I just wrote this little write up for the urth list; I tried to be pretty comprehensive in my approach, where I have been doing some more or less chronological analysis of Wolfe's stories.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
I felt odd moving past 1972 without at least some mention ofWolfe’s first successful long volume, The Fifth Head of Cerberus; the titularnovella was published in Orbit earlier that year.
I want to start bysaying that Borski’s Cave Canem, now on the Wolfe-Wiki, constitutes his bestwork, and is well worth considering. Iwill gloss over some of the information that he fleshes out more thoroughly,but there are a few things I want to emphasize in light of later Wolfe works.(Though some of this may re-treat or recapitulate his observations, I haveresearched the allusions again myself wholesale as I saw fit). In some part this is a response to Borski’s,Wright’s, and others comments on the book. I quote them extensively towards the end of this analysis. This is such a complicated work that involvesso much that there are probably a few important details and themes that aresimply mentioned in only a sentence or two or not at all.
First, my philosophy on Wolfe’s stories: repetitive symbolsand theme are key to interpreting the actual surface level of “whathappened”. In his novels after Peace,juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated things is also of absolute importance,though I do not think this is yet as stylistically prominent in Fifth Head ofCerberus. I think that many repetitiveinternal symbols are ignored by critics and interpreters, and this confoundsme. Borski latches onto repetitionsquite a bit but too often throws in everything but the kitchen sink to force apat conclusion. I tend to force patconclusions when the theme warrants it (For example, in The HORARS of War, ourmain character is both fully human and fully machine because the religioussymbol of the star at Christ’s birth resonates with that theme, but in” Trip,Trap”, the spiritual world is unambiguously the real world and more objectivethan the physical world – the blade has a point in the physical world, but ourtroll is not pierced, only slashed, because in the spirit world the point isbroken and the two protagonists have formed the third billy goat of objectivereality instead of subjective prejudice – objective outside detail is usually,in my opinion, at the heart of getting to the bottom of things in Wolfe).
FREQUENT REPETITIONS IN FIFTH HEAD OFCERBERUS:
CIRCULAR COLUMNS IN DREAMS: a circular column of pillars ortrees that suffuse ALL THREE NOVELLAS. The dreamer is surrounded by this columnthat extends to the sky. This appears to be the “natural” temple that appearsin V.R.T., made up of trees that our narrator (at that time Marsch) insistscould never occur naturally, as there is one tree for every day of the Anneseyear. THIS IS IMPORTANT!!!!!! Equallyimportant is the slab of stone where supposedly God can’t see what happens, andthis is where Eastwind/Sandwalker are born and probably where Marsch dies (orat least, where he claims the boy V.R.T perishes), and the magical cave nearthe river of time.
47 AND THE PIPES: prisoner 47 had been knocking on the pipesin prison in VRT … and there are 47 old pan pipes above the door frame in ouropening scene. #47 is a politicalprisoner who states he is “Fifth of September” – lots of things happened onthat date in history, but probably the French revolution is implied, as theFrench have now been repressed.
PROPHYLACTIC SHOWERING/ NONSEXUAL REPRODUCTION/SALIVA:There’s something weird in the saliva in Fifth Head, and in the third novella,our officer has sex with a girl and then bathes “prophylactically” to get hersaliva off him – in VRT a girl who paints a no and yes on her breasts leavesthe imprint on the man she favors, but then goes and washes in the river –“that’s for forgetfulness in the tales, you see.”
