Stasis and Rebellion in Gormenghast: Part I – Stasis

Author(s): Pierre François

Source: Peake Studies , October 2007, Vol. 10, No. 3 (October 2007), pp. 5-23
Published by: G. Peter Winnington

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24776395

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 Stasis and Rebellion in Gormenghast
Part I - Stasis

Pierre Frangois

In an article about Titus Groan published in the October 2004

issue of Peake Studies ('Godless religion and maimed earldom'), I
attempted to dispel some pervasive and, in my view, misguided views
about the fiction of Mervyn Peake. I called these views 'the patholog
ical strain' and 'the collage syndrome', and I was adamant that a
form of 'total coherence' (to use Northrop Frye's words about great
literature) does inform the three novels. I insisted that this coherence
is mythopoeic in nature, and I proceeded to show that, in Titus
Groan, Mervyn Peake re-visits the age-old myth of the ageing king
whose self-inflicted death is meant to ensure the regeneration of the
social order and of the cosmos as a whole. However, at the end of
this article, I pointed out, as it were prospectively, that in Gormen
ghast Peake deals with an altogether different fictional materia,
namely the lone hero's rebellion against the stifling constraints of the
body politic. I also suggested that Peake's re-creation of the Fisher
King's death-and-rebirth motif and of similar mythologems (such as
Balder's) departs from the 'originals' in one important respect: Gor
menghast society and the cosmos in which it is inscribed do not
appear to be re-invigorated in the aftermath of the Earl's death,
which may seem to dent the relevance of the argument.
These two objections notwithstanding, I believe that the 'total
coherence' pervading the first two Titus books1 is enhanced, not
impaired, by the paradoxical complementarity of the two plots, and
that Gormenghast society's failure to rejuvenate itself from the Earl's
death (in Titus Groan) and from Titus's defeat of Steerpike (in
Gormenghast) is a necessary condition, possibly a justification, of

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6 Peake studies 10:iii

the young Earl's defiant flight from the castle at the end of the sec
ond book.

Mervyn Peake's fictional perspective is, in my view, unquestion

ably mythopoeic in all the books of the trilogy, but, while the empha
sis is macro-social in Titus Groan, it becomes overwhelmingly indi
vidual in Gormengbast. Peake fictionalizes 'the myth of the birth of
the hero' (to use the title of a Rank classic) in Gormengbast as a kind
of individual foil for the - arguably parodic - sense conveyed by
Titus Groan that the essence of human life is contained in the peren
nity of stones, ritual words and social hierarchies. The first book
spans one year in the life of the seventy-seventh earl (from his birth
to the 'Earling'), and he is said to be seventeen1 round the end of the
second book when he blasphemously runs away from the great bon
fire ritual in pursuit of the Thing. This is an indication of the stark
individualization of the 'matter of Gormenghast' from the moment
Titus takes over from Sepulchrave as Earl of Gormenghast. In the
Earling episode, the last but one chapter of Titus Groan, we get the
first symbolical hint that Titus will develop into a rebel as he
'dropped the sacrosanct symbols [of the earldom] into the lake'3 and
a yell (the Thing's) can be heard from across the lake answering his
own defiant cry. The rebellious drive is of course subconscious at this
early stage, but Peake implies here that the sequel to Book One will
deal with an ever-more conscious rejection by Titus of the social con
straints imposed on him by the castle authorities. The ten-odd years
in the Groan heir's life covered by Book Two - Titus is seven at the
beginning of Gormenghast - can be envisioned as the mythic hero's
gradual turning away from Gormenghast glooms to the promise of
the wide world's sun-drenched freedom.
I find it odd that the first book should be entitled Titus Groan and
the second one Gormengbast, in a kind of ironical reversal of the
contents of the two books. In Book I, the main protagonist is indeed
the castle itself, whilst, in Book II, the young earl is pitting his hero
ic self against the constraints of social life in Gormenghast. I conjec
ture that this is a witty, oxymoron-like, indication that, in the second
book, Peake's hero will confront head-on the Gormenghast dogma
that the earl's individual destiny should completely overlap with the

