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©2004
Jeff Percifield Minnesota Review 2004
MORDREN GRANGE (excerpt) This
is a novel, and I am writing it to amuse you. —Anthony Trollope I will set it in a Victorian manor house.
This is a trope so filtered and distilled through modern entertainment that it
feels archetypal, seems to spring from the collective unconscious. I will utilize the usual cues: fogs, butlers,
parlour maids, arcane constructions, narrative props as alien to your waking
life as they are embedded in the genome of popular culture. She stepped
down from the hackney, into a vapour of snowflakes and extermination… This, a reference to the ill-gotten nature of the Mordren
fortune, the particulars of which I may only hint at, ambiguity – though hardly
characteristic of Victorian literature – being a particularly contemporary
malady. The Victorian gothic is a myth, a fabricated past, a harsh
world which nevertheless seems innocent in the gas-lit haze of nostalgia. It’s
a decadent, late-phase fantasy that appeals because it portrays a society that
for all its rigidity and shortcomings seems predictable and well-ordered in a
way that modern life is not. It has the
faux-atavistic appeal of Tolkien. The
well-dressed 19th Century characters seem noble, in that they are by
definition innocent of the unimaginable crimes of the 20th Century;
they inhabit a steamy, well-tended conservatory where the serpent of relativity
still waits among the palm fronds to lisp E=mc². These are not contemporary characters in costumed finery,
they are another species, their viewpoints alien and antithetical. You would
have more in common with a contemporary Eskimo than with these pre-modern,
pre-Freudian Britishers. You imagine
that they long to burst their stays, but it’s you who long to corset yourself
against the horror, the soulless freedom of modern life. She stepped
down from the hackney, into a morass of mist and metaphor. Well, maybe not. I will view my antiquarian subject through a
lorgnette of postmodern detachment. I will carry an intrusive flashbulb deep
into those yellow-lit interiors of guttering tallow and smoking paraffin, I
will probe deeply in my gynecological excavation of Victoriana and my squirming
characters will have no escape; they are at my mercy. You are complicit, you have a voyeur’s thrill
in knowing that I am going to strip away their emotional petticoats against their will… Or maybe not. Maybe it’s I, the writer, who simply longs
for a story, that most atavistic of
conceits, a long thread that defies our fractured and fissured reality1. And yet, ever disingenuous, I must dress it
up in the self-conscious fripperies of metafiction. I see your hesitation. You want to know if there will be
real feelings here, or if it’s to be a cold and elegant étude, as chilly as a
Victorian garret; you’re wondering if I have real feelings. Reading a novel is most intimate, you want to
know if you can trust the author to accompany you to the most tremulous part of
yourself. The writer is always present
in the act of reading – poststructuralist bores aside – and you don’t want to
spend the journey with some lonely misanthrope, say, marooned in his apartment,
writing stories to invent companions for himself… Art is a suture; art is a cicatrix. A book,
after all, closed and contained between two covers, is an attempt to organize
our feelings, to make sense of our experience of life in a way that the real
world can never make sense. Note that the governess arrives in a hackney, a pun that expresses my ambivalence about the genre, to
say nothing of my buried rage at putting words on paper for the approval of
strangers, some of them editors. My
equivocation creates a surface tension between reader and writer, a static
electricity that may repel or attract. And: The
ferret-eyed, badger-necked footman thrust a sputtering lamp at her. Behind him,
the blue-black silhouette of the Hall, like a horned beast… The wintryng reflects the emotional permafrost of the
Mordren family. Note also the feral description of the footman – who could tell
you a thing or two about Newgate Prison – and the archly chosen verb. You know
your cues. I have already palmed into your subconscious the image of our
slightly soiled governess and the baby-fat footman planting the poker. You have every right, it’s a long book, and
sex is as omnipresent in modern life as it was covert among the Victorians2. Her To write is to bear the existential onus of infinite
possibilities. And. So. She arrives, the Hall pullulating
with insectivorous servants, the dilapidated grounds treacherous with
overflowing cesspits (an entire carriage disappeared into one last autumn), the
park located on an exposed knoll where the caroling winds blah blah blah. You get the idea. One of the team, nibbling hopefully at her bonnet, exhaled
hotly down her neck… Horses were omnipresent in Victorian life in
a way unimaginable to modern readers, comparable only to automobiles today.
They were utilitarian, a means to an end; hence, people barely noticed them.
How many triple-decker novels show steaming green nests of equine feces, or
comment on the pervasive barnyard reek? Not that our governess would notice the
latter, she’s lucky if she manages a bath a week, and a cold one at that. Under
her faded bonnet, her hair is conspicuously matted, and if you were to wrap her
up in your twenty-first century arms, you’d get a heady whiff of nineteenth
century odeur. Not exactly
Merchant/Ivory. And there, behind the glass of that pearwood
bookcase: a voodoo artifact which – unknown to the Hall’s residents – is made
from human body parts. Perhaps I’ll add
a chapter from the debauched nephew’s Caribbean journal, showing how
globalization is as old as the New World. Or again: I’ll cut to the Mordren
family cemetery, now threatened by a highway, where amid the overgrown brush
and bracken, the ghosts of the clan quarrel and comment on the fractured chain
of events I call a novel. I am, after
all, a modern writer, I can do whatever I want.
After the labored experiments of Joyce, which shattered the novel
forever – well, for about five minutes – I can arrange the pieces however I
like. To be modern is to crave limits. Note also the governess’ frayed, powder-gray,
three-button kidskin gloves. Or the
pearled vial of arsenic which Lady Mordren keeps in her reticule, subscribing
to a popular belief that it cleared the complexion. I have piles of research, ammunition to show
you, the reader, that I’m in charge, I’m the alpha cur here. It’s absolutely
necessary to pin the squirming reader right away, by force if necessary, stare
her down until she submits to the writer’s authority. (Not that you’d know the
difference if I fudged the details; I can get away with a lot and I intend to3.) She was wrapped in a white morning dress, her hair falling on
her shoulders and her large eyes fixed and without light. Lovely, eh?
No wait – that’s Vanity
Fair. Sorry.
It’s a slippery slope from homage to pastiche, to outright larceny… Continued……. 1"I
should like to be able to write a story which should show no egotism whatever,
in which there should be no reflections, no cynicism, no vulgarity, but an
incident in every other page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in every
chapter." Thackerey 2Despite his chaste novels, Dickens was as fecund in
the bedroom as at his desk, fathering
ten children by his long-suffering wife before discarding her for a young
actress. 3"When I was writing about the people of the 5th
Century to the people of the 19th, many an error might be expected to
pass unnoticed; when I was writing about the people of our times to the people
of our own times, which single error, what misappreciation even, could hope to
escape?" Wilkie Collins |
