Melmoth the Wanderer

by Charles Maturin

  So it is not just a question of Protestant and Catholic, but of Abel and Cain, and Esau and Isaac – i.e. the intimate struggle between sects within Protestantism, and the tortured history of the seventeenth century during which Ireland was settled and its modern politics emerged. Maturin chooses the later period – the Restoration, and the stubbornly surviving oppositions between Catholic-friendly (Arminian) cavaliers and old Puritans (Calvinists), a period of recrimination, in which old scores remain to be settled. The novel’s central allegory ensures that this picture exists in analogy with the struggle in Counter-Reformation Spain between ‘old Christians’ and the excluded Jews and Moors (‘conversos’), centring on the role played by the Inquisition in the violent reduction of difference.

  These historical blocks of narrative are looked at across the battle lines of ‘superstition’; and the excluded other, the one cast away into outer darkness, is intimately represented in the act of narration.

  Allusion and quotation in the text are the shards of Maturin’s broken mirror: they work not by strict verbal accuracy, but by structural comparison. As a preacher, Maturin was trained to use quotation from the Bible to make analogies between issues. In the pulpit, biblical allusion is almost always adapted; and this is the technique he uses in writing. In Melmoth, however, the biblical quotations are often twisted ‘satanically’ – i.e. blasphemously. The early reviewers noticed the effect of his hyperboles and were outraged or saddened.17 A classical medallist at Trinity College Dublin, Maturin is fiendishly learned and his well-stocked mind makes baroque analogies as grotesque and oddly beautiful as those of the English seventeenth-century poets. The habit often adds symbolic depth to the characters. The main areas in which biblical allusion, for example, seems to group itself are: heresy, idolatry, testimony, and the issue of perjury or bearing false witness. Some excellent work has been done on the repeated allusions to the Book of Job, for example, which, when looked at as a chain of preoccupations, throw light on the relation between faith and doubt in the text.18 Classical allusion often provides an implicit comparison with the Christian culture that is in the foreground, via the theme of Empire. Maturin’s choice of epigraph for each chapter is often revealing, because it maps one culture on to another. Allusions to painting are frequent and allow the theme of reverse mimesis between life and art (that extraordinary anticipation of decadence which so attracts the French) to surface more or less continuously.

  Religious Background: Calvinism

  As a Huguenot, Maturin was brought up a Calvinist, and the Calvinist tradition is an important presence in the history of fiction, because, as the most extreme wing of Reformation thought, it assumes a radically internalized account of the soul’s relation to God, a narrative of the first person, which has proved significant both in the development of realism (the use of diaries, for example, and the emphasis on a record of the quotidian) and, equally, in the history of the Gothic romance. The sophisticated dynamics of confession present in the Calvinist autobiographers, Bunyan and Rousseau in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, are appropriated by Godwin (himself an ex-Calvinist) in Caleb Williams (1797) and St Leon (1799), Mary Shelley, his daughter, in Frankenstein (1818), and James Hogg, who parodies extreme Scottish Calvinism in his nightmarish Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1838). In the novels of these writers, both individual psychological states and systems of belief are subjected to ironic critique, through a series of terror- or horror-driven, first person testimonies. Maturin belongs to this tradition of ironic self-witnessing. ‘Truth is told us by any mouth sooner than our own’ (215): the many narrators of his book, and the reader too, are subject to this tricky, ironic maxim. Yet, in this religious tradition, the soul is alone with God, the unseen listener – an invisible, eternal, self-existent presence, whom all symbolical representation, even writing, must degrade. In Maturin, this mind-set is the source of paradox: it fuels his savage satire and forms at the same time the basis of his Satanic critique of belief-systems.

  So the focus on written documents – the parody of legal process – sooner or later gives way to an oral recounting of experience. Maturin has a special gift for making us hang on to the single phrase – the spark of energy is in the flow of narration itself, passing from moment to moment in the highest passion, or from interruption to interruption. First-hand testimony has a different kind of authority, the authority of the living witness which is a powerful Reformation principle, constantly brought against the corruption of’authority’, derived from dead legalistic procedures – documents relying upon documents, hidden, inaccessible authority, handed down by blind repetition (‘candour’ is opposed in the text to ‘mechanism’), rituals of all kinds designed to dull the mind and induce acceptance – all this is consciously parodied in the novel’s narrative method.

