The Book of Typhon part one, revised: Severian's true

*THAT* Matt Weber · 07 Mar 2003, 06:39 · from urth-v0303.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: *THAT* Matt Weber <mweber at library.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) The Book of Typhon part one, revised: Severian's true
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 22:39:31 -0800
Message-ID: <urth-v0303-3024 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0303/3024.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>
>	The first clue is The Tale of the Boy Called Frog .  For=3D20
>economy=3DEDs sake I=3DEDll assume everyone=3DEDs read it.  On the surface=
 it=3D20
>seems to be a story told around Little Severian.  Frog is raised by=3D20
>woodcutters and then orphaned and sheltered by the Black Killer=3D20
>(Severian) and the naked one (Apu Punchau).  In a very real sense=3D20
>this is the case, but there is more to this.  Spring Wind, the=3D20
>father of Frog and Fish, is Typhon, aka Typhoon, which is a spring=3D20
>storm.  Wolfe hides this cleverly in two ways:  First, the story=3D20
>occurs before Typhon is introduced and second, the name Spring Wind=3D20
>seems Asian in origin and makes the story seem as if it comes from=3D20
>the First Empire.  The Black Killer who shelters Frog, is the=3D20
>Torturers Guild, and the Naked One, who has =3DECnever had a son of=3D20
>Meschia to teach,=3DEE is none other than Father Inire who according to=3D=
20
>the Lexicon Urthus is the =3DECvizier to countless Autarchs since Ymar=3DE=
E.=3D20
>He occurs as the Naked One in Sword and Citadel as the bent and=3D20
>masked guide (pp. 350-1).  And here we have the answer:  Ymar is the=3D20
>bastard son of Typhon, Frog, sheltered by the Black Killer and=3D20
>taught by the Naked One, who rules by the red flower.

Yeah, okay, but it's also a paraphrase of Kipling's Jungle Book; as I=3D20
recall, Mowgli means "Frog".  The Black Killer is Bagheera, and the=3D20
Naked One stands in for Baloo.

I don't buy the exegesis, but it's certainly impressive.



Matt

L'ordre r=3DE8gne =3DE0 Varsovie.

--=20

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