Prac Crit

Today was an essay day. Chaucer and the Woman Debate in Medieval England. But instead of thinking about anti-feminism and the Wife of Bath, I ended up thinking about Leonard Cohen songs. This, of course, is not fault of my own but the fault of my Leonard-hating correspondent - and I shall hold her entirely responsible when my Chaucer essay is trashed at tomorrow's supervision.

I give you my alternative essay, on Suzanne, by that frightful but conflicted cad, Leonard Cohen.

Suzanne and the dialectics of desire and abandonment


Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
you can hear the boats go by
you can spend the night beside her
and you know that she's half crazy
but that's why you want to be there
and she feeds you tea and oranges
that come all the way from China

Leonard Cohen's Suzanne is the construct of a male-inscribed literary and oral tradition. The elusive and enigmatic speaker, and his repeated and haunting use of the word 'you' suggests a universal male experience, with the assumption that any male quest for intimacy with Suzanne will be unquestioningly accepted, and that the speaker's own experience will be echoed in that of the anonymous person to whom the song is addressed.

The imagery of the river in the opening lines locates the speaker's experience in the context of the love tradition of ages past, the river having long been the symbolic scene of love, longing and mourning from bibilical times ('By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down and wept') to the present day (ask Justin Timberlake - why does he want us to cry him a river, not a lake?). The river evokes loss, yet it is also Suzanne's abode. The implication of ownership on Suzanne's part instils her with a power that the abandonment of the speaker seems to deny her. Yet the fact that she lives by this image of eternal longing suggests that whereas the 'you' in the poem will 'spend the night beside her', thereby implying a departure the following day, for Suzanne the state of longing is one which endures, almost to the extent that it dictates her existence. Nevertheless, an encounter with Suzanne remains on her terms: the repetition in the next verse of the words 'she'll want' hints that not only does she articulate her own desires but that she does so insistently.

What power does Suzanne hold over men? The opening lines appeal to the senses, yet are double-edged: the sense of hearing is evoked in 'you can hear the boats go by' but what is actaually heard is a vessel that is passing through, merely transitory as Suzanne's men inevitably seem to be; the sense of taste is evoked, for 'she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China' - yet this is a bitter concoction, despite its momentary exotic appeal. Suzanne's mental state, moreover, is a force of attraction: the syllabic balance of the sentence 'And you know that she's half crazy, but that's why you want to be there' reinforces not only a synergy in Suzanne's mental state and man's desire, but it also articulates a double-voice, an argument followed by rebuttal. This suggests that the speaker and addressee are both one and the same person, a conflicted schizophrenic self. A self, moreover, who is attracted by a melancholy and vulnerable woman, one with whom he knows he will inevitably achieve a brief and easy intimacy, only to abandon her.

Yet Suzanne's power endures, even after the encounter. Like Euripides' Trojan Woman, who are self-consciously aware of their role in the future oral and literary tradition as exempla of suffering and grief, Suzanne exists to be left and yet remembered. The tea, the oranges, even her choice of abode (location, location, location, darlings) can be seen as a cunningly manipulative attempt to feed a poet his fodder to enable him to encapsulate their brief relationship as a series of beautiful and charming moments through which, by the power of his nostalgia and song, she will achieve immortality.