Re: From Daumier to Smith
Mattis Fishman (mattis@argos.argoscomp.com)
Wed, 15 Sep 1999 16:21:05 -0400 (EDT)
Hello,
I would like to say that I am also that I am very fond of De Daumier Smith
(although not to the exclusion of Down at the Dinghy, a personal favorite).
It seems that Jim is puzzled by the epiphany at the shop window, and to
me the viewpoint presented by Russell as described by Jon and supported
by Pasha seems almost contrived. It certainly is a nice "moral", that our
self-centered, cerebral observations can cause the simple, sincere and
genuine "observee" to lose balance, yet it seems unrelated to the rest of
the story which does not deal so much with Jean interfering in others' life
so much as trying to figure out his own.
The events at the store window puzzle me as well, and perhaps this is an
indication of "weak" writing, or a least the "willfully strange", in that,
as everyone seems to suggest, it is just too hard to see what brought
about the rapid change (by the way, Pasha, I thought that he did not "cut
loose" his students at this point, but reinstate Howard and Bambi, no?).
As for what Jim seems not to like about his character, self-centered
and oblivious, I get an entirely different feeling.
What seems to stick out the most obviously in this story is that Jean
is lonely, isolated young person, who indulges in fantasy to the point
that he lies more convincingly than he tells the truth. If his lies
were designed solely to gain credibility with others I could see calling
him self-centered, but he seems so lost, so absorbed in the persona he has
created for himself, from his name, to his religion, to his dislike of
chairs, etc., that he appears to be pitiable. His infatuation with Sister
Irma, his dreaming about the Yoshotos' moaning, his lies, are all
important only to him, and the story masterfully contrasts his own
rich imaginings with the negligible reactions of those around him:
the Yoshotos nods, Sister Irma's non-responses. I think he is so
engrossed in this mode of thinking that one would need to be a lonely
19 year old to recognize it, and of course no lonely 19 year old
would be able to recognize it (or would admit it, anyway).
The scene at the window, then, is really an un-epiphany, in the sense
that he did not go from some unelightned state similar to ours into
a higher awareness which we are looking to share through the story, but
that he arrives, having started from a position which is pointedly lacking
a normal sense of perspective, at an awareness we wished he would have had
in the first place. I admit I do not see the significance of the
surgical appliance store and the contents of its windows beyond simply
viewing it as a prosaic and rather humble setting for an ordinary person
to be doing what DDS realized he should have been doing all along, living
his life honestly (in the sense of self-honesty) and letting everyone
else live their's.
all the best,
Mattis