There's a scene in "Citadel"...

Patrick McEvoy-Halston

December 4 at 3:06 PM

There's a scene in "Citadel" where an evil doctor tries to fool Severian into thinking that he isn't seeing what he thinks he's seeing; this bit:

"The old man pinched his cheek. "He'll recover quickly--in time to warm my bed tonight. At his age they always do. Nay, it's not what you think. I only sleep beside him because the night-breath of the young acts as a restorative to those of my years. Youth, you see, is a disease, and we may hope to catch a mild case. How stands your wound?"

There was nothing--not even an admission, which might have been rooted in some perverse desire to maintain an appearance of potency--that could have convinced me so completely as his denial. I told him the truth, that my right cheek-was numb save for a vague burning as irritating as an itch, and wondered which of his duties the miserable boy minded most.”

This harm done by the doctor, this experimentation with patients, Wolfe has us associate with that of Nazi doctors: "[...] and I had a vision of children in flames."

If reading Wolfe's works helps people being alert to the terrible damage, the sadism, people cloak with rationalizations... that whole societies collude together to obscure with rationalizations, he would seem to any liberal to be of the first order of writers to introduce people to. Through his protagonists' sensitivity, their perspicacity, and ultimate refusal to lie to themselves about what they know is true, to deceive themselves about their own weaknesses -- to resist at every opportunity, the strong urge to cover up -- readers too can come to see how many things they've themselves taught themselves to overlook that could have been made apparent from the start. His work could serve as great, great "modelling," to even question the legitimacy of whole institutions. Maybe their whole motivating purpose, no matter the ardency of defence of necessity, was the execution of evil behind a banal-enough face?

The challenge to argue that he isn't at all that -- and I don't think that this is by any mean certain; that he necessarily overall tilts this way -- comes to me from the fact that when he brings a bad example forward that could seem to bleed bad implications onto others -- as here with the doctor's patients, along with his devices to drain blood, could potentially double-back to have us reconsider what exactly motivates the torturer-client "relationship" -- the text works strongly to stop us short. No chance, for example, we'd ever wonder... after catching Typhon's preference for boys, perhaps, whether little Severian might also have helped keep big Severian "warm," for the text wants THIS as sheer truth: “I knew then how Dorcas had felt when Jolenta died. There had been no sexual play between the boy and me, as I believe there had at some time been between Dorcas and Jolenta.” And no chance, in contrast with the play between them, that his own repeated pourings into Jolenta was perverse, but only "quick and clumsy [...] (whom I might have been said to have raped, though I believed then and believe still that she wished it).” And no chance we'd ever wonder that torturers might often be up anything perverse with their clients, for in every instance they're portrayed as ultimately good... even Gurloes, who does what seemingly cowardly things he does, ultimately always for the good of everyone else in the guild. They don't so much possess a weakness for perversion, as simply lack a quality -- empathic consideration of their clients -- that could ultimately be attached to them, if only they were forced into experiencing things as a client for awhile. Even with this lack, if they err in how they treat their clients, it is never toward sadistic use of them, never towards perversion, but rather to in some way come to care deeply for them; hence the autarch explaining that his guild brothers had to treat Severian as harshly as they could because otherwise others would have been more likely to follow his example. This Wolfe seems more the one that would have a culture be gabsmocked at how prevalent abuse was in the priesthood, rather than one that would have picked up on, early, how "professional conduct" was clearly something that could be used to shield a culture that would, like a torturer's guild, be especially appealing for those who'd want a position of total power over the weak, to cast many thousands of kids into the flames of subsequently destroyed or severely hampered lives, and considered suicide... Severian's own ample vice. (cont'd in comments)

Alhaji Dada The old man is a spy in service of Inire, I think. Who's role is to save severians life We also learn a very important fact. Namely, the Aristocracy and the intelligentsia are all eaters of the dead. Corroborating what the librarian tells Severian in shadow.

Alhaji Dada Also, few people notice that severian himself is a androgene: half man/half woman.

David A Stockhoff replied
 

Brian Doherty i read NEW SUN pretty much as it came out, when i was a teen and it became one of my very favorite books; i even RE read the first two vols, something i almost never do. as i have gotten more into wolfe commentary and scholarship, i have realized that i literally had no idea about around half of what was happening and why, yet STILL had that 'adore it' reaction. i don't know what that means.


