Carmen-Veronica Borbély
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania
carmenborbely@yahoo.com
The Archive of Myth: Lawrence Norfolk‘s In the Shape of a Boar
Abstract: This paper sketches a genealogical descent into the archival traces of the teratological imaginary, which permeate Lawrence Norfolk’s fictional rendition of catastrophe and historical trauma in his 2000 novel, In the Shape of a Boar. I emphasise the dislocation or diffraction of the monstrous figure outlined by this narrative from strict, fixed origins, for discursive renditions of myth are perpetually bound to fail in capturing an essential identity for the monster. Ultimately, by collapsing historical time layers (the dawn of human civilization, the pre-WWII Balkans and 1970s Western Europe) into textualised traces of the archival past, Norfolk shows the process of interiorisation monstrosity has registered, from mythical beasts (the Boar of Kalydon) to post-Enlightenment spectral internalisations of abjectionable evil.
Keywords: Lawrence Norfolk; Postmodernism; Myth; Monstrosity; Evil; Genealogy.
In light of a much-quoted passage from Michel Foucault’s “Fantasia of the Library,” the monstrous imaginary, in the sense of a repository of discursive constructions of monstrosity, rather than the product of a compensatory, counter-reality fantasy, straddles the interstitial spaces of archival domains. The imaginary, Foucault claims, “is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is a phenomenon of the library” (1977: 91). What I therefore aim to uncover is how the teratological imaginary acquires determinacy in Norfolk’s narrative, which tropes monstrosity as a heterotopian/ heterochronic amalgam, welding together mythical as well as rational representational attempts at finding meaning in or granting meaning to evil. Thus, the Greek mythological figure of the Kalydonian boar, a punitive beast sent by Artemis to ravage the realm of a disrespectful king, is set in stark contrast with the heroes embarking upon its annihilation, and, on the other hand, the inconceivable and unrepresentable horror of war, of the Holocaust, of atrocious, radical evil per se, initially located in the figure of the enemy, of the persecutor, of the other, but ultimately responsibly acknowledged to also dwell at the core of the self.
In the Shape of a Boar is not the only novel in which Norfolk shows an awareness that archival texts encrypt operations of subduing monstrosity, that is of containing its contagious potential through representational/interpretational schemes. The Pope’s Rhinoceros (1996) also highlights how “knowledges” of the monstrous are organised within various historical periods and simultaneously explores and contests, to follow Linda Hutcheon’s argument, the textualised traces of historically legitimated truths (1989: 81). Norfolk’s narrative of monstrosity under consideration here queries the authority of master texts by exhibiting the discursive constitution and circulation of monsters; in effect, it performs its own genealogical enquiry of the legacy of encrusted meanings from what Dennis Todd calls the “literature of monsters” (1995: 44), that is the teratological archive, itself evincing the complex, extensive citational and cross-referencing techniques teratologists have always resorted to.
In the Shape of a Boar, confessedly addressing the agonic relation between the need for authentic representation and unrepresentability in Paul Celan’s holocaust poems, explores the monstrosity of evil, by tracing its fractured descent and signalling its archival mutations, ruptures and inconsistencies. What the title – concurrently appropriate for the mythic boar of Kalydon and the twentieth-century monstrous sublime – suggests is, on the one hand, the desire to contain the excessive unrepresentability of evil, and on the other hand, the elusiveness of any such representational attempt. The “epistemophilic or imaginary charge surrounding the monster,” Braidotti asserts, accounts for that fact that the monster is a “shifter, a vehicle” generating webs of interconnected, yet possibly contradictory discourses (1999: 300). The monster’s concurrent externality to both biological norms and the discursive practices enlisted to the “will to truth” confirms monstrosity as the “epistemic illegitimacy,” or the “savage exteriority” (Gibson 1996: 238-239) that imperils, while challenging the limits of representation.
Indeed, whether one considers its Latin or Greek etymons, there is ultimately a semantic undecidability at the heart of monstrosity. Thus, “monster” performs the dual function of de-monstration and re-monstration, engaging hermeneutic decipherment yet foreclosing representational or taxonomic containment. The monster is averse to definitional/categorical schemes and only lends itself to a composite, diffracted mapping, whether one considers the ancient teratological treatises invoked by Norfolk in the paratextual apparatus (footnotes, appendix) of his narrative, or the poem produced by Sol Memel in the wake of WWII, its filmic adaptation, the critical responses it elicits and its impact upon the collective imaginary, given that it legitimates the conflation between the figure of the monstrous beast and the perpetrators of wartime atrocities.
