All men are liars

In the profusion of images in Gerard Windsor’s Family Lore one is particularly insistent. The surgical metaphor makes remembering an act of dismembering. It suggests control and precision, and ostensibly offers an antidote for messy feelings, which looks like a useful resource in the murky business of exhuming family ghosts. It also seems to satisfy an aspect of the narrator-personality that is reflected not only in the prose but also in little self-caricatures (such as his description of the fastidiousness with which knife and fork are used and put aside). But it is immediately at odds with both the emotionally raw material and Windsor’s procedures. His method is based on the persistent undercutting of any claims to objectivity, and therefore of received models of narrative progression and structural wholeness, by the intervening complications of acute self&shy;consciousness. I found Family Lore a compelling and very moving piece of work, though initially there were lots of grounds for doubting that it could be. The tale has the authentic urgency of an autobiography or a family history that demands to be told, but its mode insists, fashionably enough, that any quest for the reconstruction of fact is an act of fictive construction. It is an insistence that can become a bit wearing. At first it produces a sense of the delusiveness of all information and the slipperiness of all language which seems merely disabling. Windsor’s creation of an illusion of surrender to the vagaries of the author’s consciousness, and the affectation of a modest tentativeness in making inferences, appear rather coyly self-referential. The tricksy opening sentences (‘I have two grandparents, one male, one female. But they met only when she was five years past menopause’) look like a way of avoiding getting started. On the whole the recent revolutions in ways of looking at literature did us post-moderns a tremendous favour in cutting ‘self&shy;indulgent’ out of the critical lexicon, once and probably for all. But just now and again it seems a firmer fit than ‘ludic’, and the early pages of Family Lore are such an occasion. But the story does gather momentum, and it comes through the conventional narrative structure of anecdote. The grandfather’s unreliable memoirs are offered, at least by him, as exemplars; his stories are told because they point to a meaning, and may even corroborate the view that experience is some kind of teacher. In their turn, then, they undercut the initial proposition that meaning may be not only arbitrary but incommunicable, and that nothing is certain except uncertainty. It is as though Windsor, having opened with a teasing variant on the ‘brother and sisters have I none’ riddle, bases his search for truths denied by ideology on a version of the self-refuting ‘all men are liars’ syllogism. In the process the narrator abandons the postures of the opening to step into the margin, and locating the epistemological anxieties in the frame rather than the centre of the picture proves a more productive way to proceed. The withdrawal, though, is tactical, as well as tactful. The narrator becomes more actively a conversational foil and participant, and his fascination with forms of ‘dispassion’ keeps the line of self&shy;analysis running; those on the family tree who display it are drawn into a further degree of relationship with him as their lives provide metaphors for the artist’s ways of seeing and, perhaps, this artist’s limits of feeling. The thrust of the enterprise is, like any family history, the pursuit of self-understanding through the attempt to know others. For Windsor this has a distinctive emphasis (given his characterisation of himself as dispassionate) in the involvement in vicarious passion. This involves the appropriation of the stories of those seemingly unflappable medical forebears of his, who have looked often at death and plunged their hands into blood, and have witnessed extraordinary moments of pain, possession, horror and beauty. Through them the artist-mediator can find a referred intensity of feeling. They are his access, if any access can be found, to the skull beneath the skin. The structure of Family Lore insists on the fictive construction of these primary experiences as well. Between the apparent purity of the moment and its adoption by this narrator fall the same two shadows that in the opening section threaten to obscure everything – shop-soiled words and an intrusive self-consciousness. The grandfather tells all his tales of strange doings at the con&shy;vent with a practised relish, and in ‘Virgins, Widows and Penitents’ sets down his thoughts with a degree of studied self-contemplation that makes the act of retrospection a subject in itself. The father is less of a raconteur, but he knows the thrill of a strong narrative, and in ‘My Father’s Version of the Nurses’ story’ the competition between the two narrators for control of its rhythms is a process of self-conscious complicity. There is no such thing, it seems, as raw material, though there are differ&shy;ent degrees of deliberateness in the business of literary intervention. The family that supplies the lore is a pretty lop-sided one, in ways that go beyond the shared diagnostic interests of its vets, surgeons, pathologists and novelists. Mothers and wives are present in the narrative but, as in the family snap on the dust&shy;jacket, they tend to be slightly out of focus. Women are certainly there as nominal subjects; the blood that is spilt and the bodies on the operating table are characteristically female, and that emphasis almost inevitably complicates the vicariousness of the narrative method with a more immediate quality of voyeurism. The virgins, widows and penitents are the objects, unknowable but perpetually fascinating, against which father, son and grandfather might be defined in a sacrament of common knowledge. Sometimes it looks as though this is the product of what is called fate in this book ‘that dreariest cliché of all – the Irish-Catholic sexual hang-up’, and that, once again, the Jesuits have a lot to answer for. But whatever unfinished business might lie behind the disproportions in attention to men and, women in Family Lore, the more immediate source is the son’s passion to know the father who has died, and through him to clarify some things about himself. In the second half of this book, the narrative impetus comes not from the neat structural packaging of individual stories, but from the urgency of that passion. The father is a shadowy figure in the first half of the narrative, and in many ways he remains so, since his rational reserve is hard to crack. The ‘old man’, the grandfather, talks more readily of emotional and spiritual matters, and leaves bequests which can be turned more readily to use. But it is the tension between the father’s ‘discipline’ and his capacity for powerful feeling, as well as the proximity of his death, that makes him the main point of reference in Family Lore. It is what, at the end of ‘My Father’s Version of the Nurses’ Story’, makes the tears come. It reflects the central metaphorical assumption that clinical accuracy need not be at odds with strength of feeling, but can be a means of access to it. And it is a tension felt throughout this book, through the very delicacy and exactitude that almost always marks the prose; the impulse to control, to find some point of ‘dispassion’, is directly an aspect of its emotional power.

Peter Fitzpatrick

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