(urth) Suzanne Delage redux

[Gerry Quinn]

  From: Jerry Friedman 

  From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
  [missed-chances theory]

  > I don't like this theory in general because while it works on its own
  > terms, its terms call for ignoring all the strange parts - Kidd's
  > introduction, the narrator's promise, the detailed incidents, the
  > pictures, etc etc.

  I think that if you imagine that unknown supernatural forces are causing all this it works, except for Kidd's introduction.

  The quilting business is because otherwise the reader would say, "Come on, in a small town there would be connections between people even if they weren't in the same clique in high school."  So Wolfe provides a connection (with small-town atmosphere) and a reason it doesn't lead to a meeting between the narrator and Suzanne.

  The pictures were another thing for the supernatural forces to interrupt, and of course, to answer the question "Doesn't the narrator have yearbook pictures?"  (I hadn't realized high school yearbooks with photos of clubs were that old, but they are.  Next: were there high school debate teams at the time of the Spanish flu pandemic?)
Kidd's introduction is just another interpretation (really, it's not even that)..  Why worry more about it than about Borski's Snow White, or any other interpretation? 

The rest I believe is, as you say above, part of the setting, without which it is impossible to tell a story.  This also connects to something else, as follows...

Arguably the fact of Suzanne having a daughter is a difficulty for my interpretation.  It would be more symmetric if her life were blighted too, or at least not described in any way.  It does not invalidate my interpretation, but it seems to make its expression in the story less perfect.  But without the daughter, how then to tell the story?  Something with photographs might work, but it would be hard to create the same impact.  [Maybe, though, that's what made Wolfe think about photographs.]

The best is the enemy of the good.   Wolfe makes the compromise and gives her a daughter, so that he can manufacture an ending that works.  That is part of the mechanics of writing.  Sometimes stuif is in there because it's needed to make the story work.  Trying to interpret the story based on the specific characteristics of stuff of this kind is a huge mistake, leading away from the truth instead of towards it.

- Gerry Quinn





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