Introduction

And the Ass Saw the Angel is Nick Cave’s first, and so far, only novel. It was first published by Black Spring Press in 1989, and then in paperback by Penguin Books in 1990. It has been translated into thirteen languages, including German, French and Norwegian. Nick Cave has also published two collections of his song-lyrics and other writings. They are called King Ink and King Ink II, published in 1987 and 1997, respectively. Nick Cave is perhaps best known as a pop/rock vocalist and lyricist, as his work in this field has won high acclaim. This will be touched upon in the first chapter of this thesis, as his lyrical work bears some resemblance to the work he has done as an novelist in And the Ass Saw the Angel.

The critical work on And the Ass Saw the Angel is virtually non-existent. The secondary material dealing directly with the novel has been limited to certain passages in three biographies on Nick Cave and a few interviews. As I have found that there is much to be said of this novel, I suspect that it has attracted little attention from academic critics because of prejudice towards the author. The general opinion of critics seems to be that an artist should be allowed to work in one field only. If artists try to venture into other areas of art, they are not taken seriously. This is not an unusual phenomenon, whether it is Sting starring in a movie or Leonard Cohen writing a novel. In the case of Nick Cave, however, I hope to overcome this prejudice, and treat him not only as a novelist, but as a multi-artist. I regret the lack of secondary material, but I will take full use of the material available.

And the Ass Saw the Angel is a surreal and epic novel. The story stretches over a hundred-year long violent and miraculous history of religious insanity, lynching-mobs and incest in a fictional American outpost. The novel is mainly told as an inner monologue through the retarded protagonist, Euchrid Eucrow. He is the descendant of a clan marked by generations of inbreeding and mindless drinking. He is born mute, and is regularly haunted by epileptic fits. He camouflages his sensitivity in order to survive in a world of brutality, ignorance and evil. Euchrid is gradually transformed from his passive and dreamlike voyeuristic state, in which he can hear animals and nature talking to him, to become an avenger with delusions of grandeur and fantasies of being God's tool on Earth.

The characters of the novel are legion and colourful. We meet Euchrid's sadistic parents, Cosey Mo, the town whore with the heart of gold, the fanatical preacher Abie Poe, and the pathetic, but vicious hobos, and last, but not least, the "child saint" Beth. She becomes an object of worship by the religious sect of the Ukulites, who control the agrarian economy of Ukulore Valley, the arena for the action of the novel. However, this is basically Euchrid's story. Nick Cave says of And the Ass Saw the Angel:

It was about a mad hermetic mute boy called Euchrid Eucrow, who, having been denied the faculty of speech, eventually explodes in a catharsis of rage and brings to its knees the religious community in which he lives.[1]

According to Nick Cave, Euchrid's problem seems to be that he is unable to communicate. This, however, is a problem that he shares with most of the characters in the novel. They suffer because of the fact that communication seems to be constantly frustrated. It is this frustration and its consequences that are the topics of my examination of And the Ass Saw the Angel.

     In the first chapter I will take a look at some of Nick Cave's earlier work, to see if I can find themes and motifs that point towards the later novel. I will do this because this will confirm and amplify my claim that he is concerned with issues of communication. Chapter two will be devoted to an examination of the novel in itself, while chapter three will present a comparison between And the Ass Saw the Angel and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. This comparison is in order for several reasons. Faulkner’s influence on Nick Cave is not only apparent when it comes to the choice of themes and topics. Nick Cave has himself admitted that Faulkner has influenced him when it comes to the way in which language can be used.[2] My main motivation for comparison, however, is due to the many similarities between the two novels. Both novels take place in the Deep South in the first half of the twentieth century, and both novels deal with the breakdown of the human psyche, and they both have an autodiegetic mentally challenged narrator. We also see certain recurring themes, such as how frustrated communication tends to end up in violent behaviour. Euchrid, for instance takes his frustrations out on the young girl Beth, while Benjy, the dumb narrator of  the first section of The Sound and the Fury, tries to express his frustration by chasing some schoolgirls, something that is considered a violent and sexual attack by the people around him. Another topic that displays a striking similarity between the two novels is Euchrid’s and Quentin’s belief that suicide is the only way for them to achieve their goals. Quentin wants to save his honour, and Euchrid wants to be able to communicate, and they both think that death is the best solution. I will examine this more closely in chapter three. Now, however, I would like to elaborate on what I mean when I talk about "the frustration of communication."

[1]Nick Cave, "The Flesh Made Word", King Ink II (Black Spring Press, 1997), p. 137.

