Losing Nelson

How meta can we possibly go? As I've noted here a number of times, contemporary historical fiction often resorts to parallel plots: the characters in Plot A, often biographers or historians of some sort, find themselves living through events that eerily echo those experienced by the subjects of their research, who can be found in Plot B.  In a sense, these novels follow gothic logic: far from staying "past," the past hijacks the present wholesale, until the researcher solves the puzzle or takes the right action.*  But in Losing Nelson, Barry Unsworth pushes the parallel-plot historical novel a step further by undermining its basic premises.

Losing Nelson's narrator, Charles Cleasby, is afraid of making eye contact, shows all the signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suffers from paranoia to boot.  Cleasby has, so far, managed to compensate for many of his problems through his passionate identification with Lord Nelson, with whom he feels on rather chummy terms (he always refers to Nelson as "Horatio").  His life's work, if one can call it that, is a massive biography of Nelson--a project that puts Cleasby firmly in the literary line of accidental autobiographers, and which also sets us up to expect some sort of resonance between the Napoleonic era and our own.  But matters don't quite work as planned.  As one might imagine, Cleasby's life doesn't "parallel" Nelson's.  Instead, Cleasby tries to force his life into the rhythms of his Nelsonian saint's calendar:

On this day, at 12:50 P.M.--just over an hour's time--his ship, the Captain, went into close action.  And here was I among this mute herd, sweating despite the cold, a good two miles from my table and my models.  The ships were not even set out.  It mattered so much to get the time right, therein lay the whole meaning--how else could I keep my life parallel with his? (2)

Cleasby's obsessive attention to clock-time already parodies the parallel-plot novel's equally obsessive attention to the return of earlier events: the action must take place on the same day, at the exact moment, for the precise duration.  Simultaneously, Cleasby yearns to envision himself in Nelson's life, to the extent that his biographical narratives constantly slip into both the second person ("you") and the first person plural ("we").  Barely living himself, Cleasby fantasizes sharing a life of action and desire that is also, nevertheless, irrevocably gone; the pronouns fail to reactivate it.  Cleasby's life doesn't "repeat" Nelson's so much as it turns it into a bloodless, lifeless miniature--the world of the models, featuring ships with no people.  When, much later on, Cleasby internally explodes in ire at a woman who keeps interrupting a tour guide's spiel with irrelevant questions about minutiae, he fails to recognize that he, too, spends his life fixated on the wrong things. 

The novel invites us to see Cleasby's understanding of history as misguidedly masculine, as opposed to the counter-perspective offered by his secretary, "Miss Lily."  I say "misguidedly" because Cleasby himself insists on the manliness of his undertaking--and, indeed, on the manliness of all "true" supporters of Lord Nelson.  The pro-Nelson forces are "robust, deep-voiced males," whereas the anti-brigade is "more feline in character" (261); moreover, Miss Lily's sympathetic response to the victims left trailing in Nelson's wake stands in stark contrast to Cleasby's celebration of wartime heroism.  Whereas the woman on the tour merely angers Cleasby, Miss Lily poses an actual threat: her "cryptic remarks" (27) not only disrupt Cleasby's plot, but, more significantly, offer a dangerous alternative plot, one in which Nelson is a self-absorbed egotist instead of Cleasby's "bright angel" (30). 

Indeed, Cleasby's obsession with manliness reflects his own traumas.  His father, who is indirectly responsible for triggering Cleasby's fascination with Nelson, was himself obsessed with control--an obsession that eventually drives Cleasby's mother away.  Unable to repeat his father's near-perfect and frozen inwardness, "locked in some cold trance of self-absorption" (63), Cleasby parodies it in his attempts to structure his life according to Nelson's calendar (as well as unrelated compulsive behaviors).  His father also triggers both Cleasby's sometimes unwitting association of masculinity with violence and, as it transpires, his inability to complete his magnum opus.  As a child, Cleasby watches his father kill a sick rabbit by crushing it with his shoe; as an adult, Cleasby realizes that he "had no certain recollection of the dead rabbit, nothing I could be sure belonged to the time" (57).  Cleasby can neither resolve this strange gap in his memory nor interpret the meaning this violent euthanasia was supposed to bear.  The rabbit's disappearing body makes its paradoxical reappearance in the human bodies missing from Cleasby's toy-scale reenactments of Nelson's wars.  But it also reappears in a textual gap: the mystery of Nelson's betrayal of the Neopolitan Jacobins.   

