TABOO SUBJECTS
Giller-listed tale of unusual family relationships brings Joycean dynamics to St. John’s
Wayne Johnston is no stranger to controversy, and there is no doubt his new novel will shake things up.
When Wayne Johnston began to envision his latest book, The Son of a Certain Woman, he posed a question: “What if, in this period of time in St. John’s, Nfld., there was a woman who wanted two things: one was another woman and the second was a child. What might be the result of that?”
The period of time is the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Newfoundland capital, a time when the Catholic Church was a powerful all-controlling institution. It was a time when women who lived with other women were sent to the looney bin.
It was also a time when a child born out of wedlock was to be shunned as a bastard.
“I thought I could set this book in modern times but the same obstacles wouldn’t be there. And I think it would be too easy a way out of problems that still exist but are talked about in a more muted way now.
“I wanted them to have to confront these things when no one else was doing them. When no one was switching genders, when no one was possibly having an affair with their own mother or thinking about it.”
And there it is. Johnston, who has shaken up the applecart before, is at it again with a powerful and complex, yet funny novel. This time he is lasering in on the unusual relationship between the beautiful Penelope Joyce, her lover Medina Joyce and her son, Percy, who was born out of wedlock as a result of a tryst with Medina’s brother Jim, who has fled the scene.
In addition to his birth status, Percy is blighted by a physical deformity that makes his hands and feet much larger than they should have been. And, his face is blighted by a gigantic purple birthmark. He also harbours a deep sexual lust for his own mother. Greek tragedy, anyone?
The name Penelope Joyce might take you to the classics, but there is a more important connection that Johnston has made in this novel, which has just made the Giller long list.
“There’s an interesting parallel that’s completely intended in the book. If you look at the names as they are presented to you, you have Jim Joyce (James Joyce) and then once you know Penelope is Penelope, your ears should really perk up.”
The parallel is to the Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses, with Percy as a kind of Stephen Dedalus (the protagonist of Ulysses). “Except now we have the gender roles reversed instead of Dedalus looking for his spiritual father Leopold Bloom, we have Percy looking for ‘his mother’ because his father is missing,” Johnston says.
His book’s final “controversial” chapter is a direct parallel to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, he says. And the last two sentences are the same as the last two sentences in Ulysses.
He says he is asking readers to look at Percy’s St. John’s in the way that the characters of Ulysses look at Dublin.
Johnston first tried to read Joyce’s novel at age 16. “I didn’t have much success, but I picked it up again in my 20s and read it. And I have read it many times since. One thing I find about it: I don’t think a funnier book has been written. Maybe Don Quixote is funnier, but it is in that tradition. In one way, it’s a fairly traditional picaresque book that jumps from one thing to another.”
Easy for him to say. But the book is more than just an allegory about Ulysses. He also wanted to write a book about outsiders and to tackle the idea of the family.
“I did want to write about family to some extent, about our changing views of what that is. Family in a place like St. John’s in the 1950s, 1960s and even into the 1970s, was a changing thing if you looked at people who were less well off. In those cases you had a lot of Newfoundland families whose men really were missing because they were on the boats, as the expression used to go.
“Looked at from the outside, Penelope and Percy wouldn’t have seemed quite so strange because the reason why Jim Joyce ran away is one that there is a lot of speculation about, but no one really knows the answer.
“It’s known to Penelope. She and Medina know they forced him to leave by threatening to out him as a cuckold.”
Johnston: Discussing a true taboo
In this strange family, Penelope and Percy are literally beauty and the beast.
“Percy’s face is supposedly the outward emblem of whatever inner flaw that he has. Penelope outwardly is the gorgeous woman whose beauty causes people not to inquire into who she is as a person.
“The notion in the community is that Percy is the way he is because he is the product of premarital sex, but if you put aside the community view and look at just the relationship between Penelope and Percy, she does admit she gained a child by means of deception and she does that intentionally. I’m not meaning to imply to the reader that she deserves to have a child who is marred, but she herself will struggle with that in the book. ... Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.”
But then Johnston takes us into a discussion of a true taboo — incest.
“Sometimes you go where the book takes you,” he said.
“Again, it was a kind of ‘ What if?’ for Percy. What if a boy in St. John’s, a hyper-Catholic place, far flung, kind of remote, what if such a boy was a very sexually charged kid as many are, but who had absolutely no outlet for that except auto-eroticism? And what if he firmly believed he would never have any (outlet) throughout his life except for the services of prostitutes; what might such a boy do or hope for as a last resort? And the answer that came to me was his mother.
“When it came to me I went, ‘Maybe you might want to stay away from that.’ But then I thought of Oedipus and his mother Jocasta, and other Greek and classical myths in which incest is a theme. If it’s 3,000 or 4000 years old, people are doing it and people have been writing about it for a long time.
“There is something very atavistic and very deep within us. We are programmed by evolution to abhor it but we have a fascination with it. For a boy to have this longing to return to the place he came from is something that Freud explored deeply.” And therein lies a novel. Johnston calls himself an autodidact.
“I’m not a formal student of philosophy or psychology. I’m selftaught. I spent a lot of time reading after I graduated from university. I decided that I would read all the big books that people either say are too hard to read or claim to have read but haven’t really. I thought I’d give them a shot and see how they might change me or what they might tell me.
“I started right from scratch with philosophy all the way back to the beginning and all the way to the 20th century, when philosophy becomes physics.
“And one of the books that I read was The Interpretation of Dreams. It was almost like a detective story. When Freud wrote it, there had been nothing like it before. He firmly believed he was on his way to an explanation of how the mind works.
“The one driving subconscious force was sexuality. That was not greeted with open arms. It was a huge jump that Freud made.”
One place that did not greet Freud with open arms was the church. For Johnston, who was recruited very early in his life for the priesthood, the capital-C church “posits a couple of things: One that this life is an audition for the world to come. And the idea that there will be punishment. This seems to me the ultimate mind-control and people control.”
‘I’m not a formal student of philosophy or psychology. I’m self-taught. I spent a lot of time reading after I graduated from university.’
WAYNE JOHNSTON
Discussing his education
He compares the church, especially the Roman Catholic Church, to a totalitarian state, a comparison that was especially true, he says, of the era in which he sets his novel.
“I was born and raised very much like James Joyce. I was drafted for the priesthood. I was chosen by a priest in much the same way that a scout picks out an athlete on the ice and says ‘You know you’re going to the majors.’
“That’s what a priest said to me when I was 12 years old and it was another five years before I threw off the notion that that is how I would live my life. Then I read The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, other people have had this experience’.”
And he believes that the church has not really reformed its ways in the wake of scandals that have plagued it for years.
“I would stress that I would think that there is only a veneer of reform. I think most of the characterizations of church figures in the book basically still apply today.”
There is little doubt that much of what he writes in this book will rattle some chains in his home province.
“I find that because I live so far away, some things about it are not as raw as they would be if I was there. And I get a sense of perspective that does allow me to write about it.
“I think this is a pretty funny book. I think it would be hard for me to write in a partly comedic way about some of these thing were I not as removed as I am.”
He is fond of his home province but he is not afraid to take it on, either. “If you take The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, for instance, I was absolutely prepared for the reaction to that book. I knew that to write about (Joey) Smallwood in the way that I did would bring some flak upon me but I didn’t realize just how much. I should have.
“I guess that was kind of boot camp for me because I suspect that there might be some like response to this book. There might not and maybe again I’m being too naive, but there might not because the church often takes a tactic (that) the best thing to do is ignore it, to not draw attention to it.”
Readers, he says, will have to make up their own minds.