(urth) Pike's ghost

[David Stockhoff]

On 11/29/2011 3:50 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
>> Gerry Quinn: None of that can sustain even cursory scrutiny.  A “wain” is just a
>> large cart, but that’s beside the point.  The description refers to two of Pas’s
>> bulldozers which “were still at work upon the whorl”.  They were planting a tree
>> behind his throne.  If the mountain head were above a throne, a tree behind it
>> would be kind of invisible, no?  It has absolutely nothing to do with the mountain head.
>> The orgy is on a drape Blood has ordered or acquired to cover the Sacred window in his
>> brothel.  It is an obscene parody of Campion’s well-known original painting.  Typhon did
>> not have two penises, or if he had Severian did not mention it.  The two penises in the orgy
>> painting are clearly created by a painter steeped in the two-headed iconography of Pas the
>> whorl god – it was painted by someone in the Whorl, and could not have been painted before
>> Typhon became Pas.  [Campion may or may not have departed with the Whorl.]
>
> Gerry, you are entitled to your opinion though I concur that it doesn't sustain even cursory
> scrutiny. You are reading the text in isolationist fashion, as though it is describing some
> reality rather than being a work of literary fiction which contains allusion, often to the
> author's own previous work.
>
> In this case there is a clear, easy to see connection between this painting and Severian's
> encounter with Typhon. We don't know where it was created, Whorl or Urth, but it depicts
> Typhon on Urth, where Typhon actually had a throne. It does not depict Pas.  How does a computer
> program have a throne, not to mention preside over an orgy?
>
> Campion's painting is a cleaned up version of this one, not the reverse.
>
> (Blood's primary association was with Scylla, not Pas, btw) 		 	   		

Gerry has a point, however, in saying that Typhon did not have two 
penises. I'd put this down to (a) the propagandizing of Typhon as Pas 
(better to suggest the Tyrant God is a double being rather than a 
surgical freakshow) and (b) Wolfe's motif of doubling (hybridization and 
possession). As someone noted recently, there are miracles false and 
true; there may also be ways to fake doubling. Typhon is such a fake.