Under the Pendulum Sun
Jeannette Ng's Under the Pendulum Sun is a neo-Victorian fantasy that shatters its many intertexts into brilliant, cutting little fragments. The reader who recognizes the allusions knows what must be coming--and yet does not. The two works holding the novel's plot together, as it were, are Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Percy Bysshe Shelley's Laon and Cythna (later rewritten as The Revolt of Islam), but the novel intercuts them with Bronte biography, Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte's Shirley, and then reconfigures them all again within a hidden narrative--indeed, an alternative Genesis--drawn from Talmudic lore. As the novel's protagonists seek to translate Enochian, "the divine tongue" (loc. 785), so too the reader attempts to decode the novel's many layers of literary and theological allusion.
The novel takes place in an alternate timeline, in which humans have long had contact with Arcadia, or the Faelands, occupied by strange creatures whose spiritual status (indeed, their very possession of a soul) remains unclear. While the British pride themselves on their profitable trade relations with the fae, carried out under the aegis of the South Sea Company, they have not actually been allowed much farther than the coast and outlying towns; this is a space that resists imperial conquest. Nineteenth-century British missionaries, however, yearn for a different sort of conquest: as one missionary declares, now that "Arcadia’s vast unknown, which has been for many ages closed against us and the Divine Word, is at last made clear and knowable," it only makes sense that the British responsible "should have the honour of being the first to carry in the balm of the blessed Gospel" (loc. 20). In this echo of familiar imperial rhetoric, the "unknown" has become not so much "known" but, for the first time, "knowable"--a space that can be investigated, studied, and, above all, healed by the Word. Laon (of Laon and Cythna) Helstone (of Shirley) is one of the pioneering Christian missionaries to Arcadia, but at the time the novel opens, he has gone almost completely silent; his sister Catherine/Cathy (of Wuthering Heights, but also Cythna and Jane), increasingly frightened by his silence, voyages to find him.
As I will be giving away some major plot points, let's continue below the fold.
READER
The novel takes place in an alternate timeline, in which humans have long had contact with Arcadia, or the Faelands, occupied by strange creatures whose spiritual status (indeed, their very possession of a soul) remains unclear. While the British pride themselves on their profitable trade relations with the fae, carried out under the aegis of the South Sea Company, they have not actually been allowed much farther than the coast and outlying towns; this is a space that resists imperial conquest. Nineteenth-century British missionaries, however, yearn for a different sort of conquest: as one missionary declares, now that "Arcadia’s vast unknown, which has been for many ages closed against us and the Divine Word, is at last made clear and knowable," it only makes sense that the British responsible "should have the honour of being the first to carry in the balm of the blessed Gospel" (loc. 20). In this echo of familiar imperial rhetoric, the "unknown" has become not so much "known" but, for the first time, "knowable"--a space that can be investigated, studied, and, above all, healed by the Word. Laon (of Laon and Cythna) Helstone (of Shirley) is one of the pioneering Christian missionaries to Arcadia, but at the time the novel opens, he has gone almost completely silent; his sister Catherine/Cathy (of Wuthering Heights, but also Cythna and Jane), increasingly frightened by his silence, voyages to find him.
As I will be giving away some major plot points, let's continue below the fold.
READER
I
MARRIED
HIM
Laon's journey positions the novel after the conclusion to Jane Eyre, although its purpose--escaping his incestuous longing for Catherine--echoes both Laon and Cythna and Bronte's dramatic monologue "The Missionary," whose speaker tries to strip himself of all desire for his abandoned lover. In different ways, both Jane Eyre and Laon and Cythna drive towards martyrdom, a climactic moment of all-sacrificing testimony that characters in Under the Pendulum Sun yearn for but are denied. Catherine speculates that Laon's predecessor, Jacob Roche (a fractured combination of Mr. Rochester and St. John Rivers) "was overly enamoured with winning the martyr's crown" (loc. 96), but the plot reveals his death to be something else entirely. Similarly, Laon's gnome servant Mr. Benjamin, Arcadia's sole Christian convert, believes that he will be martyred in the Pale Queen's hunt, only to discover that he has misinterpreted the situation. Mr. Benjamin's willingness to accept his death at the Pale Queen's whim is, in his own eyes, both the end to "doubt" (loc. 3006) and the promise of a potential future for the missionaries, whom the Pale Queen will finally allow to voyage further into the Faelands. Such not-happening is, however, a key aspect of all the characters' spiritual trajectories. The previous missionaries, Roche and his wife Elizabeth or "Betha" (e.g., Bertha), suggest what can go all too wrong. Roche, as Catherine eventually realizes, brought Betha to Arcadia precisely so that the Fae would tell her "[t]he truth about themselves, about us, about God" (loc. 4676); as Roche was perfectly well aware, the Fae would tell the truth in order to make her experience the most extreme suffering, and thus drive her insane. He seeks revelation (or, for that matter, Revelation) on the back of another's agony, which ends in his own death at her hands. Moreover, Betha inadvertently sacrifices herself in the act of taking the Eucharistic wafer without salt--salt being necessary to contravene Arcadian magic--which entraps her forever in the Faelands. As it turns out, Betha's absolute "act of faith" (loc. 4936) is what converts Mr. Benjamin, not Roche's preaching, even though the Eucharist in Arcadia turns out to signify absence instead of divine presence.
