CRAIG STEWART WALKER
This essay examines Michael Cook's Quiller as a parable of personal eschatology. The ambivalent symbolism in the play expresses the uncertain state of consciousness in the title character, who is caught between his sense of prophetic insight and ordinary perceptions.
Cet article étudie Quiller de Michael Cook en tant que parabole de l'eschatologie personnelle. Le symbolisme ambivalent de cette pièce exprime l'état de conscience incertain du personnage principal qui est pris entre ses perceptions ordinaires et son sentiment d'avoir une vision prophétique.
We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.
D.H. Lawrence, "The Ship of Death"
In a previous article in this journal ("Elegy, Mythology and the Sublime in Michael Cook's Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust," 15.2), I argued that, thematically, Cook's history plays turned on a dialectic between Romantic and existentialist outlooks on variations of the life-death struggle of humanity. The theme is sustained by the other plays, but there are substantial differences in emphasis and corresponding differences in form. For example, the elegiac elements in Cook's history plays recede from view and instead there is a focus on eschatological concerns; that is, ideas about the end of the known world, with particular focus on the "four last things"--death, judgement, heaven and hell. Now this leap from elegy to eschatology is by no means an erratic one. Hints that the world might or should decease together with a loved one are commonplace in elegiac poetry, and there are cases in which a personal calamity is so overwhelming that it seems to strip the world of all sense of meaning or order. 1
Leaving aside the psychological connection, however, what we notice first about the change from elegy to eschatology is that focus shifts from a sense of what has been lost to a sense of what the meaning and consequences of that loss will be. In other words, the orientation shifts from past to future. Complementing this shift is an important change in the ethos of the works, for while a loss of some transcendent object or ideal may be presented as a rupture with the noumenal (thus leaving the noumenal indirectly represented, a palpable absence, as it were), the presentation of arrival at some point of transcendent meaning requires a more direct representation of the noumenal, in that it must be made dramatically present in some way. Eschatology suggests the timing of the dramatic arrival of this noumenal presence-the end of quotidian time; but it also entails the notion of an eternal truth which stands at the end and gives meaning to quotidian time. In religious terms, this is the revelation of the rational order which God has prescribed for the universe and human existence. A shift from elegiac to eschatological thought, then, entails a displacement of narrative authority from a despairing self or "epic I" to an implied divine intelligence, for effectively the author assumes the stance of a prophet whose message is not merely personal, but a revealed truth.
For this reason, I would call Tiln (1971) and Quiller (1975) "parables," following J. Hillis Miller's use of the term:
Though the distinction cannot be held too rigorously, if allegory tends to be oriented toward the past, toward first things, and toward the repetition of first things across the gap of a temporal division, parable tends to be oriented toward the future, toward last things, toward the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven and how to get there. Parable tends to express what Paul [ ... ] calls 'the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, but now is made manifest' [Romans 16: 25-6] (Miller 181).
Though there is not room here to explore the matter fully, this idea proves useful in approaching several of Cook's plays. For example, in these terms, The Head, Guts and Soundbone Dance (1973), which centres on the absurd efforts of the principal characters to ritually impose their almost fundamentalist sense of the order of the past upon the future, might be properly considered allegory. However, Miller's caveat that "the distinction [between parable and allegory] cannot be held too rigorously" is important, for while the labels conveniently distinguish between two substantially different styles of playwriting, in fact the two approaches overlap considerably. The predominantly allegorical Head, Guts and Soundbone Dance, for example, does, as "a play about Newfoundland's future," bear some features of parable. Moreover, Jacob's Wake (1975) is precisely a fusion of the two genres, its narrative extending from first to last things.
