The Bread of the Historical Present

The Holy Days of Gloucesterbook

The complexity of Gloucesterman is intimidating. The reader is tempted to give up in the face of Jonathan Bayliss's formidable demands, which include a working knowledge of Western history and philosophy, Christian liturgy, geology and modern physics. However, the major themes of the saga can be recognized easily, and used to guide the traveler through the literary trek. There are three interlocking themes that serve as a skeleton key to Gloucesterman's treasure: ritual, myth, and transformation. Bayliss himself has never explicitly described his philosophical system. In Prologos, the chapters dedicated to Dromenology resemble Melvillian satire more than a detailed exposition of his concept. However, even here Bayliss's narrator Michael Chapman defines ritual in a way that clarifies much of its use in his work:

Ritual is the traditional and orderly corporate action of a community - a rhythmic manifestation of the cult, periodically performed, in which ordinarily all winesses take part. It purifies, dedicates, initiates members of the corporation. It excites and regulates desire. By means of it we say our prayer or make our sacrifice ... ritual makes the human world resonate, and, if successful, resonate with God.                                                                                (Prologos, p. 102)

In Gloucesterbook, the chapter "Quinquagesima: Offertory" introduces us to the liturgies celebrated by Father Duncannon in the cellar chapel at the Laboratory of Melchizedek and the Mesocosm. Bayliss idealizes the liturgy as the prime example of meaningful ritual and communal endeavor. He spends a considerable part of Gloucesterbook's second movement describing Duncannon's liturgy, as three consecutive chapters focus on the offertory, consecration, and communion. Though the religious material in these episodes make them seem like a detour from the main action of the saga, these chapters contain important information about the Dogtown dramatis personae as well as a crucial exposition of Bayliss's philosophy. In Joycean terms, these chapters constitute the Proteus episode of the saga. The first movement of Gloucesterbook has already shown us corporate predator Rafe Opsimath entering the Cape Gloucester system, meeting some of the principal characters in the Dogtown drama, and getting his philosophical bearings in the Ibicity. After Opsimath hires aspiring playwright Caleb Karcist to help with the analysis of a business prospect named Parity Corporation, the focus shifts exclusively to young Caleb and his dog Ibi-Roi. Seduced and abandoned by free-spirited reporter Bice Picory, Caleb takes refuge in his work for Opsimath, his fellowship in the local Resistance movement (opposing the vapid consumer culture symbolized by television), and his assistance in Masses at the progressive church known as the Classic Order of the Vine. Now, as the liturgy is celebrated and described, Gloucesterbook increases in complexity and Bayliss develops his themes. In Prologos, Caleb's old mentor Michael Chapman theorizes about ceremony's relevance to society:

The injunction "Do this in remembrance of me." was taken not as a behest to observe a sacred moment of the past but as a procedure to be followed in developing the future, a means of discovery. In the experiential evolution of their theology Christians came to see (through performing the action prescribed) that the sacramental ritual was a sacrifice of work on their own part, something that had to be done, like pumping a lever to keep water out of a leaking ship under sail for the new world. Christianity itself has usually mistaken its truly social purpose for revelation and private salvation.                                                                          (Prologos, p.196)

