by Paul Auster
Your heart lifts when Carey does not send her away. He looks nonplussed, as if it had never occurred to him that there were other small people in the world besides himself, and yet, shy and awkward as he is with her at first, you also sense that he is intrigued by her, not only because she is beautiful to look at but because he knows he has found a semblable, une soeur. Her name is Clarice. Kind and affable, she slowly wears down Carey’s defensiveness with her friendly manner, they are settling into what promises to be a pleasant conversation, but then he tells her his full name, and she freezes. He didn’t have to do that, of course, he could have given her his first name only, or else have invented a false name, but he has done it on purpose because he wants her to know that he is the notorious shrinking man, for it is already clear to him—even if he doesn’t know it yet—that she is the one person he can confide in. Not understanding, Clarice delicately asks if he would rather be alone. No, no, that isn’t it, Carey says, he wants to talk to her, and suddenly she relaxes again, realizing she has misjudged him. The conversation continues, and bit by bit she tries to lead him into a new way of thinking about himself, explaining that being small is not the worst tragedy in the world, that even if they live among giants, the world can be a good place, and for people like them the sky is just as blue as it is for the others, the friends are just as warm, love is just as wonderful. Carey listens attentively, still dubious but at the same time wanting to believe her, and then she must be going, she can’t be late for her performance, and as he stands up to say good-bye to her, he asks if he can see her again. If you like, she says, and then she adds, looking into his eyes: You know, you’re taller than I am, Scott.
Cut to the living room of the house, where Carey is hard at work on his book. That night I got a grip on my life again, he says. I was telling the world of my experience, and with the telling it became easier.
You are beginning to feel encouraged. For the first time since the opening minutes of the film, something positive has happened, the ineluctable forces of disintegration have been reoriented toward acceptance and hope, and as you watch Carey immerse himself in the writing of his memoir, you prepare yourself for what could be an optimistic conclusion to the story, a possible happy ending. Carey will fall in love with little Clarice and live out the rest of his days as a contented midget. He and Louise will have to separate, of course, but his good and honorable wife will understand that marriage is no longer feasible for them, and they will part the best of friends, for Carey must now live among people of his own kind. That is the crucial point. He will no longer be alone, no longer feel that he has been cast out from society. He will belong, and in that belonging he will find fulfillment.
You cling to that view of Carey’s fate because of the voice-over narration, because the hero of the story is continuing to tell his story to the audience, and now that he is writing his book, you assume the words he is speaking are identical to the ones he has written. In your mind, the book has already been published (why else would he be using the past tense?), which could only mean that he has survived his horrific ordeal and is now living a normal life.
As the next scene begins, it appears that your prediction is about to come true, for there is Carey sitting on a park bench with Clarice, watching her read the manuscript of his book, and if the book has now been finished, if there are no more words to write, would that not seem to suggest that the shrinking part of Shrinking Man is finished as well?
Moved by what she has read, Clarice looks up and tells him what a fine job he has done. Carey takes hold of her hand. He wants her to know how much their meeting has meant to him, what an enormous difference it makes to be with someone who understands, to which she replies: You’re so much better now. They are a picture of two souls in harmony, a man and a woman reveling in a moment of serene companionship, and even if you are just ten years old, it is clear to you that they have fallen in love. All true, everything you have predicted is coming true, but then they stand up, and the joy in Carey’s face suddenly turns to alarm. Two weeks ago, he was taller than she was, but now (horribile dictu) he is shorter. It’s starting again! he shouts. It’s starting! He backs away from her in terror, in panicked revulsion, and then, without saying another word, turns around and starts to run.
This is the last thing you were expecting—a development so unexpected that you never even considered it as a possibility. You thought the antitoxin was infallible, that once it was shown to be effective, it would go on being effective forever, but now that its powers have been exhausted, what is there to look forward to but an agonizing plunge into the void? You brace yourself for something terrible, trying to imagine what will happen next, grimly struggling to accept the fact that all hope is gone now, but even though you think you are prepared for whatever it is that might come, the filmmakers are far ahead of you, and they begin the third and last part of the story with a startling leap forward in time, so far in advance of what your child’s imagination ever could have conceived that the wind is knocked out of you, and from that point on you will be gasping for air, struggling to breathe until the last moment of the film.
The next scene begins with a shot of Carey standing alone in a room. He is wearing what looks to be a loose-fitting pair of pajamas made of some coarse, homespun material, a strange costume, you feel, but not too strange to distract your attention from the furniture in the room, which is perfectly proportioned to the size of Carey’s body. He is no longer dwarfed by his surroundings, no longer out of place in a world that is too large for him, and this confuses you, for it is certain that he cannot have grown bigger since the last scene, which ended with the discovery that he was growing smaller again. And yet everything looks so normal, you say to yourself, as if all the elements of the physical environment have been put back into their proper balance. But how can things be normal when you have just been told they aren’t normal? A few moments later, the answer is given:
Because he is living in a dollhouse. Because he is no more than three inches tall.
