Subject: (urth) Suzanne Delage

From: adam louis stephanides <astephan at students.uiuc.edu>
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 13:17:57 +0000

On Fri, 8 May 1998 Craig Christensen wrote:

> I read Suzanne Delange again last night and when nothing unmistakable   
> jumped out at me I reread it with the story's opening statement in mind.   
>  That is, the narrator was struck by the passage he had read which stated   
> that every person has probably had at least one event so momentous and so   
> inassimilable (somebody's making good use of his thesarus, huh?) that he   
> has wiped it from his memory.  I took that to mean that the narrator had   
> not only met Suzanne in his past, but that she was very important to him.   

I was lying in bed this morning and came to the conclusion that this was 
correct.  Based on it, I developed a reading of the story.  It explains 
the text; it is consistent with Wolfe's method in other works such as 
_Peace_ and _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_; and on this reading the story is
worthy of Wolfe.  My explanation will be a bit lengthy, but bear with me.

As in other works by Wolfe, the narrative seems ordinary on the surface, 
but when you study it carefully anomalies appear.  First of all, why is 
the narrator so obsessed with the "certain remark" he reads, to the point 
of lying awake trying to remember something extraordinary that happened to 
him that he has forgotten(!)?  And what he comes up with--never having met
Suzanne--is not, despite his claim, all that "strange--I might almost
say...incredible." (362; page references to the Tor hardcover, in which
the story runs from 361 to 367).  By implication, the town's population is
close to 100,000 (362), and the high school is a large one (364).  Later
in the story he states that if he had ever danced with Suzanne "the years
have so effectively sponged the event from my memory that no slightest
trace remains." (366)  Together, these suggest that something has indeed
happened to the narrator which he has not merely forgotten but repressed,
and that his non-meeting of Suzanne is what psychoanalysts call a "screen
memory": a false memory covering up a repressed event.

What might the narrator have repressed, and why?  There are two clues in
the narrator's retelling of "the idea that so forcibly struck" him.
The first is that the "extraordinary experience he refers to is not
necessarily supernatural, merely a "dislocation of all we expect from
nature and probability."  The second is that the person undergoing such an
experience forgets it because "he has ... been so conditioned to consider
himself the most mundane of creatures." (361)  This is significant because
the narrator does indeed "consider himself the most mundane of creatures."
He calls his life "dull" and is "afraid [he] bored" both his wives (362).
The latter is no surprise, for he is a boring narrator; compare him with
Weer in _Peace_.  The information that the narrator's life is "perhaps a
lonely" one, that he was briefly married twice (362), and that he now
lives alone (366) is also significant.

If the narrator is indeed repressing something, there should be traces of
it in the narration.  And there are.  He tells us that if he had met
Suzanne as a child, "I would no doubt have soon come to both love and
hate" her. (366)  This is certainly possible, but why does he say there is
"no doubt"?  Then, it's odd that he thinks he might have danced with a
girl as beautiful as Suzanne apparently was and casually forgotten about
it.  But it is the description of Suzanne's daughter that is the real
giveaway.  I won't quote it all, but read it over.  Firstly, we have this
sudden outburst of poesy in a narrative that has up till now been
completely prosaic.  Secondly, he claims to have observed in her "an air,
at once insouciant and shy, of vivacity coupled with an innocence and
intelligence that were hers alone."  But he only saw her for a few seconds
as she "walked quickly past" him!  How could he have possibly perceived
all that?  This passage is in reality not a description of the daughter,
but a repressed memory of Suzanne herself bubbling up, triggered by seeing
her daughter.

Confirmation comes with his friend's wife's reply: "'But of course you
know who she is, don't you?'" (367)  If he really did not know Suzanne,
why should his friend's wife assume he will recognize her daughter?  He
did know Suzanne well enough for the friend's wife, an acquaintance but
not a friend herself, to remember it, although he--consciously--does not.

To sum up: the narrator did know Suzanne, who may well have been as
extraordinary as he describes her daughter as being, and did "love and
hate" her. He later "sponged the event fron his memory": either because he
"considered himself so mundane," or because the end of the affair was too
traumatic, and he made himself "mundane" as a reaction.  Since then he has
led the "dull" life he describes.

>  I read the "Unable to be photographed" to mean that Suzanne was pregnant   
> then and that the young lady he saw was his own daughter.

The girl he sees isn't his own daughter--I can't see the narrator as being
in his early thirties--but it's possible that Suzanne was unable to be
photographed because she was pregnant.  Also, the narrator may have torn
the pages out of the sophomore yearbooks himself, either to get the
individual pictures of himself and Suzanne as he says or in the wake of
the break-up.

