Column 08/26: Homo Vanus Patiens: On The Interpretation of Seven American Nights and A Modest Primer on How to Read Gene Wolfe

Homo Vanus Patiens 

On the Interpretation of Seven American Nights and A Modest Primer on How to Read Gene Wolfe

The passing of Gene Wolfe in 2019 went, like much of his literary career, mostly unnoticed by the world at large. As before, plaudits were published by his admirers--a piratic crew of literary critics, academics, fellow science fiction authors, Catholics, and nobodies--declaring him, for the umpteenth time, the greatest [blank] of his generation--with the blank to be filled in, depending on one's personal preferences, with "literary sci-fi writer," "sci-fi writer," or even just "writer." These praises make for odd reading, and I imagine would be odder for anyone who had not read him before: as they consist usually of writers struggling to find the right adjectives and express just what about this guy was so good. And usually failing.

Gene Wolfe, it must be said, is hard to describe. He is also, at least for some, hard to read. As I write this, the top prompts for "Gene Wolfe" on google include the plaintive cry, "How do I read Gene Wolfe?" 

How do I read Gene Wolfe? This is very emphatically the right question to ask. Most classic works of literature are, at heart, exceedingly simple in content--love story, adventure, horror, relationship drama, novel--even if frequently daunting in execution. For most such books and authors, the right advice is exactly the opposite of what we were taught in high-school English class: relax, forget all about symbolism and subtext and social and cultural context, and try to enjoy the book exactly as you would Animorphs. The paradox of Gene Wolfe, however, over which many literary critics and random forumgoers have struggled in the decades since he began his career, is that despite writing for a "pulp" genre shared with Animorphs, he is the rare author who does, in fact, demand to be read carefully, thoughtfully, analytically, considerately. 

Here, though, comes in the second difficulty about reading Gene Wolfe; not only is he frequently impossible to read in the typical layman way, but he is also frequently (and, I think, deliberately) impossible to read in the typically careful, thoughtful, analytical, considerate literary way as well. A typical English PhD coming to Gene Wolfe will most likely be quickly driven mad and found, months later, living in the woods hunting squirrels. For Gene Wolfe, unlike many authors, delights in providing meaningful details, modes of interpretation, symbolism, references, and connections to his readers, in rich, super-abundant profusion. Some of these will turn out to be clever misdirection, some crucially important to understanding the events of the story, and some thematic but not determinative. To read Gene Wolfe, then, requires not just a rote academic ability to identify references, interpretations, symbols, etc, but the critical judgment to sift through a vast sea of contradictory information and detail to decide what is important and what is not, what is true and what is false, and how different pieces of information actually fit together despite being seemingly contradictory.

All this, I believe, is something that makes Wolfe a distinctively Catholic author. Fundamental to all of Wolfe's fiction is the idea that reality is a vast, messy, complex array of choices, interpretations, perspectives, symbolic systems, truths, crimes, and outright lies...that does actually fit together coherently and truthfully. 

This is, I think, one of the things that makes Wolfe most unique within the world of literature; that despite being perhaps the most gifted post-modern perspectivist author ever to write, he is in fact not a post-modernist and not a perspectivist. As interviewers and academics have frequently found to their chagrin, when asked about his stories, Wolfe is quite clear that there is in fact a right answer to every question, and an underlying "real" set of events for every unreliable narration. None of the characters in the story may know it, the narrator may not know it, both or either may layer it with lies and interpretations and half-truths: but it is there and someone knows it, if only Gene Wolfe and/or God.

To find that truth, though, or at least all of it accessible to a merely human reader, requires essentially the same skill (one is tempted to say virtue, habitus) required for any human being in interpreting reality and living life: the ability to discern between truths and lies, between good action and bad action, and between higher reality and lower reality. 

It is perhaps even more this specifically multi-level (read: transcendent, hierarchical) nature of Wolfe's portrayal of reality that makes him an indelibly Catholic author. As Aquinas would have it, the higher transcends and therefore contains the lower, beginning with absolute truth and descending through a world of act expressing itself through potency and change to the human soul darkened by ignorance and sin and into the truly irrational, indeterminate potency of evil. All of Gene Wolfe's fiction takes place somewhere within this vast ascending and descending chain of being, and thus in a fundamentally multi-level, multivalent, infinitely interpretable, yet transcendentally united reality.

This is fairly grandiose in concept, but in practice simply a particular method for writing and conceiving and reading fiction, about which many essays could be and have been written. Rather than continue on this abstract level, however, I will proceed to demonstrate it more directly by giving an interpretation of a specific Wolfe story: Seven American Nights. This is one of my favorite two or three Wolfe works, but also, on the face of it, one of his most baffling and impenetrable texts, a novella of about forty pages that has frequently sent even hardened Wolfe readers running for the hills.

My own enjoyment of this work hinges to a significant degree on my own reading of the text, which is far from universal and unchallengeable, but which I believe very firmly is in fact something very close to the true, intended one of the author. I will not attempt to argue directly and in detail for its correctness here, besides presenting my basic reasons for holding it; what I will do instead is point out how this interpretation illuminates some of the key themes and methods of Wolfe's work, and transforms a baffling text into one that is (for me at least) profoundly moving and meaningful, and only grows more so with each rereading. In so doing I will hopefully provide a basic guide for how to read Wolfe in general so as to not only understand, but actually enjoy and be moved by him.

