Liquid Influences Whitney Prose
aegis 2009 38 Prose
Ideas cannot flourish in a void, nor can a soul exist in one. Anne Patchett’s ideas flow through the medium of the novel The Patron Saint of Liars, while the protagonists’ souls are enveloped by water. Patchett shares her ideas of water by understanding and utilizing the heavy influence that one’s surroundings have on each person. Her characters change, relate to, and also hate their environments. To understand the complex characters, the reader must rely on interpreting the atmosphere surrounding the characters, with water being the most constant and influential aspect of this atmosphere. Water is often considered synonymous with life, and this relation and duality is visible in The Patron Saint of Liars. In Patchett’s novel, water represents life symbolically through religion, physically though giving birth, and symbolically through drowning. Readers of The Patron Saint of Liars will miss the subtle meanings of the novel if they do not understand the many layers of significance of water that are present in it. Patchett’s novel is steeped with religious references and she is aware of the Biblical meanings of water. Her novel is set in a Catholic home for unwed mothers where the nuns not only refer to things in spiritual manners, but Patchett does herself. For example, a man feels “the call to witness” and goes into the streets testifying to the people “slow in believing” (Patchett 3). This man, Mr. Clatterbuck, is not testifying about Jesus Christ, but instead, about a spring of water on his—later the nuns’—land. An artesian spring bubbled out of the ground on the Clatterbuck’s land in the early 1900’s. The water heals Mr. Clatterbuck’s cattle, horses, and eventually saves his daughter Rose’s life from a mysterious illness. The spring is said to be working for “the Devil or the Lord” (Patchett 2). The water brings life to those who are dying. Patchett uses the traditional Christian reference of Christ the Savior as Living Water and turns it on its head. Now, water itself is the Christ Savior. Patchett has read and understood scriptures such as Jeremiah 2:13: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (KJV). She has taken this verse and brought it into her story by writing of a living spring that was not created by man. This living spring is the only thing that healed, and nothing created by man could help save Clatterbuck’s livestock or daughter. Additionally, the spring dries up when a hotel is built and the sick, ill, and lame feel too poor to pass through its richness to reach the spring. The evil sin committed is forsaking a person the living waters, so the waters go away. This theme of salvation, forsaking salvation, and then being left dry is repeated throughout the novel. Patchett might have taken her novel’s theme that sinfulness is a lack of water from Psalm 36:9, which directly makes water and life synonymous: “For with you is the fountain of life” (NIV). Water is seen as life even in the final book of the Holy Bible: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (NIV Revelations 22:1). Only water comes from fountains; but here, a fountain is springing forth life. In The Patron Saint of Liars, when the natural spring in the novel dies, the hotel falls into disarray and the people go away. Just as it is written in the Bible, life is water flowing from God. People without life, those who are dead in their souls, cannot have
