A Few Lines on the Name of a Cat: Alcestis

I'll come clean with you. I decided to blog today about my choice of 'Alcestis' as the name for one of the cats in my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me because I knew that I could never make any real headway with future posts about Euripides and Plato (two  of 'the 26') and the Plato quotation about love, self-sacrifice and gender that is the final epigraph in Kiss--could never get anything said in any of these three future posts if I didn't devote a few paragraphs to Alcestis first.

Alcestis, in A Kiss Before You Leave Me, is the name of Kathleen Kincaid's cat. Kathleen communes with her Alcestis in the first chapter, where we learn in passing that Alcestis may have kittens on the way. Later in the novel, one of those kittens will save Jack Emery's bacon on Miranda Kincaid's birthday. Miranda will adopt her and soon name her Sido (for Colette's mother), and the kitten, then adult cat, deaf from birth, is seldom far from Miranda's side from that day onward.

But what about the mother cat? What about Alcestis?

She seems to be there just to give birth to the future Sido and send her packing. As Kathleen suggests in that first chapter, a mother cat has it easier than a human mother: once Alcestis has given birth to her kittens and nursed and loved and taught them for a few weeks, she gets to say goodbye to them forever. (Unlike Kathleen, Alcestis will never have to serve as a mother-in-law.)

But what's in that name?

Although the character of Alcestis goes back to Greek legend, the earliest account of her story that survives intact is in Euripides' play Alcestis (first produced in 438 BC), which is also his earliest surviving work. By the time of the Renaissance, Alcestis had become a widely-used reference for pure, selfless love. But the 'classic' Alcestis is the one we find in Euripides.

Alcestis is a Greek princess, the wife and queen of King Admetus. The preordained moment arrives when Admetus must die unless he finds a surrogate to die in his place. Only Alcestis is willing to sacrifice herself. She is remembered for that sacrifice--to which Admetus agrees--although the story is more complicated: Admetus' friend Heracles arrives shortly after Alcestis' death (about which Heracles is not informed), and for reasons of 'hospitality' Admetus proceeds to break, one after the other, the vows he's made to Alcestis on her deathbed. Heracles produces a 'new' woman, veiled, whose hand Admetus takes--only to discover that she is Alcestis, whom Heracles has won back from Death. After three further days of silence, she is fully restored, purified.

The play is, at least potentially, and especially for present-day readers, thorny and controversial.

My own reading of the play has always begun, inevitably, with the speech in which Admetus denounces his father's refusal to die for him. It is a simultaneously powerful and alienating speech that must suggest to some modern readers the question of Admetus' own tacit refusal to die for Alcestis--a possibility he never invokes but which is clearly there: he would need only to decline to make her his surrogate. He would die; she would live.

This is not to say that Alcestis would welcome such a sacrifice on his part, nor that there is no possible justification (for reasons of family or state) for his failure to make it. (Commentators, even if they ignore the issues of self-sacrifice, always explore the cultural justifications for Admetus' apparent breaches of faith after Alcestis' death.) Indeed, I hold no brief here for any one approach, and I do not claim to hold the key to Euripides' intentions. I ask only that you hear in the name Alcestis not merely the Renaissance ideal but also the multiple possibilities that are there for readers of today.

I propose between A Kiss Before You Leave Me and Euripides' Alcestis no simple analogies or parallels (and thus no easy keys to anyone's intentions). The cat Alcestis is of course not called upon to sacrifice herself, temporarily or permanently, for love or anything else. She was named, however, by her highly literate human (an editor, a fancier of crossword puzzles), who knows--and has yet to learn--a great deal about self-sacrifice in the name of love.

From Jeanette Winterson, 'The PowerBook': Epigraph 7.1 - Ambiguity

Today I come to the one epigraph in A Kiss Before You Leave Me that I find it most difficult to talk about directly--because of my reluctance to divulge certain things about the final section of the novel, which it introduces. Partly as a result of this difficulty, I'll end up saying more about the general problem of ambiguity than about exactly what happens in that final section.