Well, that's my theory.  Do you agree?  (Even if you don't, I've learned a
lot about the story from this discussion, and I'd like to thank everyone
who's participated.)
 
> The vampire angle never occurred to me.  Neither have many other aspects   
> of Mr. Wolfe's writings revealed to me in the urth.list archives.

I have to admit, when I first read Mr. Westlake's post I thought he was
saying Suzanne was not a vampire but a fairy or something of the sort.  In
that case, I have some other objections.  "Her complexion [was] as pure as
milk" (367) does not, to my mind, describe a vampire's pallor; and the
entire description does not feel vampiric to me.  And the vampire theory
doesn't explain why the narrator never met Suzanne, or forgot meeting her,
since his wife's friend did not forget.

--Adam

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Peter Westlake <peter at harlequin.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 23:58:42 +0000

At 13:17 1998/05/10 -0500, Adam wrote:
..
>lot about the story from this discussion, and I'd like to thank everyone

Seconded. I do like your theory, even though I don't believe it's the
one the author intended. It does fit the text pretty well, but I think
it isn't quite strongly enough implied. At least, I *think* I think that.

>entire description does not feel vampiric to me.

True enough, and I would prefer her not to be a vampire.
It just seemed to fit, and to be reasonably Wolfeish.

> And the vampire theory

Not meeting her would just be a coincidence, as it is in Proust; it
starts the narrator looking through his yearbooks, and reveals the
subtext to the (possibly over-imaginative :-) reader, though not to
the narrator.

Of the theories I've heard so far, I like Alice's the best. It makes
most sense of the structure of the story - with Suzanne's daughter
appearing at the end, a very conspicuous part of the story. I do
wonder how many other readings there are, though - we haven't had
the one yet in which the Pie Club is really the Pudding Club and
they're all off ill having babies at exactly the same time, like
the women of Midwich. I'll spare you that one, I think.

Peter.

---

From: Peter Stephenson <pws at ifh.de>
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 08:02:18 +0000

adam louis stephanides wrote:
> But it is the description of Suzanne's daughter that is the real
> giveaway.
> ...
> This passage is in reality not a description of the daughter,

You're right that this is a key moment, and seems to be asking for a
psychological rather than a fantasy explanation.  Actually, it recalls
another part of Proust, towards the end, when he meets Gilberte Swann's
daughter and recognises in her all the things he once saw in Gilberte.
Sorry I don't have it around, but maybe there's a really telling
quotation in Le Temps Retrouve' (Time Regained) somewhere.

pws

---

From: adam louis stephanides <astephan at students.uiuc.edu>
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 13:02:37 +0000

> it isn't quite strongly enough implied. At least, I *think* I think that.

This might be true for another author, but not for Wolfe.  I think my
theory is at least as strongly implied by the text as is Weer's ghostly
state in _Peace_, which we know Wolfe intended.
 
> Of the theories I've heard so far, I like Alice's the best.

The main problem I now have with Alice's theory is that it doesn't account
for the strong indications that the narrator has indeed forgotten
something.  (I don't think you can say he has "forgotten" not having met
Suzanne.)

--Adam

---

From: Craig Christensen <2644 at mn3.lawson.lawson.com>
Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 08:40:00 +0000

William,

>Anyway, my point is that the narrator mentions Hamlet *after* he talks
>about the "extraordinary experience" but *before* he says anything about
>forgetting it. So "Hamlet's hackneyed precept" is about the unusual, not
>about memory, making the Horatio quote most probably the one intended by
>far.

Good points, but how about this well-known quote from Hamlet?
"Neither a borrower nor a lender be"
Maybe the narrator owed her money and has conveniently forgotten it. <g>

>I was originally going to post a message saying "enough with the
>Suzanne Delage already".

OK, here's my last Suzanne Delage post.  I'm obviously out of ideas,   
anyway.

Craig

---

From: Damien Broderick <damien at ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 22:23:57 +0000

As I was reading this morning - reading the URTH list's digest on my
computer screen, I should explain - I was struck by the deluge of posts,
deliberately left unread until now, concerning the story `Suzanne Delage'.
It occurred to me to wonder about this thread.  Living all my life, as I
have, in a genre comprising less than a hundred thousand stories, I had not
even been dimly aware of this particular tale.  And yet it had plainly
excited the witty and astute vulpine readers here.  I went as soon as it
was convenient to my local library and found the copy of ENDANGERED SPECIES
that, hardly opened except to read `The Cat',  I had returned only a month
before, and there belatedly met for the first time the enigmatic absence of
Suzanne Delage.  Or so it seemed, until, with a strange frisson, my first
for the day, I noticed that this story had originally appeared in a
collection entitled EDGES (Pocket Books, 1980), edited by Mr Wolfe's agent,
Virgina Kidd, and her other most notable client, Ursula Le Guin.  This was
striking enough as a coincidence, for at that time I too was a client of Ms
Kidd.  Stranger yet was the fact that this volume, in which I had never
previously encounted Mr Wolfe's story, opens with a novella that I believe
Mr Wolfe might enjoy, entitled `The Ballad of Bowspit Bear's Stead'.  As it
chanced, I had writtten that story.

