Paper Knife

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.

The Weird – The Spider – Hanns Heinz Ewers

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Hanns Heinz Ewers was a German horror writer, and the introduction notes that much of his work has a decadent feel to it. Yet what strikes one immediately about this story is that it seems more like a detective story. A series of inexplicable suicides in the same hotel room, on a Friday afternoon, between the hours of five and six, brings a young medical student, Richard Bracquemont, to the Hotel Stevens, determined, so he says, to solve the mystery, and claiming particular knowledge that will enable him to do so.

That is one version of the story; another unfolds as we read Richard Bracquemont’s diary, which chronicles events which occur during his sojourn in the room. What we quickly learn is that at this stage, Bracquemont doesn’t have any idea what might have happened. He can bring his observational skills to bear on the situation and hopes that he may perhaps make his name if he can solve the mystery, but there is also an element in his character that suggests he is a clever young man who has worked out a way of getting free board and lodging for a while; his lack of resources is emphasised a number of times, perhaps most poignantly when he explains how poverty has got in the way of his falling in love.

This is significant because while Bracquemont’s account is initially a breezy recitation of his experiences in the room, the tenor of the story shifts suddenly, with the appearance of Clarimonde. Before that, however, it is worth taking a look at the account of the policeman, the third of the suicides, who also was also there to solve the room’s mystery. We cannot know how reliable a narrator he was, but the implication is that as a policeman, his approach would have been rational. His experience is uneventful until two days before he dies, when he expresses the view that he may have found a clue, though what remains unknown, and that on the Friday morning ‘he ventured the statement that the window of the room certainly had a remarkable power of attraction’ (78). By that evening he is dead.

On the first Friday after his arrival, Bracquemont waits, revolver and telephone to hand, but nothing happens. By the following Monday, he notes that he is ‘gaining considerably in health and weight’ (81), suggesting he had been unwell before, but here he also indicates that something has happened. On the Wednesday we learn of the existence of Clarimonde. From the outset there is something odd about this person who sits in her window, across the street, spinning. The reader, alerted by the title of the story, will probably already be suspicious of Clarimonde, particularly when it has been noted that a spider was associated with the corpse of the dead police sergeant, although Bracquemont himself does not know this. Clarimonde, improbably, ‘spins at a little old-fashioned distaff’ – Bracquemont particularly notes just how old-fashioned it is – ‘a very tiny, fine thing, white, and apparently made of ivory. The threads she spins must be infinitely fine’ (81). Nothing about Clarimonde rings true, and everything about her is so vague. Bracquemont can barely describe her: ‘I seem to sense rather than to know all this’ (81). Again Bracquemont’s diary prepares the reader for a strange encounter when he tells the story of observing the deadly meeting between the male and female spider, but obviously does not make any connection between himself and the strange Arachne-like figure he can see from his window.

Gradually, inexorably, Bracquemont abandons everything, to spend hours ‘playing’ with Clarimonde, as they stare at one another, or mirror one another’s movements through the window. This goes on, literally, for days. Bracquemont seems unable to help himself, as though all his willpower has been drawn from him. Yet the story isn’t that simple. The dichotomy in his character that I noted earlier seems, perhaps, to be exacerbated by this experience, one possibility why Bracquement lasts longer than the other men, because he can watch himself fighting Clarimonde's influence. What is also striking is the way in which Bracquemont comes to realise that he is being played with. The moment of realisation that he is no longer fully in control of his own actions is so sharp, so certain, as is the knowledge of what he needs to do to counteract the effect of Clarimonde, and yet he can’t leave the room.

There is a temptation to assume that Bracquemont is documenting his own descent into madness, but the manner of their deaths suggests that the three other men had similar experiences to him, at least to some degree. The manner of Bracquemont’s dying is what marks his experience as different, that and his destruction of the spider, a final gesture on the part of the man trapped within the man. But questions remain, utterly unanswerable questions. Is there something about the window itself, thinking back to that remark of the police sergeant’s? Does it possess some strange power to transform objects? Suppose there had not been a spider …?

In the end, what I find so attractive about this story is that sense of uncertainty. Spider women may be redolent of decadence, of sex and death and death-in-sex, but this story somehow continues to resist that easy conclusion in the same way it resists a more straightforward explanation of a haunting. (I was strangely enough reminded of William Hope Hodgson’s ‘The Whistling Room’ (1913), for that same sense of something uncanny being somehow embedded in the room itself, although the two stories are in other ways very different.)

Thinking Aloud – The New Sherlock Holmes

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:59:00 +0000

I’ve been listening to Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime these last few days, following Antony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, the first novel officially endorsed by the Conan Doyle estate. It is very enjoyable so far as it goes, even putting aside the problems of abridgement, but that is the big question: where does it go?

Authors step into dangerous territory when they take up another writer’s characters and settings, particularly with a familiar and much-loved character like Sherlock Holmes. Horowitz is hardly the first to venture down this path. Conan Doyle’s own son, Adrian, wrote a number of Sherlock Holmes stories, some with the assistance of John Dickson Carr, utilising cases mentioned in Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, but never written up by Watson, and other writers also wrote stories about Holmes. Indeed, Radio 4’s complete Sherlock Holmes series features a number of non-canonical plays by Bert Coulls, who wrote the dramatisations of the canonical stories.

