Episode 17 - Coronation Special! Titus Groan with Toby Frost

[Dan Jones]

It's Coronation Day! Well, not quite. But it's coming. This month we're tackling Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, the first book in the seminal Gormenghast series. Titus follows the birth of the titular character and the first eighteen months of his life, which culminates in a very strange, ersatz coronation of its own. Joining @The Big Peat and me as we clamber across the rooftops and sneak through the dungeons of Gormenghast is the author @Toby Frost, best known for his the Space Captain Smith novels, Dark Renaissance fantasy series, and Straken from the Warhammer 40K universe.

We consider the sprawling castle-state of Gormenghast and it means when the old and new clash head-on, and specifically what it means when the ossified state, for so long indulged in its own wilful blindness and ritualised behaviour, comes into contact with the shock of the new, especially when the "new" - in this case, the kitchen boy Steerpike) is violent, psychopathic, and ruthless. We consider the utterly bizarre and grotesque cast of characters, from the wilfully blind, Prospero-like Earl Sepulchrave, who ostensibly rules the castle, to the ensemble of witless, violent, and occasionally noble people who live beneath his crumbling sovereignty. And we consider Titus himself, a marginalised titular character if ever there was one, who only appears as a baby, and yet whose coronation the book slowly builds to.

Elsewhere, The Judge considers the coronation as a way of revivifying the state, just as we mentioned when discussing Excalibur last month). She considers the Crown Jewels, the Coronation Oath, and how the relationship between the Crown and its subjects has changed over the centuries. To see how a real monarchy like the House of Windsor can stop itself from becoming a fossilised version of itself a la Gormenghast, The Judge shows how the coronation is a living, shifting thing, where rituals, symbols and laws either change or stay the same to maintain a crucial balance between antiquity and modernity.

Though @Phyrebrat is away this month he's still here in spirit as he won the 75 word challenge this March with his entry The Death Of Ageing, and The Martian Space Force find unexpected kindred spirits in the crazy, smelly, stupid inhabitants of Gormenghast.

Next month
Next month we'll be joined by the winner of the British Fantasy Award and one of the brightest lights of modern fantasy, the author RJ Barker, who will be talking with us about one of his greatest loves, Richard Adams's Watership Down.

Index
[0:00:00 - 56:42] Interview Part 1
[0:56:43 - 0:59:59] Skit
[1:00:00 - 1:15:05] The Judge's Corner
[1:15:06 - 1:16:21] Challenge Winner
[1:16:22 - 1:55:25] Interview Part 2
[1:55:26 - 2:00:40] Credits and close

 

[Toby Frost]

Thanks Dan! I really enjoyed doing the podcast.

 

[The Judge]

Great talk, guys. I thoroughly enjoyed listening! But it wasn't me who made the comment about the characters in Titus Groan being unlikeable. I read it back in 2015, but I can't recall discussing it here on Chrons save in passing, though I did write about it in my thoughts on my then-blog, which can be summed up in my first comments after I'd started it:

Arresting images and quotable lines abound on every page, if not every paragraph, but I can only read it in small doses as the writing is so incredibly rich, the description so vivid, the characters so grotesque, and the plot so non-existent.​

Neat use of the Zadok the Priest at the end, too, Dan!


As to my talk this month, if anyone wants more detail about the Coronation Oaths and the ceremonial generally, I've given some links from my research here The Chronscast Talks -- the Law and History But for those more taken with the beauty of the ceremonial, I can heartily recommend The Crown Jewels: The Official Illustrated History by Anna Keay (Royal Collection Publications with Historic Royal Palaces, published by Thames & Hudson) which I received as a belated birthday present this week. History at its most sumptuous!

 

[Dan Jones]

But it wasn't me who made the comment about the characters in Titus Groan being unlikeable. I read it back in 2015, but I can't recall discussing it here on Chrons save in passing, though I did write about it in my thoughts on my then-blog, which can be summed up in my first comments after I'd started it:

Arresting images and quotable lines abound on every page, if not every paragraph, but I can only read it in small doses as the writing is so incredibly rich, the description so vivid, the characters so grotesque, and the plot so non-existent.

