Ouen and Catherine

Lee Berman · 22 Dec 2010, 04:57 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:57:38 -0500
Subject: (urth) Ouen and Catherine
Message-ID: <SNT123-W60170CEB1FCBB9DEE35FFCCF1B0 at phx.gbl>

>Andrew Mason: I don't know about 'The Student and his Son'. Any attempt to apply it either 
>to Severian's life or to past events has the problem that the sea-monsters aren't dead.

>James Wynn: I think Erebus might well be dead and only living on as a name or a ghost.
>...On the other hand, I /am/ inclined to believe that the Student falling from his tower describes 
>Typhon's death.

I think it is a mistake to take the text too literally about death when it comes to mythologically
named characters.  Again I find it helpful to frame these characters in mythological terms
when the main text fails to explain them to us. What I mean is that the gods and monsters in BotNS 
should be thought of as immortal.

Let's look at immortality from a science and SF point of view. Let's assume all gods and monsters are 
ancient literary metaphors for various human rulers. The human rulers have died, but as long as their
mythological legends are told, they live on. They are immortal as long as some one believes in the stories
of gods and monsters. 

In the legends, the gods and monsters can be defeated, even vanquished, but they are immortal; they don't really 
"die" as humans do. They are trapped under rocks or chained up somewhere or placed in the sky as constellations etc. 
So if we think we see Erebus or Typhon or some other such named character in BotNS die, know that they aren't really
dead. Not in the way we define human death. They can be resurrected under the right conditions because they are 
immortal in the way legends always are.

Now in the Sun series, Gene Wolfe has seen fit to take gods and monsters and imply they have a fleshly existence 
on Urth. How does he deal with the immortality issue? He almost explicitly makes them immortal in the way of 
a sponge. How can you actually kill a giant organism when it can and has broken into many pieces which can reform?

This is what Wolfe is trying to tell us with The Whorl. What happens electronically to the gods there is what
happens biologically on Urth. They break into pieces and can reform.

(there is more to this theme which I won't get into here. But I offer assurance that some natural objections to this 
view can be addressed)

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