When Gunn's "Young Art and Old Hector" was published during World War 2, Naomi Mitchison, fellow novelist, and friend criticized it both for its escapism and for the improbable nature of its friendship between Art, an eight-year-old boy, and his grandfatherly neighbor Hector. Stung Gunn doubled down on the relationship and sent them on a journey in dystopia, a thoroughly serious one!
On an expedition to the local river, Art and Hector seeing a salmon and thinking after poaching it, accidentally fall in and emerge the 'other side' of the pool in what they come to recognize as the Green Isle. It is a land of abundance as summer draws to a close, harvest approaching, full of healthy and apparently content people. But they are greeted by a 'watcher' who tells them to walk to the Seat - a three-day journey, not to deviate from the road, and to stay at the prescribed inn. The man appears only to think from his head and from the surface of his face at that. He is straightforward though, not insincere because it is implied that sincerity (and its opposite) require a depth that is not there. It unsettles both Art and Hector.
Both because Art is an eight-year-old and his innocence is 'creeped out' by the surface people and Hector because he can see no harm in deviating from the path and sleeping in the hay (and worries for not having money to pay for the inn), they stray, doubly so, because they eat from the fruit of the land - an act that is forbidden unbeknownst to them.
On day 2, they come across Robert and Mary whose behavior appears different from their peers, deeper, more fluid, more welcoming and Art and Hector staying with them trigger an unfolding series of events that will change the Green Isle forever.
Though lively in themselves, the windings of the plot are less interesting than the world Gunn creates, A world of rational control seeking the maintenance of order. Diet is controlled - the forbidden fruit harvested is turned into a processed food that inhibits unconscious, emotional processes - and makes the fruit painful to eat - and any deviation from the rational order is straightened out by helpful, if highly persistent, psychologists, the leader of whom is called The Questioner who grinds resistance down by relentlessly probing and testing any given deviance against the obvious logicality of the coherence of the group. Hector's hatred of cruelty, for example, is used against him for why would he support deviance, a deviance that must be eradicated so that calm ordering can be restored.
I was reminded of Iain McGilchrist's 'The Master and His Emissary' that explores in a renewing way the discussion of ‘right and left brain asymmetry’ and suggested that the emissary, the utilitarian, reductionist if practical brain, had usurped its place and become the dominant mode of perception. We have come to know much of value in the process but drained life of meaning and purpose. This is the world that Gunn creates imaginatively. A world in which the Emissary is (or appears to be) fully in control - a utilitarian world of order that self-perpetuates itself. Doubly reminded because the Master in Gunn's novel is God and God is away sunk, lost in their meditations. However, this world of order, Hector discovers has a get-out clause, a last court of appeal. You can appeal to God.
This Hector does - to the consternation of the Administration - and God re-emerges to see how their world is managing without them - and to discover how and in what way the Emissary has usurped them and how it might be corrected. In a penultimate chapter of concentrated insight, imaginatively composed, Gunn repositions the necessary knowledge of the administration within a guiding pattern of wisdom, magic, and ultimately love. All such realities that come to us as embodied knowing, and emergent properties of an underlying wholeness - the heart's reasons that reason cannot fathom - and which are carried and symbolized by Art's innocence, Hector's second innocence, and Mary's love for them both.
The novel was published in 1943 and its then target was clear - a totalitarian state that had plunged the world into war - but reading it now you sense that it is more timely than ever. Both as a reminder of how any utilitarian system can function, often in highly successful ways, in complete disregard for the wider systems in which it sits - and its apparent ordering is an ever-present temptation as a perceived value in itself. But also at what happens within ourselves rationalizing away our wider perceptions of life and meaning, our stirrings from within, our intuitive glimpses of different possibilities. And how both can become a self-reinforcing world - the Emissary in charge - and no room for the grace of alternatives.
Comments
Post a Comment