Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
ANGELIKA REICHMANN Reading Wolf Solent Reading
Reading Wolf Solent Reading 49 (bow-)window, an image which returns several times later in the text always associated with the pleasurable place where Wolf Solent likes or would like to be. At the beginning of the story the thirty-five-year-old Solent is shown travelling home to his birthplace in Dorset after a twenty-five-year absence, sitting at the window of an otherwise empty railway compartment, deeply submerged in "an orgy of concentrated thought" (Powys 13), in his personal 'mythology' (Powys 19). He characterises his mental state in the following manner: Outward things [...] were to him like faintly-limned images in a mirror, the true reality of which lay all the while in his mind [...] What he experienced now was a vague wonder as to whether the events that awaited him —these new scenes —these unknown people — would be able to do what no outward events had done —break up this mirror of half-reality and drop great stones of real reality —drop them and lodge them —hard, brutal, material stones —down there among those dark waters and that mental foliage. (Powys 21, italics mine) The overall image of Wolf Solent represented here is fundamentally reminiscent of "The Lady of Shallot". He is locked up in the ivory tower of his own consciousness, intentionally separating and defending himself from outside events, which appear as mere reflections and shadows. As a result, the last twenty-five years of his life have been monotonous and uneventful; "he has lived peacefully under the despotic affection of his mother, with whom, when he was only a child of ten, he had left Dorsetshire, and along with Dorsetshire, all the agitating memories of his dead father" (Powys 14). The same surface of consciousness also seems to protect him from himself: since all the events of his 'real' life take place on a mental plane, in his 'mythology', his being bcked up in a state of utter passivity in the shell of his consciousness hinders him from any actual action. However, "the condition of narr at ability [is] to enter a state of deviance and detour (ambition, quest, the pose of a mask) [...] before returning to the quiescence of the nonnarratable" (Brooks, Reading for the Plot 108). It is exactly Wolf Solent's 'mythology' that makes it impossible for him to become the hero of his own story and thus to have an identity (Brooks, Reading for the Plot 33) of his own. His story —the novel —can only start when he is willy-nilly pushed out of this passivity, and ends with shattering his 'mythology' as a shelter from "reality" , but his ultimate desire is to return to the ideal situation of sitting at the window and submerging in his 'mythology'. For example, on returning to Dorset his wish to live in one of the little cottages is embodied in his attempt "to fancy what it would be like to sit in the bow-window of any one of these, drinking tea and eating bread-and-honey,
