(urth) Questions . . .

[Adam Thornton]

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