(urth) Dionysus, the Mausoleum

[Son of Witz]

This is getting really interesting...
Good post, James.
I don't know the Long-Short lineage stuff, so I can't judge yet.
This bit you wrote lit my head up, can you elaborate?
""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. "

I would love for that to hold water. How is he related to the book in your view? I really don't know the Classics well enough to spot certain heroic analogies here. What was that about him being Frog or suchlike?

~witz

On Dec 21, 2010, at 9:19 AM, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
>> 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
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