(urth) Short Story 81: Suzanne Delage

[Marc Aramini]

“Suzanne Delage” was first published in Edges in 1980 and is reprinted
in *Endangered
Species*.

SUMMARY: As the narrator is reading a book, he is struck by the idea “*that
every man has had in the course of his life some extraordinary experience,
some dislocation of all we expect from nature and probability, of such
magnitude that he might in his own person serve as a living proof of
Hamlet’s hackneyed precept* – but that he has, nearly always, been so
conditioned to consider himself the most mundane of creatures, that,
finding no relationship to the remainder of his life in this extraordinary
experience, he has forgotten it.”

He then ponders how boring his life is and comes to the conclusion that his
extraordinary event is simply that living all his life in a small town he
has been dimly aware of a woman his age's existence but claims to have
never met her. After reviewing his basic history, that he was married twice
and bored both his ex-wives as they bored him, that he was a second string
football player in highschool, and that he then searches his yearbooks to
find that either she was not pictured or the pictures were cut out for
collages or to attain the individual pictures. In others she is not
pictured because of an epidemic of some kind which the narrator thinks is
Spanish Influenza took place.

He reveals that their parents were great friends and searched for quilts
together, which were then displayed at the discoverers house for everyone
to come look at. Despite these parties, he believes Mrs. Delage was never
welcome because of a bitter old woman across the street who would despise
them if Mrs. Delage came over. There are several other creepy ruminations
about coming to love and hate Suzanne if he had met her, and the story
culminates with him recollecting that a few days ago he ran into someone
who had known him all his life, the wife of a friend, in the town. They see
a beautiful 15 year old girl, and his reaction to her is very strong,
noting her pale skin and dark hair and imagining his hands encircling her
thin waist. The friend says the girl is the very image of her mother,
Suzanne Delage.

COMMENTARY:

If someone were to attempt to create an infinite speculation device, they
might very well begin with the premise of “Suzanne Delage”: extraordinary
and special events, removed from everyday existence, are forgotten. Given
the vast breadth of ideas which have been put forth around Suzanne Delage,
I think there are a few guidelines which are provided through thematic
analysis and through blatant metatextual instruction to the reader. For
this reason, I will not present every possible analysis of Suzanne Delage
in its entirely, which, given the elided nature of the central event, could
be almost anything if we do not adhere to certain rigid patterns created
throughout the story.

I believe that “Suzanne Delage” is perhaps the most protean of Wolfe’s
realistic stories – it is not an almost inscrutable literary myth in the
manner of, say, “The God and his Man”, “To the Dark Tower Came”, or “Cues”
– we have low mimesis characters in a fairly believable American setting
here with fairly straightforward action (or inaction, as the case may be).
Here, a sound conclusion must be based on *theme *analysis, and the theme
of the details mentioned in the story seems to indicate that extraordinary
repression of unwanted or painful memories is not only possible but has
happened over and over throughout history. Occasionally these repressed
memories will come back involuntarily, sometimes to cause great upheaval,
but occasionally just to make us re-evaluate who we are, or even show that
we are incapable of that re-evaluation.

I accept several principals at face value from the narrator as general
guidelines:

1) That an extraordinary event actually could be forgotten, so that he
can’t be trusted to reliably remember it. If he could remember it, then the
premise of the story is invalid. If we do not accept this premise, the
analysis can stop right here – the extraordinary event in his life is that
he never met Suzanne Delage.

2) When he says, “there has, in fact, been one thread of the strange – I
might almost say the incredible, though not the supernatural – in my own
history,” I take him at face value. To be honest, never meeting a girl is
not that incredible. I see this as the metafictional statement that must
control our interpretation – incredible things are possible candidates for
elision because they have suffered oblivion, but supernatural things are
not. In other words, elves, demigods, and aliens probably don't play a part
in the best analysis of the story.

3) The narrator will only lie or be inaccurate in the suppression of a very
particular memory, and this must be a repetitive or discernible pattern or
related to the suppressed event – so that he is only unreliable regarding
the remembrance of that event.

It is conceivable that “Hamlet's hackneyed precept” might be “To be, or not
to be”, but I think it is more likely that the narrator speaks of the
observation, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are
dreamt of in your philosophy.” This quote would tie in slightly better with
the theme of many historical forces at work subjectively ignored by the
observer. In particular, forgotten or unknown things might exist in the
world and have consequences, but been rather remarkable relagated to
oblivion.

