Severian's skin color

James Wynn · 23 Jun 2005, 15:02 · from 2005-June.txt.gz

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From: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Thu Jun 23 15:02:38 2005
Subject: (urth) Severian's skin color
Message-ID: <20402465.1119564156555.JavaMail.root at wamui-karabash.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Crush said:
>>Thematically, I consider it very important.  Tussah=Typhon means that
>>Tussah;s and Pas's murder that happened at about the same are
>>connected so far as the story goes. Much has been made of Pas's
>>possible intentions for Silk. It shows that Pas' original plan did not
>>include Silk. Silk came later, after things went awry. If Silk is 
>>genetically
>>Horn's son, then the fact that the Rajan is simultaneously Silk, Horn, and
>>Horn the Neighbor builds on the theme of rationalizing the Holy Trinity
>>which Wolfe takes at many levels in The Short Sun.

>This is the kind of thing I was talking about, and I do think there's a very 
>big thematic problem here. You are suggesting that Wolfe is "rationalizing" 
>the Holy Trinity by deriving it from Typhon, who is on several levels *the 
>Demiurge*. Perhaps you can justify this, I don't know, but any attempt to 
>work this into the theme changes the implications of the entire series from 
>top to bottom - and, as far as I can tell, not for the better. It seems like 
>you'd be left with nothing but a sort of Gnostic pamphlet piece.

>This isn't the only way the clone angle can be explored, of course, but it 
>seems like many of the Clone Interpretations that have been proposed tend to 
>center the theme on this one aspect at the direct cost of turning other 
>aspects into mere farce, or simply discounting them.

I don't care if you completely deny there are *any* clones in the entire Sun
Cycle, it is still extremely arguable (but I'm not arguing it) that the books are
to Gnosticsm what The Chronicles of Narnia are to Orthodox Christianity. That's
just a fact, and discounting clones doesn't solve it. You still have a Gnostic
pamphlet.

Severian is named after a 2nd century Gnostic sect. Silk is an "enlightened"
man who becomes divine. Pas is an evil maker of an evil world who is
undermined by the original "good god" from outside it. I would really like get
Wolfe to provide a definitive answer on this.

But that is totally aside from Wolfe's rationalization of the Trinity....which he
does for example in his discussion regarding Thyone's Son in RTTW...
he is showing through the Rajan that it is possible...theoretically...for a
person to be three persons yet one person. He's not saying that's how God
*is*. He's only showing that it is not unreasonable.

Wolfe has said that originally The Long Sun was about a "good man in a bad
religion". Perhaps Wolfe is showing that you can't savage the knowledge of
the true God so much that he can't reach people's hearts. That, as they say,
when you get far enough away you are on your way back home. A demon
who imitates a god will be transformed into that god. So the more evil Pas is,
the better he exemplifies Wolfe point.

He's also clearly interested in mythical divine triads. Robert Graves made
much of the female ones in "The White Goddess" (which Wolfe illustrates
in the term "trivigaunte" and in the three sibyls) but there are plenty of
important male triads as well in the mythologies of Greece, Scandinavia,
Syria, etc. 

~ Crush

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