Reading Gene Wolfe
Like many reviewers, I’ve been looking through The Best of Gene Wolfe in the last few weeks. Most of the stories were familiar to me – the selection skews very heavily towards those from his first two collections – but I found myself with the same feelings of disorientation as when I’d read them the first time. So I thought it might be worth talking about just one story to try to illustrate just why Wolfe is such an extraordinary writer.
The story I’m going to pick is “The Toy Theater”; I’m afraid it’s not online (hardly any of Wolfe’s work is), but it is at least short, and can be found here or here. Since I can’t get cut-tags to work, consider yourself warned now about the spoilers to follow.
The story follows an unnamed narrator on a visit to the planet Sarg, where he is to meet a man called Stromboli. The narrator is a performer who uses animatronic puppets to mimic human activity. These “dolls” are lifesize, and controlled from a box used by the operator; the narrator has brought with him his own doll, called Charity. Although the narrator is evidently very skilled in using the dolls, Stromboli (though now retired) is a master with them, and the narrator has come to learn from him for a few days. He arrives at Stromboli’s rural house and is greeted by Madame Stromboli – despite her age, still a very striking woman. Several days of tuition from Stromboli follow. On the day when he is to leave Sarg, the narrator discovers that his “second best pair of shoes” is missing. He decides to leave them, and is taken in a buggy back to the spaceport. This buggy is driven by Lili, a woman the narrator has not seen before. She says that once she and Stromboli were notorious, but now no longer; she lives in a house near to Stromboli, but his wife does not realise it. She asks the narrator whether he finds her attractive, but “the delicately tinted cheeks beneath the cosmetics showed craquelure”: she is also a puppet. She says that she has been with Stromboli many times. She tries to seduce the narrator, but he declines her approaches: he lies that he has someone else whom he can’t betray. So Lili leaves him at the spaceport as planned. Then, just as he’s about to go, Zanni arrives: he’s Stromboli’s most famous puppet, a comic butler figure, and is carrying the narrator’s second-best shoes. The narrator looks for Stromboli and sees him, as he has to be, off in a corner, operating the controls that puppet Zanni. Zanni asks the narrator to consider his talk with Lili “under the rose” – that is, confidential; if Stromboli succumbed to a young man’s temptations when on tour with Lili, it’s best for all concerned to keep that quiet. Zanni continues:
“The master [Stromboli] expresses the hope that you know with whom you are keeping faith. He further expresses the hope that he himself does not know.”
I thought of the fine cracks I had seen, under the cosmetics, in Lili’s cheeks, and of Charity’s cheeks, as blooming as peaches.
Then I took my second-best pair of shoes, and went out to the ship, and climbed into my own little box. (29-30)
And the story ends; it covers, in the new collection, a little less than five pages. In his afterword, Wolfe talks about drawing some inspiration from G K Chesterton’s description of his own toy theater and, later, from his knowledge of “certain sad toys possessed by adult men”. In trying to make sense of it – in trying to arrive at a reading that gives a consistent account of why everything that’s in the text is there – I find myself having the following thoughts:
- Zanni’s last words have always seemed especially hard to parse. “[Stromboli] expresses the hope that he himself does not know.” The lack of anything after that last “know” is a little dizzying for me. Stromboli hopes that he does not know with whom he, Stromboli, is keeping faith? Or that he does not know the person with whom the narrator is keeping faith? If the latter, is that a reference to Charity? Is Stromboli saying that he hopes that the narrator is not pretending to have a relationship with Charity rather than one with a real human?
- Why the second-best shoes? The reference that evokes, at least for me, is Shakespeare bequeathing his wife his second-best bed; but I don’t see what significance that has for the story.
- Names are always important in Wolfe stories. In this case, the name Stromboli is surely meant to remind us of the monstrous puppet-buyer in Disney’s Pinocchio(1940), who has a different name in Collodi’s original book. The reference is reinforced by the description of Stromboli’s house as being “of the Italian Alpine style”. But Stromboli does not seem, at least on the surface to be either a monster or (as many other Wolfe protagonists are) someone imprisoned by his own sins.
