The book by Jacob which describes Justine, but is renamed for the book (yet he still reads as Justine), is fascinating because we are reading a book about an author remembering his time with Justine and then comes upon a book written by someone else who also knew her and so we get a mirror-world of a man looking at his life though someone else’s words. It has the effect of understanding her distance from them both.
Daily Archives: June 21, 2019
page 63 of 253 of Justine
The description of Justine’s childhood from her diary and the neighborhood she grew up in are extraordinary. The children’s hand prints on the walls (to keep the evil spirits away), the killing of the exhausted camel, “A house with an earthen floor alive with rats, dim with wicks floating upon oil”, “and everywhere the the veils, the screaming, the mad giggle under the pepper-trees, the insanity and the lepers.”
Once more, my now bewildered Dove
She seems concerned with “Bewildered”, “puzzled”, and “troubled”, perhaps using Noah’s “Dove” as a metaphor for her own faith looking for “Land”? From the bird’s (and Noah’s) perspective it isn’t certain there is yet any land yet so she’s playing with uncertainty but also hopefulness in the act (she uses the word “Courage!”) of finding one’s faith.
I love her shifts in perspective; first it’s from the Dove’s POV, but the use of the word “flings” also paints a picture of Noah flinging the bird skyward – you can almost see the old “Patriarch” standing on the wet deck of the ark (“casement” “on the deep”) holding his arm skyward as he launches the bird off to look for land. It shifts again with “Columba” as if the Dove were like the Irish Evangelist who spread the gospel through Ireland and so the bird in motion searching for land is like Columba searching for a soul to land on and save.
View of the Seine looking toward Notre Dame, 1896, Henry Ossawa Tanner
