I must admit this story puzzles me.
First, I should say, I just didn't like the story that much (which I had never read prior to reading it for your podcast, and have now read twice). I didn't hate it; it just didn't stand out for me much, unlike several dozen Wolfe stories I could name. I certainly don't see why it would end up in a Best of Gene Wolfe collection. So maybe I am just not sympathetic enough to read it.
I liked your discussion a lot — the hinge between the 60s and 70s is of deep fascination to me, and I liked the idea that this story was prescient about it. That said, I found myself wondering how much of that was in the story, and how much we see in the story because we've lived the past few decades (the story takes place about halfway between the time it was written & now). The critiques of business methods and business culture are there, to be sure. But other things — the switch of the American economy from a manufacturing to a finance focus, the absorption of the counter-culture by commercial forces, etc — I don't see in there. (FWIW, I don't see it as cyberpunk, either. Sure, the corporate-controlled dystopia was part of that aesthetic. But I don't think the focus on the digital world was as marginal to it as you implied. Further, several other very crucial parts of the cyberpunk aesthetic — the idea that technology does not always operate as intended, that "the street finds its own uses for technology" (in William Gibson's famous phrase), the idea of the human changing (in ways rare in, say, Campbellian-SF), etc — are all missing. It doesn't feel like a cyberpunk story, to me.)
The biggest question for me is the story's politics. If your reading is right, then it sounds like a very leftist story to me — worlds away from the right-wing politics we've seen in Operation Ares and "Paul's Treehouse" and many other stories. I think I read it, however, as more condemning of both sides, rather than making the corporations out to be the bad guys as opposed to the harries. I think the harries come across as awful — wasteful, unorganized, without any coherent ideology or plan or anything, just a mass of craziness. I think that Wolfe dislikes them as much as the corporate culture. In which case this story is of breakdown — much more in line with the earlier stories, at any rate. But I feel less sure here than about other works you've read.
There are, of course, ways from conservative thought to an anti-corporate critique. But those ways of thinking were very much not part of conservative thought around 1972. Traditionally, there has been a strain in conservative thought which is suspicious of big corporations, but the mainstream of conservative thought from the mid-50s up until, well, Trump (and in a great many ways through Trump) has been what's called fusionism: the fusion of three strands: religious/social conservatism, anti-communism and free market thinking. Thus Milton Friedman, although he was one of those three, was very much part of & embraced by the conservative movement. So was Wolfe that suspicious of him? I don't know. But given Wolfe, I think another possibility is that we're simply reading the story wrong.
I think that the bit with the three characters bursting into flame (or the women bursting into flame & the man exploding) may be key, and I don't think I'm persuaded by your reading that it is simply symbolic/religious/mystical. Wolfe does that sort of thing, of course, but I'm not seeing any sign of it here. And he usually writes his stories to make solid SF/engineering sense, too. In which case perhaps it's a bomb. Marc Aramini reads this as the idealists killing Peters just as he was on the verge, perhaps, of doing something idealistic, making things better: which fits with my more 'damn-both-sides' reading.
I took "Hour of Trust" to be a reference to the bit in the middle of the story when Lewis, admitting that he is seeking credit, says "Credit, as you know, is a matter of confidence, of trust." So this is the hour of credit — of seeking credit, anyway. I think it might also relate to the various types of trust of the harries — faith in human potential, faith in God — although that is a type of trust that reads to me as rather bitterly satirical. (Wolfe does not hesitate to satirize Christianity when it suits his stories, of course.)
All this is rather unsatisfying, I know, but I don't know what else to do with this story, save that there is something that we're missing. And that unlike most other Wolfe stories, I'm not quite motivated to reread until I figure it out.
I like your explanation for the title. It occurred to me it could also be a pun on "trust" in the Teddy Roosevelt "trustbuster" sense: This story is about a trust--a large number of business interests who collude in order to enhance their collective power. The governments of the world have been replaced by a single trust of trusts.
