Limbo
First paperback edition, 1952
Limbo is Bernard Wolfe's only novel-length venture into science fiction, and it remains one of the most ambitious and genuinely strange works of American dystopian fiction. Published in 1952 by Random House, the same year Wolfe also published Really the Blues (his celebrated autobiography with jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow), it has spent most of its existence in undeserved obscurity, overshadowed by the British dystopian novels it rivals in scope and seriousness.
The novel is set in 1990, eighteen years after a nuclear war reduced North America to a rump state called the Inland Strip. Dr. Martine, a neurosurgeon who fled the war by crashing his plane on an uncharted Indian Ocean island, returns to find a society organized around "Immob": a movement whose adherents voluntarily amputate their own limbs and replace them with prosthetics, on the theory that literal disarmament prevents war. What Martine discovers, to his horror, is that Immob grew in part from a journal he wrote during the war and left behind, a notebook full of bitter, sardonic speculation that subsequent generations took for a manifesto.
The book is dense, punning, philosophically overloaded, and deliberately excessive, closer in spirit to Tristram Shandy than to Orwell. Wolfe draws on Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, Freud, Dostoevsky, and Max Weber, and the novel's afterword is essentially an annotated bibliography of its own intellectual debts. It is a genuinely difficult book, and that difficulty is part of its point.
Softcover. First Paperback Edition, First Printing. Ace, A-3 ($0.75). New York: Ace Books, 1952. #11248.
Unread, near fine copy.
The novel is set in 1990, eighteen years after a nuclear war reduced North America to a rump state called the Inland Strip. Dr. Martine, a neurosurgeon who fled the war by crashing his plane on an uncharted Indian Ocean island, returns to find a society organized around "Immob": a movement whose adherents voluntarily amputate their own limbs and replace them with prosthetics, on the theory that literal disarmament prevents war. What Martine discovers, to his horror, is that Immob grew in part from a journal he wrote during the war and left behind, a notebook full of bitter, sardonic speculation that subsequent generations took for a manifesto.
The book is dense, punning, philosophically overloaded, and deliberately excessive, closer in spirit to Tristram Shandy than to Orwell. Wolfe draws on Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, Freud, Dostoevsky, and Max Weber, and the novel's afterword is essentially an annotated bibliography of its own intellectual debts. It is a genuinely difficult book, and that difficulty is part of its point.
Softcover. First Paperback Edition, First Printing. Ace, A-3 ($0.75). New York: Ace Books, 1952. #11248.
Unread, near fine copy.
Additional Details
Bernard Wolfe is one of those writers whose biography threatens to overwhelm his fiction, and in Limbo's case the biography is worth knowing. Wolfe (1915–1985) graduated from Yale with a degree in psychology, served briefly as Leon Trotsky's bodyguard in Mexico (he had left the position by the time of the assassination in 1940), and survived the Depression by ghostwriting Billy Rose's newspaper column and, by his own account, writing eleven pornographic novels in eleven months. He was, as Harlan Ellison put it, one of the most remarkable original writers of the twentieth century, and he was, for most of that century, almost entirely unknown.
Limbo was Wolfe's first novel. Random House published it in 1952 to mixed reviews and modest sales, and it has been in and out of print ever since, kept alive largely by word of mouth among science fiction readers who found it unlike anything else in the genre. A 2016 Gollancz edition brought it back into print with new introductions by Ellison and critic David Pringle, but it has never found the broad audience its ambition merits.
The novel's central conceit, voluntary amputation as a form of pacifism, is disturbing in ways that resist easy assimilation, and that resistance is deliberate. Wolfe was not interested in the clean cautionary fables that Orwell and Huxley produced. Limbo is messier, funnier, more psychoanalytically obsessed, and more willing to implicate its narrator in the catastrophe he describes. Dr. Martine is not Winston Smith or Bernard Marx. He is complicit. The ideology he finds repugnant grew partly from his own pen, from ideas he wrote down in a spirit of cutting irony that future readers took at face value.
The Immob ideology itself is a satire of mid-century pacifism's susceptibility to sloganeering. Wolfe draws a parallel with the Oxford Peace Pledge movement of the 1930s, whose signatories in many cases went on to fight in World War II. Immob does not actually prevent war; it produces a new arms race dressed in the language of disarmament, with the rare metal columbium (needed to manufacture prosthetics) replacing uranium as the resource both superpowers covertly compete to control. The structure of great-power competition persists beneath the ideology meant to dissolve it. Wolfe was writing in 1950 and 1951, at the height of the Korean War and the early Cold War.
What keeps Limbo from being a simple satirical novel, and what makes it genuinely strange, is its parallel narrative strand on Tapioca Island, where Martine has spent eighteen years performing lobotomies on violent natives as a humane continuation of their traditional practice of mandunga, or devil-chasing. The island sections are not comic relief; they complicate the book's central argument. Mandunga and Immob are presented as variations on the same impulse: the desire to cut out of a human being whatever makes him dangerous, and the willingness to call the result a cure. Martine's long relationship with Ooda, a Mandunji woman who resists the village's enforced placidity, provides the novel's most intimate scenes and its most direct engagement with the Freudian argument running throughout: that aggression and desire cannot be surgically separated, and that the attempt to eliminate one always damages the other.
