<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>You've got to admit that's about a slippery a statement as they come:<br><br>"<font><font id="role_document" size="2" color="#000000" face="Arial"><strong>I wanted Severian to have to face at
least the possibility that being an agency of pain and death is not
necessarily an evil thing.</strong> "<br><br>Severian had to "face," not accept, "the possibility," not the necessity, that causing pain is "not necessarily an evil thing," which, of course, doesn't say that it's good, only "not evil."<br><br>Even when he talks about violence and authority before, he never says that it's justfiable for people in authority to use violence. He only says that people who find themselves in positions of authority often find that it's necessary. That statement absolutely refuses to reveal a moral judgment on whether necessity makes it "okay."<br><br>To me, the ambiguity is the point. The most fascinating thing about Severian is that he is a good man in a bad world. That means that it's impossible for him to be totally good, but it doesn't remove the imperative to be good.<br><br>Just because something evil is necessary doesn't make it good. The problem of being a moral human being is learning how to live under impossible
conditions like that, and Severian is interesting to me for precisely that reason.<br></font></font><br></div><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><font size="2" face="Tahoma"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> "JBarach@aol.com" <JBarach@aol.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> urth@lists.urth.net<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Thursday, November 20, 2008 4:40:10 PM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: (urth) Severian as reverse Christ (or something)<br></font><br>
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<div>John writes:</div>
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<div>> <font style="background-color: transparent;" size="2" color="#000000" face="Arial">Wolfe makes it pretty clear, I think, that he finds
Severian's</font></div>
<div><font style="background-color: transparent;" size="2" color="#000000" face="Arial">> profession to be repugnant. </font></div>
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<div>And yet Wolfe also says this (and I've put the most relevant comment in
bold):</div>
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<blockquote dir="ltr" style="margin-right: 0px;">
<div><em>LM</em>: Where was it that you knew you were heading when you began
<i>The Book of the New Sun</i>?<br><br><i>Wolfe</i>: I knew I wanted Severian
to be banished and then to return to the Guild in a position of such authority
that the Guild would be forced to make him a Master of the Guild. And I wanted
to have Severian be forced to confront the problem of Thecla and the problem
of torture and the role of human pain and misery. At that time I had not yet
read <i>The Magus</i>, so the thought didn't come from there, but I was very
conscious of the horror not only of being tortured but of being forced to be a
torturer or executioner. I didn't want my readers to be able to dismiss
violence and pain with some platitudes about "Oh, violence—how terrible!" It's
very easy to say how terrible it is to beat a man with a whip, or lock him up
for 30 years of his life, or to execute him. These are indeed awful things.
But when you are actually in authority, you find out that sometimes it's
absolutely necessary for you to take certain distasteful actions.
<br><br><i>LM</i>: Severian makes the point somewhere that if he didn't
execute some of the people he does, they would be out killing people
themselves....<br><br><i>Wolfe</i>: And he's right. What are you going to do
with someone like John Wayne Gacy—who used to live about eight miles from
where we're sitting right now—if you're not going to be willing to lock him up
for the rest of his life? If you let him out, he's almost certain to start
killing more innocent people. <strong>I wanted Severian to have to face at
least the possibility that being an agency of pain and death is not
necessarily an evil thing.</strong> That's one recognition he must come to
grips with when he decides to leave a knife in Thecla's cell to help her
commit suicide. He's partially responsible for the blood he sees seeping from
under her cell door, just as every member of a society is responsible for the
blood shed by people it decides to execute. Of course, when Severian later
receives a letter from Thecla telling him the suicide was a trick permitting
her to be freed unobtrusively, that creates all sorts of other dilemmas for
him—and for me as well. I had started out assuming I was writing a novella of
about 40,000 words whose title was to have been "The Feast of Saint
Catherine," but now I began to see this material had greater possibilities.
The writer has a problem when ideas, characters, and so forth don't seem to
come, or when they aren't good enough when they do come. But when they're too
good and too numerous, he has another. But the time I had finished with <i>The
Shadow of the Torturer</i>, I had completed an entire novel but Severian was
hardly started. Instead of winding up the plot, I had begun half a dozen
others which needed to be worked out. Eventually I decided I needed to write a
trilogy to be able to develop everything sufficiently; and when the third book
turned out to be almost twice as long as the first two combined, I finally
expanded things into a tetralogy. When I was done, I discovered that I had
arrived where I had set out for—but the trip to that place was very different
than what I had expected.<br></div></blockquote>
<div><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm">http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm</a></div>
<div> </div>
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<div>John</div></font><br><br><br><div class="aol_ad_footer" id="fd4abac06f0049f29f57650dcae027f7"><font style="color: black; font-family: ARIAL; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none;"><hr style="margin-top: 10px;"><b>One site has it all.</b> Your email accounts, your social networks, and the things you love. <b>Try the new <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212962939x1200825291/aol?redir=http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp%26icid=aolcom40vanity%26ncid=emlcntaolcom00000001">AOL.com</a> today!</b></font></div></div></div></div><br>
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