At any rate, Miller's definition suggests that parable depends upon apocalypse, in that the former derives meaning from a sense of the imminence or immanence of the latter (v. Kermode 6). Put another way, a parable is a local example which refers to the universal context of apocalypse. Yet the term "parable" is also relevant to Cook's work apart from religious overtones, where it describes the distinct modem literary genre, practised, for example, by Kafka and Borges; and the distanced, ironic ethos which characterizes those works crops up again in certain works of Beckett, such as Watt. The characters in such literary parables, because of the degree to which they are subordinated to the work's dianoia, made mere functions of the theme, tend to become sharply delimited in intelligence-"flat" rather than "round," in Forster's terms (Forster 73-80). That formal effect bears an intimate relation to the thematic subjection of these characters to forces beyond their ken, and together these effects provide much of the distinctive ethos of the modem literary parable, the sardonic vision of comic yet nauseous haplessness which has been called "Vomedic irony." 2
Tiln and Quiller, then, are parables, in both senses of the word, which consider the apocalypse myth within the an ocean-side setting similar to that of Cook's other work. Accordingly, the metonymic identification of life on the edge of the ocean with life on "the edge of the world" is compounded with an eschatological framework. Yet, in contrast to the weirdness of Tiln, with its apparently post-nuclear holocaust lighthouse setting and its extremely bleak apocalyptic outlook, Quiller seems at first glance a relatively straightforward, realistic play. Brian Parker, for example, suggests that Quiller is a "mainly realistic monologue [. . .] without any of the symbolic excitement of Tiln" (34-5). Yet while it is undoubtedly true that Quiller is more realistic than Tiln, there are symbolic levels at work below (which later erupt upon) the play's realistic surface. In this it stands in contrast to another monologue by Cook written in an otherwise similar vein, Therese's Creed (1976). Both plays make use of a single, working-class, outport character who rambles on without apparent aim, offering simple folk-wisdom in a Newfoundland dialect; but the latter play is strictly realistic, a Maritime character-study in the vein of Antonine Maillet's La Sagouine or Marshall Button's Lucien. Quiller, on the other hand, corresponds both to J. Hillis Miller's definition of parable and to the characteristics of literary parable (though in its puzzling shift from a seemingly light-hearted surface to questions of deeper perception, Quiller is slightly more Borgesian than the Beckettian Ti1n).
The first trope in Quiller to strike the audience is the set, which serves as a synecdoche for the ethos of the play as a whole. The play is set on the bridge of an outport house and Cook adds that
The total effect is of perfect balance, harmony. There is, however, a surrealistic effect to this perfection. The clapboard exterior is white, even, immaculate. The windows are identical. The day bed, with its curved headboard, matches the remainder. The woodwork gleams. The blankets are without wrinkles. It has the sombre and unnatural look of a coffin's interior. (Tiln and Other Plays 46)
Such imagery unmistakably evokes the paintings of Cook's fellow Newfoundlander, Christopher Pratt. Like Quiller, Pratt's paintings also have been described simply as "realistic" 3 -which is to ignore the better part of the experience evoked by the actual canvases (the reproductions are admittedly less impressive). Cook himself has argued against this view of Pratt's work, in a brief article written for a Canadian art magazine not long after Quiller was first produced. He writes that "it is nonsense to equate Pratt with schools Realistic and Magic for [this] negates the impression and influence of place" ("Christopher Pratt" 89). Yet Cook is ready enough to place Pratt in a different context, which (it gradually becomes apparent) is his own:
What are the lineaments of his vision? Isolation. Dignity. Perfection. Detachment. Fury. Examine any of his exteriors ... Cottage, Coley's Point, Shop on an Island. Pristine, isolated, vested with immense dignity, it is easy at first to see them casually as obvious and familiar artifacts lovingly recreated until brought to a state of grace. But that is to ignore the exterior environment, the sea and, in Point Coley's, the sky also, reflected in the door. (89)
Cook then quotes the first few lines of the Bible to give a sense of the metaphysical context in which he sees Pratt's work.
