Vodalus & the Old Autarch

Dave Gottlieb · 11 Aug 2010, 17:35 · from 2010-August.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: dmgottlieb at gmail.com (Dave Gottlieb)
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:35:09 -0400
Subject: (urth) Vodalus & the Old Autarch
In-Reply-To: <4C624B28.8040208 at io.com>
References: <764104.69060.qm at web84104.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<4C624B28.8040208 at io.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTikUVjrzXaDcwSfn8geisbwddaYvuo4fZwNfBG3f at mail.gmail.com>

In that scene, it is said to be a combination of Thecla's recollections and
the Autarch's "tone" that leads Severian to finally recognize him. If we
allow ourselves to emphasize the "tone" part, it may be that the Autarch has
some power of concealment (hypnosis?), and intentionally casts off the veil
for some reason at the end of the exchange.

At the end of Citadel, Severian is privy to some Autarchial knowledge (power
words?) that command instant recognition from a broad swath of servants of
the Commonwealth. Perhaps the Autarch is using similar techniques to control
who does and doesn't recognize his identity.

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 3:03 AM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:

> On 8/10/2010 11:52 AM, DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
>
>> Possibly. And yet autarchal profiles figure prominently in the story (as
>> do counterfeits). They can't be quite as poor as the Romans'. I actually
>> took that observation to mean that the true and counterfeit coins had
>> the same origin (different materials?). Did the Autarch fund Vodalus
>> with false coins?
>>
>> I was thinking of when Sev meets Inire (cowled) looking for the Green
>> Room in the House. Thecla would have been disoriented meeting him later,
>> certainly.
>>
>
> I notice that in that scene (CLAW XXI) Thecla's imprint only belatedly
> recognizes the Autarch herself, after several minutes of conversation even
> after getting a direct face-to-face look at him, so Vodalus' failure to
> recognize him is not unique.
>
> And yes, I do believe that bent little man is Inire. I don't see any need
> or ability for him to be Rudesind, who apparently is so tall that he makes
> his stepladder look like a stool when he sits atop it.
>
>
> --
> Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
> IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
> < http://ieeetamut.org >
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100811/cb8b2117/attachment.htm>

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