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Thursday, August 07, 2008
Peakean Poetry
Here at the Valve we love our Peake. There’s a new edition of Peake’s collected poems out from Fyfield Books, the first of its kind actually, edited by Glasgow University’s R. W. Maslen; and it is highly recommended. The poetry has the genuine Peake tang, and the book includes a good number of the man’s excellent illustrations too.
So, I recently reviewed this title for Strange Horizons (at some length, too); and since that the site in question is primarily for fans of SF and F I start by suggesting some things about Peake’s place in contemporary Fantasy:
Here’s a thesis. The present florescence of genre fantasy—a continuing and significant cultural phenomenon—has been largely determined by two major influences: on the one hand Tolkien, construing an imaginary magical realm out of Anglo-Saxon and medieval material; and on the other Mervyn Peake, whose rich, Gothic, imaginative grotesque parses a more nineteenth- and early twentieth-century-idiom. This latter fantasy is fascinated by tradition at the same time as being repelled by it, in reaction against an industrialization—or more fully, against a deeper process of social modernization of which industrialization is one symptom—that it both, paradoxically, deprecates and admires. Today, instances of Tolkienian fantasy are legion, of course; but the list of major writers working in a Peakean mode is a long one: Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, China Miéville, and Ian MacLeod, among others. For a while, a few years ago, it looked like it might become the dominant form.
It’s worth pausing a moment to ponder this. We are naturally suspicious (or we should be) of accounts that reduce the complexity of any cultural genealogy to two quantities only. But at the same time, it is, I think, hard to deny that the other templates for possible versions of contemporary fantasy, whilst they haven’t entirely vanished, simply haven’t had the same imaginative purchase on our age as Tolkien and Peake. William Morris’s peculiar, archaic, and often resonant fantasy tales have some admirers but few imitators; Lovecraft’s type of Gothic nastiness remains potent in horror but hasn’t really spread outside it; fantasy based on fairy-tale motifs (Angela Carter, Sheri Tepper’s Beauty, some of Gaiman’s more whimsical pieces) remains a minority taste, and magic realism has desiccated and died. Of the two best-selling fantasy writers today—Pratchett and Rowling—the former uses an attractively warm-hearted Tolkienian world to pastiche a variety of contemporary topics, whilst the latter doses the Chalet School novels with a very weak preparation of Peake.
...Both the Titus trilogy (Titus Groan, 1946; Gormenghast, 1950; Titus Alone, 1959) and Tolkien’s Rings trilogy (1952-53) appeared soon after World War II, and both are in some sense not only “about” England, but are more specifically accounts of the catastrophe in traditional Englishness occasioned by the war. That fantasy narrative is the best way of apprehending this vast national and cultural sea change seems to me both hard to deny and endlessly surprising. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the change in question had less to do with material realities such as the dismantling of the empire than it had to do with the decay of an idea of England: the collapse of a particular fantasy of the realm. Both authors served in the military, although Tolkien, a generation older, fought in the First rather than the Second World War: there is a good deal of the Somme in Mordor and the Dead Marches. Peake was an official war artist, and made some harrowing sketches of concentration camp survivors in Bergen-Belsen. The barbarism that exists millimetres beneath the skin of an ancient civilization is one of the main themes of the Titus books.
The great strengths of Lord of the Rings are in worldbuilding and narrative. Gormenghast is another matter. Not that the trilogy’s worldbuilding is deficient, exactly, but it is of a different kind to Tolkien’s: a matter of mood—of atmosphere—rather than particulars (consistency, history, variety, and so on). Peake’s characterization is of a different order too: heavily Dickensian, and deliberately grotesque, whereas Tolkien arranges various types as old as romance in interlocking narrative lines. Brian Aldiss once said that, in the sense the word figures in literature today, there is only one character in Lord of the Rings: Gollum. We might equally want to argue that there is only one character in Gormenghast—Titus—but we’d be making a rather different point. Gollum has a degree of interiority, and psychological complexity, not present in the heroic 2-D personages who otherwise stalk about the world of Rings. Titus is an altogether different sort of textual construction: his interiority externalised enormously to become the world through which he moves.