The ceremony is conducted to renew the society's commitment to its purpose. Indeed, as Caleb drives up to the Laboratory through the snow, his car "seemed to be making tracks in a renewed age." (GB, p.379) Preparing for the ritual, Caleb is compared to Prometheus: summoning forth energy from the inert rock, he strikes a match (a "lucifer") on the sacristy's granite wall to light the altar's candles. It's the Sunday before Ash Wednesday (Shrove Sunday, 12 February 1961), the last Sunday before Lent. Caleb serves as acolyte at Duncannon's sparsely attended mass, the motions and words of the ritual described in detail: Caleb lights candles, helps prepare the altar, and reads from 1 Corinthians. However, Bayliss uses the ritual as a vehicle for exploration as he shows Caleb's mind wandering to other historical, philosophical, and personal matters. The Lenten tradition is important economically to Dogtown, as tractor trailers full of processed fish take the town's only remaining export to feed the wider community of observant believers. However, the liturgy itself is losing significance. Rituals meant to strengthen common purpose have been co-opted for purely selfish motives. Contemporary intitutions see the community as either consumers or factors of production. Father Duncannon's vision is to renew the liturgy, to save the community from the cycle of predation that may be its undoing. The offertory itself is the part of the mass where the gifts of bread and wine are prepared for consecration. References to religious subjects from the Old Testament through the Reformation abound in this chapter and the ones that follow. We see Samuel, whom Caleb portrayed in a school play, hearing the voice of God; the heresy of Arius, who declared that the Son was not eternal; the corruptions of the liturgy in Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer; and various other figures from Zeus to Martin Luther. We also notice mythic resonance in the characters of Bayliss's Dogtown. The priest's reading of Luke 18:35 reminds Caleb of the blind inventor Prosper Ozone and his mysterious legacy in the community. Ozone (modeled after inventor John Hays Hammond, Jr.) pioneered the communications technology that, according to the Resistance, seeks to absorb small communities into the generic maw of conformist America. A benefactor of not only renegade academic Ipsissimus Charlemagne's literary journal but also a business technology company that is in the orbit of Parity, Ozone gave Ibi-Roi to Caleb in gratitude for Caleb's service to him. Bayliss later reveals that long ago, Ozone also employed Caleb's mother Mary and owned Ibi's mother Sycorax. The character of Duncannon himself contrasts with that of Chris Lucey, a priest in the COV more interested in stock acquisition than revolutionizing the liturgy: Duncannon's ritual confession prior to the offertory is juxtaposed with Lucey's unapologetic transgression. Caleb certainly realizes that the mystery involving an unknowable father and a human son has a personal meaning for him, obsessed as he is with finding both the identity of his biological father as well as appropriate substitutes among his Dogtown mentors. He considers characters such as Jesus, Hamlet, and Oedipus, whose tragedies involved an absent father. Father Duncannon has transformed the ritual of the mass to reflect the transformation of society. In the wake of Darwin, humanity no longer inhabits a privileged place in creation. Einstein replaced the notion of an orderly universe with one of limitless uncertainty. The specter of entropy haunts the Gloucesterman saga as the ineluctability of change itself, an affront to hope.Only through work and sacrifice is local order increased, and this is what makes the offertory central to Duncannon's "theodynamics."

Because the ensuing action of the Offertory - neglected by Scholastics, suppressed by Tudors, scorned by thoroughgoing Paulines - was being restored to the rite after eighteen or nineteen centuries only by the praxis of tiny scattered congregations, much smaller than aggregations of molecules visible to the magnifying glasses of almost all searching Christians, the revision seemed insignificant even to most of the fraternal professionals who axiomatically defended the Book of Common Prayer against its insolence. Almost every adherent of the Order came to understand that the Mass they called the Anamnesis was in effect unwillingly clandestine, and that to any layman stumbling on it the variances at issue seemed either pedantically esoteric or merely aesthetic. Unless you stopped to study the words and rubrics, which reshaped the very logic of the old but far from primeval ceremonies of the ritual, you'd never suspect that the whole of Christianity was thus remounted in its social foundation.                                                                    (GB, p.401-402)

At the conclusion of "Quinquagesima: Offertory," we are flipped back and forth between Shrove Sunday and the night before, when Caleb and Ibi visit sculptor Petto DaGetto in his studio. DaGetto and Caleb are united in their sympathy for Doc Charlemagne's Resistance, but are also involved in an unspoken competition for the affection of Bice Picory. In a gesture that echoes Duncannon's offertory with its allusions to transformation, the sculptor selflessly offers Caleb one of his remarkable copper creations as a gift.

"But I can't buy it. That's worth a lot of money." "Why can't I give it to you? I got the copper free, and it didn't take long to make. I can do another one any time. Who cares about money, when it's for a friend? I've got money to live on. As long as I can convert copper into art, I don't need to convert art into coppers!"                                                                     (GB, p.410)

Caleb wonders about "a precedent for converting a coil of copper directly into bread" as the chapter ends. This echoes the beginning of the episode, wherein the next morning we see him exchanging a penny for a host wafer as he enters the Lab for his duties at the altar. The next chapter in Gloucesterbook is "Ember Wednesday: Consecration," which takes place on the Wednesday of the first full week in Lent. Again Caleb is assisting Father Duncannon in the ritual, but his mind wanders through history both ancient and contemporary, and matters both sacred and secular. Caleb is thinking of his troubled mother, Mary Tremont, a former artist now toiling in a religious cult in South America. His own travels having brought him back from the west coast to Dogtown in defeat, he revels in the prospect of a trip to England, where Bice Picory went after abandoning him. He also refers to tales of exotic trips like Melville's Typee and legends of Magellan's voyages in the Philippines. During the consecration, the bread and wine become the body of Christ. The allegory of inert matter becoming flesh is echoed in the sexual dimension of the episode. Caleb relates with embarrassment the incident when Father Chris Lucey attempted to seduce him in the Purdeyville woods. He pines for Bice Picory and reminisces about their brief affair. We learn that Caleb was conceived out of wedlock during Dogtown's summer festival Gloucestermas, nine months before the vernal equinox. Mary had always refused to divulge the identity of Caleb's father or the circumstances surrounding his conception. As Duncannon recites the lines of the liturgy, Caleb once again flashes back to his days in the employ of the shadowy Prosper Ozone. The inventor had gone blind, and so appreciated Caleb's reading aloud to him that he gave the Viking Shepherd Ibi-Roi to Caleb. Whether Ozone realized that Caleb was Mary Tremont's son, and what the nature of Mary's relationship with the inventor might have been, are questions left unanswered. After the inventor's recent death, many in Dogtown expected to be mentioned in the tycoon's will. However, in his dotage religious cultists manipulated the inventor (as they did Caleb's mother) and eventually monopolized his legacy. As the priest blesses the gifts, the urgent purpose of Duncannon's revised liturgy is reiterated:

