Thecla's genealogy folio

Chris · 04 Oct 2006, 07:35 · from 2006-October.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: rasputin_ at hotmail.com (Chris)
Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 07:35:52 +0000
Subject: (urth) Thecla's genealogy folio
In-Reply-To: <000c01c6e782$4210cd80$ef3ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F763230E2BF7F18E7B21A2861D0 at phx.gbl>

Interesting - to be honest I can't think of any interpretation of that 
statement that really makes any more sense than what you just offered.

But, yeesh, the incest-factor is being a little overloaded here.

>I had not read Wolfe's essay "Books in _The Book of the New Sun_" before a
>few weeks ago, when I obtained a copy of PLAN[E]T ENGINEERING. Wolfe said
>something else in the essay about Thecla's four books that has caused me no
>end of annoyance. <g> He said, "[t]hey all must have something to do with
>Severian."
>
>Thecla did not, of course, know anything about Severian when she requested
>the books. She just wanted help from her relatives and/or the Conciliator.
>Three of the books, as I outlined in my previous post, concern the
>Conciliator to a greater or lesser degree, so they necessarily have
>something to do with Severian. It's the folio with the genealogical charts
>that bugs me. I suppose I could fall back to the position that, since
>Severian comes to possess Thecla's memories and personality, anything that
>was important to her had something to do with him, but that's too easy and 
>I
>can't make myself believe that's all there is to it. No, I think that Wolfe
>is suggesting that Severian and Thecla are blood relatives.
>
>All of the attempts to link the two that I am aware of have speculated that
>they share a common parent, one that appears on stage in NEW SUN or is at
>least mentioned, however obliquely; that or they are related by someone 
>only
>a generation or two removed from them. Maybe so, but I have yet to be
>convinced.
>
>An alternative relationship might be suggested by the antiquity of at least
>two of the other three books and their connection to the Conciliator. The
>brown book dates back at least three or four centuries and Canog's book to
>the time of Ymar. Might it be that Thecla is related not so much to the
>apprentice Severian as to the Conciliator? Even if the connection is not
>recognizable or known to her?
>
>Several times in the Urth Cycle it is implied that Severian makes (will
>make) trips into the past that are not related in the text. The Conciliator
>might have entered Thecla's family tree anywhen from Typhon's time onward.
>
>It must be remembered that Severian made a big deal about how much his
>education was enhanced by the reading and studying of those four books. And
>even if he had not studied the genealogical charts, Thecla did and he had
>her memories. He might have gone into the past for the express purpose of
>making *come* true what he knew *had been* true. After all, someone also
>built that mausoleum and someone tinkered with the body count from time to
>time.
>
>-Roy
>
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

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