Severian as a student

Roy C. Lackey · 01 Jun 2008, 06:45 · from 2008-May.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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 01:45:44 -0500
Subject: (urth) Severian as a student
Message-ID: <000a01c8c3b3$2095a720$01ce4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Dave Tallman wrote:
>The feat of reconstructing the entire "Book of the New Sun" from memory
>is sufficient to prove to me that Severian had a photographic memory as
>he claimed. Nobody would even attempt such a task without one. If they
>did, it wouldn't read like something carefully written; it would be full
>of mistakes and backtracks.

By "reconstructing", I can only conclude you are referring to the copy
Severian made from memory shortly after boarding the Ship.

[snip]
>They say it's more difficult to lie than to tell the truth because a
>liar has more to remember. Severian wouldn't have a problem with that.
>Then also suggests that discrepancies should be harmonized where
>possible instead of treating them as signs of lies. Severian should be
>most consistent when he is lying. If this book was a rewrite from memory
>he got a second chance to fix any mistakes.

Again, what do you mean by "rewrite" and "second chance"? His original
manuscript was written shortly before boarding the Ship and sent to Ultan.
Whichever version Wolfe "translated", we have no means of comparing the Ship
copy to the original. The events recounted in the manuscript were first
written down ten years after Sev became autarch. There was no running
account made over the years that he could redact at leisure. The copy seems
to have been written out only days or weeks after completing the original
manuscript.

>The hand-off of the gun from Vodalus to Hildegrin or Thea is easily
>reconciled. Hildegrin said he couldn't use it, so it was clearly with
>the approval of Vodalus that Thea took it next. Thus he "gave the pistol
>to his mistress" even though he handed it first to Hildegrin.

I made a longish post here years ago about mistakes and inconsistencies of
memory in NEW SUN. IIRC, I concluded that the mistake about the gun was
probably Wolfe's, not Sev's, because the second mention of the hand-off,
this time to Thea, is repeated by Wolfe in the appendix to CITADEL. (It is
possible that the first mention in SHADOW is a left-handed hint by Wolfe
that Sev's memory isn't entirely to be trusted, but the revelation would be
rather far from the source.)

Most of the mistakes of memory are about things that are not, in themselves,
worth lying about. It doesn't really matter whether the pouch Dorcas sewed
was made of doeskin or manskin, or if Roche or Drotte said they saw the
pikes on the second page of the story. Unless they are all mistakes by
Wolfe, the errors were put there by Wolfe to let the careful reader know
that Sev's memory isn't quite as ostentatiously accurate as Sev loudly
claims it to be.

Sev is an admitted liar, but his worst deceptions are his omissions.

-Roy

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