But when I listen to the readings, under what terms should I judge this story? I can dismiss it out of hand as not being as good as Conan Doyle’s work, obviously enough because it isn’t by Conan Doyle, but that’s hardly a constructive approach. In that case, am I expecting Horowitz to write in a slavish imitation of the style of Conan Doyle? He might, I suppose – although he has clearly chosen not to – but where would be the virtue in that, not least because he’s still not Conan Doyle.

The most sensible route, and this would appear to be the one Horowitz is taking, is to evoke the mood of the Conan Doyle stories but devise a story of his own. Horowitz apparently created Foyle’s War, and has written dramatisations of Christie’s Poirot stories, so he has form in writing period detective stories, and he is clearly familiar with the Holmes canon as well. Possibly a little too familiar; there seemed to be an irritating tendency to assemble tropes and decorative accents from a wide range of Holmes stories. Thus, for example, the Baker Street Irregulars all come tumbling into the room, rather as they did the first time Watson met them in A Study In Scarlet, and indeed there is a peculiar sense that Watson had never seen them before. And Mycroft, who never usually stirs from his normal routine, pays a visit (the first and only time, claims Watson, which is actually wrong; I can’t remember which story, offhand, but I’m certain he pays a visit to 221b in the canonical stories). Lestrade also plays a small but sympathetic part, and there are a number of familiar bits of business, such as Holmes’ extraordinary facility for disguise.

The problem is, of course, that it is all too easy to become caught up in spotting the tropes, though it has an interesting corollary in that anyone who is halfway familiar with the Sherlock Holmes stories is almost certainly engaging with The House of Silk on a meta-level, certainly if the episode I’ve just listened to is anything to go by, given I spent fifteen minutes waiting to have my immediate suspicion confirmed, as indeed it was. Except, would anyone who wasn’t familiar with Sherlock Holmes even be bothering with the novel? (Having said that, I suspect it’s a rare person who doesn’t have some idea of how a Sherlock Holmes story works.) So, is this a bonus or a feature of Horowitz’s story?

The story itself is proving difficult to determine. The eponymous House of Silk seems to be at the back of a vast conspiracy, stretching as high as the top levels of government, but no one seems to know anything about it. How this links to the mysterious persecution of an art dealer and his family is anyone’s guess but this far into the readings I have come to the conclusion that the abridgement is struggling to contain the complexity of the story. Each episode begins with a glossing passage that seems to confuse more than it enlightens, suggesting that a lot of necessary material has been lost en route.

What I do notice about Horowitz’s story is that there is a greater attention to the other people involved. They feel more ‘contemporary’, I suppose. What is equally noticeable, certainly in the abridgement, is how Holmes is absent for a large part of the story (though this has canonical precedent), and there are moments when he seems to do things that Conan Doyle’s Holmes, I think, would not have done. He is less omniscient, less prescient as well, perhaps, even a little careless.

Which perhaps doesn’t take us anywhere at all, other than to wonder as I often do about the point of sequels by another hand. The implication is that authors should provide more of the same, and that to go ‘off-piste’ is bad and wrong, though I am often inclined to suggest that sequels by another hand are in themselves bad and wrong (and here I cite the Campion stories written by Marjorie Allingham’s husband, after her death, which are a pale shadow). Where does the interest lie is reading The House of Silk if one is not a Holmes completist or obsessive? Or, is it actually more fun to read if one doesn’t have a good working knowledge of the canon? And I could probably start a whole new post about the noble art of abridgement if I had time.

Indeed, the only conclusion I have reached so far is that I am going to have to buy the book and see for myself.

And indeed, Dan Hartland confirms my suspicions in this excellent piece on his own blog.

Thinking aloud …

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Paper Knife has been getting a lot more traffic recently, so welcome to anyone who has started reading regularly in the last few days.

My main reading discussion project at present is Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird – all of it, discussed in bite-size portions, or at any rate, one or two stories at a time. I’ve no idea how long that will take me, but at the rate of two or three posts a week, I imagine I’ll be finishing up in late January (or I may go mad over Christmas and write lots; we shall see).

However, Paper Knife isn’t just about weird fiction, or even the fantastic, or even genre fiction, so don’t be surprised if posts on other literary topics pop up from time to time.

Before moving on, however, I should mention that I’m not the only one undertaking a ‘Weird’ reading project. Des Lewis has a similar project on the go, with the latest instalment here.

***

I’ve just been reading a fascinating article that’s been doing the rounds in the genre blogosphere over the last week or so: If Tolkien were black, over at Salon. It focuses on the work of N.K. Jemisin and David Anthony Durham, and explores the relationship between African-American readers and writers and epic fantasy, on the assumption that epic fantasy is usually based on some version of medieval Britain, is inherently white in its assumptions, and very conservative in its general outlook.

It’s an interesting article. I’m familiar with N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms, and have The Kingdom of Gods on the review pile, awaiting my attention. So far, I’ve not read David Anthony Durham’s work, but from what have I read here, I’m already keen to do so. Among other things, Durham said something that caught my attention: ‘I never felt that fantasy needed to be an escape from reality. […] I wanted it to be a different sort of engagement with reality, and one that benefits from having magic and mayhem in it as well.’