- The very last line, about the narrator climbing into his “own little box” could be taken to suggest that he is, literally, a puppet, one more of Stromboli’s automata. But that feels to me like overinterpretation, even with the Pinocchio references above. (Does the narrator want to become a real boy? Not particularly.)
- A problem of consistency arises. We’re told throughout that the operator must be within sight of the puppet he is operating, as Stromboli is of Zanni in the last scene. In that case, though, if Lili is a puppet, how was Stromboli operating her? If they’re sitting in a horse-drawn buggy piled with luggage, it would be difficult – though not impossible – for Stromboli to be with them unseen.
- To what does the title refer? What is the Toy Theater? (Nowhere in the story has there been a literal theater.) Where is its proscenium, what does it frame? I think the answer to this is that you have to take the whole of the story as a theater, with Stromboli as the person directing it. In particular, you have to see the conversations with both Lili and Zanni as designed by Stromboli. In that context, it’s a reasonable inference that Stromboli orchestrated the disappearance of the narrator’s second-best shoes from his room – something not sufficiently valuable for him to search high and low for, but something that it would be worth Zanni returning. The last line of the story, then, is not the narrator realising his status as a literal puppet, but as someone who has been manipulated by Stromboli in the more general sense. And the point of the performance, from Stromboli’s point of view, is Zanni’s last line, which I do increasingly see as a warning to the narrator about the dangers of using puppets as a substitute for people – and, in turn, a strong hint that Stromboli is not as content as his idyllic life seems to suggest. The one loose end, then, is Lili’s status: what kind of puppet is she? My hypothesis, for which I can see no textual evidence for or against, is that Stromboli might have been able to construct dolls with limited kinds of self-awareness; but I’d rather I could find a more explicit pointer in the text to what’s really going on. That wonderfully well-chosen word craquelure ends up as the keynote of the story, suggesting just how fake everything in it might be.
Does anyone have any better answers than this? I’m ducking a whole series of issues, I realise: is the narrator a reliable one? Is Lili, in turn, reliable in her claims about Stromboli? Why does the narrator give us so few clues about what he himself is feeling? (In this, he’s very much like other Wolfe protagonists.) That a story of, I guess, no more than 3000 words can generate so much exegesis (and a feeling that you’ve still not exhausted it) is a huge tribute to the density that Wolfe achieves in his best short fiction.
I think your last paragraph says it pretty well.
Stromboli, in essence, lost his heart to a puppet, and came to regret it. It may be asked, I suppose, whether we are to assume that he literally had relations with Lili, or whether that’s sort of an elaborate metaphor for the way he left Maria for his art, abandoned her in order to become the best marionettist he could.
When Zanni says “He further expresses the hope that he himself does not know” I read it (as you do, I think) as suggesting that he fears that the narrator also risks become too obsessed with puppetry — or perhaps with a false “relationship” with Charity.
In this context the “sad toys of adult men” are either to be taken literally (as blow up dolls or pornography or even mistresses) or figuratively (as hobbies to which they devote too much time).
A story I did not remember, and am very glad to reread — thanks!
Another significant, if rather obvious, name is that of the planet, Sarg, after the famous marionettist Tony Sarg.
(And for what it’s worth I count the story as 2500 words.)
—
Rich
I read this years ago in The Island of Doctor Death &Etc., and I remember I cycled through all sorts of possibilities in my mind. Very possibly the story is just as you have it: a cautionary tale about the relationship that can develop between the artist and his creation. That fits the available evidence; really the only dissatisfaction with that interpretation is the number of suggestive bits of story it leaves at loose ends.
For instance, I found (and upon re-reading, still find) it suggestive that Stromboli mentions that marionettes “were little people once” and then, just a few paragraphs later, we have the line “little Maria, I mean Signora Stromboli my wife.” Which is ambiguous, but can be read as if the speaker momentarily forgot Maria’s role. And Lili says “I am only a few steps away for her husband too” — ambiguous again, but it seems to put Maria and Lili in similar positions.
