Stasis and Rebellion in "Gormenghast": Part II – Rebellion (Thanatos)

Author(s): Pierre François

Source: Peake Studies , October 2008, Vol. 11, No. 1 (October 2008), pp. 6-34
Published by: G. Peter Winnington

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24776587

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 Stasis and Rebellion in Gormenghast

Part II - Rebellion (Thanatos)

Pierre Frangois

Introduction
Just a few years after Titus Groan was published, Joseph Campbell
observed that:

It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but pre
cisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal
- carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his
tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.
(The Hero With a Thousand Faces p.391)

The contention that we all have to 'carry the cross of the redeemer'
may be a tall order in our secular, non-heroic times. Nevertheless,
Campbell's words are strikingly apposite to describe Titus Groan's
relationship to his society. The young earl does not turn outwards, to
Gormenghast, for meaningful alternatives to irksome ritual duties,
but inwards, to his intuition that freedom from social constraints is
the prerequisite for personal fulfilment. As a potential traitor to the
spirit of Gormenghast, he undoubtedly experiences 'personal
despair', but he has no real choice. He would forfeit his heroic aspi
rations if he preferred social conformity and the lures of power to the
inner craving for self-accomplishment.
It is against this paradoxical backdrop that I propose to deal
with the second term of my critical inquiry into 'Stasis and Re
bellion'. Whilst the first part in the October 2007 issue of Peake
Studies dealt with 'stasis' and focused on Titus Groan, I am now
going to turn my attention to Gormenghast, with its heavy emphasis
on 'rebellion'.

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 7

Defining rebellion
Rebellion is an intricate issue involving both Titus's confrontation
with his demonic shadow, Steerpike, and his relationship to the
Thing. Titus's confrontation with Steerpike suggests that the two
characters are complementary opposites, and that, if it were not for
Steerpike's dark scheming, Titus would not be able to rise to his
heroic, dragon-slaying challenge. As for the other protagonist in
Titus's initiatory journey, the Thing, she may be a material being,
but, more significantly, she is the outer manifestation of an inner
drive in Titus which has both erotico-incestuous and Promethean
dimensions. As Titus's Eros, the Thing materialises the indomitable
spirit of rebellion that lies dormant in his psyche until he is about
seven years old.
I am not aware that, in psychological studies, the propensity to
rebel has ever been presented as a 'drive', i.e. as an instinct irre
sistibly impelling the individual to action, but this is precisely what
Mervyn Peake implies is the inner groundswell actuating Titus's
rejection of his Gormenghast legacy. The first few paragraphs of
Gormengbast leave no doubt about the origin of the conflicts narrat
ed in the second book. Titus has been suckled 'on shadows' and
'weaned ... on webs of ritual'. For all its immensity, Gormenghast
constitutes the young Earl's 'confines': wherever he goes, 'there are
always eyes. Eyes that watch. Feet that follow, and hands to hold
him when he struggles.' Titus's social nurture is the 'umbrageous
legacy' that constrains his every movement into an insufferable ritu
alistic web. But from deep inside him rises an impulse immensely
more powerful than a couple of millennia of Gormenghast certain
ties. This impulse too is a 'ritual', but it is more 'compelling' than
any ritual ever 'devised' by man. It is a 'ritual of the blood; of the
jumping blood', and these 'quicks of sentience owe nothing to his
forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's
childhood' (Gormenghast, in the Vintage omnibus edition, titled The
Gormenghast Trilogy, p.373. All further references are to this edi
tion). Peake even explicitly links the Earl's rebellious blood to the
world of nature which, unlike Gormenghast's rituals, never ceases to
renew itself from the winter grave:

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8 Peake studies 11 :i

Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a

bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river. Deep in a fist
of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm.
A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs . . .
And darkness winds between the characters. (P-373)

Peake unmistakably pits Gormenghast's suffocating culture against

the irresistible surge of nature from within Titus's inner world. (Note
that, however cryptic the reference to the 'doll's hand', it could con
ceivably be the Thing's - a clue, from the onset of the second novel,
that Titus's foster sister will be his muse in rebellion. But I might be
overly extrapolative here.) Coming from a writer whose negative
capability is usually as impenetrable as Keats's or Shakespeare's, this
is a surprisingly robust pronouncement on what the matter of Gor
menghast is going to be - nurture versus nature, Gormenghast ver
sus Promethean Self, and it seems to imply that, for Peake, only some
exceptional human beings harbour an inborn propensity to rebel
against the established social order and pursue the inner demands of
'nature', regardless of the consequences in terms of social isolation.
As Campbell forcefully puts it, 'herohood is predestined, rather
than simply achieved, and opens the problem of the relationship of
biography to character' (Hero p.319). This 'problem' is indeed raised
by the fiction of Mervyn Peake. With an extremely archaic twist, it
concerns the young inheritor of the Groan dynasty and also, less pre
dictably, his enemy. Neither Titus, as hero, nor Steerpike, his antago
nist, can be explained by 'biography'. Instead, they obey the imme
morial demands of 'character', and, in Titus Groan and Gormen
ghast, 'character' is a two-headed hydra surging from the psyche's
unconscious depths. The two 'heads' are Titus's instinct for heroic
self-accomplishment and Steerpike's naked power drive that impels
him towards self-destruction, and they are irreducible complements-.

