The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe is a work of anticolonialist science-fiction published in 1972. Personally, I am suspicious of anti-colonialist fiction of that age. Books may inadvertently take on certain colonialist assumptions and perspectives even while attempting to reject others. (Of course, we continue to do this today.) I was interested to see how Gene Wolfe’s first major book fared.
The book is structured as three novellas taking place in the same universe. There is a pair of twin planets, Saint Anne and Saint Croix, colonized by humans a few generations ago. It’s said that there was an indigenous population on Saint Anne (the Annese). However, there is barely any trace of them left. What’s there is veiled by layers of folklore, hearsay, and charlatanry.
The book poses two major questions about the indigenous Annese. First, were they human? One character argues yes, because they are dead. They are human because it is interesting to say so. And since they are dead, saying that they were human does not burden us with the responsibility to do anything about it.
Second, are the Annese still here? It is suggested, as a fanciful conjecture, that the people currently living on Saint Anne are descended from the Annese. The Annese are said to have been shapeshifters, and could have taken the form of the colonists. So is that what happened? (And would it matter? What is the motivation for asking?)
These are not, I think, the sort of questions you would ask about colonialism if you set about to consider it analytically. These are poetic, evocative questions. The idea that we can only consider the Annese human after they are gone speaks to a bitter injustice. And of course in the real world, indigenous groups are not in fact dead, and so what are we doing about that?
These questions are explicitly posed in the first novella, but the connection to story events is oblique, and the reader is left to draw connections.
The first novella tells the life of a boy on Saint Croix. His caretaker is a robot, his father runs a brothel, and he is embedded in a society full of slavery. Without spoiling anything, it is a story about cycles of violence. Or more precisely, standing waves of violence, patterns that persist even as every individual making up the pattern is replaced. What bearing does his have on colonialism, when the colonized people are long gone, and on a different planet besides?
The third novella follows an anthropologist, John V. Marsch, and his attempt to track down information about the indigenous people. He finds someone who knows someone, who knows another, though those claims are likely fraudulent. And we do not hear directly from Marsch ourselves. We watch a police investigator reading Marsch’s diaries; the investigator does not care much at all about what Marsch discovered.
The fate of the Annesse is unclear. Were they all killed, or did they become part of the standing wave? And for all that people entertain the idea that the Annese were human, why do they not entertain the same for slaves? Ah, well the slaves, they are not dead.
I found The Fifth Head of Cerberus to be a thematically rich experience, one worth discussing and picking apart, but I also did not always enjoy reading it. It became one of those books that took me months and months to read, because I was unenthusiastic about continuing, and then when I found the opportunity, I had to work to refresh my memory. I think some of the moment to moment falls short.
In particular, the second novella felt sloggy and unpleasant. It’s a folkloric story of the Annese, supposedly told by Dr. Marsch. Marsch is an ambiguously unpleasant person, whose role as author casts doubt on the story’s authenticity. That’s kind of the point, as he somewhat embodies the regressive attitudes of old-fashioned anthropology. But the “point” such as it is, is to be enjoyed from afar, not from close up. (Along similar lines, I am not pleased by Wolfe’s habit of writing female characters within the madonna/whore dichotomy, even if there is a “point” to it.)
All in all, this is a surprisingly mature work of anticolonialism.
This was the first Gene Wolfe book I read, several years after his big splash with The Book of the New Sun. I habitually avoid reading a book which has generated a lot of favorable press, or fans, not because I distrust the opinions of fame but because I fear I would not give the book a respectful reading. I fear I would expect too much, or too little, from the book and so would not enjoy it as the author intended.
So when the opportunity showed up in a used book store to read The Fifth Head of Cerberus I took it.
