Exploring
Literature
Randy
Money
Exploring
the borderland between commercial and literary fiction, you will find
a mountain in the distance near a forest and a river, and even a stretch
of land where cacti grows. In all the surrounding territory no obvious
sanctuary appears for fairy princesses or elves or fauns; it is somewhere
beyond the fields of fantasy already well explored, perhaps at the opposite
pole from Middle Earth. Here is where we find the castle known as Gormenghast.
IMMOVABLE
OBJECT
"The
world created in Titus Groan is neither better nor worse
than this one: it is merely different. It has absorbed our history,
culture and rituals and then stopped dead, refusing to move, self-feeding,
self-motivating, self-enclosed."
--
from an introduction to Titus Groan by Anthony Burgess
The
characters and landscape in Titus Groan (1946) by Mervyn Peake
are so precisely etched in words, so well imagined and rendered, they
continue monopolizing my imagination even as I write this, a month after
finishing the book. The characters are oddly compelling, from the first
one we meet, Rottcodd, caretaker of the Hall of Bright Carvings, to
Lord Groan, the melancholy seventy-sixth Earl of Gormenghast, to Lady
Groan, with her flocks of birds and army of white cats, to taciturn
Flay, the Earl's granite-like assistant whose knees crackle with every
step, to Swelter, the garrulous, bloated chef, to Sourdust, Lord Groan's
guide to the rituals and traditions of office, to little Titus himself,
son of Lord and Lady Groan, a baby at the start and still only a toddler
by the end, who does not contribute directly to the novel's action,
such as it is, but whose birth is catalyst for all that happens. But
no one is more compelling than the castle Gormenghast, which shapes
the society and nature of its inhabitants:
"Gormenghast,
that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself
would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were
it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings
that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled
over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until,
held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels
laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets
to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill
intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their
irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of
time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous
of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly
with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists
of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night
the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless
and cast its long shadow."
Peake
begins by introducing us to Gormenghast place by place, person by person.
From introducing the castle and the Clay Dwellings attached to the outer
wall, he moves on to the people who live in the Clay Dwellings and whose
energies, after early youth, are diverted to carving a work the Lord
of Gormenghast will choose for the Hall of Bright Carvings. With the
mention of the Hall of Bright Carvings, Peake introduces us to Rottcodd,
its curator, and then to Flay, who visits him. When Flay moves on, we
follow him to the kitchen, the domain of Swelter, his enemy. With Flay
we first see young Steerpike, and the narrative shifts point of view
to him as he follows Flay from the kitchen and through labyrinthine
halls. Thus, with economy of means, Peake guides us through the castle's
massiveness, the stratifications of its society and indicating how the
very mass and bulk of the castle forms the characters of its inhabitants.
As the novel continues, what began as a detailed sketch is enlarged
and expanded by the revelation of character and the application of details
large and small of life in the castle, transforming the novel into a
portrait of great intricacy.
But
such a summary of the novel's early pages risks giving the impression
that Titus Groan proceeds with the brisk pace of a movie. It
does not. Peake, a professional illustrator and painter, had developed
the eye to see line, form and hue; and Peake the poet had developed
the language with which to describe them, giving the novel the feel
of a succession of still-lifes, visual images of character and setting
that add the detail that builds Gormenghast and its society for us
as we read. Which is not to say the novel is static, merely that it
the incidents and emotions that lead its characters to action are
prepared for with deliberation.
The
density and visual precision of Peake's prose can be demonstrated
with a few examples. Of a cactus, he writes,
"...
its flaking bole divid[ed] into four uprights like the arms of a huge
grey candlestick studded with thorns, each one as large and brutal
as the horn of a rhinoceros. No flaming flower relieved the black
achromatism although that tree had been known long ago to burst open
with a three-hour glory."
Of summer's end he writes,
"Autumn
returned to Gormenghast like a dark spirit re-entering its stronghold.
Its breath could be felt in forgotten corridors, -- Gormenghast
had itself become autumn. Even the denizens of this fastness
were its shadows.
"The
crumbling castle, looming among the mists, exhaled the season,
and every cold stone breathed it out. The tortured trees by the
dark lake burned and dripped, and their leaves snatched by the
wind were whirled in wild circles through the towers. The clouds
mouldered as they lay coiled, or shifted themselves uneasily upon
the stone skyfield, sending up wreaths that drifted through the
turrets and swarmed up the hidden walls."
