Sister? (was: Re: Severian's sister/ancestry - query.)

Jane Delawney · 07 Aug 2010, 01:14 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: jane_delawney at sky.com (Jane Delawney)
Date: Sat, 07 Aug 2010 02:14:44 +0100
Subject: (urth) Sister? (was: Re:  Severian's sister/ancestry - query.)
In-Reply-To: <4C5B8549.9060606 at io.com>
References: <4C5B6256.2020608 at sky.com> <4C5B8549.9060606 at io.com>
Message-ID: <4C5CB384.1050104 at sky.com>

Sorry for monkeying with the subject line again, I want to get my own 
posts sent back to me and this is the only way I can get Sky's mail 
server to do this. And apologies *again* if you have heard this a few 
too many times already.

On 06/08/10 04:45, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 8/5/2010 8:16 PM, Jane Delawney wrote:
>> So ... why on Urth, with the power and authority invested in him as
>> Autarch, does Severian not require access to the records of the Seekers
>> of Truth and Penitence, and thus learn beyond any doubt just who are his
>> parents, his grandparents, and his sister? The flip answer is of course
>> 'because GW does not want us to know', but I hope for more than that.
>> Sev could have asked, and he would have been obeyed. He doesn't ask.
>
>
> I believe he does open the records, which is how he knows his mother's 
> name and hair color, which Ouen confirms, and that he does it almost 
> immediately upon his ascension, before Dorcas can get over her grief 
> of the boatman and flee their house in the ruins.

Dunno. Seems to me that Sev has had sufficient information prior to 
becoming Autarch to at least be able to make an informed guess that 
Dorcas was probably his grandmother and Ouen his father. Opening the 
records would have provided confirmation for sure, but did he really 
need that to take the actions he did ie. compel Ouen to care for Dorcas 
(since he knows that he (Severian) would be the last person D. would 
ever want to see again after her return to Nessus).

Whether this is the case or not though - one is still left to wonder 
why, given that he simply must have been able to demand the relevant 
information from the Guild, Severian still does not know (even at the 
end of UOTNS he does not know - one might think that by that time, both 
Sev and GW have passed beyond worrying about it, but if Juturna is in 
the mix that is not the case at all, is it?) who his *sister* is. GW 
spends altogether too much time and effort setting Severian up as one of 
twins (or at the very least of a brother-sister pair with appropriate 
names) for this to be an irrelevant or insignificant question, surely?

I gather that in one of GW's later works (which I have not read) there 
is a scene set within the Matachin Tower which involves Severian, a 
'cacogen', and Merryn (at the time either apprentice or 'journeywoman' 
Witch) and that during this scene Merryn claims that Severian is her 
brother. This may be a generic term (Severian refers to 'the Witches, 
our sisters' in 'Shadow'; here the usage appears to be generic, though 
for any individual Seeker or apprentice there is the possibility that 
this term is literally true, given what we are told about how these two 
guilds obtain recruits) but it's possibly not. Merryn I know has been 
fingered as Severa by more than one commentator, but so have quite a few 
other characters (Juturna, the mandragora, Jolenta, and so on and so 
forth). If Sev as Autarch can be assumed to have confirmed his earlier 
suspicions and deductions about Dorcas, Ouen et al., then why, 
apparently, has he not succeeded in discovering further information 
about his sister?

I still think this is a major lacuna and pretty strange.

jd

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