Severian as reverse Christ (or something)

John Watkins · 20 Nov 2008, 22:52 · from 2008-November.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:52:30 -0500
Subject: (urth) Severian as reverse Christ (or something)
In-Reply-To: <cb9.3d3fe4cf.3657414a at aol.com>
References: <cb9.3d3fe4cf.3657414a at aol.com>
Message-ID: <93d4039f0811201452i7713b0afic82b91aa5719583c at mail.gmail.com>

It seems that Wolfe is doing a bit of sleight of hand there.  Most
people would accept a distinction between Severian's facilitating
Thecla's suicide and Severian's duties as a torturer.

On 11/20/08, JBarach at aol.com <JBarach at aol.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
> John
>
>
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