Happy Ending for 1984 [5HC spoilers]
Again, cautiously I proceed, believing there is a danger in applying anything from one of the novellas in The Fifth Head of Cerberus to one or both of the others. With that caveat out of the way, let me explore the potential provenance of “‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch” in light of the revealed situation in “V.R.T.”
“V.R.T.” gives us a Soviet model of crime and punishment which recasts “A Story” as being a work of rehabilitation rather than one of anthropology. I sketch some of this territory in “Appendix VRT8: A Soviet Model” (part of Gene Wolfe’s First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide), but I would like to expand it a bit here.
I believe “V.R.T.” is largely patterned on Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). Koestler reveals in his novel that with the Soviet system, a court case could not advance to the show trial stage until after the prisoner had signed a false confession that had been crafted entirely by the authorities. This fantastical document of made-up crime is referred to as “The Grammatical Fiction,” and by definition it is not written by the prisoner, it is written by his jailers, in order to justify his pre-determined fate.
I pause here to note that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is really a “happy ending” version of Darkness at Noon. Be aware that there will be spoilers ahead for both 1984 and Darkness at Noon.
Robert Borski is on record arguing that prisoner 143 wrote “A Story” while in prison. I am on record arguing against that, both author and setting, but I will go through a steelman argument of what I think such a thing would look like, using elements I have already published, bending and combining them in service to this new task.
To prepare the way, I will engage in a long-delayed response to Borski’s “Marschian Sexuality” (2006), a brief article that detects in the Earth anthropologist Marsch a homosexual nature (The Long and the Short of It, 49). Borski notes that Marsch’s journal describes teenage Victor as “handsome in a rather sensitive way,” and that later entries show Marsch increasingly agitated by the idea that Victor might be sexually engaged with the suspected abo girl, an agitation that rises in intensity to the point Marsch writes about shooting them both if he catches them together. As telling as that is, for Borski, “the clincher is he reports in his journal that he’s noticed Victor is uncircumcised.”
This is the first I saw such an idea, and I applaud Borski for his textual detective work. I will build upon this, going in a different direction than Borski goes.
If a reader believes there are two distinct personalities in prisoner 143, it makes sense that there be differences to distinguish between the two, differences in voice that will appear in text. Both Marsch and Victor are male; one is in his twenties, the other a teen; one is highly educated, the other is barely educated; both are beardless. Totaling these up, they are practically twins, so a difference in sexual orientation could show which personality is writing a given sentence.
Borski assigns the misogynistic remark about Celestine Etienne to the Victor side (49), whereas I take this as expressing the Marsch persona, along with the other misogynisms, such as “Most medical men . . . [only] prolong the lives of ugly women” (5HC, 205).
By my reframing, prisoner 143 is ostensibly a misogynistic homosexual, yet during his extra-harsh time in the tomb-like underground cell he writes about dream women (5HC, 210-11) and a prostitute he hired on Ste. Anne (212). After this he gets positive reinforcement, being moved back to his original cell (231), being given the best food and a bath (231), and being given an intimate visit by Celestine Etienne (232). Then, when he is about to burn his uncollected notes, his jailers confiscate them (233).
This technique employed by the jailers to break him down is not special, it is their standard way, as declared by the letter: “We are pursuing the usual policy of alternately lenient and severe treatment to produce a breakdown” (242). Yet the resulting breakdown might actually serve to wean Victor of the Marsch persona; or to exorcise the Marsch spirit, in possession terms; or, in actor’s terms, to relegate the role into a mere mask. If Victor’s mother can shift between multiple roles, it shows the importance of not confusing a mask for the core.
One model I looked at in my chapter guide was that the government fears prisoner 143 is a human sniper disguised as an abo klutz (“Appendix 5HC2: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”). The opposite to this would be a sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing, which looks like Red Riding Hood in the belly of the wolf.
Returning to the Soviet model of “V.R.T.,” perceptive readers will have been arguing for nine paragraphs that “A Story” does not look like a Grammatical Fiction; it looks more like a fictionalization of a personal psychological reintegration, ending in the killing of an ogre and the subduing of a shadow twin. In a sense, this puts “A Story” in company with I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), a famous fictionalization of a personal psychological reintegration. As such, consider this mapping of “A Story” to Victor’s point of view in “V.R.T.” (similar to the table in the aforementioned “Appendix VRT8”).
=A Story: V.R.T.=
Quest to become a man: expedition starts (find abos/mother)
Become a shadow friend: Marsch as patron (*)
The girlfriend (Seven Girls Waiting): the cat/abo girlfriend
Vision of mother in danger: clue in Roncevaux
Trip by river: starcrosser to Ste. Croix
The trap (capture by marshmen): murder of Number Four
The prison: #143
The family reunion in prison: the incoherent neighbor as mother
The girlfriend in prison: Celestine Etienne
The miracle: (black box**, reality breakthrough)
The execution of Last Voice: (black box, the killing of the ogre)
The switch: (black box, the subduing of the shadow twin)
* for “Become a shadow friend: Marsch as patron” I am especially struck by the parallel scenes where the hero, facing a threatening male, weeps and is comforted. In “A Story” this is where Sandwalker prepares to fight the intoxicated Shadow Child (5HC, 86); in “V.R.T.” this is where Marsch asks Victor what he will do when he is a man (5HC, 159), and six days later they talk about an anthropology book Victor has read (223). In addition, the way that the Old Wise One of “A Story” speaks in scientific jargon forms an unexpected link to Marsch-as-tutor; and Victor’s imitation of Marsch and Hagsmith swells their camp number to four, similar to the fluctuating number of phantom-like Shadow Children.
