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A review by beaconatnight
The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
5.0
When in popular science fiction adventurer and pioneers travel to other planets it's to explore the unknown, it may lead to first contact, or even offer an opportunity for human progress. If you've read any Gene Wolfe you will know that with him nothing is that simple. His The Fifth Head of Cerberus problematizes spacefaring from a postcolonial perspective. And I mean this in the genuine sense of the literary tradition.
The book consists of three novellas. If I begin with the third, V.R.T., maybe I can best explain how planetary occupation can become an issue. The titular initials refer to a boy whose at least on his mother's side descendant to the Aborigines that inhabited the planet before the arrival of the French settlers from Earth. Since then they fully made the planet their own. Whoever lived there before seems now extinct, their sacred sites destroyed or exploited for resources, their stories forgotten. What remains are legends and clichés.
Uprooted from his heritage the boy grows up in the limbo that the settlers wouldn't even recognize. In his preconscious identity crises he sees an opportunity to better understand his own history and even become the cultural bridge between the Free People and the colonizers. Through his business-minded father he makes acquaintance with an anthropologist from Earth whom he believes – or is told by the pompous specimen himself – is influential enough to educate and speak for a people that can no longer speak for itself. Eventually, V.R.T. assumes the role of John V. Marsch.
In this function he becomes the originator of the second novella, "A Story" by John V. Marsch. The mythical tale depicts the story of the boy's people in the events that lead to the Frenchmen's arrival. Our protagonist is John Sandwalker, member of the hill-people and twin brother of John Eastwind who is kidnapped at birth by the marshmen.
In this way we realize that the Aborigines – or Annes, so-called after their planet Sainte Anne – are not the uniform group that they are in the minds of the future colonizers. In fact, there is a third people, the enigmatic Shadow children whose psychic abilities and origins are far from the only mystery in this initially almost impenetrable legend.
That's quite tangible, right? This is the point where I have to admit that what I presented was my tacked down account of the overall narrative. The beauty of Wolfe's writing lies in the fact that very little is for certain. Much of it the astute (or at least patient) reader has to gather from passing remarks. More often than not we have to build our mental model on the most speculative foundations. We do learn thinks more directly or explicitly, only that then there is no independent evidence to consolidate the assumptions.
For me it's an endlessly fascinating experience. In the suggested realm of possibility the reader is encouraged to rearrange the "facts" and to shift her understanding of what is of core importance. Culture and identity, the tragic experience of individuals, power relations and the political climate in a postcolonial society, or even the destructive consequences of science and exploitation, these things all figure prominently in your very own attempts to make sense of it all.
Science, now this is something I haven't even talked about yet. It's the métier of the first novella, the eponymous The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Again the story is driven by the crisis or even conflict of identity. At that point we don't really know about history or the Aborigines. Instead, it focuses on the narrator's struggle to come to terms with who he is.
Somewhat early on we learn that his father calls him "Five", now if that isn't a predictor for identity in crisis, what is. His father's relationship to him is even more sinister. This becomes clear when we discover that he subjects his two sons (the other being "David") to most horrifying experiments. As you will have realized at this point, Sainte Croix (the other of the two twin planets) is a very bleak and dark place. And that is even before we gain insight into the Kafkaesque bureaucracy depicted in the third novella. It's a very engaging mystery story fully of shock-factor reveals about the nature of Five's family. With potential consequences for the state of their society.
I thought about how I would talk about the endless list of questions that the stories never conclusively answer or even explicitly address. After reading the book you passionately want to talk about these things. Yet this clearly isn't the place. Instead I should be talking of how faithfully the overall experience mirrors the academic engagement with cultures inaccessible to readers of the Global North.
If you've read works of cultural anthropology and ethnography you will recognize the desperate attempt to solidify something essentially in flux. After colonialism it has become even harder to discern truth from fiction and to discover past reality in the legends of the present. We all know the local myths, the touristy fabrications that make us roll our eyes. Yet for anthropologists it might be what the have to go on.
