Table Of ContentTHE LITERATURE OF GUILT
The Literature of
Guilt
From Gulliver to Golding
PATRICKREILLY
Senior Lecturer in English
University 01 Glasgow
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
©Patrick Reilly 1988
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1988 978-0-333-44342-2
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First published 1988
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS Lm
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG212XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Reilly, Patrick
The literature of guilt: from Gulliver
toGolding
1. English fiction - History and criticism
2. Guilt in literature
1. Title
823' .009'353 PR830.G8
ISBN 978-1-349-09561-2 ISBN 978-1-349-09559-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09559-9
To the memory of my father and mother
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction: the Dark Epiphany 1
2 Gulliver's Travels: Looking into the Pool 15
3 Heart 0/ Darkness: a Choice of Nightmares 46
4 Death in Venice: the Boons of Chaos 69
5 Nineteen Eighty-Four: the Insufficient Self 92
6 The Fall: Living in the Little-Ease 114
7 Lord o[ the Flies: Beelzebub's Boys 138
Notes 162
Index 174
vii
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my colleague Professor Philip Hobsbaum for advice
and encouragement throughout the writing of this book. I should
like to thank the Editors of Was: Hefte für Kultur and Politik for
permission to use material that first appeared in that journal. I am
especially indebted to Miss Ingrid Swanson for her skill and
patience in preparing the typescript for publication.
viii
1
Introduction: the Dark
Epiphany
Only Matthew of the four evangelists describes the two epiphanies ,
positive and negative, redemptive and destructive, connected with
the life and death of Jesus. The positive epiphany, that celebrated
by the Church, is, of course, the coming of the Magi to the stable,
where, penetrating with the eyes of faith the disguise of the home
less infant, they recognised the lord of the universe and the hope of
mankind. The moment is one of salvation in which the self attains
new, breathtaking dignity by virtue of its newly revealed kinship
with the incamate God. The negative epiphany is the sudden
blasting awareness of his own vileness that broke upon Judas after
his act of betrayal - so sickened was he at the taste of his true self
that he went and hanged it. 'I am gall, 1 am heartbum ... my taste
was me.') Hopkins, at the nadir of despondency and self-dispar
agement, makes the same discovery as Judas, though escaping the
ultimate despair. This Judas moment when the self gags at its own
corruption has become a salient, almost a defining, characteristic of
modem literature. It is especially interesting because here, as in so
much else, our own century has shockingly challenged the assump
tions and pieties of its predecessor.
'Thou didst think too highly of men';2 the Grand Inquisitor's
rebuke to Christ is not one that could legitimately be levelled
against the writers of our time, but the great nineteenth-century
writers might have had some difficulty in refuting the accusation.
Graham Greene declares that 'in all writers there occurs a moment
of crystallisation when the dominant theme is plainly expressed',
and goes on to discover such a moment in Hardy's phrase about the
President of the Immortals torturing Tess.3 If we were to risk ex
tending Greene's dictum from the oeuvre of an individual artist to
the literature of an age, we would find the moment of crystallisation
in nineteenth-century literature to be very different from that de-
1
2 The Literature 01 Guilt
tected in Hardy. If the dominant theme in Hardy is the human
animal harried to destruction, that of nineteenth-century literature
is the rescued sinner, the near-ruined individual plucked from the
brink of moral catastrophe. Not crime and punishment, but crime
and redemption is the leit motiv of the age from the Ancient
Mariner onwards:
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
To which of us is prayer forbidden, what sinner so abandoned as to
be beyond the claim of grace? The redemptive mythology, whether
religious or secularised, favoured by the nineteenth century
excluded the idea of the doomed culprit, the man like Macbeth or
Claudius or Marlowe's Faustus, the man sundered from grace,
who, wanting to pray, cannot. In the hour of truth the criminal will
be possessed with creative remorse - the crime will be undone, the
error rectified. Some such optimistic conviction sustains works
such as The Ancient Mariner, Goethe's Faust and Hugo's Les Miser
ables.
The idea of reclamation is central to the literature of the age. The
theme of the nineteenth-century novel from Jane Eyre onwards
('Reader, I married hirn') is rescue, and its majorpractitioners are all
strenuously involved in the salvage industry. Janet's Repentance: all
it needs is the change of possessive to make the title applicable to so
many key works of the time. In their pages we contemplate a gallery
of escapees, aseries of lives recovered from crime, despair and
waste. Jean Valjean is simply the most dramatic of the reprieved,
and Hugo's preface makes it plain that crime is as much a com
modity as coal, produced by society in much the same kind of way.
If we wish to discontinue the supply of violent men and prostituted
women, his book will tell us how to do it. The all-sufficient deter
rent is, of course, love. 'Those to whom evil is done / 00 evil in
retum.'4 Auden's lines are almost platitudinously irrefutable, and
the savage Valjean reflects the savage society that has so consum
mately succeeded in making hirn what he iso '00 your duty towards
me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind.'s So
declares the Creature to Frankenstein and the book shows the
terrible results of not responding to this appeal. But the converse is
Introduction: the Dark Epiphany 3
also blessedly true, as the strategy of Hugo's saintly bishop so
amply demonstrates. Love is stronger than hatred; amor vincit
omnia. This is as true of Pip and 5ydney Carton and the penitent
Dombey as it is of 5ilas Mamer and Dorothea Brooke. Each of these
characters is a brand saved from the buming, a potential castaway
rescued by love.
'I believe that people are almost always better than their neigh
bours think they are.'6 Dorothea Brooke, instinctively defending
Lydgate from the insinuation of bribery, simultaneously makes a
larger point on her creator's behalf. George Eliot holds to the funda
mental decency of the human being, to his capacity for generosity
and his ability to stand upright again after a fall. The compassionate
condusion of Chapter 74 of Middlemarch makes this dear when a
rather commonplace woman, not remarkable hitherto for virtue or
intelligence, nobly sustains in the hour of crisis her fallen husband:
'Look up, Nicholas.' 50 great is the power of love that it can dis
pense with words: 'the confession was silent, and her promise of
faithfulness was silent . . . a movement of new compassion and old
tendemess went through her like a great wave' .7 Dostoevsky shows
a similar belief in the power of speechless love at the end of the
'Legend of the Grand Inquisitor': the startling kiss instead of the
verbal defence that both we and the old man expect, the gesture of
love which shakes if it does not convert the accuser - what more
dramatic exemplification could there be of the maxim that actions
speak louder than words, what more cogent demonstration that
love can disarm where reprisal merely inflames? The silent recon
ciliation of the Bulstrodes recapitulates the even finer, because
more dramatically rendered, condusion of Chapter 42 when Doro
thea overcomes a natural sense of resentment and wounded pride
to sacrifice herself for her insensitive, offending husband. Her
generosity evokes in turn a reciprocal magnanimity from the
usually egotistic Casaubon. Treat people weIl and they will behave
well-it is Hugo's lesson all over again. Dorothea reaIises fearfully
how dose she has come to 'hurting a lamed creature' , and the final
scene is of selfishness routed by love: 'she put her hand into her
husband's , and they went along the broad corridor together'. 8 It is
the central artide of George EIiot's creed: we must love each other
because there is no God to whom the duty can be delegated; we
must, therefore we will. Man is his own and his only redeemer.
The indignant Dorothea, smarting from her husband's sIights,
might so easily have toppled irrecoverably into the pit (Gwendolen
