Adri on Brook Madregot

Term Paper
Denis Telofy Drescher
September 13, 2014
1 Introduction
Reviewers of Gene Wolfes Urth Cyclecentrally the four volumes of e Book of the New
Sun and their coda e Urth of the New Sunhave likened the author to an illusionist, a
cardsharp (Budrys 195), and a builder of labyrinths (Wolfe, A Solar Labyrinth; Borski).
Misdirection, slight of hand, and torturous paths that circle back on themselves are the
stu of his oeuvre and the ve books epitomize this style. Within the Urth Cycle, the nar-
rators are cast in major obfuscatory roles. First there is G.W., the intradiegetic translator of
the manuscript, which he has somehow received from the future, so that he has to borrow
many words from our past as suggestive rather than denitive stand-ins for words of a
language that has not yet achieved existence. (Wolfe, e Shadow of the Torturer 211;
appx.) And then there is Severian, the author of the manuscriptat least in a supercial
sense.
Severian, later known as Severian the Great and Severian the Lame, has a peculiar men-
tal condition that lends him extraordinary mnemonic abilities but also comes with more
elusive side eects. Like many other books by Gene Wolfe, the Urth Cycle puts us into this
extraordinary mind, so that we may understand its nature and overcome its limitations.
Trusting Merryns words of wisdom that ere is no magic[,] only knowledge, more or
less hidden (Wolfe, e Claw of the Conciliator 404; ch. 31), reviewers have long tried to
achieve the laer; this paper will aempt the former by highlighting how the rst-person
narrative mirrors Severians cognition.
Such a narrow focus is indispensable in a discussion of a cycle that has been analyzed in
several books, numerous articles, and countless mailing list posts over the course of three
Somehow it is rarely called a sequel, maybe to express its nality or because of codas more lupine ety-
mology.
Assuming G.W. is an intradiegetic version of Gene Wolfe.
It could be argued that just as Severian writes his autobiography, so the hierogrammates have wrien the
story of his life, all of which, in turn, is the work of Gene Wolfe.
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decades. No less focused approach could come to any conclusion within just a few thou-
sand words. Said focus, however, also necessitates that many intriguing tangents be cut
short if they do not circle back on the gist of the paper. e cited literature is recommended
to anyone interested in investigating these further.
e structure of the following is such that aer a short summary, one section will briey
highlight some of the eects of the text on the reader. en the principle section will
expand on these observations to encompass many key elements that help unlock the story
that lies obscured by the narration. Penultimately, a more speculative section will take a
fewtentative steps into the story thus revealed, until nally the conclusion will summarize
the ndings.
2 Plot Summary
is summary is meant to guide a reader who wants to follow the arguments in this paper
without having read the Urth Cycle in its entirety. It is also highly compressed. Hence
you need to take care to bear in mind that focused as it is on providing a basis for this
particular paper, it is also inevitably biased. e facts that seem crucial to one reader may
appear peripheral to another, but there is no way to even aempt to do justice to all the
more prevalent readings in a summary without rendering it greatly more expansive than
the scope of this paper would allow.
e torturers apprentice Severian has drowned in Gyoll where he has been resurrected
in a new body. inking he merely narrowly escaped death, he recovers from his trauma
quickly enough to save the life of the famous outlaw Vodalus by killing a volunteer guard.
Vodalus thanks him by giving him a chrisos, a valuable coin that shows the autarchs face,
but Severian interprets this as a symbolic enlistment of his person in the movement of the
Vodalarii and professes to have shared their ideals.
One winter, he unwiingly resurrects a dog, smuggles it into their guilds home, the
Matachin Tower, and expertly tends to its wounds. Soon the dog scules o and its tracks
lead him into dark tunnels underneath the Citadela fortied harbor for spaceships such
as the Matachin Tower, which are long grounded and have largely fallen into disrepair
so that they are used only as houses for about 135 guildswhere he loses its tracks and
emerges in the Atrium of Time, a likely time traveling platform at the heard of the Citadel.
ere he meets Valeria, who he will later marry.
A while later, the Chatelaine ecla is put into the custody of the torturers and meets
Severian. Highly placed, she can request for Severian to entertain her. In an aempt to
keep Severian from developing feelings for her despite their closeness, the guild pays for
a trip to brothel for him where he meets the autarch but fails to recognize him from the
coin. e guilds aempt fails. When ecla is subjected to torture, Severian enables her
to commit suicide.
For a much more expansive summary, see the rst appendix to Lexicon Urthus (389). at summary,
however, is focalized on Severian at the respective times.
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Expecting to be tortured and executed, Severian is surprised to nd that the masters
of the guild appear to be so afraid to lose the trust of the courts if Severians violation of
guild dogma should become known that they merely exile him to a distant town.
He ventures forth into the world carrying rst the valuable sword Terminus Est and
soon a valuable gem, the Claw of the Conciliator, which he seeks to return to its rightful
owners. Almost always he has companions at his side, most signicantly the teenage yet
wise Dorcas. At his next meeting with Vodalus, he gets to merge eclas mind into his
own, and soon his allegiances veer about 180; still he accepts a new mission from Vodalus.
At several pointsspecically in a play by a Dr. Talos, which is based on an old book,
e Book of the New Sunit is now indicated that the sun is slowly dying because it was in-
jected with a black whole that eats it up from inside. Some of the people of Urth now hope
for the coming of the New Sun (pun surely intended), while others fear the destruction its
gravitational inuence would wreak on Urth.
Severians newest mission is exhausted when he delivers a message to an agent of Vo-
daluss inside the secret house of the House Absolute, an agent who turns out to be the
autarch himself. is time Severian recognizes him from the House Azure but it is from
eclas memories that he, much delayed, recognizes him as the autarch.
He completes his initial mission by becoming lictor of rax but soon repeats, in eect,
the digression that got him exiled and has to ee the town. When his mission of returning
the Clawis exhausted as well, he aimlessly joins the cavalry in the war against the Ascians.
Aer having been saved repeatedly by friend and foe alike, the autarch bequeaths to
him his position, and as ruler of the commonwealth Severian awaits the trials of the hi-
erogrammates that will determine whether Urth deserves a fresh sun.
To aend these trials, he travels to Yesod, an ostensibly higher universe with an epony-
mous planet ship within it. ere he is told that his whole life and the lives of his prede-
cessors on the Phoenix rone were all part of his trial and that he has already passed
it. He also learns that the reason the hierogrammates have orchestrated all this is so the
hierosdescendents, they hope, of the humans of Severians daywould come into exis-
tence and eventually create the hierogrammates, which would then evade the demise and
reconstitution of the Briahtic universe (or rather multiverse) by eeing into the universe
of Yesod. Hence they are working to ensure their own procreation or birth as a race.
Severian then goes on to become the Jesus-like Conciliator in the distant past, where he
tells his life story while incarcerated in the Matachin Tower, whereby he uses Dr. Taloss
play to guide his narration. Another prisoner, Canog, protocols it and turns it later into a
book that would become known as Book of the New Sun.
A hidden house everywhere coextensive with the public one (Claw 333; ch. 20) and surely an allusion
to the Urth Cycle itself. e secret house is a product of the architectural genius of the vizier to all
autarchs for the past millennium, Father Inire.