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Stasis and rebellion 7

castle's collective customs. (Incidentally, such a prospect is pretty

squeamish since, to ensure the eternal return of the same in
Gormenghast, Titus would perhaps, one day, have to experience a
fate reminiscent of Sepulchrave's, a sacramental meal in which the
ageing earl gets devoured by the castle's relentless spirits, the owls.
Titus, admittedly, does not know how his father died, but, as 1
showed in the October 2004 article, the mode of Sepulchrave's death
is perfectly congruent with Gormenghast traditions and customs).
Though Gormenghast is a hero myth featuring rebellion against
the ancient heart of the castle, its ethos should be defined as 'change
in continuity', with Titus (together with his shadowy self, Steerpike)
and the Countess respectively standing for upheaval and perma
nence. The blasphemous change which is eating away at the castle's
immemorial bowels is indeed set against a backdrop of ritualistic
stasis. Rituals stubbornly refuse to be shoved from centre-stage in
Gormenghast because they perpetuate the age-old wisdom that has
governed castle life for seventy-six earldoms. Thus, when Titus turns
ten years old, he is confined for twelve hours to a great playroom
and is taken blindfolded in the evening to a 'sacred ground' for an
ancient mask. This is a close analogue of a 'puberty rite' meant to get
the initiand 'to effect the transition from childhood or adolescence to
adulthood' in traditional societies.4 Segregation from the rest of the
community in a dark place and blindfolding symbolically feature
death to the irresponsible world of childhood. The novice is intro
duced to the secret knowledge of the tribe, and he is thenceforth
expected to behave as a responsible adult. The pattern is quite simi
lar in Gormenghast as Titus is made to watch a mask to which all
Gormenghast society has been summoned. Though a strong parodic
element somehow detracts from the religious awe that such a ritual
normally elicited from its participants, Titus is treated to an epiphan
ic moment not unlike the revelation bestowed upon novices in tradi
tional societies and in classical antiquity;5 fittingly enough, the feel
ings that grip him during the ceremony are unmitigated elation and
wonderment. The pageant indeed enacts 'a formula as ancient as the
walls of the castle itself' (p.617).
What is implicitly sacralized in this episode - albeit along godless,

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8 Peake studies I0:iii

secular lines, as I have already ascertained in my previous article - is

the natural-cum-cultural equilibrium on which the perennity of Gor
menghast society has rested for what seems to be an eternity. The
pageant takes place on and all around a lake which seems to be 'of
great depth' (p.613) but turns out to be pretty shallow. This is some
thing of a disappointment for Titus before he realizes that 'there
could have been nothing of all this had the lake not been the merest
glaze of water' (p.617). This is not an innocuous detail, for it seems
to contain a profound comment on the essence of human cultures.
The pageant is an 'arte-fact' - it certainly tries to 'suspend disbelief,
but it leaves no illusion about the contrived nature of the props it
uses. What matters is not so much verisimilitude as the quality of the
emotions roused by the performance and its setting, and what is at
stake is the capacity of a society to generate existential meaning and
social communion through artistic/ritualistic representations.
Now, the pageant is set in a natural environment and features a
quartet of animals fraught with symbolical meaning. In this instance
(just as in the rituals depicted in the first novel), Gormenghast is the
axis mundi, the metaphorical centre of the cosmos; and the natural
world, both vegetable and animal, is part of a wider order deemed to
be impervious to change. The goddess presiding over the occasion is
the moon. Gormenghast's is indeed a sublunar, immanent world,
which is utterly indifferent to the notion of transcendence because
Truth is only of stone and of its vegetable, animal and human co
habitants.
Immanence-wise, the spirit of Gormenghast is represented by four
animal giants who are both sublime and grotesque, not unlike the
people themselves roaming the shadowy corridors and nooks of the
castle. The blend of sublimity and grotesqueness encapsulates a
world unfettered by the twofold limitations of realism and idealism.
Peake's people are neither true to nor superior to life. They are a
blend of magic and animality, none more so than the Countess of
Groan (on whom more later). The fact that the four animals do
incarnate the spirit of Gormenghast and its people seems to go un
questioned by any witness of the pageant, including Titus. This mask
is a mirror of the genius of Gormenghast, in which all the spectators

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Stasis and rebellion 9

can recognize themselves:

there was no laughter but only a kind of relief, for the grandeur of
the spectacle, and the godlike rhythms of each sequence were of such
a nature that there were few present who were not affected as by
some painful memory of childhood. (p.618)