This is a point that can be made more broadly. Peake, in his poetry as in his novels, is a writer for whom narrative, character, and metaphysics tend to be subordinated to atmosphere, mood, and image. Where contemporary writers of fantasy in the Tolkienian tradition still practise detailed and consistent worldbuilding, Peakean fantasy is much more about creating a certain tone, about generating a kind of dark imagistic excess. Another way of putting this would be to say that he is a Late Romantic, and committed to the Romantic project of self-fashioning.
OK it’s, I admit, egregious to quote myself at such length, when the words are just a link away anyway: but I do it to situate Rob Maslen’s reply. Rob‘s a friend of mine, and he emailed me after reading the review. He’s happy for me to quote bits of that email, which I do because they challenge the binary assumption about the state of modern fantasy I make above, and because they say some, I think, very interesting things about Peake’s particular sort of Fantasy:
I agreed with a lot of what you said and disagreed with a little—as should always happen with essays. At first I was strongly taken with your division of fantasy into the Peake and Tolkien strands, but on reflection I think it works better for British than American fantasy; Peake hasn’t had half the impact in the States he has had here. Is Wolfe Peakean, or Michael Swanwick, or Geoff Ryman? I prefer to think of three strands of fantasy springing from the end of the nineteenth century, and related to the works of Wells, Morris and George MacDonald - though not necessarily influenced by them. Wells is I think the most important of these writers, who affects fantasy as strongly as he does science fiction (which I see in any case as a branch of fantasy). The Time Machine is as much a development of the fairy tale as it is of the scientific romance; it’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ rewritten, and as such initiates a powerful strand of fantasy writing that leads from Dunsany to Stephen King, from Tolkien to Sheri S. Tepper and Ursula K. le Guin (whose first novel, Rocannon’s World, rewrites Wells’s story). So your split is an oversimplification—but of course you knew that, and no theses can be advanced without the application of Occam’s razor…
All the same, your Peake/Tolkien division is immensely helpful in its identification of two major ways of working in the fantastic mode. One of the aspects of it that fascinated me was your suggestion that there is only one ‘character’ in Peake’s works, as in Tolkien’s. In the latter case this is Gollum; in the former, Titus. This made me think hard, and I’m still digesting its ramifications. Another was your searching discussion of Peake’s Belsen poem in comparison with his poem about the Rat. I didn’t formerly rate the Rat poem that highly, but I’m now convinced it’s a fine one - though I still find the Belsen poem immensely powerful, because of the charge of guilt that accompanies its stunned realization that art as Peake knows it simply can NOT represent the holocaust. More interestingly, though, I loved your point about how fantasy enables us to address the issues of the twentieth century precisely by turning its back on them—so that the Rat may be said to comment on the holocaust as the Belsen poem cannot. Fantasy offers us a way both to see how the world might be much better than it is and how it is also much nastier than we ever imagined it could be. And this gave me a sudden shock of insight into your own work, which I’m currently re-reading in preparation for writing something about it.
... My friend John Coyle recently wrote a fine essay (forthcoming in an anthology) on Flann O’Brien, one of my heroes (and neither Peakean nor Tolkienesque—though I bet Peake admired him, since he uses the Flann name ‘Trellis’ in his play The Wit to Woo). In it, John proposes that the element Omnium in The Third Policeman is a metaphor for the working of the imagination. You can make anything of it, as you can with subatomic particles. You can fashion a utopia. But in fact what we choose to do with it is fashion bombs; bombs of the kind that annihilate the nameless narrator in O’Brien’s novel.
