Correspondence No. 8: Nighthawks, a painting by Edward Hopper // “Nighthawks,” a short story by Stuart Dybek
There’s no single right answer, and Hopper doesn’t give us one – he said he was “unconsciously, probably, painting the loneliness of a large city,” so even he wasn’t sure. What we have here is an instant in time captured by the visual image, with an implicit invitation to imagine the events before the image represented (where is this place, and how did these people get here?), to interpret the image itself (who are these people, and what are they doing now?), and to expand the story further (what will they do later? and what’s going on in the world beyond this painting?).
Dybek’s multipart story, from his collection The Coast of Chicago, consists of a series of episodes, each with its own title. Most of them take place at night, and while they are self-contained, subtle connections are established among them. It’s a bit like Kieslowski’s Decalogue, where main characters from one film become bit-part players in another. The general effect is painterly in the sense that we are looking at slices of life, presented as if in an art exhibition, dedicated to showing the big city in all its nocturnal loneliness and mystery. The language of the episodes is often painterly as well: “…a streetlight swirled, slowly disappearing down the whirlpool of a sewer. And beyond the aura of the streetlight, on a street whose name and numbers had been washed away, shadows moved aimlessly through rain. Tonight, they had their collars raised.”
It takes several episodes to get to the one that focuses most specifically Hopper’s painting, and then, it’s not called “Nighthawks,” but “Insomnia.” Dybek builds an entire scenario of his own imagination out of the painting. It begins: “There is an all-night diner to which, sooner or later, insomniacs find their way.” These insomniacs come “from all over the city and beyond” to “a joint that asks no questions and never closes, a place to sit awhile for the price of a cup of coffee.”
Having set the scene, Dybek allows his imagination to fill in the gaps. We learn that the bartender’s name is Ray, that the mysterious glass of water on the counter was put there for a sleepwalker who orders only water, that the guy with his back to the window has been mumbling to himself – possibly brooding about women, but possibly thinking about work. Dybek even imagines things that aren’t shown in the painting: a woman fixing her makeup in the reflection of the diner’s window, who has since disappeared; the invisible sleepwalker being awakened by a cup of strong coffee given to him by “Ray,” and stumbling out into the night.
It's all about imagining connections among these people. Hopper doesn’t spell them out; Dybek does. The visual image, capturing a moment in time, is an opportunity to spin off an infinite number of speculations about who these people are and what they’re doing.