David Dephy - The Chair

What we focus on in art and in life indicates who we are, how we perceive ourselves, and what matters to us. A painter notices the play of light on an object; a lover notices a girl's smile; a businessman notices the quality of an interviewee's coat. These remarks are practically sophisms, but there's really something true about it – how we are indicates who we are. When the Citizen King Louis Philippe commissioned paintings of himself with middle class bankers at court instead of idle noblemen it mattered because it said something about how he saw himself and how he wished to be represented. A Citizen King is more in touch with the world than a Sun King, no? No. No. Both are kings, and both are fair removed from the ordinary and the sundry. But for Louis Philippe it was important to be perceived accordingly.

Enter Sandro from David Dephy's short story The Chair. Sandro is the consummate obsessive artist, a compulsive scribble who writes, writes, writes. The narrator, nameless, watches Sandro write and tries, mostly unsuccessfully, to snatch bits of text away to read. But Sandro is churlish with his words; he squirrels them away at night, possibly burning them, but at the very least they are gone. Why, then, does he write if he never has a single reader?

At a glance he was a strange man, he never left me and seldom went out, staying with me most of the time. I often saw him asleep at his table, tired after sleepless nights, with his head, senselessly bent over his writings. He worked a lot, writing all the time.

But then Sandro publishes a book. The narrator is confused, particularly given that he is looking back at his life with Sandro and both he and we, the reader, know that a tragic end is fast approaching.

I was aware of everything about him, how he worked, how he suffered, how he loved, how he rejoiced, how he took pain… He was especially happy when his book came out, the one that is still on the shelf together with the other books.

Dephy adeptly builds up the perception of Sandro. We learn nothing of him other than he is, and what he is is effectively the embodiment of writing, of the writer's talent. The narrator grapples with the confusing intensity and intimacy of his relationship with Sandro, noting that they are never apart, that they are always together, watching one another. And the narrator is there even at the last, most terrible moment:

it’s the same questions that I ask myself – Why me?! Me and not anyone else! Why did he choose me and not anyone else to commit that terrible, inexplicable and painful action?! I cannot find an answer to that and I failed to find anyone to help me at least a bit to clear it up for me.

Sandro is, then, the writer's talent: specifically the narrator's talent. Sandro is larger than the embodiment of writing, he is writing. He is the narrator's writing made large into a human-sized and human-acting metaphor. Which makes the suicide ending all the more forceful.

Dephy's The Chair examines the horror and fascination a creator feels toward his talent. It is easy, I suppose, to hold an artist of genius high and declare their weaknesses small and their successes large. But how many autobiographies and biographies have we read where the artist is, in fact, tortured, driven to drink, or drugs, or worse, by his talent and its demands? Artists, many thousands of times more who are hungry, poor, striving and ambitious than rich fat and sleek, are consumed by their art the way a moth is consumed by the flame. They are drawn to their talent because it is so seductive, but they never notice the traps it leaves.

Sandro is the narrator's (most honestly: Dephy's) talent, both the good parts of it and the bad. But even the good parts are present in an unhealthy manner – Sandro always writes, he never socialises or interacts with others. And when he isn't writing? He's killing himself. Sandro functions as the way in which the artist sees himself and, as is often the case when we examine our qualities and failings, what is perceived isn't always good, it isn't always desirable.

Dephy presents the artist's talent as both completely separate (“At this time he did not share his sufferings and feelings with me, he never even looked at me, as if by some established rule he would never leave me, but all this was done with the same indifference.”) and completely intimate (“ I was aware of everything about him, how he worked, how he suffered, how he loved, how he rejoiced, how he took pain”). In short, inexplicable but linked inextricably, two dancers locked together forever, always arguing over which one will lead.

The Chair is very short (roughly 800 words) and is not, as far as I know, available anywhere currently in English. Mr Dephy kindly provided The Chair to me late last year, for which I thank him unreservedly. Please, if you happen to see this story in a magazine or short collection somewhere, snap it up.

See Also

Other titles by David Dephy under review include:
---Before the End