Literature Film Quarterly (2000) - Reading the birds and The Birds
From Alfred Hitchcock Wiki
(c) Literature Film Quarterly, Christopher D Morris (2000)
No Hitchcock film has generated more controversy over representation than has The Birds. The debate began with Robin Wood's lucid exploration of the logical responses to the question, "What do the birds mean?". He rejected what he called the "cosmological" and "ecological" readings -- that the birds are agents of revenge for a deity or for their own species' mistreatment -- as leading to absurdity; he also rejected psychological interpretations -- that the birds reflect tensions among the characters -- on the sensible grounds that this explanation could not account for the birds' attacks on the farmer, Dan Fawcett, and on the innocent schoolchildren. Wood's answer -- that the birds don't mean but just are -- finally dropped the issue of representation in favor of a rich study of the characters' ambiguity. Concurring with Wood's exasperation with the problem, Thomas Leitch also rejected both satiric and psychoanalytic readings of the birds in favor of the admittedly disturbing conclusion that the bird attacks are "a gag and nothing more". Although both critics' reasons for faulting hermeneutic efforts to understand the birds are sound, their alternatives are difficult to accept and, in any case, have not diminished the critical need to assign some significance to the referent of the film's title. Two recent attempts to revive psychological interpretations of the birds are those of the Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek and Robert Samuels, who modifies Zizek's position in the light of feminism and queer theory. Zizek and Samuels read the birds' attack first as a reflection of the maternal superego -- Lydia Brenner's rivalry with Melanie Daniels for the love of Mitch Brenner. For Zizek, this initial correspondence is then superseded by the more general understanding of the birds as the irruption of the Lacanian Real into the Symbolic -- Lacan's rough equivalents for the Freudian id and ego. Samuels modifies Zizek's argument by emphasizing the genderless nature of the Real, which becomes distorted and subject to ideological manipulation in the Symbolic, and by reading the birds' attack as the cinematic rendering of this originary nothingness or gender confusion.
Zizek and Samuels eventually conclude that the birds' attack neither has nor needs rational justification; nevertheless, each arrives at this point only after grounding this ultimate insignificance in the birds' correspondence both to general intrapsychic forces, that presumably exist in the world outside the film, and to the characters' repressed desires; in this way, Lacanianism, queer theory, and feminism reinstate a privileged relation between signifier and signified that is everywhere else challenged. In doing so, neither can escape the contradiction Leitch found in earlier satiric or psychological readings of The Birds:
Both [interpretations] agree that the fundamental problem in the film is the disproportion between the relatively inconsequential behavior of the characters and the magnitude of the threat they face, and both attempt to resolve that problem by establishing an intelligible relation between the two. It is the nature of the film, however, to resist any such resolution.
Thus contemporary interpretation of the birds has arrived at a point at which some explanation of the birds seems both essential and impossible, both necessary and arbitrary. Viewers cannot help asking why? but are just as surely disappointed -- a critical experience that, on reflection, was doubtless foreseeable, and, in any case, is very likely to persist. These observations suggest that the problem of representation may always have been the film's proper subject and that addressing it directly may shed light on the meaning of the birds and The Birds.
One useful context in which to study the theme of a representation that appears both necessary and arbitrary is Hitchcock's concept of the MacGuffin, his famous neologism for the plot-device of the long-sought object which serves as the rationale for the action of thrillers, while at the same time being a matter of indifference to the audience: for example, the aircraft formula in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the uranium sand in Notorious, or the microfilm in North by Northwest. Hitchcock employed the MacGuffin throughout his career and was interested enough in the idea to revisit his earlier formulations of it. Both Hitchcock and his commentators have invited viewers to understand the idea of the MacGuffin more broadly, to include other mysterious plot donnees, whether or not these are the objects of quests or occur in espionage films. Elsewhere I've argued that the MacGuffin may be understood as a metaphor for reading, an activity which is also both necessary and arbitrary; seen in this light, Hitchcock's films become allegories of reading and more broadly, of viewing. Interpreting the birds as MacGuffin is one means of addressing the problem of representation in the film and in its interpretation. This paper studies the film's title, credits, and "springboard situation" as indications of the way the birds may be read as a MacGuffin that calls into question the act of reading.
