THE HORROR OF HUMANITY: GORMENGHAST THE HORROR OF TRADITION BY GEORGE DANIEL LEAMervyn Peake's seminal trilogy, Gormenghast, is generally regarded as one of the foundational works of Western fantasy. Alongside its contemporary, J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, it established what would become the definitive tropes and subjects of the genre in the decades after, a work whose resonance can be felt in everything from Game of Thrones to His Dark Materials, from Discworld to Neverwhere. That said, it occupies a peculiar position, given the significance of its legacy: unlike The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicels of Narnia et al, Gormenghast is largely relegated to realms of academia; it exists as a mythic body rather than as something immediate and experiential, lacking the popular appeal that its contemporaries boast. For the most part, even fans of fantasy as a genre have only heard of it in reference rather than having experienced it for themselves. Barring an ambitious -but ill-fated- BBC adaptation in the year 2000, the work has rarely been adapted outside of radio plays, with many attempts to do so faltering before completion. At present, the rumoured Neil Gaiman-penned cinema adaptation is still languishing in development Hell, with small notifications occurring from time to time without anything concrete. This incongruous obscurity partially derives from the nature of the work itself: unlike The Lord of the Rings, it is not a series to which children or even teenagers readily flock. Whereas Tolkien's epic has an immediate appeal by dint of its fantastical subjects, mythic overtones and resonance with pervasive cultural mythology, Gormenghast is a wholly other, entirely more oblique kettle of fish: Whereas Tolkien concerned himself primarily with the exultation of traditional mythology, Peake takes the proscriptions of tradition and reveals them in all of their innate and inevitable horror. Whereas The Lord of The Rings attempts to create a post-modern mythology in the manner of the oral traditions of the old anglo-saxons, Gormenghast takes a mortician's scalpel to the very concept, attempting to render it apart, break it down and reveal diseased, infested innards. Like Tolkien, Peake was a man of great interiority and introspection; endlessly fascinated by the labyrinthine nature of his own mind, even unto its eventual breaking. Unlike Tolkien, Peake attempted to explore the psychological and existential implications of that through his work, whereas Tolkien was more preoccupied with the heightened and the mythic. As such, Gormenghast is that strangest and rarest of all works of fantasy; iconic and undeniable in its influence, pervasive in its legacy, and yet exhibiting almost none of the characteristics that even luminaries or students of the genre would recognise as emblematic thereof: Despite being ostensibly a fantasy kingdom (in the sense that it does not nor ever has existed, and occupies its own strange world and history), the eponymous Gormenghast boasts no magic, no gods, no demons, no dragons; no wizards or gods or manifestations of fate. The kingdom and its characters are entirely secular, with nothing abstruse or even remotely supernatural taking place throughout the course of its three-book span. Furthermore, each of its characters is profoundly human, so much so, that they utterly defeat the archetypes that occur and recur throughout more mythically-inclined fantasy fiction: Each and every one of Gormenghast's cast are complex, contradictory entities who respond to circumstances in manners that are charmingly strange, eccentric, often baffling in their contradictions. In this, Peake demonstrates his removal from contemporaries such as Tolkien or Lewis, for whom characters are merely archetypes; vessels for particular themes and notions that allow the story to evolve towards its proscribed conclusion: The denizens of Gormenghast are their own selves; so much so, they almost universally chafe against the proscriptions and parameters of their culture, even when they don't intend to. That is the core tension of Gormenghast as a setting and narrative: despite being a culture informed by -often insane or incongruous- traditions, those to whom they apply find themselves either defeated by them or railing against them, to the point whereby peculiar and idiosyncratic species of madness flower throughout. Therein lies the core of why the work is as much one of subtle horror as it is fantasy: Gormenghast is Peake's attempt to wrestle with the tensions in which he and we all operate: our desires for self-definition, authorship and impetus clashing -often violently- with the proscriptions of culture and tradition. The horror of Gormenghast is founded in its rigidity and proscriptions: Peake paints a culture in which