Thoughts on EP. #56 / VRT Part 1

Another enjoyable episode.

Some random thoughts on points which you brought up:

1) I had not read Capek's short-short about the cat and loved it. Cats start to show up as references and players in the 3rd novella; maybe as shape-shifting abos, maybe as symbols of the unknowable and often hostile natural world of the two planets. The dog references seem to drop out in the 3rd story, and there seems to be a polarity going on - Abos as cats and the Wolfe line as dogs? 2) Capek's other best known science fictional work (aside from the play R.U.R., itself an acronym like the 3rd novella V.R,.T., takes a very focused look at the pernicious effects of colonization, and the way it affects both the colonizer and the colonized - "War with the Newts". I've read it twice (once in high school, when its dark visions scared the crap out of me) and years later, and its probably time to dip into it again - there's a newer translation that is supposed to better preserve the literary devices Capek used. Like V.R.T., it's mostly an epistolary work. I'm curious if the novel has strong ties to V.R.T. 3) Probably getting ahead of your closed reading, but my impression on first reading VRT is that Vail's Hypothesis may be true, but it is only a partial truth, and that St. Croixian society has at least 4 or 5 components, each with their own genotype and phenotype:

A) A wealthy anglophone merchant class

B) the Wolfe clonal family, presumably part of the "A" class, and the discarded remnants of its genetic line which have become slaves, and the source of the "planetary face". This is distinct from the prostitutes who are employed at the bordello.

C A wealthy remnant of the original French settlers of both planets. ("At one time, French was the lingua franca")

D) The underclass society, which includes criminals, prostitutes, some of the non-Wolfeian slaves, and which are the transplanted (possibly shape-shifted) Hill People from St. Anne. Some of these remain in urban and rural society, as well as the outback of St. Anne in scattered remnants, where some may still practice the older shape-shifting skills as animals. #5 notes t0 Marsch that the "planetary face", which he seems to possess comes from a relatively small group of settlers ("Since on this world we are all descended from a relatively small group of colonists, we are rather a uniform population"), but is a different phenotype than the underclass: "Here, most of us have a kind of planetary face, except for the gypsies and the criminal tribes, and you don’t seem to fit the pattern.” {Marsch) said, “I’ve noticed what you mean; you seem to have it yourself.” These two off-hand comments leads to the question: If the common phenotype comes from the original genetic stock of the first settlers...what is the origin of the mysterious "gypsy" underclass, if not the Abos?

The persistent description of the prostitutes, who can be presumed to be members of the underclass, emphasizes very long legs, narrow necks, and high shoulders: "Two of my father’s demimondaines were waiting in the hall, costumed and painted until they seemed more alien than any abos, stately as Lombardy poplars and inhuman as specters, with green and yellow eyes made to look the size of eggs and inflated breasts pushed almost shoulder high, their long, gleaming legs crossed before them like the varnished staffs of flags."

"[T]he heads, the slender necks, the narrow shoulders, of a platoon of my father’s demimondaines"; "I have thought since, many times, of that girl as I saw her leaving: the high-heeled platform shoes and grotesquely long legs" "..an immensely tall and lanky woman who had been hawking pralines in the street came running toward us. It was Nerissa." In the descriptions of the second novella, we learn the phenotype of the Hill People: long wild hair, high foreheads, "hands—large and strong" "his skin the cold stone color of the dust, his wild hair breaking the telltale silhouette of his head". (107) “Your forehead is high and your eyes are far apart,” "wiping his long hair" (130). When he shape-shifts in some way into an otter's shape, it is noted that he is long-limbed, like the underclass of St. Croix: "...short, powerful swimming legs in place of his long limbs." The Hill People have green eyes, "Marsch" has vivid green eyes ("His eyes, I noticed, were a bright green, without the brown tones most green eyes have"), as do apparently all the Hill People, as do the the long-legged prostitutes of the Maitre's bordello, and the boy who hires out to Marsch. At least some of these phenotypical traits describe #5 and Maitre; while David is blonde, #5 is pale, brown haired and brown eyed. "Striding toward us was a tall, high-shouldered young man—who halted, with a startled look, just when I did. He was my own reflection in a gilt-framed pier glass, and I felt the momentary dislocation that comes when a stranger, an unrecognized shape, turns or moves his head and is some familiar friend glimpsed, perhaps for the first time, from outside. The sharp-chinned, grim-looking boy I had seen..."

Maitre is described as "a tall, hatchet-faced man" ("hatchet face" generally means a thin face with sharp features); "My father’s hunched, high shoulders"

The unnamed slave of the reviewing military officer in the 3rd novella is likely also a cast-off of the Wolfe clonal line: "slave—a high-shouldered, sharp-chinned man with a shock of dark hair". The Wolfes are described, then as tall, which would imply longer legs (not necessarily, of course - I am tall but much of that seems to be torso) although apparently not as long as the underclass whom #5 described; , the Wolves have sharp features that are described variously as mantis-like and hatchet-faced, but have brown eyes - unlike the Hill People, who have green eyes.

