Religion in Iain Banks' 'The Wasp Factory'

[tomwein880]

My A-level coursework. I promise that this is (probably) the last of my school essays, but I am proud of this one.

Why does Banks have Frank create his own religion?

“Religion is a reaction to infantile helplessness. In this theory we
try to recreate in religion a feeling of being protected by unbounded
'love' which we yearned for in our state of infantile helplessness.” (1)

The standard response to ‘The Wasp Factory’ is to immediately diagnose it as being ‘all about power’. In a way, this is right, but Frank does not, as has been suggested, relentlessly battle for power at every turn. Rather, ‘The Wasp Factory’ is about Frank’s struggle to find structure in his life, and his attempts to establish a hierarchy of power in his universe. It is for this reason that he creates a religion based on totemism, sacrifice and power.

Frank is forced to realise early on that there are more potent powers than himself. He recognises that some elements cannot be tamed, and though he delights in his victories when the Sea “gives up” items, he makes “sacrifices to it in [his] soul, fearing it a little, respecting it as you’re supposed to”; he accepts that he cannot dominate the Sea, and through this, that there are elements more powerful than himself.

Normally, children are protected from such powerful forces by their parents. However, Frank’s mother is absent, and his father is deeply flawed and unreliable as a symbol of authority. Though he tries to be offhand about it, there is a certain resentment in Frank’s “If I was lucky, my father might tell me something and, if I was luckier still, it might even be the truth”. It may be darkly amusing for the reader, but it must have been rather wounding for an adoring young boy to discover that his father had for years been attempting to get Frank to publicly embarrass himself with tales of Pathos the Fourth Musketeer, or the much loved Fellatio from ‘Hamlet’. In pronouncing his father “immature”, Frank rejects him as a potential figure of authority (and perhaps quite justifiably; if we question his responsibility now, then how much the more so when we discover the cruel experiment to which he has subjected Frank).

Nevertheless, rightly or wrongly, Frank’s father is pushed away. However, this presents Frank with a problem; with no mother and no father left to protect him, Frank is left without a guide through the travails of childhood. It is for this reason that he attaches himself so closely to his older brother Eric. There is a fierce pride in the way in which Frank talks of “my brother” (Banks’ italics), as Frank recalls how he “must have embarrassed him with [his] slavish following around and copying” and how he “was wretched while [Eric] suffered. Such reminisces demonstrate just how much affection Frank has for his older brother and substitute father.

However, following the graphic baby incident, Eric goes mad, and Frank loses yet another mentor. This devastating vicissitude affects Frank so deeply that he feels the need to remind us of it in almost every chapter: “since he went crazy”, “What a loony”, “He might be crazy, but he’s clever”, “given the state of his head”, “Eric was crazy all right”, “The conflagration in his head”, “Eric was committed to…his own destruction”; the list goes on and on.
In succession, his mother (by desertion), his father (by deception) and his brother (by desertion and then insanity) have all invalidated themselves as protectors. By now he is unsurprisingly disinclined to transfer his affections onto someone else that he risks losing. Apart from anything else, there is no one else in his life worthy of the title of substitute parent. Frank is forced to turn away from human protectors, and replace them with the eternal powers. He conceives a religion based upon the very elements whose power he has, in his failed attempts to master them, recognised.

The first and principal power to which he subscribes is Fate, and throughout the book, there is much discussion of Fate. Franks believes that “From the smaller to the greater, the patterns always hold true”, and later describes himself as feeling “like a bead on a thread being pulled through the air on a line”. He asserts that the date of manufacture of the clockface, which is one hundred years before his birth, is “Certainly not a coincidence”. In so doing, he accepts a deterministic view of the world, thus denying himself the power to choose and therefore absolving himself of any responsibility.

However, Fate is an indeterminate and vague power, suitable only as an overarching philosophy rather than a personal religion. This issue is exaggerated by the near-exclusive belief in empirical evidence which his father has transmitted to Frank through his emphasis on measurement and his insistence that the world could just as well be a Möbius strip as anything else. Therefore, Frank requires something rather more substantial and physical to act as Fate’s agents.

One of these pseudo-gods, perhaps the one which receives the most attention in the book, is Water, and it is for that reason that the time of high tide (when the water is at its most powerful, having encroached on the maximum amount of Frank’s island), is included in the rituals of the Wasp Factory. Furthermore, drowning is given (Frank claims “arbitrarily”) one of the most significant positions in the Wasp Factory; this underlines its moment for Frank.

