Colm Toibin sought authoritative readers for his novel,
including authoritative classicists such as Edith Hall and Natalie Haynes. Yet
this is a novel that queries the role of all sources – whether gods, kings or
parents – and invents a consciousness that Toibin elsewhere describes as ‘the essential privacy of the emerging self,
of the sense of singleness and integrity, of an uncertain moral consciousness,
of a pure and floating individuality on which the novel comes to depend. The
conspiracy in the novel is thus … between the protagonist and the reader.’
(Toibin 2012:3)
That is why both the novel as a form and its emergent dominant
consciousness, an a-social Orestes, wrests the authority to ‘name’ things as
they are from kings, queens, fathers, mothers and the hierarchies that seek to
impose social orders. Rather than allow a focus, as if from the start, to be
any first person narrator who may claim such ‘authority’ (and authorial role),
he ensures that Orestes (as a point of view in a third person narration that
overcomes theirs – morally at least) to be the novels ‘voice’ rather than that
of one of the characters. First person narrators’ attempt to control the stuff
of narrative in this novel but are submerged under questions of their ‘reliability’
and integrity as both narrators and focal centres of a moral consciousness.
Hence, Toibin’s main self-proposed challenge in The House of Names is the genuine
transfer of complex play-text ‘versions’ of the Orestes story to a novel in which
he lends, when he can, his authority as writer to emergent rather than focal
consciousness’s. The latter are compromised by their pasts whose aims are very
much about how to reproduce that past in
the present and control how that present is perceived. Toibin does not allow
either Clytemnestra (with the richness of her inner (indeed infernal) resources)
or the outright and simpler and more conscious love of control in Electra to
dominate. Hence, although given prominence – Clytemnestra opens the novel and
appears, like Mary in The Testament of
Mary, to seek to dominate with her hunger for an authority, as constant as
death itself. Like Milton’s Death she seeks to digest the world she takes in
and transform into a dark art: ‘We are
all hungry now. … Murder makes us ravenous’. This is an art that feeds the
hunger of the ‘taste’ it alone relishes by keeping still (quiet and static in
time) except as a ‘moving’ interior monologue. There is a rich poetry here: ‘I feel if I remain still, something more
will come.’(227) Dead pasts that ‘remain still’ must make the present
appear meaningless in its endeavours to ‘emerge’ anew and different. Contrastingly, Electra, accepts the most heinous
of political oppressions (that represented by a still (because broken- legged)
Aegisthus) to seek power and control rather than inner authority:
‘She no longer went to
her father’s grave. She had become brisk, almost sharp. Since she spent the day
… exercising control … . She … spoke rather of distant regions that would have
to be brought under control. (243f.)
No longer poetry – rather (and Haynes finds a similar
character in her Ani – Antigone) this is the thin legend of a politics of
control.
Orestes (the primary focal ‘point of view’ of the author)
who spends time reworking fictions which rewrite the structures in which
authority, power and control inhere – especially the family (which he witnesses
in continual cycle of formal and semantic change). He does so in collusion with
an author who renders everyone else in full meta-cognitive control of a kind of
conscious role-play that recycles the past. Note, for instance, Agamemnon: Clytemnestra
see him interacting with child Orestes (enacting a sword-fight); ‘as if (he) knew that he must play the part
of the father with his boy for all it was worth.’ There are multiple such
self-conscious references to theatrical and social role-play: ‘’I would assist my mother in her role as
someone who had known grief and was now almost foolish, distracted, harmless.
We could play the parts together even if my brother came back.’ Says Electra
(163).
Orestes in contrast inhabits fictions where people do not
exactly know what their roles are or how to name them. Central to that is his
fictive and imaginative hold on the silences that make up even his sexual and physical
relationship with Leander, until the latter pushes him out of the world of
known roles that he prefers. We know that Orestes experiences a silent physical
tenderness with Leander (125, 134) that cannot be merely explained away by
reference to Greek male bisexuality and which, in its refusal of names – such as
‘sexual’ or ‘physical’ - nevertheless has felt presence in its silence. When Orestes,
in the ‘house of whispers’ (213) that is Mycenae, hears the sexual congress of
Aegisthus and his two favoured bodyguards, by following them to a remote palace
room and waiting and listening outside these ‘sounds were familiar to him and
unmistakable’ but still do not get named.
