Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them (1948)
Sylvia Townsend Warner
For a brief period in the second half of 2020, Twitter was heaven for me. I had curated my feed to include only family, friends, and people whose literary opinions and taste I valued. Guided by their advice, I spent the summer reading novels written by American women authors, such as Paula Fox, Christina Stead, Jean Stafford, and Elizabeth Hardwick. Eventually, I came across the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel The Corner That Held Them (1948). I read it on the iPad, which has a lot of obvious advantages but lacks the tactile sense of a book’s length – of knowing how far one has gone and of feeling sad about its impending end. Initially, this loss of physical format was annoying, but it soon contributed to the blissful disorientation I experienced as I read.
My bliss and enchantment deepened as I recognized the novel’s liberal but peculiar use of the “reality effect,” where attention to seemingly unimportant detail is meant to tighten the warp and weft of story and plot. I became fascinated by these pockets of poetic knowledge despite my general skepticism toward historical novels. Townsend Warner luxuriates in depictions of practices, objects, and characters, but not in ways that serve the advancement of the story. Indeed, if a story requires a beginning, a middle, and an end, then TCTHT has no story. Set in an English nunnery, the narrative begins in time of the plague in 1349 and progresses, sometimes in very short, sometimes in longer intervals, until 1382 (the dates are the chapter titles). There are recurring characters but no protagonists, there are many subplots but no overarching plot, there is an ending, but it does not tie events together. Townsend Warner recounts innumerable conditions that lead to an event but steps back from drawing causal connections.
This open frame is the setting in which the details sparkle. I quickly came to trust Townsend Warner’s superior knowledge of medieval culture – a little research shows that she was an accomplished medievalist – though unlike in historical novels, I do not sense the heavy toil of research, nor the nudge toward allegorical, presentist interpretation. Even such a devastating event as the black death is reduced to yet another difficulty the nuns must deal with. After a while, I relax my vigilance and read on as if there is no message or moral behind this chronicle; history is just what happens, experienced by the nuns as it happens; in the instances where they themselves attribute ulterior meaning to an event – interpreting the failure of a building structure as divine punishment, for example – it turns out to be wrong or insignificant.
The solidity of fact paired with the aimlessness of the plot at first triggered all my interpretive alarms. Am I missing something? Reading in Townsend Warner’s Wikipedia page I discover, and then read, her openly lesbian novel Summer Will Show – also a work of historical imagination, but very much plot- and desire driven. Yet in TCTHT, the absence of sexual desire as a narrative agent – absence of narrated sexual desire, not of sex – is at first bewildering, then soothing. The nuns are ambitious, mad, eccentric, and each is rendered in vivid, but narratively insignificant detail, as are the manor, the servants, the landscape, the plague. Attributing overarching meaning to the setting and characters of the novel – apart from sexual desire I tried religious blindness, feminism in the church, and exoticism of the Middle Ages – feels forced and diminishing.
This novel lets us participate in ‘the varieties of religious experiences,’ and Townsend Warner goes to great lengths to bring them before us in their full “thatness” and authenticity – there is no other desire that she exposes as the ‘truth’ behind the nun’s experiences. The moment one were to read religiosity as a cover for ‘realer’ realities or truer desires, the reading experience would change and revert to the scrutiny of critical reading practices. I begin thinking what I would do with a book like this in the classroom before I catch myself and remember that aptness for the classroom is not a meaningful attribute for any novel. Some novels can only be recommended.
The overall sensation that grips and delights me is the release into the pure movement of reading – being pulled forward by the unfolding of the story, being stopped in mid-narrative by an extravagant description, by an unusual adjective, by an elaborate simile. I put the book down, read a passage again, or just marvel at it. The slightly oppressive feeling I get when reading, for example, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, where we must suspect every element of description to be in the service of the plot, and vice versa, evaporates. It is as if the genre ‘novel’ has come apart at the seams and released the lyricism of language from its servitude to narration. Long though it is – about 400 pages – I don’t want it to end, and it seems the author didn’t either.
