Melmoth the wanderer

[Fried Egg]

Well, I'm nearing the end of this long, and epic novel that has taken me quite a while to get through (although my reading has been interrupted a few times) and I don't think it's too soon to start discussing it.

In reading through this thread, I was quite surprised by Lobolover's comments about this being a collection of short stories that can be read out of order. Such a depiction runs so much at odds of my experience (thus far) that I almost wonder whether he's talking about the same book.

They aren't really a series of stories that are read one after another, rather they are embedded within one another. The most one could say is that the stories most deeply nested could be read in isolation perhaps but it does not make sense to say that it could be read before or after a story in which it is embedded within.

You could illustrate the narrative structure like this:

The Book Itself
          |
           - "Tale of the Spaniard"
                          |
                          |- "Tale of the Indians"
                          |            |
                          |            |- "The Tale of Guzman's Family"
                          |            |
                          |             - "The Lover's Tale"
                          |
                           - "The Wanderer's Dream"

And just to put it in perspective to the uninitiated, "The Tale of the Spaniard" takes up nearly 5/6ths of the book, "Tale of the Indians" about half and "The Wanderer's Dream" is but a page. So how could these stories be read in any order?

In addition, there a few points in which an embedded narrative is briefly interrupted by a character in it's meta-narrative which would only be confusing to someone not reading the tale in it's wider context and with a mind to what had gone before it.

 

[Fried Egg]

So now I've finally finished. Here are my thoughts:

This had been sitting on my shelf to read for some time now, for some reason it never felt like the time. Most of the classic fiction I have read has been in much shorter form and I was quite intimidated by this Gothic epic that I worried might be quite hard work. After completing it, it did feel like a mammoth undertaking but well worth the effort.

Melmoth the Wanderer, damned for some undiscovered reason and doomed to wander the earth looking for individuals in the pit of despair and anguish in the hope that he can persuade them to take his place before he must submit to an unspecified (and unspeakable) fate. We gradually learn about the Wanderer through the investigations of a man who is his namesake and a descendent from the same family.

There is quite a complex narrative structure in which different stories become embedded within one another as we go back in time and discover some of the history of Wanderer and the kind of suffering of individuals went through before they were confronted by Melmoth and presented with his diabolical bargain.

As the reader, we witness stories of the utmost tragedy as people's lives go from bad to worse and they plumb deeper depths of anguish and despair. Yet it seems that no level of human misery is bad enough to make it appear a less favourable alternative to that which Melmoth offers. All this is set against a time in which Europe is beset by powerful religious institutions and stringent dogma. Corruption and cruelty in these institutions and the hypocrisy of their followers is a theme common to many of the stories contained here. I was also surprised by the amount of humour present, such as Melmoth's dying, miserly uncle and Isidora's priest who's obsessed with fine dining.

Sometimes I felt the story rambled on a bit in places but more often than not I found myself rapt by the the tragic stories as they unfolded and overall, I found this a powerful piece of work. A flawed masterpiece perhaps.

 

[j d worthington]

A fairly good summation, I think. It's a difficult book to handle in brief compass, as it really is an extremely (some might say excessively) complicated narrative structure, taken from the 1001 Nights, where you also have narratives within narratives within narratives.... And yes, Maturin introduces humor in some very odd places at times (this, however, is fairly common with a lot of Irish weird fiction, at least well into the nineteenth century), and that can be something of a readjustment. (Eliza Parsons, incidentally, included quite a bit of humor in her Castle of Wolfenbach -- one of the famous, or infamous, "seven horrid novels" of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey fame -- though there it is handled a good deal more smoothly overally.)

What I think carries Melmoth is the very starkness of the book as a whole. The tragic episodes are truly tragic and horrific -- the madhouse tale, for instance, is at times almost impossible to read -- and Maturin wrote with a fiery passion which, at its best, leaps off the page and grips the reader by the throat. He has moments of this in his other work, but never anything even approaching what he accomplished in Melmoth. While Mrs. Radcliffe's novels are much more restrained (generally speaking) and as much "novels of sentiment" as novels of terror, Maturin's magnum opus is very much of the latter sort, and the result is a powerful but, as you point out, flawed one.

Yes, I'd agree that it is a flawed masterpiece, and I am glad that we have for some time had it so readily available again, unlike a goodly number of the original Goths which have either disappeared completely or are extant in only a handful of copies (sometimes as few as one, so far as is known).

 

[Fried Egg]

Of all the miserable accounts, I think it is Moncada's experiences that were the most horrific. I mean I kept thinking his situation couldn't get any worse and yet it did. Somehow he retained his sanity and came through it.