The creation myth from Genesis is at once moving and yet terrifying in its abstraction, but the artist is drawn, as in a dream or nightmare, to respond to it, either to will the creation of a new and private universe or to despair at that which has been created. (89)
That remark recalls Tiln's tortured reworking of the creation myth to incorporate a nuclear holocaust (10- 11). Certainly, it seems to be linked in Cook's mind with one of Tiln's prototypes, Beckett's Endgame, which he goes on to cite as an instance of the artist's response to biblical abstraction, and which leads him to his most illuminating observation, that
in Beckett more than any other artist, in any form, one can find at times a parallel vision in [sic] the work of Christopher Pratt. [ ... ] But [ ... ] whereas in the theatre Beckett's characters, having articulated their bleak vision, leave us with nothing save the muddy stirrings of alternatives that themselves would be doom-laden, Pratt's work brings us, by the nature of the form itself, to a terrible beauty. The possibilities of a longed-for perfection stand beforeus as artifacts of immense strength and moulding, tangible things to hold up against the implacably destructive will of fate. Or God. (90)
This then, is the setting in which Quiller lives and from which he speaks to his God: an apparently realistic outport house that is yet endowed with an obscure, mystical perfection.
Apart from the vague suggestion of its "surrealistic" effect, the hint that noumenal powers inhere in its architecture, Cook specifies that the house should evoke two ideas. Like the set of Endgame, Quiller's outport house suggests a face; the two windows are "the eyes to the nose of the house" and the blinds "are drawn to three inches above the sill," like sleepy eyelids. Cook also points out that the house should resemble a ship, adding: "This is not mere fancy. The association between ships and houses in Newfoundland is very strong, and thus, in the outports, most houses have a 'bridge.' [ ... ] But the analogy doesn't stop there. Many still speak of 'going to bunk' at bedtime" (82). In its resemblance to a face, the house seems to personify a silent, watching personality-perhaps the God to whom Quiller speaks, or some other Being, to whom he does not. As ship, the house conveys a sense of detachment with the physical world beyond its walls; one feels that the house is, or might soon be, under sail rather than staying firmly lodged in its environment. Both of these associations underscore the drama of Quiller's own condition: he is uncertainly poised between the quotidian and the noumenal worlds, not entirely sure of the status of either.
That central dramatic theme is revealed using a number of devices that gather force throughout the play. Most immediately, the division of Quiller's consciousness between two realms is established through his own speech patterns. By far the greater part of Quiller's monologue is addressed to God. He speaks to God with great familiarity; respectfully, and with humility, but without obsequiousness or self-consciousness. He makes no serious attempt to alter his diction or dialect to suit religious convention, but speaks in much the same way that he does to his neighbours. This is something of a blind, because Quiller's humility and folksy piety invite the audience's condescension. That is to say, to some (perhaps slightly arrogant) minds, the very naiveté of Quiller's religiosity may be the strongest evidence against its making any kind of authentic contact. Hence, however strongly a God-like presence may be suggested by other elements, such as the quasi-animate set or the three cockcrows which begin the play, it may seem that Quiller's running chatter must fall short of an authentically divine colloquy. In short, Quiller's manner and dialect point in the direction of the realistic, folksy sensibility which permeates the kind of character-study play mentioned earlier, while at the same time a transcendent idea is consistently evoked even within this humble guise.
Quiller's divided consciousness is also apparent in his virtually total alienation. Again, it may seem that the least significant form of alienation here is his apparent estrangement from God; for while it is true that Quiller receives no certain response to his stream of questions and anecdotes (through the first part of the play at least), this is hardly less than we would expect, common experience suggesting that conversations with God are almost invariably one-sided. Such alienation, then, is only remarkable in that, given the society in which he lives, Quiller's persistence in keeping up this chatter seems somewhat pathetically obsessive, a point which Quiller acknowledges himself, after a fashion: "Onced was, I weren't the only one who talked to ye? Everone talked to ye at one time or another" (51). More remarkable, however, is Quiller's alienation from humans, the evident indifference and disregard of his neighbours. Again, the situation is deceptive, for the audience may reasonably suppose that Quiller is simply a sad, slightly dotty old man whom his neighbours ignore because of his tiresome peculiarities. Yet enough is made of this alienation to throw that interpretation into question. After several attempts to contact those he sees from the bridge of his house, Quiller reveals his "inner agony" in a lyric plea to the luscious Mrs. Ivany: "Let me in. Let me in to all the t'oughts of men rooted in ye, bloomin' like flowers" (60). Plainly, this alienation is more acute than mere loneliness, a notion supported by Quiller's observation: "Onced was when I was a part of 'em. And they was a part of me. [Puzzled] I'm still here. And they is still there, but it ain't the same. I could ... I could go amongst them" (62). Yet he cannot bring himself to do so. Apparently, Quiller has been cut off from humanity in some inscrutable way, and his only primary relation now is his uncertain connection to God.
