(urth) This week in Google Alerts

[David Stockhoff]

On 11/3/2011 1:05 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> 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.

I think we're dealing with a problem of level of detail on huge scales 
that make us uncomfortable (recall GW's comment about distances to 
Lune). Sev's information is truthfully not very detailed at all, but it 
is enough for a rough idea that is needed (and which is itself 
compatible with the medieval mindset of his civilization regarding such 
things). Palaemon told Sev to avoid the jungle, not to check it out or 
overthink it.

Amazonia is indeed an inland-basin jungle---but it is coastal as well, 
as the jungle extends to the rive mouth. But only if Palaemon has any 
idea of ecosystems and the significance of watersheds would he care 
about the difference between the Amazon jungle and the Guyana jungle. To 
him, it's all the same---it's the jungle that mattes, not which 
ecosystem it's in.

And since the "coastal jungle" is described as "pestilential," one can 
assume Palaemon's/Severian's understanding of eco-geography to be not 
only limited but quite biased and wrong-headed. So yes, Palaemon is 
wrong, but not in the way you suggest. He just knows it runs to the 
western coast.

Note also that my mirror-image theory hardly requires perfection, any 
more than any other does. Urth's "genotype" is the same, whether 
reversed or not, but its "phenotype" is bound to be different.
>
>>>     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."


Not literally, no. I don't mean to suggest that. I think the 
Commonwealth's continent is based on what amounts to a glance at a map 
of South America---a general impression. (Anyway, the children were 
found only about 20 years ago.)