The Wake

Nation-formation and national identity have been key to historical fiction since there has been historical fiction, and in that sense, Paul Kingsnorth's experimental novel The Wake is, in fact, quite traditional.  Indeed, Sir Walter Scott might have nodded sagely at Kingsnorth's choice of anti-hero, Buccmaster of Holland, a would-be hero of dubious sanity and definite unreliability: although the title promises Hereward the Wake, he never appears on the scene (that's actually part of the plot), leaving us traveling through medieval English fenns and forests with a protagonist who is mediocre in every respect--except, perhaps, his ability to talk to the old English gods (or not).  Unlike Julian Rathbone's The Last English King, which covers similar eleventh-century territory, all major players are kept offstage, as are all the major battles and, for that matter, most representations of Norman violence (although we certainly see the aftermath on a number of occasions).  The novel does not, that is, promise to retell the story of the Norman invasion using recognizable signposts or straightforward historical chronology.  Instead, it stays firmly put in the historical margins, focusing our attention firmly on the final bloody erasure of Anglo-Saxon culture from the landscape.

Much of the novel is about language--the power associated with naming; the power of the Christian Word; the power of communing with gods and animals--and certainly its most immediately striking feature is what Kingsnorth describes as a "shadow tongue--a pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old language by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today" (353).  The reader who progresses past the modern English epigraphs soon finds herself faced with the opening lines of Buccmaster's monologue: "the night was clere though i slept i seen it.  though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still" (1).  And things get more complicated from there.  In addition to dealing with the spelling, as well as some entirely unfamiliar words (e.g., "fugol" = "bird"), the reader must also parse sentences that have no capitalization and no punctuation other than a period.  This strategy estranges the text, to use the parlance of translation theory: this "ghost image" (356) of Old English, as Kingsnorth puts it, with all post-Norman coinage stripped out, reminds us both that we have lost this form of English and Englishness entirely, and that it still remains present in our everyday speech.  That is, a modern English reader is always reading with Buccmaster (most comprehension difficulties can be solved just by reading the text out loud), yet is simultaneously struggling against him (some words can't be identified this way at all; some sentences are extremely hard to parse).  Moreover, the narrative's opacity also reminds us that this is a print rendition of what claims to be a oral narrative--a thousand years later, all that remains is this fictionalized variant of face-to-face communication.

Of course, to a certain mindset, the "Middle Ages" (very loosely defined) evokes an organic community grounded in face-to-face communication, frequently without the mediation of print.  But Kingsnorth's choice of narrator renders such fantasies problematic from the get-go.   "i specs i specs/but no man lystens" (2), says an aged Buccmaster, and certainly, given that he speaks well after resistance to the Norman invasion has collapsed, we might take that as a sign that the old communal ways are forever lost; nobody comes to Buccmaster to hear of ancient traditions.  But Buccmaster in fact disdains the community he claims to mourn.  Sure that he is a "man of greatness" (14), Buccmaster believes that he is "cursed to be all the time with esols and those who was agan me" (62).  This last becomes a refrain: Buccmaster, it eventually becomes clear, is deeply paranoid, and in his binary world-view nobody, it seems, is ever truly with him. Early on, Buccmaster remembers his much-adored grandfather advising him that "thu moste see the hafoc [hawk] tac down the craw he saes and thu will see that all of the world is blud and thy worc is not to lose thine before thy time" (37), a lesson that cuts both ways.  In a violent world, choose to be predator, not prey--but don't get yourself killed, either.  Buccmaster's appropriation of this lesson fuels his paranoia and contempt, but it also causes another psychic split: he clearly wants to identify with the apex predator, yet his intention of holding on to his own "blud" is just as likely to lead to cowardice as to feats of military might.  Thus, he pointedly refrains from joining his sons when Harold calls them up to fight (which means that he doesn't get killed at the Battle of Hastings); he is out eel-hunting when his village is destroyed and his wife murdered; he engages in occasional guerilla warfare against the invaders, but also murders at least three men out of the blue; and he spends a good chunk of the plot carefully not catching up to Hereward or any other major military force.  As a representative of a heroic doomed culture, Buccmaster is, shall we say, rather problematic (and that's before one gets to the revelations about him at the end of the novel).