Alhaji Dada "we hope that you would deceive yourself for the benefit of your race".... One of the most important and revealing passages in the tale.


Eoin Crean Brian Doherty - I still don't have a clue what's going on in these books and they're my favourite works of fiction. Granted, the 'adore it' reaction didn't come on first reading but upon finding that my mind wouldn't leave that world even a month or two after first reading


Patrick McEvoy-Halston The way to argue that the text does, even in making such an obvious overt defence of how the professional conduct of torturers was on the level, encourage an in towards doubting it, is to note that it does enable, not a guild, not an institution, but a whole layer of the social strata as holders of powerful sadistic impulses -- the exultancy: it is at least possible that something that big that is wrapped in ideology that protects it, justifies it, is rotten to the core. The poor may possess a "thousand kindnesses," and the optimates, the middle class's standard retinue of mercantile values and vices, but the exultants are almost only, it seems, holders of sadistic motivations... they suck the life out of people, to give themselves sport. The autarch is never right to trust ANY of them. THEY orgasm at other's pain; THEY visit the most powerless -- prisoners -- to humiliate and terrify; and... THEY are provided some textual evidence as to why they are this absolutely horrible, one of which, has bleed.

We are told they are angry and want to hurt people because they don't know what is to be genuinely useful... like the soldiers of the Autarch, whose problem, we are told, what de-centers them, is that they don't know the stabilizing force of having families, exultants want to know what real work is, what being useful is like, but are refused by their role to ever know it, and this twists them badly. ALSO, and to our purpose, they don't so much have mothers but, rather, tutors and governesses... and though we are told they are ignorant of the whip, they certainly get hit, beaten... are perennially under "threat of the stick," "a lot." 

They're malformed, and they knew beatings well. We aren't directly encouraged to connect the two, but the connection may be forged in our minds implicitly. And we might wonder the fate of those WHO ALSO knew beatings well, if they too were actually malformed by it... and this definitely takes us to the torturers' upbringing, for we know they were regularly beat by their masters, that it was certainly part of what could make them be deadly afraid of them, go "white" in the presence of them, and that it looks to have infiltrated how the boys engage with one another, for it's assumed practice to beat the hell out of your friends, even, to, ostensibly, manage them into line. These beatings are never so casually accepted to be forgotten... when Eata meets Severian after ages of separation, it's about the first thing he brings up... the blows Severian inflicted upon him, that apparently -- it is implied -- drew Eata to inflict the same on others. And Eata, we know, is the one and only torturer the text expliclty likens to the evil doctor, someone who could will/desire the infliction of pain upon people, when it delineates: “even if I were to dissolve the guild, Eata would become a torturer, as all men are, bound by the contempt for wealth without which a man is less than a man, inflicting pain by his nature, whether he willed it or not. I was sorry for him, and more sorry for Maxellindis the sailor girl." Eata would put his wife into the same subjected state of becoming a used object, as the evil doctor would put the boy he "treats." It's universalized as something that men just do, but Eata, as carrier for awhile of the torturers' own bullied, subjected... tortured childhoods, argues for another explanation that owes to treatment, how one was or wasn't treated, rather than universal nature. (This argument -- the pro case of not nature but how you are treated, in determining whether you end up other than severely malformed -- carries forward strongly in most of the rest of Wolfe's works.)

From there you work with the text's... with Severian's many brave examples of how we tend to want to discount, displace, avoid things... "circle attention from the recollection of," about ourselves (forced forgettings) we don't want to acknowledge (sometimes he just shows us how true this is, with for example his only very late late late in his account dealing with the matter of whether he raped Jolenta or not)... out of guilt, or shame, or discomfort, and you've uncovered, from the text itself, some justification for standing up to Severian in rebuttal of his defiant accounting of how the torturers can't possibly be accused of being as sadism-prone as exultants are, as not always being good men, and rather pretty much use their clients to carry the subjected, terrified state the boys themselves were subject to so the victim... the torturers in this case, knows the glory of being the perpetrator. And now you leave the text, without the outside critic's help, less susceptible to cooperating in the glossing over powers that exist in the world that will be in found in retrospect to have been powerfully corrupt from the beginning. You'll spot them out as quickly Severian does the evil doctor.