Part I of the novel, The Hunt for the Boar of Kalydon, exhumes, in archival manner, the legend of the monstrous beast sent by Artemis to plunder the Aetolia of King Oeneus. Meleager, the king’s son, assembles a group of heroes to hunt down the boar – including Meilanion and his cousin Atalanta, a huntress and the sole female amongst the posse, who manages to wound the boar first. The number of heroes is steadily dwindled by ambush attacks, floods, and Meleager and Atalanta are eventually the sole to enter the cave of the boar. The cavernous encounter between the humans and the beast remains, however, an enigma, until the third section of the novel, when Sol Memel, a survivor of the atrocities of war – or any human, for that matter – succeeds in laying the boar to rest.
The chase is recounted in the historical present, yet the narrative progresses trudgingly, with difficulty, supplemented and documented as it is with about 180 carefully and accurately researched footnotes, which gradually take over the graphic disposition of the pages, almost to the point of displacing the retold mythical narrative completely. Ranging from minute, sparse recordings of innumerable textual and pictorial references to pre-Trojan heroes, to recountings of the various narrative kernels contingent to the myth of the boar hunt, the footnotes explore sources as diverse as Homer’s Odyssey, Pliny’s Natural History, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pausanias’ Description of Greece, Euripides’ Hercules Furens, Aelian’s De natura animalium, etc., enlisting them apparently for hermeneutic purposes, but acknowledging, eventually, their inescapable fallibility: at the crucial point where the boar is about to be annihilated, the sources fade away into gaps of silence, Norfolk confesses (Maunsell 2008: 8). The reader’s experience of meandering, zigzagging through vast discursive references requires a painstaking, laborious effort and, despite attempts to exhaust the archival sources, to congeal time in its transcribed materiality, there is an emerging sense that gaps will never be covered, that myth-history and historiography are not consubstantial, that they do not overlap.
“There are monsters on the prowl,” Michel Foucault reminds us, “whose form changes with the history of knowledge” (2001: 218). As the archivist who catalogues the boar’s “generalized iconography of enmity and rage” (ISB 104) also points out, its “representations” dissolve and are reaggregated into a vast array of anamorphic permutations (winged, horned, riverine, stunted, etc.). This provides the narrator, however, with the perfect opportunity to attempt to capture the volatile contours of the monster and grant meaning to its free-floating mutability. By the end of the section, as the quasi-mythic narrative itself subsides into silence, substantiated, as it is, by a footnote of an “uncertain” “provenance,” the archivist must acknowledge that the sole means of discursively retrieving mythic memory is through a process of active imagination: the “Agrapha” – “a compendium of stories never recorded elsewhere,” whose title comprises “The Unwritten Things” – must be (re)written into existence (ISB 108). The “Agrapha” is, however, a blank discursive space or a faded palimpsest that clamours reinscription, a heterotopian cemetery of “empty graves” – the titles of vanished texts – whose contents can be laid to rest only by imaginatively transferring the ahistorical kernel of the boar myth into concrete time, seizing, thus, at least one possibility of its emplotment out of a myriad possibility: “The boar’s bestial mutations – his rages, his appetites, his strangest shapes and outgrowths must all accord with familiar needs, for we are the authors of our monsters” (ISB 104). In other words, while the contours of the boar remain indeterminate in mythical accounts, they can be fictionalized or can be granted – albeit fleeting – determinacy in the following section of the novel, Paris, where the savagery of the beast is alternately limned as the inhumanness of Nazi atrocities, the agonistic competitiveness amongst writers concerned with such atrocities, or the evil imagined to be perpetrated by others but ultimately revealed to reside at the core of the self, etc.
As evidence for this stands the fact that the narrative acknowledges that this cluster of heroes will not be consigned to posterity in its entirety, that some will be destined to inhabit the archives of silence. Instead, the spatialisation of time is significantly rendered through the “unmelodious music” issuing from the boar’s throat, the ultimate chronicler, its discordant notes evincing not the idea of sequence, of sequentiality, but the simultaneity of an acoustic palimpsest. The monster’s bewailing song, his own “fugue of death” consigns to timelessness the heroic or unheroic destinies of its pursuers, for ultimately it is the monster’s annihilation that legitimates or not their assumption of a heroic stature: “Meleager and Atalanta. They were with the beast whose shape was their fate and whose fate was shaped as they were. But their shapes were so various and the boar too seemed to frame himself from moment to moment. His epithets glinted, his attributes jangled in Meilanion’s ears. In this song he was the pieces of a beast: all the jumbled hoofprints of his trail, the fragments scattered and buried in the soil of Kalydon, on the slopes of Aracynthus and here. Here was where Atalanta must become ‘Atalanta’ and Meleager clothe himself in the garb of ‘Meleager’. Here was where the boar must be divided as though to make a sacrifice: meat to the men, offal to the gods” (ISB 96). The monster is not the counterpart to the heroic, not its stark antithesis; it stands for that “interstitial” formlessness (Douglas 1966) or what Victor Turner calls the “betwixt and between” (Turner 1967) that enables a reflexive acknowledgement of the foundational role monstrosity may have in arriving at definitions of the human.
