Armed with questions: Mary Butts's sacred interrogative

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

Butts is determined not to make this mistake, as we can see from her novel Armed with Madness, (9) where hints of the sacred come thick and fast. The characters think they have found the Holy Grail when they happen upon a cup around which a cloud of mystery hangs; as an old man who discusses the item with two of the protagonists (Picus and Carston) says, "In this business there are no easy answers" (Taverner 139). Notwithstanding the characters' doubts about their ability to come to any conclusions about this object, they invest it with intense philosophical significance:

           "I cannot tell you anything. A piece of worn jade, this time,
        for the question mark to the question we can none of us answer."
           "What is the question?" said Carston.
           "Our old friend. Whether a true picture of the real is shewn
        by our senses alone."
           "Can't we leave it that we don't know?"
           "Then the picture we have becomes more and more
        unintelligible." (137)

Questioning, Butts implies, inevitably leads us to question the entire "picture of the real" as we perceive it. In this sense, her work partakes of what Gilles Deleuze, writing of the modernist novel, calls "the discovery of the question and the problematic as a transcendental horizon, as the transcendental element which belongs 'essentially' to beings, things and events" (195). No doubt the modernist obsession with the Grail is part of this "discovery" of the "problematic," but few other writers have associated the Grail and its questions with doubts as fundamental as Butts's seem to be. Butts is not alone, however, in associating the Grail with acts of questioning. Eliot's The Waste Land and David Jones's In Parenthesis invoke the Grail knight's failure (as recounted by Jessie Weston in her hugely influential From Ritual to Romance) to ask the right question at the right time, (10) an omission that dooms the Fisher King to impotence and the Waste Land to continued barrenness. Butts's Grail Knight, like J. C. Powys's in his A Glastonbury Romance and Lawrence Durrell's in Clea, does ask the right question at the right time. (11)

Butts's knight is an unlikely one, partly because he is an American, yet it is by virtue of his very lack of intellectual achievements that he serves the mythic purposes Butts has in store for him. Dudley Carston's naivete and openness to experience are emphasized when he is introduced, and his thoughts merge with the narrator's into free indirect discourse marked by questions: "He had come out of simple curiosity, and to see something of England off the regulation road. So that was what this Paris bunch did when they got home? What did they do? What was there to do?" (Taverner 12). Robin Blaser sees Carston as "a near stereotype of the American who has lost all memory of the past" (192) but who becomes "a modern Grail knight in that he asks the right questions." (12) When Carston sees his beloved Scylla at the mercy of a distraught and violent Clarence (who has struck her with a stone flint and shot her with an arrow, and is preparing another arrow to finish her off with) he asks himself: "Was I made a man for this?" (Taverner 147). Evidently answering in the affirmative, he distracts Clarence with the Grail cup long enough to rescue Scylla. He persuades Clarence to drop the cup into a well, pretending that Picus has singled Clarence out as the only one who can perform this strange task. The confused Clarence does as he is told and, perhaps chastened by this symbolic gesture, calms down considerably.