from
Archetypes of Self in Suzanne.
Suzanne was first published in Parasites of Heaven (1966) and later released by
Columbia Records, the first track of Cohen’s debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967).
‘Suzanne takes you down
To her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by,
You can spend the night beside her’. (vv.1-4)
Suzanne is the dual-feminine subject presented alongside the second-person ‘you’,
who forms the direct participant under the influence of the subject, Suzanne. This affects us, we ourselves are being addressed as participates in the song, as part of its “content”.
Cohen subtly reveals a third subject; he who addresses “you”, as narrator. Suzanne influences the participant, ‘you’ as her dual subject under the influence of the narrator, who incants the creator’s voice. This subliminal trinity contained within the opening line imparts an important frame of three subjects.
Suzanne may be interpreted in multiple ways: firstly, as Suzanne Verdal, the Canadian dancer who lived along the St Lawrence River in the 1960’s, the “real” historical figure of the song. However, I will avoid the autobiographical aspects and focus on the archetypal character of Suzanne as the symbol of the anima.
‘And you know that she’s half crazy
But that’s why you want to be there’. (vv.5-6)
The archetypal element of the song is the water, thematically forming the dwelling place of the subject, scene and time; the conceptual theatrical “skene”, as the background of the song.
The ‘boats go by’ and the ‘night beside her’ reflect the transient passages of life upon the eternal water of time, a symbolic union of opposites; the permanent transience of time contained in space. The flowing water of the river and cosmological turn of night performs a permanent, changing state personified by the figure of Suzanne.
‘And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her.
That you have no love to give her.
She gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you’ve always been her lover’ (vv. 7-13)
She performs a personified unconscious shift. From the state of having ‘no love to give her’, she unifies the subject on ‘her wavelength’, she speaks through and as the river- personified as the water- she reveals the ‘answer’ that is reawakening and affirmation her eternal love; that you've always been her lover').
The unconscious shift is initiated by the ceremony of drinking ‘tea and oranges’, a consummation of exotic fruit and water, considering the alchemical parable of solutio that ‘until all be made water, perform no operation’, it comes to symbolise the corporeal dissolution in the water.
Jung considered the conceptual affinity between the alchemical solutio, as ‘mercurial water (…) (to the) mysterious psychic substance, which nowadays we would call the unconscious psyche’ (JUNG 2013: 79).
Consider this affinity in relation to Suzanne.
The influence of Suzanne to embody and speak through the river may come to symbolise her power to enact a psychic shift, as anima, by the mercurial element of the water, the unconscious transformation of the corporeal body.
‘And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them.
But he himself was broken,
Long before the sky would open.
Forsaken, almost human,
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone’. (vv. 19-30)
Note the changes of subject and time. First, the shift of the central subject Suzanne (the feminine subject, as anima) to Jesus, the masculine subject, as animus. Then, the shift of time, the change from present tense in v.1 to the past tense in v.2. We have entered into the past, but what remains is the river, the permanent water as solutio unifying subjects and time across space. Thus, the river is mercurial water transforming subject and time..
Analytically, this is the submergence into the “mysterious” activity of the unconscious. However, it is Cohen, as narrator, who enacts the descent of the subject ‘you’ into the depths of the past, the archetypal underworld and the introspective. The perspective shifts from the surface persona into the depths of the collective unconscious. The fate inevitable of this descent came from very outset when it was Suzanne who ‘takes you down’ to reveal the ‘answer’.
Jung considered the figure of Christ a total symbol of Self (JUNG 2014: 246) yet, when considering Christ by his “dogmatic” definition as ‘sine macula’ (unspotted by sin), the Self, Jung defined was a ‘complexion oppostrum’ (JUNG 2014: 246).
By presenting Jesus as a sailor, Cohen avoids portraying his subject as “dogmatic” Christ, but as with Suzanne’s dual ‘half-crazy’ aspect, Jesus is ‘almost human’, conflicted: an equal animus, to the counter-part of Suzanne, as anima. He is not perfect in the sense of “sine macula”, even though he ‘knew for certain’, Cohen casts doubt as the nature of his subject.
Jesus embodies the tragic conditions of human frailty (‘broken’), isolation (‘his lonely wooden tower’), fear and abandonment (‘forsaken’) and incompleteness (‘almost human’), yet simultaneously, performs the divine miracle of walking on the water.