According to the Kabbalah, Yesod is a seroth of Yetzirah, a lower created world than Briah, but maybe
it is lower along one dimension and higher along another. (Jordan)
ere are indications that time in Yesod runs counter to time in Briah, so that the hierogrammates may
not so much be trying to ensure their procreation in the next Briahtic manvantara but their own birth.
3
Later he steps into the future to observe the destruction of Urth, goes back to an even
more distant past to become Apu-Punchau, and nally returns to the future and to Ushas,
as postdiluvian Urth is called.
3 The Reader
Oentimes a strong internal focalization has the eect of allowing the reader an insight,
however supercial, into the nature of the focalized characters thought processes and
modes of perception. In many of his books, Gene Wolfe goes a step further. Internal focal-
ization of this kind still requires the empathetic cooperation of the reader, and in novels
such as ere Are Doors, this empathy provides a crucial part of the reading experience,
but at the same time a closely related process is going on, a recreation of the focalized
characters confusion on the extradiegetic level. Readers who try to make sense of the
text, just as the focal character tries to make sense of his or her life, encounter in their
interpretative eorts hurdles that replicate the diculties of the character. Empathy is no
longer required to evoke the readers sympathy.
Wright identies this artice as an all-pervasive theme in the Urth Cycle. e books
are replete with intertextual references to sources as diverse as Kabbalah; Tarot; Grimms
Fairy Tales; Greek, Roman, Christian, Egyptian, Persian, and Norse mythology; various
traditions of sun worship; and of course many individual authors such as Marcel Proust,
Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Campbell, H.G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, John Locke, and many
more. All of these are worked into the story so seamlessly that the reader has to be versed
in the referenced material to even notice them, but then they open up new subtextual
backdoors to countless minor mysteries of the text. e richly textured, defamiliarizing
descriptions that have led reviewers to call the style of the Urth Cycle baroque (Gordon
75) are similar in eect and function, and deciphering them does not get easier when
the narrator starts to shi between the many personalities he is host to. Finally, there is
also the archaic, eclecticist diction, which rst refracts what light one tries to shine on
the events, but then, under close etymological or historical examination, reveals impor-
tant (albeit limited) clues to their deeper signicance. While Wolfe may mention crucial
facts only once or twice in his books, o-handed remarks, idle metaphors, and the words
themselves, can give additional clues to those who look closely enough.
However interesting these facets of the text may be, Wright is wary of them for the
myopia they induce, and especially in view of the tetralogy that forms the Urth Cycle
proper, his apprehension is justied. Where unsuspecting readers will see a monomythical
coming-of-age fantasy story with many Romantic elements, more careful readers will nd
a labyrinthine science ction with self-similar riddles on all surfaces, but they would have
Which has led reviewers to miss the fact that the narrator of Peace is dead although it is said outright on
page 17. (Hall)
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to be almost paranoid to suspect that if they could view the structure from the orbit, they
would read a mocking inscription in the paerns of its meandering paths.
e coda resolves some of these puzzles, for which Kincaid has criticized it as a tying
up of loose ends that didnt necessarily need tying. Especially a character by the name of
Apheta, who, ingly, has no voice but speaks by canceling out ambient noise, makes a
central one explicit. To Wright, it is the one central puzzle of the series, and he makes a
good argument for its pervasiveness, but in a world where everything, whatever happens,
has three meanings, (Shadow 190; ch. 32) there surely are more mysteries of equal rank
that are still waiting to be discovered.
What then is the origin of all this fascinating, addictive, but distracting embellishment?
One of the answers lies in the cognitive predispositions of Severian, who unconsciously
plunges the reader into the same noisy reality that is the only one he knows.
4 The Narrator
4.1 alifications
In order to aempt an examination of the unusual cognitive abilities and limitations that
are mirrored in Severians narrative, it is necessary to make at least two assumptions that
are not trivial, namely, that Severian is (intradiegetically) real and that his memories are
not wholly fabricated.
It could be argued that the hierogrammates could have more easily instated the Concil-
iator myth by fabricating the rst Book of the New Sun and leaking it to Canog rather than
having Severian reenact all of it, so that Severians Book of the New Sun may be similarly
fabricated for the purposes of manipulating its intradiegetic readers or possibly us.
Similarly, Severian may have received a much harsher punishment than exile for his
violation of guild dogma, may have been locked away on the third level of the oubliee
Wood (5) makes a distinction between reliably unreliable and unreliably unreliable narration. e Urth
Cycle may well fall into the laer category for there are many themes, such as roses or gold, that indicate
important relationships in the text that Severian has probably remained unaware of. In some cases, these
same themes are then used to seemingly lead the critics astray throughout most of the text and mock
them subtly in the last volume.
e same evidence that Wright enlists to show how closely all of Severians life has been stage-managed
by the hierogrammates, centrally many episodes where parts of the story are staged in real or dreamed
theater plays, could also be read to indicate that Severians career itself was very literally a play to
entertain the hierogrammates without all the existential signicance that Apheta imbues it with. Yesod
certainly feels like a stage with its house specically constructed for Severians trial and its trapdoors
that lead to backstage areas with giant y los and backstage exits from the planet (Wolfe, e Urth
of the New Sun 164169; ch. 23). Apheta reveals in the same chapter that visiting the surface of the
planet is a rare reward for them who labor inside the planet. Gunnie then references Dantes Inferno
just as theyre about to exit it again, maybe a hunch she has about the pleasure-seeking disregard the
hierogrammates might have for the lives of their actors. Such an interpretation would also turn much
subtextual writerlinesssuch as etymology and history linking the names of characters or themes of
roses and gold linking familiesfrom an extradiegetic inuence by Wolfe into an intradiegetic inuence
of the hierogrammates.
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where Master Palaemon, pitying him, le him the four books Severian had fetched for
ecla, among them the brown book and Canogs Book of the New Sun (Wolfe, Plan(e)t
Engineering 15), and is at times visited by Master Gurloes who would talk with him of
things no eavesdropper could understand (Shadow 56; ch. 7). Severian would retreat too
easily into his rich imagination and relive his own version of Canogs story, eventually
able to write it down (time and time again for lack of anything else to do) thanks to a
quiet well of vermilion ink (205; ch. 35) maybe from one of his legs.
ese interpretations, however, would render much of the following considerations
moot, so that they need to be temporarily put in abeyance.
4.2 The Mnemonist
4.2.1 Wolfes S.
It seems to be a repeating theme that the narrators of Gene Wolfes novels die shortly
before the beginning of their narration. e title of the rst chapter, Resurrection and
Death, gives this fact away, which will only be explained again in the coda. e same
chapter continues to summarize many of the crucial facts in intimations that, in some
cases, will only become clear much later.
On its rst page already, Severian explains the nature of his memory in a section that
will become even more signicant in the following:
Just as all that appears imperishable tends toward its own destruction, those
moments that at the time seem the most eeting recreate themselvesnot
only in my memory (which in the nal accounting loses nothing) but in the
throbbing of my heart and the prickling of my hair, making themselves new
just as our Commonwealth reconstitutes itself each morning in the shrill tones
of its own clarions. (Shadow 9; ch. 1)
Time and time again he mentions this perfect memory and uses it to pass time by
counting from memory 137 soldiers who had marched past him a week or so earlier (Claw
319; ch. 18) or to recount verbatim several stories he was told, but supercially it does not
seem to have a major signicance for the plot.