It has set me thinking once again about how one reads fantasy. Durham’s Acacia trilogy has, he says, ‘a little bit of the Atlantic slave trade in there, and there’s a bit of the Opium Wars and quite a bit of Halliburton.’ The point is that fantasy is a way to write about these issues without readers automatically applying what Durham calls ‘particular agendas and political orientations’. This makes sense to me, given I see part of the role of fiction being to prompt us to look at things in a different light. And yes, that can go hand in glove with entertainment. Why not? I can’t speak for anyone else but I feel as though my life is one long experience of being bombarded by thoughts and ideas – the change can come at any point, from any source.

What made me uneasy, though, was one of the comments at the end of the piece, from ninaloca, who appears to be a habitual reader of fantasy, and also aware that a lot of genre fantasy used well-worn pattern types, some of which she has now chosen to reject. She was obviously open to the idea of doing something different with fantasy but at the same time, she could say this:

I accept that as a westerner I'm simply going to love certain things. I love Christmas trees and the romance of dark cold snowy Germanic forests. I love fairy tales about witches in woods and Snow Queens and trolls. We are surrounded by this (in the western world) from birth.If we want to change the fantasy genre it has to start way way earlier, by the time we get to Fantasy we've already spent our entire childhood with fairytales and folklore and European royal history and Fantasy As Written now just fits the contours of our imagination. Writing about brown people in Africa isn't going to touch that child inside of us and bring back memories of our childhood when we could escape totally into that fantasy cocoon in our heads.

I can see what she is saying, to the extent that these are the cultural cues to which we are exposed from an early age, but she seems also to suggest that there is nothing we really can do to resist or counteract this, as though we’re almost hardwired, as white northern europeans to like such stuff, and are unable to escape our own programming as a result.

I find this difficult to believe. Yes, I can see that people will remain within their comfort zones, and ninaloca does express this quite clearly, but remaining with what is familiar, choosing to do so, is not the same as being obliged by conditioning to do so, surely. The clue, perhaps, likes in the reference to childhood and the fantasy cocoon, and the implication that reading is about an escape from reality. Or it might be defensiveness – I like this stuff and want to carry on reading it. Which is fine, too; it is just not the choice I’ve made, , which is why David Anthony Durham’s approach is much more to my liking.

Other commenters mounted a defence of Tolkien’s work, particularly suggestions of racism, but I was left with the distinct impression that they weren’t always getting the point that Jemisin in particular was trying to make, and indeed that ninaloca perhaps inadvertently underlined, of what it is like when you love a novel but can’t see yourself in it, no matter how hard you try. Growing up in the 1960s, the best I could do in terms of an adventurous girl role-model, was George in Blyton’s Famous Five books, and I knew even as a child that she was by no means the positive figure one might suppose; the pervasive tone of indulgence towards her from adults signalled that they hoped she would grow out of it, and I still think Blyton herself laughed at George as much as she sympathised with her. But at least George looked a bit like me.

Later, I mentally ‘wrote’ myself into Lord of the Rings as an invisible Ranger travelling with the Fellowship, because that was clearly a far more interesting option than sitting around being Arwen, or even, alas, Eowyn. Strangely, I did not feel compelled to write myself into the text as an orc, who were, after all, nasty, brutish and short, and it was all too easy to accept Tolkien’s representations of others. I doubt that Tolkien was a paid-up racist – he was in many ways a very humane man – but neither did he question established representations of geographical groups and so on. He was working within a set of literary and social frameworks that made perfect sense to him, and I doubt it would have occurred to him to step beyond them, though as the distance lengthens between our time and Tolkien’s, it is not always easy to understand or explain them. (A prime example, to my mind, is the relationship between Frodo and Sam; however we choose to gloss that in terms of suppressed homoeroticism, for me it helps to know a little about the scout system in Oxford colleges, and the kind of relationship that forms between scout and student, akin to that of a child and nanny.)

Jemisin’s commentary on reading epic fantasy and trying to write it the way other people did before defying its tropes altogether is genuinely eye-opening. One of the things I particularly admire about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is its sharp eye for the nuances of power relations, although in terms of storytelling, I actually think The Broken Kingdom is a stronger and richer novel, overflowing with people, gods and beliefs. It’s an excellent evocation of what it might be like to come to a big city and attempt to make a life there. Jemisin questions what Tolkien simply accepted. That doesn’t diminish Tolkien or valorise Jemisin, but it makes their work different from one another, and indeed makes me reread Tolkien differently, refreshing my mind as I go.

Both writers also talk about the problems of being people of colour who are writers, and the assumptions made by readers and booksellers, not to mention the expectations they have of Durham and Jemisin as writers, Nora Jemisin picks this up in a subsequent post on her own website, the ‘things I wish I’d said’ post, which really should be read as well.

I’m thinking a lot about ways of reading at present. The Weird Reading Project provides a lot to think about in terms of European writing I’ve missed, while Jemisin and Durham are reawakening my enthusiasm for other varieties of fantastical writing. I’m hoping to revisit these themes a good deal in the next few months.

