Pilgrim
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Timothy Findley |
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| Subtitle | A Novel |
| Publisher | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Honors | |
“I have lived many times, Doctor Jung. Who knows, as Leda I might have been the mother of Helen—or, as Anne, the mother of Mary…. I was also crippled shepherd in thrall of Saint Teresa of Avila; an Irish stable boy and a maker of stained glass at Chartres…. I saw the first performance of Hamlet and the last performance of Moliere, the actor. I was a friend to Oscar Wilde and an enemy to Leonardo…. I am both male and female. I am ageless, and I have no access to death.”On April 15, 1912—ironically the very date on which… | |
“I have lived many times, Doctor Jung. Who knows, as Leda I might have been the mother of Helen—or, as Anne, the mother of Mary…. I was also crippled shepherd in thrall of Saint Teresa of Avila; an Irish stable boy and a maker of stained glass at Chartres…. I saw the first performance of Hamlet and the last performance of Moliere, the actor. I was a friend to Oscar Wilde and an enemy to Leonardo…. I am both male and female. I am ageless, and I have no access to death.”
On April 15, 1912—ironically the very date on which more than a thousand people lost their lives as the Titanic sank—a figure known only as Pilgrim tries to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree. When he is found five hours later, his heart miraculously begins beating again. This isn’t his first attempt to end his life, and it is decided that steps must be taken to prevent Pilgrim from doing himself further harm.
Escorted by his beloved friend, Lady Sybil Quartermaine, Pilgrim is admitted to the famous Burgholzi Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, where he will begin a battle of psyche and soul with Carl Jung, the self-professed mystical scientist of the unconscious—who is also a slave to his own sexual appetites.
Hungry for intellectual and spiritual challenge, Jung is fascinated by this compelling and enigmatic patient who refuses to speak. Slowly, though, Jung coaxes him to reveal the astonishing story of his existence. Pilgrim claims to be ageless and sexless, having lived as both male and female for four thousand years. Asserting that he has witnessed the greatest events of human history, he recounts his involvement with numerous figures who have shaped world culture, including Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James.
For Jung, probing this patient’s mind proves a challenge that is both frustrating and enlightening. Is Pilgrim delusional? Are his memories only dreams or something far more fantastic? Is it madness or a miracle? These interactions with Pilgrim have a profound and unexpected effect on the esteemed and controversial doctor’s own life and sanity, for his dreams soon become entwined with those of his patient’s, while the anchor of his soul, his marriage, begins to disintegrate. The puzzle called Pilgrim will seemingly lead either to Jung’s salvation—or his damnation.
Beautifully written, deeply evocative, and filled with a fascinating cast of historical characters, Pilgrim is both a richly layered story of a man’s search for his own destiny and an absorbing, mind-expanding novel that explores the timeless questions of humanity and consciousness.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Timothy Findley’s Pilgrim is the story of a man who can’t die even though he tries over and over to kill himself. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, in 1912 he’s placed in a Zurich clinic where Carl Gustav Jung is hard at work trying to determine the perimeter of the collective unconscious. For Jung, this man becomes an embodiment of the psyche’s mystery. Claiming to have no past history but to have simply arrived one day at consciousness, Pilgrim lives in a limbo outside individuality and subjectivity. He’s everyone and no one. Is he a messenger? Or is he a basket case? As the novel gathers momentum, we realise that Pilgrim is a character much like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a witness traversing gender and time. Imagining conversations between Pilgrim and Henry James, Leonardo da Vinci, and Oscar Wilde, this novel is like a party full of beautiful guests. Or a safe train trip through an exotic landscape of consciousness where men use cologne that smells like “moss…lemons…ferns”, and schizophrenics are elegant and well dressed, like the old countess who believes she lives on the moon and asks her doctor, “Is this a ballroom? Am I being courted?”—Emily White
Barnes and Noble
It is April 17, 1912, and an art historian named Pilgrim is pronounced dead after he hangs himself in his London garden. Five hours later, his heart begins to beat again. But as miraculous as it seems, it’s not the first time this has happened. Pilgrim has lived forever, and it appears he cannot die. Acclaimed Canadian author Timothy Findley himself has worked nothing short of a miracle in Pilgrim, a provocative and intelligently crafted novel that succeeds in being every bit as entertaining as it is ambitious. And it is very, very ambitious. Told through many voices, real and imagined, in many times and places, Pilgrim is a powerful exploration of the nature of reality, our unconscious knowledge, the meaning of history, and our own humanity.
