Catherine

Andrew Mason · 04 Dec 2010, 18:26 · from 2010-December.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: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2010 18:26:52 +0000
Subject: (urth) Catherine
Message-ID: <AANLkTikOKnROKeMz6_HgsN8t+qXvK_TohnFMKP+zQJ5v at mail.gmail.com>

Son of Witz wrote:

> I'm of the opinion that if these puzzles don't yield real symbolic meat they aren't worth pursuing. That being said, the idea that the Katherine he symbolically beheads is is mother is Roast fucking Beef. ?Severian has to destroy Mother Urth. He says this memory is the start of his reminiscing.
>

Brilliant idea; it explains, what has always puzzled me, why
Severian's mother is called Catherine. But I'm not sure it solves the
problem of who is who at the mundane level. Does it mean that the
woman who plays the part, the maid, actually is his mother? (If 'maid'
is understood in its traditional sense, of course, she can't be.) Or
does it just mean that the woman he is symbolically killing, Holy
Katharine, is somehow identified with his mother?

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