Regency Plot Thickens

adam louis stephanides · 11 Jul 1998, 11:04 · 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: adam louis stephanides <astephan at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: (urth) Regency Plot Thickens
Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 11:04:46
Message-ID: <urth-v0016-0054 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0016/0054.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Fri, 10 Jul 1998 mantis wrote:

> First of all, let me point out the "Odysseus Returns to Ithaca" mode
> at work in Severian's return to Urth.  He becomes angry because his
> Penelope has usurped his throne and married again--his "Id Monster"
> reanimates the dead assassin before he understands that he has been
> gone forty years rather than the hundred days he has experienced;
> Valeria is killed for her infidelities.

But when the assassin is reanimated, Severian has no idea that Valeria is
Autarch or has remarried; he doesn't even know if she's still alive.  Or
is the idea that Severian's unconscious somehow knows the future?  If so,
this would be ironic, since his conscious guesses as to the future are
generally wrong.

Incidentally, as long as we're on this chapter (41) who is the mysterious
lovely woman Severian sees in the Secret House?  (I just came across this
passage by chance, so maybe the answer is made obvious elsewhere in the
book, or maybe it's been discussed on this list; if so, I apologize.)

--Adam

*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