(A shortened version of this article was published in PN Review 39 (1984) p. 61.)
At the centre of C. H. Sisson's thinking about that problematic entity which speaks of itself in the first person singular stand "An Essay on Identity" and the poem "The Discarnation". In the essay Sisson affirms that the self-consciousness implied in the modern 'I' is present neither in the myth of Adam nor in the earliest specimens of humanity. To be Man is first and foremost to be a member of a species. 'I' the individual is not aboriginal: it has been invented by man: it is something "historical and conceptual". It makes no sense to speak of "identifiable minds in separate bodies", for the mind must be filled by something outside itself through the agency of an inherited culture.
The essay helps us to an understanding of the title of "The Discarnation". The incarnation of Adam "was like the descent of a Platonic form into physical shape. It was a reaffirmation of the kind". Each man is important, in this account, because he gives expression to the purposes of God. A discarnation may then be understood as a reversal of this descent, a denial of divine purpose, a demythologising, despiritualizing, deChristianizing of man. It will be attained through the insistence that man is a biological and historical phenomenon, a soft machine whose supposedly inviolable individuality is conventional and ideological. Neither conscience nor consciousness add up to a man, so that
what we think is less, for sure, Than what we are, and that is flesh.
Sisson's poem "The Spectre" and his novel Christopher Homm are discarnations. The difference between the lives of the spectre and Christopher – differences of birth, expectation, satisfaction – are not more significant than what they have in common. Their "paedobaptisms" (a word chosen in "The Spectre", I imagine, for its pretentious and fake air of the scientific) are alike formal and empty: their schoolings, marriages, adulteries, deaths form paradigms of a common life; and if the spectre is indulged where Christopher is deprived, his indulgences are merely a sort of tinsel overlaying the contours of the rock of necessity which in Christopher's case is always bare to the view. Neither is that free, self-determining individual who haunts the landscape of liberal thought.
Sisson prefaces Christopher Homm with the poem "In a Dark Wood" in which he declares his sense of his own damnation; Christopher Homm's initials are those of Sisson's forenames. But if this wretched Christian traveller is Charles Sisson, he is Everyman. Useless to exclaim that his existence demonstrates a programme of reductio ad absurdum on the part of a nihilistic novelist; useless to exclaim that his world is one emptied of intellect, beauty, art, love, belief – whatever it is we, his appalled readers, may feel gives cogency to our more privileged existences. For Christopher is Man as Lear on the heath is Man – the bare, forked, unaccommodated animal: he is what we know ourselves to be when – and if – we perceive for what they are the contrivances with which we surround ourselves in order to upholster the stretched wires of our mortality. Indeed Christopher is less than Lear, for he may aspire neither to the thrilling rhetoric of the storm-swept king nor to the penetrating insights of the madman. He, truly, constitutes that "nothing" which Sisson has courted through poem after poem as the one word capable of nailing, to his own laconic satisfaction, what he feels himself to be.
Christopher Homm is the bleakest novel I know; but at the same time it is one of the funniest. It is not tragic since the novelist, in denying himself the expression of pity for his creation, refuses that luxury to his reader. Its humour is excoriative, for, time and again, in cadences at once cool and savage, its prose flays the skin from surfaces that other writers have sought to romanticise: little Christopher's body – "more like something hanging from a gallows than it was like inhabited flesh"; the midwife in attendance at his birth with her pans and buckets of hot water – "like a workman come to clean out a sewer". This is satire as Gulliver's Travels is satire: its purpose to anatomise the human animal, to reveal his hypocrisies and self-deceptions. It is as painful and salutary a salt rubbed into cut flesh.
A literary critic – F. R. Leavis perhaps – wrote of D. H. Lawrence that it was his achievement to write stories in which narrative and dialogue, for the first time in the history of English novel-writing, are couched in a common style. Christopher Homm occupies a position at the opposite pole of the classic/romantic axis to that at which Lawrence's writings are to be found, and one of its crucial stratagems is to open an abyss between the language which forwards the story and the language the characters speak. We, through the narrator, observe them as we might observe caged animals at the zoo. But we cannot feel superior to them, for every page insists that they are us.
Note: C. H. Sisson's poetry, fiction, essays and translations are published by Carcanet Press.
Back to top ^