Paper Knife

The Weird – The Mainz Psalter – Jean Ray

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:00:00 +0000

The marvellous and/or doomed voyage is, if you like, a sub-genre of the weird and the fantastic. One might reach back as far as the Voyage of St Brendan, moving forward in time to Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and, to a certain extent, the account of Captain Walton which forms the framing narrative in Frankenstein. And these are only the ones I can think of, off-hand. However in the case of Jean Ray’s ‘The Mainz Psalter’, the stories most immediately on my mind are Conan Doyle’s ‘The Captain of the Polestar’ and particularly William Hope Hodgson’s The Ghost Pirates, although it is claimed that Jean Ray only read The Ghost Pirates after he’d finished this story.

The story itself begins in a familiar enough way with a framing narrative. Ballister, the man who will tell the embedded story, has been plucked from the sea by the crew of the trawler, North Caper. He is dying, but determined to tell his story. The story is taken down by Reines, ‘the radio man’. Reines, it turns out, is not only the master of radio communication but also ‘spends all his spare time writing stories and essays for short-lived literary magazines’ (192). ‘Do not be surprised, therefore’, says the first of our narrators, ‘by the rather special style given to this final monologue of a mortally wounded sailor’ (192). The implication is that Reines has dressed up the story as he wrote it down, but the narrator reassures us that the facts, as recounted to Reines, to himself John Copeland as first mate, to the captain and the engineer, are all contained within the story. It is, of course, left to the reader to wonder what are the facts, as given by Ballister, what the embellishments of Reines. And that is one of the beauties of this story. Already, there is uncertainty, but even the nature of the uncertainty is uncertain.

The story proper, Ballister’s story, begins in Liverpool, in the Merry Heart tavern, with a meeting between Ballister and ‘the schoolmaster’, to discuss a voyage the schoolmaster wants to make. We never learn the name of the schoolmaster (and indeed, we have only Ballister’s word, or someone’s, that the man is a schoolmaster). The voyage is being funded by the sale of an old book, a copy of the Mainz Psalter, that the schoolmaster found in his uncle’s papers, suggesting that the schoolmaster has sufficient antiquarian tendencies to recognise such a thing. In honour of this, the schoolmaster has determined to change the name of the boat that Ballister will captain. (I’d always understood that sailors consider it unlucky to change a boat’s name once christened, but if it is, Ballister says nothing, perhaps on the basis that if someone else is paying, who is he to argue? And yet, almost more than anything else in the story, I find myself stumbling on this point, because I cannot honestly see any reason why the schoolmaster needs to change the boat’s name in the first place.)

There are other hints that all is not well. The Merry Heart Tavern belies its name, with its ‘dilapidated façade’ (192), and its being sited in one of the back docks, yet in its way it represents home for Ballister and other sailors. Then there is the strange incident of the man, the ‘emaciated, rain-soaked clown’ (194), so terrified by the sight of the schoolmaster that he drops his drink and leaves his change so great is his haste to flee the tavern. Conversely, Ballister’s selected crew do not seem to be a prepossessing bunch, jailbirds, men with mysterious pasts, inexplicable mutilations, but insofar as the reader trusts Ballister, she trusts his choice of men. Appearance belies, and this is something that runs throughout the story. This is less a story about surfaces than what lies beneath them.

Once away from Liverpool, things become more problematic. ‘We’re in inhospitable waters’ says Ballister (195), and there is a sense that the environment is doing its best to repel the Mainz Psalter. Right at the beginning of the voyage, the sea is described thus:

A few angry currents were still moving craftily beneath the surface, but we could detect them by their green backs, writhing like segments of mutilated snakes. (194)

The sea attacks in other ways: whirlpools open up like watery potholes, one of which hurls the hull of a sunken ship at them. Later, at anchor at Big Toe Bay, after a brief idyllic moment of rest, they are fired on by wreckers. One has the sense that everyone and everything is against this voyage. But when the wreckers are thrown off the cliff there is no one to account for this other than the schoolmaster, who suddenly appears.

Now, the ship sails away from the world of men; there are no more sightings of other ships. The Mainz Psalter is the world, and something is definitely not right with it. The sea itself looks strange, nature has deserted them (the rats have jumped overboard, there are no birds). Friar Tuck, one of the crew, a man with a sense of danger, says that ‘something is around us, something worse than anything else, worse than death!’ (197). The constellations in the sky are unknown, the compass is dead. And, it turns out, the schoolmaster is missing.

The question is, what is going on? And that is the one thing that Jean Ray does not tell the reader. There is, if you like, a lengthening catalogue of wrongness but no explanation as to its cause. Jellewyn, the sailor with a mysterious past, rumoured to be nobility, expresses the opinion that they are ‘probably on another plane of existence’, in ‘spaces different from our ours’ (198). But this is, and critically remains, conjecture.

There is a tradition in stories in which a small closed community of people is under threat that, one by one, they disappear, and Ray seems inclined to follow tradition. The crew begin to die, one by one, sometimes leaving behind smears of blood as they are snatched away by invisible creatures, or else left horribly injured. There are creatures which might be giant squid, but other things too, silvery bubbles. And … what? Dead sailors? Crewing the boat overnight?

It is only when Ballister happens to mention the schoolmaster’s books that Jellewyn, the scholar, begins to have some idea of what might be happening. When he climbs to the top of the mainmast, knowing full well that like others before him, he may die up there, he leaves a note for Ballister, instructing him to burn the books. As Ballister does so, the schoolmaster, in one of the most unpleasant moments of the story, suddenly appears behind the boat, swimming. And among the parchments Ballister finds a crystal box, something Jellewyn had asked about; when he crushes it everything disappears and Ballister is eventually picked up by another ship, the North Caper.

This, though, is not the end of the story. However strange Ballister’s tale, there is still an odd confirmation of it to come, with the appearance on the North Caper of an odd figure in black, like a clergyman, who attempts to murder Ballister, a figure which eventually turns out to be parts of a mannequin.

The question is, what on earth is going on? Throughout the story there are hints but never any confirmations, because of the way Ray chooses to tell the story. It’s a series of experiences by the non-comprehending rather than a narrative by those who possess knowledge. The story, told from Jellewyn’s perspective would, undoubtedly, have been very different because he had access to the schoolmaster’s papers. A version of the story in which the schoolmaster had a name might well have provided us with more of his motivations. Instead, Ballister, and later the crew members of the North Caper, can gather information from experts but, in the end, can make nothing of it. The reader has privilege of a sort in that she has the experience of having read other stories and can make conjectures, but in the end, who knows. There are tentacular creatures, strange manuscripts and crystal boxes, journeys in and out of other dimensions. Your guess is as good as mine, but it is that very lack of certainty which lends this particular tale its weirdness. A story that could have been quite conventionally handled is twisted around because of the perspective from which it is told.

PSA – Ryunosuke Akutagawa's The Hell Screen

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:06:00 +0000

After my speculations last year that the version of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's story, 'The Hell Screen', that I'd heard on the radio seemed different to that in The Weird, the radio adaptation is currently being rebroadcast on Radio 4Extra. I will be paying close attention.

Trade Tokens – week ending 12-02-2012

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:59:00 +0000

A couple more pieces on Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s love letter to early film:

Ed Vulliamy on Brian Selznick, author and illustrator of The Invention of Hugo Cabret and some accompanying film stills and book illustrations.

The first six issues of Amazing Stories magazine (April-December 1926) are now available online, thanks to the Pulp Magazines Project.

Hilobrow.com has just finished serialising Jack London’s The Red Plague and is planning to serialise H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook later in the year.

The death of John Christopher was announced this week. Obituaries by Christopher Priest in the Guardian and Paul Vitello in the New York Times.

And apropos of nothing in particular except that I happen to like it, a shout-out for Charles Tan’s daily listing of things of sf/fantasy interest: Bibliophile Stalker.

What if … London were like Venice? (How To Be A Retronaut)

The 2011 Kitschie Awards were announced last Sunday at the SFX Weekender. These were the finalists.

Thinking Aloud – The Hatchet Job of the Year Award

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:59:00 +0000

I wasn’t sure how to respond to the Hatchet Job of the Year Award when it was unveiled. I suppose my main objection is the title itself: it smacks too much of a desperate desire to annihilate something, which is the antithesis of what the award is supposed to encourage, and is indeed the antithesis of everything I believe is important about reviewing and criticism. However, I can see that it’s an attention-grabber.

The Hatchet Job’s Manifesto wasn’t particularly encouraging either (and fascinating as I find cultural manifestos, I think they should on principle be approached with caution). So, the award apparently aims to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote honesty and wit in literary journalism, which sounds very uncontroversial. But what about: We need professional book reviewers. We need people who know what they’re talking about, whose voices we recognise and trust, even though we might not always agree with them?

And if you backtrack a paragraph or two, we have: only 15% of people said they found out about new books and authors from a newspaper or magazine review, with growing numbers relying on Amazon, blogs and Twitter. A single tweet from Stephen Fry will have an infinitely greater impact on a book’s sales than a dozen broadsheet reviews. In fact, if we go back to a Guardian article introducing the Hatchet Job shortlist, Anna Baddeley, editor of The Omnivore, the website which created the award, says ‘We think [professional arts criticism] is at risk from the growth of book bloggers and Amazon reviews.’

So, apparently it is really all about turf wars again, and the perfidious influence of people writing about books without being paid to do it. This argument about the comparative merits of book bloggers of every stripe and ‘professional newspaper critics’ is becoming old and tired, not least because it is almost invariably brought up by people who really don’t understand the full breadth of the territory they’re dealing with. ‘Book blogger’ can encompass anything from websites filled with ridiculous bits of puff that lead one to suppose every book ever published is wonderful to sites where the quality of writing and argument wouldn’t be out of place in an academic journal. There is something to suit every taste; even Amazon shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand as some of the reviews, even if ‘popular’ in flavour, nonetheless do a good job of discussing a book’s merits. A well-written review on a blog can easily compete with a ‘professional’ review in a newspaper.

It is, of course, all about brand recognition. The Omnivore, the promoter of this award, turns out to be an aggregating website and thus, one assumes it is heavily reliant on newspapers and magazines publishing reviews which it can then fillet and serve up to its own readers. One would hesitate to suggest the award is therefore more than a little self-serving but it is difficult to avoid the sense that the website ensures its own reputation by proxy, and no wonder it’s worried about a lack of reviews in the quality papers. Indeed, I think the only reason I was cutting the award any slack by this point was that Sam Leith was one of the judges and I consider him to be a sensible and thoughtful literary type. And actually, in the end, the shortlist was a decent and sensible sort of thing that it was quite hard to have an argument with.

Of the shortlist, I’d read two of the reviews already, Mars-Jones’ review of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, which was funny, and Mary Beard’s notorious and truly scorching takedown of Robert Hughes’ Rome, and there is no doubt that they are bravura pieces of reviewing. Having now read Geoff Dyer’s review of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, it is pretty much what I’d expect from Dyer, whom I find to be a consistently interesting and engaging reviewer. I want to go out and read the Barnes because Dyer’s review intrigues me so much. I’ve also been reading Mars-Jones’ work for years and again I find him to be entertaining but also very clear in his thinking. Beard I know more through her other occasional writings, though I’ve read some of her reviews in the Times Literary Supplement. Of the three reviews, hers comes closest to what one might think of as a, er, classic hatchet job. Equally, what comes through in her review is the passion and the outrage of the career classicist confronted with a book riddled with errors. I’m not a classicist myself but I can understand her anger and I admire the way she channels it into a firm explanation of why Hughes’ book is so bad. I’m looking forward to reading through the rest of the shortlist.

In the end, Mars-Jones was victorious and today the Guardian carries his own reflection on winning the Award. It is a wise and thoughtful piece in which he discusses the craft of reviewing. I suppose, in its own way, it is also a manifesto, though it might be better described as useful words for the reviewer to live by. Certainly, I found a good deal in it to agree with, not least the way in which Mars-Jones gently criticises the award itself: ‘I’d be more comfortable with the phrase ‘scalpel job’, since a review, however unflattering, should be closer to dissection than hackwork, but I have no illusions about it catching on.’

A few examples: ‘A book review is a conversation that excludes the author of the book. It addresses the potential reader. A reviewer isn’t paid to be right, just to make the case for or against, and to give pleasure either way.’ One may have to interrogate the meaning of ‘pleasure’ at some point, but I know what I think he means by that. And this: ‘The only “bad” review in my book is one whose writing is soggy, its formulas of praise or blame off the same stale shelf.’

Or, and most pertinently, ‘I’d rather be an attentive amateur than an expert. Expertise so often becomes a sort of impregnable fortress, inside which the passionate subjectivity that first made the choice of specialism wastes away.’ This comment is particularly interesting, in part because of something Mars-Jones says later – ‘I take it for granted that reviewing is a secondary activity – but one that needs to be primary while you’re doing it’ – and in part because of the award’s implicit assumption that being a critic or reviewer is a full-time thing, literarily a profession, in and of itself, which runs directly counter to Mars-Jones’ own perception of what he does.

There are no answers, no rules, of course. Adam Mars-Jones does what he does, I do what I do, the editors of The Omnivore will continue to flutter around in distress over the state of reviewing and things will continue pretty much as usual, except that as Mars-Jones notes, never again can the Hatchet Job Award be won in a state of innocence; it will always be there, lurking, as the reviewer settles down to flay a book.

Trade Tokens 5th February 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:10:00 +0000

Keeping it simple, stuff from the interwebs that I feel like sharing.

Reading

Better Bookshelves (Incidental Comics), though I admit I am of the school of shelving that doesn’t go for artistic display preferring as much shelf footage as possible.

Leading to an excellent post by Jonathan McCalmont asking Why Do People Buy Books They Don’t Read? I want to come back to this post at some point and talk more about it.

Winter in southern England. Snow. Travel chaos. The usual amazement professed that we have had the same amount of snow as we did this time last year. Sigh. So, here are five books … about snow (Reading Matters) to which I would add Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg and Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson.

Other Cool Things

Carleton Watkins, the first person to actually photograph the Yosemite Valley. Photos here and here.

Bonus time-lapse video of Yosemite now (io9)

Plant galls! (Kuriositas)

Death masks of the famous (Kuriositas). All men, so let us redress the balance with L’Inconnue de la Seine, and in particular the Radiolab podcast about her.

Vintage astronomical illustrations (Retronaut)

More vintage space illustrations (Dreams of Space)

And more (Dreams of Space)

And even more, these by Lucien Rudaux, the first illustrator to produce accurate pictures of the moon and Mars (io9)

The Ghosts in the Living Room, a fascinating analysis by Adam Curtis of the way in which Ghostwatch was shaped by the rise of the suburban poltergeist and its reporting on tv, and the response to Ghostwatch itself.

