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‘To the Renascent Stars’
Impressions of Chapter 26 of Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer
© 2019 James LaFond
MAY/26/19
Reading from pages 159-163 of Shadow & Claw
Sennet
The plot strands intertwine as Severian stands between two women, the brutal tradition of the duel and his own needling curiosity. Not often is a hero offered up on the fantasy stage who is so curious that he is an irritation to those in his life. For the reader this is an endearing quality, despite the fact that he seldom asks his questions of people with full possession of the answers. But for his fellow fictive characters one feels some pity.
Duels take place in the shadow of the great wall between the trumpets blaring that signals the closing of the gates and the tattoo, when true night has fallen and the ailing sun has sunk beyond the horizon. The chaos of the many morbid pageants with various dueling devices assails Severian as he hurries to the fateful place and yet takes time to gawk at the world that dwarfs his struggle so:
“...at that moment when lengthening shadows cease to be shadows at all and become instead pools of blackness, as if some fluid darker even than the waters of the Lake of Birds was rising from the ground. Hundreds of people, some alone, some in small groups, were hurrying over the grass from the direction of the city. All seemed intent, bowed by an eagerness they carried upon their back and shoulders like a pack.”
Never has the myopic banality, the thirst for vicarious experience sluggishly beating in the rented heart of the sports fan been more concisely depicted in prose.
Severian than speaks to the reader more directly, a reader understood to be a man, discussing the aggression motivating call of two female prototypes, the wicked woman who demands to be mastered, and the good woman who deserves sacrifice, embodied by the increasingly vicious and alluring Agia and the inexplicably loyal Dorcas.
Diction of interest
-eidolons
-ostler
-renascent
Poet: The Enlightened Fate of Akbar Qama
The Mercy Seat
fiction
‘The Sanguinary Field’
eBook
book of nightmares
eBook
sons of aryas
eBook
fanatic
eBook
america the brutal
eBook
masculine axis
eBook
wife—
eBook
beasts of aryas
eBook
on combat
eBook
dark, distant futures
eBook
menthol rampage
eBook
barbarism versus civilization
eBook
advent america
eBook
let the world fend for itself
eBook
the fighting edge
eBook
taboo you
eBook
your trojan whorse
eBook
logic of force
eBook
fate
eBook
the gods of boxing
eBook
fiction anthology one
eBook
the lesser angels of our nature
eBook
winter of a fighting life
eBook
son of a lesser god
eBook
under the god of things
eBook
songs of aryas
eBook
within leviathan’s craw
eBook
blue eyed daughter of zeus
eBook
logic of steel
eBook
the sunset saga complete
eBook
time & cosmos
eBook
the combat space
eBook
the first boxers
eBook
ranger?
eBook
solo boxing
eBook
night city
eBook
by the wine dark sea
eBook
cracker-boy
eBook
thriving in bad places
eBook
honor among men
eBook
predation
eBook
z-pill forever
eBook
the greatest boxer
eBook
into leviathan’s maw
eBook
triumph
eBook
broken dance
eBook
the year the world took the z-pill
eBook
all-power-fighting
eBook
hate
eBook
the greatest lie ever sold
eBook
sorcerer!
eBook
uncle satan
eBook
on the overton railroad
eBook
orphan nation
eBook
song of the secret gardener
eBook
when you're food
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