The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies
The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies comprises three novels: *The Rebel Angels*, *What’s Bred in the Bone*, and *The Lyre of Orpheus*. These works explore themes of personal identity and the quest for one's myth, often through the lens of art and scholarship. Each novel can stand alone, but they share common threads, particularly the exploration of characters’ inner journeys toward self-discovery.
*The Rebel Angels* introduces readers to Maria Theotoky and Simon Darcourt, who navigate complex relationships in an academic setting while grappling with their own identities. The story revolves around the provocative character John Parlabane, whose disruptive influence challenges the others to confront their personal truths.
*What’s Bred in the Bone* follows Francis Cornish, tracing his life from his family's influences to his artistic development, emphasizing the importance of understanding one's origins and personal mythology.
Finally, *The Lyre of Orpheus* intertwines the lives of the recurring characters as Simon Darcourt seeks to validate Francis's artistic legacy while dealing with interpersonal dynamics and the creation of an opera that reflects deeper truths about life and relationships. Collectively, the trilogy offers a rich tapestry of character studies and philosophical inquiry into the nature of identity and creativity.
The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published:The Rebel Angels, 1981; What’s Bred in the Bone, 1985; The Lyre of Orpheus, 1988
Type of work: Novels
The Work
The Cornish Trilogy shares many of the themes that run through the Deptford Trilogy, and it is these themes as much as the characters that link the three novels that can be read completely independently. Davies is once again concerned with finding one’s personal myth, becoming fully oneself—something that often is connected with art or pure scholarship in these novels—and in each book he again approaches the topic somewhat differently.
The Rebel Angels is the only novel in the trilogy to be written in the first person; the main narrative voice is passed back and forth between Maria Theotoky, a beautiful graduate student who narrates the sections titled “Second Paradise,” and Simon Darcourt, an Anglican priest and teacher at the university, who narrates the chapters called “The New Aubrey.” Maria’s sections focus on her love for Clement Hollier, her dissertation director, and her problems with John Parlabane, a renegade monk who teaches skeptic philosophy and was a boyhood friend of Hollier. Darcourt is one of Francis Cornish’s executors, along with Hollier and Urquhart McVarish, and his chapters attempt to provide a broader view of the university, especially of its personalities. As Darcourt and Maria’s experiences overlap, the effect of two separate narrators is not a disjointed story line but one that is dovetailed. Maria’s voice, in fact, is much like Darcourt’s, and while this is a weakness in terms of portraying Maria, it does give the novel a continuity and a unity of vision.
The main thrust of the story comes from the actions of Parlabane, who deliberately sets out to get everybody excited. He badgers Maria, poking and prying into her personal life and giving her long lectures on his philosophy; he cadges money from Darcourt and Hollier; and he plays the sycophant to Urky McVarish, the professor everyone else is united in loathing. At the end of the novel, he kills McVarish in a gruesome way and then kills himself, leaving a letter explaining the circumstances of the murder to Hollier and Maria. Parlabane also writes a long, rambling novel called Be Not Another’s, which he thrusts on Hollier, Maria, and Darcourt, asking for their opinions and then ignoring them.
Parlabane—though his book is based on his own life, though he seems to obey no rules but his own, and though he gives perfectly good advice to Maria on knowing herself—does not fully know himself. For Dunstan Ramsay, David Staunton, and Magnus Eisengrim, knowing oneself involves a balance between intellect and wonder; Parlabane has no balance and relies on his intellect, despite his claim of belief in God. Parlabane is an egotist and, as such, cannot fully know himself, for he does not really accept anything outside his own authority. Nevertheless, he is able to become one of Maria’s Rebel Angels, helping her to realize that she must accept her Gypsy background as much as her university education if she wants to be herself. Maria also calls Hollier and Darcourt her Rebel Angels, placing them in her personal mythology, for the Rebel Angels taught wisdom to men after being thrown out of heaven, and Maria believes that the three have taught her much about herself.
