Time, Not Cloning

Lee Berman · 05 Aug 2013, 15:21 · from 2013-August.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2013 11:21:33 -0400
Subject: (urth) Time, Not Cloning
Message-ID: <BLU175-W5278E1400278D137A358E5CF5C0 at phx.gbl>

>Dan'l Danehy-Oakes: ... and all this leads around to the question of whether Severian (the
>Severian we know, who is "not the first Severian") is himself a _khaibit_
>or "shadow...thus the real meaning of the title.

>Jeff Wilson: I've always taken this to mean his previous time-loop instances, or from
>earlier drafts of the life-play he finds himself in.

So we are back to the original topic of this thread- Is the Severian we know a product of
time travel or cloning?

>David Stockhoff: And the simplest way to interpret that is,
>shadow = khaibit
>khaibit = clone
>so shadow = clone and
>"The Shadow of the Torturer" = "The Clone of the Torturer"

The simple elegance of this equation is very appealing to me. It is a conclusion I think
WOlfe must have intended us to come to. One conclusion...

On the other hand, Severian being a clone doesn't jibe well with him being the product of
sexual union between Ouen and Catherine. And the mirror-image guys he sees in the tavern 
room amidst the hubbub of the Zama incident seem like time traveller types..

Maybe it is like the ambiguous solution to Severian's sister identity in RttW. We get
plausible evidence both for Merryn and Jolenta. So perhaps the most accurate answer to
these questions is that we aren't meant to definitively know.

In that case, perhaps Wolfe is saying that he finds the question to be more important
and revealing than the answer. We are supposed to "know thyself", but it is a philosophical 
truth that none of us can authoritatively know where we came from.

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