Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2002 18:53:24 -0800
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: (urth) raising the gods of Ushas

David DiGiacomo wrote:
>>50 SR Severian returns from Yesod . . . . meets Odilo III, Pega, Thais, and
>>Eata (V, ch. 44-46)
>
>I'm with you up to here.
>
>>150 SR The Sleeper awakens, raises up Pega, Thais, and Odilo.
>
>??!?!?  How do you know that The Sleeper raises them?

Right. I don't. He seems to have intent; and from the text he seems to have
the ability (unless that power stopped once the white fountain was in
place).  There are half-glipmses of the bower where he
writes/dictates/telepathizes the manuscript THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN, and I
had a sense that in one or another of these there was a hint of other
demigods present or soon to be present.  (Maybe even something like, "as
soon as I finish this story, I'll go wake 'em up.")

The final zinger, about "here is where the other gods sleep," might only be
a zinger in the pedestrian time-sense: showing that once again, Severian
has no idea how long he has been away from a given timeframe (i.e., he
expected to see the other "gods" as live old people--surprise, they are
long dead), but he is starting to get the hang of it at last and his
computations are closer than in previous cases.

But to me it seems to end on a note that is not downbeat at all, but full
of wonderous portent and potential.  In a way like TBOTNS ended, where one
had the sense that somehow Severian was going to bring the White Fountain
(and somehow he was related to that funeral mask, and Apu Punchau, etc.),
even though in that case there was precious little in the way of clues on
how he would do all that.  So in my reading, URTH ends like that but with
further closure, because after all the other things we've seen, raising a
few corpses is rather trivial (harkens back to Severian's earliest ones:
Triskele, Typhon, etc.).

Still, it might not happen that way.

=mantis=


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