Melmoth the Wanderer
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49. defaced page: now the brother Juan writes to the Spaniard Alonzo Monçada within the latter’s oral tale to Melmoth, which in its turn has been written down for its reader. Hence, the textual asterisks are the visual equivalents both of an orally reported narrative, and the defaced manuscript on which it is based.
50. Jacob…victim: This links to the earlier allusion made by Alonzo to himself as Esau – the two brothers independently use the same biblical ‘figure’ to describe themselves.
51. in ordine ad spiritualia: In the ranks of the spiritual.
CHAPTER VI
1. ‘Afar do the spirits keep me aloof, the phantoms of men that have done with toils’, Homer (Iliad, xxiii, 72). The spirit of Patroclus appears to Achilles in a dream and seeks for a swift funeral so that he can enter Hades properly. The analogy is with the spiritual limbo, into which the young Monçada is compelled to enter.
2. equivocation: Make ambiguous answers; another traditional sign of Jesuitry. Having sworn no allegiance to earthly princes, the Jesuits are not compelled to tell the truth under oath. Cf. Shakespeare, Macbeth, II, iii, which contains several allusions to equivocations in the trial of the Jesuit Father Garnet, one of the arch conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The idea of Jesuit equivocation is a traditional source of horror in the Gothic romance. (Cf. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian.) Here, the narrator, Alonzo Monçada, uses the technique against the Jesuits themselves; but the Director, an ex-Jesuit, recognizes it. Maturin thus doubles the force of his propaganda point.
3. æras: Eras.
4. Had…desire: The story was published in the Spectator, No. 447.
5. commutation: Substitution.
6. Providence: The doctrine of the Divine ordering of the affairs of the world, a key factor in the plotting of this novel because it opposes itself to ‘chance’. The universal rule, however, is that the individual (including the Wanderer himself) never has access to the pattern at times of ‘choice’, but only retrospectively.
7. railing…railing: 1 Peter iii, 9. An address from Peter to the ‘strangers’ of Asia Minor, pleading with them in their marriages to be as ‘all of one mind’, not ‘rendering evil for evil’. The comparison is around the theme of domestic harmony.
8. Ex uno disce omnes: From one, judge of all. Virgil, Aeneid, ii, 65–6. The phrase belongs to Aeneas who warns his listeners in advance: ‘Hear now the treachery of the Greeks and from one, learn the wickedness of all.’ The one is Sinon, the youth who convinced the Trojans to accept him, and then opened the gates to let the Greeks in.
9. Apage Satana: Get thee behind me, Satan. Matt, xvi, 23.
10. Agag…is past: 1 Samuel xv, 32: King of the Amalekites, Agag is ‘unfortunate’ because, after saying this, he was hewn to pieces by Samuel.
11. Johan Lorenz von Mosheim (1694?–1755), An Ecclesiastical History, 1765.
12. evanition: (Fr. evanouir) disappearance, hence as here: ‘fainting’.
13. in Beaumont and Fletcher: i.e. The Mad Lover, IV, i: ‘Let’s sing him a black Santis, then let’s all howl/In our own beastly voices…’
14. Tetzel: John Tetzel (1465–1519), the German Dominican whose sale of indulgences triggered Luther’s Reformation.
15. I was…vessel: Traditionally the sailors turn on the ‘Jonah’ figure as a scapegoat. Cf. Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, ii, 91–6 and 141–2.
16. The Almighty…literally: An almost slapstick joke that releases tension for a moment.
17. Mithridate: Universal antidote against poison and infections (named after the legendary immunity to disease of Mithridates the Great); a name for opium. Laudanum’: The alcoholic tincture of opium.
18. In Catholic…flames: This sudden comment (from Alonzo to his interlocutor, John Melmoth) draws us back to 1816 and the question for Maturin’s audience in 1820 of Catholic emancipation. The example of the theatre of hell is from the last act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which was first performed in 1787, in which the ghost of the Commendatore comes to dine and drags Don Giovanni in Faustian fashion down into the raging gulf below the stage.
19. diabole te adjuro: Devil, I bind you under a curse.
20. de novo: From the start, afresh.
CHAPTER VII
1. Pandere…mersas: To unfold secrets buried in the depths and darkness of the earth (Virgil, Aeneid, vi, 267). Virgil speaks and asks for permission from the Gods of Hades to narrate the horrors of the underworld.