This made me think about Stone, and how you’re using the dotTech as a metaphor for the workings of the imagination. And what you wrote about the Rat suggested how your narrator, Ae, inhabits a world of fantasy—and that it is by aspiring to make his fantasy world real - to impose its logic on the world inhabited by other people, who may as well be figments of his own imagination as far as Ae is concerned—that your mass-murderer is driven to commit his atrocities. This makes Ae look very like one of Wells’s mad scientists in the 1890s: the Doctor Moreaus, Invisible Men, Time Travellers, inventors of the Food of the Gods, arrogant loners whose realization of their dreams has an agonizing physical impact on their fellow beings. In your worlds as in Wells’s, scientific fantasies deplete, dismember or decapitate the human body like a series of shells, giant insects or biological weapons, and break out over and over again into war—war being the most conspicuous opportunity we have historically given ourselves to allow our scientific imaginations absolute free rein in the world inhabited by real, soft, damageable human bodies…
How does all this connect with Peake? In the Titus books Peake recounts a war between the creative imagination—the ‘true’ imagination as he sees it, as represented by Fuchsia and Titus—and the ‘false’, ersatz, quasi-scientific imagination of Steerpike, who mimics what the artist/imaginist inwardly experiences, brings it out into the open, as it were, from its secret attics and private chambers, and in the process seeks to impose his own horrific vision of how life could be led in the castle on the rest of the castle’s inmates. The frightening thing is how difficult it is to distinguish the power-hungry ersatz imagination from the powerful ‘true’ dreams of the artist or poet - a problem that must be exacerbated in time of war, when the private artist feels impelled to put his art at the service of the war machine. Peake seeks to develop the distinction between true and false artists through his representation of poets in the Titus books. They are always loners, stuck in towers or garrets, and what they write is always nonsense, as disconnected as possible from the ‘real’ world they inhabit. Except that the ‘real’ world of Gormenghast is not real at all, and the poet’s dreams may be exploited as propaganda by men like Steerpike, who uses poetry, theatre, storytelling to woo Fuchsia and thus to worm his way into the confidence of the castle’s ruling elite. So perhaps the distinction between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’ imagination doesn’t really exist at all… Perhaps Peake is not qualitatively different from the failed artist Hitler, or the scientists who shaped the abombic tomb (as O’Brien called it). The possibility damaged Peake profoundly, it seems to me.
The Titus books, then, are about the difficult place occupied by fantasy in the twentieth century, always complicit with—indeed, intimately bound up with—the atrocities it resolutely refuses to engage with.
That’s some smart criticism, right there. I’m mulling it.
Comments
"The present florescence of genre fantasy [...] has been largely determined by two major influences”
The division of influence between Tolkien and Peake is an interesting one thematically, although I agree with Rob Maslen that it works better for British than American fantasy. But as a matter of influence, I’m not sure that it historically worked that way. As I recall it, Peake obtained his current popularity largely because he was re-popularized by Moorcock. Moorcock is such an interesting writer because he’s gone through so long a period of self-improvement, discovering forebears along the way and bringing them to a wider public. In terms of expression of a particular set of tropes, Peake works as one of the two archetypes to divide fantasy into, but in terms of actual historical influence on the genre, I think it’s Moorcock. Without Moorcock, no New Wave, without the New Wave, I can’t imagine M. John Harrison, China Mieville et al.
There are a few American authors who wrote classics of fantasy that I think are a bit difficult to fit into the binary scheme. For instance, I remember Mieville in an interview proposing his own binary, saying that people writing now were either M. John Harrisonites or John Crowleyites. (Something like that.) Crowley’s Little, Big, the other perennial Valve favorite, is certainly not Tolkein-influenced, but I don’t know if I’d really call it Peake-influenced either. It certainly does have a conflicted attitude towards tradition and industrialization, so perhaps that does it?
To address a coupe of bits in Rob’s comments, Wolfe seems to me to be a Peakean if anyone is. Severian, for instance, is cast right in the mold of Titus: brought up into a traditional role, he rebels and wanders the world, trying to reconcile change and stability etc. And his writing has a decidedly Gothic element also. George McDonald and William Morris’ line of influence seems to me to run directly through Tolkien. They certainly influenced him (and Lovecraft, and C.S. Lewis, I think), but their influence on other writers has pretty much been subsumed by those three.
James Branch Cabell has to be addressed in any consideration of major fantasy writers, I think. But he seems more or less sui generis, in that he was the culmination of earlier influences (Sir Walter Scott, etc.) and that no one else ever really tried to write like him.
