Suzanne Delage

Peter Stephenson · 11 May 1998, 08:02 · from urth-v0010.mbox · original

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: Peter Stephenson <pws at ifh.de>
Subject: (urth) Re: Suzanne Delage
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 10:02:18 +0200
Message-ID: <urth-v0010-0132 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0010/0132.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

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,
> but a repressed memory of Suzanne herself bubbling up, triggered by seeing
> her 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

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

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