THE CRY OF A FIGHTING COCK:

NOTES ON STEERPIKE AND RITUAL IN GORMENGHAST

Ann Yeoman

In chapter 2 of Gormenghast, Peake's omniscient narrator describes the ambitious young Steerpike, who has long since "dug out and flung away" his conscience from "his tough narrow breast": 

High-shouldered to a degree little short of malformation, slender and adroit of limb and frame, his eyes close-set and the colour of dried blood, he is still climbing, not now across the back of Gormenghast but up the spiral staircase of its soul, bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy — some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself; where he can watch the world spread out below him, and shake exultantly his clotted wings. (G, 14, 7)

In this paragraph we see Steerpike as a complex amalgam of figures of evil: he is at once "little short of malformation" (we think of Stevenson's descriptions of Mr. Hyde); he has the eyes of both devil and vampire ("the colour of dried blood"); he has the power lust and drive of Faust, and the final image is that of a monstrous, demonic bird of prey dominating the world. "Born" in an inferno (the Great Kitchens are so described early in Titus Groan, p. 30, 21), and from the beginning recognized by Swelter as monstrous (the Castle Cook sings his song "to a hard-hearted monshter [sic]"—TG 38, 27), Steerpike is seen increasingly as Satanic, Faustian, vampiric and animalistic. Early in his "career," he is recognized by Dr. Prunesquallor as "A diabolically clever little monster" (TG 178, 138), and in Chapter 38 of Gormenghast, he is described in terms which recall the initial appearance of Mary Shelley's monster to his creator in Frankenstein: 

The sun was blocked away. For a few minutes the shadow (Steerpike) disappeared like the evil dream of some sleeper who on waking finds the substance of his nightmare standing beside his bed.... (261, 207)

Steerpike identifies with the role of the rebel (TG 159, 123) and his merciless logic teaches him that as rebel he must be "tenacious as a ferret" and subversive and  deceptive as a snake. In order to seduce his victims in the manner of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, he learns to "speak their own language," be it the romantic language of Fuchsia, Dr. Prunesquallor's sophisticated repartee, or Barquentine's strict recitation of the timetables of ritual. Described most often in terms of his shadow ("It was more like the shadow of a young man... that moved across whiteness, than an actual body moving in space" G, 15, 8), Steerpike operates with the guile  of the serpent, invading the secrets, vulnerability, and privacy of his potential victims through a device of "mirror glancing to mirror" (G, 17, 9). Steerpike's mirrors imply not the inner imaginative process of self-reflection but an attempt to so well learn the external character traits of others that he may exploit and mimic them to advantage. He gains knowledge and power through studying the surface reflection or "mirror image" of others. His concerns are material and mimetic; his advantages are won by the objective distance and unemotional clarity of vision born of his cold, calculating logic. But like Satan's Pandemonium, Steerpike's potential empire is only possible as a diabolical reflection, or "mirror image," of Gormenghast, the original; and Steerpike, also like Milton's Satan, is essentially a parodist and parasite, as is clear towards the end of Gormenghast when his time is running out and he echoes the lines from Paradise Lost in which Satan denies God's omnipotence and refuses to serve in Heaven:

[When Steerpike is cornered in the death-chamber of the Twins, his] body shuddered with a kind of lust. It was the lust for an unbridled evil. It was the glory of knowing himself to be pitted, openly, against the big battalions. Alone, loveless, vital, diabolic—a creature for whom compromise was no longer necessary, and intrigue was a dead letter.  If it was no longer possible for him to wear, one day, the legitimate crown of Gormenghast, there was still the dark and terrible domain—the subterranean labyrinth—the lairs and warrens where, monarch of darkness like Satan himself, he could wear undisputed a crown no less imperial. (G, 385-386, 307—my emphasis)

Steerpike's vampirism is evident in his treatment of the Twins. He makes them his victims by promising them the power that is their due, he tells them, by virtue of their "blood"; and then he sucks tnem dry, usurping all their meagre energy for his own purposes, until they are nothing but empty skeletons. He has the power of a Svengali to mesmerize, but this is a power which is dependent upon the submission of the victim's will.