First, though, a disclaimer: the below obviously contains spoilers for the story Seven American Nights, though with Gene Wolfe that term and category functions, I think, very differently from the typical narrative storyline with a few easily-grasped surprises at the end. Ideally, though, the reader of the below would acquire a copy of said work and would read it at least once before reading my interpretation; or even more ideally, read it and then and reread it in tandem with the below analysis, searching for clues according to my directions. I believe, however, that a typical reader who read this blogpost and then Seven American Nights, while shortening the joyful process of literary investigation, would still be able to read the work with a great deal of pleasure and even some discovery of their own afterwards--and would be more equipped to read other Gene Wolfe stories on their own in the future. Velit sicut vult.

With all that out of the way, let us begin:

Step One: Read (and Enjoy) the Text

Gene Wolfe writes pulp science-fiction; which is to say he writes stories that on their immediate face feature colorful environments and fast-moving narratives and characters doing dramatic, exciting things. In this sense, he is not difficult to read at all. What makes him frustrating for many readers is not so much that they do not find his clever heroes and laser swords and alien planets and endless labyrinths and sexy women engaging; it is simply that in reading Wolfe, they are conscious all the time that things are not what they seem, that more is going on below the surface, and thus feel (not without cause) a certain frustrating, nagging worry that they are missing the point, that they are being tricked, despised, looked down upon, eluded, cheated, and/or made deliberately to feel stupid.

The first, and one of the most important, keys to reading Wolfe, then, is to realize that this is in no way true. Wolfe's pulpish, exciting facade is not the whole of Wolfe--but it is not merely a clever misdirection. Gene Wolfe loves pulp fiction; he loves sci-fi; he loves laser swords and exoticism and beautiful women and space tyrants and wise aliens and horrifying monsters and great battles and clever heroes with magical swords overcoming dastardly villains and getting the girl. His love for these generic and specific features of 19th and 20th century "pulp" speculative and adventure and sci-fi fiction is stamped across every one of his works, to such a degree that it itself can frequently become rather off-putting for those who do not share his love. Wolfe's goal in much of those works, by his own admission, is to take these genres and deepen them by combining them with more respected literary and philosophical and scientific stuff; but nothing of Wolfe makes sense if this underlying love is not acknowledged.

Hence, dear reader: relax. Read the story about the man with the magical sword, or the other man with the magical sword, or the werewolf man or the space officer or the space cowboy or the space spy, and feel no shame at all about enjoying it merely on that level. There is more going on; but this "more" is not there to shame or defeat you, but only to deepen and justify your enjoyment in the long run.

As Wolfe famously said on many occasions, his goal in writing fiction was to write works that could be read with enjoyment and pleasure--and then reread with even more pleasure. If you wish, you can merely read the story once, and then walk away; or you can commit to the full experience. If you do, then I think you will ultimately come away with a much deeper and richer and more transformative reading experience. For a first (and possibly final) reading, though, let the nagging worries, the clues, the depths, go; and merely read.

For my chosen story, "Seven American Nights," the facade is as pulpish as it could possibly be; indeed, it is obviously and deliberately so, not merely on the level of Gene Wolfe the writer, but on the level of the story's (fictitious) internal narrator.

"Seven American Nights" presents itself as the embellished, romanticized, at least partially fictionalized journal of a wealthy man visiting an exotic foreign country, an ancient land dotted with the ruins of a fallen Empire, to indulge in adventure and danger and excitement there. In other words, "Seven American Nights" is quite self-consciously a genre exercise in the mode of the once-ubiquitous, but now largely discredited Orientalist travelogue. During the 19th and early 20th centuries Europeans in large numbers visited the East, Persia or Turkey or Syria or Egypt, toured their monuments, patronized their restaurants and bars and brothels, and brought back romanticized stories of exotic danger, slavers and harems and traps and decaying ruins by moonlight, to sell to factory workers and shop clerks and little boys. Indiana Jones is in its essence the last surviving example of this genre, albeit a highly sanitized one--but it was once among the most popular genres in America and Europe alike, an essential and irreplaceable root of science fiction, and something Gene Wolfe obviously has a great deal of affection for.

As often, though, Wolfe offers a cleverer, more sophisticated, and somewhat science-fictionalized take on the original. Indeed, what he offers is in part a clearly and deliberately ironic reversal of the genre. For the story gives us, not the tales of a European travelling in the Middle East, but the romantic fables of a Persian, Nadan Jaffarzadeh, visiting the decayed remains of what was once the United States of America. In proper 19th century Orientalist style, Nadan comes from a rich, prosperous country to an ancient, decaying one, full of exotic mysteries and wonders and dangers. Like an American visiting a third world country, he is treated with exaggerated deference by the universally obliging, but universally backward and unsophisticated local people; samples (and is disgusted by) the local cuisine; visits and sketches and speculates on the local ruins; samples the local drugs; and sleeps with the exotic local women. 

