Five Severians - Severian-as-clone

Michael Thayer · 18 Dec 2013, 23:36 · from 2013-December.txt.gz

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From: michael.o.thayer at gmail.com (Michael Thayer)
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2013 18:36:37 -0500
Subject: (urth) Five Severians - Severian-as-clone
Message-ID: <CAHS3GWeD457WFx4PTaKppXR1VjRKTB8izxkHWtF6Wia1Okpo3w at mail.gmail.com>

>David Stockoff: The cloning theory is well grounded, but temporally
dislocating the mausoleum is new AFAIK. In a way, I don't like this,
because it seems to move the explanation further away rather than explain
it. Where is this place? how does Severian get there? who put it there? But
Lee is right, and the best answer may simply be "Gene Wolfe." Whether it's
out of time or not.

>I see none of the usual clues to time dislocation: Severian doesn't
refer to time passing or not passing, and it seems like there are easier
ways to store clones than by slowing time.
Reread the first and second mausoleum scenes (Shadow, 12-13, 21-22). The
passages are pregnant with the concept of time. The door was sprung "long
ago," and remains "eternally ajar," and "a moment suffices to describe
these things, which I watched for so long," "decades" wouldn't be long
enough to write of them, the first thought that obsesses Severian while in
the mausoleum is that "at some not-distant time, time itself would stop,"
and there is little to watch "in the sleepy hours around noon." Shadow
12-13. And again, when he returns to hide his coin, Sev travels over "aged
grass" and feels "a proximity in time" regarding the truth of imagined
enemies. Shadow 21-22.  Far from conclusive, but these passages perhaps
provide some textual support for linking the mausoleum, thematically at
least, to the concept of time.
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