Mark Andresen, independent
A Painter’s Ecstasy?
(Title taken from Mervyn Peake’s poem, ‘The Consumptive, Belsen 1945’)
My theme will be two-fold: about how experience can inform an artist’s work and might subsequently influence the following generation. The first section, as introduction, will be a short, biographical description of Peake’s arrival at Belsen (serving as a war artist for the Hulton Press, commissioned to record the aftermath of the fighting, etc.) and his initial impressions of the camp. This section will be supplemented with appropriately sourced images from the Imperial War Museum, and quotes from Peake’s own published writings.
The second section will cover the subjects Peake encountered within the camp, (the prisoners, conditions, etc.), what he took away from the experience, and how he first translated what he witnessed onto paper. This section will also utilise relevant images and contemporary quotes from archive copies of ‘The Leader’ and ‘Picture Post.’ The third and final section will consider Peake’s completed Belsen sketches, (comparing pre-1945 with post-1945), and how they influenced his subsequent work and took him away from the purely whimsical, externalised, Lear-like Nonsense, to something more darkly internal and melancholic. How it was – specifically - this approach that influenced artists of today; such as Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton.
AYMES-STOKES Sophie, Université de Bourgogne
“I’m on a piece of floating ice the size of Kent”: eccentricity in Mervyn Peake’s work
This paper examines eccentricity as one of the underlying motifs of Peake’s work and explores the textual and pictorial modes by which it is expressed. It takes a preliminary look at two “minor” books: Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948) and Figures of Speech (1954), which epitomize the legacy of two cultural products that are central to the discourse on eccentricity: eccentric biography and nonsense - and the images that accompany them.
In Science and Eccentricity, Victoria Carroll sees 19th-century eccentrics as “boundary figures” that transgressed and/or negotiated boundaries at a time of growing specialization - boundaries defining gender, the generic conventions of scientific works, or the taxonomy of animal species. Peake’s work demonstrates an acute awareness of those boundaries and of the threats to the body, to identity, or to rational discourse. In this respect his book of nonsense and his epistolary mock travel-book reflect the need to delimit and/or undermine taxonomies and to create new singularities. Nonsense, Peake said in the radio talk “Alice and Tenniel and Me”, “swims, plunges, cavorts, and rises in its own element. It’s a fabulous fowl.” It is just the sort of creature that would lead explorers/naturalists such as the uncle in Letters from a Lost Uncle to embark on new expeditions.
Letters from a Lost Uncle and Figures of Speech shed light on Peake’s larger works of fiction and on the closed but self-sustaining environments in which eccentrics thrive in their isolation and obsession. The inhabitants of Gormenghast are characterized by extreme singularity and self-sufficiency. They function as what James Gregory calls “extreme signifiers of identity” in the context of local communities as opposed to the “trend of increasing sameness”. This particular quality of Peake’s work accounts for his eccentric place in the literary canon as a constant challenge to critical classification.
Francesca Bell, University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
The Fleeting Line: An analysis of the illustrative work of Mervyn Peake, with particular reference to Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm, published 1946.
Mervyn Peake wrote in The Craft of the Lead Pencil ( 1946):
‘. . . drawing should be an attempt to hold back from the brink of oblivion some fleeting line or rhythm, some mood, some shape or structure suddenly perceived, imaginary or visual.’
Selected illustrations from the following tales are examined to discover how Peake achieved this goal:
The Goose-girl
Jorinda and Joringel
The Three Spinners
Our Lady’s Child
Cat and Mouse in Partnership
My perspective on Peake’s creative methods is that of a professional illustrator. He was an artist for whom I have always had the utmost respect and admiration. I believe his work is greatly undervalued. As an illustrator, he tried to ‘subordinate’ himself totally to the book, and ‘slide into another man’s soul’.
The presentation contains some brief biographical elements, centring around Peake’s unconventional childhood and its influence on his relationship to fantasy literature.
I will touch on some of these topics:
How does Peake ‘hold back from the brink of oblivion’ images in fairy tales which are otherwise subliminal?
Artistic approach
Media and techniques.
Perception as active imagination.
Significance in tiny details.
How Peake’s images lead the reader into deeper creative involvement with the tales and give previously unrecognised insights into their meaning.
His work exemplifies how illustrations may complement literature and provide a different mode of critical exegesis.
Conclusions will emphasise the complex psychological insights underlying the surface simplicity of Peake’s illustrations.
Edward Carey, Independent
“Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone” – space and claustrophobia in the Gormenghast Trilogy.
