(urth) Severian as reverse Christ (or something)
JBarach at aol.com
JBarach at aol.com
Thu Nov 20 14:40:10 PST 2008
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_
(http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm)
John
**************One site has it all. Your email accounts, your social networks,
and the things you love. Try the new AOL.com
today!(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212962939x1200825291/aol?redir=http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp
%26icid=aolcom40vanity%26ncid=emlcntaolcom00000001)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20081120/6bdca7c0/attachment-0005.htm>
More information about the Urth
mailing list