House of ancestors genre

Still working my way through the stories and podcasts. I would agree that this is the work of a Young Wolfe rather than a Mature Wolfe, but there's some interesting things in it. This story is from the era when I first began actively reading SF, and outside of the hard-edged pages of Analog, where I tended to reside, there was a lot of New Wave experimentalism going on in IF magazine, where this appeared.  

I'll read anything Gene wrote, even relatively lesser works, as I like to see the first intimations of themes and tropes that would appear later.  

I agree with Marc, though, as I don't think this is worthy of opprobrium and it's an interesting piece.

Some thoughts:

There's a quick reference to Joe's failed athletic career that (I thought) explained his anger and bitterness, to a degree - while riding the subway, he mentions trips outside the city and playing softball "in the high grass of the meadows and enjoyed it much more than the semi-pro which had occupied his weekday evenings since he had quit night school," which implies that the industrial accident ended attempts to improve himself both scholastically and through athletics.  

That nail in Joe's heart reminds me of that mysterious thorn in his side that St. Paul mentions in the Epistles, without further describing.  Whenever a Catholic writer mentions nails, however, I always expect to see torture, death, and ultimate rebirth, which seems to be the model of this story.

As this seems to be a Freudian tale, I wondered if Wolfe was wandering into Oedipan territory, as Lamarck is wearing a bandage over his eyes like a man who had put both his eyes out, but I'm not sure how that plays out or whether it is just a muddled reference.  I'd also note that his mother is named Mary and Joe is Joseph, of course, but again, I don't know if that was intentional.

Much of the shape-shifting robot technology seems so advanced that I wondered if the entire episode inside the Thing is Joe's fantasy, but the prologue relating to people viewing Joe's confrontation with his vandal robot self through a telescope belies that. That image of an open hole in the massive structure and the two Joes looking out and down into the street reminded me a little of the boy looking out the open window of the library in The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

The image of hundreds of his matrilineal female ancestors pursuing him through the conveyors and atom-rooms of the DNA display struck me as something like the scene in A Night at the Opera where the room is progressively overfilled.

Marc's perceptive comment above that "Indeed, belief itself serves powerful enough to transform the entire abo population into "humanity" in Port Mimizon. I think it is a current that runs through Wolfe which also resonates with his take on imitation: imitate something long enough and you become it, for good or ill." seems to apply to Wolfe's conception of robots and humanity, or even ensoulment, certainly. Ditto Marc's point about the blurring of subjective mental states and objective reality in Wolfe's work.

Re the overt Freudianism, the late 1960s were a time when Freudianism was largely accepted both by the psychoanalytic community, literary scholars, and the public at large. I think it began a gradual decline since then as competing worldviews arose. But certainly it was part of the creative zeitgeist at the time it was written.

I'm very intrigued by this, and for much the same reason. Rest assured, the next time Lamarck appears, we'll do our homework, and I may even try to Freudianly wrestle one of my colleagues in the history of biology to come on the show and set us all straight.

Re: Wolfe and Lamarckism, see Castle of Days, "Son of Helioscope", p. 225: "…I also believe in Lamarckism, as it was put forward by Lamarck. (The Lamarckism presented in standard textbooks is actually Lysenkoism, a straw man set up by the opponents of Lamarckism, palpably false and easily disproved.) There is no paradox in that: Lamarckism and Darwinism are not mutually exclusive, except politically."

I would like to ask a historian of biology about this. From what I know, Wolfe is simply mistaken — but then, all I know is the standard textbooks, so if he's right I would think that. Still, my priors on Wolfe being right on this and the consensus history of biology wrong on it are low.

Hmm. I, too, will have to go and check on that. Your suggestion that there is some radical metaphysics a la gnosticism and the kaballah is extremely interesting to me. This will have to be a new avenue of research I explore in the future.

I think there is an atemporal suggestion in the two men struggling at the start, as if there is movement through time (backwards). I need to read it again, though - it has probably been five years since I looked at it. There is a weird blurring of mental states and physical ones in Wolfe - this is most obvious in the short story "melting" (and to be honest in Wizard Knight). I don't think it is incorrect to see some of his more radical metaphysics influenced by gnosticism and the kaballah.

I see. I suppose I'm caught up on amount of scaffolding Wolfe puts together in order to tell this story and make it take place in a material world. He seems to go to great lengths to emphasize the material world in this story, not to mention that Joe's psychological needs are resolved by an physical confrontation with his embodied Death Drive.

(It's not that nothing happened that is observable, it's that there is still something almost "magical" going on here - Wolfe's dualistic sensibilities are once again on display. Joe's experiences are real and observable but might transcend the physical laws of our reality. Wolfe often writes in this mode.)

Marc, thanks for this insight. I think the fact of the story opening with an objective third-party observer who is witnessing the events may undermine the argument that there is no consequence to Joe's time in the Helix or that there is something ultimately unrealistic taking place. I agree with Glenn that the psychoanalytic elements of this story are a bit too on the nose, especially because we've been spoiled be better and more sophisticated representations of this sort of thing later in Wolfe.

Wow, that's awesome. I will add this to my list of things to be on the lookout for as we proceed.

Hi Glenn. Definitely something Lamarckian going on in The Fifth Head of Cerberus and in Short Sun, where the behaviors of the parent species far beyond selecting a mate influence the offspring significantly. Indeed, belief itself serves powerful enough to transform the entire abo population into "humanity" in Port Mimizon. I think it is a current that runs through Wolfe which also resonates with his take on imitation: imitate something long enough and you become it, for good or ill.

Marc, thanks for your comments. So far, House of Ancestors is the only story that we both actively disliked. Actually, I think it's the only story that either of us has actively disliked.

My dislike of this story is far more rooted in the Freudianism than its Lamarckianism. I have never subscribed to it or even found much value in it as a lens, but I think in particular it brings me back to one of my awful high-school English classes in which we read every single text as Freudian. If it weren't for that class, I might have become a scholar of Latin poetry rather than a late antique historian.

I'm very interested in your comment concerning Wolfe's views about Lamarck. Where else does this come up?