(urth) _Edges_ shows "Suzanne Delage" involves memory loss; SD is probably Bram Stoker's _Dracula_

[Gwern Branwen]

I recently purchased a scan of the 1980 SF anthology _Edges_ to check the
accuracy of my transcript of Wolfe's enigmatic short story "Suzanne
Delage" (https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage), which was first published
in it. The scan confirmed that,
as I suspected, some of the very-long paragraphs were mistakenly
combined, and helped me correct a few typographic errors like missing em-dashes.

But what was more interesting was it turns out that _Edges_ contains
more commentary on "Suzanne Delage" than anyone on Urth.net or
elsewhere has ever pointed out online (that I am aware of from my
extensive searches). It was previously pointed out that Virginia
Kidd's very short introduction to the story says that

> His short story hereunder is a den of iniquities; no one else could have written it.

And this has motivated the search for an esoteric narrative. But what
hasn't been pointed out before is that Ursula K. Le Guin's
introduction to the anthology as a whole contains a brief description
of what the iniquities in question are:

> ...Some—Engh, Mitchison, Sanders, Dorman—write of existences at the limits of civilization/the comprehensible/the known, that gleaming uneasy ground where two kinds or cultures meet, or fail to meet: the boundary, no man’s or woman’s land. Wolfe, and Pei, and Emshwiller tell of lives lived on the edge of hope, or a little over the edge.

So, Wolfe's story in some way involves a life lived 'a little over the
edge of hope', which once had great hope and yet has since become in
some way hopeless as a result of great iniquities. (None of the
stories in _Edges_ I've skimmed so far ends well, so we can safely
assume that "Suzanne Delage" must represent a Bad End, even without
Kidd telling us about iniquities.)

This is interesting but still
fairly consistent with many interpretations of "Suzanne Delage". But
it gets more interesting: the front and back cover of _Edges _
includes *per-story summaries*, written, presumably by Le Guin (or
more likely, Kidd). These summaries do not include the story names,
but because there are only 12 stories, by process of elimination and
checking against the individual story introductions / stories, we can
confidently identify almost all of the summaries, except for one: the
summary for either "Suzanne Delage"/Wolfe, Pei, or both, is:

> "VISIONS:
> ...
> - of a sweetheart forever lost"

(I suspect that this summary is meant to apply to both, and they were
just too similar (as Le Guin's intro indicates) to give 2 different
blurbs too.)

So, since the protagonist doesn't recall ever so much as meeting
Suzanne Delage, much less her being his sweetheart, his memory must
have been damaged or altered in some respect.

This represents one of the first really solid clues as to what's going
on in SD, I think.

Any interpretation which doesn't involve memory loss is at odds with
the external evidence. This means we can reject: Borski's Snow White
theory (nothing in Snow White involves memory loss and his criticism
of the prince doesn't match up with the prince being victimized); the
sheer-probability/missed-connections stories (there is in fact
*exactly that* missed-connections story in _Edges_ - It's just not SD,
it's the Emshwiller story!) or the shaggy-dog-story explanation; most
of the cloning hypotheses; the sexual affair/romance gone bad ones (no
way for him to brainwash himself so totally) etc.

We are left with: vampires; underspecified Spanish Influenza theories;
and underspecified ghosts.

Ghosts generally do not come with any brainwashing or memory-loss
powers, so it's hard to see what sort of narrative that yields.
Spanish Influenza comes off a bit better, due to the association with
encephalitis and comas (see also _Sandman_), but it's very hard to
give a purely naturalistic explanation here: both the narrator and
Suzanne Delage appear to be very alive and well, and not in a coma,
and the narrator, who is the one who ought to be brain-damaged here,
asserts a successful life with a career and multiple marriages after
an athletic highschool career in which he is visible in many photos
and participated in many football games.

The one SD theory which suddenly looks extremely attractive in light
of comments about 'a sweetheart forever lost' is vampirism, and we can
now be more specific about what classic mythological horror monster
Wolfe is invoking, which we are supposed to recognize the allusions to
in order to fill in the gaps and understand the true story: Bram
Stoker's _Dracula_!

I don't believe anyone has brought it up before, but the parallels are
(ahem) uncanny.
Wolfe loves vampires, of course, and recall that _Dracula_ is all
about stealing a nubile young bride, and one of Dracula's canonical
powers is mind-control by biting & hypnosis. If Suzanne Delage was the
protagonist's lover and a vampire decided to take her, then we can
explain everything neatly: a vampire (Delage's implied but unmentioned
husband?) mind-controlled Delage into leaving him and him into
forgetting about her very existence (no inconvenient questions), and
destroying the photos that might remind them of each other or serve as
dangerous documentation, and perhaps adding post-hypnotic suggestions
to avoid each other. (Note that in _Dracula_, Dracula makes a
particular point of trying to destroy all documentation the
protagonists have collected about him.) The narrator then *has* been
the victim of a truly extraordinary event passing the bounds of all
ordinary rationality, one which involves great iniquities, plural, and
"a sweetheart forever lost", parallel to the Pei and Emshwiller
stories.

The Spanish Influenza references and oddities may then serve as cover
for vampiric depredations: the highschool was suddenly afflicted by
new vampires preying on the students, producing anemia, exhaustion,
and other issues, which might be ascribed to lingering effects of flu
or other issues (cf. Long Covid, encephalitis, and Mina's experiences
in _Dracula_). Also a classic gimmick for vampire fiction - the crimes
covered up by a war or crime or pandemic.

