Subject: (urth) Sev's name

From: Alice Turner <al at interport.net>
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 08:49:50 +0000

>From mantis

>The intended point of my post, which I hesitate to belabor in sightof your
>evident happiness, was to say, well yes, "Severian" is in theOED, but
>how much can you do with the information given there?

Oh, it does make me happy. What can I do with it? Hmm. Well, the first thing
I can say with confidence is that is that, in a long book where virtually
100 percent of the human characters are named after either Christian saints
or Roman pagans, to name the hero after a heretic, or indeed an entire sect
of heretics, adds a note of playful cynicism. Wolfe has said (to Ratty, as I
recall), Well, I am a Christian Catholic, but not the sort you think. (I
paraphrase.) Well, yeah!! Dr. Talos's play, which is written along
Manicheaen lines, might merit another reading with Sev's name in mind.

Simple reading: I am now going to write a sort of Christian fable, a Rapture
and Rebirth imagining  retold as sword-and-sorcery adventure with some Torah
and pagan mythology tossed in; obviously this is not scripture, so I will
make it clear that I am writing heresy. Of a sort.

-alga-

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Alex David Groce <adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 09:46:38 +0000

I think it is suggestive, although I'm not sure it's as cynical as might
appear.  As to Wolfe's 'not the sort you think' comment, he also said something
similar in an old interview with Larry McCaffrey (don't have it with me...)
although there (and here) it looked like the implication was more that most
people have no idea what being a Roman Catholic means (including most
Catholics).  I'm pretty sure Wolfe wouldn't consider himself a heretic (not
that most heretics would...) and would, I suspect, fall into church line on
defined doctrinal points (which leaves a lot of room for oddness--after all, I
doubt the Church has made a proclamation one way or the other about the idea
the Greek gods were real beings of some kind, for which Wolfe has expressed
sympathy in the past).  He's orthodox enough to be a huge Chesterton fan,
anyway...  And I would say that despite some terminological and mythological
borrowings, the BOTNS is philosophically quite anti-Manichean.  The Pancreator
is fairly clearly fills both the 'God' and 'Creator' slots, and rather than
despising the physical as inferior or absolutely corrupt, good old earthy
Severian ends up taking off his boots because it's ALL Holy Ground.  :)

	Just my two cents--as to the whole mess of genealogical speculations I
came back from break to find, I think it's fine to make them, but that most of
them are fairly indefensible except as wild speculation unlikely to have been
authorial intent or even the way most people would read things after a great
deal of study (unlike the Dorcas, etc. hypothesis...)

On Oct 15,  8:49am, Alice Turner wrote:
> Subject: (urth) Sev's name
> From mantis
> 
>-- End of excerpt from Alice Turner

-- 
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." - John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu)
Senior (Computer Science/Multidisciplinary Studies in Technology & Fiction)
'98-99 NCSU AITP Student Chapter President
608 Charleston Road, Apt. 1E (919)-233-7366
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~adgroce