Alice Munro, rakkaus, mediaimages

Munron novellikokoelma on lievä pettymys, harmillista.

Jotakin kuitenkin:

Then he lifted his head, gave it a shake, and made a pronouncement.
"Love never dies."
She felt impatient to the point of taking offense. This is what all the speechmaking turns into, she thought, a person who can say things like that. Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid - it might as well be dead. (Munro Open Secrets, 49.)

Anna Gavaldan Je l'aimais-romaanissa (suom. Viiniä keittiössä) oli samankaltainen ajatus pohjalla. Ei se ole paha. Tietyssä määrin armahtava, jopa toivoa antava. Rakkaus, tai sen päättyminen, kumpikaan ei ole kohtalo. Akteja maailmassa. Kerrostumia.

Jos palaan takaisin Austerin Book of Illusioniin... ja sotken sitä viimeviikkoiseen televisioaddiktiooni: elämä on yksinkertaisesti moniulotteisempaa kuin televisioruutu (valkokangas). Simulointi tuottaa vääriä käsityksiä, pintaa, liian helppoja maailmoita, tulkinnattomuutta, staattisuutta. Taiteessa ei kuitenkaan ole samaa ongelmaa - vaikka ulottuvuudet näennäisesti pysyisivätkin samoina.

Yritän jättää Gilmoren tytöt vähemmälle ;), ja siteeraan Illusionin kertojaa, taas:

No matter how beautiful or hypnotic the images sometimes were, they never satisfied me as powerfully as words did. Too much was given, I felt, not enough was left to the viewer's imagination, and the paradox was that the closer movies came to simulating reality, the worse they failed at representing the world - which is in us as much it is around us. That was why I had always instinctively preferred black-and-white pictures to color pictures, silent films to talkies. Cinema was a visual language, a way of telling stories by projecting images onto a two-dimensional screen. The addition of sound and color had created an illusion of a third dimension, but at the same time it robbed the images their purity. They no longer had to do all the work, and instead of turning film into a perfect hybrid medium, the best of all possible worlds, sound and color had weakened the language they were supposed to enhance. (Auster 2002, 14.)

Tähän vielä Kristeva ja mediakuvien psyykkistä tilaa tuhoava voima sekä Lars von Trier, niin kaukana ollaan Munrosta ja rakkaudesta. Bon!