But Balzac ironically reproaches Maturin for not sending his hero to Paris, ‘where he would have found a thousand persons to one who would have accepted his power’. So he rewrites Melmoth and sets his story in the Paris banking world and Stock Exchange, ‘a civilization which’, as he put it, ‘since 1815, has replaced the principle of honour by the principle of money’.10 In this post-heroic world Melmoth cannot fail to make a deal with someone, and that someone is Castanier, ex-military man and now a cashier in a bank, whom he catches forging a cheque.
Some of Balzac’s story is a burlesque of the romantic trappings of the figure of Melmoth with his cold and glittering eyes and of the hyperbolic style of Maturin. But the parody is not even, and besides some very funny episodes, there are some sublime passages about the paradoxical state, after the ability to possess any woman Castanier pleases has destroyed desire even before it can be born, in which even this vulgar ex-soldier still feels a ‘horrible thirst for love’, a desire for desire, passages which seem close to the perverse vocabulary and conception of Maturin. Balzac seems powerfully attracted here to the ‘weariness of feeling’ which arises, and this perhaps pulls against his satirical intentions.
But it is Baudelaire who remains perhaps the real source of critical insight into Maturin’s achievement in Melmoth. Baudelaire converts Maturin from a romantic into a modern. Modern art, as he conceived it, was demoniac, oppositional, perverse. Maturin becomes one, like Beethoven in music, who has set the standard by exploring the inner universe of man. As he wrote in ‘Reflections on my Contemporaries’: ‘Maturin in the novel, Byron in poetry, Poe in poetry and in the analytic novel…have admirably expressed the blasphematory aspect of passion; they have projected splendid and shimmering beams on to that latent Lucifer who is installed in every human heart.’11 Baudelaire proposed on a number of occasions to translate Maturin, but the project was never accomplished. He used the vocabulary of the novel of terror in his own writings to describe human psychology, and he identified clearly from the outset with Maturin’s understanding of perversity as the root form of human consciousness. Above all, Baudelaire derived his theory of the satanic nature of laughter from Maturin’s Melmoth. He writes in ‘Of the Essence of Laughter’ in 1855 about the rictus sardonicus of the ‘famous wanderer, Melmoth, the great satanic creation of reverend Maturin’:
And this laughter is the perpetual explosion of his anger and his suffering. It is, to speak plainly, the necessary result of his double, contradictory nature, which is infinitely great in relation to the human, and infinitely vile and base in relation to absolute Truth and Justice. Melmoth is a living contradiction… It is a laughter which never sleeps, like an illness which pursues its course continually and carries out a providential order.12
Baudelaire responded to the self-conscious nature of Maturin’s project, understanding that his romantic satanism was a description of the contours of the modern psyche in all its complexity and perversity. All of those features which were picked out by the English reviewers as old-fashioned, eccentric, wild, revolting and obscene, Baudelaire regarded as traits of greatness.
It is no surprise, then, to find Oscar Wilde, when he came out of jail and headed for the last hellish phase in Paris, taking the name of ‘Sebastian Melmoth’, his great-uncle’s creation, an erotically martyred Wanderer.13
Narrative Methods
Maturin’s reference to Aladdin’s Lamp in his letter to Scott is significant, because one of the marked formal originalities of Melmoth is his habit of ‘nesting’, or embedding, his narratives, telling stories within stories within stories after the model of The Arabian Nights, in such a way that the text is interrupted by multiple points of view, teasing the reader’s desire for overview and authority, just as the power of a new story sweeps us away. We are dynamically, but often confusingly, involved in a chain of narrators who are witnesses. The publishers, who were sent reams of manuscript as it came hot off the press of the author’s imagination, without any title or external indication of how it hung together, seem to have assumed, after some pained attempts to get the author to explain, that it was a novel, and printed it accordingly, as a rather oddly continuous four-decker. It has been conjectured, however, that it was originally designed as a series of interlinked tales, with a continuance built in, since Maturin needed the money so desperately. Apparently, his working title was ‘Tales’, and the first story was christened ‘Melmotb’ by the printers as they set it.14
Melmoth the Wanderer himself is a hybrid figure, a mixture of Faust and Mephistopheles. Gradually, we are invited to piece together his story through a chain of people who have glimpsed his existence which stretches back in time and away in space from early nineteenth-century Ireland to seventeenth-century Spain and London. We have no access to the original Faustian bargain, but it appears that he has acquired, either from Satan direct, or by ‘satanic’ knowledge acquired from his own acquaintance with Dr John Dee (556), an extension of his natural life of 150 years, with the unusual clause in the agreement noticed by Balzac that, if he can find someone to take his place, then he will be allowed to escape his wandering condition, and (presumably) the a natural death. He is thus the agent of another, and a genuine protagonist at the same time, both a metaphysical being and a human. He is simultaneously both inside and outside human history, and the narrative deliberately and teasingly exposes the reader to different versions of this paradox:
He constantly alluded to events and personages beyond his possible memory, – then he checked himself, – then he appeared to go on, with a kind of wild and derisive sneer at his own absence. (254)
The Wanderer appears at crises of suffering and despair in the lives of a range of men and women. In the main (and with the devastating exception of Immalee), he does not cause their predicament, but he predicts it, witnesses it, and makes his offer: if they will change places with him, their fleshly sufferings will cease. His peals of demonic laughter partly register his inexpressibly self-contradictory emotion at the suspicion that he is predestined to fail over and over again, and therefore to remain where he is, neither properly in nor outside human history.
