The Rape of the Cosmos: Part III
Well as I was saying.
So the text is arranged in the frame of a first person narrative by the slightly fictionalized Alasdair Gray, who discovers a book by Dr. McCandless and a letter debunking the book by another Dr. McCandless, his wife. Dr. McCandless #1 is a poor country boy risen to the status of petty bourgeois, and is a devoted liberal. Appropriately, in proper liberal style, nested in the first McCandless text are other texts by other men, giving their own perspective on Bella Baxter, allegory and symbol, archetype and thought experiment. The Liberal text contains the portrait and opinions of the Promethean Anarchist, Godwin Bysshe Baxter, who to the liberal appears honestly admirable, superbly gifted and skilled, and unbearable to listen to (a voice pitched too high and too loud and inhuman). Anarchism is absolutely loveable but unnatural, a golem sprung from a masculine arrogance contemptuous of women’s monopoly of child-production, a man-made superman, but failed, defective, metabolizing the world with great difficulty, constant suffering, and the aid of physic and machinery. The Tory rival of the Liberal, also nouveau riche, jumped up ambitious lawyer Wedderburn, is in contrast a pathetic sort of soggy decadent, a cad who can only seduce his social inferiors; we know him from the 19th century’s naughty disciples of Sade, from Disraeli and from Wilde and Stevenson, but rather like Humbert Humbert, try as he might, he fails to shock the Mrs. Grundys of the jury, or the Madams of whorehouse, tho we find him still flattering himself that he is a great Grandly Satanic defiant sinner because he dares his routine debauchery, and finally, unable to use and discard, but being used and discarded himself, he reveals himself a big crybaby. Then passing through Bella’s life as seen in McCandless’ text, several other men, one nameless because he is the figure of Dostoevsky himself and/or his autobiographical fiction narrating The Gambler, a novel which discourses on the meretricious allure exuded by the false liberty and equality of chance, the bad anarchism of roulette, and alongside him Astley, the rich Englishman from that novel, who is given a diabolical Malthusianism to preach, an unsentimental acid pessimism as a kind of ruling class confession, attractive to leftists in the manner of Machiavellli in Joly’s Dialogue in Hell. Joining the latter at the scene of Bella’s confrontation with Orient-Imperial Underside-Dispossession (the opposite of her plentitude), a probable imperial intelligence agent masquerading as missionary who delivers even nastier social darwinist lectures than the modified Astley, and completing the gallery of men a tyrant pursuer in the form of a walking Ancien Régime, a Commendatore, a forgotten First and True Husband, (accompanied by entourage of subalterns) liberal party stalwart and General of the British Empire, whose celebrated stoic endurance of an unfortunate career of grave battlefield wounding turns out to have not a little to do with a masochistic perversion that also takes him to Paris brothels for dominatrix punishment and renders him unable to fulfill his masculine, marital, imperial duties.
And Bella, what is Bella, beauty, who doesn’t become Vera, truth, but rather is supplanted by Victoria, and rewrites everything sociologically and psychologically in supremely unsatisfying Edwardian Fabian style? A tabula rasa mind being lugged about by a re-animated corpse…yes, uh no, actually. At first this initial unconvincing Lockean allegory is merely tinkered with, within the memoir of the Liberal itself: the recycled corpse, after all, was once a woman, we must remember, and even now put to the purposes of its fresh new brain, retains a slight historical status, not merely a species one: traces of experience, a slight memory, persistent posthumous habits, a regional accent. More and more the determinations are detected. Yet the Liberal persistently denies her any tastes and talents, any favourite foods or sartorial preferences, any libidinal foci, except shagging and Shakespeare. The arch liberal is working his way toward an historical humanism, under the pressures of the democratizing and sociological environment, reluctantly, in perplexity.
But what started off so wrong can’t really be fixed, and the object turned subject just finally throws it all out. Throws the content out, but preserves a single copy. For the library. For posterity. To contradict, yes, but not erase the author. But Bella, the sentimental socialist, sensuous, sensitive, sensible humanity — helplessly, self-destructively, and fatally attracted to Tory and crypto Tory shits, to Virile Authority, yes that stands — never loved the Milquetoast Liberal M.D, Public Health Officer, called throughout his reminiscences ‘The Candle,’ never loved him nor his modest phallic lumières. Lived with him, partnered with him, sustained him in his illusions of importance and wisdom. But her one true love ever was and remains Promethean Anarchism in the uncanny person of Godwin Bysshe Baxter, alas unfit for this world.