Cleasby yearns to render Nelson wholly spotless in the affair, yet he cannot write through this event; he writes around it, worries at it, and finally goes to Italy in order to seek the ultimate truth.  This ominous break in Cleasby's narrative finds its mirror image in Cleasby's larger theory of both heroism and angelic twinning.   For Cleasby, Nelson became "an angel" when he "broke the line" (7)--that is, the prescribed attack formation--in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent.  This swerve away from formulaic order is a sign of Nelson's "spontaneity," his ability to "create [himself] anew" (7).  Implicitly inverting Milton, Cleasby's angels manifest themselves by rebelling against authority; "breaking the line" leads to salvation instead of damnation.   Yet "breaking the line" also suggests violent disruption. As the attentive reader soon realizes, there is a discrepancy between Cleasby's everyday acts of commemoration and the triumphant announcement of the first chapter: "He [Nelson] became a bright angel on February 14, 1797, during the Battle of Cape St. Vincent.  I became his dark twin on September 9, 1997, when I too broke the line" (8).  For all intents and purposes, the narrative that follows serves as prehistory to Cleasby's own violent "breaking," which occurs in the novel's penultimate paragraph. 

As in The Songs of the Kings, Unsworth emphasizes the contingency of hero-narratives.  Miss Lily, who fails to be an Emma Hamilton, is alluring but dangerous in her constant reminders that Nelson was merely a human being.  Worse still, when Cleasby journeys to Italy in order to find the elusive truth that will "clear" Nelson of the charge of treachery, he discovers that the Italians (naturally enough) fail to share his enthusiasm.  As an Italian scholar points out, "you could walk round in this city every day for a year and you wouldn't see the slightest sign of Nelson anywhere, neither hide nor hair of him.  Not a syllable" (323).  Nelson is not absent from Italy's history, but he is absent from Italy's heroic narratives and monuments--save, perhaps, as a villain.  "Heroes," insists the Italian scholar, "are not people":

"You know," he said, "dulce et decorum, sweet and fitting.  Not to die for one's country exactly, not necessarily, but to dream of it and be proud.  To deal with our fears by dreaming.  There are no heroes out there, Mr. Cleasby, there are only fears and dreams and the process of fabrication." (329)

Heroic narratives, in other words, are a kind of therapy on a grand scale, whether written by a nation or an individual.  In insisting that Nelson was a person, Miss Lily resists the hero-building enterprise; instead, she grounds him in history, which deals in warts but also human sympathies.  At the same time, she insists on a different kind of parallel interpretation: as she remarks, "'Well, I dare say you have got this historical sense, but you don't join up the past with the present.  I mean, the present is where we are now, isn't it?  If you did join it up, you would see that Nelson is one of those people who think they are above everything" (197).   Miss Lily believes, that is, in universal human types; Nelson's historical difference dissolves into a recognizable case of self-satisfied arrogance.  Moreover, in reading Nelson as a type, Miss Lily reabsorbs him into standard-issue humanity.  For Cleasby, however, Nelson is supremely self-aware of his own historical positioning, as well as the "rules" that will make him into the model hero. But, as Miss Lily sees but cannot quite articulate, this interpretation of Nelson is a backformation of Cleasby's own desires.  Nelson's angelic perfection somehow atones for Cleasby's own inability to act (whether the "acting" in question involves his feelings for Miss Lily or his biographical project).  It's no wonder that Cleasby continually slips into autobiography--Nelson is himself, but not in the way he originally envisioned. 

(Spoiler for the novel's ending below the fold.)

*--The most important theoretical discussions of this type of plot can be found in Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (Routledge, 1989) and Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto, 2001).