The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a

myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his oppo
site (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or being swal
lowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his
pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolute

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 9

ly intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of dif
ferent species, but one flesh. (Hero p.108)

The complementarity of Titus and Steerpike1 may seem dubiou

until we come to realise that critical resistance to considering
pike as Titus's darker side is cultural. Christianity's ethical dua
(good versus evil, Jesus versus Satan) should be shrugged off in a
serious discussion of the fiction of Mervyn Peake. For instance
Miltonic undercurrent suffusing Steerpike's showdown with
three pursuers2 (section fifty-eight in Gormenghast) might mist
ly induce a metaphorical identity between Steerpike and Satan in
reader's mind, whilst I believe that the close links between Steerp
and Satan are parodic. The implicit castigation of Steerpike's
derous climb is not so much 'moral' as based on the sense in which
his consuming power drive is a foil to Titus's instinct for self-realiza
tion. This implies that, in the depths of the human psyche, there lies
a libidinic pool that ends up flowing alike into Steerpike's lust for
power and Titus's rebellious stamina. Proof of this is that both Titus
and Steerpike are said to be driven to their antinomic forms of self
affirmation by 'blood', by an inborn propensity to bow to the
demands of selfhood rather than to those of society: Titus as a child
enacts 'a ritual of the blood' (p.373) which turns him into a rebel in
the second book, while Steerpike is 'the vehicle through which gods
were working. The dim primordial gods of power and blood'
(p.655).
The paradoxical essence of the Titus/Steerpike doublet, then, is
that the hero and his negator 'are not of different species, but one
flesh,' as they both bow to their inner nature, not to social tyranny.
At the same time, they are also mutually exclusive, if only because
the essence of conflict in quest literature is the inevitability of the
protagonist prevailing over the antagonist. Intriguingly, what is
always left unexplained in literature (including Peake) is why the
libido - in Jung's comprehensive sense of 'psychic energy' - can turn
destructive and serve the cause of death, as exemplified by Steer
pike's icy murderousness. The only answer to this metaphysical
interrogation is 'predestination', which is not so much an answer as

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10 Peake studies 11 :i

a leap into the unfathomable abyss of what Campbell calls 'charac

ter', and so, on this elusive matter, only silence is the proper critical
stance.

In words that pointedly echo Campbell's about character an

biography, Peter Winnington remarks that 'a person of high so
class, like Titus, suffers a conflict between fidelity to their person
identity and absorption by the fabric of society that the count
apes do not. It's a matter of education, of self-image and - m
important of all - imagination' (Voice p.159). The 'countless ap
Winnington alludes to are for instance the Grey Scrubbers, w
'have become like the walls themselves, their faces expressionl
slabs, their mouths mere cracks' (Voice p. 158). The implication
that, although all human beings should ideally pursue the fulfilme
of their 'personal identity', those who do so are de facto only
privileged who have been given the right 'education' and the p
bility to give free rein to their 'imagination'. This elitist stance
polar removes from today's educational egalitarianism in the West,
presumably Mervyn Peake's own conviction as it is also conveyed b
the abhorrence of social uniformity and complete congruence w
social function in Titus Groan and Gormenghast.3

The hero myth

'Fidelity to personal identity' is a rare commodity in Gormengh
and so are the heroic attributes that go with it. Titus is the only t
rebel against social tyranny within the Gormenghast macrocos
hence also the trilogy's only hero. At this stage, 'heroism' needs to
clarified, because a great deal of cultural, indeed Christian, in
ference is likely to blur our apprehension of Peake's fictionalizatio
of this mythologem. Two conditions seem to be needed in Peak
yield the mercurial attribute: an inner call to freedom; and unflin
ing determination to respond to the call every time it surges u
consciousness.

Several Gormenghast characters admittedly display selfless

courage in the face of Steerpike's demonism, none more so than Flay
and Prunesquallor, but only Titus consistently puts the demands of
the individual self over the collective. At an important stage in the

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 11

novel, Prunesquallor and Flay do join forces with Titus in thwarting

Stcerpike's demonic plans, and they show great fortitude, both phys
ical and moral, in their pursuit of the 'beast', with Flay even paying
for his boldness with his life. However, they never swerve from social
orthodoxy in confronting the skewbald youth and cannot, for this
very reason, aspire to heroic status. Thus, even when Flay has been
exiled from Gormenghast and become a hermit, he remains at heart
a warden of orthodoxy, insisting that the right 'Keeper of the Groan
law' be found after Barquentine's death (p.587). And he flinches in
disapproval when he hears Titus express his longing to 'be free': 'A
wicked thing to say, my lord, a wicked thing. ... You are a Groan of
the blood - and the last of the line. You must not fail the Stones. No,
though the nettles hide them, and the blackweeds, my lord - you
must not fail them' (p.476). As to Prunesquallor, he may be less con
spicuously anchored to Gormenghast fundamentals than Flay, but he
never questions the castle's dogmas. It is for instance significant that,
when explanations have to be found for mysterious disappearances
(pp.629-30) or when strategies have to be worked out for tracking
Steerpike after the discovery of the twins' skeletons (pp.660-61),
Prunesquallor is the person the Countess turns to, almost as a mat
ter of course. She knows that the doctor's keen mind, however eccen
tric, never strays into blasphemous territories.
Now, the ternary structure of the hero myth is unmistakably
exemplified by Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Joseph Campbell has
shown that 'the nuclear unit of the [heroj monomyth' unfolds in the
three stages found in rites of passage, namely 'separation-initi
ation-return' (Hero p.30). This 'monomyth' has an archaic origin
and can be found in traditions as varied as primitive lore, Sumerian
legends and Christianity's evangelical writs, making it a choice sub
ject for comparative studies. In a closely contiguous context,
Northrop Frye similarly argues that quest literature contains 'three
main stages':

the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adven
tures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either
the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero.

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12 Peake studies 11:

We may call these three stages respectively, using Greek terms, the
agon or conflict, the pathos or death-struggle, and the anagnorisis or
discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has clearly proved him
self to be a hero even if he does not survive the conflict.