It is not dlfficult for Steerpike to draw the empty-headed, silly Twins into his hypnotic web, but Fuchsia presents him with more of a challenge. Whereas Steerpike's power over the Twins is covertly sexual (he tickles them with his phallic sword-stick to the point of physical helplessness— G, 47, 34) wlth Fuchsia he feeds on her romantic longing for the lover who will bring her fulfillment. Peake introduces his reader to Fuchsia's emerging sexual fantasies in Titus Groan; significantly enough, Fuchsia is dreaming of her future lover at the same time that Steerpike is beginning his climb across the rooftops towards the window of her secret attic and his subsequent violation of that sanctuary:

He will be tall, taller than Mr. Flay, and strong like a lion and with yellow hair like a lion's, only more curly; and he will have big, strong feet because mine are big, too, but won't look so big if his are bigger; and he will be cleverer than the Doctor, and he'll wear a long black cape so that my clothes will look brighter still; and he will say: "Lady Fuchsia", and I shall say: "What is it?" (TG, 146, 113)

It is, of course, Steerpike who takes to wearing a long black cape, and Steerpike who calls her "Lady Fuchsia" in mock deference to her rank. In her own way a rebel against "the stones," Fuchsia falls in love with Steerpike because he is the epitome of difference:

"She admired all that she was not. It was all so different from Gormenghast" (G, 351, 280). Yet it is this difference between Fuchsia and Steerpike, more fundamental than Steerpike had anticipated, that causes their fragile relationship to shatter. Peake describes Steerpike's attempt at seduction as a work of art, but a work of art that is brittle because of the one-sided and evil nature of the lover's intent. When Steerpike calls Fuchsia "Fool": 

The delicate balance of their relationship was set in violent agitation — and a dead weight came down over Fuchsia's heart. Had the crystalline and dazzling structure which Steerpike had gradually erected, adding ornament to ornament until, balanced before her in all its beauty, it had dazzled the girl—an outward sign of his regard for her — had the exquisite structure been less exquisite, less crystalline, less  perfect, then its crash upon the cold stones far beneath would never have been so final. Its substance, brittle as glass, had been scattered in a thousand fragments. (G, 351-352, 286)

The Steerpike/Fuchsia relationship is so delicate because the lovers are such extremes; their worlds, it would seem, are mutually exclusive; where they may be able to persist in conflict, they could never exist in harmony. Steerpike's is a world of shadow which takes its shape by virtue of its opposite —light. As a type of the archetypal rebel, characterized by movement and change, he can thrive only in an atmosphere of perpetual opposition, a world of inter-dependent opposites: 

It was as though shadow [Steerpike] had a heart—a heart where blood wasdrown from the margins of a world of less substance than air. A world of darkness whose very existence depended upon its enemy, the light. (G, 261, 207)

Steerpike's "every action [is] ulterior" (G, 344, 275), whereas Fuchsia's energy is usually focused in one direction: towards something or someone she can love, whether the love exists in outside world or in the imagination. "[Fuchsia] lived in the moment of excitement, savouring the taste of an experience that was enough in itself. She had no instinct of self-preservation" (G, 344, 275). Fuchsia lives in and for the emotional intensity of the moment, unable to accommodate the rough reality of a world beyond the world of her imagination. Steerpike lives for the future  - his future, or "narrative," at the expense of all others. He is, perhaps, the artisan and craftsman concerned solely with form, or artifact for its own sake; he seems to revere only objects, never people, and he abhors sentiment. And so the "artifice" of his supposed love for Fuchsia has no substance, no integrity, and is therefore too brittle to survive. Fuchsia, on the other hand, is often at a loss for the right words or "form" by which to give expression to the tumult of her emotional life, and so is more closely identified with the unself-conscious artist committed to poetic intuition (see TG, "The Attic").

So for the Twins, and for Fuchsia, Steerpike is transformed from hero and lover into murderer and villain. And despite his unchanging purpose, despite his wish to use rather than revitalize the ritual of Gonnenghast, Steerpike becomes not only the agent of change but himself the victim of the change he initiates. Rather than fulfilling himself as both author and hero of his own narrative, he becomes another — albeit significant and horrific —instrument in the larger narrative of Gormenghast, its inhabitants and heir. sensing Fuchsia's own rebellious nature, Steerpike complains to  of the tyranny of age and custom in order to gain her sympathy and win her into his power; he uses the predictability of both age and ritual to further himself, knowing that to acquire Barquentine's knowledge will render him indispensable and therefore powerful; but when he eventually cuts his way through to the "hidden centre" of Gormenghast after systematically eliminating those who stood in his way, he confronts a complexity he had not anticipated:  both the implacable Countess Gertrude and the impetuous Titus — images of permanence and process, respectively.

