Nicholas Royle - Quilt

What convinces me that he is having a breakdown? It is not when he goes on to outline the beautiful bareness, as he calls it, of his theory. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, is it a few minutes later, when he drifts off into what, to anyone else, might seem demented singsong.

It is a question of veils, capes, sheets, shrouds, cloaks, blankets, quilts, mantles.

It’s too crazy for a cult. He realises that. And it might indeed remain for centuries illegible, incomprehensible or even imperceptible to the general public.

But a ray doesn’t constitute an analogy or ‘lively metaphor’ for a ghost. Rather, it is the other way round: it is necessary to think spectrality starting from the ray . There is no ghost without a trace of the ray. Everything that might be identifiable with the singularity of a living cape or gliding sheet comes back to this. Put crassly, the pallid underside of a ray is not like the bed-sheet whiteness of a spectre. The ray is at the origin. It’s the originary spook. Plato was already onto that, in the ray haunting Socrates and Meno. What people call the Gothic is a kind of anamorphic manifestation of the effects of the ray. The whole sprawling industry of ghosts and vampires is, in truth, largely a ray-phenomenon. Any moderately reflective reader might notice the importance of cloaks, mantles, shrouds, shawls and so on in the Gothic novel. It is necessary, however, to realise how integrally, how inextricably, this motif is folded into the figure or property of the ray, the living blanket or quilt. The bat is a red herring, in fishy phrase, dried and smoked, tried and tested, a making small and manageable of what is neither. What haunts is of greater scope, more minatory and dangerous, all-enfolding, from another element.

Broadly speaking, the manta and the vampire (or ‘vampyre’, in its earliest orthography) emerge at the same period, in the first half of the eighteenth century. That the latter (a fantasy) seems to owe something to the former (the real) might veritably be classed a no-brainer. We don’t know when exactly the word ‘manta’ (meaning ‘blanket’ or ‘cloak’) was first used to designate the rays now linked with that name, but it appears to have been originally used interchangeably with ‘quilt’. In Socratic spirit it is tempting to construe ‘quilt’ here in its other sense, namely as a reference to that point in the throat at which swallowing becomes involuntary, but Antonio de Ulloa in his Voyage to South America (1758) writes of the ways in which the negro slaves off the coast of Panama are fastened with ropes and forced to fish for pearls, ‘and the mantas, or quilts, either press them to death by wrapping their fins about them, or crush them against the rocks by their prodigious weight’. This is as shocking an evocation of the reality of slavery as it is a fictitious and absurd description of mantas. Despite their often great size, manta rays are of course completely harmless. De Ulloa goes on: ‘The name manta has not been improperly given to this fish, either with regard to its figure or property; for being broad and long like a quilt, it wraps its fins round a man or any other animal that happens to come within its reach, and immediately squeezes it to death. This fish resembles a thornback in shape, but is prodigiously larger.’ It seems unlikely that, for all his luminous childlike gifts as an actuary of the imaginary, Lewis Carroll had the ray in mind when he frabjously unveiled his portmanteau but, once the double meaning of ‘manta’ is registered, it seems equally difficult not to envisage such a creature in the bag, so to speak, or lurking at any rate under his cloak. It is a question of a new imaginary, not a regression into the vagary of animistic belief, a restituted primitivism, but a thinking of the ray as a force, a trace, whether buried or dancing, in a quite different understanding of the spectre and the wake. Like a dream of excarnation without any possible fossilisation, dream as impossible fossil, there is a naked cape and it is alive. Rays to the ground: starting off in the substrate. It is a matter of a new teratology, an enantiodromic animism that is radically non-theological, nanothinking through the ray.

But next thing he is framing snatches of Clarence, speaking of ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon, wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, his internal marination, lengthening after life, in search of the empty, vast, and wand’ring air.

Gently I ask him what he’s talking about, but he’s hopped into blurred song, and I am inclined to think this is his way of acting off the slightly ‘possessed’ sense that he claims his theory has given him:

It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring, I see the doctor, I see the doctor and couldn’t get up in the morning, it’s roaring, marauding, we went to bed and deformed the head, of hearing and hoarding, who’s moaning, who’s speaking, it’s raining, it’s pouring, it’s howling, it’s calling, the moon rings, the moon sings, it’s paining, it’s spawning, wedged your head and went to bed, it’s feigning, it’s shoring, you hear the words are calling, cawing, they’re gnawing, and can’t get up in the can’t get up in the staining, it’s boring, she’s reigning, he’s fawning, I hear your voice, I know you’re dead, and can’t get up in the morning the morning the morning.

Such is the range of his more lyrical and impassioned traits. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here, I think. No, the horrifying conviction comes when he tells me about some writing project he’s begun elaborating and proceeds to read it aloud to me over the phone. It is a work of lexicography devoted to the buried life of anagrams and homophones, each word with its own idiosyncratic definition, a dictionaray, yes, as he is pleased to declare: the world’s first English dictionaray. It would be a verbal laboratory, a dictionary testamentary to the way the ray leaves its mark in everyday language, a vocabulary that might constitute a new species of bestiary, and generate an altogether other estuary English. He remarks that it is practically impossible to complete, particularly on account of the peculiarity of the adverb form in English, interminably stirring up as it does new terrain. And then he begins. With each new letter of the alphabet he pauses momentarily, then proceeds to the next series of words, giving each entry equal measure, enunciating throughout with customary care and scrupulosity (no doubt, it occurs to me, also his father’s). He reads it, in short, precisely in the manner of a poem. It takes me a while to get a grasp of what is going on:

A

Airy

Awry

Anniversary

Anteriority

Arraign

Arrange

Actuary

Afraid

Allegory

Amatory

Arty

Abrasion

Aurally

Absurdity

Already

Astronomy

Astrophysics

Arbitrary

Acrylic

Antiquary

Archetype

Archetypal

Apparatus

Alteration

Alterity

Abruptly

Army

Attractively

Admirably

Articulately

Apparently

Angry

Aleatory

Archaeology

Archery

Astray

Adversary

Ashtray

Aviary

Adoration

Anticipatory

Apothecary

Approvingly

Alary

Adultery

Adulterate

Asseveration

Accordingly

Accurately

Accelerate

Anywhere

B

Brae

Beray

Brain

Bleary

Binary

Betray

Berate

Brassy

Brazen

Braised

Barbarity

Break

Breakdown