Over the course of the story in its simplest form, then, Nadan, writing in the first person in his journal, lands in what remains of Washington, DC, does touristy things, goes to plays, visits monuments, is attacked by wild dogs and a bizarre mutant creature, buys and attempts to consume an ancient American hallucinogenic drug, has an American actor try to pick-pocket him, falls in love with an American actress, and in the journal's closing pages is invited by her to go on a dangerous expedition into the fabled American interior in search of excitement and treasure. 

This pleasant, exciting story ends, though, on a notably jarring note. After pages upon pages of Nadan's meandering escapades, suddenly we are met with an entry in which Nadan declares that the woman he loved was in fact all along some kind of bizarre mutated monster--and in the journal's last entry, we see him, seemingly lost in a drug-induced haze, confess that he has murdered his American love and will now flee into the interior on his own, with the police in hot pursuit, to meet his end there. Then we even more jarringly see his mother and Persian lover, Jasmin, who, we learn have been reading this journal along with us all along. Jasmin, relieved, declares that "he is alive then"; but his mother answers with a doubtful question: "You think this is his writing?"

Wolfe, then, ends his tale with a question--and an invitation to re-read.

Step Two: Question Everything

Part of the joy of reading Seven American Nights, and Gene Wolfe in general, is how radically disjunctive consecutive readings can be. On a first read-through, it is likely that the above surface narrative will be all one sees. The ending itself, though, when we at last reach it, suddenly and drastically calls that narrative into question, and demands either our abandonment of the tale, or our committed attempt to answer the two fundamental questions that ending poses: (1) What has happened to Nadan? and (2) Is the journal genuine?

With these questions in mind, our second re-read is apt to be a rather suspicious one; and it will quickly be amply rewarded by numerous, not particularly disguised signs of artifice, fictionality, and outright deception.

To begin with, we should note the overt fictionality of the text itself--on the part not only of our author Gene Wolfe, but also our internal narrator Nadan Jaffarzadeh. Travelogues of exotic foreign countries were not a genre noted for their strict accuracy and commitment to the truth; and indeed, in writing his own Nadan on multiple occasions cites other such writers as a point of comparison and deprecates their truthfulness. For him almost as much as for Wolfe, the story he tells is a self-conscious genre exercise, premised upon his own admitted flair for the dramatic and thirst for exoticism, danger, and adventure. At a quite late point in the narrative, Nadan abruptly confesses to his reader that he has at times exaggerated or colored the events he reports to make them more exciting and significant. This is certainly enough to cast doubt on the story told by the journal.

Then there is the drug. On his first day in America, Nadan mentions the ancient Americans' fabled skills at creating hallucinogens, and after a bizarre and alienating first day in the country openly wonders if someone has administered such a drug to him. Orientalist adventure, after all, was commonly as much in the (drug-addled) mind of the adventurer as in reality. Only a few pages later, an American woman sells him the object of his obsession, an alleged vial of an ancient drug meant to initiate hallucinations. Upon returning home, he hides the drug, in suitably romantic fashion, within one of seven candy eggs, and from then on consumes one every night without fail. Not long after, wandering in the night streets of the abandoned capital, Nadan is surprised by and apparently kills a bizarre ape-like creature, a mutated descendant of humanity mentioned in exotic travelers' tales but in no reputable source. When he goes back the next day to see the corpse, though, it has vanished, and Nadan begins to believe that what he saw was simply a hallucination spurred on by the drug. But can he be sure? After all, the journal ends with Nadan apparently feverish in his bed hallucinating after the apparent murder of his American mistress--the result, finally, of the true egg?

Here, then, is another level to the story, another complication: what was in the drug Nadan bought, and when, if at all, did he consume it, and did anyone else administer such a drug to him, and if so, what effect could it have had, in tandem with his already over-active imagination, on his perception of events?

These are mere quibbles, though, in comparison with the story's central conceit. When Nadan at the theater meets and talks with an old American man (an employee of the American government, whose wife will soon sell him an alleged hallucinogen), the American offers him an educated discourse on the "writing machines" used by the Americans at the height of their power. As the old man explains, writing itself represents a process of abstraction from the (1) original reality, (2) expressed originally through smell, (3) translated into speech, and finally (4) written down. This basic process, by which an original reality is communicated through consecutive degrees of abstraction, can, he argues, be taken to infinity while still preserving the "essence" of the message--or, this process can quickly lose all touch with the original matter, or even be deliberately taken advantage of to falsify the truth. In the glory days of America, sophisticated writing machines produced reams of falsified text intended "to produce a psychological effect" on the populace at large. At this point, the old man shows him what looks like the handwritten speech of an American president, and tells Nadan that in fact, it is a machine-written forgery whose content bears no genuine relationship with any historical event at all. This ability to manipulate narrative and text and psychology was, after all, the secret to the American Empire's power.

When we remember Nadan's mother's doubt that the journal was actually written by him, we realize, suddenly, that everything we have just read, or any part thereof, may in fact be a false reproduction produced by a machine. This inoffensive story, this romanticized genre exercise, thus takes on an entirely different valence: a deliberate, politicized deception.

But how could we possibly tell the difference? 

