(urth) Questions . . .
Adam Thornton
adam at io.com
Tue Nov 27 07:55:39 PST 2007
On Nov 27, 2007, at 6:27 AM, <thalassocrat at nym.hush.com>
<thalassocrat at nym.hush.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:42:17 +1100 Eric Ortlund
> <eortlund at briercrest.ca> wrote:
>> Dear Friends,
>>
>> Forgive me again if I'm repeating old questions, but perhaps some
>> of you
>> can help with the following . . .
>>
>> 1) What is the larger significance of the story Sev reads to Jonas
>
>> about
>> the man fleshed from dreams? I get that it's a re-working of the
>> Theseus and Minotaur story, but is it anything more than an
>> entertaining
>> interlude? Is it some kind of commentary on the surrounding
>> narrative -
>> or Jonas' story? Severian finishes the story with a dismissive
>> comment
>> about it being an idle tale, but I'm suspicious something more is
>> going
>> on here.
>
> I think this fable might be partly a conflation of the Theseus myth
> with a story which is in fact Jonas' own.
>
> Something like this: The enclave of magicians is a research
> institute; the magical son is a robot; the story is perhaps a dim
> remembrance of a time when Abaia or his ilk began to oppress or
> threaten Urth, and humanity launched missions into space against
> them, crewed by robots. Jonas' voyage was one of those missions.
>
It's also a Borges riff; I think the story in question is "The
Circular Ruins." Of course there's also the one about the Minotaur
which I thought was the source for Seventeen, having forgotten that
"fourteen" rather than "seventeen" was "infinity" in "The House Of
Asterion." There's a lot of Borges going on in the first couple
books, especially.
Adam
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