That possibility was very much on my mind when I was creating the Urth of The Book of the New Sun. I was trying to come to grips with the end-result of the do-nothing attitude so many people-on-the-street have about the future. These people seem to feel that space exploration is a lot of bullshit (‘there’s nothing really out there we can use’), that undersea exploration is a lot of bullshit (‘there’s nothing down there for us’), that we should just go about our business the way we are and be ‘sensible’. But what is going to happen if we keep on being ‘sensible’ in the way they’re suggesting? If we keep clinging to our old home (the planet Earth) and sit around waiting for the money and resources to run out? The Urth I invented in The Book of the New Sun is the world which has followed that course, a world in which people have been so limited in their vision of the future that they saw no other option except what was immediately in front of them. They’ve been practical and down-to-earth, they’ve gone on planting their cabbages. Well, there’s nothing wrong with planting those cabbages, God knows; but when you ignore any possibilities except those cabbages, you wind up living in a world something like Urth, with its exhausted mines and exhausted farmlands. You get a land which may have had a long period of relative peace and stability, but it’s a period of slow decay. I keep tropical fish, and I remember there used to be a fad among fish owners about trying to keep a perfectly balanced environment in the tanks – they’d seal everything up to see how long it was until the fish died out. Sometimes it would take eighteen months or more, but eventually the last fish always died and you were left there staring at a tank full of scummy green water. That’s what the Urth of the Commonwealth has become (and what we’re headed for unless we look to the future more adventurously) – a tank full of scummy water. (Gene Wolfe. McCaffrey interview.)
Knowing Typhon as I do, he probably had at least half a dozen purposes; but certainly one of the chief must have been self-aggrandizement – to return human kind to the stars would be a very great thing indeed. Yes, the Blue-Green system was the intended destination. (Gene Wolfe. Whorl e-mail discussion list questions.)
In Home Fires, Skip and Chelle make a deal with one another. Chelle will venture out into space to fight alien invaders and Skip will stay home, hoping to keep the home fires burning for her return (Skip seems to have proposed the deal: Chelle agrees, "[S]ure, darling, you wait for me.") Skip is left in their decrepit apartment -- Chelle twice describes it as a "stinking studio" -- a version of a tank full of scummy water, and thereby, while his wife performs as what to Wolfe real men do -- seek the stars -- Skip performs as the inevitable fate awaiting all those who do the sensible -- wallow in self-decay. Chelle knows glory, the glory Wolfe talks about when men do not content themselves with collecting cabbages -- "And damn it, up there it was glamorous! We were us. That was the big thing." -- while Skip performs a version of nineteenth-century traditional wives, like Little Woman's Marmee, who make sure that when their husbands finally come from war, or from battling in the cold, cruel marketplace, they have a welcoming hearth and an angel in the house to serve as antidote. Skip becomes the mother many Wolfe main protagonists turn to at the end of his fictions, to say, '"Sleep," she whispered. "Rest you, O my lover. Sleep, O my brother, and be well"' (Castleview).
There are two emplotments at work here, neither favourable to a real man's self image. Either he lacks boldness and is thereby rendered, like Urth's inhabitants, effeminate, or he has boldness -- he, like perhaps the Odyssey's Penelope -- will keep the home fires going, but is thereby rendered literally into a woman by conservative assessments of gender role. Further eroding his real male status is his sense that he is fortunate to even serve that role: his likely understanding that in identifying himself as serving a well-known role that seems to argue a secure relationship can be maintained even as lovers keep at a geographic remove from one another -- I will be a Penelope to your Odysseus -- he was hiding from himself the fact that his relationship is very tenuous, already, before departure: he informs us that since his wife had just before divorced herself from her parents, he had expected her to do so with him as well. Lucky him! While she hated her mother for what she did to her, and hated the life Skip was presenting her with, she hadn't worked herself, yet, to getting rid of him en total.
So is Wolfe finally presenting us with a main protagonist who doesn't venture out to stars like Severian, who doesn't venture across seas like Pirate Freedom's Chris, who doesn't venture into heavens and hell like WizardKnight's Able, but who chooses to be... in effect, a homebody, as hero, an apparent counter-argument to Wolfe's argument that choosing not to head out into space means spiritual and material depletion and withering/souring? The truth is that while teasing us with the possibility, he doesn't give us much chance to consider it, because, as we are told, unlike for example Green in There are Doors... whom it should be noted is fundamentally one of his world-explorers because the bulk of his text is his not at home, who after being abandoned by his true love continues working as a retail clerk and is sent for psychiatric help, as soon as his wife leaves Skip becomes a massive success. A famous celebrity law firm hires him, and so while Chelle performs a bit like Typhon, transplanting herself gloriously to the stars, Ern performs a bit like Severian, by bringing a powerful "star" back into his home (“He came back to our stinking studio and he’s signed on with Chet Burton. God knows I didn’t know much, but I knew who Chet Burton was, the guy the celebrities went to when it was win or die and blood on the knife in their car.”)
