Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically [electronic resource].

Hatje Cantz 2012

Open access content

A painter arrived in a desperately wounded condition in a network of galleries beneath Chaillot, Paris. Aboveground, in that city as in most of the world, everything was contaminated with radioactivity after the series of nuclear explosions that wiped out much of life during a lightning Third World War. He was promptly operated on. The prognosis of the doctor who examined him following the operation was that he had only weeks, or at best months, to live. As a result, he was selected to participate in a time-travel experiment. He soon learned that another man, a photographer, was also approved for undergoing the time-travel experiments.When he met him, he was taken aback on learning that the latter had volunteered to participate in the experiment. Why did he do it? As a boy, he used to be taken by his parents to the jetty at Orly airport to watch the departing planes on Sundays. There he developed a childhood crush on a woman who also visited the jetty every weekend. But one day he witnessed a traumatic scene. The vio- lent scene, whose meaning he would not grasp until much later, took place on the great jetty at Orly, a few years before the start of the Third World War: the sudden noise, the woman’s gesture, the crumpling body, the cries of the crowd. Later, he knew he had seen a man die. As the boy grew up, he thought that with time he would forget her and, when a man, find another women he would love. This did not prove to be the case…
https://www.librarystack.org/reading-rewriting-poes-the-oval-portrait-angelically/?ref=unknown

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