INACCURATE OR CONTRADICTORY DETAILS:

If the story were completely unreliable and our narrator a thorough liar,
then nothing could be ascertained. However, if he is conclusively
unreliable on one or two related topics and it is possible to establish
that, then we can assume he is only, but still utterly, unreliable on that
topic. In this case, every claim he makes about Suzane Delage falls under
suspicion for the following reasons.

The story begins “last night”, when the narrator starts to think about
extraordinary events, and after pondering for what seems like forever, he
says, “I have been dimly aware of the existence of a certain woman without
ever meeting her or gaining any sure idea of her appearance.” At the end of
the story, we get a graphic, strange, and obsessive depiction of the young
girl on the street, which took place “a few days ago”:

Her hair was of lustrous black, and her complexion as pure as milk; but it
was not these that for a moment enchanted me, nor the virginal breasts ..
nor the little waist I might have circled with two hands … to the woman
beside me I said, “What a charming child. Who is she?”

“Her name? … I can't think of it. But of course you know whose she is,
don't you? She's the very image of her mother at that age – Suzanne
Delage.”

The meeting had this eerie impact, and even after this almost ephebophiliac
description, he *still* forgets about the oddity of it until he ponders and
ponders for hours over his book. He knew exactly what she looked like
before the text even started, according to his own description, but did not
think his reaction to the 15 year old girl was at all extraordinary, and
did not even mention it until the long, discursive review of his life, then
claims he has no idea at all what she looks like.

There are further inconsistencies, claiming that “(though I fear most of us
here have always pronounced it 'Susan')” (note the parentheses there) and
that he has no idea which groups she associated with, though he states of
the year book pictures, “I seem to recall that these were torn out and cut
up to obtain the individual photographs many decades ago. My own face is
among those missing, as well as Suzanne Delage's; but in another section,
one devoted to social activities, a girl's club (it was called, I think,
the Pie Club) is shown, and one of the names given in the caption is
Suzanne's.” Notice the vague verbiage here: he *seems* to think they were
obtained for individual photos (why would he or his mother cut out the
picture of a girl they never met?) and that he *thinks* it was the Pie
Club, again in parentheses, though he has the yearbook right in front of
him. He later claims “whether Suzanne Delage had entry to one of more of
[these little coteries] I do not know,” despite the fact he knows of her
involvement with the Pie Club. This haze concerning Suzanne seems like an
extreme inability to retain memories concerned with her.

He even says only a few of the girls, the “really promiscuous ones and the
dazzlingly beautiful ones whom we, in those naïve times, called 'queens' –
were known to everyone,” but he seems to think that the young girl is
dazzlingly beautiful, and the lifelong friend also just assumes that of
course he knows exactly who the girl is, for he must have known Suzanne
Delage. Why would she make that assumption?

This particular narrator seems especially faulty when saying “I think” and
“seem” - and when he thinks about why she was unable to be photographed, he
says, “there was an epidemic of some kind (I think Spanish influenza)” just
at the time the pictures for the annual were to be taken. Suzanne is listed
as one of those “unable to be photographed.” Like everything else that he
associates with Suzanne Delage, the memory is hazy. However, anyone who
actually lived through the Spanish Influenza would not be likely to
identify it as “an epidemic of some kind” which is incredibly only recalled
to our narrator when “on one of the closing pages a woebegone roll of names
reminded me of something I had forgotten for many years” - (see the theme
section below for more details on its destructive and terrible effects, but
since World War I was about to escalate, it was somehow historically less
known that other destructive pandemics in history like the Bubonic Plague
or the Black Death). How could he have forgotten this, if it devastated the
school and community during his adolescence? He isn't even certain that it
is Spanish Influenza.

The mothers even seem to be close friends who leave town together all the
time. The primary impediment to the mother's sharing the sheets is the old
woman across the street, a widow who would have become enemies for life if
Mrs. Delage was invited over, and the narrator states, “I believe my
mother's friend died while I was at college.” However, it is unclear if the
friend referenced is the widow, who was never referred to as a friend, or
Mrs. Delage, who was so identified earlier: “Mrs. Delage, who became my
mother's friend.” This seems like a rather nebulous excuse as well.

