Severian as reverse Christ (or something)

JBarach at aol.com · 20 Nov 2008, 22:40 · from 2008-November.txt.gz

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From: JBarach at aol.com (JBarach at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:40:10 EST
Subject: (urth) Severian as reverse Christ (or something)
Message-ID: <cb9.3d3fe4cf.3657414a at aol.com>

John writes:

> Wolfe makes it pretty clear, I think, that he finds  Severian's
> profession to be repugnant.  

And yet Wolfe also says this (and I've put the most relevant comment in  
bold):

LM: Where was it that you knew you were heading when you began  The Book of 
the New Sun?

Wolfe: I knew I wanted Severian  to be banished and then to return to the 
Guild in a position of such authority  that the Guild would be forced to make him 
a Master of the Guild. And I wanted  to have Severian be forced to confront 
the problem of Thecla and the problem  of torture and the role of human pain 
and misery. At that time I had not yet  read The Magus, so the thought didn't 
come from there, but I was very  conscious of the horror not only of being 
tortured but of being forced to be a  torturer or executioner. I didn't want my 
readers to be able to dismiss  violence and pain with some platitudes about "Oh, 
violence?how terrible!" It's  very easy to say how terrible it is to beat a 
man with a whip, or lock him up  for 30 years of his life, or to execute him. 
These are indeed awful things.  But when you are actually in authority, you find 
out that sometimes it's  absolutely necessary for you to take certain 
distasteful actions.  

LM: Severian makes the point somewhere that if he didn't  execute some of the 
people he does, they would be out killing people  themselves....

Wolfe: And he's right. What are you going to do  with someone like John Wayne 
Gacy?who used to live about eight miles from  where we're sitting right now?
if you're not going to be willing to lock him up  for the rest of his life? If 
you let him out, he's almost certain to start  killing more innocent people. 
I wanted Severian to have to face at  least the possibility that being an 
agency of pain and death is not  necessarily an evil thing. That's one recognition 
he must come to  grips with when he decides to leave a knife in Thecla's cell 
to help her  commit suicide. He's partially responsible for the blood he sees 
seeping from  under her cell door, just as every member of a society is 
responsible for the  blood shed by people it decides to execute. Of course, when 
Severian later  receives a letter from Thecla telling him the suicide was a 
trick permitting  her to be freed unobtrusively, that creates all sorts of other 
dilemmas for  him?and for me as well. I had started out assuming I was writing 
a novella of  about 40,000 words whose title was to have been "The Feast of 
Saint  Catherine," but now I began to see this material had greater 
possibilities.  The writer has a problem when ideas, characters, and so forth don't seem 
to  come, or when they aren't good enough when they do come. But when they're 
too  good and too numerous, he has another. But the time I had finished with 
The  Shadow of the Torturer, I had completed an entire novel but Severian was  
hardly started. Instead of winding up the plot, I had begun half a dozen  
others which needed to be worked out. Eventually I decided I needed to write a  
trilogy to be able to develop everything sufficiently; and when the third book  
turned out to be almost twice as long as the first two combined, I finally  
expanded things into a tetralogy. When I was done, I discovered that I had  
arrived where I had set out for?but the trip to that place was very different  than 
what I had expected.

_http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm_ 
(http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm) 

John
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