MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO

FACULTY OF EDUCATION

Department of English Language and Literature

Postmodern Mentality in

The Wasp Factory

Diploma thesis

Brno 2012
Supervisor: Author:

Mgr. Hana Waisserová, Ph.D. Mgr. Radek Holcepl

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 DECLARATION

I declare that I worked on my diploma thesis independently and that I used

only the sources listed in the bibliography.

In České Budějovice August 2012 Mgr. Radek Holcepl

..........................................................

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisor Mgr. Hana Waisserová, Ph.D. for her kind
guidance, patience and valuable comments and also to my wife for her support
and understanding.
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Bibliografický záznam

Holcepl, Radek. Postmodern Mentality in The Wasp Factory. Brno:

Masarykova univerzita, Fakulta pedagogická, Katedra anglického jazyka a
literatury, 2012. XXX s. Vedoucí bakalářské práce - Mgr. Hana Waisserová,
Ph.D.

Anotace

Diplomová práce je zaměřena na zkoumání širších kulturních souvislostí

postmoderní mentality v díle Iana Bankse The Wasp Factory. Rozbor je
věnován vztahu formy a obsahu díla z pohledu sociologie vědění a hlubinné
psychologie. Význačné symboly jsou vykládány na základě analogií s díly
antické mytologie i moderní filosofie. Součástí rozboru je i reflexe vztahu
literatury, náboženství a technologie v postmoderní éře.

Klíčová slova

Postmoderna, psychopatologie, literatura a technologie, literatura a

náboženství, narativní postupy a ideologie

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Bibliography

Holcepl, Radek. Postmodern Mentality in The Wasp Factory. Brno: Masaryk

University, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and
Literature, 2012. XXX pages. The supervisor of the Bachelor Thesis – Mgr.
Hana Waisserová, Ph.D.

Annotation

The Diploma Thesis is focused on the enquiry into broader cultural contexts of
postmodern mentality in The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. The analysis is
dedicated to the relation between form and contents from the perspective of
sociology of knowledge and depth psychology. Relevant symbols are
interpreted on the basis of analogies with the works of antique mythology and
modern philosophy. The reflection of relation between literature, religion and
technology in postmodern era constitutes a part of the analysis.

Keywords

Postmodernity, psychopathology, literature and technology, literature and

religion, narrative techniques and ideology

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction 7

2. Narrative Technique and Ideology 8

3. Modern Critique of Religion 11

4. Postmodern Critique of Frank's Cult 14

5. Sympathy for a Devil 20

6. Narcissism and Violence 25

7. Misogyny and Good Intentions 29

8. Measure What Is Measurable 40

9. Freud, Athena and Opus Contra Naturam 44

10. A Song of Water and Fire 48

11. Conclusion 54

12. Bibliography 56

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1. Introduction

Vladimír Novotný, the reviewer of a printed Czech translation of The Wasp Factory,
summarizes the book as ―storytelling about mental power of evil – firstly as a story of total
deconstruction of human (here: child, more precisely adolescent) dreaming of a world order
and of civilization values (moral, and even immoral, though equally unbreachable
commandments), which have been associated with the vision from one generation to another.
Analogous histories of lonesome, consciously and unconsciously frustrated individuals
usually aim in accordance with the moral code of mankind from initial trauma towards its
overcoming; a world full of anxiety, isolation and hostility is gradually suppressed by
constructing personal or communal religion. It relies on both recognized certainties and ―the
others‖ and especially the so called natural interpersonal relationships.‖

According to Novotný all the standard moral strategies are abandoned or perverted in TWF.
Such a conclusion can be, however, drawn only if one assumes that the happy ending of the
story (a new beginning, freedom from delusions and lies) is just an illusion as Novotný does.
He also has it that the real and truly memorable message of TWF is summed up by this
laconic utterance of Frank’s: ―Well, it is always easier to succeed at death‖. Novotný
considers the sentence as way to convey the nearly unbearable truth that violence is also a
possible response at the ready to the challenges of life. That seems to be meant either a very
alerting warning or a reluctant acceptance of the state of affairs. Surprisingly enough, the grim
interpreter Novotný asserts that TWF is a “British black grotesque” and as such “a classical
work of postmodern prose”. Nonetheless, TWF goes much deeper in the analysis of the
source of darkness and the very roots of evil. The aim of the presented thesis is to prove
that The Wasp Factory is not only a black grotesque but also a psychologically
sophisticated tragedy whose moral message is ideological in the modern (not post-
modern) sense of the word.

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2. Narrative Technique and Ideology
The narrative technique itself belongs among those very basic and yet very efficient tricks
played by novelists on their readers. The whole story is told from the perspective of one
character only. The focal point of the book is set on Frank Cauldhame, sixteen years old
actual narrator of the story. The first person perspective always leads to reader’s feelings of
strong attachment to the main hero. From a psychological point of view a long monologue
about one’s activities, thoughts and feelings inevitably creates an intimate atmosphere. Such a
monologue always tends to take on a form of a confession or personal myth narration. In both
cases people are invited to share the innermost secrets, fears and hopes. In other words the
narratee bestowed with a bare minimum of empathy must feel honoured and even flattered by
the narrator’s trust and openness. Such exposure makes it very difficult to reject or even
condemn the confessor. Narrator’s story may be embarrassing, drastic, base or even vile, but
nevertheless expresses (from the pragmatics standpoint) one’s sincere attempt to put their life
in a new, more cultivated and orderly perspective be it by talk therapy alone or by sharing a
heavy burden. If a written medium is taken into account, the most obvious analogy to
confession is a diary, an autobiography or memoires.

One passage in TWF states unambiguously how powerful motivational and existential a
device such open monologues are: “I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret
catechisms. I could recite them automatically, but I tried to think of what they meant as I
repeated them. They contained my confessions, my dreams and hopes, my fears and hates,
and they still make me shiver whenever I say them, automatic or not. One tape recorder in the
vicinity and the horrible truth about my three murders would be known. For that reason alone
they are very dangerous. The catechisms also tell the truth about who I am, what I want and
what I feel, and it can be unsettling to hear yourself described as you have thought of yourself
in your most honest and abject moods, just as it is humbling to hear what you have thought
about in your most hopeful and unrealistic moments.”1

In the case of TWF reader is confronted with a lot of bizarre, violent and distorted actions
carried out by the narrator. The book is divided into two distinct groups of chapters. The first
group forms a relatively consistent unit dealing with recent events in Frank’s life. These
chapters follow chronological order and therefore serve as the backbone of the story. The
other cluster of chapters is presented directly as a sort of explanation provided to the narratee

1
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 8, The Wasp Factory, p. 42.

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at the moment when further recounting of recent events would be incomprehensible without
some insights into Frank’s past. The novel as a whole is organized in a way that suggests
Frank’s own uncertainty about the final outcome of latest actions and their connection to his
family saga. The reader is not only confessed to but also drawn into a current of an ongoing
adventure.

I felt compelled to comment on the formal aspect of TWF as most critics concentrate on
brutal, disturbing and gritty contents.2 Even the final epiphany tends to be praised just as a
culminating point of twisted bizarreness that characterizes the whole plot. Occasionally, the
reviewers mention Banks’ crafty dealing with the last pages of the book that allows multiple
exegeses, a happy ending included. Nonetheless, in order to do justice to the novel the
ultimate revelation ought to be understood as an integral part of a carefully planned and
meticulously devised plot. In a very unsettling way the novel itself resembles the namesake
mechanical oracle assembled by Frank Cauldhame. The nearly surgical formal timing and
dosing of information serves to convey a completely deranged message, i.e. inner world of an
obsessive, violent psychopath. Such an uneasy alliance between rational form and irrational
contents seems to paraphrase Nietzsche’s concept of Dionysian and Apollonian elements in
the Greek tragedies.3 The contrast between controlling regularity, meticulousness and
compartmentalization on one hand and wild, abrupt and ecstatic passions on the other hand
creates the tension arc of the book on many and various levels. The most general and
therefore the least visible or perceivable aspect of control-possession dilemma can be
described as a neat narrative design versus revolting wickedness of the narrated story or form
versus content. With both extremes (obsessive rational control and equally extreme emotional
enthrallment) Banks goes to great lengths.

In fact I cannot make myself understand the book in a way that would not include personal
confession of the author’s as well. All authors, especially those working with mysterious or
overtly fantastical elements, have to face the tension between strictly rational control of the
form and wildly imaginative process of acquiring inspiration. Nevertheless, this issue is

2
An Honourable exception is the online review by John Mullan, Behind it all. On the use of explanation as a
device in Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory (2012-08-10)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/28/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview31 (2012-08-10).
3
―The tragic myth can only be understood as a symbolic picture of Dionysian wisdom by means of Apollonian
art.‖ From: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth Of Tragedy Out Of The Spirit Of Music
http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm#tragedy (2012-08-08)

9
overshadowed by more specific and personal messages Banks sends to his readers. As a
matter of fact, the disentanglement of the novel sheds a very intriguing light on Banks’
philosophical standpoint and ultimate artistic goal (and in the most likelihood a subconscious
need met by projection as well). After a shocking discovery about his true “nature” Frank
Cauldhame shakes off all the ritualistic needs and obsessions as if touched by a magic wand.
All the phobias receded to a manageable level and the murderous past was disenchanted to the
extent that allowed for a new hope and a new beginning. In the last chapter called “What
Happened to Me” Frank undergoes a rapid psychological transformation. The “truth” plays
the role of the decisive agent in this rebirth which is facilitated by conscious acceptance of
what is “natural”. The lies are unravelled as such and repudiated along with all the unnatural
pseudo-religious patterns of behaviour that formed the axis of Frank’s life before the moment
of revelation.

The depicted approach towards the truth and delusions, naturalness and twistedness,
transsexuality and gender identity does not fit into the “postmodern” paradigm very well.
Even though “postmodern” is a label stereotypically put on TWF there is no sign of
postmodern approval of freedom to construct life on arbitrary foundations as, according to
postmodernism, there are supposedly no absolutely objective (postmodern anti-scientism),
natural (postmodern anti-essentialism) or even divine (postmodern anti-metaphysics) scales or
standards. In TWF the confession of truth about one’s natural essence leads to a salvation of a
sort. The final chapter definitely defies a postmodern reading of TWF as there is no doubt
about Frank’s fatalistic accepting the newly found identity. Frank did not find himself in a
position of an arbitrarily choosing post-modern identity consumer.4

4
Among numerous interpreters of our ”Zeitgeist” Gilles Lipovetsky and Zygmunt Bauman represent arguably
the most influential proponents of the abovementioned sociological definition of post-modernity and its effect
upon people’s behavioural patterns.
Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygmunt_Bauman#Postmodernity_and_consumerism or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_consumericus (2012-08-10).

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3. Modern Critique of Religion
The old personality is rejected at the moment of liberation as a big mistake, stupidity and
delusion based on malign, unnatural schemes. Conclusion that TWF represents a specimen of
modern “salvation myths” would be nearly impossible to digest for those among us who still
associate words like myth or salvation exclusively with explicit religion or God forbid
Christianity alone. Moreover, Frank’s old identity religious practices belong among those
condemned consequences of “false consciousness” or “neurotic personality”. Banks puts these
words into the mouth of a re-born Frances: ―The Factory was my attempt to construct life, to
replace the involvement which otherwise I did not want.‖5

Repudiation of religion on the basis of hermeneutical critique6 characterizes modern, not

postmodern mainstream. Comte, Feuerbach, Marx, Frazer and Freud are typical
representatives of such a modern approach to religion. In all their super-influential theories
religion is interpreted as an imperfect, outdated or all-out harmful version of abovementioned
thinkers’ evolutionary and revelatory systems of “purely scientific” thought. In all the
mentioned reductionist philosophies attention is paid to a proper understanding of religion as
a mere precursor or a grotesque parody of real science. Science is elevated onto a position of
true knowledge that can heal or safe man(kind) from a crippling and deluding grip of religious
superstitions. Religion is mocked either as a childish or pathological illusion suitable only for
those pitiful who are not able to sustain a mature worldview.

Freudian pan-sexual reductionism is evidenced by yet another part of Frances’s final

omniscient monologue: ―Having no purpose in life or procreation, I invested all my worth in
that grim opposite, and so found a negative and negation of the fecundity only others could
lay claim to. (...) I would find or make my own weapons, and my victims would be those most
recently produced by the one act I was incapable of; my equals in that, while they possessed
the potential for generation, they were at that point no more able to perform the required act
than I was. Talk about penis envy. (...) The murders were my own conception; my sex.‖

5
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 65.
6
Cf. Mircea Eliade, Dějiny náboženského myšlení IV, Praha 2009, chapter 437.: Klasikové ―hermeneutické
kritiky náboženství‖: Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, p. 447-453.