We can interpret the 'memory of childhood' as being 'painful' in two

ways. Either it is childhood itself which is suffering-ridden, or, in
hindsight, it is the loss of innocence and the discrepancy between
childhood hopes and adult reality which is the source of pain. Only
the latter explanation appears to make sense in our context. The
mask is an initiation into the responsibilities of adulthood for Titus,
who has just turned ten (i.e., is about to reach puberty) and who is
not so much a child as Child in his quality of Earl. In other words,
what will prove 'painful' in his (and every child's) future adult life is
somehow graphically enacted in the mask.
The animals are alone, morally ambivalent and bound together by
links which, if unleashed, can turn to lethal weaponry. I want to dis
cuss each of these animal/human features in turn, with the implicit
notion in mind that Titus's quest for freedom will involve grappling
with these existential issues.
It is clear that, in Peake, every (wo)man is an island,6 a fact which
is strangely congruent with the extreme social cohesion that prevails
in Gormenghast prior to the advent of a spirit of rebellion. It is
almost as though solipsism were the price to be paid for unthinking
social conformity.7 About this aspect of the human condition young
Titus has the right intuitions when the mask has come to an end. He
wishes he were just 'alone among companions', but, as seventy-sev
enth Earl, he is also 'lonely' (p.619). In other words, he compounds
the common lot (all human beings are 'alone') with the extra curse of
being unique (the Earl is idiosyncraticaliy 'lonely'). I will have more
to say about the hero's solitude in Part II ('Rebellion') of this paper.
On ambivalence, the four animals share the same outer and inner
contradictions in one single identity. The contrast between 'the
mutual darkness of the lower two thirds of their bodies' (p.616) and
the glorious, near-garish, quality of the upper body, is striking and is

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10 Peake studies I0:iii

indicative of an inner ambivalence. The Lion is both impressive and

absurdly grandiloquent (p.617); the Wolf is 'undeniably wicked -
but so decoratively wicked' (p.616) as though there were beauty in
wickedness; the female Horse parades sophistication, conceit and a
poetic temperament, but cannot conceal its 'baleful idiocy' and its
'fatuous melancholy' (p.616); and the Lamb is predictably 'pure',
but its own sanctity seems to be a prison for 'however it moved its
head ... there was no escape from its purity' (p.617). Irrespective of
the cliche that appearances are deceptive, Titus is shown that
human/animal nature is very much of a chiaroscuro affair, with
shades nibbling away at light like in the ancient castle itself. This
point reminds me of Blake - the god that created the lamb also
wrought the tiger's 'deadly terror'. Similarly in Peake, human beings
are an uncanny (possibly grotesque) blend of the fierce and the gen
tle. Ambivalence, not duality, is the word to describe human nature
in Peake, and the Titus/Steerpike divide itself is only deceptively a
dichotomy, for the solar hero and his demonic counterpart may be
conventionally antinomic (I am referring here to the conventions of
the hero myth), but a close reading of the text shows that hero and
daemon are as inseparable as a moving body and the shadow that it
projects 'outside'. (More on this in due time).
The last initiatory aspect of the mask is ethical. If the animals are
carnivalesque reminders of human beings being torn apart by con
tradictory drives, they also tell us how potentially lethal (for society
and the individual) possession by the darker side of our animal
nature can be. In particular, the mask implies that the naive endorse
ment of the good versus evil dichotomy is the best way to ensure the
triumph of the devil. The 'poisonous' wolf and the 'pure' lamb,
admittedly, figure evil and good, but it is pretty clear that Peake is
here being sarcastically parodic of Christian goodness and of the
belief in 'purity'. The 'silver crown' the lamb is wearing is not made
of thorns, but its wearer has been strangely shorn of the power of
love to move mountains in evangelical literature. This lamb is a
bigot, foolishly awed by its own purity, clasping its hands upon its
heart, and, with 'a grey shawl ... drawn demurely over the shoul
ders', unwilling to reveal anything of its 'golden breast' (p.616).

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Stasis and rebellion 11

There are clear indications that, if this lamb is at all male (which is
dubious!), it has heeded literally Jesus' injunction to the followers, in
Matthew 19:12., to turn themselves into eunuchs. What I think Peake
is doing here is satirizing the detrimental effect of the myth of non
instinctual goodness on our capacity to resist evil. As wickedness has
been turned into an 'objective' reality, it has become all the more
potent as an inner, unrecognized force. As for the other two animals,
the lion and the horse, they seem to figure, mythology-wise, such
solar and chthonian antinomies as the masculine and the feminine,
power and gentleness, glory and grace, force and compromise. The
problem is that the lion's 'imperial' force is all show and little sub
stance. The kingly animal seems to be intent on warding off any
attempt by the wolf to poison him as, in either hand, he is holding a
dagger (p.616). As a figure of authority, the lion is a very defensive
creature who seems to live in a mental ghetto, expecting only aggres
sion from the outside world. The mare does not fare much better as
a representation of the earthly. She does have queenly attributes, and
she seems to be a patron of the arts (if her reading poetry is anything
to go by), but, if she is at all 'of the earth', she seems to channel her
instinctual energies into meek, idiotic and mock-female pursuits. To
sum up the impressions conveyed by the lion and the mare: he/it is all
maleness untempered by feminine attributes, and she/it is all female
ness unable to enhance gentleness by force of character and self
assertiveness.

