Regency Plot 2

Mark Millman · 10 Jul 1998, 14:53 · from urth-v0016.mbox · original

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: "Mark Millman" <Mark_Millman at hmco.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Regency Plot 2
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1998 14:53:44
Message-ID: <urth-v0016-0042 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0016/0042.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On 10 July 1998 at 5:42 pm GMT mantis sez:

> Anyway, applying details from "The Map" to
> Eata's tale in URTH, we find that "The Map"
> must be taking place in 8 S.R. or 9 S.R., since
> Severian is Autarch and "the law" (i.e., he
> hasn't left Urth yet, which happens in 10 S.R.),
> Maxellindis is dead (so presumably Eata has
> already been arrested, served on the ship,
> jumped ship in Xanthic Lands, spent two years
> there, then returned to the Commonwealth;
> since Maxellindis drowned avoiding the arrest),
> Severian's face is on newly minted silver coins.

But a close reading of "The Map" will convince you
that it's set immediately after Maxellindis' death; in
fact, the corpse that Eata fishes out of Gyoll with his
boat-hook doesn't make him cry because it reminds
him of her; it makes him cry because it is her.

I think that Eata's story in _Urth_ is the story as he
has convinced himself it should be.  Maxellindis,
in Eata's version of events, wasn't unfaithful to him
and didn't betray him, and, perhaps most import-
antly, wasn't casually killed by her lover right after
the theft of the map.

This suggests that Eata could indeed have returned
from the Xanthic Lands after Severian's departure
(in fact, I believe that Eata leaves soon after this very
episode; his rejection of the steady job is suggestive),
though it doesn't mean that Severian couldn't have
interpreted the story that Eata in fact tells in such a
way as to convince himself that Eata returned before
Severian's own departure.  And it doesn't in any way
invalidate your conclusion, mantis.  Indeed, if any-
thing, I'd say it strengthens it, since it introduces a
parallel situation, i.e.,

     Valeria : Severian :: Maxellindis : Eata.

Though I would like to know something more about
the relative timing of the composition of _Urth_ and
of "The Map".

Mark Millman

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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