The Shadow of the Torturer: Chapters XXVII and XXVIII

Is He Dead? and Carnifax

The recap of these two chapters is quite simple:

Severian goes to the duel and seemingly gets killed by his opponent, but when his opponent claims his clothing and sword, Severian just stands up. This freaks everyone the hell out and his opponent and would-be killer runs away.

Then he passes out and Dorcas carries him somewhere to be healed.

The careful reader will have already put this all together and even the moderately careful one will have noticed the name Agia yelled out when Severian’s would-be killer ran through the crowd murdering people. Agia and her brother wanted Severian’s clothes and sword. They tried to swindle it out of him by buying it when he entered their garment shop to buy clothes. But since they couldn’t buy it, they decided they’d just kill him and get it that way.

They assumed he was some dummy unaware of the value he had.

We’ve seen their shop and we’ve seen how they dress and Agia has even told us how poor and desperate they are.

The poor and the desperate feasting on other poor and desperate people.

This is the slum of Nessus.

It’s every slum in the world.

I’ve often heard people criticize poor people for committing crimes. They are especially critical when they commit these crimes against other poor people. Poor people in their community, no less!

The gall!

What these people never consider is that if you rob a rich person, that person will call the cops and the cops will listen.

But if you rob some other poor person, will the cops show up at all? Will they bother to solve the crime or find out who the perpetrator was?

I’ve often reminded you that Severian is telling this story to a particular audience, and I think that’s where these chapters become most interesting. Severian seems completely incurious about the fact that he seemed to have risen from the dead. And when he was near dead, only Dorcas helped him.

Everyone else would’ve just as happily robbed him and gone on with their day, but not Dorcas.

Agia’s gone, of course. She tried to kill him. Even succeeded! But then he got back up.

Everyone else is amazed at what happened and Dorcas shows great devotion to him, in contrast to Agia. This plays well with Severian’s description of women, with Dorcas obviously being the preferred type of woman. She wants to be dominated. Wants to worship.

I mean, yeah, go on, Severian.

But why did we spend so much time with Agia? A sizeable chunk of the novel is spent on this day with Agia and for what purpose? I mean, from the perspective of the novelist, I understand completely. The transition from bildungsroman to picaresque is fascinating in how well it works. We spend half the book covering years and then we spend the second half covering about three days.

I don’t question why Wolfe would write this this way, but why would Severian?

And maybe this line of question seems too inside itself to be of any use to you, dear reader, but I find that I must follow it.

Severian is building himself a bit as a normal man, like any of his subjects. He’s telling them that, like them, his head can be turned by a pretty face. He can be duped and swindled. He can even be beaten in a fight!

In many ways, much of this novel is rather embarrassing for Severian.

He has a private mausoleum as a child where he imagined that he was not an orphan but the lost child of some important family. He was a torturer, a member of a despised sect in society that is also the thing of legends. He fell in love with a woman he was meant to torture and then helped her kill herself, but did not kill her himself.

And since leaving his despised guild, he’s stumbled around like a toddler, getting dragged here and there, only to get murdered by a flower wielding idiot.

And yet, this is the man who sits the throne as Autarch.

I want a president I can have a beer with isn’t a common sentiment these days, but once upon a time it mattered quite a lot. It may even explain why George W Bush beat Al Gore (setting aside the whole Florida debacle) and probably a small piece of why Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney.

And remember that all we know about the Autarch at this point in time is that the entire Citadel waits for his return. He is thought of and talked about like an errant god, standing high above and beyond the rest of humanity.

But Severian is telling his subjects that he is not beyond them.

He is one of them.

More than that, he was the least of them.

I don’t think I need to explain every Christlike moment in this narrative (he literally rose from the dead!), but I do think this is an important and, essentially, unstated aspect to this story. Severian never draws the connection out for us explicitly, but he’s given us all the pieces for us to assemble this picture.

And it is a clever piece of propaganda. Rather that overawe his subjects the way every previous Autarch has, he chooses to stretch a hand towards them and say we are the same.

That’s a powerful thing, I imagine, when you live in a galaxy spanning autocracy. And that last word is important. This is not a nice democratic world or even one where upward mobility is really possible, though we’ll discover how Severian stumbled back into his throne. But this is a totalitarian regime with a single node of power. And if Severian’s view of women and desire are anything to go on, I think we can also assess the type of ruler he would be.

The will to dominate. The desire for it.

The need.

But this relatability of Severian—to the extent this story would be relatable to those reading—is an important feature. Especially when you consider the Vodalus of it all and his relation to the autarch and the nobility.

And as a Vodalurian, we may get a bit of understanding for why he tells his story the way he does.

Next week, we’ll read Chapter XXIX and XXX. We’re approaching the end of this first novel in the series!