From: "Alice K. Turner" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Jonas <> Pinocchio 
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 22:20:21 -0400

Crush cried:

> Regarding Alga's background on the Tin Woodman:
>
> Ok. Now I have brand new interest in the sequels to "The Wizard of Oz",
but
> I still don't see more than a superficial connection to Jonas. Jolenta was
> "in love" with a man who was *entirely* synthetic...ah! Perhaps you're
> saying she was in love with Baldanders "right-arm man"! Nice flag, that
> links Jolenta to Nimmie Amee. But still, she was rejected by him. And she
> never loved his artificiality. If Baldanders or Jonas would or could have
> maintained her beauty products she would have loved either of them as
much.
>
> But the big thing is that ...Jonas *becomes* human, right? He doesn't
repair
> the robot parts. He repairs the human prosthetics to the point of growing
a
> whole body. He becomes the human Miles. This surely was his intent when
> going to be "repaired". Is it not generally agreed that Jonas left
Severian
> and became Miles? I searched the list on this and didn't find anything to
> the contrary.
>
> The Tin Woodman may have been an *inspiration* to Wolfe's images of
> synthetic people, but can the connection be drawn any more tightly?

I don't think it's tight. But consider an author's thinking: A Tin Soldier
(and I think he *was* thinking of Andersen's tin soldier too, thank you,
mantis). What about a Tin Sailor? The Baum Tin Soldier likes being Tin more
than meat--so will my Tin Sailor--but we'll reverse the process of repair. A
Tin Soldier in love? My Tin Sailor will be too, but of course with the most
artificial woman he can possibly find (Anderson's soldier loved a paper
doll--make of that what you will). And that, in a curious writerly way,
leads to the invention of Jolenta who is created by another metal man (the
original mythical Talos was made of bronze). If you think about it, Jolenta
doesn't have an important plot role, though GW has given her some nice small
scenes; my guess is that he conceived her after dreaming up Jonas and
developed her role after that to make some points about Talos and Sev,
killing her off fairly quickly. Sev thinks she might have been in love with
Talos--like Nimmie Amee, attracted to metal. So perhaps Talos was the
trigger--but I think Jonas

Now we don't know for sure about the Miles identification--I wouldn't make
too much of that. Unless you have a really good theory about Inire's
mirrors.Or Sev's projections.

-alga



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