book review:
Awe-Inspiring Hideousness
Powys’s Great Twentieth-Century Novel of the Fifth Century
Porius
by John Cowper Powys
Reviewed by Nicholas Birns
Eugene Lang College, the New School
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, November 2010. Copyright © 2010 Nicholas Birns and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
LITERATURE
John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) has always been a far more difficult writer to assimilate than to read. Though it is frequently complained that not enough read him, in fact some do, not many, but those few of fierce ardor. But he has never entered the common parlance of highbrow literary conversation, instead being both beneficiary and victim of periodic ‘revivals’ more often than not designed to promote him for some ideological or commercial reward extrinsic to Powys's own vision. None of this has made a dent in his inassimilability, although Powys has reached readers not so much through organized campaigns but through fortuitous pickings-up from random bookshelves; an adept general reader of my acquaintance encountered Powys’s Wolf Solent two years ago when he was past 80, and it gave him a jolt as few other books had done. Readers who read Powys do not find him hard to read at all—they are fascinated—the problem is not that individuals but the culture has not found a way to read him, has seen him under the sign of his own inassimilability. If this is so, then Porius is the most Powysian novel, because it is the inassimilable of the inassimilable, the book least talked about when a Powys revival is mooted, the book least likely to be taught—as opposed to the shorter Wolf Solent (1929), teachable if one, as I did in 2000, allots three weeks to it—or to be offered as a representative sample of Powys’s genius—A Glastonbury Romance (1932) is better for that. Different theories have been advanced for the inassimilability of Porius. Jerome McGann, in a 1995 TLS article, spoke of Porius as a novel so ultimate that it burst the form, leaving any further attempt to write novellas as at best recuperative; whereas a book like Ulysses innovated upon the novel, or pastiched it, Porius exploded the form so much that to read it would be to dwell upon the bursting of the possibility of writing fiction. In a 1997 issue of Powys Notes, Charles Lock, pointing to the use of “gwork” as the Cewri word for “fighting and struggling” (570) in chapter 27, “The Homage of Drom.” The outrageous dissonance of “gwork” so horrendously upset the outside referee, Norman Denny, consulted by the original British publisher of the novel, and Lock used this as a base to position “gwork” as emblematizing the glorious indigestibility of the work. Both McGann and Lock, in essence, argued that Porius cannot be domesticated, that its wildness, its challenge to normative ideas of morality and perception, is so great that if we were to embrace it we would have to jettison those attributes of the novel which have enabled it to continue as a living phenomenon and, in the ‘right’ hands, be both commercially lucrative and socially sanctioned.
All this is undeniably true. But this new edition of Porius, substantially enlarged and overhauled from the original manuscripts, and edited by Morine Krissdóttir, Powys’s biographer and the leading scholar of his work, as well as by Judith Bond, raises the opportunity to find other motivations behind the way criticism has so flagrantly neglected this work. The text, presented in Krissdóttir and Bond’s edition, whose issuance is the acumination of a series of reissues of Powys’s major novels from the admirable Overlook Press, is not a pure reconstruction from the original. Rather it is a re-expansion of the previously published editions, incorporating the vast majority of the portions left out by earlier truncation (which, because it was based on the idea that the novel as submitted was too dense and ambitious for an audience, was really a kind of censorship). But spelling and grammar are made consistent with normative uses, and the text in general is made ‘presentable.’ So this is an enhanced and in many ways redeemed Porius, and certainly the most authoritative version and the one closest to the author’s intention. But, as McGann would be the first to argue, it is not the only possible ‘authentic’ Porius, and future editors may well come up with different Poriuses that, like new translations of Dostoyevsky, might continue to incite debate and interest and renew the pertinence of a novel felt to be especially difficult to digest.
Beyond the sheer strangeness of the novel, it might be well to historicize Porius, (perhaps a potentially dreary exercise but such a flagrantly inventive text can tolerate some historicization that might drain a lesser book of all vitality). Indeed it is well to historicize it in two separate ways: with respect to the 499 AD of its setting and the 1951 of its publication (in fact, the text was complete by 1949). The 499 date is meant to signify being on the verge of a century’s end, just as Powys, even in the 1940s, was prompted by the apocalyptic horrors of World War II to think of the upcoming millennium. The millennial resonances continue even after the turn of the millennium has passed; the last conference in the U.S. devoted exclusively to Powys took place at the World Trade Center in May 2001, and the support staff that facilitated the meeting fled for their lives from the Towers four months later, fortunately escaping intact. But the millennial aspect of just a garnish; the fifth-century setting puts the book not just in the Age of Arthur (or, as it might be called nowadays, “the long fifth century,” but in an interstitial context, after the waning of Roman rule, before the rise of an English national identity, and in a period of history traditionally neglected by the mainstream and left to be valued by eccentrics and connoisseurs of the strange and obscure. Brochvael praises the forest people for not aspiring after a “Golden Age” (194), and those writers interested in the interstitially early medieval have similarly been, as Brochvael says, “beyond it.”