The Weird – Meyrink and Heym

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Having spent the last few post dealing with the work of old reading friends, this post sees me moving into less familiar territory. I recognise Gustav Meyrink’s name from The Golem, of course, but Georg Heym’s name and work are unknown to me so far. Or, rather, and I suspect this is much nearer the truth, I may have encountered both writers in the past and kind of … well, glided past them. My younger self, for all that she loved exuberant and exotic language – with writers like E.R. Eddison, it’s hard to avoid, was rather less fond of exotic imagery, oriental fantasies, tales of cruelty, and so on. She would have found Kubin’s ‘The Other Side’ intensely disturbing, for example. She wanted security in her reading, and Tolkien, ghost stories, and so on, provided that because they operated within historical and metaphysical frameworks that she understood.

More overtly transgressive work was problematic, and for years I simply didn’t have the reading skills to deal with it. It is to be hoped that things have improved over the years, but I am acutely aware that my reading tends to run along well-marked Anglocentric pathways. Part of the reason I’m carrying out this extended reading is to challenge myself with unfamiliar approaches to writing, and to read work from other countries.

***

Meyrink’s ‘The Man in the Bottle’ places us without ceremony in the middle of a masked ball. There are no explanations, but the reader picks up snippets of gossip as she is moved through the throng by the author, handed from one character to another. First, there is speculation about the identity of the woman in the spectacular costume that makes her look like a bat at rest, upside down – Meyrink’s description of this remains a little vague; if we are to believe one character, perhaps a little drunk, the occupant of the costume is herself upside down, which is impossible, but we might wonder. The story rides the flow of gossip, the hints of an illicit liaison between the Count de Faast and the wife of his highness, Mohammed Darasche-Koh, the party’s host; the absurdity of the costumes – a Gordian knot rushes past, pursued by Alexander the Great. For the most part people are not named, they are characters, stripped of personal identity, possessed of identities conferred by their clothes. They are not, for the most part, accessible to us, except in vague hints and allusions.

What is also interesting, and clearly intentional, is the way that the characters lack any sense of awareness that something terrible is about to happen. To me, it seems to be signalled from the outset; that sense of the characters whirling around aimlessly; the nervousness about the prince, described as a jealous Asiatic, with vague undertones of Othello. There is a sense of suppressed unease, of people dancing and gossiping to distract themselves. Surely, when the ‘crimson executioner’ signals the start of the entertainment, they might wonder. That the play is billed as being a ‘Marionette Comedy in the Spirit of Aubrey Beardsley’ surely doesn’t bode well, and someone is bruiting abroad the fact that it will be gruesome. One wonders how many more clues the audience might need.

One senses that this throng has lost touch with what it means to be human, to fully feel emotions, or else its appetites are so jaded it seeks ever more extreme thrills without fully recognising the horror of what is happening in front of it. Thus, in this case, the people watch a man being dropped into a large glass bottle from which he cannot escape, after which the top is screwed down tight, and the prince is seated on the bottle. Pierrot, Count de Faast, becomes the genie in the bottle who cannot escape, who cannot be summoned, and also the incidental background for the marionette show, where ‘[t]he semblance of death brooded over the entire motionless group’ (73). The symbolism of the marionettes is difficult to escape, for as is clear to the outsider, this whole court dances under the control of the prince, who is firmly reminding them of the court’s power structure even as they watch. Yet the people do not seem to realise that they are as much puppets as the marionettes that they are watching, or if they do, fear prevents them acknowledging this. In the same way, they seem unable to acknowledge that they are watching the man in the bottle as he dies.

The spectators had formed themselves into two camps. The one was speechless under the spell of this vampiric, enigmatic marionette play that seemed to exhale an atmosphere of poisoned merriment; the other group, not sensitive enough to appreciate such a scene, laughed immoderately at the comical capering of the man in the bottle. (73)

Again, when the Lady in the Sedan Chair is brought onto the stage and placed close to the bottle, it’s clear, from the reaction of the Man in the Bottle, that something terrible is taking place before their eyes, and the reader probably has a shrewd idea what it is, but from the audience ‘[l]aughter and applause rose to a tumult’ (73).

It is interesting to try to pinpoint the moment when realisation dawns. I think it comes at the point when ‘one of the Moors haltingly approached the sedan chair and opened the door’ (73) (my italics). Until this point there has been motion and the lack of motion. Motion has been fast and furious – dancing, thronging, rushing – while motionlessness is equated with death or paralysis, and particularly with the marionettes, but to move hesitantly is something new. It suggests uncertainty, a relinquishing of control somewhere, but simultaneously that someone else is in control. Jerky movement suggests puppets, the first time there has been a sense of a marionette moving as it ought to. We note that the Persian prince has also become motionless. As a frenzy of activity erupts he is suddenly absent.

This is on the one hand a remarkably unpleasant little tale of a hideously thought-out punishment for adultery, with two people murdered before one another’s eyes, by someone who has the time, money and patience to wreak such revenge. On the other, there is something indefinably odd going on here. Who is in charge? Who is controlling the marionettes, who seem to move independently There are no strings, no puppet masters, only the Prince, and now he is gone. Indeed, the more deeply one probes the story, the less it seems to make sense, and one begins to understand the reason for the story’s last sentence:

Silently and with invisible pinions the gigantic ebon birds of terror streaked through the hall of the fête. (74)

There is something else going on here. I find myself wondering what happens in the next line of the story, the one after it finishes.