(Anatomy p. 187)

Frye then proceeds to show that the 'central form of quest-romance

is the dragon-killing theme exemplified in the stories of St. George
and Perseus' and that 'the monster is the sterility of the land itself,
and that the sterility of the land is present in the age and impotence
of the king, who is sometimes suffering from an incurable malady or
wound' (Anatomy p. 189; Frye's italics), so that, when the hero has
killed the dragon, he has also metaphorically vanquished sterility
and re-introduced life and fertility into the land.
Eyebrows may be raised at my contention that the ternary struc
ture of the hero myth can be 'unmistakably' recognized in the plot of
the first two books. Resistance to this claim lies in the fact that, in
Peake as in other major mythopoeic writers (e.g. Shakespeare in his
later plays, notably The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, or James
Joyce in his two great epic novels of the modern psyche), a great deal
of 'displacement'4 takes place as a result of the writer's idiosyncratic
re-writing of the original myth. This is the critical issue that I dealt
with in 'Godless religion and maimed earldom in Titus Groan' (PS 9:
PP-5~34)- A brief reminder is needed at this stage to place 'stasis
and rebellion' in the more comprehensive perspective of the mytho
poeic unity of the three books.
Titus Groan is the long preamble to Peake's fictionalisation of
the hero myth in the next two books. As Northrop Frye suggests, the
heroic quest is made necessary by the maimed king's sterile rule over
his kingdom. The 76th Earl of Gormenghast is just such a ruler, who
ends up seeking refuge from the agony of maiming time in demonic
union with the castle's emblematic owls. And the earl's sacrifice
leads, in the second book, to the young hero's confrontation with a
demonic enemy (aptly called a 'dragon' by the implicit narrator5). In
ancient myth and Titus Groan alike, the motifs of maimed ruling
and heroic quest are closely interwoven.'' Also, Frye implies that the

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 13

legend of the maimed king has a macro-social, even cosmic, dimen

sion (the king is the world), whilst in its sequel, the quest, the hero
epitomizes individual selfhood. This is an insight that emphatically
applies to Peake since 'the emphasis is macro-social in Titus Groan''
and 'becomes overwhelmingly individual in Gormenghasf as I put it
in the first part of this article (PS 10: 3, p.6). Finally, the showdown
with the enemy has an erotic foil in the myth, with the hero's 'ulti
mate adventure' being 'commonly represented as a mystical mar
riage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the
World' (Hero p.109). Campbell describes the latter - in somewhat
pompous terms - as 'the sublime acme of sensuous adventure' (Hero
p. 116) and as the 'reply to all desire', because she is Woman - 'moth
er, sister, mistress, bride' all in one (Hero pp.110-11 ). The parallel
with Titus Groan is obvious: Titus Groan's passionate pursuit of the
Thing is Peake's superb re-creation of the mythic hero's seminal pur
suit of Eros.7
A display of physical valour and awesome encounter of the
bride, a fight to the death and erotic involvement with the female un
known, these are the fledgling hero's complementary feats, as re
enacted prospectively in Titus Groan and effectively in Gormen
gbast. However, even though the myth's two-faceted quest - con
frontation with the enemy, hankering for the love object - is
enshrined in the fictional heart of the first two books, there is no
doubt that sameness should be qualified by divergence. Thus the
quest motif is embedded in numerous peripheral elements (e.g. the
professors' courtship of Irma Prunesquallor), and, more important
ly, Peake's brand of displacement pulls the hero myth into fictional
territories where only he (Peake) has dared to tread.
It is indeed difficult to recognise in Peake the chronological
sequence of events normally found in the hero myth: separation from
'home'; initiation involving confrontation with the enemy and love
encounter; return and regeneration on the sexual-cum-individual
plane and on the collective plane. The centrifugal drive is an inborn
tendency, but it takes the full length of the first two novels for Titus
to sever the cord with the castle. Also, in myth initiation necessarily
occurs away from home as a stepping-stone to return, whilst it takes

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14 Peake studies 11:

place within Gormenghast in Peake. To complicate the comparison

further, there is, paradoxically, a long extra muros initiation into the
responsibilities of adulthood following the intramural ordeals, and it
takes place in Titus Alone. Finally, the hero myth is usually conserva
tive since 'return' restores social order and individual-cum-cosmic
fertility, whilst, in Peake, return is a brief episode at the end of the
third book paving the way for final separation, which precludes any
'restoration' in the mythic sense.
The question as to why Peake was both extensively drawing
upon the hero myth in the trilogy and conspicuously departing from
it in some important respects, might lead us astray into the issue of
authorial 'intentions', a critical concept of which I am extremely
wary. I am instead going to deal with how Peake fictionalizes the
hero myth in Gormenghast, and I will do so in three coherently inter
woven movements: Titus's epic confrontation with the adversary; his
erotic quest for freedom; and the mental and emotional price he has
to pay for submitting to the dictates of the heart.

The Adversary
Titus Groan and Steerpike are, respectively, the traditional protago
nist and antagonist of the hero myth, otherwise called 'romance' by
Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture. Frye argues that romances
are 'secular stories . . . forming a single integrated vision of the
world, parallel to the Christian and biblical vision' and providing
'man's vision of his own life as a quest' (p. 15). Also, characterisation
in romances is polarized since the 'quest. .. assumes two main char
acters, a protagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy' (Anatomy
p. 187). Titus Groan and Gormenghast roughly correspond to Frye's
definition since they are 'secular', godless stories dealing with human
life as 'quest' and pitting a hero against an enemy. Frye adds that,
while the hero often has messianic attributes, his enemy 'is analo
gous to the demonic powers of a lower world'. Nevertheless, the
'conflict takes place in, or at any rate primarily concerns, our world
. . . which is characterised by the cyclical movement of nature'
(.Anatomy p. 187; Frye's italics). Not a word of all this jars with the
Titus versus Steerpike showdown, for throughout the first two

