(urth) What symbols mean for Wolfe

[Bill Burgess]

*In response to the previous thread inquiring into the meaning of the thorn
in the claw and what all other symbols, fangs, talons, etc., this might
possibly allude to,  I thought I’d start a new thread in order to solicit
general thoughts,  as well as to give my own,  as to what symbols mean for
Wolfe.

I don’t mean this thread to be about any particular symbol(s),  but an
inquiry into what symbology itself is.   Of course we’ll have to use
individual symbols as examples,  but that will be only to elucidate how
Wolfe uses symbols in general rather than to inquire into what a specific
symbol means.

Forgive me if all I say is well known stuff from this list.  I’m brand new
to this mailing  list and have not read through the archives at all,  nor
 have I read any scholarly works on Wolfe;  I’ve only read the five books
comprising the Book of the New Sun.

With that,  here are some of my own  observations with support from the
text of TBotNS

1. Symbols REPRESENT human life.

*
*That is to say,  that the story of an  individual human beings’ life,  a
particular group of human beings lives,  or  human life in general,  can
all be represented, in various ways, by various symbols.   This means that
a symbol can no more be exhaustively defined then a  human being or
humanity can be.

In the text,  in the very first  paragraph,  Severian remembers the wisps
of river fog threading the spikes in the locked gate like mountain paths
and this image is for him a SYMBOL of his exile.

Then after four books,  at the very end of TCotA,  he tells us that he has
carried us, his readers, from

“gate to gate -- from the locked and fog shrouded gate of the necropolis,
 to the cloud racked gate we call the sky, the gate that shall lead me, as
I hope, beyond the nearer stars”.

So,  from the locked gate of the graveyard  to the gate of Hope --  which
is as wide open as the sky.    Thus Wolfe expresses his Christianity, but I
digress; this isn’t really my point in citing these passages.

We know that the locked graveyard gate symbolizes Severian’s  exile  from
the guild,  but we also know,  by the way this is expressed,  that Severian
sees that exile as a symbol of an even larger Exile,  the one that will end
on the other side of the sky gate.

The story of his life is Exile.   But we could go on forever about what
this means without ever exhausting its meaning and could probably find
something in every chapter/episode  of all four of these books which would
add to what Exile means.   And whatever we’d find,  it is all contained in
this one symbol: a  locked graveyard  gate with fog wisping in it.
So it is with all symbols.


2. Symbols represent COMMITMENTS that SHAPE human life.

In the first chapter of TSotT, Severian says that symbols invent us rather
than we inventing them.
Using the example of the soldier who takes an oath and is given a coin to
symbolize that oath,  he says they are soldiers at that moment,  even
though they know nothing of the management of arms.   The implication being
that they spend the rest of their lives learning the meaning of their
commitment.

Over and over this happens to Severian.    He commits himself to something
that moves him,  some image or event  becomes a symbol for him,    and only
later does he learn more about why he was moved, and what his commitments
mean for his life.   He never stops learning as long as the story of his
life continues and  this story is the unfolding of what his commitments,
and the symbols that caused them,  mean.


3. The story of a human life is itself a symbol.

In the passage below,  Severian says that Thecla is a symbol of undeserved
love (Grace) for him,  and says that the force of her life as a symbol  did
not disappear when she died anymore then what  his own life  story
symbolizes will disappear when he closes the book he is writing.   So the
lives of people are symbols of something that continues to exist even after
they are gone.   The great question he ponders,  is what these symbols mean
in and of themselves, apart from their expression in the lives of human
beings

“If Thecla had symbolized love of which I felt myself undeserving, as I
know now that she did, then did her symbolic force disappear when I locked
the door of her cell behind me? That would be like saying that the writing
of this book, over which I have labored for so many watches, will vanish in
a blur of vermillion when I close it for the last time and dispatch it to
the eternal library maintained by the old Ultan.
The great question then, that I pondered as I watched the floating island
with longing eyes and chafed at my bonds and cursed the hetman in my heart,
is that of determining what these symbols mean in and of themselves. We are
like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but
one, and a sword in the last.” *
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