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What, then, is this language that says nothing, is never silent, and is called “literature”? —Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
After my abortive first reading of Maiden Castle, I moved away from the idea of Henry Miller as a descendant of Powys: the two are simply contemporaries. (There is even a book of letters between them published as Proteus and the Magician.) A summary of the influences of one can be applied to the other, and the two writers, though born two decades apart, seem almost to have caught up to each other in their old age: Miller lived to 88 and Powys to 90. They both died in the fullness of June.
Fatidical, if I remember rightly, was one of his [Powys’] favorite adjectives. Why I should mention it now I don’t know, unless it was charged with mysterious and sunken associations which once had tremendous significance for me.1
To interrupt, I should include some characteristic lines from Powys’ Owen Glendower (of which I have had to obtain another copy, having gotten rid of my first one the same way I did Maiden Castle—but, for different reasons, as though to alleviate my bad conscience at not continuing on with it). It is an overwritten, vast, lush weave of description, analogy, fragmentary discourse and ironic action bordering on the farcical.
For example: The interaction of the “consciousness” of two men in the throes of the predator–prey–state of a chase goes on for pages. The two men are, at this point, unnamed, and one chases the other out of a manorial abode, which the Quixotic pack of primary characters has ridden upon, and we are oscillated in Powys’ dense circuitry of prose between the pursuing man’s attack-drunkenness, spear in hand, the pursued man’s perverse exultation unto death, and the discontinuous, somehow overlapping perspectives of the onlookers defined by non-partisan excitement, total pity and fearful identification with the pursued, and cognitively dissonant excitement/disgust at the prospect of the pursuer’s success and of being forced to observe a killing.
This will give you an idea about what I mean:
The victim was disarmed, exhausted, done for, and the pursuer apparently felt justified in keeping him waiting for his death until he had regained his own breath. Thus both the man crumpled up upon the bracken and the man holding the spear above him panted out their long-drawn gaspings in a fearful unison and in complete disregard of five strangers.
Enter three of the onlookers:
It must be confessed that Rhisiart's first instinct was the law-abiding Hereford one—more than natural in the scion of a legal family—the instinct to assume that a man in such haste must be a malefactor and that the death held over him was a lawful execution.
Tegolin, however, who had been brought up in a less well-ordered society, felt nothing of this. All she felt was the spear of the hunter at the throat of the hunted; and jerking Griffin [Rhisiart’s horse] forward she lifted up her voice in a shrill cry of protest. The sound of her cry made Mad Huw recall his own recent predicament and he began leaping up the rocks with such agility that it was soon clear he would reach the scene of the killing before she could.
Meanwhile, the man with the spear, who was a tall personage with a heavy protruding forehead, deep-set eyes and shining teeth, seemed determined to get his own breath before despatching his panting enemy.
He kept lifting up his spear as if pondering where to strike, but he was clearly reluctant to waste his stroke, and the memory must have come to him of some unpleasant recent occasion when he couldn't draw out his weapon from the victim's body.2
This is as fantastic as it is a total mess. Instead of time dilation, you might call it “time jamming.” This is a fraction of the description of what takes place in a single moment, the spatial analogue of which is the distance between the would-be killer’s spear and the other man’s throat: short and yet containing all.
Powys turns the common wisdom of “show rather than tell” on its head, telling and telling and telling. He talks the action into being, like a furious, vengeful orator (recall Miller’s description of him at the podium: “blood in his veins and the fire and magic which invests all Gaelic spirits”).
Now, when Miller indicates the importance for him of one of Powys’ “favorite adjectives”, I doubt he means this in any denotative, dictionary thumping sense. (Did you know what it meant without looking it up? I did not.) “Fatidical” might as well be a pure invention of Powys’ (or of Miller’s). If the word signifies anything here, it is only that savage elevation of a vital (not “vitalistic”), proto-surreal impulse to resurrect the dead storyteller and the speech that penetrates one’s chest with the “rhythm of the nighttime.”3 This is not “literature.” It is a verbal onslaught, the word made flesh, which accounts part of the way for why writers like Powys and Miller are kept safely at bay on at the Plutonian fringes of the canon. All the better.
Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium. To paint a pre-Socratic being, a creature part goat, part Titan. In short, to erect a world on the basis of the omphalos, not on an abstract idea nailed to a cross. Here and there you may have come across neglected statues, oases untapped, windmills overlooked by Cervantes, rivers that run uphill, women with five and six breasts ranged longitudinally along the torso. (Writing to Gauguin, Strindberg said: "J'ai vu des arbres que ne retrouverait aucun botaniste, des animaux que Cuvier n'a jamais soupconnes et des hommes que vous seul avez pu creer."4)
When Rembrandt hit par he went below with the gold ingots and the pemmican and the portable beds.5
Who wants literature anyway?
Henry Miller, The Books in My Life, New Directions, 1969. 137.
John Cowper Powys, Owen Glendower, Overlook Press, 2002. 80–81.
This phrase, or something like it, is in the introduction to my copy of Grimm’s fairy tales. If I remember rightly, it’s Joseph Campbell, who I could not care less about.
“I saw trees that no botanist would find, animals that Cuvier never knew of, and men that only you could create.”
Tropic of Cancer, annotated.