every moment is defined by tradition, orchestrated with reference to tenets that none now living understand. There is a madness inherent to Gormenghast as a culture, a society, but one that is hideously, oppressively stable; that grinds on year after year, decade after decade, those born to the relentless rounds often not even realising it; knowing only what those traditions allow or impart, dying in similar ignorance. There is no meritocracy in Gormenghast; it is a caste-based society, in which the sons of cooks become cooks regardless of relative talent or inclination, in which smiths give birth to smiths and wood-carvers to wood-carvers. This is also true of the upper-echelons of that society, arguably even moreso: from the very beginning, we are presented a voyeur's view of life above stairs, in which the ruling family of Gormenghast -the wonderfully named Groans- go about their various daily duties and routines at the behest of aides and secretaries whose entire ethos is to keep the wheels turning, ensure the engine continues to run, regardless of what it means on a human level. As such, there are various instances in the story whereby characters such as Sepulchrave, the incumbent Earl, must make entirely symbolic circuits around certain quarters of the castle, performing strange ceremonies and routines the provenance of which is lost to time. Likewise, those for whom life is not so proscribed, who have no immediate function within the engines, are left in a state of limbo, almost disregarded. Nowehere is that more clear than in the eldest daughter of the Groan family, the bag of contradictions that is Fuschia; a young woman who exhibits qualities of an extremely young girl, yet also demonstrates herself to be one of the most perceptive, imaginative and broken characters in the entire trilogy. Whereas her Father Sepulchrave, Mother Gertrude and infant brother Titus all have significant roles to play within the immense engine of Gormenghast, she does not, and so is largely left to her own devices, such that she doesn't even see her Mother or Father for months - sometimes years- at a time. The result is a strange and eccentric woman-child, a creature that is fey and prone to bouts of despair, hysteria and incredible insight. In her, Peake paints the portrait of a child who has no particular use or function within the engine, and so is all but abandoned by it. She is a lost child of tradition, the outcast who has no means or cause to fight, who can't even conceive of what she is, what she is to do. Compare and contrast with the idealised, almost deified portrayals of womanhood that pervade Tolkien's works, in which women are generally mythic entities proscribed by patriarchal assumption and mythological requirement: the likes of Arwen, Eowyn and Galadriel are utterly themselves, composed and controlled and pristine in a manner that neuters them, rendering them ineffective in contrast to male counterparts. Fuschia, by contrast, is a wholly more real affair; reflecting a state of psychological fracture that is not only redolent of Peake's own, but also of womanhood itself in a state where women are reduced to functionaries as much as men; in which there is no cultural space for individual development or desire. Of all the characters, Fuschia exhibits a state of mind that is always teetering on the brink, in which she hasn't been provided the means, contexts or the language to explore or understand herself. As such, she flits and dances from one state to the next, sometimes shifting from angry to despairing, from frustrated to passionate, in the blink of an eye. There are even instances in which she simply flees encounters because she doesn't know how to respond to them; because no one has taught her how or given her sufficient freedom to develop those contexts. In Fuschia, we have the horror of being trapped in a cage without obvious walls or bars or locks; a cage of abstraction, against which she endlessly flutters and batters herself bloody, in an effort to realise her fantasies of flying. For those who have read the books, her ending takes on a bitter note of inevitability; even were it not for the trials and travails that the narrative puts her through, it's arguable that Fuschia's ending would have always been the same, that there can be nothing else in a realm like Gormenghast for a soul such as hers. A creature that endlessly reimagines and reinvents herself in the manner of a little girl playing imaginary games, but that endlessly finds the interruptions and disturbances of the real interjecting, clipping her wings, curtaling her flights. In that, she has a certain echo in her Father, the appropriately named Sepulchrave Groan, who goes about his duties and routines as Earl in a robotic, mechanistic fashion, because he has known nothing else his entirely