11
The concluding message of TWF was the only letdown I experienced when reading it and
musing over it. A profound and extremely convincing depiction of a tormented soul has been
at last raped by implementing ideological moral lesson into the last chapter. A simplistic
misreading of late Freud’s dual instincts (life-instinct Eros and death-instinct Thanatos) can
lead to a conclusion that we either have inclination towards healthy sex and rationality OR
sickly aggression and superstition. It may be the case that Banks consciously continued
shrouding his own opinion in a cloud of mystification – it is the fictitious heroine who speaks
not the author himself – and then Frances’s final self-understanding would be possible meant
by Banks as another example of dangerously distorted, black-and-white logic. This time the
fallacious dichotomy would not be represented by two clearly weird value clusters
(evil/women X good/men) but by two way too often espoused and dichotomised value
packages (sex / ”natural” reason and goodness X violence / ”unnatural” faith and badness).

Even though I would personally appreciate such a sublime, sophisticated subversion of

intellectual clichés, it is hardly imaginable that Banks resisted the temptation to finally reveal
the real Truth (his own conviction) to the readers in the finale of his novel. Banks is a self-
proclaimed committed atheist, a person on a seriously taken warpath against dangers of
religious “faith”, ergo a doctrinaire and ideological activist: ―Quite a few of us are guilty - by
us I mean so the atheists - we are kind of guilty of thinking that religion will somehow you
know ... back off, embarrassed, you know, backing to the shadows going: ―Sorry, it was all
nonsense, wasn‘t it? Sorry all... forget what we said.‖ Err and it‘s not. It‘s come back with
the vengeance, you know, you got people especially in the States it‘s err basically bananas...
and it‘s this host of gradual turning away from reason and rationality... Faith itself and faith
is a belief without reason. I think as soon you turn your back on reason you turn your back on
what makes us human...‖7

The abovementioned position characterizes every public statement delivered by Iain Banks
that deals with his attitude towards religion. It might be argued that for many it was Banks
who introduced them to a specific phrase “evangelical atheist” to further promote his believes
concerning faith. No matter how repetitive it may sound this position cannot be in any way

7
Cf. Iain Banks: 'I'm an evangelical atheist' from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dnCTApJ4Bc (2012-08-
09) . Transcription RH

12
labelled postmodern in the strong sense of the word. Banks’ conscious aim of his “evangelical
atheism” is supposedly to "to proselytise about the badness of religion, and to say that faith is
wrong, belief without reason and question is just evil".8 This struggle seems to be stemming
from a perspective that is definite and essentialist. Much to my dismay “evangelical atheism”
tediously repeats 18th century arguments with all the plain naivety of the Encyclopaedists
generation about the absolute and clear boundaries between religion and science,
backwardness and progress, “historical” faith and “natural” reason.

The most important question presents itself quite naturally (rhetoric figure only – it is clearly
a cultural issue): “Is there anything postmodern about TWF at all?” If we dismiss an obvious
notion of its publishing date (1984) we are not far from the end of the list. The tension
between a refined, rationally structured form and irrational or even repulsive subject of
depiction has been around on a large scale since L'art pour l'art aestheticism and decadence
movement. Bitterly sarcastic mockery of church and religion can be traced back to at least
18th century literary canon. A painful enquiry into uncivilized island mentality of adolescent
males and their barbaric idolization of killing urges made its way into compulsory school
reading lists years before TWF. Nihil novi sub sole then?

Not exactly. Truly postmodern is the cultivated and learned attempt to reject vast
majority of classical Western “Great Stories” that have an ambition to present a global
vision of the world and the laws governing it, therefore “rightfully” claiming absolute
commitment of their followers.9 Banks mocks scientific manipulation (Frank-enstein theme
of hubris), military prowess (courage, discipline, cold-blooded determination) and religious
motivation (Power, altar, sacrificial poles etc.) indirectly by ascribing all these ideals to a
mad transsexual serial killer.

8
http://www.infidels.org/kiosk/author204.html (16.3.2012)
9
Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 1979

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4. Postmodern Critique of Frank’s Cult
The book’s namesake apparatus, the Wasp Factory itself, is an elaborate divination device:
―All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in.
The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses
mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid. The Wasp Factory is part of
the pattern because it is part of life and—even more so- part of death. Like life it is
complicated, so all the components are there. The reason it can answer questions is because
every question is a start looking for an end, and the Factory is about the End—death, no less.
Keep your entrails and sticks and dice and books and birds and voices and pendants and all
the rest of that crap; I have the Factory, and it's about now and the future; not the past.‖10
Factory constitutes one of the dominant elements in Frank’s private religion. In this context
the word private denotes that the whole cult evolved and revolves around Frank himself. In
this sense Frank’s cult may be counted among numerous postmodern self-realization or self-
actualization movements that have flourished since the 1960s at a large scale.

Nonetheless, pointing out this similarity ought not to conceal two radical differences between
New Age movement and Frank’s cult. Firstly, New Age systems of religious validation of
personal uniqueness publicly proselytised their version of the path to salvation or
enlightenment. Even though every adherent of New Age was supposed to find his own
individual Self there was a little to no discussion that everybody must restrict their cultic,
meditation and other practices solely to the boundaries of their personal past time. The
modern division of state and church was paralleled by an analogous division of public and
private dimensions of postmodern world. It has always been anathema for New Agers to stir
the beast of the Establishment with a piece of constructive critique. They have never struggled
for official power by means of a theocratic political party. New Age unconformity remained
totally loyal to the Enlightenment tenet that delegates religion to the realm of civil society. In
fact the fragmentation was deepened by one more step. It was preached that the only genuine
spiritual path is the path of non-violence, tolerance and individualism. The rest of religious
practices were condemned as authoritarian, hypocritical and hence intolerable. The only
community sanctioned (and not criticised) by New Age dogmas consisted of free, equal and
brotherly individuals. Hierarchy and authority was questioned even in the relationships
between parents and children.

10
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 7, Space Invaders, p. 42.

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In contrast, Frank would never approve of the idea that all people should be considered
equally valuable and that everyone is infinitely important. In Frank’s cult, he himself became
the exclusively sacred person. To be honest, many New Age doctrines only barely conceal
that their all-mankind-broad-unconditional love just compensates for their equally unlimited
self-centredness. The individualism in Frank’s cult does not spring out of compensatory bonds
with universalism. On the contrary, it represents a bizarre product of conscious tribalism and
exceptionalism, resembling to a haunting degree the cults of Egyptian pharaohs, Oriental god-
kings and Roman, Chinese etc. emperors or even mediaeval Christian kings. Banks, however,
as a stout critique of what he understands under the term religion, ridicules the parallel with
the following words of reborn Frances’: ―I was proud; eunuch but unique; a fierce and noble
presence in my lands, a crippled warrior, fallen prince.... Now I find I was the fool all along.‖

The similarity goes deeper because both Frank bears the same twin responsibility as divine
kings of yonder did. Kingship has traditionally consisted of profane and spiritual power,
authority and duties. It is no coincidence that there were clerics called “rex secrorum”11 in
Rome, “Archon Basileus”12 in Athens or that the Czech word for a priest “kněz” and a prince
“kníže” has got the same origin with German “koenig”, i.e. a king. Frank was also both a
chief military commander of his one-man army and a supreme spiritual leader of his one-man
church. The borders of his island empire were marked and magically protected by devices far
more macabre than mere frontier stones. Frank describes the role of his Sacrifice Poles in an
inner monologue as his ―early-warning system and deterrent rolled into one; infected, potent
things which looked out from the island, warding off. Those totems were my warning shot;
anybody who set foot on the island after seeing them should know what to expect.‖13 The
Poles in question are not called Sacrifice or infected for no reason. Every piece of the magical
firewall consists of several severed animal heads or whole creatures in case of those smaller,
less potent ones. The whole description of Poles’ function sounds pompous, archaic and
fanatical. Most postmodern Western people would be probably scared to death by just
listening to a speech like this. Witnessing to a person ranting about a non-traditional, violent
religion without irony or sarcasm can lead to just one conclusion. The speaker is a dangerous
11
The title means literally a sacred king. Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_sacrorum (2012-08-12).
12
The title literally means an anointed ruler. Cf. „The Archon Basileus was charged with overseeing the
organisation of religious rites.“ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon_basileus (2012-08-12).
13
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 65.

15
madman. Frank fits the description pretty well: ―That's my score to date. Three. I haven't
killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going
through.‖14

Freudian edge to the critique remains quite tangible even if only the titles of his most
notoriously known antireligious books are taken into account: “Totem and Taboo” and “The
Future of an Illusion”. For Freud religion was nothing but a collective neurosis stemming out
of the most urgent human wishes. Freud was quite an early critique of religion and therefore
in fact aimed only at the nineteenth century type of European monotheism (need for a father
figure and immortality of human soul). All these facts considered, there is no doubt that
Banks followed Freud only as far as to claim that cultic practices are products of a
pathological wishful thinking. Frank’s private religion does not include any personal loving
deities or believes concerning life after death. Both these key points of Freud’s attack on
dominant type of religion of his days are dismissed by Frank as pervasively mocks the
Christian notion of God as something unrealistic and in the most likelihood totally non-
existent. His dead relatives went ―to whatever they imagined their Maker was like‖15 and his
brother Eric went mad because there was a fundamental flaw in his personality, feminine
oversensitivity, which caused that ―(m)aybe some deep part of him, buried under layers of
time and growth like the Roman remains of a modem city, still believed in God, and could not
suffer the realisation that, if such an unlikely being did exist, it could suffer that to happen to
any of the creatures it had supposedly fashioned in its own image.‖16

The other significant difference between New Age and Frank’s religion therefore lies in their
directly opposite standpoints from which they criticise Christians and their concept of God.
Most hippies would focus on how brutal, violent and corrupted by political power
Christendom had been throughout its history. Especially crusades, witches processes and
destruction of supposedly “natural” heathenism belonged among pacifistic, feminist and anti-
industrial pet hates. These arch-crimes were attributed to male chauvinism and aggression
sanctioned by Christianity. On the contrary, Frank saw the feminine need for reconciliation,
wishful thinking of ultimately triumphing love and forgiveness as the most abhorrent vices of

14
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 2, The Snake Park, p. 13.
15
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 2, The Snake Park, p. 8.
16
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 10, Running Dog, p. 52.

16
Christian dogma against a realistic, scientific and manly worldview. New Agers strived to
promote historically newer and more differentiated development inside Christianity. Politics,
wars, nationalism and authoritative discipline of old patriarchal Judaism ought to have been
radically wiped out of “real” or “pure” spirituality. Universal scope of all-embracing
tenderness (faith, hope and love) became quite rightfully a trademark of the Primitive Church
and her founder chose to die as a political criminal when confronted with an armed
opposition. The sacrifice was made in order to prove that the faithful of God who is Love
must not resort to violence as a means to serve their ultimate purpose. Frank could not stand
such a concept and rather embraced more Mohammed-like view towards the value of
vengeance in the eyes of his God. Six years old Frank, after murdering his one-legged cousin
Blyth by putting a viper into his prosthetic leg, had a theological dispute with his older brother
Eric. The untimely death of a small boy was put into connection with God’s wrath over
Blyth’s killing boys’ rabbits with a flamethrower: ―All I said was that I thought it was a
judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the
instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a
religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a
terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was.‖17

As stated above Banks is an “evangelical atheist”. An interpretation was proposed that

Frank’s values are all rejected in Frances’ final monologue as misguided and erroneous.
These two general premises should logically lead to a conclusion that Frank’s critique of
Christian and New Age spirituality is either also rejected by Frances (and therefore in
contradiction to evangelical atheism or final epiphany) or an exception to the rule which
deserves further investigation. The first option leaves us disappointed and angry with Banks’
lack of intellectual integrity. The other option opens a new dialogue with an extremely
sophisticated message that a brilliant novelist enwove into the fabric of his story. Let us then
assume that critical thinking is the core of Frank’s personality that survives the apocalyptic
event of Frances’ psychological birth out of his ashes. The shock and pain of a sudden
collapse of the old self-image could not be better described than as a psychological equivalent

17
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 2, The Snake Park, p. 13.

17
of death:‖I want to laugh or cry or both, as I sit here, thinking about my one life, my three
deaths. Four deaths now, in a way, now that my father's truth has murdered what I was.‖18

Those experiences that revolutionise our worldviews are truly apocalyptic in both original and
derivative form of the word.19 As always Banks plays the card of inner vs. outer dichotomies
and analogies. Frank’s inner devastation and Frances’ resuscitation takes place on the
background of a real conflagration caused by Eric’s mad assault on his family. The flaming
inferno of burning sheep, swinging axe and exploding bombs foreshadowed the ultimate fate
of Frank’s. He survived the catastrophe. Or at least the nucleus of his psyche survived that
consisted of a paranoid pride of uniqueness and intelligence. For instance, Frank admitted he
could not convince Eric to give up his arsonist plans with these words: ―(N)o normal brain—
not even mine, which was far from normal and more powerful than most- could match that
marshalling of forces.‖20

Critical thinking helped Frances to get over the most critical stage of her phoenix-like rebirth.
All the crimes were rationalised and explained, put away from her herself in stricto sensu.
Even though the continuity was accepted as logical, carrying the burden of Frank’s old crimes
was not deemed fair from the analytical point of view: ―But I am still me; I am the same
person, with the same memories and the same deeds done, the same (small) achievements, the
same (appalling) crimes to my name. Why? How could I have done those things? Perhaps it
was because I thought I had had all that really mattered in the world, the whole reason—and
means—for our continuance as a species, stolen from me before I even knew its value.
Perhaps I murdered for revenge in each case, jealously exacting—through the only potency at
my command—a toll from those who passed within my range; my peers who each would
otherwise have grown into the one thing I could never become: an adult.‖21

18
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 64.
19
Apocalypse is a Greek word for revelation whose meaning was transposed to denote just the most spectacular
content of the most influential, biblical revelation. In New Testament the Apocalypse of Saint John or the Book
of Revelation of Saint John depicts the future cataclysmic end of the world, the Last Judgment and the beginning
of completely new life – either in heaven or in hell. The vivid imagery of the horrendous destruction (Great
Tribulations) preceding the Last Judgment became equivalent with the word apocalypse in modern European
languages.
20
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 8, The Wasp Factory, p. 45.
21
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 64, 65.