Gosh that was a long time ago, it might have been that that I remembered... or possibly something else. It's a strange old book, is Titus. It become better in retrospective, considered in the round as opposed to being deep in the weeds of the prose. I think what Peake did was admirable, and I understand why it's considered a great novel. But yes, the plot is so very simple it would function perfectly well as a novella, or perhaps even a short story.

I thought your TJC was one of your best yet. I was bandying around ideas for future episodes and was thinking we might need to feature a TJC in the future around the legal implications of AI and its applications.

 

[The Judge]

I thought your TJC was one of your best yet.

I'm actually miffed, as looking again at my research notes this morning to get the links I needed for my Chronscast History thread I realised that in the rush to get it written and recorded I'd missed out more historical details and changes to the pre-1688 Coronation Oaths I'd meant to include and had completely forgotten about.

I was bandying around ideas for future episodes and was thinking we might need to feature a TJC in the future around the legal implications of AI and its applications.

Eek! I'll have to pass on that one unless and until I can find some articles from people who specialise in Intellectual Property Law and who know what they're talking about, not least as there aren't likely to be any British enactments or cases involving AI (at least ones which I can actually understand) for some time.

 

[Toby Frost]

"Lovecraft writes Wodehouse"!
"Blackadder meets The Name of the Rose"!

 

[Extollager]

I got to teach this book in a one-shot college course something like 20 years ago. I don't remember the experience well, but I think the book went over OK with students. I'd read Titus Groan once before, and knew that including it in the semester plan was a bit of a risk, so my thanks to those long-ago students who (as I recall) didn't let me down.

I read it again within the past few years. It's a great work of fantasy, but often one would not feel ready to reread it. I wonder who would publish it now if it were a new book. Seriously, I wonder; that's not a rhetorical comment. Who would? I mean, would any major publisher put it into print? I don't follow publishing very closely now, if I ever did, but maybe someone here can think of some British or American publisher that might well give Titus Groan the go-ahead.

Then too I might wonder who would give it a good review if it were newly published now. Michael Dirda at the Washington Post is one of us -- he would review it, and favorably, I think. Who else?

 

[Toby Frost]

I wonder who would publish it now if it were a new book.

Not many, I suspect! But I'd say the same thing about The Lord of the Rings, if it appeared out of the blue today and we didn't have The Hobbit and the stereotypes of fantasy in place. Both are very much their own thing, and a lot of their success comes from the sheer power of the author to drag the reader into their own weird setting and prose. I agree that I wouldn't want to read Titus Groan often: it would be like eating strong curry or birthday cake for every meal.

I think things have changed greatly, partly because there is so much stuff out there now. So many more people get the opportunity to come up with strange worlds and see them in print, even leaving aside the world of self-publishing. Even 1984 feels clunky and crude in parts, but there just wasn't very much like it at the time, at least in the popular imagination. Titus Groan had the chance to come out of pretty much nowhere - there wasn't even a genre for it.

Incidentally, I really liked @Phyrebrat 's story. Really poetic.

 

[Extollager]

Toby. it's interesting that you mention 1984 along with Titus Groan, because one way of considering Gormenghast Castle is as a late totalitarian society.

In Gormenghast there is evidently no need for police state terror; this is an achieved totalitarian state, in which rebellion, departure from its imperatives, is unthinkable. (Titus, like C. S. Lewis's Dymer, doesn't think his way out; he is just compelled to his escape by the power of his blood.) The rituals go on meticulously although hardly anyone really believes in them, which is like, say, East Germany and Russia in the late 1980s. (A parallel between the place of Marxist-Leninist books and the ritual books of Barquentine, Sourdust, etc. exists.)

