The green man is fake

Lee Berman · 16 Jan 2011, 21:46 · from 2011-January.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: Sun, 16 Jan 2011 16:46:18 -0500
Subject: (urth) The green man is fake
Message-ID: <SNT123-W61147465C4658444B748E8CFF50 at phx.gbl>

>Marc Aramini: Is he completely plant-like in energy or can he eat if he has to?

The showman gives him only water and threatens as punishment to cover the hole in 
the top of the tent which allows sunlight in.

>I thought he saved him obliquely, or tried to, in Urth of the New Sun, doesn't he?  
>Or did he show up too late?

When Severian recovers from the daze he was in from the old Autarch's analeptic, he
finds he is being helped, one on each arm, by the green man and Agia (this odd alliance
should raise red flags. Who is it that promotes Agia to head the rebel group?).

Later, Severian tells the green man they are even ("quits") one freedm from imprisonment
for another. But the green man says that Agia would have saved Severian without him, so he 
must find  another place in time to save him and promises Severian he will see him again. 
Perhaps he does, but Severian does not see the green man again. Not in that guise, anyway.

>Jack Smith: I think you're absolutely right in your scientific analysis of the green
>man.  But perhaps Wolfe just did not think things through as you have done.

It's possible. But I still get the feeling Gene Wolfe has thought about The Green Man a lot
more than I have. I think perhaps he is stitched throughout the whole 12 book Sun series, but
in ways difficult to recognize.

>Gerry Quinn: The laughter is easily explained as expressing the Green Man's 
>disappointment and despair after he had briefly hoped in Severian, and then 
>found him to be an ignorant primitive babbling about a New Sun of which the 
>green Man had no knowledge (because in his time it is forgotten).  And he 
>never promises to rescue Severrian.

This "easy explanation" doesn't wash with me. There are plenty of disappoined characters
in BotNS. They don't laugh inhumanly with a sound worse than the alzabo which hasn't even been 
introduced in the story yet (except as an analeptic). The Alzabo is arguably depicted more hideously 
than anything else in the story- an ugly, putrid, scavenger/predator which eats you whole then speaks
in your voice. Now why would Gene Wolfe want to compare the green man to this creature? (p.s. the 
green man does promise to save Severian, as noted above).

>> And we know that the Green Man is a walker through the corridors
>> of time, which requires energy approaching full stellar output.

>Jeff Wilson: If it does, that coming from the the White Fountain seems sufficient.

If the green man is powered by a white fountain (Severian's or another) then he is lying
about needing Urth's feeble sunlight to live and probably lying about needing Severian's help in
breaking free. He is just playing a role.  He plays so many roles and tells so many lies (including
the one about the locket).

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