer, unfolds within the confines of the huge city of Nessus, which is located on either bank of the river Gyoll somewhere in Urth’s Southern Hemisphere. To the North lie “the wide pampas, a hundred trackless forests, and the rotting jungles at the waist of the world.” To the South lies the “ice-choked sea.” Is Nessus the city we now know as Buenos Aires? But soldiers are constantly moving through Nessus to the North, headed for war against the “Ascians.” If Earth can become “Urth,” then perhaps Asians can become “Ascians,” in which case perhaps we are in Australia?

It doesn’t really matter where we are, of course, except that such geographical questions as these, along with questions about how and why human civilization on Urth has fallen to so low a state, are among the questions the novel’s hero, Severian the torturer, sets out to answer for himself (though he is unaware of it as his quest begins) when he leaves Nessus at the end of Volume One, heading North to an uncertain destiny as an ad hoc member of a small troupe of travelling players. His primary objective is to reach the small northern city of Thrax, where he has accepted a position as executioner. But as geographical and historical riddles present themselves — and they do at almost his every turn — they too become part of his quest, as do riddles of a more pragmatic character: Why does the beautiful woman Agia, a dealer in antiques and collectibles in a small shop in Nessus, follow Severian out of the city and take every opportunity to try to kill him? Are greed and revenge for the death of her brother sufficient motives? Why does the Autarch, the absolute ruler, if not of all Urth, then at least of all Urth that Severian knows, take such an early, active interest in the life of the young torturer? Why does the Autarch’s arch-rival Vodalus take an equal interest in Severian’s comings and goings? And why do the Autarch and Vodalus seem at times to be working together for common goals? As Severian journeys from gate to gate, from town to town, and from volume to volume, his purpose grows, broadens, and deepens —though of course it is far too soon to anticipate where it will take him.

The same might be said for the themes which run like wild rivers through The Book of the New Sun: they become more complex and more mysterious with each page we turn, but we cannot, at that relatively early state in the novel’s development, be sure what Wolfe plans to do with them. “We believe that we invent symbols,” Severian writes at the end of the first chapter of Volume One of his tale. “The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.” One might call this the novel’s epistemological theme. “That we are capable only of being what we are,” he tells us later in the same volume, “remains our unforgivable sin.” One might call this the novel’s moral theme. But more important than either of these in the present context, and in light of my previous remarks on the inherently libertarian character of the thriller, is the political theme of The Book of the New Sun.

It is obvious from the very beginning that Severian’s story is primarily political in its thematic thrust. As a torturer a member of the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence—Severian is of course an archetypal representative of Government: he is the man who performs its essential, defining tasks. But before the end of the first chapter of the first volume, he has withdrawn his allegiance from the State he has been trained from childhood to serve. “I knew nothing,” he writes, “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. Of those values that Master Malrubius (who had been master of apprentices when I was a boy) had tried to teach me, and that Master Palaemon still tried to impart, I accepted only one: loyalty to the guild. In that I was quite correct — it was, as I sensed, perfectly feasible for me to serve Vodalus and remain a torturer.”

Yet before the midpoint of the first volume, Severian has forsworn his loyalty to the guild as well, by falling in love with one of his victims (“clients,” as they are called in that portion which the guild inhabits of the massive Citadel that looms above the city of Nessus on a hillside, sharing space with a vast graveyard), and allowing her to take her own life rather than let her be subjected to the “excruciations” which are his stock in trade. He is banished, is told of the executioner’s job in Thrax, and sets out northward. Along the way he meets with Vodalus, a Robin Hood figure who lives with his band of supporters in the forest outside Nessus, and becomes one of his sworn agents against the Autarchy. He also begins to learn more about the ill-defined war which has been waged to the north of the city for as long as Severian can remember. “I’ve followed if for years and years now,” a small town innkeeper tells him, shortly after he has left the city, “though the battles they fight never seem to make much difference, if you understand me. It never seems to get much closer to us, or much farther off either. What I’ve always supposed was that our Autarch and theirs appoint a spot to fight in, and when it’s over they both go home. My wife, fool that she is, don’t believe there’s a real war at all.” “Where does your wife think the soldiers are going, then?” Severian asks the innkeeper. “Looking for Vodalus, that’s what she says. As if the Autarch—whose hands run with gold and whose enemies kiss his heel—would send his whole army to fetch a bandit!”

As he travels, Severian also begins learning bits and pieces of the history of the place in which he has spent all his days. One traveller he meets on the road, for example, tells him of the origin of the Citadel which, until the time of his banishment, had always been his home:

“In the old times, the lords of this world feared no one but their own people, and to defend themselves against them built a great fortress on a hilltop to the north of the city. It was not called Nessus then, for the river was unpoisoned. “Many of the people were angry at the building of that citadel, holding it to be their right to slay their lords without hindrance if they so desired.”

The story thus begun is interrupted in the telling and never resumed. But what we have heard has been enough, for we remember reading more than two hundred pages earlier a conversation between Severian and one of his fellow apprentice torturers.

“The Citadel used to stand some distance north of Nessus, did you know that?” Severian’s friend asks him.

I shook my head.

