The Dark Circus: an Examination of the Work of Mervyn Peake, With
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'i THE DARK CIRCUS: An examination of the work of MERVYN PEAKE, with reference to selected prose and verse. by LESLEY GLEN MARX Sul::rnitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in tNGLISH at the UNIVERSITY OF CAPE 1DWN. SUPERVISOR MR. PETER KNOX-SHAW. OC1DBER, 1983. University of Cape Town The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town i ABSTRACT I have attempted in this dissertation to draw together a number of strands that make up the intricate and often bizarre tapestry of Mervyn Peake's work. In the Introduction, I raise an issue that seems to be most central to his vision: the relationship of the artist to worlds both real and imaginary, and the way in which these two worlds relate to each other. In Chapter One, I attempt to examine the multi-faceted nature of Peake's talent. Drawn to all the variety of life, expressing his perception of that variety in many different ways, he tries to come to terms with both the aching beauty and tenderness of the world and its horror and ugliness, often, indeed, revealing beauty in that ugliness. The chapter deals, then, with the poetry, both the joyful and the tormented, with the Nonsense world which informs so much of Peake's vision, and with the need to balance the contrary forces of life which he often reveals so tellingly. Chapter Two brings us to the heart of his vision in Titus Groan. In this chapter I deal with the nature of fantasy and its relation to other modes of opening out the real so that its richness may be revealed: ranance, the marvellous,Gothic. I then examine these in terms of the mythic world that is Gorrnenghast, paying particular attention to ritual and the ways in which the characters in the novel respond to their world, often through escape into private worlds and secret rituals. Peake's use of the grotesque is examined in relation to whether characters are able to grow through their private rituals. The mythic world is again important in Gorrnenghast but here we find a tension between Titus who is at once a part of and apart from his environment, and the Castle which is at once oppressive and nurturing. The ambivalence of attitude that Titus experiences offers a focus for the conflict experienced by the other characters in response to the Castle. Titus is seen to be torn between his role as epic hero of his society and as romantic hero, ii true to his own impulses. Consequently, the movement towards an assimilation of outer and inner worlds is of vital importance and throughout one is aware that Peake, too, is trying to achieve this assimilation. Having vindicated himself as epic hero of the sheltering canmunity, Titus grows out of the mythic stillness of Gormenghast and in Titus Alone, .we see him confronted by a dystopic world bound to linear time. It is in this deracinated world that Titus learns the value of the Mother that is Gormenghast. He realises that it has given him a set of values that he may bear inside him, that informs and beautifies the world. The parallel between Titus's experience of myth and Peake's experience of imagination is clear, as both put their worlds to the test - the one by physical separation, the other by courageous self-travesty. OJNTENTS Page Abstract (i) Dedication (iv) Acknowledgements (vi) Bibliographical Note (vii) INTRODUCTION 1 a-IAPTER ONE A PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 10 CHAPTER TW) : TIWS GROAN "A WJRLD SURROUNDED BY A WALL" 66 CHAPTER THREE: GORMENGHAST "LOST IN A FAMILIAR REALM 11 127 INTERLUDE : IDY IN DARKNESS 182 CHAPTER FOUR : TIWS ALONE "GROTTOED NO LONGER" 191 EPILCWE 239 NOTES AND REFERENCES 240 WJRKS OJNSULTED 278 APPENDIX OF POEMS iv DEDICATION To my parents, with love. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest gratitude goes to the following people for their unstinting patience and love, and for the generosity with which they gave of their time to help me: my family, as always to Anne for her cheerful proof-reading, and for helping me out of all sorts of straits to Freddie Ogterop and Paul Meyer for help with the references to Peter Knox-Shaw, my supervisor, for his enthusiastic and profoundly intelligent guidance to all my students for their wannth and interest. vii BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE I have used the Penguin editions of the Titus books, and the edition of Boy in Darkness that appears in Peake's Progress (London: Allen Lane, 1978). The poans referred to in Chapter One can be found in an appendix, to which their bibliographical details are affixed. Errata: page 246, line 1 - "transmitted" to