Patrick McGrath. Sue Zlosnik
seems to be as Gothic as the fiction. This story’s powerful representation of the link between repression and transgression reveals a cultural haunting at work; other stories explore further dimensions of the cultural haunting of England.
In the figure of Father Mungo, elderly rector of Ravengloom, McGrath’s preoccupation with the colonial aspect of British history is apparent. The name of this benevolent figure (‘who was still remembered with awe and affection by the natives of the Zambesi Basin’ (68)) is derived from that of the great explorer Mungo Park. McGrath has suggested that the African motif in his early fiction was ‘probably an outgrowth of [his] interest in pastiching nineteenth-century fictions’, and that in his writing ‘Africa became a symbol of the unconscious, the unpredictable, the chaotic’.14 The influence of Conrad is clear and, indeed, McGrath has identified Heart of Darkness as one of the books that has given him greatest pleasure.15 The figure of the explorer appears again in ‘The Lost Explorer’. The cultural history of colonial exploration here finds expression in the heart of the bourgeois family, where it represents an exotic ‘otherness’ in the imagination of a girl on the threshold of puberty. Like many Gothic tales, this story works within a liminal space. Evelyn Piker-Smith’s encounter with the exotic operates in the territory where realism gives way to fantasy, and the boundary between the two is unstable.16 This is signalled in the opening sentence, as ‘one fresh and gusty day in the damp autumn of her twelfth year Evelyn found a lost explorer in the garden of her parents’ London home’ (17). In another inflection of the garden trope, the explorer’s tent is pitched in the wild area at the bottom of the garden, an area that is described in terms of a Gothic desolation reminiscent of the sexually charged dream of Manderley in the opening of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca: ‘The rest of the garden beyond the pond was a tangled and overgrown mass of rhododendron bushes, into whose labyrinthine depths, since the death of the old gardener, only Evelyn now ventured’ (20). The trivialities of life carry on in their humdrum way in the Piker-Smiths’ bourgeois home, providing a contrast with the suffering of the explorer in his tropical delirium.
The two realities exist side by side for Evelyn, however, and both are narrated as such; only in the liminal area is there an acknowledgement of Evelyn’s imagination, as she thinks of the three white sheets billowing in the wind on the washing-line as sails on ‘a great ship shouldering on to the tropics’ (21). The narrative juxtaposes this with the next sentence, as she picks up ‘a jar containing a pickled thumb that Daddy had given her’ (21). Given the sexual connotations of hands in these early stories (in ‘Hand of a Wanker’, for example), it is difficult to read this other than in terms of a rather crude phallic symbol. It is, of course, not surprising in this house (Evelyn’s father is one of McGrath’s many medical men), where the topics of conversation at the dinner table include ‘a rather interesting colostomy [her father had] performed’, after which ‘Uncle Frank made some quips which might, in a non medical household, have been taken in rather bad taste’ (24). The body in this context is a masculinized domain.
In spite of his supernatural status, the explorer has for Evelyn a fully realized materiality in the text; there is nothing overtly spectral about him. From his ‘creased map of the upper reaches of the Congo’ to his torn mosquito net, he is accompanied by the trappings of his calling (17). In the liminal zone between childhood and adulthood, Evelyn shares with the explorer an alternative reality, aligning herself with neither female sexuality (as personified by Aunt Vera), domesticity (in the shape of her ‘plump, tweedy’ mother) nor the male doctors, who represent a banal rationality. Through her fantasy, the reader is offered an alternative perspective on an aspect of British history. Listening to Uncle Frank’s rambling account of Stanley’s adventures in the Congo, Evelyn glimpses over his shoulder the explorer, his ‘unshaven face deeply etched with gullies of suffering’ and his clothes looking ‘extraordinarily ragged and filthy against the beige flowered wallpaper of the hallway’ (25). When the explorer dies shortly afterwards, Evelyn stashes his body in the corner of a closet and tries to get rid of ‘the stink of a man too long in the jungle’. In one of the many comic turns in these early stories, her mother attributes the ‘funny smell’ the next morning to Evelyn’s ‘hockey things’, thus creating a bathetic closure to the explorer’s sojourn in the Piker-Smiths’ residence (28). After burying him with his possessions in the garden, Evelyn sees him occasionally as a spectral presence under a full moon, but by the time she has decided to become a doctor (at the age of fourteen and a half), ‘he disappeared from her life completely’ (31).
