Dave Seeley: Woman with Gun (aka San Diego Girl)
Oil on Gesso panel (15" x 20")
I.
You don't have to own a gun or be a member of the shooting fraternity to acknowledge the fetishistic appeal of firearms; guns are stylish, guns are cool, and guns are deadly.
In short, guns are sexy and excite many different types of people, from Melanie Blanchard, the morbidly curious young female protagonist in Michel Tournier's Death and the Maiden, to the socially and sexually awkward loan manager Mark Corrigan, played by David Mitchell, in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show.
I will discuss the latter case in part two of this post [click here]. Here, I wish to speak of Melanie Blanchard and her practice of joy before death ...
II.
Ah, the lovely lemon-eating, death-obsessed figure of Mlle. Blanchard ... Her face "the picture of innocence, its thinness and pallor accentuated by the heavy mass of her black hair" [109] - surely one of the most intriguing figures in 20th-century French literature.
I understand perfectly her metaphysical dread of boredom and that great grey wave of blandness which threatens not only to submerge her, but drown the entire world. And, like Melanie, I prefer to eat "everthing acid, sour, or highly spiced" [112] rather than stuff on cakes full of jam and covered in buttercreak icing; the childish food that people were always offering her and which "foreshadowed and provoked the advancing tide of greyness, the engulfment of life in a dense, viscid slime" [112].
And like Melanie, I believe the practice of joy before death is of vital importance; that one should constantly think about how best to construct a beautiful, stylish - some might even say chic - death and keep at hand the instruments that might facilitate such - ropes, razors, pills, and - if possible - a pistol ...
When she thought about [her friend's] fiancé, who was training to become a police officer, it was "always the image of the bulging holster containing his pistol that first entered her mind" [118]. She arranges to meet the young man at a café and when he leaves his cap, truncheon, and bulging holster on the counter in order to go and make a phone call, she yielded to temptation and slipped the latter into her handbag, then made a quick getaway before he returned.
In several magnificent paragraphs, Tournier writes:
"The pistol [...] was a source of great comfort. Every day, at a certain hour - she always trembled with impatience and anticipated joy as she awaited it - she brought out the magnificent, dangerous object. [...] Placed on the table, naked, the pistol seemed to radiate an energy that enveloped Melanie in voluptuous warmth. The compact, rigorous brevity of its contours, its matt and almost sacerdotal blackness, the facility with which her hand embraced and grasped its form - everything about this weapon contributed to giving her an irresistable force of conviction. How good it would be to die by means of this pistol!" [119]
"The pistol was not loaded, but the holster contained a magazine and six bullets, and Melanie soon found the orifice in the butt where it should be inserted. A click apprised her that the magazine was in place. Then the day came when she felt she could no longer wait to try it out.
She went off very early in the morning into the forest. When she came to a clearing, a long way from any path, she took the pistol out of her bag, and, holding it with both hands, as far away from her as possible, she pulled the trigger with all her might. Nothing happened. There must be a safety catch. For a moment she ran her fingers over the butt, the barrel, and the trigger. Finally a kind of protuberance slid towards the barrel, leaving a red spot exposed. That must be it. She tried again. The trigger yielded under her fingers and the weapon, as if seized by a sudden fit of madness, kicked in her hands.
The explosion had seemed tremendous [...] Trembling all over, Melanie put the pistol back in her bag and resumed her walk. Her legs felt weak, but she didn't know whether this was the result of fear or pleasure. She now had a new instrument of liberation at her disposal, and how much more modern and practical this one was than the rope and the chair! She had never been so free. The key to her cage was there, in her bag, next to her make-up remover, her purse, and her sunglasses." [119-20]
It's not that the gun - or any other instrument of death - is particularly fascinating in itself; it's more the fatal significance of the object that counts for one who knows the sinister happiness of preparing their own exit from this life and thus putting an end to the boredom of existence. The immanence of death - made manifest in the pistol, for example - "conferred an incomparable destiny" [117] on Melanie's life.
See: Michel Tournier, 'Death and the Maiden', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.