E) The ruling governmental elite, which includes the military, police, and all members of the fraternal (and role-shifting) bureaucracy, and which are descended from transplanted (possibly shape-shifted) Marsh People from St. Anne, and which continues its battle for control and dominance over the Hill People on a new planet. Their phenotype of the Marsh People is described: "From behind him stepped two men. The people of the meadowmeres, he knew, drove their young men from women until fire from the mountains proved their manhood and left their thighs and shoulders puckered with scars. These men had such scars, and their hair had been knotted in locks..." On St. Anne, They also seem to have a larger, more organized and authoritarian society than the nomadic Hill People: "...and on the bank several hundred people waited—silent figures light-stained early morning colors of yellow and red, their features growing clearer, individuals, a man here, a child there "

The Marsh Man Lastvoice is described as "very tall, and the blue light of rising sisterworld showed a bloodless face from which the few wisps of beard, as ritual required, were plucked daily. The sides of his head had been seared with brands kindled in the flows of the Mountains of Manhood, so that his hair, thicker than any woman’s, grew only in a stiffened crest." He is tall, and thus likely long-legged, but is also (as Eastwind) a snatched Hill Person (", although his appearance has been altered based on the puberty initiation rites of the Marsh Men. Lastvoice, the former Hill Man, is described as having a "bloodless face"; #5 is pale; and "Marsch" is described by #5 as "He wore a beard, very black and more full than the current style, if the skin of his face—what could be seen of it—had not been of so colorless a white as almost to constitute a disfigurement." Sandwalker is described as having skin " the cold stone color of the dust", which could mean pale but is a little ambiguous.

There is the interesting moment when "Marsch" looks at the government functionaries in his rented room and sees one in a mirr0r - which Wolfe took pains to note earlier in the passage: "Madame Duclose, particularly, must have been concerned for the large, gilt-framed mirror in my room, which she had cautioned me about repeatedly. (Mirrors, I have found—I mean good ones of silvered glass, not polished bits of metal—are quite expensive in Port-Mimizon.)" Mirrors in folklore derive their ability to represent someone or something's true nature, such as the soulless nature of a vampire - due to its silver backing. And when "Marsch," who may have some slightly magical capacities himself, looks at the one of the arresting bureaucrats in his room he sees "Mme. Duclose’s mirror was behind him, and I could see that his hair was cut short and that he Had a scarred head, as though he had been tortured or had had an operation on his brain or had fought with someone armed with some tearing weapon." In other words, a Marsh Man. He later notes that all three look similar, with "pointed chins, black brows and narrow eyes, so that they might have been brothers,"

It's unclear to me if the Marsh Men imposters were the ones who returned to St. Croix, took control of the French-Speaking settlers there, and then returned to St. Anne to wage fiery war upon them and enslave the Hill People.

4) Just as a side note, you mentioned John Marsch's inventory of the supplies he took on his expedition, which noted that he would take vitamin pills. I've noticed a couple of times that Gene Wolfe seems to have been a life-long user of vitamin supplements. In his letters home from the Korean War, he asked his mother to send him some vitamins, and in an interview where he was asked about his daily routine, he mentioned taking his vitamins as part of it. He must be doing something right!

5) In another post, I suggested that David is the actual author of "A Story", both from the internal evidence describing the folk-ways of the Annians ("You might say they needed those obsidian arrowheads and bone fishhooks for getting food, but that’s not true. They could poison the water with the juices of certain plants, and for primitive people the most effective way to fish is probably with weirs, or with nets of rawhide or vegetable fiber... They killed their sacrificial animals with flails of seashells that cut like razors, and they didn’t let their men father children until they had stood enough fire to cripple them for life. They mated with trees and drowned the children to honor their rivers. That was what was important..")

Yet, #5 also seems to be tied into authorship of the second novella, as he is the brother who stated in the library that "“because it is distinctly possible that the aborigines of Sainte Anne were descendants of some earlier wave of human expansion—one, perhaps, even predating The Homeric Greeks...I nevertheless gloss upon the Etruscans, Atlantis, and the tenacity and expansionist tendencies of a hypothetical technological culture occupying Gondwanaland." - predating the Old Wise One's peculiar comments about the origins of the Shadow Children on Earth. Unless #5 is in some way part of the Shadow Children's group norm... I'm not sure what all that means, still - either the young David and #5 had read the second novella after finding it in the library, and it is of much earlier composition than its title suggests, or the two brothers composed it, either in collaboration or singly as fan- fiction (could Marsch have stolen it from their home?), #5 composed it while in prison, or the unnamed officer reviewing the case in the 3rd novel is the true author, David, and he has used Marsch's name as the author to satisfy his own literary or political ambitions. There seems to be a specific reason Wolfe brought up those very specific allusions very early in the first novella, but it escapes me.