• 1 Quoted in Tanya J. Gardiner-Scott, Mervyn Peake: The Evolution of a Dark Romantic, New York: Peter (...)
• 2 Introduction to The Drawings of Mervyn Peake, London: Grey Walls, 1949, 9.

1‘Damn novels in the sense of being NOVELS,’ Peake exclaims in a letter dated 1943,1 thus giving vent to his impatience with the constraints and limitations of the novel. He states elsewhere that there are two kinds of books, ‘one of which is on the classic side, where there is a mould [. . .]’, a mould into which Peake obviously prefers not to squeeze his fertile imagination. About the other type of book, which seems more congenial to him, Peake writes: ‘[it] is not, I think, necessarily a formless thing [. . .] but it creates its own form.’ This distinction opposes a classic side to another one, which remains unnamed here but could perhaps be termed baroque. Mervyn Peake himself was in favour of describing Titus Groan, the first of the three Titus books, as a romantic novel but underlined that he always tried to maintain a balance between the classical and the romantic or, in his own words: ‘between the passion and the intellect, between the compulsive and the architectonic’.2 The purpose of this paper, however, is not to try and attach a label to the trilogy but to show how, by maintaining moulds at a reasonable distance, Peake’s texts throw into relief the thin line separating what is traditionally considered as form and formlessness.

• 3 Peake, Gormenghast et le fantastique, Thèse Mf, Rennes: 1993.

2The mixture of genres in the trilogy is an aspect that has already been examined by several critics, in particular Pierre-Yves Le Cam in his thesis.3 The focus of this paper will be on what can be called Peake’s baroque resistance to the constraint of linearity, his hostility to straight lines.

• 4 All the references are to the Methuen.Mandarin edition (1989). The titles are abbreviated as follow (...)

4The description of the castle’s eastern wing in Titus Groan can be read as a metaphorical description of the trilogy itself, especially of Titus Groan and the first half of Gormenghast. The wing has been growing in length over the years, Titus’s ancestors giving way to their architectural whims and making incongruous additions to the building: ‘Some of these additions had not even continued the easterly direction in which the original wing had started, for at several points the buildings veered off into curves or shot out at right angles before returning to continue the main trend of stone.’4 (TG, 202)

• 5 John Batchelor, Mervyn Peake: A Biographical and Critical Interpretation, London: Duckworth, 1974, (...)
• 6 Manlove, C.N., Modern Fantasy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, 249.

5This passage highlights a baroque hostility to straight lines, but the tension between individual freedom (whim) and structural constraints, what Peake called ‘the architectonic’, can also be felt. The ‘main trend of stone’ in the trilogy is the story of the growth of Titus Groan, heir to Gormenghast, from birth to manhood—in other words, the Bildungsroman structure. The many peripheral episodes and several subsidiary diegetic strands that appear in the trilogy constitute deviations from the main trend, or parasitic growths. The negative reactions of some critics to several of these growths are worth mentioning since they reveal traditional reading expectations and underline that these well-anchored expectations are defeated by Peake’s text. Thus, for example, John Batchelor finds the episode centred on the philosopher and his three disciples (Gormenghast, chapter 13) ‘unnecessary’ and goes as far as calling it ‘bad art’.5 About the passage focusing on the game played by the schoolboys in the classroom, Manlove writes: ‘It is there simply as a piece of self-indulgent fancy.’6 Thus both passages are seen as nonfunctional, nugatory episodes. Manlove also underlines that the Irma-Bellgrove comic strand in Gormenghast leads to a split in the tone of the book, a split he seems to deplore. As for the Juno-Anchor strand in Titus Alone, it was cut in the first edition of the book because it allegedly destroyed its symmetry. The implicit norm underlying most of the criticisms is obviously the classical rule of unity, unity of action and tone in particular.

• 7 Gérard Genette, ‘D’un récit baroque’ in Figures II, Paris: Seuil, 1969.

6Thus, Peake’s text abounds with what Genette calls ‘diegetic amplifications’ in his well-known analysis of a baroque narrative7 and these recurrent amplifications may be seen as a serious threat to order and unity. As a matter of fact, the proliferation of episodes peripheral to the main story-line disrupts the traditional order of precedence, the margins threatening to eclipse the centre. Indeed, in Peake’s text, even the smallest peripheral element may become the subject of a story. In some places, apparently insignificant details are magnified and another world, a miniature world, sometimes comes to life. Thus, in Gormenghast, Barquentine is shown scratching his back against a wall: ‘disturbing in the process a colony of ants which (having just received news from its scouts that the rival colony near the ceiling was on the march and was even now constructing bridges across the plaster crack) was busily preparing its defences. Barquentine had no notion that in easing the itch between his blades he was incapacitating an army’ (G, 161).

• 8 ‘A Radio Discussion of Titus Groan. The Reader Takes Over’ (BBC, 20 June 1947). Quoted in Tanya J. (...)