life, yet suffers from a burden of melancholia that he cannot define or find escape from, save in the solace of his private library. From the start, Peake takes pains to communicate that Sepuchrave's moribund nature isn't some aberration; something developed with age, perhaps as a result of some incipient dementia, but has always been part and parcel of who he is. This is subtle but massively significant, as Sepulchrave, from the moment he was born, would have been subjected to the same conditioning and endless, pointless routines as every one of his forebears. At the story's outset, he has been fed through the engine perhaps more thoroughly and utterly than any other character, ground down and ground down over a span of decades until there is little left save his status, the routines it obliges and the melancholia that consumes him. Sepulchrave is the loss of individuality to systems of tradition, the interminable erosion of any sense of self, until there is nothing left but an existential abyss. In Sepulchrave's peculiar case, this results in near-total disassociation, triggered by the burning of his library, the loss of not only his sanctuary, but the one scrap of self he has left. In the aftermath, he loses himself, conjuring manic characteristics and personas from thin air, evoking the hideously acute horror of dementia, Alzheimers and similarly degenerative conditions. Whilst the burning of the library is indeed the cypher, it is almost incidental; his breaking is as inevitable as Fuschia's eventual suicide. A cruel and dreadful irony of the story is that: whatever endings are orchestrated or inflicted by the actions of antagonist Steerpike, they are merely expedited forms of fates that are inevitable regardless. Sepulchrave is moribund from the moment of his introduction, already losing himself within the engines that he feeds himself through day after day. Ultimately, it is Titus, the Earl's son and the last surviving heir to the throne of Gormenghast, who exhibits the only means of surviving it: tormented by the culture and his place within it from the moment he was born, Titus grows to loathe his birthright, to express outwardly all of the frustrations and neuroses that his Father, his sister and thousands before them refused to invoke. He hates Gormenghast, hates his status as the Earl, and, ultimately, survives in the only way he can: by leaving it behind. With the death of Fuschia, there's nothing he loves there, nothing anchoring him. His leaving is the footstep of doom for the castle and its culture, as, without an Earl, the entire edifice becomes static, its engines grind to a halt, and the systems of proscription become inert. One can almost imagine Gormenghast itself winking out of existence or freezing in place the moment he is beyond sight or thought of it; a factor that is emphasised in the third book in the series, Titus Alone. Whilst writing Titus Alone, Peake himself was slowly succumbing to a degenerative psychological disorder; one that saw him regularly disassociate from himself in the manner of Sepulchrave, become paranoid and manic, perceiving things in the waking world that weren't actually there. In this third instalment, that disease finds expression: Following Titus during his journeys in the strange and hallucinogenic realms beyond his ancestral home, it is a feverish descent into broken-minded paranoia, in which Titus starts to doubt his own history and memories, in which his proclamations of being “The Earl of Gormenghast” are met with confusion, derision and more than a little fear. He begins to doubt if Gormenghast ever existed, considering that everything he experienced there might be nothing more than a delusion of his own breaking-down sanity. What follows is a frantic scrabbling for reassurance and certainty in a world intent on denying it. Just as he sought to escape the stultifying confines and constraints of his ancestral kingdom, now he seeks its reassurance and definition; a means of ratifying himself in a world where he is always barely a breath or thought away from efflorescing into mania. Given the eventual fate of Mervyn Peake himself, this portion of the story maintains a peculiarly disturbing resonance, expressing, as it does, the author's own descent into paranoia and the eventual dissolution of his sanity. Interestingly, in the final steps of his prodigal journey, Titus chooses to turn his back on that reification, refusing the final steps that should, in theory, take him within final sight of the castle walls, and the reassurance he has been craving since the first page of the story. In this, Peake appears to make a peculiar commentary on the nature of certainty and sanity; that they are secondary, perhaps even empty concerns, next to determining one's own sense of self, which Titus embodies through his