The critical dismissal of Gormenghast ritualism as 'mediocre', let

alone meaningless, is irresponsible. Through rituals, the castle actu
ally informs its prospective ruler about the fabric of the cosmos,
about human nature and about the ethical issues that he will be con
fronted with as omnipotent Earl of Gormenghast. The 'lessons' Titus
is likely to have drawn from the initiation are anything but cliched
wisdom. One striking element about the mask is the implicit warn
ing to the young earl about the repressed violence underlying the
stalemate within the giants (each of them is a bundle of contradic
tions) and without them (evil is lurking, and the ineptitude of each
giant in his/her social role is ominous for social stability). I will have
ample opportunities to suggest how relevant to the young earl's exis

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12 Peake studies I0:iii

tential vecu all this ritualistic wisdom will be, though not quite along
the lines Gormenghast orthodoxy would have imagined.
One further aspect of the ritual needs clarifying at this stage. The
words 'good and evil' have come up several times in my discussion
of the mask, and, in the context of Mervyn Peake's fiction, these
words are likely to be misunderstood owing to inevitable Judaeo
Christian overtones. There is little doubt that the poison that the
wolf intends for the lion in the mask has a name in Gormenghast:
change. Good and evil are indeed identified with, respectively, the
stability of the social order and the love of 'difference'. A number of
characters - the Countess, Flay, Barquentine, and, to a lesser extent,
Prunesquallor - incarnate this orthodoxy, indeed this hatred of
change. From the implicit narrator's point of view, the hatred of
change is understandable, even in a special sense commendable,
when it is voiced by the Countess, but it is downright evil (in the
Judaeo-Christian sense of the word!) when it is upheld by
Barquentine.
Peake's depiction of Barquentine is spine-chilling in our post-9/11
times, for he is truly a fundamentalist driven by 'this blind, passion
ate and cruel love for the dead letter of the castle's law' (p.568).
Steerpike himself, who is not prone to emotional outbursts, is
'chilled ... by the direst expression of mortal hatred that had ever
turned an old man's face into a nest of snakes' (p.572) when he has
entered the old man's quarters to despatch him. The demonic
imagery leaves no doubt about the de-humanizing effect of
Barquentine's brand of fundamentalism on his soul. His love of filth,
his 'vile and brimming eyes' (p.568), and the 'unwelcome memory'
of a wife he seems to have driven mad and of a son he apparently dis
owned more than forty years before (p.570), contribute to the sense
in which the Master of Ritual represents a form of blind abidance by
social orthodoxy that Titus will be justified to discard. In words that
strikingly herald the advent of 'our' contemporary forms of religious
fundamentalism (whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Hindu),
Barquentine is said to cling, 'like a vampire, at [Steerpike's] breast'
and to display 'an unholy glee' as 'he was burning the traitor with his
own flame ... burning an unbeliever' (p.575). When Titus wishes

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Stasis and rebellion 13

'there wasn't any Master of Ritual' (p.588), he voices his disgust at a

form of secular zealotry that leaves him no room for self-fulfilment.
The Countess of Groan is also a staunch defender of Gormen
ghast orthodoxy, but she is different from Barquentine in one im
portant respect. While Barquentine stands for a perverted form of
culture, Countess Gertrude's 'huge clay' (p.377) is a perfect conjunc
tion of nature and culture ('perfect' by Gormenghast standards, that
is). To her Gormenghast is a macrocosmic organic entity. When voic
ing her suspicions about Steerpike to the doctor, she says: 'by the
black tap-root of the very castle, if my fear is founded, the towers
will sicken at his death: the oldest stones will spew' (p.630). She sees
the castle as a huge organic growth that draws its life-sap from the
darkest underworld and has a 'natural' propensity to spew its dis
content with any polluting influences. The Countess is Peake's most
accomplished rendition of the genius of Gormenghast. She is the pre
lapsarian embodiment of Gormenghast culture (with its cumber
some ritualistic trove) and Gormenghast nature (with the mountain
and forests all around precluding any heroic temptation to look for
an 'elsewhere'). She embodies the true spirit of Gormenghast, for the
castle itself is an extension of the natural world, with whole landings
'taken over for many a decade by succeeding generations of dove
grey mice' (p.405), with large halls being claimed by herons, egrets
and bitterns (p.421), with, even, the whole structure being turned to
a Genesis ark when the Great Flood leaves animals no option but to
find a safe haven in the upper storeys. The Countess hyphenates the
two kingdoms, cultural and natural, and her patronizing of the
animal species is no charity: half of her is of nature, turning dining
halls into hospitals for birds during harsh winters (p.590), drawing
to herself a magpie oblivious of its duty 'to flap away into the after
noon sunlight' during a ritual (p.501), and of course followed every
where by a swarm of white cats treated to goat's milk in a most
incongruous situation (p.397).
The Countess can be deemed cold, heartless and devoid of mater
nal instinct only from an 'extraneous', i.e., non-Gormenghast, van
tage point. Blaming her for heartlessness or indifference to human
beings misses Peake's fictional point within the larger design of the