2. I’ll shew…Butts?: Shakespeare, Henry VIII, V, ii, 20–21: the ‘sight’ is Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, waiting his turn like other common suitors to approach the table of the Privy Council and be told that he is committed to the Tower.
3. despair…diary: Another memorable observation about the rhetoric of the Gothic novel, which is often founded on diaries and manuscripts and the apparatus of recording experience.
4. all…forgotten: Gen. xli, 30: Joseph interprets the Pharaoh’s dream: ‘and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt’.
5. light…darkness: Job x, 22: Job’s description of his own death-in-life.
6. My…Jew: The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1480. Jews were given a choice of baptism or banishment from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. In 1502, it was the turn of the Moors. Jews are assimilated as ‘conversos’, but lead a secret, underground life.
7. am as good…mountains: Don Quixote, Pt II, Ch. xlviii. Dona Rodriguez, the Duchess’s waiting woman, describes her former husband to Don Quixote.
8. agremens: Fr. agrements: ornaments.
9. the…Sacrifice: i.e. God’s sacrifice of his only Son, and Christ’s voluntary sacrifice of himself.
10. re-act Penelope’s web: Homer, Odyssey, XIX, 137–55. Penelope, wife of Odysseus, who, in order to gain time for him to return, imposed the condition on her suitors that they could not ask for her hand until she had finished weaving the shroud of her father-in-law, Laertes. At night, she unwove what she had done in the day, gaining three years this way until betrayed by her waiting-women.
11. on the ‘qui vive’: On the alert.
12. If I…there: Ps. cxxxix, 8–9. God searches for David, who seeks to escape from him.
13. a branded Cain: Abel is Cain’s brother, whom he slew, for which act he was branded by God and became an outcast, doomed to wander. The story is a source for the legend of the Wandering Jew; here, it foreshadows the predicament of Melmoth the Wanderer, and connects it with the story of the two brothers.
14. like…mechanism: Here this running conceit refers to the transfer of moral responsibility.
15. Pentecost: Festival of the Christian Church, which celebrates the Gift of Tongues, observed on the seventh Sunday after Easter, in commemoration of the descent of the Holy Spirit, upon the disciples (Acts ii); Whitsunday.
CHAPTER VIII
1. Ye monks, etc.: Not traced.
2. like witnesses: The analogy is derived from accounts of the procedure of the Inquisition, in which the accused is assumed to be guilty until proved innocent, unlike the presumption of the English Common Law, which is the reverse. It is also an image of the individual cut off from the face of God.
3. rictus Sardonicus: Facial symptoms resembling those of laughter, after which death occurred. This is the deathshead grimace: the Gothic heart of the novel, repeated on the living faces of its characters.
4. eastern tale: ‘The History of Chec Chahabeddin’, in Turkish Tales, by Chec Zade, English translation, 1708. A résumé of the story is given in the Spectator, 94, Monday, 18 June 1711, which is probably Maturin’s source.
5. Moore’s: John Moore (1729–1802) first brought out A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland and Germany in 1779, with a continuation about Italy in 1781 (Grant).
6. cranched: Gnashed, crunched (i.e. more violent than ‘gritted’).
7. a blue mist: A traditional sign that the devil is near.
8. noctuary: A nightly record, just as a diary is a daily one. The sentence is another pithy p
sychological ‘axiom’ of terror.
9. travellers: The most famous is Giovanni Belzoni (1778–1823), an Italian ex-circus strong-man, who looted the Valley of the Kings for his English masters and exhibited some of his finds in London, in response to which Shelley composed the sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, the Greek name of Ramses II. Belzoni was the first to enter the Pyramid of Khafra at Ghiza. He returned to England in 1819 and his Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia, 2 vols., 1820, contains a description of getting stuck in a narrow passage inside the pyramid. But without the fantasy of dismemberment.
10. whom…for ever: Heb. xii, 18: ‘For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest.’
11. Perhaps…extremity: This impressive disquisition on Silence draws upon idolatry and blasphemy for its metaphorical inversions.
CHAPTER IX
1. irrepealable: Incapable of being repealed, irrevocable.