** by “black box,” I mean that science and technology term wherein an input goes into a black box and the black box emits a transformed output, but the internal working of the box remains mysterious and opaque. One explicit “black box” in “V.R.T.” involves the murder out in the field: we witness events leading up to that incident, and notes after the incident, but the incident itself remains mysterious and opaque.
Continuing beyond this mapping, the letter from the jailers to the junior officer names two solutions: execution of 143 as an agent of Ste. Anne; release of 143 as a scientist from Earth, “at least until he further incriminates himself” (241): in effect, the Darkness at Noon option (execution), or the 1984 option (release for eventual execution). In his response, the junior officer writes that neither is acceptable, and that, “Until complete cooperation is achieved we direct you to continue to detain the prisoner” (243). This “complete cooperation” sounds like the prerequisite for “Grammatical Fiction,” but it also could imply an implied third option, a “fork ending” of the sort promoted by Damon Knight (who, you will recall, grew Gene from a bean), where the third ending is not named but subtly foreshadowed. So, if the end result, the black box output, is the production of “A Story” (foreshadowed by appearing in the text before “V.R.T.”), then the implied off-the-page ending of “V.R.T.” is not a list of imaginary crimes to warrant 143’s execution as a sniper agent, but an anthropological romance to allow 143’s release as a scientist from Earth. Yet this is not the simple release of 143 as the 1984 option, it is a third way: to avoid the possibility that he “further incriminate himself,” the jailers must actively remake him as a scientist from Earth, if only as a stable role. According to my thought chains on Manchurian Candidates (ibid “Appendix 5HC2”), the government therefore must first determine that prisoner 143 is not, in fact, capable of being a sniper (i.e., an Earthman with proven skill at long range rifle use), but is an abo klutz.
Given that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a “happy ending” version of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, I hope I have made clear the likely stages required for an even “happier ending” in “A Story” as a rehabilitation document for prisoner 143. The “Grammatical Fiction” has turned into I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; the Soviet-style prison is revealed to be more like a healing mental health hospital, if only for this one exceptional case where the government finds itself in a bind.
“V.R.T.” gives us a Soviet model of crime and punishment which recasts “A Story” as being a work of rehabilitation rather than one of anthropology. I sketch some of this territory in “Appendix VRT8: A Soviet Model” (part of Gene Wolfe’s First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide), but I would like to expand it a bit here.
I believe “V.R.T.” is largely patterned on Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). Koestler reveals in his novel that with the Soviet system, a court case could not advance to the show trial stage until after the prisoner had signed a false confession that had been crafted entirely by the authorities. This fantastical document of made-up crime is referred to as “The Grammatical Fiction,” and by definition it is not written by the prisoner, it is written by his jailers, in order to justify his pre-determined fate.
I pause here to note that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is really a “happy ending” version of Darkness at Noon. Be aware that there will be spoilers ahead for both 1984 and Darkness at Noon.
Robert Borski is on record arguing that prisoner 143 wrote “A Story” while in prison. I am on record arguing against that, both author and setting, but I will go through a steelman argument of what I think such a thing would look like, using elements I have already published, bending and combining them in service to this new task.
To prepare the way, I will engage in a long-delayed response to Borski’s “Marschian Sexuality” (2006), a brief article that detects in the Earth anthropologist Marsch a homosexual nature (The Long and the Short of It, 49). Borski notes that Marsch’s journal describes teenage Victor as “handsome in a rather sensitive way,” and that later entries show Marsch increasingly agitated by the idea that Victor might be sexually engaged with the suspected abo girl, an agitation that rises in intensity to the point Marsch writes about shooting them both if he catches them together. As telling as that is, for Borski, “the clincher is he reports in his journal that he’s noticed Victor is uncircumcised.”
This is the first I saw such an idea, and I applaud Borski for his textual detective work. I will build upon this, going in a different direction than Borski goes.
If a reader believes there are two distinct personalities in prisoner 143, it makes sense that there be differences to distinguish between the two, differences in voice that will appear in text. Both Marsch and Victor are male; one is in his twenties, the other a teen; one is highly educated, the other is barely educated; both are beardless. Totaling these up, they are practically twins, so a difference in sexual orientation could show which personality is writing a given sentence.
Borski assigns the misogynistic remark about Celestine Etienne to the Victor side (49), whereas I take this as expressing the Marsch persona, along with the other misogynisms, such as “Most medical men . . . [only] prolong the lives of ugly women” (5HC, 205).
