Wyatt’s Inheritance

The character of Aunt May has been fascinating and repelling me in equal measure. And yet most of all, there’s something familiar about her. Something nineteenth century, that smacks of workhouses and Dickensian spinsters, and something further back in the mists of literary time that screams evil stepmothers, witches and gorgons. Aunt May is a force of evil masquerading as a force of good, I thought at first. And then I remembered reading about the sacred, as the French cultural critic and anthropologist, Roger Caillois, describes it. Caillois was writing in the 50s, contemporary to Gaddis, although I doubt very much that their paths ever crossed. Caillois contended that the sacred must be understood as a force rather than a thing, and because of this, its nature is inevitably ambivalent; forces can be used for good or evil, and it is only once the force has crossed the boundary and manifested itself as an action that it becomes fixed in purpose. Now because the force of the sacred is inherently ambiguous in this way, the sacred is divided into the distinct and opposing polarities that produce the concepts of God and the Devil, or which, in other cultures, separate white from black magic. We can see both polarities belong to the realm of the sacred as the same degree of hypnotic fascination adheres to both, the same reaction of simultaneous reverence and fear.

Caillois made another distinction that can be applied to the force of the sacred whether it manifests itself as godly or devilish. That distinction is between what he calls the fascinans and the tremendum. The fascinans is the good bits, if you like, ecstasy and spiritual uplift, but also mercy, goodness, and love. The tremendum is the wrath of God, the harsh spirit of divine justice, and the rampant possessiveness of divine jealousy. Aunt May embodies the angry, judgemental, possessed, almost Satanic aspect of religious fervor. All her energies have been whipped up into an excessive rage that circles in a vortex of unloveability and lack of compassion. It always strikes me as odd that the Puritanical aspects of the church should exclude all that is beautiful, charming, merciful and just from their devotion. Purity itself is a beautiful concept (and one that Caillois discusses a lot as foundational to religion – the sacred being itself so pure that it becomes almost dangerous and only those qualified to do so may approach it). But Aunt May’s purity is one based on ugliness, harshness, joylessness, and anger. This might still be okay for Wyatt, if only the Reverend Gwyon could fulfill his part of the bargain and embody the fascinans of the sacred. He’s almost there – he’s mercy and kindness, he’s lost to an ecstatic contemplation of previous cultures (a bit like Caillois the anthropologist). But he is too weak, too unable to rise above his own boundaries to truly offer Wyatt the experience of religious misericord he needs to balance his Aunt’s excesses. As is so often the case, the soul of mercy fails the child because of its own fragility, leaving the force of rage unchecked.

So Wyatt’s childhood is lacking in balance, and therefore, in grace. But I could also see another possible distinction arising in that bizarre coupling of Aunt May and the Reverend Gwyon. If Aunt May represents the force of fundamentalism, the most extreme of all religious dogmas, then the Reverend Gwyon represents radical liberalism, the kind of boundary-less inclusiveness that ends up encompassing everything and meaning nothing. Gwyon cannot act, cannot adhere to an ethical framework, because he has too many competing frameworks intellectually jousting for his attention. So that when Wyatt’s life is in danger, all he can fall back on is a kind of superstitious paganism. That this paganism should seem to work is a part of the narrative I don’t know how to account for. Unless it is simply to undermine the entire religious dimension and to suggest that at basis we have nothing but one kind of magical thinking to pit against another. But in any case, if this is the parenting of Wyatt, the unequal balance between fascinans and tremendum, the confused legacy of fundamentalism and liberalism, then it’s not surprising if Wyatt is going to emerge as a child of postmodernism, that great hotchpotch of all thought systems, in which truth is plural, suspect and playful.