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http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041024/news_mz1v24queen.html
Go ask Margaret 'The Red Queen's' lost her head, and her way, in Drabble's ambitious, confused tale
SignOn San Diego - 2004-10-24
Go ask Margaret 'The Red Queen's' lost her head, and her way, in Drabble's ambitious, confused tale Reviewed by Bart Thurber October 24, 2004 The first thing you come across in Margaret Drabble's new novel, 'The Red Queen,' is a prologue. Fine.
Go ask Margaret
'The Red Queen's' lost her head, and her way, in Drabble's ambitious, confused tale
Reviewed by Bart Thurber
October 24, 2004
The first thing you come across in Margaret Drabble's new novel, "The Red Queen," is a prologue. Fine. Lots of novels have prologues.
In this one, though, we hear of translators, scholarly editions, academic suggestions regarding what may or not be appropriate. Then comes the novel. Then comes, excuse me,
A Note on Sources. Then a Bibliography.
Now, given that Drabble is one accomplished lady, the author of 14 or 15 prior novels, several of which wax seriously postmodernistic, my first thought was that she was going to Nabokov us to death with this, teasing us with nonexistent or endlessly self-referential references, shading us into the ways we construct and are constructed by our reading, but, well – no. I checked. Her sources are real. This novel is not Despair. Her academics, her intellectuals, are all real people and her translations are genuine, all three of them.
The Red Queen
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Margaret Drabble
Harcourt, 334 pages, $24
Which means that "The Red Queen" is seriously, even overwhelmingly, scholarly as novels go, and that there will be a certain determined quality to this fiction, a weight. There is no parody here; no irony, no epistemological tomfoolery, no Umberto Eco even though, as it turns out, she is meditating on how we construct and are constructed by our reading. That, she tells us, is the experience out of which this novel comes: reading, thinking, pondering on the relation between various things literary and what we laughingly call real life. Whether that can work as a fictional strategy (Readers pondering reading? Be still, my heart) is a question to which we'll return; Borges managed it, but he was both unusually brilliant and unusually solitary.
Fortunately, though, what Drabble has been reading and pondering on is both fascinating in itself and not widely known outside Asia, perhaps not even outside Korea: the autobiography of an 18th-century Korean crown princess, the Lady Hyegyong, in all its different versions and translations.
Because at the heart of Drabble's story is that of this crown princess, as retold, sort of, by Drabble. "Sort of" because, as the author tells us in her prologue, "this is not a historical novel ... her voice has mixed with mine, and with ... the voices of her various translators and commentators, all of whom will have brought their own interpretations to her and imposed their personalities upon her." Which means, dizzy with the myriad ways voices can impose on other voices, wondering who, after all, is who, we are cast willy-nilly into the mind of an 18th-century Korean princess.
And, as Drabble reconstructs it, it's quite a mind. It was quite a life, too: Entered as a child by her parents into a kind of nationwide sweepstakes to pick the wife of the crown prince, and therefore the next queen, she is married at age 10 to a crown prince quietly going bonkers. The marriage is consummated (on schedule) when they are both 15, whereupon she gives birth to a son, ensuring, she learns after the fact, that she will be neither executed nor exiled. All things being equal she would then, having produced an heir, be allowed to rule someday as queen of all Korea.
Excerpts from "The Red Queen"
Although I am dead and immortal, I cannot read the undiscovered past. I have to wait for some mortal human agency to dig it up for me. It is slow, and sometimes I grow impatient. These mortal human agents were, through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, called archaeologists and anthropologists and historians. They are joined now, in the exploration of the past, by geneticists and evolutionary biologists. Were I to have a second or a third time on earth again, perhaps I would choose to be reborn as an evolutionary biologist. But I am a ghost, and I am not free. I can speculate, but I cannot rend the veil that obscures the past. I have my envoy, and she has her envoys, but all these emissaries have their temporal and corporeal and local limitations. As a ghost, I am denied easy access even to some of the discoveries that have been made about my life and times. My life was full of prohibitions, and not all of them have passed with my death. Ghosts, too, have their restrictions.
