Bottle Chucked Away

Is there a way back to comfort and security after you’ve left the castle? By the time this novel was written the old world was gone, Britain on the supersonic plane to the 1960s. Could an empire-child cope with such a transformation, carry this loss? Mervyn Peake, Titus Alone. A novel of exile, of trauma, where our hero relies on the flimsy fantasises of the mind to survive. You rest on a granite outcrop only to find it a lump of polystyrene….

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Don Quixote chased after phantasms and returned home to die, his mad dreams shipwrecked on the rocks of reality. Not so this Spanish knight, who is as sane as you and me, though others think him ripe for the asylum. Cheeta tries to turn Titus insane; her jealousy, intelligence, her material resources - her father manufactures industrial death - large enough to create a stage set as big as any Cervantes could devise. But this is no satire, nor a fantasy; Cheeta fated to fail, for her - rather mechanical - imagination unable to match the realities of Gormenghast, more unreal, more incredible, than any single human mind can imagine. Pasteboard and maquillage no substitute for such an extraordinary place. There are other, simpler, more human ways that Titus can lose his sanity.

So Titus fled from Juno. Out of the garden and down the riverside road he kept on running.  Sense of both shame and liberation filled him as he ran. Shame that he had deserted his mistress after all the kindness and love she had showered on him; and liberation in finding himself alone, with no one to weigh him down with affection.

But after a little while, his sense of aloneness was not altogether pleasurable. He was aware that something was missing. Something that he had half forgotten during his stay at Juno’s house. It was nothing to do with Juno. It was a feeling that in leaving her he had once again to face the problem of his own identity. He was a part of something bigger than himself. He was a chip of stone, but where was the mountain from which it had broken away? He was the left but where was the tree? Where was his home? Where was his home?

Like many today, Titus believes his identity an individual affair. Away from Gormenghast, he discovers that this is untrue, as he feels its loss; the start of a discovery, the finding of a truth, that much of who we are is embedded in the geomorphology of our childhood, the place of our youth. Identity less of the mind than of the senses. Gormenghast, once thought an alien presence, now found to be an intimate friend; and that in leaving it Titus has torn out part of his very being. To cross the seas…the further he travels from home the more of himself he loses. Soon to be little left; home dissolving until all that remains is memory and idea; this past just another inhabitant in the island of his mind, hardly different from a fiction. Indeed, how does one tell them apart? It is why Titus needs people to believe in him - even Juno doubts his account of Gormenghast - for without that belief his past becomes unreal - it is a fiction - and his identity collapses. The risk of madness. Not creating a caricature of the place, a parody of what he has left behind - Cheeta - but of losing it altogether, is the danger here. The reason Titus is reluctant to commit to others, to love Juno or Cheeta. Their life to entirely replace his own, Gormenghast buried under their affection. Only by staying free - his mind active and alone - can he keep a line back to his home.

This has its dangers. Without the touch and taste and smell of the castle, the castle fades away. Titus has a number of choices. To go back and concrete his identity within Gormenghast’s walls: accept his inheritance and the burdens that come with it. The alternative is create an entirely new life that replaces the old; the promise of Juno. A  third option is Cheeta’s: live a pastiche of his childhood. Titus cannot choose. Having escaped one society he is reluctant to join another. He is too independent, too locked into his ego, to submit to anybody else’s vision of himself. So he tries to live alone, keeping Gormenghast alive inside his head. It makes him fragile, which can easily lead to insanity, as he feels himself vanishing before his own eyes.

Titus thinks he’s broken free. Silly boy. No. He is circling around his childhood, which exerts its centripetal force. Cheeta is clever enough to realise this, but is too clever to know how to use it to best advantage. Affection will break Titus, not the cartoon Freudianism that she attempts here. Acting our his fevered memories only reinforces his independence - he knows the past was not like this. Not the images but the feeling those images have left behind is they key that unlocks the door to Titus’s soul, which, because unprotected by geography’s sensorium, is vulnerable. Having lost a physical connection to his past he can only cling onto the flimsy wire of an idea. Hanging over the abyss…how  his fingers stretch and strain…he stares into his egoistic void. That lone, proud ego now his only protection against his loss. And yet, though dormant, the old feelings still exist. It is why the love of Juno hurts so much, and why he runs away from it: love brings back his longing for Gormenghast and its people; while the love itself promises to wipe them out: all of his affection to be transferred to another, to Juno. Too painful. Better not to feel.

To live inside an idea thins out our lives, making us fragile. Titus wholly dependent on his own mental resources, his old home turned into a stage set, where he acts out the creations of his own mind (it is one reading of Cheeta’s games). This can easily unbalance a man, as his past becomes both an ideal and an obsession; and a standard, both unreal and impossible, by which all present activity is measured (and fails). 

What is going to happen to Titus….

