Severian's Journey: Happenstance or Masterplan?

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 19 Aug 2010, 19:12 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:12:29 -0700
Subject: (urth) Severian's Journey: Happenstance or Masterplan?
In-Reply-To: <BFB7DCA7-7A0B-401A-BC17-24E1B186FE6F at liftingfaces.com>
References: <BFB7DCA7-7A0B-401A-BC17-24E1B186FE6F at liftingfaces.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=nekbeDmGMUhvy41j02M17YUnRR6VWZFRC95G3 at mail.gmail.com>

Ryan,

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Ryan Dunn <ryan at liftingfaces.com> wrote:

> In my (less than academic) study of the tetralogy which has confounded,
> inspired, and enlightened many, I now ask the question in a different way.
> When analyzing Severian's journey as a whole, and knowing where his journey
> ends, have the path he has taken -- the events he experiences, the people he
> encounters, and so forth -- been the product of one large design? Or were
> loose parameters were set forth for Severian in order to create an
> environment conducive to his inescapable ascension to Autarch and (later)
> New Sun?

Let's further break this down. There appear to be three possibilities:

1. Severian's journey is entirely happenstance

2. Your "loose parameters" model

3. Your "one large design" model

I realize that you (quite correctly) eliminated #1 out of the gate,
but I want to artificially resucitate it for a moment to observe that
these are in fact analogous to three cosmological models:

1. Atheism/Theism, where shit just happens and our behavior is
determined by our biology and environment

2. "Intelligent design" - style cosmologies, where it all has a
purpose but we have free will within that

3. Predestination, in which free will is an illusion

We now see why it is correct to eliminate #1 out of the gate: Wolfe
clearly is _not_ writing in the context of an atheistic or theistic
cosmology. What you are, then, asking, is, in the context of which of
the latter two cosmologies is Wolfe writing in _tBotNS_?

I suspect that #2 would be the answer, with subtle shadings toward #3.
Cosmologically, it means this: we have free will, but the Increate
(i.e., the Christian God) always-already knows from-Eternity what we
will, freely, choose in-Time, and is able to take all our freely
chosen actions into account in the Grand Scheme -- thus providing in a
sense an illusion of predestination, because it all turns out the way
the Increate wants.

> if Severian, the hero of our story, was always meant to become the
> New Sun, then we as readers ought to trust the text as a recount of one
> large piece of choreography, a construct that may or may not be known to the
> narrator.

I agree, within the context I have suggested above.

> the only way to control something is to tie strings to it and
> make it perform as you wish.

Here I disagree. You can control something the way you control a dog,
by understanding what motivates the dog and providing it with the
correct stimuli. It is still free to choose its responses -- but
_being a dog_, it will almost inevitably respond as you want. Given
that the Increate understands our motivations (infinitely) better than
we understand a dog's, the Increate can motivate a given human
perfectly _without violating that human's freedom_.

Thus the "paradox" of free will vs. predestination dissolves.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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