That long bony finger....
Dear Tara and Anthony,
In Chapter 7 we find the Grim Reaper, in the guise of old Doc, pursuing the bus and those on board it. The bus-driver cannot believe his eyes that he once again is seeing the old Doc peering out of his broken-down car, at the same spot and exactly as the bus-driver saw him the prior week. The bus-driver distrusts old Doc and admonishes him to quit following his taillights, to give up trying to stop him “with that long bony finger of his.” The bus-driver tells old Doc that he did not ask for medicine to help him out of this world. “It was always the same medicine—something to put us to sleep, something never to awaken us until we were dead.” Aboard the bus Madge and Homer also talk of death, specifically the rumored murders of various people from their hometown.
In my previous post (Oct. 7), I wrote about the novel’s way of exploring life and death, not only as two points on a continuum, but also as cohabitating, simultaneous states of being for individual characters. In this I’m reminded of the epigraph from one of my favorite books published this year: Chilean writer José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night (translated by Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades, and Megan McDowell). The epigraph (and the basis of the novel’s title) is a quote from Henry James, Sr. in a letter to his sons Henry and William:
“Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.”
I love this quote and reflect on it in the context of the characters in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Take for instance Mr. Spitzer, haunted by the tragic suicide of his twin brother, Peron. Mr. Spitzer lives, but the roots of his consciousness and identity are stuck fast in the quotidian recognition of his brother’s death. For Mr. Spitzer, the wolves are the constant reminders of his brother--the strangers who mistake him for Peron; items of his brother’s that he discovers in his own clothes’ pockets; the recollections that unmoor him, confused as to whether the occurrences happened to him or Peron. And, perhaps, Catherine Cartwheel is Mr. Spitzer’s chattering, obscene bird of night, with her uncanny ability to know where Mr. Spitzer has been without ever leaving her bed, and her oft proclaimed romantic love for Peron, at Mr. Spitzer’s expense.
Wishing you happy flowering and fructifying,
Lori
PS I will be returning to The Obscene Bird of Night in a future post on how the novel’s form mirrors that of its sprawling Casa, the retreat house where many of the characters live, as is the case with Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, and the sea-blackened house.