Georg Heym’s ‘The Dissection’ is tiny by contrast even with the Meyrink, a prose poem, a reverie, as the introduction notes. It is a fantastical description of a dissection. We know nothing about the man being dissected, why he is being dissected, though there are hints that he has been wounded. Heym draws a weird and dreadful beauty from the bloated rotting corpse: ‘His body resembled the iridescent calyx of some gigantic flower, a mysterious plant from Indian primeval forests that someone had shyly laid at the altar of death’ (75).

The description of the dissection itself is the stuff of nightmares, exaggerated for effect, perhaps, but revoltingly physical and visceral, more like an abattoir than a scene of scientific endeavour. Which makes what happens next all the more shocking, when, as the doctors cut apart his skull, ‘a remainder of love awoke in him, like a torch shining in his personal night’ (75). Suddenly, the reader is pitched into the corpse’s memories of his love, of a summer’s day, of seeing her dressed in poppy red, a stark contrast to his own black blood.

The juxtaposition of a beautiful memory and the decaying horror of the body is extraordinary; to call it beautiful seems perverse, and yet there is something so passionate, so vibrantly alive in this crumb of residual memory, with the promise that love survives all, that one accepts it and somehow steps aside from the horror of the operating table, as the dead man quivers in happiness at his memory.

***

It would be wrong to pass a judgement on the whole of the European weird/fantastic literary tradition based on two small stories, but at the same time, I cannot deny that the mood of them is different. They’re more introspective, perhaps, more sensual, more … decadent, more grotesque. Neither is overtly supernatural in the way that, say, the Crawford, James or Blackwood are; their weirdness emerges in other ways. This, I’m sure, is where I got into trouble as a young reader. The weirdness is, in many ways, more overt yet less direct, an intellectual oddness. That’s a thought to hold onto as I continue reading.

The Weird – How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles – Lord Dunsany

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Back in my misspent youth, to judge from the pile of books I still have, I read a lot of Lord Dunsany. I still remember The King of Elfland’s Daughter but the short stories seem to have vanished from my memory like strands of mist evaporating in the morning sunshine. Consequently, I have no idea at present how typical ‘How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles’ might be of his output, but if much of the rest is anything like this, a reread is in order at the earliest available opportunity.

Rather like Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar’, this story is a miracle of concision. It has been scrupulously trimmed of fat, and every word is pulling its weight. More than that, every sentence, every image is multilayered. But best of all is the way that Dunsany constantly plays with the reader’s expectations and assumptions. Nothing is quite what it seems to be.

Despite the advertisements of rival firms, it is probable that every tradesman knows that nobody in business at the present time has a position equal to that of Mr. Nuth. To those outside the magic circle of business, his name is scarcely known; he does not need to advertise, he is consummate. (68)

In many respects, this is entirely innocuous. Perhaps the name is a little unusual, but we don’t know what Mr Nuth’s business might be. It would be easy to imagine him as an emigré businessman, working in a small office somewhere in London’s East End, one of Sherlock Holmes’s many mysterious informants, or one of M.R. James’s antique or curio dealers. The tone is reminiscent of other stories of the period: a calm narration of facts, references to a back story we can only guess at, grounded in a familiar milieu of genteel trade. But as the paragraph unfolds, we learn that ‘[h]is terms are moderate, so much cash down when the goods are delivered, so much in blackmail afterwards’, and we begin to wonder.

And our suspicions are shortly after confirmed: ‘for Nuth is a burglar by trade’. Suddenly, the nature of this story has changed. On the one hand, the narrator continues to praise Nuth’s artisanal skills; on the other, the voice in the reader’s head reminds her, ‘Nuth is a burglar’. And as the otherwise unidentified narrator acknowledges, ‘It must not be thought that I am a friend of Nuth’s; on the contrary such politics as I have are on the side of Property’ (68), but there is clearly an appreciation of craftsmanship at work here. One begins to suspect that Dunsany is indeed parodying a certain style of writing, or a certain character, but if he is, he keeps a straight face about it, and never loses control of the story’s tone.

This refusal of the story to acknowledge the oddness of the situation persists as Nuth takes on an apprentice, brought to him by the young man’s mother, takes up references, teaches the boy all he knows, sends reports to Tonker’s family. The craft mysteries are preserved, merely hinted at, as though the narrator knows but sees no reason to divulge. For the reader, there is that moment’s hesitation – suppose there are trade secrets? – and then the quiet laugh: what am I thinking? And yet, the idea persists, and it is tempting to plot a line from Nuth’s London to, for example, Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork, through a series of secret histories, and it would be remiss not to acknowledge E.W. Hornug’s Raffles stories, with which this has perhaps a slight nodding acquaintance, though it predates the adventures of Father Brown and Flambeau, the reformed criminal.

