On ghosts and ground plans, nanoverses and the Leto Bundle
by Rob Irving
[ people - april 02 ]
Marina Warner (marinawarner.com) is a novelist, historian and critic, most widely acclaimed for her studies on myth and allegory. She has been a Getty scholar, Reith lecturer, a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge, and appointed a Chevalier de l'Order des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. We arrange to meet in a Habitat café in central London, a chilled basement retreat from the hubbub above and chattering echoes of the previous night's launch of her latest book. Both of us are feeling delicate; me from the wine, and Marina, obviously, by her choice in spring pastel and fetching hat. It's a lovely hat but she is suddenly troubled by it. She'd agreed to my taking her photograph with the request that I make her look ghostly...
MW I'm meant to be a ghost, but I don't think ghosts wear hats.
RI Oh I think they could, depending on the fashion of the time.
MW Could a ghost wear a hat? I think the ladies at Versailles wore hats.
RI Well of course... they'd have looked rather out of place without hats, even if the brims were a little understated.
We order refreshments, coffee for me and something more sensible on a warm day for her. Ghosts and the spirituous form the bulk of our occasional conversations. I know little of the classical mythologies woven through Marina's work but having read her observations on phantasmagoria I regard her as an oracle. An oracle of invisibilities; somewhere inside it's vaguely disconcerting - you'd think we'd have nothing to talk about...
RI I'm planning on taking the spirit-image idea to northern India, to somehow incorporate it with kathak dance.
MW Does kathak have a ghost theme?
RI The word translates as 'story', the dancer being the teller of stories. Mainly these are Hindu myths told, or enacted, through dance in the temple. There are varying forms of temple dance besides kathak, some more spiritual than others, but what I like about kathak is that it's performed in cycles of a certain number of beats - I like the idea of improvisation within given limits and I thought I'd time my exposures accordingly. Okay, I'll end up with blur - that's nothing new - but it's what the blur represents that I find interesting.
MW I came across some photographs of vibrations at the Rudolf Steiner internet bookshop. They're very interested in wave formations, and what the photographer did was to capture different substances whilst running vibrations through them. He called the results 'cynatics' - spelt c-y-n but looking as if related to sine waves. It's interesting in a way, I mean similar... if you have the idea of pulsation, or a beat. You know, the Javanese don't have a word for dancer - the dancer is the dance.
RI So if I blur the human element...
MW You'll capture the essence of the dance. And ghosts being breath, if you can capture the immaterial breath of the dance it would be quite interesting.
I described my difficulty in verbalising the Hindu concept of a universal spirit being inherent within the ground plan of a temple - as Joseph Campbell said, draw a circle around a stone and the stone becomes an incarnation of mystery. Only, as soon as the plan is drawn it gains materiality, and therefore becomes something else, a mandala perhaps. I tried to explain this in terms of spiritual intent, a consecration pre-existing the mandala, but again, simply by considering the concept I felt it enclosed by something material.
MW I don't think you need to go backwards in time. Think of it more as the sum of the ground-plan rather than behind it. Think of the plan as a kind of synthesis, the essence of what the building is for - the whole character and nature of the building. Funnily enough, I just reviewed a book that I didn't terribly like, but I should give you a copy. It's called The Geometry of Love, by Margaret Visser, who used to write about food and table manners - a sort of anthropological account of a meal relating to ritual and hospitality and the rules of exchange. All very interesting. Anyway, here the subject is a church, Sant' Agnese fuori le Mura, St Agnes outside the Walls, of Rome - a very, very old basilica. Originally it was catacombs, with many martyrs buried under the earth, and then the very early church grew up over it. Gradually it accreted many different layers of adornment, ornaments, relics and so-forth. She's analysed the whole church, systematically peeled. But the book has two difficulties for me; one is that she's become a Catholic, so it's a very pious book, really a prayer, and I had a bit of trouble with that. And then she decided not to have any pictures, possibly because she wanted to open the eyes of our minds, to use our inner eye. But as she's talking about the ground-plan - not only one but many, one on top of another - I was just longing to look at a plan. I wanted a fold-out that showed me exactly where everything was. So reading it became very abstract. But she is very interesting on how a sanctuary, a holy place, is created, and she is rightly committed to the idea of how presences of the past saturate a building. So that a church like that - a really ancient place of worship - has become the sum of all the people's experiences that have gone before. It isn't just like any other place, it's completely different.