Religion and the state are one. Education is entirely devoted to the perpetuation of the state even though creativity in Gormenghast is virtually extinct. (My sense is that Fuchsia has something of an artistic temperament, but no teacher of living art to teach her, and so her artistic impulse wastes itself in gestures and productions that she zealously keeps private -- they matter to her alone, and are probably not very good.) As we see more in the second book, Dr. Prunesquallor is an intellectual who can see much of the soul-shriveling truth of Gormenghast, probably because his vocation requires him to deal with real things -- otherwise people wouldn't get well; but he doesn't think in terms of any place to escape to.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Titus Groan would be self-published, then become a word of mouth hit.

 

[Toby Frost]

I hope so!

@Extollager , have you read the edition of Titus Groan with an introduction by Anthony Burgess? He says that Titus Groan isn't a deliberate comment on its times, but that elements in it reflect the time when it was written.

I think this comes down to how you define "totalitarian". Personally, I see Gormenghast as a decrepit feudal monarchy. I say this for two main reasons: the technology of close control (cameras, propaganda, informants etc) isn't there, and nor is the sort of deliberate cruelty that one expects from fascists or Stalinists. Gertrude and Sepulchrave hardly seem to notice their subjects, while someone like 1984's O'Brien is really there for the torturing ("The cruelty is the point"). I'd say that once those things have gone, it's not really totalitarian, but maybe that's splitting hairs.

Interestingly the BBC adaptation gave some of the characters their own artistic styles: Prunesquallor's house is Georgian and slightly fussy, while Steerpike's rooms have a 1930s fascist style.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Feudal Monarchy for me too.

 

[Extollager]

How about a totalitarian society instantiated as an hereditary feudal state?

Yes, how one defines "totalitarian" is involved.

A developing totalitarian society is one that claims everything: the language, education, religion or what takes its place, arts, the innermost thoughts too of every person, but has to use propaganda and terror to enforce obedience. An achieved totalitarian society claims everything and receives everything willingly from everyone despite its sterility and pervasive falseness.

The society in 1984 is totalitarian certainly, but it's not a fully achieved totalitarian society because secret police, surveillance, etc. are still necessary. When it is fully achieved, they would no longer be necessary. Everyone will believe in Big Brother, especially those who are behind his announcements and who know he has no independent existence; doublethink will be so perfect in them that they fully believe the lie while knowing it is a lie. The idea of truth as something objective will be extinct in an achieved totalitarian society.

As for cruelty, yes, it will presumably continue, but not because it is actually "necessary." The inflicters of torture and murder will know that their victims do not deserve penalties even because the "needs" of the state, but, thanks to doublethink, they won't need to think the victims do. There won't even be a dialogue even like this:

Victim: Why have I been arrested? What am I guilty of?
Torturer: We wouldn't have arrested you if you weren't guilty.

In a fully achieved totalitarian society, the victims too will practice doublethink. Knowing their innocence, they will submit to whatever brutalities are inflicted upon them, knowing their guilt.

Something like that perhaps has already happened in Gormenghast. Gormenghast may be an achieved totalitarian state in decline. It's sterile. Creativity is banished outside the walls, though artworks may be brought inside, to be burned or stored away where no one sees them except a custodian.

So far as Peake shows us, history is extinct in Gormenghast. I recall no historical monuments, no literary references, no glimpses of schoolchild education, that would indicate that historical fact is available as perspective on the present. This raises the question of what the boys are learning in school, and though I have just reread Gormenghast within the past few months I don't remember much about the curriculum. I would expect that they learn pointless rhetoric, useless mathematics, perhaps mind-numbing dates and names with no evident importance, etc., and lots and lots of the ceremonies of Gormenghast.

Whether Peake intended something like this, might be another matter; it seems to me that this angle of view of Gormenghast could help one to see what's going on there.

Everything truly creative goes on beyond the confines of the Castle. Fuchsia, as I see her, would eventually have turned into a sour and frustrated adult, ceasing his artistic outbursts, who probably would have destroyed her artworks in disgust. She would have become a rigorous devotee of the Gormenghast ceremonies.

