Having finally received spousal access to the Princeton University Library, I’ve been able to borrow a copy of Peter Wright’s “Attending Daedalus,” one of the only pieces of secondary literature on Wolfe’s corpus. Last I checked, a hardcover copy is $500 and a paperback (of which there must be exceedingly few) is $6k. It contains an interpretation of Wolfe’s most famous work, the tetralogy (plus coda) The Book of the New Sun, the content of which we will get to shortly. It is an academic work, full of frameworks of interpretation and hefty textual support, from the work in question and beyond, in Wolfe’s short stories and essays.
Now, Wolfe has written various essays about the novelist’s imperative to not worry about the self-referential technicalities of the academic’s analyses, literary devices, metafictional discourse, formal functions and so on. I assume then that Wolfe never read Wright’s book.
Had he read it, I imagine by the time he made it to the meat of the argument he’d find the interpretation far from his intentions (which, as in any great work, do not provide a reductive meaning but rather constrain readings to within a certain bound). But more than that, he would be very familiar with the precise way Wright has misread his work.
Wright fails to understand Wolfe because Wright is an atheist, and Wolfe was a Catholic.
This essay is not necessarily intended for one who has read Wolfe, though for a certain like-minded person I could not recommend him any higher, but I must briefly allude to Wright’s particular misreading. Wright sees the tetralogy as a tale told by an ignorant pawn in a cosmologically-scaled evolutionary game, in which a highly-advanced race of starskipping time travelers are reaching into their past to ensure the creators of their race (mankind or some evolved version of mankind) make it through the gauntlet of the cold, harsh universe. Nothing in the novel, he claims, is truly mysterious (my word, certainly not his), and everything could be explained as advanced technology. God has no place in the narrative.
Even a careful reader would be forgiven for not seeing this, as our narrator has seemingly mystical visions and spiritual experiences. And the most careful reader of all would, of course, discard such a reading immediately (as the most careful readers are spiritual).
Wolfe’s works ooze the divine. His worlds are manifestly mysterious, in the Catholic sense of the word, inviting deeper and deeper reflection that never truly reduces to some final meaning. And it is that mystery that Wright fundamentally cannot understand, as an atheist. An atheist denies mystery; even the agnostic recognizes at least the One that can’t be denied.
For this reason I became possessed with the idea of writing this essay. For Wright too must have been possessed by his own idea, such that he would undertake the impressive task of exhausting The Book of the New Sun. The effort alone is commendable — in his chapter that linearly constructs the supposed objective plot of the novel, the citations that populate the pages point to each of the four volumes seemingly at random, weaving the references and hints into cohesion. But it simply astounded me: How could someone misread the novel so thoroughly?
The answer, about his atheism, illuminates a bit of Chesterton’s, who said that believing in that central mystery of the universe makes everything else clear; but in believing that that central mystery is wholly unmysterious, merely psychological, everything else becomes mysterious.
It’s quite clear that Wolfe understands mystery. All beings in the novel, the lowly humans and the elevated starskippers alike, refer to God, albeit by a different name. This God is philosophically necessary — it is that first cause, the unmoved mover of an infinite qualitative distance from all creatures, even those that Wright sees as gods in themselves.
Wright puts that philosophical God into the chain of evolution. To him, God too is reaching back and manipulating the higher beings such that they eventually evolve into him, closing his own creative loop.
This is silliness. Such a world is infinitely regressive and entirely unfeasible. Wolfe is doing much more than masking a reducibly rational under an unreliable narrative. He, just as much as us, does not know what God is up to, in reality or in his novel. It’s only under that fundamental mystery that the arcs of his characters have a weight and potency to them, such that they don’t get crushed under a Darwinian-psychological reading. It’s only in mystery that the events at the cosmic scale can make any sense at all without seeming amoral or sinister.
But such mystery seems out of reach of the atheist. This is a tragedy. If only we could convince them that theological mystery is not the end of critical thought but its necessary beginning, they would cease being atheists.
So it is that The Book of the New Sun will make its way into my hands every few years, as it does for many, just as Wolfe dreamed his books would. It will have reprints, anniversary editions, spawn (more) podcasts, inspire more essays. Its mystery will remain inexhaustible but infinitely rich.
Perhaps in those days I will check again, and Attending Daedalus will sit at $10k.