Attic Tragedy investigates family more radically (and with
self-conscious politics since Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE itself
aimed to refashion family links for the purposes of its democracy and no more
so than in Aeschylus’ Orestes plays) than has been done (except perhaps in Shakespeare)
until modern times. Toibin’s analysis is a defence of what in Margaret Thatcher’s
legislation was called ‘pretend family relationships’ and what more knowing
souls call the ‘chosen family’.
He imagined sometimes
that Leander and Mitros were his sisters, … (115).
These imaginations and plays (transformations of role) seek later
not to be named but merely experienced: ‘Orestes
lay back and leaned his head on Leander’s chest as Leander put his arms around
him and held him. Orestes knew when that happened to say nothing, …’.
Personally I have always wanted Toibin to be known as a
great gay novelist. That would be a help to restore so much of what is lost
otherwise to public discourse of gay sexuality (something Lorca struggled with
when he met open gay people in the USA and thought ill of them in contrast with
Whitman’s ideals). However, to name him thus might be ambivalent – a mere act
of power. In the novel the richest character, however otherwise unreliable as a
‘narrator’ and who needs to be finally (as is old Hamlet by his son) dismissed
as backward-looking ghost, is actually the one who gets nearest to the theme of
that ambivalence and projects it, if not in a way she will ever understand,
into the world:
There are presences I wish to encounter, presences that are close but
not close enough to touch or be seen. I cannot think of their names.
Un-named presences remain open rather than closed
identities. Names may overly bind presences – perhaps. Such is our existential
dilemma. Hence I’ll be happy for Toibin to remain merely a great novelist and
for the radical potential for the future of the novel as champion of chosen
family in his novels such as The
Blackwater Lightship and The Master
to remain unarticulated within that ‘greatness’
All the best
Steve
Toibin, C. (2012) New
Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families London, Viking.
Colm Toibin (2017) House of Names London, Viking: ‘Orestes wanted to say to (Electra) that neither she nor anyone else in the palace had authority.’
Part 3 of a 4-part self-directed project
Colm Toibin sought authoritative readers for his novel, including authoritative classicists such as Edith Hall and Natalie Haynes. Yet this is a novel that queries the role of all sources – whether gods, kings or parents – and invents a consciousness that Toibin elsewhere describes as ‘the essential privacy of the emerging self, of the sense of singleness and integrity, of an uncertain moral consciousness, of a pure and floating individuality on which the novel comes to depend. The conspiracy in the novel is thus … between the protagonist and the reader.’ (Toibin 2012:3)
That is why both the novel as a form and its emergent dominant consciousness, an a-social Orestes, wrests the authority to ‘name’ things as they are from kings, queens, fathers, mothers and the hierarchies that seek to impose social orders. Rather than allow a focus, as if from the start, to be any first person narrator who may claim such ‘authority’ (and authorial role), he ensures that Orestes (as a point of view in a third person narration that overcomes theirs – morally at least) to be the novels ‘voice’ rather than that of one of the characters. First person narrators’ attempt to control the stuff of narrative in this novel but are submerged under questions of their ‘reliability’ and integrity as both narrators and focal centres of a moral consciousness.
