This 2013 novel by Donna Tartt won the Pulitzer Prize for
fiction this year. It received mixed
reviews when it was first published and mixed reviews from my literary
friends. Some gave it a thumbs up, some
a thumbs down, and some, like me, a sideways thumb.
The strongest reaction from my friends was that it is too
long (784 pages), too heavy on detail, repetitive, etc., etc. I agree that economy is not the author’s
strong point, and especially since a lot of the detail involves copious
consumption of drugs and alcohol, I almost didn’t finish it myself. I stuck with it, partly because I was looking
for a good reason to award it a Pulitzer Prize; partly because I was curious
how the main character, suffering from multiple psychological wounds, was going
to end up; and partly because I was quite mesmerized by the actual Fabritius
painting “The Goldfinch” as well as its fictional fate in the novel.
In any case, apart from the suspense surrounding Theo
Decker’s life drama, starting at age 13 as a motherless, practically
fatherless, unintentional art thief, the novel is worth our time for the
complexity, the artistry, and the profundity that makes any work of fiction
worth reading, however long and drawn out.
By the way, at one point the text indirectly defends the
excessive detail in the novel, suggesting that no detail in a work of art is
wasted. The artist is trying to tell us
something with every brushstroke. That
may be true, but a writer might be wise to attend to her readers’ capacity,
lest she lose them.
As for the complexity, The
Goldfinch can be read, studied, and appreciated from numerous
perspectives. It is a coming of age
story as Theo is initiated into a world of violence, homelessness, drug
addiction, petty theft, as well as not so petty theft, and a whole dark
underworld of criminal activity. It is
also a conversion/recovery narrative as he eventually meets what he himself
calls his Damascus moment, alone and suicidal in an Amsterdam hotel (on
Christmas Day no less), and begins to take responsibility for his past misdeeds
and heal from the early and sustained effects of his traumatized childhood.
It is also a realistic study of the dark underside of modern
civilization in contemporary settings like New York City, the Las Vegas desert,
and Amsterdam. In these settings the
disease of modern life is played out with drugs, alcohol, family dysfunction,
gambling, deception, , crime, heartbreak, anxiety, pain, loss, and the
incessant longing, not only for freedom from our history and circumstances, but
also for the love and belonging that could somehow fill the absence of family
and romantic fulfillment.
It is a psychological drama of Oedipal conflict, repressed
desire, hostility, and relentless anxiety.
And it is a captivity narrative as Theo is trapped by his
personal and social circumstances, his own desires, and the painting itself,
his “fateful object.”
At another level it is the universal story of human tragedy
and redemption—the hero’s entrance under dangerous conditions, his initiation
into evil, withdrawal, trial and quest, the encounter with death, rebirth and
return. In this case the mythic promises
of redemption and atonement are muted by the compromises of reality, but they
are not entirely denied. Though in the
end Theo calls himself a nihilist, he leaves the door open for God and an
afterlife.
What redeems the “cesspool” of life, Theo comes to see, is
art, illusory as it may be, for it is in art that reality strikes up against
the ideal, and it is in that space that we glimpse a mysterious something that
transcends the human tragedy and the “wreck of time.”
And what redeems The
Goldfinch, for all its failures, is the way it weaves great works of art
through its narrative, reminding us, as Theo comes to see, how beautiful
objects can speak to us past the limitations of time, space, and mortality.
Thus in the first chapter, titled “Boy with a Skull,” Theo’s
mother shows him Hal’s painting of the same name just moments before a
terrorist explosion rocks the museum, killing her, turning Theo’s like upside
down, and thrusting him into a future in which his mother’s absence becomes his
constant psychological companion.
In that chapter, his mother, an art lover and student of art
history, also delivers a commentary on “The Anatomy Lesson,” in which a
cadaver, laid out on a table, is being dissected, surrounded by students and
doctors in a medical school. In chapter
two, titled “The Anatomy Lesson,” Theo learns the lessons of loss in the
immediate aftermath of his mother’s death.
As the painting exposes the stark mortality of every individual life, so
Theo continues to be haunted by his mother’s death just as we are all required
to live our own lives in death’s shadow.
But the painting Theo’s mother had really come to see that
fateful day is “The Goldfinch” by Fabritius, a trompe l’oeil of a goldfinch
“chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle.”
In the 17th century goldfinches were popular as indoor pets,
chained to their feeders in this fashion, instead of being caged as pet birds
are today. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldfinch_(painting)) A trompe l’oeil is a realistic
painting that “deceives the eye” into seeing it as an actual object. Theo’s mother first loved a reproduction of
the painting in an art book she had as a child.
These details become significant later when Hobie, a furniture
refinisher who becomes Theo’s surrogate father and the one stable point in his
chaotic life, reflects on the value of art even if it is a copy or fake, and
when Theo reflects on the value of art even if it is an illusion, because it
saves us from gross reality.
The painting of the goldfinch also symbolizes Theo himself,
chained to his time and place; chained to his life circumstances; chained to
his addictions; chained to the painting itself, which he takes from the museum
and has to hide and later rescue; chained to the memory of his mother; chained
to a “self one does not want” and “a heart one cannot help.”
The painting thus represents layers and layers of reality
and layers and layers of illusion. The
reality of a goldfinch chained to a wall is almost repulsive, but somehow the
painting, the deceptive copy of reality, redeems that grossness, that
“cesspool,” as Theo calls human reality.
And the painting, which becomes Theo’s burden, also becomes
his salvation, as it lifts him “above the surface of life” and teaches him who
he is. Surrounded by secrets and lies
the painting becomes the means of Theo’s redemption, and such is the paradox at
the heart of the novel—how truth cannot be separated from falsehood, good from
evil, beauty from corruption, love from loathing, life from death.
Ironically, Theo’s friend/enemy, Boris, a Russian immigrant
who had lived for a while in Indonesia, converted to Islam, and been given the
Arabic name Badr al-Dine (“Badr” means “light”), for all his darkness—drug
addiction, crime—becomes the means by which the painting is rescued and Theo is
saved from punishment for having innocently removed the painting from the
museum in the aftermath of the explosion.
And it is the light that draws Theo’s mother to both the paintings that
she loves (“that clear pure daylight” in “The Goldfinch”) and those that she
hates (that “radioactive” quality of the corpse in “The Anatomy Lesson”).
No light without darkness, no darkness without light; no
imagination without reality, no reality without imagination; no truth without
illusion; no illusion without truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment