Near the end of Gene Wolfe's 1980 novel The Shadow of the Torturer, the narrator, Severian, an exiled executioner, has what he thinks is a vision of a burning cathedral. “Hanging over the city like a flying mountain in a dream was an enormous building—a building with towers and buttresses and an arched roof,” Severian writes. “I tried to speak, to deny the miracle even as I saw it; but before I could frame a syllable, the building had vanished like a bubble in a fountain, leaving only a cascade of sparks.”
As Severian later discovers, what he took for a vision had a very material explanation: It was a papier-mâché cathedral maintained by a religious order, who then used flames to levitate the light structure like a balloon and have it burn up in the sky. It was in that cathedral that Severian earlier acquired a holy relic, a claw-shaped thorn with healing powers that is instrumental in his learning that all creation is governed by cycles of death and rebirth.
The burning cathedral, like virtually everything in Wolfe's fiction, is multi-layered. Within the story, it's meant to be seen both literally and metaphorically, as a thing that exists and also a thing embodies truths beyond its materiality. As such it is not unlike the Eucharist, which, to a believing Catholic, is both a ritualistic re-enactment of the last supper and the actual consumption of the body and blood of Christ.
Wolfe, a celebrated writer of science fiction and fantasy with a deeply Catholic imagination, died on Sunday at age 87. Wolfe was a writer who occupied a unique niche by fusing together three seemingly divergent strands: pulp fiction, literary modernism, and Catholic theology. His four-volume masterpiece The Book of the New Sun (of which The Shadow of the Torturer is the first tome) is an almost indescribable combination of speculative Christian eschatology with a Conan the Barbarian adventure story, written in a prose that can fairly be described as Proustian.
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