abandonment of Gormenghast. By allowing for the uncertainty, Titus appears to take mastery over his own mind and sense of self; it doesn't matter if it ever was physically real or merely a delusion; he is who he is regardless. The Groans are universally disturbed, each and every one of them victims of Gormenghast itself, as much as the various specimens of the “lower orders” we encounter in the first two books. Even the seemingly most composed and coherent, the lady Gertrude, is a strangely disconnected, distracted individual who finds closer association with the menagerie of birds and cats that always surround her than other human beings, including her own children. She is a character acutely aware of her place and function within the mechanisms of Gormenghast but, rather than allowing them to grind her up and spit her out, in the manner that both Fuschia and Sepulchrave do, she has found her own peace in those systems; a means of contentment that is rare and eccentric, and seems like its own species of madness from the outside. Interestingly, being more coherent and acutely aware of the systems surrounding her than the rest, she is the first who begins to sense their arrhythmia after Steerpike sets about his sabotage of them; whilst her disconnection from waking concerns means that her process of deduction is glacial, she is amongst the first of the characters -and the only one of the Groans- to sense something off-kilter in the great engines of tradition, which she expresses openly to other characters in her quest to identify and snuff out the verminous element. Even so, she is as much a victim of those systems as anyone; throughout the course of the story, she loses her husband and both of her children, not to mention experiences the ultimate cessation of those systems when Titus abdicates at the end of book two, presiding over a world that no longer has any figurehead or guiding principle and likely never will again. Gormenghast robs her of connection with other human beings; even those who should be her closest confidantes and most beloved, leaving her seekign surrogates in the forms of animals. Beyond the Groans, every strata and caste of Gormenghast operates under the auspices of its own peculiar, proscribed species of madness, from the various functionaries of the castle itself -all of which preside over or operate within self-contained cultures and kingdoms with theocratic adherence- to the lower quarters; the various tribes and menials who cluster around the castle and are told that they rely upon it for patronage, sustennance, purpose and poetry, when, in any logical examination, they sustain perfectly well without it and would likely learn to thrive far more happily on their own terms. Yet, the “Carvers,” as they are known, are as zealous and conformist as any; Peake's unflattering parody of the working and under-classes in any given society, who mindlessly conform to and allow for the systems that keep them in their place, and elevate those that preside over and prey upon them. Peake makes no secret of the fact that the Carvers sustain in misery, their world one of short-lived struggle and tribal violence, whose entire culture revolves around making carvings for annual ceremonies in which the presiding Earl determines the most beautiful, condemning the rest to fire. Even those that are selected end up discarded in the so-called “Hall of Bright Carvings,” a place largely forgotten to most members of the castle itself, and certainly to the Groans. Society, culture, history and tradition; all of these things, in Peake's estimation, are sources of insanity and horror. Having served in World War 1, Peake was well acquainted with the ultimate manifestation of that insanity; the willingness with which the patriot and the nationalist, the self-professed “citizen” hurls themselves into those meat-grinders, becomes both the subject and source of atrocity, and is enjoined to celebrate in that status or accept it as blithely every-day. It has become a common, pop-culture assumption to market antagonist Steerpike as the “villain” of the piece. In many instances, his name has become a by-word for villainy itself, in a manner not dissimilar to Doyle's Moriarty. This is both a reductive simplifcation and misapprehension of the truth; whilst Steerpike is indeed the cypher that unsettles Gormenghast in its well-worn ruts, whilst he does indeed exhibit characteristics such as sadism and pointless cruelty (which, in the end, become the seeds of his undoing), he is no more the “villain” of the piece than any of the Groans, than Gormenghast itself. Consider: when we meet Steerpike, he is an abused and belittled youth under the dubious care of Swelter, the castle's porscine chef. A physically, mentally and (implied) sexually abusive monster of a man, it is clear that Steerpike