Merger

Lee Berman · 31 Jan 2011, 03:50 · 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, 30 Jan 2011 22:50:13 -0500
Subject: (urth) Merger
Message-ID: <SNT123-W66A7C0992B48933890315CFE20 at phx.gbl>

>Andrew Mason: I don't think it likely that this was a deception,...

I think it was and at a few different levels. It was first a deception
on the old Autarch, Appian. I think he surprised them with his dedication
and bravery in giving it a shot. Not what you'd expect from a honey steward.

If they saw a future where he returned unsuccessfully to Urth and had some 
kids, it could interfere with Severian taking the throne so they put a stop
to that branching. 

The autarchs were place holders. Figureheads propped up (by whom? the grand 
vizier, surely). It didn't matter much what they did as long as the Commonwealth
stayed intact. (Thus I argue that Appian's name is a minor mystery. He is not 
really a major character).

"They" were waiting for Severian and Severian alone. For some reason he had to 
serve as autarch (maybe Sev 1?) before becoming the New Sun. The white fountain
was active during all Severian's younger years. Somebody on Urth was keyed to it.
But who? Someone with nascent resurrection powers. Once identified, that person
was relentlessly poked, prodded and steered on the necessary path (the aureate path?)
to fulfill the destiny of Ushas.

I think "unmanning" (they never say "castration" but c'mon..) was necessary not for
the purposes mentioned by the characters. As elsewhere argued, a simple vasectomy 
would have prevented an Appian dynasty. But Wolfe needed more than just a sterile
male for this story. He needed an androgyne. Why?

It is my argument that the story needed an androgyne to point to the subtext which is
never openly spelled out:  a Dionysus-like demiurge has created all we see. The god
Dionysus was androgynous and we see his echo in the old Autarch. Also in the Green Man,
in Tzadkiel and perhaps in the two-sided male/female coin which is Inire/Cumaean. 

(heh,Appian's androgynous face is on the obverse side of Vodalus' coin. What is on the 
reverse side?)

Hmm, perhaps I should amend that to, "never openly spelled out until RttW".

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