Another is Fire, a destructive element which Frank puts at XII on the clockface, indicating that even he sees it as the most important of the elements. In lighting candles, he subverts their use in many religious ceremonies as light-givers, and instead uses them to symbolise fiery destruction. Fire comes up time and again in the book, in the burning of rabbits, wasps and dogs, and in the climactic scene with the gunpowder.

The final and most powerful of these ersatz gods is Death itself. Death is immediately represented within his rituals by the killing of the wasps, and also by the skulls which “look…down on him” in his alternative temple, the Bunker. Furthermore, death provides the mythology of his religion, with the dramatic and macabre ways in which people die. For instance, there is Leviticus, crushed by a flying black man, or Athelwald, who burned then drowned in his attempt to gas himself (an interesting mixture of the three major elements which constitute Frank’s trinity).

Notably, none of these three powers is personified, because Frank is desperate to avoid the possibility of mortality which being human would bring. However, since Fate is so vague, and he cannot accept that anything so powerful could be random, he designs the Wasp Factory, his Delphic oracle, to allow him to interpret what will happen. For

“Determinism is the theory that if you knew all the details about every particle in the world,
and had a computer powerful enough, you could feed all the data into the computer and
use it to predict the future, because you could know where every single atom is going and
what it's going to interact with.” (2)

To Frank, the Wasp Factory is that computer. Death is the most powerful of his pseudo-gods, so he uses the supposed symbolism of the way in which the wasp dies to decide what will happen in the near future.

Thus far, only the powers which are above Frank in his hierarchy have been examined. However, Frank is by no means at the bottom. As High Priest of his religion, Frank assumes a little of the arrogance of religious belief; as the follower of (as far as he is concerned) the only true faith, he assumes that the Gods must be on his side. This means that all other people are, to borrow a phrase, infidels, and can be treated as such. Thus, the violence with which he responds to being pushed about a bit is perfectly justified, as is the patronising way in which he treats “old Mackenzie”, and Frank’s power over him is emphasised in that he does not ‘buy’ a catapult, but rather “take” it.

Furthermore, if he has some power of people, then his power over animals is absolute. His religion conveniently permits this, because he extrapolates his moral code from that of the powers which he acknowledges as deities. There are none of the moral conundrums of ‘why do bad things happen?’ in Frank’s religion, because he has no belief in the inherent benevolence of his gods. Since the Wind and the Sea are guilty of attacking him (in destroying his dams, for instance), a precedent has been set which permits causing pain to those below Frank in the hierarchy. Therefore, his vicious torture of the rabbits is entirely justified, because in attacking him, they have revolted against their rightful master in this feudalistic society. The difference in scale between having his sandcastles eroded and murdering an entire warren of rabbits is not, in his egocentricity, apparent to Frank.

Frank’s religion is a very pragmatic one; his logic is not that they are deities and therefore he cannot dominate them but rather that he cannot dominate them and therefore they must be deities. In short, he accepts he cannot dominate everything, but attempts to dominate whatever he can. At one point he even says that his reaction to the Sea is to “in many ways treat…it like an equal”, and it is here also that the prevalence of the Sacrifice Poles as an element of his religion becomes particularly vital. For, as the revolutionary work of the social anthropologist William Robertson Smith has demonstrated, “the purpose of [sacrifice] is…to make a communion in flesh between the worshipper and his god, to establish a bond of kinship between them.”(3) Such a “bond of kinship” inevitably implies a degree of equality. This springs from his logic that elements more powerful than him should be worshipped; if he did not continually test these elements, in striving to become equal through sacrifice or better, through dam building, then he could not prove they were more powerful, and therefore they would not deserve his obeisances.

In summary, Frank concentrates his philosophical efforts into creating a hierarchy of power, with Fate at the top, then Death, then Fire and Water, then Frank, then other people, then animals. But, returning to the issue of empiricism and vagueness, such philosophising is still a little too disconnected from everyday life for Frank. Just as a parent sets out the carefully organised routines of childhood, where the maximum possible amount of time is structured and productive, Frank needs his substitute parents to interfere directly in his life, and he therefore sets out rules and routines for himself, through which the powers to which he submits can demonstrate their potency, because they have forced him to do things in a particular way.