In this paper I would discuss how the characters fit the architecture and the architecture fits the characters, how the stone of Gormenghast creates the tone of the first two books, and provides the novels with its extraordinary structure. Whilst unbound from his ancestral home Titus in Titus Alone floats in an agoraphobic terror. Touching on other great examples of architecture from Brideshead to the Marshalsea of Little Dorrit I will discuss Peake’s sense of home and homeland in his trilogy.
Prudence Chamberlain, Blackshaw Theatre
Adapting Titus Groan: creating the ‘sublime character’ through collaborative writing
Adapting Titus Groan raises numerous problems for writers, particularly in regards to architectural scope and physically distinctive characters. How can a book, so firmly located within the gothic tradition that distinguishes itself through the evocation of the sublime, be transferred to the physical limitation of a stage? This presentation aims to marry the process of adaptation with Peake’s gothic tropes, exploring the ways in which collaborative writing has enabled the new text to convey the sublimity of his original work.
Ronald Paulson posited in his essay, ‘Versions of the Human Sublime’ that characters can be responded to in the same way as a natural landscape, eliciting awe or fear from those who behold them[1]. In the absence of gothic archetypes, Peake’s eccentric characters engender reactions similar to those of nature, with Swelter’s vast bulk and murderous intentions captivating with fear or Lord Groan’s descent into madness evoking futile despair.
This presentation will also debate the concept of ‘Gormenghast’ as character in the context of a collaborative playwriting process. The size of the castle cannot translate directly into the physical limitations of a theatrical space. Thus, place must be evoked through dialogue and narration, inviting an audience to acknowledge the castle as an overwhelming presence, steeped in tradition, rather than as a basic setting for action.
Our paper will foreground collaborative playwriting as the means by which issues of human sublimity and Gormenghast as character were addressed and conveyed throughout the creative process.
Simon Ekstein, Swansea University
There’s No Place Like Home: Modernity, Community and the Idealised Return in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan and Gormenghast
Steerpike, the Faustian anti-hero of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, is undoubtedly the most ostensibly modern character in Mervyn Peake’s novels. He also constitutes a clear point of correspondence between Peake’s work and that of Franz Kafka, to whose labyrinthine works the Titus novels have often been compared. Like Kafka’s K., the central protagonist of The Castle, his conception of individual emancipation and social mobility sets his apart as a distinctly modern subjectivity, one very alien to his surroundings. Even at his most grotesque, Steerpike as the Faustian Gothic anti-hero is, like K., merely a monstrous parody of the modern Western subject, a man unbound from the milieu of his birth, setting his own values, and attempting to exercise (and forge anew) his individual rights.
If, then, both K. and Steerpike can be considered essentially modern subjects, the tenacity and determination with which they each attempt to infiltrate the hierarchies of what are essentially feudal systems appears somewhat puzzling. Inevitably, the seemingly incongruous decision of K. and Steerpike to pursue acceptance and power within each castle’s respective hierarchy provokes an inevitable question: why do these modern subjects so stubbornly seek admission to such conservative communities? With this question as a proviso, I want to pursue a line of enquiry that considers their attempts to imbed themselves in feudal societies as a response to the modern condition. More specifically, I will explore Steerpike’s narrative arc in relation to the German Heimat discourse that Elizabeth Boa identifies as a central presence in Kafka’s The Castle, assessing how far Peake’s engagement with this discourse might be understood as an implicitly modernist critique of both traditional and contemporary notions of modernity, community, and the prospect of an idealised return to that which has been culturally lost.
