Hut/Ultan's Library/Catherine

James Wynn · 08 Apr 2009, 15:20 · from 2009-April.txt.gz

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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 10:20:32 -0500
Subject: (urth) Hut/Ultan's Library/Catherine
In-Reply-To: <93d4039f0904080749j78d31ccjdb186bc2c4b1792d at mail.gmail.com>
References: <COL109-W203E9E25E77526A04FB504D7870 at phx.gbl><883571995.20090405181338 at poczta.fm><AFEB31E805FC4A70A20D18FBF4D07BC3@eMachinePC><49D97045.8000800 at io.com><D75AFBBB6BC0424FAC57BAFF1757A694@eMachinePC><49DB204A.2050004 at io.com><FC6E33530DBB4F1AA87E316EE1471FDE@eMachinePC><49DC615F.8040406 at io.com><97B6FA1D6FAD4016BBBE736AEC53B810@eMachinePC>
	<93d4039f0904080749j78d31ccjdb186bc2c4b1792d at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <6823751C32E64206A3C2DB3D27E06381@eMachinePC>

>James, I really admire the insights you bring to this topic. 
>I am curious, though--if Severian is a clone of one of
>Typhon's children, what is Ouen's function? 
>Just a red herring?

I would presume that it would have to be a given in that case that Ouen is a clone too (given his resemblance to Sev), and that Dorcas is Ouen's birth mother and Ouen is likely the husband of Sev's birth mother. This seems the most obvious route to Dorcas becoming Sev's "grandmother".

Remember that Mucor was the "granddaughter" of Marble and that the Raja said Jahlee "could be" the sister of Hide (or maybe Hoof--I can't remember right now) and that Number Five called Maitre his father and Jeanine his "aunt". All this is fair warning that that familial titles in a Wolfe story should be read with suspicion or at least laxity. There are mythical/theological reasons IMO that lead Wolfe to choose to make familial titles to be true/untrue in his stories.

Why would an important clone like Ouen be a commoner in Nessus? There were dozens (or hundreds) of Number Fives running around in The Fifth Head of Cerberus. If Ouen was married to Sev's birth mother, I guess it implies a more deliberate plot, however. Further, once you move down this corridor, the possibility cannot be ignored that all of Sev's patrilineal heritage are clone's of himself, so that amnesiac Dorcas found it very easy to take Sev as her lover. But all this, is not part of Don's theory. It is just a potential logical extension of it.

J.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20090408/bea3a32f/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net