So far no critics have discussed the title's recollection of Aristophanes's play by the same name -- an omission perhaps borne of a reticence that may seem increasingly ingenuous and difficult to maintain with regard to a filmmaker whose work alludes specifically not only to modernists like Conrad, Freud, and Nietzsche but also to such canonical works as Hamlet and the Book of Matthew. In any case, allusive titles may be said to raise the questions of reading and representation at the outset of the film, before any analysis of the plot can begin. Is the true referent of Hitchcock's title an animal or a text? In fact, Aristophanes's The Birds employed many of the same plot-devices as Hitchcock's: the purchase of two birds in the marketplace, as a means of locating someone; the removal of the principal characters from a city known for its litigation; the enlisting of the help of birds in acquiring a lover; the premise that birds may be capable of some overwhelming, greater-than-human power; most importantly, the question of the birds' "speech" or, more broadly, meaning.4 Weary of the empty political rhetoric of Athens, the hero of Aristophanes's play, Pithetaerus, succeeds in leading a rebellion of birds against the Olympian gods. He does so by persuading Tereus, a former king of Thrace who had become a Hoopoe, or bird, to rally others of his species and reclaim the latent power invested them because their birth preceded that of the Olympians. The birds achieve victory by fortifying the skies in such a way that Iris, the Olympian messenger, can no longer mediate between the immortals and mortals. As the reward for his inspiration, Pithetaerus is given the woman of his dreams, Basibia, and power in the new kingdom. On the other hand, by the end of the play it is apparent that the new city he has established is in fact no freer than Athens. The vanity and futility of human action in each version of The Birds is made all the more obvious by its contrast with the seeming omnipotence of the birds.
Part of each work's disillusioning conclusion derives from concentration on the birds' acquisition of speech. In Aristophanes's play, the birds soon manifest the power of speech; indeed, Pithetaerus's project can only be realized by making the birds speak; thus, the play's presiding trope is the making-articulate of formerly cacaphonous or arbitrary sounds. But what is true of bird-sounds in particular is also true of human language in general-linguistic signification is achieved through the bestowal of semantic meaning upon arbitrary signs. This is the element which gives each version of The Birds a universal theme. Pithetaerus's seemingly fantastic plan is simply a comic extension of the operation of ordinary language: attributing meaningful speech to birds is in principle no different than extending meaning to Greek or English phonemes. Likewise, Hitchcock's characters engage in a never-ending process of interpretation, of "giving voice to the birds" that, like subsequent criticism, is interminable. From this perspective, Aristophanes's play and Hitchcock's film may be considered allegories of language, of the necessity for interpretation based on the false or unnatural distortion of arbitrary sound.
One of Aristophanes's modern interpreters raises the linguistic theme of The Birds to a pre-eminent position, noting the extended parallel the play makes between wings and words. Cedric H. Whitman -- glossing Peithetaerus's claim, "I will give you wings by talking" -- notes that "everyone is given wings by words" and that "the whole underlying assumption of the play" is the "Aristophanean gestalt of lunacy and language, the nothingness of things and the power of the word" (194-95). If Aristophanes's The Birds reveals the association between lunacy and language, Hitchcock's The Birds conveys a similar theme, beginning with the credits.
II
Like all of Hitchcock's credits, those of The Birds emphasize the way reading, seeing, and hearing are false impositions of constructed meaning on arbitrary visual and aural signfiers. The stylized birds appear behind the credits like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave; viewers must construe these flapping, flickering black shapes as birds. Of course, the superimposition of written language over black-and-white shapes invites consideration of both as a series of signifiers. It may be as impossible to understand the black shapes as cinematically generated alternations of light and shadow as it is to understand the letters of words as mere graphemes (or subsequent images of objects and characters, for that matter, as representations of photons on celluloid). The "pecking away" of the words into meaningless, constituent graphemes is a means of reminding viewers that apparent meaning is derived from the arbitrary. Thus, even if these moving shapes "must" be read as birds, their artifice and activity stir questions as to how cinematic and linguistic representation arises. By this means the film allegorizes reading as a nearly inevitable mistake which can be understood as such only later, only in retrospect, a conclusion that recalls the famous twostage definition of reading hypothesized by Paul de Man:
The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration. As distinguished from primary deconstructive narratives centered on figures and ultimately always on metaphor, we call such narratives to the second (or the third) degree allegories.
