(urth) Five Severians - Severian-as-Clone

[David Stockhoff]

On 12/18/2013 10:33 PM, Michael Thayer wrote:
> >David Stockhoff: The mausoleum is the nexus of the various Severians, and
> it is he himself he might see if he looks over his shoulder.
>
> I don't disagree with this statement at all (in fact I'm very fond of 
> it), and I certainly think you and I are on the same page (and not 
> just literally page 12 of Shadow!) -- but isn't it a bit fuzzy?  In 
> what way -- in terms of plot mechanics -- is the mausoleum the nexus 
> of the various Severians?
>
> The assumption behind the statement is that there are five various 
> Severians, one for each coffin, right?  But surely these various 
> instances of Severian do not walk the same time-strand/universe. 
>  Instead, they exist in alternate time-strands/parallel universes.  We 
> know this, textually, because we are expressly informed of at least 
> two such alternate/parallel Severians --  "then those who walk the 
> corridors walked back to the time [the first Severian] was young, and 
> my own story . . . began" Citadel, 406.  The mausoleum suggests 
> strongly that there are five such Severians (we are told of two of the 
> five (Citadel 406), just as we are told two of the five coffins are 
> open/empty (Shadow 12)).  But why would the mausoleum in the 
> second/narrator Severian's necropolis house the five coffins for five 
> alternate/parallel Severians if four of the five Severians do not 
> exist in his universe/time-strand?  Given the two alternate 
> time-strand Severians we are told of, the two of five open coffins in 
> Severian's mausoleum, the Botanical Gardens, Master Ash's Last House, 
> and the numerous references to time in the mausoleum scenes (Shadow 
> 12-13, 21-22), I think we should seriously consider the possibility 
> that the mausoleum is dislocated in time and may be entered from all 
> five alternate universes.  I don't know if you meant it this 
> literally, but, as you say, "the mausoleum is the nexus of the various 
> Severians."
>

Yes, I definitely meant that in terms of timestreams/iterations, but it 
would depend on how you construct the five timelines: Are they 
simultaneous, sequential, or concurrent? Are they separated by only a 
few seconds, enough so they are dislocated from one another? Or is that 
a meaningless question because they are utterly cut off from one another 
(Severian seems to doubt it)? Yet we know the five coffins are "here," 
all at once, all together. There seems nothing magical or technological 
about the mausoleum; it is merely old and, for Severian, haunted.

As Jeff suggests (and this is the simplest path I can envision), three 
coffins have dead Severians and two do not yet have dead Severians. Of 
course there are problems with this---how do the Severians separate to 
become five, how do they return, how did his "parents" know there would 
be five of him, and so on. Are they truly clones or are they 
time-clones? Or eidolons?

And is our Severian #4 or #5? I am not even sure the Severian of UNS is 
the same Severian as BNS, or that Severian really did pass the test in 
UNS. If there was a #5 (and there must be!), he may be only a hair 
better than #4, so that we as readers of UNS would never know the 
difference if he replaced #4.

And what gets you a coffin? Severian "dies" so many times it's hard to 
keep track; I think he may leave a corpse once in BNS and once in UNS 
before his apotheosis. That would be five. How his body would have been 
interred on Urth I do not know. (Of course you always have the symbolism 
of the "open tomb," which might require that the last one stand 
empty---I have no idea.)


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20131218/569378eb/attachment-0004.htm>