Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis

Craig Brewer · 25 Nov 2008, 05:00 · from 2008-November.txt.gz

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From: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:00:46 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis
References: <W6892515715278931227569143@webmail10>
Message-ID: <508691.69387.qm at web37608.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

>>Yes, "just."  Even in its internal cosmology, it's very clear that
>>Severian's actions are in no way the last word about the humans of
>>Urth--they're a hit of the reset button so that, in time, the humans
>>might evolve into Hieros and escape into a higher plane of existence.
>>That moment, if/when it comes, would be a transcendent moment akin to
>>a Last Day.  This is a wiping away of the bulk of humanity to leave
>>behind a virtuous remnant, exactly like the Biblical flood.  It would
>>be a pretty dramatic error to read the Flood in Genesis and the Second
>>Coming of Christ as equally important pieces of Christian mythology.
>
>*sigh*
>I'm not claiming a one to one correspondence.
>I'm looking at this in poetic and metaphorical terms.
>and it's TOTALLY there in the text.  this is not much of a stretch of the imagination.
>
>~sonofwitz

Of course you're right that the metaphorical suggestion is there. But what I think others are trying to do is to figure out exactly how far the metaphor carries. It's one thing to say that there's a poetic metaphor of the Second Coming working in the text. It's another thing to say that it's the most important metaphor, even and especially if, for example, the Flood metaphor is also there. So what if Wolfe was doing something even more interesting than just writing a sf/fantasy version of the Second Coming? What if he was intentionally was trying to conflate the Old and New Testament stories in such a way that neither works as a master metaphor for the text, but actually something quite different? That doesn't negate what you've said, nor does it argue for a one-to-one correspondence. Instead, it takes both the metaphors and the text on their own terms to see how they're using all of this mythic material in unique ways.

I don't think anyone doubts all that you've pointed out about the various metaphorical ways that the Gospel and Christian myth works in the text. I think they're trying to look at the ways that the book diverges from the metaphor in order to find out what Wolfe might be creatively doing to the myth(s) by changing them, mixing them, etc., which is what he always does with myth, even those which he apparently thoroughly believes.

Craig

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