Lame Protagonists

Lee Berman · 17 Jun 2011, 12:17 · from 2011-June.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: Fri, 17 Jun 2011 08:17:17 -0400
Subject: (urth) Lame Protagonists
Message-ID: <SNT123-W4D8A2D9EB66D1A09549B7CF6D0 at phx.gbl>

>JBJordan: IIRC it's also in The Hero as Werewolf.

Nice to see you again, James! BTW, I still consider your 1996 interview with Gene
Wolfe to be a watershed moment in understanding his work. I quote from it
often.

>Gerry Quinn: For what it's worth, though, we do see a wounded king (Severian, the 
>Autarch, or both) in a wounded land (the Commonwealth).  The wound of the Fisher 
>King may be in the groin or the leg, suiting the Autarch or Severian...There is 
certainly a Grail in BotNS (the White Fountain).

Who are you and what have you done with Gerry Quinn?

>So I mention it, but I am not at all convinced that any intentional reference exists.

Ah, there you are. But you DID mention it.  That says something ;- ). Plus it is a
significant contribution, imho.

>JBarach: The cross is the crushing/bruising of  Jesus' heel, the serpent's strike at 
>Jesus, which results in Jesus' death ...  but that death isn't final, and in the 
>serpent's striking at Jesus, the serpent  ends up with his own head crushed.

This reminds me of Severian's encounter with Typhon. Though his foot is not injured
there, he is dangled in a vice-like grip by his ankle(s).  And of course he does crush 
the head of a character whose mythological namesake is variously associated with snakes, 
dragons and the Devil.

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