Michael Cox's neo-Victorian The Meaning of Night: A Confession (2006) revisits that popular mid-to-late Victorian genre, the sensation novel. Its rather unreliable narrator, Edward G. (he takes on various last names over the course of the narrative), discovers that he is actually the long-lost son of Lord Tansor. Alas, Lord Tansor has become partial to Edward's enemy from Eton, the icky Phoebus Daunt, and Edward spends nearly seven hundred pages in monomaniacal pursuit of both his real identity and his hated competitor for Tansor's estate. Along the way, he falls madly in love with the beauteous Emily Carteret, takes photographs, gloats over antiquarian books, engages in the occasional act of torture, knocks himself out with laudanum, and carries on with various ladies of the evening. Oh, and he murders someone just for practice.
As I'm about to give away the plot, I'll put the rest of this post beneath the fold.
Despite my plot summary, this is one of the most academic novels I've ever read. By "academic," I refer not to Edward's thwarted intellectual ambitions or the novel's bibliographical obsessions, but instead to the plot mechanics. The novel reads like a parody of poststructuralist theory: its narrator is a suspiciously decentered subject, the plot proceeds through an endless deferral of meaning, it's difficult to locate an origin, and everything reduces to text (or, rather, a bewildering proliferation of texts). Cox begins the game with his "Editor's Preface," a jokey disavowal of authorship--the novel has purportedly been edited for us by Prof. J. J. Antrobus--that slyly hints at Cox's own reputation as an anthologist. And yet, the confession has no verifiable author, since Edward cannot be found under any of his names (11); moreover, the book's authenticity rests in part on Phoebus Daunt's existence--which, of course, is also a fiction, complete with fictionalized bibliography as "proof." Cox here continues the grand Gothic tradition of the "found manuscript," also recently put to use by Benjamin Markovits. But the preface already confuses our quest for a stable author-function, if you will, especially given the manuscript's problematic status as a "confession." As Antrobus remarks, in some puzzlement, "[a]s to the author, despite his desire to confess all to posterity, his own identity remains a tantalizing mystery" (11). But then, the novel calls the very possibility of complete confession into question...
While Edward's antipathy to Phoebus begins before he knows that anything is amiss, his attempt to regain his proper heritage associates identity with origins. After piecing together his situation from his dead "mother's" journals, Edward anxiously wonders "Who was I?" and finds that "I did not belong here, in this place I had previously called home, where the past no longer seemed to hold any meaning" (192). Edward's quest for his roots elevates both past and future into the determinants of the "I," while making the present essentially meaningless. On first seeing his father, he seeks for clues to his own nature; similarly, reading a thirteenth-century writ to one of his ancestors, he asks himself, "what qualities of character [...] had I inherited from this man of iron and blood?" (350) Edward occupies a failed fairytale, playing the role of the dispossessed heir, raised in poverty, who returns to seek his birthright and assume his proper identity. But by insisting on the authenticity of that other life, Edward dismantles any chance he has to succeed in his own "story." One of the central problems of Edward's confession, not surprisingly, is that the self who confesses remains protean and destabilized, "in perpetual exile from the life that should have been mine" (625). Edward always understands himself to be elsewhere.
One of Edward's very few friends, his employer Mr. Tredgold, suggests that Edward should photograph Lord Tansor because it would give his "descendants [...] an unmediated image of him as he really is, at this present time" (254). To the reader's no great shock, Tredgold's belief in the joint possibilities of "unmediated" representation and knowing someone "as he really is" undergoes a thorough manhandling everywhere else in the novel. Not only are we reading a supposedly "mediated" text--an oral confession, transcribed after the fact, then edited--but also the narrative takes concealment as one of its central themes. In fact, we discover elsewhere that Lord Tansor's stern bearing conceals his "true" nature, just as Tredgold conceals his vast collection of vintage pornography in a cupboard, Edward's "mother" conceals his true identity, Emily conceals her love for Phoebus, and so on, and so on, and so on. Such revelations are the stock-in-trade of sensation fiction, of course (well, not the revelation about the vintage porn, which is the stock-in-trade of neo-Victorian fiction; cf. Fingersmith). But in Edward's case, such revelations are never final; even in his confession to his friend Le Grice, which the novel purportedly documents, Edward never reveals the murder with which the narrative opens. About the only thing to which Edward confesses in entirety is that he's an unreliable narrator!
Nearly every revelation simply leads to another text. Journals,
letters, articles, wills, writs...the list goes on. As Edward himself notes in some despair, his quest feels like it has an "eternally receding end" (499). (Ultimately, this
is the novel's greatest flaw, since Cox could have omitted several
links in the chain--not to mention two or three hundred pages of
text--without materially affecting the novel's structure or themes.)
Edward, in turn, covers further reams of paper with notes, annotations,
and memoranda--compulsive acts of writing doubled by Phoebus Daunt's
"unstoppable torrent of drivel in rhyming couplets and blank verse"
(266), and then tripled by Phoebus' far juicier occupation as a forger (425).
To Edward, Phoebus' plot to take over the Tansor inheritance is the
ultimate act of forgery; after all, Phoebus quite literally wants to
sign Edward's rightful name. The problem, though, is that Edward's
identity also quite literally rests on nothing but texts. Stupidly
relying on Emily's supposed "love" for him, Edward gives her his
accumulated materials for safekeeping. Alas, when he returns to her to
fetch them, he opens the secret cupboard behind his biological mother's
portrait and finds, "of course," that it "was empty" (618). The
mother's secret, the engine of the plot, simply vanishes, and Edward
changes names once again in order to take his revenge; indeed, the
murder which concludes the novel's main body is not done under any name
that the victim could recognize. By answering "Ernest Geddington" when
the dying Phoebus asks "Who are you?", Edward refuses what ought to
have been the novel's climactic revelation. There really is nothing behind the portrait.
For the reader, needless to say, there's one more obvious irony: once the texts that support Edward's claims disappear, then within the novel's own world, Edward's "confession" begins to look more than a little problematic--especially since his reliability has already been called into question. In fact, it comes to look more and more like a sensation novel. Yet the sensation novel as the Victorians knew it didn't become a fad until the early 1860s, and The Meaning of Night is set during the 1850s. Our mysterious narrator, whoever he is, may not lay claim to the Tansor inheritance, but he has apparently invented a new genre...
I just finished this last night and wished I could discuss it with someone, so thanks for the dip into the 'academic' side of it - I enjoyed the read!
Rosie of BooksAndBooks
Posted by: Rosie of BooksAndBakes | March 15, 2010 at 01:48 PM