Series of East London scenes by Noel Gibson (Spitalfields Life). Would love to have seen these in the flesh.

Spitalfields Market Nocture – beautiful black and white photos of the old Spitalfields Market (Spitalfields Life)

World Fair, Paris, 1900 (How To Be a Retronaut) Click through to the links to the rest of the set, and on to the archive at the Brooklyn Museum.

Cartoon Column

Robocat Returns (Savage Chickens)

The Weird – The Book – Margaret Irwin

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:30:00 +0000

The dining-room bookcase was the only considerable one in the house and held a careless unselected collection to suit all the tastes of the household, together with a few full and obscure old theological books that had been left over form a learned uncle’s library. Cheap red novels, bought on railway stalls by Mrs Corbett, who thought a journey the only time to read, were thrust like pert, undersized intruders among the respectable nineteenth-century works of culture, chastely bound in dark blue or green, which Mr Corbett had considered the right thing to buy during his Oxford days; beside these there swaggered the children’s large gaily bound story-books and collections of Fairy Tales in every colour.(183)

I have quoted at length from the opening of this story because the contents of the bookcase is metonymic of the Corbett family itself: Mr Corbett more concerned by appearances, Mrs Corbett not concerned by anything much at all. The children’s books suggest some life, some energy, and at least one person has a taste for something a little imaginative, Fairy Tale collections being in the plural. With everything stuffed together in the one bookcase like this, it might be seen to represent a very close and happy family. On the other hand, one might also argue that ‘this neat new cloth-bound crowd’ suggests a careful keeping up of appearances; the bookcase is the only one of significance, and it is in the dining room, not the sitting-room. There are no bookcases in the children’s bedrooms, apparently. Reading is not as central as it might at first seem to be.

But why do the theological books remain on the shelf although they are of no direct interest to anyone? On the one hand, it might be that a book is a book, no matter what it might be about and no matter what its condition, and thus deserving of a place on the shelf. Yet everything about these books is bad or wrong: ‘evil-smelling pages’, ‘a musty sepulchre of learning’, ‘moribund survivors’. These books are downright unpleasant, ‘their blank, forbidding backs uplifted above their frivolous surroundings with the air of scorn that belongs to a private and concealed knowledge’ (183). As much as the other books tell us about the Corbetts themselves, these few tell us everything we need to know about the unnamed uncle, the Dean: a high-minded or snobbish man, finding no pleasure in anything, disapproving, a disapproval that perhaps extended to his nephew or niece’s family.

As to why one would want to put these ‘slowly rotting volumes’ on the shelves of an ordinary house, one can only guess. The Corbetts’ own snobbery, perhaps, given the age and appearance of the books? Or perhaps, given what we are to learn in the course of the story, the Dean’s influence has been exerted over the family for some time already and they can’t bring themselves to throw the books away, or, most likely, that carelessness remarked on earlier, that lack of thinking. Whatever has happened, the ‘worm of corruption’ that lurks in these books has already taken over the household. The old books breathe a ‘dank and poisonous breath’; as the story opens, Mr Corbett is suddenly aware of this.

Everything to do with what one might call ‘frivolous’ reading has become sour. Mr Corbett no longer finds Dickens ‘a pleasant, wholesome and robust author’ (184). Clearly, on the one hand the unimaginative Mr Corbett has missed the point entirely of Dickens’ writing; on the other , this sudden new response to Dickens makes no sense either. And it is not just him; his youngest daughter is crying over the horror she perceives in The Rose and the Ring while his son is suddenly appalled by Gulliver’s Travels, and the thought of men being worse than beasts. And Corbett suddenly finds himself reading again, this time to find out why he dislikes it so much, and apparently believing that his failure to find satisfaction in anything marks him out as possessing ‘a mind so great and original he should have achieved greatness’ (185). There is, needless to say, a difference between questioning received opinion and simply dismissing everything in the way Mr Corbett apparently does, and something oddly jejune about the way he does it, not to mention the way it spreads into the rest of his life, like a contagion.

But that is not the only thing that is strange. There is also the matter of the gap on the second shelf, which keeps appearing and disappearing, although no one is apparently removing or replacing books. Only Jean, the youngest, has noticed this. ‘You can take out lots of books from it and when you go back the gap’s always filled up. Haven’t you noticed that? I have’ (185). And Mr Corbett must have noticed, of course, otherwise why work so hard to convince himself that there was no gap.

By now this haunting makes no sense at all, insofar as one can even term it as a haunting to begin with. It’s appeared out of nowhere, it doesn’t seem to have a discernable structure, a linear relationship between cause and effect, none of the conventional trappings of a ghost story. It is a much more organic kind of story. And now it takes another odd turn, as Corbett, having exhausted the contents of the unwholesome bookcase, lights at last on a curious manuscript among the Dean’s effects, written in Latin, and begins to decipher it. Scholarship is a new activity for Corbett, yet something catches his attention. At the same time, there is a strange little vignette, when Corbett, suddenly fearing an onset of influenza, goes in search of medicine and stumbles into the family drawing room, where the rest of the Corbetts are amusing themselves with non-literary activities, a ‘peaceful and cheerful scene’ (187), which Corbett’s appearance disrupts. He is, by this time, distanced from his family by his attitude towards them as well as by a physical distance. This distance will increase as Corbett pursues his interest in the manuscript.

The astute reader will have already realised that he has pronounced a spell which puts him somehow in league with or in debt to the entity lurking behind the manuscript, and this opens up yet another phase of the experience, one in which Corbett is in thrall to a book to which new instructions are constantly added, becoming ever more capricious. If he doesn’t carry them out his wild financial speculations suffer. It is at this point obvious that the demands will escalate and that it is likely that Corbett will find he has a breaking point. From this section we learn too that the reason the books moved around in the bookcase was ‘so that all in turn should come under the influence of that ancient and secret knowledge’ (189), but what that actually means is anyone’s guess.

The story’s final turn is its most logical, and the part that most nearly conforms to the stereotypical ghost story; the rest, though, is a swirling mass of things that half fit together, half don’t, leaving all sorts of alarming possibilities hanging in the air. What about the rest of the Dean’s library? What is happening to the people who bought the volumes? There is ambiguity as to whose views it is we hear articulated by Mr Corbett. The Dean’s own, or were his views contaminated or emphasised by the mysterious entity we know nothing of. Did the Dean resist the siren call of the manuscript? We can never know, and it is that lack of certainty that is intriguing.

And, given that most people reading the story are, of course, dedicated readers themselves, there is that added horror of something that we care about, believe in and invest in being so insidiously undermined. A very nasty story indeed.

The Weird – The Dunwich Horror – H P Lovecraft

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:30:00 +0000

Back to my project of Blogging the Weird, I reach ‘The Dunwich Horror’ by H.P. Lovecraft, the grandfather of the pulp weird story, perhaps. Except, as we have already seen, he is now but one among many, and the name people reach for when they talk about weird fiction. I was not, when younger, a huge fan of Lovecraft. It wasn’t the language, I think, as I loved the flood of words, but I think I recognised instinctively that while he could describe things he could not make you see them, and he wasn’t much of a story-teller. Historically, he is in his way interesting and a necessary participant in the history of the weird, but he is too a man of his times and by our lights frequently racist and anti-semitic, snobbish and, to judge by his fiction, obsessed with purity and terrified of anything vaguely monstrous. I cannot think of another writer who has used the word ‘degenerate’ as often. One should endeavour to separate fiction from biography but the frequent recurrence of certain themes in this work makes it almost impossible to do so.

I wonder what it says about this story that the first moment that genuinely shocked me was when Wilbur Whateley gallops into the village to use the telephone to call for a doctor. There is no reason why it should be so much of a surprise. Lovecraft hasn’t been coy with dates. This event occurs at a point in the story that the reader is actually told is post-1923. One of the small features of this story is its scrupulous historical accounting. World War One is acknowledged as happening, while government officials, reporters and cameramen have visited the area; there is a sense of a paraphernalia of organisation in existence. As we will see later in the narrative, the telephone is at the heart of one of its more frightening moments. The story is unequivocally ‘modern’, and yet that telephone … why does it bother me so much? Perhaps it is that Wilbur Whateley suddenly emerges of his own volition into the contemporary world. Which perhaps says a good deal about what Lovecraft has been doing in the previous five pages of the story.

For now skipping the quotation from Charles Lamb’s ‘Witches and Other Night-Fears, the first sentence of this story is quite arresting: “When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country’ (159). There is the geographical precision of ‘north central Massachusetts’ and ‘Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners’, but even the ‘wrong fork’ seems to be a recognised feature, even if the country beyond it is ‘lonely’ and curious’. And there is a sense that this is a well-marked turn off the mapped and familiar, as if there were some rite of passage involved in taking the wrong turn.

Whatever else one may feel about Lovecraft, he had a certain skill in building a sense of unease from topographical description. I love the way the walls ‘press closer and closer’, while the trees are ‘too large’ and the vegetation has an unnerving ‘luxuriance’. Are these the fears of the townie lost in the country, afraid of everything, or the concerns of the countryman who suddenly knows that things are not quite right. No one seems to feel easy in this landscape, dotted with ‘gnarled solitary figures […] so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things with which it would be better to have nothing to do’ (159). With mountain summits that are ‘too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness’, there is a sense that there is nothing right about this landscape at all, and indeed that it has all been shaped by some unnatural force, and that’s before we get to ‘the queer circles of tall stone pillars’ which crown the mountain tops.

However, if there is one thing that Lovecraft was incapable of doing in his descriptive writing, it was knowing when to stop. Two well-observed paragraphs of topographical dread become four distinctly over-egged paragraphs. Suddenly, nothing at all is right about this place. Ravines are ‘problematical’ in their depth, while bridges are ‘crude’ and ‘dubious’, and the sides of the mountains ‘loom up […] darkly and precipitously’. It goes on and on. One might say it represents the burgeoning fears of the nervous traveller in an inimical landscape, his imagination beginning to run riot, but there is a dry precision about these descriptions, more evident if you hear them read out loud, that suggests otherwise. This is Lovecraft hammering home his point, just in case you missed it. And not just hammering home his point. Reading ‘The Dunwich Horror’, I am struck by how manipulative a writer Lovecraft is. He is absolutely determined that the reader will hears story the way he wants it to be heard. He is like an imp sitting on the reader’s shoulder, whispering into his ear. It becomes easier to understand why Lovecraft is parodied so much; so prescriptive an approach is in some respects very simple to imitate. It is what lurks behind the impulse to write like this that is harder to gauge.

But back to the ‘tenebrous tunnel of the bridge’ (160) and other such joys. Having finally arrived in Dunwich, with its ‘faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries’ (160), one should be clear by now that this is not a good place be. In case there is any doubt, the story’s narrator reaches back into history to establish that people have been avoiding it for centuries, thanks to claims of ‘witch-blood, Satan-worship and strange forest presences’ (160), making the point that as we reach the modern day, they still shun the place but no longer have an explanation for why. Modern science has perhaps stripped away the older superstitious frames of reference, so the narrator offers another, scientific framework, degeneracy arising from inbreeding.

They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, while their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity.

Even the gentry, and Lovecraft seems to have a certain preoccupation with ‘gentry’, are not immune. Some ‘have kept somewhat about the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace’ (160).

At the same time, Lovecraft as narrator seems able to absolve them to some degree for being responsible for their own degeneracy, pushing it back further in time, blaming the Native American population and their strange ceremonies for the wrongness. It being New England there are of course no longer any visible Native Americans so they can be conveniently maligned, not least because theirs is the oldest historical presence in the area. The key points, though, are that this community in this ‘lonely and curious country’ is and always has been different. This sense of difference and distance is further emphasised by the Whateley farmhouse, the main setting of this story, being some distance outside the village of Dunwich itself. Beyond the farmhouse is the hill, the ultimate symbol of otherness and wrongness. Indeed, this point is emphasised by the farmhouse being ‘set against’ the hillside. The connection couldn’t be made more specific.

Candlemas, 2nd February 1913, is the birthday of Wilbur Whateley, son of Lavinia Whateley and an unknown father. In Christian terms, Candlemas is the feast of the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the presentation of Jesus in the temple. But Candlemas, one of the cross-quarter days, halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, is also associated with older festivals marking the beginning of spring and celebrating fertility. Lovecraft’s story hints that the inhabitants of Dunwich celebrate it under a different name. Whatever the festival, it is made plain that Wilbur Whateley’s birth is ‘special’, to his family at least. Old Whateley himself has a reputation as a wizard, and Wilbur’s birth is attended by strange noises and other mysterious signs. Wilbur himself is a ‘dark, goatish-looking infant’, forming a stark contrast to his mother’s ‘sickly and pink-eyed albinism’ (161. His family show an immense amount of pride in him, and are inclined to make puzzling statements about his future.

It perhaps comes as no surprise to anyone that Wilbur develops at a prodigious rate: ‘within three months of his birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in infants under a full year of age’ (162). Everything about him signals that something is wrong, and Lovecraft goes to immense lengths to establish this in his descriptions of the boy. On the one hand, ‘his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes […] give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence’ (163), while on the other he is described as being:

exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. (163)

Given Lovecraft’s own well-documented views on race, it’s difficult not to feel he is pouring all his feelings about non-Caucasians into that one short passage.

So, by now we have a situation where on the one hand the young but apparently gifted Wilbur is hard at work, studying his grandfather’s eclectic library and stuffing his head full of arcane knowledge, while on the other hand, his grandfather is renovating the farm, the barns in particular, and buying astonishing quantities of local cattle, paying for them with gold coins. The cattle themselves appear to be ‘anaemic, bloodless-looking specimens’ (162).Twice a year mysterious ceremonies occur on Sentinel Hill, behind the house. In 1917 the family is the subject of outside attention from newspaper reporters but are apparently left to their own devices again. It is obvious that the inhabitants of Dunwich know perfectly well what is going on but choose, for whatever reasons, to overlook the matter, either out of fear or else misplaced pride.

But equally, I can’t help feeling that Lovecraft himself is playing games. I can’t quite decide whether he is toying with the reader, signalling the outcome of the story with outrageously visible clues, or whether he is subtly mocking the yokels for their failure to take action, suggesting their complicity in what is to come, while avoiding discussion of what it means to live in such a remote community. Either way, it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, and one that persists as Lovecraft recounts Wilbur’s adventures in scholarship. There is a certain element of tragedy in his struggles to collate the information he has in the piles of decaying books that belonged to his grandfather and his bruising encounters with academe as he searches for the books he needs. There is, on the one hand, the invisible corresponding scholar who displays great erudition and then the shabby and peculiar-seeming young man who arrives at university libraries, struggling to cross-reference the material they hold with his own collection, and earnestly hoping to borrow valuable books. Which is not to say that, if we are to believe the narrator, Wilbur is not an unpleasant young man but one also has a sense of him as now considerably out of his depth, reflected not least in the fact that he is driven to visit libraries in person.

