(urth) Torturers? (was: Re: Ymar The Almost Just)
Jane Delawney
jane_delawney at sky.com
Wed Jul 28 16:40:12 PDT 2010
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
More information about the Urth
mailing list