“The Green Wall Said” (Wolfe)
Gene Wolfe’s “The Green Wall Said” (first published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds in 1967) is his first really cryptic story, and what follows contains SPOILERS.
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There are five people in a room, apparently abducted by aliens in a flying saucer (maybe). Gradually, we recognize who they are. One is a Jewish accountant with six children. Another is a Red Cross helicopter medic snatched out of the Vietnam War. The third is a nun. The fourth is an Australian doctor who, judging by what he says, seems to be involved with a clinic for the aboriginals. The fifth is clearly a prisoner, but we learn from something he says that he has been involved in some sort of cancer program.
There is a green wall with bits of a message appearing on it, which (put together) reads as follows:
This is a meeting / a symposium / call this a council / you will not be harmed / are you afraid / nothing will harm you / let us explain / we are an ancient race / our laws are just / you may depend upon us / to always function rationally / we had begun our evolution as / intelligent beings / during your planet’s / carboniferous age / we need / information a technique / if we are to / survive longer / as a race / because we cannot as all of / you do sacrifice / as individuals all / our lives for the kind / and now our springs / of being fail / how do you do it / how do you do it—do you do it
The people don’t know why they’ve been selected. There are one woman and four men. All of them speak English. As for religion, the accountant is Jewish, the medic nominally Baptist, the nun (of course) Roman Catholic, the doctor Church of England, and the prisoner, after his incarceration, has recently become Seventh Day Adventist. There doesn’t seem to be much diversity.
And then, before much else happens, the story ends. It doesn’t appear that any of the five has read the messages on the wall.
What are we supposed to make of all of this?
Wolfe has given us some clues. First, he has allowed us to identify who these people are and what they do, so that bit of information is likely important. Second, he has deliberately brought up the fact that four of them are Christian — broadly defined to include Seventh Day Adventists — and the other is a Jew; there are no Buddhists or Muslims or Hindus, and no atheists or unbelievers here. Third, he has ruled out the idea that this is meant to be a group of diverse people. If they clue to why they have been selected is not diversity, then, perhaps we ought to look for what they have in common.
And the Green Wall indicates what they have in common: “we cannot as all of / you do sacrifice / as individuals all / our lives for the kind.” That is to say, what all five of these are doing is sacrificing themselves as individuals, not as a one-time action but throughout their lives, for others, for “the kind,” for human beings.
Consider again who these people are and what they have been doing. The nun has given up marriage and family for a different calling. The medic constantly risks his life to rescue and take care of wounded soldiers. The doctor runs a clinic, not a clinic that is going to make him a lot of money but one that’s out in the Australian outback to help the aboriginals. The prisoner, it turns out, has gone from living for himself (robbing gas stations) to participating (it seems) in an experimental cancer treatment program. He is probably dying of cancer himself, but he is willing to undergo this treatment because it might benefit others. And the accountant? He isn’t risking his life, but he has six kids and all he thinks about right now isn’t what might happen to him. His concern is who is going to take care of the children?
The beings questioning them say that they have been intelligent long before humans have existed. They assure their captives that they are rational. But they cannot understand the people they’ve selected.
Indeed, it is not strictly rational to have six kids and focus your life on caring for them. It is not rational, on the other hand, to forego marriage and children to serve God and others, as the nun has. It is not rational to risk your life as the Red Cross medic does or, in a different way, as the prisoner is doing by receiving a treatment that might even end up harming or killing him (or not receiving a treatment that might help him). It is not rational to devote yourself, as the doctor does, to the care of others (perhaps others who are viewed as primitive, but also others who can’t benefit you in return).
After all, survival of the fittest — survival of me — is the rational approach, isn’t it? So what would make these people behave so irrationally? And yet it appears that this is precisely why the human race, unlike these other “superior” beings, continues on and even thrives. It does so, not in spite of but precisely as a result of such irrational behavior? “How do you do it?”
How do they do it? Wolfe draws our attention to religion, specifically Christianity, though he includes a Jewish character as well, so that the answer to “How do you do it?” might be “Judeo-Christian ethics.”
But in a richer sense, surely the answer is love, love that has a biblical basis: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friend.” Love — self-giving, self-sacrificing love — is the irrationality that preserves and promotes the human race, prompting people to lay down their lives for others, to risk their lives for others, to give up things to help others, to give up even marriage and family in order to serve, or just to have children and care for them.
“How do you do it” the Green Wall asks and then adds “Do you do it.” As Marc Aramini says, “The stutter seems a question rather than a malfunction.” In fact, the five people in the room may not know the answer to the question “How do you do it?” because they may not even recognize that they are doing it (“Do you do it?”), that they are acting in love, sacrificing themselves for others. And even at the end, the prisoner is still thinking of giving himself for others: “I wonder if they got cancer research here too.”
Sheer rationality, like that of these hyper-intelligent beings, can’t conceive of self-sacrificing love. The rational things for an individual to do is to preserve his own existence at all costs. For that matter, an atheist or a nihilist — and Wolfe calls Moorcock a nihilist in his introduction to the story in Young Wolfe — doesn’t have a basis for this sort of self-sacrificing love (and Wolfe was amused that Moorcock took the story anyway).