Seen through the superior eyes of Dr Armitage, fully aware of the stories from Dunwich, Wilbur Whateley is presented now as being like ‘the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, time and space’ (167) rather than as the mere product of inbreeding. There is a new sense of sniffy superiority in this assessment and the nature of the story shifts too, from scared tolerance to outright concern as Armitage makes more enquires about Wilbur.

Matters are brought to a head when Wilbur raids the library in his desperation to get his hands on the Necronomicon and dies. Lovecraft is lavish in his revelatory description of the true physical nature of Wilbur. One honestly wonders how, in sheer physical terms, this creature could actually have existed from one day to the next, but Lovecraft is clearly enjoying himself so it would be perhaps churlish to quibble. Wilbur’s death is the turning point of the story. As Lovecraft himself notes, this is but a prologue to the actual horror which is, of course, the rampaging horror itself, tramping invisibly round Dunwich, leaving huge footprints, crushing and devouring all living things in its path.

It would almost be risible – and indeed, the story written up for the newspaper wire, takes precisely that tone – but there are moments when Lovecraft catches the sheer raw horror of there being something in the people’s midst that they can’t identify or deal with. In many ways, the most horrific moments come when the village people attempt to keep in touch by telephone and there is either no answer or else the line suddenly goes dead. So much is achieved in such economy, far more than in lavish descriptions of the footprints. The sense of desperation and uncertainty experienced by the villagers is never plainer than here. And finally, indirectly, the telephone is the instrument of their salvation when Armitage sees the newspaper report and realises that his half-formed plans to do something about Wilbur’s papers need to be accelerated.

We are now back in a world of scholar-heroes, with Armitage working long nights to decode Wilbur’s diary, work out what he’d done and then come up with a solution. It’s a familiar world of competent men undoing the mistakes of ill-informed dabblers. One has the feeling that Lovecraft himself is more secure here. The yokels can stand by and watch while the university men sort things out, make reparation, explain, tell the locals what to do to make things safe, and admonish them not to do it again. There is an underlying implication that knowledge should not be left in the hands of the ignorant because they cannot make proper use of it, which is to make no use of it at all but to instead appreciate its aesthetic properties. One can see why, on the one hand, having Yog Shothoth roaming the countryside is not the best thing ever, but so many questions remain unanswered about for example, the Whateley family got as far as they did in establishing contact, creating Wilbur and his brother. This was not an accident. Were they guided by some other force or was this an original experiment? We will never find out. ‘We have no business calling in such things from outside’ (182) says Armitage, exhibiting his own kind of parochialism perhaps, and that is that.

Yet, going back to the epigraph taken from Lamb, does it not imply that there is something deeper even than the understanding of Armitage can fully grasp, that can suddenly appear like a flower emerging from a crack in the pavement. And that, perhaps, is the weirdest thing about this story. It’s not the odd happenings themselves, which are expected, it being Dunwich, but those little inexplicable moments, such as how the Whateleys came by their knowledge, the strange little hints that Wilbur is not quite master of all, the mundane intrusions like the rush for the telephone, that make this story really weird. It’s not about fulsome language or overwhelming scenery, it is about the still moments of wondering.

Reading and Watching January 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:55:00 +0000

Farewell, January, I hardly knew you.

The month was proceeding really well. I was catching up with work, had a ridiculously fabulous research day trip to Paris with my supervisor to see L’Invention du Sauvage, , which was richly rewarding in terms of thoughts and ideas (not to mention possessing the world’s most enormous exhibition catalogue). And then, a few days later, the virus which had been wandering quietly around in the background for a week or so apparently decided ‘enough’. To judge from my work diary, that was round about January 13th, Friday 13th, after which it degenerated into an interconnected series of naps and bouts of coughing. Be grateful this is not a podcast otherwise you would be able to appreciate the resonant maturity of that cough, eighteen days later. Or, as I keep saying, I feel so much better than I did, cough, hack, no, really. And it’s true. I began to perk up last weekend and started writing again, which was a relief, and since then have been catching up on various writerly tasks.

So, here we are at the end of the month, damn all done and a twelfth of the year gone already. Still, better late than never, it’s time to get back to blogging before the cobwebs get any larger and the tumbleweeds start eating the cats. One of my plans for 2012 is to make more of an effort to list books read, films seen, and so on, as much for my own information as for your pleasure. It may not reveal anything startling, but there may be patterns to be discerned. We shall see.

Books

The Children’s Book – A.S. Byatt (review below)
Ben Jonson: A Life – Ian Donaldson (detailed biography of a fascinating character)
The Last Pre-Raphaelite – Fiona McCarthy (big biography of Edward Burne-Jones, rich in information, stylistically dull)
Pyg: The Memoirs of a Learned Pig – Russell Potter (amusing if slightly laboured account of the travails of a genuinely learned pig)
Desdaemona –Ben Macallan (reviewed for The Zone here: I liked it)
Kultus – Richard Ford (reviewed for The Zone here: I didn’t like it)
Giant Thief David Tallerman (review forthcoming in Interzone: not overly impressed)
Pandemonium – ed. Anne C Perry, Jared Shurin (review forthcoming in Vector: good in parts, adored the Sophia McDougall story)
Remainder – Tom McCarthy (Very much enjoyed C; this has certain similarities and preoccupations. Still mulling over it but was fascinated by the concepts.)
Glorious Nemesis – Ladislav Klima (review to come).

The Children’s Book (2009) – A.S. Byatt

The first novel read in 2012, and I could have wished for something more … novelistic, I suppose, rather than huge lumps of undigested research barely submerged in a thin soup of narrative. It’s been lauded to the skies, was nominated for the 2009 Man Booker, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize yet I remain utterly baffled by its success. What Alex Clark praises in this review in the Guardian in 2009 I can see in the novel I read, but Clark’s review suggests it is all much more highly developed and ‘finished’ than I found it to be. One begins to wonder whether the glamour of Byatt’s name has exerted an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ effect on the novel’s readers.

The novel centres on the Wellwood family: the Kentish Wellwoods are presided over by Humphrey, who works at the Bank of England, and his wife, Olive, who writes stories for children. They have a large family (and it is fair to say that a number of the younger members of the family become disturbingly interchangeable: Tom and Dorothy are of most immediate interest to the reader). Olive’s sister, Violet, keeps house for the family, and is fond of noting that she is in effect the children’s real mother.

The Kentish Wellwoods seem to be living in some sort of fairy tale, a very carefully calculated fairy tale, as Olive works particularly hard to maintain an atmosphere of magic in the household, with annual parties, dressing up, performances and other events. She has a talent for creating an atmosphere around her, but as one sharp-eyed character notes, only within her immediate vicinity. Move out of the aura, and things are not quite as wonderful as they seem Anyone familiar with the life of Edith Nesbit might, by this time, be wondering whether this is based on Nesbit’s life, and one would have to say that there are a lot of similarities, strengthened by the fact that the family spends a certain amount of its time out on Romney Marsh, where Nesbit herself finally went to live.

The London Wellwoods, headed by Basil and his German wife, Katharina, are rather more buttoned up, or at any rate, Basil is. He is something in the city, Katharina keeps house, and the children, Griselda and Charles look with envy to their Kentish cousins. To them must be added the families of Prosper Cain, an important official at the newly established Victoria and Albert Museum, a widower with two children, Florence and Julian, and Benedict Fludd, a master potter, who with his wife, Seraphita, and their three children, Imogen, Pomona and Geraint, lives far out on Romney Marsh, barely making a living as he struggles with his considerable personal demons (and here we should consider Eric Gill, though the time frame and indeed the artistic medium are different).

Into this elaborate set-up of relationship and acquaintance comes Philip Warren, whom Tom and Julian find hiding in the cellars of the museum. He has run away to London, desperate to make some sort of life for himself in art, and is fortunate to find himself taken up by the Wellwood and Cain families, and despatched to the Fludds to become Benedict’s apprentice. One might suppose that Philip will become the outside observer who unravels the families’ various secrets but once despatched to Romney Marsh he is hardly in a position carry out that function and the reader is instead left to the mercy of an omnipotent narrative voice which informs us about the families’ movements and dispenses lectures about elements of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Fabian Society, suffragism, and so on, at the drop of a hat. On occasion the narrative focuses in sharply, and briefly, on a particular incident in the life of one family then pulls out again and moves on elsewhere, hunting for interesting scraps.

Perhaps the most consistent story is that of Tom, Olive’s eldest son, a rather fey individual who cannot settle to any idea of life away from the family house and indeed away from his mother. One of Byatt’s great interests, apparently, lies in the things that happen to the children of famous writers – she singled out the son of Kenneth Grahame (who committed suicide eventually by lying on the railway line at Oxford), A.A. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin; Kipling’s son, John, and the Llewellyn boys, whose adoptive father was J.M. Barrie. Olive’s habit, throughout the novel, is to write individual stories for her children – they each have a book of their own – in which she works out ideas and thoughts. Tom’s story is by far the best developed, and it is not difficult to see that they are overly emotionally invested in one another, causing all sorts of problems for both of them.

However, and for me this is one of the significant problems with the novel, we are told and shown this but there is surprisingly little self-reflective examination of the situation by the characters. This novel sits unashamedly in a pre-Modernist world where such questions are simply not considered, which is a pity as what is mainly interesting about most of these characters is their psychology, something several of them seem to dimly perceive.

Whether Byatt was more interested in writing a panoramic novel about late nineteenth/early twentieth-century artistic circles, I don’t know, but one has a sense that she isn’t really that interested in most of her characters. They are very much like the puppets who dominate the action at various points in the novel. On the other hand, I don’t feel Byatt is actually that comfortable with producing a novel of this scale. I am also frustrated by the fact that I know enough about the Arts and Crafts movement, about suffragism and political movements of the early twentieth century to suspect that many of her fictional characters have their roots in reality but not quite enough to work out who all the rest of them are. On more than one occasion the people I suspect to be models for them actually appear in their own right and one ends up wondering what kind of game Byatt is playing. At its worst, one ends up suspecting a significant chunk of the novel was constructed in order to allow her to use a particular Lalique dragonfly brooch on the novel’s cover.

This is not to say that there are not some interesting ideas about the nature of the creative impulse and its effect on people but that is one of several thinner novels fighting to get out of this bloated monster.

Addendum 31/1/2012: I wrote this review at the beginning of the year, since when it has slumbered gently on my hard disk. Looking through it again today, I realised that I didn’t comment on the coldness of her voice in this novel. So detached, so dispassionate, as though she were writing a history. Which, I suppose, in effect, is what parts of this novel are.

Bonus link to some great pictures of the Exposition Universelle of 1900, held in Paris. One portion of the novel is set there. It’s worth clicking the link leading to the Brooklyn Museum photo sets for more photos. And just to close the circle, this is of course the section of Paris I was wandering around in at the beginning of January!

Watching

Puss in Boots

Very agreeable (cat) fluff, with an absolutely minimal storyline but lovely set-pieces, particularly the dance-fight between Puss and Kitty Softpaws and the various rooftop chases. It’s an odd thing but in the sequences in the Litter Box bar, none of the other cats seem to be as realistically drawn (give or take the walking on back legs, the wearing of swords, boots, etc.) as Puss or Kitty, the two talking felines. Narnian hierarchies seem to be in play again.

Hugo

My first experience of 3D film-viewing; technically not that pleasant though I can’t tell whether that was the film or the fact that I had to watch without my own glasses under the 3D viewing specs. I wear glasses in part because I have no depth perception and I have no idea how that works with 3D film.

The film itself was very odd, rather disjointed plotwise, a love-letter to the early days of film-making all mixed up with the story of Hugo, a young boy struggling to make his way in the world, living in the walls of the railway station. But rather than listen to me wibbling on, read this excellent discussion of the film by Jonathan McCalmont.

John Martin – Apocalypse (Tate Britain)

The exhibition is sadly now over but it was a delicious collection of OTT paintings, the people huddled around the edges of the pictures as disaster overwhelms the landscape. Looking forward to working my way through the exhibition catalogue

L’Invention du Sauvage (Musée du Quai Branly)

Or, as the English exhibition catalogue has it, Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage. Huge exhibition at the Quai Branly about the ways in which humans have been put on public display.

The Weird – The Night Wire – H.F. Arnold

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:00:00 +0000

‘There is something ungodly about these night wire jobs’ says the narrator. ‘You sit up here on the top floor of a skyscraper and listen in on the whispers of that civilisation’ (154). There is so much packed into the first two sentences of this story. The narrator is simultaneously connected to the world and distant from it. The wire puts him in touch with the world, while his job physically removes him from it; he’s working in a different time frame to everyone else, on the night shift. His location is deliberately obscure, and he is detached from the world, lifted high above it in his skyscraper, cocooned in his office, dozing, almost working in his sleep.

The work itself is repetitive, the transcribing of reports as they come down the wire, something that almost requires the brain to be bypassed. It is significant that the narrator describes his colleague, John Morgan, the man at the centre of this story, as ‘a mechanical automatic wizard which functioned marvelously but was without imagination’. That ‘which’ transforms John Morgan into something other than human, a machine perhaps. The ‘without imagination’ is a signal that Morgan himself is unlikely to be the originator of what is to come, except that, as we discover later, he couldn’t have originated it anyway. How many more walls can the author insert between the characters and the real world?

At first glance, there is a wonderful simplicity to this story. It is in fact two stories, carefully twisted around one another. On the one hand, we have the account of the night manager, who witnesses John Morgan’s remarkable feat, using two typewriters to transcribe what he hears coming down the wire. On the other hand, we have the story that Morgan transcribes, the frantic reports from Xebico as the drama unfolds: a heavy mist has swamped the town, people are disappearing within it, and later it is determined to be alive, containing mysterious figures. And the lights arrive …

There is, I think, something strangely compelling about mysterious events recounted at a remove, as they unfold. Orson Welles recognised this in his dramatisation of Wells’ The War of the Worlds, but Arnold has also understood this, and doubled the effect; the narrator comments how it was ‘almost with dread that I went over to the waiting piles of copy’, and we feel the same, reading the narrator’s account. And of course the effect is doubled yet again as the unknown correspondent is reporting from a distance too. It is shocking when he is swept up into the action and the transmission ceases abruptly.

