More thoughts on "On the Wolfsberg":

The first thing to say about this story is that is permeated with symbolism. The presence of this symbolism is explicitly pointed out by the central heroine ("No more of those square old symbols", p. 248, "A symbol cocking its leg", p. 250), and not merely something we must infer, as in the earlier stories. But the meaning of some of this symbolism is so obscure or personal as to be impenetrable, and this after several utterly comprehensible stories. It seems a strange way to end a collection of short stories, and not just a collection, but THE collection of PO'B's short stories ("The Collected Short Stories of Patrick O'Brian" is the name of the collection in Britain.)

So why this heavily symbolic story at the end? For one thing, it serves to transform our perception of the earlier stories, which in many ways has been negative for the reputation of the short stories; for after reading this last story, the reader is likely to say, "Huh? Wha'? What just happened? She knew who she was at the end (p. 250), so why doesn't PO'B tell US, his dear readers who are buying his books and putting bread and butter on his table, who she was? And what's the deal with all those symbols? I know it means something, but I don't know what! And now that I think about it, there's a lot of them symbols and hard-to-understand stuff in the earlier stories, as well! I don't like this short story business at all! Why doesn't PO'B stick to Jack and Stephen!"

This is, as I say, the negative aspect of the placement of this story, and could have been somewhat alleviated if PO'B had ended the collection with a more comprehensible, less overtly symbolic story (such as "The Handmaiden").

But the placement also transforms our perception of the earlier stories in a positive way, in that this level of overt symbolism strongly suggest that there may be more subtle symbolism present in the earlier more seemingly straightforward stories(fortunately for those of us participating in this short story thread who have been seeing symbols left and right in the earlier stories), not to mention the rest of PO'B's writings.

More importantly, "Wolfsberg" needs to be last, because it is the conclusion of the meta-story that has developed across the stories. I think we can decipher some of this conclusion, though much of it remains mysterious.

The narrative in "Wolfsberg" is unusual in that it seems to be at least partly determined by the thoughts of the heroine (she thinks of things and they happen). Jean's suggestion of the story as a conscious dream (in which the dreamer knows she's dreaming) makes sense, but I had another idea as I read it, which is that the story is similar to Flann O'Brien's novel "At Swim Two Bird" in which an author begins to write a story and the characters come alive, so that the forces he has set in motion are to some extent beyond his control.

The first symbol we encounter is that of the path, which the protagonist travels on through the woods and mountains. This is an image used over and over in the short stories, beginning with "The Return", and carrying on right through to "The Handmaiden". In fact, the narrative from "Handmaiden" continues without a pause in "Wolfsburg": "Handmaiden" ends with the heroine walking: ("She walked along the hall towards the door, ... and hurried out of the house on Edward's track", p. 244), and "Wolfsberg" begins with the heroine still walking ("When she came out of the mindless, ruminating state that walking often induced ...She also found that she had no notion ... why she was walking", p. 245).

In our discussions of the earlier stories, Charlezzzz and other have identified the path with the journey of the soul.

The path in "Wolfsberg" is associated with damnation: note the number of time the heroine uses "damned" or a variant in relation to her journey: "This is the damnest thing" she says as "[s]he looked attentively at the road" (p. 245); "the reason why I do not really care where this road is going is that I do not care where I am going either: not a damn, alas." (p. 249), and, of the wolf: "What kind of a goddam symbol are you, anyhow?" (p.250). She thinks at one point (p. 248) of Shakespeare's "Lust Sonnet", "that leads men to this hell" (quote from the sonnet, does not appear in the story).

Clearly, the end of the path, or one possible destination, is Hell.

At least two of the seven deadly sins appear along the path: lust with the lust sonnet ("expense of spirit in a waste of shame", p. 248), and accidie (spiritual despair, a favorite PO'B theme in the stories, most notably in "The Walker") when the heroine declares "the reason why I do not really care where this road is going is that I do not care where I am going either: not a damn, alas." (p. 249).

At the extreme, if one falls too far into the depths of accidie, one can succumb to what PO'B elsewhere calls The Death of the Soul, and become, like the title character in "The Walker", a member of the walking dead. From PO'B's novel "The Catalans": "I will tell you what I mean by the death of the soul. When you no longer have the power to love, when there is no stir of affection anywhere in your being, then your soul is dead. That is the death of your soul. Your soul is dead, and you are damned: you are dead walking, and you are in hell in your own body." (Catalans, p. 96)

Also appearing along the path is an image of "clouds from an aeroplane" (p. 247), which seems to be taken directly from "The Little Death"'s image of "an unending floor of white cloud, and in the sky was an aeroplane falling and falling, falling forever." (p. 55), which is, I think, an image of the death of PO'B's brother Michael. (See http://jfinnera.www1.50megs.com/Death.htm for a fuller explanation.)

Another theme continued from previous stories is that of the missing woman. As I noted in our discussion of "Handmaiden", in the earlier stories women were alluded to, but did not appear, or were disappearing in one way or another, until the emergence of Paula in "Handmaiden". (See http://jfinnera.www1.50megs.com/Handmaid.htm for our earlier discussion of "Handmaiden"). Again in "Wolfsberg", there is a central female character.