In Part II, Paris, Poet, Solomon Memel, “true custodian of our uncertainty” produces a poem entitled Die Keilerjagd, or La Chasse au Sanglier (The Hunt of the Boar), based partly on the Greek myth, partly on events which befell him during the war, in particular his fleeing southwards to an area of Greece called Agrapha, where “the unwritten things” of the mythical narrative are written or rewritten into a palinodic historical narrative. It was in Agrapha that he supposedly witnessed the annihilation of a German officer (another boar-like embodiment of evil) by yet another Atalanta (a Greek partisan, Anastasia Kosta, known by her nom de guerre Thyella). The authenticity of his account is contested, however, by various competing discursive authorities, and Sol Memel arrives at the realisation that he himself might have perpetrated evil – that he also partakes of the monstrosity of the boar (and identificatory patterns abound in the narrative) by moulding an unheroic Thyella into the mythical cast of Atalanta.
The recognition that the Nazi officer was not the sole embodiment of evil, which is diffracted into the presumably heroic yet treacherous Thyella, amounts to a triple disenchantment gesture. Sol Memel’s poem may retrieve the Kalydonian boar into the collective imaginary as the representation of evil, yet it is a conventional, rather than a natural “objective correlative” of evil. Secondly, monstrosity may serve, again conventionally, as the extrinsic domain of otherness against which an illusory sense of self-consistent identity can be erected, yet the boar’s fluctuating contours, and Sol Memel’s own identification with the beast, will go counter to that erroneous assumption. Found in a gorge-like cave by the Greek partisans, Memel traces, indeed builds, his chased, victimary identity back to the Kalydonian boar pursued by the Greek heroes. Thirdly, discursive practices aimed at enforcing the immovability of boundaries between human and monstrous, self and other, are bound to fall apart in the face of the realisation that the borders between them are permeable and easily transgressable.
What Norfolk attempts to do by juxtaposing Greek legendry and the recent historical experience of war and the holocaust is a multifaceted approach to the unfathomable/unreasonable experience of evil. In effect, he admixes several discursive genres deployed to make sense of evil, prevalent amongst which, as Richard Kearney maintains in Strangers, Gods and Monsters. Interpreting Otherness, are the mythological, the scriptural and the anthropological (2003). Thus, the novel’s first section, The Hunt for the Boar of Kalydon, adopts myth as a discursive genre that incorporates evil into cosmogenetic narratives, for it is myths that “offer a ‘plot’ which configures the monstrosity of evil, explaining the source of the obscene and thereby taking some of the shock out of it” (Kearney 83). The second section, entitled Paris, appears to endorse the scriptural or biblical discursive genre, whereby, as Kearney puts it, evil may be differentiated into suffering and wrongdoing, while humans are subjects of evil – blamable culprits – or subjects to evil – lamenting victims (2003: 84). However, this disjunctive logic needs be supplanted by a conjunctive one, since complications arise regarding the agency of evil, in particular revolving around the legitimacy of Sol Memel’s aesthetic transposition of the atrocity of Holocaust in poetic form, in his “Die Kielerjagd” (The Boar Hunt). Ultimately, in the third section, entitled Agrapha, Sol Memel’s recognition of himself as an agent of evil is consubstantial with an understanding of the contingency of evil, with a demotion of evil from its excessively metaphysical abstractedness. Hence, Memel’s relinquishment of the tropological use of darkness and silence as metaphors for the inscrutability and incomprehensibility of radical evil and the adoption of an ethical stance, whereby the darkness of the cave in which he eventually embraces the dying monster signals, through its quasi-concrete materiality, the awareness that evil is a “phenomenon deeply bound with the anthropological condition” (Kearney 2003: 87).