The story itself is dramatic, a heavy mist, later a fog, that envelopes the town, cuts it off from the rest of the world, contains nameless threats. Anyway who has been out in a thick fog knows that strange sense of detachment from the world, the cocooning, the uncertainty as to what might be out there. And then the denouement, the revelation that Xebico doesn’t exist plus, even if it did, Morgan couldn’t have taken down the messages because he had already been dead for hours. And how on earth had the narrator not noticed?

You begin to realise just how intricately constructed this story really is, yet how compressed that detail is – as it should be, because economy of words is the telegraphy game (which makes the length of the reports from Xebico all the more remarkable, and indicates how dire the situation is).

Indeed, the more you look at the story, the weirder it gets. The narrator attempts to remain aloof, but there is a wonderful little moment when he walks to the window: ‘Could I be mistaken, or far down in the canyons of the city beneath me did I see a faint trace of fog?’ (156). I think too the story taps into the idea of the mystery of telegraphy, of messages emerging from the ether. Who knows what wires were crossed in this instant, but the result is a remarkably compelling story, as though the fog might at any moment seep out of the wires, into the office, or off the page.

This story also reminds me a little of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ perhaps because of the underlying theme of inexplicable messages. One of Kipling’s lesser-known stories but well worth reading.

Trade Tokens – 1st January 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 16:45:00 +0000

I forgot to note, a few days ago, that Paper Knife is now a year old in its new incarnation. In fact, it's now a year and four days old, but let's not quibble about a few days here and there. Posting has been more erratic than I would have liked but I count it as an achievement after a year I'm still here, I've managed a posting average of more than once a week, and people are actually reading the blog. So happy new year to you all, and here’s to another year of blogging.

The weekly post gathering up cool links got mislaid rather quickly last year, so in a fit of new-year optimism, let’s start again from scratch with a few things to provoke and entertain.

I’ve become a bit of a podcast-junkie over the last year, and one podcast I particularly enjoy is WNYC’s Radiolab ‘where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience’. It seems to be a bit of an acquired taste, to judge by some people’s reactions to it, but I find the podcasts to be invariably interesting and thought-provoking, often leading me into areas where I wouldn’t normally go. The most recent is this one on mutant rights, in which ‘a strange twist of legal taxonomy causes a dispute over whether X-MEN action figures are toys or dolls and sparks a court case about what it means to be human’.

Via Kuriositas comes this extraordinary group of photos of a remote volcanic crater called Dallol, in the Danakil desert in Ethiopia. It’s difficult to believe that this is an actual landscape on earth rather than an imagined planet elsewhere in the galaxy.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird has been occupying my thoughts a good deal of late as I blog my way through it, making fascinating discoveries but also reacquainting myself with writers I haven’t given much thought to for a while. A particular example of the latter is Algernon Blackwood, whose amazing story, ‘The Willows’, is one of the outstanding stories in the first part of the collection. Quite by coincidence, one of the Guardian’s Winter Reads is a lesser known Blackwood piece. The Glamour of the Snow, introduced by Claire Armistead. Both story and introduction are well worth reading.

And while we are thinking about winter, and even though the house is currently being pounded by a torrential rain storm, perhaps because it is, another set of photos from Kuriositas, on the subject of Winter, featuring an awful lot more snow than we’re seeing here in Folkestone this holiday. I’m particularly taken with the ninth photograph in the sequence, which looks as though it has come straight from the illustrations of Tove Jansson’s Moominland Midwinter, one of the most magical of winter reads.

As I think is self-evident by now, I have a bit of a thing about decay, dereliction, empty and abandoned buildings. I do, I admit, feel somewhat uncomfortable about this; it seems wrong somehow to be taking aesthetic pleasure in things that embody shattered hopes, a declining economy, traumatic loss. However, this item on Ruin Porn attempts to cast the argument in a different light:

[B]y outing and framing it—not to mention capturing the inherent beauty in broken things—Ruin Porn exposed the failure and decay, thus clearing the secrecy, the shame, and leaving perceptual room to see less emptiness and more space.

[…]

To that end Ruin Porn has the ability to be the tip of a powerful perceptual movement that allows America to change the way it has confronted its structural failures in the past.

I can’t decide how persuaded I am of the argument but it is certainly worth considering.

Changing tack entirely, Charles Nicholl published a new book just before Christmas, Traces Remain, and a copy duly turned up in my Christmas stocking. It’s a collection of essays in which Nicholls functions as a kind of literary PI, teasing out tiny scraps of information about, among many others, Shakespeare and Thomas Coryat. This week’s Guardian Review has a lovely feature on Nicholl here.

And that’s it for this week. Trade Tokens will, I think, take up residence in a regular Sunday slot as it will give me a chance to compile it over the weekend.

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:59:00 +0000

‘No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference’ Charles Lamb observed, in his essay entitled New Year’s Eve, and one can only agree. In my case, I tend to arrive in January 1st with a profound sense of relief that December 31st is finally over and done with for another year.

I don’t particularly like New Year’s Eve. It always seems to promise so much and yet invariably disappoints, more than almost any other day of the year. As a child I was convinced that New Year’s Eve must be the most exciting day of the year, as one year changed into another, and adults all stayed up until midnight to see this amazing thing happen. I longed to do the same. The reality, when I finally got there, was disappointing to say the least, and no amount of sherry and mince pies could ever make it better. Even now, I don’t think, deep down, I’ve quite got over it. These days, I am happy if New Year’s Eve looks like any other evening, the one concession to festivity being the now-traditional roast duck dinner. We don’t stay up until midnight any more; the first premature fireworks usually wake me for long enough to note the year’s passing, and to comfort any cats that need comforting because of the noise, before I go back to sleep. I will undoubtedly wake up around 5.30 as I usually do, and be pleased to discover that the world is still tootling along, but that it is now January 1st. January 1st means celebratory champagne and getting on with life.

2011 has been a very uneven kind of year for Paul and for me. Too many bad things happened along the way, and although life has improved slightly during November and December, getting this far has seemed like too much of a struggle for me to want to look back over the year now fading away. So, no highlights of 2011 – it's enough to have survived – just a resolute looking forward to 2012 and the hope that things will continue to improve, globally and locally.

No resolutions either. I may have plans for Paper Knife for the coming year, but for now I am keeping them to myself, except to note that I am going to participate in a project to read and blog about the works of Alan Garner, and a few related books, something I’m really looking forward to. More details when we figure out what we’re doing, but commentary will be spread between here, Practically Marzipan and Solar Bridge.

Among the related works we will be reading is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, my favourite piece of medieval literature. I oredered the modern versions by Simon Armitage and Bernard O’Donoghue just after Christmas and, almost miraculously, they arrived today; definitely my kind of post.

You will, I hope, recall that after beheading the Green Knight at Arthur’s Christmas gathering, Gawain agrees to receive a similar blow the following year. After spending the Christmas season with the jovial Sir Bertilak and his predatory wife, as the New Year approaches Gawain at last finds his way to the Green Chapel to meet the knight.

Welcome to my world after all your wandering.

You have timed your arrival like a true traveller

to begin this business which binds us together.

Last year, at this time, what was yielded became yours,

and with New Year come you are called to account.

That’s Armitage’s version. Here’s O’Donoghue’s:

You are very welcome to my place here.

You’ve timed your arrival as a true man should,

and you know the terms agreed between us:

a year back you had to take what was yours,

and I was to repay you this New Year’s Day.

At the end of the encounter, Gawain is still alive, if slightly bloodied and more than a little bowed. That is how I feel at the end of 2011.

So now, on to 2012.

Holiday Reading – Words Without Borders

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:19:00 +0000

Here in England, the period between Christmas and the New Year is a tangled mess of bank holidays and ordinary working days, no one quite clear which shops and businesses are open, whether public transport is running a full schedule, when refuse might be collected. It becomes difficult to maintain a sense of conventional daily life when the media seems to be convinced we are engaged in one long festive whirl. I welcome the downtime, in particular Paul being on holiday, but I don’t really enjoy the sense of limbo. When you have no family and aren’t doing anything with friends during that period, there is only so much lounging around to be done before it’s back to the desk. So, yesterday, while Paul was sanding the floor of the room we are currently decorating, I was clearing through my assorted online reading backlogs.

I’ve been reading the December 2011 issue of the online magazine, Words Without Borders, a magazine of international writing. I’d not come across this magazine before but the current issue has an extensive feature on fantastic stories from around the world, and another feature on Iranian writers which turned out to be equally fascinating.

Of the eight stories identified as part of the fantastic section, the most ‘conventional’, perhaps, is ‘Orkish Cornbread’ by Ranko Trifković, a fantastical recipe for that very substance. I like the Tolkienish riff on lembas, the bread of the elves, and cram, the dwarvish version. Why shouldn’t the orcs have their own take on so fundamental as food as bread? It’s pleasingly transgressive in its view of the world, and very amusing in the way it plays with fantasy conventions and foodie pretensions. ‘Orkish Cornbread’ doesn’t really step beyond that one riff, although it hints at the author’s imaginativeness so I’d like to see more work from this author.

‘The Navidad Incident: The Downfall of Matías Guili’ has rather more substance. Set on the fictional South Sea island of Navidad, it concerns the adventures of a group of Japanese veterans, visiting the former colony, and travelling by tour bus. Here is the opening paragraph of this novel extract.

At 6:00 A.M., lowest ebb tide, a bus was sighted crossing the lagoon between Gaspar and Baltasár islands, sending ripples across the surface. The yellow and green vehicle careened this way and that, racing gaily over the crystal blue shallows. The first rays of the morning sun over the low central hills of Baltasár glinted off the windows as the bus took to the water out past the airport bearing northeast, skimmed the tip of Tsutomu Point, then disappeared in the direction of Colonia.

The rest of the extract comprises a series of reports on the appearances and disappearances of the bus around the island, gradually broadening into a portrait of the role played by the bus system in island life, from birth to death. It would be easy to casually say ‘magic realism’ and move on, but I think that would be lazy. Yes, it has a flavour of some Latin American fiction I’ve read in recent years, but it emerges more in the description of the way in which the bus figures in island culture than in the disappearing/reappearing tour bus, which partakes more of the overtly supernatural, with people responding accordingly.

Naiyer Masud’s ‘Dustland’, translated from Urdu, is a very different kind of story, inclining more towards the VanderMeerian definition of weird, at any rate as I currently understand it. ‘Dustland’ is set in a landscape which seems to be entirely empty of features. The narrator finds himself here after having deliberately chosen a series of ‘bleak and dreary’ paths, rejecting the lush and the green. One has a sense that allegory is lurking off to the side of the path somewhere, rather like the snakes that the narrator fears so much, but if it is, it doesn’t appear. Instead, the narrator fetches up in a curious desolate settlement which threatens to be overwhelmed by dust every time there is a storm, and there are many such storms.

While, we are led to understand, most people fear dust storms, the narrator is something of an oddity. He has always loved dust storms, and goes out in them when sensible people stay at home. This unusual habit marks him out and is the thread that unravels a curious story of improbable connections between him and the inhabitants of the Dustland settlement.

I particularly like this story for its evocation of a settlement in the middle of nowhere, somehow clinging onto life because of someone’s conviction that it needs to exist.

André Pieyre de Mandiargues’ ‘The Red Loaf’ (translated from French) and Nazli Eray’s ‘The Map’(translated from Turkish) both incline towards the phantasmagoric, ‘The Red Loaf’ particularly so. Here, a clearly unreliable narrator – philanderer, liar, drug addict – wakes up in a hotel room, stripped of his possessions, and aware of a strange light coming from a drawer. In the drawer is the eponymous loaf, and it takes but a moment for the narrator to become the same size as the mites he perceives to be crawling on the loaf, after one bites him, and to embark on a mysterious journey through the loaf’s interior. Oddly, my immediate thought was of Wells’ The First Men in the Moon, and the characters’ exploration under the moon’s surface; the story has that same analytical and observational flavour, but can we, should we, trust the narrator.

‘The Map’ starts promisingly, with the narrator’s discovery of a bundle of maps in an Istanbul bookshop. They are ‘interpreted’ maps, drawn according to the cartographer’s own understanding of the thing that he or she is mapping, an intriguing concept which throws up all sorts of possibilities for reshaping the world. However, the author, and thus the narrator, focuses on a ‘Map of Man’ which endeavours to interpret the behaviour of men, which seems to be a mystery to the female narrator, whose relationship with her boyfriend seems to be under some sort of pressure. Somehow, she and a girlfriend become lost in the map itself. While I liked the idea of becoming lost in a map, I have to admit that I was less engaged by the idea of the voyage round the male psyche, and the discovery that it was bleak, empty, inimical of life.

In fact, mapping seems to be an underlying theme in several of these stories; it turns up again in the story by Maltese writer, Pierre Mejlak, ‘At Livia’s Bar’, a möbius-like story in which a girl maps an imaginary city, centred on a bar run by Livia, mixer of the most remarkable drinks. It’s a small story on the page, but the more one probes it, the more it seems to contain, bigger on the inside than the outside, so to speak.

Miguel de Unamana’s ‘The Man Who Buried Himself’, translated from the Spanish, is a more conventional story of a man being confronted by a doppelgänger, whose life he takes on, leaving him to bury himself. It’s a curious story, more psychological in flavour than some of the others and I half-suspect I was less receptive to it than I perhaps should have been, as it seems not to have stayed in my mind in the same way as some of the others.

Of all the stories, the least successful in my view was Maja Novak’s ‘The Ghosts Are Schrodinger Cats’, translated from the Slovene, not so much for the premise as described in the title, but for the story’s execution. For reasons that elude me, the story is set in Scotland, in a curiously cartoonish Scotland, as though the writer’s knowledge of the country is based on watching bad films and old-fashioned tourist guides. There might be a satirical element to this, but if that is so, it is escaping me, as does the appeal of the bright narrative tone which is, I think, supposed to suggest ‘comedy’. I would just dismiss it as poor writing except that I’ve seen something like this recently, in an unpublished manuscript written by someone entirely different, from the same area, suggesting that it might be a narrative style I have simply never encountered before. Be that as it may, it’s not one that works for me.

And just to finish off, Elham Eshragi’s ‘Lamb’, translated from Persian, although not part of the fantastic collection, is a nicely observed story of a man who is obliged to suffer the consequences of an ill-judged act.

In all, this is mostly an excellent collection of fiction, and yet again, I am reminded of just how much material there is out there, beyond the English language. I’m already looking forward to the next issue of Words Without Borders.

The Weird – The White Wyrak – Stefan Grabiński

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 20:23:00 +0000

Stefan Grabiński is another European writer unknown to me but on the strength of this story, I’d certainly like to see more of his work.

‘The White Wyrak is a first-person narrative with something of the flavour of a folktale, the account of a young journeyman chimney sweep working for Master Kalina, and a strange encounter with the supernatural. Yet, reading past the surface of the story, one has the sense that there is something else going on, something not fully articulated.