Louise comes down the stairs, and her footsteps are thunderous, shaking Carey’s little house so violently that he has to cling to the banister to prevent himself from falling down. When she opens her mouth to speak, her voice is so loud that he covers his ears in pain. He steps out onto the balcony and scolds her for making such a racket, and you understand that he has lost his mind, that he has turned into a tyrant, that this ever-shrinking man rules over his wife with aggressive, ever more vicious acts of mental terrorism. Only I had the power to release her, he tells the audience—if I could find the courage to end my wretched existence. But each day I thought: Perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow the doctors will save me.
Louise goes out to do some errands, and as she opens the door to make her exit, their pet cat slips into the house. The cat has already appeared in a number of earlier scenes, but Carey was larger then, too large for the cat to pose any threat to him, but now he has been reduced to the size of a mouse, and with Louise suddenly out of the picture, the film enters its final, excruciating act.
For the next half hour, you watch in a state of horrified wonder, marveling at each new trick of perspective, each new distortion of scale, the brutal assault of the cat to begin with, who attacks the dollhouse and sends Carey sprinting across the living room carpet, a thumb-sized man running for his life over a floor that resembles an immense barren field, an empty plain stretching for hundreds of yards all around him, the ferocious, Brobdingnagian cat in pursuit, yowling with the force of a dozen demented tigers, who manages to swipe Carey with his claws, ripping off part of his shirt and bloodying his back, but Carey leaps up onto a dangling electric cord, which is attached to the base of a table lamp, and when the lamp comes crashing to the floor, the cat is temporarily frightened off. Carey dashes toward the cellar door, another all-out run across the immense, barren plain of carpet, maneuvers himself behind the door to hide from the now-recovered cat, standing on the top step of the mountainous wooden staircase that leads to the ce
llar, and just when it looks as if he has wormed his way out of trouble, Louise returns to the house, a draft of air rushes through the room as she opens the front door, and the cellar door slams shut, banging into Carey and knocking him off balance. Without warning, he is suddenly pitching forward into empty space, falling headlong into the depths of the cellar, like a man who has been pushed off the roof of a twenty-story building.
He lands in a wooden crate filled with assorted bits of discarded junk—and (luckily) a thick pile of rags. The rags cushion the fall, but the impact is nevertheless jarring, he is stunned senseless, and some moments pass before he comes to. Meanwhile, upstairs in the living room, Louise has walked in on the disturbing spectacle of the wrecked dollhouse, the presence of the cat, and the absence of her husband. When she discovers the small bloodied fragment of Carey’s shirt lying on the floor, there is only one conclusion to be drawn. Grotesque and unthinkable as that conclusion might be, the chilling sight of the cat sitting in a corner licking his paws leaves no room for doubt in Louise’s mind. She moans in agony, unable to see her way past the evidence. Carey is dead. She has proof that Carey is dead, and before long the news will be reported on television, word of the tragic death of the shrinking man will be broadcast from one end of the country to the other, and Louise will retire to her bedroom in a state of nervous collapse.
But there is Carey down in the cellar, still alive, bruised and shaken but very much alive, sitting up in the wooden box and trying to figure out what to do next. He is certain that Louise will eventually come downstairs to rescue him, and because he believes there is still hope, he resolves to do everything in his power to survive, even as he continues to grow smaller. From this point on, the film becomes a different film, a deeper film, the story of a man stripped bare, thrown back on himself, a man alone battling the obstacles that surround him, a minute Odysseus or Robinson Crusoe living by the force of his wit, his courage, his resourcefulness, making do with whatever objects and nourishment are at hand in that dank suburban basement, which has now become his entire universe. That is what grips you so: the very ordinariness of his surroundings and how each ordinary thing, whether an empty shoe polish can or a spool of thread, whether a sewing needle or a wooden match, whether a lump of cheese stuck in a mousetrap or a drop of water falling from a defective water heater, takes on the dimensions of the extraordinary, the impossible, for each thing has been reinvented, transformed into something else because of its enormous size in relation to Carey’s body, and the smaller Carey grows, the less sorry he feels for himself, the more insightful his comments become, and even as he endures one physical trial after another, it is as if he is undergoing a spiritual purification, elevating himself to a new level of consciousness.