And then, at the story’s halfway point, almost precisely so, things change again. We have enjoyed the mild absurdity of professional consulting burglars, the talk of their trade craft and so on, but when Nuth decides to burgle the house of the gnoles, we’re suddenly in a completely different world. The story does not represent the existence of the gnoles as strange or unusual, at least no more unusual than that of a consulting burglar, nor does it seem unreasonable that they should use emeralds to ornament their house.

But suddenly, almost without explanation, we are in a ‘dreadful wood’, its location unidentified, but clearly well away from London. We have strayed into a fantastic landscape of ‘sinister gloom’, with a village whose houses have turned their backs on the wood, whose inhabitants don’t acknowledge the existence of the gnoles, a world where poachers once snared elves. As for the wood. It’s clearly no ordinary place. ‘The trees themselves were a warning, and did not wear the wholesome look of those that we plant ourselves’ (70). The two men spend all day travelling ‘deeper and deeper’, into a place which is a grotesque fairytale, best summed up in this line: ‘They saw the skeleton of some early Georgian poacher nailed to a door in an oak tree’ (70). There is a whole story contained in that one line, not to mention its oddly prefiguring Robert Holdstock’s Ryhope Wood, in Mythago Wood.

Dunsany alters the register again when Tonker breaks into the house: ‘the silence that, though ominous, was earthly, became unearthly like the touch of a ghoul’ (70). Silence, imperative to the work of a burglar, has been transformed into a threat: silence so silent it is wrong, because there is no such thing as total silence. I leave you to infer the ending of the story, but as the narrator observes, ‘Nobody ever catches Nuth.’

The economy of this story is remarkable to the end. So much is left to the reader’s imagination, yet at the same time, the way in which the reader is lulled into accepting without question the story’s premise and setting is so carefully calculated, so deftly executed. It is a literary equivalent of the craft of Nuth himself. One is left blinking at the end, much as Nuth is, wondering how this happened.

News, news, news!

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 21:06:00 +0000

Tonight's post is rather brief as I've had a busy day at work. However, I do have a piece of very important news to share.

I am joining the team at Weird Fiction Review as its regular book reviewer. I was honoured to be invited to join and am delighted to accept. My first column will appear in January, and thereafter on a semi-regular basis.

Details about submitting books for consideration can be found here.

Tomorrow, I'll be writing about Lord Dunsany's 'How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles'.

Friday evening housekeeping

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:30:00 +0000

It has been a busy week here at Paper Knife, trying to get my Weird Reading project off the ground, but I’m pleased with the way things are going, even if I have been going slightly cross-eyed from the reading. I’m taking a break from story criticism for a couple of days, just to let some of the brain cells snap into place, but there will be a new story post on Sunday evening.

If you haven’t already spotted it and are looking for more weird fiction-related material, let me just point you at the Weird Fiction Review, the latest project from Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (do these people never sleep?), and a repository of all sorts of weird goodies. Seriously, I think this is going to become a valuable resource for people who want to expand their understanding of the weird in fiction, or who just want a taster before committing themselves to The Weird itself.

***

I have also made a few appearances on the interwebs this week. The Locus Roundtable, in which I sometimes participate, has been discussing Formative Reading Experiences here and here. I appear briefly in both parts, but the discussion is generally fascinating, for the reassurance it offers in places that my early reading experiences were by no means unique, but particularly for the differences in reading experiences between, most notably, the US and UK, and the generational differences.

And I also have a review up at Strange Horizons, this time of Mira Grant’s Deadline, the second in the Newsflesh Trilogy. I am unimpressed. When the third and final volume comes out, I may well do an in-depth piece about the trilogy for Paper Knife.

***

Meanwhile, I have been thinking about other bookish things; in this instance, about book collecting. I have a number of friends and acquaintances who ‘collect’, by which I mean they pay rather more attention to editions than I do, to first editions, first printings, advance reading copies, and things of that ilk. Collecting seems to go with the territory if one is dealing with obscure authors, or publications of an earlier era, but I am never quite sure if it is the same as that first edition ‘thing’ that people have.

Would it be bad of me to say I don’t quite get it? To be fair, I have literally never been able to get the first editions themselves, mostly as a result of never having had that necessary combination of money and the time and energy to trawl bookshops. Or rather, it seems to be more a matter of temperament, or it was in the days before internet book-buying. I used to find the thought of a secondhand bookshop utterly overwhelming if I was looking for something in particular, and an utter pleasure to flit around if I wasn’t. And I’ve had my minor triumphs, including Hope Mirrlees’ other novels, which I gather are worth a bob or two, though I’ve never seen a hardback of Lud-in-the-Mist.[1]

In the end, I suppose for me it is about text. I am quite happy to have a text to read; the need for first editions only comes into play if I am writing academically and need page references. And possibly, probably, I just don’t have the temperament of a collector. I’m an accumulator, who builds micro collections of authors and topics when I need them for research, but that is about it really. And yet I have this sneaking suspicion that in some mysterious way I am missing out, and I have no idea on what. Someone may care to explain the thrill of it to me.