The cryptic ‘only drowning men” may see him’ may correspond to Matthew (KJV, 14:22-34), when Jesus’ disciples caught in a torrent-storm at a sea: ‘Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea, they were troubled and, saying, it was a spirit; and they cried out in fear’ (Matthew 25-6). When Peter stepped out of the ship he cried ‘Lord if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water’ (Matthew 14: 28), and drowning, Peter ‘cried; saying Lord save me’ (Matthew 14:30).
In relation to Cohen’s ‘only drowning men could see him’, Peter truly visions in his drowning moment Jesus not as a sailor, nor an apparition on the water, but the higher nature, or Self, as as Christ, the Saviour: ‘Of a truth, thou art the son of God’ (Matthew 14:33).
Analytically, Jesus walking on the water is an allegory of the animus and Self, emerging out of the depths of the collective unconscious, “resurrecting” into personal consciousness.
‘And you want to travel with him
and you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you’ll trust him,
For he’s touched your perfect body with his mind’ (vv.31-35)
To travel with one is to be conscious, aware to the sight and touch of their presence; but to travel blind is the way of our unconscious. Trust is the affinity between each subject.
Again this pattern corresponds to Matthew when Christ questions Peter’s trust and strength of faith when drowning in the water: ‘O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt’ (Matthew: KJV 14:28). In spite of blindness, the inability to see and know where one is travelling, trust predicates “faith” and unifies the subjects by the ‘touching’ of the corporeal body with the spiritual mind.
John records how Jesus cured the blind during his ministry. In one particular instance, where the source of healing was made, alchemically speaking, from the admixture of Christ’s mercurial solutio with the materia of the earth, as ‘he spat on the ground, and made clay from the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man, with the clay, and said unto him, Go wash in the pool of Siloam’ (John 9:6, KJV). The cure, as the cleansing of perception, is the resurrecting light from the darkness; analytically, the integration of conscious and unconscious mind.
Jesus said ‘Except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God’ (John 3:1-5). We may infer initiation into heaven, as second spiritual birth, necessitates the dissolution of the corporeal body into pure solutio, as spirit.
The corporeal “contents” of this solutio, as “eternal spirit”, revealed at the crucifixion when pierced in his side “forthwith came there out blood and water” (John 19:34).
Thereby, if we consider ‘until the sea shall free them’ as the transformation of the body dissolved into solutio, as spirit-the baptism into eternal life- we may consider a passage from the Book of Revelation: ‘the sea gave up the dead which were in it and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged everyman according to their works’ (Rev. 20:13).
The sea that shall free them may regard the deliverance of the body through the water into spirit; the transformative rebirth into pure elemental form.
‘Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters.
And the sun pours down like honey, On our Lady of the harbour’ (vv. 35-41)
Having reawakened and returned to present time and previous subject, Suzanne
directs the persona to the source of transformation, the water adorned with sacred and profane array from ‘Salvation Army’ charity counters. The Old Testament anima echoes from Timothy as ‘modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety: not with braided hair, or gold or pearls, or costly array’ (KJV 2:9).
The setting sun as pouring honey is a symbol that conjures sweetness when contrasted with the oranges in verse I: the sensual, particular and digestible contrasted with the fluid heavenly rays in cascade, to form a solutio from the celestial body of the sun, as Sol.
This psycho-symbolic significance Jung outlined:
‘the alchemical Sol corresponds psychologically to consciousness; the diurnal side of the psyche we must add the Christ analogy to this symbolism. Christ appears essentially as the son- the son of his mother-bride. The role of the son does in fact devolve upon ego-consciousness since it is the offspring of the maternal unconsciousness’. (JUNG 2014: 100)
Jung’s description of the alchemical Sol elicits from Suzanne a transformation of the feminine subject: from in her profane ‘rags and feathers’, to the venerated figure of ‘Our Lady of the Harbour’, Suzanne, from the Hebrew name Suzanna, meaning lily, a symbol of purity, becomes archetypal affinity with the Virgin (Symbols and Subjects in Art: 294): so it is through Sol, the dawning consciousness of the persona perceives Suzanne, as Luna in the various guises of the anima, the Virgin, Bride and Mother:
‘And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed,
There are children in the morning.
They are leaning out for love,
They will lean that way forever,
While Suzanne holds the mirror’ (vv.42-48)
Suzanne reveals the sacred and profane time encompassing the ancestral past, the drowned ‘heroes in the seaweed’, and future ‘children in the morning’ are one in present time. Thereby, the act of love is past and future present.
The sacred and profane are the heroes and flowers, the garbage and the seaweed: the dawn of children from the union of corporeal bodies, conceptually analogous to the birth or rebirth of Self, from the integration of personae, animus/anima and shadow all reflected in the mirror of Suzanne.
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