If the ritual  of Gormenghast is empty and devoid of meaning, it is evident  that the "myth," or "sacred history" which we suppose must once have inspired that ritual has long since been forgotten. Peake's presentation of the "unimaginative laws" of Gormenghast that deny the spirit begs the question of what more vital myth might have imbued "the stones" with life some generations before the demise of Lord Sepulchrave and the birth of his son, the Seventy-Seventh Earl in the line of the Groans.

The consensus of most scholars of myth and ritual is that neither mvth nor ritual is primary: they are interactive and interdependent. Clyde Kluckhohn, writing on a general theory of myths and rituals, argues:

Those realms of behavior and of experience which man finds beyond rational and technological control he feels are capable of manipulations through symbols. Both myth and ritual are symbolical procedures and are most closely tied together by this, as well as by other facts. The myth is a system of word symbols, whereas ritual is a system of object and act symbols. Both are symbolic processes for dealing with the same type of situation in the same affective mode. (71) 

But also:

man, as a symbol-using animal, appears to feel the need not only to act but almost equally to give verbal or other symbolic "reasons" for his acts. (70)

There is, therefore, an interpretative and metaphoric function to myth as well as a symbolic function. Yet Titus finds no mythic or symbolic "reasons" for the ritual acts he is required to perform on a daily basis, and certainly it would seem that any former "mythic" basis to the society of Gormenghast, given form by the ritual to which it itself afforded significance, has evaporated. A cohesive "world view" is no longer shared by the younger inhabitants of Gormenghast, and there is division even between members of the older generation who consider themselves to be loyal to "the stones" (for example, Flay's banishment by the Countess Gertrude.) 

In his article, "The Religion of Gormenghast", David Sutton argues that rather than there being no religion in the Titus books, "the true religion of Gormenghast is Gormenghast itself." He continues: 

Gormenghast's society has become a personified being, a god. It is appropriate, therefore, that it should gradually acquire a devil — in the form of Steerpike.... He is a Satan figure, even down to his fear of, and torture by, fire; and his enjoyment of his evil is fitly ritualistic — as in his cockerel-like dance over the putrefied bodies of Cora and Clarice. (12-13)

Sutton argues that Peake is not an allegorist, and that therefore the narrative of Gormenghast cannot be reduced to a battle of Good versus Evil. Peake's characterization is far too complex to allow for such a reading. And it is complex not only in the case of Steerpike, who is at once Satanic, Faustian, hero, villain, lover, murderer and serpentine principle of energy and transformation. Gertrude is as synonymous with Gormenghast—the "stones"— yet she see much a voice in tune with the outside world of nature as she
is a petrifying Medusa figure, "half asleep and half aware" (G, 12, 15); Titus is both self-defined romantic rebel, saviour, and "king" turned traitor by the end of the second novel.

As Peake's main characters grow increasingly complex, and acquire the weight of literary, mythological and Biblical connotation (Steerpike as Faust and Satan; Gertrude as Medusa-figure and earth goddess; Titus as rebel son, etcetera), critical analysis is drawn towards the supposition that Peake is concerned with "re-mythologizing" Gormenghast. Yet, as the relationships between Peake's principal characters become more intricate, and the action more fast-paced, the narrative becomes multi-dimensional,
moving away from, rather than closer to the uni-dimensional, formulaic structure of myth, away from the type of "story" that promises meaning and understanding as well as a practical resolution. If there is narrative resolution, it is a resolution in the world of profane action. The direction of Peake's narrative is not towards a revitalization of the long forgotten "myth" of the castle and the ancient line of the Groans. Steerpike is dead. The danger has passed. The Countess Gertrude stands at the end of the novel affirming that "everything comes to Gormenghast" (G, 510, 409), but Titus, the future of Gormenghast, turns his back on the castle, obeying a personal "law of quest" rather than the law of convention and tradition (G, 508-511, 406-9}.