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14 Peake studies I0:iii

first two books. The word that best captures her nature is 'self
possession', and this is an attribute that she shares with her cats:

though a number of them sported together, rolling over one anoth

er, or sitting up straight with their heads bridled back, tapped at each
other sparring like fighters, only to lose interest of a sudden, their
eyes unfocusing, their thoughts turning - yet for the main the white
creatures behaved as though each one were utterly alone, utterly
content to be alone, conscious only of its own behaviour, its own
leap into the air, its own agility, self-possessed, solitary, enviable, and
legendary in a beauty both heraldic and fluent as water. (p.607)

There is a community of nature between the Countess of Groan and

her white followers. Like her cats, she can be intensely focused on
whatever draws her attention, but she is mostly self-contained - not
needing 'others' because this is part of the all-too-human tendency to
depend for happiness on the outside world and on other human
beings. She is a total individual, intensely collective in her adherence
to Gormenghast values but utterly self-contained in her awesome
detachment from social agitation. In a sense, she is as close to the
state of nature as is possible for a human being without forfeiting the
link to humanness. Animals are gregarious but are not, for that mat
ter, 'sociable'. This is why they presumably never feel lonely. The
Countess's cats are a case in point: they are 'content to be alone'
though they also belong in the tightly-knit community of white cats.
Peake's choice of these animals as emblems of the Countess of Groan
is extraordinarily apt, because, Gertrude-wise, a cat combines the
dominant features common to a whole group and an uncanny capac
ity for near-manic self-absorption.
It would no doubt be inappropriate to reduce the Countess's
essence to this kinship with animals, for she has the quintessentially
human capacity to use a powerful brain. True, this brain 'had been
drowsing since girlhood' (p.694), and it 'had been purred to sleep for
so long by her white cats that it was difficult at first to awaken it'
(p.388), but, once it is 'fully awake' (p.694) after Steerpike's treach
ery has been exposed, it proves a fearsome instrument against rebel
lion and heterodoxy.

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Stasis and rebellion 15

In one of the most revealing episodes of the second book, Titus is

depicted walking by his mother's side and being struck by her
expressionlessness. However, her face's 'vague, almost mask-like
character was something which he was beginning to suspect of being
no index to her state of mind' (p.607). The countess is obviously
aware of a 'presence' in the woods nearby. At first, she communi
cates with birds, as she is wont to do, through shrill notes the pitch
of which depends on the kind of birds she is 'speaking to'. But then,
'all at once a fresh voice from the wood silenced the birds', and 'Its
effect on the Countess seemed out of all reason' (p.607). The voice is
of course the Thing's. Peake implies here that the Countess and the
Thing are kin: they can both commune with nature and mimic its
languages. But something has been lost in the translation: 'It was no
bird that was answering her; that much she knew. Clever as it was,
the mimicry could not deceive her' (p.608). Gertrude and the Thing
are of nature, though not quite. Their empathy with fauna has
indeed been hybridized through the world of culture. And it is in this
no man's land, mostly of nature albeit not unreservedly, that the con
frontation is taking place. The Countess and the Thing stand for ele
mental, irreconcilable principles on which Gertrude of Groan knows
that, one day, Titus will have to make a stand. These two principles
are orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, submission ('Islam'!) to the social
writ versus rebellion against it, acceptance of the identity between
social body and individual body versus insistence that individual
self-fulfilment overrides social commands.
In the scene I have just been discussing, Titus is the stake of a con
frontation between two conceptions of human destiny. His mother's
face is said to have 'darkened' when the Thing challenges her whis
tles by echoing them, and Gertrude's hand grips his shoulder 'like an
iron clamp' (p.607). She trembles and is angered, and 'it seemed as
though she were holding [Titus] back from something, as though the
wood was hiding something that might hurt him'. And, when she
threateningly cries out, 'Beware!', to the hidden Thing, 'a strange
voice' ironically answers, 'Beware!' from behind a screen of 'cold
needles' (p.608). The countess is addressing the Thing and telling her
to shy away from the Groan heir, who is too susceptible to voices of

