I’ve just finished reading Pincher Martin by William Golding. Here’s an extract (context: a man, Christopher Hadley Martin, has been washed up onto a rock and is having hallucinatory memories that are interpolated with fragmentary descriptions of his body falling apart. This is one of the memories - he is seeing a friend, Nathaniel, after a long time):
“Doesn’t like lectures on heaven.”
Then the body was laughing, louder and louder and the water was flowing again. Nat was grinning and blushing too.
“I know. But you don’t have to make it worse.”
He smeared away the water and hiccupped.
“The sort of heaven we invented for ourselves after death, if we aren’t ready for the real one.”
“You would – you curious creature!”
Nathaniel became serious. He peered upwards, raised an index finger and consulted a reference book beyond the ceiling.
“Take us as we are now and heaven would be sheer negation. Without form and void. You see? A sort of black lightning, destroying everything that we call life –”
“I don’t see and I don’t much care but I’ll come to your lecture. My dear Nat – you’ve no idea how glad I am to see you!”
The burning fuse whipped through Nathaniel’s face and he was gone. The centre remained looking down into the funnel. His mouth was open in astonishment and terror.
“And I liked him as much as that!”
The “centre” is Christopher Hadley Martin’s consciousness. It rattles around and contracts and expands inside his body, peeking out of windows, or getting lost. The centre sometimes fills the body completely, sometimes lopsidedly – the body’s experience is sometimes his, and at other times dissociated from him (‘his mouth said things but he could not hear them so he did not know what they were’). The violence, we remember in the backs of our minds, is being done to Christopher’s body. Yet Golding gives Christopher’s consciousness centre stage. He doesn’t use the “wrenched-from-routine, thrust-into-the-extraordinary” trope as an excuse to turn the experience of the consciousness into a series of outward looking discoveries (“oh look, the seagulls look like lizards”/”wow, I am lonely”/”Is there hope for survival?”). We look not through Christopher’s eyes at everything else, but always from outside of him directly at his shifting centre.
Everything collapses into ‘the centre’, so that the rock on which Christopher is sitting is described as a tooth sticking out of his gum. Running his tongue along his teeth reminds Christopher of why the whole place feels familiar.
“I can create my own heaven” Christopher rails against his dwarf woman statue
“You have created it,” he/she/it replies.
And he has. His centre has ballooned out and encompassed everything, distorting it all after some soon abandoned efforts to gain control over its own wild subjectivity. No one else tells it where its boundaries lie when it is given free reign over a rock in the middle of the sea, and so it reigns supreme. It is Golding’s heaven – the black lightning into which the whole book looks.
I am reminded of something Auden writes – he is paraphrasing an opinion he thinks Valéry holds:
most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is. This kind of profundity is a literary effect, which can be calculated like any other literary effect and [is] usually deplorable
But what if someone makes you stare and stare at what-is-not/the absent centre/the darkness, for so long that you begin to notice the little components that make it up? The Lamberts in Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections ‘no longer heard the message of “bell ringing” but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds […it became] not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones’. Golding shows us the centre, and for so long that we come to see what is at its centre – Nathaniel, Mary. We see where it shifts and distorts, what it sucks in, what it spews out. Golding shows you darkness. The components of the darkness. It’s such a good book.
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