Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

I tried posting yesterday, however, it seems blogger.com was 'indisposed'. Perhaps there was a clog of traffic related to the pope's death and/or funeral?

As I was drawing near to the end of Mervyn Peake's beautiful, elegiac Titus Groan, I came across a striking passage in the novel. It seemed to paint a verbal picture using a particular artistic technique of an early twentieth century art movement: Futurism. At the time, yesterday, I did not realize the amazing discovery I had made. However, I searched a few dissertations available in electronic format to see if any of these 'experts' had noted this. After skimming over two papers I found what I was looking for in a U of T PhD dissertation written almost 20 years ago by Tanya J. Gardiner-Scott. Her introduction caught my attention immediately--as any good intro should--and I found a key to unlock the ideas in my mind. She wrote: "To Mervyn Peake, writing and drawing were two aspects of the same creativity, and he switched from the one to the other with ease during the course of his creative life."

It occured to me that Peake was using artistic techniques in his writing and descriptions, which would explain his unique style and idiom. While he was using Gothic and Romantic tropes and their subjects, he brought a modern artistic flair to create his own grotesque, satiric, dreary tale. Compared to Tolkien, whose tales had a tinge of romantic, escapist fairy-tales at best; Peake, like any true artist of his era, witnessed and painted a portrait of the horrific effect of the Second World War. Read Tolkien's "On Fairy Tales"--his mentality is pure, naive escapism into a fairy-tale past, which will cure the modern man's wounded soul. Peake knew that the world would neither escape nor recover from the scaring horror--as he was among the first to liberate the Concentration Camps he knew first hand of the demonic horrors of the War. I believe his novels--the Gormenghast trilogy--drew upon the Gothic and Romantic literary tropes and an artist's painterly technique to express this sense in a truly modern epic. He was also a professional artist, no doubt familiar with all major art developments. He was painting a picture with words. No doubt Gormenghast seems like a typical Gothic on the surface, but Peake seems to paint over this with a grotesque, satiric, artistic wit. Peake paints an extra layer of chiaroscuro over the already gloomy Gothic landscape, with a modern brushstroke.

Wow. I never meant to write that much--it just came to me. Well, here is the passage that inspired it all:

Flay, nonplussed for the moment, watched in fascinated horror the rapid succession of faces which the swivelling of Swelter conduced; faces of which he had hundreds; appearing and reappearing at high speed (with an equal number of rear-views of the huge head, interlarded, in all literalness). The whirr of steel was approaching rapidly. The rotation was too speedy for him to strike between the cycles, nor was his reach long enough were he to stand his ground. (341)

Now look at these Futurist and Dada paintings: Severini's Dynamism of a Dancer, Boccioni's States of Mind: Those Who Go, and Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Take note of Boccioni's Second Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, too. The Futurists developed the modern technique to capture motion in their art using a modified Cubist technique of multiple, fragmented, layered perspectives--as advocated in the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism written by F.T. Marinetti in 1909. It was a poetic idea that was later developed into an artistic technique, so it is interesting to see how Peake develops this painterly technique into his own masterpiece prose.

Whenever I sit down to read Peake I see more than just words on a page. I see an animated painting, page after page in my imagination -- a dynamic brushstroke forever in a self-conscious motion (Futurist and whatever other Artistic) evoked by a painterly prose.