Hornby's "NippleJesus" Ultimately Confounds
Hornby Uses Illusion to Encourage Fascination and Contemplation
“NippleJesus” is part of a collection of short stories called Speaking with the Angel that Hornby compiled to raise money for TreeHouse, a school for children with autism.
"NippleJesus” is rich with facets that readers who appreciate irony will find striking, hilarious, and beautiful. One of those facets is illusion.
Illusions Revealed
Dave, the narrator, momentarily leaves his post guarding the controversial exhibit NippleJesus to remove a protestor from the building. While he is away, someone tears the picture, an image of Jesus on the cross composed of tiny images of women’s breasts, from the wall and destroys it. Dave, as well as the picture, is crushed.
“…it was only when I saw the picture smashed up on the floor that I finally realised how much I loved it.”
Dave, so far, has taken everything at face value, so to speak, and now that there is no longer a face on the NippleJesus, Hornby allows the Janus faces of others to become apparent, thus smashing some of the illusions.
Those who had destroyed the NippleJesus had, in fact, ravaged and desecrated an image of Jesus. The symbolism of this act is not lost on Dave.
“What they’d done was much more blasphemous than anything Martha (the artist) had done. Jesus is Jesus, isn’t he? No matter what you make him out of. And maybe that’s one of the things Martha was trying to get at: Christ is where you find him.”
Dave is thoroughly upset about the ruined work, but Martha is happy, excited, thrilled. She tells Dave the NippleJesus was not the point.
She says that something is art only if it provokes people. She was waiting, all along, for someone to destroy the painting so she could use the CCTV film of the destruction in an exhibit called “Intolerance.”
She valued this film of someone destroying the picture more than she valued the picture. She failed to recognise that the NippleJesus had been provoking people all along.
Most had an angry, negative reaction, but for Dave, the NippleJesus opened his eyes to beauty and excitement in art. It lifted him to an extraordinary place, a higher plane, for a couple of days.
- At the end of the story, Hornby allows some of the unanswered questions, some of the negative space, to be resolved as the illusions fall away.
- The story does not produce a firm, happy ending for Dave, but he, at least, is at peace with those questions that are left unanswered.
- He sits by his onion, contemplating the future.
Perhaps the onion is art, Hornby might be suggesting. An onion has layers, as the NippleJesus had to be viewed in stages, appearing different depending on how close the viewer stood to it.
Perhaps real life itself is art, perhaps all things bright and beautiful, ugly and dull, great and small, are threads within the overall fabric of existence and creation, like the thousands of nipples that made up the picture of Jesus.
Hornby, however, might remind us not to get too pretentious, not to venture too far into the sublime. It is, after all, only an onion.
Source: Speaking With the Angel, "NippleJesus," by Nick Hornby, Riverhead Books, 2000.
Nick Hornby
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