Of course, our narrator has dinner with both Stromboli and his wife — so if Maria is a puppet, “Stromboli” probably is, too, as he could not be her puppeteer. Additionally, the “Stromboli” character says that the most puppets he can control at once is five, but says that six “is not impossible.” And the most characters gathered together that the narrator sees is in fact six.
Which leads us towards the end of the story, and isn’t it suggestive that “Antonio” the driver disappears — making him a character who the narrator never sees alongside any of the other characters. Antonio, this “man of all work” (an identifier repeated twice), who commiserates with our narrator that he “knows how difficult it is” to do complex puppetry, in particular how hard it is to make a puppet travel via non-traditional locomotion “for so long, over the uneven ground” of the road between Stromboli’s house and the spaceport, “and so rapidly,” which is exactly what beflippered Zanni at the story’s end has done (“I have run all the way”).
So yes, perhaps everything the narrator sees is a performance, with the puppeteer (at least at first) in plain sight — just not quite as the narrator understands it.
Or: the narrator refuses to have a relationship (not talking about sex) to Lili, claiming to keep faith with someone else. He thereby avoids empathy, something that is very dangerous and probably inimical to an artist. To make good puppet-theatre you probably have to feel love for your dolls. Or to be a writer for that sake. Thus Strombolis comment, since he wants to teach the narrator the real Art.
Reminds me also of a zen-koan:
Long ago, there was an old woman who had supported a hermit monk for twenty years.She had a sixteen-year-old girl bring him meals. One day she instructed the girl to
embrace the monk and ask, “How do you feel right now? ” The young girl did as told,and the monk’s response was, “I’m an old withered tree against a frigid cliff on the coldest day of winter. ” When the girl returned and repeated the monk’s words to the old woman, she exclaimed. “For twenty years I’ve been supporting that base worldling!” The old woman chased the monk out and put the hermitage to the torch.
/S.
I agree that the narrator’s claustrophobic stateroom on the starship is an allusion to a puppet box and nothing more.
We also agree here: The narrator has just brushed off Lili’s approaches by saying he cannot break the trust of another. It is clear then that Zanni’s speech refers to the master expressing the hope that the narrator is not overly attached to his own puppets.
I disagree strongly about the title, since that was the key for me. The Toy Theater is Stromboli’s house. The description: “smaller than I expected, of the Italian Alpine style,” suggests a puppet theater. Everyone there is suspect. Recall the information that the master can control five puppets at once. There are eight named characters at Stromboli’s house. The three girls who sing are identified as puppets: Julia, Lucinda, and Columbine. Zanni the Butler is clearly a puppet. Lili is unmasked as a puppet. That leaves Stromboli, Little Maria (Madame Stromboli), and Antonio the “man of all work.”
Little Maria seems to be named for the character of the little girl, Little Maria, in Frankenstein, who is unintentionally killed when the monster throws her into the river. This suggests that Stromboli’s wife was unintentionally killed by one of the puppets. Her death has warped the master and his affections have transferred to his puppet creations.
Notice that Zanni’s speech at the end refers only to the master. You have helpfully added clarification: “The master [Stromboli] expresses the hope …” But you have fallen for the master’s slight of hand. I feel sure that Stromboli is a puppet, too. Antonio, who is “indisposed” in order to introduce Lili, is the only human at the Toy Theater that is the Stromboli house. I could point to the arch, theatrical speech patterns of Stromboli, Zanni, Lili, and Little Maria, and the more natural speech of Antonio, but I am not sure that it is conclusive. Disprove it if you can, but I think it is Antonio who performs under the name Stromboli.
Steve Lovekin
I see that Rich Horton has already found the link that confirms my speculation: Antonio of planet Sarg – Tony Sarg. Antonio “the man of all work” is the master of the puppet theater.
Matt is on the same track, quoting the early scene where Antonio displays that he is quite knowledgeable about puppetry.
Steve Lovekin
That’s brilliant, Steve. I think you (and Matt) are definitely on to something there.
Thanks, all. I don’t necessarily agree with everything suggested above, but it’s great to have so much debate generated by one story. I suppose, when I referred in my opening to “disorientation”, this was what I was thinking of – the sense that Wolfe stories can sometimes get to your interpretative faculties so you’re not sure if you’re overinterpreting or seeing clearly. I suspect that my own take on the story – my own standard for what’s “really” in the text – may be more conservative than for Steve and Matt. Some specific comments:
Rich: Yes, clearly, Sarg must be named for the puppeteer. (It’s not a name I’d heard before – would it have been familiar to Wolfe’s presumed audience – North Americans in the 1970s?)
Steve: the identification of Maria with Maria in Frankenstein – I’m afraid I just don’t feel comfortable with this, because there’s no real evidence in the text beyond the coincidence of names. (Indeed, the narrator does get a close look at her, of the kind he gets with Lili, and remarks on how striking she still is, how he can imagine what she looked like when younger, etc.)
I’m afraid I also disagree on Stromboli’s house as the theater. At the very least – even in my conservative interpretation – the “performance” takes place outside the house on at least two occasions. The whole story is the theater, and there is no proscenium that we can see.
Matt: I prefer to read the references to “little Maria” as broad hints that Stromboli manipulates her figuratively, as he does the narrator and, presumably, many others. And Zanni’s having “run all the way” I take as merely Stromboli showing off, demonstrating to the narrator that he’s still more skilled.
The key issue is whether the idea of Antonio as puppeteer of everyone except the narrator holds up. This is enormously suggestive, given the coincidence of names with “our” Sarg and the “man of all work” tag. (Surely the interest in puppetry is less probative – a real person who worked for Stromboli would have the same interest/knowledge.) Both Matt’s and Steve’s arguments here depend on reading a great deal into the data that five puppets can be controlled, not six. However, I’m uncomfortable with this reading for a couple of reasons:
– The narrator either doesn’t spot Stromboli’s and Maria’s puppet status during several days with them (when he spots Lili after a couple of minutes), or he spots it and chooses not to tell us. Why would he not do so?
– Antonio’s control over Stromboli would have to extend over several long sessions during which Antonio was puppeting Stromboli, puppeting three other puppets. Quite a feat of endurance/skill.
– We know that Stromboli and his wife can eat and drink – it’s not denied that puppets can do this, but it seems unlikely given what we’re told about their composition. (Craquelure suggests paint on wood or similar; if Zanni’s hand is a “flipper”, it’d hardly be articulated enough to eat.)
– It still doesn’t give a good account of Lili’s seemingly autonomous status.
– Above all, it leads me to a reading that I find less rich. If Stromboli is not real, then he hasn’t committed the adultery that I’m suggesting he has, and the emotional punch of the story is diminished. Zanni’s last words are not, then, the tip of an iceberg of repressed emotion but just something read off a card. It feels like a reading against the grain of the story. Moreover – I *think* – it goes against what Wolfe says in his afterword, about “certain sad toys”. If the story isn’t really about men being unfaithful with puppets, but instead a lesson about art, I don’t see why it would carry the emotional burden it does.
I’m prepared to accept that, say, Antonio might be a *figurative* manipulator in the same way that the narrator sees himself as a *figurative* puppet. (He might, for instance, have designed a semi-autonomous Lili puppet.) But I don’t see the textual evidence to answer this definitively.
Tony Sarg is not a name I knew back in 1980 or so when I would have read “The Toy Theater” — I encountered it first in one of Robertson Davies’ novels, which I read rather later. So I don’t think it was a name that a large portion of Wolfe’s audience would have known, but I think a significant subset would.
Graham: I agree that the puppet performances extend beyond the house. I imagine we have all seen puppet shows where the puppets leave the stage and mingle with the audience. Still, it seems reasonable to say that the Stromboli house is the main stage.
The puppet master explains that his skill in manipulating puppets has improved over time. It is a small leap to think that his skill in making puppets has also improved. Lili is revealed as a puppet only upon very close inspection. I think there is a progression in the realism of the puppets. The caricature of Zanni, the more subtle appearance of Lili, and the still more subtle little Maria.
As you say, “names are always important in Wolfe stories,” and the fact that Stromboli stumbles over her name (“little Maria, I mean Signora Stromboli my wife”) is a big nudge that her name is significant.
