Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 09:42:52 -0700
From: Don Palumbo 
Subject: Re: (urth) sev's skull


Somewhere in BNS (it's at the end of Torturer), Sevarian talks
about the writing process, comparing it to being a torturer, and says
among other things that one of the tasks a writer must perform is to
follow the prescribed models. Wolfe, in writing this story, is following
the prescribed model of the monomyth very consciously, and all of the
references to death and rebirth throughout the text--as well as
references to a whole lot of other things, such as ogre/father-figures,
women of all sorts, initiations, threshold crossings, talismans, etc,
etc.--should be understood in this light.  Campbell asserts that
death and rebirth is a metaphor for transitions that occur to everyone in
the course of life, and Severian certainly undergoes enough changes of
this sort so that this invites the reader to see his death-and-rebirth
experiences as symbolic of his own transcendence of past selves.



As the demands of the monomyth model, and a symbolic reading in any case,
is enough to explain the reason for all the death and rebirth stuff in
the story, I see no reason to believe that Severian ever literally dies
for good and is replaced by some other version of himself unless what
happen cannot be explained in any more plausible way, which I don't think
is the case in BNS inself.



Mind-boggling as reading BNS is in itself, this effect is truly
compounded if you read it while keeping the monomyth in mind every
sentence of the way.  This adds whole new dimensions to the
story.



--Don Palumbo



At 12:47 PM 7/8/03 -0700, maa32 wrote:

So there is some disagreement over the
skull.  I tried to emphasize that 

perhaps the Severian we knew was just a copy, as the Apu-Punchau who
rises 

over his body is just a copy.  The original Severian has long since
died, and 

has always been dead, as he says while underground with Master Ultan: I
felt 

as if we were both dead and buried, or something like that.  Why
should the 

chapter entitled "resurrection and death" be any different than
the later, 

heirodule maintained Severian?  If he's not the first Severian (and
we meet 

Ymar in Urth, and Severian says little about being identical to him -


something one would certainly note: "he looked just like me as a
kid! Go 

figure!")  I think that when Severian speaks of not being the
first Severian, 

he means that there was a boy raised among the torturers who died and was
then 

altered and artifically maintained by the Hierodules, who have the
ability to 

tamper with time itself - and remember that the conciliator is the master
of 

time.   If the Severian of the narrative of The Book of the New
Sun is simply 

another eidolon, then surely that could be Severian's skull.

Marc Aramini







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