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I hear the emotional-coldness rap against these books a lot, and (given the great warmth and humor with which Wolfe writes elsewhere) I think the clinical, detached tone of NEW SUN was a conscious choice. I think it's a conscious evocation of the epic style--back to ancient Greece again: you weren't supposed to empathize with Odysseus, you know?
In part, too, I think it's the author commenting on the narrator. Everything we see and hear in NEW SUN is filtered through the consciousness of Severian. And Severian, who forgets nothing and renders it flawlessly, is nonetheless an unreliable narrator: by his own admission, he is "somewhat insane."
If his version of events does not convey any emotional heft of those events, I think that says a lot about his weirdly passive and analytical character--and about the nature of eidetic memory. Eidetic or so-called "photographic" memory unconsciously takes everything in as pure impression, without decoding it into information: a page of print is remembered simply as a pattern of black shapes on a white background. The rememberer may recall the pattern perfectly, but may lack the skills to translate that pattern into words.
Just so, I get the feeling that Severian sees everything, but lacks a capacity for understanding--particularly the kind of instantaneous emotional understanding that most of us have. That's my take, anyway.
Either that, or the curious emotional muting of the books is another symptom of the dying Sun: Urth is worn out, and even the passions of her people are feeble and exhausted.
Either that, or looking for warmth in the NEW SUN books is beside the point--like looking for touchy-feely moments in Borges.
Anyway, speaking of unreliable narrators--the SOLDIER series (SOLDIER OF THE MIST, et al) used the short-term memory trope some ten years before MEMENTO--and it's a tribute to Wolfe's skill as a storyteller that the conceit is not the whole of the story. |
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