Book Review - 'While They Slept,' by Kathryn Harrison - Review - NYTimes.com
The violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling. Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs. Mythology and literature (and their descendant, the Freudian talking cure) manifest a profound hunger for narrating what is called, paradoxically, the unspeakable. Raped, her tongue torn out, Philomela becomes the nightingale, singing the perpetrator’s guilt. When Oedipus appears with bleeding eye-sockets, the tragic chorus simultaneously narrates and says it cannot speak; it looks while saying it must look away:
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WHILE THEY SLEPT
An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family.
By Kathryn Harrison.
290 pp. Random House. $25.
Mail Tribune, 1984
Billy Gilley in 1984, when he was convicted of murdering his parents and sister.
What madness came upon you, what daemon
Leaped on your life with heavier
Punishment than a mortal man can bear?
No: I cannot even
Look at you, poor ruined one.
And I would speak, question, ponder,
If I were able. No.
You make me shudder.In the “Inferno” of Dante, Count Ugolino, forced to cannibalize his children’s corpses, is led to narrate the horror by Dante’s offer to retell the story up in the world above. Genesis 19 not only tells the story of incest between Lot and his daughters, but proceeds to name their offspring: Moab and Ben-ammi, and the Moabites and Ammonites descended from them. Abel’s blood “cries out” with its story, and the fratricide Cain is marked.
June 8, 2008
Discovered Today! 06/09/2008
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