18
Stubborn, courageous and open-minded search for the Truth is therefore celebrated as the
only unambiguously positive trait of Frank’ and Frances’ alike. Critical thinking can save us
in the same manner it saved them. Not from suffering or responsibility that naturally came
with life, but from illusions and delusions that hurt people unnecessarily, i.e. unnaturally. In
my opinion, Banks moral lesson reads that only our own individual reason can provide us
with the Ariadne’s thread that will lead us out of the labyrinth inside which unnatural
monsters are crouching and feeding on human flesh. Remember that you can not leave until
you have killed your own personal Minotaur – a man-eater with human body but animal head.
Put off the mask of a beast and join the people outside dungeons. And do not forget to help
the others to get from the dark to the light, too.

Frank confronted his and Eric’s demons at night: ―He looked at me. His face was bearded,
dirty, like an animal mask. It was the boy, the man I had known, and it was another person
entirely. That face was grinning and leering and sweating, and it beat to and fro as his chest
heaved in and out and the flames pulsed.‖22

Frances and Eric met in the bright morning: ―I found Eric lying asleep on the dune above the
Bunker, head in the swaying grass, curled up like a little child. I went up to him and sat
beside him for a while, then spoke his name, nudged his shoulder. He woke up, looked at me
and smiled. 'Hello, Eric,' I said. He held out one hand and I clasped it. He nodded, still
smiling. Then he shifted, put his curly head on my lap, closed his eyes and went to sleep.‖23

22
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 11, The Prodigal, p. 62.
23
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 64, 65.

19
5. Sympathy for a Devil
There is a general theory of the relation between author’s “being” and his “consciousness”
manifested in his work. Karl Mannheim pointed out that when we want to embrace a certain
state of things we just describe it affectionately without any further analysis.24 This
conservative stance is opposed by a reformist viewpoint that goes beneath the surface of a
studied phenomenon and tries to “dismantle” it into rational elements. Using a template of
ideal norms for judging the present reality of course leads to an assumption that the reality
should be shaped into a better, more sensible state of affairs, free of the irrational burdens of
the nowadays.25 TWF represents a brilliant fusion of both a conservative and reformist
attitude.

As stated above, the final epiphany allowed Banks to use conservative narration technique for
everything he wanted to ridicule or warn against. All pre-Frances Frank’s horrendous actions
and deranged views are delivered in such a package. It means that told stories and disclosed
feelings or ideas are not rendered as a dubious material to be questioned and analysed in order
to reshape that something fundamentally flawed or at least imperfect but rather as a kind of
myth that confirms the value and significance of what Frank was, is and will be – ideally
forever. The style of conservative narration makes it extremely difficult for readers not to
sympathise with Frank in spite of his vicious bizarreness. This way Iain Banks shows to all
readers that are honest with themselves how alluring the power of mythical tales is that
exculpate and aggrandize the pivotal character (be it individual or collective) of the narrative.

On the other hand Frances speaks in a tone that suggests a liberal position of a person who
firmly believes in an ever enfolding process of life. Frances warns against the idea that the
world is and will be the same place as it has always been. Our need for the feeling of secure
definiteness and regularity forces us to construct our own personal Factories, models of life

24
―The conservative type of knowledge originally is the sort of knowledge giving practical control. It consists of
habitual and often also of reflective orientations towards those factors which are immanent in the situation.‖
From: Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, 1936 (1954
English translation), p. 206. http://www.unz.org/Pub/MannheimKarl-1936 (2012-08-09).
25
The liberal „ideal of reason, set up as the goal, contrasted with the existing state of affairs, and it was
necessary to bridge the gap between the imperfection of things as they occurred in a state of nature and the
dictates of reason by means of the concept of progress. From: Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. An
Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, 1936 (1954 English translation), p. 200.
(http://www.unz.org/Pub/MannheimKarl-1936 (2012-08-09).

20
that allow us to control or at least accept our limited worlds by and at the cost of ignoring
everything outside the box. Frances, however, preaches that the intrinsically unfitting
stationary models of a dynamic reality are prone to collapse at the moment of enlightenment:
―Each of us, in our own personal Factory, may believe we have stumbled down one corridor,
and that our fate is sealed and certain (dream or nightmare, humdrum or bizarre, good or
bad), but a word, a glance, a slip—anything can change that, alter it entirely, and our marble
hall becomes a gutter, or our rat-maze a golden path. Our destination is the same in the end,
but our journey—part chosen, part determined- is different for us all, and changes even as we
live and grow.‖26

Even though Frances does not explicitly express a belief in an unilinear progress but in an
inevitably transient character of life, it seems that she welcomes broadening of horizons as
something valuable and worthy all the turmoil it may bring along. Moreover, in the case of
Frank/Frances there is a little doubt that accepting transiency of evolving worldviews dawned
a very promising new day – both in a literal and figurative sense of the word. Banks uses the
ancient notion of weather conditions mirroring the inner psychological processes: ―The
weather had cleared. No storm, no thunder and lightning, just a wind out of the west
sweeping all the cloud away out to sea, and the worst of the heat with it. Like a miracle,
though more likely just an anticyclone over Norway. So it was bright and clear and cool.‖27 28
It remains unclear what is Frances’, let alone Banks’, attitude towards the subjectively
meaningful coincidence of objectively causally unrelated phenomena. The perceived
numinosity of the inner experience is instantaneously dismissed by a hardcore scientific
causal rationalisation. The term “synchronicity” was coined by a Swiss psychologist Carl
Gustav Jung to denote (subjectively) meaningful coincidences of inner and outer reality or in

26
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 65.
27
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 64.
28
Cf. Mannheim’s assertion about liberalism that “the central elements of the intellectualistic mentality were
open to the clear light of day. The dominating mood of the Enlightenment, the hope that at last light would dawn
on the world, has long survived to give these ideas even at this late stage their driving power. However, in
addition to this promise which stimulated fantasy and looked to a distant horizon, the deepest driving forces of
the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment lay in the fact that it appealed to the free will and kept alive the feeling of
being indeterminate and unconditioned.‖ From: Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction to the
Sociology of Knowledge, 1936 (1954 English translation), p. 206. ( http://www.unz.org/Pub/MannheimKarl-
1936 (2012-08-09)

21
other words an accumulation of symbolically, not causally related occurrences.29 In the
context of Frances’ final epiphany it might be plausibly argued that after the discovery of her
“true nature” Frances is no longer willing to yield herself to the magical thinking that relates
everything to her ego and finally sees the things clearly and from the perspective that sheds
illuminating light on objective, scientifically explicable “natural truth”.

It may be concluded that although dispelling of clouds of delusions may be very harsh or
virtually unbearable, it has got a liberating and invigorating potential in a sense of two very
famous aphorisms: ―And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.‖30 and
―What does not kill me, makes me stronger.‖31 These two classics could be completed with a
sinister quote of Dexter’s: ―Conscience is a killer.‖32 Frances is able to resist the temptation
of a suicidal escape from the remorse pressure mainly because her sharp analytical reasoning
separated the old personality and the new one. Frank is seen as a victim of a cruel deception
who passed on the destructive urges of others in magnified, truly abominable dimensions and
forms. All the kills were sacrifices to non-existent gods, bloodsucking apparitions and
delirious demons: ―Now it all turns out to have been for nothing. There was no revenge that
needed taking, only a lie, a trick that should have been exposed, a disguise which even from
the inside I should have seen through, but in the end did not want to. I was proud; eunuch but
unique; a fierce and noble presence in my lands, a crippled warrior, fallen prince.... Now I
find I was the fool all along.‖ With a new name and gender, Frances feels that she reached the
end of the old path, and standing at the crossroads, she can choose what turning she will take.
Actually, Banks selects more appropriate wording in order to render the atmosphere of a
newly gained objective point of view: ―Now the door closes, and my journey begins.‖

In the last chapter Banks suggests that, generally spoken, all sins and crimes have their roots
in inadequate interpersonal relationships and in a consequently twisted self-image. The whole
story implies that the “island mentality”33 leads to the emergence of pathology. Being isolated

29
Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity (2012-08-10)
30
From: John 8:32, http://dedication.www3.50megs.com/truth_free.html (2012-08-10).
31
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888. Cf. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/38037.html
32
From: http://www.veidt.com/?p=2145 (2012-08-10).
33
“Believing in my great hurt, my literal cutting off from society's mainland, it seems to me that I took life in a
sense too seriously, and the lives of others, for the same reason, too lightly.‖ (emphasised by RH) From: The
Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 65.

22
and separated from what and whom we really love inevitably distorts our notions of right and
wrong and results in an acute need for morbid and bizarre substitutions. Here again it
becomes clear that TWF cannot be seen as an affirmation of post-modern “everything-goes”
ideology. From the perspective of the last chapter the reader observes that Frank’s insanity
can be explained as a result of the Cauldhames’ family tragedy. There is no room for a
metaphysical evil existing on its own as a supernatural element defying rational analysis. All
the monstrous actions are shown as being caused by deprivation of basic personal needs.
Little Frances was deserted by her mother and rejected by her father. The terrible void opened
inside Frank’s soul and, as it is inevitable with all human beings, the “horror vacui” made him
hastily construct a substitute identity. Frances sums up this insight: ―Lacking, as one might
say, one will, I forged another.‖34 Ironically enough, it means that the “evangelical atheist”
Banks promotes Christian dogma of evil as a mere lack of good.

Nevertheless, in the classical concept of evil as the absence or deprivation of good, i.e. God
(privatio boni), Thomas Aquinas equates moral good (being empathic/good to someone) and
existential good (being efficient/good at something) as it is inevitable in any strictly
monotheistic religion that merges all the desirable features into the image of One True God.
Frank Cauldhame on the other hand is extremely good at doing what he does (bombs making,
dams building, running, shaving, religious rituals observing, philosophical reasoning and, of
course, killing in particular) which does not mean he has genuine feelings to anybody but a
dwarf Jamie and his mad brother Eric. Frank’s relationship with his father is explicitly
ambiguous: ―I've always had a rather ambivalent attitude towards something happening to
my father, and it persists. A death is always exciting, always makes you realise how alive you
are, how vulnerable but so-far-lucky; but the death of somebody close gives you a good
excuse to go a bit crazy for a while and do things that would otherwise be inexcusable. What
delight to behave really badly and still get loads of sympathy! But I'd miss him, and I don't
know what the legal position would be about me staying on here by myself.‖ Reading these
lines about the prospect of a death in the family strikes horror and disgust in heart.
Nonetheless, the childish openness and all-out selfishness provokes eruptions of laughter. The
level incongruence between the expected and the performed determines the intensity of
comical effect. Usually, people laugh at the expense of somebody who wanted to or was
expected to behave maturely but failed to. Frank’s high brow stylisation of the last sentence
stands out as a sore thumb after the abhorrent hymn to death-related fun and a minimalistic

34
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 65.

23
confession to a normal emotional reaction. We should be terrified but instead we end up
perplexed, amused and positively curious what will come next. The whole book can be
therefore labelled a “sympathy for devil” novel.

