“This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece” (190).
The closing paragraph of Written on the Body is starkly different from the rest of the novel, which focuses overwhelmingly on bodies and the effect of language on the body. If the passage above does actually describe Louise’s return, and I believe that it does, then the narrator’s lack of focus on Louise’s body is startling in the context of their obsessive attempt to learn and possess her body throughout the rest of the novel.
The final passage reveals that “the story” is not in fact written on Louise’s body, as the title of the novel suggests. Rather, it starts in “this threadbare room,” which rapidly transforms: walls “exploding,” windows turning into telescopes, the sun descending to rest above the mantelpiece. The room’s extraordinary transformation is at once an expansion and a condensation; while the walls explode, and the windows would need to expand outward in order to become telescopes, the moon and stars seem to have come into the room, where they are “magnified,” and the sun too now exists indoors. It would seem that the room has either expanded to accommodate the newly descended universe or that the universe has coalesced in a single room. The passage does not provide any clarification, and the paradoxical nature of the description works well as a means of understanding how the narrator’s understanding of love has transformed throughout the novel.
On the previous page the narrator asks Gail, “What else is embossed on your hands but her?” (189). The question captures the narrator’s previously narrow perspective on their relationship with Louise. The narrator was focused only on Louise’s effect on their body, was unable to recognize Louise herself. After Louise’s return, however, the narrator is able to look past their own body and Louise’s body and to recognize the significance of their relationship. All of the physical marks that Louise has left on the narrator’s body diminish in comparison to the universe that she has brought with her return. At the end of the novel, we see that the narrator has learned to look beyond Louise’s physical self and has fully recognized not her body, but the world that they inhabit together.
While the passage seems to deviate from the title and major themes of Written on the Body, I’m inclined to understand it as an illustration of the narrator having finally learning to apply the text that Louise has written on their body as a means of understanding the full scope of their relationship. Louise is no longer the only one translating and creating language. The narrator has also learned to translate something other than Russian literature, and can consequently step back from their intense focus on the body in order to appreciate the world that they inhabit alongside Louise.
I find your interpretation of this passage interesting because you are aware of how much it seems to diverge from the major themes of the novel. However, considering the obsession the narrator seems to have with bodies, the absence of bodies in this paragraph is quite striking. The word love is also absent from this paragraph. As love is as prominent a theme as bodies, I can’t help but wonder if this absence has its own meaning.
I liked how you remarked on the difference between the last paragraph of the novel and the rest of the novel. I also like that you have taken a stand on whether Louise was real or not, because I think it adds more to one’s understanding to be able to have a firm opinion about what happened. I also liked and agreed with how you used the word “obsessive” to describe the narrator’s focus on Louise’s body. Your analysis of how the title fits in with this final paragraph of the novel was something I had not thought about. I think the title of novels are often overlooked, but in this case you made such an excellent point about how the story isn’t written on Louise’s body. The analysis you made about the narrator’s focus on Louise’s physical body, not her entire self, helped me to clarify some of the confusion I had when reading the novel. Overall, you made some magnificent connections between the title and the last paragraph, as well as some great interpretations of how the narrator transformed from seeing Louise as a body to seeing her for who she is and what she means to the narrator.
I like the idea of the narrator moving past Louise’s effect on their body and the ways in which you articulate how that signifies the narrator’s realization of the impact of their relationship with Louise. Do you think that because the narrator was forcibly separated from Louise, it is the only way they were able to look past the body? Since they tried to reunite physically with Louise but their efforts failed. Do you see the ending paragraph as a moment of reunion? I kind of see it as the narrator coming to terms with never physically being with Louise again and in this way they were able to move past her body and what that meant to them.