In chpt. 7 Francis and Richard arrive to Shady Brook for funeral and meet Mr Corcoran:
This scene shows that, unlike his friends, Francis was quite fond of Mr Corcoran, and vice versa. But why exactly Carrot Top? Not that it was an uncommon tease, it still sounds peculiar.
There's a wordplay, of course: Bunny was gnawing on Carrot, so Carrot killed Bunny — prey becomes the hunter, if we can think of rabbits and vegetables in that fashion.
And another possible wordplay. There's an idiom 'carrot and stick', in which carrot means a reward, something that is used to tempt/seduce — Francis is a seducer.
That's it, unless "Carrot Top" stands for something more particular.
I think, it might imply a classic French story about miserable childhood "Poil de Carotte" (1894) by Jules Renard, translated as "Carrot Top" in English.
[pic source: pinterest]
This assumption is based on a specific set of features, which belong to the main character. In short, it goes like this:
A boy François, called Carrot Top because of his red hair, has an extremely problematic relationship with his mother, living under pressure and suffering humiliation from his milieu in the French country. He's sometimes ironic, sometimes a bit cruel, and chronically unloved. Life seems bitter, and young François desires love and recognition.
Name, appearance, experience and personality — all that sound too familiar in the context of TSH. Even an attempt of suicide in water is present here, though in a different way. And the author, Jules Renard, looks right in his place among other references to the Victorian era and Fin de siècle.
If a nickname "Carrot Top" in TSH actually relates to that French book, at least as to a source of inspiration, it might add a dramatic undertone to the background of Francis Abernathy.
In many respects Francis appears to be not that spoiled as it was depicted initially. His alcoholic mother was shown at once neglecting and controlling. And with such a childhood even Mr Corcoran would give the impression of exemplary father figure, evoking "depth and warmth".
Or it can be just another grain of sand on the shores of Metahemeralism.
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These words occur together in the poem Gerontion, which Elliot originally included into The Waste Land:
Some critics suppose these lines to be extremely personal for T. S. Eliot. But is it even possible to lose beauty in terror?
I think, TSH can provide a response to this matter.
Tartt's paradox 'beauty is terror' relates to Freudian terms Eros and Thanatos, considering the context in which it was suggested:
The lecture proceeds with a question of what is desire, and Bunny answers 'to live forever'.
In Freud's drive theory Life and Death are two basic instincts that counterbalance each other in human existence as the opposite cosmological principles, the driving forces of civilization.
What happens in TSH can be seen as the result of ruined balance between these forces. Here both beauty and terror become the instances of the death drive, and nothing is left for Eros, the life.
Life without beauty is an empty desire.
So Henry Winter was infatuated with death: dead languages, dead knowledge, dead moon in the sky. With all his love to poetry, he knew that the most beautiful thoughts and feelings evolved from an encounter with the idea of death.
However, no word was said about beauty after the Battenkill murder. And when they planned to kill Bunny it was just 'redistribution of matter'.
Maybe 'to lose beauty in terror' actually means to lose the difference between these two concepts.
Henry's expression of triumph before he shot himself could've been the result of regained sense of beauty. Sublime beauty of tragedy, of course.
I was wondering where Francis ‘borrowed’ this accessory, so let there be some observations.
First of all, there’s a sassy definition of a typical dandy by Paul de Saint-Victor (La Presse, 21 August 1859):
'Black Prince of Elegance, the demigod of boredom who looked at the world with an eye as glassy as his pince-nez, suffering because his disarranged cravat had a crease, like ancient Sybarite who suffered because his rose was crushed.'
Then I thought that red hair combined with pince-nez reminds of Ezra Pound, known for his dandyish style and some other unpleasant things.
[Considering that Henry Winter could be read as a projection of T. S. Eliot, I think it's logical to compare Francis to Eliot's friend Pound, who edited The Waste Land, btw.]
Pince-nez also wore Mark Twain, another elegant redhead. Speaking of Twain, he left a description of one notable encounter in his Autobiography (vol. 2, 1924):
'Last night I was at a large dinner party at Norman Hapgood's palace uptown, and a very long and very slender gentleman was introduced to me — a gentleman with a fine, alert, and intellectual face, with a becoming gold pince-nez on his nose and clothed in an evening costume which was perfect from the broad spread of immaculate bosom to the rosetted slippers on his feet. His gait, his bows, and his intonations were those of an English gentleman, and I took him for an earl.'
Dapper-looking, tall, thin young gentleman in pince-nez, giving an impression of English aristocracy at uptown dinner parties. Doesn’t it sound like Francis?
Another possible source is 'The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez', one of Sherlock Holmes short stories. This pince-nez belongs to a refined and well-dressed lady, who committed an accidental murder, and then committed a suicide.
Eventually, when I was reading a review on Baudelaire’s last oeuvre, among his notes about Belgium I discovered a curious fact: Baudelaire complained that Belgians sold pince-nez with plain glass as a fashion accessory.
So I put my nose into that piece of prejudiced decadent writing:
'The pince-nez, with its cord, perched on the nose. A multitude of vitreous eyes, even among the officers. An optician told me that the majority of pince-nez that sells are clear glass. Thus this national pince-nez craze is nothing more than a pathetic effort to appear elegant and yet one more sign of the spirit of imitation and conformity.'
Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed, trans. by Richard Sieburth (p. 301)
Francis bought his phony pince-nez in Belgium. That's it.
I’m sure, many readers noticed that Julian, despite his outspoken prejudice against psychology, described the seduction of Dionysiac ritual in terms of psychoanalysis, like this:
Even more funny is that Julian’s method of teaching is probably based on psychological theory from the late 60s. I mean, the Pygmalion effect.
Source of image: steemit.com
According to Richard, Julian:
Meanwhile, Julian’s students represent the psychic structure of personality:
Henry is the Superego, the all-controlling perfectionistic intellect;
Bunny is the Id, the suppressed unconscious;
Francis is Libido, the sexual energy;
the twins are Anima and Animus, the masculine and feminine sides of human Self.
Richard must be the Ego, a poor neutral, influenced by everyone else.
Julian Morrow in this scheme plays the role of religious thinking in the human mind (the idea of god). In the novel it comes how it was interpreted by Søren Kierkegaard: religion serves as a mediator in Self’s relation to the Other. But also, the god here is an idea of absolute Other, which helps to shape human identity as opposed to something that is not human at all — consider how Henry identified Julian as a deity.
So, Julian and his students together construct an integral psychological model of personality. A personality in crisis, as one could assume.
[Psychology is relevant, because we have a foreshadowing for it: during the year Richard was working part-time for professor of psychology Dr Roland, assisting in his 'vague research'. And there was a dialogue with Richard (chpt. 1), when Julian said that ‘psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.’ He also told Richard that he always knew what his students were going to do, like an omniscient god.]