RI And if we were to clad this place with anonymity, perhaps disguise it as a MacDonald's, would we still feel this?
MW If we made it profane?
RI I mean, do we have to know the bones are there to sense the sanctity?
MW The rational answer is that if we didn't know we probably wouldn't feel it, but the point is - and this is one of my central themes - we're not rational in that way. If we were queuing up at MacDonald's and someone in line said "this used to be a church, a very holy church - what a shame they built a MacDonald's here", we'd feel differently.
St Agnes lived and died around the turn of third century, a martyr at 12 years. According to the Catholic Forum Patron Saints Index she was killed because she refused to 'sacrifice to Pagan gods and lose her virginity'. This could be euphemistic, because she is listed there as a patron saint of rape victims. (As Margaret Visser writes, "It is probable that many, even most, early Christian virgins executed for their faith were, in fact, first raped. One of the most shocking incidents in the story of Agnes cannot be dismissed as a lurid invention.") If such a concept emanated from Greek mythology the title might go to the Titaness Leto, raped by Zeus and consequently mother to Apollo and Artemis, and now the subject of Warner's fifth novel, The Leto Bundle.
Warner's Leto - described in one review, far from disparagingly, as a 'pitiful Orlando' - slips with her offspring through time, shifting shape from legend to documented history, from shelter in the she-wolf's lair, to imprisonment, to abandonment and refugee status before vanishing again in the missing persons section of a street magazine. She is the constant, eternal Mother. Kim Mcquy, an obsessive inner-city teacher-cum-activist, worships her as a goddess, a national symbol to lead us into a golden age. He runs a web-based movement called History Starts With Us (HSWU). While Hetty Fernly, a museum curator and keeper of Leto's relics, balances her outward distaste for romantic revisionism with an inner bliss for myth. Marina indicated a peculiar sensitivity to this book: I ask about this.
MW Novels are very personal. Although they can have arguments, points-of-view, even information, all that is subordinate and buried compared to the texture of feelings. The novel can have ideas but the ideas will not be fictionally expressed unless they're expressed through emotions of some kind, through passion and descriptions. So you are very exposed - the quality of it is up to the reader to decide whether it is communicating what you intended it to. It's not autobiographical in terms of the story but I draw on my experience, so it is in the sense that it's very difficult to write about emotions you haven't had. You tend to transpose feelings from one scene to another, depending on things that you've felt.
RI Not simply imagination?
MW You see, sometimes projecting very strongly from something that can be very small, some remembered incident in childhood - of feeling forsaken or feeling fury - and then you can transpose that into a larger context or a different kind of situation. You're drawing on that, so it does test the limits of your own being and understanding. I do feel that fiction is also a way of working things out, and the same goes for reading it. Some of the greatest novelists... such as Henry James whom I like a lot, he can be very perceptive about the way people will do things, perhaps to betray or to deceive each other - he's particularly good on that. So you can read fiction to find out the way people do things, in a way that you can't with most non-fiction, and we also write it to find out.
RI Do you mean in this case enacting some of your non-fictional material - here, the main characters are very wrapped up in myth.
MW This book, more that some of my others, is trying to enact my theory of myth. It's trying to say that myth exists around us and it is part of our being, our way of being in the world. And the prejudice against foreigners, the desire to exclude the outcast and the stranger, belong in a certain history of mythology that we can either accept or change. We can work with it.
In this book it's present in different ways, which is why Leto comes down through time. She slips through time for many, many reasons, one being that in every phase and every crisis of her existence she meets another set of circumstances of exclusion that are essentially mythic. Not in terms of what threat she represents... in fact in my book Leto doesn't represent any threat at all - she's rather a powerless woman with children.
RI She needs help from other people.
MW Yes, or social sustenance. Of course strangers can come in different forms, they can come in more powerful forms than Leto - I'm not saying that strangers are always helpless victims like she is - I mean obviously strangers can come in the form of invaders, but she is not invading, she's a woman struggling for survival. And she does... or that kind of figure does turn up in mythology. But she turns up as a myth of threats, a myth of invasion, a myth of the alien in different parts of history at different times. So I showed her coming through time and this happening to her.
RI A victim?