Stephen, as always, thank you for your comments. I thought this story was a BIG DEAL and I though your reading of it was, too ... so I was hoping for a big, energetic exchange about Wolfe's politics. Maybe we'll get that early next year when we do Forlesen (which is also much more pleasurable to read).
I'm actually not convinced that Gene Wolfe held a conservative political ideology. If he hadn't said so himself in that famous interview, I certainly wouldn't have suspected it from the 40% or so of his work that I'd read before we started doing the show -- indeed, quite the opposite. Sure, the speech about gun rights in Long Sun stands out, but when I read that in 2003 I didn't think of it as a uniquely conservative position (I would now) so much as a quintessentially American position. And even though we've seen opposition to the welfare state and to communism in his early work, we've also seen (in those very same works) support for a universal basic income, criticism of excessive wealth disparity, and a hardcore environmentalism. Wolfe himself said that although he will tell you he's a Catholic and a Buckley conservative, those labels mean less than people think -- that is, that those are descriptive not prescriptive, that he's self-consciously not dogmatic -- he's not asking "what do conservatives believe?" and then adopting those same beliefs.
If he is taking cues from other thinkers and writers, I think Chesterton is where we should look. Chesterton proclaims himself a conservative, and he puts a lot of energy into critiquing communism and fascism and worrying about the future. But he's just as opposed to industrial capitalism -- indeed he says in several of his essays that communism is simply the logical outcome of industrial capitalism, and that if we want to conserve our way of life, then we need to walk away from industrial capitalism. I think that's the attitude Wolfe has in Hour of Trust (and Forlesen), and I think we can even return to that famous interview to see it. When Wolfe described himself as a Buckley conservative, he went on to talk about the 1992 presidential election and said that he was interested in Pat Buchanan's candidacy because he was the only candidate talking about liberty and freedom. I think we can see that individual liberty is something that mattered a lot to Wolfe, and that he's opposed to institutions and systems that are oppressive, and especially institutions and systems that create dependency while also robbing people of their dignity. That includes the welfare state, but it also includes global corporatism.
All of that said, I don't think Wolfe is on the side of the Hairies in this story -- he's not advocating or yearning for a revolution led by Hippies. I think you are right to point the sense of breakdown, and that we are meant to see the creation of a Hippy State as a bad future. But I think it's a cautionary tale. Wolfe is saying something like "Do you want a Hippy revolution? Do you want to live in a Hippy State? Because that's where this is going if we don't put some checks on corporate capitalism."
Some of these ideas will be back in The Death of Dr. Island (and some are in "La Befana," too), but all of them will be back in Forlesen, and I'm eager to see what you make of the political ideology in that story.
You may be right that I've been placing too much emphasis on that claim to be a William F. Buckley conservative. I do think that Wolfe fits in with a conservative tradition — Chesterton was a conservative, from back before Buckley cemented the alliance between social conservatives and free marketers. (Tolkien was this sort of conservative, too; there are interesting parallels in the politics of Tolkien's works and Wolfe's.) Which allows room for his suspicion of corporate power and his environmentalism, both of which were in the older version of conservatism (which was essentially very suspicious of modernity).
I don't mean to be — and I hope I don't come across as — reductive, and reducing Wolfe to his politics. Wolfe is a brilliant writer in ways that are untouched by political considerations (pace those who think everything is political). I do think, however, that his politics are interesting, and I've been enjoying teasing them out. I am also afraid of assuming (which no one, of course, would do consciously, but which is easy to do subconsciously) that since Wolfe is a great writer & smart, he naturally shares my politics (for any value of "me"). It is quite possible that I overcorrect, and tend to assume his politics are the opposite of mine!
