Port Mungo
Patrick McGrath's neo-Gothics occasionally take place in the time-honored settings of the Gothic. Asylum, for example, draws on the Victorian madhouse tradition. But McGrath is usually not so much interested in exterior "settings" per se as he is in the claustrophobic interior of a deranged psyche. His favorite mental territory belongs to the alienated but often apparently "normal" loner, especially a man suffering from sexual obsession of one sort or another; this figure becomes our unreliable guide to the plot's increasingly ominous events. In some novels, McGrath initially conceals the narrator's unreliability under a cloak of professional normality, as he does in Asylum and Dr. Haggard's Disease; in others, he allows the reader to perceive the narrator's insanity from the beginning, as he does in Spider. Whichever approach McGrath takes, however, his narrator's plotting--self-justifications, evasions, repressions, and so forth--dominates the plot.
Port Mungo furthers McGrath's experiments with the unreliable narrator. His female narrator, Virginia ("Gin"), is uneasily aware of her own wayward memory, but she is just as willing to collapse what she imagines into what she sees. A case in point is her "primal scene" of sorts, involving her brother Jack and their tutor:
They turned towards me, Miss Splendour abruptly sitting up, startled and alarmed, as well she might be: my brother's penis was up out of his trousers, emphatically erect, and I'm quite certain that a second before I opened the door Miss Splendour had had it in her hand or in her mouth, or both. It was huge, this I do remember from the glimpse I had of it as I went in to get my book. (21)
Gin knows the sexual transgression that she doesn't witness. The real event happens just out of sight; what's left is the thing she constantly denies that she wants, but which preoccupies her nevertheless. (As she later admits, her relationships with men always fail because she is searching for "[s]omeone like Jack" [127].) This scene's structure sums up the narrative's movement as a whole: Gin is almost always too late or too far away to witness the novel's core events, and the stories she tells about these events compensate--albeit inadequately--for her inability to truly possess Jack.
While Gin's sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious oscillations between the imagined and the real already complicate our reception of the story, McGrath renders matters even more obscure by making Gin the filter for other storytellers: Gin's artist-brother, Jack, the incestuous focus of her obsessions; Vera, Jack's lover; and Anna, Jack's and Vera's surviving daughter. There are other storytellers who muddy the waters even further, including Gin's eldest brother, Gerald, and Vera's other lover, Johnny Hodges. The narrative that results is an unsteady layer cake, since Gin herself "knows" the events she describes almost entirely through the self-interested stories told by yet other unreliable characters.
By now, some readers may be muttering "radical indeterminacy" and wandering off in quiet despair. Hold firm. At the center of the novel lies its one brutal, unquestioned fact: that Jack's teenage daughter Peg died in a swamp near the fetid South American town of Port Mungo. "What can you say about the death of a child?" (3) Gin asks, but, in fact, the characters all seek ways to explain the event. Did the drunken Vera accidentally kill Peg during a boat trip, as Jack claims? Or did Jack suggest that the depressed Peg ought to kill herself? Or, as Vera and Gerald argue, did Peg commit suicide because Jack molested her? Gin's response to these multiple stories reflects her own, unconsummated longing for Jack; while her position eventually tilts towards Vera's and Gerald's, the truth of what happened to Peg remains less important to the characters' actions than the incontrovertible fact that it did. Despite Gin's rhetorical question, Peg's death "inspires" storytelling, and storytelling, in turn, leads to Jack's own death--possibly, indeed probably, at the hand of his other daughter, Anna.
Jack's suicide/murder speaks to one of the novel's subtler appropriations of the Gothic tradition: the role of doubling and repetition. As a teenager, Gin takes a traumatic boat trip with Jack, and has a similar experience later on with Vera and Peg. Gin/Virginia herself, "no sort of an explorer" (84), is a static, pale shadow of the peripatetic Vera. When Vera first sees the adult Anna, she tells her that "you're the image of my Peg" (195); similarly, when Gin studies Jack's painting of Anna, she first sees Peg (177) and later, at Vera's prompting, Jack himself (203). Anna slashes another artist, Eduardo, with a razor, and may or may not have repeated this assault on Jack. And Anna, like Vera, often disappears and reappears without notice. (Incidentally, Gin's narrative breaks off with a dash, which repeats the ending of Dr. Haggard's Disease!) In many instances, these doublings suggest frustrated or conflicted desire: Virginia, who dislikes travel, identifies Vera's strength with her ability to wander; Jack's ongoing obsession with Peg blinds him to Anna's otherness; Anna simultaneously yearns for and loathes the father she never knew. But echoes take on additional significance when it comes to Jack's standing as an artist.
Much of Gin's life revolves around her conviction that Jack is an unsung master--a conviction that Jack, at various points, appears to share. And yet, Jack's life and art doesn't seem to be quite his own. The portrait of Anna reminds Gin "of a Venus I once saw in the Louvre, a Cranach I think" (176); Gin dubs Jack a "latter-day Gauguin" (81); and Jack has to admit that, as a young man, he painted over some of Vera's work (217). Even Jack's suicide/murder apparently echoes Mark Rothko's:
I thought of Rothko then. Jack's hero. I was living in New York when he died, and I remembered how he'd cut himself with a razor blade, not his wrists but the brachial arteries under his elbows. So there was a derivative quality to Jack's death, it lacked originality. Say the same about his paintings, I suppose. (241)
While Jack represents himself throughout as an artist pursuing Art with admitted selfishness, Gin's unwilling epiphany at the end dismantles much of his life-journey's significance. Jack flees to New York with Vera to create, but finds himself creating nothing; after they flee to South America, Jack finally does begin to paint, but, as Vera tells Gin, "He convinced a lot of people he was Gauguin come back from the dead. It was a hoax, and if you had an eye, Gin, you'd have seen it" (222). In other words, Jack is not so much an Artist as he is a maker of pastiche, an echo of the brilliant original. For Jack, Narcissus--wasting away for love of a reflection perceived as another--stands for the artist himself. (The image of Narcissus also suits Gin, who adores a brother of her own creation.) But in the end, Jack is merely a narcissist, not Narcissus, and his passion for himself leads only to imaginative sterility.