Torture in Gene Wolfe

One of the difficulties in recommending The Book of the New Sun to friends is Wolfe's approach to torture. Severian, the main character, begins as an orphan apprentice of the Order of the Seekers after Truth and Penitence commonly call the Guild of Torturers. In the Matachin Tower, the guild maintains an ancient trade in the Commonwealth serving the single ruler, the Autarch (the self-ruling). They are one of many ancient guilds in a future world in which every scrap of the earth has been mined and turned to machinery, broken down and been buried and mined again - and in politics too every system has been tried, and every tradition and mode of living and structure of society is still to be found in some form. The Guild of Torturers have their place. The secret of their Guild (spoilers!) is that in all the ancient rotting corrupt commonwealth of institutions, the Guild alone is the only sound stone, the only truly obedient, never inflicting more pain, but never less, than ordered. Only when a man will do the unthinkable do you have his complete obedience.

(Compare with George Orwell in 1984:

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"
 Winston thought.
 "By making him suffer," he said.
"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them back together again in new shapes of your own choosing....In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything.")

When an Autarch tells old Master Palaemon, Severian's old teacher, of plans to reform the guild, the following dialogue ensues.

“It will not avail. If I offend you, Autarch, I ask your indulgence for my age...but still it will not avail. You will find in the end that you require men to do what we do.  You may call it healing, if you wish.  That has been done often. Or ritual. That has been done too.  But you will find the thing itself grows more terrible in its disguise. Will you imprison those undeserving of death? You will find them a mighty army in chains. You will discover that you hold prisoners whose escape would be a catastrophe, and that you need servants who will wreak justice on those who have scores to die in agony.  Who else will do it?"
“No one will wreak such justice as you.  You say our mercy extends from sun to Sun, and we hope it is so. By our mercy we will grant even the foulest a quick death. Not because we pity them, but because it is intolerable that good men should spend a lifetime dispensing pain.”
His head came up and the lenses flashed.  For the only time in all the years I had known him, I was able to see the youth he had been. “It must be done by good men.  You are badly advised, Autarch! What is intolerable is that it should be done by bad men.” 

Here there are two arguments. The first argument for torture is pragmatic - that a society will always have reason to inflict suffering on non-conforming people (which is most economically inflicted speedily - note the massive imprisoned population of the present-day USA), and the second is that frankly admitting what is happening makes it the least terrible - perhaps because it is easier to see that prisoners should not be tortured than that they should not be 'exploited for intelligence.'  Even today, many prisoners would prefer to take lashes or lose a finger or perhaps suffer a waterboarding as an alternative to prison.

The fundamental distinction between Wolfe's world and that of Orwell.  Wolfe's Autarch stands for so many things that are wrong, and yet is the last human ruler, and the hope for a new sun for urth. The Autarch represents a system that is Human, accepting and incorporating everything a human has in him or her - a congruence which is Good, even Holy. The non-conforming person is anti-life, evil.  Orwell's Party are fundamentally anti-human, aiming to strip away everything except power, and the power of suffering.  And yet, the resolution of the Book of the New Sun leans against torture because a day is coming and has indeed come and the time is short.

But none of this is the difficulty: I have no problem publishing this argument myself.  The real difficulty is that Wolfe does not shy away from portraying the horror of torture, the exercise and refinement of skills to produce suffering and degradation for their own sake. Unless you are a student of primitive mythology or the practices of ancient peoples (e.g. the Romans) in their cruelest mode, you should find parts of this series disturbing, even mildly traumatising. They are unspeakable.  In this Wolfe is like Severian himself, able to inflict the unthinkable in order that the object might be achieved.

Surface Detail

Iain M Banks* writes so engagingly that reading his novels is always a pleasure.  Surface Detail returns to the Culture, one of a small number of Level 8 (referring to a top degree of technical accomplishment) civilisations in the galaxy. The galaxy is not short of less developed civilisations and has its own meta-civilisation with strict social rules about technology transfer and comportment.  The Culture is perhaps defined by it's willingness to go all out at 'being' - engineering Minds (vast machine intelligences that are worth billions of human lives) that long since took over the running the show, extending the powers of matter to its limits in this universe - while usually remaining very laid back about 'doing' anything in particular, and having as little as possible in the way of 'tending'.  But somehow, the Minds and the humans and the drones all seem to get along pretty well, and if you can't get along, well you have as many options as you can think of, money being no object, literally.