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 15

books Pcake inscribes the conflict within 'the cyclical movement of

nature'. Leaving behind generalities, I now want to probe Peake's
original handling of the protagonist/antagonist motif, starting with a
non-psychological and non-Christian inquiry into the nature of the
enemy.
My discussion of Steerpike's demonic nature will be 'non-psy
chological' because psychology connotes opposition between depths
and consciousness, whilst Steerpike does not so much contain depths
as embody them in everything he does and thinks; in a special sense,
Steerpike is an impersonation of the 'shadow' (to be defined below).
Also, my inquiry into 'antagonism' will be 'non-Christian' because
Steerpike is not endowed with the capacity to choose between good
and evil, and the absence of free will, indeed the predestination to be
demonic, rules out a Christian interpretation of character.
In my view, psychology and Christian ethics should not be
allowed to interfere with our critical assessment of Steerpike's role in
Titus Groan and Gormenghast for a very simple reason: as a literary
character Steerpike antecedes Christian myth and the advent of mod
ern psychology by several millennia. The myth critic has little diffi
culty in recognising in him the trickster of anthropological studies. I
have shown in another piece that Muzzlehatch is a trickster too,"
though the comparison between the two should not be overstretched
as I will presently suggest.
The trickster is a morally ambivalent character whose origins
can be traced back to the oldest mythologies and folk traditions. He
has survived in various rituals all over the planet, including the rag
ging of first-year students in universities (Carl Gustav Jung, 'On the
Psychology of the Trickster-Figure', p.25 5). He is notably the 'spirit
of carnival', that is, the subversive element within all human cul
tures, and he reminds us that our animal self has to be released in
brief periods of misrule if social anarchy is to be warded off. While
standing for man's animal self, the trickster also contains an
immense potentiality for self-development, and he has even come to
symbolise artistry as the creative impulse channelling lower instincts
into works of beauty ('Trickster-Figure' p.6). Now, the carniva
lesque, tricksterly element is conspicuous in Steerpike. His emblem

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16 Peake studies 11:

atic animal is the monkey, which is dressed as for a carnival9 when

Steerpike attempts to give it to Fuchsia (p.636). The animal's name,
Satan, is appropriate, for Jung tells us that the age-old trickster has
found its way into Christianity in the form of 'the devil as simia dei
(the ape of God)'. Jung also speaks about the trickster's 'fondness for
sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter'
('Trickster-Figure' p.25 5). The first two books of the trilogy abound
with such tricksterly 'rogueries'. There is for instance the scene in
which Steerpike follows Barquentine through the corridors of the
castle and amuses himself by clipping strands of the old man's hair
and by inventing 'a peculiar dance, a kind of counterpoint to Bar
quentine's jerking progress' (p.495). Up to a point, Steerpike embod
ies a farcical, carnivalesque form of rebelliousness against the estab
lished social order. Among his tricksterly oddities, there is his pecu
liar habit of perambulating a room 'on the palms of his hands with
the peculiarly stilted, rolling and predatory gait of a starling' (p.508).
He appears to do this when his scheming is about to take a subver
sive, sometimes demonic, turn. In this case, he has just stolen a poi
sonous concoction from Prunesquallor's laboratory. In a somewhat
similar context, he moves about his room on his hands prior to going
to Barquentine's to despatch the Master of Ritual (p.562). Steerpike's
acrobatics are a striking topsy-turvy figuration of the trickster's
'reversal of the hierarchic order' ('Trickster-Figure' p.255). There is
also a form of playful ubiquity about his unexpected appearances, as
in the scene in which he climbs down from the rooftops to Fuchsia's
room, introducing himself, trickster-wise, as 'His Infernal Slyness,
the Arch-fluke Steerpike' (p.385).
In his essay on the psychology of the trickster, Jung shows that,
though the original trickster was a 'delight-maker' in primitive
mythologies, his fondness for mischievous rogueries are indicative of
a shadowy, indeed evil, essence. Jung defines the shadow as 'the
"negative" side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant
qualities we like to hide' ('On the Psychology of the Unconscious'
§io3n), and argues that it is no different from the Freudian 'id', the
personal unconscious ('Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation'
p.284). He sees the shadow as the inner counterpart of the 'objective'

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 17

trickster of ancient myth and ritual: we 'are no longer aware that

in carnival customs and the like there are remnants of a collective
shadow figure which prove that the personal shadow is in part
descended from a numinous collective figure' ('Individuation'
p.2.6z). Now, uniquely in Peake, the trickster (as objective presence)
and the shadow (as inner demonic self) have fused into a single char
acter, Steerpike. It would be inaccurate to say that the skewbald
youth is 'shadowy' or is 'associated with' the shadow. He is the shad
ow as trickster.
In his creation of Steerpike, Peake is at his most metaphorical, in
the primary sense of the word1" - he identifies the demon's outer shell
and his inner core in a radical manner. He shuns depths and turns
away from the psychologising tendency that characterises much of
twentieth-century, post-Freudian fiction. It is almost as though Steer
pike were wearing his heart on his sleeve, if, that is, he could be con
ceived of having a heart. This is a major tour de force because, in
turning his back on psychological literature, Peake was running the
risk of allegorically reducing Steerpike to the status of an evil con
cept. Instead, he contrived the behavioural creation of a shadowy
trickster combined with a tricksterly shadow. Steerpike is what he
does, and motivation is at best perfunctory. Or, to be more precise,
what impels Steerpike to action is not so much 'motivation' as
demonic possession by the power drive.
For the sake of accuracy, the last sentence must be qualified, for
only in the second book is Steerpike truly demonic. Peake only hints
at Steerpike's demonic potentiality in Titus Groan. The tricksterly,
mischievous element in Steerpike is dominant in the first novel,
whilst it is shadowy evil which overwhelmingly characterises him in
the second. Although Peake's treatment of him is unquestionably
consistent, it is the specificity of the matter of Gormenghast which
made the radicalisation of the demonic element a fictional necessity.
This is where I disagree to some extent with Peter Winnington's dis
cussion of Steerpike's evil in Voice of the Heart. Winnington con
vincingly shows that Gormenghast becomes Peake's Paradise Lost
through a dense web of metaphor identifying Steerpike with Milton's
Satan. However, 1 feel that one word is missing from Winnington's