Step Three: I Know There's an Answer

In a typical pop-postmodern narrative, things would simply stop there; the "point" of the story would be (at least in part) the ambiguity of the story, and therefore of reality itself. "This text might be a forgery!" the text would proudly declare, and we would all go home, shaking our heads ruefully over the inherently constructed nature of texts and I guess by implication reality, you know, man? 

For Wolfe, however, this is emphatically not the case. As I argued above, and as Wolfe himself has affirmed, in his stories, there is always a genuine underlying reality, no matter how totally occluded. For every question, there is an answer. And if we are to be good readers of Wolfe, we can never simply give up and walk away.

After all, the story in its final pages does deliberately associate us, the readers, both with a detective tasked with finding Nadan and saving his life, and with his concerned family members. They clearly will not give up until they find Nadan, or at least confirm his death. And while, perhaps, we do not feel any such affection for the rather vain, pompous man we encounter in the story, at the very least Wolfe can draw on our own curiosity and frustration and pleasure and pride to get us to solve the puzzle he has set us. And so, if we wish, we can continue to unravel the thread.

Perhaps on a consecutive re-read, we should notice that the old man's speech gives us, not merely an open-ended declaration of the possibility of forgery, but a more narrow, limited statement about such forgeries and how to detect them. After all, as the old man says, such writing machines were not designed to actually imitate truthfully the content of a story, merely its form. The speech he shows Nadan imitated the handwriting of a President, but its content was, by design, sheer nonsense, intended to produce a psychological effect on its readers. Hence, we should expect such forgeries, when we encounter them, to be emotionally and narratively over-the-top and manipulative, but largely content-less and not in any way in keeping with the genuine events or characters we know. Given the insight we get into Nadan in the story, and multiple levels to the events he narrates, this rules out the entire narrative being merely a forgery. If a part or parts have been added to the journal, though, it should be emphatically possible to detect them--given sufficient knowledge of Nadan, his underlying character, and the underlying thread of events.

To do this, however, requires understanding more deeply Nadan, his psychology, the characters and society around them, and the events he witnesses.

Reading with this in mind, we can fairly quickly come to a few conclusions: Nadan is a clever man, self-indulgent, vain, rather horny, but also thoughtful and analytical, albeit obsessed, as he explicitly says, with the idea that "the romance of life is the only thing worth seeking." He is also, in his presence in America, first and foremost a tourist; simultaneously thrilled and disgusted, thirsting for the exotic and homesick. The Americans he meets, by their admission, are dependent on foreign money and so outwardly servile, but also deeply proud, constantly looking backwards to the days of their power, and so some combination of self-hating, bitter, and murderously resentful towards those more powerful than them. "They--we--were betrayed. In our souls we have never been sure by whom. When we feel cheated, we are ready to kill, and maybe we feel cheated all the time." On the most basic level, the relationship between these two is unlikely to be either honest or benevolent. Both parties are in essence exploiting the other; both are in a sense hating the other; and neither thinks of the relationship as at all permanent. 

Step Four: The Big Lie

The first deception we can uncover comes relatively easy, even if it may require a reread or two, and even though it requires a radically different kind of reading than we may be used to. When we have reread the story looking for a melodramatic, nonsensical forgery such as the old man describes, it becomes simply obvious that the entire ending of the journal is a fraud.

This is so for a number of related reasons. First, the Nadan in the latter parts of the story bears little resemblance, in his writing or his psychology, to the Nadan who writes the first part of the journal. While the Nadan of the first part of the journal is fundamentally a tourist, secure in his sense of privilege and immunity to harm, and only secondarily and self-consciously a romantic figure, the Nadan of the ending writes purple prose with utter apparent sincerity, refusing to "corrupt the clean wombs of the women of our enduring race" by returning home and referring to America as a "maggot-ridden [...] corpse-country." In speaking of America, in fact, he directly echoes several of the American characters he has met, who all speak in such melodramatic language about their country. More mundanely, the Nadan of the first part of the journal, while not a devout Muslim, is explicitly a teetotaler, refusing alcohol on more than one occasion--the Nadan of the climax plans to drink alcohol with no apparent self-consciousness. More seriously of all, though, the Nadan of the final pages of the journal has apparently murdered his lover in rage and horror and then been so overcome with grief, guilt, and disgust that he has decided never to return home but instead travel into the interior of the country with the explicit goal of meeting certain death. This hardly seems in keeping with Nadan's exoticizing tourist mindset.

Upon our first reading we were likely not attuned to these discontinuities simply because as readers of dramatic fiction, as readers in particular of a self-conscious Orientalizing traveller's tale, we had unconsciously trained ourselves to expect the bizarre and the romantic and the melodramatic. As readers of American genre fiction, too, were expecting a climax, in which dramatic things would happen and our narrative end. Seven American Nights, though, is most fundamentally not such a romantic tale, not even a modern American short story, but a journal containing some self-conscious dabbling in romantic genre fiction by a bored self-interested tourist planning to return home to his mother in a few weeks.

Still, these discontinuities are more debatable and less fatal to the ending of the story than the more basic fact that the ending in itself makes no sense.

