The Modern English Visionary: Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2000 by Edward J. Ahearn

Similarly, while the narrative proceeds, many other echoing passages counter its forward movement. Eve's "descend lower," just quoted, repeats the opening of the Beulah chapter: "Descend lower. You have not reached the end of the maze, yet" (49). This in turn echoes Evelyn/Eve's reflection, about leaving New York, that "our destinations choose us, choose us before we are born"--

And exercise a magnetic attraction upon us, drawing us inexorably towards the source we have forgotten. Descend lower, descend the diminishing spirals of being that restore us to our source. Descend lower; while the world, in time, goes forward and so presents us with the illusion of motion, though all our lives we move through the curvilinear galleries of the brain towards the core of the labyrinth within us. (39)

Here the real movement is backward and inward; forward movement, time, and world are all illusory.

This descent beyond time prepares us for a culminating initiation (179- 86). Return to the womb and rebirth, survival of the Holocaust and descent to the underworld-this carefully staged sequence evokes progressions in other visionary writers through a series of caves and fluids.[12] Sweating, alone, naked, deprived even of an image of self in a shattered mirror, Eve follows fresh water and freezing stream, then "suiphurated" and blood-hot liquid, then visceral maternal slime, to the "amniotic sea" of primordial time before emerging from the final cave. Mythic figures recur as Eve realizes that the words duration and progression are meaningless. She is present as evolutionary time rolls backward: "My shaggy breast, my great, carved brow with the germ of a brain behind it. I have forgotten howl picked up a stone and shattered a nut with it" (186). Then Eve emerges on the shore of the Pacific, in some "real" time-but how can one remember, or forget, having been transformed into a prehistoric being?

As I have been arguing, Hawksrnoor and The Passion of New Eve, in their different, complementary ways, are apocalyptic and visionary novels that destabilize our sense of space and time and threaten our experience of self and sexual identity. Nowhere is this more true than in the impossible last paragraphs of each work. These "conclusions," like all apocalyptic and visionary writing, stretch experience and language in a direction that, for all its roots in politics and history, is profoundly religious.

Here is the last chapter of The Passion of New Eve. Eve, believing herself to be pregnant, sets to sea in the dying Mother's boat/coffin:

We start from our conclusions.

I arrived on that continent by air and I left it by water; earth and fire I leave behind me. And all this strange experience, as I remember it, confounds itself in a fugue. At night, dreaming, I go back again to Tristessa's house, that echoing mansion, that hall of mirrors in which my whole life was lived, the glass mausoleum that had been the world and now is smashed. He himself often comes to me in the night, serene in his marvellous plumage of white hair, with the fatal red hole in his breast; after many, many embraces, he vanishes when I open my eyes.