This
ability extends to delineating character in concise strokes, as when,
during Titus' christening, he says of the diminutive Sourdust,
"Sourdust
returned to his position behind the table which he held alone, and
was relatively more impressive now that the crag of Flay and the mound
of Swelter no longer dwarfed him. He lifted his voice again, but it
was hard for him to speak, for there were tears in his throat and
the magnitude of his office weighed heavily on him. As a savant in
the Groan lore he knew himself to be spiritually responsible for the
correct procedure. Moments such as this were the highlights in the
ritualistic cycle of his life."
Peake's language also captures the essence of the life and concerns
of Gormenghast in short strokes, as with the ritual words Sourdust
recites at Titus' christening:
"'Suns
and the changing of the seasonal moons; the leaves from trees that
cannot keep their leaves, and the fish from olive waters have their
voices!
"'[....]
Stones have their voices and the quills of birds; the anger of
the thorns, the wounded spirits, the antlers, ribs that curve,
bread, tears and needles. Blunt boulders and the silence of cold
marshes -- these have their voices -- the insurgent clouds, the
cockerel and the worm.
"'Voices
that grind at night from lungs of granite. Lungs of blue air and
the white lungs of rivers. All voices haunt all moments of all
days; all voices fill the crannies of all regions. Voices that
he shall hear when he has listened, and when his ear is tuned
to Gormenghast; whose voice is endlessness of endlessness. This
is the ancient sound that he must follow. The voice of stones
heaped up into grey towers, until he dies across the Groan's death-turret.
And banners are ripped down from wall and buttress and he is carried
to the Tower of Towers and laid among the moulderings of his fathers.'"
And
sometimes Peake's exact description of place also illuminates the character
of its inhabitants, as when he leads us through the Cool Room: "The
room was perhaps the most homely and at the same time the most elegant
in the castle. There were no shadows lurking in the corners. The whole
feeling was of quiet and pleasing distinction, and when the afternoon
sun lit up the lawns beyond the bay windows into a green-gold carpet,
the room with its cooler tints became a place to linger in. It was seldom
used."
That
last also indicates Peake's humor, with its occasional irony, and
the understated recognition of absurdities in individual character
and in the character of Gormenghast's society. And yet, though our
narrator may be bemused by or exasperated with Gormenghast, he also
respects the individuals who maintain and sustain the society.
The
source of the power of Titus Groan is hard to pinpoint. Part
of it stems from Peake's language, his command of poetically dense,
rhythmic, imagery-laden prose. Speaking of Peake and Wyndham Lewis,
Anthony Burgess says, "If their books seem slow moving, that is because
of the immense solidity of their visual contents, the lack of interest
in time and the compensatory obsession with filling up space. Titus
Groan is aggressively three-dimensional."
Characterization
is another source of power. Flay, Dr. Prunesquallor, Fuchia, seemingly
steeped in the British tradition of grotesques and named accordingly,
transcend their names, grow beyond caricatures, and develop a surprising
humanity: Fuchia, at first sight selfish, is revealed as a courageous,
loving and sensitive young woman who fluctuates between the thoughtful
and the thoughtless; Dr. Prunesquallor seems a dandy and a toady at
the beginning but we find he is possibly the most sensible of Gormenghast's
denizens; Flay's anguish at displeasing Lady Groan is deeply moving.
And all of them are characters reasonably extrapolated from what we
learn of the society and culture of Gormenghast.
Further,
Peake's clear view of Gormenghast's strengths and failings, his ability
to pin-point and describe its social and cultural rigidity while still
implying value in its core adds to the novel's impact. He is capable
of mocking the society as he shows sadness at its impending doom,
outrage at its waste of individual talent and intelligence, and regret
for a society losing its stability. Peake introduces us to Gormenghast
at the historical moment when change threatens a society that resists
change and will not change without a struggle. We see the conflict
between the loyalty to their society of men of good will and their
early inklings that the irresistible force of change approaches. This
generates a slow, steady suspense, and provides an air of melancholy
and foreboding somewhat leavened by Peake's wit.
Titus
Groan is a novel that resists simple plot summary; plot is not
its most important element, yet the lives and actions of so many of
characters are woven together that to describe one strand leads to
describing many. And a cursory summary could lead one to think of
Titus Groan as allegory. Certainly there are parallels between
the life of Gormenghast and the England of the 1940s, with the world
in drastic flux, but Peake does not create easy parallels, neither
does he slip into parody or direct satire. Instead Peake imagines
the world and people of Gormenghast so fully that his creation takes
on much of the density and completeness of life, which it then shares
with the patient, persistent and diligent reader.
Copyright
© 2001 Randy
Money
All Rights Reserved
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