The Lacuna

“They were prisoners on an island, like the Count of Monte Cristo. The hacienda had heavy doors and thick walls that stayed cool all day, and windows that let in the sound of the sea all night: hush, hush, like a heartbeat. He would grow thin as bones here, and when the books were all finished, he would starve.

But no, now he would not. The notebook from the tobacco stand was the beginning of hope: a prisoner’s plan for escape. Its empty pages would be the book of everything, miraculous and unending like the sea at night, a heartbeat that never stops.”

As a boy, Shepherd is obsessed with page-turning novels like The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. He associates himself with the eponymous Count, as they are both trapped on an island prison. In this quote, he realizes that he can use his writing as a way to “escape,” if only in his imagination, from the island. This shows Shepherd’s recognition as a young boy of the power of writing.

“In all, he showed a habit that claimed him for life: his manner of scarcely mentioning himself. Anyone else would say in a diary, ‘I had this kind of a supper,’ but to his mind, if supper lay on the table it had reasons of its own. He wrote as if he’d been the one to carry the camera to each and every one of his life’s events, and thus was unseen in all the pictures.”

This quote from Mrs. Brown, the “archivist,” describes Shepherd’s unusual tendency to write in his journals in the third-person rather than the first-person perspective. She notes this is like the photographer who does not appear in any of the pictures themselves. Later, Mrs. Brown explains that this metaphor was inspired by Sheldon’s sadness over the death of Sheldon Harte, who was killed in the Stalinist attack on May 24, 1940. Sheldon was a photographer and, therefore, did not appear in any of the pictures himself. She realizes that Shepherd identified with Sheldon.

“Laguna? The lagoon?

No, lacuna. He said it means a different thing from lagoon. Not a cave exactly but an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things. He opened his mouth to show. It goes into the belly of the world.”

This quote introduces the first literal meaning of lacuna in the novel, in reference to the underwater tunnel Shepherd finds. The imagery of Leandro “open[ing] his mouth to show” a lacuna, or hole, that leads to “the belly of the world” is reprised later in the novel when Shepherd finds an ancient figurine of a man with “a hole for a mouth, like a tunnel from another time, speaking. I am looking for the door to another world” (265). This set of imagery connects the literal lacuna, the contemporary people of Mexico, and the historical past.

“In the forgotten white land at the bottom of our wall, the eagle has no cactus, no snake for his lunch, he can’t find home. The story of Mexico waits for its beginning.”

Shepherd is fascinated by the ancient origin myth of Mexico in which the Aztecs find an eagle on a cactus eating a snake, and they take it as a sign from the gods they should settle there. (The image is found on the Mexican national flag.) In this quote, Shepherd laments that Diego Rivera left for the United States before he could finish the massive mural of Mexico’s history in the National Palace. Shepherd’s experience contributing to this epic artwork inspires his sweeping epic about the mythic story of Mexico’s founding, The Pilgrims of Chapultepec.

“This hurts, an ache in the groin, wanting so badly to see that smile and follow it somewhere. It keens like Mother waiting for the next cigarette. That is how she loves men, too. It must be. But in this case, can’t be.”

This quote from Shepherd is one of the earliest moments where he expresses his sexual desire for another man, Bull’s Eye. The language here emphasizes his acute awareness that such a desire is not permissible in the time and culture in which he lives. He compares such desire to his mother’s addiction to cigarettes, implying that attraction to other men is as carcinogenic and taboo as a cigarette.

“He says the architect planned for no driver or servant’s quarters because he was a Communist, like the Painter. Olunda agrees. They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.

Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatías.”

This wry comment about the design of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s house gets to the heart of the contradictions between their utopian Communist visions of equality for all and the reality of the class structures they perpetuate. Shepherd, a member of the working class without any political commitments, notes that even though they want equality, they still want the perks that come with inequality, “clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatías.” This relates to the theme of The Complex Relationship Between Art and Politics.

“Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?”

Shepherd takes inspiration from working with Trotsky. He notices that Trotsky embraces life despite the difficulties he faces in exile. This rhetorical question Shepherd asks demonstrates that he is beginning to question his life lived in “submission” and wondering if, like Trotsky, he should attempt to have joy.

“‘But newspapers have a duty to truth,’ Van said.

Lev clucked his tongue. ‘They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.’”

