(urth) Boatman as Inire

[John Watkins]

Dammit, Lee.

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 10:32 AM, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> I lean toward him being a version of Inire because of the physical
> resemblance of course.
>
Fair enough, I think.


> Also, his folksy way of speaking, similar to Rudesind's.


This is a great point if Rudesind in Inire, which is not established.


> Then there is his attraction to
> very young women (Dorcas being about 14 when they married).


I'm not sure about this.  14 is "very young" in our culture but is of course
normal marriagable age for a woman in the majority of human history.
Moreover, I always thought the Inire/little girls thing was supposed to be a
Lewis Carroll thing.  As we've discussed, Carroll's reputation is somewhat
unearned, but assuming Wolfe bought into the general depiction, Carroll's
special area of interest was in prepubescent girls.  I'm not convinced we're
meant to take Inire's interest as a sexual one, either.

(Dorcas's youth seems to me to be an echo of the Blessed Mother, whose
attributes are of course mostly pushed in Catherine's direction, and
possibly a sign that Wolfe conflated the women resurrected by Christ and St.
Peter in order to create the character.)


>   Mythological Charon was the
> son of Erebus. Perhaps the son of Urth's Erebus is a boatman also.


This is the part that makes me say "dammit, Lee."  It isn't established that
Inire is the son of Erebus or has any such connection at all, or that he has
any connection with Charon.  Instead, in the last few weeks we've developed
a somewhat logical connection between Fenrir and Inire.  Fenrir and Charon
are both underworld residents, but that's about it in terms of connections
between them.

What we have here is speculation ("Inire is the son of Erebus") put forth as
a buttress for somewhat less-wild speculation ("Inire is the boatman.")  If
this argument is to be made, it should be made in the opposite direction:
"If Inire were the boatman, what would it say about his connection with
Erebus?", or "Given the mythological connection between Erebus and the
boatman Charon, and the resemblance between Charon and our boatman, do any
new interpretations of the Book suggest themselves?"

The thing that's great about this list is that those are really good
questions that I wouldn't have asked if it weren't for you pointed out the
connection.

Off the cuff, to me, it suggests that Erebus is part of Severian's family
tree in some sense, possibly metaphorical.  The boatman, I think we agree,
is Dorcas's husband and therefore likely Severian's grandfather and Ouen's
father.  We have no need to make him Inire to speculate on whether or not
the boatman is the son of Erebus, literally or figuratively.  The boatman
doesn't seem especially spooky and doesn't seem too connected to Erebus or
Abaia, but he is connected with Severian's family and water, and, if I
recall correctly, is hanging out right about when Juturna shows up the first
time.  Juturna is both possibly Severian's sister and possibly Abaia's
"daughter-bride"--presumably these designations are mutually exclusive
unless she is Abaia's "daughter" in a non-literal sense or is some kind of
compound being like the ones we encounter regularly in Long and Short Sun.

But maybe it is true that Severian and Severa-that-was are part of a family
tree meddled in in some manner by Erebus.  Perhaps this meddling made
Severian and Severa particularly accepting of further meddling--maybe it
made Severian an especially good candidate for New Sun status and made
Severa an especially good candidate for undine status.


> There are just too many
> coincidences and mentions of "manatees" at the Lake Of Birds for me to
> think the boatman
> was a simple, uninvolved by-stander.
>
> I agree that there's at least one boatman-connected mystery (he's
Severian's grandfather).


> In UotNS I think Wolfe tells us why Severian cannot openly reveal any of
> Father Inire's
> disguises (if indeed he does recognize them). When Severian realizes and
> expresses that the
> hairy little guy helping him on the ship is the same same being as the
> shaggy apport
> creature, the little guy, Zak, takes off running. Severian then realizes
> that one of the
> deepest instincts of a shape-shifting being would be to flee when the
> disguise has been
> penetrated.


If Severian "then realizes" this, then it wasn't his motivation when he
wrote Book of the New Sun.  He had composed it and put it in Ultan's library
before boarding the ship.

I will point out here that it is not established that Inire is a
shapeshifter.  In fact, him being a shapeshifter conflicts slightly with
what we know about him--that he employs disguises, and the one disguise we
know about is also that of a bent old man--and with your own argument that
the physical resemblance between the boatman and Inire is a reason to think
they're the same.  But of course if Inire was a shapeshifter he'd probably
employ that skill to look different when in disguise.


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