Lud-in-the-Mist as a novel of ideas
Part three on Hope Mirrlees' story
Previous posts on Lud-in-the-Mist gave an overview of the novel and looked at its portrayal of Faery. I concluded that Mirrlees’ book should be remembered not so much for its version of Faery as for its considered reflection on certain ideas, in a fantasy setting. It is a “novel of ideas”.
It includes many literary and mythological allusions. In Greek myth, for example, Endymion was a worshipper of the Moon Goddess. But I think the book’s ideas are also informed by the political context.
It was published barely a decade after the Bolshevik revolution, and there had been other unsuccessful revolutions across parts of Europe, leading to the general strike of May 1926 in Britain itself. So it’s not too surprising to read that a bourgeois revolution had toppled Dorimare’s decaying aristocracy two centuries before the tale began, and also that the bourgeois era itself had become stultified, its rulers cut off from commoners. But Mirrlees had a wealthy patrician background; hot-blooded revolutionary feeling is not to be expected from her. Rather, her “class struggle” involved only minor unrest among the plebs, and Duke Aubrey’s invading army from Faery did not topple the merchant overlords.
The literary and political elements both feed into the main substance of the book: Modernism comes to Fairyland.
Portrait of a moon goddess. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Modernism had its heyday in the early decades of the twentieth century. Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem has been described as “modernism's lost masterpiece… and is considered by some to have had an influence on the work of her friend, T. S. Eliot, and on that of Virginia Woolf.”
Modernism suggested that people are not self-contained units, but are subordinated to wider social forces, as well as inner ones. The latter include psycho-sexual drives and desires; Freud was making an impact at this time (and makes an unpleasant appearance in Mirrlees’ own Paris: A Poem). Hence Dorimare people’s inner fears and longings could turn up as fairies. Modernism also portrayed an inherent uncertainty, ambiguity and fragmentation in society as a whole, and sometimes in physical reality itself, and this too takes fictional form in Mirrlees’ tale.
Dorimare gathers together the rational, the steady, the industrious and the moral, Faery the wild, the amoral, the fluid, and the artistic. They clash, but they also interweave and reflect one another. So, for example, the novel can play with the idea that the law, the epitome of cut-and-dried precision and clarity, is just as fanciful and detached from reality as Fairyland.
In the story we learn that a familiar object or person, if stared at long enough, grows weird and unfamiliar until at last they refer you into yourself.
You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait… yet with every added stroke of the brush… the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candle-light, when all the house is still.
And yet illusions and fancies, under similar scrutiny, also fall away.
The songs and legends described Fairyland as a country where the villages appeared to be made of gold and cinnamon wood, and where priests, who lived on opobalsum and frankincense, hourly offered holocausts of peacocks and golden bulls to the sun and the moon. But if an honest, clear-eyed mortal gazed on these things long enough, the glittering castles would turn into old, gnarled trees, the lamps into glow-worms, the precious stones into potsherds, and the magnificently-robed priests and their gorgeous sacrifices into aged crones muttering over a fire of twigs.
Life and death interweave in this tale. Mirrlees’ fairies and their fruit are associated with vitality, artistry and joie de vivre, but also with the dead. Indeed country folk “did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead,” calling both the Silent People. Near the end, Chanticleer describes life and death as “the sacred objects of the Mysteries”. After all, dead people have become immaterial like fairies, playthings of the imagination, and fearsome as signs of the Beyond.
In the case of dead people, the Beyond means not just the unknown, but a hint of our own certain demise. Hence we also fear time. It may be no coincidence that when fairy fruit are smuggled into Chanticleer’s house, they are hidden in his grandfather clock.
Otherness exists in the everyday world as a man contemplates a loved woman, or perhaps, when anyone studies their lover: at one point middle aged Nathaniel contemplates his wife, and “suddenly he saw her with the glamour on her that used to madden him in the days of his courtship, the glamour of something that is delicate, and shadowy, and far-away—the glamour that lets loose the lust of the body of a man for the soul of a woman.”
Image by Bronisław Dróżka from Pixabay.
What we have here is that rarest of creatures, the fantasy novel of ideas…. One academic has characterized Mirrlees' novels as being about "the contested boundaries of Art and Life." True enough. I see also the influence of Jane Ellen Harrison in the division of the world into Apollonian and Dionysian aspects, the homely and the wild. Nor are the centuries-long struggle between Classicism and Romanticism or Freud's theories of the conscious and unconscious mind or the relationship between terror and beauty irrelevant to our understanding of this work.
The amorality, fickleness and creativity of the fairies certainly evoked the unconscious and the Id to me – something straight from Freud’s playbook, however much Mirrlees disliked him.
Equally, the spiteful side of Duke Aubrey could have been a response to hyper-entitled “creatives” of her acquaintance, who claimed artistic license for selfishness, malice or cruelty.
One character who rises above these contradictions is old Hempie, Chanticleer’s childhood nurse. She can’t see the point of trying to keep Fairyland sealed off, and has happily accepted fairy handicrafts into her bedroom. As for time, she says there’s “no clock like the sun and no calendar like the stars.”
And why? Because it gets one used to the look of Time. There’s no bogey from over the hills that scares one like Time. But when one’s been used all one’s life to seeing him naked, as it were, instead of shut up in a clock, like he is in Lud, one learns that he is as quiet and peaceful as an old ox dragging the plough.
In her commonsense way she prefigures the resolution of the story, when Dorimare catches up with her and allows Faery back into itself, without too much disturbance to the order of things.
This resolution makes an interesting contrast with other takes on the issue of reason versus creativity. One reviewer remarks how we “have been conditioned by contemporary fantasy to know exactly where our sympathies lie: with the fairy smugglers and against the self-satisfied merchants. But the fairy fruit is not wholesome stuff, and its effects are alarming… there is also the sick stench of cruelty.” In the same vein, another says: “Too often this sort of struggle is presented purely one-sided: art must win out over anything that reeks of conformity or repression. In Lud-in-the-Mist, as for Mirrlees presumably, creativity is a dangerous, wild thing. Given totally over to it, the rulers of Dorimare had become abominations.” For Mirrlees this balanced resolution probably had political connotations as well, but that is another issue entirely.
Modernist art was often self-referential, or “self-reflexive”, deliberately highlighting its artificial, constructed nature. So rather than trying to build up the self-contained “Secondary World” that Tolkien called for, Mirrlees allows her metaphors to poke through the fictional fabric, especially toward the end of the tale. “There are many trees in my orchard,” the Duke tells Chanticleer, “and many and various are the fruit they bear—music and dreams and grief and, sometimes, joy. All your life, Chanticleer, you have eaten fairy fruit.” The Dorimare cemetery is called the Fields of Grammary, and the author ends by telling us “that the Written Word is a Fairy, as mocking and elusive as Willy Wisp, speaking lying words to us in a feigned voice.”