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18 Peake studies 11 :i

discussion of 'evil': parody. Linda Hutcheon has shown that 'parody

is . . . repetition with a critical distance' (A Theory of Parody p.6).
Winnington brilliantly shows where 'repetition' lies, though, in my
view, he does not highlight the 'critical distance' inherent in parody.
This 'critical distance' is the lack of free will involving Steerpike in a
free-fall plunge into murder and self-destruction.
Unlike Milton's Satan who has free will, Steerpike is tempera
mentally 'beyond good and evil' in the Nietzschean sense of this
expression. He is a fictional incarnation of the demonic extremities
to which some human beings can be driven by the sheer lust for
power, spine-chillingly endorsed by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and
Evil. Not unlike Peake in his creation of Steerpike, Nietzsche some
how denies 'psychology' when he claims that 'thinking' is not willed
by human beings. Instead, it 'occurs' in all of us (Beyond Good and
Evil p.47), and its ideal form is arguably the eagerness to yield to
'the will to power' (p.67). Nietzsche contends that Christianity has
replaced the 'natural law' of the power drive by the 'mediocre' myth
of universal love, and he advocates surrendering, as in the state of
nature, to the Eros of the lust for power (pp.75-77). What is inter
esting in all this is the radical simplification of human motivations.
Not unlike Nietzsche's 'supreme individual', Steerpike is single
mindedly driven to action by the power instinct, and his claim that
he is his own god in the showdown with all Gormenghast (p.702) is
a symptom of his Nietzschean hubris. Steerpike does not pursue
power, he is the power drive from the inception of the first novel
until the underwater fight with Titus at the end of the second novel.
Am I going too far, though, in my contention that Steerpike has
no free will, let alone a conscience for actuating it? Peter Winnington
assumes that, early on, Steerpike has a conscience of sorts since,
when Prunesquallor tries to arrest him, his 'lust for evil is such that
he has . . . passed beyond choosing' (Voice p. 184). Winnington also
argues in connection with Mr Pye that 'feeding one's vices stimulates
the appetite to the point where it becomes more natural to do evil
than good' (Voice p.179). Though I agree with the latter part of the
argument, I am, to say the least, sceptical about Steerpike having any
form of 'conscience'. There are admittedly numerous references in

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 19

Gormenghast to a Christian set of beliefs and Winnington mentions

'specific references' to Satan, God and the concept of sin (Voice
p.180). Yet my conviction is that these references are, again, parodic
and that they are at best perfunctory within an archaic re-enactment
of the shadow-cum-trickster motif. In Gormenghast's social ethics,
'sin', for instance, is utterly unrelated to Christianity's obsession with
lustful indulgence or the like. The 'sin to cap all sins' (p.675) is dis
obedience to the Law and pursuit of the Thing, not any innocuous
moral breach of the 'thou-shalt-not-covet-thy-neighbour's-wife'
kind. What is sacred is social conformity, not the purity or the inno
cence of the human heart.
Peake's conception of evil is a dramatic departure from Christ
ianity's. Steerpike embodies evil as fate, as a destiny that cannot be
escaped, though it is necessary to qualify this radical pronounce
ment. Steerpike admittedly evolves to some extent, but this evolution
is inevitable from the onset of the first book, precisely because Steer
pike does not harbour any inner capacity to shun evil and opt for
good. Peter Winnington seems to take it that, Christianity-wise,
Steerpike's is an evolution in kind (from the inborn capacity to
choose between good and evil towards the loss of it), whilst my view
is that this is an evolution in degree. When he is still a 'boy', Steer
pike's evil nature is limited by lack of opportunity, but his gradual
acquisition of power practically opens his demonic vista to unlimit
ed possibilities.
It takes the fascinating episode of Steerpike's initiation by fire to
turn innate evil into a demonic absolute. Until the botched despatch
of Barquentine Steerpike's evil indulgence was often blended with
tricksterly playfulness, but the fire ordeal seems to cleatise the boy's
mind in a demonic crucible. In his classic book about fire, Gaston
Bachelard argues that fire is ambivalent because it can, depending on
the context, be associated with destructiveness or with a radical
process of purification that 'separates matters and annihilates mate
rial impurities'.11 In Steerpike's case, purification by fire amounts to
the completion of a de-humanising process, and here again Peake
appears to parody an idealistic,12 partly Christian, tradition which
takes it that the spiritualising fire has the ability to 'shine without

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20 Peake studies 11 :i

burning' (Feu p.173). In Peake, the fire engulfing Steerpike and

Barquentine in a demonic dance is the kind that burns without shin
ing, that consumes humanness and extinguishes what little warmth
there could have been in the boy's heart, or, more appropriately, in
his 'brain' which is of 'ice' (p.5 39). Interestingly, Steerpike's ordeal is
an ironic initiation through fire and water, and this initiation irre
trievably 'changes' him (p.581) as it turns him from an evil-cum
playful trickster into a mirthless demon, a 'shadow' really. His initia
tory immersion in fire and water is certainly apposite in view of the
fire and ice attributed by Peake to Steerpike's inner world (of which
we are only allowed glimpses because Peake never 'psychologies' in
the Titus books). After the Barquentine episode, Steerpike's 'mind,
always compassionless, was now an icicle - sharp, lucent and frigid'
(p.597), but, as a 'monarch of darkness' akin to 'Satan himself'
(p.658), he has 'dark red eyes like small circular pits' (p.657). The
conjunction of the incompatible elements, fire and ice, within the
compass of a single brain is demonic and enhances the youth's final
forfeiture of the human factor in the wake of the struggle with
Barquentine.
The fire-induced 'change' that besets Steerpike after he has failed
to neatly, hygienically, murder Barquentine is further sharpened after
his killing of Flay:

Something had altered. It was his mind. His brain was the same but
his mind was different. He was no longer a criminal because he chose
to be. He had no longer the choice. He lived now among the abstrac
tions. His brain dealt with where he would hide and what he would
do if certain contingencies arose, but his mind floated above all this
in a red ether. And the reflection of his mind burned through his eyes,
filling the pupils with a grizzly bloodlight.
As he stared down like a bird of prey from its window'd crag, his
brain saw, far below him, a canoe. It saw Titus standing on the
stone balcony. It saw him turn and after a moment's hesitation enter
the rotting halls and disappear from view.
But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a
warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man's land,

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 21

over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood's red
bugles. To be alone and to be evil! To be a god at bay. What was
more absolute. (p.702)

This is one of the most elusive inte

oeuvre. The narrator says that the
is his brain, which analyses any 'c
and enables him to respond to th
efficacy. In this particular scene, i
in a canoe (p.702) and decides, in
Conventional wisdom has it that t
'heart', the seat of emotions, an
immortal 'spirit', which is cons
books. But in Steerpike's case, 'h
adoxically replaced by 'mind'.
While 'the blood's red bugles' n
emotional, irrational acts, they m
cold blood, against the vast wor
from the 'red ether' of his hub
strewn with dead bodies. Strikingly
his mind (not of his soul, of cou
they reflect the inner flames of
bloodlight' scintillating in his pup
In the excerpt quoted above, St
criminal because he chose to be.
this imply that there was a tim
oped into 'the right sort'? I am ad
non-existent if by 'free will' we m
to choose between good and evi
ruthless will to power from the
omniscient narrator implies that,
ders of Barquentine and Flay), S
become 'a criminal', we are again
above as an 'evolution in degree
power in Gormenghast might con
and 'the death toll' less horrific, b

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22 Peake studies 11 :i

matter, have been less evil. What evolves in him is not his 'nature' but
the sense in which, from a relatively evil upstart when he emerges
from the kitchens, he becomes absolutely evil concomitantly with the
Great Flood: 'To be alone and evil! To be a god at bay. What was
more absolute.' Steerpike is the ultimate fascist of world literature.
Salman Rushdie has said somewhere that 'purity is a fascist myth',
and there is undoubtedly a form of unadulterated purity in Steer
pike's pursuit of power for the sake of power, but it becomes
'absolute' only when he has renounced the dictatorial dream that
possessed his mind at an earlier stage of his 'career'. In creating
Steerpike, Mervyn Peake seems to have isolated the essence of fas
cism, which pursues social omnipotence early on and then develops
into sheer hubris, that is to say, into the overweening arrogance of
the inflated evil individual who is his own god. The Hitlers, Stalins,
Pol Pots and Saddam Husseins of twentieth-century history in
evitably spring to mind in this context.13
Finally, there is one prominent reason why the 'free will' issue is
a non-starter in Titus Groan and Gormenghast - the shadow has no
conscience, and Steerpike is a shadow. The following comment by
Jung on the shadow belongs here:

With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow - so far as
its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one
encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other
words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recog
nise the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering expe
rience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil. (Aion p.io)

All human beings harbour an inner 'shadow' which is 'relatively

evil', but 'relative evil' can expand into 'absolute evil' in people who
are manically possessed by one of the destructive drives (the will to
power in this instance) normally tamed by education and social pres
sure into moderation, into what Freud calls the acquisition of a
superego. I want to show now that the ambivalent mischief-maker,
the trickster, evolves into the shadow as 'absolute evil' in Gormen
ghast.
In Maupassant's 'Le Horla', which is arguably the most famous

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 .W nim ur.' "*

*» IK «M.CI»
7i - .^ri

phot © Ab ot and Holder Ltd

Just as Collected Poems was being published, this

incorporating Peake's 'September 1939' came

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 This content downloaded from
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 /■

/&
&

Above: Man with scythe

(1934, from John Watney's
biography of MR p.57).
This may be
the same figure as in

Left: Cutting hay on Sark,

oil on board 59 x 49 cm
dated 1934.

From a private collection.

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This painting, depicting a pool on Sark (with a few extra tre s) or perhaps Guernsey, also dates from about 1934. Oil on canvas ca. 25 x 36cm From a private collection.

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 27

'shadow' story in western literature, the narrator exclaims: 'I can no

longer want; but somebody wants for me; and I obey' ('Le Horla'
p.70; my translation). To his horror, he discovers that he has been
robbed of his free will. This 'somebody' who wants for him against
his own will is unmitigated evil, and he is turned into a passive wit
ness of the autonomous shadow's mischief. In the process, he has
'lost his shadow'. Losing the shadow literally means no longer being
able to see it, paradoxically experiencing it instead as an omnipotent
inner force. Maupassant's Horla is the shadow when he has lost it.
Possession by the shadow is also experienced by, among other liter
ary characters, Goethe's Faust (Faust - Part Two P.Z64) and Hans
Christian Andersen's scientist in the story 'The Shadow'. Now there
is a fascinating twist in Peake's fictionalization of the motif of posses
sion by the shadow. Maupassant, Goethe and Andersen all assume
that there is such a thing as a human conscience, and so they situate
the shadow motif within a Christian set of ethical beliefs. On the
other hand, in creating Steerpike, Mervyn Peake has all but re
nounced the Christian assumption of the existence of a 'conscience'.
At the very beginning of Gormengbast, the implicit narrator
straightforwardly equates Steerpike with a shadow:

Surrounded by the whiteness of the walls he appeared, as he moved

across the room, weirdly detached from the small world surround
ing him. It was more like the shadow of a young man, a shadow with
high shoulders, that moved across whiteness, than an actual body
moving in space. (p.379)