Indeed, even somewhat pulpy bestsellers set in this period—such as Gary Jennings’s Raptor (1993), or the mid-twentieth century novels of Alfred Duggan, have a strangeness about them, an aspect of fantasy. It is indeed hard to write realistically about this period as so few records survive from it and these lack other orderly or inspirational virtues we normally look for from history. All this makes the era inherently destabilizing. A writer of idiosyncratic tendencies such as Powys could very plausibly find an imaginative home there, and Powys signals this by his delight in the representative arcana of the age, the cameos he gives to figures like Boethius (159, 391) and Sidonius Apollinaris (392), whose fastidious Gallo-Roman elegance most likely, Powys admits, had been gathered to the next world by the 499 of the novel’s setting. But Powys was also doing something specific with respect to the history and legend in of the period. It is set in the Age of Arthur, a conceit whose allure has always been that Arthur probably did not exist, but that so little is known of the Britain of his time that his existence cannot totally be ruled out. The Arthurian idea has served as a safe semi-legendary space to play out constitutive dilemmas of the European. But Porius is not in fact a very Arthurian book—certainly not as compared to John Heath-Stubbs’s Artorius (1972) or T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1938-1958)—and in a book surprisingly sympathetic to so many contending forces, the Arthurians do not come off that well: the “new Arthurian cavalry” (38) is seen as somewhat of an unwelcome innovation, their relentless pursuit of battle yielding an arrogance that Porius, our protagonist, does not especially admire. Indeed, Powys historicizes Arthur and mystifies his milieu, making Arthur and his retinue more matter-of-fact and their distant surroundings more colorful, in such a way as to disestablish the centrality of Arthur with respect to his own ‘age.’
Indeed, though Porius is (somewhat Sir Walter Scott-style) Arthur’s cousin, the Arthurian cavalry (too early to be ‘knights’) are seen with wary though suspicion, and as a kind of alien body, not unlike their portrait as an ethnically distinct Sarmatia cadre in the 2004 King Arthur movie. In truth, Powys is far more interested in Merlin (Myrddin Wyllt) than in Arthur, and the master-disciple relationship Merlin usually has with Arthur in the legends is here largely between Myrddin Wyllt and Porius.
This is not just, though, a turn from the Arthurian to the more primally mythic. It is to some extent, as Powys makes clear that Romano-Britons like Arthur are not at the core of the novel’s imaginative vision, their places taken by more aboriginal figures such as the Cewri (giants), called the real prehistoric aboriginals of Wales (25) the Gwydyll-Ffichti (Scots and Irish, or proto-Scots and proto-Irish, but distinguished from the Britons-Brythons, who, though also Celtic, are not only more Romanized but more ‘European' in outlook), and the forest people, repeatedly identified as non-Aryan and with connections to the Mediterranean basin and to Africa (Iberian or Berber). These less heroic but more instinctual groups provide the novel’s spirituality and strangeness, leaving the Arthurian world as, by contrast, a far more conventional, workaday enterprise—which the giant exception of Myrddin, whose magical craft is far more akin to the unfettered energies of the more fiercely wild people. Yet again, Porius does not simply favor myth over history. Porius is said to be the great-great-grandson of Cunedda, an attested historical figure who is claimed in the cultural linage of both Wales and Scotland. Cunedda is a much more reliably real personage than Arthur ever shall be, and in linking Porius to his lineal descent, Powys is making sure his protagonist has one foot in the referential world, even as his other is certainly in the fantastic. Moreover, there are all sorts of links in the book to the remnants of the larger Mediterranean world—Porius’ grandfather, Porius Manlius, is still as much a Roman of the mos maiorum—of the old, severe, pagan ways—as it was possible to be in the late fifth century AD. Furthermore, there are still links with Constantinople, a motif that often crops up in Arthurian fiction, as if to make the point that Britain has a connection with the East unadulterated by the attempted mediation of Western Europe, particularly the Roman papacy. Indeed, the Byzantine connection has a pronounced anti-Papal tilt, were, as Brother John goes to Constantinople to combine in support of the Pelagian ‘heresy,’ of individual choice—that individuals can strive for the salvation of their soul—as opposed to the Augustinian ‘orthodoxy’ of guilt and original sin—that individuals are doomed from birth because of Adam’s and Eve’s transgression and can only be redeemed through the radical grace offered by Jesus Christ.
Yet despite taking one side in controversies within Christianity, the outlook of the novel is overwhelmingly non-and even anti-Christian, which is especially notable because so many of the Victorian novels set in this or slightly adjacent periods were conversion-novels depicting the rise of Christianity, which served to compensate for whatever social disruptions were chronicled in the books. Powys is not disdainful of Christianity and understands the enabling role it has played in Western cultural and intellectual history. Yet the thrust of the book is one of straightforward protest against the “new Three-in-One with its prisons and its love and its lies,” which, with a quasi-Nietzschean flourish, will “only last two thousand years” (261).
Porius indeed—and this is its second temporal subversion—is part of the late, mythic, less canonical phase of modernism, in which the emphasis was less on irony, disjuncture, and innovation of technique than on totalizing mythic syntheses, somewhat verging on the parodistic. This is the difference between the Joyce of Ulysses (1922)—whose taking place in one day in Ireland in June 1904 is paid tribute to by Porius's taking place in Wales in one week, from October 18 to 25, 499—and that of Finnegans Wake (1939), and the caustic and elegiac ‘The Waste Land” (1922) and Eliot’s more serene and harmonious “Four Quartets” (1944). Porius can also be seen as part of the New Romanticism of the 1940s, which yielded in poetry such figures as Heath-Stubbs and Sidney Keyes, and which betokened a general interest in the Celtic and the fantastic seen in T. H. White and also in J. R. R. Tolkien, whose The Lord of the Rings (1953-5) is a weird counterpart to Porius, even containing some of the same names (e.g., “Teleri,” originally from the Mabinogion, used by Tolkien as a name for an Elvish people, by Powys as that of “The Half-Woman” who provides the title of Chapter XXIX). Powys has all the overt sexuality and apparent reference to the modern world Tolkien positions far more obliquely, yet the works undeniably exist in a strange kinship.
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