***

I’ll be adding another innovation to Paper Knife in the next few months, namely a rolling bibliography of my book reviews and articles. I’ve been meaning to do this for years, and the longer I’ve left it, the more daunting the project has become. I have no idea how many pieces I’ve produced since I started reviewing in 1984 (Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, seeing as you ask, and I enjoyed it very much). This is likely to be as much a voyage of discovery for me as it may be for some of you! Anyway, keep an eye on the tab labelled ‘Bibliography’ and see what I find.

[1] And here I must tell my terrible Hope Mirrlees story. I loved Lud-in-the-Mist to distraction when I was an adolescent, wondered if Hope Mirrlees was still alive, assumed she wasn’t. I happened to be reading the Death Notices in the Oxford Mail one day, by chance, and noticed the announcement of her death. She had been living in my home city all along. But I still had no idea where. More recently, I have discovered she was living no more than a couple of miles away from where I was brought up, and within a mile of Tolkien’s house. and that is the great lost opportunity of my life.

The Weird – Casting the Runes – M R James

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:30:00 +0000

I may as well say here that M.R. James is my favourite writer of ghost stories; indeed, with a few noble exceptions, most of them actually written by friends or associates of James, or emerging from the same period, most other ghost stories seem like pale imitations by comparison. There is also an awful lot of pastiche James around, and to my mind very little of it comes anywhere near James’s own work. It is a curious thing that James does invite this impulse to emulate and yet, even with all the classic elements of a Jamesian ghost story in place, they invariably can’t quite capture the tone; something is always just every so slightly ‘off’.

Which is perhaps ironic because that sense of something being slightly ‘off’ is an important part of James’s work, the sense of ‘offness’ gradually gathering, growing, until it cannot be ignored, at which point, something genuinely dreadful bursts into a world that is theoretically very stable, very grounded n the here and now. ‘The Mezzotint’, a particular favourite of mine, works on the principle of tiny, accumulated details, interspersed with small moments of terror, yet the double audience of the reader and the main characters remain safely, and powerless, at a distance. ‘Lost Hearts’, another of my favourites, signals heavily to the reader that something quite dreadful is about to happen, but this is set against the professional ignorance of the servants who suspect that something is wrong but who dare not question their master, and young Stephen, who is the innocent asker of questions.

‘Casting the Runes’ positions the reader firmly in a world that seems, to the onlooker at least, to be very stable. Of course, anyone who has any involvement in academe knows full well that it was and is a seething mass of rivalries, jealousies and discontents, but that for the most part those involved strive to present an outward appearance of serenity, respectability, dignity, etc. (James, it should be noted, had a very well-developed sense of humour, and one should always read his stories with an eye to his having his tongue firmly in his cheek as he portrays his fellow antiquarians. He was in his way a sly dog.)

Here the scene is set with an exchange of letters, which the wife of the Secretary of an unnamed learned society has just picked up from her husband’s desk, and read. [1] From her, we learn about Mr Karswell, the so-called Abbot of Lufford, an alchemist and a man of intemperate character, who is currently trying to find out the name of the referee of a paper of his that has been turned down by the society: Edward Dunning. It is a long time before we meet Lufford himself; instead, we are introduced to him gradually through a series of gossipy stories told by his neighbours in Warwickshire, including an elaborate plan to terrify the local schoolchildren by showing them magic lantern slides of various horrors. Also, and crucially for the story, he had previously published a History of Witchcraft. Badly received at the time of its publication, its most critical reviewer, John Harrington, later died in unusual circumstances.

It is clear that Karswell is a transgressive figure. He does not play the academic game as a gentleman ought to. He does not accept the polite brush-off by letter, nor does he honour the institution of the blind peer review. The soubriquet, ‘Abbot of Lufford’, is mocking, a society joke at his expense, because he is obviously regarded as ‘not one of us’. He literally doesn’t belong. One could therefore make a case for Karswell as a vengeful man, but that is perhaps a little too easy. Or, rather, there is something deeper and more subtle at play here; it emerges in the comments about Karswell’s History of Witchcraft, reviewed by John Harrington, the man who later died mysteriously.

“Was it as bad as it was made out to be?”

“Oh, in point of style and form, quite hopeless. It deserved all the pulverizing it got. But, besides that, it was an evil book. The man believed every word of what he was saying, and I'm very much mistaken if he hadn't tried the greater part of his receipts.”

That is the Secretary in conversation with the host at a dinner party.

One chapter in particular struck me, in which he spoke of "casting the Runes" on people, either for the purpose of gaining their affection or of getting them out of the way--perhaps more especially the latter: he spoke of all this in a way that really seemed to me to imply actual knowledge.

And that is Henry Harrington, brother of the deceased reviewer.

There is a different kind of tension here, not that between the socially superior and the socially inferior, but between, on a fundamental level, the practical and the theoretical. Dunning, the Harringtons, Gayton the Secretary are all learned men, but they are theorisers; Karswell, the supposedly inept academic, is the man who can actually perform magic, real magic, and of a most unpleasant kind.[2] As such, he upsets the ordered world of the academic and the antiquarian. One wonders a little where James’s sympathies lie, given he is an antiquarian himself; it’s not easy to judge but there is a small aside in ‘The Haunted Dolls House’ that pokes fun at collectors, and one wonders if James isn’t himself having dangerously transgressive ideas beneath that mild exterior. And that is a notable thing about Karswell himself. When he appears in the story it is always as a mild-mannered, very civil and unremarkable man. He dissembles even as he carries out his revenge. Inside and outside do not match.