Flaying of the leg is described as inducing a slow, generalized welling of blood (Shadow 23; ch. 3), but
any form of torture would require a judicial decree, and in the ostensible story at least, the guild tries
to cover up their internal issue so not to lose the trust of the Autarchs courts. en Severians wound
might be self-inicted.
e curious order of the words in the title may indicate the perspective of the hierogrammates and hiero-
dules for whom time runs in the opposite direction, or Death actually refers to Severians rst homicide
in the chapter, rendering him in eect Death for the rst time, a name and role he would subsequently
assume with frequency and varying degrees of willingness. ere is another related, collocationally sur-
prising but apposite inversion in the title of the play that would serve as blueprint for Canogs Book of
the New Sun, Eschatology and Genesis.
It is never called eidetic but maybe just because the term might have been anachronistic for Severian. It
was coined by Erich Jaensch in the 1920s. (Harper)
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e simile in the quoted paragraph is also a surprisingly apt description since each
morning may appear a recreation of the last but is yet bound to be dierent from it in
countless ways, just as new recall errors increasingly skew the original memory with
every reactivation (Bridge and Paller).
Finally, the same section even illustrates this process. A few sentences before the quoted
paragraph, we have the sentence I would have hidden, but Roche held me, saying, Wait,
I see pikes, and immediately following it, e men had no armor, as I could soon see by
the sickly yellow light of the lanterns; but they had pikes, as Droe had said, and staves
and hatchets.
Other examples of the mutability of his memory concern the bag Docas sews to hold
the Claw and the pistol hand-o in the necropolis. As Wright (114) observes, the bag
transmogries from doeskin (Wolfe, e Sword of the Lictor 13; ch. 1) into manskin
(Urth 279; ch. 39), a very unlikely material for Dorcas to have used, and (here Wright quotes
Greenland (8285)) Severian rst recalls Vodalus giving his pistol to Hildegrin, who then,
being unacquainted with the weapon, hands it to ea (Shadow 13; ch. 1), and later recalls
Vodalus handing it to ea directly (Claw 221; ch. 1).
Severian freely admits to the mutability of his ostensibly perfect memory at several
places.
You that read [my story] cannot but have noticed that I have not scrupled to
recount in great detail things that transpired years ago, and to give the very
words of those who spoke to me, and the very words with which I replied;
and you must have thought this only a conventional device I had adopted to
make my story owmore smoothly. e truth is that I amone of those who are
cursed with what is called perfect recollection. We cannot, as I have sometimes
heard foolishly alleged, remember everything. I cannot recall the ordering of
the books on the shelves in the library of Master Ultan, for example. But I
can remember more than many would credit: the position of each object on
a table I walked past when I was a child, and even that I have recalled some
scene to mind previously, and how that remembered incident diered from
the memory of it I have now. (Claw 260; ch. 8)
Known gaps in his memory do not seemto worry him; he may not have paid aention to
the ordering of the books in the rst place, and so it never impressed itself on his memory.
Alternatively, it may be that he once knew it but not only forgot it but even forgot ever
having known it. Either case would explain his indierent aitude. Interesting is also the
equanimity with which he observes alterations of his memories. Since his memory of how
he had previously recalled some scene may have undergone alterations just as severe as
any alterations of his memory of the scene itself, he has no way of knowing the scene itself
anymore. at his original memory of it has been replaced by a ction does not undo the
fact of his forgeing, it merely conceals it, yet he does not seem to acknowledge this form
of forgeing or dismisses it as inconsequential (I searched my memory, which is perfect,
except perhaps for a few slight lapses and distortions. (Urth 244; ch. 34)).
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What seems to be truly frightening to him, though, is forgeing. e following excerpts
show his fear of forgeing and the powerful mechanisms his brain has developed to con-
ceal it from him.
I shook my head. I dont want to forget, Tzadkiel. Ive boasted too oen that
I forget nothing, and forgeingwhich I have known once or twiceseems
to me a kind of death. (Urth 174; ch. 24)
I have forgoen! Do you remember when we ew over the armies? For a
time I forgot it! I know now what it is to forget.
ere was pale laughter in his voice. Which you will now remember al-
ways.
I hope so, but it fades even as we speak. It vanishes like mist, which must
itself be a forgeing. (Wolfe, e Citadel of the Autarch 336; ch. 25)
In addition to these sections, which portray his acknowledged fear of forgeing, there
is another where he describes the experience of facing his fear of phantom memories
poignantly as the most harrowing of [his] life, e catalyst was that, as an apprentice,
he has assumed that many of the upper-class prisoners given into the guilds custody were
supporters of Vodalus. Upon reading some of the clients court dossiers, however, he has
found that none of them were, but only minutes later thinks that he has heard Vodaluss
name in a conversation though no one else seems to have heard it. He extrapolates that his
whole memory of meeting Vodalus and ea may have been a hallucination or phantom
memory, that only his killing of the volunteer may have been real.
It was in this instant of confusion that I realized for the rst time that I am
in some degree insane. It could be argued that it was the most harrowing of
my life. I had lied oen to Master Gurloes and Master Palaemon, to Master
Malrubius while he still lived, to Droe because he was captain, to Roche
because he was older and stronger than I, and to Eata and the other smaller
apprentices because I hoped to make them respect me. Now I could no longer
be sure my own mind was not lying to me; all my falsehoods were recoiling on
me, and I who remembered everything could not be certain those memories
were more than my own dreams. I recalled the moonlit face of Vodalus; but
then, I had wanted to see it. I recalled his voice as he spoke to me, but I had
desired to hear it, and the womans voice too. (Shadow 27; ch. 3)
ese limitations, however, are marginal compared to the feats of memory he per-
forms, for example, when retelling the same dialogue verbatim and identically several
times throughout the narrative.
Fear of forgeing is one side of the chrisos, but the more optimistic side becomes evident
once Severian becomes more aware of the possibility of time travel.
8
e chiliarch said, Well stay here and die with you, Conciliator, if you
desire it.
I dont, I told them. And I wont die. I tried to reveal the workings of
Time to them, though I do not understand them myself. Everyone who has
lived is still alive, somewhen. But you are in great danger. Go! (Urth 279; ch.
39)
is consolation, surely unhelpful for the chiliarch, may be one that has great meaning
for Severian, for whom time was gradually becoming as freely navigable as space. Hence
his fear may be less of him losing his memories than of the corresponding events geing
irretrievably lost in the past. A fear that only abates as he grows accustomed to time travel.
His motivation for writing his Book of the New Sun may spring from the same source. In
Return to the Whorl (262; ch. 13), it is revealed that Horn alias Incanto, the narrator of e
Book of the Short Sun, introduced Severian to the writing of autobiographies or memoirs,
but that alone would probably not have suced to drive him to invest endless hours into
the recording of his memories.
In his own autobiography, he laments, But what a disease this writing business is!
