A Slow-Moving, Half-Living, Smiling, Pale-Limbed "Statue"?

E · 17 Nov 2007, 08:51 · from 2007-November.txt.gz

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From: euth82 at gmail.com (E)
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 03:51:16 -0500
Subject: (urth) A Slow-Moving, Half-Living, Smiling, Pale-Limbed "Statue"?
Message-ID: <ca4bdd8f0711170051s78a81d75u3926ca6783ab4e82 at mail.gmail.com>

Hello,

In Urth of the New Sun Ch 41 "Severian from His Cenotaph", he says the
following:

  "An antlered buck... to my right... On my left, a statue stared with
sightless eyes."

Then a few paragraphs later, after analyzing his epitath/monument:

  "...and my absurd memorial stood where at another time I had feigned
to think the giant Nod a statue.  Recalling the moment, I glanced at
the one I had seen upon stepping back into Briah, and found it was,
just as I had supposed, one of those harmless half-living creatures.
It was moving slowly toward me now, its lips curved in an archaic
smile. For a breath I admired the play of my own light on its pale
limbs, but it seemed to me it had been only two watches or three since
daylight had come to the slopes... and the vitality I felt now put me
in no mood to contemplate statues..."

>From the above, to me at least, it seems Severian is applying the
terms "half-living", "smiling", "slow moving", etc., to the statue to
his left, the one with sightless eyes.  Are these terms implying the
statue is some sort of bio-engineered type monument, and not of stone?
 His description almost makes it seem zombie-like, like a
partially-animated corpse (paleness, slow-moving, smiling but
seemingly non-sentient, etc.).  It must not be sentient, because if it
were, he would probably have spoken to it; were it dangerous or
threatening, he would have noted that as well.

Any conjectures would be great.  Now that I think about it, the
"zombie-statue" idea seems too extreme; if I had to guess right now I
would say it's a hologram of some sort, a projection... and Severian
doesn't say this explicitly because he assumes we know about his world
and know that statues on Urth aren't necessarily made of stone.

[Maybe this is related to the hologram/projection of himself that he
sees much earlier in UOTNS when the "jibers" on The Ship want him to
salute his own hologram, which itself is stuck in a pattern of walking
3 steps and then saluting... but in this case he explicitly says he
sees an image of himself being repeated, and doesn't call it a
'statue' at all... so maybe it is not related.]

Best

-Adam

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