By my reframing, prisoner 143 is ostensibly a misogynistic homosexual, yet during his extra-harsh time in the tomb-like underground cell he writes about dream women (5HC, 210-11) and a prostitute he hired on Ste. Anne (212). After this he gets positive reinforcement, being moved back to his original cell (231), being given the best food and a bath (231), and being given an intimate visit by Celestine Etienne (232). Then, when he is about to burn his uncollected notes, his jailers confiscate them (233).
This technique employed by the jailers to break him down is not special, it is their standard way, as declared by the letter: “We are pursuing the usual policy of alternately lenient and severe treatment to produce a breakdown” (242). Yet the resulting breakdown might actually serve to wean Victor of the Marsch persona; or to exorcise the Marsch spirit, in possession terms; or, in actor’s terms, to relegate the role into a mere mask. If Victor’s mother can shift between multiple roles, it shows the importance of not confusing a mask for the core.
One model I looked at in my chapter guide was that the government fears prisoner 143 is a human sniper disguised as an abo klutz (“Appendix 5HC2: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”). The opposite to this would be a sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing, which looks like Red Riding Hood in the belly of the wolf.
Returning to the Soviet model of “V.R.T.,” perceptive readers will have been arguing for nine paragraphs that “A Story” does not look like a Grammatical Fiction; it looks more like a fictionalization of a personal psychological reintegration, ending in the killing of an ogre and the subduing of a shadow twin. In a sense, this puts “A Story” in company with I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), a famous fictionalization of a personal psychological reintegration. As such, consider this mapping of “A Story” to Victor’s point of view in “V.R.T.” (similar to the table in the aforementioned “Appendix VRT8”).
=A Story: V.R.T.=
Quest to become a man: expedition starts (find abos/mother)
Become a shadow friend: Marsch as patron (*)
The girlfriend (Seven Girls Waiting): the cat/abo girlfriend
Vision of mother in danger: clue in Roncevaux
Trip by river: starcrosser to Ste. Croix
The trap (capture by marshmen): murder of Number Four
The prison: #143
The family reunion in prison: the incoherent neighbor as mother
The girlfriend in prison: Celestine Etienne
The miracle: (black box**, reality breakthrough)
The execution of Last Voice: (black box, the killing of the ogre)
The switch: (black box, the subduing of the shadow twin)
* for “Become a shadow friend: Marsch as patron” I am especially struck by the parallel scenes where the hero, facing a threatening male, weeps and is comforted. In “A Story” this is where Sandwalker prepares to fight the intoxicated Shadow Child (5HC, 86); in “V.R.T.” this is where Marsch asks Victor what he will do when he is a man (5HC, 159), and six days later they talk about an anthropology book Victor has read (223). In addition, the way that the Old Wise One of “A Story” speaks in scientific jargon forms an unexpected link to Marsch-as-tutor; and Victor’s imitation of Marsch and Hagsmith swells their camp number to four, similar to the fluctuating number of phantom-like Shadow Children.
** by “black box,” I mean that science and technology term wherein an input goes into a black box and the black box emits a transformed output, but the internal working of the box remains mysterious and opaque. One explicit “black box” in “V.R.T.” involves the murder out in the field: we witness events leading up to that incident, and notes after the incident, but the incident itself remains mysterious and opaque.
Continuing beyond this mapping, the letter from the jailers to the junior officer names two solutions: execution of 143 as an agent of Ste. Anne; release of 143 as a scientist from Earth, “at least until he further incriminates himself” (241): in effect, the Darkness at Noon option (execution), or the 1984 option (release for eventual execution). In his response, the junior officer writes that neither is acceptable, and that, “Until complete cooperation is achieved we direct you to continue to detain the prisoner” (243). This “complete cooperation” sounds like the prerequisite for “Grammatical Fiction,” but it also could imply an implied third option, a “fork ending” of the sort promoted by Damon Knight (who, you will recall, grew Gene from a bean), where the third ending is not named but subtly foreshadowed. So, if the end result, the black box output, is the production of “A Story” (foreshadowed by appearing in the text before “V.R.T.”), then the implied off-the-page ending of “V.R.T.” is not a list of imaginary crimes to warrant 143’s execution as a sniper agent, but an anthropological romance to allow 143’s release as a scientist from Earth. Yet this is not the simple release of 143 as the 1984 option, it is a third way: to avoid the possibility that he “further incriminate himself,” the jailers must actively remake him as a scientist from Earth, if only as a stable role. According to my thought chains on Manchurian Candidates (ibid “Appendix 5HC2”), the government therefore must first determine that prisoner 143 is not, in fact, capable of being a sniper (i.e., an Earthman with proven skill at long range rifle use), but is an abo klutz.
Given that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a “happy ending” version of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, I hope I have made clear the likely stages required for an even “happier ending” in “A Story” as a rehabilitation document for prisoner 143. The “Grammatical Fiction” has turned into I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; the Soviet-style prison is revealed to be more like a healing mental health hospital, if only for this one exceptional case where the government finds itself in a bind.
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