(Urth 1; ch. 1) is statement suggests that he is not merely motivated but compelled to
write. Moreover, he repeatedly claims not to be writing for anyone. e same volume
starts with the words:
Having cast one manuscript into the seas of time, I now begin again. Surely
it is absurd; but I am notI will not beso absurd myself as to suppose that
this will ever nd a reader, even in me. Let me describe then, to no one and
nothing, just who I am and what it is that I have done to Urth.
His manner of publication is also not optimized for mass dissemination, distinguishing
the book from the autobiographies of other famous rulers. Of the rst manuscript, he gave
one copy into the care of the library of Nessus, a giant, dusty archive underneath the city
that is not open to the public (Shadow 42; ch. 6), then wrote a second copy from memory
(surely with some unconscious alterations), sealed it in a trunk, and tossed it into space.
If it had not been for G.W.s knack for time travel and xenolinguistics, at most a librarian
or two would have read it. (Johnson)
While some part of him may be unable to acknowledge that his memory, due to its
silent mutability, is unreliable, he may yet be aware of it on another level, one that does
not allow him to express this insight. His drive to write then may stem from a latent
fear that without his help the events he witnessed would fade to oblivion, either upon
his death or even much sooner. e reason he has never, to our knowledge, continued his
autobiography further than he had, may also be due to the waning of the same fear as
time travel becomes natural for him.
From this evidence it becomes clear that while Severians recall is exceptional, it is
imperfect and subject to slight alterations, which his strong imagination disguises from
Compare, for example, Vargha-Khadem, Isaacs, and Mishkin.
9
him. It is also likely, though the evidence appears more tenuous, that Severians fear of
these imperfections is the driving force behind his writing.
4.2.2 Lurias S.
From the 1920s to 1950s, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria studied the jour-
nalist and mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky and summarized his ndings in his book
e Mind of a Mnemonist. Solomon Shereshevsky, called S. in the book, evinces several
parallels to Severian, as Wright already observed, but also a few marked dierences.
Jerome Bruners foreword already contains a good summary of the parallels:
For the mnemonist, S., whose case is studied in such exquisite detail in these
pages, is a man whose memory is a memory of particulars, particulars that
are rich in imagery, thematic elaboation [sic], and aect. But it is a memory
that is peculiarly lacking in one important feature: the capacity to convert
encounters with the particular into instances of the general, enabling one to
form general concepts even though the particulars are lost. It is this laer type
of memory without record that seems so poorly developed in this man.
Several notable things about the disorders of this mnemonist are especially
fascinating from a psychological point of view. For one thing, the sheer per-
sistence of ikonic [sic] memory is so great that one wonders whether there is
some failure in the swi metabolism of short-term memory. His immediate
images haunt him for hours, types of images that in much recent work on
short-term memory are found to fade to a point where information retrieval
from them is not possible aer a second or so. Along with this trait there is
also a non-selectivity about his memory, such that what remains behind is a
kind of junk heap of impressions.
So powerful is his imagery that this man can easily drive his pulse up by
imagining running. He is ooded and disturbed by the images and impressions
of childhood, and, when he was a child, his imagery of school would become
so real that he would lie abed rather than get out from under the quilt and
get ready. It is interesting that, given his mode of remembering, there seems
to be no childhood amnesia, and his memories from the earliest period can
cause him acute malaise and chagrin. roughout, there is a childlike quality
in the protocols, protocols that are rich beyond anything I have ever encoun-
tered in the psychological literature on memory disorders. S.s life in some
deeply touching way is a failure. He waited for something to happen to him,
some great thing. In the conduct of his life, too, there was a passive-receptive
Wright (108) notes that as Wolfe took beginning and advanced courses in Abnormal Psychology at
Miami University in Ohio in the late 1960s, and an introductory course at the University of Houston,
it is probable that he was familiar with the clinical studies of the psychology of mnemonists when he
began writing e Book of the New Sun.
An ineectual pseudonymization not only because Shereshevsky was a well-known mnemonist but also
because both his rst names are mentioned in the text (Luria 50).
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aitude, almost precluding organized striving. In place of the more abstract
and constructional aitude of planning, there was waiting. (Luria 57)
Certainly Severians writing is brimful with particulars and rich in imagery. More irrev-
erently, it could be called a junk heap of impressions. Similarly, that Shereshevsky could
easily drive his pulse up by imagining running is reminiscent of Severians description
of moments that recreate themselves in the throbbing of [his] heart and the prickling
of [his] hair (Shadow 9; ch. 1). But Severian seems to also know about some of the side
eects of his condition:
Some say [perfect recall] is linked to weak judgmentof that I am no judge.
But it has another danger, one I have encountered many times. When I cast
my mind into the past, as I am doing now and as I did then when I sought
to recall my dream, I remember it so well that I seem to move again in the
bygone day, a day oldnew, and unchanged each time I draw it to the surface
of my mind, its eidolons as real as I. (Claw 261; ch. 8)
Shereshevsky found it dicult to recognize faces (Luria 64) and voices (25) because of
how changeable they were. He could not extract and recognize whatever commonality
most people nd in the same face or voice what allows them to agree that it is indeed
the same. He compared the aempt to trying to tell apart waves on an ocean. Similarly,
Severian has problems recognizing faces, for example, when he repeatedly sees the old
autarch but the recognition keeps being one-sided. ere are also cases where he considers
that people may not be the same people anymore having changed or matured so much.
In the case of his own person (Citadel 401; ch. 37), the observation is debatable on several
levels, yet his readiness to accept this unintuitive nonidentity is telling.
e same extraneous data that distracts Shereshevsky and Severian also distracts the
readers from whatever paerns they would otherwise recognize. at is one of the ways
in which the book forces the inquisitive readers to sympathize, rather than bargaining for
their empathy. One could imagine that Shereshevsky was not describing the inuence of
S.M. Eisensteins acoustic voice in this paragraph but that of Severians literary voice:
You know there are people who seem to have many voices, whose voices
seem to be an entire composition, a bouquet. e late S.M. Eisenstein had just
such a voice: listening to him, it was as though a ame with bers protrud-
ing from it was advancing right toward me. I got so interested in his voice, I
couldnt follow what he was saying. (Luria 24)
e Urth we see is thus an eclecticist world somewhat like the House Azure, in which
the accumulation and interconnection of what were originally separate buildings pro-
duce a confusion of juing wings and architectural styles, with peaks and turrets where
the rst builders had intended nothing more than rooops, (Shadow 62; ch. 9) except that
He is yet unaware of having died and having been recreated as aquastor.
11
Severians uncomprehending, defamiliarizing lens (aided by the translation) fuses the het-
erodox assemblage of numerous religious mythologies, weapons and ships from various
cultures and times of Urths past, animals from at least nine geological epochs, and au-
thors of various genres into a fairly homogeneous whole. Put dierently, it sounds like a
color blind person describing in great detail a most artful Ishihara Color Test to the reader,
all the while completely missing the number depicted in the center. If the readers could
look at the image directly, they would see it clearlyalthough dierent readers might see
a small set of dierent numbers.
ere are also several instances (e.g., Claw 261; ch. 8) in e Book of the New Sun where
Severian gets lost in his memories forgeing the reality around him just as the young
Shereshevsky mixed up the real geing up and geing to school with his imagined (third-
person) version of it (Luria 151).
