Armed with questions: Mary Butts's sacred interrogative

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Bradley W. Buchanan

Butts's characterization of Kralin reminds us of (and may indeed have influenced) Virginia Woolf's later description of what she calls the "inconclusive" Russian spirit, whose typical narratives end in a desperate "note of interrogation" rather than in any comforting certainty ("Russian" 240). If we recognize the caricature of "the Russian mind" as partly a projection of Woolf's own mind, we may decide that Woolf is describing a problematic aspect of her own work (which is amply interrogative). (17) Similarly, Butts may be displacing her own interrogative energies into Kralin and disparaging them. We might also note that Kralin's habit of "interrogating his subconscious" (Taverner 276) isn't so different from the less demonic (and much more English) Felix Taverner's problem of "How to be yourself when you do not know that self" (105).

As Butts noted, Parisian cafe society was the potentially dangerous meeting place for "the East and the West" as well as a space to enjoy "all pleasures of compromise and ambition" (qtd. in Blondel 248). She emphasized the need to balance these competing forces; as she put it, "with every drunkenness there must be an equal and corresponding sobriety." Thus in the collision of Russian and American characters in her fiction (especially in the Paris she describes there) she addresses two kinds of interrogativity: the worldly, secular Russian questioning embodied by Kralin (who spends a good deal of time in Paris) contrasts with the ingenuous, spiritually inclined questioning of Dudley Carston.

Currer Mileson, the ill-fated hero of Butts's late story "Mappa Mundi," offers an even more relevant example of the questioning American, since he is fascinated and consumed by Paris, the city that Butts clearly believes holds the key to any spiritual renewal. Mileson goes to Paris for many of the same reasons Carston goes to rural England: he seeks more meaningful experiences than his Midwestern upbringing has provided. The narrator of "Mappa Mundi" says of Americans: "Their imaginations having less historical exercise than ones over here, they are inclined to be superficial--that is, romantic ... their national culture not yet achieved, what they do not despise they gobble" (189). Although the narrator is careful to note the differences between herself and the naive American, she and he seem to have a good deal in common, and experience a strange sort of simultaneous insight into their Parisian surroundings. The expression of this shared intuition takes the form of a question, not surprisingly:

          "Have you ever thought?" we both began at once. Both meaning
       the same question, but it was he who explained.
          "Have you ever thought what lies behind this city--above all
       behind the ancient part we're sitting looking at? What, if you go
       at it long enough, comes through, comes out, what you walk into
       when you're awake and when you're asleep?" I stared at him. He
       went on:
          "It's easiest on the Quai Notre-Dame, by the little old shop
       where they sell books on how to raise the devil. There it's
       pretty well done for you." (190)