December 11, 2005
The Kitchen Boy Who Would Be King: Steerpike and Class Struggle in Gormenghast
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Novels are, as previously indicated, densely populated with rich characters that move, sometimes in dignity, sometimes in madness, but always within the constricting bounds of ritual, through day-to-day life in Gormenghast castle. There is a place for everyone in the castle, and those places have been occupied by them and people like them for over seventy generations. The patriarch of the Groan family presides as lord and master. His family is waited on hand and foot by a vast array of servants.
There are the coveted, prestigious positions: Lord of the Library, personal butler to the Earl of Gormenghast, personal nurse to the children of the line of Groan, Chief Gardner, Head Cook, Duster in the Hall of Bright Carvings. Then there are the villagers whose houses huddle against the outer walls, and who only enter the castle once per year for the Festival of the Carvings or when a new Groan baby requires a wet nurse. However, lowliest in the hierarchy of class that governs the world of Gormenghast, even lower than these ignored peasants, are the countless, nameless kitchen workers. Little better than slaves, these hapless individuals work tirelessly in the heat and the smoke and the noise to perform all tasks related to this area of castle life. For instance:
The walls of the vast room which were streaming with calid moisture, were built with grey slabs of stone and were the personal concern of a company of eighteen men known as the 'Grey Scrubbers.' It had been their privilege on reaching adolescence to discover that, being the sons of their fathers, their careers had been arranged for them and that stretching ahead of them lay their identical lives consisting of an unimaginative if praiseworthy duty. This was to restore, each morning, to the great grey floor and the lofty walls of the kitchen a stainless complexion. On every day of the year from three hours before daybreak until about eleven o'clock, when the scaffolding and ladders became a hindrance to the cooks, the Grey Scrubbers fulfilled their hereditary calling. Through the character of their trade, their arms had become unusually powerful, and when they let their huge hands hang loosely at their sides, there was more than an echo of the simian. Coarse as these men appeared, they were an integral part of the Great Kitchen. Without the Grey Scrubbers something very earthy, very heavy, very real would be missing to any sociologist searching in that steaming room, for the completion of a circle of temperaments, a gamut of the lower human values (Peake 18-19).
It is the centuries-old system of class hierarchy which relegates these workers to a role where they are so obviously oppressed and exploited by the ruling class. But one, single bold member of the proletariat in Gormenghast is not satisfied with the injustice of his subjugation. His name is Steerpike, and he is a kitchen boy. Unlike his legion of fellows, who are content to remain the simpering lackeys of the bloated chef, Abiatha Swelter, Steerpike possesses ambition and an overwhelming sense that his mind makes him worthy of something better.
And he is most definitely right! Steerpike's resourcefulness, ambition, and natural intelligence enable him to escape his job in the kitchen, taking a series of successively higher positions in Gormenghast: first as assistant to Dr. Prunesquallor and finally as Lord of the Library and Keeper of Ritual himself. Yet, in The Gormenghast Novels Steerpike is considered the villain because of his efforts to overthrow the established order in the castle.
What that order amounts to is the perpetuation of an aristocratic class system which crushes the many beneath it while glorifying the few. And as for those few who are glorified, many of them are certifiably insane, and those who are not insane are for the most part either cruel or stupid. Their power derives from, in one memorable scene (I kid you not), a farcical aquatic ceremony. In a broader sense the ruling class stays in power simply because that is their traditional role, handed down for over six dozen generations, and no tradition in Gormenghast Castle ever goes away, once begun.
Despite the obvious and grave problems with this system, Peake's storytelling angle very clearly seems to support the ruling class in all its decadence, in particular the heir to it, Titus Groan. Steerpike's many excellent qualities (courage, intelligence, resourcefulness, skill), however, are of no consequence except insofar as they help him in his "evil" designs, for he wishes to overthrow the established order of rank and class. This book very clearly shows the tension between the classes and the revolutionary spirit of the Proletariat waiting to break forth, but the sympathies of the narrator are entirely with the old, hierarchical order.
Posted by Jared at December 11, 2005 11:20 PM | TrackBack