Number 5 is formed parthenogentically, as is the partabo/part human girl grown from an arm by Cinderwalker. Additional nonsexual reproduction occurs in theexperiments of number 5: “I was stimulating unfertilized frogs’ eggs to asexualdevelopment and then doubling the chromosomes by a chemical treatment so that afurther asexual generation could be produced. “ ( 23)
SENTIENT TREES, LEAVES OF GODHOOD: Trees that move aroundand act in sentient fashion, with holy connotations, including impregnation:
“They mated with trees and drowned the children to honortheir rivers. That was what wasimportant” (FHOC, 11)
“Sandwalker greeted the tree ceremoniously, … a murmuring ofleaves answered him, and though he could not understand the words they did notsound angry. (98)
“it isn’t good to sleep where a tree is for more than onenight” (100)
“I am not, you comprehend, a Christian, but may yourgenerosity to my poor boy be blessed by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, or in theeventuality that you are Protestant, Monsieur, by Jesus only and by God theFather and the Holy Ghost. As my ownten-times decimated people would say, may the Mountains bless you and the Riverand the Trees and the Oceansea and all the stars of heaven and the gods. I speak as their religious leader” (VRT, p.198)…
”many animals and birds, trees that were alive, just as youand I have traveling, … though this is still not the back of beyond where onesees gods come floating down the river on logs, and trees gone traveling, thegods with large and small heads, and blossoms of the water hydrangea in theirhair, or the elk men whose heads and hair and beards and arms and bodies werelike hose of men, whose legs were the bodies of red elk, so that they needed tomate with the cow-woman once as beasts and once as men do” (VRT, p. 173) and,when the “boy” is captured with the current, according to Marsch’s journal(after he VRT begins writing for him: “Downstream a long way, a big tree stoodgrasping the rock, with water at his feet, and had thrust out a root to catchmy friend.” (VRT ,p.261). The hybrid Shadow Child who claims to be amental combination of the “man” Sandwalker and the other Shadow children says ”Wehad no names before men came out of the sky … we were mostly long, and lived inholes between the roots of trees.”
Then there is this odd explanation for what the herbs of St.Anne do when chewed: “Once between the full face of sisterworld and her next, aman may take the fresh leaves and folding them tightly carry them in hischeek. Then there is no woman for him,nor any meat; he is sacred then, for God walks in him. … When we die at last wehave been greater than God and less than the beasts. . . when the phase comes again we find newwives, and are young, and God.” The herb is described as wide, warty, andyellow, the seed pink prickled eggs. Atthe culmination of “A Story”, the shadow child bites Eastwind and says, “Thatwhich swam in my mouth swims in his veins now” – this allows the switching ofperception between Eastwind and Sandwalker. Borski implies in his explorations that the abos mimic the trees, but Iam sure these trees are the masterminds of the Shadow Children, though theiractual life cycle is mysterious.
THE RIVER AND THE STARS: The Tempus body of water seemssomehow associated with something mystical, it is in this water that many ofour characters drown or disappear, whether it be Marsch (or the boy VRT,according to his unreliable journal), Last Voice, or Sandwalker. It is associated with time and the sky aboveis also somehow associated with the Shadow Children and their ability to “hide”the planet from terrestrial colonization. As soon as their protection is no longer offered, the French land. These shadow children have a different namedepending on the number present, and often their numbers are not subjectivelyreal, as they are mental projections.
DREAMS: In the drugged dreams of Number 5, he actuallyremembers foreign experiences that must have been from his “father” or furtherback in time. Eastwind and Sandwalker,twins, dream of the other awake when they are asleep, and the aborigine who hasreplaced Marsch, though he is attempting to pass himself off as Marsch, relatesdreams of his mother and red-bearded father that are clearly of his previouslylife as the boy V. R. Trenchard.
SANDWALKER’S FEET: A few more things: every time Sandwalkerappears , his feet are shown hitting the ground: “ The second came not as theyare ordinarily born – that is, head foremost as a man climbs from a lower placeinto a high – but feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lowerplace. His grandmother was holding hisbrother, not knowing that two were to be born, and for that reason his feetbeat the ground for a time with no one to draw him forth.” ( 84) Then later, “feet foremost as a man letshimself down into a lower place, climbed into Thunder Always” (86). This is important for determining who dies atthe end of the story, for the characters feet are swept out from under himbefore he descends to a lower place.
REPETITION OF THE NAMES WALKER AND WOLF: Number Five is aWolfe, and later when the five shadow children are only one, their name isWolf. Oddly, the Old Wise One who is afigment of the mental reality of the Shadow Children is also called “The GroupNorm”. They have names like Firefox and Swan, and afire-fox shows up again, along with a ghoul-bear and tire-tiger, in the huntingsequences of V.R.T.