The persecution of the Jews; the recent traumas of holocausts, genocides and wars on terror: most societies resort, Rene Girard claims, to monstrifying and ritually scapegoating their maligned others (Girard 1979: 299-300). Ritualised violence, targeting sacrificial victims as reservoirs for society’s pent-up aggression, must serve a therapeutical role, since it “mimetically” displaces, as René Girard might say, the monstrosity at the heart of humanity itself, cleansing it in the process. Ritual sacrifice is essentially a sporadic re-enactment of the originary violence implicit in a cosmogenetic myth, accounting for the birth of the world, in illo tempore, out of the scattered remains of a chaos monster. Such gigantomachic juxtapositions of two paradigmatic figures (monster/heroic god-figure, chthonian/solar, chaos/cosmos) are, however, only partial approximations of what appears to be a complex antinomian entwinement between the monstrous, as a foundational fabric for the cosmos, and the godly-heroic, as sharing in his antagonist’s monstrosity. Either anticosmological or cosmological beings, in Foucault’s pithy estimate (2003: 57), sacrificial monsters, analysts agree, are paradoxically both awful and aweful, both portents of impurity and indexes of numinous otherness (Kearney 2003: 34); they are participants in the “drama of creation,” their annihilation signalling the coextensivity between the origin of evil and the origin of things (Ricoeur 1967: 172). In ancient Greek myth, the boar of Kalydon responds and corresponds to an infraction of the cosmic order (King Oeneus’ failure to propitiate Artemis); hence, it is an anomaly reverberating and disrupting the smooth unfolding of regular, mundane events. In Sol Memel’s native Romania, the horrendous acts committed alternately by the Soviets and the Nazis (mass murders, deportations, persecutions) persistently employ the figure of the Jew as the element that is polluting the fabric of the nation and demands expurgation. Monstrosity thus signals the irruption of another universe in the quotidian world – a world whose coherence and homogeneity may nonetheless stand in starker relief by contrast with the eccentricity such sporadic phenomena exude. The boar of Kalydon stands, as Norfolk’s narrative suggests, as the middle term between the originary crisis and the resolution of that crisis, as the sacrificial scapegoat whose annihilation may bring about the restitution of order, confirming thus the role monstrosity has in reinforcing, while destabilising, what Elaine L. Graham calls the “ontological hygiene” of the human (2002: 33). Monstrosity concurrently demarcates and invalidates structural distinctions meant to keep the mundane and the divine, the self and the other apart; rather than corresponding to an antagonistic, subversive other against which the anthropomorphic norm gains its structural solidity, monstrosity suggests an enmeshment of self and otherness, and nowhere is this more evident than in the rites of passage experienced by the Greek heroes, in their quest for the boar, or by Sol Memel, in his flight southwards to Agrapha.
By way of conclusion, I would say that In the Shape of a Boar partakes of a certain Gothicity permeating British fiction on the cusp of the new millennium, evincing what Eagleton has referred to as the postmodern fixation on the horrific or the monstrously evil, coupled with a rejection of the normal and the normative (2003). As the third section in the novel, Agrapha, intimates, the final encounter between the human and the monstrous is not carried out in belligerent, agonistic terms: the human embraces monstrosity, the self witnesses compassionately the demise of the wounded beast, acknowledging that it is foundational for recuperating a sense of his own humanity. In a way, as the cave episode suggests, either Sol Memel or the boar itself may be seen as the Derridean “monstrous arrivant”, which must be offered hospitality within the intimate space of selfhood, allowing thus for a metamorphic becoming oneself-as-another, rather than for a hybrid congealment of otherness in selfhood. Having provided the mythical beast with what McHale calls a “flickering ontology”, having discursively materialized it into time, the narrator must acknowledge the limits of representation and allow the boar respite from its chase. The final section is titled Agrapha, “The Unwritten Things”, precisely because monstrosity must ultimately remain unrepresentable, unaccountable, silent. As such, Norfolk’s novel points out a transvaluation of the Gothic in contemporary fiction, which either no longer endorses cleansing rites destined to destroy monsters as bearers of haunting fears and self-shattering anxieties, exposes monster-making cultural mechanisms or questions the legitimacy of such purgation practices. Norfolk’s narrative serves to evince a relational reconsideration of self and otherness. Instead of agonic duality (identity/alterity, humanity/bestiality), the preferred formula is a polychronic, liminal composite between self and other, with characters from the Greek myth being reshuffled into similar and dissimilar patterns, into a continuum of identity-monstrosity.
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