In the first part of the journal, we learn that America fell in part because of self-inflicted genetic damage that has left most Americans with various minor mutations and disabilities, such as extra teeth, hump-backs, club-feet, and the like. When he has sex with his American lover, a beautiful blonde woman with no apparent sign of genetic damage, she insists on them making love in the dark, a condition that Nadan finds trying but also rather romantic. The climax of the journal rests on the idea that Nadan has decided to secretly overcome that condition by making love with her and then lighting a cup whiskey on fire with his laser-pistol; and in so doing discovered that his lover had all along been a bizarre, monstrous mutant such as the ape-creature he killed earlier in the story. Upon seeing her true form, he was so overcome with horror that he vomited and then immediately murdered her and then immediately decided to seek death for himself.

This is a suitably melodramatic tale, but we should note that it is also an obviously literary variant on the ancient tale of Cupid and Psyche, in which the bride of the god Cupid also must make love with her husband in the dark, but is persuaded by her jealous sisters that she is in fact making love with some kind of bizarre serpentine monster. Horrified by this idea, she too, hides and secretly lights a lamp in the dark after making love to her husband, only to discover his divine beauty but be driven away from him because of her transgression.

Both narratives suffer from a rather obvious problem, though: which is that the very act of making love makes it impossible for Ardis/Cupid to actually have any kind of truly monstrous form and Nadan/Psyche not know about it. The idea that Nadan could have had sex multiple times with his American lover and somehow be unaware that she was some kind of mutant ape-creature is obvious fairy-tale nonsense. Indeed, it is much less plausible for Nadan than for Psyche. Psyche's fear that her invisible husband is actually a monstrous serpent is at least in part a manifestation of her naivete, while Nadan, at least by his own boasting, is quite experienced with women, having already had sex with at least one American prostitute. Likewise, Psyche had never seen her husband in any form, whereas by the narrative of our story Nadan has seen Ardis on many occasions in many changes of clothes, including on stage wearing relatively little. The search for a mutation so horrifying as to drive Nadan to murder but otherwise invisible and undetectable in all these circumstances comes very quickly up against total contradiction. 

The much simpler answer is that this entire section of the journal is in fact the kind of nonsensical melodrama disguising errors of fact with psychological deception that the old man described as characteristically produced by American writing machines. Ardis' desire to make love in the dark is in the first section of the journal no great mystery; she either has some very minor genetic mutation that she, like all Americans, is ashamed of, or simply wishes to play to Nadan's romantic psychology as she has done earlier by drawing him on through mystery and danger; and Nadan would be no more likely to be utterly horrified by either such a romantic deception or such a mutation and murder her for it than he would be to flee in the interior of America on foot to be killed by ape-creatures.

The forgery detected, though, this leaves us with even more questions: (1) Where, precisely, does this forgery begin, and where does it end? And more importantly: (2) Who has falsified the ending of this harmless tourist's journal, and why?

The second question is easier to answer, but has enormous implications for our reading, not only of the journal's forged climax, but also of the events the true Nadan narrates.

Put simply, the forged ending of the journal very expertly (if melodramatically) provides a justification and explanation for Nadan's disappearance--one in which the Americans, and their government, can in no way be held responsible. Nadan encountered a semi-mythical American mutant; Nadan murdered an American citizen; Nadan bought and consumed an American hallucinogen (and possibly more, off-screen, than he admitted to in the journal); and then Nadan made the decision, on his own, to travel into the American interior to meet death at the hands of these same fabled mutants. Whatever bad things this tale may imply about America, however deterring it may be to other tourists, it is not the kind of event that would lead to a diplomatic incident or a war or the closing of borders. 

Indeed, the forgery is even cleverer than that: for it not only provides a justification for Nadan's disappearance, it does so in a specifically romanticized, exoticized vein that will likely not be believed by most who read it. Nadan's tale reads, in the end, like a romantic Orientalist adventure story about the dangers of exotic America--exactly like the ones Nadan himself, as an educated Persian, has declared he has never believed. The Persian government and Nadan's family are unlikely to take such an account at face value; but they are much more likely to depreciate Nadan's truthfulness or state of mind than expect a clever forgery. Nadan, the childish tourist, did drugs and lost his mind and murdered someone and got himself killed in the wilderness--there the investigation is likely to stop. Most ironically, as with the exotic tales told of Eastern countries by and for Europeans, this tale is even likely to boost tourism and not depreciate it. Down the line, other Persians will read or hear of the exotic tale of Nadan Jaffarzadeh, how he supposedly made love to an American mutant ape creatures and killed her and disappeared into the great American interior; and while disbelieving the truth of the tale, they too will be drawn by their thirst for adventure and romance to America. 

Who, then, does this lie benefit? America in general and the American government in particular. How was this lie committed? With an American writing machine, such as those once used and currently preserved by the American government. 

Grasping the fact of the forgery thus brings us to the question of America.

Step Five: Actors and Acting

 As I only recently learned, "Nadan" is in fact the Farsi word for "ignorant, unaware"--and on consecutive readings, it will become clear that this perhaps the best possible description of the character and his true role in events.

