(urth) Sev's family tree

[Mr Thalassocrat]

I think it’s possible that Wolfe scattered red herrings around as fake clues
to Severian’s family tree, with the intention of driving overly-attentive
readers insane.

But it’s a question you keep getting drawn to at odd moments, and I’ve
finally hit on a solution which makes sense to me. I doubt that anybody will
agree with me, or even read all of this long post, but I’ve written it up
partly as an attempt to stop my brain from thinking about it any more J

Anyway ...

I posit that Sev has Magic Genes which somehow or other can draw or resonate
with or whatever the New Sun.  Other characters who seem to have a sun
connection are Fechin (cf Casdoe’s father’s story), Agia/Agilus (cf Sev’s
sudden lust for her at first sight, with the sun highlighting her skin; and
both of them halo’d by the sun in the cell), Dorcas herself.  We know Dorcas
is Sev’s grandmother; I want these others to be related to him as well.

(I also think that Sev’s attraction to Agia and Dorcas is driven largely by
Magic Gene calling to Magic Gene. Also, Agia and Agilus’ incest. As Sev
himself says, it is hard to explain why he was attracted to Agia, and it may
be relevant to note that this lust seems to have waned after the sun went
down – cf the events at the tree inn and after. Overall, I don’t see a
predisposition to incest as such as part of the family make-up, but rather
an attraction driven by the Magic Genes, which will of course have the same
result.)

I posit that Dorcas is Fechin’s daughter, by the quiet girl Fechin dallies
with in Casdoe’s father’s story.  As hints to this: both women are quiet and
beautiful; Dorcas is a surprisingly good scenery painter. Also: Dorcas’
father and his brother made cloisonné work – enamel work, often on copper.
Casdoe’s father’s story has Fechin stealing a copper pan.  There is no
reason to suppose that Fechin’s artistic work was limited to painting; eg
Sev imagines Fechin moulding figures in wax. Cloisonne work may well have
been a commercially sensible pursuit.

I discount Fechin’s hairy red monkey arms as evidence against this; others
will disagree. I think it more significant that old men who knew Fechin in
his day seem compelled to spout off about Fechin when they meet Sev. Perhaps
this is triggered by a facial resemblance.

Where do Agia/Agilus fit? My Magic Genes hypothesis calls for them to be
descendants of Fechin as well.  They come from the same small business kind
of world as Dorcas and her father and brother, inheriting a clothing store
from their mother, so things seems seem to fit together fairly plausibly.
Dorcas’  background seems to be quite religious, from some of the things she
says, her song, her general demeanor and also from her memory of sitting in
a shop window with objects including a “rood”. I have a strong sense of Agia
being well-versed in religious matters, even if she rejects them: she knows
stories of the Conciliator, she knows a building as the “Mensal of the
Monachs”, she knows about the Pelerines. If Fechin is the “patriarch” of the
Magic New Sun Gene line, it is thematically fitting for him to be religious
and for this sensibility to be passed down to his children, and for his
grand-children to have been exposed to it in turn. I note also that
Agia/Agilus seem to have a good “eye” for things, which I think also fits
with this background.

I put all this together to hypothesize that Agia and Agilus are the
grandchildren of Dorcas’ brother, Fechin’s son.  So Sev and Agia/Agilus
share a great-grandfather in Fechin. The clash between them and the struggle
between Agia and Sev for the Claw take on a new dimension; perhaps we can
see these events as part of an unconscious struggle between them for who
takes on the mantle as the culmination of the Magic Gene line, to become
avatar of the New Sun. Jonas says that averns are used in ritual combat on
some other planet; perhaps the Sev vs Agilus death match has some of that
character. Of course in this collapse of the wave function, Sev is
post-assured of victory, but you can see the struggle as the shadow of a
conflict played out across the quantum foam of possibilities, or something
like that.

I also want to tie in Casdoe’s family.

First: Little Sev asks Sev whether he is his uncle. I can’t see a way for
that to be the case – even if Sev were his uncle, how would Little Sev know
of his existence? - but I feel reasonably confident that Little Sev would
not ask the question unless he knows he does actually have an “Uncle
Sev”.  With
so many Sev’s around, either they just *have* to be related or Wolfe is
playing dirty red herring tricks. Assuming the former, I go with the
supposition that both Sev and Little Sev have a relative also called
Severian.

Second: The twin thing. We have Little Sev/Little Severa, Agia/Agilus,
presumably Sev/some Severa (quite likely dead in childbirth).  I don’t want
to get into the real-world *facts* about genetic issues in twin birth, or
detailed ruminations about whether these are all identical or non-identical
twins. As far the story goes, I do want these twin-ships to indicate a
shared genetic line.