One other note: I recall the interview in which he said the labels don't apply to him. I am suspicious of such claims in general. A huge number of people in the US call themselves independents and claim not to be represented by parties, but vote like faithful Dems/Repubs. I think it's easy to see oneself as Special, but the truth is we are often more standard than we think. I presume (although I am less sure) that the same would apply regarding Catholicism & theology. In particular, that remark was made, I think, in the context of preempting some myths about Catholics that aren't now widely held, but which would have been much more common in Wolfe's formative ideas. Note that it was followed up by his saying he thought Priests were not... I forget how he put it but, basically, supermen or something. That is, he was rebutting the idea that Catholics thought ridiculous things about priests, which I think is not an issue now, but for Wolfe, whose ideas were largely formed in a pre-1960 milieu, it would have been true. Which is to say that I think Wolfe was not claiming, in that remark, to have any sort of unique theology so much as warning that people's ideas of Catholicism were wrong.
I do think gun control was definitely a conservative position by 2003 — indeed, by 1993, when Wolfe would have been writing that book. It was one in which there was more cross-party dissent, to be sure — rural democrats in particular were eager to be on the other side of it, and for well over a decade (from the passage of the assault weapons ban under Clinton (note: under a Democratic president, back when the dems held both houses of congress!) to Sandy Hook) a lot of people on the left basically gave up on it. It wasn't always a conservative position — modern battles for gun rights were inaugurated, quite ironically, by the Black Panthers, in response to which Ronald Reagan signed gun control laws — but it became a conservative issue pretty quickly & has stayed one.
Anyway, sorry that I didn't use this story for the exchange you were hoping for! As you say, maybe in future stories. (Haven't gotten to "La Befana" yet, but hope to in the next week or so.)
@stephenfrug Well, I tried drumming up interest in this one on social media, but maybe were polticsed out in the real world of 2019.
This is an interesting conversation. I think one way to assess Wolfe's ideology is not to assess his point-by-point beliefs, but the kinds of conversations he wants to contribute to, and thus who his implicit interlocutors are (e.g. Chesterton). It strikes me that Wolfe sees himself as playing a role in intra-conservative discourse similar to one that a Ross Douthat plays today: more steeped in Catholicism than markets, and tending to judge policies and institutions by how much they support traditional family structures, communities, and (particular visions of) freedom.
It's even more clear to me that Wolfe does not see himself as part of ongoing conversations on the left. While we've seen him write a little about the Civil Rights Movement, he is relatively uninterested in the more expansive versions of the black liberation movement. I've never seen his stories really engage with feminism, women's rights, or the gay rights movement. Given how preoccupied Wolfe is with exploring identity, this omission is striking--except that he is obviously more interested in exploring universal forms of identity (like, say the universality of the soul) than he is in exploring particular expressions of identity (like, say, the experience of being a black woman in 1960s America). It's funny, one can imagine Thecla-varian becoming a queer icon if Wolfe's ideological orientation were a little different. But Wolfe is not Le Guin, whose ambisexual Gethenians are clearly meant to be part of a larger conversations on the left about gender and sexuality.
FWIW, I am a Jewish lefty and Catholic conservative Wolfe is my favorite writer. That speaks to the generosity of his soul, his gifts as a writer, and--as @stephenfrug says--that Wolfe can't be reduced to his politics. He's much more interesting than that. Still, I do often find myself daydreaming of a world in which Gene Wolfe was the modal Republican.
@CEG: very well said. You sum it up much better than I do!
Obviously, as a fellow Jewish lefty, a world in which Wolfe was the modal Republican would be far better than ours! Nevertheless, I think that we oughtn't overlook the strong connections, just as a matter of actually existing history, between the socially conservative catholic left and what the current Republican party has become. I'm not, repeat not, saying that Wolfe did or would have made that same journey! But a lot of people did. And even in Wolfe's case it's notable that he praised Buchanan, who was actually a predecessor of Trumpian politics (anti-immigrant, racist, at least somewhat isolationist, not particularly deferential towards markets, etc). He is a good figure to see how the party of Barry Goldwater became the party of Donald Trump.
