Severian's Daughter & Thais

James Jordan · 29 Jul 2002, 15:36 · from urth-v0207.mbox · original

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: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Subject: (urth) Severian's Daughter & Thais
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 10:36:50 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0207-1466 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0207/1466.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 06:50 PM 7/27/2002 -0700, you wrote:

>Well, as I glance back over UTNS, it seems unlikely
>that Thais could be Severian's kid by Dorcas.  The
>last he saw of her was a decade or so before leaving
>to get the New Sun, and he returns several more
>decades latter, if poor shriveled Valaria is any
>indication.  Thais is in Severian's estimation "fairly
>young", so perhaps a grandchild?
>J

         Hmmm. Well, I've always thought Severian was his own grandfather=20
somehow, and that was the outcome of his relation with Dorcas. I can't=20
recall how I came up with that -- maybe it was just the general ambience of=20
the novels that led me to it. But if that's right, it would seem to=20
eliminate Thais from direct consideration. Set me straight, someone!
         Alga's contribution on Thais is interesting. THE Ship is clearly=20
some kind of image of the Church, moving through of history, ascending to=20
"heaven," bringing the "new sun," etc. So, what about other ships? Do they=20
have symbolic meaning? One would think so, this being Wolfe and all. Is=20
Thais the sailor a replay of the converted Thais the Saint, with her being=20
a sailor on a ship a replay of her work in the church/convent?
         One of Severian's youthful buddies (whose name I cannot call up at=20
the moment; Eata?) is captain of the ship, iirc. (I'm 15 years removed from=20
my second reading; gotta read'em again!) Is he Peter to Severian's=20
"Christ"? Or at least a local pastor of a small ship linked to The Ship=20
symbolically? Is this worth an investigation?
         (For those who don't know, Church as Noah's Ark and Ship is common=20
coin of symbolism. The interior of a church is called a "nave.")

Nutria

Nutria


--=20

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