Take Kalina, for example. The journeyman describes him as ‘literate and intelligent’, having ‘seen a lot of the world’ (148). What that means precisely is unclear, but even stripping away the narrator’s evident hero-worship, we have a sense of there being more to Kalina than at first meets the eye. ‘He was a bit of a philosopher, and books he really liked’ (148); this suggests a tension between knowledge passed down through storytelling – much is made of the evenings spent by the fire at Kalina’s, talking – and written knowledge; the narrator notes that Kalina ‘apparently even wanted to put out a gazette for chimney sweepers’ (148). One lingers a moment on that ‘even’, hearing the note of incredulity in the narrator’s voice. Fortunately, this is tempered by his faith; no atheist, Kalina. Besides Kalina, the narrator is close to Jozek Biedrom and Antarek, two very different young men, one good-hearted, the other melancholic and shy.

It is Antarek who pays most attention to Kalina’s stories. ‘[I]n each story one could detect some deeper thought hidden behind all those words’ (149), but what they are the narrator never says, noting only that ‘one was still young and foolish them, and took from these stories only what amused one, for a laugh’ nothing but ‘tales and balderdash’, the narrator says (149).

It is Antarek who vanishes first, having gone to clean a smoking chimney at an old brewery. His absence is marked, there is a search, but it is only belatedly that Kalina remembers where Antarek has gone, but there is no sign of him. ‘He left so imperceptibly that we didn’t even know when’, says the man whom Kalina meets. And still the chimney smokes. The next day, Biedron returns to clean the chimney and also vanishes. By now Kalina suspects ‘evil spirits’ and refuses to let the narrator go after the missing men until the next day, when the two of them set out to resolve the mystery.

The old brewery has a history. It has been disused for many years – the last brewer went bankrupt and hanged himself – and the people living in it now do so for little rent. Old chimneys, ‘heavily packed with soot’, and for the first time Kalina shows fear. He is afraid of soot:

[S]oot is treacherous, my boy, soot lays dormant inside dark smoke chambers and stuffy furnaces, and it lies in wait – for an opportunity. Something vindictive resides in soot, something evil lurks there. You never know what will emerge from it, or when. (150)

For all that Kalina is a man of faith and a philosopher, alongside this lies another more atavistic set of beliefs deriving from his craft and his experience of that. But there is also something else in play. Kalina, seeing it as his responsibility, is determined to climb the chimney himself, but the narrator, possessed by ‘[a] mad stubbornness and a desire to uncover the truth’ insists on taking the job himself. Going back to folktale conventions, he will be the third person to climb the chimney, and the third person, as we know, is the one who succeeds. He is also, if obliquely, demonstrating that he is no longer a journeyman but a master, taking control of the situation while Kalina is left to keep watch.

The creature the narrator encounters in the chimney is mysterious to say the least – ‘art monkey, part large frog’ (151), clutching the body of the hapless Biedron while he sucks the juices from him. There is a sketchiness about the creature, as though the narrator has no real context for it. It is so alien he can only look at it and describe it rather than respond to its presence on a deeper level. And it is surprisingly easily killed – one blow is all it takes. When Kalina and the narrator drag it from the chimney, it transforms, melting and contracting, suddenly transforming into ‘a large mass of soot – glittering and black like tar’ (152), the source of evil, as Kalina predicted.

What makes this story weird is not easy to determine. There is an oddness about Kalina’s responses that doesn’t quite make sense. The wyrak itself somehow doesn’t quite make sense; it’s just there, and that is perhaps the strangest thing of all. We learn nothing about its history, very little about its habits, it is just there, in the chimney, preying on unwary chimney sweeps unprepared for its presence. And oddest of all, perhaps, is Kalina’s response to the narrator’s experience: ‘The White Wyrak. That was him. I had a feeling it would be him’ (152). So much is left unsaid in that series of statements. A whole other story is poised, ready to be unpacked, and never is.

A note about the picture: 'wyrak' turns out to be the Polish for tarsier. I'm not suggesting there was a monstrous whit tarsier up the chimney, but I'm certainly intrigued by the similarity of the huge staring eyes.

The Weird – In The Penal Colony – Franz Kafka

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:52:00 +0000

As I continue my reading of The Weird, I approach Kafka’s ‘In The Penal Colony’ with a certain trepidation, I must admit. I studied Kafka, including this story, for my German A-level, an experience I can only describe as deeply traumatic, so poor was the teaching, and have avoided him ever since. (The same could be said of my English A-level texts; sometimes I think it’s a miracle I emerged from my school years with my love of literature and reading basically intact, given the way the teachers worked so hard to destroy it.) In fact, I retain almost no memory of reading ‘In the Penal Colony’, so I come to this story fresh, and indeed it occurs to me that I hated Kafka so much when I studied this story I never even bothered to read it in an English translation. Which is a pity as I think I might have appreciated it rather more than my very imperfect German permitted.

Unlike some of the stories I’ve looked at so far, ‘In The Penal Colony’ makes no effort to establish itself within a naturalistic framework. The setting is vague – a tropical island, a prison colony, with a few extra scraps of description: a ‘small, deep, sandy valley, closed in on all sides by barren slopes’. This last is the setting – and I use the word advisedly – for the events on which the story focuses, the execution of a soldier, the Condemned, to be carried out by the Officer, using a ‘remarkable apparatus’, and witnessed by the Traveller (also known as the Explorer). Again, these are not individuals but roles or functions, labelled for ease of identification. We can not, from the outset, be in any doubt as to who will do what. The Officer will oversee the execution, the Condemned will die, the Traveller (also known as the Explorer) will observe, take notes, report back, because that, of course, is what Explorers do.

Except that the Traveller has ‘little interest in the apparatus’ and is ‘almost visibly indifferent’, and indeed is only present because he ‘had responded to the invitation of the Commandant only out of politeness, when he had been asked to attend the execution of a soldier condemned for disobeying and insulting his superior’ (133). Yet the presence of the Traveller is to be instrumental in bringing about the final crisis of the colony, and the remarkable apparatus. The penal colony, it turns out, is under a new command, and the machine, and the Officer, are tangible representatives of the old command, which the new Commander wants to finally get rid of. The officer’s analysis of the situation is this:

[M]y guess is that with you he is exposing me to the judgment of a respected foreigner. [..] You didn’t know the Old Commandant and his way of thinking . You are biased in your European way of seeing things. Perhaps you are fundamentally opposed to the death penalty in general and to this kind of mechanical style of execution in particular. [..] And if you didn’t consider it right, you wouldn’t keep quiet about it. [...] It’s true that you have seen many peculiar things among many peoples and have learned to respect them. Thus, you will probably not speak out against the procedure with your full power, as you would perhaps in your own homeland. But the Commandant doesn’t really need that. A casual word, merely a careless remark, is enough. It doesn’t have to match your convictions at all, so long as it apparently corresponds to his wishes. (141)

Yet, as the Traveller points out, if the Commandant’s ‘views of this produced are as definite as you think they are, then I’m afraid the time has surely come for this procedure to end, without any need for my humble assistance’ (141) And, ‘I can help you as little as I can harm you’ (141). The Traveller’s position is intriguing: everyone understands the nature of his function very well, and are determined to use it for their own ends. A traveller’s role is to, on the one hand, record and preserve the past and the passing, and to lament its passing, something the Officer understands all too well. On the other hand, the New Commandant sees the Traveller a representative of modernity, a voice against the barbarity of custom. The Traveller himself struggles to avoid being a participant in the business to come, but as his experience will show, for all he claims that ‘the purpose of his travelling was merely to observe and not to alter other people’s judicial systems in any way’ (139), his mere presence affects the situation. It is impossible to remain aloof or neutral, no matter how hard one tries.

An execution is a ceremony, a ritualised putting to death, a carefully constructed distancing from death, a way of absolving those who participate in the process of killing from their involvement in the death. They do it not on their own account but on behalf of a greater authority who has deputed the task, and it seems the further one moves from the visceral act of self-defence the more ordered, the more complex, the process becomes, a matter of craft and precision. The hangman prides himself on positioning the noose and the knot just so, to remove the condemned swiftly, efficiently, from the world. The guillotine was the ultimate in efficient killing. And here, the Officer has his ‘remarkable apparatus’ with which to carry out the sentence on the Condemned Man.

And what of the remarkable apparatus itself? The Officer describes it to the Traveller in obsessive detail, almost down to the function of every last cog and wheel, it seems, and one sees that for the Officer the machine is the most important thing in his life. He is the only person left who understands how it works and it is symbolic, even down to the way it is disintegrating, of the administration which he represents, that of the Old Commandant. It and he are relics of the past. There is undoubtedly a horrid fascination to be derived from his loving description of the machine, which is, with all its brass, all its strange little parts that are impossible to replace, a thing of peculiar beauty, even as it is a killing machine. There is an aesthetic tension between form and function; the Officer is so much in thrall to the one he misses the horror that lies within the beauty.

The apparatus is, inevitably, symbolic of the apparatus of state, at least as it pertains to the penal colony, a thing that has grown unnecessarily complex, that is collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. The seemingly stark simplicity of the punishment, to have one’s sentence inscribed upon one’s body until it kills one, is set against the perversity of the sentencing itself. In this instance, the Condemned Man has been condemned for the absurd crime of failing to wake up every hour to make a salute in front of the captain’s door. The duty itself is impossible to fulfil, the sentence is out of all proportion, and as the Traveller discovers, not only does the Condemned Man not know what his ‘sentence’ is, even though he will supposedly ‘experience’ it, he will ‘experience’ it in a language he doesn’t speak. In fact, as the Traveller’s own experience reveals, the inscribed sentence is illegible even to someone who does speak and read the language. The crime is ridiculous, the punishment is nonsensical, and the method of punishment is out of all proportion to the supposed crime. There is no promised transfiguration, only a slow, exquisite and extraordinarily painful death. One is left to wonder what on earth happened in the history of the penal colony, other than it being left to its own devices (literally), in the hands of a madman and his equally deluded subordinate, to create this monstrous object.

It is a religious artefact in a ceremony which has become emptied of meaning. The Officer carries out the sentence as the Commandant once did, and his whole reason for living is invested in this machine, in the plans and diagrams which he carries with him as though they were sacred relics. For all the Officer’s protestations at the popularity of the executions, one can only wonder whether people were ordered to attend, or whether they attended because there was nothing else to do. It is surely significant that the old Commandant was refused a burial in what we casually assume was a Christian burial ground. When the Explorer is shown his gravestone, it mentions a prophecy that the old Commandant will rise again ‘and lead his followers to a re-conquest of the colony’ (147).

I could go on; there are many layers of oddness in this story, some obvious, others that reveal themselves only as the story unfolds. The more one reads, the more there is to see, and each subsequent reading just makes the story more and more peculiar. For all that one can point to the weirdness of the machine, this is in some respects the least weird thing about the story simply because it is so corporeal by comparison with the assumptions and suppositions of the various characters who aren’t really characters, except that they fight to assume individuality even as the machine and the penal colony stand as emblems for political states whose functions fall short of their ideals (and some day I will attempt a postcolonial reading of this story, because it so richly deserves one).

So, belatedly, I find myself pleased with a story by Kafka, and that is not a thing I ever thought would happen.

The Weird – Unseen-Unfeared – Francis Stevens

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:24:00 +0000

‘Unseen-Unfeared’ (1919), by Francis Stevens, is rather different in character to its predecessor, ‘The Hell Screen’. We are unequivocally back in the USA, in Philadelphia’s South Street, where the narrator, Blaisdell, is dining with his friend, the ‘ever-interesting’ Mark Jenkins, in a little Italian restaurant, and yet something is not quite right. It is a chance meeting, because ‘Jenkins is too busy, usually, to make dinner engagements’ (124), which makes one wonder just a little about the nature of this friendship. A little jealousy in play, perhaps? Jenkins is described as a detective, and when he speaks of ‘little odd incidents and adventures of his profession’ it is ‘[n]othing very vital or important, of course’ (124). Jenkins is not the kind of detective, we are told, who brags about his achievements, though one has the suspicion the narrator rather wishes he would, just a little. The food is highly seasoned, the wine is sour and thin, and the narrator’s account of the meeting exudes a general dissatisfaction, not least when Jenkins has to leave: ‘He so clearly did not invite my further company that I remained seated for a little while after his departure’ (125). Prior to this, Jenkins has offered Blaisdell a cigar, so we must imagine him lighting it before he starts to walk home.

‘These streets always held for me a certain fascination, particularly at night’ (125), says Blaisdell.

They are so unlike the rest of the city, so foreign in appearance, with their little shabby stores, always open until late evening, their unbelievably cheap goods, displayed as much outside the shops as in them, hung over the fronts and laid out on tables by the curb and in the street itself. (125)

It is a short but revealing passage. Streets that are unlike the rest of the city, and Balisdell’s apparent sustained interest in them, throw up ideas of his wanting something different, deliberately seeking it out indeed, underlining that sense of unease already noted. He comes to these streets as someone who doesn’t belong in them, as a tourist, a voyeur, a flâneur, to view the spectacle of lives very different to his own. Whether it was in Stevens’ mind when she wrote this or not, I don’t know, but I thought of de Quincey’s accounts of roaming the streets of London at night, and Poe’s ‘A Man of the Crowd’, but for reasons that will become clear later, of de Quincey in particular. Note too the emphasis on abundance, goods overflowing the shops, spilling out into the streets, and people everywhere, activity until late at night. The word that springs to mind, perhaps, is teeming.

Blaisdell clearly enjoys the scene as a rule, but tonight things are different, he believes: ‘neither people nor stores in any sense appealed to me’ (125). Instead, he struggles to make connections between himself as a human and people who he knows to be human but who, ‘bareheaded, unkempt and generally unhygienic’ (125), now revolt him. Blaisdell claims to be ‘rather a sensitive, impressionable sort of chap’ (235|), but we assume that this has never happened to him before in this neighbourhood, otherwise why come back?

Tonight, though, it is as though his anxieties can barely be controlled. There is a ‘sense of evil’ in the air. People seem ‘bestial’, ‘brutal’, and there is ‘a warning of things which is wise for a clean man to shun and keep clear of’ (125). Is it the Chianti? Is it contaminated in some way? Over and over the narrator refers to dirt, grime, dread, horror, shabbiness, stickiness, sourness, mustiness, poverty. It is as if he is experiencing an acute recoiling from the world around him and its people. Everything is sickly, him most of all. ‘I could feel the grit of dirt under my shoes, and it rasped on my rawly quivering nerves’ (126). It is as though Blaisdell’s senses have merged one another, and one cannot help but wonder what on earth is going on.