DeMan thought that unreadability became apparent only after a necessary first attribution of meaning to the arbitrary. This formulation comports well with the credits and with Hitchcock's idea of the MacGuffin -- an arbitrary detail that is experienced by the characters as necessary but by viewers with a detached bemusement. From this perspective, Hitchcock's choice of birds as MacGuffin may be seen as his most determined effort to make its liminal quality -- its status at the threshold between meaning and non-meaning -- clear to his audiences.
The soundtrack of the credits, which blends music, recorded bird calls, and synthetic sound, has a similar effect. The blurring of the distinctions between animal and artificial sounds shows not only the way univocal meaning is an abstraction of heterogeneity, but also the sense in which no logical priority can be placed on a "natural" over a "constructed" meaning -- it is simply impossible to determine which, if either, deserves an ontological privilege. Both graphemes and sounds in the credits thus call into question any "natural" relation between sign and referent.
III
Everywhere in the "springboard situation" of The Birds, questions of naming and the relation between sign and referent are foregrounded. The story begins with the incoherent squawks of gulls in the streets of San Francisco, followed by the sound of a wolf-whistle, which makes Melanie Daniels turn in acknowledgment; this vignette dramatizes the credits' allegory of the way recognizable language is composed of and abstracted from meaningless signifiers. In such a world, naming and attributions are like wolf-whistles, false names, personifications or catachreses: when Mitch requests lovebirds that are neither too "demonstrative" nor too "aloof," his unconscious prosopopoeia only reinforces the way meaning is portrayed as the extension of the human onto the mute world; when Melanie says that moulting birds can be identified from their "hangdog" expressions, the pervasiveness of mistaken tropes becomes even more obvious. The question of whether any name is true to its object arises as Mitch and Melanie walk past a cage of small birds and look for the "true referent" of the word "love-bird":
Mitch: Are those love-birds? Melanie: Those? Those are red birds. Mitch: Aren't they strawberry finches? Melanie: Yes, we call them that, too.
Of course, as this exchange indicates, the inability to truly name objects is repeated in the misnaming of "subjects" as well, since Melanie's "we" is part of her charade as a salesperson. In fact, the "true identity" of both principal characters is unknowable from the very outset of the film. Melanie and Mitch lie from the first moment they see each other: she pretends to be a salesperson, and he pretends not to recognize her. These "spontaneous performances" call into question generalizations about each character's "true" identity, and because the main characters' masks precede any hope of determining their "true" personalities, the very existence of the latter is put in doubt. The idea that language's figuration occludes personal identity may be evident in Melanie's challenges to Mitch at the end of the scene: "What are you, a policeman?... I think you're a louse." Melanie's metaphor aptly inverts the prosopopoeia by which Mitch had said to the canary, "Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels." The pet-store sequence exhibits naming as an inevitable human construction of meaning in a world of masks and arbitrary signs, not identities.
The emphasis on arbitrary nomination is insistent. Melanie goes to absurd lengths to determine "the exact name," down to the spelling, of Mitch's sister. Her quest is preceded by dialogue that stresses arbitrariness in naming, as the postal clerk calls to his unseen friend, "What do you call the little Brenner girl? Lois? Alice?" The mistaken reply ("Alice"), cut off from its source, highlights the way the misnaming of language is independent of both sender and recipient. The effect of the interchange is duplicated when Melanie hails Annie Hayworth:
Annie: "Who's there?" Melanie: "Me." Annie: "Who's me?"
Pronouns, as Benveniste points out, reveal at once the alienability of language from its object and the fallacy of thinking "proper names" are any less arbitrary. Melanie's interchange with Annie is as potentially endless as the search for the "true name" of Mitch's sister; there may be visual application of this idea to Annie herself, when after Melanie departs, the scene concludes with a shot of Annie Hayworth looking wistful as she stands next to her name, printed on her mailbox.
Like the springboard situation's emphasis on misnaming, its depiction of "spontaneous performances" extends well into the film. Melanie lies when she tells Mitch the reason she is in Bodega Bay; Mitch lies when he tells Lydia that he has already invited Melanie to stay for dinner. Even Cathy Brenner, a supposed innocent, admits to a performance when she explains she already knows the details of her surprise party. The choral recitation and greetings of the schoolchildren further exemplify the blend of the seemingly natural with the artificial. Other characters may be said to "perform" through self-deception: Annie Hayworth's insistence that "it's all over between Mitch and me" rings as false as does Lydia's denial of the wish to interfere with Mitch's life. Of course, these examples raise the question of how one distinguishes self-deception from the "intent to lie" and both from the "spontaneous performances" of the pet-store.
