Antipolaric brothers

Lee Berman · 26 Nov 2010, 15:32 · from 2010-November.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: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 10:32:12 -0500
Subject: (urth) Antipolaric brothers
Message-ID: <SNT123-W38865BC51B74C4E35CF6DCF210 at phx.gbl>

On further consideration I am now more firmly sold on the conclusion that the blonde, 
hawk-nosed guy steering the ship at the end of RttW is meant to represent Typhon. It 
just doesn't seem right that a revelation in the grand finale of a 12 book series would 
be as anti-climactic as Dux Caesidius.

Still, I think Dux's resemblance to Severian, implying a shared aquiline nose
is important. It reinforces the idea of Typhon and Severian resemble each other, as 
antipolaric brothers should. The Mandragora also reinforces this link.

My further consideration was inspired by reviewing a conversation Hoof and SilkHorn 
are having about making these Red Sun Whorl trips. Hoof is wondering why Pas would allow 
Scylla to make the journey with them to the Red Sun Whorl. SilkHorn says that he would not, 
unless there was a way that Pas could also make the journey. The issue, like so many others
in this series, is left unresolved, unexplained: so where is Pas?

Making this dream-journey to the Red Sun Whorl seems to reveal the true essence of a person
or something like that. Scylla appears as a young woman (with snake-like arms). So, I think
Pas' true essence as a tall, hawk-nosed blonde guy is also revealed. I'm not sure if he is 
there as the aspect of Pas found in Silkhorn or maybe he has possessed the inhumu who is 
with them. But I think it is Typhon we are seeing.

The scene also invokes (for me) one of the most important scenes from 5HoC. It is a dream 
sequence in which Number Five's father is steering a ship, refusing to untie it from the dock
until he can determine what is impeding the progress of the ship. It is meant to symbolize
the self-defeating nature of cloning and trying to micro-manage and overcontrol the world and 
one's self/family.

I think this dream scene was the germ of a continuing gnostic theme in Wolfe's work. In BotNS 
Typhon takes the role of light, over-controlling Creator while Severian is his antipolaric 
brother, the dark, chaos-bringing Destroyer.

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