Pierre, Francois,Mons University (Belgium)
Success and failure of the mythopoeic element in the Titus books
Much of my research into the fiction of Mervyn Peake has focused on genre. In five pieces published in Peake Studies, I tried to show that ‘total coherence’ stems from the mythopoeic element informing Titus Groan, Gormenghast and even Titus Alone, and I largely dealt with the hero myth as rebellion against the perennial sacredness of Gormenghast’s ritualistic society. In the paper, I intend to keep this structuring element in mind and turn my attention to a controversial critical issue, i.e., Peake’s arguably unsuccessful fictionalisation of the Keda episode. Peake is still being coherently mythopoeic in this episode as he appears to be complementing his heroic, all-male material by an all-female, mythic subplot centred on Keda’s quest for tragic fulfilment. Mervyn Peake implicitly depicts Keda as the Great Mother of mythology (‘she is caring for Titus as though all the mothers who have ever lived advise her through her blood’). Her lust for love and her qualmless self-slaughter are a creative-cum-destructive drive (Eros/Thanatos) which is part of the Mother’s legacy to the human kind. Keda is indeed a living bundle of complementary opposites. She craves for love before the double bane of ageing and death ruthlessly strikes; she is socially conservative, but she feeds the rebellious element into Titus and her child; her love of life and human beings is absolute, but she is uncannily indifferent to her child’s fate and her lovers’ ritualistic death; she is a muse, but death is the price both her lovers have to pay for hunting Keda as they would artistic perfection. Mervyn Peake may have intended Keda to be a motherly foil for the overwhelmingly patriarchal (albeit godless) order of Gormenghast, but he found it more difficult to give flesh and blood to the Great Mother’s ambivalence than to the conventional ‘hero/villain’ duality. One of the reasons could be that he (unconsciously?) had mixed feelings about the futility of the hero’s quest if it is true that ‘all will crumble’ as soon his individual destiny, like Keda’s and all things human, has been fulfilled. Somehow, the Keda subplot stands uneasily alongside the heroics of the main plot and might even undermine the latter, but if this is a novelistic failure, it is quite … heroic.
John Vernon Lord, University of Brighton
‘A Tutorial with Mervyn Peake’
This paper will reconstruct the atmosphere of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1960. It will recreate the kind of tutorial I had with Mervyn Peake. It is based on memories of what he said to me during the few encounters I had with him in the Fine Art studios at the Central. It will also conflate extracts from his writings, such as The Craft of the Lead Pencil. It was a time when the onset of his illness was evident but his advice was always incisive and different from the other tutors. It was also a time when Peake was working on Balzac’s Droll Stories for the Folio Society. Peake’s own description of his method, as an illustrator, was that ‘there must be above all things the power to slide into another man’s soul’. I will address his main concerns as a teacher.
I will also discuss the kind of teaching we had at the time and how there was a growing division between ‘fine’ art and ‘mere’ illustration. My time-table, on a post-graduate course at the Central, straddled between the Fine Art and the Graphic Design departments. I was thus taught by the likes of Laurence Scarfe, Stanley Badmin, and Gertrude Hermes as well as by Cecil Collins, Alan Davie, Mervyn Peake, and Alan Reynolds. Morris Kestelman was the benign Head of Fine Art at this time, who, I later discovered, was a great support to Peake during his illness and a great encourager to students. A number of works by Peake and other tutors will be shown and I will also include a number of images of my own whilst studying at the Central and more recent ones.
Irene Martyniuk, Fitchburg State University
(In)visible Black Holes: The Aporias of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy
While worlds of fantasy often require aporias—originary myths that would necessitate too much page space or background to explain, other stories stand out for their blank spaces. I contend that Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is one such exception to the rule. Most readers have a satisfying experience with the novels by ignoring the blank spaces of the text, but I argue that, once noticed, these aporias, challenge the reader in exciting ways and tie Peake’s work to earlier texts. For example, Steerpike emerges from Swelter’s kitchen, but his previous life, including his parentage and upbringing are never discussed—even by him. As he develops as a character, I contend that he becomes an heir to Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff—the anti-hero with the missing past. Similar aporias I explore include Gertrude’s parentage and, in that same vein, the missing possibilities of an appropriate lover/husband for Fuchsia. Finally, who is Titus meant to marry? These blank spaces eventually become black holes, forcing characters to collapse and then deconstruct—much like the Castle itself. Once more, I see this as an influence of Wuthering Heights and other similar, aporia-driven texts.
Robert Maslen, University of Glasgow
‘Mervyn Peake’s Nonsense: The Poetry of Gormenghast’
With Peter Winnington I have just finished editing the Complete Nonsense of Mervyn Peake, to be published by Carcanet in time for the centenary of his birth – and, we hope, for the Chichester conference. My paper will consider what is distinctive about Peake’s nonsense, its relationship to his life and work, and above all the question of why nonsense verse is the poetry that dominates the Titus books. I will argue that the ancient, self-sufficient castle acts as a protective space for the kind of ‘divine lunacy’ (as Peake called it) which is beloved of Fuchsia, Lord Sepulchrave, Titus, Lady Gertrude and the Castle Poet; and that their delight in the self-sufficiency of nonsense verse is threatened by the intensely intrusive and practical intelligence of the upstart Steerpike. Steerpike’s uninvited reading of a nonsense poem, ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’, in Fuchsia’s secret attic hideaway, marks the beginning of his planned ascent to dictatorship of the castle. And the resistance of Titus and his friends to the young man’s plans corresponds to Peake’s lifelong resistance to the forces that made it difficult for him to practise his double craft as a verbal and visual artist.