There is however one other consideration, that works against believing the text immunizes us to being those who'd let sustained abuse go, sans an outsider's, a critic's, "spotlight"... and it's a doozy.

Note: Severian's world is one where you often have to interrupt your appreciation of someone by a momentary consideration of something they've admitted to that strikes you as incredibly, starkly, foul about them. We may be more familiar with the foul appearing after you've been directed to hate someone you previously appreciated, like with the boy found in the bed of Baldanders -- an image out of the Shining -- but witness for example, this, from one Severian's soon-to-be allies, who'll give him the complement of his knowing the great thrill of becoming a military leader over willing forces: “My wife is hard on her when I am not at home," he told me. "Beats her and makes her scrub all day. It's good for the child, naturally, and it makes her happy to see me when I come back. But she would rather go with me, and I don't greatly blame her.”


Patrick McEvoy-Halston In the movie "Spotlight," none of the characters ever admit to ever being themselves victims of priests, only that "it could have been any of them." One wonders how many would have watched the film, encouraged it to win an Oscar, if known there would prove some reveal near the end where several of the reporters themselves admitted to being victims of ongoing rape as children.... where they lost the status of being the concerned but also the exempt, as the status of life-long "victim" encroached on them too. One wonders it, because a principle that Wolfe shows us through the example of Guasacht in how he encounters Severian at one point, is pretty accurately at work in most people today... though not, as I will delineate, concerning showing fear at the commencement of war, which in fact is actually "showy." When Guasacht registers that Severian is unconsciously conveying just how fearful he is of war, he banishes him to the back of the company, and Severian is saved from becoming an object the rest of the company can jeer and defile at their leisure, only due to Daria's kind contrivance to make their being at the back appear something other than what it really was. Severian here contemplates: "Fear is like those diseases that disfigure the face with running sores. One becomes almost more afraid of their being seen than of their source, and comes to feel not only disgraced but defiled. When the piebald began to slow, I dug my heels into him and fell into line at the very end of the column." Showing fear... defiles you, ostensibly. Yet in any conceivable macho world, what Severian shows of himself at the commence of battle, is not really going to seem a major strike against you. It's his first time into battle, a battle guaranteed not to be only skirmishes -- what Severian says it is axiomatic that mass charges devolve into -- but one that would have lines of troops, consisting of thousands, ultimately against one another, developing into a overwhelming torrent, and where the like of what happens -- people made into "bloody ruins," “troopers flying apart as though they themselves had contained small bombs, the head of the first bursting in a gout of scarlet, the neck and shoulders of the second, the chest of the third, the bellies of the fourth and fifth, and the groin (or perhaps on the saddle and the back of his destrier) of the sixth" -- was inevitable. Indeed, that's why senior combatants were inevitably going to know fear as well -- no one could really be exempt from it, even as everyone was to pretend they were. Severian can be shown as being fearful, for he doesn't really lose his audience by it... it doesn't really defile you... at least in others' eyes. Indeed, arguably it can serve as backgrounding that can promote you, for it serves as pre-text for making any subsequently shown effectiveness of yours, that much more telling of your worth: the tale Severian lends us of the young man he knew who'd never seen war, using a weapon he had to kill hundreds of enemy troops in his first battle, doesn't only lend to our sympathy over his thereafter being someone who stares at the ground and says nothing, but our admiration as well -- some kind of boy, there! Severian, with his not yet being wizened on how to better cover your fear so it's not as apparent, was akin in his innocence to this young lad, and so too his not only proving his word true that he wouldn't run unless others ran first, but proving an astonshingly effective trooper as well, cutting down enemy troops, left and right... "“I think I must have cut down half a dozen Ascians before I saw that they all looked the same... "“My own were to veer away from any dwarf who looked ready to shoot and try to catch others from behind or from the side. They worked well enough when I could apply them.”

