Why Three Faces? My AI expert got it down to three AI videos of this painting you’re looking at and I couldn’t make up my mind which one. So I decided to go with all three and come up with a title that connected them. If you look at the cover of the book, Confessions of St. Augustine, she’s the one on the upper left hand corner.
The narrator is the stud in the middle of the cover as well as the artist which is why he can paint himself looking like some Brando, Newman, Dean lookin’ stud, with his girlfriend cruising down that open road across America like Jack Kerouac with the top down with “No Particular Place To Go” as the late great Chuck Berry once sang. Who wouldn’t want that?
Anyway, back to “The Three Faces of Eve.” Could be taken a lot of ways: 1 – the movie reference. 2 – the Biblical – Eve as in the Garden. 3 – or life? Comic, tragic, or tragicomedy? All of which apply to the trilogy (again with the three).
As far as the Biblical? Too many to mention, so let’s just go with the three analogy first: first, innocence; second, disobedience and the fall; and third, repentance and redemption. Not to mention her name is Sharon, as in the Rose of Sharon, a reference to Christ which in retrospect she is a Christ-figure whose death saves him both physically and spiritually. Because all three images are disturbing – that face that adds to that disturbing sense of future suffering – a face that portends something disturbing when the sky behind her turns dark and foreboding and you see the difference in her “countenance” all of which portends the tone of the story – all in contrast to the wisecracks of our narrator in his initial attempt to see life as a comedy, only to have it turn dark as in a black comedy, a world in which he later describes in his inebriated state as a “tragesty”).
So being the supposed reviewer of Confessions of St. Augustine with all these allusions, half of which who knows what, I obviously read more into these videos than the average Instagramer and consequently the more I look at the different takes of the girl, the more disturbing I find them – macabre, surrealistic and foreboding and if I had to pick one image or video that sets the tone for the first novel (The Mendicant), it would be those three takes, where their very repetition tells me something foreboding is inescapable. Because whenever I go over certain lines or scenes in the book in my mind, the more those videos set me up for the developing undercurrent where behind the manic rants and sardonic ridicule of the narrator lies an ineffable underlying fear that propels him to the inevitable explosive conclusion that occurs in the summer of ’65 (the very end of part one called Portrait of an American Wiseguy), which takes him another fourteen years to process (in Portrait of an American Christian, 1979 in part II), and then another ten years to truly reconcile even that (in Portrait of a Christian, 1989 in part III) – all of which ends the first novel, The Mendicant, 1989.
Mendicant by definition has a two-fold meaning from a 60s perspective: 60s idealism sometimes couched the entitlement of upper middle-class children who thought the world owed them a living where as the world merely saw them as a bunch of beggars or freeloaders. While they saw themselves as the Pilgrims of their namesake, St. Augustine (thus the Mendicant Order of Augustinian Monks), America saw them as dirty “Hippies.”
In the second novel, The Militant, he’s merely painting pictures of her as well as America as symbol of lost innocence or Eden as seen all over the front and back cover and on almost every page of the book. But unlike Pygmalion, Geppetto, and even Dr. Frankenstein, he can’t create what he really wants and gives up his serious art altogether settling for mere sketches.
Because by the third novel, The Missionary, he’s living out the life he thinks the Rose of Sharon would approve of (and you can take that both ways) – now literally living his life out like an Augustinian monk, living out in some God forsaken desert with the “lepers” of society: the mentally handicapped and the Native Americans in an updated version of a 60s commune. Native Americans perhaps because of his childhood dream to be one and perhaps because in his mind she represented not only one too, but perhaps the world in general since at one point he sees her as some dark Semitic princess (JAP? – derogatory slang for Jewish American Princess because it’s her quick wit and retorts that initially fascinate him – an attribute he holds in high regard as evidenced by the second chapter of Portrait of an American Wiseguy where it’s obvious he’s obsessed with getting the last word with his one liners [comebacks] which by the way is the only mention of me in his trilogy whom he erroneously dismisses as a hopeless pedantic bore) and eventually Christ-figure (back to her now) since it’s her death that saves him both physically and spiritually.
Anyway, eventually he goes back to his art, and because of that, they (the videos) could be a great “trailer.” Question is what one image to start with that best represents the real tone of the novel, or at least the first one. Since it all goes much further than just a “Portrait of an American Wiseguy.”
Dr. Phineas T. Redwell (Dr. of American Literature and DEFINITELY not a bore)