Halfway through the story, roughly, Nadan, at the instigation of his hoped-for American mistress, visits a prison and police headquarters to secure the release of an American actor who tried to pickpocket him. There, he learns, through a mix of explicit information and his own intuitions, that America is an authoritarian regime with revanchist hopes and multiple, hidden layers of uniformed and secret police constantly engaged in shadowing and spying and scheming for power. In travelling from office to office, he realizes that the facade of American government and society he has encountered thus far, wholly decrepit and wholly deferential to every wealthy foreigner, is merely "a children's fable, concealing an actuality less forthright and more convoluted," while the American governmental officials he meets (officials of the secret police masquerading as ordinary police and magistrates) are in fact "going through a solemn ritual of deception" for his benefit. This realization does not necessarily cause any particular fear in Nadan himself, any more than the realization that, say, the Indian government is corrupt causes personal fear in a wealthy American tourist in Bombay. He is a wealthy tourist from a more powerful country; he is immune from danger. 

Somewhat later in the story, however, Nadan finds to his overwhelming alarm that this is far from true. Returning from a long-delayed evening at the theater with his American lover, he discovers that  his apartment has been almost undetectably broken into and searched by the American secret police. The only missing thing, so far as he can tell, is one of the candy eggs within which he had hidden the hallucinogenic drug. For the first time actually alarmed, Nadan tells us that he has gone back and deleted all passages related to his "true reason" for coming to America (a reason that, it is suggested in the journal's forged closing pages, has something to do with his status as an art expert and the Persian artworks held in the American museums). Nadan, then, is not just a tourist; and America is not just a decayed civilization theme park full of helpful exotic strangers. As a beggar in Washington, DC tells him early in his travels, the Americans, from governmental figures down to beggars like himself, are all fixated on the idea that "someday we are great again."

Behind the simple story of a Persian tourist visiting a fallen Empire, then, is a more contemporary, and more political, story. America is a corrupt and revanchist government, supported by a bitter and resentful populace and dominated by a sophisticated secret police who frequently masquerade under other roles. They resent the currently powerful countries, and desire to return to their former status as a global Empire, however nonsensical that idea may be for a country with a tiny population clinging to the coasts and barely sustained by foreign trade and tourism. And Nadan, tourist, art expert, wealthy Persian, has been, from the moment he arrived in America, the subject of their attention and manipulation.

When we reread with this in mind, we find numerous signs of such attention. When wandering the streets of America alone, Nadan speaks of his feeling of being watched; after attending the theater, he again speaks of his feeling that his surroundings are a mere stage concealing an audience of "dark faces." When he is attacked by the mutant ape creature, he is alerted by a "flicker of scarlet" that resembles the laser sight on his own pistol; and his own assumption, after losing consciousness, that he must have somehow managed to shoot it as it fell on him seems less likely than that someone else, someone with a laser pistol like his own, killed the creature for him. The next morning, he returns to find the body removed and the street cleaned.

Much more impactful and characteristic is Nadan's relationship with the actors of the American theater, including his American mistress. His first visit to the theater leads to an apparently chance meeting with the old American man, who by his own admission works for the American government, and whose wife sells him the alleged hallucinogen. His next visit, premised on his increasing obsession with the blonde American actress "Ardis Dahl," leads to another apparently chance meeting with an American actor who questions him about his obsession, promises to introduce him to her, and then tries to pickpocket his sketchbook. Nadan assumes that the actor must have been trying to take his money, and merely grabbed the sketchbook by mistake; but when we remember the "true reason" for his visit and the American government's interest in him, we can find a more likely reason: the actor was paid by the American government precisely to take Nadan's art sketchbook from him. 

It is at this point that the story takes a turn for the romantic (and the improbable). The lovely American woman Nadan has been obsessed with suddenly shows up at his door, declaring that she has just gone through a failed nighttime performance and spent hours at the police station and gotten from them Nadan's name and address and then traveled on foot to his hotel to intercede for him to the actor. This is, with a moment of thought, a ludicrous story; and it only gets more ludicrous when the actress claims to recognize Nadan from his two visits to the theater, having watched him secretly and admiringly from behind the curtain; and then immediately begins coming on to him sexually. As Nadan himself intuits, the actress is playing him like a fish, for some external reason; but with his own sense of total immunity, he feels not fear at this, but excitement. Ardis presumably wishes the theater to succeed, and to get her friend out of prison; everything else is romance, the kind of exotic dream-like adventure Nadan has been thirsting for. He is in America; whatever their intentions, exotic American women throwing themselves at him is merely the kind of thing that happens here.

The next day, Nadan and Ardis' efforts to release the actor are met with endless bureaucratic stonewalling; but when they return to the theater, the actor has apparently and inexplicably been released anyway. Another actor, though, has gotten suddenly and inexplicably sick--something about which Ardis expresses surprise, but which, Nadan realizes suddenly and with absolute certainty, she had been expecting beforehand. He nonetheless agrees to her request that he take on the missing role, spending the entire evening distracted and nervous and working hard to remember his lines, after which he and Ardis eat dinner, after which they have sex, and after which he finally returns to his hotel room--to find that American agents had spent the day carefully and painstakingly searching it in his absence.

When we put these clues together, we can conclude that these the actors, including his American mistress, are working for the American secret police, and have been tasked with, first monitoring Nadan, then questioning him, then stealing his sketchbook, then distracting him so that his apartment could be searched, and finally--

Finally what? If this is true, if the entire sequence of events we have observed have been, in reality, a kind of cynical drama acted by actors and secret police agents for Nadan...what was the ultimate goal of their manipulations? Again: what has happened to Nadan? 