What WOULD have defiled Severian.. certainly in "our" eyes, is if, for example, after Typhon had shown himself as some inflated authority figure who rendered his subjects into helpless, terrified children, who'd just dispensed with little Severian as if he was nothing and who'd casually admitted that if any interest in little Severian actually had developed, it would have been only for purposes for use as sex object, if Severian, already himself in a very precarious relationship vis-a-vis him... that was bordering on making him seem just another tool for a pederast's use, in making him into a Piaton, didn't prove a massive defiance of him but only quiescent, if he hadn't turned the tables on Typhon here, hadn't responded to this shaming by shaming the ostensibly all-powerful tyrant, defeating this man bragging about how he could lay waste to empires with nothing more than a quick whack to the face, and simply submitted to him, even if was very quickly saved by someone else we'd know that if he himself when younger he would have been exactly the kind of boy pederasts would have picked out for their use, and many of us would have rejected him for it. Total rejection, not just dispatching him to the back of the line; for while we can tolerate being with someone others would seem right to disparage as a torturer, a sadist, a misognyist -- someone who abuses, but is also one on top -- we can't have found out that there was anything in us that drew us to him for sensing a likeness... in his being a someone who could be easily cued in performing once again as "agreeing" victim, someone upon whom "a snare was closed," stronger than Decuman's, actually owing to Severian being summoned to perform in a role... he knew was actually customary of him. (To note, after this incident Severian makes sure that if there is any confusion as to who he resembles, the ready tool of a tyrant or a tyrant himself, it is to be of him as tyrant only: when he visits the shore people, he acts all Typhon-arrogant... bring me food and women slaves, or it'll be your head. And just before, with the sorcerers, when the possible threat of the textual assignment of little Severian as possible predator/predation-food of a company of men, could fuse onto him as well, if not handled right, Severian makes sure to terminate the encounter in what'll come across subsequently as full-on Typhon-arrogant mode... I am magus the great! And I could have killed hundred of you!) Whenever Severian encounters those that are helpless to be other than repeatedly victimized, he expresses deep sympathy for them... but to some extent this is performance-sympathy: it passes as him showing that his heart is in the right place, and serves as fitting in with the narrative account of himself he is developing for us of him as someone who was finally coming to empathize, but also does fitful work as contrast -- between the victim's status and his own -- so that we know that Severian himself is UNDERSTOOD BY THE VICTIMIZER in a very different way. Those who seek out those who'll work as victims, have shown they don't understand Severian as such... and this is something, though he would never express it in the text, he's grateful for. And if he ever attacked the assailant, it would have to be done in a way in which there would never be any confusion as to motivation... and if this isn't possible, then it's actually best to let the world of the terrorizer and the terrorized alone -- alas, left to their fates! -- and take advantage of the free space of ostensibly "at least being himself free"... like a first child, spared by his parents' knowing there would be others, the clinging, sadomasochistic psychology of his subsequent siblings.

(to be cont'd, and finished, tonight, with discussion of Severian the precious)


Gerald P Leb "Perhaps light cultivates trees as fuel". Or something like that. One of the best scenes in the book. Of course, the doctor did in fact successfully treat Severian's wounds, let's not forget. But yes, he was a piece of work. So was Severian.


Patrick McEvoy-Halston Severian's manner of relating to little Severian is very impressive. In terms of modelling, it's better than how "the Knight's" Ravd relates to Able -- which nevertheless remains itself impressive -- because it's not so much emblematic perfect father, but perfect father, in the real: we witness him, for example, judging how best to answer's little Severian's brave inquiry of him concerning whether or not he hesitated to save his mother, in a manner that comes as close to full honesty that can be managed in that situation without it leaving the boy afflicted with truths that will simply shut him down. There's no tyrant in him; when little Severian innocently acts in a way which near costs both of them their lives, he takes care to guide him as to how he's going to have to adjust, without unduly shaming or cowing him. 

