Black Sunlight,



"We had only that single year at Oxford together, full of study and hugs and shit and that somnolent afternoon… On the mantelpiece fragrant sticks were burning. Their thin curls of air-sweetening smoke somnolently plucked upwards seeming to pause contemplatively before the framed print of Bronzino’s An Allegory. Blanche sat before the electric fire wearing nothing but her scholar’s gown. Through the wide open curtains, thick handfuls of snow digressed slantwise against the windowpanes. The transparent lattices of that somnolent afternoon. I lay naked face down on the bed, my mind utterly blank, my body languorous, my feelings a sheer perplexity. The silence was even nastier than the experiments we had done on each other’s bodies. The best had emerged from the sunken depths and we had clawed, scratched, bit, drawn blood till our eyes had enflamed and frightened the dragon back into its lair in our bodies. And the distant bells of St Mary’s had to clang the hour, letting loose upon the slate roofs and spires a peal of golden sparks." (BS. P.5) 

This is an early reminiscence of Christian, Marechera’s “protagonist”, anti-Bunyan pilgrim, in Black Sunlight. Its subject is the anthropologist Blanche Goodfather.

What exactly is being said?

At this moment in time, Christian is hanging upside down, tied to a rope, as a punishment. He is well aware of the different levels of meaning. He refers to his swinging thoughts. And yet, the reader is not given an oscillating stream-of-conscious narrative, but this weighted prose. The weighting of the language is calculated, it would seem, to match the gravity of the moment—for Christian. The very formal descriptive prose also measures Christian’s state of mind. A reminiscence is something ordered tightly by memory. And here, the reminiscence is pictorial. Like a painting.

Christian recalls an afternoon in Oxford University. (Marechera is drawing upon his own experience in the city of dreaming spires). His experience is pointedly related. The reader expects “study”, “hugs” not so much, “shit” even less. Quickly, the academic world is reduced until all that remains is a “somnolent afternoon” that explains the mixture.

“Sticks” burn on the “mantelpiece”. Not candles. The two words pin-point the older-world homeliness of Oxford and a modern decadent(ism). Marechera is writing a language with an irony that touches on the mock-heroic (of Fielding). Like hair (sexually) the “smoke” is “plucked” upwards. Cleverly, the hair image rises through a verb that means to pull hair (from the Latin root pilus, hair). There is the poet’s eye. The fragranced air becomes religious as it pauses to contemplate a painting on the walls of Blanche Goodfather’s room.

Marechera is creating a joking religious tone in Christian’s mind, a joke that becomes apparent at the moment when “Bronzino” is included. Instead of some religious icon, the wall holds sexy paganism. And Marechera is specific about which: it is one that he would have known from the National Gallery, London: An Allegory of Venus and Cupid (1540-1550). Bronzino’s painting is a Mannerist allegory and the style now takes on the quality of the painting: it has a veiled eroticism in which the figures are distorted and figures assume a symbolic stature.

In Bronzino’s allegory, Eros incestuously fondles Venus, behind which a tortured face hints as the dangerous side of Venus, venereal disease and infection, whilst two figures bring rose petals and a honeycomb—these probably refer to the honey that led Eros to be stung and the fallen rose petals of Venus's desire. The exact meaning of Bronzino’s painting cannot be known, but that doesn’t really matter, for Bronzino is being re-interpreted by Marechera. Themes emerge from the painting, eros, incest and infection, an individual’s distance from original desire (the image is only a print) but the immediate comparison is between the divine beings and Christian and Blanche.
Sitting naked in her Oxford gown, Blanche/White is a representation of Venus, her name connecting her to the skin of white civilisation and to the glowing white goddess painted by Bronzino. In her black gown, by the fire (of desire) she repeats the academic eroticism of An Allegory. White snow is seen through the lead-glazed windows of academia and in front of them Christian lies naked. He is prone, not supine, not an accidental detail for it shows his passivity. Suggestively, Christian relates his mind, at this moment, as “blank”, whitened, empty, as if his blackness has been lost. (At Oxford, Marechera felt that he had been reduced to a student of whiteness, an “Uncle Tom").

This sexual experiment is one of the many in Black Sunlight—“experiment” is a key noun. And in keeping with the rest of the passage, Marechera's writing advances through a pun that functions like a false perspective famous in Mannerism. Within this world of allegory, the reader is prepared for a sexual beast, instead s/he is given “be(a)st”. Christian relates a view in which the best is inseparable from darker, less likeable layers, but in these levels life exists without any form of check—carte blanche? Unbounded desire?

In the final image, Christian (Marechera) recalls the Church of St. Mary’s, an image central to Oxford’s history. The ringing of “golden sparks” from the Church of the Virgin is a beautiful piece of Decadent pastiche, but also a description that parallels religious ecstasy and ringing the orgasmic bell. This pictorial covering over of “clawed, scratched, bit” intimates the veil that Western civilisation has cast over sexuality.

But not all of Black Sunlight is like this!
Is this the "best"?
No, it shifts with the mind, as it critiques the Western novel.
There is still the beast.

Comments

Wallpapers said…
Thoughtful blog thanks for posting.

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