Corundum of the Claw

Lane Haygood · 24 Jun 2010, 15:16 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: lhaygood at gmail.com (Lane Haygood)
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:16:35 -0500
Subject: (urth) Corundum of the Claw
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Here's a hypothesis I have:

(x)  Wolfe found gnostic, kabbalistic and other (quasi)heretical
notions interesting and plundered them for story material, eventually
coming up with a story about a young man's journey from outsider to
king to flawed savior of the world (which is itself a common enough
storyline).

This theory has the benefit of explaining the major themes and plot
points of the BOTNS, while explaining away neatly any conflict between
the theological grounding of Briah and that of the author,
spatiotemporally situated so near to us as he is.

yvt,
Lane

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 9:53 AM, John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I sort of can't believe we're having this discussion again, so I will
> simply restate my point.
>
> 1) ?Gene Wolfe tells us he's an orthodox Catholic, and we have no
> reason to disbelieve him.
>
> 2) ?Severian is pretty clearly not literally the Jesus guy orthodox
> Catholics say they believe in. ?He is a killer, likely a rapist,
> interested in worldy power, et cetera.
>
> 3) ?Severian is also pretty clearly surrounded by Christlike imagery.
> Some of this seems almost parodic, some of it seems almost reverent.
>
> There are many hypotheses consistent with these facts. ?The hypotheses
> that aren't consistent are
>
> a) ?Severian is a literal stand-in for Jesus Christ as understood by the author,
>
> b) ?The author just screwed up and put in a lot of Jesus stuff for no reason.
>
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