Third: Look at Casdoe’s father.  He is *really* old, and it would appear a
close contemporary of Fechin. On the other hand, his daughter Casdoe appears
to be the age you’d expect of the mother of a six/seven year old kid. Casdoe
was born in Thrax, she says, but everything points to her father having
grown up in Nessus.

A big leap in my Sev family tree construction is putting all of this
together to conclude that Casdoe’s father sired a family in Nessus, before
moving to Thrax, including twins named Severian and Severa. This  Severian
is in fact the Old Boatman: Dorcas’ husband, Sev’s grandfather and Little
Sev’s half-uncle.  And this Severa married Dorcas’ brother, grandfather to
Agia/Agilus.

So Casdoe’s father’s earlier son and daughter married Fechin’s daughter and
son, spreading the twin-disposition genes to Fechin’s line.

Of course the main argument against this view is the lack of direct support
in the text, and possibly the bigger objection that even if it were true –
so what?

I can’t do anything much about the first beyond pleading at least
consistency. First, the ages work out OK.  I assume that the Old Boatman is
in his 60’s when we meet him (a little older than Dorcas would have been had
she lived).  As a contemporary of Fechin’s, Casdoe’s father is presumably in
his 80’s.  Second, obviously Casdoe’s father was well acquainted and there
is no reason to suppose their respective children did not also know each
other well.  It provides an answer to the question of why we never learn the
names of CF and OB (ie, because Wolfe used this lack as a “dig here” clue.)
Finally, if you think that Little Sev and Sev *must* be related somehow or
other, and that the existence of twins *must* indicate a family
relationship, then I don’t see a better way of making it work.

On the “So what?” question, I can only answer that Wolfe probably
(hopefully?) didn’t intend the relationship to be vital to understanding the
story, otherwise he wouldn’t have made it so difficult to figure out. But
fwiw I do think it provides a nice picture: a family dwindling into the
gutter or into the forest, unneeded by-blows on the path to constructing
Sev.

An interesting question is what CF’s gene line contributed to the making of
Sev.  Disposition to twin-birth doesn’t seem to get you anywhere, on my
picture – the twins we know of look pretty accidental, and from the point of
view of the story, I think they are mainly marker-clues for puzzling out the
family tree.  There doesn’t seem to be any evidence for remarkable memory,
Sev’s other extraordinary characteristic apart from the New Sun stuff, in
CF’s close family.

Dunno. But assuming that there was in fact something in the gene line of
importance, it is kind of consistent with my picture of CF’s son and
daughter marring Fechin’s daughter and son, leading to Agia/Agilus on the
one hand and Sev on the other, with the shadow of some cosmic struggle
played between them. Two rolls of the dice, if you like, with Sev the
winner.

The missing piece in this is of course Catherine. Where does she come from?
I expect just about everybody else would hate my answer: she’s the second
child of Dorcas and the Old Boatman, in giving birth to whom Dorcas died.

We know that Dorcas died in pregnancy, after previously giving birth to
Ouen. We hear absolutely nothing about the child; Ouen clearly has no idea
whether or not it lived.

On my story, it was a girl, and it did live, probably taken in by the
in-laws, Agia/Agilus’ grand parents, shortly after birth – the Old Boatman
not being in a position to care for it.  Around this time, perhaps Fechin
died or became incapable of work; the OB starts his downward slide and loses
touch with his dead wife’s family. Catherine’s foster parents find her a
place in the Pelerines – in line with comments above positing a religious
streak in the family, and noting comments from Ava, to the effect that the
daughters of optimates with a long standing relationship to the order are
sometimes admitted as postulants.

Perhaps Catherine’s situation was different from this girl’s – maybe she
ended up as slave of the Pelerines, like Winnoc, as her foster parent’s
family embarked on their own downward slide (culminating eventually with
beggarly Agia/Agilus).  It’s always been hard to connect Ouen’s comments
about Catherine having run away from an order of monials, with her ending up
in the clutches of the torturers. Surely renunciation by a postulate
wouldn’t be punished like this? But if she was a runaway slave, the
situation could be different – noting Winnoc’s comments about how the
Pelerines deal with disobedient servants. Or perhaps she isn’t with the
torturers for running away, but for some crime committed afterwards.  Dunno.
Anyway, after running away, she meets Ouen. Unaware that they are sister and
brother, Magic Gene calls to Magic Gene, and Sev results, the unwittingly
incestuous union perhaps concentrating the lineage enough to achieve the
goal of producing the avatar of the New Sun.
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