9Nowhere is this possibility or ‘threat’ more apparent than in the first book, with its obvious decentering. It is entitled Titus Groan but the eponymous hero is only 18 months old at the end and thus remains a peripheral character throughout this first part, in a way reminiscent of Tristram Shandy. As has often been noted, though plot developments are not absent, this book is mainly expository: the exposition has swollen to excess and outgrown the usual frame. Peake described this first book as a ‘pantechnicon’, a large warehouse that could accommodate anything he wanted to say: ‘I really wanted to make a kind of pantechicon book, in which I could shove in any mental furniture, however horrible—or however beautiful—if I could do so.’8

• 9 Quoted in Gardiner-Scott, 281.

10^{Here again the stress is on the artist’s individual freedom but the restriction} ‘if I could do so’ is evidence of a need for order and structure. The consequence of Peake’s longing to say anything he wished to is that the book became potentially endless. Peake’s notes clearly show that Titus Groan was not intended as a separate book but as a sort of preface or introduction to the story of Titus. However, when he realized that the preface had reached the length of a book, the author felt the urge to make it a closed unit, albeit artificially: ‘What sense of incompletion there is at the end of the book [. . .] I have attempted to nullify by the symbolism of Titus’s coming into his inheritance. I have tried to make the book artificially complete, although the story is obviously unfinished.’9

• 10 This is a translation of the phrase ‘effet de liste’ used by Philippe Hamon in Du Descriptif (Paris (...)
• 11 Christine Buci-Gluckmann, La Folie du voir. De l’esthétique baroque (Paris: Galilée, 1986).

14The lists that appear in the trilogy are probably one of the clearest manifestations of this urge to show all. To give but one example, the list of the different types of outcasts that make up the population of the Under River contains 32 items (TA, 132). An interesting ‘listing effect’10 is created in Titus Groan when, in the aptly named chapter ‘Meanwhile’, the omniscient narrator describes what several characters located in different rooms are doing at the same moment in time. More precisely, Nannie Slagg is making a list of all the people who are to attend Titus’s birthday party and each time she mentions one, the reader is allowed to see the character getting ready for the ceremony. Apart from considerably slowing the action, this device makes the reader keenly aware of the fact that a narrative can open up at any point to accommodate potentially endless descriptions that lead away from the main line. By the same stroke, it throws the writer’s infinite freedom into high relief. Peake draws attention to both this freedom and its potential dangers in the chapter entitled ‘The Dark Breakfast’. One of the few direct addresses to the reader is to be found in this chapter and it concerns a list: ‘Tiresome in the extreme for all those present, it would be hardly less tedious for the reader to be obliged to suffer the long catalogue of breakfast ritual [. . .]’ (TG, 390). The danger inherent in lists or, more generally, in descriptions is of course that the reader, too, can exert his or her freedom and skip lengthy descriptive passages or even close the book. Thus, once again, the tension between what Peake calls ‘the compulsive’ (his apparently natural preference for description) and the ‘architectonic’ is brought to the forefront. The describer’s infinite freedom is very often highlighted in the text, one of the devices consisting in underlining that what is described cannot be seen by the character who is focused on, the stress being thus laid on the ‘omnivoyance’ of the narrator (in Christine Buci-Gluckmann’s term).11 In several passages, the latter introduces descriptions with phrases such as ‘had his vision been free’ (G, 323) or ‘he didn’t know that [. . .]’ (TA, 61) or, else, with a reference to a hypothetical observer. The passage about the warring ants quoted above is but one of many examples. Some of the worlds that open up in descriptions are not even ‘real’ but imaginary or hypothetical worlds. In some places, the narrator describes what the character does not actually see but could see if his or her vision gave imagination enough room: ‘What did he see among the overhead shadows? Some, in his place, must surely have seen battle or the great jaws of carnivores or landscapes of infinite mystery and invention complete with bridges and deep chasms, forests and craters. But Crabcalf saw none of these; he saw nothing in the shadows but great profiles of himself, one after the other’ (TA, 113).

• 12 Eugénio D’ors, Du Baroque, Paris: Gallimard, 1935/1968.

18Thus the hero is presented as a textual creation inside the fictional world, a character created by the written words and destined to remain under their control. Yet Titus slips out of the book, tearing one of its corners in the process, which is seen as his first act of rebellion, foreshadowing his attempt at becoming his own author. The text is a rigid mould from which Titus strives to escape, just as Peake longs to break away from conventional moulds and forms, from what has already been written. The linearity Titus resists can be said to be that of lineage, the family line being like a river flowing in a channel and ‘obeying the contours of hallowed ground’ (TG, 452). More accurately, Titus, like his creator, is both a rule breaker and a preserver of tradition, torn as he is between his craving for individual freedom and his loyalty to the castle and its age-old traditions. The Thing, Titus’s foster sister, is a symbol for the protagonist of the freedom he hankers after. It is worth recalling that the name originally chosen by Peake was not the Thing but the Leaf, a name which lays stress on the creature’s lightness and mobility, as opposed to the weight and immobility of the castle. Thus Titus can be said to be torn between ‘les formes qui s’envolent’ and ‘les formes qui pèsent’, to borrow the phrases used by Eugénio D’ors in his book about the Baroque.12 And so can Peake in the sense that he keeps a powerful impetus towards individual freedom under check (but constantly makes this impetus visible). Titus exhibits the state of mind that is often considered as typical of the baroque hero, a hero who does not know what he wants, who wants both to stay and to flee, to protect and challenge the millennial order.