The tremendous credit I felt to Severian here, is probably why I was a bit sickened by Wolfe in presenting these protagonists subsequently with the obstacle of Typhon, because Typhon plays to a weak spot in Severian's character that Severian can't help but fall for... and therefore amounts to the sort of callous mis-use of someone you'd created that "Gene Wolfe" was guilty of with his character Brick in "Last Thrilling Wonder Story." Severian's way of interacting with little Severian is not especially old-school, but almost bears resemblance to the ideals of contemporary parenting, where you readily draw yourself into the situational experience of your child to know how best to communicate with them so what you say has relevance. Typhon to... any of his subjects, is definitely old-school, where you don't ever forge this sort of connection -- the sort that'd ever have you say the like of Severian's "in some ways I am no wiser than you" -- where you always keep yourself hoisted into a status where a strict line divides you and anyone vulnerable, because to admit to being able to relate to someone's vulnerability means leaving room to be sized up as someone who yet themselves remains so. And in Typhon's company... like a teenager who's being admitted to a more elite sect, suddenly acting differently towards his old friends while amongst his new crowd whom he knows would think differently of him and cast him back out, if exposed that he could at all "relate" to these clear "losers," Severian becomes in no way simply "bigger" than little Severian, but as if always cast out of a different mold. His status now is actually more epic than Typhon guesses his is (I believe Typhon suspects him the conciliator... who yet remains), and as well, his powers -- Typhon, unaware, is taking on someone who cannot but succeed... a reveal that comes out later in a way that shames Typhon as oblivious, culpably so, for it being available... in the ether as it were, to be sensed -- and his status "then," in the past as he was at the same age as little Severian... just doesn't seem someone who would, twice, haplessly run into dangers that make you ready predator food, like little Severian does, but more like a boy who would be soon due to kill a man much older than he was, when he himself is of the mood to do something spontaneous. Severian, sensing that what is at issue with Typhon is whether someone given textual support as someone who recognizes a rival, but also a natural supplicant, and not being himself actually being someone who could deal with being spotted out in the shame of undisguised, unredeemed vulnerability, forces the encounter as one between titans -- the strong man who gloats like Smaug, and the never-truly-defeated smart man, who, caring what-not about the other's presentation of himself as invincible, never stops looking for advantage. Given that this presentation of himself has to carry so "to make it clear" his ostensibly essential self as winner, the one "redeemed" by a bit of tricky bait-and-switch with an ostensible, undefeatable master, it is no surprise that for a good long while there are no remembrances of little Severian to inspire anything as precarious as a retrospect re-think. He pops back in midway in "Urth," I believe... or in his most standout fashion, when we really once again focus on him again, in any case.

Wolfe inflicts the same mean trick on Severian when he springs the witches -- specifically, the Cumean -- onto him when he and Dorcas were looking for help with the text's then current embodiment of vulnerability, Jolenta. At that time with Jolenta, Severian is admitting that he has come to be more interested in her, more keen on involving himself with her in a way with that allows a more coherent understanding of her, better focus... for the "first time," he is "noticing" things about her, always previously available to be noticed. Whereas before he had her pushed out as someone who depresses rather than lifts a group's spirit, as someone who's sole purpose is to garner admiration -- something ostensibly antipathetic to the nature of all rest of the company -- making her much worse than of no help or a hassle, but a beguiling vampire of everyone's life-blood, now he is humanizing her... seeing her as someone who in no way deserved the severity of the punishment that fate was handing out to her, and, when idealizing, doing so in a manner where not snuck into it, commentary that is snake-mean (... chafing thighs, breasts reminiscent of a woman's belly, pregnant with baby), but acknowledgement of truth -- possession of charms which give and elevates, rather than misleads or takes away -- in a way more unambiguously expressive of respect, and respect only. No more simply a perfect beauty-machine of opulent flesh, an always, ALREADY-spoiling flowering, that menaces other women by making their true beauty rendered into monstrosity (Thecla's) or stunted immaturity (Dorcas's), but ONLY JUST NOW over-ripened into setting decay, ONLY JUST NOW, and not before, a "flower too long blown, the very end of summer to Dorcas's spring." She's not just worse than nonsense anymore, but someone whose take on things... might in fact prove right: her fears about what lies ahead in the wild, Severian ends up gauging, after originally dismissing them, quite possibly, very precisely bang on.

