Dorcas (was: The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind)

António Pedro Marques · 09 Jul 2010, 19:40 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:40:52 +0100
Subject: (urth) Dorcas (was: The mystery of the image of an astronaut
 cleaned by Rudesind)
In-Reply-To: <4C37739F.6050508 at gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTilrQ1e2iotSu2Uc-uUsJPF1rwbndjWSOchjrUY1 at mail.gmail.com>	<AANLkTilGlftBM6m70yNZYnV5v61rGR9ahZdtsAwTfxBF at mail.gmail.com>	<4C376EDA.2040408 at gmail.com>
	<4C37739F.6050508 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C377B44.7050903 at gmail.com>

James Wynn wrote (09-07-2010 20:08):

> Sure there were people who read tBotNS and said "Aha! Dorcas is Severian's grandmother."

Unlike the usual 'Wolfean mysteries', the indentity of Dorcas is hinted at 
using the classic literary devices one finds everywhere. I think this is 
what makes it so obvious and not really a 'puzzle'. I also think it makes 
your comparison misguided. Again, the debate with Dorcas isn't whether there 
is convincing evidence, it's more like whether the evidence isn't deceptive.

> I think simian references to Inire and Rudesind are significant, but I
> never paid them much mind before. Now they *do* appear obvious, don't they?

I don't see what you mean. There are several simian references throughout 
the book. Lowering the bar for what constitutes a simian reference gets us 
even more. They do not apply only to Inire and Rudesind. They may tell us 
more about Severian and his society than the people being described. And 
it's funny that the fauna is so different yet simians are supposed to be 
just like our own. But again - what do you mean when you say they're obvious?

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net