A brilliant lack (of food)

In children's books there always seems to be an abundance of food. Adult literature, too, seems to appreciate the many metaphorical qualities it possesses. One of the best novels to use this, I think, is Een Schitterend Gebrek by Arthur Japin, by far my favourite Dutch novel. It was translated to English as In Lucia's Eyes. Unfortunately, this misses the all-encompassing theme of the book that the Dutch title alludes to: 'gebrek.' This word, as many Dutch words, translates in several ways. In the context of the title, it would be considered 'flaw' with the full title translating to 'a brilliant flaw.' This is what the young man who we now know as Casanova it told by his friend, when he tells him the girl he's in love with only has one flaw: she's too young. However, in the context of the entire text, I would argue 'gebrek' translates here as a 'lack' or 'absence.' The most powerful metaphor concerning food in this novel is indeed about the lack of it.

The message Japin tries to convey is simple in essence, but the amount of layers of metaphor make it seem overly complex. Bear with me.

With Casanova as one of its few characters, the novel not surprisingly is a comment on love and sex. Lucia, the protagonist, breaks her engagement with, and consequently the heart of, a young Giacomo Casanova.As her face is maimed by smallpox while he was away for a while, she decides she can no longer be his wife (it would be social suicide in the circles of Venice he moves in) and leaves him with a lie before he can return. Years later she meets him again in Amsterdam as the veiled courtesan Galathée, without him ever knowing who she really is.

In the time between their split and reunion, Lucia has gone through hell and back. She has had an extraordinary education, but is reduced to earning money as a whore in Amsterdam, and even that is hard with her 'ghastly'-looking face. Though she works her way up the ladder (by concealing her face with a veil) it is in these times, she says, she's known hunger. With too many women and too little men, getting a client was almost impossible. Japin expertly uses the connection between food and sex. I still don't know whether Lucia is talking about the literal starvation she felt because she wasn't earning enough money to buy food, or if the starvation was yet another layer of metaphor. Here's how the three stages of hunger are described:

1. The gnawing of the stomach. Worry grows to panic and your body wants everything it sees.
2. The lack becomes acute. There is no time or space for fear and nerves. Wild, you scrabble and collect even what is utterly inedible. You grab everything you get and stuff it in your mouth. You no longer think but take.
3. Eventually nature grants mercy. Face to face with death, apathy washes over you like a wave. You conquer everything and let yourself drift along. This gives a blissful peace, because of which you don't look back at life anymore, but think ahead. You no longer want to own, no longer want to take, not even hold. Your thoughts surrender their siege. The spirit opens itself. Here, there's space for hallucinations. This feeling is so addictive that it's hard to be grateful when you are saved after all.

She then likens this to sailors fallen overboard. First they look and calculate all the chances they have. Then they become desperate, clinging to anything they can get their hands on. Only when all of this is to no avail do they relax, and spread their limbs in surrender. They no longer desire, but trust the water. It is in this state that they are most easily saved. Lucia then gets to her point: this was the way she was hauled along by love. She thought that in order to survive it she had to cling to it for dear life. 

So from sex, to hunger, to drowning, to love. Do you follow? 

The entire book is a memoir Lucia writes to her unborn child. A child she only wants to teach one thing: love. Not the noun, but the verb. She urges it to love. She explains how all her life she saw people craved love, the noun. For the longest time she confused it for desire. People spoke of it as a must, as something you had to have. Again, Japin brings hunger into the equation: love was more important than even bread, for whomever had love didn't worry about hunger. But in all the different scenarios of people pining for love, she realised it was always something given to them. She, too, clung to it when it was there, and to the memory of it when it was gone. She played it over and over in her head. 

It then hit her: if love was something given to you, you would expect it to cease to exist when you were no longer receiving it. But that was furthest from the truth: her fondest memories of Giacomo, of their love, were from their time apart. Her love blossomed, not because she was beloved, but because she loved.

This is the message to her child: we are unhappy because we think we need to receive love. But in order to be saved, a sailor needs to surrender to the waves. We need to give away what we desire most. She says her 'gebrek' taught her that, and therefor I argue it translates as 'lack', rather than 'flaw' since it was only in the absence of receiving love that she realised this.