|
3 0 1
T h u r s c h w e l l
•
W r i t i n g a n d T e r r o r
.
Id
. at
.
.
Paulhan,
supra
note
at
.
.
DeLillo,
supra
note
. After this essay was written, DeLillo published a short story about a
/
survivor—titled “Still Life”—that (it seems to me) recapitulates many of the themes discussed here.
Don DeLillo, “Still Life,”
The New Yorker
, April
,
, at
–
. On
/
, Keith, who was in the tow-
ers when the planes hit, makes his way uptown to his ex-wife Lianne and their son Justin’s apartment.
He appears in Lianne’s doorway “all blood and slag, reeking of burned matter, with pinpoint glints of
slivered glass in his face.” Keith has in effect returned from the dead—Lianne, like others with relatives
and friends in the towers, immediately assumed that he must have died when they collapsed—not only
to life, but to something like his former life with Lianne and Justin.
Id
., at
. She takes him in, unsure
herself why she is doing it, and they slowly grow back together as he recovers from the surgery for his
injuries. Both of them find that they have been changed by the events. Keith had been “the man who
would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, over-intimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve,
draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything.”
Id
., at
. As Keith also says, “We used to say every-
thing, all the time. We examined everything, all the questions, all the issues,” and goes on to say that
“[i]t practically killed us.” Now, however, both Keith and Lianne find that they are ready to forego this
game of (female) hyper-analysis and (male) resistance. “Is it possible that’s over? We don’t need that
anymore. We can live without it. Am I right?” Lianne asks. To which Keith responds, “We’re ready to
sink into our own little lives.”
Id
., at
.
In fact, both of these “little lives” begin to resemble the artistic life of Lauren Hartke. During their
marriage, Lianne observes, she had been frustrated by Keith’s refusal to submit to her “need for probing
intimacy…a need that had the body in it.” “She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of
stray sensations, whatever she could breathe in from other people’s pores.” In a formulation that recalls
Lauren Hartke’s aesthetic practice, Lianne says she “used to think she
was
other people.” During the
marriage, however, this need took the form of the “urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out”—that
is, to force things and people to give up their meanings. After
/
, the need to “be other people” takes
a very different form. In a beautiful, delicate image of seeing oneself in another without imposition or
appropriation, Lianne, on the morning after they first make love again, presses her naked body against
the bathroom mirror while Keith is still in the shower, leaving him to discover “the fogged marks of her
face, hands, breasts, and thighs stamped…on the mirror,” presumably superimposed over his own
reflection.
Id
., at
. For Keith’s part, Lianne says that she had married him in spite of the fact that he
was a businessman and “not an artist”—“Doesn’t paint. Doesn’t write poetry.”
Id., at
. After
/
,
however, he begins to relate to his life in a manner that is reminiscent of Lauren Hartke’s aesthetic
impulse to “stop time, or stretch it out, or open it up”: “He began to think into the day, into the
minute. . . . He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the small lost strokes of a day or
a minute, how he licked his thumb and used it to lift a bread crumb off the plate and put it idly in his
mouth.” Justin, who is speaking in monosyllables as part of a school exercise intended to teach him
“about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts,” explains to his
father, “It helps me go slow when I think.” And like Justin, Keith himself was “going slow, easing
inward.”
Id
., at
–
.
I do not wish to over-interpret a story that is itself so deliberately light-handed in its treatment of
/
,
and that in fact warns against just such over-interpretation. In a key moment, Lianne visits her mother
and pauses to appreciate the twin still-lifes by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (which she also iden-
tifies in the Italian, as “
natura morta
”) hanging in her living room. (Notably, Morandi’s architectonic
still-life figures have been described by critics as structures, “cathedrals rather than bottles.” See Gior-
gio Morandi Exhibition, Tate Modern, May–August
, http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
exhibitions/morandi.htm, last visited April
,
.) Lianne resists the urge to analyze these “brush-
strokes that held a mystery for her . . . some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure.” Instead, she
says, “Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment.”
Id.
, at
.
LAL1902_07.fm Page 301 Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:21 PM
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