I will accompany the talk with a PowerPoint presentation based on our edition of the Complete Nonsense.
Stuart Olesker, University of Portsmouth
'Adhesive Smiles: Nonsense and a taste for language in Peake's poetry. A reading of a range of Peake's nonsense and serious poetry'
Aaron Paterson, Blue Elephant Theatre
“Performing Peake”
Kim Pearce,
“Adapting Boy in Darkness”
Larisa Prokhorova, Kemerovo State University, Kemerovo, Russia
Algorithm of Disenchantment: Reading of Gormenghast Trilogy as an Anti –Tale
Though being placed within the realm of modern fantasy, the Gormenghast Trilogy stands apart from the mainstream of British fantasy writing due to its unconventional narrative structure, Gothic atmosphere, and grotesque style, as noted by many critics.
As a starting point of my journey through the labyrinth of Gormenghast, I will take the idea of “genre memory” (M.Bakhtin) to explore the eclectic nature of fantasy literature in general, and the roots of its generic links with fairy tale (in terms of V.Propp’s fairy tale model). Then, I will move on to the concept of anti-genre, which orients itself to the memory of prototypal genre, while discrediting its authoritative model of the world of Harmony, and creating the model of anti-world, like “the unreality of a recrudescent dream” in Gormenghast.
In my paper I propose to approach Mervyn Peake’s Titus story through the agency of anti-tale concept, to argue that the trilogy can be looked through the mirror of its antiness. Firstly, in a sense that it refutes the joyful message and “curative” potential associated with tales (as joy, according to J.R.R.Tolkien, is one of the essential components of the prototypal genre of a fairy tale). Secondly, while generating a unique vision of reality, Gormenghast’s metanarrative clarifies the inexpressible traumatic essence of the real world, thus subverting “a fairy-tale-like response to the world…that gives expression to humankind’s desire for happiness and fulfilment” (Stein 2008). I hope to show that the anti-tale reading of Mervyn Peake’s trilogy answers the question, why Titus rejects his castle in the end to be “never seen by him ever again”.
Jeremy Sampson, University of Chichester
Towards a Hermeneutics of Otherness: A comparative study of “The Hall of Bright Carvings” in Mervyn Peake’s “Titus Groan” and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”
Often described as Dickensian in tone, the contention of this paper will be that conceptually the Gormenghast novels and in particular the chapter “the Hall of Bright Carvings” are in fact modernist, prefiguring key elements of Waiting for Godot. Otherness is not merely conceived as another way of describing mimesis, but a multi – relational dynamic.
Heideggerian in its inspiration, Otherness will be explored as throwness – ‘the force that drives’. This force is both extratextual and intratextual in nature. Throwness will be explored through estrangement and engagement in the setting of both works, and in the awkward relational dynamic between the two sets of characters (Flay and Rottcudd) and (Vladamir and Estragon), together with the ambivalence that both sets have to inexorable future.
The discussion will move to Otherness as Indeterminacy - ‘chasing the still point’. This will draw on the work of Badiou and in particular presentation and representation. Flay and Rottcudd, together with Vladamir and Estragon are uncertain of the value of what they are doing which leads not necessarily to nihilism, but the provisionality of all understanding.
Otherness will also be explored as metaphor – ‘dancing between’. This will delve into the mimetic quality of Otherness, drawing upon the thinking of Hans Georg Gadamer, Here Otherness will be explored as a relationship in itself that makes life and art possible, essentially the art of ‘being in two places at once’. Such is the nature of all literature and in particular fantasy. This final section will explore the dynamic of how both texts not only transport themselves to our world, but also transport us to theirs.
