Some Speculations

by David Stacey

Haydn Middleton as inheritor of a specifically Oxford group of writers, the Inklings?

Waste Land: Nennius "heaps up images" (LL 77) and he is a sick god ("bent," C.S. Lewis might call him [Out of the Silent Planet]) in a modernist (empty and forlorn) landscape. For fifteen years he has merely stared at his allotment garden (and Quinn is trying to get it started again).

        What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
        Out of this stony rubbish?  Son of man,
        You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
        a heap of broken images....  
                         (lines 19-22, "The Burial of the Dead.")

Cf. Yeat's "Leda and the Swan" and Chapter 1 of "David's Story" LL, when Mary Machin is accosted by the stranger in her bedsit: this is either a divine conception or a sordid rape. The ambiguity is dangerous: it's either an immaculate conception or a sordid rape. It's more Joycean and Yeats, more "high modernist" than the use of myth in Tolkien and Lewis and the Inklings, although in the main I believe that Haydn Middleton is an inheritor of that inherent Oxford tradition of using myth, Northern (Anglo Saxon, Icelandic, Norse and Welsh and Gaelic, etc) in modern settings. (They are not modernist.) Also there is a bit of Philip Larkin's post-second World War England in Haydn's Oxford: "...the small fenced playing field, the entrance to the ironworks, the convent behind its wall, the row of mostly boarded shops" (LL 61-2). We might call this now a Thatcherite contemporary or post-modern landscape too--maybe? It's the same one, especially when I see the main figure in The People in the Picture, with his bald head and beer can, in black leather and Doc Martens.

We have an interesting re-naming (and Kenneth Burke says to watch it when characters are "reborn" like this) from Machin ("machine" or "making?") to "Nennius," the name of a Monk from the Welsh Dark Ages [but see Erin Gray's note!]. ("Dark Ages" may or may not be a misnomer, but metaphorically it has to do with "before time," or "eternity" rather than "temporality" [See Burke]--and that is what allows the Lion to regenerate itself in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is it not?: that he knew "deeper magic" than the witch, who only went back to the start of time; he could go back before that. CF "Albion," or the "inner island" in and of Britain).

Note how Nennius only speaks indirectly, in story: he demonstrates (60-1) to Quinn that he is not worthy of his emulation by beating up and killing the drunkard in the lavatory.

The use of myth makes the novel High Modernist. Cf. Ulysses and, yes, The Wasteland. I hadn't thought of The Wasteland in connection with it but Nennius is the wounded Fisher King, etc.

What makes it NOT POSTmodern is that it doesn't burlesque or parody these elements. It treats them seriously. This makes it seem like a very old fashioned novel indeed.

John Gilgun

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