And this is precisely both the problem and the novel's key revelation. "Why do you think the natural order simply doesn't work here?" asks Betha (loc, 4836), and the answer is: the Faelands are Hell. Granted, this is not Hell as normally imagined. Instead, it is the space that emerges from the union of Lilith and Lucifer, a kind of incestuous embrace in which the partners are "equal" (loc. 4323), whereas Adam mates with "his own shadow" (loc. 4331). Only belatedly does the reader recognize the stealth pun in "Helstone," along with the significance of the multiple references to and representations of the Harrowing of Hell. As Catherine and Laon realize, the Enochian narrative discovered by the Roches is actually the Fae book of Genesis (loc. 4410), an alternative origin that challenges the characters' understanding of both soul and salvation. The Faelands are, in a sense, orthagonal to God, who is conspicuous by his absence. Lilith/the Pale Queen engineers Catherine's journey to Arcadia (a parodic Providence) and thus facilitates the consummation of their incestuous longings, stripping them of their mutual and self-misrecognitions in the process. Catherine is led to believe by her brother's companion, a changeling named Ariel Davenport, that she too is a changeling, which simultaneously strips her of her identity and enables her to achieve her union with her not-brother, Laon. Unlike the sequential Cathy and Cathy II of Wuthering Heights, Catherine is both constrained "Catherine," unable to have what she wants, and liberated not-Catherine. Or so she thinks, for in fact the Pale Queen manipulates Ariel into believing that Catherine is a changeling, manipulates Catherine into murdering Ariel during the hunt (an act of mercy that is also a "fall"), and thus tricks Catherine into incest. Catherine is forced to face what she has not been able to speak or recognize by temporarily becoming other to herself, her own mirror, just as Laon eventually recognizes that Catherine is his mirror, "showing me my sin" (loc. 5029).
In Laon's relationship with Catherine, Laon simultaneously occupies the positions of St. John Rivers (both his occupation and his appearance) and Mr. Rochester (Laon reunites with Catherine in a dramatic fall off his horse); however, his anguished flight from his sister is also Jane Eyre's escape from Rochester after the secret of his marriage is revealed. Yet the God who regulates Jane's actions does not stretch to the Faelands, producing a particularly difficult narrative problem: once they become aware of the trick, Laon and Catherine are immediately enmeshed in a Christian narrative of sin and damnation, but because the God who guides Jane Eyre's moral choices does not exist in the Faelands, that story fails to "translate." It was this incommensurability that doomed the Roches, who thought they could make God fully present according to the rules of their own Church. For the Pale Queen, Catherine's union with Laon is indeed another Fall, but a joyous one: "“The sins that I have set in motion, the gift that I have given you. Had I not summoned you to Arcadia, would you have seen these wonders? Had I not placed into my own home, remade for your pleasure, would you have realised your love?” (loc. 5090) The Pale Queen imagines that her acts have been liberatory, creating a "new Eden" (loc. 5095) for the brother and sister in which they might enjoy the same kind of glorious union imagined at the end of Laon and Cythna. But even if Laon and Catherine are, in Hell, literally out of God's sight, they cannot un-know their own faith. In going forth to the inner reaches of the Faelands, under the Pale Queen's protection, they go fully aware of the depths to which they have fallen. "They have already found the darkest corner of our souls and dredged from there the greatest sins," Catherine urges her despairing brother. "They have already stripped us bare and made us face our own worst selves. Face each other’s. They cannot do more” (loc. 5137). Martyrdom for humans in the Faelands is not, after all, the glorious crowning death imagined by the human missionaries, but rather this total abjection, this torturous recognition of one's own darkest urges. Nobody in that space can emulate Christ's sacrifice: Ariel dies deluded, Roche undergoes his insane wife's vengeance, and Mr. Benjamin doesn't get to die at all.
What the novel imagines at the end, then, is not so much St. John Rivers' projected apotheosis or Laon's and Cythna's arrival at the Temple of the Spirit, as two sinners' journey into a future of unknown and potentially fearsome possibilities. Laon had desperately needed missionaries like Roche to be "good" (loc. 4703), as a kind of moral talisman against his terror of himself; instead, he and Catherine elect to go forth speaking "the language of sin" (loc. 5151). Earlier in the novel, the Pale Queen had dryly observed to Catherine that in the logic of Christ's parables, "for there to be those who understand, there must be those who do not"; it follows that Christians "need someone to be different" (loc. 2236), for without the Other, there can be no sense of self. But by undertaking their new missionary endeavor as sinners instead of saints, Laon and Catherine go not as the "good" Other to the damned fae, but as one with them in their fall. As Laon admits, he has not yet felt "repentance" (loc. 5151) for what he and Catherine have done, yet even that is not a prerequisite for their work. In an "unharrowed hell" (loc. 5151), from which God has always been absent and the very possibility of redemptive sacrifice apparently mooted, only those self-aware of their sinfulness as such can speak of it. The novel's conclusion bears some resemblance to the famously Eucharistic symbolism of Lizzie's sacrifice for Laura in "Goblin Market," in which Laura consumes the fruit mediated by her agonized awareness of her sister's suffering body; the fruit's taste is horrifying because eating it is inseparable from the act of kissing her sister's brutalized form. But Laon and Catherine, unlike Lizzie, have given in to their mutual temptation, and in the absence of God, exist in a strange state of suspended judgment. Sharing Laura's newfound self-consciousness of sin, they do not yet enjoy her rebirth. Yet it is only this identity with sinners--a rejection of "those who do not"--that gives them any chance at all of introducing the possibility of something else.