Armed with questions: Mary Butts's sacred interrogative

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

This episode is a complex one, and bespeaks Butts's concern not only with acts of interrogative magic but also with rituals of initiation. Before he proves himself a hero, Carston's "day had been a penance," and, as if consciously purging himself for a ritual, he sings pious songs instead of his usual "bawdy repertory" (146). These signs point to Carston's status as a hero of the sacred, yet some readers have nevertheless felt that he fails in his central aim, which is to win Scylla's affections. Others (with greater justice) claim that he alone escapes the "autointoxication" that Libbian Benedict sees afflicting the English characters in the book (qtd. in Blondel 209). What Benedict calls the "naive, essentially hopeful outlook" of the American expatriate is certainly responsible for Carston's interrogative attitude toward himself and his surroundings, and thus does seem to function as a catalyst for the Grail-centered, otherworldly regeneration Butts celebrates. Nevertheless, as we shall see later on, Butts offers a darker, more self-destructive version of these traits in her later story "Mappa Mundi," in which a curious American visitor disappears forever into the Parisian mystique he is trying naively to penetrate.

There is room for debate about what exactly is at stake in Butts's vision of regeneration in Armed with Madness. Is she more optimistic about Europe's chances to heal its political divisions and revitalize its literary heritage after the First World War than were Eliot and company? Or does the novel suggest something quite different? Is Carston's rescue of Scylla a sign that women can survive the wave of essentializations that mythic narratives so often bring with them? Is it a clue that women themselves have a closer connection to the Holy Grail than we might have suspected from male writers' version of the story? (13) Or is it merely another symptom of women's dependence on men? We may get a sense of Butts's main concern here if we follow Scylla's thoughts at the start of the novel, thoughts that echo Butts's essay "Traps for Unbelievers":

      What was she worried about? ... Hitherto God had fed his sparrows,
      and as good fish had come out of the sea. But everywhere there was
      a sense of broken continuity, a dis-ease. The end of an age, the
      beginning of another. Revaluation of values. Phrases that meant
      something if you could mean them. The meaning of meaning?
      Discovery of a new value, a different way of apprehending
      everything. (Taverner 9)

Scylla can no longer find any reason to have faith in a divine power, especially since "there were fifty good reasons for supporting the non-existence of God" (10). The rebirth that comes about as a result of Carston's question thus ought to be a return to faith of some kind, though it is hard to find more than a hint that this is indeed the case. Butts is content to let the Grail myth (and the nexus of questions that trigger its sacred energies) suggest rather than enact the spiritual recovery she seems to long for.