Unusual stability is also common to Severian and Shereshevsky. e laers synes-
thetic associations remain very stable throughout his life and enable him to recall memo-
ries from decades past (Luria 12), even into his early childhood (76). Similarly, Severians
character seems to undergo curiously lile development while his position in society and
his political stance change radically and repeatedly. What there is in terms of develop-
ment can oen be explained by him gaining knowledge and applying it in a very immedi-
ate fashion. e instances where Severian comments on his earliest memories, however,
are few and fragmentary, and due to this sparsity it is not clear whether Shereshevskys
were similar. In the rst book Severian claims From my earliest memory I remember all.
at rst recollection is of piling pebbles in the Old Yard (Shadow 16; ch. 2). In the second,
however, he manages to penetrate further into his past; the neonatal blur in the paragraph
is very reminiscent of Shereshevsky protocols of his earliest memories:
I sought to recall that celebration of Holy Katharines day that fell the year
aer I became captain of apprentices; but the preparations for the feast were
hardly begun before other memories came crowding unbidden around it. In
our kitchen I lied a cup of stolen wine to my lipsand found it had become
a breast running with warm milk. It was my mothers breast then, and I could
hardly contain my elation (which might have wiped the memory away) at
having reached back at last to her, aer so many fruitless aempts. My arms
sought to clasp her, and I would, if only I could, have lied my eyes to look
into her face. My mother certainly, for the children the torturers take know
no breasts. e grayness at the edge of my eld of vision, then, was the metal
of her cell wall. Soon she would be led away to scream in the Apparatus or
gasp in Allowins Necklace. I sought to hold her back, to mark the moment so
I might return to it when I chose; she faded even as I tried to bind her to me,
dissolving as mist does when the wind rises. (Claw 384; ch. 27)
e parallels between the mechanisms behind Shereshevskys alter egowho does onerous things Shere-
shevsky himself is loath to do (Luria 153) or behaves in socially awkward manners so Shereshevsky gets
spared the embarrassment (156)and Severians alzabo-induced legion of them seem merely nominal.
It should be fair to call Severians memory unusually stable despite its slight mutability.
12
While serendipitous here, this paragraph also shows the diculties Severian and Shere-
shevsky encounter in trying to concentrate on one train of thought and not being swept
away by circumstantial associations. Luria (155) writes:
ere were many instances too in which images that came to the surface
in S.s mind steered him away from the subject of a conversation. At such
moments his remarks would be cluered with details and irrelevancies; he
would become verbose, digress endlessly, and nally have to strain to get back
to the subject of the conversation.
Wright (110) gives a lengthy example from (Sword 148; ch. 27) where a red cape triggers
a chain of association so tenuous and arbitrary as to appear non sequiturs, but which
Severian presents as an argument for various fantastic empyrean machinations behind
the piece of cloth. Of these fantastic ruminations there are several throughout the Urth
Cycle.
Both mnemonists also show a surprising aptitude for seemingly unrelated cognitive
tasks. Severian solves several criminal mysteries through surprising feats of ratiocination
(e.g., Gunnies and Purns involvement in the killing of his steward in e Urth of the New
Sun) and Shereshevsky is able to recognize minute inconsistencies in stories and perform
impressive calculations through idiosyncratic processes of visualization (Luria 102).
Apart from these many striking parallels, there are also a number of dierences. With
Shereshevsky, for example, the basis for his exceptional memory is in his ve-fold synes-
thesia; no synesthesia is discernible in Severians case. Shereshevskys memory is perfectly
static even over decades; Severians memory shows curious alterations.
Before one can assemble these into a coherent whole, more parallels between the two
S.s have to be explored.
4.3 The Marionee
e rst sentence of the rst chapter of the rst book reads It is possible I already had
some presentiment of my future; the last sentence of the same chapter reads It was in this
fashion that I began the long journey by which I have backed into the throne. Together
they summarize well Severians expectations, hindsight bias, and passivity.
One of Shereshevskys protocols from 1937 could be that of a Severian lost in our time
and forgoen by the hierogrammates.
I read a great deal and always identied myself with one of the heroes. For
I saw them, you know. Even at eighteen I couldnt understand how one friend
of mine was content to train to become an accountant, another a commercial
traveler. For whats important in life isnt a profession but something ne,
something grand that is to happen to me If at eighteen or twenty Id thought
I was ready to marry and a countess or princess had agreed to marry me
even that wouldnt have impressed me. Perhaps I was destined for something
13
greater? Whatever I did, whether writing articles, becoming a lm starit
was just a temporary thing.
At one point I studied the stock market, and when I showed that I had a
good memory for prices on the exchange, I became a broker. But it was just
something I did for a while to make a living. As for real lifethats something
else again. But it all took place in dreams, not in reality
I was passive for the most part, didnt understand that time was moving
on. All the jobs I had were simply work I was doing in the meantime. e
feeling I had was: Im only twenty-ve, only thirtyIve got my whole life
ahead of me. In 1917 I was content to go o to the provinces. I decided to get
in with the movement. So I was in the Proletcult, ran a printing shop, became
a reporter, lived a special sort of life for a time. But even now I realize times
passing and that I might have accomplished a great dealbut I dont work.
ats the way Ive always been. (Luria 157158)
Had Shereshevsky become the monarch of South America and later the Jesus-like cyno-
sure of that continents predominant religion, these feelings would, in retrospect, have
seemed presentient.
Having always, on some less rational level at least, expected his ascent, Severian goes
along with it docilely and unquestioninglyand that is the essence of what he does, too.
ere are few major decisions by Severian that are not forced by circumstances or dic-
tated by authorities, and even these decisions, like allowing ecla to die, serve to mark
the passing of the authoritative leash on Severian from one authority to another (in this
case from the masters of his guild to Vodalus). When the decrees (or maybe rescripts
(Urth 138; ch. 19)) of the authorities diverge, Severian seems to simply follow the one he
perceives as greater rather than to decide for himself.
His upbringing has of course reinforced this docile nature, for the torturers carry out
the sentences that are delivered to [them], doing no more than [they] are told, and no less,
and making no changes (Shadow 81; ch. 12).
Furthermore, he places great importance on symbols, which may either render him sus-
ceptible to magical or mythical thought that relies on symbols and to those who employ
symbols as means of control, or which may be a result or symptom of a pre-existing dis-
position to magical thought. Maybe it is a mutually reinforcing cycle.
Certain mysteries aver that the real world has been constructed by the hu-
man mind, since our ways are governed by the articial categories into which
we place essentially undierentiated things, things weaker than our words
for them. I understood the principle intuitively that night as I heard the last
volunteer swing the gate closed behind us. (Shadow 11; ch. 1)
Maybe it can be imagined as a feeling akin to Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freuds so-called oceanic
feeling, only with the additional feature that it puts the subject in some key position. Such a similarity
would also provide a basis to explain the Romantic themes that Severian perceives.
Another example may be the way Severian oen conates ocean-going and space-going ships while to
us they are starkly dierent.
14
It is certainly true that there are many specic things weaker than our words for them,
but that does not mean that all things are an undierentiated hodgepodge; Severian is
probably underestimating things here. Such constructivism has been criticized on var-
ious grounds, crucially that of its self-refutation and related problems (Boghossian e.g.,
66).
