Signals of Distress
From Jim Crace by Philip Tew (
Signals of Distress is a highly complex novel. As Field comments,
the novelist “has, he says, the kind of Puritanism which
puts everything
in a story for a purpose.” (49) Hence the following
analysis
charts key elements in the text’s development, juxtaposing
the often
interdependent features of each chapter. According to Robert Wilson
in ‘History on the Rocks’ (1996) this is a “muscular
novel” that vacillates
between nature and a demotic democracy of the ordinary
person,
but finally is sympathetic towards its protagonist, Aymer Smith (x9).
For Lane, “the protagonist is
a humanist, someone who thinks he
cares, but is revealed to be a pompous prig out of touch
with the world
he wants to save.” (27) Aymer’s
pomposity and apparent do-good
intentions can be interpreted radically differently, given his
self-evident
vulnerability. He is acted upon and mocked. Crace implies that
an ethical judgment is required in facing the complex
human interactions
of everyday situations, recognizing even in the mundane
what
Ricoeur in The
Symbolism of Evil (1969) calls the “possibility of evil.”
(3) Aymer
is an unthinking thinker, for as Emmanuel Levinas
says in
On Thinking of the Other: entre nous (1998 [1991]): “A particular being
can take itself for a totality only if it is unthinking.
Not that it is wrong
or thinks badly or foolishly – it simply does not
think.” (13) Aymer
significantly misinterprets agency in others, but importantly
without
malice. This is Crace’s most
conventional novel in terms of idiomatic
style, chronology, but also its specificity. However,
although set in
November 1836 in Wherrytown, as Hamilton-Pearson comments,
“Unlikely as it seems, the
settings of Continent and Signals have much
in common. This makes sense if one remembers L. P.
Hartley’s
dictum that ‘the past is a foreign country,’ because it is
evident that
Crace’s imagination is mobilized by confrontations between
various
kinds of foreignness, and that 1836 is quite as foreign as
his seventh
continent.” (38)
Crace’s imaginary community by the sea, and Dry Manston, a tiny
hamlet further down the coast where two kelpers
live, are both located
near Cradle Rock, a huge rocking stone set above the sea,
whose balance
is a symbol of the ethical engagement of the text,
representing a
wavering between different senses of the world. According to
Begley
this setting is in part “anchored by a ‘real’ geography,”
(184) but not
an urban one. If the new arrivals to the city in
they are nevertheless migrants drawn by the ‘sorcery’ of
the
urban mass and its economic benefits. In contrast in Signals of Distress
the arrivals in Wherrytown are
more numerous, and their reasons
contingent, and heterogeneous. Wherrytown
seems microcosmically
small. Unlike
from the violence that occurs in the brief glimpse of the
town at the
novel’s end, a chthonic and threatening addendum. The novel’s
chief
concern is the disturbed balance of a small community and the
fate of
individuals literally in transit.
Seascape and landscape
feature strongly. The sea delivers or
attracts a range of visitors who then explore both themselves
and the
littoral nature and possibilities of the coastline, a theme
present in
The Gift of Stones. Generally the characters
represent traditional (recognizably
Shakespearean) archetypes: a
radical male virginal puritan,
an unsympathetic ambitious brother, two young lovers
brought
together by fate, a Rabelasian
female innkeeper, and a grasping
merchant. Cracean elements persist,
for as Crace says:
The critics who said it was a
dismissal of my previously established style,
in almost every respect were wrong. Because it was set
in a named place,
they presumed it was a realist novel, set in west
Actually the landscape is
just as invented as the landscapes of the
other novels, something I’ve dreamt up in order to fool you
that it’s real.
The use of stones and the use
of landscape, as metaphor and as character,
are exactly part of my usual kind of plot. And it’s very
much part of
my overall agenda to that point, which is concerned with
communities
on the edge, undergoing change. However, there were
significant differences
from other books. Undeniably it’s set in a named year and
a
named country – even if you don’t want to specify whether
it was exactly
idiom I could use, one I was almost obliged to use, because
in the 1820s
and 1830s people spoke in a certain way, which is a
matter of record.
The impulse for historical
specificity, exploring social nuances, allows
the characters through idiomatic dialogue to experience a
gamut of
emotions and epiphanies, often romantic. The shaping force of
nature is recurrent, partly conveyed in a further symbolic
aspect of the
Cradle Rock, representing the
delicate equilibrium of forces that constitute
the ontology or being of the world, a fragility
reflecting the situation
of many of the characters. In disturbing the social
balance,
small decisions and actions have unintended and yet
substantial consequences.
