Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck
In the chapter titled Solarium in Black Swan Green, Jason meets with Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck to discuss his poetry. When they first start talking, Madame Crommelynck critiques his poetry by saying that he “thinks his words, his paints, his notes, makes the beauty” (Mitchell 147). She believes that the excess imagery and words detract from the hidden truth within the poems which is what beauty is. Eva dismantles the whole premise of Jason’s poetry career; Jason hides his identity with the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar, which Eva thinks makes his poems less truthful and therefore less beautiful. With her intense questions, she helps unearth unspoken beliefs that Jason holds that he didn’t even know that he had. As Eva aptly puts it, “you want a double life. One Jason Taylor who seeks approval of hairy barbarians. Another Jason Taylor is Eliot Bolivar, who seeks approval of the literary world” (154). At this point in the book, Jason desperately wants to be acknowledged and be popular, bu...