In the allegory, this failure is ambiguous: the early reviewers were sarcastic about it, suggesting that the author couldn’t create a devil clever enough to persuade anyone. But the text hints that the Wanderer is not allowed to use any means he wishes to persuade his prospective victims; beyond a certain point, he is ‘perhaps constrained by a higher power’ (330). So he is not allowed to lie to Immalee about the superiority of Catholicism (as a form of Christianity, however corrupt) to Islam or Hinduism. He must be a true witness. This is both a diabolic satirical point (because by doing this he sadistically plunges her back into both history and unnecessary suffering), and a notion that Maturin the propagandist would agree with: i.e. that the corrupt forms of Christianity, even Catholicism, as he would view it, will ultimately wither away into an Enlightened Protestantism (399, note 8). That enigmatic ‘higher power’ is therefore not necessarily Satanic: the doctrine of Providence plays a role in Maturin’s plot too, whereby the Wanderer is also a kind of Holy Fool, a Christ-figure, whose failure ‘proves’ the strength of faith in the other characters, even if this test results in their destruction, as in the appalling, tragic case of Immalee/Isidora.
The instability of Maturin’s narrative techniques helps to create these ambiguities in his central allegory. The effect of his curious and distinctive use of embedding is to play freely between worlds that are conventionally separate in the act of narration; the text continually crosses the borders between the world of which these narrator-witnesses tell, and the world in which they tell. When Monçada, the Spaniard, formulates this transgression as an axiom: ‘we are all beads strung on the same string’ (332), the text implicitly invites us to include ourselves as listeners or readers too.
The reading experience, however, begins in a relatively simple fashion: it starts almost at the end of the historical sequence, in 1816, with a wonderfull
y atmospheric piece of Gothic: young John Melmoth’s trip to his dying, miserly Uncle’s house in County Wicklow and the reading of a manuscript in a room there, which he subsequently burns at the request of the dead man. The manuscript is the story of a man called Stanton’s incarceration in a madhouse in seventeenth-century London, and the visitation he receives, at the height of his despair, from the Wanderer. Stanton refuses the Wanderer’s request, the terms of which are not revealed at this stage, but he spends the rest of his life seeking for him. Eventually, having traced the Wanderer’s family, he brings the manuscript to Ireland and deposits it with Uncle John Melmoth, as the descendant of the Wanderer.
As Young John reads the manuscript, he becomes aware of the haunting presence, in the house, of the figure he is reading about, his ancestor the Wanderer. When he has finished reading the manuscript, there is a shipwreck nearby on the coast and a young Spaniard, Alonzo Monçada, is brought ashore, who tells Young John his story, which involves recounting a manuscript he has copied for an old Jew. The narrative from the outset conflates the oral and the written into a double effect, and as we go on, the narrative method frequently confounds the two, so that when there is a ‘historical’ gap in the transmission of the story, where the chain of witnesses is stretched to the limit – or even, apparently, broken – it is preserved by the presence of a written text. But the written text is also ‘performed’ by an oral recounting.15
Here is a simplified scheme of the first embedded ‘Tale of the Spaniard’ – the longest and most complex tale in Melmoth – which extracts the sequence of embedded narrations in linear ‘historical’ form:
Date Message Medium
1680 Exchange between Immalee and Wanderer Oral
n/d Adonijah collects parchments, listens to Tale Oral/written
n/d Adonijah writes out MS Written
c. 1814 Monçada copies MS Written
1816 Monçada to John Melmoth Oral
1820 Maturin’s edited text Written
There is a hint that Adonijah has prolonged his life like the Wanderer himself, by consulation with ‘Egyptian sorcerers’ (300). We do not know who told him what happened between the Wanderer and Immalee on the remote island off the coast of the Indian subcontinent in 1680. Nor how they could possibly have known, unless the Wanderer himself recorded the incidents, or told someone else, unknown to us, about them. But this is typical of the questions provoked by the relentless fragmentation of the process of transmission. This process includes the author himself, who sometimes seems only to have the authority of an editor of the text, pointing out anachronisms (sometimes when they are not present), and adducing his own eye-witness corroboration for events that are plainly fictional, in a manner that seems like abad parody of Scott.
I have said that the above schema is a simplified version of the major tale. So far, the Wanderer is the object of all the tales within tales. But towards the end of the text, in ‘The Lovers’ Tale’ – subordinated, paradoxically, within that of the Spaniard, Monçada – he tells his own story to Isidora’s father, becoming subject and object of his own narration, jumping out of the frame and rebelling against the novel’s own adopted narrative convention. A similar paradox is revealed, at another level, when the author, rebelling against his own God-like authority, jumps into the frame and testifies as an eye-witness (even using the legalistic formulas: me ipso teste’ with myself as witness’ (223); andsMO periodo’at the peril of his own soul’ (14)16), to the facts contained in his fictions.
