Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk

Author:Elvia Wilk
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593767167
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

“So it’s simple, then,” I said. “No mystery. You don’t love me because you love Lack.”

“Yes.”

“But he doesn’t love you back.”

“Yes.”

“You tried then. You offered yourself.”

No answer. But when I turned from the sink she stared at me hollowly, then nodded.

At moments like this Philip can’t seem to help calling Lack “he,” even though he knows gendering the hole is ridiculous (and if it had to be gendered, the default probably wouldn’t be masculine). His anguish is compounded by the fact that he has no opponent, male or otherwise. Literally nobody stands in the way of his lover. Nobody threatens his failing relationship. There is no person to envy; neither can he explain Alice’s infatuation under the rubric of any known fetish like object sexuality, the romantic attraction to inanimate objects. Lack is no more object than person. Philip says: “The problem was that my usual approach—anthropology—would give blessing to Alice’s anthropomorphization of Lack. I wanted to prove Alice wrong, to show Lack to be a dead thing, a mistake, a cosmic pothole.” Yet again, the notion that Alice has abandoned him for a cosmic pothole only makes him feel worse.

Lack is a joke with infinite punch lines. Lack can signify whatever you want it to mean: mouth, pussy, asshole, queerness, blackness, god, yonic void, “what women want,” trauma, autonomy, rejection. These answers are all too obvious to be satisfying—and should you think you’ve found a uniquely satisfying interpretive twist or Freudian spin, the characters have inevitably beat you to the punch. They offer all sorts of readings themselves. “Lack is the Other,” insists one woman to Philip at a party. A physicist colleague of Alice’s implies that Lack represents “a third gender.” In one scene, Philip tries to make Lack mean everything by meaning nothing, saying, “Lack is the inevitable: the virtually empty sign. The sign that means everything it is possible to mean, to any reader.”

Philip is speaking both on and off the page here. Philip is chasing Alice, Alice is chasing Lack, and you, the reader, are chasing the meaning of it all. With each attempt to read deeper you glance off the fact of the matter, which is that Lack is exactly what it looks like, namely a black hole—and an assault on everyone’s interpretive abilities. You desire to uncover the hidden message of Lack, and the story refuses to serve one to you, drawing you into the dynamic. Desire triangulates between the two characters due to the (empty) obstacle at the center of their relationship; desire triangulates on the level of story, too.

How does this story speak to the structure of plots about love and to love itself? Anne Carson goes so far as to propose the triangle—“lover, beloved, and that which comes between them”—as the basis for all erotic desire, as well as the basis for the structure of novels about love. This is not necessarily the rom-com love triangle where, say, a third person offers temptation; it is a triangle where the third

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