The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapter XIX & XX

Closets & Pictures

What do these chapters reveal?

What is Severian telling us?

On the surface, there’s a lot of disparate and confused chatter! So why include it? What are we learning about Severian, about Urth, about his journey to become Autarch?

For one thing, Severian loses his friend Jonas at the end of the previous chapter and just takes it in stride. Unsentimental, as always, but I think this is part of the intoxication of Severian as a narrator.

He doesn’t wallow or spend inordinate amount of time moaning or mourning. Instead, he’s immediately onto the next thing.

He takes a moment to consider his isolation though.

I was alone, and I had not been truly alone since I had entered his room in the tumbledown city inn and seen Baldanders’s broad shoulders above the blankets. There have been Dr Talos, then Agia, then Dorcas, then Jonas. The disease of memory gained upon me, and I saw the sharp silhouette of Dorcas, the giant, and the others as I had seen them when Jonas and I were being led through the plum grove. There had been men with animals as well and performers of other kinds, all of them no doubt going to the part of the grounds where (as Thecla had often told me) the outdoor entertainments were held.

The disease of memory.

How I love that phrase, those three words, for have I not felt it acutely, even in my own tattered recollection of my days? The disease of memory forcing my life back before my eyes, forcing me—and all of us—to face the person we are, the one we’ve become, the one we were when we were the worst versions of self.

Wolfe has this tendency, this ability to strike you in the back of the throat with a perfect phrase when you least suspect it.

But much of what follows is not rumination. Rather, it’s this strange and surreal wandering through the House Absolute. And what we learn, to the extent we learn anything, is that the House Absolute is a stranger to everyone, including those who inhabit it, including those who have been bound generationally to it. Severian seeks his sword Terminus Est and is given free access to a closet of weapons and devices because the guard just assumes he’s telling the truth.

The guard knows nothing. But not only him. Everyone in the House Absolute knows nothing of their tasks, their purpose, the people who come and go, the people who never leave. And so when someone says, Hey I need my sword, the guard’s first reaction is to show him a haphazard armory.

Not finding his sword, he wanders on and stumbles into the curator he met as a child, who showed him the paintings in the depths of the Citadel.

How did he come to be at the House Absolute?

Perhaps he doesn’t even know, isn’t even aware. He thinks he saw Severian recently though it has been at least a few years, if not many.

What we get is a surreal image of a place lost to itself, lost inside itself. And this is the Autarch’s home!

A wasteland. An empty place full of hollow men and women, trapped, lost, uncertain of why they are, who they are, what they’re doing. It is a land of blankness and absence.

But it is full of what might be described as magic. Or at least a kind of architecture that bleeds into magic, for all the unknowing surrounding it. Severian stumbles, seemingly, into a painting only to find himself in a new place, a new room, where he is told by the androgyne—who oversaw that brothel where he met the fake Thecla—unfathomable things about the House Absolute, about the structure of this place.

Severian seeks the gardens where performers entertain in hopes of finding Dorcas and the others again, but no one seems to know anything about anything or anywhere.

Father Inire built this place and it is alive, in strange ways.

An infinite castle.

A dark and mysterious realm to itself.

A lost place.

A forgotten place.

The disease of memory.

And the House Absolute could be described as a place suffering from memory’s wasting disease.