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16 Peake studies I0:iii

dissent, but the Thing snubs the warning and, instead, addresses
Titus, daring him to sever the cord with Mother, castle and
Submission. This is Peake at his symbolical best, for, with remark
able verbal scarcity, he visually captures the sense in which Titus is at
a crossroads. From this moment on, rebellion will sweep him Thing
wards, away from his Groan mother's 'iron clamp'.
In Mythologies, Roland Barthes makes a point that has direct
relevance to Titus's revulsion for his mother's endorsement of Gor
menghast stasis. Barthes argues that, through the essentialist element
in myth,8 history is transformed from culture to nature. What is
historically determined, hence also relative and time-bound, is ideo
logically transmuted into timeless, unchangeable nature, and this
process is meant to bolster up the ideology of the dominating class.9
Something of this kind seems to have been taking place over a long
period of time in Gormenghast, and the end-result of this process
could be the Countess of Groan's conviction that the castle's social
system will never be affected by change. Nature's being 'eternal' is a
poetic truth10 which the Countess unconsciously endorses, as do all
Gormenghast's denizens as they witness the never-ending cycle of
seasons regulating the life of the castle. But what is highly question
able, indeed proto-fascist, from the implicit narrator's point of view
is the notion that the Groan dynasty and the social system around
the ruling family are also 'eternal'. To use Barthes' 'demythologizing'
strategy, Gormenghast culture has been 'naturalized' - turned into
an analogue of nature - over the long period spanned by the dynasty.
There can be no doubt that this is a political process aimed at perpet
uating the social system and its privileges, indeed at abolishing his
tory itself.
Not the least baffling aspect of the 'naturalization' process in Gor
menghast is the sense in which Peake's people have been destined to
be what they are. Gormenghast as a social structure is a-historical, as
it were frozen in an ever-repeated pattern of rituals punctuated by
the cycle of seasons, but, even more stupendously, Peake's people are
well-nigh rootless and are never explained by historical circum
stances or genetics. Steerpike is a striking case in point. He emerges
from the kitchens unexplained, family-less and devoid of any social

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Stasis and rebellion 17

background. He is (from 'to be', to have an essence) an upstart, a

climber, whose ambitions are never traced back to an origin,
whether psychological or sociological or both. He is the evil rebel,
just as Titus will be his 'positive' foil:

High-shouldered to a degree little short of malformation, slender

and adroit of limb and frame, his eyes close-set and the colour of
dried blood, he is still climbing, not now across the back of Gormen
ghast but up the spiral staircase of its soul, bound for some pinnacle
of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to
himself; where he can watch the world spread out below him, and
shake exultantly his clotted wings. (p.378)

Steerpike has no motivation for climbing to the summit of th

menghast edifice - he climbs for the sake of climbing. In a sp
sense, he is the power drive, which can only find complete fulfilm
in 'a virtual dictatorship' (p.63 2). What few psychological or
logical explanations that can be adduced for this unquenchable thi
for power are at best perfunctory. For instance, there is the scen
which Steerpike nearly alienates Fuchsia, calling her 'a fool'
reviving in her the proud feeling that she is after all 'the daught
an Earl' while he himself is 'a commoner' (p.63 3). This scene m
suggest that Steerpike's lust for power is the evil counterpart of
American dream - as a 'commoner' he would start at the bottom of
the social ladder, and he would ruthlessly shove his way up to the
aristocratic top, leaving behind him a long list of casualties who had
impeded his ambitions. Such an explanation, though, is both too
sociological and too psychological. It can can only be valid for more
'conventional' fiction, and it certainly detracts from the universal
ethos of Peake's art. What is aesthetically wizardly about the Titus
books is that, though behaviour is hardly ever accounted for, we are
not for that matter in allegorical fiction. Indeed, Steerpike's 'being'
the power drive does not turn him into an allegory. He is the flesh
and-blood embodiment of a universal drive which is not so much an
'idea' as a libidinic longing obsessively channelled into actions,
strategies and impetuses. Mervyn Peake is unique in the great tradi
tion of English fiction because he brings to sensory life a whole

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18 Peake studies 10iii

humanity while dispensing with conventional cause-and-effect

explanations (simplifications?) for their actions and thoughts.
Peake's people being 'rootless' is remarkably consistent with the
process of 'naturalization' defined by Roland Barthes in Mythologies
and brought to bear by Gormenghast society on its own culture. It is
almost as though the people inhabiting the castle were excrescences
of its labyrinthine structure, indeed as though the place and the peo
ple were of one essence. Gormenghast people never seem to have
grown into a position or a trade through training or through trials
and errors as in 'real life'. Instead, they seem to be as congruent with
their social situation as is a tree with the forest it is a part of. Thus,
being a doctor, a cook, a master of ritual, a poet, a countess or a
teacher is not so much a profession as an essence. Let us take a clos
er look at the professors to support this claim, though any other
trade would do equally well.
In Gormenghast, you are a teacher by nature, not by choice or by
circumstance. This is why Darwinian metaphors are strangely appo
site for the professors as a human species. They are, for example,
likened to a 'black, hydra-headed dragon with a hundred flapping
wings'. And, as in the state of nature (of which Gormenghast is part,
as ascertained above), change is the arch-enemy: 'It was for the pro
fessors to suffer no change' (p.458).11 What is immovable in the pro
fessors' trade is the tedium of the work itself and the exhilaration of
the five-o'-clock movement to their quarters. To them, bliss is the fif
teen hours of idleness until

