“[E]verything that is to be made whole must first be broken”: religion, metaphor and narrative alchemy in Hilary Mantel's Fludd (1989)

Abstract

In its depiction of the events initiated by a stranger’s arrival to a rural Catholic parish in 1950s England, Hilary Mantel’s (1989) novel Fludd is built upon fundamentally metaphoric foundations. Most noticeably, the novel’s articulation of alchemy captures the defining opposition of literal and fantastical meaning at the heart of all alchemical symbols. It does so via a metaphorical construction that is first outlined in the opening paratextual 'note' before continuing to provide the narrative backbone to the whole novel. This article adopts a broadly cognitive approach to illustrate how metaphor fulfils multiple crucial functions in the text, acting as a tool of characterisation, a means of narrative compression and a form of meta-textual referencing, all of which directly link to the novel’s central theme of transformation, particularly in the context of contemporary Catholicism. In so doing, it draws upon Biebuyck and Martens concept of the ‘paranarrative’ to demonstrate metaphor’s potential to fulfil a wide range of fundamental narrative functions.