The epigraph comes from The PowerBook, a novel by Jeannette Winterson (born 1959) first published in the year 2000. Winterson has been a novelist (and essayist) to read and follow since three of her earliest novels: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry (author page at Amazon.co.uk, author page at Amazon.com). Her work (most often compared to that of Virginia Woolf, especially the Woolf of Orlando) arouses strong passions and in my experience never fails to fire the reader's imagination. I recommend her website and the rest of her work as the ideal introduction.

As with other epigraphs in Kiss, the very act of quotation gives Winterson's original sentence a change of context. First, the sentence:

There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

The context, in The PowerBook, is a description of love as a force larger and more powerful than individual subjectivity, psychology, can account for. For better or worse, its context in A Kiss Before You Leave Me (and in the rest of this post) is subjective, as a result of the proximity of both (a) a particular epigraph from Plato (which we'll talk about another day) and (b) the final chapter of Kiss.

It's a sentence that, even taken in isolation, provokes strong feelings, depending in part on (a) the reader's experiences of (and approach to) love and (b) the reader's interpretation of the sentence. From time to time I've tweeted each of the epigraphs to Kiss at least once, but this is the only one that ever triggered a strong negative response.

At first glance, the sentence (there on the screen, say, of your ebook reader, at the beginning of the last section of Kiss) does not appear to be ambiguous. There are clearly possible nuances of interpretation (just try to paraphrase it: how rational or how 'Romantic' do you want to make it?; do you want to highlight or tone down the allusion to Christ-like/Christian martyrdom?; etc.)--but it appears to say something like the following: to love another person (or group, or creature, or thing) is to be vulnerable to suffering terribly, like a martyr.

I want to suggest to you, however, that the sentence ('There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet'), in its new context, is ambiguous. And that's the relatively good news: that the sentence can be 'taken' in two ways, a bit like C. Allan Gilbert's 1892 drawing 'All Is Vanity', reproduced here, or a Necker cube (see, in addition to the article in Wikipedia, the presentation here). The bad news is that I'm barred from spelling out the ambiguity of the sentence. It's something that has to fall into place for the reader.

It's not difficult. It doesn't rest on a syntactic ambiguity. It's not richly satisfying, especially for readers who don't yet know A Kiss Before You Leave Me. But seeing the ambiguity (which I can't spell out) and knowing just one thing about ambiguity (which I can)--can put you well on the way to knowing what to make of the end of the novel.

All you have to know about ambiguity--this sort of ambiguity in art or fiction--is that your task, as a viewer or reader, is not to resolve the ambiguity. Not to find some hidden sense (to be sought out) behind some manifest one (to be discarded). It's not an either-or but a both-and... to be embraced and experienced... and understood on its own terms.

Don't take my word for it. Look again at the drawing 'All Is Vanity': we aren't fully seeing it until we see it both ways. Or work through the whole theory of the Necker cube and the lengths to which viewers go to reduce ambiguity: the price they pay. Or read Shoshana Felman's extraordinary study of ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw (here, or included here).

All this may give you a clearer sense of how you deal with ambiguity, and what your options are....

From Beryl Bainbridge, 'According to Queeney': Epigraph 2.1 - The Artist, the Model - Striking a Pose

Beryl Bainbridge's novel about Samuel Johnson, According to Queeney, is the source of a second epigraph in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. (For the first, and more general remarks about Bainbridge, According to Queeney, and the real-life characters who appear in it, see here.) By the time I came to this passage in my first reading of Queeney I was so much in the habit of smiling indulgently or ironically over what Bainbridge's Johnson did and said (that's the explanation most charitable to me, at least), that I misread it. That's what I believe today, at any rate. I'll explain.

Johnson is of course best known to readers of our time as the subject of James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791), considered by many the greatest biography ever written in English. It's a 'classic', part of our or 'our' cultural heritage, one of the 'great books'.

