47 pages • 1 hour read
The Sea
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Part 2, Pages 135-186Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Pages 135-160 Summary
Max and the twins spend most of their days swimming. One day, they swim during a thunderstorm and a fork of lightning strikes the water near them. The twins swim gracefully with good technique, but Max has superior stamina. When Chloe waits for him to come out of the water, Max comes to believe that she is starting to have feelings for him.
As he recalls the three children walking away from the beach, adult Max reflects on the nature of memory and ponders the identity of the version of himself who is observing them from the shadows. Max notes that he cannot conjure a mental image of Chloe, although certain features of her remain intensely vivid to him. He finds it hard to believe that all that remains of her now is a figment of his memory. At the same time, he finds it to be a frustrating paradox that even though Chloe now only really exists in his memory, she still somehow eludes him. He cannot really possess or control her. He reflects on mortality in general, including his own. Max remembers kissing Chloe in the dark at the picture house and reflects on how strongly he felt experiences and emotions in childhood.
Max reveals that one of his reasons for coming back to the Cedars was that he no longer felt comfortable in his own house after Anna’s death. He believes the Colonel is rather jealous of him; he reflects that Blunden’s bluff, ex-army persona seems a little too good to be true and considers he may be lying about his military past. The Colonel is clearly hiding a Belfast accent, and Miss Vavasour had spotted him going to Catholic mass.
Max describes Bonnard’s relationship with his wife and muse, Marthe de Meligny. Marthe, who struggled with mental illness, was the subject of the Baignoires, a series of paintings of her lying in the bath. He dwells on the last of these paintings in particular, Nude in the Bath, with Dog. He recalls how Anna, too, found baths soothing during her illness and how he would sometimes guiltily fantasize about her drowning in the bathwater. He remembers a conversation with his wife during which she sympathized with him for the fact that he was no longer “allowed” to hate her (155).
Max remembers Miss Vavasour showing him around the house when he arrived and how many details failed to comply with his cherished memories of the place. A robin in the garden reminds Max of his boyhood passion for finding and secretly observing the nests and eggs of birds. He remembers how on one occasion, he must have inadvertently given away the location of a nest and came back to find the eggs smashed.
He is transported back to Anna’s hospital room. He pictures her vomiting and likens her frail, burning brow to an ostrich egg.
Part 2, Pages 161-186 Summary
Max remembers sitting with Chloe in the Strand Café after they kissed. He abruptly interrupts his train of recollection, realizing that the episode must have happened at the time he remembers because it was nighttime and Myles was with them.
Young Max is tortured by his feelings for Chloe. He finds her intermittently vague and distant, to the extent that he sometimes reacts by physically shoving or shaking her. She responds to this by playing “grotesquely, grinningly dead” (165). Chloe, too, is physically violent and provocative. He now attributes his tolerance of her caprices to a sense of protectiveness and compassion for a fragile ideal. He also observes that his relationship with Chloe was his first experience of otherness, his first sense of the world being an objective entity. Formerly, he had a sense of connectedness, of “the immanence of all things” (168). He remembers feeling particularly ashamed on one occasion when Chloe victimized a “townie” who clearly shared a similar social background to his own. Max remembers longing to cancel the negative image produced of himself in the “townie’s” perception. His train of thought turns to his dislike of being photographed in general and of having his picture taken by his wife in particular. He recalls a series of pictures she took of him and how they left him feeling “exposed” (174).
Max describes another series of photographs Anna took in hospital, these of her fellow patients. He was jealous to find that Anna had asked Claire to secretly smuggle the camera to her and was embarrassed to be called up before the matron when the relatives of his wife’s subjects complained. The pictures displayed the other patients’ scars, disfigurements, and infirmities, juxtaposed by their calm, smiling faces. When Max confronts Anna about the pictures, she describes them as her “indictment.”
Back in the present, Max feels exhilarated by a storm at night. He confesses that he has always felt his life has been nothing more than a rehearsal for some kind of apotheosis, or realization, yet to come. When this happens, he feels, he shall be fully “expressed” or “said” and thereby transformed from flesh into “unsuffering spirit” (185).
Miss Vavasour has told Max that the bed in which he is sleeping was occupied by Carlo and Connie Grace.
Part 2, Pages 135-186 Analysis
Memory becomes an increasingly central concern as Part 2 progresses, developing the theme of Time, Loss, and Memory, particularly the potential falseness of memory and the reasons why it may be warped. Max’s memory proves unreliable once again, first in the many inconsistencies that Max finds between his recollections of the Cedars and the actual place and then in his realization that the episode in the Strand Café cannot possibly have come after the kiss at the cinema. The act of capturing memories is increasingly portrayed in a predatory light—as a means of trapping and somehow possessing the object of reminiscence. Picturing himself and the twins as children, Max imagines an adult spying on the youthful bathers to record these images as a sinister figure. This image reflects his sexual shame and his conflict around “owning” his memories of sexual desire toward the pre-pubescent Chloe. By the same token, he is frustrated that he cannot fully picture and therefore cannot fully possess Chloe, a further means of objectification. Max wishes to own his memories of her while distancing himself from any responsibility.
The connection between memorization and artistic representation is increasingly developed in this part of the novel. Max directly links his experience of being perceived and recalled in an unflattering light by the “townie” boy to that of being photographed by his wife. When he sees Anna’s photos, he feels as if he has been violated and somehow robbed: He comments that “took” was an appropriate choice of verb and imagines voices calling out “Stop thief!” (174). His comparison to the “townie” story shows how the dynamic of Max’s relations with Anna captures his sense of social inferiority. Max’s description of Bonnard’s Baignoires reverses this power dynamic, where the painter used his craft to “capture” his complex, troubled wife, deliberately changing and infantilizing her. The novel suggests that Max’s reflection on Bonnard is a subconscious means for him to reassert his masculinity and the traditional relationship of male artist and (objectified, exploited) female muse in order to exact a form of mental revenge on Anna (and Connie and Chloe).
If Bonnard’s paintings depict the naked female body in an impressionistic and, in some ways, idealized manner, Anna’s last series of photos—her “indictment”—focuses with brutal and surgical detail on the diseased, mutilated body itself. They are pictures that alienate Max inasmuch as they represent an experience that he does not share and a level of human corporeal existence that social convention and the natural fear of mortality incline him to avoid. This treatment of the human body continues to be mirrored in the childhood narrative. Chloe, Max, and Myles continue to be physically cruel to each other and to the hapless “townie.” Chloe invites Max to swim between her legs when she has just urinated and then immediately dismisses him as disgusting. Max justifies his tolerance of Chloe’s cruelty in terms of the preservation of an ideal vision of her that does not include her physical flaws—her green-tinged teeth or her smell—but there is an increasingly masochistic element to his relationship with her in this part of the novel. His tolerance of her cruelty speaks to his sense that she is superior to him and that he is both elevated and humiliated by her company.
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