I have since read every book written by Gene Wolfe. I consider him one of the greatest stylists of the 20th century, although a lot of his work is somewhat experimental. For example, Castleview is almost unreadable, until the reader realizes that Wolfe deliberately put all the action off-stage. Chapters will end in a cliff-hanger for a set of characters, move to a different set of characters, and when the scene shifts back to the first set of characters the crisis is past and the resolution of the cliffhanger is only referred to in the past tense. Structurally it is a fantastic creation, but I don’t recommend people read it unless they are interested in how a novel is structured. It violates so many narrative rules that it is instructive, and I can think of only a few authors who might be able to pull it off. Honestly, I think Wolfe failed on this one.
I have considered going back and re-reading The Fifth Head of Cerberus a couple times, now that I’m older and more experienced. I may have a different opinion of it now. My memory of it is a little hazy, but I do recall thinking that Wolfe was deliberately invoking Lovecraft with Dr. Marsch. I felt there was a similarity of character between Dr. Marsch and Dr. Armitage from The Dunwich Horror. Of course, none of Wolfe’s characters are reliable narrators.
As for Wolfe’s predilection for woman as Madonna or whore, I can only say that there is a strong element of sinner/redemption which runs through all his works, and I have to believe it comes from growing up within Christian mythology. As much as I love Wolfe’s writing style, it would have been nice to see him break away from the Christian ethos and maybe try something from another culture. I think he could have written amazing fiction using the South African San culture as a basis. But, maybe not. While I think as a stylist he transcends mythologies, the reason he is able to do so may be rooted in a deep understanding of the mythology he lived in.
The Madonna/whore trope is so common in fiction that I rue the influence it has on AI conclusions about the nature of women. Don’t know what to do about that.
I wish I had something sensible to contribute, because Wolfe is one of my favorite authors, but I haven’t actually gotten to Fifth Head yet.
I will say, regarding the Madonna/whore thing, that I find that it’s often less that Wolfe writes the female characters that way as other characters view them that way.
Specifically, in BotNS, Severian’s view of women is often very simplistic and self-serving, but there are lots of hints in the text that those same women are actually a lot more interesting and complex than Severian ever realizes. It’s just rather subtle, since we’re getting everything through his filter.
This may fall under the heading of ‘even if there is a “point” to it’, though. YMMV and that’s totally fair.
LykeX wrote @3,
Which leads to the conundrum of whether we, as readers, are reading into the text more than Wolfe ever intended to convey.
I don’t have an answer to that.
As a rule I don’t care much for Rodney Dangerfield movies. The comedy is not subtle, and while I can appreciate this type of humour on a vaudeville stage, I feel that the Pat and Mike type banter (English) or the Mr. Bones banter (American), doesn’t transfer well to movies. But I find the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School quite funny, and one of the funnier bits was when Melon was asked to write a book report on, IIRC, Slaughterhouse Five. Melon hires Kurt Vonnegut to write the report, which gets a failing grade, and the instructor tells him, “Whoever *did* write this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!”
There are a lot of books where I fear that I’m reading more into the novel than the author ever intended. It doesn’t make my interpretation wrong, and it vindicates my belief that a novel should be judged on it’s own merit not on the public (or private) behaviors of the author. But it does make me wonder if authors like Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Karl Capek, or George Orwell knew they were writing books which people would analyze for generations. Possibly finding meaning in them which the authors did not intend when those works were written. Dickens is straightforward, Borges knew what he was doing, and T.S. Eliot, like Oscar Wilde, was in it for the commercial possibilities. Don’t get me wrong, I admire Wilde’s work and Eliot is technically superb. But I doubt Eliot will be read for pleasure in 100 years and if Wilde is read for pleasure it will be for his children’s stories, much like Roald Dahl’s more adult works are largely ignored today.
So when someone suggests that there are subtle indications within a novel of a different interpretation than the protagonist is reporting, it makes me wonder if the reader is getting more out of it than the author intended. Which isn’t wrong, just interesting. Of course, Wolfe almost always suggests that his protagonist is an unreliable narrator, which increases the possibility that Wolfe did intend this reading. But cracky, it’s hard to be sure. Interesting regardless.