Matthew Sangster, British Library
Peake and Vulnerability
This paper will discuss Peake’s particular talent for humanising the figures he depicts by rendering them vulnerable in the eyes of readers and viewers. I will begin by examining the introduction to Drawings by Mervyn Peake alongside writings by William Blake to demonstrate that while Peake wholeheartedly subscribes to the idea of the heroic creative artist, he values art most highly for its ability to connect with others and express humanity – ‘art is the voice of man, naked, militant and unashamed’, as he puts it. Using documents from the Peake Archive and through brief references to works in a variety of media I will show how throughout his career these values underpinned his works and guided the aesthetic choices that he made. I will focus particularly on passages from the first two Titus books, looking at how Peake uses narrative time and carefully modulated free indirect discourse both to reveal characters to the reader and to hold something of them back, to make them human both through exposing their complexities and through refusing to overinterpret their actions. While many of Peake’s characters are outwardly grotesque or express themselves through grotesquery, I will argue that in most cases their outward seemings are shown to hide complex minds and emotions, compelling portraits of loneliness, discontent and ambivalence made particularly poignant by Peake’s facility for portraying miscommunications. I will conclude by discussing Steerpike, whose failures of empathy trip him up despite his talent for identifying and taking advantage of vulnerabilities in others. Steerpike has style, but it is not largely a style of his own – his mimicry, dishonesty and failure to use his eloquence to reveal his self render him a destroyer rather than a creator. He lacks Peake’s generosity with regard to human weakness, and this makes him curiously vulnerable himself.
Nahid Shahbazi Moghadam and Arbaayah Ali Termizi, Universiti Putra Malaysia
The Grotesque in “Danse Macabre”
Mervyn Peake has been referred to “as the most accomplished fantastic realist of modern English literature” by Duncan Fallowell (1981). What brings a sense of realism and the touch of fantasy into a unique combination may be ascribed to the presence of the grotesque in Peake’s fiction. The realm of the grotesque is the territory where reality and fantasy are most obviously witnessed to be intrinsically interwoven.
The short story “Danse Macabre” with its fantastic incidents and realistic narrative tone is an example for such a claim. The weird play of crossing boundaries between life and death is enhanced by objects (i.e. the clothes) developing a life of their own. The matter-of-fact tone of narration falsely lulls the mounting anxiety, while maintaining a contradictory sense of repulsion and attraction as the story line progresses.
Thus, this study is concerned with a textual analysis of “Danse Macabre” focusing on the elements of the grotesque as manifested in the story. Objects taking an independent life of their own and the fusion of organic and nonorganic, as indicated among characteristic motifs of the grotesque by Wolfgang Kayser, are two of the main elements both depicted in this tale in relation to the clothes moving around in their own. Furthermore, the copresentation of opposing entities, confirmed by scholars like Philip Thomson and Geoffrey Galt Harpham as a key element of the grotesque, is manifested in this story mainly through the clash of fantasy and reality as well as attraction and repulsion.
Gabriela Steinke, University of Wolverhampton
Pirates and Explorers: Mervyn Peake in and beyond the ‘Boys’ Own’ tradition
Mervyn Peake’s children’s books have not attracted a great deal of critical attention as texts rather than vehicles for illustrations. While it is impossible to discuss Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor and Letters from a Lost Uncle without referring to their illustrations, this paper will be concerned primarily with Peake’s use of an existing tradition of adventure stories for children that he then bends to his own purposes. It will go on to examine how the books relate to depictions of pirates and explorers in contemporary narratives for children. If Captain Slaughterboard would be unthinkable without Long John Silver, can today’s children find resonances with Jack Sparrow, too? And to what extent does Letters from a Lost Uncle work as a book for children, given its parodic elements and its protagonist’s lone search for a meaning to his life? What kind of tradition does a reader need to be familiar with in order to appreciate the subtext of Peake’s writing? How reliant is Peake’s construction of the absurd in these texts on the ‘Boys’ Own’ stories he will have known, and how can a modern child not steeped in this tradition read them? Some answers to these questions will be suggested, but it is hoped that the paper will feed into the general discussion on where to situate Peake’s work in the fantasy tradition.
Sara Wasson, Edinburgh Napier University
Sentient Ruins and the Ventriloquised Dead: Mervyn Peake’s Wartime Poetry
This paper explores a key fantasy trope in Peake’s wartime poetry, arguing that his work offers a valuable counterweight to dominant period discourses of nationhood. Adam Roberts opens the way to such analysis, noting that the Titus books are ‘accounts of the catastrophe in traditional Englishness occasioned by the war …. the decay of an idea of England: the collapse of a particular fantasy of the realm’.
In line with fantasy tradition, Peake often depicts buildings as sentient. Castle Gormenghast is an anthropomorphised edifice where every stone throbs with projected human emotion. In draft notes for a theatrical adaptation, the Castle explains, ‘I am … the component exhalations of the shell and the interstices, from my battered spine of stone to the vaults’, and it speaks gently to baby Titus, urging him to sleep. Peake’s wartime poetry, too, abounds in this trope, often depicting London as a mother. Peake, however, unsettles the trope, anthropomorphising buildings as maternal only to describe them as ruined composites, ‘Half-masonry, half pain’ (Poems 89).
