In The Hearing Trumpet, Otherness is treated as a free and vulnerable position, although one worth holding on to. Marian and other characters in this position seem generally comfortable until what I will call “standard society” decides to infringe upon it. From the start Marian embraces her Otherness, but after being entirely rejected from standard society and given opportunity to explore the Other herself, her embrace becomes more pronounced. In the end there is a kind of glorious retaliation of the Other which destroys the known world, and it is in this world that Marian’s freedom is finally secured.
To begin, a word on Otherness. It is essentially a
relational quality. One must be “other” to something else, but also that
something else must be in some sense dominant. Furthermore, although one
has to be other to a specific thing, the class “Other” can be used as an
umbrella term for people who are all other to something in perhaps
distinct ways. Tropes such as the “band of misfits,” or “motley crew, or the
“outlaw” and so on explore this to some extent, but in The Hearing Trumpet this
is taken further by exploring characters who are not just other to polite
society but he entirely of humanity. Indeed, “the band of misfits” trope
typically involves finding a place where one is not Other, whereas Marian is
permanently and comfortably other. It is this comfort in fact that means Marian
does not seek out a community.
The Hearing Trumpet establishes these facts about Marian
from her initial description, which may be thought to place her other to “young
and able”. “True, rheumatics have bent
my skeleton somewhat. This does not prevent me from taking a walk in clement
weather and sweeping my room once a week, on Thursday, a form of exercise which
is both useful and edifying.” And “the fact that I have no teeth and never
could wear dentures does not in any way discomfort me, I don’t have to bite
anybody and there are all sorts of edible foods easy to procure and digestible
to the stomach”. We see repeated use of this structure: description of a
would-be social failing followed Marian’s indifference. This returns throughout
the book. Not too long after we see: “Indeed I do have a short grey beard which
conventional people would find repulsive. Personally, I find it rather
gallant.” This follows the same structure as before, and also introduces an
important point; Marian is well aware she is not a conventional person. It
should be emphasised that her comfort is not due to ignorance.
The reader gets the
sense that Marian is not made worse by age, merely transformed by it. But
transformed into what? Marian herself doesn’t seem to give much attention to
this question, rather accepting her qualities as they apply to her life.
The clearest depiction of Marian being placed into the category
of other is this: “I do not believe she puts in in a human category so our
relationship not disagreeable. The maguey plant, the flies and myself are
things which occupy the back yard, we are elements of the landscape and
accepted as such.” It is at this point we realise quite how far into the
position of Otherness Marian has been placed; she is not recognised by human.
Albeit by one character here, but comparisons between her and these inanimate
things are repeated, most powerfully when Marian says, “The maguey cactus seems
alive to me, so I feel I can also make claims on existence.”
Marian is deeply intertwined with nature, and this is an
important part of her Otherness. Frequent comparisons between her and natural
objects are made, as seen above, and also her space and nature’s space seem to
be one and the same. Marian remarks, “The red hen looked as if she was laying
another egg on my bed.” Nature enters Marian’s bed, a place that for many of us
would be deeply personal. Her blasé attitude towards this event, which is of
course not unusual for Marian, tells us that she does not see herself as
separate to nature. It cannot intrude upon her because it is her, or perhaps,
she is it. One can see Marian as simply
in the place of Other, but can also ask the question, “If Marian is not part of
society, then where is she?” The answer seems to be raw and unfiltered
nature.
Finally, it is established that Marian’s attitude towards
society is the antithesis to her attitude towards nature. She is consciously aware
of being outside of society, and not only is she happy there, she does not want
society to intrude on her. In her mind, as long as she “makes herself useful”
then society will have no reason to bother her; this is an unspoken agreement
between herself and the outside world. She says, “I give no trouble at all and
keep myself clean with no assistance from anybody.” If she is not a bother to
others, she herself will not be bothered back by them. This of course
foreshadows the novel’s central conflict, where the unspoken agreement between
Marian and society, in particular her family, is broken.
This break happens after Marian’s friend Carmella gifts
Marian the titular object of the book, “The Hearing Trumpet,” which enables
hear to hear people, something has not been able to do well for a while. After
receiving this gift, she returns to her family home, accidentally intruding
upon her grandson Robert and his friends having cocktails. She is aware he is
embarrassed by her and makes herself scarce. A while later, Galahad, her son, gifts
her a bottle of port. This prompts Marian to discover what motivated “Galahad’s
unwonted kindness.” She is suspicious because “he considers “kindness to inanimate
creatures a waste of time.” Using the Hearing Trumpet she discovers that her
family think “she would be much better off in a home” and that she has been “a
constant anxiety to [her family] for the past twenty years.” This final point
establishes that Marian’s understanding, bother not and be bothered not, was
not only ultimately wrong but had never really been right. Her family intend to
send her off to an institute in Santa Brigida which is run by the “Well of
Light Brotherhood.”
Listening further she hears what her family really thing of
her. They see her as non-human but in a very different way. To her grandson
Robert, “Grandmother can hardly be classified as human being. She’s a drooling
sack of decomposing flesh,” and to daughter-in-law Muriel, “these old people do
not have feelings like you or I.”
