UotNS and how it screws with your head

Lee Berman · 13 Jul 2010, 16:12 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:12:03 -0400
Subject: (urth) UotNS and how it screws with your head
Message-ID: <SNT123-W503B0599845318309EDA73CFB90 at phx.gbl>

>Thomas Bitterman- Fenrir as father of "Wolfe"s is good enough for me.

>Cliff Judge- But part of me is also thinking....yeah there it is, Severian is his own
father.

I think Severian bears quite a resemblance to Number Five (as Phaedria quite resembles
Thecla). Number Five's real name is Gene Wolfe. Is it so far fetched that Inire is 
father to another of these literary Gene Wolfe avatars? I always thought the 
mausoleum, with its five coffins, was a connector between these two stories.

Anyway, how the heck are we supposed to draw sensible family trees if they involve
clones and time travel and shape changing alien beings who can reproduce sexually and
asexually?

With regard to Severian's father, we must ask about Ouen (though I am more interested
in Ouen's small, bent father).

I think of Theseus (though it could be various other Greek heroes) who was:

>"son of Aethra, and fathered by Aegeus and Poseidon, both of whom Aethra lay with in one night."

The mechanics of that parentage are a bit mysterious...then again Christianity also relies
on a similar divine conception of a hero with a surrogate human father figure. (I mean hero
in the Campbellian sense here).

Alright I am done trying to make sense of this for now. I'll just concur with Cliff
that it screws with your head. As I expect it was intended. Some qustions we'll never get a 
definite answer to. 		 	   		  
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