Suzanne Delage redux

David Stockhoff · 08 Dec 2010, 13:02 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:02:28 -0500
Subject: (urth) Suzanne Delage redux
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Message-ID: <4CFF81E4.7010402 at verizon.net>

Interesting.

I'm baffled as to why "Cloning" appears as a clue but not as a theory. 
To me, there are 3 "obvious" Clues, with a capital C---that is, 
objectively verifiable as signals from writer to reader:

(1) Proust. This is just the narrator's hook, but the story must proceed 
logically from it in some way, even if it mutates.

(2) Artificial fertilization of urchins: There are no coincidences, or 
rather none that go unexploited, in Wolfe.

(3) The Snow White correspondence: We know Wolfe works this way, as 
commented in the entry.

Without having thought much about the story, I propose that the story is 
basically a Proustian memory anecdote draped on a Snow White frame, with 
cloning as a mechanism to connect the two. The rest is noise.

On 12/7/2010 11:25 PM, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 11:15 PM, Gwern Branwen<gwern0 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> So, someone complained it was quiet around here...
>>
>> To rectify that, I'd like to offer up a little experiment of mine.
>> This is sort of an attempt at what I think a wiki article on Wolfe
>> stories could look like: the story or a detailed summary, followed by
>> analysis of allusions, and then a summing up of the theories floated
>> on Urth.net and hopefully a dispassionate appraisal. I doubt this
>> format would scale to the novels, but it seems to work well in this
>> case.
> I recently gave it another polish and put it on my website:
> http://www.gwern.net/Suzanne%20Delage.html
>
> Hopefully this form is much more readable. I don't think I missed any
> major theories about "Suzanne Delage" but perhaps someone has thought
> of a new one in the last year or so?
>

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