Wolfe draws heavily and openly on Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and Its Discontents, on Norbert Wiener's cybernetics (EMSIAC, the military computer that in the pre-war sections commandeers Martine's plane against his will, is the novel's most vivid embodiment of this), and on the figure of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, whose perverse insistence on suffering as the precondition of consciousness shadows the whole book. The afterword, in which Wolfe catalogs his intellectual sources, is remarkable for its candor. He describes Limbo as "a grab bag of ideas that were more or less around at the mid-century mark," and says he is writing about "the overtone and undertow of now, in the guise of 1990 because it would take decades for a year like 1950 to be milked of its implications."
David Pringle, in his 1985 introduction, called Limbo the closest American equivalent to Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jonathan Lethem described it as a straight arrow pointing from the British cautionary dystopias to the postwar American absurdism of Catch-22 and Philip K. Dick. Both descriptions are accurate and neither is quite sufficient. Limbo is funnier than Orwell, more philosophically explicit than Huxley, and more formally experimental than either. In Wolfe's own formulation, it's a novel that wanted to be a Tristram Shandy for the atom bomb age. That it has not taken its place alongside those books says more about the difficulty of its pleasures than about its quality.
Limbo was Wolfe's first novel. Random House published it in 1952 to mixed reviews and modest sales, and it has been in and out of print ever since, kept alive largely by word of mouth among science fiction readers who found it unlike anything else in the genre. A 2016 Gollancz edition brought it back into print with new introductions by Ellison and critic David Pringle, but it has never found the broad audience its ambition merits.
The novel's central conceit, voluntary amputation as a form of pacifism, is disturbing in ways that resist easy assimilation, and that resistance is deliberate. Wolfe was not interested in the clean cautionary fables that Orwell and Huxley produced. Limbo is messier, funnier, more psychoanalytically obsessed, and more willing to implicate its narrator in the catastrophe he describes. Dr. Martine is not Winston Smith or Bernard Marx. He is complicit. The ideology he finds repugnant grew partly from his own pen, from ideas he wrote down in a spirit of cutting irony that future readers took at face value.
The Immob ideology itself is a satire of mid-century pacifism's susceptibility to sloganeering. Wolfe draws a parallel with the Oxford Peace Pledge movement of the 1930s, whose signatories in many cases went on to fight in World War II. Immob does not actually prevent war; it produces a new arms race dressed in the language of disarmament, with the rare metal columbium (needed to manufacture prosthetics) replacing uranium as the resource both superpowers covertly compete to control. The structure of great-power competition persists beneath the ideology meant to dissolve it. Wolfe was writing in 1950 and 1951, at the height of the Korean War and the early Cold War.
What keeps Limbo from being a simple satirical novel, and what makes it genuinely strange, is its parallel narrative strand on Tapioca Island, where Martine has spent eighteen years performing lobotomies on violent natives as a humane continuation of their traditional practice of mandunga, or devil-chasing. The island sections are not comic relief; they complicate the book's central argument. Mandunga and Immob are presented as variations on the same impulse: the desire to cut out of a human being whatever makes him dangerous, and the willingness to call the result a cure. Martine's long relationship with Ooda, a Mandunji woman who resists the village's enforced placidity, provides the novel's most intimate scenes and its most direct engagement with the Freudian argument running throughout: that aggression and desire cannot be surgically separated, and that the attempt to eliminate one always damages the other.
Wolfe draws heavily and openly on Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and Its Discontents, on Norbert Wiener's cybernetics (EMSIAC, the military computer that in the pre-war sections commandeers Martine's plane against his will, is the novel's most vivid embodiment of this), and on the figure of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, whose perverse insistence on suffering as the precondition of consciousness shadows the whole book. The afterword, in which Wolfe catalogs his intellectual sources, is remarkable for its candor. He describes Limbo as "a grab bag of ideas that were more or less around at the mid-century mark," and says he is writing about "the overtone and undertow of now, in the guise of 1990 because it would take decades for a year like 1950 to be milked of its implications."
David Pringle, in his 1985 introduction, called Limbo the closest American equivalent to Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jonathan Lethem described it as a straight arrow pointing from the British cautionary dystopias to the postwar American absurdism of Catch-22 and Philip K. Dick. Both descriptions are accurate and neither is quite sufficient. Limbo is funnier than Orwell, more philosophically explicit than Huxley, and more formally experimental than either. In Wolfe's own formulation, it's a novel that wanted to be a Tristram Shandy for the atom bomb age. That it has not taken its place alongside those books says more about the difficulty of its pleasures than about its quality.
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