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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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God I looked into the article this is meant to illustrate, and I have feelings. The idea this mysterious, evocative short story is something to be solved, and that he's somehow cracked the code. And it must be precisely about Dracula. Don't ask yourself why the name comes from Proust, and why the style and themes are so heavily proustian. Proust is not genre literature, it isn't in communication with the literature of ideas, which means it is of no value. Gene Wolfe is genre literature, so the story must be about vampires, and nothing else. Any literary depth is mere distraction, a ruse meant to mislead you and have you fail the test. Can't wait for the rationalist Pale Fire remake!!!
From Gwern's "solution":
Dafuq?
Yes, two different stories both alluding to the most quoted work in English goddamn literature can't be a coincidence. It's not like the line "there are more things in Heaven and Earth..." has been repeated so often that even Wolfe's narrator calls it "hackneyed"... Hold on, I'm getting a message, just let me press my finger to my imaginary earpiece....
I would say myself that Wolfe's alluding to a line rather than quoting it exactly serves to call up the whole feel of Hamlet, rather than a single moment. It evokes the Gothic wrongness, the inner turmoil paired with outer tumolt, the appearances that sometimes belie reality and sometimes lead it. You could take this as suggesting that Susie D. is the Devil in a pleasing shape. Or, with all the Proustian business, and the lengthy excursus about historical artifacts hanging on as though the past lies thick in the present and refuses to lift... Perhaps the secondary Hamlet allusion behind the obvious one is "the time is out of joint". Maybe Suzanne is a notional being, an idea tenuously made manifest, a collective imaginary friend or dream-creature leaking out into our reality. She looks the same from one generation to the next, because the dream of the girl next door stays the same. Perhaps the horror is that our reality is fragile, that these creations are always slipping in, and we only have a stable daylight world because we refuse to see them.
Also, the illustration sucks.
Thanks for pointing me to this. I hadn't read the Wolfe story and I appreciated it. I skipped most of the gwern fluff, precisely because while his preferred interpretation is one possible of many, what I like about Wolfe is that the story can be about multiple things beside that.
And the illustration sucks.
Goddammit now I actually have to credit Gwern for something unambiguously positive in directing me to this story.
I found myself appreciating it a lot even just on a relatively surface level. I must confess to having no experience with Proust or some of the other references it makes, but it sent my mind back to my own time in school and struck me with a very particular kind of social vertigo, thinking about all the people I vaguely knew but haven't spoken to or about since we were classmates. Like, people talk about the feeling that everyone around you is a full person with their own inner life and all that, and it feels similar to think how many people, especially in childhood, live their lives almost parallel to ours, intersecting only in passing.
Also given how many rationalists seem utterly convinced that many of not most people are just NPCs who don't meaningfully exist when "off screen" I'm not surprised that they're excited to have this mess of an interpretation that sidesteps that whole concept.
Ed: Also, the illusion sucks.