2. You, Sir…countries: Monçada has evidently forgotten the storm in which he arrived. Ireland tends to be wet, and Wicklow, as the descriptions of its stormy night skies suggest, can be wild. The joke tends to remind us of the layering of the text, by halting the narrative and breaking the frame.
3. sleep for ever: Source unidentified. But the point is clear: such a sleep excludes the resurrection and is heretical. Cf. the sub-Pauline cliché on Victorian (nonconformist) tombstones: ‘who fell asleep in Jesus’, which coyly evades the heresy.
4. small but indispensable refreshment: Gen. xxv, 34. Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for ‘a mess of pottage’ and thus despised his birthright. The allusion acts as an unfortunate echo of the Wanderer’s Faustian ‘transaction’.
5. An old man…in him: The allusion is to Lady Macbeth’s hair-raising line: ‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.’ Shakespeare, Macbeth, V, i, 39–40.
6. me ipso teste: Lit. ‘with myself as witness’. The author poses as an editor of Alonzo Monçada’s oral account: but this corroboration has the opposite effect to the one apparently intended: it breaks, rather than confirming, the narrative, drawing our attention to the printed text.
7. as the beasts that perish: Ps. xlix, 12. The Psalm is a consolatory warning that riches (and honour) ultimately make no difference, that without a sense of God we shall perish like the beasts. Here the allusion suggests that to deny your consciousness is to be reduced to that situation before death.
8. Phalaris: Died c. 554BC, the tyrant of Acragas (modern Agrigento). He is alleged to have roasted his victims alive in a bronze bull, their shrieks representing the animal’s bellowing.
9. Emotions are my events: A witty condensation which sums up the rhetoric of the Gothic novel from Ann Radcliffe’s version of the Burkean sublime (see above, Chapter II, note 4) to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘objectless yet intolerable horror’ (William Wilson, 1839). Now the Parricide takes over the role of Narrator of the oral tale, telling it to Monçada as listener, who is recounting it to John Melmoth as listener.
10. the dignified depravity of an informer: Another oxymoronic but morally acute psychological description. (See intro. pp. xxvi-xxviii.)
11. amateurs: i.e. ‘connoisseurs’. Sadistic voyeurism, linked to a lust for power.
12. ineffable: Unspeakable, inexpressible. Ironic because usually used to describe God, or God’s gift of grace.
13. Charlevoix: Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix (1682–1761), History of Paraguay, 1756 (English translation, 2 vols., 1769), Vol. I, 22: ‘The Indians say that they engender in the same way with land-animals, and that the males often attack women as it is pretended monkeys do in some countries…’ Then follows the reported confession of an Indian woman to one Father Montaya, that one of these animals attacked her sexually while she was sleeping by a river. The lurid, horrified tone is Maturin’s: it is ostensibly part of an analogy for the emotions caused (in a narrow, superstitious mind) by the transgression of conventual rules. But its effect is not to harness horror so much as to create it in another direction. Cf. Matthew Lewis’s horror story about a giant boa-constrictor, ‘The Anaconda’.
14. the horns of the altar: 1 Kings i, 50.
15. confidence: The mental attitude of relying on a person, firm trust, faith. But also, boldness, assurance. The expression combines ‘trust’ and the role of ‘one who entrusts’, i.e. narrates.
16. The force…tale: Here the act of narration is placed on the same level as the survival of the character.
17. hateful…another: Titus iii, 3. The epistle is from Paul to his son, Titus, whom he has left in Crete, exhorting him to practise and preach good works. The phrase is a confession that Paul himself, in his previous life before his conversion, was (like the rest of the community) full of ‘malice and envy’.
18. induration: Hardening.
19. Here is no hope: Dante, Divina Commedia, Inferno: III, 9: ‘All Hope abandon, ye who enter here.’
20. Madame Sevigné (1626–96). Her letters (published in 1726) to her daughter, Françoise Marguerite, the Comtesse de Grignan, written without specific literary intention, became the model for the epistolary novel.
21. clamp me…hours: ‘Clap’ (Grant). Here for a moment the Parricide drops into the hearty cynicism of an English seventeenth-century cavalier about romantic love, then settles into the position of a fetishistic voyeur of suffering.
22. couch: (From Fr. se coucher) go to bed, make love. Love is an appetite which, under certain circumstances, literally consumes itself, so the analogy is between eating and lovemaking: ‘couch’ nastily condenses the two. It also seems to suggest ‘crouch’.
