Sev as the avatar of Abaia

mournings glory · 05 Apr 2006, 17:15 · from 2006-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: mourningsglory at hotmail.com (mournings glory)
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006 17:15:10 +0000
Subject: (urth) Sev as the avatar of Abaia
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370604050852vc8aef86hd23b1ded7a6dd9ca at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BAY107-F9FD4C0E1EB886E22D650CD8CB0 at phx.gbl>

thalassocrat first:

> > But there is one glaring difference which I find very difficult to
> > ignore: Merryn. When Sev meets her & the Cumaean in Stone Town,
> > they don't recognize each other. But in Long Sun, Sev fetches
> > Merryn to meet with Jahlee; after that, at any rate, they *must*
> > know each other. Something has definitely changed.

I'm not sure that the first half of this is altogether true, since Sev 
clearly does remember meeting Merryn when he was much younger and details 
the reminiscence in Chapter XXX of _Claw_. It's Merryn, on the other hand, 
who must ask the Cumaean, "Who is...this man in fuligin then, Mother?"

now blattid:

>Not clear. Granted Severian's trick memory, some years pass
>between this and the Stone Town. How much has Merryn changed
>in that time? For him not to recognize
>someone he hasn't seen in several years (during which time both
>have grown from preadolescence to adulthood) doesn't seem too
>improbable.

The thing is Merryn has *not* changed at all from the time Sev first meet 
her as a boy in the tower of the witches to his encounter with her in the 
stone town. In his called-up memory of Merryn, "The witch to whom [the face] 
belonged seemed old to me and must actually have been about twenty or a 
little less." Back in real-time, however: "I mention all this now because it 
seemed to me...that the women who crouched over it were the same. It was 
impossible; the old woman to whom I had handed the my letter was almost 
certainly dead, and the young one (if she were still living) would be 
changed beyond recognition. Yet the faces that turned toward me were the 
faces I recalled."

In _Return to the Whorl_ Merryn is described in very similar terms as the 
one in _Claw_. If there's a physiological difference it is slight. I believe 
it's also important to note that Sev never tells us or Horn that the witch's 
name is Merryn. We learn this only from Horn, who sources the information as 
originating with Jahlee.

back to thalassocrat:

>But in Long Sun, Sev fetches
>Merryn to meet with Jahlee; after that, at any rate, they *must*
>know each other. Something has definitely changed.

Again, Sev *does* recognize Merryn from the first time he encountered here, 
just as obviously he cannot retroactively remember her from a book that has 
yet to be written. Merryn may not be as gifted in the memory department -- 
hence, given the passage of years, her failure to recognize Severian as the 
boy apprentice who once delivered a message to the witches' tower.

So really nothing has changed -- including Merryn's appearance over the 
course of both the New and Short Sun series. This, to me, is the mysterious 
part of the bargain.

m.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net