Patrick McEvoy-Halston But like as with Typhon, the Cumaean represents a harsher old-school presence, the anti-thesis of this sort of advanced, humane relations, and also the sort that'd be lookout for nothing more than viable signs of weakness in others and who would be reliable in spotting you out on it (contra her apprentice Merryn, she knows what sick motivations, Jolenta is moved by) which Severian isn't evolved enough not to think he couldn't be managed into "admitting" about himself through the "evidence" of actions he was clearly coming to categorize in a different way, that is, as actually a source of supply, of strength. If this sort of old authority, one that might be akin to what you'd known when you first were raised up, when perhaps, as with Gurloes, you knew from the way you were handled or abandoned just how things were "harder, much harder" and less sympathetic back then, of someone who early on caught you out as powerless victim, made you feel that quintessentially, that is who you yet are, gauges you a weakling, a predator's ready food... you're at risk of not thereafter being able to shut that self-assessment out for it also being YOUR FIRST... ostensibly obviously THE TRUTH, that is, and thereby bear a degree of shame and rage and extent of self-fragmentation that'd destroy you... all your forward progress, an illusion. And so the whole show with the Cumaean, after Severian is exposing himself as... a man who relates, amounts almost to a performance Severian was going to have to agree to partake in, a repudiation and defacement of his emerging caring, relating self, so that someone who'd recognize this exposed sympathy as a spotting out of someone's genuine-known thorough vulnerability once being a core part of himself, rather than something learned from how others differed from one, would agree NOT TO FORCE the recognition, this devastation, too manifestly upon him. So the Cumaean floats the "reward" of Severian being a great personage, one, like her, lucky to be counted in the rare fraternity of the wise and powerful, "a [fellow] sage in time," thereby severing his associational relationship with "victim," and proceeds to more or less force him to be inert to the swag of her commanding, dominating, domineering presence (her having everyone hold hands to command forces from afar is reminiscent of Silk own total control in his exorcism of Blood's mansion, the first scene where Blood agrees, truly, to be a supplicant of Silk's), in a scene where we don't just go back in time, but where precepts of earlier times, where things were tougher and less sparing, gets displayed, as we witness younger people and the vulnerable -- get old-fashioned "schooled." Severian won't again "awaken" to Jolenta until there's no life at all in her, until then, only his witness to the stark ugly contrast between her and the vibrant... between her and Dorcas and Severian; and Merryn, her acolyte, evidently eager to appear masterly, tries to spout knowledge and wisdom, and for it gets spanked down and publicly shamed as someone who "speaks by rote like a starling in a cage," as someone who only by chance speaks knowledge (“She's right," she croaked. "Though she does not know it”) while Severian’s instinct for where to look for truth is estimated profound (“In my sabretache, I have a book called The Wonders of Urth and Sky, and the story is told there.” “That is the wisest of all the books of men," the Cumaean said.”) and is revealed and essentialized as someone who's relationship to her master, to her Mother, no more than collapsable doll to orchestrating owner.

Severian ends up being applied in the text as someone who ever-rides a guaranteed path to success… someone who more truly traverses the guaranteed easy road than any exultant could ever righteously claim to, but even before he learns himself of such inheritance, he surely knows himself someone who could break out onto life in a Darwinian-success-story way. We’re told, for example, that he’s only ever been called a coward when he was a small boy, and the only example he gives of himself as maybe such… or at least of himself as fearful, is when being a cowardly small boy, being an afraid young boy, makes him resemble — but every other boy in the world involved in that kind of circumstance… one who might, but who actually doesn’t in this instance, duck out as soon as possible from the witches’ tower. He acknowledges as an adult having a core child in him, but makes this “exposure” one of the ways you distinguish an actual real adult from a fake one — the real one, of course, the one who acknowledges the fact, rather than denies and claims himself an exception; it isn’t Severian that shows something particular about himself when in a battle of magicians he is magicked into thinking himself “small and contemptible,” but only… the universal, until you know manhood. Severian just hasn’t known any profound shame in his childhood, he floats above, and the reason you know this, the reason you ostensibly know this, is because there is no rage in him that could come out… to expose himself the sufferer of a personal wound/betrayal of it—all—happening—to—a—wee-child magnitude… little-Severian-watching-his-mother-being-eaten severity. Sure, with Master Asch he becomes irked and angry, and with the autarch, he even admits of “all his terror turning rage,” but it all gets settled down quick… and the reason we know this is because if we were asked about which characters in the “New Sun” revealed themselves of explosive rage and anger, we’d never think, well, Severian of course, but of Baldanders and Agia, obviously. There is some kind of deep humiliation within Baldanders for him to turn so explosively at the Hierogrammates in the audience, risking his own demise… everything he was in the process of building for himself, in doing so. And in the psychodrama between they and him, the only way he-of-no-possessed-deep-shamed-status could fit in, the only way Severian could fit in, is as someone who spurred yet more rage in him… as he “innocently” does, in becoming the much saluted arrival at Baldander’s own hopeful meet-and-greet engagement with the aliens at his newly built castle (not likely to be noticed, but how Severian applies himself here, in “innocently” stealing the show away from the eager, ultimately humiliated hosts, is very much akin-activity to Thia, Thecla and other exultants,’’ who are always ready to see temporarily elevated “friends” — or lovers — dropped low, discarded, terribly suddenly and starkly, so that they themselves, through making others feel dislike them in their sodden dismay, can feel more distinguished and carefree again.)


