Warwick Collins' The Marriage of Souls is the second novel in a projected trilogy* that began with The Rationalist. The year is 1798 and the place is Lymington, a town dominated by the ominous fires of its salt furnaces. But there is almost no action. Instead, the novel dwells on the reverberating effects of an absence--the absence of the mysterious Mrs. Celia Quill, whose presence in the first novel awoke the titular "rationalist," Dr. Silas Grange, to the possibilities of passion. When the second novel begins, Grange is beginning to recover from the mysterious illness connected with Mrs. Quill's departure, with the sometimes equivocal aid of the town's senior physician, Dr. James Hargood.
What follows is a cross between confession and proto-psychoanalysis. (In fact, the two doctors spend some time discussing what amounts to a French theory of the subconscious mind.) Collins shifts back and forth between a third-person limited omniscient narrator and Hargood's letter-journal, paying close attention to the limitations of language itself: to what extent is is possible to fully confess? To what extent does language collapse under the weight of emotion, or even betray it? As it happens, the character who changes most is not Grange but Hargood, whose sense of self transforms radically as he reveals his earlier relationship to Mrs. Quill. Hargood's self-discovery rests in his reevaluation of "purity," which he defines not as "innocence" but, instead, as authentic "wholeness." While Hargood initially disdains purity--at one point he proudly describes himself as "impure"--he comes to see that purity cannot be separated from autonomy, a respect for one's own liberty and the liberty of others. Grange's own purity, however, is not quite enough: he still needs feeling. For Grange, this lack in himself becomes most evident when he encounters the banker Mr. St. Just, whose purely rational calculations about the relationship between profit and the welfare of his workers elides the experiential reality of human suffering. Nevertheless, Grange's budding humanitarianism indirectly results in tragedy.
There's far more going on here: reflections on subjectivity, the relationship between the subconscious and the conscious mind, the nature of atheist morality, the role of accident in historical events... This novel takes some patience, since very little actually happens; speech and writing substitute for physical action. All of the characters exist in a heightened state of consciousness, forever reflecting on the process of interpreting other human beings. As the novel warns, seeking for patterns and motives may itself become dangerous; it is Hargood's misreading of Mrs. Quill, for example, that propels the crisis of the first novel, just as in the second it prevents him from acknowledging the demons in his own soul. In a sense, Collins drives his characters towards "objectivity," by forcing them to acknowledge that the Other's autonomy is not exhausted by the Self's own needs and desires. I'm not sure that this is an altogether successful novel--the characterization is occasionally inconsistent, the absent Mrs. Quill is a disappointment when she reappears (odd, given the novel's feminism), and on occasion the novel simply becomes too talky--but it is certainly an ambitious one.
*--The third novel was announced for 2001 but never appeared, although it is still listed in some online bibliographies of Collins' work.
Comments