Relations with other civilisations are more complicated, are regulated through a Culture organisation called Contact, and are usually where the story-worthy material uccurs.  Within Contact, the usual heroes of these novels, the ships, drones and humans of Special Circumstances.  In Surface Detail, the trouble arises around the widespread galactic practice of preserving the minds of people after death in simulations.  Once discovered, the possibility of condemning the images of sentient minds captured in their 'soulkeeper' to eternal punishment seems attractive to many societies.  Many civilisations maintain large and expanding Hells of a very medieval sort, in Matrix-style worlds in processing substrate. For some reason, there is debate about this obscenity, and the debate has reached such a pitch that the Hells themselves have been declared appropriate space for the war to a finish on the issue.  The war has gone on for thirty years.

The losing side, the one that has been aiming to shut down Hell, has become desperate and attempts action in the Real, with the help of Veppers, a corrupt corporate Tyrant from a Level 3 or 4, a couple of Level 8 civilisations and a Level 6 civilisation that is modeling itself on the Culture, trying to do what it thinks the Culture wants - in fact, offering the sincerest form of flattery.  While the Culture is against the Hells, it is careful about imposing values on other civilisations, and more than careful because there are a bunch of other Level 8s and they all have to agree on how to proceed.  The heroine, Lededje Y'breq, begins as an intagliated prize of Veppers - tattooed inside and out, her very DNA altered to imprint her flesh as the property of Veppers thanks to his betrayal of his oldest friend, her father.  Her native Sichult is a place that believes in punishment.

The themes Banks is playing with here are crime, revenge and punishment. Alongside these is 'surface detail' - and its significance is still a question for me.  Given the interest in simulation and reality throughout, surface detail makes sense as an issue is of interest to conscious beings looking to understand their world - it is repeated in the tattoo, the quality of simulation. The cover design is a fractal, the Mandelbrot set - defined in a simple algorithm, yet the most complicated possible 2D shape. Is the idea here that the Hells are an organising principle, a fractal algorithm for the societies that need them?  That abusive power is the final texture in those societies - that no relationship occurs without tincture of power?

Two confrontations stand out - Veppers confronts the Culture ambassador and the worlds collide: his world of abusive power, and her world of contentment and peace. This moment is small enough, but pivotal, providing insight into all the major players.

The second is Lededje confronting an old lover who tells her gently that Love is not Enough. I think the way this rankles expresses the secret essence of the Culture, hidden behind all the surface detail: that the Culture is founded on the idea that Love is Enough.  The Minds of the Culture enjoy themselves in their immense fashion, but they also make great sacrifices to remain engaged with humans, sometimes ultimate sacrifices. This is belied by the relish with which Banks has all his Culture people & Minds squabble with each other, and his interest in the fringe, the Contact section, in which the people are a bit edgier than the Culture mainstream. But I think the secret constitution of the Culture must be Love.

The problem he raises but cheats in resolving is that some people do deserve punishment and the Real can't be relied on to administer justice - indeed the opposite is probably true for most of us (those who read and write blogs). Sometime its not even just people, its the entire civilisation.  The point of the Hells is to torture, and the point I expected him to be making is that Torture is Wrong - it isn't made significantly worse when applied to the weak or the moral, or carried out by the immoral, because in its face all are weak but relatively righteous, ad beyond its practice no one can remain righteous.  He went to some pains to set up a range of problems and to narrate the awful reality of Hell, but in the end the Culture wins thanks to the strength of an Abominator class vessel with psychopathy on tap.  The Hells become an object of disgust to most of the civilisations that used to operate them once they have the chance to try their civilisation without that threat, but the Abominator doesn't mind administering punishment. Apparently Culture principles of merciful treatment of fellow sentients are not Enough in the Real.

For Banks trainspotters (he invites it) look out for the return of a long lost SC agent. This may be a habit - certainly there was another one in Matter.  There are also major subplots that apparently come to nothing, just carrying a variety of interesting exposition - the treacheries of the SC agent in question, the involvement of the Bulbitians with the sublimed, and the Nauptre Reliquaria as a potential nemesis of the Culture.  I would like to think that these extraneous bits will one day add up to something, perhaps the revelation of the cause of the eventual demise of the Culture revealed in Look to Windward.  While this might be satisfying, I fear it may be too much to ask - these overconstrained plots, with too many players, have happened up before (in Excession, for example).  For all the annoyance of structural redundancy, Banks' writing is so smooth and pleasurable, and his idyllic world of the Culture so pleasant, that I will certainly be lining up again.

*probably the second best M Banks, after Rosy, but well ahead of the others.