Adam asked us to think about how Kurosawa's axiomatic expression functions in Special Exits. I must say, when I began reading this memoir, I expected to be looking for the ways in which the artist/author, Joyce Farmer, would use the means provided by the graphic format to illustrate the process of the end of life; I thought I would be looking for the ways that pacing, space, time, and composition would function to reveal her parents' deep and tumultuous--and slow and painful--transition into death. But I found myself thinking more about the way that art functions, as a plot device, in the memoir, and how, more existentially, art functions as a facet of life and an affront to death. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, I am drawn to a quote about the relationship between art and death from an article I quoted in one of my first posts on this blog. The article is a chapter from Andre Bazin's book, What Is Cinema? In it, he writes about the function of art, historically, as a means of defeating death. Bazin points to the role of sculpture in the burial rites of the ancient Egyptians. He says: "[N]ear the sarcophagus, alongside the corn that was to feed the dead, the Egyptians placed terra cotta statuettes, as substitute mummies which might replace the bodies if these were destroyed. It is this religious use, then, that lays bare the primordial function of statuary, namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life." This preservation of life by its representation seems to me to find an interesting, but complicated, place in a work like Special Exits. I am left to wonder if a work of art, even and especially a work of nonfiction like this one, which deals with the end of life, or seems to be oriented towards a telling of the deaths of two people is alike the Egyptian use of terra cotta statuettes: that is, does Special Exits, or any work about the death of its main characters, work as a meditation meant to preserve them and protect them against death? or does it work simply to preserve their deaths instead?
I am left wondering whether Lars' growing superstition towards the end of the memoir (is this the right word for his growing sense of the hereafter? Is a term like Nabokov's potustoronnost' a better one?) is meant to function as a kind of attempt to negotiate with the ways in which the living, with no epistemological surety about what comes after death, if anything does, themselves negotiate with the coming ends of their lives. I think it significant that Lars, towards the end of the memoir, seems to imagine Charon in his ferry beckoning him towards the hereafter, and that he chooses to make ready payment for his passage across the river Styx. I think it is perhaps more significant to remark that Joyce Farmer seems to think it important, both for personal and for literary reasons, to include and extend the function of Greek mythic elements in both her real life (see the scene at the mortuary in which the title I take for this post comes) and in the work itself, embedding the notion of her father's superstition in the text and adopting it for herself in his memory in real life.
Perhaps there is no experience more universal than death. But can we call this an experience? Is something which we have no ability to talk about once we're gone something we can call an experience? That is, don't we have to have the ability to communicate experience for experience to be constructed in the ways that make it experience? This is where and why I think that Farmer's literary and artistic efforts in a work like Special Exits are perhaps more important and more significant than other works we've read for this class. That she is able to communicate the experience of death for her parents, means that she has both demonstrated and conquered the fundamental paradox of narrative's relationship with death. That is, however secondhand this process of communicating the experience of death must necessarily be, however refracted it must appear to us, and however fleeting and ultimately unknowable the experience actually is, Farmer shows us the power of the artist's eye to capture, through narrative, the incomprehensible, secondary relationship between art and the inevitability of death that it is meant to, or has been meant to, obstruct.
by Kyle O'Malley
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