the clanging bell aroused them, and a day of ink- and thumb-marks,
cribbing and broken spectacles, flies and figures, coastlines, prepo
sitions, isthmuses and essays, paper darts, test tubes, catapults,
chemicals and prisms, dates, battles and tame white mice, and hun
dred half-formed, ingenious and quizzical faces, with their chapped
red ears that never listened, renewed itself.' (p.460)12

In Gormenghast living is the stuff essences, not existences, are made

of. This does not mean that Peake himself is an 'essentialist' writer.
Quite the opposite since, at the end of Gormenghast, Titus rejects
wholesale this humanity which regards all human endeavours as

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Stasis and rebellion 19

society- and nature-given.13 The 'naturalization' of human life is

indeed responsible for strange distortions, especially in men/women
relationships. Thus, being a professor is deemed to be the essence of
his life, it therefore follows that there is no such thing as private life
to balance public life. The professors' retreat from their teaching
activities every day is indeed a woman-less, sterile, self-enclosed and
purposeless span of time until the next day, and the advent of an invi
tation in their evening routine - and one which is fraught with sexu
al innuendoes as it comes from husband-hunting Irma Prunesquallor
- predictably has the impact of an earthquake on each of them.
The main human casualty of living by essence, not by existence, is
the loss of eros, of the life principle, and the upshot of such a distort
ed way of life over a very long period of time is the increasing hold
of decay and decrepitude over people's lives and over society as a
whole. I am not aware that critics have highlighted Peake's implicit
inveighing against the omni-presence and -potence of abstract
essences and against the frightful toll this form of mental tyranny
takes on the human psyche. I have just mentioned the professors as
evidence - however comic - that the reduction of human life to the
alleged 'essence' of a trade substantially diminishes the human fac
tor, but similar examples abound in the first two books. Barquentine
hardly recollects being married; he assumes his wife has died, and he
hasn't spoken to his son for more than forty years (p.570). The rela
tionship between Sepulchrave and the countess is so perfunctory that
one wonders how an act of copulation can have taken place between
them, yielding the seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast. Fuchsia
dies a virgin, thriving for years on fantasies and falling victim to her
own romantic idealization of the only man she has ever regarded as
a potential lover. Irma Prunesquallor is a pathetic spinster, only
redeemed in the reader's eyes by her unwittingly comic pursuit of a
passionate suitor, old Bellgrove. Flay embodies the single-minded,
uncritical reverence for Gormenghast orthodoxy; his is a one-idea'd
existence, albeit tempered by sincere love for the two Groan heirs.
And so on.
In the first part of this article, I have been dealing with the
omnipotence of social life in its perverted, essentialized form, and, in

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20 Peake studies 10:iii

the second part (to be published later), I will try to show that Titus's
rebellion is really an attempt to substitute the law of the self for the
iniquitous law of the polis, indeed the necessity of existence for the
assumption that life is immovable essence.14 Titus Groan is the lone
hero governed by the Promethean drive to become an individual,
though this means toppling a social hegemony presented as eternal.
The great paradox of Gormengbast is that the inner craving for free
dom within a single individual proves more than a match for two
millennia of Gormenghast homogenization. From this vantage
point, the Titus trilogy can be read as a paean to the indomitable
human refusal of collective immobility. What Titus Groan will refuse
to rubber-stamp in Gormenghast is graphically represented by the
hilarious ritual marking the end of the professors' day after their
evening meal. They turn the tables upside down and sit down on the
table tops 'as though they were boats and were about to oar their
way into some fabulous ocean'. Then they start singing a dirge the
significance of which has long been forgotten (pp.466-7). As is
always the case with Gormenghast esotericism, the gist of the rituals,
however obscure to the participants, is pretty transparent to the
'modern' reader. The professors re-enact the daily rite of passage to
a realm where doom and dawn, child and thrush in the tomb, corn
awaiting the scythe, figure the eternal cycles presiding over cosmic
harmony. This is an initiatory 'truth' not drastically dissimilar from
the epiphany befalling the Eleusis initiand, who was made to re
enact the death and rebirth of Persephone as represented by the
'mown ear of grain' exhibited to the novice at the end of the myster
ies.15 However, the comparison with ancient mysteries is fraught
with irony within our Gormenghast context because unspeakable
'boredom' is expressed by the professors' voices as they intone this
'obscure chant of former days' (p.466). This is, again, a good exam
ple of Peake's parodic intent in Gormenghast,16 which will provide
us with the proper starting-point for our discussion of the hero myth.
It is indeed a stultified set of creeds that Titus will be discarding
when he gallops away from Gormenghast at the end of Book II.
© Pierre Francois 2007

