Suzanne Delage

Peter Westlake · 14 May 1998, 11:27 · from urth-v0011.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 Westlake <peter at harlequin.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) Suzanne Delage
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 12:27:12 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0011-0040 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0011/0040.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 22:23 1998-05-13 +0000, 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,
>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.

Masterful! :-)

 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.

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.


*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