Finally, the springboard situation emphasizes the absence of language's referent in its opening narrative of a missed delivery. The mynah bird Melanie ordered has not arrived -- the promised "content" of her language is missing from the beginning. Thus to the extent that the plot-action is made possible by Melanie's delay in the pet-store and by Mitch's inability to find the object of his language, too, the film allegorizes the way the events of life proceed from language's deferral of content. Put another way, the springboard situation plunges the characters into the vertiginous world of the pursuit of the signified described in Derrida's Post-card: the original deferral of Melanie's delivery leads to an open-ended succession of signifying relays -- to Melanie reading a license plate, then to her phone call to the newspaper-office, then to an inquiry to the California Motor Vehicle Department, then to Melanie's writing a note and conveying it first on an elevator-ride to Mitch's apartment and later by car (after a detour to determine the "true name" of the recipient), and then by boat to its destination. Of course, throughout this elaborate tracking of the signifier, the "true identity" of the "recipient of the signifiers" is also in doubt, since the "significant" recipient of the message has always been Mitch, not Cathy. But before the two can finally come together, a gull intervenes, swooping down upon Melanie, as if to punctuate the ultimate delivery with the arbitrary. In this way, the bird's function as reminder of the absent referent also marks the inevitable separation between desire and its object, and Hitchcock invites us to consider a world in which a true coming-together or knowledge of the true destination of the signifier may be forever deferred.
The bird's appearance as the absent referent which is also arbitrary has consequences for film criticism, too. In the absence of any "natural" or "inherent" referent, meaning must be bestowed. This seems one implication of Melanie's dialogue with Mrs. Magruder:
Melanie: Will he talk? Magruder: A full-grown mynah bird won't talk. You'll have to teach him to talk.
Read in the context of language's absent referent, the dialogue anticipates the actions of both characters in and critics of The Birds: each must "teach the birds to talk." The film's major action consists of looking at birds and speculating as to their meaning. Meaning must be continuously reconstituted, as Paul de Man argued, in the light of prior unreadability. This understanding of interpretation is later crystallized in the famous scene in the Tides Cafe, when the birds are interpreted in three unsatisfactory ways -- scientifically, theologically, and superstitiously. Each specific interpretation is discredited while the necessity to interpret is seen as inevitable. This is the interminable process of "teaching the birds to talk," which extends, of course, to film criticism, too, including deconstructive criticism.
IV
The elaborate technical work that produced the birds has been documented in several sources. The total effect was created by mechanical birds, real birds, and photographic processes which superimposed bird-shadows over the action. In other words, Hitchcock has so constructed the film that audience members often have difficulty distinguishing the "real" from the "constructed" birds. (There are exceptions: the birds that "land" on the shoulders of the fleeing schoolchildren are clearly mechanical props, while the shadows behind the credits are photographic effects; such "pure" rather than "blended" effects temporarily expose for the viewer the constituent parts of the whole, as might individual syllables separated from a word.) On the other hand, the composite effect of the birds is no different in kind from any other cinematic effect; an important Hitchcockian analogue is back projection. In The Birds, back projection is obvious as Melanie drives in her Aston-Martin toward Bodega Bay and later when she motors across it; back projection is present but less noticeable when she and Mitch walk from the dock to The Tides restaurant. Throughout his career, Hitchcock made use of back projection even when other directors had minimized or abandoned the practice in the interests of greater verisimilitude. It is as if -- far from seeing back projection as an embarrassment -- Hitchcock wanted to call attention to it, to flaunt it subtly, if such a paradox can be allowed. So a first response to the birds is that -- to a degree not exceeded by a "naturalistic" interpretation of them -- viewers may be invited from the outset, from the very abstract credits, to read the birds as constructed visual effects.