If this is a fantasy, it is (with its details of anthropophagous pygmies and a ‘creased and sweat-stained’ map (30–1)) a male adventure fantasy. Evelyn’s decision to become a doctor – entering into the male territory signified by the thumb – coincides with the disappearance of the explorer as she finds an adult role to pursue. The immediacy of her experience and her compassion towards the suffering man, as she tends to his needs, suggest, however, other possibilities for the medical profession than the smug indifference exemplified by the male doctors in the story. Hovering over both the fantasy and the quotidian reality, however, is a deeper fear, that of regression and entropy. In the wild zone of the garden, the wood-shed harbours ‘three substances, sacking, wood and the earth beneath the rotten wood, [which] had begun to coalesce, as if in attempting, in their nostalgia for some primeval state of slime, to abandon structure and identity, all that could distinguish or separate them’ (29). In the face of such forces the ephemeral nature of human lives is thrown into sharp relief, as are the ways in which they are recorded. The insubstantiality of textuality is represented by faded photographs in the shed, in which
barely a trace could now be detected of the humans who had stood, once, before the camera, vital, one presumes, and alive. It was as though they had died in the bad air, the malaria, of that neglected little corner of the garden, the thin dusty air of the old shed, within which everything must devolve to a fused state of formless unity … (30)
A less ambiguously comic treatment of the Englishwoman and Britain’s colonial past is to be found in ‘The Black Hand of the Raj’, which adopts an earlier setting, that of Victorian India. In this story the motif of the hand is central; its synecdochic quality places it in a tradition of hands with sinister import in Gothic texts.17 This hand acts autonomously and with lascivious intent, as does its American counterpart in ‘Hand of a Wanker’, but in this instance it is also murderous. Parodying the tradition of earlier stories of the Raj, from Kipling to Forster, and set in 1897, the story relates the experience of its young Victorian heroine, Lucy Hepplewhite. The narrator speaks from a mid twentieth-century perspective and the story opens with an academic Marxist discourse on the economic foundations of imperialism; this is soon explicitly set aside in favour of an exploration of the ‘soft face of imperialism’, which had enabled Europeans to discover passion in torrid climates. The narrator then sets the reader up for a tale in which ‘darker forces’ are at work and ‘the encounter of East and West, of the sensual and rational’ has a less satisfactory resolution (32). At this point the narrator displays the stylistic versatility of the parodist by adopting the language of romantic excess; Lucy becomes a ‘flower of Victorian maidenhood’, whose ‘dark eyes are misted and shining’ and whose ‘small pearly teeth gleam like stars’ from between ‘her soft lips’ (33).
Lucy is also represented as belonging to the tradition of intrepid colonial Englishwomen: she is ‘a girl of pretty stout kidney’ (34). Even for such a heroine, however, what follows is horrific. The erotic awakening implied by her expectations of her imminent marriage takes a most peculiar turn, when the reason for her fiancé Cecil’s reluctance to remove his pith helmet is revealed. Underneath it, a hand is growing out of his head. This is the result of the laying-on of hands by a mysterious little old man ‘with a bald head and a loincloth’, a figure that bizarrely evokes the image of Gandhi (36). Cecil has medication to keep the hand sedated; tragically, this seems ineffective on the night of Lucy’s arrival, so that she finds him dead in the morning, strangled by his uncanny appendage. She has dreamed about the hand, which had taken on an erotic agency: ‘it writhed and twisted and beckoned and pointed, it throbbed and undulated like a serpent, and performed gestures of an unspeakably lewd nature’ (38). What follows is an act that is comically abject: the hand consummates the relationship as Lucy ‘moan[s] in the shadows of the body of her lover’.