Subject: (urth) Call me Severian

From: Peter Stephenson <pws at ibmth.df.unipi.it>
Date: Fri, 05 Feb 1999 11:10:25 +0000

Has anyone noticed the strange resemblance between the following?  Are
they perhaps related?  (If anyone has, I should just look back in the
archive for the same subject line, since it's the obvious one.  But I
haven't.)

				-----
       Grand Championship for the Title `Great American Novel'
				 ---
			    The Contenders

  		 Moby Dick             	   The Book of the New Sun
  	      Melville, Herman		         Wolfe, Gene

Location:     C3, `The Spouter Inn', f.    I.xv, `Baldanders'

Protagonist:  One Ishmael                  Severian of the Torturers

Plot:         I. needs a room for the      S. needs a room for the
	      night, finds inn, tries	   night, finds inn, tries
	      to sleep on bench, is 	   to sleep in chair, is
	      offered bed to share with	   offered bed to share with
	      unknown companion.       	   unknown companion.

Bedfellow:    One Queequeg     	       	   Goodman Baldanders (+ friend)

Bedfellow's   Andes, apparently            The mountain range formerly
Provenance 				   known as Andes

Other Items   One (1) Tomahawk 	       	   One (1) Carneficial Sword
in Bed:

Head:         Q. collects and sells        S. makes money as vertebral
              human heads.  	   	   partitionist; all and sundry
			    	   	   dreaming of severed heads.

Matters	      `Thar she blows!'            S. dreams of falling into sea
Arising:		    	       	   and seeing `great shapes ---
       	       	       	       	       	   things hundreds of times larger
			    		   than a man'.

Pertinent     Leviathan                    Abaia
Mythical
Creatures:

Still to      `WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE       Journey into exile by S.
Come:		     ISHMAEL'

Future        One Queequeg                 Goodman Baldanders (+ friend)
Travelling
Companions:

corncrake

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

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Fri, 05 Feb 1999 08:53:30 +0000

> Bedfellow:    One Queequeg     	       	   Goodman Baldanders (+ friend)

Now that you mention it, this scene did remind me when I read it of Moby
Dick, at least as far as sharing a bed with a weirdo, but I'd forgotten
about it.  I didn't notice all the other parallels.

In other words, "me too."

-Rostrum