For that matter, in that same interview (which is online here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/fiction/1992-jordan.pdf) he says that people in the US have gotten a lot less free over the last thirty years, i.e. between 1962-1992. This is the sort of thing that is said a lot by contemporary conservatives (sometimes talking about the 50s, sometimes about the 19th century, etc), and usually causes awkwardness when it's pointed out (fairly irrefutably) that this is only true if under "people" you don't count either African Americans or women. This is not, again not, to say that such comments are deliberately racist; but I think they speak to what people focus on, and the fact that (in Wolfe's case as in others) he was, as you pointed out, just not very interested in either the feminist movement or the black liberation movement. It's a disinterest that in some cases — although I wouldn't include Wolfe here — is in fact necessitated by ideology: as you say, conservatives in the social conservative tradition of Chesterton/Wolfe/Douthat take a particular kind of freedom seriously: but it's a sort of freedom that simply falls apart when considering the issues of women and African American, for whom collective, including state, action was central to achieving freedom as opposed to the cause of a lack of it. Which is to say that, if conservatives both cared about freedom and considered the case of the civil rights movement too closely, they would have to radically alter their understanding of either what conservatism is or what freedom is.
It's hard to talk about all this without coming across as slagging Wolfe, which I don't mean to do; he's one of my very favorite writers, too. (Tied with a bunch of others, I suppose.) But one can be a great writer without being particularly politically perceptive (which is not to deny that, in other cases, a writer's political perception was central to the brilliance of their writing), and I personally think that was true of Wolfe. (But then, I'm an atheist Jewish lefty; I would say that, wouldn't I?) And, also, I don't think it's accidental that the Republican party of 1972 became what we see today. Not to say it was inevitable; just to say that you can see the seeds of today in the past; it was there in potential, although of course a lot of other things were too, of course.
My guess is that Wolfe's politics, over time, will come to look like Tolkien's do today: not entirely congruent with either the modern left or the modern right, with things to please and displease both. (Both leftists and rightists can and have claimed Tolkien as inspiration.) That said, Wolfe is closer to our time, so his politics are closer to ours, if only in the background against they were formed. So that his politics map a little better onto ours — not perfectly, but better. Including a few cases that are such as to make lefty Jews uncomfortable. And while I would never want to dismiss Wolfe's works on those grounds, I don't want to blind to that fact, either.
Yes, that's well put about Wolfe's blindspot for the expansion of freedom in the US post-60s. Wolfe's interest (tepid as it seems) in Buchanan does make me uneasy, especially as Buchanan was being accused of anti-semitism and Holocaust denial by fellow conservatives at the time. It's worth noting that Chesterton was anti-semitic (though Wolfe tries to deny it in Castle of Days, if I recall). I don't think Wolfe is anti-semitic (honestly, I don't), but this all makes me feel that Wolfe wasn't as revolted by anti-semitism as much as I would've hoped.
All of that said, I will be curious to discuss Wolfe's invocation of Judaism when we get around to Peace. It's perhaps my favorite Wolfe novel, but I feel weird about how the Jewish characters are portrayed there. Maybe I am missing a deeper theme and if so, I'd love to hear it.
@CEG I haven't read Peace yet — it's one of the major holes in my Wolfe education, which I look forward to remedying along with Glenn & Brandon — but will keep an eye on that element, among others, when I get there.
I'm glad you make the important (but not always made in today's culture) distinction between "anti-semitic" and "not as revolted by anti-semitism as one would hope". I think you're probably right (again, not having read Peace) that Wolfe is the latter not the former. Whereas I suspect that he can be fairly accused of actual sexism, not just being unduly sensitive to it (which is not, to my mind, a reason to dismiss his work; it is just a flaw in it, which neither negates nor is negated by the vastly larger number of strengths in it).
I haven’t read every post on this thread yet as I am waiting for the doors to work to open and I just finished the episodes. I agree with Stephen - I think Wolfe is critical of both sides for sure - those hippies with their phallic nonsense etc. the hour of trust is also the moment when you are in bed with someone thinking you share the same values and they explode, killing you, the corporations and the counterculture are both like this. The jewelry might be explosive. Even silk’s enlightenment has a physical cause; I don’t see spontaneous combustion not having one, and I think it is the jewelry, but I need to read the text again. Critical of both sides, or my writeup on it. I see Wolfe as far more mercifully rightwing than you guys do. I think Clio is seducing the hapless schmo ”hero” as well, who actually is taking a long time to objectify her as she desires.