[2] See Chapter 3.

The frustration of communication

Jesus said, "Wherever two or more are gathered together, I am in your midst." Jesus said this because wherever two or more are gathered there is a communion, there is language, there is imagination. There is God. God is a product of the creative imagination and God is that imagination taken flight. [1]

He goes on from this bold statement on the importance of language to talk about his father's great love for literature, and how his father tried to pass this love on to his son:

Literature elevated him, tore him from normality, lifted him out of the mediocre and brought him closer to the divine essence of things. I had no notion of that then, but I did see somewhere that art had the power to insulate me from the mundanity of the world, to protect me.[2]

The divinity of language and the importance of communication seems central to Nick Cave. In a way, language seems to be a way for him to escape from the realities of a harsh world, but in his novel, the breakdown of language and failure to communicate create more dangerous situations than merely an experience of the world as mundane. In And the Ass Saw the Angel communication is related to overcoming destructive impulses. Throughout the novel, we see time and again that where communication is frustrated, violence occurs. It seems that violence is the final means of communication to many of the characters in this novel.

            This is related to the fact that communication is a highly political issue in this novel. It is related to the fields of domestic politics, religious politics and sexual politics. In each of these fields we observe that one party is dominating the discourse and muting their opponents. This repression invariably ends by some act of violence performed by the repressed, either on themselves, their oppressors or an innocent third party.

If we for instance look at some the religious politics that are at play in the novel, we see that the strict laws and inherent flaws of the Ukulite religious system that dominates the novel seem to block any forms of real communication. This is blatantly expressed through the description of the relationship between Sardus Swift, the Ukulite religious leader, and his wife Rebecca. The Ukulites seem to have forgotten the message of the Christian faith, and instead they merely worship the creed. This leads to a life that consists of adhering to rules, written and unwritten. Some of these unwritten rules communicate the norm that womanhood should be equal to motherhood. If a woman cannot be a mother, she is of little or no value to the community. These are attitudes that are communicated perfectly, and when Rebecca finds that she is infertile, she never expects or gets an affirmation of her worth as a human being in her own right. She therefore tries to kill herself.

On the other end of the scale, the failure to communicate seems to be a problem that is related to substance abuse. This is particularly the case when it comes to Ma Crowley, the mother of the protagonist, and the hobos that populate the outskirts of Ukulore Valley. Their obsessiveness is not centred on the adherence of strict religious rules, but on the necessity of securing means by which to get intoxicated. This as good as ensures a narrow focus and single-mindedness on the part of these characters. In the household of Euchrid's family, the domestic politics are driven by his mother's needs, and as a result of this, she has taken control of the discourse in their home. This leads to frustration for her husband, who ultimately reacts with violence. These issues, as well as the issues concerning sexual politics, will be dealt with more fully in chapter two.

            So in the end, what is better communication good for? It seems that Nick Cave thinks that communication and language ensures interpersonal understanding and an absence of violence. I find a longing for these qualities flowing like an undercurrent through And the Ass Saw the Angel.  The wish for real, positive communication seems, however, to be a yearning, with all the sadness that this word connotes. The reason I say this is that, in the novel, the wish for true communication seems to remain unfulfilled. The novel ends in violence and destruction, but the longing for communication is always melancholically present.

[1]Ibid., p. 142.

[2] Ibid., p. 137.

The use of narratology

In my thesis I will apply theory and use terminology from the field of narratology. According to M.H. Abrams the most important thing about narratology is that it denotes a concern with narrative in general. It deals especially with the identification of structural elements and their diverse modes of combination, with recurrent narrative devices and with the analysis of the kinds of discourse by which a narrative gets told.[1]

I will, more specifically, use Gérard Genette's Narrative Discourse as a basis for my writing. Genette's work from 1972, subtitled "An Essay in Method," is one of the most influential works on the topic of narratology, and therefore I find it natural to base my use of narratology on its ideas, as well as Genette's "follow-up", Narrative Discourse Revisited from 1983.