It was at this point of qualitative discontinuity that works of the world were informed with the uniquely counterentropic energy to jump their otherwise gravitated orbits in relative time and enter into the coherent order that otherwise could never be attained by a society of ignorant selfish and quarrelsome wills. Unless this reasonable and unbloody mactation was repeatedly performed by the cells of Christ's church, the suicidal species could neither evolve nor survive.                                                                        (GB, p. 426)

The final chapter in this trinity is "Lady Day: Communion." This episode takes place as Caleb assists Chris Lucey in conducting Mass on the feast of the Annunciation. This would be 25 March 1961 (a Saturday, not a Wednesday as Bayliss asserts), mere days after the vernal equinox and Caleb's birthday. Lancelot Duncannon is present only in the congregation, but looms in spirit above the Mass. According to this pioneering priest, the community of believers is unaware of its peril. Though burdened by Cold War anxiety, the populace has been conditioned by a vulgar consumer culture, and is reveling in unprecedented physical and spiritual leisure:

But Caleb constantly fears that the degradation of mentality has gone too far for corporate regeneration. In ad hoc unity of interest, under benign leadership, it has been possible to put down waves of fascism; but it's too late to evoke even the Holy Ghost in offering to withstand the irreversible tide of the Atlantean plague infecting every hearth and inn with mental sloth. There's no hope in resisting the overwhelmingly unopposed epidemic of anti-autoimmunity when it's spread by devilvision. Our Antichrist is no mere prince of reversible darkness or whore of perishable Babylon, still less a rebel leader outcast in the cause of Promethean liberty, but the Evil Eye itself: disembodied, inorganic, ubiquitous, artificially replicated, more prolific than Sin the daughter of Satan's head (bred in incest to her father), more virulent than the money in it.                                                         (GB p.442)

The communion is the climax of the theodynamic liturgy, as "the bread of the historical present carries work through time." (GB p.434) Educated as a physicist, Duncannon redefined the liturgy according to thermodynamic principles. This chapter is especially marked by the dread of entropy in physical, economic, and social terms. Since the advent of atomic weapons, the threat of entropy has been physical as well as philosophical. Spiritual and individual salvation won't save humanity. However, Duncannon considers the transformative power of the liturgy the only thing that will redeem society, renew its common purpose, and keep it from "the White Death of humanly determined entropy." (GB p.443) The communion celebrated during the Mass is a metaphor for the creative power of other social unions. The Annunciation (when the archangel informed Mary of her miraculous pregnancy) provides Bayliss with an opportunity to explore the saga's mythology of conception and anonymous paternity. This episode relates Caleb's surprise meeting with Lillian Cloud, who has returned to Dogtown with a daughter fathered by Caleb during their west coast affair. Caleb's sperm donations to Annunciator Laboratories of Cornucopia, Inc., may indeed have made him a father of many more unknown children. From these, Bayliss draws parallels to Caleb's distant relationship with his mother Mary, and his search for the identity of his father. In addition, Caleb has brought to the attention of the stock speculators in the Classic Order of the Vine a prospect named Paraclete Biochemical Corporation. In hindsight, any company able to mass-produce birth-control products would have been a goldmine during the Sixties, but the Order's members are stuck in a debate over the ethics of investing in such a concern. So as Caleb extinguishes the candles in the chapel barely a week before Easter 1961, Bayliss has left us with much to consider. Can society be transformed? Will Caleb ever find out the identity of his father? Is Dogtown doomed? The details of the liturgy are meant to demonstrate the effort involved in anything of value to society. A similar point must be made in terms of Bayliss's fiction. There is a certain amount of sacrifice involved, but the rewards make the effort worthwhile.