Nevertheless, as a counterpoint to the bleak image outlined above, Weymouth Sands – similarly to Wolf Solent – involves a vision of the Golden Age at a crucial juncture. It is also associated with the resolution of the dilemmas the novel poses, but the Dostoevskian allusion – the reminiscence of Stavrogin’s vision in Devils (cf. Dostoevsky, Stavrogin’s Confession 64–5) – seems to be much more prominent in this text. As a further parallel to Wolf Solent, it is also the fate of the Powys hero to gain a glimpse the Golden Age here, and formulate a vision which writes over Stavrogin’s, and even more particularly his
“disciples’” monologic, ideologising readings of the mytheme. In Weymouth Sands the motif evolves into a carnivalesque acceptance of growing up, being imperfect, seeing the cosmos as recreated out of the chaos surrounding it with each new day, and being aware that temporary boundaries exist only to be washed away – and redrawn. As the elaboration of the motif and its association with Dr Mabon suggest, the tone of Weymouth Sands is defined by the spirit of this vision, which can be read both as the mise an abyme and a metatext of the entire novel.
The Weymouth appearing in the Powys hero Magnus Muir’s consciousness in the course of his mythic vision, which is fundamentally the elaboration of the eponymous metaphor of the novel into a complex image of the Golden Age, is the model of the whole (fictional) universe. As such, it is a cosmos separated from the chaos of non-being only by fluid boundaries, which is able to contain simultaneously the carnivalesque and grotesque moments of buffoonery and the perfect harmony of Golden Age – or at least its promise. Before a closer analysis of Magnus’s vision and the exploration of the central figure of “Weymouth sands”, however, it is worth looking at the narrower and wider context of the image. The vision appears in the chapter entitled “Punch and Judy”, which creates suspense between the anticlimax of the plot and its resolution in the two final chapters, and makes the impression of a tableau, a standstill. The importance of the scene is highlighted by the fact that in the whole story covering the events of almost a year this chapter features the only sunlit summer day – Magnus’s birthday in August (WES 467). Consequently, the Weymouth beach appears – for once – as most fitting for the idyllic seaside resort. And the beach is unimaginable without a “Punch-and-Judy performance” (WES 4) – the comic show the non-fictional Weymouth is actually famous for9. This
9 The puppet-show, which has been performed for centuries according to by and large the same scenario but with a half-improvised libretto, features Punch as its main character. He first throws his child out of the window, and then beats to death Judy, his understandably upset wife, with his stick. In the rest of the play he goes through a large number of adventures, all of which involve
carnivalesque performance and a sort of mythical perspective, which Magnus calls his own “Homeric religion”10, determine his emphatically phantasmagoric mental image of the small town: “It seemed an immaterial, an insubstantial thing to him just then, a thing made of the stuff of thought! It was as if in all its long nights and days an impalpable thought-image of it had been wrought, that on such an afternoon as this substituted itself for the solid reality” (WES 465).
Weymouth appears as a subjective space, in the formation of which the carnivalesque and the Saturnian vision are inseparably intertwined.
Seen in this context, the description of the beach with its sharp focus on the metaphor of “Weymouth sands” is fairly consistent with Magnus’s overall vision:
it involves images of the Golden Age and the abject – seen as carnivalesque – simultaneously and depicts them as mutually dependent on each other:
That difference, for instance, between the dry sand and the wet sand, which had remained in the memory of Magnus as a condensation of the divergent experiences of his life, heightened the way everything looked from the esplanade till it attained the symbolism of drama. On the dry sand sat, in little groups, the older people, reading, sewing, sleeping, talking to one another, while on the wet sand the children, building their castles and digging their canals were far too absorbed and content to exchange more than spasmodic shouts to one another. The free play of so many radiant bare limbs against the sparkling foreground-water and the bluer water of the distance gave to the whole scene a marvellous heathen glamour, that seemed to take it out of Time altogether, and lift it into some ideal region of everlasting holiday, where the burden of human toil and the weight of human responsibility no more lay heavy upon the heart.
