The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapter XXV & XXVI
Attack on the Hierodules & Parting
Dawn found me on a narrow path that straggled through a forest more sumptuous in its decay even than that outside the Wall of Nessus. The cool fern arches I had seen there were absent here, but fleshy-fingered vines clung to the great mahoganies and rain-trees like hetaerae, turning their long limbs to clouds of floating green and lowering rich curtains spangled with flowers.
Read that again.
Go ahead, once more.
I’ve gone dozens of chapters without remarking upon Wolfe’s prose, but look at this. Feel it in your mouth. Let it roll around in your ear canal. This isn’t just building an image, building a world, but a moment of linguistic ecstasy.
And what you can learn, here, from these two sentences, is that great prose does not require complex words or ideas. It requires only vision and precision. The right word deployed at the right moment.
turning their long limbs to clouds of floating green
I love that. I want to live there, in that world, in that mind that describes this world this way.
Anyway, Severian flees the rampaging Baldanders after the play is combusted by his raging. Is it part o the play or is it a true madness? Who can answer such things.
But Severian runs away and becomes lost and ends this chapter by finding a fire surrounded by people.
Can you guess who?
Along the way, though, Severian takes a moment to consider all that had happened to him so recently. He was with Vodalus, lost Jonas, met the Autarch in the Second House, and it’s all so surreal and strange and unbelievable, even to him, that it felt like a dream. That he feels like it almost wasn’t real, despite it happening to him.
He considers the Claw and we’re once more thrown into language so bright.
Though it lay upon the palm of my hand, it seemed to me now a great pool of blue water, purer than the cistern, purer far than Gyoll, into which I might dive…though in doing so I should in some incomprehensible fashion be divine up. It was at once comforting and disquieting, and I pushed it into my book top again and walked on.
The world Severian inhabits is surreal. He’s playing and wielding powers larger than himself, that he doesn’t understand. And with a lifetime of fantastical literature inside us, with stories of the One Ring and other such cursed objects, we may take a breath to consider what this means, this falling up into the Claw.
We know it’s powerful and we know it has a great draw to it. Like Gandalf, the Autarch rejects taking it.
How curious it all is, to be in this world, guided through it by Severian, because he knows less than nothing about what matters. He has lived his entire life cloistered in a tower in a vast city that he had only caught brief glimpses of until he was cast from his tower. Since then, he’s joined a revolution, gone through some cannibalistic, eucharistic ritual. He’s met the Autarch and seen the strange magic of Father Inire’s mirrors. And all along he holds this Claw, which he’s used to heal people and possibly even bring them back from the dead. Bring himself back from the dead.
Severian is, in many ways, more innocent to the world than Bilbo or Frodo or Luke Skywalker. The difference being that he was not so innocent in deed.
He was and remains a torturer.
Severian meets the troupe of players once more and is paid by Dr Talos for his role in the play. Everyone takes a portion of the pay but Baldanders.
How curious.
Dr Talos says something perceptive that may explain much of what I just described above as well.
“Severian has friends in high places. I own I have thought so for some time—a torturer wandering the roads like a vagrant was a bit too much even for Baldanders to swallow, and I have, I fear, an excessively narrow throat.”
“If I have such friends,” I said, “I am unaware of them.”
We know Severian has friends in high places. We’ve met Vodalus and the Autarch! But because we were there, we also know the absurdity of this.
And so what do we make of all this?
Severian attempts to heal Baldanders with the Claw but it fails, though he believes he has some insight into Baldanders and Dr Talos. And, curiously, despite all evidence to the contrary, Baldanders asserts that he is Dr Talos’ master.
We continue on and discover that Baldanders and Dr Talos are going their own way, with Severian and Dorcas going their own way, leaving poor Jolenta alone.
So what must come of poor Jolenta? Mutilated by Dr Talos to become an object of desire. Hated by Dr Talos, perhaps, because of what he did to her or perhaps because of something unexplainable, unendurable.
Severian will not take her with him and Dr Talos threatens to kill her, which seems extreme.
And I think this is another aspect of this world easy to forget after all the time we spend wandering Nessus with Agia and all the time we spent wandering the House Absolute.
This is a brutal world. Especially to women.
Dr Talos barely considers her a person and will kill her as easily as saying goodbye to Severian. He speaks about it like she’s not right there, like she’s not alive.
The Doctor won’t let me come with him.
Jolenta speaks this with such despair, her whole life collapsing, and we must wonder why. Why is Jolenta this way? Why did Wolfe create so cursed a creature? Why does Severian despise her so?
Perhaps the answer is all those chapters ago when Severian went to the brothel to find a doppelganger of Thecla.
Jolenta seems to be collapsing, deflating from the way she’s been rejected by Dr Talos and now Severian.
One thing I find curious about Wolfe here, with the contrast between Dorcas and Jolenta, is that he makes one to be despised by the other characters and one so innocent and charming, who is also a font of knowledge of the world, despite being so newly born to it.
We cannot help but see that Severian is giving us a declaration of the sexual politics of his Autarchy. He has often praised the innocent and docile, like Dorcas, while speaking of Jolenta and Agia as archetypal harpies out to ruin men.
And so I wonder, dear reader, what do you make of Dorcas and Jolenta? What do you make of Jolenta as we know her?