(urth) Sister? (was: Re: Severian's sister/ancestry - query.)
Jane Delawney
jane_delawney at sky.com
Fri Aug 6 18:14:44 PDT 2010
Sorry for monkeying with the subject line again, I want to get my own
posts sent back to me and this is the only way I can get Sky's mail
server to do this. And apologies *again* if you have heard this a few
too many times already.
On 06/08/10 04:45, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 8/5/2010 8:16 PM, Jane Delawney wrote:
>> So ... why on Urth, with the power and authority invested in him as
>> Autarch, does Severian not require access to the records of the Seekers
>> of Truth and Penitence, and thus learn beyond any doubt just who are his
>> parents, his grandparents, and his sister? The flip answer is of course
>> 'because GW does not want us to know', but I hope for more than that.
>> Sev could have asked, and he would have been obeyed. He doesn't ask.
>
>
> I believe he does open the records, which is how he knows his mother's
> name and hair color, which Ouen confirms, and that he does it almost
> immediately upon his ascension, before Dorcas can get over her grief
> of the boatman and flee their house in the ruins.
Dunno. Seems to me that Sev has had sufficient information prior to
becoming Autarch to at least be able to make an informed guess that
Dorcas was probably his grandmother and Ouen his father. Opening the
records would have provided confirmation for sure, but did he really
need that to take the actions he did ie. compel Ouen to care for Dorcas
(since he knows that he (Severian) would be the last person D. would
ever want to see again after her return to Nessus).
Whether this is the case or not though - one is still left to wonder
why, given that he simply must have been able to demand the relevant
information from the Guild, Severian still does not know (even at the
end of UOTNS he does not know - one might think that by that time, both
Sev and GW have passed beyond worrying about it, but if Juturna is in
the mix that is not the case at all, is it?) who his *sister* is. GW
spends altogether too much time and effort setting Severian up as one of
twins (or at the very least of a brother-sister pair with appropriate
names) for this to be an irrelevant or insignificant question, surely?
I gather that in one of GW's later works (which I have not read) there
is a scene set within the Matachin Tower which involves Severian, a
'cacogen', and Merryn (at the time either apprentice or 'journeywoman'
Witch) and that during this scene Merryn claims that Severian is her
brother. This may be a generic term (Severian refers to 'the Witches,
our sisters' in 'Shadow'; here the usage appears to be generic, though
for any individual Seeker or apprentice there is the possibility that
this term is literally true, given what we are told about how these two
guilds obtain recruits) but it's possibly not. Merryn I know has been
fingered as Severa by more than one commentator, but so have quite a few
other characters (Juturna, the mandragora, Jolenta, and so on and so
forth). If Sev as Autarch can be assumed to have confirmed his earlier
suspicions and deductions about Dorcas, Ouen et al., then why,
apparently, has he not succeeded in discovering further information
about his sister?
I still think this is a major lacuna and pretty strange.
jd
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