Patrick McEvoy-Halston Readers intuit this as perhaps the text’s core lesson: not just to learn to be kind, but to be hypersensitive to how you apply yourself if you're going to be kind: if you’re going to help people, be as the armigers who volunteered to count amongst those serving time in the prison of the House Absolute… in some way, have it made clear that if you look as if you're at the bottom, you've still somehow made clear that you’re a class apart, and that if they come after you, they'll have to deal with a "you" that knows he's not defenceless... that, at minimum, he's got friends. Never let the distance close, too much, between you and the genuinely helpless, genuinely afflicted. You can allow yourself to be seen as afraid a little bit, as lacking courage a little bit, as being spiteful a little bit, as being perhaps, wonky in the head... a bit insane, a little bit -- especially as the whole text contexts you as being the most intellectual and honest… the most fully PRESENT torturer, ever, making this admission crowded out by other trustworthy characters’ counters. But you don’t ever present yourself so that anyone would guess that those boys who were preyed upon and victimized by ghoulish adults, was ever once actually you. It cues you to make use of your fellows, the opportunity of your fellow readers of Wolfe, so that they can offer wonderful counter to you... as those who surely truly suffered, were victimized as children, for taking up a bait given in this work, in many of Wolfe's works, to become rageful and angry at some of what Wolfe applies as tease-for-rage that you remain uninvolved with, ostensibly insouciant to. In this text it's Wolfe's reveal of the Pelerines as perhaps the most truly ghoulish people ever... Winnoc, their slave, delineates them those who can present themselves as kind and sweet to their servants, as possessing slaves who do the best of service, so they'd pass as hosting the most beneficent "household" ever -- a model "commonwealth," a Utopia -- in much the same way Russian communism passed as a model societal system to fooled visitors like Bernard Shaw, because if ever a slave displeases them they immediately get sold to work the mines... rendered into the worst of all possible fates. And after hearing of this, this cause to go after the Pelerines in a more devoted way than Severian ends up hunting after Baldanders -- a matching up of these almost-entirely-only exultant constituted fraternity, with the rest of the exultant pack, in being the most truly sick and sadistic people alive, we're forced to encounter him having only having the nicest sweetcakes-with-tea sort of discussion with the head of the Pelerines, Mannea. Before meeting her, he discusses himself as "disgraced and outcast and homeless, without friend and without money," but its "truth" is fundamentally a misrepresentation of himself, for if he himself had become someone who'd effectively been shipped off to the worst of fates, the most forlorn of fates... if he'd been, in effect, sent to the mines, known the lowest, the "bottomest" state possible, as he says he has, he's not feeling so "all would be well" here but tasking to account for this crime those who could apply this sort of fate to people, not because they'd proved themselves traitorous, for any reason, seemingly justifiable, but for merely falling short of constant demonstrated excellence, and who were excused for ever being reprimanded on it for being able to cast blame entirely on the victim -- you were the one who sold yourself into our slavery… so the fault’s “clearly” with you. Severian, who eventually connects the dots between his own responsibilities and crimes he'd previously ascribed only to others -- he admits for example how he permitted Agia to bait another driver into going through a reckless ride through the streets of Nexus, making us see how before this was almost factored out as a potential thing that could have happened... as if Severian was simply caught out in surprise, rather than someone who was even there, keeping his head -- at some level knows it’s complete withdrawal from him here, with no explanation, just a denial and stubborn intentional withdrawal of interest. He's the voice here of the textually often encountered, "there was was no reply,” that has someone out there — hopefully some readers feel, you — feeling snubbed.