There, above, on the dry sand, there were forever limning and dislimning themselves groups and conclaves of a rich, mellow, Rabelaisian mortality, eating, drinking, love-making, philosophizing, full of racy quips, scandalous jibes, and every sort of earthy, care-forgetting ribaldry. But as these mothers and these fathers, these uncles and these aunts from hundreds of Dorset villages [...] formed and reformed their groups of Gargantuan joviality and exchanged remarks upon the world that were “thick and slab” with the rich mischiefs of a thousand years, while, I say, the dry sands of Weymouth received the imprint of these mature glosses upon the life that went crying and weeping by, [...] the wet sands of Weymouth were imprinted by the
beating up his enemies. In the end he is to be hanged, but he manages to escape even the gallows – what is more, he even kills Satan/Death. Cf. (Mayhew).
10 Cf. “but I fancy I am the only one who accepts Homer’s philosophy as my own and Homer’s religion as my own” (WES 485).
“printless” feet, light, immortal, bare, of what might easily have been the purer spirits of an eternal classical childhood, happy and free, in some divine limbo of unassailable play-time. (WES 462–463)
Since the introduction of this passage defines the atmosphere of the scene through ekphrasis – a comparison to Jean-Antoine Watteau’s painting entitled Embarkation for Cythera – the image evokes both the mytheme of the Golden Age, the Isle of the Blessed, and one of its most famous literary representations involving ekphrasis, Stavrogin’s confession (cf. Lukacher 20–21; Hyman 21).
While Stavrogin’s version proves to be an ultimately failed attempt to redraw the subject’s boundaries through myth – the discourse of Law and the transcendental signified (cf. Bell 9–38; Riceour 5–6; Kristeva, Powers of Horror 7) – Powys seems to apply a fundamentally different strategy here. The cosmos of Weymouth is barely separated by a thin line of sand from the amazing primeval chaos of the sea – which appears in the novel as the archetypal metaphor of the unconscious, the abode of the sea serpent representing chaos (e.g. in the chapter
“The Sea Serpent”, cf. Eliade 48) and the realm of death. The narrow line of sand – the space of the conscious and of earthly life – is nevertheless an ephemeral and insecure boundary, which has to be fought back from the sea each and every day. The Golden Age of childhood, this mythic, timeless world placed on the border of the universe of signs, which might as well never have existed, is inevitably replaced by adulthood. The latter is, in contrast, pronouncedly carnivalesque, somewhat obscene and grotesque, definitely corporeal and can assert itself with the help of signs. Nonetheless, it is also idyllic in its own way. Similarly to the border between the sand and the sea, the division line between childhood and adulthood also seems to be insecure and permeable. The description of the two kinds of sand can be interpreted both as a contrast of childhood – “the age of innocence” – and a carnevalesque, frolicsome, experienced adulthood in the context of individual development, and as a cosmology, in which the separation of chaos and cosmos is followed first by the mythic Golden Age of humanity, and then by a grotesque, Rabelaisian era.
This Weymouth idyll contains both of the latter, but narrative, text and identity can be born only from the carnivalesque vortex – only facing the abject and overcoming the narcissistic crisis of encountering the body and its dissolution can lead to the emergence of the speaking subject. In the world of Weymouth Sands, speaking about or from another position is neither possible nor worthwhile.
This carnivalesque vision slowly but surely appropriates the whole chapter – or rather the entire novel. “Punch and Judy” enumerates almost all the characters of Weymouth Sands, whom Magnus Muir interprets as figures in the ongoing Punch and Judy performance. In his words, “’There is something […] of Punch in me, in Gaul, in Jerry, in old Poxwell, in the Jobber! Punch must be the eternal
embodiment of what Rabelais calls the ‘Honest Cod’, the essential masculine element, in every living man’” (WES 465). In the same vein, as Linda Pashka also points out, the text of the entire novel can be read as a bitter Punch and Judy show (30). One of its first scenes involves the performance of the puppeteers on a cold winter beach, but the analogy does not end here. As if to emphasise the unstable boundaries of “stage” and “reality”, Marrett, “the Punch and Judy girl”, who is a spectral reminiscence of a puppet herself with her face evoking a “china doll” (WES 388) and her body resembling a clothed broomstick, leaves the puppet show and “comes alive”. She is in good company in crossing this insecure boundary – Jerry Cobbold, the “world-famous” clown (WES 8) also keeps playing a role without a break, even in his private life (cf.
