24 pages • 48 minutes read
Skin
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Symbols & Motifs
Art
Early in the story, art is associated with opulence and wealth. While Drioli looks through the shop windows at everything he cannot afford (silk ties, diamonds, perfume), he also sees the picture gallery, “the finest shop in Paris” (2). Art rests along the opulent walls in the warmth of the gallery and is appreciated and observed by a decadent audience, and the impoverished Drioli is an outsider who glimpses this luxury through glass but is unable to enter it, despite having a valuable work of art inscribed on his body.
Having had a prior friendship with Chaim Soutine, who was also ostracized from elite worlds but posthumously celebrated in them, Drioli parallels his friend’s experience in gaining access to this aesthetic realm only through death. When Drioli felt the richest, as a younger man prior to the war, he asked Soutine to tattoo a work of art on his back. As an emaciated, starving, and lonely man after World War II, Drioli represents realities that the elite prefer to forget. Although he cannot purchase a meal for himself, the stranger who claims to own a French hotel assures Drioli that people will refer to him as “the fellow with ten million francs upon his back” (19). The art inscribed on him has value only when it is disembodied and its non-aesthetic origins are obscured.
Hunger
The motif of hunger is used throughout the story, and one of its functions is to divide the social classes. Without the means to work, reduced to begging, Drioli has withered into a bony version of his former self. In the memory of Soutine, he comments that art cannot nourish him; he is unaware of the irony in his words, as his inability to resist the roast duck dinner a stranger offers him leads to his death. In the postwar era, Drioli’s desperation and hunger represent reminders of years of suffering, and the wealthy people he encounters erect barriers between themselves and these images of suffering, preferring to place themselves on display as denizens of art galleries and avert their gaze from the street.
Hunger also develops Drioli’s desperation at the end of the story: He has been starved for stability and comfort. Having lost his friends, his job, and his wife, Drioli is physically exhausted and filled with longing for security and rest. The ostentatious life offered to him, with servants, wealth, and spectacle, highlights the extremes of his needs. However, it is the stranger’s offer of a warm, comforting meal that he succumbs to, lulled by the promise of satiating his hunger rather than by the promise of luxury.
Drioli’s Tattoo
The permanent placement of Drioli’s tattoo symbolizes ownership in the story. In most cases, art is a transferable good, one that—for the right price—can switch hands and owners. Yet Drioli requests that the art be placed right on his body, as something he can have with him “always,” as he states twice. Drioli’s intention can be interpreted as a way of asserting his dominance over Soutine regarding his wife, echoing Soutine’s inability to take Josie from his friend. The art survives from its 1913 debut up until the 1946 confrontation, enduring two World Wars. Its inscription on his body, however, prevents Drioli from being able to profit from it without sacrificing his life, denying the transferability of the object and preventing it from enriching its owner.
Drioli also refers to Soutine as “my little artist” (13), and after Soutine is gone, Josie claims “a dealer had taken him up and sent him away” as if that dealer owned him (13). The lines between possession of the art and possession of the artist are blurred, as if ownership of one equates to ownership of the other. However, in the story, only the created object is permanent. Drioli’s skin and his life are ultimately sacrificed, as the tattoo becomes a valuable piece of art that can be displayed on a gallery wall only after it is separated from him.
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