It is that civility as well as cunning which enables Karswell to identify Dunning as the anonymous referee, and he is already on Dunning’s trail, even if Dunning doesn’t yet know it. What happens almost immediately is that Dunning has a very peculiar experience travelling home by tram, when he sees, somehow embedded in the glass window of the tram, a memorial notice for John Harrington. There are other witnesses to this extraordinary phenomenon, the cab man and his colleague (although I think James overdoes the comic working-class turn in this story).[3] Untrammelled by academic concerns, they confirm the notice’s existence in the simplest of terms. What really works so well in this scene, however, is the juxtaposition of the modernity of the tram car, brightly lit, and the unfathomable message in the glass. This juxtaposition of the mundane and the mysterious occurs with each subsequent warning. Someone gives Dunning a leaflet in the street, another warning, with a hand ‘unnaturally rough and hot’ (61). Dunning’s cook and maid go down with ptomaine poisoning after buying shellfish from a hawker, but no one else on the street has seen this hawker at all.

And then there is one of those small but terrifying moments that James is so good at. Alone, at home, in bed, Dunning puts his hand under his pillow and feels, not his watch as he expects, but ‘a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being’ (62). This is so simple, so mundane an action, so domestic and so intimate, and James has brought oddness, weirdness, right into Dunning’s very bed. His reaction is wonderfully right and normal, too. He bolts, and locks himself in the spare room for the rest of the night.

It is, strangely enough, the Secretary’s wife who makes the intellectual step the Secretary can’t quite bring himself to when they both hear the story. The Secretary, a ‘scientific man’, must remain aloof from such flights of fancy even though he surely knows well enough that he can’t reject the story out of hand. He can talk about ‘hypnotic suggestion’ all he likes. Mrs Secretary, however, free from the constraints of academe, although at risk of being dismissed as a foolish woman, nonetheless has the freedom to make that assumption, and does so, determining that Dunning must meet Harrington’s brother, Henry.

The two men, working together, now begin to unravel the story of what happened to Harrington, and to decide what they must do to ensure that Dunning doesn’t follow. Karswell passed to Harrington a strip of paper with mysterious lettering on it, and it turns out the same happened to Dunning. There is no indication as to what the lettering means, but Henry Harrington recalls that Karswell’s book spoke about ‘casting the Runes’. The reader is left to infer, given that Harrington died in a state of abject panic, apparently being chased by something, that it had been summoned by the strip of paper. Whatever the reader thinks of this, Dunning and Henry Harrington now accept it as perfectly possible. Interestingly, they seem to show no signs of worry at having had their worldview completely overturned.

The rest of the story is concerned with the efforts of Dunning and Henry Harrington to return the strip of paper to Karswell, and thus divert the threat to him. The return is accomplished during the course of a railway journey, richly symbolic of the well-ordered and regulated society that Dunning’s and Harrington’s efforts are directed towards restoring. We never see the something; there are only vague hints as to what it might be, like the mouth under the pillow, the rough hot hand, the comments about Karswell’s servants, or the shadowy figure that the ticket collector sees behind Karswell. Much of what we learn about the effect of such a creature comes secondhand from Henry Harrington, deriving from things his brother told him.

The supernatural is, thus, for the most part, kept at a distance, safely tamed by academe, but it nonetheless retains the power to suddenly irrupt, and to cause fear. The lovely irony is that Dunning and Harrington can only deal with its manifestation by using it. And it is, I think, magic rather than suggestion, in that Karswell appears to remain unaware that the runes have been returned to him, thus their power in calling whatever creature it is that kills him is external. Which leaves an moral problem for Dunning and Henry Harrington, in that they have employed something that doesn’t exist, theoretically. Dunning does exhibit entirely appropriate last-minute scruples about what he has done, and attempt to save Karswell. Harrington, seeking retribution for his brother’s death, experiences no such doubts. What I am left wondering is what happened to their view of the world beyond the end of the story.

You can read Casting the Runes for yourself, here, but I do recommend trying other stories by M.R. James. His ghost stories are very corporeal in many ways; he is not a man for wispy bits of shroud. Indeed, the one occasion I can think of when a shroud does turn up, in The Uncommon Prayerbook, the revenant which it contains is described rather prosaically as looking like a large roll of carpet. A very malevolent roll of carpet.

[1] Women did not always fare well in James’s stories; they were often portrayed as inquisitive, overbearing, interfering; the more gentle portraits of women seem always to be of servants; James was very much a college man, used to male company, which is not to say that he did not have female friends, and indeed regular female correspondents, but he seems not to have formed any close attachments during his life, and there is always a slight waspishness towards women with status in his fiction.

[2] And here one can’t help thinking of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. which is situated in not dissimilar territory, in terms of the tension between theorised and practised magic.

[3] I’ve often wondered if C.S. Lewis knew this story as the dialogue is remarkably similar to that of the Dufflepods in The Voyage of the Dawntreader. Equally, it may just be that I’ve heard both stories read in Michael Hordern’s very distinctive voice.