The Grotesque

Patrick McGrath's The Grotesque (1989) is, in some ways, more conventionally "Gothic" than McGrath's other novels, in the sense that it features such traditional elements as a dank and comically decaying mansion (watch out for wayward plumbing), a physically and mentally decrepit family line (primarily distinguished by insanity and buck teeth), and a pair of creepy servants (the butler, in particular).  But the novel uses its conventions in such a fashion as to enter the realm of parody--or, perhaps, "mock-Gothic."  Characters even come equipped with names like Coal (appropriate for a student of fossils), Limp, Fledge, and Giblet.  The genre conventions seem as deliberately decrepit as the house. 

Our narrator, the titular grotesque, recounts the novel to us from within his paralyzed body; once a "gentleman scientist"--or, more properly, a crackpot convinced that the scientific establishment is out to silence him--he suffers, apparently, from the aftermath of a stroke.  When still active, Sir Hugo engaged in such charming activities as feeding maggots to his toad at the dinner table and ignoring his wife in favor of the bones he keeps in the barn.  Now trapped in his wheelchair, Sir Hugo meditates darkly on his wife's affair with the butler.  Or, at least, he meditates on what he thinks is his wife's affair with the butler. 

Like all of McGrath's narrators, the truly odious Sir Hugo Coal is spectacularly unreliable.  Unusually, however, Sir Hugo's unreliability goes beyond the bounds of dramatic irony; as he admits to us near the end, "I began to find that the only events that I could record with any precision were not those that happened outside myself, but, rather, the operations that my own mind performed upon the fragmentary stimuli that now constituted reality for me" (151).  By the end, it simply isn't clear if what Sir Hugo sees--namely, Fledge usurping his own place in the household--is an artifact of his observations or just his paranoid storytelling.  For Sir Hugo does indeed suffer from paranoia: other scientists are out to get him, Fledge wants to kill him, and so forth.  Most readers will figure out that Sir Hugo is somewhat around the bend before they get to page 25, which brings his narrative voice closer to the speaker of Spider than, say, that of Asylum. 

Given that we can't be sure if Sir Hugo's narrative tells us anything about what's going on outside his prison-house of consciousness, does it help us understand what's going on inside? The answer initially struck me as a fairly predictable one: Sir Hugo, who thinks that his would-be son-in-law is carrying on a homosexual affair with/being blackmailed by/blackmailing Fledge, is, we are strongly led to believe, himself the blackmailed homosexual--and, of course, the murderer.  (Apparently, McGrath took a detour into Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?)  Sir Hugo inadvertently drops some clues along the way: his mysterious lack of interest in his wife; his relationship to George Lecky, who is wrongly hanged for the murder ("I gripped him by the shoulders and squeezed them warmly" [115]); his unnervingly detailed fantasies about Fledge in the nude.  If we think about this "solution" in relation to the novel's other parodies or exaggerations of Gothic conventions, though, it becomes predictable in a more fitting way.  It's both a parody of the Gothic's own obsession with sexual secrets--incest, for example--and, I think, of how literary critics frequently read the Gothic in psychoanalytic terms.  (One character eventually suggests that Sir Hugo's paralysis might be "hysterical" [176].)  What else but sex could be at the bottom of everything, the local swamp included?