The Human Predicament: The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess

Richard Hughes' planned trilogy, The Human Predicament, was supposed to be a "sort of War and Peace" (qtd. in FA ix), although the two completed novels are set not during war, but instead from the close of WWI to Hitler's consolidation of power in 1934.  We might call the whole thing "Peace," were it not that the peace is distinctly illusory.  The novels are as much about a post-Freudian, global spiritual malaise as they are about political conflict per se; the reader quickly scents the encroaching disaster once Augustine, the protagonist, suddenly realizes that after Freud, "theirs was the first generation in the whole cave-to-cathedral history of the human race completely to disbelieve in human sin" (FA 65).  Augustine is, in fact, overstating his case considerably, but Hughes nevertheless drops us into a world in which the traditional underpinnings of morality have either waned or vanished altogether--yet without erasing mankind's yearning for an absolute God. The moral conditions that blind nearly all of the characters to the sheer horror of Hitler's vision also make Hitler possible.

Despite the lack of "War," The Human Predicament shares War and Peace's interest in the philosophy of history (albeit in a far more concise form), in the role of elites at times of great historical crisis, and in the distorted subjectivities of leaders with mass cult followings.  Hughes' Hitler, summed up by one character as "a tabula rasa without any will or ideas of his own at all, but a superhumanly sensitive nose for what potential followers think and want" (WS 206), responds to Tolstoy's theatrical and ultimately empty Napoleon, "the most insignificant tool of history." Hughes' characters are all struggling for self-consciousness in a world apparently without moral boundaries (although, in fact, very few of the English or Welsh characters fully succeed in shedding their "traditional" values, whether those values are based in class, morality, or prejudice).   The "human predicament" of the trilogy's title is that of the self's universal and eternal need to define itself against an other, even though that other always emerges from local historical circumstances (FA 90-93).   Societies must hate something, Hughes dryly suggests, in order to maintain their equilibrium.   Hitler becomes so dangerous because there is no other beyond himself; he is "an ego virtually without penumbra," for whom "[t]he universe contained no other persons than him, only things; and thus for him the whole gamut of the 'personal' pronouns lacked wholly its normal emotional content" (FA 243).  Hitler's loves and hatreds are not Hitler's, but those of his followers, who contemplate themselves in what a character from the unfinished third novel calls an "unflattering mirror" (WS 414).  Here is Romantic self-consciousness gone wildly awry, seeing itself and yet not recognizing what it sees.  Against Hitler's "I," so complete as to be utterly empty, stands the budding mystic Mitzi, a blind young woman who enters a Carmelite convent.   In the wake of her blindness and ensuing struggles with spiritual elation and doubt alike, Mitzi eventually has a vision of herself as "this miniscule Mitzi, an infinitesimal grain of sand which because it had once been lifted and swirled in the tide had come to think of the tide as her own to command" (WS 135).  Mitzi's humility in the face of the divine will, her simultaneous acknowledgment of self and its relative worthlessness in the greater scheme of the things, makes her one of the very few characters capable of recognizing "Satan loose in the country she'd grown up to love" (WS 366).  Unlike just about everyone else, Mitzi retains the power of thinking in moral absolutes.

But the moral struggle in both The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess also plays itself out as a struggle with the nineteenth-century historical novel (indeed, the nineteenth-century novel per se) as a genre.    The trilogy's central character, Augustine Wadamy, descends very obviously from that quintessential "mediocre hero," Sir Walter Scott's Edward Waverley.  (One wonders if the superficial similarity between the two names is altogether unintentional.)  Augustine is a mostly congenial non-entity who frequently regurgitates whatever ideas he has heard most recently, whether those ideas are aesthetic or political.  Like Waverley, Augustine is almost entirely passive, a man who has the "knack of having things happen to him without ever needing to lift a finger to make them happen" (WS 271), and his wanderings across Wales, England, Germany, France, the United States, and Morocco all have their origins in some unexpected outside force.  Augustine's cheerful cluelessness enables all sorts of cultural clashes, whether political, sexual, or theological; he is particularly helpless when it comes to the female of the species, and variously misunderstands them, insults them, or frantically runs away from them.  Unfortunately, with the trilogy left incomplete, it's unclear how Hughes planned to domesticate Augustine, although there are signs that Hughes intended the Catholic, working-class Norah to reinvigorate the trilogy's otherwise degenerate aristocracy with a shot of new blood.

In addition to their debt to Scott, the novels look suspiciously like Victorian multiplot narratives.   But Hughes complicates the multiplot form even further by rapidly cross-cutting between the plots within chapters, rather than separating plots by chapters or books.  This cross-cutting is Hughes' way of trying to solve the problem of narrative simultaneity: as the narrator moves from one plot to another, he either "resets" the narrative clock or picks up exactly where the preceding plot left off.  Everyone exists in the same time (Benjamin's "homogenous, empty time"), and yet many of the characters remain resolutely unaware of the existence of other ways of thinking about history; the trilogy's English and Welsh aristocrats cannot possibly imagine a connection between themselves and the goings-on in Germany.  As of the end of the second novel, there is as yet no sign that the characters have achieved the sometimes shattering social consciousness of a multiplot novel by Dickens or Eliot, in which everyone must ultimately contemplate their sometimes welcome, sometimes horrifying links to everyone else.   

One more thing to note before I'm done: the ellipses.  The novels create the illusion of containing more dialogue than they actually do; much of the narrative moves through free indirect discourse, as the omniscient narrator quietly slips in and out of each character's head (with the exception of Hitler, who has no thoughts of his own).  Both the characters and the narrator tend to trail off into ellipses, undercutting declarative statements with a uncertain pause, hinting at a moment of anger or disgust, leaving a thought only half-complete, or stranding an argument midway through.  These gaps in the text all hint at that clash between self and other, with the thinker or speaker suddenly becoming aware of something that penetrates their "secure" consciousness...if only for a brief moment.