Simultaneously, he also knows this to be wrong (and one might think back momentarily, to Ewers’ ‘The Spider’, and the splitting of Bracquemont’s apprehension of his situation, as he realises that something is wrong, and attempts to fight it). Blaisdell is determined to get the better of the feeling, but at the same time is driven by a need to find sanctuary, quietness, somewhere where he can sit down, recover. Possibly a museum of fakes, a promise to See The Great Unseen, is not the best way forward, but this is where he finds himself.

One might wonder if the plot is a little too mechanistic at this point, or whether we should read Blaisdell as being drawn to that which he most fears; either way, he finds himself in a rather tatty laboratory, presided over by a man of rather startling appearance, black eyes and white hair, overly eager to see him: a man who on the one hand assures him that he is nothing like ‘these timorous, ignorant foreign peasants’(126), and who exhorts him to ‘Have no fear at all – of anything’ (127).

By this time, the story has clearly taken a very odd turn, almost as though we are now part of a story within a story, as the unidentified man lectures Blaisdell about his work, something the reader is mostly spared as Blaisdell drifts in and out of awareness. Time, like his senses, is contracting and expanding; we have no idea how long he has been in the room, and nor does he. The lecturer’s story has shifted from an account of microphotography to an story of a mysterious membrane which reveals the room to be alive with hitherto invisible creatures, and thus he demonstrates it to Blaisdell. The man claims that these creatures are made from the thoughts of man himself:

By his evil thoughts, by his selfish panics, by his lusts and his interminable never-ending hate he has made them, and they are everywhere! Fear nothing – but see where there comes to you, it’s creator, the shape and the body of your FEAR! (129)

What Blaisdell’s self-created Thing looks like, we never learn, for at this moment he loses consciousness, and when he wakes it is to find himself alone in the laboratory, shocked by his experience, stripped as he believes of self-delusion, and convinced that the only good he can contribute to the world is by removing ‘my monster-creating self’ (130) from it.

The final section reveals what is allegedly really going on. Blaisdell has been accidentally drugged by a poisoned cigar taken by Jenkins from the man responsible for poisoning a third party, a poisoning widely believed to have been carried out Doctor Holt, the man whom Blaisdell encountered, except that by the time Blaisdell allegedly met him, he had already committed suicide. A chance encounter with the same man who had, according to Blaisdell, stared at him so unpleasantly as he entered Holt’s building had brought Jenkins to the laboratory. The young man had been concerned for Blaisdell rather than expressing hatred of him.

The wrapping up is all very tidy. This is Jenkins the detective at work, rescuing Blaisdell, finding explanations to the various points of his story, restoring rationality. Holt, it turns out, had provided microphotographs of bacilli for a settlement house initiative to show people how germs cause disease. Jenkins has an explanation for every point of Blaisdell’s experience until Blaisdell spots the flaw in his argument and then discovers the membrane still sitting in the projector. It is when he holds it up to the light that Jenkins’ composure is finally shaken We are left with the implication that Holt committed suicide not because he had been falsely implicated in a poisoning but because of what he in turn had seen.

But that in turn is a tidy ending to what is, the more one looks at it, a very odd story indeed. While it might present initially as a fairly conventional pulp offering – men encounter something abnormal, solution is found, order is restored, or is it? – it seems to me that this story doesn’t really start from the place it pretends to. Blaisdell’s unease is, in my view, already manifesting itself before he smokes the poisoned cigar. The drug strips away his self-control and allows him to fully articulate his latent xenophobia, his fear of contamination, and enhance his paranoia rather than inducing it in the first place. There is the sense that Blaisdell was already teetering on the brink of some sort of shift in his own behaviour, which the drug simply accelerated, ripping aside the polite fiction of enjoying the strangeness of South Street, suggesting his visits instead are more a matter of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.

And what of the role of Holt in all this? If we, like Blaisdell, refuse to accept the comforting certainties of Jenkins’ explanation and instead believe that he actually met Holt although he was already dead, what is Holt doing? Is he trying to encourage others along the route he has already taken? Or is this some sort of perverse warning to Blaisdell to mend his ways, draqwn from Blaisdell's own unconscious? Or is Holt himself the disruptive element in this story, having discovered what lurks beneath the surface of the world, or more pertinently, how to see what lurks beneath the surface, how people fill the world with unarticulated thoughts. Or, perhaps, a combination of all these roles. Which leads to interesting moral implications when Blaisdell and Jenkins decide to burn the membrane, because, according to Blaisdell, ‘there are marvels better left unproved’ (132). And that, I think, is what brings this over to the weird, that sense of uncertainty even to the last.

The Weird – The Hell Screen – Ryunosuke Akutagawa

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:46:00 +0000

Regrettably, I have been silent for a few days. Last Monday I had the upgrade viva for my Ph.D, which I’m pleased to say I passed without too much trouble. So only another two years, many thousands of words of thesis and another viva, and with a little luck I shall be Dr Speller! But after the viva I had to take a few days’ break from blogging and writing, just to recover from the stress of it all. However, it’s time to start writing again, and today I’m returning to the short stories of The Weird, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, and this time I’m discussing Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s ‘The Hell Screen’.

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By yet another of those peculiar coincidences that The Weird seems to bring with it, it turns out that I am familiar with ‘The Hell Screen’, as it has been read on BBC Radio 4 Extra a number of times in the last few years. However, I have the impression that the dramatised reading was somewhat sanitised as this story seems much darker than I recall (but given Radio 4 Extra’s habit of endlessly recycling the same bits of material, the story must be due for another outing any time now).

Akutagawa (1892-1927) is often called the ‘father of the Japanese short story’. His first story, ‘Rashomon’, lives on in Kurosawa’s film of the same name, although Kurosawa used the setting of ‘Rashomon’ and took the film’s plot and characters from another of Akutagawa’s stories, ‘In a Grove’. Akutagawa committed suicide at the age of thirty-five, and his last words in his will are variously translated as saying that he felt ‘a vague uneasiness’ or ‘a vague insecurity’, and that is perhaps a useful starting point in thinking about this story.

It is narrated by a court attendant of the High Lord of Horikawa, and tells of what can only be described as an epic battle of wills between Horikawa himself and Yoshihide, a painter, whom even the narrator admits was considered ‘the first among painters, an unrivalled artist’.

The story begins with a series of observations about Horikawa, intended to demonstrate his perfection. At least, one might suppose that, for the attendant’s narrative seems to be sycophantic, almost hagiographic, in its account of his wondrousness, but at the same time, amid the gossipy tone, the fluttering evasions, denials and digressions, the artless mislaying of the story – one should, I think, imagine the storyteller constantly glancing over his shoulder as he hurriedly recounts this story, just in case someone else is listening – the narrator also points up the staggering cruelty of the High Lord. On the one hand, he comments that ‘I cannot recall an act that did not deserve our wonderment’ (110), and yet a few paragraphs later, he tells how ‘when construction work on the Nagara Bridge was damaged, he offered his favourite boy attendants as human pillars to propitiate the gods’ (111), which is indeed cause for wonderment, though not necessarily in the way that is superficially represented. It is certainly at variance with the claim that he ‘had a kind and generous heart that would partake in the happiness and distress of all, even the humblest among his subjects’ (110).

Yoshihide the artist is represented as the antithesis of Horikawa, with his ‘vulgar appearance and his lips, too red for his age,’ possessing ‘an unsettling bestial quality’ (111). It perhaps comes as no surprise that he is nicknamed ‘Monkey-hide’. We are to understand that Yoshihide is less than human even while Horikawa is more than human, but at the same time, the narrator betrays a certain awe of Yoshihide’s skills as an artist, as well as admiration for the beauty of Yoshihide’s daughter, Yuzuki, who is a lady in waiting in the palace. She is believed to be an object of interest to Horikawa, though the attendant denies this as unfounded rumour, just a little too often. She is also the subject of intense obsession on the part of Yoshihide himself; he has made several requests for her to be released from the lord’s employ, all of which have been refused. Again, the attendant’s narrative is all a-flutter, ever-so-vaguely hinting at something unnatural, as though he can’t see that the entire set-up of the court is one long series of unnatural happenings. And indeed, one strongly suspects that he knows all of this while making heavy weather of his protestations of innocence in order to firmly underline his hints. This is not a foolish narrator, however much he would like one to believe he is.

And yet, in various ways he betrays his culture – he constantly stresses Yoshihide’s arrogance, manifested in his recognition of his own abilities as an artist, and also in what the narrator sees as sacrilegious behaviour, not taking the spirits seriously, or using the faces of ordinary people when painting gods and goddesses. This is not unfamiliar artistic behaviour; one thinks immediately of the scandalous accounts of the behaviour of artists of the Italian renaissance, and more recently, the Pre-Raphaelite painters painted and married an assortment of young shop girls and prostitutes. Having said that, one has the sense that in Akutagawa’s story, there is a struggle going on between the notion of art as the preserve of the refined, a thing of delicacy, and Yoshihide’s terrifying form of art which bursts through propriety. ‘All the paintings by Yoshihide seemed to elicit disturbing feelings’ (113), says the narrator, and one can feel his shiver of exquisite horror when he quotes Yoshihide as saying ‘It is an unaccomplished artist who cannot perceive beauty in ugliness’ (113). And this, perhaps, is the true heart of this story: a struggle between a beauty which is underneath deeply corrupt and an ugliness which is pure in its expression. And perhaps we should reconsider, briefly, Yoshihide’s obession with his daughter: she is motherless, though we don’t know how Yoshihide’s wife died. If he is obsessed with Yuzuki, perhaps it is because he fears losing her too, or perhaps there is some underlying guilt, the cause of which we do not understand.

Much of the narrator’s story is devoted to examples of Yoshihide’s obsession with his art, and the lengths to which he will go in order to satisfy his artistic impulse. We are told that Yoshihide can only draw what he has seen with his own eyes, and given the nature of his art, we might note another delicate tremor of horror from the narrator. We are invited to see Yoshihide’s engagement with his own art as being excessive, and perhaps it is, but while the narrator is quick to criticise, there are also darker hints as to the manner in which Yoshihide is driven to such excess in pursuing his art.

It would be easy to overlook the strange story told by one of Yoshihide’s apprentices, of having to sit with his master while he sleeps, and the strange dream-argument he overhears. The dialogue is difficult to make sense of, though the references to Hell are suggestive, for Yoshihide is by this time painting the so-called Hell Screen for the High Lord. But what are we to make of ‘Come. Come to Hell. There your daughter is waiting for you’ (116)? At this point Yuzuki is still alive, so what does this refer to? And what is the nature of the dark figure looming from above that the terrified apprentice sees? It is not made clear, and our narrator does not, perhaps dare not, speculate.

One circles round the supposed cluelessness of the narrator, never more apparently evident than at the moment when he is fetched by Yuzuki’s pet monkey because, as we suppose, she is being raped by a man, perhaps the High Lord himself, and the narrator can nonetheless comment that she appears ‘alluring, quite unlike her customary childish innocence’ (119). We might take the monkey’s distress as a sign that something is wrong, but we should also bear in mind that the monkey has been christened Yoshihide by the young Prince. When he protects his mistress, is it because he is the avatar of his namesake, determined to keep Yuzuki from forming a relationship or is it genuinely because she has been assaulted. We infer the latter but it is never quite clear.

It is shortly after this event that Yoshihide asks Horikawa to burn a nobleman’s carriage and perhaps … as he has envisaged there being a woman inside … The story reaches its perhaps inevitable climax when Horikawa grants Yoshihide’s request but burns Yuzuki alive in the carriage, where she is joined by the monkey. Yoshihide the artist’s horror is transformed into ecstasy at what he is witnessing.

The Lord claims to have committed the deed to chastise Yoshihide for asking that a carriage be burned with a human inside it, which might be true, though it may be as much a convenient way of getting rid of Yuzuki. For the narrator, Yoshihide exhibits a heart of stone in witnessing his daughter’s death and then incorporating it into his art, yet the reader sees a man agonisingly torn between the horror of the moment and the beauty he perceives in its ugliness, father and artist somehow detached from one another.

And that, perhaps, is where the weirdness lies in this story, not so much in the outright horror of physical events, but in the glimpses we have into the creative tumult that Yoshihide carries with him yet which he cannot articulate simply as an act of imagination. For him it has to be real, no matter what the cost.

The Weird – Homework

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

Short commons these last couple of days as I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t had the necessary space in my head to write criticism.

Today, a group of links for you, as markers for material I want to come back to, some time in December. Part of my underlying project in reading my way through The Weird is to revisit my own understanding of terms I have thrown around without giving them much thought over the last thirty-odd years, terms like ‘supernatural’, and ‘ghost’, and so on. I think, from some of the things I’ve already said, it’s perhaps becoming clear that in the past I’ve had an aversion to the term ‘weird fiction’, although I seem to be more comfortable with the way that Jeff and Ann use it in The Weird, perhaps because I’m practising some sort of ostensive understanding based on their selections, which so far chime with my established taste for “something fantastic that isn’t epic fantasy but for which ‘ghost story’ is not a great term either”. Catchy definition, don’t you think? I can see it being employed with vigour in English departments the length and breadth of the land, can’t you? No, I didn’t think so.

As already noted, the term “weird” is derived from the critical writing of H P Lovecraft, in particular, Supernatural Horror in Literature. I have read it, but a long time ago, and I need to revisit it fairly soon. I mention this because of this piece by Erich Zann on a blog called Hideous Thing (which seems to have died almost before it got started, more’s the pity) which queries the use of the term ‘Weird’, with reference to what Lovecraft may or may not have meant in using it: a useful corrective.

And finally, we have Scott Nicolay’s Dogme 2011 for Weird Fiction, a personal manifesto, which I hope to read against some of what I’ve already been looking at.

I’ll come back to these nearer Christmas, but in the meantime, happy reading.

Thinking Aloud – Decoding

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

I was puzzled when I read this article about Binyavanga Wainaina’s complaint that British authors had nothing to say to Kenyan readers, in part because it seemed to be a non-story, in part because, well, why was this non-story being turned into a story, and mostly because Wainaina seemed unable to articulate what it was that he did want British writers to do, other than to be mysteriously universal without being universal, all at the same time. Was this some kind of postcolonial critique I was only half-getting?

On the one hand, he complains that the modern educated Kenyan can’t read the ‘codes’ of British literature, though, for some reason, he can, but finds them ‘indigestible’, then notes that African writers have similar problems when their work is published in Britain. African writers don’t write about things like female genital mutilation and the issues that British readers might expect them to, but at the same time, he doesn’t want to read about Blair, Oxfam, aid donors, whatever. It’s not clear what he does want British authors to write about, other than demanding that in some way they be global, but like the Americans. Which, given the way so many authors and artists in other countries seem to be actively protesting against globalisation, I remain baffled.

