Severa

Gerry Quinn · 04 Dec 2011, 01:37 · from 2011-December.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: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 01:37:53 -0000
Subject: (urth) Severa
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W59A3BC8DD61767E2E7DCEACFB40 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W59A3BC8DD61767E2E7DCEACFB40 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <A81B5587CC8947888268A147D29A5DB8@Rover>



From: Lee Berman 

> One thing to consider- if Jolenta is really Severa the ex-witch, then Merryn and the
> Cumaean are being deceptive in pretending they don't know her. 
A good point.  You would expect them to know her.  Definitely a strong point against her having been a witch.
> There is evidence they
> are being deceptive. Firstly, they pretend Hildegrin is not there. Also, they might be
> pretending they don't recognize Severian as a torturer and that they have arranged this
> meeting with him on purpose (a coincidence that two witches from the Citadel and 
> Severian's childhood happen to appear in the middle of nowhere to intercept his journey? 
> I don't buy it).

It seems not unlikely that devotees of Vodalus and those who deal with them tend towards discretion when they meet strangers.  As for the rest: it?s a story; building conspiracy theories on the coincidences inherent to stories achieves nothing.  


> Even after Severian introduces Jolenta by name, the witches do not call her that name.
> She is just "the sick woman". In my view, this episode could be one of a string of
> pre-arranged situations, complete with rehearsed lines, designed to test and/or poach
> Severian's nascent New Sun powers of healing and resurrection by those who only have 
> a dark, perverted version of that power. (the Lake of Birds, the avern battle, Typhon, 
> etc. are further examples)

Such a theory has the advantage that everything naturally deducible from the text can be waved away and ignored. 
 

> > Gerry Quinn: Why the fear of posting it, if all posters but I would consider it evidence?

> Heh, heh. Fear? Nice try. Actually I do respond to all polite requests when I can. I think you
> have been making an effort lately Gerry, but I still don't really trust your sincerity yet. I
> hope you can understand that.

You?re repeating your lines.  But I wasn?t making a polite request above.  I was pointing out that if you had anything, you?d have posted it.  If your ?evidence? is worth anything, my words cannot negate it.
 

> > A worse problem, perhaps (for Jolenta as witch-Severa, is Wolfe?s selection of her as an 
> > exemplar of the commonality.

> And choosing Severian, (her twin?) as an example of servant of the throne. On the other hand, 
> by doing this he does bring both characters to mind and asks us to compare them  and their social 
> class. Social class is related, in part to height, and Jolenta is tall, like Severian.

Tall is sexy in the Commonwealth, for precisely that reason; thus Jolenta is tall.  We are not told, however, that the waitress is.
 

> Keep in mind, Gerry, that Jolenta as Severa is only a suggestion. There may have been no intention
> by WOlfe to include a Severa.  It seems quite clear that Jolenta-as-Severa can't be proven or 
> disproven with the evidence we are given. I'm comfortable leaving it at that.      

Indeed, even Merryn has considerable defects as a candidate, and it may very well be that no sister-character exists at all.  That said, the question of whether something can be proven or disproven rests substantially on one?s standards of proof.

- Gerry Quinn 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111204/2ebcb2bb/attachment.htm>

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