Patrick McEvoy-Halston Severian is a knight for her, telling her he'll do whatever she wishes, even taking by force someone who'd done nothing to him, and whom Mannea had no claim upon -- Master Ash -- and the reader has a choice, they can either get severely angry at Severian, and likely also with Wolfe, with so evidently betraying the high principle of good faith in people that gets sacrificed here, or, they can take advantage of the fact that at some level they know some readers are going to feel like they've been taken on a ride here, denied something they were expecting, without explanation, or even textual admittance that it had even happened, to go along counting themselves akin to Severian in being those who might miss something like that, might be guilty of that "crime" of not making the connection here, because as much as they care that people not be abused, most of their lives has been one where they've only ever been those who been seen as favourites that it takes effort to remind themselves that some of those who have treated them so well, have in fact treated others deplorably. We get baited this same offering in "Long Sun" as well, where Silk, after delineating exactly how society got so bad, rests his focus entirely on the villainy of Blood, and on no one else but he — the buck stops there! — AFTER, that is, providing a lead to a more profound and central source, with its textual proof that the reason Blood was so bad was because his mother abandoned him to the streets to live a life prostituting himself to survive. Matera Rose did that to him, but if you don't take up the opportunity Silk provides himself here to be a knight to the principle source of abuse, to Marble/Rose, be her arm in the struggle against "evil," and rage instead at being bated and suckered, then you'll have revealed yourself akin TO BLOOD as someone who himself is built out of humiliation, abandonment and suffering -- of being used -- for it is only Blood here who rages out of control. Same thing happens in "the Wizard," as Garsecg, after genuinely delivering fatherly stewardship over Able, after providing him with resources with which to best a world, after possessing genuine claim on his loyalty, is told in an off-hand manner that that thing he was hoping Able would do for him in return, that business of defeating that giant woman made of worms that Able knows for only two seconds... well, about that… I actually did take her on as wished, but somehow forgot to tell you. My bad! I lost, btw… tough nuts! Able teases him into exploding anger, and so, also, us... and as readers again we know the score: to become angry at the text means duplicating the same rage that exposes one as someone built out of some deep-core humiliated status, but to be insouciant, oblivious, as if the obvious denial, terrible, ruthless teasing and egging on... the cruel playing to someone's susceptibility, hadn't happened, means we get to pretend it's others, not us, who've learned to be sensitive to these thing, for their only knowing what it is to not be "able," to not be amongst the chosen, to not being the preferred, to not be the one susceptible to being applied as precious. "Sorcerer's House" -- your brother rages at you endlessly, not because you bait and tease him with your favouritism, but because he's not as able as you are, with his not having magic and being the runt of the family and all that -- and probably many other of Wolfe’s works, carries the same sort of baiting dynamic as well, a tease to some readers to demonstrate a rage of unfair treatment which amounts to show for other readers, that they could only be defined as those who've been spared knowing victim status. Wolfe can offer us this service, but so too many corrupt institutions in real life that produce screams of anger and violence from their victims, SO THAT, through comparison to them, they serve to help us present ourselves, to ourselves, as basically a spared people.

POSTSCRIPT

The reason Wolfe has so many people delineating themselves as those who are onto Severian as an ostensibly unreliable narrator, by the way, the reason it seems the first thing said by anyone concerning Severian, owes to a felt sense that there is a terrible game at play that is attempting potentially to make sick work of them: thus their justified instant defence of themselves as fundamentally unsusceptible, as those who can’t be fooled but rather are the first to spot out a fooler. The text primarily draws people not so much to spot out crimes, but to work to distinguish themselves from victims. You have to make yourself immune to this draw, to have yourself shown as revealing your inherent core victimhood, in order to do the very best study… to be fair to the whole of Wolfe’s legitimately wonderful offerings. Otherwise, Severian’s not to be disproved a liar, even if he isn’t one, and other mistakes of appraisal will continue to accumulate, as our study of Wolfe becomes our show that we too are immune to bait.)