My hottest front-burner project is a talk that I will be giving in a couple of weeks at the Carolina Conference on Romance Literatures. I will be speaking on art in Rosa Montero's novel Lágrimas en la lluiva - specifically role Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid plays in highlighting some of the work's theoretical points.
The more I think about the novel, the more I have come to believe that the two central (and related) issues at stake in this work are mortality and solitude, or -- as Emmanuel Levinas would put it -- Time and the Other.
I have long admired Levinas for his ability to cut through issues of ontology in order to highlight more important issues of ethics. I often teach about Levinas because I find that students can quite easily understand the basics of his thoughts on encountering the other. But Levinas should never be underestimated. His thoughts are as powerful as they are deep. In Time and the Other he claims that Time and the Other are related because "solitude is the absence of time" (57), and Time is "the very relationship of the subject with the Other" (39). The other in this case is the unknowable, absolute mystery, and may come in the form of another consciousness, or death, or the future. In any case as a subject I am trapped in my own consciousness, my own mortality, my own present. I only experience Time as I encounter it patiently, as Levinas explains, with a lover's caress.
In Lágrimas en la lluvia Bruna (the novel's replicant protagonist) is obsessed with her own mortality, and that obsession expresses itself in the form of an incessant clock that counts down toward her (in her mind) inevitable death. She hangs Vermeer's painting on her wall, because when she admires the serenity of the servant girl. The girl's patient (bored?) gaze out the window indicates to Bruna a kind of suspension in time, like the hands on the clock have stopped turning. When Bruna looks at the painting she feels almost human because with the clock stopped, humans seem immortal to her. We could say that the frozen clock in Bruna's story would indicate for Levinas the beginning of Time.