The Rape of the Cosmos: Part II
Even through the hollow eyes of death, I spy life peering.
It is of course political life and death, later to be seen as national and imperial life and death, of which Shakespeare spoke through Northumberland, in Richard II. And here too, Gray is promising political renewal, irrepressible because rooted in life, in lust and in love, or so he figures. It’s this simple. Yes — and no. But the assertions are all this simple. He creates his complexity, his doubt, his depth, his dialectic, with rather crude, and honest, perspectivalism, the childish collage of subjectivities. But in good modernist style, despite post-modern trappings. The accounts stay attached to their authors. There are falsehoods aplenty, but no fiendish ruses, no malign forgeries. The incompatibility of the narratives, of which each one in itself, nested or competitive, is quite simple and coherent, gives rise to a churning process of breaking down, blending, and reshaping the materials —themes, images, plots, allusions — of literary production. It is not metaphysics — two sides of every story! - but genuine dialectic.
I guess everyone has read the plot summary by now, but quick recap: Bella Baxter is the creature of a Frankenstein’s monster, fashioned by himself in deluded hope of securing a Bride by the transplanation of the living brain of a viable yet unborn infant into the skull of the corpse of her mother, a suicide. (I refer to the primary internal manuscript, positioned first in the novel). This fast-maturing being runs off on a globe trot of Bildung with a handsome, egoistical, social climbing prat, sends increasingly literate and properly penned letters home, lots happens I’ll get to by and by, and at some point Bella is shown poverty and commits herself to the cause of socialism.
This revelation and conversion occurs in Egypt, under the boot of Empah.
The novel, once again, is 1992. In 1993, Edward Said published Culture and Imperialism, a big hit popularization of a couple of decades of academic trends. In other words, it was impossible as a hip literary author to present The Orient in this manner, as the sewer of civilizations whose meaning and concrete reality are exhausted by this white-damsel-horrifying poverty and degradation. It makes the reader squirm, and here is the letter, the evidence of shocked regression, that Bella sends back to Glasgow after this experience of Egypt has cracked her consciousness.
But this cliché episode in the education of Bella is related in the manuscript (actually, later we will learn, it’s the sole surviving printed copy, the manuscript having been lost) of her future husband, Dr. Archibald MacCandless, and the reader of 1992 would recognize the whole sequence as not only inspired by the Edwardian novel topos of the British girl’s loss of innocence abroad, but more specifically echoing, imitating, conjuring, a scene in a hit late 70s lefty movie, Julia, in which Jane Fonda played a fictionalized Lillian Helman, and the luminous Vanessa Redgrave gave a truly inspired performance as her friend an aristo red, whom we witness transforming into a radical upon her return from a trip East to the imperial periphery with her aristo family.
Gray knows perfectly well that socialism is not a hobby of refined ladies with charitable hearts who can’t get the Levantine Squalor out of their heads after their chaperoned tours. Yet this narrateme is presented, made vivid, and put to work. It is simply surrounded by subsequently added, contrary versions of events and ripostes. The cliché is not story and history, yet the point is this story and history cannot be rendered if one omits this very cliché.
Three main narrators deliver memoirs of Bella: 1. The anarchist, Dr. Godwin Bysshe Baxter (I will remind Americans that Baxter means baker in Scots), her presumed monstrous creator who delivers his testimony only via 2. the Liberal striver Dr. Archibald McCandless, her future husband and author of the main text within the text 3. her road-trip lover the Tory lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (whose letters are also conveyed to us solely through McCandless) whom Gray endows with a famous bit of Rousseau’s character, that is, he is a man who has put all his own illegitimate offspring in the workhouse. Additionally, in the telling by The Liberal of this education of the tabula rasa into an increasingly sentimental socialism, Bella the Innocent Abroad encounters two other significant men who have stepped from the pages of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, whose interventions refine her conception of freedom and social power, and a burlesque version of the Domestic Tyrant type, who must be ceremonially defeated as a kind of phallic scapegoat so that all the other men may be spared.
(The above should be the first para of the next post, since i’m pausing here, but as i bothered to type it out on the vexing phone screen, I’ll leave it like a threaded needle …)