Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (16 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page 41
Grandgousier estoit bon raillard en son temps, aymant à boyre net autant que homme qui pour lors fust au monde, et mangeoit volontiers salé. A ceste fin, avoit ordinairement bonne munition de jambons de Magence et de Baionne, force langues de beuf fumées, abondance de andouilles en la saison et beuf sallé à la moustarde, renfort de boutargues, provision de saulcisses ... [
Gargantua,
ch. iii, p. 46]
Grandgousier was a boon companion in his day, loving unwatered drink as much as any man in the world, and by choice he ate salt food. To this end, he ordinarily had a good supply of hams of Mayence and Bayonne, many smoked tongues of beef, an abundance of tripes in season and beef salted with mustard, reinforcements of caviar, provision of sausages ...
Women writers of recent times, including Margaret Atwood, have made an effective use of the listing technique, especially in enumerating food items to create huge surplus, but Weldon is a superb and constant player of this game of disconcerting abundance:
"I dream of strange and marvellous things. I dream of fish and chips and bread and butter and cups of sweet tea. I dream of ship-loads of boiling jam cleaving their way through the polar ice-caps." [
The Fat Woman's Joke,
p. 63]
So says the dieting Alan, discovering the important agony of deprived orality in the Weldonesque world of oral cravings and experience. The chief mediator between Rabelais and Weldonif any is wantingmust be James Joyce. Yet Joyce is sentimental and romantic by comparison with Weldon, as with Rabelais. If Weldon resembles Rabelais who is a "classic" author (in sense of distinction), she may become a "classic" too.
Also, Weldon is "classical" (in another sense), then, for if we divide the world (or at least Literature) between Classical and Romantic, well, Weldon can certainly never be termed
romantic
. We don't usually think of Rabelais as "classical" in the way that we use the word when we say that Austen is "classical." But the work of Rabelais has predecessors in the ''classical" period or, rather, periods, from Aristophanes to Lucian. These, however, are writers who disturb our sense of the regularity, the desire for high-minded order that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment taught us to associate with the "classical." Rabelais is as classical as any other modern European writer in bearing a strong relationship to Greek and Roman literary forebears. And Fay Weldon's novels likewise have a strong relation to certain Greek and Roman antecedents. It does not matter that she herself is not a "classical scholar" in the sense that we might use such a phrase in speaking of Rabelais, or, say, Thomas Love Peacock, for an author gets the message most often and most effectively perhaps through diverse mediators. Keats did not know Greek and did not have to
 
Page 42
know Greek to make a contact that mattered with styles, manners, and concepts flowing from the Greeks.
Our own concept of "the classical" has been confused by the emphasis on realism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Classical satirists such as Aristophanes, Apuleius, Petronius, and Lucian use enormous amounts of realistic detailso far, so good. But then they puzzle us by employing what we term the "fantastic." We have been reluctant to come to terms with the multiple kinds of nonrealistic styles and manners. As the novel, above all, has been considered the special abode of realism, we have found it hard to describe our reading experience when works of very animated prose fiction do not take what we might call the George Eliot line. Here Joyce is not problematic (save in
Finnegans Wake
), for the Joyce of
Portrait of the Artist
and
Ulysses
keeps to strict realism in event and situation; the nonreal, including the mythical and the obscene, resides in the language and in the multitudinous references. But some writers in various periods are not content to rest there. You cannot enjoy Apuleius'
The Golden Ass
unless you are willing, playfully at least, to entertain while you are reading the possibility that a man canand doesturn into an ass. Similarly, you cannot quite enjoy
The Cloning of Joanna May
unless you are willing playfully to entertain (at least for the length of time it takes to read the book) the idea that a woman's egg might be cloned so that she arrives at middle age to discover that she has four other selves, all versions of her young self.
Of course, Fay Weldon uses realism. The realismsometimes even perhaps naturalismcomes in the form of the details, inescapable physical details, grossly and inexorably moving in upon the reader.
Chloe is shown to a table between the kitchen door and the toilets. She asks for a Campari while she waits, and is given a Dubonnet.
... They order
antipasto
. He brings dried-up beans, hard-boiled eggs in bottled mayonnaise, tinned sardines and flabby radishes prettily arranged in bright green plastic lettuce leaves. [
Female Friends,
pp. 35, 42]
In this description of lunch at a sullen restaurant, one sees that the author is aware of history, of fashion, of the names of products. She also knows that even an unpleasant physical experience is a sensual experience. Weldon is as good at the mildly disgusting, the merely displeasing or off-putting, as she is at the extreme edge of the revolting (broken houses, dead bodies). She orders her world. But we realize that the thick realities, such realities as a dingy salad on bright plastic lettuce leaves, are only an outer layer. She is interested in situations, imaginative situations in which the characters can revealoh, not themselves, for Weldon's interest in selves

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