Word: copyist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fortunately the Chinese respect the copyist. Traditionally, the masters of Chinese painting practiced the craft not only before but as a part of painting. Which brings to us and brings...
...copyist is Israel Horovitz too. The copyist, in the final analysis, realizes that life will never end. About Byron the copyist reports: "Byron will delude himself . . . He will each time believe that it is over. That he is free." Later the copyist says: "Soon to end . . . The cast is their duet now . . . Each knows the other if forever now and both are frightened awed terrified by all that notion contains...
Horovitz's just-published Cappella, his first novel, is a strange mixture of forms; certainly not a novel in the ordinary sense. The story weaves around two characters--one young, one old--who lie in adjacent beds in a hospital surgical ward. A copyist assigned to note everything dictated by the young man, Byron, relates the story. But the copyist makes his task a greater one and copies diligently not only what Byron says, but what he thinks, and also what his roommate, the 70-year-old Cappella, says and thinks and does. The novel is this copyist's first...
...much as the copyist obscures, he also analyzes, and his thoughts parallel the developing relationship between Byron and Cappella as they relate parts of their lives to each other. Cappella is lonely and troubled mainly because he is unwanted and superfluous. He explains a painful extramarital relationship which resulted in a daughter whose true identity he had to keep from his wife; and between sad reminiscences he screams in the night for herring or chopped liver...
CAPPELLA IS ABOUT dependency. Byron and Cappella become so reliant on each other that they merge into one. Byron is submissive to the female surgeon Pauline, but their interdependence is mutually satisfying. Byron is also dependent on the copyist, who, though blind, is the final historical record of Byron's thoughts and deeds. It is as the copyist himself says, the story of slave and master...