However if a coin or a gem can alter ones loyalties and aitudes so dramatically, it is
probably a reassuring illusion to believe that nature is inherently that malleable or am-
biguous so that it is not just ones conception of it that is being manipulated. He comments
on these tokens, or Vodaluss coin in particular, a few pages later:
We believe that we invent symbols. e truth is that they invent us; we are
their creatures, shaped by their hard, dening edges. (Shadow 14; ch. 1)
More concretely again, he later recites a verse that his older friend Roche told him
would keep hidden items from being discovered by others. Severian uses it to protect the
coin he had received from Vodalus and observes that he was somewhat astonished to
discover that [he] was now old enough not to be ashamed of it (Shadow 25; ch. 3). His
concern here is with having overcome his adolescent fear of appearing childish, which
veils the age-independent superstition in trying to use such a charm. He does, however,
dismiss more inconvenient aspects of the spell, showing a certain divide between what he
feels and what he knows. en again, he shows less reection when commenting on the
sensation of being watched (33; ch. 4). e chapters are riddled with similar episodes.
Another section highlights his internal conict between the rational appraisal and the
distractive magical intuitions. In the Garden of Endless Sleep, he considers a hyacinth
while the others who are with him think, guessing from his circumstances and counte-
nance, that he is considering his own death.
Severians musings are also reminiscent of the debate over whether language determines thought or vice
versa, which, on account of the intertwined, oen inseparable nature of the two concepts, probably has
to be answered dierently.
However, this thought sequence may have several more meanings. In e acre drew up to her with
the skiish animals dancing to one side as though she were a thyacine (Shadow 112; ch. 18), Severian
indirectly and counterfactually likens Agia to a thyacine. He, however, stands close behind her in the
scene, so it is possible that they shied away from him as much as from her. is interpretation is corrobo-
rated by the fact that thyacine is a misspelling of thylacine, the native Tasmanian wol or zebra-wol
(Andre-Driussi 348), and, obvious extradiegetic associations aside, the wolf is typically associated with
Severian (17). Hence the thought sequence about the hyacinth may mirror Severians possible drowning
or near-drowning in the lake, since Dorcas saved him by plugging him from the water (and from the
other hand that tried to pull him down) just as she plugged the hyacinth moments later. In an inver-
sion of it, it must have seemed to amnesiac Dorcas as if she came into existence to save Severian, when
really the saving had been mutual. When Dorcas nally insists that he had been thinking about dying,
Severian does not again contradict her. Furthermore, thanks to the misspelling (the only appearance of
the animal in the books), the word shares a sequence of six characters with hyacinth, a common type
of hint in the cycle, which, in this case, may have the additional function of intimating Agias family
bonds with Severian (Borski 1017). It should also be noted that Hyacinth is the name of the wife of the
protagonist of Wolfes Book of the Long Sun, who (the protagonist) is subtly linked to Severian.
15
Is it possible the ower came into being only because Dorcas reached for
it? In daylight moments, I know as well as the next that such things are im-
possible; but I am writing by night, . (Shadow 147; ch. 24)
is propensity is not unknown to Shereshevsky:
One time when I was planning to go to Samara, Misha [his son] developed
stomach pains. We called in a doctor, but he couldnt gure out what was
wrong with him . Yet it was so simple. I had given him something that was
cooked with lard. I could see the pieces of lard in his stomach . I thought to
myself Id help him. I wanted him to digest them . I pictured it in my mind
and saw the lard dissolving in his stomach. And Misha got beer. Of course, I
know this isnt the way it happened yet I did see it all. (Luria 144)
Luria summarizes this aspect as follows:
With each individual there is a dividing line between imagination and real-
ity; for most of us whose imaginations have distinct limits, this is fairly clear-
cut. In S.s case the borderline between the two had broken down, for the
images his imagination conjured up took on the feel of reality. (Luria 144)
e dierence is that Shereshevsky was not, according to Lurias account, exposed to
any manipulation that he would have to disguise from himself. Severian is, and Wright
points particularly to the Claws psilocybin-like psychedelic inuence described at the
very end of the third volume:
Seeing it thus without its case of sapphire, I felt profoundly an eect I had
never noticed at all during the days before it had been taken from me in the
hetmans house. Whenever I looked at it, it seemed to erase thought. Not as
wine and certain drugs do, by rendering the mind unt for it, but by replacing
it with a higher state for which I know no name. Again and again I felt myself
enter this state, rising always higher until I feared I should never return to
the mode of consciousness I call normality; and again and again I tore myself
from it. Each time I emerged, I felt I had gained some inexpressible insight
into immense realities.
At last, aer a long series of these bold advances and fearful retreats, I came
to understand that I should never reach any real knowledge of the tiny thing
I held, and with that thought (for it was a thought) came a third state, one of
happy obedience to I knew not what, an obedience without reection because
there was no longer anything to reect upon, and without the least tincture
of rebellion. (Sword 200; ch. 38)
If you are tasked with destroying most life on Urth so that it can re-emerge to evolve
into something beer (by the standards of the hierogrammates), then obedience without
16
reection is surely inevitable lest the magnitude of the risks and uncertainties become
apparent. e claw lends Severian the comfort of the illusion that he is integral in some-
thing overwhelmingly grand and good, and as the old autarch told him, You came for
pleasure, did you not? If a dream adds to your enjoyment, why dispute it?
Another way to dismiss the global near-omnicide and all considerations of necessity,
proportionality, and eectuality is to dismiss consequentialism in favor of some brand of
moral philosophy that concerns itself with intentions onlywhich of course are good so
long as obedience to a perceived god is considered incontrovertibly good: Until we reach
the end of time, we dont know whether somethings been good or bad; we can only judge
the intentions of those who acted. (Urth 237; ch. 33)
5 Reconciliation
Given that in the Urth Cycle everything has three meanings (Shadow 190; ch. 32)
and seeing the ambiguity that facilitates such versatility, great caution is necessary when
forming sweeping theories of the text. In its vast repository of facts it is too easy to let
ideology blind oneself to gaps and contradictions. As a preemptive countermeasure, this
section will try to introduce its hypotheses with all their qualities and shortcomings in so
far as they were apparent to the author.
ese hypotheses will concern the parallels and dierences between Shereshevsky and
Severian. ough the true relationships of cause and reaction may be more convoluted,
it appears that for Shereshevsky his synesthesia was integral to his mnemonic abilities,
which in turn caused his cognitive limitations due the noise he had to consciously si
through in order to recognize any paerns. So how can Severian perform such similar
feats and be subject to such similar limitations with no noticeable synesthesia? And how
come that some of his memories change when Shereshevsky was so notable for his prefect
recall even aer decades?
5.1 The Man Your Mother Bore
e Urth of the NewSun gave away many a secret that people like Kincaid would have liked
to or had gured out themselves. One of them is Severians nature as aquastor. In a partic-
ularly revealing conversation with the hierodules Barbatus, Famulimus, and Ossipago,
this is made explicit.