What’s Bred in the Bone is the strongest novel of the Cornish Trilogy, perhaps because it is the most focused. It tells the story of what is bred in the bone of Francis Cornish, the experiences and inheritances that make him who he is. It begins prior to his birth by describing the town of Blairlogie, Ontario, and the family into which he was born, and goes on to describe all the events that are important in forming Cornish’s character, from his first discovery that the world is separate from him to his death. Francis discovers that art is his talent and develops it by sketching the corpses at the undertaker’s, where his grandfather’s coachman holds a second job. At the university, he practices drawing in the manner of the Old Masters, using the silverpoint technique, and after Oxford he takes a job helping Tancred Saraceni, an art restorer. When Saraceni challenges him to paint a picture in Old Master style, mixing paints as they would have done and using a wooden panel of the right age, Francis paints “the myth of Francis Cornish.” It is a triptych of the Marriage at Cana, and every figure in it is significant for whom Francis Cornish has become.
In What’s Bred in the Bone, Davies again strongly emphasizes the importance of discovering one’s personal myth. In an early conversation with Francis, Saraceni says that modern artists “are painting the inner vision . . . but they depend only on themselves, unaided by religion or myth, and of course what most of them find within themselves is revelation only to themselves.” One needs a connection with the “world of wonders” to produce a life that is meaningful. Davies does not imply that finding one’s personal myth is easy or that knowing oneself solves all problems. Because Francis expresses himself best in Old Master style, he is effectively prevented from painting anything, for he would simply be accused of fakery. Though in his old age he seems to the world an “eccentric and crabbed spirit, there was a quality of completeness about him.” Francis dies laughing, having recognized the allegory of his own life.
The Lyre of Orpheus, which further develops several of the main characters of The Rebel Angels, pursues several threads of plot. Simon Darcourt, whose discoveries while writing a biography of Francis Cornish provided the framing fiction of What’s Bred in the Bone, is studying Francis’s art and discovering his own personal myth in the process. His plan to prove and reveal Francis as a great artist and not a skillful faker leads him, with help from Maria’s mother, to identify his personal myth as that of the Fool on the tarot cards, who is pushed by instinct, “something outside the confines of intellect and caution,” into unconventional paths. Darcourt finds this identification of his personal myth gives him “a stronger sense of who he was.”
The second major thread of plot involves the decision by the Cornish Foundation (headed by Arthur Cornish, Francis’s nephew) to produce an opera called Arthur of Britain: Or, The Magnanimous Cuckold. The opera and the characters involved in creating it take up a large part of the narrative, but the most important facet of it is the way the plot—Guenevere and Lancelot’s betrayal of Arthur—is reflected in the lives of Arthur and Maria Cornish and Geraint Powell, the director of the opera and Arthur’s friend. Maria’s infidelity with Geraint does not exactly parallel Guenevere’s, for she does not love Geraint, and in many ways Geraint’s bedding of her reflects the way Uther came to Ygraine to sire Arthur more than it does Guenevere and Lancelot’s affair. During a discussion of what plot the opera should use, Darcourt recalls Ovid saying that “the great truths of life are the wax, and all we can do is to stamp it with different forms. . . . If we are true to the great myth, we can give it what form we choose. The myth—the wax—does not change.” Arthur and Maria must learn how to be true to “the great myth” in order for their marriage to be enriched rather than destroyed, and that lesson is expressed in the loving charity of Sir Walter Scott’s lines used in the opera’s libretto:
It is the secret sympathy,
Bibliography
Cude, Wilfred. A Due Sense of Differences: An Evaluative Approach to Canadian Literature. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1980.
Grant, Judith Skelton. Robertson Davies: Man of Myth. Toronto: Viking, 1994.
Jones, Joseph, and Joanna Jones. Canadian Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Keith, W. J. Canadian Literature in English. New York: Longman, 1985.
La Bossière, Camille R., and Linda M. Morra, eds. Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarieties. Ottawa, Ont.: University of Ottawa Press, 2001.
Lawrence, Robert G., and Samuel L. Macey, eds. Studies in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Triology. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1980.
Little, Dave. Catching the Wind in a Net: The Religious Vision of Robertson Davies. Toronto: ECW, 1996.
Monk, Patricia. The Smaller Infinity: The Jungian Self in the Novels of Robertson Davies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.
Peterman, Michael. Robertson Davies. Boston: Twayne, 1986.