I turned for clues to Ms Kidd's introduction to the story.  It proved
immediately unreliable in a small way, not perhaps a startling discovery in
a paperback original which had printed the closing sentences of my own
story not on its last page but at the head of the italicized introduction
to the next, Carol Emshwiller's `Omens'.  We are misinformed that Mr Wolfe
had been `working extensively on his tetralogy (*The Rock of the New
Sun*)'.   Nevertheless, it is worth attending to Ms Kidd's insiderly comment:

`His short story hereunder is a den of iniquities; no one else could have
written it.'

I think this is likely.  It is less a madeleine than a reverse veronica, a
kind of Turin test.  Here are some incidental, glancing reflections:

Suzanne is not a vampire, I think, nor is she her own daughter and mother,
not quite.  I do think she might have no use for men.  Is it implausible
that those exhausting trips taken by Madame Delage and Mother, so eagerly
repeated, were spent as often under the quilt as on it?  Was it Mother who
later scissored out the photos of the young woman who (perhaps) - like
daughter, like mother, like grandmother, faithful mirror of the flesh - so
resembled her lost lover?  Why did the bitter old neighbor widow so detest
Mrs Delage?  Had she been displaced in the beautiful friend's affections
(or those of someone looking quite similar - wait, wait for it) by other,
younger women, Mother being merely the latest?

Why should this be the occasion of retrograde amnesia?  The conjecture
above might be the root of a complex Oedipal agony of (as it were) biblical
proportions.  As Adam noted of this confessedly (or avowedly) dull
small-town dog:

<  "extraordinary experience he refers to is not
necessarily supernatural, merely a "dislocation of all we expect from
nature and probability."  The second is that the person undergoing such an
experience forgets it because "he has ... been so conditioned to consider
himself the most mundane of creatures." (361)  This is significant because
the narrator does indeed "consider himself the most mundane of creatures."
He calls his life "dull" and is "afraid [he] bored" both his wives (362). >

The provenance of the luscious 15 year old daughter of the absent Suzanne?
Mantis provided the key allusion to Proust, a writer for whom sexual
evasions and masks were not unknown.  But here's another possible layering
(if we are prepared to accept that Gene Wolfe is vatic as well as gnomic,
the necessary premise for many of this list's entertainingly
over-interpretative hi-jinks). You all know, of course, that Ives Delage
(1854-1920) was the French zoologist who (as the EB tells us) `developed a
method for culturing sea urchins following artificial fertilization of the
eggs with chemicals'.  This might be irrelevant in the work of anyone with
less interest in cloning and reduplication than Mr Wolfe.

Having mused on this matter for a time, I let it slip my mind and opened my
mail from the Taxation Department of the Australian Commonwealth.  It is a
truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
IQ, is quite often as thick as a brick when faced by normal tasks routinely
handled with dispatch by the village halfwit.  Horrified by what I found
there, I pedalled at once to gladiolus-rich Moonee Ponds [sic], Melbourne
seat of the Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, suburb apostophised so
lovingly by our laureate Dame Edna Everage for its lower-middle class
*niceness*, in order to set right, if I could, a lamentable lapse of
memory.  In a fit of near-Alzheimerish muddle I had written not long ago to
the Deputy Commissioner or his lackey a brief message deploring his request
for a certain penalty that I believed wrongly had been forgiven following
an earlier round of correspondence.  Or rather, that amount having indeed
been remitted,demurring at the more substantial amount now requested with
menaces, which proved to relate to another year entirely.  How time flies
and so on.  

Since I could find no method of electronic payment, and no other that did
not involve a hefty excess for the service, I bicycled, as I say, to cloudy
autumn Moonee Ponds and there withdrew from the local bank branch - after
first admitting my inability to drive a car and producing what I regarded
as an excessive number of documents showing my face and my signature - an
amount of folding cash equal to 68 times the sum paid me by Deakin
University Press for my book about deconstructive theory.  