A perfect example of this is his “daily washing ritual”. Since it involves water, everything must be done to a set pattern, so Frank “take the same number of strokes of the same length in the same sequence each morning”. Indeed the very use of the word “ablutions” gives the scene a religious tinge. Again at the Wasp Factory, Frank’s ritualistic behaviour is particularly evident, for, if the Wasp Factory is to work at all, then Frank must be certain that the powers which he believes power the Factory are indeed mightier than he. He therefore uses the rituals here, which are forced home for the reader with the use of such deliberate and purposeful verbs as “noting”, “set”, “extracted” and “recite”, as a way of reminding himself of the routines imposed upon him by those powers, as a demonstration of their dominance of him.

In reminding him of the power which his gods hold over him, such rituals remind Frank that he is absolved of any responsibility. Just as his belief in determinism prevents him from having to make any major decisions, his commitment to rituals means he need not make any minor decisions either. This extends right down to what he wears for the day; “green for that day” implies that he wears green socks because it is that day, while “In the winter I’d have a vest underneath…but not in the summer” informs the reader that he would dress the same for the whole of the summer and the same for the whole of the winter.

The most vital feature of Frank’s religion is that it is not born out of true religious revelation, but rather out of necessity. He creates his religion in order to provide himself with a substitute protector; he creates his religion for a purpose, and not because he believes it to be a universal truth. There are, therefore, many parallels with other religions; many elements of his faith are drawn from Christian worship. Candles have already been alluded to above, but Frank also refers to his “brick, wood and concrete altar” and to the Holy Water-esque “phials of precious fluids”. When he describes how “Each drawer…held the body of a wasp”, there is a clear parallel with a graveyard, and even the “gloom” and “dim” light recalls a mediaeval church.(4) In so doing, Bank’s has us ridicule Frank’s lack of imagination and unoriginality, thus reminding the reader that this is a religion built not on true religious faith but out of unconscious necessity for a system of belief, for

“Freud had often said that paranoid delusions are like philosophical systems
or scientific theories - they are all trying to make sense of the world, and our
place in it.” (5)

It is not just Christian symbolism which Frank draws upon to inspire his religion. There are, for instance, the mythological allusions in ways in which his victims die; Esmerelda perishes in a perversion of the myth of Icarus, not arrogant or ambitious but merely innocent. Blyth is killed by a snake, which recalls a multitude of myths, from The Fall to a host of classical legends: Amphisbaena, Cerastes, Medusa, Ophiusa and Python, to name but a few. Frank likens Paul’s death to death by fire, and this recalls the ancient Melqart of Tyre, or the greek Herakles. If Frank’s claim that he is “educated” is true, then he would, at the very least, have been aware of the links to Icarus and of the mythological significance of snakes; once again he is unoriginal, because his religion is not supposed to be true, merely useful, so it does not matter if elements of it are derivative.

Banks is that rarest of writers, who is fully aware of the intricate symbolism he packs into every line, and aware of the significance of every word, both internally, in terms of the plot, and externally, in terms of Bank’s attitude. As far as it concerns religion, this attitude is, in its basic form, is extremely simple. Banks is virulently opposed to all religion. On the subject of his novel ‘Whit’, in which he creates his own sophisticated religion, he has commented “I despise all religions - whether they're cute or not.”(6) Banks elaborates, saying that “the fact that Frank has all these ludicrous symbols, totems and objects of significance like the belly-button fluff, shavings off his Dad's stick or the skull of the old dog”(7) is in part designed to show how meaningless other religious symbols, such as the Cross, are.

This wish to ridicule religion is continued with his treatment of mythology. The perversions of the Icarus myth and the allusions to the Fall have been discussed above, and yet another myth is distorted in the history of the clockface, though this time it is Christian rather than classical. Frank likens the disappearance of its sister clockface to “a little Grail legend of its own”, yet all that has happened is that it has been either “melted down years ago” or put up on “the wall of some smart house on the Black Isle”. In so doing, Banks scoffs at the fuss which is made over finding the real Grail, when that too has probably been melted down. Similarly, the degradation of Saul/Paul, a leading Christian disciple, into a “wet-jowled, yellow-bleary-eyed, fishy-smelling old hound” and then a naïve little child, easily outsmarted, is hardly complimentary to Christianity.

