Typhon, Sev, Silk

*THAT* Matt Weber · 13 Mar 2003, 06:04 · 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) Typhon, Sev, Silk
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 22:04:53 -0800
Message-ID: <urth-v0303-3066 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0303/3066.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>Andrew :



>Sev's lack of meekness is almost a critique of Christ by Wolfe. If I were a
>Christian, there's one scene I'd find quite disturbing - his arrest in
>UOTNS. He fights the soldiers savagely, killing at least one (?). When he
>arrives at the Typhon-era Matachin Tower, he kills the Governess, almost
>immediately & with almost no discussion. Followed, of course, by the slayi=
n=3D
g
>of Typhon. The contrast with Christ's arrest and execution must be
>deliberate.
>
>I'd not be surprised to find that Wolfe regards Christ as something of a
>wimp, and I'm pretty sure he regards the pre-Horn Silk in the same way.

I think you're off base here.  Wolfe is presenting Severian as a=3D20
human being who is in the process of becoming more Christ-like (i.e.=3D20
as a Christian).  Severian's arrest occurs near the beginning of his=3D20
journey, if I'm remembering correctly.  His actions at the arrest=3D20
remind me more of St. Peter at Gethsemane than of Christ.

If Wolfe is indeed the Catholic he claims to be, regarding Christ as=3D20
a wimp would pose something of a problem of faith.



Matt

Si le Roi m'avait donn=3DE9
Paris, sa grand' ville,
Et qu'il me fall=3DFBt quitter
L'amour de ma mie,
Je dirais au roi Henri:
"Reprenez votre Paris:
J'aime mieux ma mie, au gu=3DE9,
J'aime mieux ma mie."

--=20

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