spoilers for the beginning of hangsaman... i just finished rereading the first chapter. i feel like talking abt it would reduce it. i don't even know what to say, there's so much there. it's orchestral... all these instruments tuning up and then playing together and then playing against each other so terrifyingly. natalie, and the detective in her head merging with the man in the garden; natalie has done the crime, she is the crime, natalie has erred. the whole chapter she is picturing a detective questioning her. and then she is at her father's party, in the garden with the man who will rape her:
"Thinking what about yourself?" the man asked.
Said the detective, leaning forward, "Have you given any thought to the extreme danger of your position? What about the knife?"
"About how wonderful I am," Natalie said.
and later it is said that this is her "final statement" as if given to the police. the whole chapter, she has been playing the game of guilt, the game of talking to this detective who is trying to find her out, and it is real to her, and it is pretend, it is an imaginary layer to an equally imaginary world.
the chapter seems to work backwards. before she is raped she thinks something wonderful will happen to her today, but at the very beginning of the chapter:
"Of course you remember," the detective said impatiently. "No one can live through such things and not remember them."
and it is natalie's crime, the crime the chapter works towards, the one she can't remember, because it hasn't happened yet. or it has already happened. she's already being shaped. her father wants her to write about him. at the beginning of the chapter, she submits to him a character sketch about him.
but just before she's raped - she's thinking about how wonderful she is for succeeding in a conversation with a man. for using words fluently, fluidly. her crime is to be the killer and the body both. she is at fault for both her own assertion and her failure to assert herself. "is he going to touch me?" but she doesn't say it. she feels so wrong when she wakes up the next morning. something terrible has happened. in the land of her childhood, where she used to play knights among the trees, something terrible has happened.
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