Thus the birds may be said to be constructed visual effects to which the characters necessarily, inevitably attribute motivation. Of course, the characters are constitutionally unable to endure the bird attacks without asking why, without seeking the cause, without the desire for an inside to explain an outside. This is the whole meaning of the discussion in The Tides restaurant when explanations are shown to be inadequate. But these flawed explanations are only more articulated versions of the characters' spontaneous comments, such as "It seemed to swoop down on you deliberately" or "It must have lost its way" or "They're massing for an attack." To this degree, the characters behave as do others in Hitchcock's MacGuffin films: they assume the vital significance of the "object" giving rise to the main action and dramatizing the necessity for interpretation. But unlike viewers of earlier MacGuffin films, critics of The Birds may r;ow strongly identify with the characters' search for meaning. If it is a matter of indifference to critics what the details of the fighter-jet formula are in The Thirty-Nine Steps or the anti-ballistic missile equation in Torn Curtain, in The Birds critics are forced to share the characters' obsession with causality. For recent critics (as we have seen) the mistaken judgements of science, religion, and superstition must be replaced by the characters' manifest or repressed sexuality. To such positions have critics been driven by the hermeneutic enterprise, by the necessity to make the birds speak.
But if we hold to the definition of the birds as visual effects to which characters attribute motivation, we can see that instead of an allegory of sexuality, the film is an allegory of viewing. The spectacle of the birds only presents more compellingly the spectacle of film in general, in which viewers are asked to attribute motivation to a play of light and shadow, to find an inside for an outside. To understand how this may be so, we should re-examine the scene in Davidson's Pet Store from the standpoint of motivation.
As we've seen, in the opening scene between Mitch and Melanie, we cannot know how much of their action is "natural" and how much "constructed"; their dialogue is a tour de force of undecidability. Even before we know Mitch's name, before we have any "natural" or "normal" against which to judge his action, he is presented as acting. Or is "acting" his "normal" behavior? Does his stated motivation -- to teach Melanie a lesson -- truly represent him? Is it possible that humans cannot represent their own motivation? The scene suggests that true answers to these questions will remain unknowable. As to Melanie, how much of her own "spontaneous acting" is caused by attraction to Mitch and how much is caused by the desire to exact revenge for being mistaken for a salesgirl? Is she capable of interpreting her own motivation? If neither Mitch nor Melanie can interpret themselves, what of the film critic? Thus before we see even the first "malevolent" bird, questions about the attribution of motivation in human beings permeate the action and stall hermeneutic interpretation just as it starts. And of course this stalling-process inevitably runs up against the realization that film audiences are being asked to disentangle the natural and constructed from visual effects -- here two elaborately directed human beings -- which blend them indissolubly.
This is where the birds function in the allegory of seeing. The birds are an instance of a visual effect which must be interpreted and given a human construction, despite the evidence that no such construction can be true. This is not an "ultimate" statement or a paradox; instead, it describes two stages of visual interpretation. We first see arbitrary shapes which we then cannot not interpret as revealing a valorized "natural" that subordinates a dispensable "constructed." It is as automatic that "natural" or "interior" motivations be assigned to Mitch and Melanie in Davidson's Pet Store (underneath their "constructed" or "exterior" surfaces) as it will be, later, to assign an interior to the "malevolent" birds. Making the birds a blend of "real," mechanical, and photographic images reduplicates the "normal" deployment of actors (whom Hitchcock once famously compared to cattle) in film: it is as if Hitchcock could get his audience to reflect fully on the constructed nature of meaning in film only by putting into play an exaggerated parody of the cinematic mise-en-scene, including acting which would reveal both the necessity for and the futility of looking "within" the film image to find authentic meaning.
The film is at pains in its second half to deconstruct the distinction between interior and exterior; it does so most obviously in the reversals between humans and birds. In the beginning, humans cage birds, although one happens to make a short-lived escape; at the end, birds cage humans, though a few are able to make a tentative (and temporary?) escape. The "action" sequences demonstrate that the distinction between indoors and outdoors is meaningless. The attack at the birthday party shows the danger of being outdoors; the attack at Dan Fawcett's farm shows the danger of being indoors. The schoolchildren's outdoor walk/ run is as futile as the barricades of the Brenner farmhouse, vulnerable first through its chimney and later through its defenses. The film's conclusion, in which humans tiptoe through apparently -- temporarily? -- quiescent birds, confirms the basic principle of Hitchcockian terror -- that there is no safe place. The inside -- whether a place or a psyche -- is no more privileged or authentic than the outside and is equally vulnerable to destabilization. Thus the allegory of the birds is that the fictional meaning retroactively bestowed upon them exposes the fictional nature of other human distinctions. As soon as we say the birds "really" represent the revenge of a species, a gag, the maternal super-ego, or the Lacanian real, these "inner" signified presences break down as quickly as Mitch Brenner's wooden barricades erected to protect his own interior.
