Close Reading: Torturer Chapter I

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 05 Sep 2006, 18:45 · from 2006-September.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: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 11:45:40 -0700
Subject: (urth) Close Reading: Torturer Chapter I
In-Reply-To: <20060905071954.88492.qmail at web54202.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <44FC0DDF.9090405 at charter.net>
	<20060905071954.88492.qmail at web54202.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <1f7617370609051145w19a62addg41d6a68772d95d6d at mail.gmail.com>

I think this is an excellent idea. At the risk of repetition or
contradiction I will go ahead and make my comments before reading
others'. So pulling out my old copy of SHADOW, and with TextEdit
open...

Chapter title: "Resurrection and Death"

A bit of irony here; death usually precedes resurrection. But, of
course, "resurrection" in this case is meant in literal root sense,
unburying, and so refers to Vodalus and his companions as
"resurrectionists." Severian's own first (?) death and resurrection,
though they have already happened earlier in the day, are postponed to
the second chapter. The imagery of the sepulcher is brought to bear
right as a _memento mori_ hanging over the whole Book.

p9. IT IS POSSIBLE I already had some presentiment of my future.

A rather haunting first line, for me. I used to think that tBotNS was
an attempt at "holographic" prose -- the idea that, as when you cut up
a hologram, the whole picture, in less detail, is contained in each
piece, so each chunk of the Book would contain an image of the whole.
I no longer think this, but clearly there is a lot of cross-reference
and cross-imagery, and this first sentence is a clue as to the why of
it; time is not linear here. This first page is full of forward
references:

--The image of "the locked and rusted gate," of which we shall be
reminded at the end of SHADOW, as Severian tells us that he has taken
us from one gate to another.

--The gate is "the symbol of my exile." Why "the" rather than "a"
symbol, I wonder?

--Noting the "thousands of paces of wall," Severian observes that "It
was a walk I would take, much later."

Certainly many of the book's themes are taken up by the end of this
first chapter -- memory and death, wandering and exile, war and
revolution, truth, lies, and evasions, and so on.

p12. A man who had not spoken before said, "I'm going to watch over my
mother ... They could have her a league off by now."

At first I was puzzled by this, thinking this guy's mother must be
someone special if the Vodalarii were going to take her; then I
realized, they're watching out for the "ordinary" anthropophagi as
much as the Vodalarii.

Now, there's an interesting phrase at the bottom of 14/top of 15.
Vodalus tells Hildegrin (as yet unnamed) to take his pistol, then
tells the volunteers "Guard yourselves!" Then:

pp14-5. As if a dove had momentarily commanded an arctother, the woman
took the shining pistol from the heavy man's hand...

Now, the heavy man is Hildegrin, who has just been given the pistol.
But who has commanded whom? Thea does not appear to have commanded
anyone, yet it's hard to imagine Vodalus as "a dove."

The fight between Vodalus and the volunteers is delightfully confused,
more like a real fight than most in fiction.

p16. He stumbled, as I have said. In that instant, I believe my whole
life teetered in the scales with his.

Indeed it did; if the volunteers had prevailed and found him there
with Vodalus, they'd surely have taken him for the Vodalarius he would
shortly claim to be, and kill him on the spot. But Severian is talking
about the change in his life that takes place because of the incidents
that follow, about how his accepting Vodalus's service led him to
"free" Thecla and, ultimately, to the throne.

Why does Severian claim to be a Vodalarius? As he says,

p17. It was a term I had scarcely heard.

Is it only because he needs a reason for being there, which won't lead
to Vodalus killing him?

Nor, I think, does his explanation of the efficacy of the coin in
cementing his service ring true. He goes out of his way to point out
that soldiers take their oath to the Autarch and are given a coin with
the Autarch's picture. Whose picture is on the coin Vodalus gives
Severian? Not Vodalus', to be sure; so the magickal explanation he
offers simply doesn't wash.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
http://www.danehyoakes.com
I've got a piece of braaaaain lodge in me heeead!!!

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