Taking credit for my theory as to how Severian perceived the undine and Jolenta's breasts

I'm going to take credit for a couple of things. I mentioned in one of my earlier posts the damage done to characters earlier in their lives is something Wolfe never seems to forget about his characters... were they grossly abandoned? were they repeatedly terrorized and beaten? -- if so, it's going to have a deep determining influence on them. With Severian I brought up how he was left alone without a mother, and with the undine and Jolenta, suggested that his reactions to them (... his being so compelled to join with the undine, after dreaming of joining with his mother after so many fruitless attempts; his attempts to describe Jolenta's breasts as simply beautiful, but not in a way which doesn't draw remembrance of mother and child, i.e., pregnancy, rather than simply of sex-goddess allure) were influenced by his projecting a lost mother onto them... the breastmilk that finally would be his. So, yesterday, I borrowed "Shadows of the New Sun," a book of interviews with and essays on Wolfe, edited by Peter Wright, and in an interview of his with Robert Frazier discovered he focusses in on the importance of this lost love, the absent mother, on Severian's life. He say, "Subconsciously, he (Severian) has been further marked by his loss of his mother in infancy. He has difficulty in forming relationships because of that, although he does sometimes form them, and he tends towards strong erotic attachments to women who subconsciously suggest the mother he lost. On the simplest level, this means toward women who are physically larger than he -- Thea, Thecla, the undine -- and to Jolenta, who has unusually large breasts."

Wolfe directs here not to figure out who his mother ACTUALLY is, but whom he has projected her onto (which includes objects)... and how it influenced/determined his relationship with them, his take on them. If we read Wolfe's works this way, whether or not a character had any relationship to Severian... was sister, grandmother, or whatnot, may not be more worth our curiosity than those he TRANSFERRED the mother-son relationship onto. In a sense, it's a way of arguing that if you went through the text and weren't aware that revealed were many of Severian's actual relations, but had a perceptive understanding of how Severian's interactions with characters showed signs that they were influenced/complicated by his early life deficiencies, there is no exposure of you as a poor reader, but just as someone who put attention on what Wolfe himself was richly attendant upon. (I wonder personally if the source of the undine is whomever the source was of the description of "Peace's" aunt Olivia -- I suspect, of course, Gene Wolfe's own mother -- a person who was once thin but then let herself become corpulent, and who threatens to turn you into a complaint tool of hers: “my aunt soaked in a hot tub, and she often called me into the bathroom to fetch her a new book, or to bring her writing board, pen, and notepaper. The water was opaque with scented oil and foamed with lilac-scented bubble bath, from which her breasts rose and sank with the energy of her conversation. Originally small and pointed, they waxed, in the two years that passed between her marriage and my parents’ return, to globes, while her upper arms grew thick as the knees she sometimes thrust above the steaming water.”

The second thing I'd like to take credit on, is my likening of Gene Wolfe's works to a study done by James F. Masterson, an object-relations psychoanalyst, on Thomas Wolfe. I matched up the repeated descriptions of ostensible epiphany in Wolfe's works, the sense of being rejoined into something "larger," sustaining and profound, that occurs for example with Severian amidst the holy grains of sand and to Able when he exists the fire mountain that had taken him into Muspel, with Masterson's take on similar-seeming passages in Thomas Wolfe. Well, it turns out... taken again from "Shadows of the New Sun," that G. Wolfe, discussing which works he most admires, thinks T. Wolfe the writer of America's greatest masterpiece of fiction: "... and 'Look Homeward Angel' [by Thomas Wolfe], which I feel is the 'great American novel' people still talk about; very few people in this generation trouble to read it."

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  Filippo Di Paola Your points are deep and spot on. Congrats
  
  
  
  Yorgos Nls Great post !
  
  
  Patrick McEvoy-Halston The importance of the absent mother on a character's life, in Wolfe's works, leads not just to characters' "finding" this lost love through erotic transference, but to raging at them for their abandonment as well... thus the abandonment of Thecla when he could have saved her for suddenly abandoning all interest in him as she imagined herself rejoining her due high company, and ongoing diminution of her as any worth when consisting as part of him. Maternal abandonment is not always innocent in Wolfe's works, not always NOT INTENDED as deliberate rejection. "Peace" for example features a mother and father abandoning their young boy for somewhere between 6 months and two years while they frolic about in Europe, writing defensive, tone-deaf postcards to him of how wonderful it is in Nice (or where-ever) this time of year, while he recounts to himself, "... well, that's nice; what I'm doing lately is fetching random stuff for my aunt, who otherwise thinks me just another guest who'll pass through -- another rejection of interest -- watching her breasts lift up, then, sink, while lying in the tub, unconcerned of what this sort of wanton, assumed, eunuch-attendant... incest-akin exposure is doing to me, who'd rather just have her caring and respectful, thank you very much." Also in "Long Sun," with Blood reading -- correctly -- that his mother, Rose, wasn't all that concerned about leaving him to the streets, only to survive by prostituting himself. Both books explore how such mothers deal with the guilt of abandoning their sons, one by placating with presents, the other through, I believe, flat-out denial. There is some suggestion that the Wizard Knight story is about what happens to a boy after very early incestuous usage by an older woman, who thereafter tries to find some way in which this woman who played/preyed upon him can finally be made to answer to his own promptings, and so thereby regain some proper ego-boundaries that had been unfairly shattered at the bare commencement of his young adult life. After Disiri seduces him, young Able is in mind to kill a young boy for her, eager to do it in fact, and she titters at it, enjoys... that's a highly disturbed mental state, someone early on taken WAY of course, if I ever saw it... of which off course Wolfe is well aware, and presumes we're in mind to pick up on for it being so transparently there.
  
  
  
  Stephen Gordon I agree that Wolfe develops his protagonists in psychodynamic terms (closer to Jung, I would think, than Freud). This is one reason that it's so fruitless to respond to these characters, their words, and actions in terms of surface-level moral judgments. ("Wasn't it horrible for Severian to do X! And look, maybe he lied!")
  
  
  
  Yorgos Nls Excellent point I could not agree more!
  
  
  Patrick McEvoy-Halston Wolfe seems to be aware of attachment theory (it surfaces in "Five Heads," when D. Million espouses its validity), which unlike Freud focuses mostly on the relationship between 0 to 3 years -- and thus mostly on the mother-son relationship -- and the particulars OF that relationship -- what is "good enough," or starkly abandoning? The foremost reason I'm wary to link Wolfe in with either Freud or Jung, is because of course early psychoanalytic theory turned against the proposition that little children weren't creatures of sexual desires/wishes but of significant incurred abuse, and the characters we meet throughout Wolfe's corpus are each distinguished as greatly used and discarded creatures, even if Wolfe, at his worst, makes a fetish state of it, by linking it an incurred pitiful status that functions to draw upon oneself, attention and love. Other than the psychoanalyist I mentioned, James F. Masterson, I would think the ones most appropriate to one's understanding of Wolfe, are the trauma therapists, Judith Herman and Bessel Van der Kolk ("Body knows the score"). Cheers.