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The reader is suddenly the read, the storyteller the one listening: Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise (2019)

I don’t think I understand the power of Mark Haddon’s work very well but I’m sure, since I read The Red House, the most undervalued book of the last decade, that the path to understanding has something to do with reading itself, with what is re(a)d.

Reading is a strange activity – this novel shows that it involves all the contingencies of the act of reading that shape a ‘reading’ of a novel and a poem, and that these contingencies are legion. Haddon feels, I think, that stories are part and parcel of the gains and losses that arise from introjecting them from a very material external world. In introjection we take something into ourselves. Although the cognitive bias of our culture insists that the external object is taken into the ‘mind’ in order to be known cognitively, it is the body that mediates mind both in fact and in realising the act of knowing by taking something in and reflecting on it. Thus, as I fell asleep one night I was pulled up by this description of Pericles in the psychological and physiological weariness of his losses:

He does not want to eat. He drinks only because his body demands it. He runs his hand along the spines of books in the library but when he opens a volume his eyes will not hold the page. He forgets one line while he is reading the next. Nothing makes sense, nothing remains.

Porpose, p. 182

The reader is suddenly the read, the storyteller the one listened to. The body supports or fails to support the introjections that constitute a reading – eyes cannot hold physical volume nor touch the passage of the reading process. And here the storyteller must weigh up his or her own stories in an evaluation so severe it reduces them all to the mere object to contain a story (a page, volume or library shelf) until forced to become meaningful through bodily of something more than just filling idle time:

What follows is a story up which he would have previously dined out, a story he would have shelved beside many similar stories with which to entertain himself or others in the idle hours some men fill with poetry.

Porpoise, p. 177

That something more is the harsh responsibility we have once we have realised that no story disengages one from difficult choices of self-and-other making that underlie all social interactions – done with others:

You shape your own life, … When the path veers into darker, more difficult terrain you finally understand that what you thought was weakness in others is not weakness at all; it is simply the structure of the world.

Porpoise p. 203

 Haddon’s stories are I think then only useful when they form paths to otherness, as they did, in a rather different way with George Eliot in her pained identification with Mr Casaubon. We cannot know the world through stories alone because, ‘of the making of many books there is no end.’ We must know the world through our subjection to its unchangeable objects and that involves separating attempts to make the external world intelligible from cognitive biases about our own specialness.

In order to do all this, Haddon chooses a story that can live only in its retellings from following an original Old English prose text (p. 307), Gower into the hands of Shakespeare and Wilkins (who both live, die and after-die in the novel). And the core theme of these stories – incest and the self-protection of the dubious values of the islanded self (and self-based groupings) it (as a literary idea at least) fosters and protects. Like Shakespeare, Haddon relies on what might appear to be the Goddess Diana as a deus ex machina: but the Diana of the hunt is a central symbol in more places than her rather pantomimic appearance at the end. She embodies ‘the wisdom that comes with knowing you could be prey,’ (with a sense of the body’s vulnerability to appropriation) something she teaches to both Actaeon and his dogs, who forgot the power which contains them: ‘the structure of the world.’

The novel never takes the step from knowing the ‘world is too much with us’ to saying that same world could under a revolution of thought be thought differently, I think. However, I get that feeling with all of his work: that liberation comes from taking cooperative control of the material world, using its fictions, and the ideologies they support, rather than being their victim. Going beyond that moment when, like Angelica victim of family-rape, one ‘no longer has any reason to stay alive. … But the animal body will not give in so easily’ (p. 304).