Father Inire-Hethor

Lee Berman · 20 Oct 2011, 16:08 · 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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:08:45 -0400
Subject: (urth) Father Inire-Hethor
Message-ID: <SNT123-W64351C1377E25A3A927E1BCFEB0 at phx.gbl>

> The linchpin for me is the leap of intuitive faith that Inire is Dorcas' husband.

>Dan'l Danehy-Oakes: I can't make that leap. Dorcas's husband is the man she is mourning at
>the end of tBotNS. Inire is not dead, but her husband is.

Yep, I understand. strictly for me, the preponderance of evidence on the other side 
requires me to get around that scene. Perhaps he isn't really dead. Or perhaps this
particular iteration of Father Inire died while others live on. I could almost imagine
a scenario in which this iteration was banished from immortality for falling in love...
but I don't really like speculating that far out.

>Marc Aramini: Yes.  conflating too many identities risks making the whole thing fall apart on 
>a story level.  I don't like that trend in Borski's approach in general.

>Marc Aramini: It's not hidden if you read Short sun looking for it, it almost jumps out.  
>I can't open the book without finding further evidence of it.

Yep, that's how the Father Inire theory is for me. It doesn't make the whole story fall apart
but actually binds it all together. I think Borski was right to look for copies of Father Inire
but horribly wrong in interpreting him to be a Moses figure.

For me, viewing him as a gnostic, pagan god figure like Dionysus, not only allows all the 
weird dreams and legends of BotNS to link together and make sense, it creates a perfect connection
to Long Sun and, especially, Short Sun.

I know some prefer their art to retain a bit of mystery but I am more content knowing (or
thinking I know) what everything means. With regard to BotNS, I'm now pretty comfortable.

p.s. I also think Borski goes a bit wrong in using the "aureate" imagery as the primary
way to identify Severian's family. It is probably intended but is of secondary importance.
Incest (and the desire for it) is the most important consideration. Again, it shouldn't
just be a parlour game to have hidden family members. I think there must be a purpose.

I think Severian deliberately disguises his family in the story (while being honest about most 
of his own personal foibles) as a matter of privacy and keeping skeletons in the closet. A similar 
consideration is behind his cloaking of Inire. Of course, Wolfe won't quite allow Severian to keep 
these secrets fully hidden. We must be given Doras-as-Grandmother as a starting point. Then moving 
on to Agia, Severa, Catherine, Juturna, etc. I know I'm unique in this view but it works for me, so 
what else am I gonna do?

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