Free Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca Page B

lettuce leaves, are only an outer layer. She is interested in situations, imaginative situations in which the characters can revealoh, not themselves, for Weldon's interest in selves

 

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has conscious limits. Characters can reveal the animal impulses of the human, and the deeper irrationalities of the ways in which human beings interpret their lives, and use themselves and each other. Such revelation is subversive, for it involves testing and rejecting most conventional interpretations of character and almost all moral exhortations. It would be quite wrong to say that Weldon reveals "the worst" beneath a smiling veneer of gentility or civilization. The veneer often really is "the worst"; what lies behind it is often very cruel, but often potentially fine and lively. Unorthodoxies and secrets may sometimes be the sources of consolation and the symptoms of a struggling vitality. Characters must be given situations in which the multiplex nature of humankind can reveal itself, and the reader too needs to be startled out of orthodoxy by being made to accept some nonrational surprising story-conceptslike the existence of Joanna's four clones, or the power of a Mab and Mrs. Tree in witchcraft.
That the insights of morality and the insights of fiction can be at odds is itself the subject of The Rules of Life (1987), which postulates the overthrow and replacement of conventional religion by "the GNFR, or Great New Fictional Religion" (p. 7). In Letters to Alice, Weldon complains of the duty attributed to the writer of coming up with answers, moral solutions, guidance, and consolation:
It puts, of course, quite a burden on the writer, who is expected to direct all this mental theatre, to be seen as an Agony Aunt as well as the translator of the Infinite, and the handmaiden to the Muse ... [P. 74]
But Weldon herself, it might be retorted, has invited such treatment by the authoritiveeven authoritarianvoice by which the narrator or one of the characters trumpets opinions. It is one of the attractions of novels, ancient and modern, that they are gnomic, that they offer wisdom in various observations. Weldon sometimes overdoes the gnomic, the didactic; Darcy's Utopia seems nothing but opinion, and surprisingly boring. Weldon is at her best when attending inventively to the situation and not overdoing her (or her characters') commentary. A little of the gnomic goes a long, long way. The ironic distance sustained in both She-Devil and The Hearts and Lives of Men makes for their success.
Weldon's "characters" interest her only in a limited way, one feelsthey are the practical means to the end which is the whole novel, the action. This makes her in some respects an Aristotelian. Aristotle stressed that tragedy is "the imitation of an action" and made character ( ethos ) secondary. Of course, tragedy is not what Weldon is afterand we have lost Aristotle's lectures on comedy, so we don't know what he would have said. (He might even have been as dull and regular on the subject as some

 

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reconstructors have made him out to be.) Aristotle's Poetics is in any case a sleight of mind, a brilliant trick. At one stroke he got the West for over two thousand years to discuss tragedy and drama as humanistic matters alone, subject to the rational criteria of belles lettres . Aristotle ignored (astonishingly) the nature and purpose of the dionysia, the religious ceremonies at which Athenian plays were presented. The religious, celebratory, and sacrificial nature of the Greek plays, and the drumbeat of blood, flesh, and need behind them were superbly snubbed by Aristotle, whose own act of hubris, when one comes to think of it, has few equals. It took Nietzsche to restore the balance and put Dionysius (his Dionysius, at all events) in the picture. Fay Weldon does not believe in regularized Aristotelian tragedy, and all her works might be called Dionysian. She dislikes religion, almost as much as Nietzsche, disapproving both Jewish and