When Boswell is first mentioned in Bainbridge's novel, the future great book is but a gleam in its young author's eye. And Johnson, in this scene, shows little faith in Boswell's ability to capture Johnson's likeness in words:

"[Boswell's account of our conversation] will not be accurate, for man's compulsion is to replicate himself. Think of painting--one has only to examine a portrait to see in the sitter a resemblance to the artist."

Ten years ago, I smiled ironically (and wrongly, I believe) at the skepticism Johnson (Bainbridge's character) expresses about Boswell's accuracy as a verbal portraitist; today, I think, I can better entertain a 'straight' reading of the passage. I used to set more store by Boswell; today I'm more conscious of the tension between Boswell's Johnson and Hester Thrale's--i.e., between the classic, 'great books', canonical version of Johnson on one hand, and Johnson as captured by the other chronicler, who was at one time categorized by some simply as his 'mistress' but whose own writings about him and her era form an alternative account increasingly appreciated in our own time.

What first recommended these lines to me as an epigraph, though, was their introduction of the notion of involuntary self-portraiture, the muddying of distinctions between artist and model, portraitist and 'sitter'. When we first see Miranda posing for Jack, their conversation takes off from his sense that her place is to be nude, his to be clothed; hers to pose, his to depict. While he sketches (and lectures) her, she gives free reign to her imagination... inadvertently planting the seeds for one of his first 'sensations': some fifty pages later, we find him--them--at work on a diptych entitled 'His and Hers', in which artist and model appear to switch roles: in the second panel, he is portrayed as her model, nudity and all. Their differences, their dissymmetry, are by no means dissolved or even suspended: the less expected of the two panels is still an elaborate joke or stunt, and his exhibitionism cannot be cast as a simple corrective. Of course, his career and their relationship are still in the early stages.

But what about the claim made by Bainbridge's Johnson, that the portraitist transforms the sitter, in the sense that portraiture is always to some extent self-portraiture? There may well be some truth to this. Perhaps the (male, let's say) portraitist skews the portrait in his own direction--whereas the (female, let's say) model guides the development of the artist in a less predefined way. This is, at least, one possibility.

From Shakespeare, 'The Tempest' and 'Measure for Measure': Epigraphs 4.1 and 6.3

Of all the epigraphs in my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me, the two from Shakespeare seem to me to require the least explanation. They are lines that a number of Shakespeare editions I've consulted do not annotate, and I suspect that my own intent in incorporating them into the novel will not surprise readers already familiar with Kiss. Let's talk about them for just a moment.

The first is part of an exchange in The Tempest (V, 1) between the wizard Prospero and his daughter Miranda:

MIRANDA: How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!
PROSPERO: 'Tis new to thee!

Miranda has spent twelve of her fifteen years on the island, and the only humans she can remember seeing before now are her own father and his deformed slave Caliban. It's little wonder that the royal party her father has brought to the island--especially Ferdinand, who Prospero intends will marry her--should dazzle Miranda; nor that her father should have a different perspective, since the party includes two conspirators who deposed him. (Prospero is the rightful Duke of Naples.)

These lines from The Tempest, transported to the beginning of the fourth section of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, stand as an invitation to the reader to examine my Miranda's situation at this point in the novel. She's suddenly a celebrity, of sorts, the model and very public companion of an artist who is... perhaps the flavor of the month, perhaps more. She is, of course, dazzled; even he's dazzled by his success. What she seems not to see, however, is that she forms part of an apparatus that may be elevating him at her expense; moreover, the reader has reasons to question the artist's commitment to her.

The second epigraph from Shakespeare is a line from Measure for Measure (II, 4). Angelo (the strict judge who rules Vienna in the absence of the Duke) has told Isabella, a novice nun who has begged him to spare her brother Claudio's life, that he will do so only in exchange for her virginity. So well established is his reputation for rectitude, he suggests to her, that no one would believe her if she made his offer public.

ANGELO: ...Say what you can, my false o'erweighs your true.

One of the ironies of the situation is that the offense for which Angelo has condemned Claudio to death is fornication (Claudio slept with his betrothed wife before the banns had been read a sufficient number of times to give full legal force to their marriage); what Angelo seeks with Isabella is far graver.