Could we trace this back to the difference between gothic and romance as generic modes? I’ve not read much Peake, but I’d place him in a gothic lineage with Poe and Hodgson before, and folks like Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Jeff Vandermeer, and John Crowley after.
An extremely thought-provoking piece, Adam.
Regarding your bifurcation of current fantasy, I’d take issue with this remark: “[M]agic realism has desiccated and died.” I don’t know how true this is within genre, but in the wider world of fiction, so-called magic realism seems ever better established. In what tradition would you say Kelly Link’s work fits, for example?
Your bifurcation pleases me greatly, dead on! I always assumed that Gormenghast was entirely Titus’ hallucination, which further strengthens your thesis: Tolkein is synthetic and extroverted, Peake is synthetic and introverted.
As for American fantasy, it generally lacks omnium, perhaps Delaney’s Dhalgren excepted. Americans dislike smart-ass introverts?
Thanks for this, Adam. (More later, time permitting.)
It’s been several years since I went through the Titus trilogy, which is basically the only work of Peake’s that I know. After reading this review, I think I’ll get my hands on the Collected Poems as soon as I can.
Considering Rob Maslen’s point about the difficulty of distinguishing “the power-hungry ersatz imagination from the powerful ‘true’ dreams of the artist or poet,” isn’t it even more remarkable that Peake’s own poetic imagination should have returned so repetitively, as you note, to scenes of “plundering?” And not just any sort, it seems: of the six uses of the word that you cite, at least four have to do quite explicitly with the plunderousness of the poet’s eye. So I wonder whether, in addition to the resonances that you describe, “Dead Rat” doesn’t take some of its power from a real identification between the speaker (who is careful to distinguish himself as “unfarmerly” and even “unmanly,” being “only one that walks the farmers’ fields,” presumably in order to write poems about them) and a fellow-plunderer who gnaws the farmers’ wealth in his own way.
All v. interesting comments, and I’d reply at greater length but I’m rushing around getting ready to go off on my hols; two weeks away from the internet. I’ll get back to this when I, er, get back.
I have a piece that has just come out on Mieville (not available online unfortunately, but thems that wants it should email me or buy Donald Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, New Frontiers in Political Science Fiction), which argues that Mieville’s three New Crobuzon books are a kind of dialectic on the relationship between the fantastic imagination and politics. PSS - where imagination is pretty well subordinate to the political, as thesis. TS - where the fantastic imagination runs riot, weakening people’s grasp on political realism as antithesis. And IC - where fantastic imagination and political expedience come to an uneasy and problematic truce - as synthesis.
John Martin makes an excellent point about the word ‘plunder’ in Peake. As every enthusiast knows, he was passionate about pirates and knew RLS’s Treasure Island by heart as a boy. I wonder if he was also preoccupied by the notion of piracy in a more modern sense? Stealing other people’s words and images as material for his own imaginative constructs. An anxiety as to the extent of his own originality might explain his use of caricature and other forms of excess - the piratical swagger of his verbal and visual style, as it were. This would feed in very nicely to the notion of Steerpike as a terrible alter-ego, a fake, who must be slaughtered pirate-fashion by Peake’s ‘genuine’ alter-ego Titus if Peake is to reassure himself that he is no plagiarist, no petty plunderer. This idea has legs and could run, I think…
I wanted to say something, too, about the repeated words and ideas that crop up in Peake’s poetry - and his prose too. Repetition of terms like ‘plunder’ doesn’t seem to me to be the sign of paucity of invention in Peake; rather of a serious concern with interrogating certain concepts which came to be associated with particular recurring words in his work. Another such word is ‘heart’; another is ‘island’; and there are many more, which resonate like bells of different timbres throughout his writing. A number of these terms and concepts have been discussed in detail by G. Peter Winnington in the most important critical work on Peake, The Voice of the Heart, recently published by Liverpool University Press. It would be interesting to consider whether or not it’s a problem when an artist cannot free him/herself of a particular cluster of verbal co-ordinates or tics…
This is the first time I’ve contributed to one of these online discussions. I hope it works!