Skip becomes a massive financial success; he becomes a famous criminal lawyer. He is a powerful victor in the market place, and so in all ways, ostensibly, masculinized: refusing to narrate himself for any more than just a single moment as Marmee, he insists he be taken as Johnnie Cochrane. Their roles are different, but Skip quickly switches away from the truth that he had accepted the traditional woman's role to making it seem that their lives played out as if both partners, as if both husband and wife, had simply sought different destinations, different paths, to engage daily with the worst sorts of people. Aliens coming at you with guns vs. ongoing near proximity with those who stabbed others with knives or bludgeoned them with pipes... one risked themselves dying (Skip actually says the courtroom could be deadly for judges and therefore, one presumes, perhaps also for lawyers like him, which is the reason most judges go to court, armed), but the other couldn't be accused of hiding under a desk.
Further, he separates himself categorically from his new girlfriend, his secretary Susan, who, unlike people like him, are rejects who'll always be "second-best"... people who deserve rejection, for that being apparently their categorical imperative, and have no capacity to lead. He separates himself from servants like the beggar Achille, whom he must stop from trying to cling to him. No longer himself second-best, no longer himself clinging to a relationship his wife likely wants no part of: these aspects of himself that would make him worth rejecting, are placed onto others. He pretends that his experience in his work fashioned to secure the Home Fires, his career as lawyer, more shores up rather than questions traditional gender roles, for his experience with juries ostensibly showing that men are cold and reasoned -- adequate for jury duty and for the brutality of the working world/mean streets -- while women are easy to manipulate owing to being overly sensitive to emotional appeals and needs -- inadequate for jury duty; antithesis of working world; logical for the nurturing home. Chelle may f*ck men, she may rape Skip... but, like Athena, born not of woman but entirely of man, Skip tries to fashion her as exception.
Nevertheless, the text shows that Skip is still much in need of securing masculinity for having at the beginning taken solace in a feminine role. He obviously needs his wife to witness his ability to perform in battle... in actual battle, not just the battle of criminal court, to obtain it, which is itself emasculating because it puts your wife as the Achilles who'll notice that you too know how to handle a sword. And in the end, as if realizing that his assessment that while perhaps originally agreeing to be the wife he thereafter performed admirably as male, is a ruse, that he remains in essence, female, he himself enlists... and, as if this will work to efface completely from memory his original choice, it'll be as if he was already from the beginning someone who'd enlisted: he joins as colonel, that is, in a position normally acquired only after years of service. He'll have never known years of being shot at and having shot, as Wolfe describes himself as young soldier in Korea, but people will assume he had.
And it was a ruse: much of how he describes himself and how others are required to be, serve as superior ways of shoring up a false self than what Winnoc tried for himself in New Sun. Winnoc acknowledged he voluntarily surrendered his freedom, feminized himself, but never documents himself as Skip does so that even within this space he serves almost like an outside-the-barnyard hawk documenting the land, but rather just as a well-fed but non-epic rooster, who knows he'd be traded away to the mines if he ever for a moment dared declare himself akin to the protagonist in Melito's story. Is such a person, a man? Could such a person be deemed to have made a good choice? If we are keen to notice, Skip's effort to weave cover for himself makes him less a man than Winnoc, who opens himself up for examination for allowing himself to be so open. (If the key test in Wolfe's works is who passes as a true man, Winnoc, far more than Skip, passes. He's all bare, no obfuscations).
The considerable effort to acknowledge the possibility that one could take on a role that Wolfe would normally designate as inappropriate for a man and redeem it, in part, as an inversion -- as a domestic rooster that might perhaps if staged correctly convince as more outside-the-barn hawk or owl -- can in part be explained by Wolfe's document on his experience as a soldier in Korea, Letters Home. If the stay-at-home man can be rehabilitated as not-necessarily emasculated, then one might as author pretend to inhabit that role without it worryingly permanently affecting you. If performing, as author, that role, infects you, like possessing another person in Long Sun affects you, as you take back into you part of whom you were inhabiting, then if Marmee is Pappyified the risk is less. And the reason one might want to inhabit her rather than the man who seeks or is sent off to war, is because she... if you remain attached to her before leaving, will inevitably leave you, almost immediately leave you, and you, a soldier, will find yourself weeping to yourself, a pathetic discarded loser. Wolfe's account of Korea is that there is no such thing as a Penelope awaiting her Odysseus. Wolfe argues that if he himself were ever married before shipping off, he'd divorce her beforehand and spare himself the pain and humiliation. He'd make himself immune by doing this, but the other way to avoid the pain is tried out here: not divorce the wife, but de facto become her, and rehabilitate the possibility of her.