If you accept for a moment the thesis that Antonio is the puppet master, and that Stromboli and his wife are puppets, then whether or not you accept the reference to Frankenstein, the puppet wife still represents a tragic lost love.
You say, “the point of the performance, from Stromboli’s point of view, is Zanni’s last line, which I do increasingly see as a warning to the narrator about the dangers of using puppets as a substitute for people – and, in turn, a strong hint that Stromboli is not as content as his idyllic life seems to suggest.” I couldn’t agree more, with the minor change that it is Antonio speaking through his puppets. I think “not content” with his life is putting it mildly. Through a tragedy he lost his love, little Maria. Unable to cope, he retired to a backwoods planet. He prefers to interact with the world through layers of puppet identity, including the sexuality of Lili. That puts the story completely in line with Wolfe’s remark about “certain sad toys” in the afterward.
Steve Lovekin
Some added bits about Tony Sarg (1880-1942). Daughter’s name was Mary. Not only a creator of puppets but of one of the quintessential toy theatres: Macy’s Christmas window(s). Final years spent in disappointed exile.
Really fascinating to watch the accretion of evidence pointing to Antonio in the posts above; though I share Graham’s resistance at the seeming loss of humaneness in the tale, I feel a growing sense of inevitable rightness — the Wolfe Click you get at moments of decipherment — of the gingerbread-coffin chateau and Toy Theatre, etc, etc.
But as Graham says, lots to be resolved in this 2500 wd tale. Back to the drawing board, which is to say: back to reading it again.
John Clute
It’s a very bleak story if you don’t feel that the dolls seem to be at least semi-sentient, and thus deserve compassion. The fact that who is and who isn’t a doll is not obvious only makes this appear stronger. Compare for instance “Do Andriods Dream Of Electric Sheep”/”Bladerunner” where the main character could very well be a replicant himself, or Lem’s Solaris with the creatures the planet makes. “Sad” toys, when used … Wolfe is always moral, though never in any easy way.
/S.
Graham, re: Lili and the question of her autonomous status, you wrote in your original post that “we’re told throughout that the operator must be within sight of the puppet he is operating.” But I’m not sure where we’re told this? You could see it as implied when the narrator looks for Stromboli at the end, but at the same time, the narrator seems to have no curiosity about Lili’s method of control. Which may imply that he thinks Stromboli must be there at the end for some other reason — one such reason might be, to maintain the public illusion of control.
You also pondered “or [the narrator] spots it and chooses not to tell us. Why would he not do so?” Perhaps it is this that, he understands, he has been asked to keep under the rose? After all, Zanni’s “stage whisper” at the end implies that the master really doesn’t care if what the narrator learned explicitly from Lili is kept secret, that all of it is part of a performance. So what, we must ask, has the narrator been asked to keep secret?
(It’s a stretch, but here I wonder if the — otherwise somewhat odd — line, “The master expresses the hope that you know with whom you are keeping faith,” might have more than one meaning.)
Usually when I read an intriguing/ambiguous short story or novel I do some google searches to see what others think about it. I have to say this is one of, if not the, best results I've found on any story. Very interesting comments!
I'm still unsettled in my own interpretation, but would like to throw out a few thoughts.
First, does anyone think it's possible that Lili isn't a puppet? The best direct evidence that she is a puppet is I think 1) that the butler at the end (and hence Stromboli) know the contents of the conversation on the ride, and 2) the craquelure. Focusing on this second one, I think that word may have been used metaphorically, although obviously suggestively and with a full awareness of how deceptive it could be. I certainly think anyone could use that word to describe an actual human whose looks are fading with age. It would be particularly appropriate for someone who focuses on puppets to think of people in this way. Note also the way he explicitly contrasts the way Lili looks with Charity, who can't age. Obv that can be explained, but the direct interpretation is that Lili's aging is categorically different from the perfect, timeless beauty of the puppet.
As for the first piece of evidence, if she was sent by Stromboli, who was waiting for them at the station, she could have related the conversation.