24
6. Narcissism and Violence
Undoubtedly, the most unique feature of TWF lies in the emphasis which is put on the
description of psychologically plausible births of anti-heroes. An early childhood trauma
has always been perceived as a typical feature of great leaders, heroes and prophets.
Orphanage, semi-orphanage or adoption belong among those most widely spread means of
Fate or God’s Providence how to discard common identity of the chosen one and replace it by
a fanatical clinging to an ideal way too extreme for a “normal” or “average” everyman. To
name only some of the most famous exemplars: Zeus, Sargon, Moses, Romulus, Buddha, and
Jesus were all adopted at a very early age. When the nucleus identity of an infant lacks
unfettering love and admiration from so called selfobjects (mother and later also father) their
personality grows up around a narcissistically wounded centre. This unenviable state gets
progressively worse as the instable personality demands gradually more and more energy to
keep stress levels at reasonable levels. All the protection mechanisms need upkeep and
psychological development of narcissistically wounded personality is therefore split between
facing new life challenges and continual care of compensation mechanisms that protect
personality core from breaking apart. Those people whose nucleus self is fragile
unconsciously demand absolute love or admiration throughout their life as they were denied
unfettering parental love in their infanthood. Such demands cannot be met with understanding
under normal circumstances and narcissists therefore seek for never ending stream of extreme
self-aggrandizing in one way or another. Frank’s held himself in a certainly high esteem:
―The rocks of the Bomb Circle usually get me thinking and this time was no exception,
especially considering the way I'd lain down inside them like some Christ or something,
opened to the sky, dreaming of death.‖35 And as his monologue enfolds, Frank is absolutely
mesmerized by memories of his own actions and “achievements”, especially those involving
suffering, terror and death that he caused with impunity: ―Well, Paul went about as quickly as
you can go; I was certainly humane that time. Blyth had lots of time to realise what was
happening, jumping about the Snake Park screaming as the frantic and enraged snake bit his
stump repeatedly, and little Esmerelda must have had some inkling what was going to happen
to her as she was slowly blown away.‖36

35
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 4, The Bomb Circle, p. 22.
36
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 4, The Bomb Circle, p. 22.

25
A famous psychologist Heinz Kohut believes that in therapy sessions a well trained, insightful
and longsuffering therapist can assume the position of a substitute parental selfobject for time
long enough to heal the narcissistic wound. During so called “transmuting internalizations” a
narcissist absorbs waves of forced self-admiration that he projects onto a therapist. There are
some typical routes which a healing process can take. First of them is “idolizing transference”
during which a narcissist perceives a therapist as the best and absolutely perfect person in the
world – because it is the way all people need to perceive their parents, i.e. those caring person
who pay all they sincere and loving attention to in their infanthood. Therapist does so for a
needy narcissist and the inevitable outcome of this psychodrama is a childish idolization of a
parental figure.

Another option is called “mirroring transference” in which a narcissist patient uses a therapist
to confirm and praise good qualities. Supposedly this process leads to a firm internalization of
positive evaluation and hence to an emergence of a reliable self or in other words a stable
psychological core of a healthy self-esteem. “Twinship transference” occurs when a narcissist
perceives an analyst as a person who shares the same tremendously admirable characteristics
with him or her. They are in fact the same fantastic persons. This outer bombastic self-image
of a narcissist however only compensate for a real self-esteem rooted in early childhood
experience. The narcissists are always endangered by a full-blown realisation of their own
inferiority complex because a realistic and healthy self-image must always be created and
continually confirmed in relationships to somebody or something external. Narcissists crave
for a childish solipsistic self-aggrandisation because they never experienced enough of it in a
proper phase of their psychological development. Unfortunately, they must reduce other
people, animate and inanimate objects in their vicinity to a mere prolongation of their own
personal needs and even of their personalities. This attitude denies autonomy and to a large
extent even reality to people surrounding a narcissist for whom real are only those beings that
are confirming his compensatory self-aggrandisation. Such a fixation on archaic needs of
one’s self makes it highly unlikely for a narcissist to establish close and long-lasting
relationships with anyone but equally damaged persons. The deeper the damage goes the
more obnoxious and obscure forms the compensation takes. Vicious circle is completed.

Modern (read: 19th century and later) secular psychology proposes a liberation from the
vicious circle through a therapeutic relationship. In a vulgar secularist simplification this is
very often seen as a progress and major change in comparison with religious salvation. On
one hand there is human relationship based on a scientific theory while on the other hand

26
there is worship of illusionary “supernatural” forces or beings based on a religious dogma.
Fortunately, “by selfobject Kohut means the experience of another – more precisely, the
experience of impersonal functions provided by another – as part of the self. “37 Vitally
important psychological “impersonal functions” can be according to Kohut internalized
through the encounter with “another” who provides them.

This implies two conclusions:

1. Psychological functions are objective, impersonal and independent of individual living

people in a very similar way as laws of physics, chemistry or biology – psychological
functions shape our lives and are to be respected.

2. Psychological functions need “another” - a medium through which they can be perceived as
objectively valid and then internalized.

Even though Kohut himself considered only living people as suitable selfobjects this irrational
restriction might be plausibly ascribed to a generalized anxiety of mainstream psychoanalysts
about non-human healing agents. Talk therapy centred on personal urges and inhibitions has
been the trademark and even the war banner of psychoanalysis since the times of the founder
father Freud and this can be hardly changed. If it was possible, then perhaps only at the cost
of being ostracized and excommunicated from the movement (Jung, Adler, etc.). For our
purposes it must be emphasised that even work and especially art can reflect our desires for
wholeness and salvation and produce effects comparable with Kohut’s therapy. Any piece of
art, craftsmanship, scientific research or administration work that is suitable to serve as a
projection of impersonal psyche functions facilitates “transmuting internalization” in a similar
way to a psychoanalyst.3839

37
http://www.selfpsychologypsychoanalysis.org/selfobject.shtml (17. 3. 2012)
38
Cf. the notion of “ekklesiomorphic institutions”, a sort of factories on salvation, in: Stanislav Komárek, Sto
esejů o přírodě a společnosti. Praha 1995 or Stanislav Komárek, Lidská přirozenost. Praha 1998. The concept
was inspired by: Eugen Drewermann, Kleriker. Psychogramm eines Ideals, Olten 1990.
39
Cf. “Most mandalas have an intuitive, irrational character and, through their symbolical content, exert a
retroactive influence on the unconscious. They therefore possess a "magical" significance, like icons, whose
possible efficacy was never consciously felt by the patient.“ http://www.netreach.net/~nhojem/jung.htm (2012-
08-13). From Concerning Mandala Symbolism. C. G. Jung. trans. from C. G. Jung, Uber Mandalasymbolik.
Gestaltungen des Unbewussten, Zürich, 1950.

27
Intense relationship to one’s “special” objects or institutions can span from superstitious
fetishism, fervent worship to noble dedication. In all cases religion is considered to deal with
these projection techniques of soul care. The notion of an unsurpassable gap and even
essential enmity between religious and psychological soul cares was undermined by several
noted scholars (e.g. Jung, Campbell, Maslow), but generally spoken there is no will on part of
both therapists and clerics to abandon their trench war policies. Such a clear distinction
between our know-how and their know-how works wondrously in establishing “tribal” or
“worldview” group identities, less so in searching for a more global synthesis that would help
overcome ideological provincionalism.

TWF presents the reader with a disturbing depiction of a narcissistic character and his
bizarre idiosyncratic attempts to keep at bay his excruciating feelings of inferiority and
fragmentation. Banks’ decision to tell the story from a deeply damaged madman’s
perspective does make the reader to sympathise with the monster. The narration technique
also turns all the tragic into a sort of black humour grotesque as we cannot but be amused by
childishness and conceit that characterize every single line of Frank’s comments. Readers are
manoeuvred into laughter over his monstrously distorted vision of his actions, their
motivation and results.

28
7. Misogyny and Good Intentions
At a conscious level Frank ascribes his insecurity predominantly to his assumed genital
mutilation and also to his blighted family history. In both cases gender, its biological basis
and psychological component, plays an essential role in understanding Frank’s personality.
His mother left him and his father behind, running away from all responsibility for the family
in order to pursue her hippie happiness. Children that are separated from one of their parents
characteristically exhibit guilt anxiety as their mythopoetic and self-centred perception of
reality instantly builds a pseudo-causal connection between what children can do and what
happens to their family. Many small children therefore consider a divorce their own fault to a
certain degree because it is more acceptable for their weak, developing selves to live in a
reality of guilt than in a reality that is completely out of their control and in which bad things
happen without any understandable causes.40 Banks goes a step behind this stage when
introducing Frank’s coping strategy. Frank was psychologically able to project all the guilt
not only onto his biological mother, but women in general: “My GREATEST ENEMIES are
Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in
the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, (…) Women... well, women are a bit
too close for comfort as far as I'm concerned. I don't even like having them on the island, not
even Mrs Clamp, who comes every week on a Saturday to clean the house and deliver our
supplies. She's ancient and sexless the way the very old and the very young are, but she's still
been a woman, and I resent that, for my own good reason. ―41

The factors that contributed to such a totally undiscriminating prejudice must have been made
strong enough by Banks in order to maintain psychological plausibility of his character study.
Banks produced a colossal complex of misogyny stirring circumstances which in all its
colossal improbability cannot but provoke reader’s sense of absurdity and black humour. It is

40
In a review of Elizabeth Marquardt: Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce a
psychotherapist Thomas J. Burns says: ―Perhaps even more disturbing, parents show remarkable perseverance
in keeping the past alive, and the "visitation handoffs" are dreaded by children because their natural parents
cannot let grievances die. Marquandt gives examples of children who feel responsible for their parents' pain and
end up becoming the emotional caregivers. Divorce in effect robs a child of childhood.‖ (Emphasised by RH.)
From: http://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Worlds-Children-Divorce/dp/0307237109 (2012-08-07)

41
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 3, In the Bunker, p. 14.

29
not only a character of Frank’s reckless Hell's Angel-esque mother who abandoned men of his
family.

Frank has an older half-brother Eric whose mother died when giving birth to him. It was the
first, very tragic separation which Cauldhame Senior had to undergo. Even though Banks is
not explicit, his several hints suggest that Mr Cauldhame was deeply stricken with grief and
that his second marriage might have been a bit desperate and forced attempt to escape
depressions that followed the first Mrs Cauldhame demise. At the beginning of the second
chapter Frank describes a photograph in which his father ―was holding a portrait-sized
photograph of his first wife, Eric's mother, and she was the only one who was smiling. My
father was staring at the camera looking morose.‖42 However, the tragic dimension is
wrapped in a numbing display of bizarreness and banality. The quoted passage is preceded by
a dry, matter-of-fact description of cleaning after a twisted ritual (―I TOOK the little cinder
that was the remains of the wasp and put it into a matchbox…‖43). Even more emotionally
cold and sarcastic is the final sentence of the family photo’s description: ―The young Eric was
looking away and picking his nose, looking bored.‖ The whole “wrapping” of a personal
tragedy in aloof, black humorous observations can be at a superficial level considered as a
mere fan service to cynical audience. At a deeper level it can be understood as a very precise,
truly empathetic depiction of a fictitious but completely plausible psychopath and his inner
world that is almost entirely flat from the emotional perspective. Frank is not touched by the
picture in a normal way as a healthy interpersonal rapport is substituted (compensated) by a
rather disturbing religious cult centred around Frank’s own family: ―When the ritual
standing-down of the Factory was completed I went back to the altar, looking round it at all
its parts, the assortment of miniature plinths and small jars, the souvenirs of my life, the
previous things I've found and kept. Photographs of all my dead relations, the ones I've killed
and the ones that just died. Photographs of the living: Eric, my father, my mother.
Photographs of things; a BSA 500 (not the bike, unfortunately; I think my father destroyed all
the photographs of it), the house when it was still bright with swirling paint, even a
photograph of the altar itself.‖44

Nevertheless, the death of Eric’s mother took place long before Frank was born and therefore
it is Mr Cauldhame who is portrayed as the original vessel of profound bitterness towards
42
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 2, The Snake Park, p. 6.
43
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 2, The Snake Park, p. 6.
44
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 8, The Wasp Factory, p. 44.

30
women. After one of the harshest strikes of destiny, death of a beloved spouse giving birth to
the couple’s first child, Mr Cauldhame was smitten down by yet another fatal blow to his
belief in a generally benign nature of life. His second wife, Agnes, was a peculiar choice for a
life partner. Even though mixed feelings towards a semi orphan are quite understandable -
because the idea of being a parent for somebody who is a constant living reminder of
husband’s previous love can be quite unsettling – most women are eventually overwhelmed
by the innocence and cuteness of an adopted child, especially when they are very young. In a
stark contrast to this happy ending conclusion, Agnes Cauldhame ―didn't like children in
general and Eric in particular; she thought he was bad for her karma in some way.‖45 Both
her emotional attitude and rational theory give an impression of a pathological person who
consciously rejects not only mainstream worldview but also the most basic paternal instincts.

Indian concept of karma was very popular with the adherents of various alternative lifestyles
in the 60s. Especially because “karma” was simplified into a notion of a cosmic law that
echoes back all you give to the other beings. The karmic concept portraits the world
unambiguously as a place where practice of nonviolence (in accordance with the so called
golden rule46) is the only truly rational way of living. In spite of her hippie terminology Agnes
does not feel any affection to children at all, even to her own newborn. ―Probably the same
dislike of children led her to desert me immediately after my birth, and also caused her only
to return on that one, fateful occasion when she was at least partly responsible for my little
accident. All in all, I think I have good reason to hate her. I lay there in the Bomb Circle
where I killed her other son, and I hoped that she was dead, too.‖ In this passage it is again
evidenced that Frank is not able to consciously experience anything that would endanger his
so painstakingly constructed feeling of strength, independence and emotional invulnerability.
He does not show self-pity or desire to reunite with his mother. He seems not puzzled,
disappointed or hurt by his mother’s actions anymore. She is perceived as pure evil and Frank
is determined not to suffer from it ever again. It appears that out of the instinct of self-
preservation victims of severe abuse opt for a psychological strategy consisting in accepting
the vision of world where “might is right” and at the same time aggressively refuse to end up
as a victim again. The only possible outcome of such a life lesson lies in assumption of the
opposite role in the archetypical situation, i.e. of the bully.