           Apart from the fact that narratology gives me a language in which to describe the phenomena, effects and techniques of both And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Sound and the Fury, the choice of narratology as a theoretical approach is perhaps not that obvious. After all, my main thesis could very well be considered to be extra-narratological, since, as Jeremy Hawthorn puts it, "[n]arratology is concerned only with the issue of how the EVENTS which make up this particular STORY are narrated." [2] Since narratology supposedly is not interested in themes such as a "yearning for communication", I must at once emphasise that even though narratology is more interested in how things are told rather than what is being told, I see narratological elements as creators of meaning. The arrangement of the elements that make up a narrative is not only a technical framework, but it is the mechanism whereby meaning is conveyed. I think that it is rather obvious that a story's meaning is dependent upon the way in which it is told. As Jean Paul Sartre said of The Sound and the Fury :

The reader is tempted to look for guide-marks and to re-establish the chronology for himself: Jason and Caroline Compson have had three sons and a daughter [...] Here the reader stops, for he realizes he is telling another story. Faulkner did not first conceive this orderly plot so as to shuffle it afterwards like a pack of cards; he could not tell it in any other way.[3]

If a story was narrated in two totally different ways, the meaning of the stories would most certainly differ. This shows that even though narratology is concerned with how events are narrated, it almost involuntarily touches upon issues of meaning. To be observant of the narratological structures of a text is therefore to be observant of content as well as form. Ultimately, narration is about communication, and therefore it ties in very well with my main thesis.

Terms and terminology

Without going into detailed discussion of specifics, I will say that an important aspect in this area will be a discussion on the topic of narrative voices. As far as I am able to see, there are at least three different narrators at work in this novel: we have the voice of the protagonist, Euchrid Eucrow, then there is what has been traditionally called a third person omniscient narrator, and finally there is a crow at the beginning of the novel, who is describing Ukulore Valley to us from a bird's perspective. The two main narrators, Euchrid and the "omniscient" narrator share the narration between them, sometimes bridging each other's narrative, and sometimes repeating the action from another point of view. To Genette, the question of voice is a question of who speaks, and this makes it a question of the narrating instance. The narrative enunciation in relation to time can, according to Genette, be divided into four types of narrating:

subsequent (the classical position of the past-tense narrative [...]), prior (predicative narrative, generally in the future tense [...]), simultaneous (narrative in the present contemporaneous with the action); and interpolated (between the moments of the action).[4]

Genette also talks about narrative levels. He says that X writing a novel is a literary act carried out at a first level. This first level he calls extradiegetic. The events in this novel are inside this first narrative, so they will be described as diegetic or intradiegetic. If there is a character that tells another story within the first narrative, his or her narrative will be called metadiegetic. He says that "[t]he narrating instance of a first narrative is...extradiegetic by definition, as the narrating instance of a second (metadiegetic) narrative is diegetic by definition."[5]Genette goes on to differentiate between the types of relationships that connect the metadiegetic narrative to the first narrative. He identifies three major types of relationships, the first being of an explanatory nature, "a direct causality between the events of the metadiegesis and those of the diegesis."[6] The second type is referred to as a purely thematic relationship, a relationship of analogy or contrast. The last type is when "it is the act of narrating itself that fulfills a function in the diegesis, independently of the metadiegetic content"[7] - like Scheherazade in Thousand and One Nights, where she, as a character in the first narrative, tells (metadiegetic) stories to survive.

Another important aspect in the area of "voice" are the two types of narrative that Genette mentions. In order to get rid of what he considers to be the misleading terms of "first-person" and "third-person" narrators, he instead introduces the terms heterodiegetic for narratives where the narrator is absent from the story he tells, and homodiegetic for narratives where the narrator is present as a character in the story he tells. Also, he reserves the term autodiegetic for instances where the narrator is the hero of the narrative. According to Genette, the problem with terms such as "first-person" is that

The presence of first-person verbs in a narrative text can therefore refer to two very different situations which grammar renders identical but which narrative analysis must distinguish: the narrator's own designation of himself as such, as when Virgil writes "I sing of arms and the man..." or else the identity of person between the narrator and one of the characters in the story, as when Crusoe writes "I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York...." The term "first-person narrative" refers, quite obviously, only to the second of these situations, and this dissymmetry confirms its unfitness.[8]

The relationship between the narrators and the relationship between the narrators and the readers of the text is also interesting. First of all; how is this text related to us, the readers? How do we "hear" Euchrid? By what means are we witness to his story? Euchrid's "present" in the novel is when he is about to die. He is lying in a swamp, sinking in quicksand, waiting to be dragged under and die. At this point, he tells us his life-story, which is composed and narrated according to the way he sees reality. In this context, it seems fitting to look at issues regarding order.

Genette states that he wants to "study relations between the time of the story and the (pseudo-) time of the narrative,"[9]and he wants to do this through three determinations, namely those of order, duration and frequency. In the chapter on order he searches for "connections between the temporal order of succession of the events in the story and the pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the narrative."[10]As a good structuralist, he never implies that this search should somehow result in a discovery of meaning, but it will rather expose the techniques of the author. Unlike Genette, I will undoubtedly be tempted to draw conclusions regarding content on the basis of form, but I will unashamedly make use of Genette's apparatus of concepts.

