Subject: (urth) The Seven Dancing Severians

From: Dan Parmenter <dan at lec.com>
Date: Mon, 04 May 1998 09:49:51 +0000

Here's a question or two in relation to some other less well-defined
"other Severians".  I apologize for going a little afield from
strictly "technical" definitions and I've been awed by some of your
analytical skills, but I'd still like to look at these things in
relation to a coupld of other questions:

Could one of Severian's predecessors have been Paleamon?  We know that
Palaemon did wander at one time in exile from the guild, and we even
hear a bit of his exploits from the Pelerine's slave who had at one
time been whipped by Journeyman Palaemon.  I've often wondered if
perhaps Palaemon's story was essentially the novella that Wolfe
started out to write, as recounted in CASTLE OF THE OTTER (wherein
clever readers were encouraged to solve his "locked citadel" dilemma,
though I never came up with anything).  So I'm not saying that
Palaemon was Sev1, but that perhaps Severian was not the first
torturer to come close to bringing the new sun, or at least achieving
a kind of grace, and so perhaps Sev1 was the next in line.  Mal and
Pal (as someone here once called them) are just about the only
positive role models Severian has early on in his life since Gurloes
is more or less presented as a fraud.

And where did Palaemon get Terminus Est anyway?

Another somewhat unrelated obsevation: it's tempting to equate the
Ascians with the Red Chinese and their "little red book" of Mao's
quotations, especially with added observations about the double
meanings inherent in actual old Chinese "stratagems"; however, I'm now
convinced that Wolfe could just as easily offer the King James bible
as an example, when you consider the extent to which its words shape
our own words.

D

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