has endured any number of tortures at his master's hands, and, thereby at the hands of Gormenghast itself. It was Gormenghast and its diseased culture of tradition and conformity that led him to be condemned to the kitchens, the lowest of low castes, despite his obvious intelligence, talent and capacities. It was Gormenghast that allowed for -and even fostered- the culture of abuse that occurs and sustains throughout its desolate and decrepit halls. Steerpike is as much a victim and product of those processes as anyone; that he emerges without conscience, without concern, for those who are born to positions of relative privilege and comfort should come as no surprise, nor is it a legitimate cause for condemnation: in many respects, Steerpike is the sins of Gormenghast returned upon itself (a role that he certainly understands and revels in, before the end). But even he, consumed by his assumptions of superiority and separation from the systems he so despises and, utimately, seeks to bring down around their beneficiaries, is as much a product and function of them as any other. He is the mitigating and refreshing factor; that rare anomaly that brings the systems into question before uniting them in a state of conformity and absolutism even stronger than before. The irony of Steerpike's ascension and apparent vandalism of the engines of Gormenghast is that nothing he does, in all of his scheming, duplicity, manipulation and murder, is anywhere near as devestating as the ultimate abdication of Titus himself. In that, the most corrosive element to Gormenghast is not Steerpike, who ultimately serves to unite the state in hatred of a common scapegoat, but Keda, Titus's Carver-born nursemaid, who subtly imbues the infant Titus with a hatred for his birthplace and its stultifying traditions. Keda herself is a fascinating, etheral figure; an outcast from the Carvers, she drifts through the narrative as an almost mythical Mother figure, a creature that stands apart from the brute traditions and assumptions of the world she was born to, and is punished endlessly for that transgression. Even so, she is amongst the most self-authored and self-willed of all, ultimately prophecying Fuschia's eventual end by her own suicide. In that, she represents the ultimate escape from madness and an insane world; the most reasonable and coherent solution to a cruel and inescapably abusive situation. Her suicide is not a thing of bleak despair and horror, but a distant waking, as though she steps out of her living nightmare into another dream entirely. In that, she likely reflects certain thoughts and frames of mind that Peake himself experienced. It is known from his own conversations and writings that Peake contemplated suicide many times throughout his life, particularly in the most despairing and paranoid doldrums of his condition. Keda is strangely sanctified in that regard; arguably one of the most elevated and mythic characters in the story, despite her lowly origins and transient nature. Madness and misery infest Gormenghast like lice; unseen and abstract violence -sometimes self-authored, most often imposed by the culture itself- occasionally transmuting into bursts of literal and horrific equivalents: From the gruesomely slapstick duel between Flay and Swelter -which makes light of everything from ears being lopped off to fairly graphic stabbings- to the more sadistic torments Steerpike inflicts on his victims, there is murder and atrocity aplenty within the endless stone walls. Very often, Gormenghast itself silently colludes with the murderer(s). Take, for example, the suicide of Sepulchrave Groan (fittingly and gruesomely absurd, in that he ends up feeding himself to the flocks of immense owls that roost in The Tower of Flints); Steerpike never intended nor could he have preempted the madness that consumes Sepulchrave in the wake of his library's burning. His initial plan was to swoop in and save the Earl and thus earn himself a place close to his ultimate destination. Instead, the incipient mania that has been festering in Sepulchrave's breast since time immemorial blooms from the ashes, reducing his -dubious- sanity to similar desolation. He is as much a victim of Gormenghast itself as he might be of Steerpike, arguably even moreso, when we consider that Steerpike only operates as he does owing to the abuses he suffers via the same systems. Likewise, the twin sisters of Sepulchrave: Clarice and Cora, whom Peake describes as “. . .courting aneurysm in the formulation of a novel thought between them.” Like many of the women of the Groan household, they are largely forgotten; sequestered away in some crumbling, forgotten corner of the castle, they are literally beyond sight or memory of most of it, making them perfect instruments for Steerpike's designs. But even in that, they