Article in Law and Literature · July 2007 doi: 10. 1525/lal

2 9 6
L a w & L i t e r a t u r e
•
Vo l u m e 1 9 , N u m b e r 2
in Beirut, she is awoken at 
:
a.m. by the sound of a tank outside her win-
dow. Going out to her balcony, she is astonished to see that it is a wedding
party, adults and children dancing through the bombed-out streets in their
best clothes with champagne glasses and roses in their hands, accompanied
by a Soviet tank. Against the backdrop of the dead city, with gunfire and
photojournalists’ flashes against the night sky, the experience is miraculous,
a vision of redeemed life far more convincing than any the hopes of the Rev-
erend Moon’s followers could possibly conjure: “Brita is gripping the rail.
She wants to dance or laugh or jump off the balcony. It seems completely
possible she will land softly among them and walk along in her pajama shirt
and panties all the way to heaven.”
69
The alternatives posed by these two wedding scenes provide another
way of reading the trajectory of Bill’s emergence into the world, his
death and his suspended, literary “convergence” with the hostage he
hoped to save. It is obvious and perhaps trite to say that the final scene
suggests that love and affirmation are possible even in the midst of
unimaginable death and carnage, and that where love is, there is the pos-
sibility of community, even among strangers and enemies (in response
to Brita’s delighted shouts to the wedding party below her, “[t]he bride-
groom raises his glass to the half-dressed foreigner on the top-floor bal-
cony”).
70
What is perhaps less trite is to notice that literature, even
though it is itself founded on the negativity of death, and even when it is
overwhelmed by the image-machine and leveling effects of capitalist
exchange, can nevertheless also be the bearer of this affirmation. 
In this regard, it is notable that 
The Flowers of Tarbes
also concludes
with a wedding metaphor. After noting the irony that the lifetime commit-
ment of marriage can become a burden to the very lovers who asked for it,
Paulhan points out that there is a similar irony, and a similar solution, in
the relationship of rhetoric (understood in his sense as the constraints and
conventions of literary form) to the absolute freedom of terrorist expres-
sion: “It may at first give the impression of being an intolerable and cold
restraint. But it is up to us to rediscover within it, at every moment, the
original joy of that first commitment, when our spirit accepted having a
body, and delighted in it.”
71
That rediscovered “original joy,” I believe, is
precisely the “life” of the “living still life” that Lauren Hartke proposes as
the model of artistic creation. It is the joy discovered by the married cou-
ple at the end of 
Mao II
in the midst of the devastation of Beirut, and by
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