Almost every claim he makes about Suzanne consciously is subject to
question, but a few of the speculative ones are almost suggestive: “It
would therefore have been entirely logical for Mrs. Delage to have been our
frequent guest, at least for tea; and for her to have brought,
occasionally, her little daughter Suzanne, whom I would no doubt have soon
come to both love and hate.” This is a strong statement about someone whom
one has never met – assuming that love and hate would simply occur
naturally based on the concept of simply knowing her. Here there seems to
be some subconscious truth – the narrator loved, and hated, Suzanne Delage,
but repressed it, as the excised yearbook pictures (do we cut out pictures
of people we never met?) and the vague memory of everything associated with
her indicates. The fantasy meeting even involves a dance: “It is even
possible I danced with her – but I do not really believe that, and if,
indeed, it happened the years have so effectively sponged the events from
my mind that no slightest trace remains,” which is probably exactly what
happened.

There is one more odd disjunction that occurs at the start of the story,
where our narrator claims, “I have never made an effort to meet [Suzanne
Delage], and I doubt that she has ever attempted to meet me, if, indeed,
she is aware that I exist. On the other hand we are neither of us invalids,
nor are we blind. This woman … lives, or at least so I have always vaguely
supposed, on the eastern edge of our little city I live on the western.”
The mention of being blind is very odd indeed. Why mention this at all? We
do know that an epidemic which prevented people from being photographed hit
the city, though the narrator is not certain which it was. One disease that
does leave people blind is Small Pox, and there is an interesting
connection with the disease and quilts of just such types as the mothers
collect that is discussed below – specifically, in an attempt to eradicate
Native American populations, quilts infected with small pox were
distributed. Assuming that our narrator has suppressed the memory of a
terrible event, one in which he comes to love and hate Suzanne Delage and
then represses everything about their relationship, it is not unreasonable
to assume that they were lovers and that something disastrous happened.

We have details in the text of a denial of blindness, of her living on the
western edge of town, of his complete lack of knowledge of her appearance,
and his claim that his life is completely boring, but underneath these
details, especially parenthetically, there at least seems to be some strong
emotional certainty involving Suzanne Delage and her image, through the
daughter, has a profound affect on him at the end. If they indeed made love
on the quilts collected by their parents and spread the disease through the
town as a result, destroying families and perhaps one of them even going
blind, then a reason for the repression materializes.

While this involves a huge speculative scene (Suzanne and the narrator
possibly consummating their juvenile relationship on an infected quilt and
then devastating the town before completely suppressing the memory), the
details of epidemic, the denial of blindness, and the strange conviction
that he would come to love and hate Suzanne otherwise make very little
sense – why are they present, especially the denial of their mutual
blindness? Our narrator is metaphorically blind, but perhaps the smallpox
has made Suzanne literally so.



 THEME AND LITERARY ALLUSIONS:


 In this case, the primary literary allusion at work is also the one which
must control the theme: Proust's *Remembrance of Things Past* or *In Search
of Lost Time*. We must decide if it is a simply situational reference or if
the entire idea behind Proust's giant work is being invoked. The start of
the novel involves the narrator awakening involuntary memories of his
childhood which were forgotten through the same taste he experienced as a
child, changing his perception of his current life through all those
memories coming back. This would fit with the theme of repression of the
incredible or painful – things we cannot deal with or understand are simply
shoved to the bottom of our minds forever and we go about our lives, but
sometimes they can pop up again. The alternative, single scene reference is
as follows.

The title character is named after a scene from Proust’s *Remembrance of
Things Past*, probably first noted by Michael Andre-Driussi.

She spoke to me of myself, my family, my social background. She said: "Oh,
I know your parents know some very nice people. You're a friend of Robert
Forestier and Suzanne Delage." For a moment these names conveyed absolutely
nothing to me. But suddenly I remembered that I had indeed played as a
child in the Champs-Elysees with Robert Forestier, whom I had never seen
since. As for Suzanne Delage, she was the great-niece of Mme Blandais, and
I had once been due to go to a dancing lesson, and even to take a small
part in a play at her parents' house. But the fear of getting a fit of
giggles and a nose-bleed had at the last moment prevented me, so that I had
never set eyes on her. I had at the most a vague idea that I had once heard
that the Swanns' feather-hatted governess had at one time been with the
Delages, but perhaps it was only a sister of this governess, or a friend. I
protested to Albertine that Robert Forestier and Suzanne Delage occupied a
very small place in my life.