By my powers of being 9 months late, I resurrect this thread!
Interesting discussion guys, I will admit I have had trouble squaring Wolfe's personal views with his writing. I mentioned before that I could see things in there that to me read critical of faith, which was obviously very important to Wolfe.
I would also like to add that even if Wolfe believed X and got pretty political about it I think that he was definitely not a writer who preached and prescribed. Did he use the hippies as a boogeyman in this story? Possibly, but it is not something I even really considered before you guys brought it up because that is not what I got from it. Maybe he believed something, but once he has put it on the paper he is letting us engage with it. I think that adhering to the death of the author too faithfully is also a fallacy though, I think it is hard to entirely divorce a work of literature from who wrote it and what was going on in their environment. But forget for a moment what you know about Wolfe, are some of the calls to action (the old man asking the soldier whether they believe in anything) and the martyrs coming from the hippies' side? I know that you guys are actually looking at understanding Wolfe more through this chronological read, I am just bringing up a counter-argument.
I would also like to echo the sentiments of China Mieville (a socialist) he says that 1. Wolfe has this tragico-catholic (afaik he coined that phrase? I like it) perspective that gives a very unsanitized view of the world (which I think is why he is so good at describing what are some of the wrongs with it), and 2. that even though there are authors he agrees with more he goes to Wolfe for the quality of the writing. Ultimately I agree with Mieville, I am not necessarily looking to Wolfe to tell me his political opinions because I have my own as well (I think he has some really interesting views though), and I think idolizing someone I really did not know is dangerous, but the quality of his writing speaks for itself.
Having said that, one thing that strikes me as interesting is that over on /r/fantasy when people bring up conservative authors Gene Wolfe is quick to be mentioned. For me, this is odd because as I said his writing does not strike me as fundamentally conservative (fundamentally catholic, maybe), but something that both Wolfe and Tolkien find very important is stewardship, which can be seen in their environmentalism. That is a value that the American right has completely abandoned if it ever held them (I am not the most educated to speak on this). In my country, I would say that there are 2 major very Christian parties and one of them is a bit more to the left with environmentalism as a major concern while the other is very much to the right with much less regard for that. What I am getting at is that maybe Wolfe would have described himself in different terms if the culture around him was different, aligning yourself with just 2 viable parties seems very difficult to me.
With that out of the way, I will be honest this story didn't connect with me on an emotional level very much. Admittedly I was a bit distracted while reading it, but I just found the characters (other than Tredgold) to be quite dull. Your discussion is what kinda saved it for me on an enjoyment level, the themes, and how prescient the story is I liked on my read through. Honestly, I have no clue what is going on with the immolations or the ending, your readings are ones I can believe.
I will vehemently disagree with you guys on one thing though, the epigraph was awesome! Now onto Tracking Song for a more topical discussion since you guys are almost finished covering it. Also, can I just say that I am very much looking forward to sharing my thoughts about the Fifth Head of Cerberus, and starting Peace when you get to it?
Haha, well, to be fair, I think I was the only one who didn't like the epigraph. But I stand by my opinion!
I don't think the story lands emotionally either, and while I really appreciate the story I certainly wouldn't have selected it for a best-of collection. But it says something that Wolfe did.