Steerpike is not so much 'an actual

ow' whose dark insubstantiality is set
the walls all around him. From this
essence is consistently of the shad
who is a character of flesh and bloo
only to, later, become his shadow,
Groan and effectively in Gormengb
made of, so that his icy body and its
demonic essence. His symbiotic onen
is emphasised time and time again,

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28 Peake studies 11:

beyond [takes] him, as it were, to herself, muffling the edges of his

sharp body' (p.379). When Steerpike is said to run 'like a shadow'
(p.387), the simile is misleading, for his body is truly consubstantial
with its shadow. As he bows to the Countess, he appears 'as though
out of the mellow ground' and his shadow 'undulated' (p.500), as it
were in unison with his body.
In Steerpike, two elements which are separate in the physical
world (body and projection, materia and shade) are united. He
appears to emerge smoothly, 'mellowly', from the dark underworld
(p.500), not unlike a semi-material shade that would defeat the bor
derline between substance and thin air. The flesh-and-blood body
and its emanation somehow draw their vitality from the same under
worldly origin. The passage in Gormenghast in which Steerpike pre
pares to slip into Barquentine's apartment and kill him provides the
most graphic depiction in the Titus books of the paradoxical sym
biosis in separateness of Steerpike's body with his shadow. While the
shadow reaffirms 'its self-sufficiency and richness as a scabbard for
malignity', it also has 'a heart - a heart where blood was drawn from
the margins of a world of less substance than air. A world of dark
ness whose very existence depended upon its enemy, the light'
(p.565). 'Self-sufficiency' is the normal physical attribute of any 'vul
gar' shadow, but what is uncanny is this shadow's vampiric com
pounding of materiality and insubstantiality. It appears to have 'a
heart' and to pulsate like any living organism, but its 'blood' seems
to be drawn from the netherworld (in contradistinction to the
Hadean shades that have no substance in Homer and classical
mythology). The narrator mentions the 'richness' of the malign shad
ow, and this metaphor is echoed by the 'mellowness' of the ground
which seems to 'yield' Steerpike to the Countess's bemused eyes on
p.500. Steerpike's is a ripe shadow, full of venomous spite, and it is
ready to strike poisonously at whoever impedes its demonic pro
gress. In this context, evil is not the immaterial negation of good as
in Christian eschatology; it has instead a physical reality, of the kind
that produced Belsen and its heaps of human bodies.14
Steerpike's shadow consistently 'undulates' (pp.505 and 567)
serpent-wise, and so the chthonian (not just Satanic) origin of this

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Stasis and Rebellion part II 29

'malformation, intangible, terrible' (p.5 67) is imaginally established

as a snake's from the underworld. The animality exuding from Steer
pike and his shadowy extension is not just the serpent's, though,
since he is variously associated with cats (p.387) or with scavengers,
as when he is described climbing 'up the spiral staircase of [Gormen
ghast's] 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). There is also Prunesquallor's nightmare in which
Steerpike runs through the air, 'his body bent forward, his feet a few
inches above the ground but never touching it', while 'keeping pace
with him and immediately below him as though it were a shadow a
swarm of rats with their fangs bared ran in a compact body like one
thing, veering as he veered, pausing as he paused, most horrible and
intent, filling the landscape of [Prunesquallor's] brain' (pp.516-17).
In this nightmarish vision, Steerpike as running, levitating demon is
one with the rodent shadow, an extension of his infernal substance.
When he roams the castle's labyrinths, Steerpike's movements
betray an 'excess of vitality' (p.387) which is truly animal, indeed
truly tricksterly. The trickster has a 'bestial' nature ('Trickster
Figure' p.263) that reminds us of the 'primordial darkness'
('Trickster-Figure' p.266) that we share with animals and which we
can sometimes playfully channel into such 'monkey tricks'
('Trickster-Figure' p.267) as Steerpike indulges in when he is alone.
But whilst tricksterly malevolence is a temporary indulgence in most
human beings, it is Steerpike's whole nature, for he is

anything but inhibited. His control that had so seldom broken had
never frustrated him. In one way that this new expression had need
of an outlet he gave himself up to whatever his blood dictated. Fie
was watching himself, but only so that he should miss nothing. He
was the vehicle through which the gods were working. The primor
dial gods of power and blood. (p.65 5)

Unaware that he is watched by Prunesquallor, Flay and Tit

pike abandons himself to a grim, archaic ritual, which is a sim
('Trickster-Figure' p.25 5), an ancient trickster's. He struts in

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30 Peake studies 11:

the twins' corpses, mimics an 'earthish' dance which is a 'throw-back

to some savage rite of the world's infancy', repeatedly crows 'like a
cock' only to prove to himself that he can stop at will and that he is
not mad (p.656), amuses himself in producing 'a kind of percussive
rhythm' with a wood splinter that he runs along the ribs of the
deceased ladies, and finally appropriates the pearl necklaces that
hang upon their bones. We recognise in this uncanny episode the
trickster's 'fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks', and also
Steerpike's being an 'ape of God', an extraordinarily effective re-cre
ation of the archaic 'delight makers' of mythology who are 'half ani
mal, half divine' ('Trickster-Figure' p.255). But what is missing of
course in this instance is any form of 'delight', for when 'the muscles
of his throat went through the contractions that form laughter ... no
sound came' (p.656). Whereas Muzzlehatch (in Titus Alone) is a tra
ditional, ambivalent trickster, Steerpike is the spirit of Carnival that
has turned demonic. Carnival usually fulfils a social function of col
lective renewal, but Steerpike's antics are the mirthless posturing of a
murderer whose prime enjoyment is the desecration of the body.
With Steerpike we are as close to 'the shadow in its pristine
mythological form' ('Trickster-Figure' p.262) as is fictionally feasible
short of demonising him completely, but Peake has created a charac
ter whose mythic contours have been compounded with a very mod
ern, near-political, will to power. And this is the adversary - a blend
of the simia dei and the ruthless Stalinite - that Titus Groan is con
fronted with as an obstacle to his own quest for self-accomplish
ment.

