(urth) Dionysus, the Mausoleum

[James Wynn]

> I think Severian is the son of Ouen and Catherine (but that Catherine
> isn't a commoner). If he were not, Wolfe really would be leading us up
> a garden path. (We know of Catherine only through Ouen; and Ouen only
> seems significant because of his similarity to Severian, both
> physically and in powers of memory,  so if they're not Severian's
> biological parents, that whole episode becomes pointless.)

It's not pointless. It connects Severian to Dorcas. But Severian helping 
his biological father find his mother, but never finding his his 
biological mother strikes me as really weird story-telling. Wolfe thinks 
the The Book of the Short Sun would be "lame" if, once we know the Rajan 
can travel to Urth, he does not meet with Severian. But it seems fine to 
him that his mother is just a name? I don't buy it. If people are 
suspicious, they should be.

> I think we
> are probably meant to see other relations of Sefverian turning up
> through the series, and revealing more about his family - though I'm
> not sure who they all are; the moral, I suspect, is that Severian is
> linked to many kinds and classes of people in the Commonwealth, thus
> illustrating Malrubius' claim that in him the disparate tendencies of
> Urth have been reconciled. He may well be descended from Typhon -
> indeed if Typhon has left descendants at all, he probably is - but
> making him the son of Typhon, through cloning or time travel or the
> like, messes this story up.

Now we're getting into matters of taste. If I read this novel 
"straight", I would hate it. The first time I read it in fact (it was my 
first Wolfe book) I told the guy who recommended it that Wolfe is a 
so-so writer but an amazing creator of worlds. Then I read The Fifth 
Head of Cerberus and it completely changed my reading of "New Sun". I 
realized that I had approached the first book all wrong. I told my 
friend that my opinion had changed. I now considered Wolfe possibly the 
best science fiction writer period.

If Severian is understood as somehow directly associated with the myths 
in the Brown Book, it restores a scattered unfocused unedited brain dump 
back to a comprehensible narrative.


> That he's the father of Typhon is not
> problematic in the same way (though it would have to be reconciled
> somehow with Typhon's claim that he he was not born).

I'm curious why you think this would not "mess the story up" as well.

> As for the mausoleum; I take it that this is the tomb of a Severian
> who has already experienced the events of BOTNS, and has travelled
> back to the past for some reason. The emblem of rose, ship and
> fountain certainly suggests this.

I think that for the Rose, Ship, and Fountain to have NOT originally had 
to do intentionally with Severian --but only adopted-- is implied by the 
overall thesis throughout the book regarding symbols and their meaning. 
It is also a favorite Wolfean trope. Gerry brought up Peace this 
morning. In that story, Louis Black create fraudulent book. But in 
following it, Weer ultimately finds the treasure. In The Fifth Head of 
Cerberus, it is the false anthropologist who discovers and writes the 
truth about the abos. The false Horn completes Horn's mission. The 
mistake becomes authoritative. The lie is more true that anyone 
imagines. Probably, you see no similarity in these instances, but each 
time I encounter them, they appear to me to be characteristically Wolfean.

u+16b9