"It becomes a question of how and why Britain itself has not been able to produce literature that's global, even though it had a global empire," [Wainiana] said.

[…]

Like authors all around the world, African writers are interested in the lives of the people around them, he continued.

"If you are to ask me what are the greatest issues in Africa, I would say it is that people love, people fuck, people kiss, people speak."

Which, of course, we never write about in the UK.

There is obviously something going on in here that isn’t being properly reported. I can only conclude that it is some kind of buried complaint about the reception of his own work, but to accuse one group of practising insularity while advocating it to another group doesn’t quite sense. NoViolet Bulawayo’s response doesn’t particular shed light on the issue, but does at least attempt to redress the suggestion of insularity, and implies that Wainaina’s original complaint is the non-issue I originally thought it was.

I think, though, that what interests me most in the whole puzzling encounter is the mention of reading ‘codes’, of learning ‘how to read’ something. Not surprisingly, I think about this in terms of fantasy and science fiction, the latter in particular, as it is such a common complaint among newspaper reviewers who don’t normally do genre that, when obliged to read it, they literally don’t know how to. I admit I’ve never quite understood this as I have spent most of my reading life tackling things I don’t quite understand – as someone born in the twentieth century, for example, there are many aspects of the work of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, to pick two handy examples, I know I don’t necessarily get unless I choose to read an annotated version, but somehow I manage, as do most people. I could substitute Thomas Hardy or Honore de Balzac, a couple of writers I read a good deal of when I was young, and say much the same.

Which suggests in turn that this decoding of literature exists not so much as a way of reading as it is a refusal to read. We decode all the time, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, but critically, I don’t think we mind if we like what we’re reading. The ‘decoding’ element is foregrounded only when the task becomes, for whatever reason, onerous, and this is perhaps at the heart of Wainaina’s original complaint: a lack of interest in reading British literature in the first place.

Thinking Aloud – Really, I shouldn't …

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

Earlier in the year, I allowed my irritation with John Mullan’s dismissive attitude towards genre and his ongoing sanctification of literary fiction to spill over into my blog, and made an attempt to pick apart his antipathy towards genre, by which he meant, so far as I could see, stuff he didn’t like. In some ways, I’m sympathetic as, on one level, I tend to define genre as stuff I do like; I think, though, that what irritated me then was not so much Mullan’s general defence of literary fiction, which was about as robust as a piece of damp tissue paper, and almost too easy to take down were one so inclined, but the smug pleasure he seemed to take in representing his tastes as the only true measure of literary judgement. It might be that he actually took more pleasure in watching us froth at the mouth as we danced all over his wrongheadedness than he did in being wrongheaded in the first place. On the basis that I couldn’t figure out who among us was being the most jejune, I decided to withdraw from the taxonomy wars and get on with writing criticism instead.

And at this point, I’m not taking up the cudgels as sitting on the sidelines, with popcorn, watching drama and literature slog it out in a column in the Guardian earlier this week. This time, Steve Waters is complaining that contemporary theatre gets fewer column inches in the national papers than does literature – you can read his piece here. It is perhaps wrong of me to admit that my attention was piqued mostly when I read:

I found myself troubled by the populist tenor of Mullan's account of the books market, where the heroes all seemed to be publishers or sponsors, and the end point, "literary fiction", required to deploy smart narrative tricks and the requisite level of allusion – enough to flatter but not too much to baffle. And then, symptomatically, Mullan – having dismissed James Kelman's refusal to smile for the cameras as grumpy bad faith – turned on David Hare's suggestion that "literary" and "fiction" are the two most depressing words in the language. "What about political theatre?" rejoined Mullan, getting hearty laughs from the Oxbridge audience.

This seemed oddly familiar in some way I couldn't quite put a finger on for a moment. Well, yes, actually, of course I could!

I don’t particularly disagree with what Waters is saying, except insofar as you can take the phrase ‘contemporary theatre’ and replace it with any one of a number of different words and phrases, and come up with pretty much the same results, in terms of print of visual media coverage. I’m old enough now to have watched my way through two revivals of ‘history tv’, not to mention any number of iterations of other rediscoveries and revivals. It’s a bit like watching Radio 4 rejig its lunchtime schedule again – suddenly, news is sexy and The World at One is being given a 45-minute slot to account for this, overlooking the fact that this is not new and innovative but merely a return to previous practice. One day, drama will be sexy again, and WatO will be cut back to allow for half-hour dramas at lunchtime (though, to be honest, they would be better employed chopping half an hour off the Today programme, as no one would miss it).

It is all too easy for the likes of Mullan to be casually dismissive of theatre, not least when he is in a situation where he can happily ignore it, there's so much of it immediately available to him. A lot of people do like theatre, if it's there, even if, and sometimes especially if, it's small-scale drama, community drama, etc. But I don't think Waters fully addresses the fact that theatre is rarely as immediately accessible to people, that is literally accessible, in terms of where’s it going on, can I afford to get there, get tickets, etc., and as a result it doesn’t loom on the intellectual radar as much as it should. Theatre doesn’t happen in my own town (we have an amateur company with its own small theatre, but I have no idea what they are doing up the other end of town), and even in Canterbury, which boasts a brand new theatre, plus various university facilities, there isn’t that much going on which isn’t either plain commercial (the pantomime season is upon us yet again) or else so little advertised it is impossible to find out about it. London is close but it's a major outlay to attend even the subsidised theatre, and right now I just don't have the spare cash.

I suppose we expect better of Mullan because he is a literature don and we assume that drama also comes under that rubric, but until we get new drama back on tv (Play for Today anyone) and on radio in places other than Radio 3 and poorly trailed slots on Radio 4, it is going to be difficult to foster sufficient interest in people to see it done live, see it done locally. But for now, I shall sit back and reflect that with Mullan, his apparent stupidity is nothing personal, just knee-jerk, and broad-based, and that I’m grateful that people like Waters remain passionate about their causes, even when they sometimes inadvertently make dicks of themselves by protesting without fully grasping the nature of the problem.

The Weird – The People of the Pit – A. Merritt

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

When I think of A. Merritt, I think of pulp fiction inevitably. If Ugolini’s story was leaning in that direction, ‘The People of the Pit’ puts us squarely in pulp territory, but geographically somewhere very vague, above the Yukon, perhaps in Alaska. All we really know is that it’s somewhere in the North. The vagueness is deliberate, of course, enough to make you think the place might be real, enough to make sure you couldn’t find it if you wanted to, and mostly to cover up the fact that it doesn’t exist at all, layer after layer of contrivance and verisimilitude, supporting and undermining one another simultaneously. It’s irresistible.

Our heroes, Starr Anderson and the narrator, Frank, are wandering around the North, looking for gold, as adventurers are wont to do in these circumstances. With a few deft strokes, Merritt implies a shared back story for these men, one based on strange experiences: ‘It makes me think of the frozen hand of cloud that Shan Nadour set before the Gate of Ghouls to keep them in the lairs that Eblis cut for them’ (101). It assures the reader of oddness to come, as if that weren’t clear enough already, from the mysterious shaft of light they are watching, and the way it ‘broke into myriads of little luminous globes that swung to and fro and dropped gently. They seemed to be searching’ (101). It’s difficult to resist a line like that.

Yet there is incredible tension in this opening sequence, with the realisation that something odd is going on in the distance, coupled with intuitive knowledge that it is better to be observing from ‘here’, rather than experiencing first-hand over ‘there’. This business of keeping a distance is interesting. A number of the stories I’ve looked at so far use various framing devices, either a narrator recounting a story someone else told, or the diary by the person who is no longer there to explain it, and so on. It seems to be a common feature of this kind of story, and one might toy with reasons why it is so popular. There is, of course, that sense of vicarious thrill, of being able to experience the horror second-hand without being involved in it. Conversely, the extra layer of narration hints at things which might have been overlooked or deliberately left out, and the reader thrills to the prospect of imagining worse horrors. It also elevates the sense of mystery, the desire to have observed first-hand in order to be absolutely clear about what really did happen. And, crucially, it leaves room for doubt.

In this instance, the secondary narrator is a man who, in classic Northern fashion, crawls into the men’s camp. And the manner of his crawling is horrific in itself. This is no collapsing half-stagger, no dragging himself along the floor, but as the narrator says, ‘it was like a baby crawling upstairs. The forepaws lifted themselves in grotesquely infantile fashion’ (102). Again, there is so much packed into those few sentences. Man or beast? Adult or baby? Where Blackwood, for example, merely hints at the nature of the horror lurking in the willows, Merritt’s approach is much more straightforward. Is it s a small bear? No, it’s a man, horribly damaged by having crawled through the forest on his hands and knees, though does that account for his curious gait.

On top of this, he wears a band of gold round his waist, and a chain. Gold, of course, is what has brought the explorers to this place, but when they remove it, ‘it was like no gold I had ever handled. […] it had an unclean, viscid life of its own. It clung to the file. […] It was – loathsome’ (103). Something is clearly not right when a man in search of gold actively throws it away.

The story when it comes is one that is now familiar, the lost civilisation, in this instance living in the bottom of a ravine. Not any old ravine, however, but ‘Imagine the Grand Canyon five times as wide and with the bottom dropped out’ (104). It’s probably impossible to imagine this geographical marvel, and conveniently, it is tucked out of sight on the other side of the Hand Mountain that our explorers had been travelling towards, so they have never seen it, and we have only the word of Sinclair Stanton, the crawling man, that it exists at all, positioning him as an unreliable first-person narrator, not least because he has just spent several months in a cabin on his own, sitting out the winter, waiting for the spring so he could continue his journey. However, his rationality and lucidity are set against this, inviting us to believe him.

Stanton descends miles into the huge pit, down stairs that were clearly made by someone, or something. He is uncertain of what he will encounter. There have been hints; on the edge of the mega-canyon he has found ruined buildings, and sculptures of ‘the heroic figure of a man’, and lurking behind them, things like ‘enormous upright slugs’ (104). When he encounters a city made of cylinders, it doesn’t take much ingenuity to work out what is probably living in them. Except that, as Stanton’s account plays out, the creatures he encounters are rarely visible, often more a feeling than a physical experience. Physicality is most plainly manifest in the hideous trees that grow in the bottom of the pit and in the architecture and carvings that appear to mimic their writhings – ‘mad octopuses with a thousand drunken tentacles’.

There is a fascinating disconnection between the repulsive physicality of Stanton’s surroundings and his encounters with the inhabitants of the pit, who manifest as globes of light or else as feelings of, mainly, repulsion focused on an invisible consciousness, as though they have, in the best science-fictional fashion, transcended the need for a body. Stanton can offer no real clue as to what they are, except perhaps to describe himself as ‘an atom of consciousness in a sea of cadenced whispering’ (107), as though he is to be subsumed into some sort of gestalt entity. It is only towards the end of the story that the nature of the creatures is, to some extent, revealed: ‘like the ghosts of inconceivably monstrous slugs’ (108). Floating monstrous slugs. Could it get any worse?

For Stanton, yes, in that he is more disturbed by the fact that he has joined in the chanting of the people of the pit, become part of them, at least for a while. And this, to my mind, is actually the most interesting part of the story in that Stanton never clearly articulates the nature of his fear of joining in the chanting in the first place; he describes his tortuous escape, the pursuit by the slug people, and how the whispering threatens and cajoles, but there is clearly something else at work. What Merritt is getting at is not made explicit but one can make a guess, with the juxtaposing a hidden alien society against Stanton’s East Coast upbringing (Yale man, and all that), and the fear of surrendering himself to the chanting. Stanton’s escape from the malign influence, his death and demand that his body be burned, ensures that he can escape their influence finally, while the explorers, suitably horrified and chastened, turn back to civilisation. The kicker, of course, is that the civilisation remains … out there … somewhere.

‘The People of the Pit’ comes across as good, honest, entertaining pulp, riffing off authors like H Rider Haggard and the ‘into the unknown’ style of travel account, yet somehow right at the heart of it is this unspoken fear, and it’s that which really catches my attention.

The Weird – The Vegetable Man – Luigi Ugolini

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

Again, Luigi Ugolini is a name new to me, but ‘The Vegetable Man’ seems to fit very squarely into a late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century fascination with South America and what might lie hidden in the forests of the Amazon – lost civilisations, lost cities, lost tribes, lost knowledge. there is an interesting tension at the outset between the narrator, Benito Olivares, the self-styled young scientist and pioneer, educated, urban, and the uncharted jungles of the Amazon. The Amazon is ‘impenetrable’, but he ‘penetrated the virgin forests’; it is not difficult to see that Olivares is out to prove himself, forcing himself onto the forests, in order to wring ‘countless secrets out of that vegetable environment’. [S]cience’, he says, is ‘a matter of faith and martyrdom’ (97). Olivares’ engagement with his environment is one of struggle, and violence, against a jungle that not surprisingly fights back. The religious and sexual undertones point to forcible conversion and rape rather than any mutual engagement. Olivares’ scientific endeavour is a single-handed recapitulation of the explorations of early European visitors, enacted this time against the plant kingdom. The alert reader knows already that this encounter is not going to end well for Olivares. The question is, given the fact that he is narrating, how is it going to end?

Olivares can see beauty in his surroundings, describing them as ‘inexpressible spectacle, that triumph of plant life and sunshine, of the wonderful contrast of cold shadows and dazzling color,’ yet he quickly turns to note ‘the silent and titanic struggle made of indestructible embraces and horrendous tangles’ (98). Whatever he may feel about the forest, and about his discoveries, there is this constant underlying image of ensnarement, a sense of being ill-at-ease with his surroundings, suspicious of their fertility and abundance. He is not at one with the forest at all. In fact, Olivares’ great discovery is made while he is entangled in some lianas.

Olivares’ response to the new plant he has discovered is perhaps even more revealing than his obsession with the smothering properties of lianas. On the one hand:

What delight, what triumph, what delirium it is for a botanist to make such a discovery. Trembling with emotion I approached this new specimen and began to study it minutely and lovingly. (98)

It’s difficult not to imagine Olivares as the inexperienced young lover, alone at last with the girl of his dreams, not entirely sure what to do next but willing to make up for inexperience with urgency. And yet, annoyingly, the plant won’t play nicely. It resists his taxonomic advances:

Great God, that plant seemed to have been created deliberately to upset all of my botanical science. It was in fact a living contradiction. As soon as I tried to give it the particular characteristic of a species, another detail diametrically opposite jumped out, and then another, until my mind became lost in that futile work of classification. (98)

It is also very disquieting in its appearance: ‘Its branches had a reddish meat color to them that almost filled me with a feeling of disgust’ (98). That use of the word ‘meat’ suddenly pushes the story in a different direction; this plant is something different, transcending botanical boundaries. It even appears to have eyes. Yet when it bites Olivares, it is with thorns that are ‘like the teeth of a viper’ (98), suggesting that the plant, or whatever it is, has crossed a good many boundaries. Needless to say, this does not deter Olivares from taking specimens, further violating the sanctity of the forest. However, the plant seems to have a strange effect on Olivares, who fears he has been poisoned by the plant, although the symptoms pass. More disquieting is the response of the Guarani Indians whom he questions about the plant: ‘It is the Inhuacoltzi, the great spirit of the plants’ (99).

