Amelia Barnard
Some startling or even violent events can cause life to drift into a trance–like the experience of the surreal. This illusory state is precisely the feeling Donna Tartt creates in this striking passage. Following the group of friends’ trip to the pond at Francis’s countryhouse, Camila steps on a piece of glass and the events quickly spiral into a state of the surreal. While the chaos is unfolding around him, Richard begins to romanticize the beauty of the scene. He claims his fatal flaw lies in the fact that he would do anything to achieve “the picturesque,” which becomes evident in this passage in the way that he ignores the frantic actions of his friends and the violence around him in order to glamorize the scene. In the atmosphere of “the surreal,” Tartt’s use of irrational juxtapositions and evocative imagery facilitates the understanding of Richard’s inclination for “the picturesque,” regardless of the real glamor in the situation.
Richard states early on in the passage that the accident regarding Camila stepping on a piece of glass allows “the surreal [to] take over,” and it is this guise that allows him to conceal his longing for the picturesque in the severity of this situation (Tartt 98). Richard appears to romanticize the state Camila is in as he claims that she, “limp in Henry’s arms,” is “beautiful and lifeless” (98-99). This juxtaposition causes any concern Richard might have about the incident to dissipate from the reader’s understanding as the contrasts Tartt creates become even more apparent. These contrasts become even more conspicuous as Richard describes Camila’s dress. He claims that her current appearance is that of “a dead girl’s,” but continues to personify the hem of her dress as “flutter[ing] abstractly in the breeze” (99). Animating her dress in such a lively way evokes a feeling of eeriness as the reader understands at this point that Camila has lost a lot of blood and needs dire care, an observation of which Richard is completely oblivious. By creating a contrast between the way in which Camila appears lifeless, while another element is given animation with a light, even playful connotation, these juxtapositions once again create the assumption that Richard’s vying for the picturesque causes him to disconnect from more important matters.
The vivid imagery created in the passage further magnifies Richard’s “fatal flaw” of wanting the picturesque. A list-like structure is utilized in many of these descriptions in order to magnify them and make each one apparent. This includes “every pebble, every blade of grass sharply defined, the sky so blue it hurt me to look at it” (98). This clear use of imagery allows readers to grasp the scene and understand Richard’s claim that an accident can often cause time to appear to slow down. However, this imagery becomes more evocative as the scene progresses and Richard says, “It was like a painting too vivid to be real” (98). After describing the “dreamlike” scenes of the meadow, the images begin to take on an underlying, more violent connotation, despite the fact that Richard’s interpretation of them remains consistent. While Henry is carrying Camila she appears to have lost a lot of blood and Henry’s trousers are described as “spattered with drops the size of quarters, too red to be blood, as if he’d had a paintbrush slung at him” (99). Though the imagery here has an inherent sense of gore, Richard’s romanticizing even causes blood to have a much more artful connotation. With his explicit statements of the scene as related to “a painting,” Richard’s inclinations of wanting the picturesque to remain constant throughout the passage as the bright image he “paints” is tainted by the elements of gore that remain.
With the vivid imagery and stark juxtapositions Tartt creates in this scene, Richard’s “fatal flaw” is ever apparent and foreshadowing of the dangers of romanticizing dark events appears. Knowing that this group of friends will go on to murder one of their own, this passage evokes a feeling of uneasiness regarding Richard’s habits of looking for “the picturesque.” Though romanticizing one’s life is often seen as an effort in sentimentality, observing Richard’s habits of disregarding danger and violence in an act to preserve his illusory observations raises the question of how harmless romanticism really is for both the characters and reader alike.