Hence, Toibin’s main self-proposed challenge in The House of Names is the genuine transfer of complex play-text ‘versions’ of the Orestes story to a novel in which he lends, when he can, his authority as writer to emergent rather than focal consciousness’s. The latter are compromised by their pasts whose aims are very much about how to reproduce that past in the present and control how that present is perceived. Toibin does not allow either Clytemnestra (with the richness of her inner (indeed infernal) resources) or the outright and simpler and more conscious love of control in Electra to dominate. Hence, although given prominence – Clytemnestra opens the novel and appears, like Mary in The Testament of Mary, to seek to dominate with her hunger for an authority, as constant as death itself. Like Milton’s Death she seeks to digest the world she takes in and transform into a dark art: ‘We are all hungry now. … Murder makes us ravenous’. This is an art that feeds the hunger of the ‘taste’ it alone relishes by keeping still (quiet and static in time) except as a ‘moving’ interior monologue. There is a rich poetry here: ‘I feel if I remain still, something more will come.’(227) Dead pasts that ‘remain still’ must make the present appear meaningless in its endeavours to ‘emerge’ anew and different. Contrastingly, Electra, accepts the most heinous of political oppressions (that represented by a still (because broken- legged) Aegisthus) to seek power and control rather than inner authority:
‘She no longer went to her father’s grave. She had become brisk, almost sharp. Since she spent the day … exercising control … . She … spoke rather of distant regions that would have to be brought under control. (243f.)
No longer poetry – rather (and Haynes finds a similar character in her Ani – Antigone) this is the thin legend of a politics of control.
Orestes (the primary focal ‘point of view’ of the author) who spends time reworking fictions which rewrite the structures in which authority, power and control inhere – especially the family (which he witnesses in continual cycle of formal and semantic change). He does so in collusion with an author who renders everyone else in full meta-cognitive control of a kind of conscious role-play that recycles the past. Note, for instance, Agamemnon: Clytemnestra see him interacting with child Orestes (enacting a sword-fight); ‘as if (he) knew that he must play the part of the father with his boy for all it was worth.’ There are multiple such self-conscious references to theatrical and social role-play: ‘’I would assist my mother in her role as someone who had known grief and was now almost foolish, distracted, harmless. We could play the parts together even if my brother came back.’ Says Electra (163).
Orestes in contrast inhabits fictions where people do not exactly know what their roles are or how to name them. Central to that is his fictive and imaginative hold on the silences that make up even his sexual and physical relationship with Leander, until the latter pushes him out of the world of known roles that he prefers. We know that Orestes experiences a silent physical tenderness with Leander (125, 134) that cannot be merely explained away by reference to Greek male bisexuality and which, in its refusal of names – such as ‘sexual’ or ‘physical’ - nevertheless has felt presence in its silence. When Orestes, in the ‘house of whispers’ (213) that is Mycenae, hears the sexual congress of Aegisthus and his two favoured bodyguards, by following them to a remote palace room and waiting and listening outside these ‘sounds were familiar to him and unmistakable’ but still do not get named.
Attic Tragedy investigates family more radically (and with self-conscious politics since Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE itself aimed to refashion family links for the purposes of its democracy and no more so than in Aeschylus’ Orestes plays) than has been done (except perhaps in Shakespeare) until modern times. Toibin’s analysis is a defence of what in Margaret Thatcher’s legislation was called ‘pretend family relationships’ and what more knowing souls call the ‘chosen family’.
He imagined sometimes that Leander and Mitros were his sisters, … (115).
These imaginations and plays (transformations of role) seek later not to be named but merely experienced: ‘Orestes lay back and leaned his head on Leander’s chest as Leander put his arms around him and held him. Orestes knew when that happened to say nothing, …’.
Personally I have always wanted Toibin to be known as a great gay novelist. That would be a help to restore so much of what is lost otherwise to public discourse of gay sexuality (something Lorca struggled with when he met open gay people in the USA and thought ill of them in contrast with Whitman’s ideals). However, to name him thus might be ambivalent – a mere act of power. In the novel the richest character, however otherwise unreliable as a ‘narrator’ and who needs to be finally (as is old Hamlet by his son) dismissed as backward-looking ghost, is actually the one who gets nearest to the theme of that ambivalence and projects it, if not in a way she will ever understand, into the world:
There are presences I wish to encounter, presences that are close but not close enough to touch or be seen. I cannot think of their names.
Un-named presences remain open rather than closed identities. Names may overly bind presences – perhaps. Such is our existential dilemma. Hence I’ll be happy for Toibin to remain merely a great novelist and for the radical potential for the future of the novel as champion of chosen family in his novels such as The Blackwater Lightship and The Master to remain unarticulated within that ‘greatness’
All the best
Steve
Toibin, C. (2012) New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families London, Viking.