The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapter XVIII
Mirrors
There are three primary points of interest in this chapter:
Thecla emerging
The return to Severian’s frame narrative
Jonas leaving
Thecla rising to the surface is the most interesting, I think, at least so far, because despite being a metaphysical nightmare to untangle is at least more comprehensible as a reader than the mechanism by which Jonas leaves.
Severian is under a variety of stresses here in this generational dungeon. His only friend seems to be going insane and has fallen silent. He’s trapped. He’s surrounded by the kind of people of the cave Socrates wrote about. There are strange yet devastating weapons that go off periodically here as a show of force and threat of violence.
And so he has what he describes as an atypically unpleasant night of sleep.
When his body wakes, it’s not him commanding it but Thecla.
Now, yes, we must trust Severian here in order to follow this leap but I think Thecla’s sacredness to Severian is reason enough to believe he’s not lying. It also explains how he escaped this prison. While he contains all his own and all Thecla’s memories, they don’t seem to be memories as easily accessed as his own. For if he had a perfect memory of Thecla’s memory, he would not need Thecla to rise to the surface.
But, perhaps, this is all metaphorical for that reason. Thecla did not rise but he simply knew the way he has known things Thecla knew.
And when he’s remembered Thecla’s memories previously, they have not so overwhelmed him that he became Thecla, or, rather, Thecla had not taken over his body. But he also was not under this kind of stress before, in an unfamiliar place that was familiar to Thecla, whose memories are housed within him.
So while there are a variety of ways to view this moment where Thecla takes over—metaphor, hyperbole, lie—the way I choose to view it here is as the truth, or at least the truth to Severian.
Thecla’s memories rise and her personality rides along this cresting wave, for are we not but the amalgamation of our memories, and she finds herself in a place she knows only to find herself horrified by the experience of understanding that she is housed in the body of another, in the large mannish hands of someone else, our young torturer. And then, as if to accentuate the fact, one of the imprisoned children tells Severian that she came here to meet the woman walking by, cloaked blacker than black, but found, instead, only Severian.
She doesn’t see Thecla’s face but knows by the way she moved and walked that she was a woman.
This presents something fascinating, especially about the lasting effects of consuming Thecla for Severian. When her consciousness rises on that wave of memories, she truly emerges. Though the body remains Severian’s, the posture and character of this physical embodiment becomes Thecla. She asserts herself in an undeniable way, in a visible, observable, measurable way.
This also leads us to interesting questions about Jonas, which I’ll circle back to.
First we must detour to the present, or the future of these events, wherein Severian recalls all this. Severian allows the present to intrude on this moment of stress to tell us that he survives by the fact of him being present in the present. Which is interesting since we don’t really know anything about Severian but what he’s told us.
For all we know, he could simply be the combined memories of a life entombed in whatever or whoever the Autarch is.
So let us return to Jonas, who is a bit of an abomination in his own mind. He has given up parts of himself and used the organic matter of humanity and earth to reconstitute himself. For all that, he remains a man and has found love or at least a great well of desire for Jolenta.
And it’s worth asking if he would have felt this love and aching desire had he not begun to become human. Just as Thecla has become, in a sense, Severian, perverting her own sense of self by the mixing and enmeshing of memories and consciousnesses, so too can we assume Jonas has transformed. Perhaps only in minor ways and perhaps only in this specific case of desire.
For he is a man of metal who has fallen in love with a woman of flesh and blood and bone. He is of the sea of stars and she is of the dirt of Urth, yet he has found a love that transcends the chasms separating their species.
For he himself is a bridge. Part man. Part metal. Stranger to where he came from, where he has found himself, and even to himself. It’s literally driving him insane, this unholy, ungainly reconstitution.
He seeks his home where he may heal himself.
And he promises to return to Jolenta after he is once again himself, wholly.
But will he still want her once he’s no longer human?
Is Thecla still herself, even when she asserts herself into Severian’s body?
How can we not be changed by the meat encasing our consciousness? How can our consciousness even be considered different than the meat of our body and the bones of our soul? If our bodies, if material meant nothing to our sense of self, then why should Thecla have responded at all to the sight of her hands as Severian’s?
When Jonas says he’s going home, I don’t know what I initially thought. I suppose I was perplexed by quite a lot in this sequence of the novel so maybe it sort of fell into that vat of bizarre, unexplainable happenings.
Jonas is there and then he is gone.
Somehow, these mirrors—Father Inire’s mirrors—have catapulted him…somewhere.
How utterly fascinating.