Duma Key

In the novel, art make it a heady, powerful force, capable of healing its practitioners and endangering them.

The therapeutic aspects of art affect multiple characters. When Elizabeth lost language and memory from a traumatic brain injury, she drew pictures to communicate: “She thinks I can make the world on paper. I can draw what the words mean” (110). The process was restorative, helping her remember the names of the objects she sketched, stopping her headaches, and even bringing her back to herself. As Edgar looks into Elizabeth’s memories, he can see that her art allowed her to reclaim her own name and identity: “She thinks I am ELIZABETH” (110). Finding these memories is described as an artistic process, like filling a white page with images. Edgar too experiences similar healing and self-discovery when he paints at Duma Key. The focus required for the activity alleviates his chronic physical pain. He trivializes his art at first, calling it “my new hobby” (59); yet he notes that it “helped in my transition” (59) to health. Eventually, the curative power of art is literalized—Edgar restores Wireman’s eyesight and removes the bullet lodged in his brain by painting a portrait of a younger, pre-injury Wireman. For these characters with traumatic brain injuries, resulting in bodily and intellectual limitations, art is thus very empowering.

Art also feeds and rouses the creative urge, which is linked to moving away from realism and into surrealism, a genre that uses representational techniques to depict the impossible, dreamlike, and unreal. In the novel, this impulse exposes the artists to external manipulation. Elizabeth’s artistic talent is described as hungry: The more Elizabeth draws, the more she wants to push the boundaries. When her paintings start seeming mundane and repetitive, she adds surrealistic elements to them. Edgar does the same thing, adding blown-up images of shells and flowers to his vivid, frightening sunsets. The evening that he paints his first surrealist canvas, Edgar feels the “wonderful, blissful sensation of having caught an actual bolt of lightning in a bottle” (68). Edgar is an artist discovering the extent of his power, realizing that he can envision and produce something new, but the word choice hints at the destruction to come from this captured “bolt of lightning.” But with their newfound skills, Edgar and Elizabeth find that “something dark slipped in” (171). The creators lose control over their art, though the need to create continues to grow. For instance, Edgar’s phantom limb itching is only relieved when he gives into the urge to paint, even if the thoughtfulness with which he approached his early work—deciding to add a sophora garland to a sunset—is now replaced with a compulsive, trance-like state motivated by dreams and visions.

At this point, the magic Edgar and Elizabeth produce via their art turns perilous. Elizabeth feels compelled to draw the horrifying frog-like monster big boy, which herds her sisters into the ocean to drown. Driven by the impulse to exact vengeance, Edgar draws Candy Brown without a nose or mouth, suffocating the murderer. Uncontrolled and unbalanced power has corrupted him: Rather than trust the penal process, Edgar becomes a magical vigilante, doling out punishment as he sees fit. King uses the lens of the supernatural to explore the limits of such absolute creativity, which is central to Perse’s motivations. Edgar imagines a prehistoric origin for her: “there were elder gods in those days, queens and kings they were” (527). Perse’s malevolence is what happens when this kind of creative power is uncoupled love, conscience, and judgment, but the raw power is alluring, as Edgar points out when he describes making his last painting: “that remembered sensation of power began to flow […] I could see my picture almost with the eye of a god […] or a goddess. I could give this up, but it would not be easy” (688). Edgar cannot keep channeling Perse because it will cost him his soul, his entire family, his friends, and perhaps the entire world. Thus, he must balance the power of art with control.

Although it costs Edgar and Elizabeth dearly to put down their brushes, they do so despite the temptation to hang on to their powers. When Edgar’s art brings a version Ilse back to life, she offers him the chance to die by suicide and join her aboard Perse’s ship—one way to handle his guilt at her death. But this would mean awakening Perse again, so he steels himself, dispels the sand-Ilse, dooms the island to stormy destruction, and stops painting for good. The decisive finality of Edgar’s act makes literal the need for artists in any medium to recognize that their work is done, and move on.