45
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 4, The Bomb Circle, p. 22.
46
―One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.‖
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (2012-08-01)

31
Moreover, Frank is determined to purge the world from anything that has connection with the
original tormentor. Even though it is far more common for general public to associate abuse
with direct violence, humiliation and intimidation, psychologists ever since Adler have been
pointing out the devastating effect of parental indifference and neglect. Frank hates his mother
for deserting him. She was also responsible for Frank’s first separation from his much
admired and beloved half-brother Eric: ―It was she who let the Stoves take Eric away to
Belfast, away from the island, away from what he knew. They thought that my father was a
bad parent because he dressed Eric in girl's clothes and let him run wild, and my mother let
them take him because she didn't like children in general and Eric in particular.‖47 That is
what Frank consciously felt and thought about his mother at the age of sixteen. There was no
redeeming quality in women at all. Their treacherous nature was to be banished from the
world in as big scale as it was possible for Frank. Such a blind hatred towards all feminine is
easily recognisable for an uninvolved observer as a result of inappropriate generalization
fallacy. The same diagnosis holds true for Mr Cauldhame as well. Nonetheless, there is no
easy way to transform profound personal anguish and despair into an elevated scientific
perspective.

Mr Cauldhame lost his first wife and his second wife gave birth to his daughter Frances and
made him reject his son Eric. Then she left both him and Frances. At the top of that Agnes
returned to him only to give another birth - this time to a child of another man. Such an
outrageous act alone could make many a man fly into rage. Unfaithful wife on the run that
dares to come back for the sole purpose of taking a shelter in a house of her humiliated
husband is an infuriating situation. However, Mr Cauldhame swallowed the insult and helped
Agnes in distress. Actually, it was Agnes’s own irrational and irresponsible behaviour that
puts her in danger: ―WHEN Agnes Cauldhame arrived, eight and a half months pregnant, on
her BSA 500 with the swept-back handlebars and eye of Sauron painted red on the petrol-
tank, my father was, perhaps understandably, not ferociously pleased to see her. (…) Agnes,
tanned, huge, all beads and bright caftan, determined to give birth in the lotus position (in
which she claimed the child had been conceived) while going 'Om', refused to answer any of
my father's questions about where she had been for the three years and who she had been

47
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 4, The Bomb Circle, p. 22.

32
with. She told him not to be so possessive about her and her body. She was well and with
child; that was all he needed to know.‖48

No one could blame Mr Cauldhame from a lack of good will. In fact, he exhibited quite a
suspicious amount of understanding for or rather submission to a woman who was so arrogant
as to dictate him an unconditional surrender to all her utterly impudent demands bordering on
insanity. According to information available to Frank, his mother never apologised and as the
story goes on the readers are provided with material evidence indeed: ―Agnes didn't stay long.
She spent two days recovering, (...) then got on her bike and roared off. My father tried to
stop her by standing in her way, so she ran him over and broke his leg quite badly, on the
path before the bridge.‖49 Frank therefore quite understandably contemplated possible
reasons that had made his father agree that he would house, feed, nurse and deliver Agnes:
―Whether he was secretly glad to have her back, and perhaps even had some foolish idea that
she might be back to stay, I can't say. I don't think he is all that forceful really, despite the
aura of brooding presence he can show when he wants to be impressive. I suspect that my
mother's obviously determined nature would have been enough to master him.‖50

Frank can perceive that his father might still have loved Agnes, but that is - in Frank’s view -
not an extenuating circumstance. On the contrary, Frank is able to understand irrationally
forgiving or at least ambiguous nature of Mr Cauldhame’s affection only as a sign of
weakness, be it of reason or of willpower. Such a position completely dismisses the value of
emotionality and is not a real help when it comes down to understanding of psychological
importance of romantic love. Actually, throughout the novel there is no mention about Frank
ever falling in love. That seems very suspicious as people in general suffer from acute need to
be in love with somebody during their teenage years. Romantic involvement (stretching from
platonic love, daydreaming, writing poems, first dates and kisses to bravado-styled exploring
of sexuality) forms the centre of most teenagers’ life values. Falling in love belongs among
one of the most widely shared numinous51 experiences and ever since the romanticism era the

48
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 6, The Skull Grounds, p. 37.
49
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 6, The Skull Grounds, p. 38.
50
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 6, The Skull Grounds, p. 37.
51
Here used in the sense that was coined by ―the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book Das
Heilige (1917; translated into English as The Idea of the Holy, 1923), who described it as the power or presence
of a divinity. According to Otto, the numinous experience has in addition to the tremendum, which is the
tendency to invoke fear and trembling, a quality of fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The

33
western culture has been plagued by works of art that depict and idealise heterosexual lovers’
relationship as the most sacred value out there. Nonetheless, Frank appears to be through and
through immune to it.

There are psychological theories that describe mechanisms responsible for falling in love.
Generally, love is considered as a relationship in which our subconscious expectations of our
ideal partner are met. These expectations have always something to do with the idea of
perfection achieved by completing the whole with two matching opposite parts. Romantic
love is the encounter with the numinous “wholly other”. There are two widely recognised
varieties of romantic love: “passionate” and “compassionate” love. Passionate love can be
labelled “Jungian” because the famous concept of archetype anima/animus was introduced by
a Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung: “The anima and animus are described by Jung as
elements of his theory of the collective unconscious, a domain of the unconscious that
transcends the personal psyche. In the unconscious of the male, it finds expression as a
feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the unconscious of the female it is
expressed as a masculine inner personality: animus.‖52 Jung ascribed natural, innately
configured tendency to develop technical rationality to men and the analogous tendency to
develop caring emotionality to women. The complementary features supposedly atrophy
because of both nature (gender genetics) and nurture (gender politics) and are therefore
hidden or suppressed beneath the light of daily consciousness. Nevertheless, all human beings
strife for wholeness in so called process of “individuation” and therefore seek for a way how
to redeem their anima/animus from the atrophied and subconscious state. The most natural
way is to project our unmet need for psychologically androgynous wholeness to a person who
can be more or less suitable for such a role. Such a compensation for our lacking qualities is
experienced as a miracle full of infinite promises and deep meaning. Another psychologist,
Elaine Hatfield, has described passionate love as a ―state of intense longing for union with
another. (...) Reciprocated love (union with the other) is associated with fulfilment and
ecstasy. Unrequited love (separation) with emptiness, anxiety, or despair‖53.

numinous experience also has a personal quality to it, in that the person feels to be in communion with a wholly
other. The numinous experience can lead in different cases to belief in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the
holy, and/or the transcendent.‖ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous 2012-07-31)
52
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_and_animus (2012-07-31)
53
http://psychology.about.com/od/loveandattraction/a/compassionate.htm (2012-07-31)

34
“Jungian” or “passionate” love seems to be an ad hoc compensation of problems with our own
one-sidedness and corresponding inferiority complex. The state, according to Hatfield, lasts
between 6 and 30 months. In an optimistic scenario, “passionate” love undergoes a
transformation into “compassionate” one. This relationship relies more on intimacy, sharing
and mutual commitment. This sort of happiness soothes worries and tensions, hence
contributes to establishment of a calm, mature self-confidence. In the terminology of
humanistic psychotherapy people able of a compassionate love have their ideal self in
congruence with they personally experienced self image. That is of course much easier after
6 to 30 months of a close relationship with an idolized selfobject.54 In the terminology of
humanistic psychotherapy people able of a compassionate love have their ideal self in
congruence with they personally experienced self image.

If all those abovementioned factors are taken into a consideration the whole love business
seems to be a layman’s version of psychotherapy. That position appears to be just one side of
a coin and the other side taps into the dark waters of a primordial, Darwinian struggle for
propagation of the fittest. While the model of humanistic psychology stresses spiritual and
teleological (towards-a-higher-purpose-aiming) dimensions of erotic fascination, there is
another school of thought which puts emphasis on the basic instincts and urges. Today these
thinkers are known sociobiologists or evolutionary psychologists and they usually pay
homage to Charles Darwin or Sigmund Freud as to their prophetic precursor and founding
father. Long before Freud and earlier than Darwin German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer,
wrote his “Metaphysics of Love” where he asserts that: ―Every kind of love, however ethereal
it may seem to be, springs entirely from the instinct of sex; indeed, it is absolutely this instinct,
only in a more definite, specialised, and perhaps, strictly speaking, more individualised
form.‖55 In other words, love serves as a drug that lures people into a blind obedience to the
nature’s most fundamental imperative: ―the establishment of the next generation‖.56

Schopenhauer is quite monomaniacal about his explanation and covets his theory as the only
secret key to the understanding of the origin of love. That sounds a bit presumptuous but it

from: Hatfield, E., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Love, sex, and intimacy: Their psychology, biology, and history. New
York: HarperCollins.
54
Cf. Kohut‘s selfobject theory. (p.)
55
Arthur Schpenhauer, Metaphysics of Love, p. 2. From:
http://pryazhnikov.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/mataphysics_of_love_eng.pdf (2012-08-13).
56
Arthur Schpenhauer, Metaphysics of Love, p. 2. From:
http://pryazhnikov.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/mataphysics_of_love_eng.pdf (2012-08-13).

35
also gives enough vigour to his arguments that can therefore serve as a healthy counterbalance
to the equally extreme position of some idealistic humanistic psychologists that prefer to talk
only about soul mates, soul twins etc. The raw power of flesh, however, seems to influence
human romantic preferences as heavily as our psychological needs of individuation or self
actualisation. Shopenhauer puts it this way: ―Hence the most manly man will desire the most
womanly woman, and vice versa, and so each will want the individual that exactly
corresponds to him in degree of sex. Inasmuch as two persons fulfil this necessary relation
towards each other, it is instinctively felt by them and is the origin, together with the other
relative considerations, of the higher degrees of love.‖57

Even as cynical thinker as Schopenhauer somewhat trimmed his theory for the symmetry’s
sake. Today’s popular theory has it that we all struggle to mate with as much attractive
(wo/manly) partner as possible and moreover that there is a constant secretly waged gender
war. That war consists in tensions between different behavioural strategies of men and
women. Women crave for stable, long-lasting protection of a responsible father to their
children, while men are driven to spread their genes in as big scale as it is possible. These
strategies (female monoandry and male polygamy) are supposedly “natural” because of
human biological differences: one egg a month and 9 months of pregnancy versus dozens of
millions sperms a day and no biological responsibility for the outcome of conception. This
popularization of sociobiology is being promoted not only by direct pseudoscientific
propaganda, but also by virtually all documentaries about wildlife whose message “all living
organisms, homo sapiens sapiens included, live to survive long enough for proliferation of
their genes” instil the dogma far more efficiently. Still, documentaries cannot stand a
comparison with the impact of Hollywood film industry (and its epigones) that has been quite
rightfully nicknamed “the dream factory”. Hollywood literally manufactures the most vivid
artistic form used for storytelling, a perfect embodiment of Wagnerian Gesammtkunstwerk.
Frank admits the profound influence film heroes had on him and his notion of manliness
ideal: ―I believe that I decided if I could never become a man, I—the unmanned would out-
man those around me, and so I became the killer, a small image of the ruthless soldier-hero
almost all I've ever seen or read seems to pay strict homage to.‖58 Banks lets his hero(ine)
honestly admit that the expected award for a knight in shining – the princess – was denied to

57
Arthur Schpenhauer, Metaphysics of Love, p. 8. From:
http://pryazhnikov.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/mataphysics_of_love_eng.pdf (2012-08-13).
58
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 65.

36
him and therefore only one pole of perfect man – the warrior – remained attractive or just
available for Frank to identify with. The other pole of a perfect man – the lover – had to be
demonized in order to preserve Frank’s dignity as a worthy human being.

Frank could not make love, so he made war. The true reason of his sexual impairment was
monstrous. His own father in a fit of desperate rage towards all the anguish women brought
into his life decided to transform a daughter into a son. Banks major success is not the theme
itself but the elaborate and hugely convincing depiction of psychological motives that lead Mr
Cauldhame to make a monster out of his own child. Usually, authors of fiction just assume
that there of course are some people that embody the trope of a mad scientist. Such people are
irresistibly attracted to mad science just because the potentially godlike powers are, quite
understandably, incredibly tempting. It is not a rare case that the mad pseudo-demiurge is
made more humane and sympathetic by adding a story of a tragic loss that is supposed to be
undone by an insanely risky experiment. The natural order of things is corrupted by a hubris
stricken scientist and the eventual backlash is nigh. Banks most certainly pays homage to the
genre defining classic of the mad scientist stories – Frankenstein by Mary Shelly – by naming
his main character Frances/Frank. In many ways Banks’ novel rolls over the original
Frankenstein in terms of plausibility and realism. Victor Frankenstein had no other reason for
making his monster than that he could make it. Moreover, the process itself was more magical
than scientific at best. Some secret formula and a bit of body bits plus lightening and voila! A
dead body is animated. On the other hand the motivation of Mr Cauldhame’s would seem
plausible to a real life psychologists. His romantic history is moulded – I assume that more
intuitively than from actual study of the matter – after the psychological theories concerning
falling in love, mourning, generalization of experiences, personal disorders and pathological
defence mechanisms. The depth of Banks’ understanding for limit states of a hurt soul borders
on a psychological prodigy. It seems much more intriguing for him to observe and examine
the complicated “cultural” interplay of individual feelings, rationalizations, lies, illusions,
delusions and emotionally self-preserving logical fallacies than mere biologically or
chemically hard-wired, universally applicable “natural” laws.