I don't see Gormenghast as like any real feudal monarchy, with the basis thereof in limited powers and responsibilities of the various orders of society (those who work [including artists], those who fight, those who pray). A society inhabited by people who produced The Divine Comedy and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight etc. -- wasn't artistically sterile.

The baron might connive to take your sheep from you but he didn't claim to own your soul.

In contrast, Gormenghast, like the 1984 society, like East Germany and Russia, etc., is a godless state, or you could say that the "god" is Gormenghast itself. How could a "rival" to the worship of Gormenghast be tolerated? Where are its priests? In Gomenghast, all the dwellers in the Castle are "priests," with their various responsibilities to the "idol." They do their ritual jobs at the prescribed times and then return to petting their white cats or dusting their folios or whatever.

Or maybe someone can show me where I'm forcing the textual evidence to fit a thesis. ; )

 

[Dan Jones]

I hope so!

@Extollager , have you read the edition of Titus Groan with an introduction by Anthony Burgess? He says that Titus Groan isn't a deliberate comment on its times, but that elements in it reflect the time when it was written.

I think this comes down to how you define "totalitarian". Personally, I see Gormenghast as a decrepit feudal monarchy. I say this for two main reasons: the technology of close control (cameras, propaganda, informants etc) isn't there, and nor is the sort of deliberate cruelty that one expects from fascists or Stalinists. Gertrude and Sepulchrave hardly seem to notice their subjects, while someone like 1984's O'Brien is really there for the torturing ("The cruelty is the point"). I'd say that once those things have gone, it's not really totalitarian, but maybe that's splitting hairs.

Interestingly the BBC adaptation gave some of the characters their own artistic styles: Prunesquallor's house is Georgian and slightly fussy, while Steerpike's rooms have a 1930s fascist style.

This is a great point. It's definitely not a totalitarian state, as it doesn't have the wherewithal or care enough to control its citizens to that extent.

Steerpike certainly has the makings of a totalitarian. He enjoys the cruelty (witness him pulling the legs off insects while wittering about equality).

 

[Toby Frost]

I think we could probably argue about this forever, but I just don't see Gormenghast as totalitarian. For one thing, the point of totalitarianism is to indulge the violent impulses of those in control (I'm thinking of 1984 and Umberto Eco's list of factors of fascism here, although not all totalitarian societies are outright fascist - depending on how you define "fascist" of course!). Brave New World is only non-violent because the people in it are bred to the point of being barely human at all (interestingly, Orwell seemed to think it missed the point, and Huxley seemed to think the same about 1984). The point, really, is that humans can't fit properly into a totalitarian system, and this causes them to be unhappy or to rebel, both of which allow those in power the pleasure of sadistically persecuting them. A totalitarian system effectively turns an entire country into a torture chamber, which Gormenghast certainly doesn't. It isn't oppressive enough to work as such, to my mind.

To some extent, this also begs the question of how bad daily life in Gormenghast is. I suspect that it's just dull, rather than frightening. It's so badly-administered that you could probably just wander off or live as you wished, provided that you were useful (like the Poet). Nobody seems very afraid of anything, and there's no mention of the Groans ever ruling by force or terror. They just rule because ritual says they do, which leads me to this: I don't think a monarchy requires a god to exist (although the Divine Right of Kings was very useful to the monarchs who claimed it). Gormenghast pretty much does have a religion in the form of ritual, with Sourdust as its high priest. Besides, all real-world totalitarian states are religions, in that the leader is seen as a demi-god who can do no wrong.

What Gormenghast reminds me of is Dune, especially the House Atreides bit: a family of relations and advisors, some of them so weird as to be close to the edge of what humans can resemble, ruling in a vaguely benevolent (or just too disinterested to be outright villainous) way. It's not so much evil as a bit rubbish.