I'm not sure it's at all fruitful to use labels such as conservative, liberal, and progressive. Can we even define what those words mean for us in our own present context? I don't think so, so I think it's even less useful to apply these labels to contexts decades or centuries gone. So, in particular I think that too much has been made of Wolfe labeling himself as "conservative" in a handful of interviews (the most recent, I think, from 1992) while also forgetting that Wolfe said in at least one other interview that people have made too much of that. From my perspective right now, and only considering what we've read so far (so, up to 1975), it's hard for me to find much that I would label as "conservative" now, and those things that I might apply that label to are cultural norms rather than policy positions. What is interesting to me, then (and I've been very interested in it), is seeing Wolfe's stories from the 60s and 70s as primary sources for constructing an intellectual history of political ideologies during these decades. Because it does (or did anyway; I've gotten used to it now) that someone applying the label "conservative" to himself would be an advocate of environmental protection laws and universal basic income while also opposing the growth of corporations. That fascinates me. If you're interested, we do talk about this at more length in an episode we did reflecting back on the first novel and twenty or so stories we covered. It's called "The Road So Far, Part One" and is probably epiosde nmber 32 or something close to it.
Tracking Song is a masterpiece. I want to read it again right now. I can't wait to hear what you think of it!
I don't see any split between Wolfe being a conservative, Catholic, and an environmentalist. Environmentalism should be a very conservative and Christian tenet: conservative and conservation have the same root word. Recall that Theodore Roosevelt (a Republican) started the National Parks to preserve lands for long-term use. Nixon signed the act that opened the EPA. George HW Bush signed the treaty with Canada that stopped acid rain by controlling sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions from power plants. The modern Republican party's abandonment of those principles (e.g., "Drill, baby, drill!") is one of the things that pushed me out of the GOP.
Meanwhile, Christians are charged with managing the Earth as God's estate, awaiting the master's return. Unfettered consumption is hardly the stewardship expected.
Maybe there should be no conflict between conservatism and environmentalism, but in what I like to call (after the famous phrase "actually existing socialism") "actually existing conservatism" it is clearly diametrically opposed. Roosevelt, of course, was a progressive, and was president long before the conservative movement took over the Republican party (a lengthy process in the 1960s and into the 1970s). The conservatives of his time never liked Nixon; but also, if memory serves, the EPA passed by a veto-proof majority, so it was either sign it or have it go into effect unsigned; he gets less credit for that than you'd think. And the conservatives never liked nor trusted H. W. Bush, unlike both Reagan and W. Bush. He ran as a conservative, but then was practical about violating its principles when necessary (the most famous example being the tax increase he signed); they never forgave him for it, and it helped bring about his defeat in 1992.
Again, I agree: there is an idealized version of conservatism that should protect the environment. Nothing, after all, will so fundamentally change all of human society in this century as the disruptions we will get from climate change; anyone who fears change should resist that. But since William F. Buckley crystallized the modern synthesis that created the conservative movement (which begat Reagan, which begat Bush II, which begat Trump) it has been anti-regulation and pro-business, which cashes out to a bitter opposition to any and all environmental regulation. Trump is busy hurrying to do what damage he can—pretty literally!—before he is ushered out of office.
I guess I insist on this because I fear a lot of conservatives vote for the image of Edmund Burke who lives in their heads, and which might not be a bad ruling philosophy, and don't notice that what they get is, well, Bush & Trump. I know from what you said that you are not in this category! But I think it's important to remember that, for practical purposes, what conservatism is is what actual conservatives support.
I would love if American conservatives even knew who Burke was or read him.
To bring this back to Wolfe writing this story: none of that would have happened by 1973, except Roosevelt starting the National Parks. Plus, Wolfe's not a politician, he's a writer. It's easier to hold self-consistent thoughts when you don't have to attempt to appeal to voters, only to readers (and editors, I suppose).
I think it's very likely that Wolfe's environmentalism is tied to ideas of stewardship from Christianity and reinforced by a certain conservatism (in the sense of not being wasteful).
Maybe there's even a little room for Wolfe's engineering mind, as most engineers abhor waste and inefficiency; especially a process engineer like Wolfe. Material is money when you're running an assembly line or process. A friend of mine who works for Ford got a big bonus because he was able to save something like $0.50 per Ranger pickup truck. That's a big deal when Ford was making about 500,000 trucks per year.