u/John_Lee_Petitfours

In my other post today, impressions on finishing a reread of The Urth of the New Sun, I bemoaned the disappearance of Eata from the story. He doesn’t get to be in the Pantheon even though, out of all the survivors on his boat, Eata kicks the most ass. I was genuinely puzzled by his fate, and a little miffed at Severian for not wondering about it himself. To be fair, Sev has gone through some things and has a lot to absorb. But thanks to u/meshuggainmissoula, I think I get it now. He said, “I assume Eata died of old age in the village.”

And of course Eata did. He’s the only one of the four Severian left behind who survived. Why did I assume that the three, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, palace fops outlived the guy who knows how to sail the boat, is used to living in rough country and has worked with his hands for a living? God love ‘em, the poor saps would’ve fallen overboard or stepped into a crevasse or eaten some bad fish pdq—probably before even meeting the settlers. Eata’s very absence from the mythology is the key to what really happened. Severian assumed his priest knew so much about him because Odilo had been listening the night Severian told Eata the whole story. In fact, the villagers got Severian’s story from Eata himself. And he spun out the rest of the mythos to cement his place with the newcomers, in a parallel with Severian’s speeches in the Stone Town. But Eata didn’t have to deal with a language barrier, and being a practical man, knew not to paint himself into the divine picture. That’s how you end up strangled and mummified in your own house. (We’re given no evidence Eata was ever much of a reader, but maybe Master Ultan had a copy of The Golden Bough on a shelf somewhere and Eata came across it on an errand!) Eata carefully edited himself out of even being remembered as a prophet—he’d been in enough scrapes to know how to disappear from places or stories.

This explains another thing that puzzled me too: why are three of the bowers together, but the Sleeper’s is way off in the opposite direction from town? And the Sleeper is the greatest of the gods. Do we really think Odilo or Thais would tell it that way? Of course not. But Eata would. To Eata, Severian was forever the cool upper-classmate. The other three would be lumped together, though top of mind when he had to spin out some kind of explanation to the newcomers. Even though he and the other three were from different social worlds, he probably missed them once they were gone. They were his last link with the world he knew. And really, Odilo’s raft was kind of clever kitbashing, and the other two seem to have helped. He must have been lonely. So given the choice between the truth and the legend, he printed the legend.

(Someone else suggested that maybe “Severian” in Urth is really Eata and just thinks or pretends he’s Severian, kind of like in that later series other people seem to like. I don’t think this can be true for a combination of Watsonian and Doylist reasons. A manuscript gets produced. A damned long one! That’s a lot of work. We know Severian is a scribbler. Eata gives no sign of being a reader or a writer. Then too, I can’t see how the story of the New Sun is made any better, richer or more meaningful by that kind of fake-out. Especially one that’s not signposted and goes unnoticed for decades. At least in that later trilogy, the identity confusion is made explicit at the end.)

(No, Eata didn’t murder the other three. He is my unproblematic fave and how dare you. And for real, his criminal record shows smuggling but not homicide, and as a practical sort he’d know that four people have a better chance of survival than one person.)

I just finished it this morning, after reading the whole Severian saga straight through from Shadow over the last couple of weeks. In no particular order:

I am pro the “coda.” Yes, it mostly works out the details of what Doctor Talos’s play prefigures, but that’s important imo. We need to have our faces rubbed in the atrocity attending Urth’s “salvation,” and in Severian’s feelings of wonder and despair.

At the very end, are we to take the three bowers on the far hill as empty since Severian doesn’t mention any bodies, living, dead or ethereal, or should we take that as Wolfe’s deliberate ambiguity? I tend to think the former, for structural and diegetic reasons. While Severian chooses to end his narrative with the site of the bowers, we know he continued on to write up his story, which means he surely had determined for sure whether they were empty. His own bower had been empty until he reappeared from the Corridors of Time. And we know Severian is an Aquastor, but it’s hard to see Odilo, Pega and Thais having made enough of an impression to get “Aquastored” themselves.

Of course, maybe Severian isn’t there either. Except we have his second manuscript, so.