The power of the sea and of
the elements can mould
human lives. Crace choreographs the disparate events around
a series
of repeated journeys along the coast. As he explains,
“The main journey
is Wherrytown up to Cradle
Rock, which is a place where you
would rest, and continue to where the women live and the
boat was
wrecked, Dry Manston, and
subsequently the walk back.” As
Meletinsky comments, “Modern mythification
uses the cyclical
aspect of myths and rituals to express universal archetypes
and to
structure the narrative.” (312) At the
end Crace’s narrative is resituated,
first in imaginary dream locations, second in the city and
finally
briefly in the ocean. The preceding pattern is displaced by
fantasy, by
violence and death, a social and metaphysical disruption. Crace’s historical
impulse expresses a contemporary mythical consciousness.
The force and presence of
nature is established early as a motif. The
opening chapter is tumultuous; ‘The “Belle” and the “Tar,”’
two ships,
battle a storm that is so strong that “A few miles down the
coast from
Wherrytown, the Cradle Rock, which normally would take the
efforts
of two strong men before it began to seesaw on its pivot
stone,
teetered, fluctuated, rocked from just the muscle of the
gale.” (1)
Having suffered seasickness, Aymer Smith is aboard the paddledriven
steam-packet, the Ha’porth of Tar.
As a puritanical moralist he
had undertaken personally to represent his family soap
business,
intent on explaining why the company’s new process based on
developments
by Leblanc makes the local kelp collectors redundant,
although in reality this virgin seeks a country wife. Aymer is central,
and his rites of passage constitute much of the novel.
Certainly
through him the novel becomes, in part, an ironic
self-conscious
reflection by Crace on his particular brand of secular
Puritanism. The
Belle of Wilmington, a sailing barque, crewed by Americans under
Shipmaster Comstock, with
Otto, a slave, chained below with the four
hundred cattle loaded at
and is beached on a sand-bar with the loss of four
sailors. This is a crucial
event, significant in terms of the kinds of juxtaposition
it creates,
and its origins lie in Crace’s
own experiences of the West Country and
the Isles of Scilly:
There has been for many
generations a family of photographers called
the Gibsons, who photographed
shipwrecks in the Isles of Scilly and the
West Country, mostly the Penwith Peninsula of Cornwall which is the
far west part. Those photographs are immensely powerful
black and
white pictures, all of wrecked ships, sometimes ships still
in the sea and
being broken up, sometimes beached. They were my companions
while
I was writing, providing
stimulation for the book. The photographs represent
something about an isolated community at that time, way out of
contact. Suddenly one day wrecked on your beach is a boat;
something
almost inexplicable and unprecedented is delivered on your
shore. One
of the reasons for setting this book in the nineteenth
century is that this
is the last time you can have such inexplicable, sudden
interfaces
between things you haven’t heard of or things you haven’t
encountered
before, in this case a black man and American sailors.
As the Belle is wrecked, the narrative juxtaposes the cautious packing
of Aymer with Otto’s injury
aboard ship and the fate of the ship’s
bitch, Whip, cast into the sea with a ‘signal of distress’
that Ralph ties
around her neck. The dog’s name symbolizes the realities of
slavery
and oppression, ironic since it is one of the few English
words that
Otto can articulate. This
ensign is found hours later by seventeen-year-
old Miggy Bowe,
a kelper from Dry Manston,
and the alarm is
raised by her mother, Rosie. The rescuers, local fishermen,
are
amazed by the African, a result of their cultural isolation,
their innocence.
Miggy’s desire for Palmer Dolly, a young fisherman, is
displaced
when a young American, Ralph, playfully attempts to
retrieve the
ensign from Miggy’s neck. As if
through calamity and rescue, another
Shakespearean motif, the two
are drawn together by fate. By this point
Crace has established the
major locations, the inn without name
where they lodge being a focal point. As Crace says, “Most
of the main
players are out of place. They’re either waiting to be
dislocated entirely
– they’re
going to the
because they are washed up on the shores of this place where
their
culture, and their attitudes and their responses don’t really
gel. The
American sailors, Aymer himself, certainly Otto, and even the cattle
themselves, are all dislocated.” The novel’s intricate plot maps
the
nuances of characters’ encounters and their underlying
responses,
replete with the minutiae of such interactions between this
isolated
community and their visitors. Begley identifies the
consequences of a
typically Cracean strategy of deceit:
Critics praised the book’s
‘period precision,’ and certain rustic details
are particularly striking, like a tilled field at dusk
smothered with the
town’s surplus of herring: ‘a shoal of pilchards staring at
the moon, their
eyes as dead as flint, their scales like beaten tin, their
fraying fins and
tails like frost, their flesh composting for the next
year’s crop.’ Crace
delights in announcing to interviewers that this detail is
wholly invented
– fake
folklore: As far as he knows, no nineteenth-century farmer ever
fertilized fields with unwanted fish. (Think of it as the
author’s intertidal
fantasy.) (231)
Crace delights too in the
poetic incongruities of these false images,
his uncanny symbol of fertilization and renewal. The
generic landscape
and knowledge of local detail are synthesized through the
medium of Crace’s fabulist
inclinations.
© Philip Tew, 2006