(urth) Dionysus, the Mausoleum

[Son of Witz]

On Dec 21, 2010, at 8:45 AM, Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com> wrote:

>> 
> 
> Lee Berman wrote:
> 
> 
>> Hm. If this were simply an American tale I could see how Severian might simply be the humble son of
>> commoners Ouen and Catherine who managed to make good. We like that sort of thing.  But since
>> the story seems to draw upon Medieval, Greek and Roman themes I guess there is more to Severian's
>> lineage than is openly acknowledged. Be it Arthur or Aragorn, Theseus or Hercules, that noble/divine
>> blood will out. (Even Jesus needed linkage to the House of David, yes?)
> 
> 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.) 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. 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).
> 
> 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. At the end of COTA he proposes that
> both the face in the mausoleum and Apu-Punchau are the time-travelling
> 'first Severian'. He is, as it turns out, wrong about Apu-Punchau, who
> is himself; and he may be wrong about the mausoleum as well; but I
> take it he's right that both are time-travelling versions of himself.
> We aren't told the details of what happened with the mausoleum, but we
> do know he intends to make more trips to the past.
> 


I'm pretty much in sync with this layout, Lee.

Can someone bust out the RttW mausoleum quotation? I don't have the text around and I've only read it once. Does it say it is Typhon's tomb, or his family's specifically?

In the initial descriptions of the Necropolis in Shadow, Severian says "Our necropolis is said to be the oldest in Nessus. That is certainly false, but the very existence of the error testifies to a real antiquity, though the autarchs were not buried there even when the Citadel was their stronghold, and the great families - then as now - preferred to inter their long-limbed dead in vaults on their own estates."

Autarchs and great families were not burried there.

Then there is the *clue* about the false assertion of the age of the necropolis.
When Severian returns to the Citadel in UotNS, he is marched as a prisoner from the river, with steps much like where he swam, then up a wooded hill, then, to his surprise, to the Curtain Wall of the Citadel and the Sally Port later known as the Corpse Door.  The Necropolis is not described at all, and if it was there, Severian would have recognized his location before the shock of the Wall, which he initially thinks is the Wall of Nessus. This suggests that the necropolis was either not founded yet, or hadn't yet spread that far.  The mention of the error compells me to think there is no necropolis yet, though the narrator does not have the "Citadel Again" experience from UotNS, so if it is a hint, I don't know how Severian knows yet. Perhaps it is just a presentiment of his past-future.

~Witz



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