Step Six: The Subtext is the Text

Here, I think, the analysis of Seven American Nights in a merely textual, merely factual, merely puzzle-esque way comes to an end. Everything I have said so far, I believe, is firmly rooted in the text, and relatively plain to see and interpret. It gives us, too, a very different story than the exotic science-fictional traveller's tale we started with; the story of a man's unwitting stumbling into deception and danger, and of the attempted cover-up of a crime.

To know for certain what that crime is, however, requires an entirely different kind of analysis, and an entirely different kind of reading.

This is, again, perhaps the thing I most appreciate about Gene Wolfe, which elevates him, in my view, above virtually all science-fiction writers. Many of them are as clever or cleverer in their construction of a plot, their leaving of a clue--but few or none have his sense of a specifically multi-level reality, a reality interpreted and interpretable in many interrelated ways going far beyond the merely factual.

In the case of Seven American Nights, as with much of his fiction, this higher, meta-textual, interpretative level is where the real meat of the story can be found. Nadan is the narrator of our quasi-exotic tale; and he is a deeply interpretative, deeply unreliable narrator, obsessed by his own admission with rendering every event as exotic and romantic and exciting as he can make it, lending significance to everything according to his own understanding of what that significance should be. As we have learned, though, he is also in a genuine sense wrong about most of what he witnesses. There is in fact another level to the events we see, grounded in the nature of the American governmental system and the preoccupations and goals of the American psyche and the individual Americans he meets; and this level is much more operative for what happens to him than his own romantic fantasies.

If this were all there was to the story, it would be, in the end, a rather cynical narrative--the story of a hopeful romantic fantasy hiding a darker, crueler reality. 

If we have read thus far, however, (and this many times), we should have gradually become aware of the deeper questions that both the narrative and Nadan are asking us. Nadan spends a great deal of the story watching plays--two real plays, in fact, Visit to a Silent Planet and Mary Rose--and analyzing their meaning and significance for himself. In watching Visit to a Silent Planet, the story of an extraterrestrial's visit to Earth and doomed romance with a human woman, Nadan is mostly attuned to the "modernized" nature of the production, the political and ethnic complexities of its choices, and the beauty of the actress he will soon romance; in all this indirectly associating himself with the central character of the alien visitor to a strange land. In watching Mary Rose, however, Nadan has a sudden revelation of sorts, realizing that the play, ostensibly the story of a young girl's kidnapping by fairies, is in reality a story about the nature of theater itself, with the fairies the dark faces of the audience watching the woman on stage unseen and drawing her out of the scenery to themselves. A few scenes later, the actress will be seemingly, as if by magic, drawn out of the play to him--or he will be drawn by her, and the other watching faces.

When later on Nadan himself is tricked into acting in the play, he finds himself cast (appropriately) as the human lover of Mary Rose, and at least in his own recounting stumbles his way through his part with great aplomb. It is in looking back on his performance that he issues his final statement of his own beliefs about the mystery of, not merely of theater or drama or storytelling or narrative, but human life itself:

"But I have just--between this paragraph and the last--read over what I wrote earlier tonight, and it seems to me that one sentence should have had more weight than I gave it: when I said that in my role as Simon I never lost the trend of the play. 

What the fabled secret buried by the old Americans beneath their carved mountain may be I do not know, but I believe that if it is some key to the world of human life, it must be some form of that. Every great man, I am sure, consciously or not, in those terms or others, has grasped that secret--save that in the play of our life we can grapple that trend and draw it to left or right if we have the will.

So I am doing now. If the taking of the egg was not significant, yet I will make it so--indeed I already have, when I infused one egg with the drug. If the scheme in which Ardis is entangled--with Golam Gassem and Mr. Tallman if it be they--is not some affair of statecraft and dark treasure, yet I will make it so before the end. If our love is not a great love, destined to live forever in the hearts of the young and the mouths of the poets, it will be so before the end."

The question, then, ultimately posed by Seven American Nights is: considered as a narrative, what is the final, true trend, the final, true significance, of human life? Or at least, what is the final, true significance of Nadan's journey to America?

Nadan had hoped that, as a "great man," or at least a wealthy tourist and author, he could by sheer willpower draw the significance of his life and the events in which he participated to his own liking--into a realm of romance, fantasy, and exotic danger. About this, he was, to some extent, wrong, to his own undoing. Yet the question remains: is there no truth in Nadan's hopeful romanticism? And is the final truth of this story, and therefore of human life in general, merely a tale of the politicized deception, betrayal, and victimization of the unwitting and the innocent? 

There is, I believe, one more narrative level, one more source of significance, buried in Seven American Nights: though to recognize it fully, we must begin to grapple, not merely with Nadan, but with Gene Wolfe. Wolfe was, as everyone knows, a devout convert to Catholicism--and though most "Catholic" interpretations of Wolfe's work by secular critics tend to be rather simplistic and silly, that fact is indeed the key to understanding much of his work. Where such interpretations often fall short, though, is in failing to observe the specifically multi-level nature of Wolfe's own thought and, indeed, of Catholicism itself. The truth of Catholicism is not something that, for Wolfe, usually emerges on the first and most immediate narrative level of his stories; he is not an allegorizer or an apologist or anything so silly. It is, rather, something that emerges at the highest interpretative and meta-textual level of his story, as the meaning behind the meaning behind the meaning of what we observe.