Scaling walls with one-inch nails bent into grappling hooks, sleeping in an empty box of wooden matches, striking a match as long as he is in order to cut off a slender filament of sewing thread that for him is just as thick and tough as a line of hemp, nearly drowning in a flood as water pours out of the defective water heater—saved from slipping down the drain by clinging to an immense floating pencil—scavenging for crumbs of hardened bread, and then, the quest for the most important prize of all, a stale, half-eaten wedge of sponge cake, which has been captured by Carey’s new enemy, his sole fellow creature in that lonely underground world, a spider, a monstrously large and repugnant spider, three or four times larger than Carey, and the combat between them that ensues, with all its delirious shifts in advantage between the one and the other, is even more compelling to you than a similar scene you witnessed in another movie theater a year or two earlier, Odysseus thrusting his sword into the eye of the Cyclops, which was played out in Technicolor in the film Ulysses (with the former Issur Danielovitch in the title role), for the shrinking man does not have the confidence or the strength of the Greek hero, he is the smallest man on the face of the earth, and his only weapons are a pin he has extracted from a pincushion and the brain in his head. From your earliest childhood, you have been a keen observer of ants and bugs and flies, and you have often speculated on how large the world must look to those tiny beings, so different from the way you perceive the world yourself, and now, in the final minutes of The Incredible Shrinking Man, you are able to see your musings acted out on-screen, for by the time Carey manages to kill the spider, he is indeed no bigger than an ant.
Transfixed as you are by these deftly orchestrated sequences, these enthralling visual tropes and inventions, which turn real space into imagined space and yet somehow contrive to make the imagined real, or at least plausible, convincing, true to the geometries of lived experience—in spite of how dazzled you are by the action on-screen, it is Carey’s voice that holds it together for you, his words give the action its meaning, and in the end those words have an even greater and more lasting effect on you than the black-and-white images flickering before your eyes. By some miracle, he is still talking, still telling his story to the audience, and even though this makes no sense to you—where is his voice coming from? how can he be talking about his present condition when his lips are not moving?—you nevertheless accept it on faith, acceding to the givens of the film by reinterpreting the role of the narration, telling yourself that he is not really talking but thinking, that all along the words you have been hearing are in fact the thoughts in his head.
Louise has already come and gone. Carey has watched her walk down the stairs to the cellar, he has called out to her in a frantic attempt to attract her attention, but his voice was too small to be heard, his body was too small to be seen, and she has gone upstairs again and left the house for good. Now, in a final burst of will, summoning every bit of strength that remains in his depleted, still-shrinking body, acting with unparalleled stubbornness and ingenuity, he has captured the one source of food in the cellar, he has killed the spider, and just when you think he has triumphed again, has achieved what is perhaps his greatest victory, his thoughts push him forward to the next stage of understanding, and the victory turns out to be nothing, of no importance whatsoever.
But even as I touched the dry, flaking crumbs of nourishment, it was as if my body had ceased to exist. There was no hunger—no longer the terrible fear of shrinking …
So begins Carey’s concluding monologue, a quasi-mystical interrogation of the interplay between the divine and the human that both stirs you and confounds you, and yet even if you do not fully grasp what he is saying, his words seem to touch on everything that matters most—who are we? what are we? how do we fit into a cosmos that is beyond our understanding?—which makes you feel that you are being led toward a place where you can glimpse some new truth about the world, and as you transcribe those words now, recognizing how awkward they are, how scumbled their philosophical propositions, you must travel back into your ten-year-old’s mind in order to re-experience the power they had for you then, for wobbly as those words might seem to you today, fifty-five years ago they struck you with all the force of a blow to the head.
I was continuing to shrink. To become what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future?
If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?
So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite, but suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.
I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number. God’s silver tapestry spread across the night, and in that moment I knew the answer, the riddle of the infinite.
I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man’s conception, not nature’s.
And I felt my body dwindling into nothing, becoming nothing. My fears melted away, and in their place came acceptance.
All this vast majesty of creation
. It had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.
To God there is no zero.
I still exist!
By the end, Carey is no more than a fraction of an inch tall, so puny that he is able to step through a square in a screen window and go outside into the night. The camera then tilts upward, revealing an immense sky thick with stars and the swirl of distant constellations, meaning that when Carey comes to the end of his monologue, he is no longer visible. You try to absorb what is happening. He will continue to become smaller and smaller, shrinking down to the size of a subatomic particle, devolving into a monad of pure consciousness, and yet the implication is that he will never entirely disappear, that as long as he is still alive, he cannot be reduced to nothing. Where does he go from there? What further adventures await him? He will merge with the universe, you tell yourself, and even then his mind will go on thinking, his voice will go on speaking, and as you walk out of the theater with your friend Mark, the two of you battered into mute submission by the ending of the film, you feel that the world has changed its shape within you, that the world you live in now is no longer the same world that existed two hours ago, that it will not and cannot ever be the same again.