The reader can already guess what has happened, from the fact that the story begins with a single sentence: ‘The following is the story told to me by the green man’ (97), and has worked its way to its logical conclusion. When Olivares takes off his gloves, it is to reveal a transformation that is perhaps less surprising than it might have been. For me, what is interesting at this point is the way in which he verifies the nature of the ongoing transformation, by examining his own blood under a microscope, while the doctors he consults, scientific man to scientific man, cannot do anything to help. There is that tension again between science and nature, though I think the most revealing moment comes when Olivares explains how he fled abroad, hoping a change of air would help, and ‘a few months ago I came to your wonderful Italian soil’ (100). The extent of the transformation is so perfectly caught in those few words.

Is it a weird story? I think so. It, like several of the stories to come, is told in a very rational way, with the marshalling of data, the appeals to science, the narrator as scientist even, and the emphasis is on that rather than on any ideas about unknown jungle creatures or arcane Indian knowledge – I think Ugolini does well in not overplaying that aspect of things; the Indians know as much as Olivares, effectively, except they also know to steer clear rather than to take samples. Is he being punished for his curiosity? Yes, but not necessarily in the terms we might think of. Olivares’ crime, as much as anything, lies in his failure to step back and think harder before taking samples from something so unusual, perhaps unique. If anything, his curiosity is rather vulgar, not driven by a desire to determine the nature of the gods, or any such elevated notion.

***

An afterthought: it is my habit, as you’ll have noticed by now, to pick an illustration for the head of the page that in some way reflects on or counterpoints the content. For this entry, I thought first of Arcimboldo’s vegetable people, but when I looked at them, I decided they were actually too damn cheerful, literally apple-cheeked in one or two instances, so I turned to looking at representations of green men, only to notice that recent depictions of foliate heads tend to be rather benign and majestic. It’s some of the older heads which are more disquieting, particularly those where the tree branches seem to force their way out of the unfortunate man’s mouth, which is why I’ve opted for this carving. There is that sense of agony and resistance I think this story needs.

Science Fiction Foundation SF Criticism Masterclass 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

Class Leaders:
Edward James
M. John Harrison
Kari Sperring

The Science Fiction Foundation (SFF) will be holding the sixth annual Masterclass in sf criticism in 2012.

Dates: June 22nd, 23rd, 24th 2012.

Location: Middlesex University, London (the Hendon Campus, nearest underground, Hendon).
Delegate costs will be £190 per person, excluding accommodation. Accommodation: students are asked to find their own accommodation, but help is available from the administrator (farah.sf@gmail.com)

Applicants should write to Farah Mendlesohn at farah.sf@gmail.com. Applicants are asked to provide a CV and a writing sample; these will be assessed by an Applications Committee consisting of Farah Mendlesohn, Graham Sleight and Andy Sawyer. Completed applications must be received by 28th February 2012.

Thinking Aloud – A Different Kind of Weird

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

The grand plan for this evening was to write about the new dramatisation of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen which ran on Radio 4 this afternoon. I’d been looking forward to this all week; Radio 4’s previous dramatisation, done some 25 years ago, so far as I can remember, lacked a certain something as the child actors were not terribly good, and tended to put ... the emphases ... in … all the wrong places (though the adults weren’t too bad, particularly the actor playing Gowther Mossock).

As it turned out, today’s programme also lacked a certain something. It lacked the entire Earldelving sequence, the part where Colin and Susan, aided by Fenodyree and Durathror, make a terrifying journey through narrow tunnels under Alderley Edge, pushing and pulling themselves along on their stomachs, constantly at risk of becoming trapped. It is a tour de force of storytelling, the single best sequence in the entire book, the moment when you know just how good a writer Alan Garner is capable of being. I still find it very difficult to read, except for that wonderful moment of relief when they escape, finally, into daylight, and meet the Stromkarl sitting on the Goldenstone.

And it wasn’t there in the dramatisation. Given I consider it to be the spine of the narrative, its own Alderley Edge, so to speak, this was a disappointment, to say the least. It’s also an important aspect of the story in that it is a rite-of-passage for the children, earning them the right to participate in what is to come. But, never mind.

Trying to figure out what was in the mind of the writer when he did this is perhaps wasted effort, but I did go back and read the novel this evening, and it confirmed my feeling, listening to the adaptation, that the writer had pretty much used the first few chapters wholesale, including small fussy details that could have been pruned out of an hour-long story without losing anything (the previous adaptation was an hour and a half in length; the extra half hour allows for such a luxury, and indeed for using the Earldelving sequence). And then, perhaps the writer realised that he was running out of time and needed to speed up, so dropped the Earldelving sequence in order to wallow around miserably at the end in a battle sequence that was rather too long for what it is in the novel, but everything needs to end with a battle, right?

It’s undeniable that in some ways The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is a difficult novel to adapt. When you look at it closely, it is several sequences linked together rather than one sustained piece of storytelling, and as a result it might be difficult to keep the momentum going. Having said that, I think it would have been possible, even with an hour slot, to produce something rather better balanced than this production was.

Many years ago I began to train to abridge books for a certain organisation that made a feature out of marketing such things. Unfortunately, the editorial department had a reorganisation before I got too far so my glorious career as an abridger was stillborn, but I got as far as understanding that what seemed to be needed was to isolate a series of key events, and keep a good deal of the detail surrounding them, while constructing bridging passages to move between the key events.

Bearing that in mind, the problem with the first section of The Weirdstone becomes a little more obvious, in that it has few large events, but an awful lot of scene-setting in terms of the legend of the wizard, getting Alderley Edge firmly established as a place, etc. Except, and may god forgive me for this, Alderley Edge really doesn’t matter that much in terms of place in a radio adaptation, because you are not going to see it. A few words to establish the relationship between the Mossocks and the land, self-evident in the telling of the story anyway, onto exploring, svart-alfar, Cadellin, Susan’s Tear, then squeeze the period of time between the loss of the Weirdstone and Grimnir’s move to Selina Place’s house, and hey presto, time for the Earldelving.

There are deeper issues lurking under this, of course, such as Radio 4’s reluctance to produce any drama longer than an hour, these days, as though they don’t trust the audience to sustain concentration, leading to such travesties as the entire Mahabharata dramatised in two hours, and other such nonsense.

So, disappointment over something that could have been so good, but a chance to reread The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is never to be sniffed at, and it might be time to reread my entire Garner collection, so another project beckons in the new year.

And if you want to listen to the production of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, it is available here for a week. It's not bad, so far as it goes, but it doesn't go underground as it should.

The Weird – The Hungry Stones – Rabindranath Tagore

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

I have in the past read Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916) his novel about the beginnings of the Swadeshi movement, which reflects his own attempts to reconcile the influence of Western culture with a desire for Indian independence from Britain, but so far I’m unaware of having read any of his short stories.

Putting aside any considerations of the weird for a moment, what struck me first was how like some of Kipling’s Indian stories it seemed to be, superficially at least, though this story, published the same year as The Home and the World, is at least one generation younger, perhaps two. Kipling himself wrote some extremely good ghost stories and other supernatural tales set in India, though the Indian characters were, inevitably, positioned as inherently unknowable, the engagement with their cultures throwing up things that were finally incomprehensible to the civilised white man. It is easy to dismiss Kiping as being racist and jingoistic but that’s too simplistic. Kipling saw India with a child’s wonder, in many ways, mixed with homesickness, nostalgia, but he was also part of a system that ‘knew’India through cataloguing and classifying it, through administering it. I suspect, in part, Kipling’s Indian stories were a struggle to reconcile these two very different parts of his experience. His ghost stories tend to achieve explanation and closure, although at times the hauntings can be grotesque and very immediate.

A characteristic of many of Kipling’s stories is that they have a framing narrator, telling a story he heard in the hills, or at the club, or something that he experienced himself, but a long time ago, last year, and so on: there is a space between the narration and the experience, almost a cordon sanitaire, as though ensuring that it can’t wash over into the experience of the listeners, except when, as sometimes also happens, they are to be the instrument’s of its resolution. There is always the feeling, though, of compartmentalisation, of everything being in its place. Loss of control, in Kipling’s stories, is usually temporary.

‘Then Hungry Stones’ starts with a similar structure: a narrator tells a story about being on a journey with a relation, on a train, when he meets a man, whom he believes to be ‘an up-country Mahomedan’ from his dress and bearing (and here I refer you to the Great Trunk Road sequence in Kim, when Kim first sees the mass of humanity travelling across India, and Kipling reflects the way in which the British categorised them by dress and behaviour). However, ‘he discoursed upon all subjects so confidently that you might think the Disposer of All Things consulted him at all times in all that He did’ (90). Again, turning to Kim, one might think of Hurree Chunder Mookherjee – Hurree Babu – the Bengali spy, educated by the English, careful to conceal his true nature behind an outward appearance of buffoonry.

Then the mysterious person, as if well aware of the effect he has, begins to tell a story, and this forms the heart of Tagore’s story. From the outset, he is a man with agency. He can through up a job ‘owing to a disagreement about some questions of administrative policy’ (90) and as quickly find another job. This is not a man who is obliged to find his way by means of cherishing small connections and begging for interviews, at least not by his own account. He is forthright and confident in what he is doing, and as an employer of the Nizam of Hyderabad, he is working within one of the princely states of British India, which enjoyed a certain amount of autonomy, managing their own affairs.

The narrator takes up residence in the abandoned palace of Emperor Mahmud Shah II, although warned by his clerk not to do so. The narrator dismisses the clerk’s warning, yet almost immediately finds that ‘the solitude of the deserted palace weighed upon me like a nightmare’ (91), mirroring the experience, again, of many of Kipling’s characters, who find themselves cut off from company (in their case, other Britons). Why the narrator keeps himself aloof is less clear: status, or religion, perhaps, or other issues that he doesn’t mention.

Before a week had passed, the place began to exert a weird fascination upon me. It is difficult to describe or to induce people to believe; but I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting by the action of some stupefying gastric juice. (91)

Here, one thinks back to Hanns Heinz Ewers’ ‘The Spider’, and the mysterious effect of the room, the window and the presence of Clarimonde. In ‘The Hungry Stones’, however, the story’s register is, initially, more that of a straightforward ghost story, as the narrator hears sounds around him, of what he comes to think of as resonances of the life within the palace when it was still occupied. This is benign enough in its way, to begin with – the laughter of young women as they go down to the river to bathe, the sound of their jewellery. The narrator is ‘filled with a lively fear that it was the Muse that had taken advantage of my solitude and possessed me’ (92), a reasonable enough concern, not least because he finds himself drawn back to the palace again that night.

This time, he has a much more elaborate dream, of being awoken by a servant girl and then led to a bedroom where, before he awakes, he catches a glimpse of her feet before he is disturbed and awakes. The dreams, if they are dreams, continue, ever more elaborate and confusing.

Then followed a great discord between my days and nights. During the day I would go to my work worn and tired, cursing the bewitching night and her empty dreams, but as night came my daily life with its bond and shackles of work would appear a petty, false, ludicrous vanity. (93)

In some respects, this is a classic scenario, of someone moving between two worlds, one more attractive than the other, being pushed more and more urgently to make a choice. In the narrator’s daytime world is nothing but work, which he obviously isn’t that engaged with; at night, he pursues a mysterious, scarcely visible woman.

She had maddened me. In pursuit of her I wandered from room to room, from path to path among the bewildering maze of alleys in the enchanted dreamland of the nether world of sleep. (94)

The dream world and the waking world seem to be collapsing into one another. In a deeply enigmatic passage, the narrator describes how he dresses himself for these encounters, though what is not clear is whether this happens in the dream or in reality.

I would then be transformed into some unknown personage of a bygone age, playing my part in unwritten history; and my short English coat and tight breeches did not suit me in the least. With a red velvet cap on my head, loose paijamas, an embroidered vest, a long flowing silk gown, and coloured hankerchiefs scented with attar, I would complete my elaborate toilet, sit on a high-cushioned chair, and replace my cigarette with a many-coiled narghileh filled with rose-water, as if in eager expectation of a strange meeting with the beloved one (93).

Later, it seems that this is ‘real’, as the narrator notes the day ‘I gave up my queer English coat and hat for good’ (94). He says also that ‘[w]hatever belonged to the present, whatever was moving and acting and working for bread seemed trivial, meaningless and contemptible’ (95).

It is entirely possible to read this story simply as a strange encounter in an old house, the very stones of which are ‘thirsty and hungry, eager to swallow up like a famished ogress any living man who might change to approach’ (96), a form of possession which might simply be the result of too much solitude or something external acting upon the narrator’s senses, and it works very well as such. However, there is something else happening here as well. Tagore has taken a classic story and given it another layer of meaning. The narrator is not simply seduced by the house, he is seduced by the past, and in a very specific way: he is being drawn back to the pre-British past of the area, but from the world of one coloniser (symbolised by the English coat, breeches and the solar topee) to another, that of the Nizams, whose rulers came originally from Baghdad (hence the Arabic influences in the story, and the references to the Arabian nights and a thousand and one stories), and were themselves interlopers, establishing the state after the fall of the Mughal empire. Tagore seems to be suggesting here that it is wise to be careful about what sort of model you take for independence, and that reaching into the past is not necessarily a good idea. Words such as ‘dream’ and ‘intoxication’ pepper the narrative, suggesting a commentary on more than the narrator’s own mental state.

I can’t help reading this story with a postcolonial inflection at present, thanks to my academic work, but at the same time it is also a powerful story of enchantment, exotic to western eyes but also very controlled in its construction, working within the rhetorical rules of a particular style of story-telling familiar to us through the Arabian Nights but not falling prey to overdoing the exoticism. Much is hinted at, little is seen, and for all we know, given the track record of other occupants in the house, the narrator has indeed gone mad, though we infer, of course, that he hasn’t, from the fact that he is telling, supposedly telling, the story. And the attempts to offer an explanation are cut off by the narrator’s offering another story which, through circumstance, remains untold, as though Tagore himself is reminding us that this is an Indian story, and as such we should not expect a British resolution. Indeed, the more we look at the story, the more convoluted it becomes in terms of its embedded structure, which in itself has a nice touch of the weirdness about it.