I am now half way through my discussion of 'rebellion' in Gor

menghast, and, in a subsequent piece, I will turn to Titus's craving
for the Thing, which is to the life-drive (the Eros) what the struggle
with the antagonist is to the death-drive (Thanatos). Through his
creation of this triplet of characters (Titus/Steerpike/Thing), Mervyn
Peake has presumably fictionalised the mythic core of story-telling,
albeit within a fictional context all his own - Gormenghast society.
© Pierre Francois 2008

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 Stasis and Rebellion part II 31

Notes

1 The complementarity of the heroic self and the demonic shadow makes
psychological sense. For instance, Carl Jung shows in Psychology and
Religion that 'the somatic man, the "adversary," is none other than
"the other in me"' (§134).
2 See Peter Winnington's discussion of 'the conflict between art and reli
gion' in The Voice of the Heart, pp.185-191.
3 See my discussion of what I called 'living by essence' in 'Stasis and
Rebellion in Gormenghast, Part I - Stasis,' PS 10: 3, p.19.
4 Northrop Frye defines 'displacement' as follows: 'The central princi
ple of displacement is that what can be metaphorically identified in a
myth can only be linked in romance by some form of simile: analogy,
significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like.
In a myth we can have a sun-god or a tree-god; in a romance we may
have a person who is significantly associated with the sun or trees. In
more realistic modes the association becomes less significant and more
a matter of incidental, even coincidental or accidental, imagery'
{Anatomy, p.137).
5 'Steerpike had become an almost legendary monster - but here, alive
and breathing, was the young earl who had fought him in the ivy. Here
was the dragon-slayer' (p.748; my italics).
6 There is a sense, however conjectural, that, had the Earl of Gormen
ghast not gone mad and prematurely taken his own life in a demonic
banquet, Titus would not have been confronted so early in life (he is
one year old at the end of Titus Groan) with the taxing duties of earl
dom, and his rebellion would, at the very least, have been protracted.
This is only guesswork, but I do think that the quest somehow results
from the 76th earl's disappearance from the Castle. Just like in the
myth, then, the Earl's death and Titus's confrontation with the dragon
are very much cause and consequence.
7 Titus's pursuit of the Thing often evokes critical bewilderment. One of
the most derogatory assessments of the Thing episode and, more gen
erally, of psychological motivations in Peake, is by Colin Manlove,
who argues in turn that the rebellion theme is not properly fictional
ized by Peake, that the Thing is a 'mere airy nothing' without any real

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32 Peake studies 11: i

power (hence is arguably no

lious drive in Titus), and th
pike are at best childish (M
recent piece, Manlove stran
a cause' in Gormenghast b
rebellious sixties and the o
vague one' of finding freed
all these misconceptions ste
on his own mythic terms.
presupposition that human
chology, i.e. by what Camp
and Steerpike are governed
ter has a mythic origin.
8 See my article 'Titus Al
Catastrophe'", PS 6: 3, pp.4
9 'It was dressed in a little
head was a small velvet hat,
from the crown' (p.634).
10 'The metaphor, in its radi
is B" type, or rather, putting
"let X be Y" type' (Anatom
11 My translation of 'le feu
materielles'1 (La Psychanaly
12 'Idealistic' is the adjectiv
going back to Plato and pro
and its ideology. Idealism p
pre-exists the mind - desce
after disintegration. It is t
alism, which takes it that th
extinguished in death along
Le My the d'Icare.
13 Steerpike's aspiration to
parodic element. Peake seem
dream would be an uncanny
Both Christ during Passion
scapegoat figures - they st

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 Stasis and Rebellion part II 33

and they experience infamous deaths in fe

text, the 'ultimate fascist' is therefore the h
substituted hatred for love and willingly sac
of his own self-worship.
14 The ontological non-reality of evil in
redeemed by Christ's First Coming was pr
Peake to be indicative of a scandalous insen
history. His conception of human history
geschichte, not Christianity's wishful Heilg
ly quality about Peake's creation of human
al context of Gormenghast which is quinte
underpins Steerpike's destructive nature is
tions in the reader's mind between the sk
tyrants responsible for mass slaughter th
century.

References

Andersen, Hans-Christian. 'L'Ombre,' in Contes d'Andersen. Lausanne:

Editions Rencontre, 1968.
Baehelard, Gaston. La Psychanalyse du Feu. Collection Idees, Saint
Amand: Gallimard, 1981.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. London: Fontana,
1993
Comte-Sponville, Andre. Le Mythe d'lcare (Traite du desespoir et de la
beatitude - 1). Paris: PUF (Perspectives Critiques), 1984.
Francois, Pierre. 'Titus Alone, or the Spirit of Carnival "after the
Catastrophe"', Peake Studies, 6: 3 (October 1999).
'Stasis and Rebellion in Gormenghast, Part I - Stasis,' Peake
Studies, 10: 3 (October 2007).
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1973.
The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1978.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust - Part Two (1832), tr. & intro. Philip
Wayne. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.

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 34 Peake studies il:i

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theo

1985.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Aion:
(Collected Works 9.2),
Gerhard Adler and Will
Kegan Paul, 1981.
'Conscious, Unconscio
Transition (Collected W
Fordham, Gerhard Ad
Routledge & Kegan Paul
'On the Psychology of t
the Collective Unconsc
Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler & William McGuire.
London/Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Psychology and Religion (Collected Works 12), ed. Sir Herbert
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London/Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
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Pierre Francois teaches English literature and language at Mons

Hainaut University (Belgium). He is currently working on a book about
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy from a mythopoeic perspective.

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