First of all, a rationally oriented young scientist Mr Cauldhame fell in a presumably

“compassionate”, mature love with his first wife. His education59 suggests that he was used to

59
Frank hints that his father probably ―used to work in a university for a few years after he graduated, and he
might have invented something― and that he ―never seemed bothered about the suffering of lower forms of life,

37
understanding those biochemical processes in our body very well and that his positivistic
approach was dominant, well developed and fully conscious segment of his psyche. Until the
tragic death of his wife this one-sidedness had not represented a major problem for his
personal balance. Nevertheless, the safe picture of a rational world governed by science was
shattered as Mr Cauldhame had to face one of the most excruciating experiences one can
possibly imagine. What are the odd that in Scotland of the 1960’s a mother dies during
childbirth? What is the statistic probability that an advanced, scientifically based medical care
is not efficient enough to save her? Such questions alone would be enough to shake trust in
seemingly omnipotent science. Other questions arise and are even more personal: “Why did it
happen to her? Why have we done to deserve it?” And perhaps in the most vulnerable layers
of his soul even a selfish, hurt cry could be heard: “Why did she abandon me?” Unfortunately,
that sort of blaming fate or generalising personal experience does violate a lot of fundamental
rules of scientific conduct. The invasion of archaic emotions, primitive reactions to death and
mourning must be very unsettling for a mind trained in a cold positivism of biochemistry.

The clash remained largely at the level of unease and vague feelings that Mr Cauldhame is not
acquainted with. Nonetheless, his sub-consciousness finds a way how to solve the acute
identity crisis in a unsophisticated, “natural” ignition of love to a woman that represents
everything so far unconscious in Mr Cauldhame’s psyche. Agnes is a proponent of a
counterculture of the 1960s and her own values literally opposed everything Mr Cauldhame
stood for prior his wife’s death: emotions over reason, freedom over control, religion over
science, intuition over scrutiny. The way she is depicted all these values of hippie generation
were more of a pose and external adornments to Agnes than a real, seriously taken moral
compass. However, this shallowness and lack of a rationally coherent code of conduct
qualified her as a perfect projection screen for equally undeveloped, but unconscious
emotionality of her future husband. The Jungian archetype of “anima” is an amassed
collective and hereditary experience that provides men with an instinct to seek for a
passionate love as means of “transmuting internalizations” that can heal a serious injury
(inadequacy) of their selves. So far so good, but ―there‗s always a ―but‖ in this imperfect

despite having been a hippy, and perhaps because of his medical training.― The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 1,
The Sacrifice Poles, p. 3.

38
world‖.60 In the case of “passionate” love affair with anima men encounter the numinous
“wholly other” and the ecstasy of reciprocated love overwhelms them utterly.

The less conscious and differentiated male emotionality is the more divine and enthralling
power a “femme fatale” exercises over an infatuated man. Mr Cauldhame plunged into
another marriage in a hope to heal his deep emotional wound. The relationship with a woman
that was as insensible as he was insensitive collapsed soon after their mad love bore a fruit
called Frances. From a common sense perspective the blame could be attributed solely to a
crazy mother that had fled away from her husband and a newborn daughter. On the other hand
Agnes was a suspicious choice for a life partner on the part of Mr Cauldhame from the
beginning. That illustrates well Banks’ refusal to exculpate or condemn anybody completely
and to make it easy for a reader to assume a way too tempting position of a moral authority
over the lives of his characters. In other words, Banks excels at masterful dramatization of the
profound truth that the way to hell is paved with good intentions. This is the feature that
qualifies TWF as a full-blooded tragedy.

60
A quote by Anne Bronte. Cf. http://thinkexist.com/quotation/there-is-always-a-but-in-this-imperfect-
world/532160.html (2012-08-12).

39
8. Measure What Is Measurable
Frank’s recollection of the second coming of his father’s false saviour exhibits a magnificent
eruption of contemptuous sarcasm. It is highly probable that even her name was chosen by
Banks for this reason. Agnes means “pure”, “chaste” or even better “immaculate” in ancient
Greek, “a” being a negative suffix. Not only that Frank hates her through and through as the
most eminent exemplar of all women’s depravity and corruption. The word “immaculate”
tends to be almost exclusively associated with the collocation “immaculate conception” of
Virgin Mary. Banks’ hostility towards religion taken into consideration, it might be a subtle
accusation of all unconditional love centred cults. The main point of the charge stands against
their hypocrisy: ―So that was my mother's last visit to the island and the house. She left one
dead, one born and two crippled for life, one way or the other. Not a bad score for a fortnight
in the summer of groovy and psychedelic love, peace and general niceness.‖61 At the top of
that, Agnes’ own conception was in a way immaculate, too – at least from her husband’s point
of view. In contrast to that, her delivery proved to be stained by horrible guilt. The old, ugly
and compassion provoking bulldog Saul, which was kept by Mr Cauldhame also because he
disliked women a lot, got kicked to the head by Agnes as soon as she arrived to the island.
This might have, along with the heat, contributed to Saul’s aggression with which he
responded to little Frances’s annoying mischief. Were it not for Agnes’s extravagant
selfishness - she insisted on giving birth on the island, not in hospital – Mr Cauldhame could
have kept the bad tempered beast or his naughty daughter at bay.

Nevertheless, the disaster happened and still not even Frances’ serious injury and a cry of
little Paul could stop Agnes from deserting island again, leaving her deceived husband in both
physical and mental agony. At that moment something broke deep inside Mr Cauldhame and
he conceived a truly abominable idea. He can safe himself from the devastating influence of
close relationship to women only by using science to mould a son out of a daughter. Such a
creepy obsession and terrible violation of a child’s identity is presented by Banks as a mere
experiment to Mr Cauldhame.62 This apology that he produces when Frank discovers the truth
speaks in favour of the theory that extremely harmful influence of Agnes, the “anima”

61
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 6, The Skull Grounds, p. 38.
62
―'Wha' you goin' t'do, Frangie? Am sorry, am really really sorry. Was an experimen, sall. Juss an
experimen.... Don' do anything' t'me, please, Frangie.... Please....'‖ The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 11, The
Prodigal, p. 62.

40
woman, lead Mr Cauldhame to reject all the emotionality, teaching of universal love and
empathy in favour of the only thing he could muster himself to still cling to – the science.

When the challenges of the present times are too harsh to face people sometimes resort to a
defence mechanism called regression. It means that they regress to the nearest safe stage of
their psychological development and cling to the then working behavioural codes.
Psychoanalysts explained a very common practice of eating or drinking oneself out of stress
as a retreat to the safe haven of “oral” phase of childhood when sucking or not sucking milk
was the only real issue in the world. The following phase labelled “anal” refers to the
psychological atmosphere in which training to pooh discipline shaped child’s attitude towards
order, cleanliness and regularity. Such kernels of personality are of course modified by later
experience and common sense expectations about respective age of those who regress to their
dominant happy time. However, a regression is always bizarre and ridiculous to a certain
degree. When the suffering, psychologically impaired neurotics succumb to the temptation of
escapism they protect themselves from an unbearably negative self-image. On those occasions
when neurotics see clearly the level of their humiliation from a common sense perspective,
they cannot but despair and teeter at the brink of utter self-loathing under the weight of
enormous shame. The original-incompetence-plus-weird-response stress seems
insurmountable by reason or will and unaided (or misunderstood, hence misguided) neurotics
fall back into the blissful oblivion of regression. The vicious, self-sustaining circle is
completed.

In case of Mr Cauldhame an obsession with scientific control over life developed. He

withdrew from the outer world to his island so that his bizarre idiosyncrasy would not be
exposed to criticism of real scientists that can more or less keep their common sense grip on
reality because they are in interpersonal contact with their peers and non-scientists on a daily
basis. In contrast to that Mr Cauldhame surrounded himself only with family, a senile
housemaid and pub buddies. In all these cases a harmful tolerance switching between polite
indifference and amused curiosity towards eccentricity can be taken for granted. Mr
Cauldhame was left largely unnoticed to live his secluded, secretive little life in whatever
fashion he inclined to.

These inclinations consisted mainly in compulsive measuring and controlling of all objects in
his household. Frank admits that there were times he was scared by his father’s demands to
learn the scores of Imperial measures of all imaginable household components. As Frank

41
grew up and gained more confidence in his own judgment, he could knock off a lot of
childhood indiscriminating respect to a parent and the fear of numbers receded. In his sixteen
Frank sees clearly that his father suffers from an obscure obsession: ―It gets embarrassing at
times when there are guests in the house, even if they are family and ought to know what to
expect. They'll be sitting there, probably in the lounge, wondering whether Father's going to
feed them anything or just give an impromptu lecture on cancer of the colon or tapeworms,
when he'll sidle up to somebody, look round to make sure everybody's watching, then in a
conspiratorial stage-whisper say: 'See that door over there? It's eighty-five inches, corner to
corner. ' Then he'll wink and walk off, or slide over on his seat, looking nonchalant. Ever
since I can remember there have been little stickers of white paper all over the house with
neat black-biro writing on them. Attached to the legs of chairs, the edges of rugs, the bottoms
of jugs, the aerials of radios, the doors of drawers, the headboards of beds, the screens of
televisions, the handles of pots and pans, they give the appropriate measurement for the part
of the object they're stuck to. There are even ones in pencil stuck to the leaves of plants.‖63

The only excuse for quoting such a long passage is that it can render a lot of meaningful
insights into the artistic goals and means of TWF. First of all it should remind of a style Frank
uses for his narration. It is a dry, sarcastic, matter-of-fact description. Frank is honest and
open in every possible way. His need to tell the story in an aloof, cold and cool way exhibits
many features of a self-aggrandizing control freak. Actually, Frank feels, or better knows, that
it is him not his father who really understands and controls the environment. Frank is very
certain about it and loves nothing more than his frankness and Frankness because these two
utmost valuable qualities – scientific and narcissistic – fall in one in his mind. This wordplay
is unlikely to be accidental or of my own invention in a world devised and controlled by
Banks.

Moreover, the massive quotation was aimed to make the reader laugh and it worked perfectly
for me. It is an at least partly sad truth that nothing provokes a heartily laughter as much as a
dry description of somebody else’s embarrassment, especially intellectual and social. No one
could be blamed for laughing at somebody adorning his house with stickers indicating every
possible measured dimension, even the length of growing leaves! Or ... could? Why? It is so
hilarious to meet a nutshell like that! He is harmless so why not to have some super fun at his

63
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 1, The Sacrifice Poles, p. 2.

42
expense? Why? Because such a person must have some serious personal issues and his
immediate family is unlikely not to get caught into the whirlwind of his grotesque madness. I
believe that in this respect TWF can be read as a critique of indifference and especially of the
cowardice that is the true motivation of people that prefer a loud laughter to active empathy.
“It is not our business” could be a perfect motto for everybody who prefers the seeming safety
of an island mentality. Speaking of that, another etymology lesson might appropriately sum
up the last train of thoughts. Somebody living on his own, not communicating with or
participating in a larger world used to be called “idiota” in Latin.

Mr Cauldhame’s obsession with dimensions, measures, numbers and figures resembles the
very foundations of what the Euro-American civilisation understands under the term
“science” since its revolution in the 17th century. Galileo Galilei, an Italian philosopher,
astronomer and mathematician, who fundamentally contributed to the development of a
modern scientific method is famous also for these two quotations: ―Mathematics is the key
and door to the sciences.‖ and ―Measure what is measureable and make measurable what is
not so.‖64 Supposedly, Banks aimed to ridicule hubris of scientists who claim complete
control over nature, animate and inanimate alike. Mathematization of the world may be
helpful in many life situations but certainly not in all of them. As it is shown in the example
of Cauldhame’s house, this approach can end up as a suffocating grasp around all involved.
Especially interpersonal relationships suffer from mathematization and in fact the top
achievement of human rationality quite paradoxically turns on the soil from which scientific
method grows – on common sense. Modelling the world “more geometrico” reduces all the
marvellously varied manifestation of reality to their minimal common denominator and
therefore blinds scientific fundamentalists to the specificity of more complicated phenomena.
Uniqueness is lost in translation into the language of statistically relevant figures. That
uniqueness which has always been accessible through respectful compassion and authentic
communication. Nevertheless, quite a lot of men suppresses their emotionality in a way Jung
observed and analysed. The main reason for such a dubious strategy lies in peer pressure and
generally less demanding specialization that is not jeopardised by complementary yet still
antagonist character of intuition and sensitivity. It is just more “natural” for men to culturally
support callousness and cold bloodiness.

