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

[Gwern Branwen]

I've added a bunch of stuff to https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage based
on further pondering & reading _Dracula_, which provided no major
revelations but fills in a number of details and parallels - the
_Hamlet_ ones are especially hard to explain away.

Miscellaneous:

- are there email delivery problems with Urth.net?

    Gerry Quinn's email was delivered to me but doesn't appear in
http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2023-August/thread.html
while a 'Factory Farmer'
http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2023-August/054343.html
doesn't show up in my Gmail.
- Japanese Suzanne Delage discussions: there was apparently recently
published a literary magazine analysis of SD in Japanese, as attested
by a bunch of tweets, describing it as long (20+ pages?) and in-depth.

    Frustratingly, none of them describe what the analysis says. Does
anyone know what, if anything, new it brings to the table? (I assume
it doesn't take the Dracula approach because it was published months
before my emails; is it a Proust-only interpretation?)

More interpretation:

- The lack of playing football and being relegated to the bench,
despite a previously active lifestyle and no mention of a reason for
poor football playing, can be explained by the narrator being
vampirized after defeat.
- The narrator is not simply passive, he is trapped in the town by the
vampires (thematically like Harker realizing he is trapped in
Dracula's castle to prevent him from telling the rest of the world
anything).
- Pie Club: I think the 'Pie Club' name can now be given a satisfying
explanation. The narrator does not say the real title was 'Pie Club',
he hesitates, saying only "it was called, I think, the Pie Club" -
which is a hint of a memory lapse/erasure involving the club.

    Thanks to the Claude-2 AI's suggestion, we can interpret this as
*Wolfean irony*: the Pie Club is not about delicious desserts for its
members, but is itself a delicious dessert for a member - the vampire
Suzanne Delage. The vagueness of the photo, aside from concealing
Delage's inability to be photographed or seen in a mirror, helps
conceal the necks and 'anemia' of its members. (_Dracula_ emphasizes,
apropos of vampire Lucy, that young weak vampires do not necessarily
turn their victims into vampires. So none of Suzanne's victims early
on would have to become vampires too.)
- _Dracula_ turns out to have a frame story of Jonathan Harker
collating the documents for his son to read about the victory over
Dracula and understand why Mina Harker was such a wonderful woman; the
preface doesn't reveal this, but once you get to the end, the
postscript does.

    This is exactly parallel to the narrator of SD, who is analogous
to Jonathan Harker, fruitlessly reminiscing about his defeat and with
a vague sense that Suzanne Delage was a wonderful woman (if her
daughter was so beautiful).
- The first few chapters of _Dracula_ are rife with parallels or
echoes in SD; this makes sense because the stories diverge rapidly,
but I also suspect that it reveals Wolfe's methodology here: he was
consulting _Dracula_ but it is a substantial novel and so he mostly
was skimming the first few chapters.

    - The textiles association may be explained here: Harker notes
that Dracula's castle is lavishly furnished with textiles which are
eerily well-preserved compared to the historical textiles he had seen
in England, even in royal palaces.
   - The 'certain racial minorities' comes immediately to mind when
reading Dracula's long blood-and-soil monologue speech about martial
glory and 'the four nations', but it especially explains the material
on the American Revolution & Civil War. Dracula is obsessed with
Hungarian/Transyvlanian independence and martial glory, and the
closest analogies to those in 1920s America are the Revolution & Civil
War.

    So we can now explain why SD wastes all this space on textiles &
military antiquarianism: it is deliberate stylistic echoing of the
opening of _Dracula_.
    - _Hamlet_: It turns out _Dracula_ makes *several* references to
not just Hamlet, but to the Ghost in Hamlet - just like SD! This is
quite a 'coincidence'.

        First: Harker refers to the ghost as analogous to Dracula,
both disappearing at sunrise, and of course, the ghost of his father
is the more-things-under-heaven-and-earth thing Hamlet refers to in
the quote SD alludes to. So the allusion to Dracula goes straight
through: extraordinary thing -> Ghost -> Dracula. Dracula is the
extraordinary thing the narrator encountered, like Harker, but can't
remember.