The sense of Angelo's line is simple: even if you accuse me truthfully, it is my denial, a lie, that everyone will believe.

The context in the penultimate section of A Kiss Before You Leave Me is quite different. I used the epigraph to focus the reader's attention on one character's claim that might be paraphrased as follows: 'What I told you may technically be a lie, as you see it; but for me, at a deeper level, it is profoundly true.' My intent was dual: to suggest some sort of analogy between the character's ploys and Angelo's, and to ask the reader to weigh the possible truth of that character's claim as paraphrased here.

I apologize for my inability to discuss this more openly; those who've already read A Kiss Before You Leave Me to the end will understand.

Note one thing, though, about both of these epigraphs: they are not intended to pronounce judgement on characters or situations in the novel; rather, they offer different possible perspectives. Think of these lines of dialogue, and all the other epigraphs, as being themselves in dialogue with the novel that quotes them. That, at least, is the approach that works best for me.

From Hanif Kureishi, 'Gabriel's Gift': Epigraphs 1.2 and 5.2 - Art, Imagination and Absence

Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) won international fame (and an Oscar nomination) as the author of the screenplay for the Stephen Frears film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), in which Londoners variously marginalized (by ethnicity, class, sexual orientation...) meet, clash, love and, for the most part, find mutual understanding--in Margaret Thatcher's England. I find the film as fresh and powerful (and funny) today as I did over 25 years ago.

Before Laundrette, Kureishi was already playwright-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre, and his subsequent career has defied those who would pigeon-hole him as any one thing: novelist, short story writer, essayist, screenplay author or playwright. I drew two epigraphs for my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me from his fourth novel, Gabriel's Gift (2001; UK Kindle edition here, US paperback edition here). Like Laundrette and Kureishi's first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, Gift is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of familial wrangling. Like Buddha, it features prominently a Bowie-like rock icon--in this fourth novel the father's former bandmate, who presents the 15-year-old Gabriel with a sketch that the boy, a budding artist, copies perfectly as the first step in a demonstration of the power of art to mend what's broken.

Accordingly, the two epigraphs we're talking about today resonate more optimistically in Gabriel's Gift itself than when they appear in the context (out of context) of A Kiss Before You Leave Me.

Epigraph 5.2: 'Art is what you do when other people leave the room' (from Gift, chapter 1). In Gabriel's Gift, this is the boy's recollection of a sentence heard on television the night before, now turned into a comforting accompaniment for the solitary creative process of an artist in the making. True, there have been traumatic departures from his household: his twin brother who died as a toddler, and his father, whom his mother has sent packing. But the emphasis in the sentence is on the rightness, the appropriateness of solitary artistic work, and in Kureishi's novel the power of art is, as we've said, fundamentally restorative.... In A Kiss Before You Leave Me, this epigraph introduces the section entitled 'Solo Show', which begins with an inventory of paintings done by Jack Emery in preparation for his first one-man show, but is also about departures affecting or involving him, dissolutions of ties, in both the past and the present, and, to some extent, about the reasons for those dissolutions: rightly or wrongly, art may seem to at least one character in A Kiss Before You Leave Me like what you can finally do when you've left the others behind.

Epigraph 1.2: '"What does an imagination do but see what isn't there?"' (from Gift, chapter 3). In Gabriel's Gift, rock icon Lester Jones is speaking to Gabriel, polymorphic icon to fledgeling artist, affirming the boy in his creative identity and reassuring him of the powerful value of his differentness. (It's a rare 'creative' who receives this message at the age of 15, but it's never too late to read this scene, in its entirety.) Where the question is inserted in A Kiss Before You Leave Me, however--as an epigraph to the first section, 'Seeing Someone'--the reader knows nothing of the 'art' plot and can associate the quotation only with the tortured power and play of the voyeuristic imagination as seen in the culmination of that section. (See the second half of my Sartre post of three days ago, and the earlier discussion of the lyrics of 'A Kiss to Build a Dream On'.)