64
According to en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei (2012-08-05) to be found in: Building Fluency Through
Practice and Performance (2008) by Timothy Rasinsky and lorraine Griffith, p. 64.

43
9. Freud, Athena and Opus Contra Naturam
The abovementioned psychological mechanisms (regression and suppression) are sometimes
called Freudian after Sigmund and Anne of that name who established corresponding
scientific theories. Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, employed his
classical education to draw a connection between Greek myths and constellations of
psychosexual development, most notoriously in his notion of Oedipus complex. Much to my
astonishment the situation of Frank’s artificial invention and making described by Banks
bears a striking similarity to one of the most widely known Greek myths – the birth of
Athena.

Zeus, the notorious skirt chasing King of Gods, made a terrible mistake when he raped Métis,
the Titaness of wisdom, cunningness and deep thought. Since it was prophesied that Métis
would give birth to a daughter and then to a son more powerful than his father, whom he was
destined to overthrow. That’s why Zeus tricked his wife into an exhibition of her ability to
transform. When she turned into a fly Zeus promptly swallowed her. Nevertheless, the already
conceived daughter continued growing inside her father’s head and when the pain became
intolerable, Hermes, the messenger of gods, summoned Hephaestus. Then the divine
blacksmith cleft his father’s head with a hammer and so released Athena from her unlikely
womb. Athena leaped out fully grown and armoured and gave her clarion cry of war. The new
born goddess became a patroness of craftsmanship, prudence and calm practical intelligence.
She also embodied a new approach towards war craft. The older God of War, Ares, remained
in Greek pantheon but his role was quite negative as he personified all the brutal savagery and
senseless butchering that is unleashed during armed conflicts. On the other hand Athena was
perceived as a supreme strategian who wins by calculation and cold blooded courage.65

65
It is fascinating that Carl von Clausewitz, the most influential modern theoretician of war, saw the nature of
war in a fascinating alliance of two contradicting poles that can be easily attributed to what Ares and Athena
represented for ancient Greek. A quotation by Christopher Bassford, professor of strategy at the National War
College of the United States, explains the previous argument: ―Clausewitz's famous line that "War is a mere
continuation of politics by other means," ("Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen
Mitteln") while accurate as far as it goes, was not intended as a statement of fact. It is the antithesis in a
dialectical argument whose thesis is the point – made earlier in the analysis – that "war is nothing but a duel [or
wrestling match, a better translation of the German Zweikampf] on a larger scale." His synthesis, which resolves
the deficiencies of these two bold statements, says that war is neither "nothing but" an act of brute force nor
"merely" a rational act of politics or policy. This synthesis lies in his "fascinating trinity" [wunderliche
Dreifaltigkeit]: a dynamic, inherently unstable interaction of the forces of violent emotion, chance, and rational

44
Already in Homer’s eposes Athena is portrayed as an eternal virgin who can always prevail
over Ares.

In other words Athena was neither a genuine woman nor a man who was born out of “its”
father’s head. Conceived with Métis, a personification of mind and cunningness, she was born
with the help of Hephaestus, a symbolic figure of what was for centuries closest to an
“engineer” mentality. Mr Cauldhame also - at least symbolically - devoured and buried deep
inside him all Agnes represented for him and so engineered his son (with androgen) and
designed him as an eternally virginal celibate66 (with bromide). In both mythological and

calculation.‖ (from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz#Interpretation_and_misinterpretation

2012-08-07) Nevertheless, as it is stressed elsewhere, only brilliant minds are able to encompass both polarities
and unite them in a ―hieros gamos‖ (Greek for sacred marriage) of a sort. Most people can identify themselves
with just one of the complementary forces and use it as a guiding principle in real life. As a general rule the so
called Western civilisation preferred Athena to Ares, scheming rationality over brutish instincts, and therefore
only the famous aphorism about war being ―a mere continuation of politics by other means‖ has made it into the
pantheon of western intelligentsia clichés. The evolution in general proceeds through differentiation and
integration in all strata of reality, from astrophysical forces, chemical reactions, biological evolution in stricto
sensu and human society to an individual personality. At least according to the synthetic philosophy of Herbert
Spencer. Frank is a proof that a dogmatic, stilted dichotomy between differentiated elements is not to be feared
for no reason. Especially if the cultural idealtypes are intentionally identified with biological differences so that
they seem ―natural‖. For Frank, all women ―are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing
compared to them‖, mainly because of generalization of his own traumatic narrow-minded experience. Banks
hints at how easy it is to be rational and liberal if there is no personal involvement in the particular scorn
prejudice: ―Another part of me is racist, probably because I've hardly met any colored people and all I know of
them is what I read in papers and see on television, where black people are usually talked of in terms of numbers
and presumed guilty until proved innocent. This part of me is still quite strong, though of course I know there is
no logical reason for race hatred. Whenever I see coloured people in Porteneil, buying souvenirs or stopping off
for a snack, I hope that they will ask me something so that I can show how polite I am and prove that my
reasoning is stronger than my more crass instincts, or training.‖
66
In this case it is the only desirable state of being for Mr Cauldhame and from his point of view for his child as
well. Therefore we can assume that Frank was supposed to be saved from damnation (femininity) and designed
to live the only caelibatus or literally celestial life (masculinity) a deranged atheistic misogynist could conjure
up. What would the equivalent of the first Buddha’s noble truth (arya satya) read if Mr Cauldhame consciously
formulated his worldview? Perhaps something like: “Women are full of sorrows and malice” instead of “The
world is full of suffering”. The lesson got through to Frank: ―Frankly, I didn't have much faith in either, Jamie
being too small to stop me if I really started to topple, and the girl being a girl. Probably too weak; and, even if
she wasn't, I expected she would just let me crack my skull on the pavement because women like to see men
helpless.‖ The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 4, The Bomb Circle, p. 27.

45
literary versions the product was an androgyne with ambition to out-man those around it –
both in practical intelligence and battle prowess. It is a question whether ancient Greeks or
Romans would find it fitting to say about Athena / Minerva that she is a “normal (divine)
female, capable of intercourse and giving birth, (but she would) shiver at the thought of
either.‖67 It would be definitely understandable if one takes her family history into account.
Sex equals (a) rape; pregnancy equals (a) violent death.

Such a brutal story seems rather inappropriate for a state patron deity and still the old Romans
elevated their version of Athena, Minerva, into an unlikely dominant position among the gods
they worshipped. The most venerated triad of gods underwent a very rare transformation
within Roman state cult. The so called archaic triad consisted of three male gods, namely
Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus. Such male triads of high gods used to be fairly common in Indo-
European societies, for instance Zeus, Poseidon and Hades or Odin, Thor and Frey. However,
at the times of the Republic Romans adopted a non typical Capitoline Triad probably because
they continued to pay great respect to Etruscans in the matters of religion and Etruscans were
the only society that worshipped a trio of a supreme god, his wife and daughter. If religion
represents an evolving system that – despite its notorious conservatism – reflects changing
realia and ideals of society, it can be assumed that the concept and symbolism of Minervian
values must have appealed a lot to a very prominent and still unique feature of Roman
national character. Romans excelled at brutal execution of a cold-blooded logic that requested
absolute discipline and no exceptions. There was a streak in Roman character that mistrusted
natural order of things. They did not bathe in rivers but in spas. They did not depend on local
sources of drinking water and brought it via technical miracles called aqueducts instead. Their
armies triumphed because they were calculating and disciplined not only in battle but
especially in logistics. They did not believe in vague notions of charismatic power but in a
complex and detailed legal system. Latin tendency towards anti-naturalism evolved
throughout centuries and eventually coined a very one-sided definition of education: opus
contra naturam.

A-work-against-nature may be one of the best fitting definitions of Frank Cauldhame. He

stands in a firm opposition to what people in the 1980s and today alike call “natural” when
they mean “good”, “right”, “healthy” or “desirably spontaneous and fluent”. Not only that he

67
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 12, What Happened to Me, p. 64.

46
is not “good” to animals or empathetic to people, he even killed his brother and cousin which
is considered very “unnatural” even though statistically a significant number of murders is
committed by victims’ family members.68 But this is just the most abominable tip of the
iceberg. Despite the fact that Frank does not share the same form of measurement compulsion
with his father, he can be clearly labelled as a person suffering from an obsessive-compulsive
personality disorder. Frank follows an “unnaturally” strict regimen when it comes down to his
daily hygiene. Every procedure must be executed in the only possible right order and in the
only possible right way: “Next the shave. I always use shaving foam and the latest razors
(twin-blade swivel-heads are state-of-the-art at the moment), removing the downy brown
growth of the previous day and night with dexterity and precision. As with all my ablutions,
the shave follows a definite and predetermined pattern; I take the same number of strokes of
the same length in the same sequence each morning. As always, I felt a rising tingle of
excitement as I contemplated the meticulously shorn surfaces of my face.”69 Even though no
animals in the world shave daily people do not find daily shaving itself unnatural. It is the
exceeding amount of rigid attention paid to insignificant procedure details that makes Frank’s
shaving session abnormal, “unnatural” or more precisely ritualistic.

68
―A Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of murder cases disposed in 1988 in the courts of large urban counties,
found that 16% of murder victims were members of the defendant's family: 6.5% were killed by their spouses,
3.5% by their parents, 1.9% by their own children, 1.5% by their siblings, and 2.6% by other relatives. Women
were 45% of the victims in murders involving family members but 18% of victims in other murders. Among
family murder defendants, 35% were female versus 7% among nonfamily defendants. Women were over half of
the defendants (55%) in only one category of family murder: parents killing their offspring. Firearms were used
in 42% of family murders, compared to 63% of nonfamily murders. 7/94 NCJ 143498‖
http://murdervictims.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=family&action=display&thread=1402 (2012-08-06)

69
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 3, In The Bunker, p. 14.

47
10. A Song of Water and Fire
When we speak about fluency of expression, about “natural” flow of life or uncensored
stream of consciousness, water metaphors render very positive, wholesome images of
liberating surrender to a benign power. However, there are water metaphors which have
served for millennia as symbols for being overwhelmed, unable to escape; surrounded by
legions of enemies you cannot fight, drawn out of the solid ground into the abyss. Floods,
whirlwinds and swamps belong among the most dreaded natural phenomena. Drowning
stands for helpless awaiting of inevitable doom as it is evidenced for example in the
collocation “drowning in debt”. Nevertheless, all these terrible associations with death have
been incorporated into religious practices in varied traditions. It is possible because water
does not only take life but it also nurtures living creatures during their prenatal or immature
development. All the eggs and wombs are literal substitutes for an outer watery environment.
Water is one of the most widespread religious metaphors for primordial chaos out of which
the cosmos rose. The intuition has been confirmed by geologists and evolutionary biologists
and a standard theory on origin of life really says that life came into existence (was born?) in
Precambrian oceans presumably earlier than 3.500 million years ago. Water abounds with
potential to give birth not only in biological but also spiritual sense of the word. For instance,
having a sip out of the Holy Grail could save the life of an ailing king and so invigorate the
waste land king’s country has turned into as a result of his disease and a presumed mystical
bond between kingdom and its ruler. Christian baptism unites both drowning and life giving
symbolism sets. The old, worldly man must die so that the new, heavenly can be born. Water
represents the potential for both ruthless cleansing and wholesome growth in the soul. The
message is clear – if you open yourself to the divine waters your old rigid sinful personality
will be drown in floods and in that numinous environment the seeds of your new / mature /
saved personality will sprout.

Freudian iceberg metaphor for conscious, preconscious and unconscious layers of psyche are
notorious and in Jungian psychology the collective unconsciousness have been very often
described by water metaphors like well, lake and ocean or some containers that can found in
mythology all over the world.70 Banks puts these words into Frank’s megalomaniac mouth:
―My GREATEST ENEMIES are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. (...) the Sea because

70
Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung (2012-08-08)

48
it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left,
wiping clean the marks I have made. And I'm not all that sure the Wind is blameless, either.
The Sea is a sort of mythological enemy, and I make what you might call sacrifices to it in my
soul, fearing it a little, respecting it as you're supposed to, but in many ways treating it as an
equal. It does things to the world, and so do I; we should both be feared.‖71

Frank openly likens himself to a natural force and demands the same respect as the enormous
Sea commands. The so called psychic inflation, an inadequate identification with superhuman
agent, usually arises from the other extreme, i.e. identification with a subhuman quality.
These two harmful, inadequate extremities form a blindly “natural” or “elemental”
overcompensation for either a conscious or unconscious inferiority complex as the case may
be.72 It is no coincidence that Frank who is consciously narcissistic and unconsciously suffer
from inferiority hates the Sea as a mythical enemy of his. Large bodies of water has always
fascinated human imagination and provided one of the best natural symbols of a deep
knowledge or secret memory, magically hidden under the surface. Frank cannot allow the
secrets to pour out and flood his so painstakingly constructed conscious life. In addition to
that the Sea stands for periodical tide of ebbs and sways governed by the Moon which
presides over women’s period as well. The Sea has got a way too many associations with the
Women and that is dangerous. The oceanic feelings of surrender to the “wholly other” or to
the mystical flow that ruptures people from their conscious controlling egos and makes them
float helplessly on the surface of waves cannot be tolerated by obsessive people. A deliberate
loss of rational and volition control would mean a supposedly irreparable betrayal of “manly”
principles Frank and his father valued so much. Therefore Frank literally struggles to keep the
Sea at bay.

