{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/419",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 419,
    "subject": "Severian/Faust",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-03-13T09:14:50+00:00",
    "last": "1998-03-13T09:14:50+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0008-0622@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Peter Stephenson",
        "address": "pws at ifh.de"
      },
      "date": "1998-03-13T09:14:50+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Severian/Faust",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "m.driussi at genie.geis.com wrote:\nRe: Severian as Faustian when tempted by the undine who quotes\nMarlow.  Please say more--which temptation are you thinking of?  The\ndream scene?  The sandbar scene?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "The latter.  I was a bit glib, so I've looked it up, in chapter XXVIII\nof Claw, `The Odalisque of Abaia'.  The undine tempts Severian to join\nher under the water for largely unnamed delights, and he is about to\nstep in --- his motivation is not really clear to me: `I wanted to\nbelieve her, to go with her, as a drowning man wants to gasp air' ---\nwhen Dorcas wakes up and the undine disappears.\n\nA couple of pages later, during the ensuing conversation, Severian\nflicks through the brown book and finds \"Hell has no limits, nor is\ncircumscribed; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there must\nwe ever be.\"  This is almost verbatim from Mephistopheles' remark to\nFaustus in Marlowe's Dr Faustus (actually, I remember \"Hell hath no\nlimits, nor is circumscribed in one self place...\"): Faustus has asked\nhim, if you're all confined in Hell, how come you're here? and this is\npart of the response.  Faustus evidently hasn't really got the point\nsince his own reply largely adds up to `oh, that's not so bad, then.'\n\nGiven whose name is on the cover of Claw, this presumably has some\nsignificance at this point.  Is Severian being tempted into a Faustian\npact (which takes different forms in different tellings of the Faust\nlegend)?  Is the undine Mephistopheles?  Is she, perhaps more likely,\nHelen, as conjured up in Marlowe's version up to tempt Faustus (``was\nthis the face that launched a thousand ships'', etc.)?\n\nWith Wolfe you seem to need some analogue of the `Seven Principles of\nGovernance' from Shadow, say Principles of Association, in which case\nthe Faustus quotation would be of the first kind, `Direct association\nwith the body of the text', and the relationship with the undine of a\nhigher kind, `Association conceived of as including but not limited to\na reference to some or all of the immediately preceeding or following\noccurrences'.  This second kind is rather more typical.\n\nPeter"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}