The war years saw a paradoxical enthusiasm for fine art representations of ruins. A magnificent structure in ruin can display remnants of monumental grandeur, so ruins were often presented as symbolic of Britain’s noble past and enduring history, bolstering narratives of the nation’s triumph and endurance. Peake’s poetry, by contrast, offers tender ruins, vulnerable, decayed, and weighted with grief. His anthropomorphized ruins demand we recognize the pain of mortality and the suffering of war. While wartime propaganda deployed the ventriloquised dead -- in which the war dead declare that their sacrifice was willing and worthwhile – Peake’s ruins portray war’s suffering and the stark silence of the corpse. As such, Peake’s work was a rare and valuable antidote to the simplistic tropes that saturated home-front representations of death.
Charlie White, University of Reading
‘O little revolution in great shades!’
This paper will discuss how Peake can be situated in both Children’s Literature and Gothic. I will look at how Peake, and particularly the Titus novels, are referenced in the reviews for contemporary Gothic Children Literature writers such as Marcus Sedgwick and Jonathan Stroud. Using a couple of reviews I will discuss how the Titus novels are set up by these other texts and the implications therein. For example, how Peake as a reference stands as an exemplar and implies both credibility and a particular style of writing. My argument will be that this sets up a lineage between Gothic and Children’s Literature that can be traced back to and past Peake, to the claim made by Karen Jackson and her colleagues that Gothic originated in Children’s Literature of the 18th century.
Then, closely analysing a representative section of Gormenghast, I will look at how Peake produces the Gothic and the child in terms of inheritance, transgression and, with reference to Chris Baldick’s definition of Gothic, how old buildings, such as Gormenghast castle and its environs, have an historical resonance as sites of human decay. I will be suggesting that although Gormenghast can be read as restrictive and controlling, Gormenghast always includes the possibility of transgression and disruption to the very limits it imposes. The potential for such disruption is to be found in Titus who stands as a Gothic figure as well as ‘child.’
Zoë Wilcox, British Library
The Imagination at Work: A Study of the Drawings in the Gormenghast Manuscripts
It is known that Mervyn Peake made working drawings of characters in his Gormenghast manuscripts to imagine how they look and speak. Peake’s archive, which includes the Gormenghast manuscripts, was acquired by the British Library in 2010. Through cataloguing of the archive, it has become apparent that Peake drew a small number of the Gormenghast characters repeatedly, yet others hardly at all. It can be argued that Peake inhabited some of his characters so completely that he did not need to draw them. For those that he failed to see adequately in his mind’s eye he turned to drawing as a method of discovery, depicting some in great detail and others less so.
This paper will consider what Peake’s working drawings (or lack of them) tell us about his imaginative process, and how this differs for particular characters. We can then begin to understand how the detailed visual representations of particular characters, with all the extra information they carry compared to a mental picture, might affect how these characters are realised in Peake’s writing. It will be argued that the frequently drawn, detailed depictions of the Prunesquallors, Flay, Swelter and the professors helped Peake to produce full-rounded characters whereas the sketchier depictions of Titus (and to a lesser extent Steerpike) betray their less coherent psychological motivations.
Digital images of the manuscripts will be used to show the different types of working drawings Peake made, their physical position in the text and the apparent effect of these drawings on subsequent passages of writing, additions and revisions to the manuscripts. This paper will also give a brief introduction to the Mervyn Peake Archive, highlighting the scope and content of extant material, as well as gaps in the record, in the hope that this will encourage further study of these primary sources.
Joseph Rex Young
But Are They Fantasy?: Peake’s Titus Novels and Modern Fantasy Theory
Mervyn Peake’s Titus books are among the twentieth century’s most remarkable feats of imaginative writing, but the question of whether they constitute works of ‘fantasy’ continues to vex scholars. The question of why they are fantasy is more novel, and ought also to be addressed.
In this paper I provide an introduction to a theoretical framework by which Peake’s novels can most certainly be considered fantasy literature. This is accomplished by examining the essential, defining features of Gormenghast Castle and its inhabitants and correlating those attributes with those conventionally considered as central to fantasy literature. Although some literary theorists would dispute the categorization of these works as fantasies, I demonstrate a clear structural and spiritual kinship between Titus’s world and that of other major works of modern fantasy.
[1] Ronald Paulson, ‘Versions of a Human Sublime’, New Literary History, Vol.16, No.2, (1985) pp. 428.