The daughter is then most likely Suzanne: as dramatically appealing as
it is, and as extremely stereotypically vampiric as the 'daughter' is
described as looking, I've objected that this involves practical
difficulties. However, now we are required to invoke mind-control &
memory-modification powers, so there's no longer any difficulty in
things like Suzanne pretending to be her own daughter, and it explains
why the encounter had such an impact on the narrator (the old buried
love trying to overcome the vampiric mindcontrol), and the oddly
ephebophilic tone people have remarked on - but of course, the "Brides
of Dracula" female vampires were lethal seductresses in _Dracula_ (a
lead followed by much subsequent vampire fiction). We can also explain
how Suzanne is out in broad daylight with no apparent ill effect if
this is a vampire story: she is cursed like Mina Harker
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mina_Harker), and increasingly vampiric
in powers and nature, but not actually a vampire until she dies.
(Since there are no apparent vampire hunters and the protagonist &
Suzanne are still well within an ordinary human lifetime, there is no
particular reason to assume Suzanne has died and become fully
vampiric.)

We can go even further: the collecting expeditions are probably how
the vampire located the town to parasitize. _Dracula_, as has been
noted, is chock-a-block with trains, and we are told that the mothers
'once or twice went by rail'; rail, of course, would be the logical
way to transport a vampire and his coffins, inasmuch as Dracula's
preferred method of ship or carriage would not work in a contemporary
1920s settings for a family which doesn't have a carriage and lives in
a landlocked town. At some point, they dug too deep into antiquities,
and unearthed an aristocratic family they would have done better to
leave undisturbed, and the next time, the female thralls ensured
transport for their fell master to fertile new grounds to hunt...

So, I think this resolves SD. It explains all of the external evidence
and fits the internal evidence demands of an extraordinary forgotten
event, it fits into how we know Wolfe liked to refashion and allude to
sources and is a truly Wolfean reading in a way that the suggestions
about cloning or ghosts have been unable to provide, the parallels
like the destruction of documentation or the Brides of Dracula or
mind-control/hypnosis or Mina Harkness being cursed or the mention of
just 1 trip by train are striking (and unexplained by all other
theories), it provides a satisfyingly horrifying narrative of a small
town being stalked and controlled by a vampire

------------------

The _Edges_ table of contents:

#. Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin
#. “The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear's Stead” by Damien Broderick
#. “Omens” by Carol Emshwiller
#. “Touch the Earth” by Scott Sanders
#. “The Other Magus” by Avram Davidson
#. “Peek-a-Boom” by Sonya Dorman
#. “Suzanne Delage” by Gene Wolfe
#. “The Finger” by Naomi Mitchison
#. “Barranca King of the Tree Streets” by Lowry Pei
#. “Thomas in Yahvestan” by George P. Elliott
#. “The Vengeance of Hera” by Thomas M. Disch
#. “Falling” by Raylyn Moore
#. “Father Returns from the Mountain” by Luis Urrea
#. “The Oracle” by M. J. Engh

The back cover rules out 4 stories easily by providing their authors:

Back cover:

> - Tom Disch: on the Vengeance of Hera in White Plains, New York [“The Vengeance of Hera”]
> - Naomi Mitchison's dark tale of magic in modern-day Africa [“The Finger”]
> - Avram Davidson’s: lament for a misplaced magus [“The Other Magus”]
> - M. J. Engh’s: poignant, moving novella of love, revolution, and the dragon at the bottom of the world [“The Oracle”]
>
> A dozen dazzling journeys that hurtle you across the vast landscape of the imagination to its furthest... EDGES

We can cross them off the list of the dozen stories, and turn to the
front cover, and begin reading through the stories to figure out their
summary:

> GLIMPSES:
>
> - of disaster too great to believe
>
>    [“Falling” by Raylyn Moore]
> - of a captured quantum creature
>
>    [“Peek-a-Boom” by Sonya Dorman]
>
> VISIONS:
>
> - of a lover never known
>
>    [This is *not* "Suzanne Delage", but Emshwiller's "Omens", as the story introduction makes clear: "There are reputed to be a limited number of possible story situations, anyhow, of which boy meets girl is one. Boy almost meets girl is another." The story then confirms this.]
> - of a sweetheart forever lost
>
>    [There are only 2 possible candidates for this (as Urrea's “Father Returns from the Mountain” is the only other unlisted story and doesn't match): “Suzanne Delage” by Gene Wolfe; and “Barranca King of the Tree Streets” by Lowry Pei.]
>
> JOURNEYS:
>
> - to the last days of a dying empire
>
>    [“The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear's Stead” by Damien Broderick]
> - to the land of lust and lost gods
>
>    [“Thomas in Yahvestan” by George P. Elliott]
> - to an awesome world of earth and sky
>
>    [“Touch the Earth” by Scott Sanders]

Assuming that both Wolfe & Pei are meant by 'a sweetheart forever
lost', that means 11/12 stories are covered on the covers. Apparently
omitted from both front & back cover is:

- “Father Returns from the Mountain” by Luis Urrea

Skimming, Urrea's story is pretty weird and experimental, so I'm not
surprised it got omitted. I'm not sure how I'd capsule-summarize it
either.

--
gwern