In Seven American Nights, then, I am convinced that the ultimate key to understanding this story of a week in which a wealthy visitor from far away travels to a cursed land and there is betrayed is the fact that, as we suddenly learn nearly at the end of the story, Nadan's visit of seven nights takes place during Holy Week.

When we grasp this fact, and its true significance within both the world of the story and Gene Wolfe's world and our own, the answers to many of the questions posed above become, suddenly, clear.

What has happened to Nadan? He has been betrayed and murdered, on Good Friday.

Where does the genuine part of his journal end? On the evening of Holy Thursday, with the entry I quoted above--ending with the words "the end." As a poetic note, as a clever meta-textual note, as a religious note, this is all but perfect: Nadan's account of his life ends with his final statement of his beliefs and his questions about human life, with the words "the end," after which he is killed, and a machine takes his place.

Nadan's recounting of the next day, Good Friday, is indeed where our story and characters suddenly take a turn for the genuinely exotic, including not only the bizarre events discussed above, but the more mundanely incongruous notion that Nadan's American lover is secretly arranging an expedition to the American interior in search of treasure, and the even more incongruous notion that Nadan would be prepared to go with her on such an expedition and then take her back to Tehran with him. This is, then, all forgery, intended to allay suspicion about Ardis' role and set up Nadan's alleged disappearance into the interior.

In reality, after a week full of deception, Nadan awoke to betrayal from his unfaithful american lover, arrest by the American secret police, suffering at the hands of the resentful American people, and finally death: that is to say, Good Friday.

Our clever science-fictionalized tale of exotic danger and adventure has thus taken its final form and significance. A man has come to a strange land, ignorant and unaware, searching for the dreams in his own head; and in so doing has become unwittingly entangled in a much darker series of events, manipulations and deceptions and finally brutal murder by a bitter, broken people desperate to avenge their own suffering and humiliation and return to power; but in the end, both they and he, each playing their own purposeful role, trying their best to drag the trend of the play in their own direction, have become entangled in a much deeper, and much older narrative, the underlying narrative and trend and significance of human life and history: a Passion play.

Conclusion: Homo Vanus Patiens

All of the above analysis is necessary for conveying why I love this story, this odd little novella, so much--and by extension, Gene Wolfe. No author I have ever encountered has quite his ability to get inside the heads of very small men, with very small worlds--while still giving them not only their own perspective, but their own human and divine dignity as well. And this is in fact a kind of secret of human life itself, one that can only be learned through such stories. 

The main barrier to most people enjoying Seven American Nights, and by extension much of Gene Wolfe, is that our narrator and hero, Nadan Jaffarzadeh, like most such exoticizing romanticizing privileged tourists, is not a particularly likeable person. He is petty, vain, lecherous, naive, arrogant, self-deluding, exploitative, thoughtless...in other words, a human being much like each one of us. Like each one of us, he is profoundly centered on himself, on his own thoughts and desires and self-perceptions and self-deceptions and narratives, and so notices little of what goes on around him. And yet, what is going on around him is, in fact, far more interesting, far more dramatic, far more significant, far more romantic even, than the petty narratives in his head. An ancient, fallen people is scheming and plotting and taking revenge; he is being led like a lamb to the slaughter; and God is being betrayed and dying in the midst of men.

Nadan, a fornicating irreligious Muslim, makes for a very unconventional, Christ figure--but not, I think, an inappropriate one. The underlying premise of Catholicism, which Gene Wolfe conveys like no other author, perhaps, in the entire tradition, is that in being born and dying in our midst, God has given a new, highest, most fully transcendent level of significance to the overall narrative of human life and history, and to each individual person and life and narrative within it. In the drama of life, we are all, to some degree, wittingly or unwittingly participating as actors in the performance of a Passion play. 

Nadan, of course, has no idea that he is participating in the narrative of Holy Week in the role of Christ; he thinks he is a romantic privileged traveler in an exotic land of danger. The American actors and secret policeman do not know that they are acting the roles of Judas and Pilate; they think they are detecting and punishing a Persian spy, getting back at the more powerful nations of the world, and getting away with it.

For Gene Wolfe, however, these narrative levels are in no way in conflict with each other. Nadan has his goals and intentions and perceptions, true and false; and so do the Americans. Each figure in the play is acting according to their own lights and their perceptions; but all the while the audience is watching and the director is directing in such a way that these actors end up performing the play he has set for them regardless. And in this is found the deepest and truest dignity, and the deepest and truest hope, both of the fallen Americans and of Nadan Jaffarzadeh. 

Of course, this is not the only way to read Seven American Nights; like Nadan, we each have the ability to read and interpret as we wish both each individual fact and each written story and each human life. Yet I am quite confident that this is what Gene Wolfe himself intended in writing this story; and also that this is what God intends in writing our stories as well.

May we all play our parts well.