Time, Not Cloning

Marc Aramini · 05 Aug 2013, 15:37 · from 2013-August.txt.gz

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From: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2013 08:37:41 -0700
Subject: (urth) Time, Not Cloning
In-Reply-To: <BLU175-W5278E1400278D137A358E5CF5C0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BLU175-W5278E1400278D137A358E5CF5C0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <0D937914-4B6D-4BD6-8D57-79B818D36517 at yahoo.com>

Not to be all negative, and not that a title can't have two connotations, but there is a pretty explicit rumination on that shadow that comes from the hand of the secular authority administering justice, standing between the soon to be executed and the inexplicable divine justice, the increate or his symbol, the sun.  Severian's narrative blurs what is actually standing between the light and the victim in his insistence on being consubstantial to some degree with the New Sun - and the justice of that coming is pretty much universal excision and execution for the majority of mankind. Is the torturer in the way of the light or serving it?

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 5, 2013, at 8:21 AM, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

>> 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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