The division of quotidian and noumenal consciousness is also reflected in the uncertain symbolic significance of everyday objects. At the outset of the play, Quiller's determination to find portents all around him seems the pathetic attempt of a lonely man to find meaning in his life-a slightly less advanced case of the disease described in Nabokov's short story, "Signs and Symbols." 4 The details to which Quiller ascribes meaning seem insignificant enough in themselves: a door is found closed which he believes he left open (47); he forgets to wash the shaving lather off his brush before dumping the water (49); swinging on an old rope, he breaks it (61-2); he is suddenly reminded of a long forgotten punt, the heel of which he had carved from a tree years ago (and which, in Quiller's mind, was symbolically phallic, a sort of personal Golden Bough-67-8). Yet, as in Nabokov's story, the authorial control of all this is felt strongly enough that, faced with the accumulated detail, we gradually begin to wonder if these minor events might be omens after all.
But if Quiller is indeed a parable pointing to apocalypse, the most important of the various devices representing divided consciousness is the uncertain representation of time. In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode explains the important difference between chronos and kairos: the former is quotidian time, just one thing after another without a sense of it all leading somewhere; the latter is "a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the End" (47), when the ultimate divine purpose and the destiny of mankind will be revealed. In Quiller, the distinction between chronos and kairos is ambiguous, for Quiller himself has drifted into a state of mind in which all of his acts are kairoi, so that activities such as shaving, which would ordinarily be viewed as simple habit, assume a ritual significance; hence any disturbance of routine, however slight, is of apocalyptic significance to his mind (e.g. 49, 69). Naturally, this tendency further arouses the audience's scepticism because, as Kermode argues,
Normally we associate 'reality' with chronos, and a fiction which entirely ignored this association we might think unserious or silly or mad; only the unconscious is intemporal, and the illusion that the world can be made to satisfy the unconscious is an illusion without a future. (50)
As these comments would suggest, our initial inclination is to dismiss Quiller's mystical perspective. Yet, despite our scepticism, there is something real in these dubious kairoi; indeed, we find Quiller's apocalypse upon us before we are entirely ready for it, not having seen its imminence in these moments as Quiller (more or less) has. In effect, what is revealed here is that there are two ways of reading or viewing the same phenomena, and some combination of the two is necessary to a full understanding of this play. Kermode compares this dualism to the "principle of complementarity" in physics: just as experiments with light can be set up to produce results in either waves or particles, "we might imagine a constant value for the irreconcilable observations of the reason and the imagination, the one immersed in chronos, the other in kairos; but the proportions vary indeterminately" (63). Analogously, in Quiller, what was interpreted within the context of "reality" on first acquaintance may, in hindsight, be fully consistent with a mystic or surrealistic interpretation.
Where ideas of time corresponding to "reason" and "reality" are thrown into doubt to the degree that they are in Quiller, however, it follows that there may be some difficulty placing the ontology of the character, of deciding where the fictional cosmos is ultimately located, so to speak. One possibility is that Quiller himself is already dead, and that the ordinary human activity he perceives (and which we occasionally overhear but never see) is a kind of residue of worldly life, like the after-impression left on the retina by a bright image. In this aspect Quiller is a fiction like Ambrose Bierce's story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," William Golding's novel, Pincher Martin, or Bruce Joel Rubin's screenplay, Jacob's Ladder; that is to say, a story about a character gradually and confusedly divesting his soul of worldly attachments in preparation for his ultimate destiny. 5 This reading is encouraged by Quiller's mesmerized carving with his razor of his own tombstone in the door of his house while speaking to the-physically, at any rate-absent Amos (70-1). Then, having suddenly recognized what he has done, the aghast Quiller says "Lord, I've sailed wid ye all me life, even when I weren't sure where ye was leading me. And now I'm confused, Lord. T'ings is different. But they is the same" (72). The confusion is not Quiller's alone, for there are other elements in the play which steer interpretation as much towards general apocalypse as private eschatological vision.