Absence, separation and negativity come to the fore at these moments in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. They may well not be the dominant notes in the novel as a whole--but at these moments in particular the novel feels very different from Gabriel's Gift, which most readers would call Kureishi's sunniest work to date. It's all in the context.

From Sartre's 'Kean': Epigraph 1.3 - Seeing Someone, or Not

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about The Collector, let's talk some more about the amorous observer's inability to see.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean (a very free adaptation, first staged in 1953, of an 1836 play by Dumas père) is best known as a bravura star vehicle for actors as different as Anthony Hopkins and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It turns the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean (1789-1833) into a specimen of existentialist bad faith: even 'actor', 'man', 'lover' are for Sartre's Kean just so many roles in his repertoire. As the play continues, he will be called upon to step aside and yield Elena, the woman he loves (or 'loves'), to the advances of the Prince of Wales--in exchange for money to pay off his creditors. In an earlier scene (II, 2, 1), however, he explains why he must use his time before she joins him in his dressing room, to think about Elena:

'It's only when I'm alone that I can meditate on the charm of the woman I love.... When she's with me, I won't have a moment to see her: I'll be too busy watching her.'

Watching her, noting her responses, trying to catch her out, stealing glances at her, spying on her--but not for a moment seeing her....

The first section of my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me (the section introduced by the epigraph from Kean) is entitled 'Seeing Someone'. It extends from the first gleam in a matchmaker's eye (roughly speaking) to the culmination of the first date of the pair she's brought together. The reader's attention by this time is not on the matchmaker at all, and not primarily on the new pair (Miranda and Jack), but on an observer who's secretly followed them back to Miranda's place, lingered outside in the dark--watching, spying and all the rest--and who sees, or believes he can see, even in the darkness, through walls, then from blocks away. The section ends:

A part of [him] recoils, but he cannot look away, he stares, through the blackness, the streets, the walls that separate them, that close him in and out but cannot save the three of them from this: he sees.

Or not. The watcher in the shadows can imagine well enough what the other two are doing--can't 'avert his gaze', can't stop imagining, can't not 'know', can't escape that knowledge--but these are all negations relating to a figure who is herself absent. His view of the 'real' Miranda may be even more compromised than Kean's of the 'present' Elena....

From John Fowles, 'The Collector': Epigraph 6.1 - In the Name of Miranda

One of the shortest epigraphs in A Kiss Before You Leave Me may appear at first quite innocent: '...Her name as beautiful as herself, Miranda.' That innocence doesn't last for long, but here I'll pretend to preserve it a bit longer by talking first about my secondary reason for using the quotation and only after that, and cryptically, about my primary reason.

Miranda is of course the name of the apparent protagonist of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, whose beauty animates the so-called 'Miranda paintings' for which she poses. In using the epigraph from John Fowles, I wanted the reader to think, if only for a moment, about the name Miranda (as well as the recurrent subject of 'my' Miranda's beauty).

Miranda is such a popular name today that we may forget that it seems to have been invented by Shakespeare. (He used it, of course, for Prospero's daughter in The Tempest, the source of another epigraph [4.1].) The form 'Miranda' is a Latin gerundive--'a 'verbal adjective' formed from the present participle of a verb, always passive in force; e.g., agenda (neuter plural), literally, '[things that are] to be done'; 'referendum'; 'propaganda'; 'Amanda', '[she who deserves] to be loved'. The meaning of the name Miranda is sometimes given simply as '[she who is] to be admired', but the verb mirari means not only 'admire' but also 'look at', 'marvel at'. I propose that we gloss 'Miranda' as 'she who is to be gazed upon in amazement'. Miranda Kincaid is admirable in every way... and beautiful, yes, astonishingly, wondrously so--but not necessarily to be emulated--especially in her moments of 'passivity'.