The metaphor of breaking down might be exchanged for the metaphor of shattering. Of course, before the movie begins, Melanie has been accused of breaking glass: this is the event which precipitates Mitch's prank and hence the action of the film. It is as if some primordial shattering precedes even our introduction to the characters, as if the world can't be conceived without a prior shattering. In any case, memorable diegetic shatterings include the windows and chinaware of Dan Fawcett's house, the Brenners' china, a child's glasses, the windshield of the car in which Melanie and the schoolchildren hide, the telephone booth, and the windows of the Brenner farmhouse. The film's many instances of shattered glass accompany its process of breaking down its characters' and viewers' fictions of causality. One revered illusion after another is shattered: that people can truly represent their true identities, their "inner" motives, or the meaning of the external world. Of course, these illusions are so persistent, so seemingly impervious to destruction, that they survive in the characters through to the very end and in criticism through all attempts to construct a meaning for the birds.
And the metaphor of shattering may be exchanged for the even more fundamental idea of puncturing. To puncture is to pierce through, and the first bird attack on Melanie -- which breaks the skin -- may be said to be their first instance of puncturing. A second instance is the popping of balloons at Cathy's party. But the film's climactic attacks -- first on the Brenner farmhouse and then on Melanie herself -- may be understood as visualizations of puncturing glass, wood, clothing, skin -- all exterior sheathings of interiors. Roland Barthes thought that the idea of the punctum was inherent in photography itself. He argued that the "piercing" of a photograph was one of two structural properties of the art which acted to remind the viewer of the ephemerality, the instant obsolescence of every photographic moment. The birds of Hitchcock's film accomplish a similar objective; further, they may be said to dramatize the puncturing Barthes had in mind. But of course "puncturing" is also the essence of both "punctuation" and "point." We may say that the film's first sequence was punctuated at its end by the bird attack on Melanie -- as if it were a sentence ending with a period. Thereafter the birds' increasingly frequent punctuation of the action exposes its arbitrary construction, much as the birds' nibbling at the credit-names reduces words to morphemes or phonemes. As the film action accelerates and culminates in the horrific assault on Melanie, it may become possible to see life reduced to a radicle, to the alternation of arbitrary sound and nothingness, and to the condition of a sentence decomposing into syllables and silence, that is to say, to only the most frantic and futile gesticulations to postpone inevitable death.
There can be no question that the birds "bring death into the world," as Miltonic interpretations of the fall would have it; to this extent, the impossibility of truth they embody becomes linked with human mortality -- an association that Heidegger called Sein-zum-Tode. In the first fatal attack, on Dan Fawcett, the film insists on the logical separation between death and causality that is plain to intuition: human ascriptions of "the cause of death" are ludicrously inadequate, and the renunciation of cause seems revelatory of death. Put another way, the frantic search for causality by characters and critics is allegorized as a denial of mortality: the more obsessive the quest to know and understand, the less reconciled to the arbitrary inevitability of death. In this way, The Birds paints western logocentrism as denial of death and irrationality, one that emerges from the necessity to read those black constructed visual effects and all of the other signifiers of the film.
Shattering, puncturing, the Miltonic fall, Heideggerian Sein-zum-Tode -- these are, after all, only new metaphors for the birds, a kind of critical analogue of Melanie's pursuit of the license-plate or the names Mitch and Cathy Brenner, the search for truth or love or whatever it is humans think they want; like Derrida's idea of a postal system without true destination, these metaphors imply rupture and absence. But of course there is always suspense in Hitchcock, always an exception that makes it impossible to accept even such minimalist themes as certainty, and in The Birds this final subversive function is carried out by the lovebirds that Cathy brings into the car, with the cry, "They haven't hurt anyone!" -- a point no metaphor of absence for the birds can refute. Thus in the face of the birds' overwhelming demonstration that human life is only mortality in a world of reading without love or truth, even this tautological "conclusion" must be set aside as but one more fictional construct, which will inevitably be followed by new ones -- new attributions of present or absent significance, new ways (like this one) of making the mute birds speak.
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