Serpents and Undines

John Watkins · 30 Jul 2010, 16:41 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:41:28 -0400
Subject: (urth) Serpents and Undines
In-Reply-To: <4C52F8FE.8010807 at io.com>
References: <SNT123-W60A3BA68B6F64EC2BF06CACFAA0 at phx.gbl>
	<4C52F8FE.8010807 at io.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTik10__tcK_Q6OVBf1NR3kR2yGQUtqGkLBe+Xz8k at mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:

>
> I get the sense that the author is trying to convey that the various "kinds
> of resurrection" are a mortal projection; there is only one source of the
> gift of life and that is the grace of the Increate. Then there are people
> who presume to decide that the Increate hasn't given them enough and will
> try to get more some other way, rather than living and sharing so that what
> they've been given *is* enough. This kind of substituion of one's judgment
> for that of the Increate is the first step on the dark path that eventually
> leads the likes of Typhon and Ceryx to airs of godhood, the way Vodalus
> presumes to substitute himself for the Autarch.
>
>

I really like this, and reading it the tumblers fell in my mind a little--of
course it's the usurpation of the perogative of God that Wolfe means to
invoke by paralleling Baldanders with Victor Frankenstein and his monster
alike, and in fact the precise effect and only be achieved by a blurring of
the two figures:  Baldanders is like Victor Frankenstein, seeking to take
over a divine role and like Victor Frankenstein, seeking to do so with
forbidden science, but he is also in his rejection of God a rebellious son
like the Monster.  This makes Baldanders both Promethean in his giving of
fire/life/science without divine license and Luciferian in his rejection of
the divine.

By the way, a similar dynamic of good/bad resurrections, although much
simpler, is at work in the Harry Potter books, where Harry achieves various
sorts of "good" immortality (protected from injury by mother's Christlike
sacrifice, resurrected from dead by his own sacrifice of blood to
Voldemort) while Voldemort (whose very name is so often parsed by clueless
commentators as the vaguely sinister "flight of death" rather than the
surely intended "fleeing death") pursues "evil" immortality, by feasting on
the blood of unicorns or the use of "horcruxs."  I understand that "horcrux"
is Rowling's coinage, and a pun:  "whore-cross," something that has the same
resemblance to the salvific and immortality-granting Cross of Christ as a
whore has to a bride--a quick, dirty, and likely cheap way of achieving the
basest end intended.

> --
> Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
> IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
> < http://ieeetamut.org >
>
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