            The first concept of importance in the chapter on order is that of anachronies. The understanding of this concept rests on the condition that one is aware of the two concepts of story and narrative. Story basically is what happens, and narrative is how it is told. Anachronies, then, are "the various types of discordance between the two orderings of story and narrative."[11]The temporal level of narrative that an anachrony is defined against, is termed "first narrative". These are obviously very useful terms for the study of novels such as And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Sound and the Fury, where the story and narrative are not exactly synchronised. A narrative that is written continuously in the present tense might be without anachronies, but this is certainly not the case for Cave's novel. Genette continues:

An anachrony can reach into the past or the future, either more or less far from the "present" moment (that is, from the moment in the story when the narrative was interrupted to make room for the anachrony): this temporal distance we will name the anachrony's reach.[12]

Also, the anachrony can cover a period of story that is more or less long, and this is what Genette calls the anachrony's extent. The concepts that I will include under the heading of "Order" all belong more or less to the category of anachronies. The terms I will mention are the following: prolepsis, analepsis (heterodiegetic, completing and partial), and finally paralipsis.

Prolepsis is defined as "any narrative manoeuvre that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later."[13] This phenomenon is also known as anticipation, or in some cases, foreshadowing. Genette mentions that the "first-person" narrative is probably the best suited for prolepsis, because it is generally retrospective, and this "authorizes the narrator to allude to the future and in particular to his present situation, for these to some extent form part of his role."[14]

           Analepsis refers to "any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment."[15] Heterodiegetic analepsis is an "analepsis dealing with a story line different from the content of the first narrative."[16] An example of this would be Abie Poe's story in And the Ass Saw the Angel. There are two other types of analepsis mentioned, and these are completing analepses, or returns, which "comprises the retrospective sections that fill in, after the event, an earlier gap in the narrative."[17] This type contrasts with the last one, which is partial analepsis,  which is defined as retrospection that ends on an ellipsis without rejoining the first narrative.

The last thing I find it necessary to mention from the chapter on order, is the term of paralipsis, which signifies places "where the narrative does not skip over a moment of time, as in an ellipsis, but it sidesteps a given element."[18] This term seems to be dependent on the fact that this missing element is eventually revealed, like in a detective story. Otherwise, it might be the same as an ellipsis.

Genette also comments on duration. Duration can be defined as the study of relations between the story and the (pseudo-) time of the narrative according to "connections between the variable duration of these events or story sections and the pseudo-duration (in fact, length of text) of their telling in the narrative."[19] The most important concepts regarding duration are the concepts of speed and novel tempo or narrative movement. Speed is defined by "the relationship between a duration (that of the story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years) and a length (that of a text, measured in lines and pages.)"[20] The point of taking speed into consideration is that a novel always has variations of speed. A narrative with unchanging speed, where the duration of the story would be equal to the length of the narrative is virtually impossible in the written medium for obvious reasons, for instance like the fact that each reader reads at his or her individual speed.

            Genette contends that there are four basic forms of "narrative movements" that decide the novel's tempo. He identifies these as pause, scene, summary and ellipsis. The pause is here the "slowest", a pause is where the story almost stops and the often descriptive narrative continues, it is "where some section of narrative discourse corresponds to a nonexistent diegetic duration."[21] A scene is where story-time and narrative-time approach each other the most, it exists most often in the form of a dialogue. The summary, of course, is what we encounter where the narrative-time is shorter than the story time. Finally, we have the ellipsis, which Jeremy Hawthorn defines as "[t]he omitting of one or more items in a NARRATIVE series: any gap of information in a temporal or other sequence."[22]

            For the most part, it is Euchrid that controls the narration in And the Ass Saw the Angel. Since a narrative is all about regulation of information, and the concept of mood can help us to identify some of the ways in which narrative information is regulated. Genette does this by explaining his understanding of diegesis and mimesis. According to Hawthorn, "diegesis stands for those cases where the poet himself is the speaker and does not wish to suggest otherwise, and mimesis stands for those cases in which the poet attempts to create the illusion that it is not he who is speaking."[23] Genette says that these ancient Greek terms had become the equivalents of what British and American critics called telling and showing. He attacks these terms and says that

no narrative can "show" or "imitate" the story it tells. All it can do is tell it in a manner which is detailed, precise, "alive", and in that way give more or less the illusion of mimesis - which is the only narrative mimesis, for this single and sufficient reason: that narration, oral or written, is a fact of language, and language signifies without imitating [...] The truth is that mimesis in words can only be mimesis of words. Other than that, all we have and can have is degrees of diegesis.[24]