  Calvinism, however, born after the death in 1563 of its founder, John Calvin, itself became a rigid system, particularly after the reinterpretation of Theodore Beza (1519–1605), acquiring its own systematic rules which became the subject of theological dispute, ossifying them in the process. In Maturin’s text, these disputes (between Arminians and Calvinists, for example) are parodied in the figure of the weaver in the madhouse, telling over and over again his ‘five points’. Despite the fact that Maturin boasted perversely to Scott in 1813 that he would never gain preferment in the Church because he was a ‘high Calvinist’ in his religious opinions ‘and therefore viewed with jealousy by Unitarian Brethren and Arminian Master…’, Maturin’s relation to Calvinism is more distant than this would seem to imply. Five years earlier, in The Wild Irish Boy (1808), we find this passage:

  The system of Calvin is amazingly splendid and awful. A youthful mind in its first pursuit of religion, neither inquires for evidence, nor wishes conviction; it demands something that may fill to the utmost its capacity of the marvellous; something under which its faculties may succumb in mute acquiescence; something that requires not the labour of ascent[sic]; but the passiveness of prostration. To such demands, the Calvmistic system is abundantly adequate.19

  The scepticism is evident here; the irony is directed towards the idea of‘systems of belief’, what Blake calls ‘organiz’d Religion’. Significantly, belief (‘assent’) is not automatic, not the starting point, but ‘a labour’.

  In Melmoth, in the narrative of Monçada, Maturin conducts a fierce propaganda war against the Catholic monastic system, lifting some of his account of monastic life from the first part of Diderot’s anti-clerical La Religieuse (1760). But he also includes parody of the Calvinist system too, in the madhouse in which Stanton finds himself incarcerated in the second Tale, and in the figure of Elinor’s Puritan aunt in ‘The Lovers’ Tale’, who can no longer tell the Bible from the system. Equally, he satirizes, through the Wanderer’s account to Immalee, the Buddhist and Muslim systems, too. The real subject is the absurd distortion of the psyche created by systems of belief.

  The Comic Tradition: Parody

  and Romantic Irony

  Maturin’s literary precedents are epic and romance, and their parodies in the sceptical and encyclopedic book-making jokes – the corrupted manuscripts, absurd footnotes, and shaggy-dog stories – of the eighteenth-century novel, which followed Cervantes: Swift, Sterne, and Diderot. Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605–15) is a strong presence in the novel; alluded to on a number of occasions, it forms a kind of subtext. For example, at one point Cervantes tells us that the whole of Part II is a translation of a manuscript found in a lead casket, written in Arabic, by a Moorish historian called Cide Hamid Benengeli. Cervantes poses as the editor of a text translated by someone else, and reports the marginalia of this translator who sometimes cuts out materials because they are improbable or includes them with a question mark. Parts of this prior historical text are even written ‘in Gothic script but in Castilian verse’. Even in their original context, these devices are not just comic literary jokes, but they raise and keep before the reader the question of a divided soci
ety, based on institutionalized intolerance, which suppresses languages and beliefs, and the habits of people who rely on underground codes. In Melmoth it is the Jew Adonijah, hunted by the Spanish Inquisition, who writes his manuscript in Greek characters to disguise its Spanish contents.

  It is Maturin’s distinction as a writer (as it is Byron’s, too) that he grafts this comic and sceptical Enlightenment self-consciousness about the representation of history and the inevitably asymmetrical relation between readers and texts on to a high Romantic, sublime mood which seeks perversity and obsession because they live outside, or in the gaps between, conventional psychological and cultural formulas. So, for example, in ‘The Lovers’ Tale’, Chapter XXIX, the pathos of Elinor’s abandonment by her lover, which is perfectly expressed by the chance playing of a peasant boy, is interrupted by a footnote from the author/editor, in which he provides the reader – since the story is based, he insists, on fact – with the actual score of the pathetic tune which Elinor hears (545). The tactic is reminiscent of Sterne, and offers a similar scrutiny of mimetic representation. The exposure of the fiction of sentiment creates the same kind of radical ambiguity between comedy and pathos as the incident of Maria and the Goat displays in Sterne’s The Sentimental Journey.