• 13 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, the Literature of Subversion, London: Routledge, 1988, 162.

19The main criticism Titus levels at the castle has to do with symbolism. For the Groans, life is mainly made up of a succession of symbolic ritual gestures whose meaning has been lost, and which have thus become absurd, empty gestures (a comment, perhaps, on the absurdity of the human condition). On a more general level, Titus, as heir to Gormenghast, is but an abstract symbol and he rebels against this limitation of his identity, wanting to ‘become something more than the last of the great line’ (G, 506), ‘a real live person and not a symbol anymore’ (G, 459). In this restricted sense, a symbol is an element that prevents multiplicity, a closed unit in which a signifier can have one signified only. In the course of the story, Titus shows that he is a multi-faceted being, that he can be many different things: a loyalist, a rebel, a child, a lover and so on. The equivalent on the textual level is the proliferation of similes and metaphors in the descriptions of the characters, which transform them into other things and give them a metamorphic quality. Thus Steerpike, the rebel, is not only a wolf, a scavenger or a cat but also a dancer or an acrobat. To give but another example, Fuschia’s feelings when she takes refuge in her beloved attic are compared in turn to those of a diver, a painter and a yeoman (TG 77–78). Once more, a listing effect is created and each simile is extended to Homeric proportions, three different worlds opening up for a few sentences. While symbols as defined in the text are synonymous with fixity, establishing one-to-one correspondences, analogies make for fluidity and multiplicity. More generally, the proliferation of images, similes and metaphors in Peake’s baroque prose makes the characters appear as multiform beings inhabiting a metamorphic world: the castle turns into a monster (G, 101), a candelabrum into a spider (TG, 54), a hat into a yellow cabbage (TA, 79), etc. Thus, nothing seems to be fixed, even though the main features of the diegetic locus are fixity and stasis. The impression created is, in Rosemary Jackson’s words, that of ‘a dynamic stasis’.13

• 14 Le Cam, 342–43.
• 15 Interestingly, Edmund Little reaches the same sort of conclusion when he underlines the importance (...)
• 16 It is to be remembered that the last book is in fact an editorial synthesis of different versions w (...)

20The same preoccupation with constraining symbolism can be felt in the comments on the trilogy made by John Watney, one of Peake’s closest friends. In an interview,14 Watney underlined that one should probably refrain from putting too much stress on the symbolic value of the world of Gormenghast, as Peake had no such precise plan in mind when writing the Titus books: the creation of a world was what interested him most. What transpires is an uneasiness with symbolism as a reductive process consisting in ascribing one specific meaning to a colossal work, thus imposing a form of closure. In Watney’s comments, strong emphasis is laid on the predominance of the process of representation and on the represented world in itself, which is deemed more important than the meaning(s) that may be ascribed to the text. In a way, this amounts to saying that form is more important than content in Peake’s work, that the ‘message’ does not matter that much.15 The reader is presented with a profusion of characters, objects, places and events that are described in minute detail, with a proliferation of matter, an excess of signifiers, compared to which the signified, the ‘meaning’, seems a mere featherweight. This is particularly true of the first book, in which the world so lavishly described is like a pageant meant for the eye. As a matter of fact, many readers argue that the main appeal of this first book lies in its having no ‘meaning’. More generally, and even though Titus Alone stands slightly apart from the other two novels,16 the Titus books can be likened to a baroque façade in architecture, an ornate, convoluted surface which tends to monopolize attention, to thrust itself forward, and to become independent of the structure of the building.

• 17 Jacques Favier, ‘Distortions of Space and Time in the Titus Trilogy: a first approach to Mervyn’s P (...)
• 18 Op. cit., 221–22.

21‘One grows so very tired of straight lines,’ exclaims Bellgrove in Gormenghast (393), an opinion to which Peake undoubtedly subscribed. In multiplying episodes and lavish descriptions, he created a colossal work that is all curves and luxurious ornaments, a work that is not easily classifiable as it hardly fits into a ready-made literary category. Both in his work and in his life, Mervyn Peake maintained a distance from norms and conventions, resisting constraining formal structures. Furthermore, the writer admitted that he found it difficult at times to discipline his writing, to plan and organize, but he insisted that he always tried to keep his free-wheeling imagination under check, thus underlining a need for order and structure. Critical response to the trilogy shows how such a text can be perceived as verging on confusion or even madness. A significant number of critics resort to the vocabulary of pathology to describe the impression they were left with: ‘neurotic precision’ or ‘almost paranoiac denseness of detail’ are some of the phrases used. Jacques Favier underlines that the proliferation of descriptive excursuses produces an effect of ‘permanent digression, of ‘mad’ writing’.17 This is bound to remind one of Genette’s comments on the reception of Saint- Amant’s narrative, which was considered as the work of a madman by Boileau, but was described as ‘typically baroque’ in the twentieth century.18 Thus the allusions to madness that appear in some critical analyses of Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy may be seen as a telltale sign pointing to its baroque dimension.