Revivified, but refusing to speak, Pilgrim is brought to the Bürgholzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zürich, where Carl Gustav Jung, now in his late 30s (and in spite of his disagreement with Freud on the sexual nature of the unconscious, a slave to his own libidinous passions), has already achieved some fame for his studies in schizophrenia. In Pilgrim, Jung sees a future prize patient: a man who has made multiple suicide attempts (each of which have failed under extraordinary circumstances) and who claims to be eternal—ageless, sexless, having lived many lives. Pilgrim believes he remembers the sum of humanity’s experience, an unbearable and seemingly endless psychic burden of witness, and a fate he cannot escape, even in death. He believes himself “a voyager…denied my destination.” Having seen the past, Pilgrim now claims to suffer phantasmagoric visions of the future, and he desperately believes, “[K]nowing what I know of the past, my discomfort with the future is a burden I think I cannot bear.” His vision of the world is that of “[a]n abattoir, I fear, and we the sheep.“ But in a Europe on the verge of war, is this the outlook of a suicidal disenchanted with humanity, or the prescient dark knowledge of a visionary? Or, as his orderly (and former Bürgholzli patient), Kessler, believes, is Pilgrim an angel?
When Pilgrim refuses to speak (except in dreams, crying out in voices which are not his own), his lifelong friend Lady Quartermaine gives Pilgrim’s journals to Jung, in the hope that he will begin to understand the nature of Pilgrim’s “dread necessity of self—an identity whose burden he can no longer bear.” More importantly, she encourages Jung to believe Pilgrim, as impossible as his tale appears. But nothing could have prepared him for Pilgrim’s journals, which seem to contain the voices of people throughout the history of mankind—extraordinary eyewitness accounts of the lives of everyone, it seems, but the mysterious and silent middle-aged man in Jung’s care. The voices are male and female, of all ages and stations in life—who have been friends with Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and St. Teresa of Avila, and witnessed the death of Hector in the Trojan War. Most remarkably, his journals include the account of a transvestite woman who, having disguised herself as her brother, is then brutally raped by her brother’s lover (Leonardo da Vinci), only to sit before the artist years later, when she is immortalized as the subject of his “Mona Lisa.”
All these events are recorded as “Dreams,” and although he is puzzled by the vividness of the journal’s entries, Jung is unsure of their nature—whether they are dreams, fictions, the rants of a schizophrenic, or the voices of channeled spirits. Jung wonders, “Had it all been a dream? All of it? Or was it that Pilgrim—if truly a medium—sometimes recovered his voices in what he called dreams? Calling them dreams, but meaning something else. Meaning conjurings—gleanings—messages. Disturbances. Other voices, not his own, intruding on his reality…. Like a house invaded by marauders, while the owner—helpless, watches, and listens.”
In Pilgrim, Jung is faced with a patient who tries his own theories of the collective unconscious, challenges Jung’s understanding of the nature of self, and ultimately, forces the doctor to confront his own “madness”—for Jung, too, is haunted by other voices, dreams, and visions, and a taunting conscience. But while Jung’s theorizing provides a philosophical backbone for the tale, Pilgrim is aimed at the general reader. It is told through multiple points of view, alternately in Jung’s thoughts; in the mind of his estranged wife and academic collaborator, Emma, as she reads and attempts to interpret Pilgrim’s journals; and in glimpses through the eyes of countless others, each of whom is at odds with his or her own identity.
For Jung, in his approach to Pilgrim’s disturbance, and for all the characters in Pilgrim, the goal is the individual’s ultimate realization of self. But Findley poses the question of whether the essential “self” is the “owner,” as Jung describes it—or is it the house, where many lives come to rest? Ironically, of all the characters in Findley’s novel, it would appear that those who truly know themselves (or claim to) are deemed mad: a woman who believes she is a resident of the moon, a man who thinks he is a dog, and Pilgrim himself, who wishes only to escape his endless identity. Mad or not, like the woman who would become Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” each of Findley’s characters struggles to reconcile the “I” by which they know themselves, in a world which knows them only by the masks they wear.
Pilgrim brings to mind the adage, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But Findley points to a truth this statement overlooks: Sometimes, even those who can remember the past are condemned, for the fate of humanity is a shared responsibility. He knows that ultimately, “We none of us can be cured. Not of our lives.” But as much as we bear the weight of the darkness of history and suffer from the inevitable blindnesses that lead us into the future, humanity also offers light. Findley reminds us that if the self—if life itself—is an incurable condition, it also offers—through art and imagination—the power to heal, to lift the spirit, to learn, and to one day find rescue. —Elise Vogel
