ROBERTSON DAVIES AND THE PLACES THAT HAUNT US

My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Robertson Davies' The Fifth Business, the first book in his Deptford trilogy (the other two being The Manticore and World of Wonders). I first read it in high school during our one unit on CanLit. We'd been given a list of six or seven Canadian authors to choose from, along with recommended books. I asked my mom for advice, and she suggested Davies to me as the writer who would most appeal to my tastes. She was right there. She has, in fact, never failed in suggesting books to me, and even though we don't share exactly the same tastes (she is not an SF fan, and she can't really get on with magical realism), no one manages to get my taste in novels right more often. The Fifth Business might be her best recommendation, though. Since high school, I've read it a handful of times. My parents have a handsome, hardback copy (it might be a first edition), but I didn't own a copy until I spied the entire trilogy in a used bookstore in Corvallis, in the same Penguin print run as my copy of The Rebel Angels. I got all three for the princely sum of $4.50, fifty cents cheap than each sold for individually when first released, and I'd have quite willingly parted with more to get them.

Few novels speak to me in the way that The Fifth Business does. While I adore the entire Deptford trilogy as a whole, I would not for a second suggest that The Manticore or World of Wonders are the equal of their precursor. Part of its initial appeal was the shocking realization that someone could write a novel about life in a small town in Ontario. This was unbelievable; to my teenage self, art was made by people who lived in glamorous places, like London or Paris or Rome, or in exciting places like New York and Los Angeles. The books and movies I liked that weren't set in those places were set in the future or in space. Art most definitely did not come from people writing about fictional towns on the wrong Thames. I was sure of that. That the small town in Ontario in which I grew up could be worthy of commemoration or reflection in this way was stunning. Since then, I've grown accustomed to the idea--indeed, I'm fairly convinced that I owe a great deal to growing up in the suburbs, intellectually and otherwise, although the sense of inferiority about where I come from (is this a general Canadian feeling? It might be. . .) has both served me well and hindered me at various times--and, as I read this time, when I came upon Dunstan Ramsay's line that "I boarded the train--there was no crowd at the station this time--and left Deptford in the flesh. It was not for a long time that I recognized that I never wholly left it in the spirit," I was so overcome and agitated I had to put the book down for several minutes. Nothing else has ever quite captured so well the way I feel about Canada while I'm in the States: the physical disconnection, but psychic/spiritual hyperconnection that is at once painful and embarrassing (I kind of hate being reminded of it by other people, especially by several people in the same day, or by the same person over and over again) but something that I long for and need (I will surprise myself at odd times with the need to assert, to myself as much as to anyone else, that I am Canadian).

Davies can flat out write about place. His description of a public mental hospital does such a good job capturing its atmosphere and evoking dread and loneliness that I found it (again) so unsettling as to require me to put the book down:

[T]he building was an old horror. It was about eighty years old and had been designed for the era when the first thing that was done with an insane patient was to put him to bed, with a view to keeping him there, safe and out of the way, till he recovered or died. Consequently the hospital had few and inadequate common rooms, and the patients sat in the corridors, or wandered up and down the corridors, or lay on their beds. The architecture was of the sort that looks better on the outside than on the inside; the building had a dome and a great number of barred windows and looked like a run-down palace.
Inside the ceilings were high, the light was bad, and in spite of the windows the ventilation was capricious. The place reeked of disinfectant, but the predominating smell was that unmistakable stench of despair that is so often to be found in jails, courtrooms, and madhouses. [The smell of the carceral society; and wouldn't Foucault have just loved that grouping: the apparatus of discipline!]
She had a bed in one of the long wards, and I left her standing beside it, with a kindly nurse who was explaining what she should do with the contents of her suitcase. But already her face looked as I remembered it in her worst days in Deptford. I dared not look back, and I felt meaner than I have ever felt in my life. But what was I to do?

Of course, that's not his only stunning description of place (his depiction of the Staunton house on Christmas morning as "a dismal, toy-littered waste of wealthy, frumpish domesticity" is delightfully savage), and really the entire novel is a long investigation of the psychological ramifications of places (especially homes). Davies' writing is uncanny, but in a quiet, subtle way. Without ever really seeming to disturb, he manages to get under my skin and make me uneasy.

Freud looms large in his novels in more than that sense of the uncanny, though. While his work is often discussed in relation to Jung--Dunstan Ramsay mentions a preference for Jung over Freud, and The Manticore is in the form of a Jungian analysis of its protagonist--in his tracing of the conflagration and commingling of history, religion, and myth in everyday life, his exploration of the logic of obsession and fetishes, and his depiction of psychosexual trauma as a key lens through which a person's life must be read, Davies is unabashedly a Freudian (cf. "I was trying to forget the spectacle, so horrible in my visions, of what I had seen when first I happened on them--those bare buttocks and four legs to strangely opposed. But I could never forget"). As in his evocations of the uncanny, the darkness of the pleasure principle and the death drive bubbles below the surface for the most part, but it will burst out in sharp passages that sear one's brain and cause a slight recoil in horror from the images on display. In fact, with all of its discussion of the Real and the Symbolic and their place in our lives, The Fifth Business might be of particular interest to a Lacanian. . .

There are other reasons the novel resonates with me: Dunstan Ramsay's appreciation of learning and his valourization of his scholarship as a hagiographer made my current life path seem glamorous, even when I was in high school. The plot is full of action and adventure, surprising for a novel so focused on deep psychological exploration. It is, to a degree I probably underestimate, a book that has shaped the way I see the world and the way I interact with the people and things I encounter. I can think of only a very small number of novels that have equaled it in terms of impact, and I don't think anything had such a radical and profound impact on my worldview until I really started to get into theory in grad school. At this point, I have a great deal invested in The Fifth Business. Once, after several years of me prompting her to do so, an ex-girlfriend read it: she said it was a good book, but the narrator sounded so stuffy and old that she couldn't really enjoy it. I should've known right then and there it wouldn't work out between us.

EDIT: I forgot one of my favourite passages. It's rare that someone catches the pain of puberty with such precision:

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find out, and if I could have summoned up the courage at the right moment, I would have kissed her.

That was painfully funny and painfully true to my high school self.