Merger

Gerry Quinn · 01 Feb 2011, 22:01 · from 2011-February.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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 22:01:36 -0000
Subject: (urth) Merger
References: <SNT123-w3092414BD12446FF3AAD7DCFE50 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <9B24CC735D7346A0AD052B285E14F3A1@jill>


From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>Gerry Quinn:

> > Is there a lot of other androgyny in BotNS?  Hardly.
>
> Hm. I think I came up with 8-10 examples previously. How many are needed
> to be "a lot"? I
> guess it is all what you are used to. That seems like a lot to me. What
> other books are
> you comparing it to?

Here's your list of "examples":
> > > Didn't you ever wonder why Typhon had an erection in front of Severian
> > > and demanded tribute of both sexy males and females and why Dorcas
> > > and Jolenta got it on and why the green man's
> > > voice is so feminine...why Agia has a low voice, why Thecla has a
> > > masculine gait
> > > and enjoys wearing men's clothing, why the Autarch is rendered
> > > androgynous (when a
> > > simple vasectomy would do), why Severian is forever conjoined with a
> > > female and is
> > > mistaken for a female on at least three occasions, why Tzadkiel is
> > > both male and
> > > female

Typhon, Dorcas and Jolenta are not androgynous in any normal sense of the
word; they are presented as distinctly masculine and feminine, even if they
sometimes like a little variety in their partners.

There's a plant-man whose voice is high-pitched, and a heterosexual woman
whose voice happens to be low.  Right...  In this universe we have David
Beckham and Marlene Dietrich, to name but two.  It is hardly a novel 
phenomenon.

Has Thecla a masculine gait?  Surely the opportunities for taking a stroll
in the dungeons of the Torturers are limited?  On one occasion Severian is
mistaken for a woman when walking around in the dark after the Thecla
persona takes over - that hardly suggests a masculine gait.

Oh, and in Severian's dream she found herself wearing his clothes and
"rather enjoyed it".   Such things are hardly unheard of, and there's no 
suggestion
that during her life in the House Absolute she was known for cross-dressing

The Autarch looks androgynous because he's been neutered.

Severian is forever conjoined with numerous individuals of both sexes.  He
is mistaken for female on occasion when a particular female persona has
taken over.

An alien/angel has male and female aspects.  Tzadkiel is just about the only
legitimate example of androgyny in this entire collection!  But angels are
often presented as androgynous.  We don't go from that to a presumption that
the deity commanding them must be one traditionally associated with
androgyny.

One could probably find twenty more references which could be arbitrarily
stretched into having some connection with an extremely broad definition of
androgyny.

They still wouldn't present evidence for leaping to the
cosmological conclusion that the creator of Urth's universe must be a
"Dionysus-like demiurge".  Indeed, inasmuch as Urth appears to be somewhat
fallen, one would expect that conditions there would tend to be in
opposition to the nature of the Pancreator, rather than a pointer to them!


>>I could walk down a street of any city today and spot more androgynity
>>than this lot.
>
> Oh you are comparing to the real world. Well, I'd say your statement
> depends on which street,
> or which bar you happen to be doing your spotting. As I said, it is all
> what you are used to.
> But you are just arguing to argue here. It wouldn't be Gerry if there
> weren't a sneering line
> tossed in there somewhere ;- ).

I'm not arguing for the sake of arguing, and I am not sneering.  I'm making
the point that any thousand page book with the slightest pretensions to
naturalism is probably going to include a good few examples of the sort of
thing you are stretching into examples of androgyny.

It's telling that you avoid the most obvious examples of androgyny in the 
Solar
cycle such as Titi and Incus. Should we conclude from their existence that 
the
creator of their Whorl is androgynous?  Or should we conclude that the human
species of the Whorl contains variety comparable to that of our own?


>>Presumably every cosmic cycle was created by the same entity, including
>>that of Urth and our
>>own if it is different.  This entity is known on Urth as the Increate or
>>the Pancreator.  No special
>>characteristics are ascribed to him; in particular there is no suggestion
>>in the text of androgyny.
>
> Unless you know where to look. You may think of God as an incorporeal,
> distant being who never
> gets personally involved in human affairs but not everyone does and in the
> mythological past almost
> everyone assumed there were godly appearances on earth in human form. I
> think this happens in BotNS.

So what character are you proposing is really Dionysus?


>>It's also suggested that Ah Lah is an alternative name for the Outsider.
>>It can hardly be doubted
>>that Increate and Pancreator are also alternate names.
>
> Correct. However the name "Jahweh" or even "God" is suspiciously absent.
> Present is the suggestion that
> The Outsider is the God of Wine, Son of Thyone. Can't get a more direct
> reference to Dionysus than that.
> And you correctly deduce that he and the Pancreator are one and the same.
> I'm not so sure about the
> Increate who was "not created". But Pancreator and demiurge are synonymous
> enough for me.

As I pointed out, the definitions of the Outsider in BotLS character lists
spell out characteristics of the three Persons of the Trinity.  There are
multiple other Christian references.  'Pancreator' and 'demiurge' are
synonymous only in terms of the meaning "creator of the universe" - that
fact invokes no specific Gnostic interpretation whatsover.


> Using these terms independently as though the Increate and Pancreator
> might not be the same being suggests
> to me that BotNS is set in a gnostic universe. In such a place, the true
> spiritual God and the pancreator
> of all the material substance we see are not the same thing.

Your argument depends on the notion that a single deity goes by different
names; you cannot now turn around and assert that the fact of different
names suggests multiple deities.


> Moreover, we find Dionysian associations, androgyny, witches, snakes,
> bull, green man etc. in BotNS. If
> you don't see any transubstantial meaning to them, it is fine to restrict
> one's self to the plowman's
> interpretation. It is a crackling good story read at face value. Who cares
> if there are a few stupid
> dreams and stories with mythological symbolism. We can ignore them, as we
> can ignore our own dreams.

You can find as many random associations as you want to just about anything, 
Daleks or whatever.  It's not "ignoring them" to question whether they are 
some sort of Secret Key to understanding the work. [As it happens, Severian 
himself has been given knowledge that he calls the Key to the Universe. 
Hint: it's not androgyny.]


>>Finally, why link Dionysus to the concept of a demiurge?  Are they
>>classically identified?
>
> Yes, they are. You can Google "Dionysus" and "demiurge" and "Plato" and
> "Zoroastrianism" and "Great God Pan"
> and "The Green Man" and "Nietzsche" etc. as easily as I have done. It is
> just a matter of wanting to.

Not an answer.  In fact looking up juxtapositions of Dionysius and demiurge 
leads to a terrible mass of babble. Can you point to one decent reference 
that Dionysus and demiurge were classically identified?


>>Is the universe of Urth especially Dionysian in aspect?  I don't see
>>anything especially Dionysian about
>>it at all.
>
> That's because you are not trying very hard to see it from that
> perspective. In fact, you are trying very
> hard not to see it. Such efforts do not go unrewarded. If you were more
> easy-going you'd just ignore it.
> But the effort is noted.

What then, in your mind, is especially Dionysian about it?


> Anyway, you have apparently missed a substantial number of posts in the
> past few months identifying not only
> the Dionysian aspects of BotNS but also the Apollonian counterparts. Very
> interesting philosophical and
> literary concepts these Apollonian and Dionysian themes. You should check
> them out. (in fact, Gerry, you
> personally would seem to lean very heavily toward one side of this
> spectrum; guess which one).

Presumably your hypothesis of a "Dionysus-like demiurge" implies that the
universe of BotNS tends more to the Dionysian than the Apollonian side
compared to ours.  I ask again - what aspects of it do you see as reflecting
this?

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