Frank indulges in a fervent, almost fanatical building of dams. Dams are his way how to set
limits to the Sea and hence control it physically and at the same time to fight off everything
that water symbolises in his psyche. Frank openly admits that when he was younger he used
to day dream about saving their house by building a dam: ―There would be a fire in the grass
on the dunes, or a plane would have crashed, and all that stopped the cordite in the cellar

71
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 3, In The Bunker, p. 14.
72
Inflation means “identifying with a nonpersonal part of the psyche as though it were acquired individually. A
regression into unconsciousness. Positive and negative inflation supercharge the collective unconscious and can
alternate. Inflation causes dissolution of the ego into its paired opposites (inferiority/megalomania, good/evil,
etc.).” according to a glossary of Jungian terms. Cf. http://www.terrapsych.com/jungdefs.html (2012-08-13).

49
from going up would be me diverting some of the water from a dam system down a channel
and into the house.‖73 The ambivalent symbolic role of water and also fire appears very
explicitly in such fantasies. The enormous fluid Sea is in itself an ancient symbol of
limitlessness (“apeirón“) and gaping chaos that surrounds the solid Earth, the home of people:
“Piston gé, apiston thalassa.” On the other hand, house and fire are the most obvious symbols
of civilisation as an “opus contra naturam”. It seems that Banks wither intuitively or
intentionally let a very young Frank dream of a solution to his life dilemma. The unhealthy
dominance of conscious/rational/scientific/masculine experience threatens to explode in a
similar way that strenuous and concentrated work can burn people out. The consequent fire
can be extinguished only if the unconscious/emotional/intuitive/feminine experience is
assimilated and integrated into the system.

The solution suggested by unconscious gathering of symbolic images into a salvation story
was not understood and later Frank underwent a stage when his ambition was to persuade his
father to buy him an excavator that would allow him to make really big dams. That seems as a
complete victory of conscious control-oriented ego. Nevertheless, Frank transcended the
dilemma of natural flow and civilised control in the same way Hegel, Clausewitz or Jung
proposed only in the philosophy of his dam-building. The psychological gain was
considerable but indirect at best. ―But I have a far more sophisticated, even metaphysical,
approach to dam-building now. I realise that you can never really win against the water; it
will always triumph in the end, seeping and soaking and building up and undermining and
overflowing. All you can really do is construct something that will divert it or block its way
for a while; persuade it to do something it doesn't really want to do.‖74

Such a change of opinion stands out in comparison with the rest of meticulously and
stubbornly observed rituals. Frank remains fragmented and unsure what element (“natural”
water or “cultural” dams) should win in his ideal scenario. The hectic dam-building is
followed by a construction of a model of whole town. The miniature town, a classical
metonymy for human civilisation in general, is then flooded by water accumulated in dams.
―Bursting a good big dam, or even just letting it overflow, is almost as satisfying as planning
and building it in the first place. I used little shells to represent the people in the town, as

73
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 2, The Snake Park, p. 7.
74
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 2, The Snake Park, p. 7.

50
usual. Also as usual, none of the shells survived the flood when the dam burst; they all sank,
which meant that everybody died.‖75

The analogy between rational civilisation, an exemplar city and Frank’s conscious character is
developed into an unexpectedly detailed psychological symbolism. Frank can feel the
incongruence inside and is sometimes affected by what he considers to be feminine weakness.
However, the assaults of remorse and bad conscience are fought off by very intriguing mental
game that consists in likening different psychological impulses to individual citizen or
political parties, vocational organizations and so on in a state that represents the entirety of
Frank’s fragmented psyche: ―It used to seem to me that the different ways I felt sometimes
about ideas, courses of action and so on were like the differing political moods that countries
go through. It has always seemed to me that people vote in a new government not because
they actually agree with their politics but just because they want a change. Somehow they
think that things will be better under the new lot. Well, people are stupid, but it all seems to
have more to do with mood, caprice and atmosphere than carefully thought-out arguments. I
can feel the same sort of thing going on in my head. Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I
had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside
my brain.‖76

This is one of the most unsettling and impressive ideas introduced in TWF. The opposite
direction of symbolisation is far more widespread throughout the history of political
legitimization. It seems that Frank’s genuine brilliance at rational analysis (fire, masculine,
mechanical) combined with an equal lack of emotional cohesion (water, feminine, organic)
produced a philosophical turns the intuitive order of things upside down. “Normal”
understanding of personality and society presumes that a single person functions in concord
with himself as the individual organs are synchronised in a hierarchical harmony. Such a state
of affairs is then “naturally” seen as an ideal role model for the whole political “body”. The
“head” of state is expected to control the “arm” of justice and to rule from the “capital” city
that represents the real “heart” of the country etc. Plato introduced a very influential version
of bodily metaphor in his treatise on the ideal state called “The Republic”. In such a
prototypical state population is stratified into three distinct classes. The working class is
associated with abdomen, concupiscible soul and the virtue of temperance. The soldiers and

75
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 2, The Snake Park, p. 7.
76
The Wasp Factory (1984), chapter 4, The Bomb Circle, p. 21.

51
guards have irascible souls positioned in chests and their virtue is called audacity. The
political leaders, dubbed famously philosopher-kings, are virtuously wise because their
rational soul resides in their heads. All three castes and every citizen have to exercise justice
as this is the virtue that corresponds with wholeness of soul and society alike. For Plato being
just means to assume one’s position in the political system and embrace it sincerely.

These days, philosophers usually interpret Plato’s Republic as a projection of his soul concept
that is more fruitful when used for shedding light on psychology than political theory.77
Closer to Frank’s concept lies another attempt to understand psychology via political
metaphor. Nietzsche wrote that Zarathustra thus spake: ―Illustrious is it to have many virtues,
but a hard lot; and many a one hath gone into the wilderness and killed himself, because he
was weary of being the battle and battlefield of virtues. My brother, are war and battle evil?
Necessary, however, is the evil; necessary are the envy and the distrust and the back-biting
among the virtues. Lo! how each of thy virtues is covetous of the highest place; it wanteth thy
whole spirit to be its herald, it wanteth thy whole power, in wrath, hatred, and love.‖78

While the totalitarian dystopy of Plato’s republic seems a bit idealistic projection of self-
control, Nietzshe’s pessimistic concept of ever warring virtues that struggle for utter dominion
over a person appears to be written by a man haunted by monomania. Frank’s version of
psycho-political metaphor clearly wins the competition in producing the most sober map of
human psyche of all time because he offers all the possible scenarios – not only a bloody
protracted struggle between aspiring warlords (Nietzsche) or society ruled by a caste of
godlike philosophers (Plato).

Even though Frank/Frances twist might put the whole concept in doubt, the realism and
elegance of the metaphor will remain a lasting achievement of Banks’ writing. Of course,
such an approach towards one’s personality can be constructive only during meditative
introspection that aims to harmonise and unite the state of soul. Such meditations are
definitely exclusive to instable, power oriented rational geniuses. The extreme profundity of
Frank’s insights is paid for by his severe impairment in social life. Frances abandons the
external isolation (literal island) and internal fragmentation (figurative state) hence restoring

77
Cf. Zdeněk Kratochvíl, Filosofie mezi mýtem a vědou. Od Homéra po Descarta, Praha 2010, p. 150-153.
78
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883, chapter V: Joys and Passions, p. 43.
From: http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/nietsche/tszarath.pdf (2012-08-13).

52
the “natural” balance. Banks’ healthy people feel congruent within and sociable outside, in the
big world. Anything obscure and religious, i.e. pathological, can be observed and analysed by
science or art. In fact, the vicarious thrill of experiencing religion without any real
commitment is an advisable entertainment according to Banks. "I wanted to write about faith
and the nature of belief," explains Iain Banks. "I find that fascinating, being an evangelical
atheist myself. There was also the sheer fun of making up a new religion. I felt like L. Ron
Hubbard. He did it for real, I know. But he started out being serious about it and then he
eventually started saying things that were just so utterly absurd that he thought, 'Well, they
can't possibly swallow this. It's so stupid'. There is considerable fun to be had devising a
religion. I recommend it."79

79
http://www.infidels.org/kiosk/author204.html (2012-08-13).

53
11. Conclusion
In conclusion, Iain Banks’ premiere novel The Wasp Factory is a brilliant and empathetic
study of a psychopath’s journey from absurd, terrifying monstrosity to a hope of becoming a
human being. The grotesqueness of the surface is unveiled with a surprising subtlety and
sensitiveness. Inside the black humorous story a reader can find a literal treasure island of
paradoxes that confine deluded people into the endless labyrinths of their personal hells.
Unfortunately, it seems that Banks himself can relate to the numinous symbols of salvation
only inside the books he writes. In these little, schizoidly private “factories on redemption”
Banks opens the dams of his religious imagination and heals his soul and those of his readers
with a magical talent equal to that of Plato or Jung. In the big world of reasonable and
economically active citizens Banks resorts to a role of a comedian because he cannot
withstand the idea that his book should compete with something as real as cars or jets are.
This masochistic streak of his character makes me sad. The sip of Holy Grail is ridiculed as a
mere fun to kill some time. As such Banks adopted a “serious” worldview of hardcore
scientists. From this point of view the dignity of man lies solely in his machines, not in his
psyche: ―I think it‘s bringing this reason and rationality that makes us who we are...it‘s the
only thing we can do better than any animal...because animals can fly faster, dive deeper and
swim better and run faster and that‘s to it... But we can do better than animals because one
thing we can do is we can think and therefore we can create, you know, rockets and jets and
submarines and cars and all the rest. So we can do better. We can outdo the animals but only
because in this weak little body (...) human stuff we‘ve got incredible brain and it uses reason
and rationality. It‘s got not very much to do with superstition and stuff you are told by your
holy man.‖80

The positivist fetishism of technology that changes the material world and only indirectly
human self-understanding is perfectly understandable with working class or engineers. It is a
philosophical absolutisation of their social dignity, promotion of their own values as the best
or perhaps the only possible values at all. Nonetheless, it remains a mystery to me why a sci-fi
and psychological horror author clings to getting engineers’ worldview through to his readers
in interviews. If Banks were consistent in his logic, he would have to give up all that literary
non-sense and start doing something proper, like cars or submarines. Fortunately, the costume

80
Cf. Iain Banks: 'I'm an evangelical atheist' from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dnCTApJ4Bc (2012-08-
13) . Transcription RH.

54
of an evangelical atheist is just a silly mask the wizard wears for whatever twisted reasons I
cannot fathom but do not mind anymore. Hopefully, Banks himself will see one day that this
bizarre and tragic fragmentation of his own allowed him to delve deep into the ocean of truly
numinous images and words. For the time being, let us not spoil the experience of reading
The Wasp Factory by the accursed postmodern fallacy that even good books are just a
vicarious thrill. Good books do something as real as planes and ships do. Powerful stories are
means of transport human soul needs for a journey from the dark to the light.

55
12. Bibliography

Printed Sources:

Banks, Iain, Vosí továrna, Praha 1998

Concerning Mandala Symbolism. C. G. Jung. trans. from C. G. Jung, Uber Mandalasymbolik.

Gestaltungen des Unbewussten, Zürich, 1950.

Eliade, Mircea, Dějiny náboženského myšlení IV, Praha 2009.

Komárek, Stanislav, Sto esejů o přírodě a společnosti. Praha 1995

Komárek, Stanislav, Lidská přirozenost. Praha 1998.

Kratochvíl, Zdeněk, Filosofie mezi mýtem a vědou. Od Homéra po Descarta, Praha 2010.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883.

Schopenhauer, Arthur, Metaphysics of Love, 1837.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung (2012-07-31)

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http://dedication.www3.50megs.com/truth_free.html (2012-08-10)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_and_animus (2012-07-31)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon_basileus (2012-08-12)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz#Interpretation_and_misinterpretation
(2012-07-28)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (2012-08-01)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_consumericus (2012-08-10)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous (2012-07-31)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity (2012-08-10)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygmunt_Bauman#Postmodernity_and_consumerism or

http://pryazhnikov.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/mataphysics_of_love_eng.pdf (2012-08-13)

56
http://psychology.about.com/od/loveandattraction/a/compassionate.htm (2012-07-31)

http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm#tragedy (2012-08-08)

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