Still Life with Woodpecker

In Still Life with Woodpecker, Robbins traverses human history from the modern world, back through older versions of civilization to reconnect the reader to humans’ basic animal nature. Throughout the text, he contrasts the modern world, which he characterizes as capitalistic and insincere, with the reality of the animal human body to show the distance between people’s essential natures and the modern world.

In the opening chapters, Robbins firmly establishes the modern setting by repeatedly calling attention to the time period as “last quarter of the twentieth century” (3). This usage places the setting in the context of centuries, as part of a much longer history, while also establishing its specific context in the 1970s-1980s in the US. Through the juxtaposition of Leigh-Cheri and Bernard, he also draws attention to current events during that time. They are from two different generations—she is a child of the 1970s, while he took active part in the political activism of the 1960s. Leigh-Cheri is naïve and idealistic, because of both her age and the era she was born into. Through Leigh-Cheri, Robbins showcases that generation’s preoccupation with wellness, coupled with an overall feeling of optimism. Bernard’s philosophy, rooted in the political activism of the 1960s, acts as a counterpoint to her view. The generation gap between the two characters isn’t just about age, but also attitude, awareness, and even optimism, exposing the gaps in understanding others even within the modern era.

Between this modern world and human nature, Robbins offers a half-step: the old-world era represented by the quasi-European monarchy that Max and Tilli have been forced to abdicate. This old world is more “civilized” than humanity’s most animalistic impulses but retains the romance that, according to Robbins, is completely lost in the modern world. Max fondly remembers how “they, to a man, were consumed by a great, enormous, burning love for the drama of it all, an unrelenting passion for the secret theater of the planet” (184). Robbins establishes the romance of this era as a remnant of the deeper passions of the human animal, before they were lost in the modern world.

However, Robbins’s true purpose with the construction of this long timeline is to juxtapose the modern world with human nature at its most elemental. One way that he accomplishes this is by focusing on one of the human body’s most basic functions: sex. Leigh-Cheri experiments with a wide variety of contraceptive options, but finds herself “repulsed by the technological textures, industrial odors, and napalm flavors” (13). She theorizes that birth control is actually a tool of “capitalistic puritans, [and] were supposed to technologize sex, to dilute its dark juices, to contain its wilder fires and censor its sweet nastiness, to scrub it clean” (14). In contrast, when she is in her attic, with only the moon through her window, her menstrual cycle begins to follow the waxing and waning of the moon, a return to the human animal body’s connection to the natural world. Robbins portrays the modern world as cold and clinical, intent on removing humanity’s passion and wildness. Robbins continually speaks in graphic terms about sex, discussing semen and saliva, for example, in order to banish romanticism and present it in an animalistic way. He juxtaposes this imagery with the modern era’s capitalism, worrying that sex is being commodified so that “it is not a manifestation of love at all, but a near anonymous, near autonomous, hedonistic scratching of a bunny itch” (14).

Through his contrast between the modern world and humanity’s animal nature, Robbins addresses a much larger thematic issue, worrying that “the real purpose of human beings in a capitalistic, puritanical society, […] is to produce goods and consume them” (14). As a result, he argues, the modern world aims to distance humans from their own bodies, an aim that Robbins worries also distances people from their purpose and passions.