Post 13: Mousetraps
11 June 2025 // Pages 305-323It has been longer than I intended. My jaw keeps unhinging from its joints and I keep going to dentists and doctors, trying to get it re-hinged again. Our narrator Nobody is still stuck inside Zellen Warhol’s tapestry version of the city, holding the book his Mother has handwritten this time. It is 1634. The City is walled now, gated by fortresses and keepers, all of whom are very nervous about the power Zellen Warhol’s map holds to make it permeable to enemies. They want to put Zellen in a Zelle, a cell, a jail, for this cause, so maybe when it comes to names, etymology here really is destiny. The Narrator decides to enter one of the Gatehouses, finding its keeper making plates surrounded by engraving tools. It’s not this altarpiece but the description reminds me of this altarpiece, specifically the rightmost panel:
This is the Mérode Altarpiece, by Robert Campin and his workshop around 1422-30, which actually lives here in New York City, up at the Cloisters. Nobody, by which I mean the world’s nobody as no person and not our narrator, can quite figure out what the rightmost figure, who may be Joseph, is doing with his baffling array of tools. One hypothesis is making mousetraps. There is some argument for the futility of drilling holes, which you can see in the wood in his hand, one after the other. This is perhaps the array of memory.
I first saw this altarpiece up at the Cloisters when the trajectory of my life looked like I would be an art historian of this period and nothing else, which is to say not doing the other literary writing that most of you know me for. The Narrator reaches a gatehouse which is a like a camera obscura for memory. He is going through memory’s of his mother’s life. She is in those moments frozen, at two, fifteen, after she married his father etc.. One of the things I remember about that trip up to the Cloisters is being stuck in our professor’s car, with several graduate students who probably rightfully found my undergraduate presence annoying, as he tried to use its then-novel self-parking feature, which did not work. I think about this now because people are summoning autonomous driving cars, Waymos, that do to some degree work if you don’t mind the mowing down of pedestrians, and lighting them on fire in the LA protests right now.
When the Narrator is in the dark tunnel of the gatehouse of memory, “images are consummate”—he could get stuck there forever, examining the past, and the past’s past, and the photographs, one of which along could fill a life. I liked this about images then, in the car at the Cloisters struggling to park itself in front of all those nailed up Christs, and I like it now. I’ve chosen to fill my life by looking at them, with knowing things like that if St. Joseph on the right really is making mousetraps, mousetraps are metaphors for the cross of the crucifixion. That a field of fiery Waymos, symbols of technoautocracy’s broken hold on the very fabric of cities, is in its way a beautifully Biblical revenge, the kind of thing where allegory collapses onto reality.
Nobody says this is dangerous, that you could get stuck in that tunnel forever, thinking and thinking about memory and past and present entirely by image, that if he stayed in the gatehouse of the camera obscura “the images would fall upon me and destroy me”. He is stuck in the “panopticon” of his self demanding: “Where is the one who persuaded us that the hidden is more significant than the visible? Wouldn’t one have to turn the tables on the gaze, the that which shows the photograph would come into view—the eye?” I think I personally persuaded you that the hidden was more significant than the visible, or rather that the visible was a gateway to the hidden, that knowing St. Joseph is or is not making mousetraps in the rightmost panel means something. That’s what art historical and critical analysis does, makes you fold it back, mean and mean and imbue with meaning until a thing is heavy with it.
You can look at my eyes here:
You can’t really see them in an x-ray, to be fair, but you can see the trouble jaw of the hinged joint which looks like a thing that fits right in on the Mérode Altarpiece’s carpentry table. Images are dangerous portals in Schattenfroh, they lead to potentially anything, but also to gazing back at the self in troubling and revealing ways. That’s what this whole project is, the map, the Book of Life, Father, Mother, all of it, stepping back and looking at yourself looking, looking at Nobody look at himself which is the story of so much more than one person because no image is singular, any one thing.
Nobody gets through the Gatehouse, in the end, with a dubious letter of permission from Schattenfroh. It denotes him as “bachelor of sacred theology and thwarter or also sign painter of the arts…”. This is what the novel renders us, the readers, too. We co-construct the inverse theology of Schattenfroh’s world, read it for the hidden below the skimmed visible, the letters below the letters, which is a meaning that also forces us to say or consider certain things about how we make images, and how images make selves.
Build a mousetrap. Build a Waymo. Drill out the mousetrap. Light the Waymo on fire. Is this about Christ? It’s usually about Christ, sometimes by one degree of remove, in 1422 or 1634 if it’s an altarpiece. The theology is baked into how we look at places like the Cloisters, full of art from this period and earlier. Christ, and the Christological narrative, is not at remove from the personal one in Schattenfroh. The mousetrap is usually a crucifix. The x-ray is one literalization of the totalizing vision of God. Watch me go, I could stay in the tunnel forever! But we’re supposed to leave the gatehouse, so I’m going to tear myself away from the images under the images.
-- A.V. Marraccini
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