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

[brunians at brunians.org]

A torturer insists upon being told the truth, and has various means to
ensure that he is being told the truth.

These seem to me to be useful qualifications for a successful monarch.

.



> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>