But if Apu-Punchau is myself, what was the body I found on Tzadkiels
ship?
e quotation is of course taken out of context, but then again an earlier section has already drawn
aention to the similarity between the House Azure and the reality of Urth as we might see were it not
for Severians consciousness and the translation ltering our perception. en the quotation might not
be out of context aer all and might even be directed not only at Severian but at the reader, reminding
the reader to consider dismissing the very thought they have at that instant.
ough Ossipago may be a machine or Father Inire in disguise.
17
Nearly whispering, Famulimus sang, e man whom you saw dead your
mother bore. Or so it seems to me from whats been said. Now I would weep
for her if I had tears, though notperhapsfor you still living here. What we
did here for you, Severian, the mighty Tzadkiel accomplished there, remem-
brance taking from your dead mind to build your mind and you anew. (Urth
359; ch. 50)
She is of course wrong in the sense that Severian had died and was rebuilt in much
the same fashion several times before that incident, but had they been talking about
Severians death by drowning in Gyoll that starts the narrative, then she might have been
right.
Much earlier, the aquastor of Master Malrubius, created from Severians childhood
memories of him, explains his nature thus: Once you met a woman named Cyriaca, who
told you tales of the great thinking machines of the past. ere is such a machine on the
ship in which we sailed. But we are maintained in the physical world by the energies
of the machine, and its range is but a few thousand years.
is immediately suggests that Severian, as aquastor, may be able to draw upon the
storage capacities of a computer, maybe the ship computer of the Matachin Tower, in
order to augment his memory, and the interaction of these memories with his biological
body may introduce occasional inaccuracies.
Furthermore if Severian was created as aquastor not just aer his rst death but from
his birth, created according to the designs of the hierogrammates or their subordinates,
then he could have been born without the help of a father, though some gruesome scenes
in Baldanderss castle suggest that a female host was necessary to create Dr. Talos (Sword
176; ch. 33). is would also underline the Christian mythological imagery with Severian
being born to a virgin thanks to advanced alien technology.
An alternative would be that he only became an aquastor a few years later in his life,
an event that would, in retrospect, be marked by his rst memory (at rst recollection
is of piling pebbles in the Old Yard (Shadow 16; ch. 2)).
e text does not seem to provide much evidence for the theory of Severians ontoge-
nesis by design to the degree Dr. Talos was designed; Ouen is rather assuredly Severians
biological father; and furthermore Severians mother Catherine may have taken the vows
of abstinence of the Pelerines, thus giving her a motive to lie about Ouens fatherhood and
outing the appropriately subverted allegory in any case.
However, the second theory does hold some appeal as the Old Yard, either by name or
by implication, is repeatedly invoked in dying visions or dreams of Severian like an echo of
an early, unremembered trauma. Furthermore, it is where Severian is shot and probably
killed once again in ancient times resulting in the breach of the curtain wall (Urth 255; ch.
36). Finally, the Old Yard has been the site of executions and probably excruciations, and
Assuredly once but likely more oen.
I knew he was looking for me in the Old Yard below. (Shadow 12; ch. 2) e deepest bell in the Bell
Tower was ringing. (Urth 65; ch. 9)
By ancient custom, we must not use the steps (although I have seen Master Gurloes assist his vault to the
scaold with his sword, in the court before the Bell Tower). (Claw 234; ch. 4) Its no more than it seems,
18
is located close to the Bell Tower with its Bell Keep the apprentices are forbidden to enter
for unknown reasons, so it may be a rather hazardous place.
But the evidence for a rst death when Severian was barely old enough to stack pebbles
is thin and as a means of explaining his extrodinary memory fails to account for one
important phrase in the cycle.
5.2 Our Own Shadows Race Into the Past
I dont forget much, is how Ouen explained that he learned reading and writing without
formal education. Ouen being Severians biological father, this suggests that Severian has
something akin to an inherited predisposition for great memory.
But that does not yet explain the memory itself. Absent any solid cause and grounding
of his gi, such as highly developed synesthesia or the hard drives of a ship computer, it
seems necessary to assume that Severians memory is no beer than average.
In the same conversation with the familiar trio of hierodules, Severian learns that his
ability to time-travelor to walk the Corridors of Timeis dependent on the energy of the
star he identies with and that he cannot draw on it in the day of Apu-Punchau (until aer
the death of that version of him) because the light of the star had not yet reached Urth.
It should be noted thatwith the exception of his decade-long sojourn as Apu-Punchau
among the autochthons of the stone townhe can draw on this source of energy through-
out his whole life.
ere are also many indications that his awareness of this energy source maybe aids
his conscious control over it but that it can work quite independent of this awareness. In
a dierent context Severian explains:
I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we
must know of such things to be inuenced by them, and in fact to believe so
is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. e would-
be sorcerer alone has faith in the ecacy of pure knowledge; rational people
know that things act of themselves or not at all. (Shadow 14; ch. 1)
Examples are the countless cases where he resurrects beingsstarting with Triskele
before he receives the Clawbut continually misaributes the causes.
Dorcas, also aributing the phenomena to the Claw, gives a parsimonious explanation
of the workings behind the events even though she does not even consciously know that
Severian would aain the ability to time-travel:
just a stake to immobilize the hands, and a thirteen-thonged scourge for correction. It used to stand in
the Old Yard, but the witches complained, and the castellan made us move it down here. (Shadow 81;
ch. 12)
While his conclusion is surely correct in most cases, the argument is invalid, since the proposition that
things can have an eect without our knowledge of them does not imply that our knowledge of them is
necessarily without eect, but this is unrelated to the argument of this section.
19
Severian, when you brought the uhlan back to life it was because the Claw
twisted time for him to the point at which he still lived. When you half healed
your friends wounds, it was because it bent the moment to one when they
would be nearly healed. And when you fell into the fen in the Garden of End-
less Sleep, it must have touched me or nearly touched me, and for me it became
the time in which I had lived, so that I lived again. (Sword 60; ch. 11)
Severian later lends extra emphasis to this statement by recounting himself retelling
the episode verbatim to Miles (Citadel 217; ch. 3).
With Severians unusual ability to resurrect reduced to a manipulation of time, it be-
comes even more parsimonious to explain his unusual memory in the same terms. Not
physically transferring himself into the other time but just bending time for his conscious-
ness nowto meet his consciousness then might require much less skill, focus, and energy,
so that he could master it at a much younger age and still several resurrections away from
the Severian who would go on to become the Conciliator.
e inaccuracies of his memory may then be grouped into three categories in order to
explain them in terms of this system. First, it is possible that from a certain present dier-
ent pasts whose dierences have proved inconsequential for the present are are blurred to
a degree and thus hard to distinguish for the time traveler. Hence Severians dierent ver-
sions of the pistol hand-o in the Necropolis, where, in both cases, the pistol soon ended
up in eas hands. Second, Severian may be loath to enter into the trance-like state that
his casting back into the past entails for his present body, especially when he had just done
so and still thinks that he remembers (with his ordinary episodic memory) what he saw in
his transtemporally enhanced remembrance, so that he misremembers facts just as anyone
would, for example, who spoed the pikes rst. ird, his ordinary semantic recall may be
subject to production errors. A moments reection would have convinced him that there
is no way Dorcas would have used human skin for his lile sack, but since the sheath of
Terminus Est was fashioned from something called sable manskin (Shadow 90; ch. 14)
and both were items very dear to him that he carried with him across the Commonwealth,
he might have momentarily mixed them up.
e uidity of the dividing line between this travel in his imagination and actual time
travel is exemplied when he dreams on the shores of Ushas, is told in his dream that he
no longer dreamed, and soon emerges, wholly physical, as Apu-Punchau in spe. When he
returns to the approximate time of his departure, he learns that a wraith-like aspect of his
had the whole time remained where he had slept, one that the priest of this new religion
of Ushas professed to be able to sense.