MW More of a counter, or a pawn. In other work I've written about an idea of Georges Dumezil, although its become unfashionable due to perceived fascistic undertones... anyway, it's a theory of mythology about tripartite society, that every human society allots power in three different areas: warrior power, wisdom power and fertility, the control of the future through the children. So in the warrior section you usually get male power, kingship and sovereignty of the forceful kind by running armies and so forth, and in the wisdom section you sometimes get female power - you often get priestesses, but on the whole the sovereignty lies with the priesthood, which is part of the power system of society, with every society allocating that area of expertise to someone. And the third zone is fertility, which is usually contested through women's bodies. Sometimes women have power over their own bodies and over the future, and sometimes they are wards of different powers, of different men - they're the wards of their husbands or brothers or fathers.
RI And when you say contested through the body...
MW Well it's to do with who fathers the children, and controls the children once they've been conceived.
RI So, the body as a vessel...
MW Yes, and in my Leto, who is seen from the very start having babies, she is in a sense a figure of that area of contested power. So at times they want her - when she's a hostage it's because they want to control her fertility, to give her in marriage to the right person. Then it all goes wrong because she has a love affair and is raped, so the children are born to the wrong... they're hybrids, they're mixed up... they belong to the wrong social group, so she's cast out because it's an illegitimate progeny. And then in the next incarnation, when she has the children and gives one away or sells one, and although she is in charge it's without really being in charge and I wanted that to be very sad. For me it's the saddest part of the book, and it's the story with which I began - I began with this idea of the woman who parts with the child to get the child a better life.
RI A form of sacrifice.
MW Yes, because apparently, in one of the books I read about the abandonment of children - The Kindness of Strangers - the author argued that the children weren't just abandoned to die. If they felt themselves inadequate the mothers left the children to be found by those who could cope better - it's a desire for the child's best survival. It wasn't just dumping or killing, it was a form of not killing. So there's a great sadness there, and my idea from the start with Leto was that she would think it was a success - she would identify her lost son on TV, she thinks it's him, she wants it to be him because she wants her giving him up to be a huge success, that she made the right decision. But in fact we don't know, we never really know that he is truly her son. A lost mother is always a lost mother and a lost child is always a lost child.
RI Meanwhile, from Kim's point of view he is abandoned...
MW He's a war orphan.
RI ...and he develops this need for some sort of figurehead...
MW A mother figure.
RI ...a goddess, and very easily latches on to a symbol that is being made popular at the time - a figure that he somehow feels a personal attachment towards. How important is it to him that other people follow him in this?
MW I think I should have dramatised more of the HSWU web-site and the whole movement, and should have followed it more closely. But I didn't want the book to get enormous - it's really quite long. Oddly enough, I saw an article in which the internet is described as the meeting place of 'these odd twos and dozens' - meaning the people that belong to very marginal and peculiar kinds of clubs - "who can link hands across time-zones and space... a brotherhood of cranks the size of Kathmandu". It rather corresponds to the web-site of Kim's movement, History Starts With Us.
RI And Hetty, the museum curator, was fighting a subtle battle of control of the information...
MW Yes, well there's lots of things going on there. One is that interest today has renewed emphasis on populism and outreach. It means that there is much less of an authoritarian attitude, and people in her kind of job are encouraged to hear everybody's opinions, you know, teachers are encouraged to listen to children's views etc. Then is much more tolerance of something as wild as Kim saying that Leto is going to be the new national figurehead. In real life we perhaps would have asked the question, do you like this image or not... those that do please press the 'yes' button and vote. It is an effect of the internet too, a kind of new democracy, but there's something not quite right about it - it's too quick off the mark, and there is, I think, a hidden agenda of containment. The authoritarianism is in a sense concealed; by letting people speak, paradoxically, you effectively mute them, because everybody speaks and there's such a hubbub it cancels itself out - the head of steam is skimmed off. And at the end of the book I try to suggest that with Kim's murder. The fact that it isn't explained is important because we do live in this unknowable world, and I want to get that across. At the same time there's a very strong suggestion that he was inconvenient, because he really means what he's doing. That's the real danger, but after that you can have crowds and processions and a little bit of popular worship, and it's all part of the multicultural pot, which isn't going to boil over if it's kept gently stirred.
