Welcome to a K3 seminar with Berndt Clavier, Senior Lecturer in English Studies, K3.

The title of the talk is:

The End and the Origin: Language as Time in the Speculative Fiction of Gene Wolfe.

The seminar will take place on Wednesday, April 20 at 10.15-12.00. It will be an online. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).

Here is an abstract for the talk:

In this paper, I propose to bring Heidegger’s notion of the “origin” of the work of art into dialogue with one of the masterpieces of science fiction, Gene Wolfe’s tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun. Heidegger’s approach to art, especially poetry, carries a dimension which is often disregarded by literary theory, namely how literature fuses the anticipation of future meaning with the “here” of the reading present. As Mark Currie argues, literary theory has been much concerned with narrative retrospection and “has paid far less attention to the correlative issue in which the present is experienced in a mode of anticipation” (5). In my close reading of Wolfe’s work, this mode of anticipation is understood through Erich Auerbach’s notion of the figura, which when developed from Christianity into realism and modernism, becomes a mode of interpretation where things predict and confirm other things, making connections that are not causal but rather based on an intellectual energy that in its oscillations back and forth produces ever thicker layers of meaning, or “atmospheres” as Auerbach calls them (see especially Auerbach’s discussion of “atmospheric realism” and “atmospheric historicism,” 473ff). Heidegger provides an analytical framework for the establishment of the atmospheric conditions by suggesting that the artwork is “bringing here into the unconcealed” (81, emphasis in original) something which reveals its nature as the “work-character of the work,” and which, once this is accomplished, might afford “the unconcealedness of that which is as something that is” (79). This “unconcealedness” is the “being of truth in the work” which appears to us as “beauty”—hence the connection between beauty, truth, and art in the Western history of art (79). This combination of “work-character,” “unconcealedness,” “appearance,” “beauty,” and “here” is cumbersome to say the least, but it opens up for a kind of reading where the “atmospheric conditions” of the text appear via minutiae that accumulate into what Heidegger provocatively calls “origin.” This “origin” does not necessarily have to be “truth” or “beauty” if we try to build an analytical framework out of Heidegger’s ideas. However, it does need to “appear” as the “work-character of the work,” and it needs to do so in a here that involves the reader and the “atmospheric conditions” of the text. In this paper, I propose to read Gene Wolfe’s tetralogy with a mind to Heidegger’s notion of “origin.”

The New Sun is set billions of years into the future. The sun is dying and anthropocene is not enough to describe this world, which, as John Clute puts it, is “so impacted with the relics of humanity’s long residence that archaeology and geology have become, in a way, the same science” (1339). The mysterious “G.W.,” “translator” of the manuscript which is The Book of the New Sun, notes in a series of appendices that in his translation into English of “a tongue that has not yet achieved existence,” he has been “forced to replace yet undiscovered concepts by their closest twentieth-century equivalents” and that “Latin is once or twice employed to indicate” what “appears […] obsolete” (ST, 302-3). This planetary language of the past is subsequently folded into the plot to provide a veritable tapestry of analogies, metaphors, symbols, and emblems. Faces, things, and relationships recur and redouble in an often dizzying, spiraling way. The world and the word are thus joined in anticipatory antiquity, a future as past where “those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past” (ST, 148). Nature itself has become like a dictionary, suffused with historical and alien meaning. The novels that comprise the tetralogy fuse this poetic imagery with what in literary theory is referred to as “the anticipation of retrospection,” which normally is understood as the structural condition or logic of narrative itself—that any narrative sequence is told with the sense of its ending in mind (for some, the very definition of the term “plot”). Wolfe’s “translation” into English of a language not yet existent plays with the conventions of this narrative logic, but does so in ways that cannot be easily described in terms of plot, in terms of what is happening or what has happened. Towards the end of his narrative, Wolfe has not revealed anything except perhaps that in his world everything is interconnected. This is unconventional in science fiction, which often includes a moment of denouement, where something hidden becomes progressively revealed.

Here is where I think an imagined dialogue between narratology and Heidegger’s notion of the “work-character of the work” would prove a better framework for Wolfe’s “atmospheric realism.” Wolfe’s work with time as language is a mode of anticipation that functions as an “origin” in his work, and in the process shines a light on what Heidegger argues is the “oldest natural cast of language,” which is to “disclosingly appropriate things into bearing a world” (191, 200).