read "recorded." page 287, line 11 - "Moorcock, Malcolm" to read "Moorcock, Michael. n INTRODUCTION The words, "dark circus," used in the title of this dissertation, appear half-way through Titus Alone, as Titus confronts the terrifying Veil in the Under-River: Around him, tier upon tier (for the centre of the arena was appreciably lower than the margin, and there was about the place almost the feeling of a dark circus) were standing or were seated the failures of the earth. The beggars, the harlots, the cheats, the refugees, the scatterlings, the wasters, the loafers, the bohanians, the black sheep, the chaff, the poets, the riff-raff, the small fry, the misfits, the conversationalists, the human oysters, the vennin, the innocent, the snobs and the men of straw, the pariahs, the outcasts, rag-pickers, the rascals, the rake-hells, the fallen angels,' the sad-dogs, the castaways, the prodigals, the defaulters, the dreamers and the scum of the earth. (Titus Alone,p.132) This description seems an appropriate one for the world created by Mervyn Peake. It is a Nonsense universe, 1 a collection of incongruities and freaks, provoking laughter, bJt a laughter which is frequently uneasy and which modulates into a sense of pathos and, ultimately, horror as we are made more and more aware of the dark world of fear, ruin and chaos that is so tenuously controlled by human structures. Peake warns us at the end of Titus Groan to expect "tears and. strange laughter. Fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams, and violence, and disenchantment" (TG,p.505). Nevertheless, as "human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality, 112 men and wanen devise strategies for ordering that reality, for transfonning it into sanething that can be controlled, whose pattern can be enjoyed. When Goya translates the horrors of war into a perfectly canposed painting, he expresses this need for order, yet there is the tension of knowing that to do this is to tum away from naked confrontation with the horror, to impose a vision of harmony on chaos. The circus is, in many ways, also an image of the attempt to control reality. It does not deny the existence of the dark world, it often thrives on that world, bJt distances it and makes it bearable. 2 The circus is a way of structuring incongruities in order to give expression to the complexity of the real world and, as such, has had wide appeal among artists fran Dickens to Carson McCullers and Herman Hesse, fran Chaplin to Welles, Bergman and Fellini. A circus is an enclosure, a world of "radical juxtaposition" 3 vklere the sublime and the ridiculous confront each other in a space that exists outside that of "normal" everyday experience (normal, that is, fran the perspective of a rationally and scientifically orientated society). 'vfilen we enter this space, we are presented with a world on which the imagination feeds~ romance, heroism and terror (albeit contained in a cage, in itself a metaphor). Just as important are their opposites -- the clown who turlesques the tightrope walker, the dwarf who travesties the trapeze artist. As with the novelists and filmmakers mentioned above, Peake reveals a deep-seated fascination for this latter aspect, which finds its fullest expression in the Freak show. Leslie Fiedler has demonstrated how the shift in attitude towards the Freak, from revulsion to fearful attraction, has increased in our century. For Victorians, the Freak show "is, like Victorian nonsense, intended to be finally therapeutic, cathartic, no matter what initial terror and insecurity it evokes. 'We are the Freaks,' the human oddities are supposed to reassure us, fran their lofty perches. 'Not you. Not you! 1114 Even in Victoria's day, though, Dickens could say of Mrs. Q,tilp that she was "a pretty little, mild-spoken, blue-eyed wanan" w-io had "allied herself in wedlock to the dwarf in one of those strange infatuations of vklich examples are by no means scarce . 115 In our century, Carson McCullers, says Fiedler, "finds them revelations of the secret self," and he uses as an example a passage fran The Member of the Wedding: Frankie had wandered around the tent and looked at every booth. She v.Bs afraid of all the Freaks, for it seemed to her that they had looked at her in a secret way and tried to connect their eyes with hers, as though to say: we know you. She v.Bs afraid of their long Freak eyes. 6 3 The Freaks haunt Frankie to the extent that, much later, she asks Berenice, "Do you think I will grow into a Freak?117 Thus the fascination for the strange, the alienated and the grotesque can becane dangerous and undermine the individual's confidence in an integrated identity.