I've now read Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, and I'm 70% of the way through Gormenghast now; these two novels were the source material for the BBC's mini-miniseries Gormenghast, about which I had such nice things to say earlier. I wanted to share with you the line I just read, spoken by Steerpike:
'And I will understand, if you have no wish for Satan.'
The books have always been weird, but the sort of weirdness has been changing as it's gone along. In Titus Groan it was mainly a weirdness built of the grotesque, and Peake's heady infatuation with his own poetical prose. It wasn't as funny as the television adaptation, because all the funny bits were wrapped up in this lyrical language, but quite affecting in its own way, with a sort of warped beauty. Gormenghast is getting more extreme, changing much in the way that Gormenghast is changing in the book. It's getting positively self-referential. What is one to make of the gigantic puppet-show on the shallow lake, scripted centuries before, on the occasion of Titus's tenth birthday? The wolf-headed puppet, carrying bottles of poison, clearly represents Steerpike. Peake isn't even trying to hide it. There's also a dunce-capped Lion, which made me think immediately of Headmaster Bellgrove of the leonine mane, though there's no reason I can think of that it should be connected to him...And a moronic, apparently female, Horse with a long and absurdly supple neck, a feature associated with Irma Prunesquallor. Also an angelic, crowned Lamb, who one would immediately take to be Titus himself. If these figures are meant to stand in for characters--and there's nothing to indicate that any but the Steerpike Wolf do--then Titus should surely be the Lamb, but who would the other two be? What would the tableau represent? The Horse, one would think, ought to be Gertrude, or Fuchsia...It carries poems, which are Fuchsian...Then who would be the Lion? Is it the late Lord Sepulchrave, and does the tableau then show Steerpike and the Groans who stood between him and power? Or is it something completely unrelated altogether?
And a little monkey called Satan...Not that the name seems to mean much to the Gormenghastly, whose only religion is that of their timeless, lifeless ritual.
One of the most vivid pieces of Peake's imagery is, I think, Professor Opus Fluke, who fills one with a horrid revulsion...Reclining in some chair, with a jaw like a loaf of bread, he is rocked with soundless laughter whose description inspires in me thoughts of some horrid soggy flippered thing twitching and shaking, sort of like a landed fish only infinitely more unpleasant. It would've made good television.
I was afraid Irma Prunesquallor's party wouldn't be as funny in print as it was on the screen, but I found quite the opposite: our little glimpses into Bellgrove's and Irma's wracked brains filled me with a sick glee, even though the Professorial spasm was less immediately comic, having as it did some philosophical roots.
Dr Prunesquallor remains a marvellous creation. His flights of poesy go so well with Peake's style. The Doctor also reminds me, to an extent, of me, which is perhaps why I take to him so. One wonders about him. On television, he seemed to take a suppressed erotic interest in Fuchsia, while in the books it is made explicitly paternal (though one could read it as having an almost incestuous component as well, if one were really determined). On the other hand, he manifests a repulsed attraction for a shirtless Steerpike early on in Titus Groan which I cannot read as being other than sexual. Even though the Steerpike of the books is manifestly less beautiful than Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
The book is taking on the unnatural vitality and potency of a dream...
Posted by aloysius at October 04, 2003 12:25 PM | TrackBack |