“The city keeps creeping upriver. The armigers and optimates want purer water—not that they drink it, but for their fishponds, and for bathing and boating. Then too, anyone living too near the sea is always somewhat suspect. So the lowest parts, where the water’s the worst, are gradually given up. In the end the law goes, and those who stay behind are afraid to kindle a fire for fear of what the smoke may draw down upon them.”

If we are attentive readers, we will also recall the conversation Severian had with Master Palaemon at the time of his banishment from the guild— the conversation in which he learned that while those left behind by the city’s northward progress may fear to light fires, those within the city must fear to leave it.

“You know of the roads?” Palaemon asks him.

“I know they must not be used. Nothing more.”

“The Autarch Maruthas closed them. That was when I was your age. Travel encouraged sedition, and he wished goods to enter and leave the city by the river, where they might be easily taxed. The law has remained in force since, and there is a redoubt, so I’ve heard, every fifty leagues. Still the roads remain. Though they are in poor repair, it is said some use them by night.”

“I see,” I said. Closed or not, the roads might make for an easier passage than travelling across the countryside as the law demanded. “I doubt you do. I mean to warn you against them. They are patrolled by uhlans under order to kill anyone found upon them, and since they have permission to loot the bodies of those they slay, they are not much inclined to ask excuses.”

“I understand,” I told him, and in private wondered how he came to know so much of travel.

And then there are Severian’s dreams, which are frequent and perplexing. In one of them, he is a boy again, enduring an oral examination by his schoolmaster Malrubius. “Severian,” the teacher says. “Name for me the seven principles of governance.”

It was an effort for me to speak, but I managed (in my dream, if it was a dream) to say, “I do not recall that we have studied such a thing, Master.”

“You were always the most careless of my boys,” he told me, and fell silent.

A foreboding grew on me; I sensed that if I did not reply, some tragedy would occur. At last I began weakly, “Anarchy...”

“That is not governance, but the lack of it. I taught you that it precedes all governance. Now list the seven sorts.”

“Attachment to the person of the monarch. Attachment to the bloodline or other sequence of succession. Attachment to the royal state. Attachment to a code legitimizing the governing state. Attachment to the law only. Attachment to a greater or lesser board of electors, as framers of the law. Attachment to an abstraction conceived as including the body of electors, other bodies giving rise to them, and numerous other elements, largely ideal.”

It is doubtless significant that when Malrubius further demands of Severian that he name the nature of his own allegiance to governance, he hesitates for some minutes, then answers, “The first, if I have any.” It is doubtless significant, but of what? What exactly are we to make of these constant, ambiguous references to political matters? What are we to make of the fact, which is established at the end of the first chapter of the first volume of The Book of the New Sun, that by the time of the writing of his autobiography (the book we are reading) Severian himself has become the Autarch?

In the words of the old song, it’s too soon to know. We have still to read the entire second half of The Book of the New Sun before we can judge what Gene Wolfe is developing for us in this political fable. But even when we’ve finished reading it, we should be prepared still to be dealing with ambiguities and imponderables. In Wolfe’s earlier political and quasi-polticial fiction — his novel The Fifth Head of Cerberus and his short stories “The Death of Dr. Island,” “The Eyeflash Miracles,” and “The Horars of War” are good examples — he has frequently, Henry Jameslike, left us with unresolved mysteries on our hands even as we turn his last pages. Then too, the act of literary interpretation is so intrinsically individual an act, so dependent upon variations in individual education and temperament, that the only reasonable response to a question like “What does this novel mean?” is “To what reader?” Susanne Langer says somewhere that grasping the meaning of a story is more like having a new experience than like learning a new set of facts. And it is notorious that even if you and I should have the same experience, we shall very likely differ in our estimate of its implications, of what it “means.”

At one point in The Shadow of the Torturer, Severian pauses in his narrative to reflect on how his memoir will be apprehended by those who read it. He reproduces one paragraph from a biography of Ymar, one of his predecessors on the throne, and discusses four mutually exclusive interpretations of the paragraph which have been taught to schoolchildren studying the same ancient text. “Of this I feel sure:” he comments, “not one of the explanations for the behavior of Ymar was correct. The truth, whatever it may have been, was simpler and more subtle.” Or, to put it in another way, that we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

Ursula Le Guin pronounced The Book of the New Sun “a masterpiece” after reading the first volume. After reading the first two, I can only add that it’s easy to see why. Gene Wolfe is one of the most accomplished wordsmiths now writing fiction in English. His two earlier novels, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) and Peace (1976), would secure him a place in American literature even if he had written nothing more, even if he had not also written some of the most arresting short stories in the language, even, wordsmithery aside, if he had not on many other occasions demonstrated one of the richest, most individual, and original imaginations to be found in or out of the science fiction field. The Book of the New Sun is shaping up as far and away his finest performance to date as a writer. It is shaping up as a perfectly stunning work of art. And if it is not to be considered “serious literature,” then “serious literature” be damned! I’ll have none of it.

Jeff Riggenbach is West Coast Editor of LR, and a regular contributor of reviews and essays on literary, artistic, and cultural matters to newspapers, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle.