Undine's nature

Gerry Quinn · 19 Oct 2011, 12:49 · from 2011-October.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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:49:23 +0100
Subject: (urth) Undine's nature
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W34D231B3FEF11E134EEC4FCFE50 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W34D231B3FEF11E134EEC4FCFE50 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <E6B3A9460A364382AFA18918AC70854E@Rover>

From: Lee Berman 

> >she also apparently sleeps with Dorcas, who would be her gran.

 > Correct. I perceive the incest curse to extend across all members of Severian's family.
> This says something about his relationship to Agia and Agilus. (and explains the 
> impossible mutual  sexual attraction Severian and Jolenta feel for each other at 
> Ctesiphon's Cross)

I really don?t understand your obsession with this supposed ?incest curse?.  The women Severian is attracted to comprise a remarkably even social, geographic and biological cross-section of the inhabitants of the Commonwealth, which as well as being convenient to an author wishing to describe the realm, probably also has symbolic value given that Severian will eventually become Autarch, and then the Epitome of Urth.  That they are all related to Severian ? and therefore related among themselves ? seems nigh on unbelievable.

And *everybody* is attracted to Jolenta.  That?s the point of her.

> > Ruling out what most consider the most likely candidate for Severian?s putative sister, 
> >simply because he does not note that he is sexually attracted to her, seems a perverse 
> >reading in every sense of the word.

> This is a perverse story written by a perverse author. If your world/literary view still
> directs you to think of WOlfe as a very chaste and sexually virtuous author after 
> all these years I think that is to your eternal credit and speaks highly of your own
> morally upstanding nature.

Perverse it may be, but that doesn?t mean that every perversity imaginable must necessarily be omnipresent in the text.  Extraordinary hypotheses require extraordinary evidence.

- Gerry Quinn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111019/a0c47cf3/attachment.htm>

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