“HUMAN BECAUSE THEY’RE ALL DEAD”:
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS
by BRIAN EVENSON
1.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) was Gene Wolfe’s second book, and is the sort of book that gives the lie to the myth of the sophomore slump. It consists of three linked and structurally distinct novellas, the first of which, also called “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” was published in early 1972 in Damon Knight’s anthology Orbit 10. That novella was nominated for the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Locus Award (losing out to Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word for World Is Forest,” and Frederik Pohl’s “The Gold at the Starbow’s End,” respectively). The other two novellas, “‘A Story,’ by John V. Marsch” and “V.R.T.,” were not published individually before appearing as part of this volume: they function best in conversation with one another and with the titular novella.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus is Wolfe’s first major book, and it holds up remarkably well fifty years later. Wolfe’s first novel, Operation Ares (1970), has only the barest traces of the writer Wolfe would become. Indeed, Joanna Russ suggested in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction that it was “going to do the author’s reputation a disservice someday.” With the appearance of Fifth Head just two years later, however, Wolfe seems suddenly to have come fully into his own (admittedly, it wouldn’t have seemed quite so sudden to those following Wolfe’s work in magazines and anthologies, since by 1972 he had already published a number of outstanding stories). It is the book that most clearly teaches a reader how to approach Wolfe’s oeuvre as a whole, so is the book I most frequently find myself recommending to readers as a means of understanding what Wolfe’s work is doing. It demonstrates why Wolfe is one of the most significant fiction writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and why he deserves to be read both by readers interested in genre and by readers interested in literature.
Each of these novellas is carefully shaped, functioning according to its own structural logic. Each also functions on a distinct narrative level: the first is a first-person record, the second a “story” written by a character in the first, the third a mediated archive of documents. Since Wolfe’s commitment is as much to how each novella works as it is to the flow of the whole, the novellas do not build on one another in the conventional way a novel in three parts normally would. John Clute calls them “each independent, each inextricably interwoven.” Robert Borski speaks of Wolfe’s “contrapuntal and fugal majesty,” and indeed, each individual novella clarifies, complicates, and contradicts what the other novellas assert. As dizzying as it can be to read the titular novella, whose not wholly reliable narrator sometimes hides things from us and other times seems to be absent from awareness of what his physical body is doing, it is even more dizzying—and exhilarating—to read all three together. In the second and third novellas, Wolfe takes an already delicate and lacy structure of meaning and snips certain strands of it, which at once leaves parts of it flapping in the wind and also reveals deeper structural tetherings that, initially invisible, have been there all along. The end result is that once you finish the final novella it’s hard not to feel that you’re ready to read the first novella over again with different eyes.
I’ve read The Fifth Head of Cerberus a half dozen times, and have probably read the titular novella twice as much. That first novella is, in my opinion, one of the best of the last half of the twentieth century. That it functions well both on its own and as the linchpin for a novel is testament to Wolfe’s skill and virtuosity as a writer.
One of the most amazing things about the book is that it actually works, that the ambiguous tensions between its parts are productive rather than destructive. “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” is nonidentical to The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and yet the way that the later novellas amplify the first ends up making you realize that they are in a sense identical, that “‘A Story’…” and “V.R.T.” are ways of allowing you to see more clearly what was originally in the first. In other words, The Fifth Head of Cerberus both is and isn’t a novel. Wolfe, already comfortable with the shorter form by the time he wrote it, brings together here three novellas so as to simulate a novel. The book mimes being a novel, acts like a novel—which, when you consider the themes of the book itself, seems even more significant, as if the themes have bled out into the structure.
Back in the late 1990s, trying to teach myself how to write a novel after having published several collections of shorter fiction, I had the idea of composing a novel in three novellas. The first novella would serve to establish a reality, the second would partly negate or contradict what the first had asserted, then the third would further negate and contradict what the first two had done, hopefully leaving just enough intact at the end to make the reader come away feeling dizzy but satisfied. It wasn’t difficult to write the first novella, was somewhat harder to write the second, and was very difficult to write the third—like trying to remove just enough bricks from a tower to let light flood every inch of the interior without causing the structure to collapse. It took me almost six years and a great deal of frustration to cement the tensions between the novellas and finish that book, which would be my first novel, The Open Curtain.
For me, the temptation was almost irresistible to make my three novellas feel more and more like a novel, even while the parts stubbornly insisted on remaining distinct and in tension. What is impressive to me about The Fifth Head of Cerberus is both the speed with which Wolfe wrote it (it didn’t take him anywhere close to six years) and that he resists so well the urge to groom the book into what would, strictly speaking, be a proper novel. Fifth Head is its own distinct genre: three unique works in conversation that add up to a larger book without losing their individual identity. The only other analogous book I can think of is Hermann Broch’s modernist collage novel, The Sleepwalkers.
Like Broch, Wolfe is unapologetic about the shifts between the three parts of his book. Both give the reader just enough to avoid frustration, allowing for moments of almost breathtaking revelation as you begin to see glimpses of how the whole nearly fits together. Critics have spoken of Wolfe’s books as being puzzles or labyrinths. In a way this is correct—and there are a number of very good critics and readers of Wolfe’s work who have thought very carefully about Wolfe’s allusions, the hidden clues scattered throughout his fiction (for instance the Shakespearean resonances of certain character names in “Fifth Head”), the way that many small and seemingly insignificant details can be concatenated to show hidden chains of significance, as if a secret structure of meaning serves as the underpinning of any given work of Wolfe’s.
But despite this, I see Wolfe’s work not so much as a puzzle meant to be solved as the ghost of a puzzle, an implied puzzle with many pieces still missing. What makes Wolfe’s work different from something like, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses or Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is that those works insist you be aware of how the text functions as a game; they recruit you into figuring out the rules: that’s the point. Solving the puzzle is a good part of the experience, even on a first read. But because of Wolfe’s interest in (and skill at conveying) narrative in his best work, you can enjoy the story, at least on the first read, without agonizing over the puzzles, perhaps without even fully seeing them. Indeed, on a first reading of a Wolfe book, you often don’t realize you’re in a labyrinth until it’s too late to grope your way out.
2.
Copyright © 1972 by Gene Wolfe.
The novella entitled “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” appeared first in Orbit 10. Copyright © 1972 by Damon Knight.
Introduction copyright © 2022 by Brian Evenson.