The aborigine of theFree People, Sandwalker, has a name that is echoed later in Twelvewalker (Ibelieve the name Trenchard assumes) and Cinderwalker, a very magical aboriginewho takes “a cattle-drover’s woman [who] had her arm cut off by a train” anduses the arm to “[grow] a new woman on that so that the drover had twowives. Naturally the second one, the oneCinderwalker made, was abo except for the one arm”
In each tale we have a doubling, followed by incarceration:the clone number five is imprisoned for murdering his father, the twinSandwalker is born on the slab where foul acts are invisible to God, iseventually cast into a pit “The Other Eye” to be sacrificed, and will attemptto murder his brother Eastwind before a Shadow child bites and switches theirperceptions. In the final tale ouranthropologist is imprisoned as well, perhaps indefinitely.
BRIEF SUMMARY, with interpretations:
Our narrator Number Five lives in a Brothel called theMaison du chien on the blue planet St. Croix in Port Mimizon. He and hisbrother, actually a genetic son, live with their father, called Maitre, andtheir robotic tutor, M.Million, a neural copy of the original man who boretheir genetic code. It turns out thatMaitre is actually a key spy for the government, which may be facing a probablyFrench revolution. (who has colonized the French?) The play that Number Five, David, andPhaedria star in is later mentioned in VRT as a reference to letting the Frenchmaintain some infrastructure thanks to slavery on St. Croix. The dream of our narrator seems to echoevents from previous iterations of his genetic code, and he also sees thecolumn of pillars/trees that is found in all of the dreams throughout thenovellas and is the temple on St. Anne. His aunt, Jeanine, or the black queen, is Aubrey Veil, who haspostulated the idea that the abos have replaced the colonists, but she alsoundercuts it. Number Five recognizesthat Marsch is an aborigine, and Marsch recognizes that Number Five is a clone,who repeats the murderous pattern of his father, even down to the crippledmonkey. Many of the slaves are failedclonal experiments of the Maitre, and the whole planet seems to have stagnatedwith very little genetic diversity. Number Five kills his father and moves back into the compound to restartthe same pattern. His father said thathe made the experiment to see why no clone ever becomes greater than this –talk about a cycle of degeneration.
In A Story by John V. Marsch, Eastwind is born of CedarBranches Waving, followed by the breach baby Sandwalker. Eastwind is taken while being bathed in theriver and his grandmother drowned, and he is trained to be an acolyte of Lastvoice,his beard ritually plucked. Sandwalkerknows little of his brother save in his dreams, where they each perceive theother, and grows to seek out the sacred cave of a priest (who is there, butapparently awake, as Sandwalker feels his feet and withered legs and thenleaves his sacrifice for the priest (it is not clear that the priest is at alllike the man of the Free People, Sandwalker)). He meets with Seven Girls Waiting under a treeand they develop a relationship. Hismother has been taken by Eastwind’s people, and along with some ShadowChildren, who seem to cast a glamor into the sky that keeps St. Anne from beingdetected by colonizers, Sandwalker is eventually cast into a pit called “theother eye” to be sacrificed to the holy river. He discourses with the shifting shadowchildren. The end involves beatingLastvoice to death as sacrifice, then Sandwalker decides to kill his brother,but a Shadow Child disappears, and with a “magic” bite, switches theirperceptions. It is pretty clear thatEastwind is the one who survives, as he kicks Sandwalker’s feet out from underhim, and, later in V.R.T, the rumor is that the landing of the Frenchmen aboutto occur at the culmination of this tale and at the removal of the ShadowChildren’s perception filter, that Eastwind greets them.