As a result, Buccmaster's theories of the right relationship between man and landscape, or man and the old gods, have to be treated with some readerly caution--if not dismissed, then at least understood as ideals lived out only partially, at best.  One of the most important articulations of Buccmaster's belief-system comes in a memory of his grandfather's teaching:

cilde i has telt thu how the land specs and thu has seen in this ham how folcs has teorned from it to the hwit crist and this has been the brecan of angland cilde.  it is not in the words cilde it is not in bocs thu moste go to the holt to the fenn sleep by the waters cilde in the wuds in the regn do not spec and thu will waec one daeg and the land will be in thu and thu in it and thu will feel as it feels and all that it has will be in thu cilde and in this way the eald gods will return cilde they will return in thu (149)

Buccmaster's sense of both self and national identity derive strongly from this speech's organicism.  His grandfather distinguishes between Christianity ("the hwit crist"), which segregates and imprisons spirituality in written language (the "bocs"), and the way of the old gods, which so melds man and nature that individual subjectivity ceases to be bounded.   By adopting radical silence ("do not spec") and entirely opening up the body to its natural surroundings, the believer transcends an antagonistic self/other relationship to both landscape and the divine: instead of speaking about the land, the believer "feels" with it, just as the speaker no longer speaks of the gods, but instead incarnates them.  Buccmaster anticipates this memory a few pages earlier, when, contemplating the trees, he realizes that "if the frenc cums and tacs this land and gifs these treows sum frenc name they will not be the same treows no more" (124).  Foreign language and foreign religion alike threaten to alienate the English from their own landscape, expropriating in the act of renaming.  But at a deeper level, the Word and words alike are potentially dangerous, inhibiting the true Englishman's ability to simply be with nature and the gods.  

However, at both pragmatic and ideological levels, this vision of Englishness falters.  To begin with, the narrative explicitly identifies this ideal as anachronistic long before the Normans violently disrupt the English way of life.  Aside from the obvious--Christian missionaries had successfully spread their message long before 1066--Buccmaster's grandfather is considered eccentric by both his son and his neighbors, and when the youthful Buccmaster tries and fails to burn his corpse in a ship, as per his request, his father throws him out of the village.  The patriarchal chain of transmission here has been disrupted: it skips from the grandfather to Buccmaster, then jumps genetics and nationality altogether when Buccmaster tries to pass the traditions on to Tolfe--who, significantly, is of Danish origins.   This break repeats itself in the case of Buccmaster's supposedly magical sword, made by and handed down from Wayland (the god with whom Buccmaster [also supposedly] speaks), which Buccmaster would not allow his son to use, and which Buccmaster repeatedly misuses.  In other words, Buccmaster has read The Invention of Tradition: he's trying to reconstruct an "authentic" way of being that authorizes English national identity and, in this case, also motivates resistance to a brutal invader.  But Buccmaster himself, raised in a Christian household, can himself never fully be in the tradition he tries to resuscitate.  Nor is he capable of reflecting on the obvious weaknesses of his own practice.  He's violently abusive to every member of his family, for example, although the extremes to which he went are held back until the end.  Indeed, his actions, which include rape, murder, and burning, anticipate the Norman invaders themselves.    Ultimately, his invented tradition produces not a great leader of men, but a hyper-individualist, a believer in his own status as the Messianic "ceosan" one who nevertheless feels nothing but loathing for those he is supposedly going to save.  "and did they thinc i wolde stand," Buccmaster rails in the grips of paranoia, abandoning the men he believes have betrayed him, "did they thinc i wolde stand and die with them these esols these cwellers of angland these wifmen who has not been triewe to me" (342).