  Likewise, after Melmoth has expounded with brilliant ferocity and passion to Immalee, his innocent interlocutor, the corruption of institutionalized religion, and the ‘unequal division of the means of existence’ in a manner worthy of Blake or Shelley, the author suddenly puts a footnote at the bottom of the page (Chapter XVII, 338) in which he declares that these sentiments are diametrically opposite to his own. It is hard to know what the ‘diametrical’ opposite of this passionate republican attack on ‘bloated mediocrity’ would be. An appeal to Maturin’s supposed Anglican toryism will fail to reverse this satirical double-take. It leaves the reader uneasy.20 The difficulty here is akin to the interpretation of Swift’s ‘Digression on Madness’ from The Tale of a Tub, where the standards of madness and sanity, although they are supposed to, no longer reverse themselves in a comfortable and ‘diametrical’ fashion.

  These instances and many others show how cuspid, or tightrope-like, the relation between the reader and this extraordinarily hybrid text is. The style has many pleasures, including a pithy, apothegmatic undertow (‘terror has no diary’; ‘this atheism of bigotry’; ‘extacy only smiles – despair laughs’), recalling the gnomic wit of eighteenth-century writers. Laughter is essentially reflexive for Maturin: it rebounds upon the one who laughs, as we can see from Melmoth in Chapter XVIII, when faced with the beauty and pathos of Immalee’s innocence. To her astonishment, he sheds tears, dashing them away the next moment with the hand of despair: ‘… and grinding his teeth, burst into that wild shriek of bitter and convulsive laughter that announces the object of its derision is ourselves’ (354). The reflex of self-awareness is accompanied not by wisdom but by despair: the ability to know ourselves, traditionally from the Greeks onwards represented by laughter, is, absurdly, laughably, precisely what cuts us off from the face of God and leaves us in limbo.

  Notes

  1. Fanny E. Ratchford and William McCarthy Jr (eds), The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, Austin, Texas, Texas UP, 1937; repr. New York and London, Garland, 1980, 14. Henceforth referred to as Ratchford and McCarthy.

  2. ibid., 59.

  3. Syndey M. Conger, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Salzburg, 1977, 168–73. The opposition between the Quarterly and Blackwoods over matters German also goes some way towards explaining Maturin’s very different treatment by the reviewers of these magazines.

  4. Ratchford and McCarthy, 7.

  5. ibid., 59.

  6. ibid.

  7. Quarterly Review, January, Vol. XXIV, 1821, 311.

  8. See Shirley Clay Scott, Myths of Consciousness in the Novels of Charles Robert Maturin, New York, Arno Press, 1980,116–18. For further information, see M. A. Ruff, ‘Maturin et les Romantiques français’, Introduction to Bertram, Paris, J. Corti, 1956, 7–66.

  9. Balzac, Œuvres Complètes, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 529–46. See also G. T. Clapton, ‘Balzac, Baudelaire et Maturin’, The French Quarterly, Juin et Septembre 1930, Vol. XII, Nos. 2 and 3, 66–84 and 97–115 – Quoted in Clapton, 66 (my translation).

  10. Balzac, Melmoth Reconcilié, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1968, 530 (my translation).

  11. Clapton, op. cit., 73 (my translation).

  12. Baudelaire, ‘ “De L’Essence du Rire” ’, Œuvres Complètes, ed. M. A. Ruff Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1968, 370–78, 373 (my translation; all refs to this edn.).

  13. The Surrealists followed on in this tradition of appreciation of Maturin. André Breton wrote an excellent preface to the re-edition of Melmoth after the war: see ‘Situation de Melmoth’, Melmoth, Homme Errant, Paris, J. J. Pauvert, 1954, XI – XX. And see also the perceptive piece by Jean-Jacques Mayoux: ‘La grande création satanique du Reverend Maturin’, J. J. Mayoux, Études Anglaises, No. 4, Oct.–Dec., 1969, 393–6.

