62 pages • 2 hours read
Still Life with Woodpecker
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Symbols & Motifs
The Moon
The moon is one of the central motifs of the book, appearing immediately in Chapter 1 with the narrator’s statement that “Nobody quite knew what to make of the moon anymore” (4); Robbins also divides the novel into parts labeled as “phases,” like those of the moon. This preoccupation with the moon and its symbolic meaning, coupled with the loss of this meaning in the modern world, develops the theme of The Modern World, the Old World, and the Human Animal. Robbins uses traditional symbolism of the moon as feminine and romantic, but also illustrates the deeper human connection to the moon with the idea of “lunaception,” in which a person’s menstrual cycle aligns with the moon, which the narrator traces to ancient Babylon and the concept of the Sabbath. He then shows the impact of this elemental connection on the modern world with his observation that “nowadays hard-minded men with hard muscles and hard hats are relieved from their jobs on Sundays because of an archetypal psychological response to menstruation” (22). In this way, he connects modern civilization with human nature through the moon.
The moon motif emphasizes Robbins’s efforts to keep the narrative in the perspective of a much longer human history, but it also draws attention to his treatment of objects throughout the novel. Although the moon is symbolic, meaningful, and sacred to humans, it is also just an object. After spending the entire novel making the moon into a sacred symbol, in the closing pages of the book, Robbins flips to the perspective of the moon as an object with no stake in the meaning humans choose to attribute to it: “The moon can’t help it. It’s only a fat dumb object, the pumpkin of the sky. […] A burnt-out cinder the color of dishwater; a stale gray cookie covered with scars” (252). This drastic shift in perspective highlights the tension that Robbins plays with throughout the novel between an object as just an object and the symbolic meaning that humans attribute to it.
Camel Cigarette Pack
The pack of Camel cigarettes is another way in which Robbins plays with the tension between objects and the symbolic power attributed to them by humans. The only thing that Leigh-Cheri takes into her self-imposed imprisonment is a pack of Camel cigarettes, because it is the only object that Bernard will have in his cell. Because it is the only object she has, Leigh-Cheri contemplates the cigarette pack deeply. It becomes more than an object, or even a symbol; it becomes a portal to her future—a new way to think about her life’s purpose. The cigarette pack leads her to pyramids and pyramidology, as well as the sense that she was a part of something larger.
Leigh-Cheri finds meaning in the pack and the journey she takes into it by entering the world of the pack’s design and interpreting what she sees as a message. The pack’s meaning, however, is personal to Leigh-Cheri alone—she finds out later that the pack doesn’t mean the same thing to Bernard. To her, however, it is meaningful as it offers the promise of intelligent extraterrestrial life, the Red Beards, the idea of which offers her a sense of belonging and the possibility of being, in this mythology, a god-like figure.
The cigarette pack is one of several objects that the novel that Robbins uses to explore the power of objects. With the cigarette pack example, Robbins shows the deep power of a symbolic object and the way that Leigh-Cheri reshapes her life in a drastic way as a result of the meaning she gets from the cigarette pack. The pack of Camels represents an escape not only from her cell, but also from her larger reality in “the last quarter of the 20th century” (3). To Bernard, however, the cigarette pack is meaningless.
Although the Camel pack maintains its status as a real object for the bulk of the book, when Bernard and Leigh-Cheri fall on the pack of Camels before the pyramid explodes, they both report having the same dream of traveling through a desert to an oasis on a camel. They fully slip into the world of the cigarette pack, as Leigh-Cheri did when she was in her cell, but the fact that they are together raises the possibility that it is more than a dream—that together, they’ve managed to transcend the reality of the 20th-century United States.
Remington SL3
The Prologue, Interludes, and Epilogue all feature the author’s new electric typewriter, the Remington SL3. This marks a shift from his previous manual typewriter, and the author struggles with this shift throughout the novel. He is both impressed and intimidated by the typewriter. As the novel continues, he expresses frustration with its inability to deal with the real emotions that the author wants to delve into in the narrative. Robbins uses the typewriter as a symbol of the modern age, and its inability to deal with real emotion or the messiness of humanity highlights the gap between human nature and the modern world.
From the beginning of the novel, the author longs for “a typewriter that could type real kisses, ooze semen and sweat” (33). At one point, the author tries to break the typewriter out of its modernity by painting it red, telling the reader, “Externally, at least, the effect is interesting. Almost shocking. Almost intimate. Jiggling upon my table now, it’s as ruddy and indiscreet as a plastic sack full of hickeys” (116). The author thus moves the object from cold modernity to intimacy, and the mention of hickeys echoes Robbins’s frank discussion of sex to develop the theme of the modern world, the old world, and the human animal.
As the writing process continues, the typewriter shifts from an object of hope and aspiration to one of frustration. He becomes convinced that this modern writing tool isn’t up to the task, and by the Epilogue, he says, “I’ll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I’d rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit” (258). However, in the context of Robbins’s exploration of the importance of objects, he grants the Remington SL3 grace at the end, recognizing, “the Remington, although too pseudosophisticated for my taste, is an object, after all, and wasn’t the possibility of a breakthrough in relations between animate and inanimate objects one of the subjects of this book?” (258).
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By Tom Robbins
