(urth) Time, Not Cloning

Lee Berman severiansola at hotmail.com
Thu Aug 1 11:12:02 PDT 2013


>David Stockhoff: Lee, I my not quite follow how "freeing itself at the moment 
>of death"  fits in here. What about Severian frees itself at the moment of death? I 
>suppose since Severian dies many times, this should be discernible. 
>Or is it more just that a khaibit is specifically the shadow, i.e., 
>copy, of a soul? That would be enough for the clone theory. But we also 
>know that Severian is a copy of himself. If he does drown on page 1, 
>then the first book is indeed about his shadow.
>When is his first known "resurrection"?

I would say that when Severian dies on the Ship and as Apu Punchau, and he
is resurrected as an eidolon from his own dying mind/memories, that is as
close to the Coptic definition of a khaibit that we could hope to have.

What complicates things for me is that those two incidences occur in UotNS, 
which written after the original tetralogy. It might only have occurred later 
to Wolfe that the eidolon creation thingie could work as a cloning device for
Severian (or Catherine).

Since being "grown from cells" is mentioned in the old Autarch's explanation of 
khaibits, I have to think Wolfe originally meant "khaibit" to mean more exclusively 
the biological cloning of an individual. And since the cloned prostitutes in House 
Azure are alive at the same time as their donor mistreses, "khaibit" must mean, 
as you suggest, only the copying of a soul, and not requiring death. 

There are stories in Egyptian and Greek (not to mention Judaic) mythology which 
involved reproduction occurring via body parts (both from the dead and alive). Perhaps
by invoking the "khaibit" concept, Wolfe is only saying, "hey, when the ancients told
stories about Osiris or Zeus or Adam and Eve, it was their way of describing what
we call cloning". (or, if we include Tzadkiel, gemmulation budding)

Since Severian talks at length about the hypothetical "first Severian" I have to 
guess we really are reading a story about the second one. I find that two of five 
coffins being open in Severian's mausoleum to be a literary (at least) symbol of 
that. So if you ask when was (our) Severian first resurrected, I'd say at birth. 
How that jibes with Ouen and Catherine is something of a mystery.

I don't think he drowned on page 1. I believe what Juturna says, that she saved him then. 
Just as she helped him find his sword in the Lake of Birds. I further think that Severian's
later ability to breathe underwater is via the efforts of Juturna, just as for Baldanders. It 
is a pointed reference to the legend of the "mermaid's kiss" which was said to confer that
underwater breathing ability to drowning sailors.

Wolfe's emphasis on biological cloning in the original tetralogy doesn't bother me. It
makes sense to me. I think that in writing BotNS, he was still very much in the dark 
place from whence 5HoC was spawned. Number Five reminds me so very much of a Blade Runner
replicant in outlook on life. The movie came too late but perhaps Wolfe was influenced by
the P.K. Dick story?

And of course there seems to be much of Wolfe in Number Five and Severian. I think somewhere
in an interview I read that Wolfe felt alone and cut off or disconnected in life as a youngster, 
having to do with him being an only child. I really think he felt like a clone or something. 
Happily Wolfe's life outlook seemed to have improved. Perhaps in direct correlation to the 
improvement in his literary career. 		 	   		  


More information about the Urth mailing list