What makes the transition to a less personal theme possible is the play's parabolic nature, particularly the "negative capability" of the character Quiller as an ironic, diminutive, everyman figure of the "flat" type which is typical of Vomedic comedy. In other words, because he is more caricature or clown than fully fleshed-out human being, the ethical centre of Quiller is placed rather more in dianoiac revelation than in personal exploration. The latter, of course, is the province of the character-study plays such as Therese's Creed, La Sagouine or Lucien, and in this rests the most important distinction between Quiller and those plays. There is in Quiller enough of the folk realism of the character-study plays to encourage reference to a precise external reality, but there is also enough contrary information to ensure that interpretation will not rest comfortably there. In essence, this is to argue that the same 'principle of complementarity' between realism and surrealism which Cook saw in Christopher Pratt's work is present in our response to Quiller; that the ironic simplicity of the character prompts us to look at least as much without as within for the source of the surrealist effects.
There is, moreover, an amply established external context to account for this surrealistic contribution: religious allusion. This is not only evident in Quiller's addresses to God, but in Cook's careful use of the nautical imagery incidental to his Newfoundland setting, which indigenous poetic tradition has infused with religious symbolism. The centrepiece of this effort is the old Methodist hymn "Will Your Anchor Hold in the Storms of Life," of which Cook says: "The ability to translate the metaphors of daily life into a sung Christian vocabulary was one of the energizing forces of the early Methodist movement, a vocabulary vigorously sustained by many Quillers on the east coast of Newfoundland" (82). In this context the resemblance of outport houses to ships assumes a whole new significance, and even Quiller's casual, barnacled dialect is endued with the earmarks of a Christian pilgrim. As a result, when Quiller witnesses the spectacle of Amos's boat exploding on the water (an event which, he tells us, actually occurred twenty years before-74), the imagery powerfully evokes apocalypse:
The bridge is bathed in the reflected glow of flames. Quiller leaps to his feet. "What in the name of?. . . " He runs to the right of the bridge and looks out. He shouts. "Amos ... Amos. . . " A cacophony of sounds filter through space, flames crackle. Wind, cries of lamentation, a church organ resolve into a congregation singing slowly, painfully . "Will your anchor hold in the sea of life. . . " (72-3)
It may be that in this context the name Amos alludes to the biblical Book of Amos, in which the prophet inveighs against the Hebrews who have turned away from God and taken up newer materialist interests. The biblical Amos is ignored and expelled by these people, upon whom Jehovah's wrath then falls: He promises to "make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight" (Amos 8:9)-which is what happens in Quiller-and proceeds to lay city after city to waste with fire. A further parallel between Quiller and this story is the character of the Biblical Amos: a rustic who prophesies to more urbane people.
