Ouen and Dorcas and ??

Lee Berman · 06 Dec 2010, 11:00 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 06:00:13 -0500
Subject: (urth) Ouen and Dorcas and ??
Message-ID: <SNT123-W18C411AEEDE980B5944FC6CF2B0 at phx.gbl>

>Ouen: I never knew her, sieur.  Cas they called her, but she died when I was young.
>in childbirth, my father said.

Borski takes this to imply that Dorcas had a pregnancy and birth after Ouen. I agree
that it is a strange (though not impossible) turn of phrase to refer to one's self at
birth as "young". I would express it as "she died when I was born".

I, personally, consider Severian's grandfather to be a great deceiver so I don't take
a lot of stock in the exact wording of anything he says.

>Jane Delawney: Dorcas remembers going to buy clothes for her child, remembers looking 
>after a child and so forth.

Dorcas has a dream in which she is shopping for, "tiny clothes", holding her hands half
a span apart. "Doll's clothing, perhaps". A greek span is the distance from the thumb to
the pinky of a hand with splayed fingers. Half that would be too small for any born
child to wear. I'm more inclined to interpret this dream as a metaphor for shopping for
baby clothes while she is pregnant. I don't remember a memory of her looking after a child
but I could be mistaken.

Dorcas says: "I have to go back and find out who I was and where I lived and what happened
to me...."..."My child may still be alive- an old man, perhaps, but still alive. I have to 
know."

She doesn't say "children" so I think her own sense is of having only one child.  

>Jeff Wilson- Dorcas' physical description upon being found at the lake does not seem 
>to agree with her having died in the act of childbirth.

I agree with this. On the other hand, Dorcas says, "I was dead, a shrunken corpse preserved
in the brown water." She guesses that the Claw works by shifting time. If correct I suppose
there is no reason it would have to work to shift her body to her moment of death. Her body
could be shifted to a time/condition before her death, perhaps even before her pregnancy.

I don't think the text is silent on the subject of a second child but spread across a couple
books and vague and perhaps conflicting.

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