(urth) Severian as reverse Christ (or something)

[Craig Brewer]

You've got to admit that's about a slippery a statement as they come:

"I wanted Severian to have to face at  least the possibility that being an agency of pain and death is not  necessarily an evil thing. "

Severian had to "face," not accept, "the possibility," not the necessity, that causing pain is "not necessarily an evil thing," which, of course, doesn't say that it's good, only "not evil."

Even when he talks about violence and authority before, he never says that it's justfiable for people in authority to use violence. He only says that people who find themselves in positions of authority often find that it's necessary. That statement absolutely refuses to reveal a moral judgment on whether necessity makes it "okay."

To me, the ambiguity is the point. The most fascinating thing about Severian is that he is a good man in a bad world. That means that it's impossible for him to be totally good, but it doesn't remove the imperative to be good.

Just because something evil is necessary doesn't make it good. The problem of being a moral human being is learning how to live under impossible conditions like that, and Severian is interesting to me for precisely that reason.





________________________________
From: "JBarach at aol.com" <JBarach at aol.com>
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 4:40:10 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Severian as reverse Christ (or something)

John writes:
 
> Wolfe makes it pretty clear, I think, that he finds 
Severian's
> profession to be repugnant.  
 
And yet Wolfe also says this (and I've put the most relevant comment in 
bold):
 
LM: Where was it that you knew you were heading when you began The Book of the New Sun?

Wolfe: I knew I wanted Severian  to be banished and then to return to the Guild in a position of such authority  that the Guild would be forced to make him a Master of the Guild. And I wanted  to have Severian be forced to confront the problem of Thecla and the problem  of torture and the role of human pain and misery. At that time I had not yet  read The Magus, so the thought didn't come from there, but I was very  conscious of the horror not only of being tortured but of being forced to be a  torturer or executioner. I didn't want my readers to be able to dismiss  violence and pain with some platitudes about "Oh, violence—how terrible!" It's  very easy to say how terrible it is to beat a man with a whip, or lock him up  for 30 years of his life, or to execute him. These are indeed awful things.  But when you are actually in authority, you find out that sometimes it's  absolutely necessary for you to take certain distasteful actions. 

LM: Severian makes the point somewhere that if he didn't  execute some of the people he does, they would be out killing people  themselves....

Wolfe: And he's right. What are you going to do  with someone like John Wayne Gacy—who used to live about eight miles from  where we're sitting right now—if you're not going to be willing to lock him up  for the rest of his life? If you let him out, he's almost certain to start  killing more innocent people. I wanted Severian to have to face at  least the possibility that being an agency of pain and death is not  necessarily an evil thing. That's one recognition he must come to  grips with when he decides to leave a knife in Thecla's cell to help her  commit suicide. He's partially responsible for the blood he sees seeping from  under her cell door, just as every member of a society is responsible for the  blood shed by people it decides to execute. Of course, when Severian later  receives a letter from Thecla telling him the suicide was a trick permitting  her to be freed unobtrusively, that creates all sorts of other dilemmas for  him—and for me
 as well. I had started out assuming I was writing a novella of  about 40,000 words whose title was to have been "The Feast of Saint  Catherine," but now I began to see this material had greater possibilities.  The writer has a problem when ideas, characters, and so forth don't seem to  come, or when they aren't good enough when they do come. But when they're too  good and too numerous, he has another. But the time I had finished with The  Shadow of the Torturer, I had completed an entire novel but Severian was  hardly started. Instead of winding up the plot, I had begun half a dozen  others which needed to be worked out. Eventually I decided I needed to write a  trilogy to be able to develop everything sufficiently; and when the third book  turned out to be almost twice as long as the first two combined, I finally  expanded things into a tetralogy. When I was done, I discovered that I had  arrived where I had set out for—but the trip to that place was
 very different  than what I had expected.

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm
 
 
John




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