Moreover, several of the deaths (which, as Frank’s mythology, are inseparable from an examination of his religion) are riven with black humour and their ridiculous and over the top nature encourages the reader to find them amusing rather than to revere them. For example, Leviticus’ shocked last words were “My God, the buggers’ve learned to fly”, while there is a shaming amusement as one reads how Blyth “screamed and jumped and tugged at his leg”. Such examples underline just how laughable Banks finds religion.

In one’s amusement, it is sometimes possible to ignore just how brutal the deaths are, but they are unequivocally so. To picture the death of a fictional character with whom we have no sympathy might be easy enough, but if one really imagines what it might be like to feel one’s lungs slowly fill with water, struggling in a confined oil drum, then one cannot help but squirm. Such a level of brutality in mythology recalls many of the more distasteful of Christian tales, such as the punishment of Jezebel, for whom God decreed that “The dogs shall eat Jez'ebel by the wall of Jezreel”(8) or the retribution which the Philistines exacted on Samson: “But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.”(9) In introducing these allusions to the brutal side of Christianity (for it is principally Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition with which Bank’s deals), the author reminds us of his personal view that religion, though easily ridiculed, is also to be criticized as an uncivilized force.

Banks has in fact been caught in the same paradox as Frank. Frank simultaneously wants power and to be overpowered. In exactly the same way Banks promulgates the view that children need discipline and structure in their lives, if they are to develop successfully. However, his libertarian political instincts lead him to rail against the oppressive constraints of organized religion. This, perhaps, is because Banks would advocate structure for children yet freedom for adults. As such, ‘The Wasp Factory’ can be seen as a kind of distorted rights of passage tale. Frank is not mature enough to deal with his own problems, so he creates a religion which absolves him of responsibility for them, with disastrous results. It is only when Frank has matured significantly (and the matter of fact discussions of such complicated theories as “penis envy” at the end of the book demonstrate this new found maturity) that this freedom to “live and grow” becomes suitable. For, as one of the concluding sentences asserts: “Now the door closes, and my journey begins”.

(1) http://www.freud.org.uk/religion.html
(2) Bill Hellier (Personal interview)
(3) Robertson Smith, William (1894), Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, A&C Black, quoted in Durkheim, Emile, Trans. Cosman, Carol (2001), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Oxford University Press pp.249
(4) http://mb.sparknotes.com/mb.epl?b=70&m=1134104&t=316452
(5) http://www.freud.org.uk/religion.html (My italics)
(6) http://homepages.compuserve.de/Mostral/ ... gger95.htm
(7) Ibid
(8) 1Kings 21.23, quoted in http://www.bartleby.com/108/11/21.html
(9) Judges 16.21, quoted in http://www.bartleby.com/108/07/16.html


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[k-j]

Good essay. I think an A is nailed-on. Really well-written and referenced.

I'm with you most of the way. Just two things I'll pick up on: you claim that "the most vital feature of Frank’s religion is that it is not born out of true religious revelation, but rather out of necessity." But is there anything in the novel to suggest that the converse is true of other religions? I think Banks uses the petri-dish of the island to give the lie to all religious mythos. As such, I disagree that he "has us ridicule Frank’s lack of imagination and unoriginality." He's having us ridicule those qualities in all hierophants - at least the isolated and psychologically damaged Frank has an excuse for his fantasy. Or perhaps this is what you are saying, but I think you're a little harsh on Frank.

I think Banks is very sympathetic to Frank, and your concluding paragraph is a stretch. I don't see the contradiction you claim. Obviously I'm not going to go and read the novel again in writing this, but I got the sense that Frank was far from being all-wrong. Indeed, while away from his island-asylum, out on the town with his midget pal, he seems pretty normal. You say Banks's "libertarian political instincts lead him to rail against the oppressive constraints of organized religion". How do you know it's his libertarianism that's motivating him? Couldn't it just be huamism? Where does Banks "advocate structure for children yet freedom for adults"? If "The Wasp Factory" advocates anything, it seems to me it's a cohesive social environment for children and adults alike, free of religious or other (e.g. hippie) dogma and underpinned by rationalism, empathy and mutual responsibility.

n.b. you want to be careful, putting your coursework up on the net like this. People will be ripping it off as soon as it shows up on Google.