Her reaction to all this is, fittingly, “The cats, what will
become of the cats?” She is relatively unbothered by her family thinking poorly
of her, but is aghast at the idea of “Brotherhood with the grim knowledge of what
is better for other people and the iron determination to better them whether
they like it or not.” That her thoughts are turn to this aspect so quickly
compounds the sense that Marian has anxiety over people intruding on her life,
that this is something she has guarded against consciously for some time. It
says that Otherness, happy or unhappy, is a vulnerable position to outside
influences; either Otherness is assimilated or rejected and since Marian is so
far removed from the dominant position she must be rejected.
Marian is taken away from her peaceful life to the
Institution in Santa Brigida. During her family’s attempts to persuade her, we
seen that another feature of Otherness is incomprehensibility. Galahad tries to
persuade Marian by saying “You are going on a very nice holiday, Mother.”
Marian refuses to entertain his “silly lies” for a moment, telling him plainly
that she knows “You are sending me to a home for senile females.” After a pause
during which Galahad looks “as if [Marian] had picked a live goat out of [her]
bonnet.” He keeps on insisting she will be “comfortable” and have a “lot of
company” even though we have so far seen that Marian’s comfort is conditional
on mostly having her own company.
Galahad cannot comprehend what loneliness is for Marian. He
says she will have “a trained staff to see that you are never lonely,” which
causes Marian immediately inform him that, “I never suffer from loneliness. I
suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from the idea
that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly
well-meaning people.” She makes a final please for Galahad to understand that
he is not persuading her at all but forcing her to go against her will. He
tells her, “Really mother it will be for your own good”, a line that might
would fit equally well whatever form Marian’s protest had taken. This builds
the sense that the Other is ignored by instinct.
The lack of understanding goes both ways, only Marian is
more conscious of it. As she packs, she remarks upon the bible and how “I don’t
pretend to understand anything, however why worship something that only sends
you plagues and massacres? and why was Eve blamed for everything?” Marian is
well aware that she does not understand things outside herself, in stark
contrast to the arrogance Galahad had shown shortly before with his
presumptuous claims about what Marian would and would not like. Perhaps this is
because Marian at one point was part of humanity, so has enough
experience of it to appreciate her lack of understanding.
In a similar way, she remarks upon the military: “Military
people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed
for writing some nice inert paper book,” and remarks further that, “Values are
very strange, they change so quickly I can’t keep track of them.” This
highlights a distinction in the ways the Other and the standard are
incomprehensible. The Other is incomprehensible to the standard because it is
unknown, and sometimes wilfully ignored, whereas the standard is incomprehensible
to the Other because of contradictions; and of course there are contradictions
since the standard changes and which wouldn’t be necessary if it were complete
or perfect.
When Marian arrives to the institute she is taken by
surprise by its form and the forms within: “Pixielike dwellings shaped like
toadstools, Swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows,
and another I took to be an outsize Egyptian mummy.” The institute is made to
feel like a whole other world to the society Marian had lived adjacent too.
This is where the place where what is Other is banished.
There are ten residents in total, not including Dr. Gambit
and Mrs. Gambit who run the institution. These residents are Other in their own
way. We are first introduced to the resident Anna Wertz specifies how. Anna
cannot stop talking, her eccentricity made obvious, and goes on at length about
her philosophy on life which comes down to her “mortal fight to keep on [her]
feet and not lose [her] inspired joy for life.” She laments about how “nobody
understands her.” Like Marian, Anna possesses a reverence for nature and
scepticism about the modern age: “when I think of the autumn leaves and the
snow, …, I realise time is unimportant, yet people attach so much importance to
clocks.” This echo of Marian’s own attitudes towards such things as the bible
and military. Marian herself “heartily agree[s]” with Anna’s philosophy on life.
After this point in the book, things continue to grow
stranger and stranger and it becomes more an exploration of some very
unconventional character dynamics rather than specifically an exploration of
her Otherness. And as such, I will skip to the end.
The book finishes with the end of the world. Carmella and Marian
have a brief chance to discuss this. For Carmella this is “poetic justice” and
although Marian is “far from happy” she does agree that a world without
authorities would be nice. Given her greatest unhappiness came from the
imposition of her family’s authority on her, it may be reasonable to guess that
the existence of authority is part of what makes the Other such a vulnerable
position.
Despite the ordeals being Other puts one through, the final
message of the book is hopeful. When the chaos and apocalypse is over and the
old world is no more, Marian remarks, “werecubs will continue the document till
the planet is populated by cats, werewolves, bees and goats. We all fervently
hope that this will be an improvement on humanity, which deliberately renounced
the Pneuma of the Goddess.” This concludes the theme of humanity’s rejection; the
‘pnuema of the goddess’ may be considered just one of the many Other’d things
humanity has rejected. Magic and nature, which are not made especially distinct
in the book, have now rejected humanity (at least as we are to understand it in
the context of this book) and one gets the feeling that this is an act of
retaliation. However, this retaliation happened off-screen, so the ending is
not about that. Rather it is about Marian’s reaction to it. Ultimately, she
is looking forward, seemingly settled into her new life: “a shewolf gave birth
to … six white woolly puppies. We’re thinking of training them to draw a
sledge.”
