Agilus and Agia

Lee Berman · 06 May 2013, 15:09 · from 2013-May.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 6 May 2013 11:09:31 -0400
Subject: (urth) Agilus and Agia
Message-ID: <BLU175-W41300BD3E2899776F1B8E9CFB90 at phx.gbl>

>Marc Aramini: Anyway, we know something of number five's first cloning efforts.

Yep, I remember the frog experiments. But that's a far cry from producing a human 
clone, especially considering the mysteries of birth. How did Number Five feel
about the process, when he finally mastered it? Probably somewhat divorced from it
even though it produced him. Rather as we tend to divorce ourselves from thinking 
about sex and even birth as related to the way each of us entered the world.

>The unhatched chick between Jolenta's legs.

Heh, yep. I remember one of the early (and very few) female contributors to this
list cited that line as an example of how Wolfe can be clumsy in dealing with 
sexual issues. At the time I tended to agree.

Now, I instead think it is another example of Wolfe's cleverness with words and 
his ability to wring multiple meanings from them. The line might serve to illustrate
Severian's sexual clumsiness. But I think it also serves as a textual clue, especially
since it was a common trope back in those days (remember M*A*S*H) that to determine a
woman's true hair color, you had to check her pubic hair.

As the waitress, Jolenta's hair is pointedly introduced without color as "straggling".
Later, her hair is hammered home to us as "red-gold". So which was her original color?
Given a chick's color I think we can conclude gold, while the red has been added. 
(significant of course that the addition was done by vulpine Dr. Talos).

Borski finds great significance in gold hair color to Severian's family tree and in 
this case I tend to agree.

A similar mystery can be found with Typhon, I think. We know one of his heads is
blond haired and the other dark haired, but we are not told which is Typhon's and
which is Piaton's. We are able to deduce later that Typhon is blonde and this 
apparently insignificant fact becomes important in establishing identity in 
Long Sun and Silk's paternity plus the identify of the big blond guy steering the
ship at the end of RttW.

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