WES 204). Both the novelistic characters themselves and their personal relationships evoke a carnivalesque turmoil, since they form and re-form emotional ties in the most surprising combinations. This holds true for the Cobbold brothers – otherwise typical carnivalesque parodying doubles (cf.
Bakhtin, Problems 127) – for Tissty and Tossty Clive, who seem to be interchangeable throughout most of the text; for Jobber Skald, who is simply a twentieth-century reincarnation of Gargantua (WES 54); and last but not least, for the abortionist Dr. Girodel, who is an embodiment of Panurge (WES 228). In the meantime, these figures gradually seem to become ghosts in the carnivalesque underworld of the novel – whether it means being an inhabitant of the “Homeric” underworld (WES 479), featuring as a grotesque “Holy Ghost”
(WES 333), resembling a living dead recovering from a spiritual breakdown (WES 577), or feeling like the “moaning and gibbering” ghost of the Punch and Judy show (WES 465).
All in all, though the emblematic image of the sunlit sea at dawn or sunset, which – just like in Wolf Solent – clearly associates the mytheme of the Golden Age, appears several times in Weymouth Sands (pl. WES 392, 497), the myth itself is reinterpreted on slightly different terms here. The Golden Age appears as a subversive discourse, which is able to present carnivalesque phenomena outside the concepts of sin and the abject (religious and ethical discourses) or disease (scientific discourse). In other words, it evades the discourse of the Law and the Father, and offers the alternative of a carnivalesque vision instead of the abjection of the self for the subject. It is for this reason that the promise of the Golden Age as an alternative discourse associated with one particular fictional character is written exactly into this vision, as a scene in the “Punch and Judy”
chapter.
In the light of Magnus’s vision, the promise of a new kind of science – and morality – heralded by the arrival of the new physician, which apparently offers an obvious but rather weak counterpoint to the dominant abject vision, gains much more weight. The tentative indication of a new approach to science and life represented by Dr. Mabon is linked to the Golden Fleece and a retrieval of
the Golden Age of mankind, though apart from Magnus’s intuitive attraction to the man there is not much else to support it. After the narrator’s introduction, claiming that “this day there did happen to be a sort of oracle delivered, though its utterer […] was a complete stranger to the town” (WES 499) it is the Latin tutor who, on their first meeting – and the new doctor’s last appearance in the novel – attaches outstanding importance to Dr. Mabon: “I’d like to know this chap’s philosophy. He’s in advance of all of us. He sees far. He’s like the Pilot of the Argo. God! I hope he stays here!” (WES 503) The doctor, the writer of a
“purely biological” (WES 504) book on ethics, which he thinks is “barbarous”
(WES 502), is also a conchologist, who looks “as if he would willingly have exchanged his present incarnation for the life of a Solen [a species of shells]”
(WES 502). He “seemed to have a special look for everyone, with its own humorous commentary upon the world, but a different commentary for each separate person in a group” (WES 503). It is his short dialogue with Magnus which gives the promise of a new science beyond psychoanalysis: he explains that having “dropped psychoanalysis” he does “nothing but listen … and … move … perhaps … a few things that have got in the way!” while treating
“neurotic cases”. The following narratorial comment identifies this particular statement as the “oracle” (WES 504–5) mentioned above and thus underpins the exceptional importance of Dr. Mabon’s rather general comment. His whole personality and approach poses a sharp contrast to Dr. Brush’s: a lover and admirer of nature, he is an advocate of non-intrusion and benevolent, humorous, tolerant passivity. His “dropping” of psychoanalysis together with the representation of its practice in Weymouth Sands as vivisection marks Powys’s disappointment in his extremely optimistic expectations concerning psychoanalysis. What he presents here seems to be nothing else but the Rabelaisian alternative – in the Powysian sense outlined in his Rabelais – to the experimental cruelty and jouissance of psychoanalysis as abject.