It's mesmerizing how Wolfe was able to capture the unique form of uncertainty in the medium of science fiction.
Rating: 5/5
The book consists of three novellas. If I begin with the third, V.R.T., maybe I can best explain how planetary occupation can become an issue. The titular initials refer to a boy whose at least on his mother's side descendant to the Aborigines that inhabited the planet before the arrival of the French settlers from Earth. Since then they fully made the planet their own. Whoever lived there before seems now extinct, their sacred sites destroyed or exploited for resources, their stories forgotten. What remains are legends and clichés.
Uprooted from his heritage the boy grows up in the limbo that the settlers wouldn't even recognize. In his preconscious identity crises he sees an opportunity to better understand his own history and even become the cultural bridge between the Free People and the colonizers. Through his business-minded father he makes acquaintance with an anthropologist from Earth whom he believes – or is told by the pompous specimen himself – is influential enough to educate and speak for a people that can no longer speak for itself. Eventually, V.R.T. assumes the role of John V. Marsch.
In this function he becomes the originator of the second novella, "A Story" by John V. Marsch. The mythical tale depicts the story of the boy's people in the events that lead to the Frenchmen's arrival. Our protagonist is John Sandwalker, member of the hill-people and twin brother of John Eastwind who is kidnapped at birth by the marshmen.
In this way we realize that the Aborigines – or Annes, so-called after their planet Sainte Anne – are not the uniform group that they are in the minds of the future colonizers. In fact, there is a third people, the enigmatic Shadow children whose psychic abilities and origins are far from the only mystery in this initially almost impenetrable legend.
That's quite tangible, right? This is the point where I have to admit that what I presented was my tacked down account of the overall narrative. The beauty of Wolfe's writing lies in the fact that very little is for certain. Much of it the astute (or at least patient) reader has to gather from passing remarks. More often than not we have to build our mental model on the most speculative foundations. We do learn thinks more directly or explicitly, only that then there is no independent evidence to consolidate the assumptions.
For me it's an endlessly fascinating experience. In the suggested realm of possibility the reader is encouraged to rearrange the "facts" and to shift her understanding of what is of core importance. Culture and identity, the tragic experience of individuals, power relations and the political climate in a postcolonial society, or even the destructive consequences of science and exploitation, these things all figure prominently in your very own attempts to make sense of it all.
Science, now this is something I haven't even talked about yet. It's the métier of the first novella, the eponymous The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Again the story is driven by the crisis or even conflict of identity. At that point we don't really know about history or the Aborigines. Instead, it focuses on the narrator's struggle to come to terms with who he is.
Somewhat early on we learn that his father calls him "Five", now if that isn't a predictor for identity in crisis, what is. His father's relationship to him is even more sinister. This becomes clear when we discover that he subjects his two sons (the other being "David") to most horrifying experiments. As you will have realized at this point, Sainte Croix (the other of the two twin planets) is a very bleak and dark place. And that is even before we gain insight into the Kafkaesque bureaucracy depicted in the third novella. It's a very engaging mystery story fully of shock-factor reveals about the nature of Five's family. With potential consequences for the state of their society.
I thought about how I would talk about the endless list of questions that the stories never conclusively answer or even explicitly address. After reading the book you passionately want to talk about these things. Yet this clearly isn't the place. Instead I should be talking of how faithfully the overall experience mirrors the academic engagement with cultures inaccessible to readers of the Global North.
If you've read works of cultural anthropology and ethnography you will recognize the desperate attempt to solidify something essentially in flux. After colonialism it has become even harder to discern truth from fiction and to discover past reality in the legends of the present. We all know the local myths, the touristy fabrications that make us roll our eyes. Yet for anthropologists it might be what the have to go on.
It's mesmerizing how Wolfe was able to capture the unique form of uncertainty in the medium of science fiction.
Rating: 5/5