Finished Citadel of the Autarch
Spoilers below. Read in the compilation volume sword and citadel published for Tor Essentials. Second read of the novel; made use of Michael Andre-Driussi's chapter guide for the series. I won't immediately move on to a first read of Urth, although I'll come back to it eventually. Very good series, but I need a break.
Leaning towards this as my favorite volume of the series. Not so much of a particular through-line that stood out to me as in the others, so here are some assorted thoughts.
On the subject of women: this book seems to work significantly better than the previous ones. Foila and Daria feel significantly more real than most of the other women in the books, and Dorcas retrieves some of her reality in her brief appearances and mentions (I am particularly happy to have seen Wolfe's quote that, when Severian expresses his feeling of betrayal by all women (II), he "means that men want to be loved more than any other thing is loved, and that though they may occasionally attract such love, they never have the power to hold it" (Andre-Driussi, p. 67), which confirms for me that though Wolfe's own misogyny sometimes shows in the text, Severian's is intentional and distinct, and actually interesting). The presence of Thecla especially solidifies in this volume, and her interjections feel often more legitimate and distinct than Severian's, and their love feels significantly more realized ("I clasped my heart's companion to me, and felt myself clasped. I felt myself clasped, and clasped my heart's companion to me" (XXV)).
I am particularly fond of the story competition. I tend to favor tales within tales, and the broad literary range Wolfe evoked in these stories was a delight. Melito's tale is reminiscent of Chaucer as well as Aesop; Hallvard's grasp of sagaic tone is compelling (my wife, my children, my children, my wife is a particularly resonant motif); Foila's Bretonic quest has many of the strangely-gendered qualities of Marie de France. I was particularly interested in the tale told by Loyal to the Group of Seventeen, which reminded me of the Egyptian poem The Eloquent Peasant. Would be curious to know what kind of ancient Egyptian poetry Wolfe had in his known library.
Severian's compassionate self is finally achieved to a much greater extent here than in any of the other novels. Two passages come to mind, of his contemplations on empathy with the dead at the end of XXVI (echoing the end of Joyce's The Dead), and of Triskele as "the ambassador of all crippled things" (XXXI). Wolfe's language about disability in the passage is a product of its time, but once one considers the actual message, that Severian is able to not only accept the legitimacy of disabled people, but to embrace his own disability by the novel's last sentence. The overwhelming impression, to my mind, is one of great compassion, and while Wolfe fails sometimes (his racist/racializing tendencies often leak into this volume), he sometimes succeeds greatly.
Probably the most interesting thread I noted was a couple of brief moments connecting different associations to plants. There is certainly the claw, a rose thorn, carefully positioned so that the burning rose motif early in the series culminates in the connection to the burning bush of Moses, the lowly briar through which God communicates, and thus Severian's realization that all ground is holy, that all thorns are Claws. Beyond that, two vegetal images seem connected to me. In chapter VIII, the Pelerine tells Severian that "every person, you see, is like a plant. There is a beautiful green part, often with flowers or fruit, that grows upward toward the sun, toward the Increate. There is also a dark part that grows away from it, tunneling where no light comes" and then elaborates that "it is the roots that give the plant the strength to climb toward the sun, though they know nothing of it". Then, in chapter XVII, Ash says that "my house strikes its roots into the past", recalling the image described by the Pelerine, but also the image of the tendrils of the nenuphars. As in shadow, we see the past in its impossible complexity as a series of knotted, writhing roots, that, though they are crucial to the growth of the organism, can catch and tangle, and drown unsuspecting children who spend too much time underwater. Ash is perhaps such a victim, who lives in a world that can no longer grow, and can only look to its roots for the beauty of the past. When Severian removes him from his home, he is exactly "some scythe, whistling along the ground, [that] sever[s] the stalk from its roots", so that "the stalk would fall and die, but the roots might put up a new stalk" (VIII). The creation of the future, to Wolfe, is destructive, as is any choice in that it eliminates the potential futures the other choices represents. But to get caught in the roots, to consider too carefully what might have grown out of the decided past, is dangerous. It is perhaps successfully achieved by the mysterious "first Severian" (although the extent of Andre-Driussi's theorizing seems presumptuous to me), but this is itself a careful pruning, so that Severian, or the New Sun, is a worker in the garden of the universe.
