rev. of The Great Victorian Collection by Brian Moore
If a work of art is the realization of one's deepest imaginative processes, including the dream process, then everything that an artist produces becomes part of his own privately-ordered collection, which as a matter of course moves into the public domain. In this literal sense, Brian Moore's
Great Victorian Collection can be viewed as a study of the public reception of the miracle that Anthony Maloney created out of a dream which in a real sense was simply the culminating act of a long-worked over imaginative process. By extension, of course, the book's more important allegorical meaning involves the public reception of a novelist's own collection of works, and of the ultimate control that they can wield over the writer unless he can maintain a balanced perspective towards what he has created. What this implies is that any artist must surrender to the world that which by the final relinquishing act of the creative process belongs properly to it, while maintaining his own artistic integrity which, like a chemical solution, is not diminished but only qualitatively modified by that surrender.
This is one of the realizations that Anthony Maloney, the protagonist of Moore's latest novel, cannot accept, and ultimately he is destroyed by what he has created. At first moved to wonder by the materialization of his extravagant dream Maloney quite naturally wishes to control and protect every aspect of his Collection, and he attends to it with a jealous possessiveness. At the outset, dream and waking are virtually co-existent, and his total jurisdiction over his creation applies equally in both of these states. But as soon as he begins to relinquish his control to various individuals in his society — media people, Victoriana experts, Management Incorporated types — his jurisdiction remains intact only in his dream. The moment that exactly unites (or separates) dream and waking is made dramatically significant here: at the precise instant in his original dream that Maloney knows he is in charge of the Collection, he wakes up, and thus must literally not only confront what he has created, but, as I
suggested above, must also turn over to the world what he has created. It is at this moment that a process of erosion begins, almost imperceptibly at first, but nevertheless inexorably, which transforms the quality of the created work — and the ways in which the world beholds it — quite away from its original inception.
I suspect that the average reader may be more prepared to accept Moore's tenth novel in these allegorical terms than as a realistic social novel of the type that he has heretofore written. It is the extravagant premise of the dream coming true that will stick here, and in what Moore calls "this age of instant distrust," many readers will not allow themselves a sufficient "suspension of disbelief" for this premise to take hold. Moore is clearly aware of this problem, and he helps us all he can, by spelling out with tangible detail and logical clarity all the circumstances leading up to Maloney's dream. The two worlds in question — pre-dream and post-dream — differ of course in only one component: the latter contains the Great Victorian Collection, but in all other respects, it is precisely like Maloney's pre-dream world. And this change is not a qualitative one so much as it is a change in logistics of some sort, for all the items in the Collection have, or have had, an
existence in some other place or at some other time. In this respect Moore differs from those fantasists who create a new world entirely out of their imagination, and then proceed to populate it with creatures and things that possess no known counterpart in reality.
What Moore is doing with these elements of fantasy is of course very much a part of our literary heritage, as works like Swift's
Gulliver's Travels or Huxley's
Brave New World testify. Critically, the obligations of an author of a tale of the supernatural or of fantasy were spelled out over a hundred and fifty years ago by Coleridge in his explanation of the kinds of works that were to constitute
Lyrical Ballads:
In the one [kind of poem] the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real.
Moore "interests our affections" in the first instance by making his protagonist wholly credible and convincing: "an ordinary young man . . . twenty-nine years old and an assistant professor of history at McGill University." Like so many of Moore's earlier protagonists, Arthur Maloney represents the essence of ordinariness, with nothing in his life, academic or personal, to hint at the extraordinary or the unusual. And because Moore focuses his attention on Maloney's human dilemma caused by this miracle rather than exclusively on the miracle itself, we consistently sense "the dramatic truth" of the emotions that his situation engenders. Maloney maintains a low-key and somewhat subdued profile throughout the entire experience, and his responses to the various would-be manipulators of his Collection reflect the same kind of bewilderment and uncertainty that characterized his relationship with his estranged wife, and that helps to account for his ultimate failure with
Mary Ann McKelvey. Moore resists here, as he has consistently done in his fiction, the temptation to enlarge his central character, and indeed, in our ultimate assessment of Maloney we share, in part at least, the New York Times reporter's view of him: "He doesn't strike me as very smart." Many of Moore's earlier characters, of course, were also not particularly smart — Judith Hearne, Diaimuid Devine, Ernie Truelove come readily to mind — but his fictional achievements in those cases derived, as they do in this latest novel, from his ability to forge genuinely dramatic situations out of the lives of these "mediocre and undaring" people. Many years ago Moore said that "a good writer must feel sympathetic with even the least of his characters," and to this credo he remains faithful in
The Great Victorian Collection, for none of his brilliantly-realized peripheral characters, such as Lieutenant Polita, Bernard Hickman, or Professor Clews, emerge as mere caricatures. Though Moore assumes an ironic stance towards a number of these minor characters, he understands their responses to Maloney's Collection, whether it be one of skepticism, professional jealousy, or unscrupulous exploitation, and doesn't use such characters for any gratuitous display of his or his protagonist's superiority.
In an earlier novel,
Fergus, Moore had experimented with the fictional possibilities of supernatural elements, but that novel was a much more personal or autobiographical work than
The Great Victorian Collection. This latest novel suggests among other things that Moore has laid all his personal ghosts to rest, and he uses the supernatural here as a device to explore the complex relationship between the act of creation and the nature of reality, and between the conscious and the unconscious that overlap in man's waking and sleeping states. "Do I wake or sleep?" — this line from Keats'
Ode to a Nightingale comes to mind as Maloney ponders the origin of his Collection, and in its many comments on the nature of art and beauty, the novel also frequently evokes the same poet's reflection about the Grecian urn. Maloney's Collection is perfect only at the precise moment he wakes up to its charge; as soon as he tries to manipulate it in his waking state it begins to deteriorate. "Unheard melodies," indeed, are sweeter than heard ones, as Maloney learns to his dismay, and in the face of what the world is doing to his creation he cannot sustain his initial delight over the uniqueness of his creative process: "No one has ever done anything remotely like it before." There is in a sense a conflict here between the two realities of content and form, and just as Keats' poem may suffer the changing moods of the world, what it celebrates is captured and unchanging forever. Maloney's dream realized may very well go the way of Disneyland, but his dream as process
will remain inviolable.
After Maloney's death, a scientific journal described the Collection as "a duality which exactly reproduces the original it commemorates," which in a very real sense is the ultimate compliment to an artist's endeavours. Maloney had earlier come to much the same conclusion, when in a sudden despair-engendered revelation he saw it as "a web of artifices as different from the reality it sought to commemorate as is a poem about spring from spring itself." What Maloney cannot see or articulate here, because of his disturbed state of mind, is that a poem about spring is for succeeding generations the only tangible proof that for that particular poet a spring did in fact exist, and therefore for that reason the poem must be preserved. No one, perhaps, can share the artist's total experience of creating and beholding what he has created, but there always remains for the rest of the world the residual delight of continuing to behold the created thing long after the creator has
passed away. If the world turns the product into a kind of Disneyland, Moore seems to imply, this is a comment on the state of the world, and not on the artist and his art.
