Ouen and Dorcas and ??

Jane Delawney · 06 Dec 2010, 03:20 · from 2010-December.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: jane_delawney at sky.com (Jane Delawney)
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 03:20:06 +0000
Subject: (urth) Ouen and Dorcas and ??
In-Reply-To: <002301cb93f6$dcbb6e60$9dce4a0c@rclackey>
References: <AANLkTim_gb+9W=XhR2+4j9_qTTD0oi9F5LGff4MtMjjs at mail.gmail.com>	<F66E3EE3-2334-4DFC-A78F-85A96E0CDABF at liftingfaces.com>
	<002301cb93f6$dcbb6e60$9dce4a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <4CFC5666.10100 at sky.com>

On 04/12/10 21:04, Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> Ryan Dunn wrote:
>    
>> If the old boatman (in his 70's?) is looking for his wife, Dorcas, who is
>>      
> mid-to-late-teens when resurrected. That would suggest at least fifty years
> have passed since she died, thereabouts.<
>
> He had been searching for her body for "forty years".  (SHADOW. chap. XXII)
> Ouen is about forty-two.
>    
I concur. Also, it is deducible from the text (Dorcas remembers going to 
buy clothes for her child, remembers looking after a child and so forth) 
that if Dorcas died in childbirth, as is usually assumed, it was in 
bearing her *second* child, ie. Ouen's sibling.

What I can't remember right now is whether there is much textual 
evidence that Dorcas did in fact die in childbirth. All the old boatman 
tells us is that they'd been married four or five years, then 'Cas died. 
It's entirely possible she died of other natural causes when Ouen was a 
toddler.

But if she did die in childbirth, Ouen was two or three years old at the 
time, which would indeed make him forty-two/three when Sev sends him 
back to find his mother in Oldgate. But there's no information about 
what might have happened to any theoretical sibling. Are we to 
understand that the second child died with his/her mother? Or is there 
anyone around who might be identified as Severian's paternal uncle or 
aunt? I think Borski had a theory on this, but without my books to hand 
I can't remember what this theory was alas, and it's far too late right 
now for me to come up with any fresh suggestion.

be interested to know if anyone else has any ideas on this though.

cheers

jd

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