And this central character (not named) is a naturalist, and a rationalist. Susan compared her to Stephen Maturin. Perhaps a better comparison is to Christine Wood, the female naturalist who appears at the end of the Aubrey-Maturin saga. (And "Wood" is perhaps a significant name, if she comes from the realm of the subconscious, the wood (what we Americans would call the woods) in the short stories.)

"Wolfsberg"'s heroine is a rationalist, a categorizer, a cataloguer: she likes to put things into neat, ordered lists, such as "the alphabet, the cranial nerves of the dogfish, the list of elements" (p. 246). In this she is like the central characters in "The Clockmender" and "The Lemon", and like the protagonist of "Lemon", at least, this extreme rationality, can lead to insanity. "The sleep of reason produces monsters," as Goya said. Also highly instructive on this theme is "The Maniac", chapter two of G.K. Chesterton's book "Orthodoxy". This is from that chapter: "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." and "Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom."

In political terms, this extreme rationalism leading to madness was seen in the French Revolution and its aftermath in the 18th Century (theme of the Aubrey-Maturin novels) and its descendants, the Bolshevik and National Socialist revolutions in the 20th Century.

And, in "Wolfsberg", the heroine, in the sleep of reason, is again producing monsters: she calls up the wolf by whistling "Death and the Maiden" (p. 246. She whistles again on p. 249). "Naming calls" (i.e., naming the Devil calls the Devil), to use the familiar expression from the Aubrey-Maturin series (and also the name of one of PO'B's short stories not included in this collection). And, as in "The Passeur" (p. 61), whistling calls the wolf. More about the wolf in a moment.

One of the most memorable passages of the story comes when the heroine says, "I suppose I have not been knocked on the head and raped, with all that grass on my back? No, of course I have not: everything is perfectly intact. And I do so despise who are perpetually being raped, or almost raped, or in situations where they might have been raped -- trains, cabins, lifts, lonely woods -- the lot." (p. 248) This is a very strange statement: the defining aspect of rape for the victim is that it is involuntary, but here she treats it as something which is chosen, and in a sense it is, if one assumes an identity which is independent of the actual facts, and in this false identity one has not been knocked on the head (a euphemism for being killed in PO'B's sea novels) or raped if one does not chose to have been.

"[E]verything is perfectly intact" suggests virginity, but this may be a false virginity as part of the heroine's chosen false identity. The theme of false female virginity has also appeared earlier in the short stories: with Conchita in "Handmaiden" and in "The Chian Wine" with new brides putting pigeon's blood on their matrimonial sheets (p. 140) and with Halevy traveling four hundred miles for a statue of the Virgin Mary which does not exist (p. 144).

A double or false identity is a theme that PO'B uses throughout his writings: most completely in his novel "Richard Temple", but also considerably in the Aubrey-Maturin books, with the double agents and secret pasts of many of the characters. (PO'B is also familiar with double identities in his personal life.)

Now the wolf: a wolf appeared in "The Passeur" (which has many parallels to "Wolfsberg") and we identified it with Golgotha and National Socialism, among other things (see http://jfinnera.www1.50megs.com/Passeur.htm ). In "Handmaiden", we can also identify it with the "monster" from the "sleep of reason" and with Death (from the song "Death and the Maiden") and with The Big Bad Wolf from "Little Red Riding Hood". Note also that the wolf is "six feet long" (p. 250), i.e., the size of a man, and a tall man at that, perhaps "a big, heavy man" like The Walker (p.70).

Immediately before the final confrontation, the wolf cocks his leg, presumably to urinate. I see a few possible reasons for this: he exposes his penis, which confirms conclusively that he is male, and underscores the sexual menace to the heroine (of rape or seduction); he may be about to mark his territory (with the heroine inside his territory); and (delicate lissuns avert your eyes from the remainder of this sentence) the wolf urination advances the thoughts of the heroine (and thus the action of the story), as she thinks: wolf piss, lu-piss, lupus, canis lupus, Hugh Lupus.

Then there is the final confrontation itself, where the heroine throws the stone at the wolf. This is the great break with the template of Little Red Riding Hood. Red is eaten by the wolf (or saved by a woodcutter ex machina in other versions), but our heroine fights back (she awakens from the "somnalence of victimization", to use Lois's fine expression) and is perhaps rejecting all the symbolic meanings of the wolf as well, and is also perhaps now not going to advance mechanically to Hell.

And she realizes that the wolf is Hugh Lupus. We've seen the name Hugh before, back in "Not Liking to Pass the Road Again" (another story similar to "Wolfsberg"), who has his face bitten by a mad dog (p. 37): biting off his face would be symbolically removing his mask. And in "Wolfsberg", too, the mask is off, and, the wolf is exposed as Hugh Lupus, the heroine realizes who she is, and symbolically, the whole structure of Double Identity is collapsed, and identified as "hollow and false: false through and through". (p. 250)

John Finneran
(who is going on vacation and not checking e-mail from 1/12 - 1/23)