(urth) traveling north

[Jerry Friedman]

From: Matthew Weber <palaeologos at gmail.com>


>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.  
 
I thought that too, and I think many people have.  Has anyone ever identified it?  Someone said Robert Borski had, but I'd like to see it.


>
>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.

Sorry, maybe I should have said Severian had been taught that our kind of government was the highest.  I find it a bit surprising that such a belief had existed on Urth and that the aquastor of Master Malrubius would need to correct it.

> 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.

Yes, that's what I'm suggesting, and I should have thought of the parallel to /The Lord of the Rings/.  The question I'm asking is how far it goes.  The names Robert, Marie etc.?  Other names?  The pun on "present"?  How about what Severian says Thecla said Father Inire said, "light is so weightless that we have given its name to that condition"?

Maybe Mr. Wolfe's definitive statement on cycles of the universe is from the James Jordan interview: "I was toying with those ideas, I think, rather than trying to
make sense of them."

Jerry Friedman



      
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