Miranda's beauty is a huge topic. Among other things, when other characters find her appealing, her beauty is often all they can see, or at least all they can name. We wonder at times how deeply others understand her, especially those who are attracted to her. Moreover, as the novel goes on, her beauty becomes a commodity of sorts, subjected to commercial exploitation. Some readers may discover a recurring theme of the connection between (a) certain loves' failures to see deeply or to understand and (b) the monetization of beauty or of love itself.

But my primary reason for including the epigraph from John Fowles's 1963 novel The Collector was to remind readers already familiar with it that Miranda is the name of the young woman in that novel. I don't want to say much here about the plot of The Collector, because that might imply a closer parallel between situations in the two books than is actually there. But the least I can say is that my brief reference to Fowles's novel suggests that what presents itself as a passionate love of beauty, a love or 'love' that understands itself as collecting, preserving and protecting the exquisitely beautiful, can also be the enemy of what it admires.

From Beryl Bainbridge, 'According to Queeney': Epigraph 1.1 - Better in Translation

Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010) was admired by critics throughout her career but achieved greatest popular success with the historical novels she published in the final decades of her life. At home in England the popular press cast her as the Susan Lucci of the Booker Prize (always a bridesmaid...), and I always found that this distracted potential readers from her fine, dry wit and the nuanced sensibilities that set her apart from the herd (even the Booker herd). She's been on my mind lately because of the recent publication of her posthumous novel The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (set in the year of American assassinations, 1968) and of this morning's announcement of the new Booker shortlist (where she's not even a bridesmaid this time).

One of her best historical novels, According to Queeney (2001), presents a view of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) through his relationship with 'Mrs. Thrale' (Hester Lynch Thrale, later Piozzi, 1741-1821), a relationship that literary historians believe grew to be far closer than the one between Johnson and his best-known biographer, James Boswell. The novel provides two of the epigraphs for A Kiss Before You Leave Me, including the first epigraph of all:

[Dr. Johnson told Mrs. Thrale] that he had written her a letter which he wished her to read when she was alone. It was not for careless eyes and was in French. 

'Why French?' she asked. 

'The sentiments in it,' he said, 'are best conveyed in another language.'

Bainbridge's reader well understands by this point in the novel the embarrassment of the great (not to say immense) 18th-century lexicographer who wants to draw even closer to a much younger woman, the wife of his best friend (a wealthy brewer and Member of Parliament), in the midst of the couple's entire household, of which Johnson himself was a member for extended periods of time. Even (or especially?) lexicographers may be reluctant to call things by name, even or especially the things they desire. (The letter itself, when Mrs. Thrale finally reads it, turns out to be more puzzling than conventionally seductive.) The tension here could be seen as residing in the ambiguity of the word 'best'. 'Best conveyed in another language': conveyed most effectively (as we might expect of a great lexicographer) or conveyed in the way discretion, secrecy and embarrassment dictate?

Of course, French is not just any 'other language', especially to an Englishman, and especially in the great century of libertinism (and marivaudage). When we smile at the lines Bainbridge gives Johnson, our smile embraces all of this.

The question of translation and multiple languages crops up in A Kiss Before You Leave Me with Jack's grandmother Elise's diaries, which Miranda agrees to translate, and never really goes away. (See 'In Context, Out of Context', paragraph 5.) We readers are uncertain, especially at first, why Elise insisted that the diaries, which she kept in French, be translated into English; we don't know what the choice of languages meant to her at different points in her life. But we do suspect that the content of the diaries is erotic (we're right), and we'll soon see that the diaries both (a) seduce Miranda as a reader and translator and (b) pull her in the direction of a relationship with Elise's (married) grandson: the book as go-between, as in Dante (see 'Five Faces of Emma', paragraph 2), with an assist from a different sort of matchmaker.

We'll return to Bainbridge's Johnson, and to the binary opposition between Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, when we talk about the second epigraph from According to Queeney.

From Pablo Picasso: Epigraph 3.2 - That Worrisome Picnic

Since this is, in the U.S., a weekend for picnics--and since we all take our inspiration where we can--I thought this might be a good time to return to talking about the epigraphs that introduce sections of A Kiss Before You Leave Me and to focus on the one that refers to the real-life painting that anticipates (and perhaps triggers) so much in the plot of the novel.

