(urth) Hut/Ultan's Library/Catherine

James Wynn crushtv at gmail.com
Wed Apr 8 08:20:32 PDT 2009


>James, I really admire the insights you bring to this topic. 
>I am curious, though--if Severian is a clone of one of
>Typhon's children, what is Ouen's function? 
>Just a red herring?

I would presume that it would have to be a given in that case that Ouen is a clone too (given his resemblance to Sev), and that Dorcas is Ouen's birth mother and Ouen is likely the husband of Sev's birth mother. This seems the most obvious route to Dorcas becoming Sev's "grandmother".

Remember that Mucor was the "granddaughter" of Marble and that the Raja said Jahlee "could be" the sister of Hide (or maybe Hoof--I can't remember right now) and that Number Five called Maitre his father and Jeanine his "aunt". All this is fair warning that that familial titles in a Wolfe story should be read with suspicion or at least laxity. There are mythical/theological reasons IMO that lead Wolfe to choose to make familial titles to be true/untrue in his stories.

Why would an important clone like Ouen be a commoner in Nessus? There were dozens (or hundreds) of Number Fives running around in The Fifth Head of Cerberus. If Ouen was married to Sev's birth mother, I guess it implies a more deliberate plot, however. Further, once you move down this corridor, the possibility cannot be ignored that all of Sev's patrilineal heritage are clone's of himself, so that amnesiac Dorcas found it very easy to take Sev as her lover. But all this, is not part of Don's theory. It is just a potential logical extension of it.

J.
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