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From: adam louis stephanides <astephan@students.uiuc.edu> Subject: (urth) Suzanne Delage Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 13:17:57 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/