According to this theory, Ouens good memory may be not so much the genetic precur-
sor and foundation for Severians gi but a latent ability of his to access the energies of
the new sun due to his close relation to Severian. A gi handed back in time. Such notions
are not foreign to the text, where Dr. Talos observes that just as the momentous events
of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward
Barbatus suggests that the amount of energy at ones disposal is crucial for determining the number of
people one can ferry through time. (Urth 361; ch. 50)
20
the dark, our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankinds dreams. (Sword 186;
ch. 35)
Symmetrically, the same counterchronological inuence may be the reason for Vale-
rias association with the Atrium of Time. Borski (19) presents a convincing argument
that two of the women Severian has a relationship with, Dorcas and Valeria, are both his
grandmothers. is is clear in the case of Dorcas, but there is also ample evidence (de-
tailed in Solar Labyrinth) that Severians mother Catherine is the daughter of Valeria and
her second husband Dux Caesidius, and that it is her who is sent back in time on the nal
day of Urth.
Further evidence of this theory is that the period Severian lives as Apu-Punchauthe
only one, as noted earlier, when he cannot draw on the energy of the new sunis kept
very short despite its many years in story time and contains no direct speech until right
before the end when he can escape to the future again. Severian has not scrupled to render
the language of the Ascians in his own in his account, so the foreign language they speak
is not likely to be the reason for the stylistic break, and the content of the two chapters is
close to what someone with ordinary memory would be able to remember of the events.
Conversely, there are several unexplained visions of the past embedded in the cycle,
which Andre-Driussi (93) has compiled under the headword Corridors of Time, thereby
implying the same conation of memory and time travel that may be at the basis of Sev-
erians mnemonic ability. At least two of these visions take place before he has obtained
the Claw and one of them clearly reaches back much further than his own lifetime.
What further corroborates the theory is that it repeats the paern of annular fusion,
the circular or mutual recursion that is found all throughout the Urth Cycle, be it in the
schemes of the hierogrammates who want to ensure their own creation by ensuring the
genesis of the humans of Ushas who will evolve into the hieros who created the hiero-
grammates, or be it in Canogs Book of the New Sun, which serves as blueprint for Dr.
Taloss play Eschatology and Genesis, which Severian uses to guide his account of the fu-
ture that Canog protocols and eventually turns into the rst book. Severians mnemonic
ability is the reason he is enlisted by the hierogrammates and his mission eventually is
the counterchronological cause of the same ability.
Father Inire may have the same gi as Severian. Borski (4370) makes a good case for
Inire reappearing throughout the cycle as a father gure in various guises. He is usually
distinguished by this stature, size, abilities, manner of walking, manner of social interac-
tion, and signicantly his impressive eyes, either directly or in that he tries to hide them.
e ostensible hierodule and machine Ossipago is likely to be one of these guises. He is
the one who enables the other two hierodules of the trio to step through time (Urth 360; ch.
50), and reduplicating himself throughout time is probably also the way Inire manages to
stay alive so long beyond the span of his short-lived kind. (Citadel 405; ch. 38) So when
Dreams, here, can be taken quite literally since the ght in the ensuing chapters had been foreshadowed
in one of Severians dreams in the rst volume.
Or at least why he ended up as the successful candidate if Baldanders was a previous one but was found
to be too egotistical and ambitious for the job.
Hierodules typically live only a score of years, like dogs. (Sword 178; ch. 33)
21
Famulimus says that Only Ossipago here has memory like yours (Urth 405; ch. 38), she
may have meant memory that has transtemporal access to all brain states all throughout
the persons lifetime.
5.3 For That Were You Chosen
Some previous sections have already pointed toward the enhanced manipulability through
myths and symbols and scintillating gadgets that may be a concomitant of a memory that
does not lter any noise, but the hierodules Barbatus, Famulimus, and Ossipago imply that
Severians memory capacity itself may have been an even more immediate and forcible
reason, but not necessarily because of any record he would write, though lethe suggests
that interpretation.
Barbatuss pleasant baritone outed the gloom. Youre conscious. What do
you remember?
Everything, I said. Ive always remembered everything. Dissolution was
in the air, the fetor of [Severians own former bodys] roing esh.
Famulimus sang, For that were you chosen, Severian. You and you alone
from many princes. You alone to save your race from lethe. (Urth 353; ch. 50)
is description, as well as previous, identical descriptions of the nature of aquastors,
suggests that the accurate recreation of a person is aided by good memory. Anticipating
that their marionee would die repeatedly on his journeys, the hierogrammates hence
selected someone they could recreate almost losslessly from his own memories.
at is, if the hierogrammates are even the directors of the play. Father Inire, genius
architect and adviser to all autarchs over maybe 1,000 years, is a formidable contender for
the role, but as hierodule, he may be just the subcontracted architect of the hierogram-
mates. Finally, Sergei Novikov may also be behind it all, seeing how the future may dictate,
through the self-consistency principle, all the less likely events of the past that caused it.
But such speculations would go beyond the scope of this paper.
6 Conclusion
First, the reader of e Book of the New Sun gets to experience the overwhelming deluge of
data and associations that cause mnemonists like Shereshevsky and Severian to perceive
If instead Ossipago is really only a machine rather than a machine with Father Inire inside, then this state-
ment would seem to corroborate the theory that Severians memory is owed to cloud-sourced storage
augmentations.
And at least in dismissing Severians faith in the Claw, they have been remarkably (surprisingly) honest
with him (Sword 184; ch. 34).
e river of oblivion, one of the streams of Hades, the waters of which possessed the quality of causing
those who drank of them to forget their former existence. (e Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia)
Trivial for beings who can contravene time or whose clocks run widdershins round both suns (Urth
360; ch. 50) by design.
22
much less clearly paerns that would be obvious to most people, a condition that also
seems to entail passivity and, with Severian, docility, the laer of which is reinforced by
his upbringing. ese processes are detailed by reference to the research of Luria.
Second, and more fundamentally, there is the search for the basis of Severians condi-
tion. Cause and eect cannot be assumed to be clear-cut in a medium as interconnected
(or curiously disconnected) as our brain, but to the reader of Shereshevsky case history it
would seem like his synesthesia is the foundation for his mnemonic feats, while the laer
are the cause of some of his peculiar character traits. e absence of any such synesthesia
in Severian forms a conspicuous lacunaa clear sign that it is up to the reader to interpo-
late.
One argument that reconciles these similar symptoms with their dissimilar causes draws
on Severians latent ability to navigate time, which is only fully revealed in the coda of
the cycle. Various fragments of evidence can be marshaled from the text to substantiate
this hypothesis.
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