Because of this, Genette feels that he must separate between narrative of events and narrative of words. The narrative of events, or "showing", is "always narrative, [it is] a transcription of the (supposed) non-verbal into the verbal."[25] When the narrator is "showing" something, he is trying to create an illusion of mimesis, but it will always remain diegesis. Genette says:

"Showing" can be only a way of telling, and this way consists of both saying about it as much as one can, and saying this "much" as little as possible: [...] speaking, Plato says, "as if the poet were someone else" - in other words, making one forget that it is the narrator telling...pretending to show is pretending to be silent...[T]herefore, we will have to mark the contrast between mimetic and diegetic by a formula such as: information + informer = C, which implies that the quantity of information and the presence of the informer are in inverse ratio, mimesis being defined by a maximum of information and a minimum of the informer, diegesis by the opposite relationship.[26]

            When it comes to narrative of words, which can, in fact come close to real mimesis, Genette focuses on three states of characters' speech, the first being narratized, or narrated speech. He defines it according to its narrative "distance" to mimesis. He considers narratized speech to be "obviously the most distant, and generally...the most reduced."[27] The second state is that of indirect style, what Genette calls transposed speech. This type of speech is more "mimetic" than narrated speech, but "this form never gives the reader any guarantee - or above all any feeling - of literal ffidelity to the words "really" uttered."[28] The last and most "mimetic" form is that of reported speech, "where the narrator pretends literally to give the floor to his character."[29]

            Genette is also troubled by the common use of the term "point of view." He feels that most theoretical works dealing with "point of view" confuses the two terms mood and voice, a confusion he feels really boils down the confusion between the question of who sees? and who speaks? The purely modal determinations of who sees?, what is normally referred to as "point of view", are here put into a system of focalizations. Genette operates with three general types of focalization. The first one he christens nonfocalized narrative or narrative with zero focalization. When using this term, he refers to situations "where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly says more than any of the characters know."[30] He symbolises this by a formula that he adopted from Todorov: Narrator > Character. The second type of focalization is the internal focalization, which is symbolised by the formula    Narrator = Character, where the narrator says only what a given character knows. This type of focalization has some variations: there is the fixed internal focalization, where you only see through one character, then you have the variable internal focalization, "as in Madame Bovary, where the focal character is first Charles, then Emma, then again Charles,"[31] and finally there is the multiple internal focalization, "as in epistolary novels, where the same event may be evoked several times according to the point of view of several letter-writing characters."[32] The final type of focalization is external focalization, where the formula would be Narrator < Character, which means that the character knows more than the narrator tells us. In this mode, "the hero performs in front of us without our ever being allowed to know his thoughts or feelings."[33]

With this introductory chapter on theory, I hope that I have made clear the meaning of the terms that I intend to apply in chapters two and three. The reason I included them is to avoid any misunderstandings as to how certain terms are to be used and understood. Whether or not these tools are helpful in the search for meaning, they are without a doubt helpful when it comes to precision.

[1] M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Sixth edition (Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1993), p. 123.

[2]Jeremy Hawthorn, A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, Second Edition (Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 130.

[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, "On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner", From Literary and Philosophical Essays (London: Rider 1955, reprinted in The Sound and the Fury, Norton Critical Edition, 1994), p. 265.

[4] Genette, p. 217.

[5] Ibid., p. 229.

[6] Ibid., p. 232.

[7] Ibid., p. 233.

[8]Ibid., p. 244.

[9] Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, (Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 35.

[10] Ibid., p. 35.

[11] Ibid., p. 35.

[12] Ibid., p. 48.

[13]Ibid., p. 40.

[14] Ibid., p. 67.

[15] Ibid., p. 40.

[16] Ibid., p. 50.

[17] Ibid., p. 51.

[18] Ibid., p. 52.

[19] Ibid., p. 35.

20]Iid., p. 87.

[21] Iid., pp. 93-94.

[22] Hawthorn, p. 58.

[23] Ibid., p. 42.

[24] Genette, p. 164.

[25] Ibid., p. 165.

[26] Ibid., p. 166.

[27] Ibid., p. 171.

28] Ibid., p. 171.

[29] Ibid., p. 172.

[30] Ibid., p. 189.

[31] Ibid., p. 189.

[32] Ibid., p. 190.

[33] Ibid., p. 190.