Father Inire-Hethor

David Stockhoff · 20 Oct 2011, 19:17 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:17:58 -0400
Subject: (urth) Father Inire-Hethor
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W64351C1377E25A3A927E1BCFEB0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W64351C1377E25A3A927E1BCFEB0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4EA073E6.1020406 at verizon.net>

On 10/20/2011 12:08 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
> 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?

Well, if Inire is the boatman, he is (presumably) Sev's grandfather, 
which makes him a family member as well, so no other reason is needed. 
But what does this general family-hiding do for Sev? After all, he 
couldn't have had sex with all of them. Some narrators might not wish to 
get into messy details like, "My parents split when I was 10 after my 
dad went to jail for molesting me and my mom and I lived in a trailer 
where my mom had lots of "friends" overnight ... " etc. But he grew up 
in the Citadel---none of these things happened or could have happened.

The most rational approach I can come up with is that Severian is 
consciously working in the broad genre of "rags to riches"---not the 
American version of the self-made man getting stinking rich, but more 
like an Abraham Lincoln who rises to power from humbly virtuous yet 
ignorant beginnings, paralleling his "bad man becoming a slightly less 
bad man" path. As an ostensible orphan he needs to hide (1) anything 
that mentions any living family (2) anything that makes him look too 
awful (homicidal, criminal, rapacious, innately cannibalistic), though 
this is debatable (3) any hint of excessive (or excessively 
aggrandizing) assistance from others.

That's the surface argument. What complicates it is that the entire 
thing is ironically undermined by Wolfe, so it's hard to see. Sev 
violates all these rules. There are clues he lets slip about his 
connections and his destiny (the crypt). He acknowledges plenty of help, 
but naturally never spells out that he is a puppet. His "virtue" is 
being a torturer. He may or may not have figured out the identity of his 
father, but his father is not interesting or evil enough to be useful to 
the theme. And so on.

Given this, there would be other reasons (#3) to hide Inire other than 
his being Sev's grandfather, but if he is, that gives 2 reasons (#1 and 
#2, although we already have Dorcas for #2).

However, there's the subversive argument to account for. Expressed as a 
rule, my argument would be "Everything Severian hides, he reveals." That 
is, if he does not reveal it with plain clues, it's not a secret. A 
secret that is too deeply hidden or speculative does not count as 
revealed and fails to support the rhetorical structure that defines the 
whole novel. We can argue, but Wolfe's overall purpose should be kept in 
mind: if nobody gets the joke but a small minority, it's probable there 
was no joke at all. And the above "3 silences" should govern all cases.

I don't pretend this framework solves everything or does any new work. 
I'd put Dorcas, Sev's father, and Sev's status as a puppet of aliens 
clearly in the Open Secret category. The others are tough arguments to 
make, as we already know.

---ID of his mother and sister is suggested, but Severa has so many 
candidates with no clear mention of any twin. We know Sev slept with 
Dorcas and others, but a twin sister should be easier to spot. And since 
Sev needs to deny his parents whoever they are if he can, sleeping with 
a woman does not make her a family member (maybe a cousin at most).

---Inire = grandfather. There is no evidence Inire directly helped Sev. 
We can imagine he did, and we can guess Inire knew who he was and acted 
accordingly, but that requires going a step beyond evidence. The slight 
clues to Inire as boatman are contradicted severely by the death of the 
boatman. If Inire is a time traveler who died before he worked for the 
Autarch Severian, that could work. But the circumstantial evidence that 
he time-travels (or time-dilation-travels) are contradicted by arguments 
that Inire is stuck on Urth.

And so on.

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