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[Jerry Friedman]

> From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>

> On 11/2/2011 6:39 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>>  Gyoll flows roughly south to the west coast of the continent.  At the 
>> climatic

Or "climactic", as some prefer to spell it.

>> scene on the beach when Severian takes his boots off (CotA, Ch. XXXI), 
>> "Land--Nessus, the House Absolute, and all the rest--lay to the east; west 
>> lay the sea."  And that's near the mouth of Gyoll, as I recall.
>
>>    On the other hand, Severian remembers when he's in the mountains that 
>> Master Palaemon had told him a pestilential "coastal jungle" lay to 
>> the west (SotL XXIII).  It doesn't sound like the mountains are so far east 
>> that we're in a mirror image of South America. 
> 
> That's it---thanks! But it sounds to me exactly like a mirror image of South 
> America.
> 
> The Andes are not all in Chile and Peru. There is a mountaintop in northern 
> Argentina where children were ritually exposed and stayed frozen for a few 
> thousand years. Near Salta, I believe (Saltus).

When Severian is thinking about the coastal jungle, he's come "nearly to the waist
of the world".  So on a mirror image of South America, he's in southern Ecuador
or northern Peru, and he went west (our east), he'd go maybe 2000 miles before
he got to the coast.  I don't think he'd call that "coastal forest".  Of course we can
always imagine Palaemon was wrong or something.

>>    The Commonwealth is clearly in the southern hemisphere, and there are far 
>> more suggestions of South America than of Africa or Australasia, but I don't 
>> think we're supposed to connect it with the real present-day South America, 
>> still less connect the mountains with the Andes or Nessus with Buenos Aires.
> 
> Possibly. And yet, it's so obvious, how can we NOT connect it? Therefore, 
> how can it not have been intended?

I'm sure it was intended.  There's a South American feeling (at least literarily--
I've never been there).  No doubt some aspects of Lake Diuturna were inspired
by Lake Titicaca, for instance.  But I don't think we can say Lake Diuturna /is/
Lake Titicaca, or say, "At this point Severian is near a place where children were
ritually exposed, which tells us something about what he encountered here."

Jerry Friedman




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