Despite Peake's interest in the literary and artistic image, his focus would appear to be on narrative, in the second half of Gormenghast, rather than on the elaboration of image for its own sake. The temporality of narrative works against the "spatial," simultaneous quality of image, yet Peake "grounds" his narrative, even when it is most concerned with action, in a series of "tableaux" to "frame" or capture in an image those stages in the metamorphosis of both Titus and Steerpike that inform the narrative movement in the first place. So the narrative does not finally "explain" or interpret Gormenghast and the passions of its principal players either to the castle's inhabitants or to Peake's readers. Such narrative expectations are frustrated. Instead of pushing towards meaning, a universal meaning that may be shared, Peake uses narrative to lead back to experience, reaffirming the primary, if personal and essentially solitary, nature of direct experience. The hopes, fears, suffering, and exhaltation of Steerpike and Titus; the largely hidden terror, determination, dreams, and disillusionment of the Countess, are not shared, "public" experiences, yet they are what effect change.

Myth and ritual are essentially static. They are concerned with eternals with repetition, convention, and tradition; the mythic narrative is the story which consolidates a world view for a specific group of people in a specific time and place. According to Eric Gould, myth is the attempt to fill a gap, the inevitable gap that persists between experience and language (the description or "narrative" of experience). Gould reminds his reader that "since myth is language, it is a response to the conditions of language
itself "(39), namely that language both embodies the extent of our knowledge and indicates the limits of, or gaps in, our understanding:

The history of "what-is" becomes a summary of the scope of our inability (as much as our ability) fully to authenticate Being in language. And in the modern, I think, mythicity [Gould's term for the "nature of the mythic"] has little chance of adhering to anything more important than this lack: a knowledge of language's deconstructive talents, which is not merely nihilistic, but an attempt to account realistically for the limits of our understanding.... The incompleteness of the sign (after Saussure's well-known theory) insists that no complete meaning is possible, only a system of differences: form and meaning are never present at once;... So we become as concerned over the play of differences and absences of meaning as we are over what Derrida has called the "metaphysics of presence." (40, 41)

The appropriate myth might move towards filling the widening gap in Tifus's "understanding" by answering his many questions concerning his family, his heritage, and the role he is asked to play as earl of Gormenghast, but Peake does not, and cannot afford his protagonist that luxury.

As in the case of the "myth" of Gormenghast, a particular myth may over time become "fixed" and so empty itself of meaning by becoming divorced from life, the reality that it originally signified (again, the Medusa figure is a mythological equivalent of such a tendency to kill by "fixing" or turning her victim to stone.) However, Gould argues that the mythic resides at the interface of "inside" and "outside" for it is an attempt to realize the hidden, absent or dimly intuited significance (the "inside") of an experience in "fact" or story ("outside"). Myth therefore inhabits the essentially fluid margin seen as existing between conscious and unconscious, waking and dream or fantasy worlds, between inside reality and outside actualities. It may be argued, in consequence, that myth, as art, is born of the need to fill, or interpret and stabilize, our experience of the "lack"—or gap in understanding— that persists at this margin. Both art and myth, then, share a metaphoric and interpretative function, and as reality forever eludes a  meaning that is absolute, this function must be seen as "process," as interpretative act or symbolic proposition, rather than as explanation with the fixity and opaqueness of an icon or idol.

As an artist Peake was individualistic and iconoclastic. His persistent image for the artist is of one who would continually break vases, break vessels, break window panes, as a symbolic prerequisite of the need to "see" and create something fresh. All but three of the carvings of the Mud-Dwellers are burnt, and these three are relegated to the Hall of Bright Carvings where, as useless icons, they become nothing more than objects for Rottcodd, the curator, to dust. Towards the end of Gormenghast, Peake emphasizes yet again the necessary function of the iconoclast.  Without Steerpike's iconoclastic energy, no change would have occurred within the crumbling walls of Gormenghast. Without Titus's iconoclasm, the emptv ritual might well have been perpetuated after the death of the rebel Steerpike. But Peake has the Poet follow Steerpike as Master of Ritual, and Titus breaks out of, rather than conforms to, the generally accepted perception of him as a hero and saviour of mythic proportion. The anticipated —or formulaic — ending to the encounter between Steerpike and Titus is thwarted. There is no resolution, there is no closure. Neither Steerpike nor Titus acts as their closest mythological precursors acted, and Gormenghast is not reaffirmed as the embodiment of all that is significant. In this way, Peake is asking his reader to look beyond the individual work of art to an intuition of the creative process which brought it into being. He asks us to look through the ponderous, opaque icon that Gormenghast has become to what it once signified — and to that which, in Titus's rebel eyes, even in its state of crumbling putrefaction, it still points: the irreducible and essentially enigmatic nature of reality.