23. barter a descended Venus: A striking phrase. Venus does not normally ‘descend’ like Jove, and offer her love to mortals. But Homer describes in Iliad, III, for example, how Menelaus, the husband of Helen, would have defeated Paris in single combat but for the intervention of the goddess, Aphrodite. Maturin perhaps has in mind the tale of Cupid and Psyche in the Greek romance of Apuleius, The Golden Ass.
24. Zeno…Burgersdicius: Not Zeno of Elea, but Zeno (fourth century BC), the first of the Stoics. Francis Burgersdyck (1590–1629), Professor of Logic at Leyden. The point is that one cannot philosophize away physical needs. Love here is like the Marquis de Sade’s analysis of it: ultimately reducible to a question of power.
25. ascititious: (From Lat. adscisco-ere) supplemental, i.e. redundant. The OED says the more common form is ‘adscititious’, but records a use of this archaic form in Sir Walter Scott, which is possibly where Maturin found it.
26. Trembling: The story is handed back to Monçada at this point.
27. I would have…brightness: Job xxxi, 26. Maturin has run another phrase into the Job quotation, the original of which reads: ‘If I beheld the sun when it shines, or the moon walking in darkness.’ The point about Job is that he has not committed idolatry: the sun and moon, he is saying, do not secretly remind him of his gold and silver. So the general sense is accurate to the biblical original.
CHAPTER X
1. Sir W. Scott, Marmion, Canto II, xxiv. These are the executioners of Constance Beverley, prepared to wall her up, alive, deep under Whitby Abbey. The analogy is with Monçada’s imprisonment in the Inquisition.
2. You…images: Another paradorical literary denial of fiction, in which narrative is presented as testimony, and therefore as ‘facts instead of images’.
3. All of the free-standing lines of Latin poetry on p. 423 are taken from Virgil, Aeneid, ii.
Heu…venis?: ‘How greatly changed, alas, from what he seemed – From what shores, Hector, long-awaited, have you come?’ (Virgil, Aeneid, ii, 274, 282–3 – Grant). Aeneas is confronted by the ghost of Hector in the ruins of Troy. Slightly adapted: the original reads: quantum mutatus ab illo/Hectore qui redit exuvias indutus Achilli: How changed from that Hector who returns after donning the spoils of Achilles.
Heu fuge: ‘Ah, flee’ (ibid., ii, 289): Hector urges Aeneas to flee from the flames, because ‘all claims are paid’.
Venit…tempus: ‘the final day has come and the inevitable hour’ (ibid., ii, 324). Panthus runs frantic to the doors of Aeneas’s house.
Proximus ardet Ucalegon: ‘the house of his [Deiphobus’s] neighbour Ucalegon is ablaze’ (Virgil, Aeneid, ii, 311–12): Aeneas looks out over the rooftops of burning Troy, seeing Anchises’, his father’s house, and that of Deiphobus’s neighbour, Ucalegon – all in flames.
4. vox stridula: ‘Creaking voice’ (Seneca, Epistles, lvi, 2). Seneca lives above a bath-house, and hears constantly below the shrill, self-regarding tones of the hair-plucker.
5. the Upas: (Malay: ‘poison’) Antiaris toxicaria: tree which exudes poison if an incision is made. In the eighteenth century tales were current that the tree destroyed all animals with in a fifteen-mile radius, but there was no truth in them. Cf. Blake’s lyric, ‘The Poison Tree’.
6. Bermudez de Belmonte, El Diablo Predicador, y Mayor Contrario Amigo, 1624 (Grant).
7. the devil…stage: Here the devil’s hypocrisy, in crossing himself, is presented as a joke about representation – the actor has forgotten he is acting but in that moment unconsciously represents the true nature of the character he is playing.
8. men…hearts: Maturin, for a number of reasons, did not obtain preferment in the Irish Church. Cf. Swift’s division of the Irish clergy in the earlier eighteenth century into two types, the successful and obsequious Crusodes (‘Drip-nose’); and the cheerful Eugenio (‘Benign’) who is denied a fellowship because he ‘has been found dancing’. Maturin was a Eugenio – one of the few things we know about him is that he liked dancing. See Swift, The Intelligencer, Nos. IV and V, 1728.