RI There's a saying that once you stop believing in God, rather than believe in nothing you're likely to believe in anything, to fill the vacuum. It seems that Kim needed something to replace what he perceived as having lost, or not had.
MW He's been totally deracinated, but he doesn't want to go back to the folk roots of what he might have been when he was born. He's not quite sure anyway, because he hasn't experienced it. One of my main points of interest in the book, and also true of Leto herself, is that the story that you inhabit isn't really the story that you're given at birth. It could be - some people match one story to the other - but we tend to take rather unexpected paths. Folk ethnicities expect everybody to somehow turn out to be very typical in the way they react. Also within the family, you can get two children of very similar age taking completely different positions on their story, their relation to the past. One of the assumptions that I think is wrong in organising multiethnic communities is that the elders speak for the community. We would never assume that in a non-ethnic community.
RI Right, no more than Norman Tebbit speaks for the English.
The conversation drifts toward Kurdistan, me noting that given the opportunity for autonomy the leaders resorted to factional infighting, ultimately for the same cause but in doing so negating that cause.
MW I've tried to show in the book that often the virtues of religious loyalty are invoked purely for political ends. I mean they're not really sincerely held, because they come and go according to expediency and convenience. Certain ideas, such as betrayal, are only suddenly powerful when one is bidding for power over someone else.
RI Members of my own extended family came from Kurdistan, but with some of them I'm not sure they're happier in England - in some ways they've given up more than they've gained.
MW Mass communication has changed distances, so things that are far feel close and how our glut and surplus, and how we live in this wasteful way, taunts the poor or the comparatively poorer. But society looks very different than it is to actually inhabit. Even in spite of documentary realism and lots of soap opera grit and swearing, nevertheless we still look more prosperous.
RI And here we are in Habitat, a place full of wonderfully cool objects that we know when we get them home are just not going to look how we'd like them to.
MW I had exactly the same thought as I came through and saw that pink tray. But you're absolutely right... we need to have enormous amounts of everything.
RI Another idea I have is that of imaginary worlds, literally planets and their landscape. Not especially exciting and colourful worlds, as with science fiction book jackets - mine are rather dull, and their inhabitants play cricket and lawn bowls. I once interviewed Michael Roll, who'd attended a seance conducted by a friend of mine and through her he met his late father. His father told him that in the afterlife we return to our prime and play cricket all day, which is rather fortunate for Michael because he's a very keen cricket fan. It's not so much anthropomorphism as hobbymorphism - fashioning paradise after our favourite pastime, or even aspiration. And have I told you about Alternative Three?
MW Julian Barnes wrote a heaven fantasy - is it in A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters? - in which the character goes to heaven and it's a bloke's paradise, it's got everything he's always wanted - he can put his feet up and watch his favourite soccer team etc. And it gets more and more boring - eternally dull. He was punished by his aspirations.
But the thing is, I like these science fiction fantasies, but perhaps they're not fantasies? There are tiny worlds, and I love the way someone like John D Barrow will talk about other dimensions folding and rolling into each other, like nano-universes. So there's space-time, and there's all these little folded universes rolled up in the nooks and crannies of our space-time. Anyway, I feel that your worlds could evoke the hidden universes that exist in the cracks between floorboards that we don't know about, a bit like Man Ray's photograph of Duchamp's Large Glass, with the dust rising up between the cracks in the glass.
This reminds me of a friend of mine and her extraordinary experience. She abandoned her flat because she'd had an intruder - she couldn't bear to go back. So after some time her boyfriend went back, and he opened the door to a strange, strange smell. He swung the door open and everything was covered in mould. And the mould had made shoes on the floor, these huge shoes perfectly outlined in the carpet, and there was a huge dress on a hanger, all covered in mould. She'd left something in the kitchen - it was an open-plan flat - and it had spawned over the summer, covering everything.
RI Similarly, after a crop circle is harvested you often see a negative image of itself where the grain that was lost has started to grow - you see massive green pictograms in the stubble.
MW Fantastic, that's amazing...
RI But there's not much mystery there.
MW Oh, I think you could argue - if you wanted to - that it's the spirit reasserting itself. There's something truly extraordinary about it.
Like Marina's Leto, the seed becomes the symbol of an endless cycle - sacrifice and rebirth, a symbol seized upon by the world's religions as the revelation of eternal truth.