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 Stasis and rebellion 21

Notes

i At a later stage of my research, I intend to show that the third book

too, Titus Alone, bears out the 'coherence' argument, albeit with some
important qualifications.
z Gormenghast, in 'The Gormenghast Trilogy' (1999), p.678. All page
references are to this edition and given in the text.
3 Titus Groan, in 'The Gormenghast Trilogy', p.360.
4 Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation - The Mysteries of
Birth and Rebirth (1975), P-2
5 On the latter aspect see the chapter on 'Patterns of Initiation in Higher
Religions' in Eliade's Rites and Symbols of Initiation, pp.103-37. I
find the parallel between Gormenghast mysteries and, say, the
Eleusinian mysteries interesting because, unlike Christian rituals, both
are immanent and appears to imbue life on earth with spiritual mean
ing irrespective of any transcendence.
6 On the motif of loneliness in Peake, see the chapters 'Solitude' and
'Islands' in Peter Winnington's recently published Voice of the Heart
(zoo6), pp.28-78. I have amplified a number of other points that he
makes, such as the Countess's 'self-possession'.
7 This is no vain paradox for postmodern man, who has no choice but
to surrender to one triumphant, global ideology yet in the process feels
all the more alienated from his fellows.
8 What Barthes means by 'mythologies' (in the plural) has nothing to do
with myths as studied by classical scholars or anthropologists. It is
such modern myths as the Tour de France or the latest Citroen car
which he discusses in the bulk of the book.
9 On this matter see 'Le mythe, aujourd'hui', which is the book's conclu
sion and the theoretical part of it (Roland Barthes, Mythologies
(1957). PP-I9I_247)
10 I insist on this 'truth' being 'poetic', because, from an ecological view
point, the eternity of nature can no longer be taken for granted.
ix With Darwinian evolution in mind, it may seem to be paradoxical to
argue that the 'state of nature' is incompatible with 'change', but what
is 'eternal' is nature itself, notwitstanding the evolutionary processes
taking place within it.

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 22 Peake studies i0:iii

iz There is of course a stro

of the professors, but a cas
Books (not just professoria
and Peake might then be e
the language.
13 Interestingly, the 'natu
out of the picture. Peake's
ular, society.
14 Though I am aware that some critics might regard such a claim as far
fetched, I do think there is a strong existentialist strain in the Titus
books, and the link with Sartre and his more humanist contemporary
Camus is not as preposterous as might appear from a superificial read
ing of the trilogy. Literary chronology would certainly support this
claim.

15 'Kore' by C. Kerenyi, in Essays on a Science of Mythology - The Myth

of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis (1973), p.148.
16 Peake's 'parodic intent' is, in particular, expressed by the mock-cycli
cal structure of the song ('Hold fast /To the law ... Hold fast!'). Peake
mischievously breaks the intricate pattern of death-and-rebirth images
in the poem by implying in the last few lines that only suffering ('the
thorn / In wait / For the heart') and nothingness ('Till the last / of the
first / Depart. /And the least / Of the past / Is dust / And the dust / Is
lost') are in store for humanity.

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 Stasis and rebellion 23

References

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies. Saint-Amand, France: Seuil, 1957.

Eliade, Mircea, Rites and Symbols of Initiation - The Mysteries of Birth
and Rebirth. New York/Hagerstown/San Francisco/London: Harper
& Row, 1975.
Kerenyi, Carol (with C. G. Jung), Essays on a Science of Mythology - The
Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries ofEleusis. Bollingen Series
XXII. New York: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Peake, Mervyn, Gormenghast, in 'The Gormenghast Trilogy'. London:
Vintage, 1999.
, Titus Groan, in 'The Gormenghast Trilogy'. London: Vintage,
1999.

Winnington, G. Peter, The Voice of the Heart. Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press, 2.006.

Pierre Francois teaches English literature and language at the Ecole des
Interpretes Internationaux (Universite de Mons-Hainaut, Belgium). He
has specialised in the relationship between myth and literature, on which
he has published one book and a number of articles. He has been work
ing for some time on a book about Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy
from a mythopoeic perspective.

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