This quote from Trotsky is directly taken from his memoir My Life (Leon Trotsky. “The Planet Without a Visa.” My Life. 1930). In it, he paraphrases the French leftist novelist Émile Zola, who came under attack by the French media for his support of Captain Dreyfus during a moral panic in France between 1894 and 1906 over Jewish influence in the military. This quote’s use in The Lacuna displays the depth of research Barbara Kingsolver undertook for her historical novel. It also provides the framework for understanding The Role of the Media in Shaping Public Perception and Creating Panic in the novel.

“‘Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.’

‘That’s a better story, to tell you the truth,’ she said. ‘Greatness is very boring.’”

In this quote, Shepherd reflects on the similarity between people in ancient history and contemporary people, like his mother, after learning about their practices at the ancient Pyramid of the Sun. This is an important moment in the bildungsroman because it shows a moment where Shepherd takes what he is learning and uses it to better understand his life and the direction he will take in his art. It also shows how Frida Kahlo encourages him along this path. Her assessment that “greatness is very boring” is in keeping with her Communist principles of equality.

“He took off his glasses and turned his face to the sun for a moment, boots planted wide, the peasant brow facing heaven. He looked the very image of the People’s Revolution in one of Diego’s murals. Then the former president of the Petrograd Soviet put away the manure shovel and went to his breakfast.”

In this quote, Shepherd describes his impression of Leon Trotsky shortly before his assassination. Shepherd notes the abrupt shift between the idealized image of Trotsky, like the one in the lower right-hand corner holding a red flag in the Diego Rivera mural “Man at the Crossroads,” and the humble Trotsky shoveling chicken manure in the yard. It is an example of how the public perception of someone—as seen in the mural—can be very different from their private life.

“This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulations of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable. That particular handful of coins had no special meaning together, it seems, except to pay a particular price. It might remain real, if someone had written everything in a notebook. No such record now exists.”

In this quote, Shepherd uses an apolitical, economic metaphor to describe the disintegration of the household following Trotsky’s assassination. Although Shepherd never articulates a coherent political ideology, this metaphor implies a left-leaning interpretation of the free market in which humanity is alienated (“separate, invisible, and untraceable”) and reduced to its economic value. Shepherd laments the loss of his notebooks, which he thinks could have restored meaning to the collective that made up the home.

“Accumulating words is a charlatan’s career. How important is anything that could burn to ash in a few minutes?”

In this quote, Shepherd expresses bitterness over his seeming foolishness in believing in his dream to be a writer. He assumes his papers have been burned. He uses the word “charlatan,” meaning fraud or imposter, to deride seemingly all authors, but primarily himself. He uses a rhetorical question to express this bitterness. This is the inverted echo of the rhetorical question he posed when he felt inspired to pursue joy by Trotsky.

“So he was right about something alive in the crate, wanting out. Mrs. Kahlo did that for him. He’d about given up on life as a whole, going away on a train to the next world. If he didn’t take one other thing, she wanted him carrying his words.”

This quote gives insight into Shepherd’s character. Upon his arrival in Asheville, he is depressed and avoids writing for the first time in his life. This is because he felt his “life,” meaning his “words,” had been taken away from him. Once he gets them back, courtesy of his longstanding supporter Frida Kahlo, he begins to live again and pursue his dreams of becoming an author.

“The grain of the wood tells a story of years in the mountains, all the rains and droughts leading to the beginning of my life, when these trees were felled. The house was built the same year as my birth.

So we’re well-matched companions, sheltering roof and solitary soul, crouched in a domestic forest of elms and maples.”

Shepherd is largely driven by The Struggle of Dual Nationality and the Search for Belonging. When he buys his house in Asheville, he writes Frida to report with great satisfaction about having finally found a home for himself. As a sign of his sense of belonging, he connects the material of the house to his own life, noting that “the house was built the same year as my birth.”

“See how that pronoun now stands in the lines I write, tall and square-shouldered. I strive for the stout American declarative, so entirely unaccustomed: I am.”

In his teenage years and young adult life, Shepherd only wrote about himself in the third-person point of view in his journals. He would use terms like “the boy” or “the cook” to describe his actions. However, after moving to Asheville as an adult, he finally has the confidence and sense of self to use the first-person “I” pronoun. He equates this feeling with his growing sense of belonging as an American, describing “I am” as “the stout American declarative.”

“Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.”

Even as an adult, Shepherd experiences The Struggle of Dual Nationality and the Search for Belonging. Because he grew up between Mexico and the United States, he does not entirely know the social roles and expectations of either, describing it as “struggling to understand what every [one] passing on the street seems to know by rote,” as in to know by heart. Despite this gap in his knowledge, he decides to “claim” the United States as the place where he belongs.

“Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives. He should still be living. Murder has the weight of an unpaid debt, death as unfinished business.”

The assassination of Trotsky deeply affects Shepherd. Over time, he becomes even more reclusive as he struggles with the loss. He characterizes his withdrawal from society as a result as the result of memory “grow[ing] edges like knives,” a possible allusion to the sharp object (an ice pick) that killed Trotsky. This assessment runs counter to the popular idea that “time heals all wounds.”

“No more riding on top of our wooden crates in the train car, which really was not half a bad place to lob around, as it turned out. (Like Hope says, Thanks for the memories!) But think of it, man, you and me in Europe. Goose-feather beds. What a gasser.”

This quote from one of Tom Cuddy’s letters alludes to the relationship he had with Shepherd while they worked together transporting art during World War II. He notes whimsically, “Like Hope says, Thanks for the memories!,” a reference to a song by Bob Hope, and writes enthusiastically about the possibility they will be able to sleep together in “goose-feather beds” instead of “on top of our wooden crates in the train car.” This excerpt is an example of the kind of vernacular English, like “gasser,” meaning “something exciting,” that Shepherd struggles to understand because he did not spend his twenties in the United States.

“Today Bull’s Eye departed, and all this he took with him: schoolboy shenanigans, promises broken, dormitories and secret assignations. An invisible boy made manifest, seen for once by another’s eyes, if only for a short while. A city of memories has gone up in fire and gas, and there can be no remorse.”

This quote is the most explicit Shepherd ever gets when describing his relationship with Bull’s Eye as a teenager. He equates burning the journal he kept from their time together to Bull’s Eye “depart[ing].” This is another example of how Shepherd sees words as giving things life.

“They look around and say, ‘This here is good, and that is evil,’ and it’s decided. We are America, so that over there must be something else altogether.”

In this quote, Mrs. Brown articulates why Americans are happy to read Shepherd’s stories about Mexico that call into question Mexican leadership while refusing to apply the same scrutiny to their own country. It is an example of how Mrs. Brown, despite her limited education and experience, has insight into topics more complex than one would stereotypically expect of her.

“You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It’s what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, ‘There, you sons of bitches, don’t lay a finger on it. That is a finished product!’

But any country is still in the making. Always. That’s just history, people have to see that.”

In this quote, lawyer Artie Gold expresses frustration with the Red Scare and the way it is used to prevent advocacy for civil rights, as anyone who advocates for equality is accused of being a Communist. Kingsolver uses his character here to express her feelings. As she writes in her Q&A about the novel, “[Americans] seem to have an aversion to national self-criticism in general. We began as a nation of rabble-rousers, bent on change. But now, patriotism is often severely defined as accepting our country to be a perfect finished product. As in, ‘Love it or leave it!’” (“The Lacuna.” Barbara Kingsolver).

“They don’t even have to indict you. One day you just feel the heat and you know they’re up there, kneeling in the circle, watching you writhe. Your name has gone on a list. Everybody stops talking when you come into a room. You think we don’t know about the plague?”

In this quote, Tom Cuddy compares the spread of polio (“the plague”) to the Red Scare. At that time, if someone were thought to have the “illness” of Communist affiliations, they were shunned as if they had a contagious disease. This foreshadows what would happen to Shepherd later in the novel after he is accused of Communist sympathies.

“The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know. He said that plenty. It would be no surprise if he asks for that put on his gravestone, if there is to be one. There you see. Hangs the tale, and still yet more to find out.”

Harrison Shepherd was particularly interested in the lacuna, or the piece of the story “you don’t know.” This is shown in the way Shepherd disguised his political beliefs and his sexuality in his writing. He embraced this principle so closely that, as Mrs. Brown wryly notes, “it would be no surprise if he asks for that put on his gravestone.” The reference to the gravestone in the present tense (if he “asks,” not “asked”) points to the final unknown Shepherd left behind, whether he is alive or dead.