"That may be; but your mothers are friends, I can place you by that. I
often pass Suzanne Delage in the Avenue de Messine. I admire her style."
Our mothers were acquainted only in the imagination of Mme Bontemps, who
having heard that I had at one time played with Robert Forestier, to whom,
it appeared, I used to recite poetry, had concluded from that that we were
bound by family ties. She could never, I gathered, hear my mother's name
mentioned without observing: "Oh yes, she belongs to the Delage-Forestier
set,"giving my parents a good mark which they had done nothing to deserve.
(from Proust’s The Guermantes Way, Chapter 2).

That relationship is straightforward enough, but there are other “forgotten
things” at least hinted at in the text. In our narrator's world, the
mothers actually are acquainted, and nonsensically seek for quilts together
and then proudly display them at parties (why would they display them in
our narrator's house if Suzanne's mother were not permitted to come over?)
If the text only refers to this portion of Proust's work rather than the
entirety, then the analysis in the section above loses some of its thematic
validity.

Spanish Flu: considering the manner in which the Spanish influenza, the
1918 flu pandemic, is treated by the narrator, as an epidemic of some kind
which he thinks was Spanish influenza, it seems like something one would
remember: it infected 500 million across the world and killed perhaps
almost 100 million of them “three to five percent of the world's population
– making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history” (“1918
Flu Pandemic”). It was unusual in that it killed previously healthy young
adults because of their strong immune response:

In the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries, despite the
relatively high morbidity and mortality rates that resulted from the
epidemic in 1918–1919, the Spanish flu began to fade from public awareness
over the decades until the arrival of news about bird flue and other
pandemics in the 1990s and 2000s. This has led some historians to label the
Spanish flu a "forgotten pandemic".

The infestation of small pox in quilts seems another fact that for many
years would be forgotten by the general populace – it is shameful and
probably evil, and the disregard for human life from the civilized portion
of American society paints a fairly vile picture that is uncomfortable to
look at and might be repressed. Perhaps forgetting this past sin comes back
to haunt the community, and the ghostly presence of Suzanne at the end
serves as a symbol of this theme for our narrator's life.

PROBLEMS WITH THE SMALL POX THEORY:

The quilts take up a fair amount of time, but the women desire 18th century
quilts, though usually find ones of the earlier part of the 19th century.
The quilt which belonged to “the wife of a major in a fencible Zouave
regiment” is mentioned in particular, and is spread over the sofa. While
the name Zouave is usually associated with French forces in Africa, but
there are non-French Zouave regiments, even American units during the Civil
War and until the 1880s when they transformed into something like the
National Guard. The dating of the quilts they attained seems off, but note
the use of parentheses and “I think” this quote: “(it was their enduring
hope, I think never well satisfied, to find a piece from what they called
'American revolution times' - by which they meant the eighteenth, even such
dates as 1790 or 1799)” Our narrator is notoriously bad at thinking,
especially in parentheses, which always seem to contain some pertinent
detail. If they did attain their desire, then it might have led to
something disastrous, as we can see from the history of 18th century
American quilts:

On June 29, 1763, ... Bouquet was preparing to lead an expedition to
relieve Fort Pitt when he received a letter from Amherst making the
following proposal: "Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among
those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every
Stratagem in our power to Reduce them."

Bouquet agreed, writing back to Amherst on July 13, 1763: "I will try to
inocculate the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands,
taking care however not to get the disease myself." Amherst responded
favorably on July 16, 1763: "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the
Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that
can serve to Extirpate this Execreble Race."

As it turned out, however, officers at the besieged Fort Pitt had already
exposed the Indians in just the manner Amherst and Bouquet were discussing.
During a parley at Fort Pitt on June 24, 1763, Captain Simeon Ecuyer gave
representatives of the besieging Delawares two blankets and a handkerchief
from the smallpox ward "out of regard to them" after the Delawares pledged
to renew their friendship. While the exact meaning of his phrase was
unclear, a later invoice appears to clearly establish the purpose was
transmittal of smallpox.

Indians in the area did indeed contract smallpox. Some historians have
noted that it is impossible to verify how many people (if any) contracted
the disease as a result of the Fort Pitt incident; the disease was already
in the area and had reached the Indians through other vectors. ... The
smallpox epidemic that had occurred during Pontiac's War ... killing as
many as 400,000-500,000 Native Americans during and years after Pontiac's
Rebellion. (“Seige of Fort Pitt”)

His claim that the sheets were never used is also in parentheses – they
could have been used by a teenage couple quite easily.