        Second: Harker later on misquotes Hamlet. The missing part of
the quote beforehand goes: "Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me." /
"Remember thee? / Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat / In
this distracted globe. Remember thee? / Yea, from the table of my
memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records, / All saws of
books, all forms, all pressures past, / That youth and observation
copied there, / And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the
book and volume of my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter." So,
_Dracula_ draws our attention to memory loss and records dealing with
our supernatural - just like SD.

        Continuing the omissions we see: "...O most pernicious woman!
/ O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! / My tables,---meet it
is I set it down, / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain."
This, of course, inescapably looks like a reference to "Suzanne
Delage's daughter" at the end: she smiles ("and, smiling but intent on
her own concerns"), but is a deceiving lying villain. Alas, the
narrator's tables of memory have failed him, and he doesn't know to
beware smiling villains.

     (I'll again point out that this all makes sense if SD =
_Dracula_, but makes no sense under accounts like Proust-only
interpretations. It's just sheer coincidence that _Dracula_ also
independently just happens to allude to the parts of _Hamlet_ most
relevant to SD?)
    - Missing parallels: explained by Lucy & Lucy's mother. One
awkward part of SD = _Dracula_ is the narrator+Suzanne :: Jonathan :
Mina, but then where do the mothers come in? The missing part of
_Dracula_ is that Mina is only the *second* Englishwoman to be
vampirized; her best friend Lucy is vampirized first, and Lucy's
mother is responsible for Lucy's turning into a vampire by
accidentally sabotaging all of the anti-vampire defenses Van Helsing
erects, before dying of fright herself. (Van Helsing et al then kill
vampire-Lucy.) So this adds in a mother who dies in the story, and it
fuses Lucy & Suzanne: Delage's mother dies during the vampire fight,
and Lucy-Suzanne becomes a vampire but survives due to the absence of
a Van Helsing.
    - Stylistically: _Dracula_ is one of the canonical Gothic novels,
having long survived Gothicism itself. SD, once you look with
Gothicism in mind, is stuffed full of Gothic tropes, from attics to
creaking old houses to moths to words like 'woebegone'. Further, we
all assumed that the book the narrator was reading was some sort of
nonfiction book... but actually, his description fits Gothic novels
(like Dracula) perfectly.

        They are generally considered low-class fiction to be sold by
the pound, which were quite a fad at times, and which could be
accurately described as "somewhat political, somewhat philosophical,
somewhat historical" (critics of Gothic novels have frequently noted
their many political themes, often including vulgar levels of
anti-Catholicism or anti-clericism like _Melmoth_; and as already
mentioned, Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ pursues its own political themes of
development/progress/modernity vs superstition, to a degree that my
references if anything understate - by leaving out parts like how
overnight transport of fresh out-of-season garlic grown in advanced
Dutch glass greenhouses plays a key part in the fight against Dracula
early on).
    - Dracula early on reveals his intent to kill Harker by forcing
Harker to write & sign fraudulent letters in which he claims to have
left Dracula's castle unharmed, which could be mailed out
posthumously, giving Dracula an alibi. This amplifies the theme of
tampered-with documents, like mutilated photographs or yearbooks. (It
also heightens the inversion of the narrator, who never consults with
anyone else nor makes copies of documents; while the protagonists of
_Dracula_ are positively consulting Robert's for how to run their
vampire committee properly and making copies constantly, frustrating
Dracula's success in destroying originals.)
   - _Dracula_ emphasizes the difficulty of getting any proper
Protestant Englishmen to believe in vulgar, even Catholic, things,
like vampire superstitions, and the complete helplessness of England
against Dracula. Van Helsing harangues the closed-minded English for
not understanding the world is full of mysterious, even supernatural
things, like hypnosis, which science is still assimilating, and that
there is much to learn from superstitions and religion.

        Nor do they have the luxury of leisurely inquiry and waiting
for authorities, religious or secular: in one particularly striking
passage, Van Helsing notes that Dracula was a genius while alive, and
has been engaged in progress & science of his own, slowly waking up
from his mental slumber of centuries, and discovering how to conceal
his coffins in a way mortal men would never uncover, and after these
experiments, was within days of victory when Van Helsing et al caught
up to him. It is unsurprising that a less-prepared town, with less
access to things like Dutch greenhouses, would lose the race.

--
gwern