To Wolfe, Penelopes don't exist in women, but Home Fires shows that they might in this male-female hybrid called "Skip." Skip is not loyal to Chelle as Wolfe argues wives ought to have been to their husbands... but he is not as these wives, either. They forget all about their husbands, permanently, as they change up man for man, partner for partner, as readily and naturally as Mani does "owners" in WizardKnight. Skip, on the other hand, does find a new partner, the secretary Susan, and they do become so intertwined with one-another others forge their names as SkipandSusan, but he drops her immediately as soon as his actual wife arrives back. Not just temporarily, but permanently. Yes, Skip is obviously enthused with the possibility of bedding a young woman, something he feels is enabled him because, despite being middle-aged and balding, Chelle remains his wife, so will grit her way through, if it occurs, disgust. But yes, also, that he is fundamentally committed to her, and never really to Susan. You want something done right, do it yourself. You want women to be a certain way, become that woman yourself. Want Penelopes to actually exist? The Odysseus's... the would-be Odysseus's, need to surrender one of their own to role-reversal, so women can be taught how it actually should be done. Loyalty, being an aspect, to Wolfe, of male not female, means some man wearing the woman's skirt for awhile, so it gets instigated into them. Diddo, passionate attachment as well: "Considering the unpassionate nature of most women" (Letters Home). Skip is doing one for the team, so to speak, and hence, even while tending the Home Fires, is part of the Brotherhood of Men. Wolfe involving himself with, in forging, a Skip, recalls his experience in Korea, recalls the consistent accounts of betrayal, and reforges an alternative where none of that emotional messiness and devastation might have occurred. He's already himself known what it is to be a soldier, known what it was to seek glory far afield. The part he needs to work on is the woman who leaves the boy adrift. The part he needs to work on is what went on at home, where women didn't fulfill their side of the bargain. Home Fires accomplishes this.
In Letters Home, women leave men for trivial reasons. Wolfe argues "they seem willing to wreck a lot of trust just to have someone take them dancing." But Home Fires builds into the narrative cover if there proves to be more to it than that. Chelle didn't herself leave Skip for trivial reasons. She left him because, poverty, yes, but also because their life involved his coming home and her screaming at him all the time. She left because they weren't going to last, one minute. She argues that already from her experience of him, behind his genuine conscious gifts there lurked some subterranean Death, some subterranean intention... it seems, to murder, accumulating, brooding. His current love was already shadowing as future hate-crime. The horror of what their life would have been seems played out in reality by Skip's descriptions of the domestic life of those he defends. In marriages like perhaps where they themselves were headed, husbands, locked alone with wives who've turned into angry hags, murder their wives; children born to them, are tortured and hacked to pieces. War gets transferred from where it ought to be, afield, to within the domestic. Would-be Home Fires impossible for houses on fire. Skip's diaries of whom he defended in court, are like Silk's premonitions drawn from his readings of holy text: they foretell disaster, for him, for Chelle, unless she makes a drastic choice. It is possible that by acknowledging that the problem isn't women, their ostensible innate lack of passion and lack of loyalty, but marriage itself, accounted for like a naturalist like Gissing or Zola or Dreisser or Ibsen would account it, then a sexist resolution to the reasons for sexual discord -- women are not to be trusted -- hesitates into more mutual, more mature territory -- marriage must cease to be romanticized and given full account for what it is supposed to represent, something beautiful, to actually have any possibility to in reality exist. Otherwise, chaos reigns.
Things are not as they seem, argues Home Fires. The "wife" may be a man; the "home," a location for debris, exhaustion, murder; the warrior, a seeking of suicide. Oh yes! the warrior is negotiated so we see them not only as seekers-of-glory but those-who-seek-Death; Chelle admits that soldiers... and perhaps herself, indeed very likely herself, were either unconsciously or unconsciously seeking more than anything, death. This itself is a romantic formulation -- seek Death itself sounds glorious, or could be made to sound glorious -- but since the text has a group of nobodies who've formed a suicide cult, "suicide," cowardly seeking of suicide (others do it for you, either fellow members of the cult or warriors on the other side), seeps its way into these soldiers' motives. Wolfe worries that in pursuing sensible cabbage-lives people erroneously starve themselves into habitats of pond-scum, but Home Fires shows he knew that sometimes people can perform as their alternative, those who seek stars! do the insensible! but for intentionally pursuing what those who remained behind only inadvertently are lent to, are not the alternative to cowards but cowards intensified.
If the man staying home is a Marmee, but a Marmee performing as men hope they would -- loyalty, devotion, passion -- and the wife performs as soldier, but not as we would hope soldiers do -- not protection, but de facto, suicide pact -- then the ownership of glory shifts back onto one side, the side inverse of normal expectations, where, if anything, the "wife" can be expected to perform, while the "male" finds another preferred mate, in their dalliance with death.