  14. The conjecture belongs to Dale Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin, New York, Twayne, 1973, 101.

  15. We sometimes find that the one layer is folded back over the other. For example, the following editorial footnote throws the written means of representation against the spoken:

  Here Monçada expressed his surprise at this passage (as savouring more of Christianity than Judaism), considering it occurred in the manuscript of a Jew. (433)

  The supposed expression of surprise is oral, and it is not written down anywhere. The ‘editor’ appears to have witnessed it, or to have had access to the characters outside the text. It is therefore an extra-textual moment. But this silent and invisible exclamation of the narrator, Monçada, is also – impossibly – imprisoned in the written text. It refers to the written level of the text we are reading in two senses: (1) the ‘passage’ in the Jew’s manuscript he has copied, on which his oral narrative is based; and (2) the text of that oral narrative which we are reading: i.e. ‘here’ refers to a particular point (‘this passage’) in the text we have just read, hence the need for a footnote to mark it. We are recalled to the coexistence of different layers of representation, often inside out – oral and written processes are made to stand for one another, because they ‘leak’ into the next layer. And the issue, the content, at this point is the improbability of a Jew writing such things. The elaboration of narrative method here parodies the cult of historical fact.

  16. The hostile Quarterly reviewer, Croker, trying to score a point, puts his finger on the paradox of this example:

  The author of the tale either fables, or does not understand the Latin words he uses. He might have repeated the story on the authority of his mother, or what would have been better still, his grandmother, but to tell it suo periculo, is to say that he, the reverend author, was present when his grandfather hired the turbot-abjuring servants; which, as that must have taken place a century ago, can hardly be true, unless indeed Mr Maturin be Mr Melmoth himself. (308)

  17. Monthly Review, Vol. 94, 1821, 84; the tone of the Edinburgh Review, July 1821, Vol. XXXV, No. LXX, being mainly concerned with the question of false taste, is pained: ‘There are wretches who never open their lips but to blaspheme…’ (358)

  18. See Kramer, 97. Kathleen Fowler, ‘Hieroglyphics in Fire’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (Winter 1986), 521–39.

  19. The Wild Irish Boy, 3 vols., London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1808, I, 123.

  20. Fowler, op.cit., 524, agrees with Robert Kiely when he says that ‘the Swiftian lucidity and energy of this passage belie Maturin’s disclaimer’.

  FURTHER READING

  The most important biographical sources are:

  The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, eds. Fanny E. Ratchford and William McCarthy Jr, Austin, Texas University Press, 1937; repr. New York and London, Garland, 1980; and the four articles publish
ed in the New Monthly Magazine, in 1827, by Maturin’s friend, Alaric Watts: ‘Conversations of Maturin, No. 1’, vol. XIX, pp. 401–11; and No. 2, vol. XIX, pp. 570–77; and ‘Recollections of Maturin’, No. 3, vol. XX, pp. 146–52; and No. 4, vol. XX, pp. 370–76. More Adey and Robert Ross, ‘Memoir’, Preface to the Bentley edition of Melmoth, is also important.

  The best critical biography remains Niilo Idman, Charles Robert Maturin; His Life and Works, London, 1923; theire is a full bibliography to 1970 in Claude Fierrobe, Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824): L’Homme et L’Œuvre, Paris, 1974.

  For Maturin and the French tradition, despite its evaluative approach, the most throrough account is still G.T. Clapton’s two articles, ‘Balzac, Baudelaire, and Maturin’, French Quarterly, June and September, 1930, Vol. XII, Nos. 2 and 3, pp. 66–84 and 97–115. Mario Praz discusses relations with de Sade in The Romantic Agony, London, 1951, p. 117. A translated extract from André Breton’s comments on the Gothic novel, ‘Limits, not Frontiers, of Surrealism’, is included in V. Sage (ed.), The Gothick Novel: A Casebook, London, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 112–15; see also in this context Mark M. Hennelly, Jr, ’Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 1981, Autumn: 21(4), pp. 665–79.

  For the German tradition: Syndey M. Conger, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans, Salzburg, 1977, is accessible and informative.

  More general modern assessments of the Gothic novel which include commentary on Melmoth: R. Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Cambridge, Mass., 1972; D. Punter, The Literature of Terror, London, 1980; repr. London, 1995; L. Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination, London, 1982. And there’s an interesting analysis in M. M. Roberts, The Rosicrucian Novel, London, 1990.