Edouard Manet, 'Le déjeuner sur l'herbe' (1862-63)

The epigraph is surprisingly innocent, in part perhaps precisely because it warns rather than reassures. Its import is approximately: When I, Pablo Picasso, look at Manet's 'Luncheon on the Grass', I know that it will spell trouble for me down the road. This is the sense in which Picasso's French sentence is usually translated, and it is (correctly, I believe) taken as an admission by the Picasso of the 1930s of a certain 'anxiety of influence' that he would not resolve until he did his own (very Picasso-esque versions of) 'Luncheon on the Grass' decades later. When I was translating the sentence for use as an epigraph in my novel, I granted myself the translator's license of rendering Picasso's intuition more general, so that it could also apply to dangers awaiting (a) Manet and his famous model Victorine Meurent and (b) the fictitious artists and models in A Kiss Before You Leave Me who, like Picasso, go on picnics (in the 1920s and in the present, respectively) that are inspired by Manet's but take different turns. So the epigraph reads, 'When I see "Luncheon on the Grass", I think: there are trials and tribulations still to come.'

Today, I googled 'CMNF' and got 2 million hits. This may not prove unequivocally that images of clothed males with naked females are no longer taboo--but it does indicate a major shift since 1863, when Manet's painting was refused by the Paris Salon. It was one of the most controversial paintings of the 19th century--and is of course today considered one of the greatest.

I find myself in the familiar situation of being unable to spell out the connections between Manet's painting and my novel without giving away far too much. But let me note, just in passing, in addition to what I've said here and what is repeated everywhere about the painting, that (a) the group of figures in the foreground is a threesome and (b) there is a fourth figure in the background, whom we neglect at our peril.

Now! Enjoy your picnic!

From Wilkie Collins, 'The Woman in White': Epigraph 1.4

I threatened months ago to 'serialize' here the epigraphs that 'introduce' the various 'books' or sections of my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me. The original idea was to reproduce them 'usually with no comments'--but, as I was thinking today about the quintessential Kiss epigraph, the one that precedes the first words of my first chapter, and that I intended as an epigraph for the book as a whole, I saw what a mistake it would be to leave the quotation on its own. It's the first sentence of another novel, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860):

'This is a story about what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.'

Why is this the 'quintessential' Kiss epigraph? Not only because, removed from its original context, it seems to refer to the entire 21st-century novel that it introduces, but also because, like the novel as a whole, it means something completely different to a first-time reader from what it means to one who returns to it after finishing A Kiss Before You Leave Me: the words 'patience', 'resolution', 'endure', 'achieve', even 'man' and 'woman'--nothing is the same. What seems at the outset to be heroic or romantic ends up seeming... something else altogether.

I can say this much: the relationship of the epigraphs to the novel itself is always potentially ironic.

In Miranda's Books

One of my major goals for this blog is to make clearer the debts of A Kiss Before You Leave Me to the work of other writers. There are prominent signposts in the novel itself, starting with the epigraphs (from Plato to William S. Burroughs) that precede each numbered 'book' of Kiss, and they're so important to me that I'm tempted, on slow days, to 'serialize' those epigraphs here, usually with no comments, as a sort of look back over my shoulder at the novel as a whole. But today I introduce another category of entries, which I call 'In Miranda's Books.' Miranda is one of the principal characters in Kiss, a sympathetic, beautiful, passionate 'work in progress' whom we first meet as a translator trying to get back on track professionally after a chaotic period of alcoholism, adultery, and divorce. She is by preference a literary translator (French to English), and her education is mostly in the area of European literature. She has her favorite writers, those who have long impassioned her and whom her (now ex-)husband Vince has read over her shoulder, so to speak, for almost 15 years. Today there's time only to mention some of the names--Homer, Cervantes, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Marguerite Duras--and to promise to return to them individually....