Dionysus, the Mausoleum

Andrew Mason · 21 Dec 2010, 16:45 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 16:45:43 +0000
Subject: (urth) Dionysus, the Mausoleum
Message-ID: <AANLkTikpzSPKLDSkczurZsOOGpK4mHqEsKEEhnWEhedU at mail.gmail.com>

>

Lee Berman wrote:

> Hm. If this were simply an American tale I could see how Severian might simply be the humble son of
> commoners Ouen and Catherine who managed to make good. We like that sort of thing. ?But since
> the story seems to draw upon Medieval, Greek and Roman themes I guess there is more to Severian's
> lineage than is openly acknowledged. Be it Arthur or Aragorn, Theseus or Hercules, that noble/divine
> blood will out. (Even Jesus needed linkage to the House of David, yes?)

I think Severian is the son of Ouen and Catherine (but that Catherine
isn't a commoner). If he were not, Wolfe really would be leading us up
a garden path. (We know of Catherine only through Ouen; and Ouen only
seems significant because of his similarity to Severian, both
physically and in powers of memory,  so if they're not Severian's
biological parents, that whole episode becomes pointless.) I think we
are probably meant to see other relations of Sefverian turning up
through the series, and revealing more about his family - though I'm
not sure who they all are; the moral, I suspect, is that Severian is
linked to many kinds and classes of people in the Commonwealth, thus
illustrating Malrubius' claim that in him the disparate tendencies of
Urth have been reconciled. He may well be descended from Typhon -
indeed if Typhon has left descendants at all, he probably is - but
making him the son of Typhon, through cloning or time travel or the
like, messes this story up. That he's the father of Typhon is not
problematic in the same way (though it would have to be reconciled
somehow with Typhon's claim that he he was not born).

As for the mausoleum; I take it that this is the tomb of a Severian
who has already experienced the events of BOTNS, and has travelled
back to the past for some reason. The emblem of rose, ship and
fountain certainly suggests this. At the end of COTA he proposes that
both the face in the mausoleum and Apu-Punchau are the time-travelling
'first Severian'. He is, as it turns out, wrong about Apu-Punchau, who
is himself; and he may be wrong about the mausoleum as well; but I
take it he's right that both are time-travelling versions of himself.
We aren't told the details of what happened with the mausoleum, but we
do know he intends to make more trips to the past.

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