Thorny paradoxes

Tony Ellis · 30 Mar 1999, 10:36 · from urth-v0024.mbox · original

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From: "Tony Ellis" <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Subject: (urth) Thorny paradoxes
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 11:36:45 +0100
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Mathew Malthouse wrote:

> m.driussi at genie.com wrote:
>
> > Furthermore, the Norse word is spelled UR+, with the plus sign being
> > that wonderful letter which we no longer have in the Anglophonic
> > world--I won't bore you with the name of it.  It is necessary,
> > however falacious an impression it creates, to spell words with "+"
> > as having either "th" (which rudely approximates the phonetic value)
> > or "d" (which rudely captures the essence of the letter's shape,
> > since it looks like "a crossed d").
>
> Com'on, don't be shy. It's a thorn, yes? (The letter that printers used y=
 for,
> as in ye=3Dthe)

-That's- thorn, yes. But I wouldn't describe it as a crossed "d", more an a=
ngular
"P".

> Incidentally 'Urth', from very first seeing the word, put me in mind of '=
Ur-",
> as in, well I can't explicayte it to my satisfaction but as in Ur-gold and
> Ur-Viles.

Me too. But then the prefix "ur" is used to mean earliest, or most primitiv=
e, so
technically speaking we were right to do so. :-) I also used to wonder if t=
here
was supposed to be some suggestion of Ur, the ancient Chaldean city, which =
really
was way off the mark...

Roy wrote:

>     But that is precisely where the paradox occurs. That chapter, chapter
> XXXVII, is titled "The Book of the New Sun". The title implies, if anythi=
ng,
> that Canog is the author of _TBotNS_.

Well, it says on the back of my battered Arrow paperback that it is volume =
one of
"The Book of the New Sun", so isn't that TBotNS too?  I did carefully say '=
If you
can accept that Severian's narrative constitutes, either wholly or in part,=
 the
"lost" Book of the New Sun on which Dr Talos says his play is based'. If yo=
u don't
want to accept that, fair enough, I'm not entirely sure that I do. -But-, t=
here
does seem to be more than one Book of the New Sun. There's the one which the
imprisoned Thecla requests from her local lending library, which by definit=
ion
cannot be "lost", and there is the one Dr Talos's play is based on, which -=
is-
described as lost. There's at least one other reference to The Book of the =
New Sun
being lost, too.

>  Regardless of who put pen to paper when--Sev, Dr. Talos, Canog, or
> another--none of them originated the story.

Severian is an eye-witness. Where everyone else is writing second or third =
hand,
he's writing about events that he himself has taken part in. You can't get =
much
more original than that. Yes, he fudges the events of Urth's last day when
relating them to Canog, but later he puts this right by witnessing them fir=
st hand
and writing about them.

>     Which brings me to Dr. Talos again. He is several times mentioned as
> tinkering with the script of the play to accommodate his circumstances. W=
hen
> he does so is he changing history/destiny?

A fun idea, but I don't think so. In the play the Contessa sees a mysterious
figure, in UOTNS we learn that this is Severian, but he's not there because=
 he
read it in Dr Talos's play. He only makes the connection at that moment. Bu=
t he
will now write about this encounter. If his manuscript goes back in time, t=
his
argues that actual events drive the content of the play, rather than the co=
ntent
of the play driving events.

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