demonstrate both their peculiar madness and victimhood; like Fuschia, the systems that be have no proscribed place or purpose for them, meaning that they are largely left to their own devices, slowly driving one another to distraction in their narcissism and misplaced ego, which, of course, Steerpike perceives immediately and utilises to the fullest extent. Like most of the characters, they begin as victims and end even moreso; manipulated, duped, abused and broken, they are ultimately left in some desolate nowhere within the castle to slowly starve to death. It is, perhaps, amongst the cruellest of fates Steerpike inflicts on his victims, but also an example of how not only the culture but the very architecture of Gormenghast colludes with him; no one in authority cares for the sisters or is concerned by their absence, nor would anyone happen by them accidentally in the derelict wing where he seals them. Whilst ostensibly emblematic of everything he despises in Gormenghast, Steerpike fails -despite his obvious intellect- to understand that there is commonality amongst them; that they are victims as he is, and of the same abusive structure into which they were all born. Whilst far from innocent, their ignorance and naivety lends them a certain patina of sympathy, especially given that almost everything they do is authored by Steerpike himself (they lack the wit and will to conceive of it themselves). There is an abiding sense at the end of book two that, with Titus gone, and no successor to replace him, Gormenghast itself grinds to a halt, might, in fact, wink out of existence without him there to sustain it. Titus Alone certainly seems to reinforce the notion that Gormenghast is not a literal place, nor are its characters literal characters, but a metaphorical construct; a great, heaving and diseased mind in which every character is an aspect of a wider psyche, and that only by slaying certain aspects -or allowing them to die- can the consciousness represented in Titus free itself from decay and inevitable mania. Those he leaves behind are all prey to particular forms of madness and are murdered by them; from Flay's unwavering, arguably lunatic sense of duty to Steerpike's ego and sadism, Fuschia's clashing romanticism and acute empathy, Sepulchrave's unthinking conformity and unwillingness to question or redress the assumptions into which he is born. From foundations to spires, from dungeons to heights, Gormenghast is a labyrinth of psychological horrors, tortured minds and broken souls; a place where fantasy and horror meet, intertwine and produce something that simultaneously hybridises and transcends the assumptions of both. It is beautiful, resonant, cruel, oft times hilarious, in its own gallows fashion; profound and yet intimately concerned with the madness of the mundane. A truly post-modern work, which takes an unflattering eye to the Modernist era that preceded it, in all of its violence, abuse, corruption and absurdity. Gormenghast is the horror of tradition and society itself; a despairing autopsy of the tensions that exist between cultural imposition and constraint and minds intent on transcending them. In Peake's estimation, the ultimate product and expression of that tension is madness, either collective or idiosyncratic; systems that grind mindlessly in their mad and weary fashions, as they always have, without question, critique or basic examination. In that, Gormenghast is as significant a political and socio-cultural commentary as Orwell's 1984, Bradbury's Farenheit 451 or, perhaps most fittingly, Huxley's Brave New World, which it certainly echoes and resembles thematically. It therefore stands as little wonder that the series is currently experiencing something of a renaissance, that awareness of -not to mention engagement with- the book has escalated in leaps and bounds in recent years: Little in the annals of fantasy fiction -or horror or science fiction, for that matter- so eloquently encapsulates and expresses the frustrations and concerns of our age. The questions it raises regarding the tensions between cultural conformity and stultifying imposition are marked in an era of escalating conservatism and right-wing scapegoating, not to mention the pervasive rewriting not only of extant history but present day events in the interests of fostering a more passive, conformist society. Gormenghast and its ilk are as essential to that cultural situation as Penicillin to a dose of Syphilis, though whether they have the capacity to cure our conditions rather than merely comment upon them remains to be seen. TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITE UNFORTUNATES BY LEO X ROBERTSON (BOOK REVIEW) THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR FICTION REVIEWSComments are closed.
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