2011/05/30

depthless eyes

"Here, the (again unnamed) female character – searching for her lost father in the Canadian bush – reaches an identification with Nature itself: ‘I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place.’ It is clear, though, that the cost of such an identification is total schizophrenic breakdown (which for Atwood does not necessarily carry all the positive libidinal charge that it can for Gilles Deleuze); and Nature does not reciprocate her character’s embrace. At the very end of the novel, the character has a vision of something that might be the ghost of her father, an animal, or perhaps the spirit of Nature itself: ‘I’m not frightened, it’s too dangerous for me to be frightened of it; it gazes at me for a time with its yellow eyes, wolf’s eyes, depthless but lambent as the eyes of animals seen at night in the car headlight. Reflectors. It does not approve or disapprove of me, it tells me that it has nothing to tell me, only the fact of itself […] I do not interest it, I am part of the landscape, I could be anything, a tree, a deer skeleton, a rock.’ "
(from frieze.com, on margaret atwood´s novel "surfacing")

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