The strange old widow across the street is another oddity in the text, but
I think that the narrator's claim that the Delages lived across town is
another one of his mis-remembrances … maybe she lives right across the
street.

The age of the narrator is a problem if we assume the girl is his daughter,
even though he retired “much sooner than most men” - for him to be the
father, he would have to probably be in his early or mid 30s, unless the
relationship with Suzanne lingered longer than in high school, and if it
did, that would certainly have prompted his lifelong friend to say
something more damning than that. Retiring “much sooner” is an
understatement there. Perhaps the girl is not his child, but the
relationship of her mother and the narrator probably goes much deeper than
he can remember.

It seems that his claim of Spanish Influenza hitting the town is wrong, but
it is difficult to determine if his childhood is set in 1918 or even the
1950s, as its depiction of small town groups seems fairly generically rural
or suburban America.

OTHER INTERPRETATIONS:

In light of the eerie description of the young girl and the difficulty in
getting a handle on the time line of the work if the girl at the end of the
story is his daughter from a high school relationship (is our narrator
really only in his early 30s?) there are several other explanations which
fit a few details but not all. One is vampirism: the lack of pictures of
Suzanne and her milky complexion as well as agelessness creates a kind of
immortal mind fog lurking over the town. Yet she is in some of the pictures
which were cut out and excised, and this does not explain many of the other
strange details of the text.

Borski asserts in *The Long and Short of It *that Suzanne is another name
for “Lily” and draws the parallel with the mention of queens with the
bitter old woman across the street as the villain of *Snow White *and the
apple of the story with Suzanne's presence in the Pie Club. Thus the girl
at the end is in some way still the original Suzanne, but our narrator
proved to fail as the prince to awake her from her slumber.

Gwern.net has several other reactions to the story, referenced below.

Both of these seem to fail in holistic explanations of why all these
inconsistencies occur in the narrator's memory and why he has cut out the
yearbook pictures, if not in a kind of deliberate but forgotten
suppression. They don't serve the theme of forgotten things returning quite
suddenly and unexpectedly, occasionally with disastrous consequences. The
suppressed relationship, making love on the quilts, and the spread of
smallpox through the town makes use of the majority of the details in the
text if we accept the premise: extraordinary things sufficiently removed
from every day life can be repressed and forgotten, even if they were a
huge important part of history (such as the disastrous but forgotten
Spanish Influenza, which devastated the world but was relatively forgotten,
or the spread of disease infested quilts in an attempt at genocide).

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:

Since I favor a “realistic” interpretation of this story (part of the
details show that extraordinary suppression of unwanted memories happens,
even if, for example, 1 in 20 people in the world die or are affected by
it), the strain of realism in Wolfe is actually relatively select. There
are *possibilities *of realism under science fiction or fantasy (*The
Sorcerer's House* or “The Ziggurat”, for example). “Beech Hill”, “The
Recording”, perhaps “The Flag”, “Pauls Treehouse”, and “The Island of
Doctor Death and Other Stories” are all perhaps realistic fiction, but just
as in those stories and others close to our reality, the strangeness lurks
beneath the surface – if not in the supernatural or spiritual, then in the
extreme unlikeliness of the situation.

This story is important for its almost sublime ordering as a palimpsest –
almost any interpretation can fit the premise, but in cases such as this in
Wolfe's fiction, his modernist, engineering mindset should lead us to look
for patterns of theme and in the unreliability, or we will be lost amid
infinite speculation. The published criticism on Wolfe has shown that this
is a very real possibility.

The most important feature of this story is the use of the parenthetical
asides, ostensibly extra information, revealing everything that our
narrator treats as extra irrelevant information to his story of himself.
Ultimately, he will never understand his life until he reincorporates the
relevant but separated and isolated information into his life.



 For the purposes of this write up, only a general assessment of the
historical references was necessary, and thus the following sources:
 “1918 Flu Pandemic." Wikipedia, Th Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc. 5 Aug. 2004.  Web. 5 Aug. 2014.
Borski, Robert. *The Long and the Short of It: More Essays on the Fiction
of Gene Wolfe*. Lincoln: iUniverse, Inc. 2006.

“Seige of Fort Pitt.” *Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia*. Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc. 11 May 2014. Web. 5 Aug. 2014.

“Suzanne Delage.” *Gwern.net*. 22 June 2014. Web. 5 Aug. 2014.
http://www.gwern.net/Suzanne%20Delage
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