Representation and History
Maturin’s book breaks at every point the conventional assimilation of fiction to history – the very archness of his imagination, which both revels in paradox and finds the subjective act of narration essential to its effect, suggests that there is for him almost no analogy between the writing of a sweeping historical narrative and the intense self-dramatization of fiction: history is present in the novel, painfully present, but it is not represented as a steadily cumulative process with linear narrative as its point of overlap. If we look again at the scheme above, we see that the novel is a juxtaposition – really a confrontation and polemical repetition – between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, rather than a cumulative process of development from one to the other.
History is a subject, but not a process at all. Maturin thinks in large blocks of historical texture – seventeenth-century London after the Civil War, early nineteenth-century Madrid – seeking to render a picture of a whole society, through a sketch of its major institutions, and then passing on to an entirely different time and place. The reader is always starting again, forced to look for and make comparisons between different characters and cultural settings. In 1800, the Marquis de Sade isolated two universal subjects for romance: ‘everywhere man must pray; everywhere he must love’. These are the subjects of Maturin’s embedded narratives, the conduits down which ideology will travel and to which fiction will respond.
Culture in this text is repeatedly represented as a kind of theatre: the effort in the seventeenth century, for example, is to get the feel of the period by describing the public space as a sort of play – Maturin even raids the minor comedies of obscure English dramatists such as Cowley and Nathaniel Lee for details of seventeenth-century London. The account of the ‘half-feudal’ manners of seventeenth-century Spain, for example, is represented as a masquerade in a Shakespearian comedy (364). When Monçada enters the convent in nineteenth-century Madrid, the place is ‘in masquerade’ – both literally and metaphorically (86). For the Wanderer, moving across history and geography is like moving through the auditorium of a theatre:
The world could show him no greater marvel than his own existence; and the facility with which he himself passed from region to region, mingling with, yet distinct from all his species, like a wearied and uninterested spectator rambling through the various seats of some vast theatre, where he knows none of the audience…(397)
Places and times are represented through a spread of public institutions, which are structurally compared: courts, jails, madhouses, theatres, convents, monasteries: the theatre turns out to be the common denominator between them all. The comparisons the reader is invited to make are all based on a kind of theatrical metaphor in which these institutions are performances – hallucinatory, death-dealing masquerades of power, which, when seen or narrated (witnessed) through the (Protestant) lens of candour, reveal their artifice or mechanism in disturbingly similar ways.
In the theatre, we are always in (at least) two places at once. The anecdote in Chapter X (246) about the actor who was playing the Devil and crossed himself when a religious procession went by outside is instructive. Actors are all ‘hypocrites’ (from Greek ypokritos), and this actor, in ceasing to be an actor for a moment, represents truly the hypocrisy of the character he is playing, the ultimate hypocrite, the Devil. This joke about representation, however, has a cultural and thematic aspect: religion, for Catholic Spain, as Monçada explains to Young John (181), is a national drama and therefore the exterior stimulus of a bell ringing or the passing of a procession, which apparently causes any Spaniard, from the actor in question to the Director of the Madrid Convent, to cross himself automatically, is itself part of a larger kind of theatrical action. Ritual, conceived of repeatedly as a form of representation, is converted satirically into theatre.
Cultures, like Maturin’s perverse version of the individual human psyche, are not homogeneous: they are portrayed by reference to the principal dramatic oppositions between their different parts – religious differences, for example. Like Milton, whom he quotes continuously in the most powerful and touching allegory of the whole collection – the love affair between the Wanderer and Immalee – Maturin was a propagandist. His index of a culture is its religious differences: Puritanism, Anglicanism, and Catholicism in late seventeenth-century England, for example; or Judaism, Islam and Catholicism in nineteenth-century Spain; or Hinduism, Islam and Catholicism in the seventeenth-century Indian sub
continent; or Protestant landowners and Catholic peasants in nineteenth-century Ireland.
These heterodoxies are mapped on to one another and presented as struggles for power, both within and outside the individual psyche. One of this novel’s great achievements, something which gives it a contemporary voice, is its ability to make us absorb sketches of the logic of the excluded position, the underground ‘other’, the horrors of being cast away into utter darkness because one is born into a certain creed. It is in the raw edges between belief-systems where the stories of the novel take place. For instance, consider the puzzle of the ‘superstition’, which rebounds upon the supposedly ‘rational’ miser, Uncle John Melmoth, at the beginning of the novel. What the novel only hints to us (29) is that he has become a miser because he is the passive inheritor of Cromwellian land-appropriations in the seventeenth century. He has neglected himself and everyone else in his guilty and secret obsession with the Wanderer, the elder brother of his ancestor, the first settler in Ireland; the Wanderer is a living witness in favour of the family’s other, Royalist (high Anglican, or even Catholic), side, who chose to exile himself on the Continent. Uncle John is afraid that the Wanderer can therefore always testify to the inauthenticity of his claim to be a landowner.
Melmoth the Wanderer Page 2