I’d have fought with the Sailors. I don’t think I gave it much thought prior to this reread, and the fact that this reread coincides with a techbro plutocracy that would celebrate a future in which almost everyone dies except for themselves may influence my loyalties. As the cliché says, “Those people had families.”

Theologically, “saving the world” meaning saving the real estate is interesting. Wolfe’s statement that he envisioned the New Sun saga taking place in a universe-cycle prior to our own provides important context. But I don’t understand all the implications yet. From what we can tell, Commonwealth soteriology contemplates only the collective salvation of the New Sun. Ideas of personal salvation don’t seem to come up? I don’t know what that means either.

Maybe one thing the New Sun books are is an allegory of the cost and cataclysm of personal salvation as figured in the calamity and renewal of Urth/Ushas. Urth has to die to itself etc. Maybe?

Poor Eata! Something happens that keeps him out of the Ushas pantheon. He dies getting the others to shore and they never bring him up again, or worse, he lives but makes no particular impression. The latter seems hard to credit: Eata is cool as shit!

The other three were each pretty self-absorbed in life. You could kind of see them not bringing Eata up. But they do talk up Severian. And one of the Sleeper’s domains—fish and fishing—could very easily have been ascribed to Eata. It’s suspicious I tell you.

Speaking of self-absorbed, the awakened Severian doesn’t wonder after Eata’s absence from the pantheon, but he’s been through a lot, so I can give him a pass here.

Speaking of Severian, he really is much less of a dick in Urth, and becomes even less of one in the course of the book. Personal growth, we love to see it.

So, “the alzabo WHO ate its mom” or “the alzabo THAT ate its mom?” The answer turns on the personhood, or lack thereof, of the alzabo, right?

It gets mentioned in the “Father Inire’s Letter” chapter of Citadel. Because the phrase is put in quotation marks and called “fabled,” I take it to be a legend that exists prior to and outside of Wolfe’s saga itself. But I’m ignorant of the reference and the Irish Supreme Court and numberless furniture vendors balked my attempted internet search for it.

The passage:

> “There were papers relating to matters now utterly forgotten and not always identifiable; mechanical devices ingenious and enigmatic; a microcosm that stirred to life at the warmth of my hands, and whose minute inhabitants seemed to grow larger and more human as I watched them; a laboratory containing the fabled “emerald bench” and many other things, the most interesting of which was a mandragora in spirits.”

FWIW I’m not asking for theories about What It Means within TBOTNS, but what it refers to outside of it, which it seems like it does.

(Separately, the “microcosm…whose minute inhabitants seemed to grow larger and more human as I watched them” reminds me of the Neoterics in the classic Theodore Sturgeon story, “Microcosmic God.”)

From The Claw of the Conciliator. Severian has been climbing down the cliff to get to the house where that nice lady, Casdoe, lives. He sees…tiles!

> “At one point, only slightly less than halfway down, the line of the fault had coincided with the tiled wall of some great building, so that the windy path I trod slashed across it. What the design was those tiles traced, I never knew; as I descended the cliff I was too near to see it, and when I reached the base at last it was too high for me to discern, lost in the shifting mists of the falling river. Yet as I walked, I saw it as an insect may be said to see the face in a portrait over whose surface it creeps. The tiles were of many shapes, though they fit together so closely, and at first I thought them representations of birds, lizards, fish and suchlike creatures, all interlocked in the grip of life. Now I feel that this was not so, that they were instead the shapes of a geometry I failed to comprehend, diagrams so complex that the living forms seemed to appear in them as the forms of actual animals appear from the intricate geometries of complex molecules.

> However that might be, these forms seemed to have little connection with the picture or design. Lines of color crossed them, and though they must have been fired into the substance of the tiles in eons past, they were so willful and bright that they might have been laid on only a moment before by some titanic artist’s brush. The shades most used were beryl and white, but though I stopped several times and strove to understand what might be depicted there (whether it was writing, or a face, or perhaps a mere decorative design of lines and angles, or a pattern of intertwined verdure) I could not; and perhaps it was each of those, or none, depending on the position from which it was seen and the predisposition the viewer brought to it.”

Apologies: I can’t get blockquoting to work in the iOS app.