(urth) Torturers? (was: Re: Ymar The Almost Just)

[Jane Delawney]

On 19/07/10 14:04, António Pedro Marques wrote:
> I put that in the subject because it's one of the things that made me 
> laugh when I first read the books.
It's kind of like the medieval Bulgarian (I think?) monarch who was 
known as 'Theophylact the Unbearable'!  May have gotten the country 
wrong there; for those who want to check,  Theophylact is referenced in 
Stephen Runciman's 'The Medieval Manichee'.
>
> Wasn't Ymar a torturer? 
Uh no, he wasn't. At least, not in the way Severian is a torturer. Ymar 
was an apprentice in the very earliest days of the guild, when it is 
remembered that the Towers are actually spacecraft, though also accepted 
that they are craft that due to circumstances will never be able to 
venture into space and have already been re-purposed to some extent 
(what will later be Severian's Matachin Tower is known as 'the hulk', 
for instance). The function that Ymar and his seniors seem to fulfill 
here is not that of torturer, but of gaoler. I think it is more 
appropriate to speak of Ymar as an apprentice gaoler rather than an 
apprentice torturer.

To expand: There is no suggestion in the relevant passages in UOTNS that 
Ymar's organization is a 'guild' in the way that the goldsmiths, 
upholsterers, witches, curators, beast-masters, bombardiers (matrosses), 
healers, torturers, jewellers (of whom the cloisonne-makers appear to be 
a division), whatever are 'guilds' in Severian's time (nor indeed that 
any of these guilds are in existence in anything like their later 
forms); Ymar's crew are more like a military formation, perhaps 
comparable to military police responsible for a prison. The Conciliator 
is imprisoned, but there is no suggestion that I can recall that he is 
liable to be tortured as a punishment (though he probably thought he 
might well be executed - MPs do that on occasion, without necessarily 
becoming 'torturers' in the process).

Having said that, there's textual evidence that Ymar's organisation both 
is, and is not the same guild as Severian's.  Ymar's "guild" or military 
formation accepts both men and women, even has a female boss - actually 
it's probably this unpleasant boss who is ultimately responsible for men 
and women being separated by Ymar as Autarch into torturers and witches, 
ie. for the Autarchial decision which gives birth to the Seekers of 
Truth and Penitence (and of course to their sister guild, the Witches) 
as Severian knows them.

I know that Sev speaks of the historical cruelty of female guild-members 
and their predilection to go beyond the sentences handed out by the 
courts, and states that this is the reason for the absence of  female 
torturers and also for the handing over of female children to be raised 
by the witches instead - but this in itself does not prove that the 
primary function of the pre-separation "guild" was torture. There's 
plenty of opportunity in running a gaol to go beyond judicial sentences, 
if you are the sole boss and not subject to all that much scrutiny. 
Severian himself discovers this during his brief tenure as Lictor of 
Thrax - though to his credit he chose the opposite path, and did what he 
could to mitigate the miserable lot of the Vincula prisoners so that 
their confinement would provide the exact punishment prescribed, no more 
and no less.

JD