Dr. Marsch, in the third section, goes to find traces of theaborigines on St. Anne and it leads him to a fraudulent man named Trenchard whoactually does have a half-aborigine son. The son and Marsch go into the wilderness, to the back of beyondtogether, to find the same sacred cave and temple of trees that played soprominently in the imagery of A Story. They are followed by a lot of strange creatures, including a cat that isprobably the boy’s lover, a ghoul bear, and a tire tiger. At one point, the boy is weeping when acreature is killed. Perhaps this is hismother or some other aboriginal familial association. Marsch is eventuallyreplaced by the boy, the cat lover also killed, and VRT goes to St. Croix, andis arrested when Number Five kills his father, for the murder. The authorities keep him contained becausethey think he might be a spy, and set up Celestine Etienne to watch him,supposedly simply the nearest woman present at the time of hisincarceration. Given that Maitre is aspy for these individuals, she is almost certainly the woman in pink who isoccasionally in his library at the beginning of the book, as it appears to beher favorite color. His files arehaphazardly looked over by an officer called Maitre, before “Marsch” iscondemned to what will certainly be a very long, perhaps terminal,incarceration.
PLACE NAMES IN THE TEXT/RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM:
Our planets are St. Croix of Number Five and the firstnovella and St. Anne of the aborigines and the second section. St. Anne is the mother of the Virgin Mary,and obviously the name Croix implies cross. Interestingly, this covers a very particular part of history, from theImmaculate Conception of Mary that sets the groundwork for God’s enfleshment,and the moment in time when that flesh will be put to death.
More disturbing are the street names: Rue D’Asticot – thestreet of Maggots, and Rue D’Egouts – street of sewers
Port Mimizon is not the word for mimicry, but it may verywell be resonant with it, and mimi does mean a mime or mimic.
The address of the Maison du Chien, the dog house: 666Saltimbanque – Charlatan/Fraud and the number of the devil
In any case, Cerberus guards the gates to Hades and sits intheir front yard. When you live in theHouse of Dogs, nicknamed Cave Canem (beware of the dog), on Charlatan streetnear Maggots and the sewer, then pretty clearly this is some hellish imagery,and number five’s parthenogenetic inception is kind of a nasty turn on thenormal order of things. He is bred torepeat the same murder his father and his father before him have – this reallyis something like a hell, and even M.Million is not free, as his creation wassomething akin to a self-destruction that led to an eternal half-life.
When confronted with the Four Armed man, David spins off thefirst lines of Virgil’s Aeneid: arms and the man I sing who forc’d by fate … interesting inthat this is a story of the founding of a second great empire after a defeat,thematically joining the Greek and Roman art and history … something that iscontemplated about the aboriginal culture as a group of cast out Greeks ratherabsurdly in the opening sections of the book. Interesting echo, nonetheless, though it is the four arms of theiradversary that prompts David to recite the lines. The Aeneid is about one hero who escapes theshambles of the Trojan war to eventually found a new Empire, and I think thatthe myths of colonizers from Gondwanaland or some other primitive earthernculture coming to St. Anne long ago and then turning into the aborigines is insome way summoned by the Odyssey/Aeneid presence in the book.
St. Anne – the mother of the Virgin Mary, intimatelyassociated with the immaculate conception, which is actually the inception ofMary without sin.
There are several secular allusions:
“When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow, and the owlet whoopsto the wolf below, that eats the she-wolf’s young” is the opening quote, and itis not clear if it is the wolf which is eating the she-wolf’s young, but inlight of the story I rather fancy so. Later, the Maitre is called an “owl” – perhaps another link between theopening scene with our narrator and David plucking pan pipes to play with – ifMaitre of VRT is David, then perhaps the slave standing under the tree is acast off clone of his brother/father, creating a nice circular situation.(Number Five often sees his own face in the slaves for sale in Port Mimizon).
Both Sandwalker and Number Five experience life as someoneelse when they sleep: “In my dreams that night I saw the little boy scamperingfrom one activity to another, his personality in some way confused with my ownand my father’s so that I was once observer, observed, and a third presenceobserving both”
On Number Five’s Name:
The volumes in the library: the volume on the murder ofTrotski was probably The Great Prince Dies by Bernard Wolfe, thoughalternatively, there is a play by Peter Weiss, Trotski in Exile (Mosley’s bookThe Assassination of Trotski was not published until 1972) that would satisfyour W requirement for the last name, Monday or Tuesday was by Virginia Woolf, amis-filed book by V. Vinge filed with the W’s, and interestingly “The Mile LongSpaceship” oddly identified as a misplaced astronautics text by “some German” –Kate Wilhelm – and that story is about telephathic communication between a manand aliens whose ” dreams” are real. Yes, Number Five was looking for some Wolfe books, clearly his father’sname is Wolfe.
