(urth) traveling north

[Matthew Weber]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>wrote:

>
>
> But I see two possibilities in addition to Mr. Wolfe's starting with the
> idea that Urth was in our future and retconning it into a past universe.
>  One is the apparently Brunian possibility that different universes and
> iterations will have overwhelming similarities for reasons we don't
> understand (unless Josh does).  In that case many or all of the universes
> have the names "Robert" and "Marie" at some point ("Marie" coming from
> "Miriam" even though there was no Mary Mother of Jesus).  Even the saints'
> names could be names of exemplary people who were equivalent to the saints
> of our world.
>
>
I had always thought that Robert and Marie was a reference to some other
work that I just wasn't getting.


> This would also explain why Severian learned that a constitutional
> representative democracy like ours was the highest form of government--his
> world once had equivalents to our governments of that type, even if none of
> the history we know about was anything like that.  (Which would throw an
> interesting light on the argument about Jesus' effect, if his universe
> passed through our stage and returned to widespread tyranny and slavery, as
> ours could.)
>
>
I'm not sure that Severian really learns that a constitutional
representative democracy is the highest form of government.  After he
recites the list of governmental types, in order of sophistication, the
Master then asks him : of what nature is his own relationship to the
Increate?  That seems to suggest, to me, that Malrubius (as mouthpiece for
Wolfe?) thinks monarchism to be really the highest form of government.

Please bear in mind also that in Christian theology, Jesus did not arrive to
set human beings free from temporal slavery, suffering, and tyranny, but
from spiritual slavery, suffering, and tyranny.  The idea that Jesus should
have had a ripple-effect of liberation from governmental tyranny, which can
never be rolled back, is more closely aligned with the Social Gospel and its
antecedents than with most early Christian ideas about government.  Ss Paul
& Augustine, and up through Luther, put this point most cogently.


> The other is that the fictional Wolfe, the translator, says in the
> appendices that he has used the "closest twentieth-century equivalents" for
> "yet undiscovered concepts"; he, not Severian, put an athame into Agia's
> hands.  He uses Latin for a language Severian considers obsolete and
> presumably changes the images in "a serpent in the last letter but one, and
> a sword in the last."  So along those lines, maybe the names Robert, Marie,
> Isangoma, Kimleesoong, and Paris are only his translations of names from the
> distant past that were unfamiliar to Severian, and maybe the translator even
> changed the description of the plane so we could recognize it.  Maybe the
> double meaning of "Verthandi" was different.  Maybe he put in all the clues
> for South America, for instance by using Quechua to translate a language
> that Severian says is indigenous, because he knew somehow that the
> Commonwealth was in South America.
>
> Or maybe this is taking the translator conceit too seriously.
>
>
Isn't it sort of like Tolkien using Gothic/Celtic names for the Brandybucks,
and Anglo-Saxon as Rohirric, in *The Lord of the Rings*?  Obviously, that
book takes place in a world where there is no Europe (and no Goths to invade
it), and no England.  But these cognates are meant to suggest relationships
between those names and the surrounding culture which are similar to the way
those relationships function in our milieu.  I think.

-- 
Matt +

Each of us bears his own Hell.
Virgil [Publius Vergilius Maro] (70-19 B.C.), Aeneid, bk. VI, l. 743
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