Soon I entered the vast building in nearby Gladstone Street and was
directed to a bullet-proof glass-fronted cashiers' counter where a small
frisson greeted me, my second or third for the day.  Waiting to take and
count my bank notes were two burly chaps, apparently there from central
casting in the role of smash-and-grab men or perhaps undercover drug cops
working a dangerous biker detail, in louche wrinkled garments revealing
rather an expanse of beefy forearm.  The thug who took my money and spent a
surprisingly long time counting it, putting it into small piles and moving
these back and forth, was shaven-skulled in a stubbled 5 o'clock shadow
way, with a long plaited queue rising from the back of his head in the
place where my male pattern tonsure, sadly, meets the equally bald portions
at the front.  I found this entire scene extremely gratifying, at once a
metonymy of the process and evidence of a new and refreshing relaxation of
out-moded shibboleths.  If the rules had been as sensible when I was a
young lout, who knows but that I might now be approaching the close of a
well-remunerated working life in the Public Service.

Damien Broderick

---

From: Jack Lyons <revjack at saltmine.radix.net>
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 10:45:17 +0000

On Wed, 13 May 1998, Damien Broderick wrote:

:As I was reading this morning - reading the URTH list's
:digest on my computer screen, I should explain - I was
:struck by the deluge of posts,

[snip]

Finally, somebody is starting to make sense.

Patera Jack
--
_________________
revjack at radix.net

---

From: adam louis stephanides <astephan at students.uiuc.edu>
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 11:08:24 +0000

On Mon, 11 May 1998 Craig Christensen wrote:

> After reading Suzanne Delange I looked for Spanish Influenza information,   
> to date when the characters were in high school.  Of course I was   
> surprised to learn that the Spanish Influenza occurred in 1918 during the   
> first World War.  This certainly doesn't seem to be the correct period   
> for the characters' high school years.

I think it could be.  According to Krug's _The Shaping of the American
High School, 1880-1920_, extracurricular activities of the type the
narrator describes were found in that period; and I don't see any other
details which are inconsistent with it.  (The reference to a
"fundamentalist church" might be a problem, since the term may not have
been in use then, though I haven't looked it up; but this could be the
narrator himself using anachronistic terminology.)  This would mean, of
course, that the "present" of the story was itself in the past when it was
published, but I see no problem with that.  In fact, the initial reference
to "those somewhat political, somewhat phiosophical, somewhat historical
books which can now be bought by the pound each month" doesn't seem to
really apply to the late-1970s publishing scene.

> Hamlet?  And second, why the long rambling description of quilt   
> collecting?   In such a compact story it must have significance.

Good question.  I took it as furthering the characterization of the
narrator as boring, as well as indicating a possible source for this trait
in his mother's conventionality; but it may well have some more specific
significance which escapes me at present.

In response to some posts of William H. Ansley's which I had deleted:
the "many decades ago" bit (363 in ES) is indeed hard to explain.  To
me "many" is certainly more than three, and even more than five--I
wouldn't say that Wolfe had written many novels with Severian as
protagonist--and as William points out, for Suzanne to be 65 now is
already pushing the outer limits of probability (although Damien's theory
would account for that).  Of course, I use this to support my own
theory: not only has the narrator repressed the events to the extent of
suppressing that it was he that tore out the pages, but he pushes the
tearing-out back in time to an impossible extent.

As for the italics in the recounting of the "idea," they're that way in
the hardcover.  I don't think it's a typo.  The narrator immediately
forgets about the forgetting, so to speak: his explanation of why the idea
is correct ignores that part of it, and he also ignores it when trying to
recall an extraordinary event in his own life.  I can tie this in with my
theory too, but I won't belabor the point.

Damien Broderick's post, which is in the archives but not yet in my
mailbox was fascinating.  Assuming that the comment about the "den of
iniquity" reflected inside information and not just the editor having
nothing else to say, it confirms that there is *something* under the
surface.  While the Ivan Delage cross-reference is indeed suggestive,
though, I don't think I can buy the theory as yet; now if you could tie it
in with those quilts...

--Adam

---

From: Peter Westlake <peter at harlequin.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 11:27:12 +0000

At 22:23 1998-05-13 +0000, Damien Broderick wrote:
>even been dimly aware of this particular tale.

Masterful! :-)

>less interest in cloning and reduplication than Mr Wolfe.

Astounding!

I don't know which boggles the mind more - that this is a coincidence,
or that it isn't. A bit like life on other worlds.

I see that Ives Delage died soon after the height of the Spanish Flu
epidemic; but that way madness lies, I fear.

Peter.