
CLOSE-UP: EXQUISITE CORPSE
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself . . .
—E. M. Cioran
WHEN DO YOU STOP MOURNING a casualty of art? Some never do. Recall Dostoevsky, driven to the verge of an epileptic attack by Holbein’s supine, open-eyed Christ, or the men who, so moved by the excavated Laocoön and His Sons, began to writhe in imitation of the marble serpents and their prey. Here we have Oscar Wilde on a suicide in Balzac: “One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of