Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (17 page)

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page 43
has conscious limits. Characters can reveal the animal impulses of the human, and the deeper irrationalities of the ways in which human beings interpret their lives, and use themselves and each other. Such revelation is subversive, for it involves testing and rejecting most conventional interpretations of character and almost all moral exhortations. It would be quite wrong to say that Weldon reveals "the worst" beneath a smiling veneer of gentility or civilization. The
veneer
often really is "the worst"; what lies behind it is often very cruel, but often potentially fine and lively. Unorthodoxies and secrets may sometimes be the sources of consolation and the symptoms of a struggling vitality. Characters must be given situations in which the multiplex nature of humankind can reveal itself, and the reader too needs to be startled out of orthodoxy by being made to accept some nonrational surprising story-conceptslike the existence of Joanna's four clones, or the power of a Mab and Mrs. Tree in witchcraft.
That the insights of morality and the insights of fiction can be at odds is itself the subject of
The Rules of Life
(1987), which postulates the overthrow and replacement of conventional religion by "the GNFR, or Great New Fictional Religion" (p. 7). In
Letters to Alice,
Weldon complains of the duty attributed to the writer of coming up with answers, moral solutions, guidance, and consolation:
It puts, of course, quite a burden on the writer, who is expected to direct all this mental theatre, to be seen as an Agony Aunt as well as the translator of the Infinite, and the handmaiden to the Muse ... [P. 74]
But Weldon herself, it might be retorted, has invited such treatment by the authoritiveeven authoritarianvoice by which the narrator or one of the characters trumpets opinions. It is one of the attractions of novels, ancient and modern, that they are gnomic, that they offer wisdom in various observations. Weldon sometimes overdoes the gnomic, the didactic;
Darcy's Utopia
seems nothing but opinion, and surprisingly boring. Weldon is at her best when attending inventively to the situation and not overdoing her (or her characters') commentary. A little of the gnomic goes a long, long way. The ironic distance sustained in both
She-Devil
and
The Hearts and Lives of Men
makes for their success.
Weldon's "characters" interest her only in a limited way, one feelsthey are the practical means to the end which is the whole novel, the action. This makes her in some respects an Aristotelian. Aristotle stressed that tragedy is "the imitation of an action" and made character (
ethos
) secondary. Of course, tragedy is not what Weldon is afterand we have lost Aristotle's lectures on comedy, so we don't know what he would have said. (He might even have been as dull and regular on the subject as some
 
Page 44
reconstructors have made him out to be.) Aristotle's
Poetics
is in any case a sleight of mind, a brilliant trick. At one stroke he got the West for over two thousand years to discuss tragedy and drama as humanistic matters alone, subject to the rational criteria of
belles lettres
. Aristotle ignored (astonishingly) the nature and purpose of the
dionysia,
the religious ceremonies at which Athenian plays were presented. The religious, celebratory, and sacrificial nature of the Greek plays, and the drumbeat of blood, flesh, and need behind them were superbly snubbed by Aristotle, whose own act of
hubris,
when one comes to think of it, has few equals. It took Nietzsche to restore the balance and put Dionysius (his Dionysius, at all events) in the picture. Fay Weldon does not believe in regularized Aristotelian tragedy, and all her works might be called Dionysian. She dislikes religion, almost as much as Nietzsche, disapproving both Jewish and Christian, her references to Christianity being more caustic and detailed in the aggregate than those to Judaism. Yet she is often at her best, her most witty, when pondering or playing with some piece of Scripture: "If thine eye offend me take a good look at yourself. If thine I offend thee, change it" (
Cloning,
p. 324).
At times Weldon seems to be trying to invent or interpret a religion of Darwinism; although she speaks negatively of Hardy's
Tess
in
Letters to Alice,
there are moments of approximation of a Hardyesque cosmology, but without any tragedies or Presidents of the Immortals. Weldon is not trying to do without religion altogether; the religion summoned up in the novels is less rational Epicurean than a mythical or mythological relative of Wicca, even though one can sense the author trying to keep the lid on this.
At one point in
Puffball
(1980), the narrative voice remonstrates against personifying blind forces:
Not that "nature" can reasonably be personified in this wayfor what is nature, after all, for living creatures, but the sum of the chance genetic events which have led us down one evolutionary path or another. And although what seem to be its intentions may, in a bungled and muddled way, work well enough to keep this species or that propagating, they cannot be said always to be desirable for the individual. [P. 14]
No, perhaps nature cannot
reasonably
be personified, but what excites Weldon is not reason but the great Life Force, the biological drive which generates life.
Having repudiated personification, Weldon brings it back:
We no longer see Nature as blind, although she is. Her name is imbued with a sense of purpose, as the name of God used to be.... if we can not in all
 
Page 45
conscience speak of God we must speak of Nature. Wide-eyed, clear-eyed, purposeful Nature. Too late to abandon her. Let us seize the word, seize the day; lay the N on its side and call our blind mistress Nature
*. [
Puffball,
p. 118]
At one level, this is prosy nonsense. Of course, some of us, another "we," can in "conscience" speak of God and have more difficulty speaking of "Nature.'' And why is it "too late" to abandon "her" rather than perhaps merely too early? Weldon's rather labored and hectoring narrative statement is refreshed by the invention at the end, the expression of desire for another word that would call for another typography. The word beginning with an N-on-its-side
looks
like "Sature" and creates interesting resonances with "Saturn," "satire," and "suture." A new word is needed for the mental suture or stitching together of a gap or rent, though this reconciliation can be performed only satirically. And yet there is need for recognition of a feminine force in things, "our mistress" who is, however, to be recognized as old, slow, determined, inconsiderate, somewhat balefula female counterpart of Saturn. This is the female Life Force.
Women are interesting to Weldon because they have a close and unreasonable relation to the female Life Force, to generative power, a matter which men don't understand. When women try to intercede with the Life Force, begging it to obey their personal wishes by taking contraceptive pills or undergoing abortion, they are meddling in a masculine way, and Weldon enjoys the comeuppance administered by pregnancy. The generative religion is Weldon's religion, which makes her a dangerous companion at times, admittedly. She is best when she can project and laugh at her own tendencies to fascistic control through nature-ism. Comedy customarily intervenes to save her from Lawrentian solemnities. Yet conceptually her novels sometimes wobble a little on their axes.
Puffball
itself presents an interesting internal conceptual conflictnever resolvedbetween the philosophical vision of ultimate Meaninglessness and a Wicca or Goddess-shaped vision of Meaningful Rhythms. Liffey, the heroine, is one of the yuppies who try to order the world according to their wishes, symbolized by her willful repudiation of conception. It is not only biology (rationally considered) that intervenes but the power of Glastonbury Tor, the old gods and forces that refuse to be thwarted. Mabs Tucker, the jealous witch who tries to curse Liffey's pregnancy, is herself a representative of that older world of blood-knowledge, the forces that must be respected. In
Puffball
Weldon carries to its most extreme degree the interest in the great drama of egg and sperm. (At times, one could wish her drama were more Shandyesque in the treatment.) Weldon characters often have sex, and the encounters are wittily described,

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