Shadow, Chapter X

John Watkins · 20 Nov 2008, 22:16 · from 2008-November.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:16:41 -0500
Subject: (urth) Shadow, Chapter X
In-Reply-To: <154094.31351.qm at web37603.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <W2452113335238931227125414@webmail32>
	<154094.31351.qm at web37603.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <93d4039f0811201416j7054c1d6ma07afb36c0564fa6 at mail.gmail.com>

> Calling him an instantiation of logos gives Severian a kind of metaphysical priority that I'm not sure I agree with. However, if anyone "good" can be said to be a "Hypostasis of Logos," then I'm with you.
>

There's something profound there.  If God is, as Christians hold,
Goodness and Wisdom and Love, then anyone who is good or wise or
loving in some way acts as God.  But only in a very limited way.

> I guess my real question is this: Doesn't it make the story almost infinitely less interesting if we simply discover that Severian was basically divine all along? If that's what we're getting, then, to put it bluntly, there really wasn't much of a story to tell. Everything was fine from the get go, and any doubt about Severian's success or the coming of the New Sun was just a matter of not knowing all the details. There was never anything for Severian to prove or be tested for. All of his concerns about his role as a torturer and what it means to do right in the ambiguous world in which he found himself were just fake problems. But it not only means that there wasn't any real tension in the story all along, it also means that the moral dilemmas which the story so often seemed to be about aren't really something that human beings can relate to. We would screw up because we're human. Severian does good because he's divine. There's nothing for mere humans
>  to reflect on except that, shucks, it's too bad we're not divine, too.
>

That sounds more like a crappy David Eddings plot than a Gene Wolfe plot.

Oh, wait.  It was a crappy David Eddings plot.  (spoiler alert, I guess.)






It's the plot of The Tamuli.  "He was a god all along!"

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