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

[David Stockhoff]

Fantastic, gwern. Now I wish I had ever read Bram Stoker!

On 8/27/2023 3:50 PM, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> I've rewritten https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage to cover the new
> _Edges_ material and elaborate on the _Dracula_ interpretation. Some
> of the additions are covered below.
>
> On Sun, Aug 27, 2023 at 1:50 PM Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:
>> Interesting, but I don't see why the interpretations of anthologists
>> should be considered 'word of God', or interpreted literally.
> This isn't an 'anthologist', this is Virginia Kidd. Who in the world
> would be better suited to know what Gene Wolfe meant by the story than
> his long-time editor who he liked & would turn into a character in a
> novel, and who commissioned the story from him for her anthology and
> had to write an introduction (and a blurb) explaining it, however
> cryptically?
>
>> If the
>> narrator didn't meet Suzanne, his potential sweetheart, she is in a
>> sense forever lost in time.
> But in the more relevant senses, she's not lost at all. She's right
> there in town. He's already divorced (twice). Given their age, they
> could totally get back together into a relationship. Heck, they could
> even have kids. (The daughter is said to be 15; if Suzanne married
> shortly after graduating highschool, as would be expected for that
> time period and in absence of her going on to higher education,
> Suzanne would be something like 18 + 15 = 33yo.  Even tacking on
> another half decade or more...)
>
>> The vampire version does have the advantage that something happened to
>> the narrator in a positive rather than a negative sense.  In this she
>> was his actual sweetheart rather than the one that was meant to be.  But
>> this seems its only advantage.
> No, it has many advantages I've laid out.
>
>> And the fact is that vampires are never
>> mentioned at all or even really hinted at in the story - isn't this a
>> little over-subtle even for Wolfe?
> That's also not true. The vampire interpretation was always the
> leading interpretation for SD, because, quite aside from external
> evidence like 'den of iniquities' or Wolfe loving to put vampires
> everywhere so vampires are *always* an option in a Wolfe fic, the
> story has so many strikingly vampiric elements jammed into it: women
> who return from mysterious trips to ancient mansions mysteriously
> exhausted but then gradually recover and become eager to go back; a
> Bride of Dracula-esque young girl whose appearance could not be more
> vampiric without mentioning fangs; odd mental gaps and lacuna; a
> bizarre absence of *photographs*; the wizened old crone who hates the
> possibly-vampiric woman...
>
> For Wolfe, I'd have to say that this is actually quite blatant
> hint-dropping compared to some of the things he's confirmed in the
> past (especially considering the size & style of the story). And while
> I and others have criticized Wolfe for having a poor understanding of
> what hints readers will and will not get, and often setting up puzzles
> which require a truly improbable level of reading-Wolfe's-mind
> (verging on the level of the crackbrained logic of old text adventure
> games), I think this is not such a case.
>
> The _Dracula_ reading is so transparent once you think of it that I'm
> now a bit puzzled that no one ever solved it before. It's certainly
> not an obscure novel. Perhaps it's too difficult to recall _Dracula_
> because our memories of it are overwritten by later fiction like
> _Nosferatu_ or Bela Lugosi; sort of like the difficulty people have
> with _Doctor Frankenstein_ or _Moby-Dick_ or _The Wizard of Oz_ - the
> original is so overshadowed by all its adaptations that it's hard to
> see what is right there in plain sight when you read it (
> https://gwern.net/story-of-your-life#fn2 ).
>
> It's just that no one could ever give a sensible explanation of how it
> all added up to (what was going on with the mother, what was going on
> with Delage and the daughter, are they the same person or separate,
> are they both vampires or just one is a vampire) or where the package
> of 'can't be photographed' + 'mind control powers' + 'can go out in
> daylight' comes from etc. So it was ad hoc and circular, and at best,
> the beginning of an interpretation. Extremely unsatisfying, and merely
> the least bad theory we had.
>
> However, once you say 'it's Bram Stoker's _Dracula_', all of that
> instantly snaps into place and it's marvelous to see how Wolfe drops
> in detail after detail pointing to the inversion of _Dracula_ as the
> skeleton key. It is indeed a carefully constructed puzzle box.
>
> To give even more examples: on Reddit ConsistentPause4083
> (https://www.reddit.com/r/genewolfe/comments/161l2b3/new_suzanne_delage_theory_its_based_on_bram/)
> helpfully points out that I'm wrong about Delage being only cursed
> (partially a vampire) in order to explain how she's appearing in
> daylight at the end without burning to a crisp - because *Bram
> Stoker's vampires* are completely immune to daylight!
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Dracula#Limitations_of_his_powers)
> It's later vampire fiction which prefers the burn-to-a-crisp weakness.
> (It is a good interpretation indeed where your mistakes turn out to
> strengthen it.)
>
> Or consider the odd mention of a railroad. Why does the narrator
> bother to specify that the mothers went on a trip 'once or twice' by
> railroad? Seems like a waste of space, at best a red herring; and all
> theories previously just ignore it, no one tries to tie in railroads
> or explain how cloning or "Snow White" could be related. But guess
> what Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ - uniquely among vampire fiction - is
> full of? Railroads.*
>
> Or how about the apparent stasis of the town? Points right back to the
> _Dracula_ theme of Dracula being the enemy of humanity & progress, and
> blighting the region he rules.
>
> Or why do the old woman & Delage's mother seem to disappear with the
> narrator unable to remember what happened to them? Most of the
> theories can't or don't, but it's easily explained if they are killed
> by the vampire and would-be vampire hunters respectively, trading
> blows.
>
> Or how about the odd mention of 'a certain fundamentalist church'? Why
> did Wolfe, a Catholic, drop that in when churches, religions,
> Protestantism, Protestant fundamentalism etc are never mentioned again
> and appear completely irrelevant to everything in the story; and why
> not instead drop in an allusion to his preferred religion? Well,
> because as an inversion of _Dracula_, where Catholic vampire hunters
> are victorious over Dracula by using superior Catholic Christian
> apparatus like consecrated Eucharists (which Catholic readers have
> always enjoyed in _Dracula_), there must be Protestant vampire hunters
> who are defeated by the vampire because they trusted in the power of
> an inferior Christianity. So Wolfe gets to subtly take a shot at the
> heretics.
>
> * railroads/timekeeping/technology/progress in _Dracula_ turns out to
> be a whole topic of its own:
> https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2014-robbins.pdf
> https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/turning-back-the-economic-clock
> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/bram-stoker-dracula-and-progress-studies.html
>