It is process and unpredictable change that brings about Steerpike's  downfall, and that also breaks the mythological mould of a battle between good and evil towards which the narrative appears to tend in the final chapters of the novel. As Peake continually illustrates, extreme position are  untenable in the final analysis: those who survive — as those who create—are multi-dimensional rather than rigidly umdimensional. Steerpike's vulnerability is first introduced when his plans tor Barquentine's death misfire. His loss of control and the realization that he had bungled the affair (G 274, 217) distress him, and the Steerpike who is reborn out of the slimy moat after Barquentine has drowned is an "arch contriver" who falls prey, more and more, to a side oi his personality he has consciously repressed - the potential for imagination, fantasy, and the irrational:

...there was a change all the same, and when he [Steerpike] was woken an hour later by a sound in the room, and when on opening his eyes he saw a flame in the fireplace, he started upright with a cry, the sweat pouring down his face, and his bandaged hands trembling at his sides. (G, 282-283, 224)

At the death scene of the twin aunts, Steerpike submits to an overpowering and unbridled impulse to strut like a cock around the bodies of Cora and Clarice. He is portrayed as the archetypal fiend, but Peake also indicates that Steerpike no longer knows himself: impulses are surfacing and erupting through the veneer of his rationality with a force that threatens to overwhelm because hitherto so conscientiously denied. Steerpike is no longer master in his own house:

He was the vehicle through which the gods were working. The dim primordial gods of power and blood. (G, 381, 303)

Governed until now by his impeccable logic, Steerpike starts to realize, more and more, the animalistic, instinctual side of his nature. Towards the end of the fight with Titus, what betrays Steerpike is a desire that arises fromt he autonomous dream level of his psyche: he is completely overtaken by a suicide fantasy in which he sees himself, once again, in animalistic terms, in his final gesture enacting "a note from the first dawn, the high-pitched overweening cry of a fighting cock" (G, 498, 399). Steerpike's suicide fantasy is well worth quoting in full, as it shows how he tails victim to his one-sidedness as did Sepulchrave and Fuchsia before him:

And now he began to experience again, but with even greater intensity, those sensation that affected him when, with the skeletoins of the titled sisters at his feet, he had strutted about their relicts as though in the grip ot some primordian power.

This sensation was something so utterly alien to the frigid nature of his conscious brain that he had no  means of understanding what was happening within him at this deeper level, far less of warding off the urge to show himself.  For an arrogant wave had entered him and drowned his brain in black, fantastic water.

His passion to remain in secret had gone. What was left of vigour in his body craved to strut and posture.

He had no longer wanted to kill his foe in darkness and in silence. His lust was to stand naked upon the moonlit stage, with his arms stretched high, and his fingers spread, and with the warm fresh blood that soaked them sliding down his wrists, spiralling his arms and steaming in the cold night air — to suddenly drop his hands like talons to his breast and tear it open to expose a heart like a black vegetable — and then, upon the crest of self-exposure, and the sweet glory of wickedness, to create some gesture
of supreme defiance, lewd and rare; and then with the towers of Gormenghast about him, cheat the castle of its jealous right and die of his own evil in the moonbeams. (G, 496-497, 399-98)

So Steerpike's ambition is sabotaged by a fantasy that springs, autonomously, from the depths of his own psyche. He is defeated by a resurgence of the "irrational inmperative," as Milan Kundera terms the archetypal, which results in that most radical transformation, death. It is something in his own nature that makes it impossible for Steerpike ever to be the idol he worked so hard to become, and to whose power he imagined the whole of Gormenghast would eventually unquestioningly yield. His final act is one of transgression, the transgression of the very fantasy of himself that had ruled his life, and in that final act he destroys both himself and the carefully-wrought image of himself.

Works Cited

Gould, Eric. 1981. Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1979. "Myths and Rituals: A General Theory." In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, ed. by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, 66-78. 4th ed. New York: Harper and Row.

Sutton, David. 1979. "The Religion of Gormenghast: A Note." Mervyn Peake Review 9 (1979): 11-13.

 "Overlook press", 1995 

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