Enough of fancies. Facing hard truths in Wolfe.

Horn in Short Sun informs is that he will be scrupulously honest. We may not like what he has to say, we may not like him, but we will know we are dealing with a man, because that's what we should expect from them. If and when he sees Nettle again, he will look her in the eye, and admit everything.

In order to keep something that is precious to him -- his adulthood -- he aims to not be one of those who retreats from facts into fancies, from truth to self-soothing lies. It's something we remember Severian was intent to keep for himself too, for there is in each of us he argues a temptation to throw off what makes us human and return to the animals, and admits late in his writings that he would rather his imaginings became his reality, so he was no longer troubled by the fear he was insane.

Those who read the stoics will hear in Horn and Severian the intent to not let the passions move you, but to move yourself through divine reason, those who read the existentialists will hear in them the requirement that you not in face of all yourself troubles, develop a false consciousness, but rather tolerate all the anxiety, the loneliness and dread, and be. You must not lose what makes you human. It is something I think most of us believe we must do for ourselves too, and believe -- like our heroes -- that we mostly do.

But Wolfe doesn't always let us feel comforted that like his main protagonists, like Marcus Aurelius, we are above other men, capable of stoic "manly" resolve to remain conscious. He will in some of his work agitate us into becoming more conscious that we too might join the savage men of New Sun's mountains, or the cannibal Osterlings, who were once human, in WizardKnight. In Memorare for example, the character March wonders why people who are intent merely to be visitors to a tomb, end up deciding to remain and count as its inhabitants. And then in his mind he hears voices. His mother speaks to him, and says:

"March? March? The voice ws plaintive, sad, and old.

That's me," he said. "Who are you?"

"You left me to die, March." You left me alone in that hospital so you could go off to some meeting. And I died, March. I died alone, abandoned."

"Mom?" His free hand was fumbling with the flashlight on his utility belt.

Now he understands. I see. If I don't join you I will no longer be able to forget that my mother was profoundly disappointed in me, and rightly so, for I made her feel unwanted when she needed my company most. The tomb promises that these voices -- and they keep on coming -- voices you had disowned, will never return to you, so long as you stay. There is no reason to feel you're insane, no reason to feel self-hatred, no reason to think of suicide, over your being "bad" and of people precious to you abandoning you forever for your being not worthy of love, because you remember nothing of what you may have done to others.

This to me is significantly worse that the kinds of realities Severian forces himself to accept, like how he may not have given his sword up to the magicians in order to save little Severian, but really to spare himself, because in a fight he might have been killed (mind you, Silk's giving up a child to Echidna out of fear may have a forced a harder self-reckoning). This is instead, catastrophic truth. You've lost the love of your mother forever, as she has permanently disowned you. Try and pretend you'd readily not turn away from truths of this kind, for more pleasing self-lies.

Wolfe actually shows, mostly, that the conscious adult self cannot actually accept keeping up this level of self-awareness, in face the experienced consequences of some of our actions. (Horn may have accepted that he almost killed Seawrack in raping her, but if ever this truth becomes overbearing, he can always say to himself that it was actually in large part not his choice, it's simply what the siren's song does to men.) In one story for example, a young man who murdered his girlfriend for a slight she gave him that made him feel unimportant, has a mind that refuses to allow him to keep this memory accessible. The mind forces it permanently into his unconscious, else he never function. Other tales bait the idea in face of intolerable truths, the mind splits into different selves, one which might recall, and others that feel it has no part in them. Death of Dr. Island has something of this feel. Same with the mind-within-a-mind, one suicidal, the other not, of Home Fires. Sometimes different selves seem splits of this kind, like in Interlibrary Loan, with the multiple Erns, with one naive of his ability to kill himself out of being disowned, and the other who can't but be now aware of it.

And many Wolfe stories have main characters realize that those they feel they've permanently offended, or whom they suspect never loved them, actually find proof that they did -- both loved and approved them (Thecla with Severian, for example). The dead speak to them, very differently than they did to March. These accounts feel already like minds that have lost touch with reality, and forced fancies in their place. Maybe Severian, however accidentally successful in his mental battle with the magician, actually lost that self-battle he talked about in reference to his encounter with them.

And Wolfe's work even rehabilitates a descent into animality, so that it spares one guilt and self-hatred at allowing oneself to regress if that's what one suspect's your mind will inevitably choose for you, transforming it into one's actually reaching a higher level of being. Able in WizardKnight is told by the lowermost god that he has had it wrong all along, that the lowest is actually highest, and the highest, lowest. This god has worms and frogs and dirt on his back, and smells of the grave, so he doesn't do himself great PR, but he is right in that Skye, where all knights hope to go, is a place where you do no thinking for yourself, and where memories of everything in your past, are taken away from you. Dwelling there, in a sense, you're less respectable than the osterlings, for they at least have some memory of who they once were, and have to reckon with it.