Fever Dreams

Casual notes in response to Waggish, who responds to an earlier post of mine (and which was, in turn a response to an earlier post of his).

Wolfe was an engineer, being said to have played a part in developing the machinery that makes Pringles crisps, and he brings an engineer’s delight to the creation of some of his literary worlds. It’s our delight too, say in ‘The Death of Doctor Island’ – a story I haven’t read for many years (and I don’t have a copy of the collection from which it comes): a sick boy on a false moon – does it orbit Jupiter? – what we take to be his fever dreams are, the literary engineer shows us, made of tiltings of his moon’s orbit.

Was that right? Do I remember correctly? The engineering was marvellous – but the fever dream of the story was more so. Like the many-sailed spaceship Wolfe lets us explore in The Urth of the New Sun, I was distantly comforted to know the story was science-fiction and not fantasy. Real laws applied; something of John W. Campbell remained in Wolfe: hard SF remained at its core: hard SF, only Wolfe had dragged a white hole into its dimming sun. But beyond the hard SF, something more – I read Wolfe when I was much younger; I was young enough to have still the attitude of the writer Mumpsimus persuasively corrects in this post, and young enough never to have met any kind of religious person.

That Wolfe was a Catholic (converting before his marriage) – this was wonderful. That he believed (as he said once of the Soldier series, still incomplete) that the gods of the Greeks were real and walked among them meant that he was more than an engineer – that outside the artifice of his world-making, there was the reality of God the Outsider. The fever-dream of God! Wolfe was a fantasist before he was a engineer, but unlike the Catholic novelists I’d also read – Greene, say or the later Waugh, his Catholicism did not saturate the plot and incidents of his fiction. He was engineer as well as a fantasist – there was not a tension between them, not really; I think God the Outsider always remains for him the real agent of creation. Literary creation for Wolfe is only ever idolatry. A fun idolatry, though; a happy artificing – if it is not innocent, it is not wicked either.

But doesn’t this prevent his fiction from bearing upon another sense of the Outside – not the real world as a referent, as the source of literary representations, but the reserve the world hides by seeming all too real? Does literature – beyond any notion of the ‘literary establishment’ Mumpsimus places within quotation marks (and beyond Establishment Literary Fiction) – bear upon a kind of truth, of a correspondence between word and referent? A correspondence, rather, with what the world is not – or that nothingness (is that the word?) that inhabits the world as reserve; that means it might become other than it is.

To read is to free the world in some quiet way. To free it from what it is, and to set free, as reading, what you are, too, who might otherwise commit that idolatry that takes our consensual world to be all it might be. For this reason, Steve’s remarks on McEwan’s Saturday are forever justified: the conventional book answers to the world of convention; it confirms even that non-reality that Bush: confirms the new world being made and remade around us, this world of lies and cyncism. And so literature really can take an axe to the frozen sea inside us, and the frozen sea that is the world.

Is it worth noting, in this context the right wing sympathies of Wolfe’s Operation Ares? And if Wolfe really is a man of the right (too quick? too simplistic? and doesn’t he think Operation Ares a bad book?), and is this why he is content to make genre artifices rather than what might be called literature (as Steve’s This Space is the guardian of this word)? Or is it because God is his fever dream, God who would have the monopoly on all true creation and compared to whom Wolfe is another storyteller beside the campfire that is the sun? I am happy to dream with Wolfe, but I feel uneasy when I wake. And isn’t this what I want from reading – to wake up?