Yet the ultimate significance of this prophetic and apocalyptic imagery does not seem to lie merely in the idea that Quiller is an ignored prophet, and it is this lack of direct and consistent correspondence which keeps the story from being a pure allegory. Instead the play is a parable, the significance of which devolves upon the individual's correct relation to his world, to his own spirit and to God. In this reading, Quiller is an everyman figure who lives in a fallen world and has been consequently blind to higher spirituality (instead projecting onto this world a false pantheistic significance). The apocalyptic vision of Amos's immolation affords Quiller a glimpse of his own death and, by implication, the death of the world. Thus, ordinary perception is burned away, allowing Quiller a sense of the deeper significance of human existence:
We ain't dust, Lord. That's what it is. I've bin foolish. [ ... ] I s'pose, Lord, I let ye down after all. Made ye a figure of fun t'rough me. [ ... ] Dat's a powerful piece of knowledge ye give me, Lord, even though I don't deserve it after the way I treated ye. We ain't dust. We's all fire and water ... (79-80)
Though both Tiln and Quiller have been called parables, however, it remains to be said that these plays should not be regarded as the sum of their parabolic meaning. Indeed, there is a certain amount of self-contradiction inherent in these plays if one attempts to reduce their significance to a single clear-cut meaning: Tiln remains suspended between an existential repudiation of God and the despairing existential leap of faith which affirms God, the poetic structure of the play supporting both or neither of these interpretations. Similarly, following the apocalyptic imagery, Quiller resumes in, from one point of view, a sort of anti-climactic afterlife, with Quiller's ramblings not so very different from what they had been before; and yet there is the clear suggestion of a kind of Blakean reawakening of spiritual vision from a sleep of dullness and foolishness, summed up by Quiller's "We ain't dust. We's all fire and water." This anagnorisis seems to have reconciled Quiller to death in some way, and yet there is no unequivocal indication that his revised relationship to God and the world is a correct one. It is only certain that he is closer to death than he was at the beginning of the play (is, perhaps, already dead).
Both parables, then, lean on apocalypse as an organizing principle for their poetic structure, without allowing the religious context to impart a readily educible meaning. In this light we can see how Tiln and Quiller are fundamentally different from parables which have an immediate religious (i.e., doctrinal) function: the former are parables which explore confusion; the latter disperse confusion, offering certainty in its stead.
Taken as a whole, Cook's plays echo the Judaeo-Christian mythical framework of the Fall, the immanence of Grace and the ultimate revelation of Apocalypse with a sequence of elegy, allegory and eschatology. Cook has employed the imagery associated with the Newfoundlanders' relationship to the ocean to give symbolic shape to this pattern. Quiller and Jacob's Wake in particular seem to be "ships of death" like that imagined by D.H. Lawrence's poem, which speaks of preparing the soul for death as if one were building a ship in preparation for a sea voyage. The sea has, of course, always been one of the most bounteous sources of the sublime in literature; the embodiment of the most mysterious and frightening aspects of our natural environment. Hence, for a romantic-existentialist playwright like Michael Cook, placed within a community which finds in the sea its greatest source of both life and death, it is perhaps inevitable that he would find himself building poetic ships to venture forth into the greatest of unknowns.
NOTES
1 Making a succinct link between the elegy and eschatology, Frank Kermode says of poets treating apocalypse: "The End is a figure for their own deaths" (7).
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2 "Vomedic irony, as it may be called with pardonable ugliness, retains enough buoyancy to function as comedy. But its spirit of the absurd is so thoroughly amalgamated with bleakness, torment, and dread (Kafka's narratives of clownish-torturous bafflement come to mind) that it may seem to betoken thedeath of comedy. Yet Vomedic irony remains affiliated with certain ancient ironic insights that were
intended to furnish a stimulus and a salve" (Gurewitch 55).
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3 E.g., Pratt is described as "the Newfoundland realist" in Taylor C1
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4 In "Signs and Symbols," an old couple returns from an unsuccessful visit to their hospitalized son,
who suffers from "referential mania." "In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything
happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence" (54). The story is full
of inscrutable symbols which arouse a foreboding in the reader similar to the son's derangement.
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5 Rubin's account of the development of Jacob's Ladder is of particular interest in this context:
"In the early drafts of Jacob I had attempted to introduce a third layer [that is, beyond 'reality'
and 'illusion'] to the script, the idea that Jacob's confrontations with demons might actually be
connected to a larger world event, the Biblical Apocalypse. I wanted to portray the dissolution
of an individual mind in the larger context of a dissolution of the entire world. For Jacob it
would be impossible to distinguish between his own death and the catastrophic end of
everything around him. In his internal landscape, the world would die with him" (175).
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