The Two Katharines

Lee Berman · 17 Aug 2010, 12:23 · 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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:23:23 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Two Katharines
Message-ID: <SNT123-W561523B7896AA7D144705ACF9C0 at phx.gbl>

>Dave Tallman- Here is another quote from that section, ambiguous but possibly
>significant, "I knew even as I watched her that her head was only
>concealed in the cloth; but it seemed there was nothing there. I felt
>dizzy and tired.">

>He had seen the illusion many times, and this time much closer. Yet
>this time "it seemed there was nothing there." He also felt dizzy and
>tired, perhaps because healing power was going out from him.

The head seeming to not be there is very good evidence for your theory Dave. 
The dizzy/tiredness a bit less compelling regarding resurrection but still good.

I like the idea of a khaibit being sacrificed every year because it explains
why she never seemed to age. It was a new clone every year. Why use a new clone
if Holy Katharine didn't really die each year? Agelessness to maintain the 
illusion? If maintaining the illusion was important why allow the apprentices 
to see the sword and the rest was fake?

A khaibit truly sacrificed each year also allows the crism to be real blood instead 
of pig blood or whatever cheap substitute for a client's fresh blood might be used. 
This seems appropriate to me. 

I see two purposes for the guild to pretending their Holy Katharine ceremony is a  
sham when it actually is a real beheading.

1. It sends a message to the apprentice that they are truly elevated. They have been 
fooled all their lives to think they will be play-acting but when they are actually on 
stage they find a real sword in their hands, a real client beneath them and real blood 
on their forehead. (Severian isn't always the brightest bulb though...)

2. It hammers home the message that, while Torturers are really performing bloody acts,
they are still directors and actors and must be in total control of the stage, the client,
other functionaries and the audience to control how things are perceived.

The legendary guild hero who fooled the both sides of an antagonistic audience reinforces 
this idea of constant stagecraft.  As does Master Gurloe's status as a complicated 
intelligent man who must create the illusion of being simple and brutal. Also Severian's 
behavior and thoughts when he is performing on stage later in the story. 

Perhaps all this is a metaphor for BotNS itself. A superficial story about a torturer who 
becomes king ends up being full of illusion, trickery and deceit, disguising multiple hidden 
layers of depth and meaning.

Dave, I think it was your observation that all THREE maids, Solange, Lybe and Kyneburga were
beheaded saints which first led me to my consideration that Catherine is sacrificed every year.  
I still think your idea about the resurrection and the real beheading as a one-time Conciliator
test is a good one. The underlying purposes inherent in our theories are quite different.

I will guess that Ryan prefers the Tallman interpretation to mine. I think his objection to my 
theory is that, "hey! the torturers are good guys! Palaemon, Drotte, Roche, Eata- all cool dudes. 
They would not participate in something as horrible as human sacrifice for the sake of ritual". 
The Tallman theory allows even the one real beheading of Catherine to not be so bad as she is 
brought back to life as expected.

I am much more willing to accept that the Torturers were fully capable of performing unnecessary 
barbaric acts. Supposedly, "Torturers Obey!". Yet at every turn they are tricking the government, 
falsifying paperwork, staging torture and beheadings to appear a certain way, covering up the 
misdeeds of their guild members etc.

This does not mean I fully disagree with Ryan. Severian, Drotte, Eata etc. ARE cool guys. But 
Gene Wolfe was in the army during a war. I suspect he came to realize that brotherhood, loyalty, 
patriotism, honor, codes and secrecy can be used to get good men to do terrible, unnecessary 
things. This applies to the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany and Al Qaeda as much as the US 
Army and Abu Graib. I think I understand why Wolfe has Severian reform the guild.

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