 

[Extollager]

"the point of totalitarianism is to indulge the violent impulses of those in control"

If you turn this into a definition, "a totalitarian state is a state founded upon, and maintained always for the gratification of, the violent impulses of those in control," then, yes, Gormenghast is not a totalitarian state.

But is even the society of 1984 totalitarian by that definition? At the end of the novel, O'Brien is done with Winston Smith. The end for which Smith's torture was a means has been accomplished: "He loved Big Brother." There's no indication that Smith will be tortured any more. He loves Big Brother.

I wish there could be some discussion of the distinction I've made between a developing totalitarian state and an achieved one. The physical horrors of a developing totalitarian state have as their telos the establishment of a state of the soul. In an achieved totalitarian state, everything really is for the state, including the inner being of each person, nothing is not for the state, and thus there's no need for censorship, secret police, torture chambers, and so on.

Human flourishing is chronically impaired, perhaps impossible, in Gormenghast. But to the inhabitants, who know only themselves and this Castle, there's "freedom" (so they can spend all their time with their birds and white cats if that's what they like) and, in general, no worries. They come together for the ceremonies and then go back to their apartments. They are content -- except for some of the young people, whose blood stirs in them inchoate restlessness and desire for they know not what; but this won't last. They'll settle in, or die, or -- in the case of Titus -- leave.

 

[Extollager]

"begs the question of how bad daily life in Gormenghast is"

To a decent, intelligent outside observer, it will be exposed as bad. But it seems that for most of the inhabitants (exceptions: Prunesquallor, Titus, Fuchsia) it is experienced as a good life. As I said, they are free to occupy themselves with the things they like. Why, the pale, shrunken kitchen urchins adore Swelter!

 

[Extollager]

"all real-world totalitarian states are religions, in that the leader is seen as a demi-god who can do no wrong"

This would be a feature of a developing totalitarian state. An achieved totalitarian state would not depend upon a figure such as Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceaușescu &c. Insofar as a totalitarian state requires such a cultic figure, it is not yet fully achieved.

Again, I see Gormenghast as an achieved totalitarian state, or perhaps an achieved totalitarian state in decline.

For one thing, people in the Castle don't seem to be having babies, other than Gertrude and Sepulchrave (two children, no more to be expected), and there's no love between them. The Castle is enormous and a lot of people live in it, but it has innumerable uninhabited -- but presumably formerly inhabited -- apartments. Eros, husbands and wives, families -- these are enfeebled in Gormenghast. An achieved totalitarian society has, perhaps, developed largely into a culture of isolated solipsists.

 

[Extollager]

Just one more point, not to monopolize the conversation further. My memory of Titus Alone -- read just once around 1975 -- is that it's apparently set in a futuristic milieu: as I recall someone flies around in a private airplane-rocket or something like that, etc. If we take it that this world Titus comes to is our own, in the future, that would lend all the more support to the notion of identifying Gormenghast Castle as "futuristic" too ... a totalitarian state in decline. I'm not saying that this was what Peake intended to do. His is a poetic sensibility, and poets sometimes seem to deal with cultural currents in ways that to them may be hidden or obscure but that to some of their readers seem to be striking.

OK -- thanks to any who've read these comments patiently.

 

[Toby Frost]

I don't really have much more to say about this. Gormenghast just doesn't feel totalitarian to me: the mechanics aren't there, even in a decayed state, and it doesn't have the right atmosphere. I'd say that it's a decayed monarchy and if it is an exaggeration of anything (which I'm not sure of), it's an exaggeration of a monarchy like the UK's (which was never totalitarian, even when it was downright tyrannical).

The world of Titus Alone feels very different to that of Titus Alone and Gormenghast and the technology seems almost science-fiction (there's a sort of tiny camera that flies through keyholes, IIRC). Ultimately, I don't think the Titus world fits together properly, unlike Middle Earth. I don't know whether it would have fitted together better if Peake had been healthy. I wonder if Tolkien was the first person to create an entirely consistent fantasy world?