THEMES: There are two very interesting and, to mymind, opposite things at play here: Maitre WANTS to change and succeed, but hisexperiment always fails – his perfect copies are stuck in the same loop ashimself and wind up in exactly the same place. While the “perfect” mimicry ofthe abos leads us to question who is human and who is aborigine, there issomething much more spiritual at stake – why does Number Five, the perfectcopy, never seem to have free will to change? Is the parthenogenetic cloning process itself why the “ship” of hisdreams never moves anywhere? Is M.Million a more perfect copy of the original human; does he evince true emotions?
Individual perception verified by external observation,imitation, and the difference between those who conquer and those who areconquered are all on the table here.
VITAL QUOTES: Davidon the abo’s tools: “If you could have asked them, they would have told youthat their magic and their religion, the songs they sang and the traditions oftheir people were what were important. They killed their sacrificial animals with flails of seashells that cutlike razors, and they didn’t let their men father children until they had stoodenough fire to cripple them for life. They mated with trees and drowned the children to honor theirrivers. That was what was important.”
This is how Eastwind kills Last Voice at the end, withflails. The aborogines probably did matewith trees literally. What is the riverthat it has so much power? How do theShadow Children obscure the perceptions of others, and are they truly able tocommunicate with the stars?
Also, there is this one: Robert Culot says that hisgrandfather saw the aborigines, and that they looked, “sometimes like a man,but sometimes like the post of a fence. … or a dead tree … sometimes like oldwood”. Pretty close relationship to thetrees they were supposed to mate with, eh?
Cinderwalker creates a whole new person from a dead arm.
RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS: There is something very fascinatingabout the names of these planets, St. Anne and St. Croix, that really does dealwith salvation – the onset of the immaculate conception that allows Christ toenter into the world through the conception of his vessel, the Virgin Mary, tohis crucifixion (St. Croix), which is symbolic of the fully human, but fullydivine Christ’s death in the act of salvation. It seems a far more sinister parthenogenesis is at work on St. Croix,designed not to save, but to damn.
The river on St Anne as greater than God and its littleplace names are interesting – how does life on that planet really work? There are Free People, Marshmen, ShadowChildren, and probably even more groups, some pretty distinct. It seems the composite animals described inVRT are aboriginal as well.
CONNECTION TO OTHER WORKS: There really are a lot of motifsthat are repeated in Long and Short Sun, from Tree hybrids to four armed men toa blue and green planetary system to parthenogenetically produced offspring,but, no, it isn’t the same as Blue/Green. This is explored further down below.
The style of A Story is something Wolfe is very good at –that mythic but confusing dream prose that channels the savage mind withoutlosing sophistication. It is verydifferent than the first part of the novel, but I would have to say he doesoccasionally repeat this tone, in things such as “The Sailor Who Sailed Afterthe Sun” , “At the Point of Capricorn”, maybe even “Tracking Song” – wheretechnology and mysticism lead to a primitive world.
LITERARY REFERENCES:Michael Andre Druisi and Borski have long since catalogued these, but I want tosay that the Puss in Boots reference is never taken far enough by Borski, it isEXTREMELY thematically important, as are the references to “The Mile LongSpaceship” (with its dreams as realityapproach and the statement that it was an astronautics text misfiled - prettyinteresting) and the opening lines mirroring of “Remembrance of Things Past”,with its exploration of involuntary memory and identity in all three stories –when the cat shows up and says that the gift is courtesy of the marquis ofCarabas, this evokes not only a sentient cat but the surrounding mythos: thecat gives stuff to the king courtesy of a peasant lad who owns him. He convinces his master to bathe in the rivernaked and hides his clothes while the king comes by, then convinces all thecountry life to say that the land belongs to the marquis of Carabas. Next, he tricks an ogre to turn into a mouseand eats it, attaining its castle for his master. With a river and nudity and pretending to besomething other than one is, this story resonates pretty well with the St. Anne portion of the tale.
