And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 3)
Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark
Links to all previous essays in this series may be found below.
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- Succession
As we have seen, the character of Dr. Haynes invokes the evangelical reformers of the English Reformation. This Reformation was a revolution from above; a top-down change of official ideology in the service of expanding the power and property of the national state and the crown. It took the form of an ‘enclosing’ of church property, wealth, land, and ideological hegemony by new owners, by the crown, the crown’s state bureaucracy, those sectors of the aristocracy allied with the crown’s project, and those sectors of the rising middle class allied with both.
It is easy to look at Dr Haynes and declare that he had no business ascending to the role of archdeacon because he did so via murder. But is this correct? His expectation was that he would be given the post upon the death of Dr Pulteney, and he was right. All he did was hasten the event. He achieved his post but the post was always and already his. How can a world which prizes enterprise and ruthlessness, competition and victory, declare out of the other side of its mouth that it is wrong for him to take the post by force? By the values of such a civilisation, surely his crimes make him more deserving? Yes, the church publicly espouses contrary values, publicly despises ambition and cruelty, but then so does Dr Haynes publicly advocate the same worldview. Is he to be declared unfit for office because he lives by both the ideological claims and the material reality of his institution, his society?
Haynes and his story invoke the spectre of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
It is by no means clear that Macbeth is actually an illegitimate king because he came by his crown by murder. He is destined to be king. We know this because the weird sisters see his kingship and its consequences in the future, already written. And if he achieves the crown of Scotland by deadly competition, so too does Duncan before him, so too does Malcolm after him. As Richard II says in his own play “they well deserve who know the surest, safest way to get”.
Much as Macbeth is haunted by three witches or weird sisters, so is Haynes haunted by three figures: the carved cat, the carved monk/Death, and the carved Devil. He does not encounter the Devil explicitly but the Devil character on the stalls is described as having fearsomely long and sharp talons, and Haynes’ facial injuries at his demise are ambiguous: they could be the work of the cat or the clawed Devil – or, in some obscure way, both. And surely his own crimes would be seen, from within the confines of his own belief system, as diabolical. Again like Macbeth he is also haunted by women in the sense that Jane Lee’s threat of exposure and blackmail dogs him, his sister’s absence leaves him at the mercy of the supernatural forces in the house, and the entities lurking in the house are repeatedly mistaken for maids moving around.…