Still young. His picaresque adventures consume all time and attention, there is hardly a moment to stop, to reflect. Yes, the past exerts its pull, but he is still close to it; Titus not yet enveloped in the madness of illusion, when a physical past is wholly replaced by an idea of it. He balances on a rock of doubt, the tides of uncertainty washing over his feet. Not easy to stay upright: we need others to hold onto; to confirm our reality. The trauma of the exile is that they find few people who can do so; these strangers do not share our memories, lack the subtleties of thought and expression that depend less on word and deed than on a supernatural connection, the telephone line that is our senses. For those who stay at home each day is a confirmation of their person, as they look into the mirror of family and acquaintances. Not so Titus. Who knows him? Juno isn’t sure about his stories. Muzzlehatch is too aloof and self-contained to be an intimate. And Cheeta is too cold to touch. He has only himself. Still young, and providing he remains alone, he has just enough resources to keep his sanity. But to see the doubts, the tears, in Juno’s eyes, or be subjected to the torture of Cheeta’s theatre - it is the restraint of the helmeted police that does the damage - could drive Titus deranged. Tenderness is the Devil here.

He is saved. Reality will not be kept out. Muzzlehatch, Juno, Anchor and the three extra-ordinary musketeers - Crabcalf, Slingshott and Crack-Bell — break into Cheeta’s cruel play and rescue the imprisoned Titus.

They escape, but Titus cannot live with Juno, whose love he finds possessive. It is the problem of the wanderer and exile, who cannot form close attachments which are felt as too binding. To escape from one closed community is to be wary of another; indeed you have conditioned yourself to feel all enclosure as unnecessary restraint. Love can produce claustrophobia; not just a repeat of his original feelings - of being hemmed in - but an exaggeration of them: not the ramshackle castle but a tightly guarded prison cell. And yet he wants love. Aches for his lost home. The further Titus tries to go it alone, the greater the past’s magnetic force, the more desperate his need for others (without his friends and lover he’d not have left the Black House alive). A paradox he is too young to understand. Titus! You have left one castle for another: yourself, whose walls keep out those lethals weapons, the feelings. It is why he - alone of her friends - can resist Cheeta’s beauty and charm; for Titus she is only a beautiful body, an exercise in sexual gymnastics. The idea of a meeting of minds…. Ha! He dons his armour-plated sensibility. He must be free! Alone for all of time.

Such egotism verges on madness, that island mind, that sees only strange ships on familiar seas. This produces pain in others; the lovely Juno is distraught. We’ve got to be honest, Titus is not a nice person. What a bastard! He is selfish. He has no feel for the feelings of others. Such insouciance about other human beings is put the test by Cheeta; yet he survives, with luck, his friends, and his own hard intelligence, bred on fighting and fleeing. Independence is a valuable quality, it makes us tough and resourceful, but alas it does cut us off. Can Titus soften? He flies away with Anchor and Juno - this is the modern world: they are in a plane - and we begin to hope that he has matured, that he will open the ducts of feeling, that - it is the sentimentalist in us - he will settle down with Juno. No! Reacting to her pity, Titus jettisons out of the plane to parachute into the dense forest below. Cheeta’s trial has not opened him to others; still that obdurate, isolated, alienated young fellow. Not strong enough to embrace the emotions of those close to him, Titus, this hard, distant, obtuse, youth, is also the fragile child, quickly collapsing when his feelings are engaged. Embrace or run away. Always he runs away….

After months of wandering Titus suddenly finds himself close to Gormenghast. He recognises a familiar rock, hears the cannon signalling some morning ritual. A force of nature tries to thrust him home. He resists, and walks away never to return again. He has felt Gormenghast again, which has confirmed its existence. There can be no doubts now. It is not a figment of his mind. And it stirs all the old feelings of longing and love. To know this is enough. Now Titus can live in an eternal exile knowing that what is inside him is true, that part of him is Gormenghast, a solid strata in the geology of his mind. The trial - the psychological breakout from the castle - is over. He has separated from his childhood, to leave memories but no painful yearning to return. At last he is a man! It is the end of his rite of passage.

But we have doubts. To return to Gormenghast and embrace it, while retaining one’s own independent mind and will, would be the heroic act. To enter Gormenghast and remain free is the biggest test of all. Titus cannot do this. In truth, he is again running away. He may think he is a man, but he is not. These adventures a Quixotic attempt to escape his past, and they end in a fantasy (he is to remain, we surmise, an adolescent for the whole of this life). When he turns his back on his home Titus is not mad, but he retains the illusions of the young adult who lives in dreams; here that he can live alone. Titus cannot give up his big idea that to be mature is to be free. Poor Titus. The rite of passage requires that you ditch that idea. You must cut out the belief in an autarkic self. Real maturity is engaging with others and society; it is to retain an independent self while giving part of one’s self away. Flay was right: you must take up your duties my lord. The mature man acts in the world, and changes it, by himself being changed. Poor boy. You are running away. Silly Titus! You are weak. A man, by contrast, has the strength to risk his ego; to lose it in others, in a community, in a job, in a tradition. What keeps us free is not some mad idea of autarky but our feelings; they anchor us to a place and a people. What Mr Wiseacre, you say this is a contradiction? No my friend, a paradox. Like all adolescents Titus is too rational to learn such a subtle, this profound, message.

Review: Titus Alone