Urth-Earth links

Andrew Mason · 14 Oct 2011, 19:54 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 20:54:01 +0100
Subject: (urth) Urth-Earth links
Message-ID: <CAM3O41LRddQ6=mncO2baP1DAWqsGrF35sV5G_P-pS5Y1yurOQQ at mail.gmail.com>

>
> When does Silk see Jesus? ?I vaguely remember something like that; perhaps
> in his meditations on the Outsider he comes to such a conclusion?

The clearest evidence is the statement that in one of his
enlightenments he saw a man riding through a city where people were
waving fronds. The man on the scaffold, and the child lying in straw,
which he sees may well be Jesus as well, but that's less certain.

>
> The Severian-as-a-type-of-Christ stuff isn't as obvious to me. ?Severian is
> not divine, and not in charge; he gives the appearance of both of these,
> however, only because as the Conciliator he is wrenched forward and backward
> in time by entities more powerful than him. ?He is used as a pawn to usher
> in the New Sun at the expense of (presumably) most of the life on Urth, but
> this seems a decidedly un-Christlike salvation to me. ?There are superficial
> similarities between Christ and Severian (male, human yet more than human,
> prophesied, etc.) but there differences enough that I see treating Severian
> as allegorical to Christ as a desservice to the complexity of his character,
> and the story. ?Rather, Severian seems a sort of perversion of what we
> consider Christ-like and heroic; Severian is decidedly flawed, mundane, and
> unaware of himself in time, his role, and his powers for the majority of the
> story. ?When he becomes an amalgamation of the past Autarchs and Thecla, he
> doesn't even retain a singular identity anymore; this is also very unlike
> Christ.

There are some rather clear correspondences between Severian and
Christ; for instance he turns water into wine, and one of his deaths
and resurrections - a death which, unlike most of the others, is
torturous - is accompanied by an earthquake.

On the more general question of whether he's a Christ figure, it
depends just what you mean by the term. In a literary sense I would
say that he is, because what he does parallels what Christ does in
some way, but that is certainly compatible with his being flawed.
(Harry Potter, for instance, is a Christ figure in that sense. There's
no doubt he's flawed, though.) And Wolfe preferred to call Severian a
Christian figure, presumably to avoid any suggestion that he should be
seen as perfect.

Wolfe has also called Severian a form of the Outsider. Forms of the
Outsider are most clearly explained in OBW; it's made clear there that
you can _become_ a form of the Outsider - Kypris has done so, and
Thelxipeia may do so in the future. So presumably these are not just
forms which the Outsider adopts; they are people in their own right,
who have become in some way attuned to the Outsider, through whom he
has spoken and acted. I suspect Silk himself may be another. Again,
this cannot mean that they are perfect - Kypris is not. So I think
this means we should see what Severian does in a positive light and as
a manifestation of God's will, but not deny his flaws.

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