I do not blame Confucius for the destruction of my husband. I could, I suppose, do so, if I wished to be ingenious, and to apportion blame far from where it must rest. But Confucius did not lay down the code and manner in which the father must kill a son and the son the father. Nor did Aeschylus, who was a contemporary of Confucius, invent this code. Nor did their near-successor Sophocles. They neither prescribed nor proscribed. They simply described what was, and what had been, in the bloody history of our ugly species. There is no moral to the story of Oedipus.
But all things, of course, turned out not to be equal. Through her eyes, we witness the almost unbelievably sequestered life of a Korean royal princess, the court intrigues, the elaborate daily ritual behind which powerful and unruly emotions nevertheless swirl.
There is King Yongjo, revered even in his own lifetime as a wise and liberal man, seen here as pathologically unable to love, or even like, his son, the Lady Hyegyong's husband; whereupon that husband, the prince Sado, the Prince of Mournful Thoughts, the Prince of the Coffin, becomes increasingly, desperately, insane. He drinks, he gambles, he develops an inability to dress himself. And he begins to kill people. Lots of people. Wardrobe people. Gardener people. People who are left-handed. People who are right-handed. People. The crown princess herself is increasingly, but always privately, terrified.
The king, finally hearing of these horrors, summons his son to a terrible judgment. After hours of public humiliation, he orders Sado into a small trunk. He cannot kill him outright; this is the crown prince. But he seals his son into his own small, nearly airless tomb, where, nine days later, he dies. The crown princess continues on, forever a princess, never a queen, as her own son, by royal decree her son no longer, ascends to the throne.
It is a story of Shakespearean dimension, for which reason any of us, like Drabble herself, might seek out some version of the Lady Hyegyong's tale. But, it turns out, the crown princess' story is only the beginning of Drabble's. It takes up roughly half of "The Red Queen."
The second half concerns one Barbara Halliwell, an academic of some small success, who, on a long flight to Seoul, finds herself reading the crown princess' memoirs, though she has no idea how she acquired a copy. Fascinated by those memoirs, as, of course, Drabble has already announced herself to be, she investigates the still-standing royal palaces, learns a lot about Korea, has an affair and returns to England determined to make the story of the crown princess better known.
She's lucky. She meets Margaret Drabble. That's right: Drabble is a character herself in what, by the end of the novel, is a hall of mirrors. Influenced by Halliwell's enthusiasm, Drabble wonders if she shouldn't write a novel, this one, about the whole tangle.
But tangle, unfortunately, is the right word. What Drabble is looking at is clear enough: multiculturalism, the ways in which we all construct, reconstruct or misconstruct ourselves as we attempt to look at different cultures. Identity, too – how contingent it can be, how transient, how colored by what we see in others seeing us. We can even, given this author's deep moral seriousness, speculate about what it means to be human, and whether there is something universally human that transcends any question of culture.
All of which is very serious and good; but in the end there is something, well, loopy here. Because in looking at all these deep things, Drabble involves herself in some fairly dubious speculation. The Lady Hyegyong narrates her adventures in real time, letting us know, for example, that she isn't tempted to call her story "her story" instead of history, that she has read the "Encyclopedia of Life Writing" (2002), that she will use the Western system of dating for the benefit of Western readers, and that she likes Voltaire and "the more interesting speculations and interpretations of Freud and Jung."
It's hard even to know where to start with this. Do the dead read, for example? If so, they sound a lot like Margaret Drabble. And if they read, why do they bother to read Western (as opposed to Korean) writers? How, for that matter, do the dead learn languages? School? Cosmic osmosis? Cosmosis? And there is this: Drabble clearly intends this fiction to be an exercise in multicultural understanding. All right, but trouble is lurking at the margins. Is this multiculturalism in action or just the latest phase of Western cultural imperialism, occupying Korea in a way that Korea could never occupy us?
Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to these questions in what is, in the end, an odd and deeply flawed novel.
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Bart Thurber teaches English at USD.