The biggest piece of evidence I think that she's NOT a puppet is that Stromboli apparently wasn't present for the conversation. As others have pointed out, he could have figured out a way to do it remotely (esp if he's actually Antonio, which is a very intriguing idea that hadn't even occurred to me I'm embarrassed to admit), but that's a major jump for the story.
Relatedly, as others have also noted, it is strange that the narrator can immediately tell who's a puppet and who isn't, and never (other than the throwaway use of the word craquelure) suggests that Lili, or Stromboli or Maria, is a puppet. Also, the puppets do not seem to be presented as ultra-realistic – the butler has those flippers, Charity is an exaggeration (or some term like that), etc. Again, there are ways that could be explained – Stromboli has new technology, the narrator isn't reliable or chooses to be deluded, etc) but it's a jump in the story world.
Second question: this planet is supposedly no-tech – to the point there are no cars, just buggies – but these puppets seem to me to be very high-tech. Remote controlled robots basically. Anyone have any thoughts on this apparent contradiction?
Third, Stromboli's account of how he learned the women's voices seems very incomplete. He couldn't do it, his wife helped, said he needed her help to do it, and he learns to do it by … going off-world without her and touring. Huh? He just says, and then I came back and could do three dolls. But there's no explanation of what actually happened. He had to dedicate himself to the task without his wife?
Lili then suggests SHE was around this whole time off-world, possibly helping with this stuff.
Anyone have any thoughts as to how he mastered the art of the woman puppets? It is significant I think that the narrator already has it mastered (and is limited to one puppet, a hypersexualized one?).
Usually when I read an intriguing/ambiguous short story or novel I do some google searches to see what others think about it. I have to say this is one of, if not the, best results I've found on any story. Very interesting comments!
I'm still unsettled in my own interpretation, but would like to throw out a few thoughts.
First, does anyone think it's possible that Lili isn't a puppet? The best direct evidence that she is a puppet is I think 1) that the butler at the end (and hence Stromboli) know the contents of the conversation on the ride, and 2) the craquelure. Focusing on this second one, I think that word may have been used metaphorically, although obviously suggestively and with a full awareness of how deceptive it could be. I certainly think anyone could use that word to describe an actual human whose looks are fading with age. It would be particularly appropriate for someone who focuses on puppets to think of people in this way. Note also the way he explicitly contrasts the way Lili looks with Charity, who can't age. Obv that can be explained, but the direct interpretation is that Lili's aging is categorically different from the perfect, timeless beauty of the puppet.
As for the first piece of evidence, if she was sent by Stromboli, who was waiting for them at the station, she could have related the conversation.
The biggest piece of evidence I think that she's NOT a puppet is that Stromboli apparently wasn't present for the conversation. As others have pointed out, he could have figured out a way to do it remotely (esp if he's actually Antonio, which is a very intriguing idea that hadn't even occurred to me I'm embarrassed to admit), but that's a major jump for the story.
Relatedly, as others have also noted, it is strange that the narrator can immediately tell who's a puppet and who isn't, and never (other than the throwaway use of the word craquelure) suggests that Lili, or Stromboli or Maria, is a puppet. Also, the puppets do not seem to be presented as ultra-realistic – the butler has those flippers, Charity is an exaggeration (or some term like that), etc. Again, there are ways that could be explained – Stromboli has new technology, the narrator isn't reliable or chooses to be deluded, etc) but it's a jump in the story world.
Second question: this planet is supposedly no-tech – to the point there are no cars, just buggies – but these puppets seem to me to be very high-tech. Remote controlled robots basically. Anyone have any thoughts on this apparent contradiction?
Third, Stromboli's account of how he learned the women's voices seems very incomplete. He couldn't do it, his wife helped, said he needed her help to do it, and he learns to do it by … going off-world without her and touring. Huh? He just says, and then I came back and could do three dolls. But there's no explanation of what actually happened. He had to dedicate himself to the task without his wife?
Lili then suggests SHE was around this whole time off-world, possibly helping with this stuff.
Anyone have any thoughts as to how he mastered the art of the woman puppets? It is significant I think that the narrator already has it mastered (and is limited to one puppet, a hypersexualized one?).