“No animal suffers worse than a human being.”
The assertion follows after Mrs. Courtney has an argument with her daughter Rhoda in front of Duffield. He is adopted into the Courtney family, making him the potential heir of the family fortune since Rhoda is female and disabled. Consequently, Duffield is treated much better than the biological daughter of the family. The assertion is Mrs. Courtney’s way of justifying her cruel confrontation with her daughter, expressing the complexity of always being compassionate. This sentiment is seen through Duffield as he comes of age, in that he is a misunderstood, tortured artist who struggles to reconcile his artistry and humanity.
“There's nothing so inhuman as a human being."
Maman makes this observation after viewing a dissected dog on display done by vivisectionists. It is a literal gesture into the all-encompassing theme of the narrative. The protagonist, Duffield, is figuratively the Vivisector in that he is an egocentric artist who is brutal to the people around him to fuel his artistry. Duffield’s viciousness is a product of his attempt to find the inspiration for his art, which sees him lack empathy of any sort. In the pursuit of the truth and art, he uses others to advance his artistry while losing his empathetic capability.
"Whatever their souls were, and he was inclined to see them as paper kites, they soared for a brief moment, twining and twanging together, in the pure joy of recognition."
It is impossible to read this line about Hurtle and Rhoda and not think of the famous line from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights that says, "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." There is a romantic context to the original text that influences a reading of the line in White's novel. Though they are step-siblings, and the context is therefore much different, there is still a Platonic intimacy to this notion of seeing the other for their true self. It is a rare moment when both Hurtle and Rhoda – both outsiders, though in different ways and therefore typically unreachable to one another – belong.
"While you let yourself gently flow with the motion of the train, soothed by the beauty of the forms disguised in Rhoda's deformed body, even in the old chamber-pot under the bed at St. Yves de Trégor."
This is the first time Duffield articulates his impulse to locate formal meaning in the illogical. It is both beautiful and painful; he has seen Rhoda at her most vulnerable, without her consent, and is now using her body – a body that causes her physical pain, and that ostracizes her from society – as his material. But he has also seen beauty in her form, so much that he is even beginning to see it in other unlikely places.
"'Well, we know Rhoda was hysterical,' Olivia went on. 'But she was always conscious of the reasons for hysteria. That was her great virtue – and why you hated her. She was never a human cow driven by something she couldn't see or understand.'"
Boo articulates her admiration for Rhoda, demarcating her as someone different from everyone else for the way that she is aware of what drives her to hysteria. Boo points out that this awareness – not the hysteria itself – is what always repelled Duffield from Rhoda. As opposed to his other human subjects, with whom Duffield could play the role of observer, psychoanalyst, even God, there is nothing he could discover within Rhoda that she was not already aware of herself.
"Until a morning when his glittering cerebrations bred in him such a hopelessness he trod flat-footed across the boards, alone in his aching, powerless body, and began a version practically unrelated to those he had done already. The big, pink, cushiony forms suggested sleeping animals rather than the rocks of his mind: they neither crushed nor cut, but offered themselves trustfully to the one-eyed sun scattering down on them a shower of milky seed or light."
Here distilled is a precise instance of artistic clarity, a moment when Duffield discovers new, more interesting forms in the figures he is working with. After Nance's death, he is fixated by the image of her body strewn on the rocks at the bottom of the ravine; naively, he believed the original image would work well enough. The discovery of the new form – "sleeping animals," rather than rocks, comes as an epiphany. It shows both his artistic genius and his perversion, making beauty out of tragedy.
"This was his family. He should have loved them. He did of course: riding with Pa on the cartload of slippery bottles; Mumma's smell of warm ironing; the exasperating hands of younger, sticky children; in bed with Will; Lena giving him a suck of a bull's-eye, hot and wet from her own mouth. All this was family, a terrible muddle, which he loved, but should have loved better."
At this point, young Duffield has grown aware of his distaste for his upbringing, the feeling that he belongs somewhere else. Though not yet fully articulated, he is bothered by all the noise, the chaos, the mess; he is bothered by the poverty, and can no longer go on living as though he does not notice the conditions.
"'Do you think you know enough about the subject, Rhoda darling, to be able to write about it?"
When Rhoda declares that she is going to write a poem, she is immediately met with amusement and skepticism. Her family neither believes in her ability to write a poem, nor do they seem to take interest in her newfound curiosity. Instead, Maman essentially mocks her daughter, asking how she would be able to write a love poem if she has never been in love. This is dismissive on many levels, but Rhoda is particularly incensed by the notion that she would have to have been in love to write a convincing text, that she could not achieve a successful result by use of her imagination.
"If he had left them bearing a grudge, it was because total love must be resisted: it is overwhelming, like religion. He certainly wasn't religious: he was an artist."
Much like he rejects material comforts, Duffield ultimately estranges himself from the Courtneys because he believes that kind of love to be too consuming, and would therefore feed from the source of his art. Though he says he is not religious, he certainly has an intense devotion to his craft and is willing to sacrifice anything for it, even the most basic familial love.
"Whether it was she or he who knew better he took his broadest, though frankly feeble brush, and patted the blue on: brush was leaving its hair behind, he noticed. All his life he had been reaching towards this vertiginous blue without truly visualizing, till lying on the pavement he was dazzled not so much by a colour as a longstanding secret relationship."
Here marks the aesthetic climax of the novel: finally, after a lifetime of trying, Duffield has found his way to that higher thing he has strived for – that "vertiginous blue," indigo as he calls it a few lines later, a color so high and so satisfying, and for so long so unreachable, that its discovery is a king of aesthetic orgasm. Formally, it is fitting that this moment should also be the moment of death – not just the "little death" of orgasm, but the literal bodily death now that he has found what he has been looking for.
