Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction: Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family 9780367210946, 9780429265334

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Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction

Detailing the adventures of a supernatural clan of vampires, witches, and assorted monstrosities, Ray Bradbury’s Elliott family stories are a unique component of his extensive literary output. Written between 1946 and 1994, Bradbury eventually quilted the stories together into a novel, From the Dust Returned (2001), making it a creative project that spanned his adult life. Not only do the stories focus on a single familial unit, engaging with overlapping twentieth-century themes of family, identity and belonging, they were also unique in their time, interrogating post-war American ideologies of domestic unity while reinventing and softening gothic horror for the Baby Boomer generation. Centered around diverse interpretations of the Elliott Family stories, this collection of critical essays recovers the Elliotts for academic purposes by exploring how they form a collective gothic mythos while ranging across distinct themes. Essays included discuss the diverse ways in which the Elliott stories pose questions about difference and Otherness in America; engage with issues of gender, sexuality, and adolescence; and interrogate complex discourses surrounding history, identity, community, and the fantasy of family. Miranda Corcoran is a lecturer in Twenty-First-Century Literature at University College Cork, Ireland. She teaches courses on nineteenthcentury American literature, contemporary literature and culture, and adaptation. She also teaches popular modules on science fiction and horror. She is currently working on a monograph focusing on witchcraft and adolescence in American popular culture, and she is a regular contributor to the online magazine Diabolique. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff holds a PhD in English from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is an author of fiction and criticism, including Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut: Golden Apples of the Monkey House (Routledge, 2016) and Mole (Reaktion Books, 2019). With Philip Coleman, he co-edited George Saunders: Critical Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

65 The Nationality of Utopia H. G. Wells, England, and the World State Maxim Shadurski 66 New Oceania Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific Edited by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long 67 French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK Edited by Irving Goh 68 Twentieth-century Literary Encounters in China Modernism, Travel, and Form Jeffrey Mather 69 Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections Matthew James Vechinski 70 Baroque Lorca An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage Andrés Pérez-Simón 71 Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature Tim DeJong 72 Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family Edited by Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

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Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family

Edited by Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-21094-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-26533-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Ray Bradbury, who invited us to inhabit “that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay”. Happy 100th birthday.

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Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi xv 1

M I R A N DA C O RC O R A N A N D S T E V E G RO N E RT E L L E R H O F F

1 Positioning From the Dust Returned in the Bradbury Canon

17

C H R ISTOPH ER T U T H I LL



3 “Homecoming” and the Imaginary Attic

55

JEFFREY KAHAN

4 “I’ll Be in Every Living Thing in the World Tonight”: Adolescent Femininity and the Gothic Uncanny in Bradbury’s “The April Witch”

70

M I R A N DA C O RC O R A N

5 “Other Ways of Being”: Ray Bradbury’s “The April Witch” in Conversation with Jamaica Kincaid’s “In the Night” and Leonora Carrington’s “The Seventh Horse”

91

M EL A N I E OT TO

6 The Other in the Self: A Hermeneutics of Otherness in Ray Bradbury’s “The Traveller” C A M E RO N W I L S O N

108

viii Contents 7 Dark Ecology in From the Dust Returned

120

F E R N A N D O G A B R I E L PAG N O N I B E R N S

8 Remembrance of Death, Family, and Place in Ray Bradbury’s “Homecoming”

135

J . PAT R I C K M U L L I N S

9 Innovating Nightmares: Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family and the Horror of Technology in Modern American Capitalism

148

KASEY SEASE

10 “Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”: Gothic Domestic Relations in Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson

162

DA R A D OW N E Y

11 “No Place in All Europe for Him”: Monstrous Migrations in the Family Gothic

182

COR D - CH R IST I A N CASPER

12 Family Fantasy and the Family: Divining the Elliotts through Depth Psychology and the Phenomenology of the Fantastic

205

S T E V E G RO N E RT E L L E R H O F F

Appendix: The Elliott Family Bibliography Index

223 227

Figures

0.1

4.1

5.1

6.1

Charles Addams’s illustration for Bradbury’s 1946 story “Homecoming”, which was published in the October issue of Mademoiselle. Addams later gifted the painting to Bradbury, and it hung in his home until his death. In 2001, the image was used as cover art for the William Morrow publication of the fix-up novel From the Dust Returned. Unfortunately, following Bradbury’s death, the original painting has proved extremely difficult to locate and no one seems to know what became of it. (With thanks to H. Kevin Miserocchi of the Charles and Tee Addams Foundation for background information on the painting). © 1946 Charles Addams, Renewed 1973. With Permission Tee and Charles Addams Foundation 10 George Garland’s illustration for Ray Bradbury’s short story “The April Witch”. The story was originally published in the April 1952 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. “The April Witch” © SEPS licensed by Curtis Licensing Indianapolis, IN. All rights reserved 73 “Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)” (oil on canvas, c.a. 1937–8), by the British-born Mexican painter and author Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is discussed by Melanie Otto in Chapter 5 of this collection. The image is currently in the Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, which is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, The Metropolitan Museum © Photo SCALA, Florence 101 Illustration for Ray Bradbury’s 1946 short story “The Traveller”, originally published in Weird Tales with artwork by Boris Dolguv. Image is currently in the public domain 112

x Figures



Contributors

Cord-Christian Casper studied English and German literature in Cambridge and Kiel. In 2018, he completed his PhD on anarchism and British modernism at the University of Kiel. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, where he pursues a project on 20th-century Nature Writing and nonhuman thought. Dara Downey is a visiting lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and English Tutor on the Trinity Access Programme. She is the author of American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Palgrave, 2014), and editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (https://irishgothicjournal.net/). She has co-edited Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (with Ian Kinane and Elizabeth Parker (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)) and co-written Antiquities of Rural Ireland (with Liam Downey and Muiris O’Sullivan (Wordwell, 2017)). Her research focuses on domesticity in American gothic literature and popular culture. She is currently working on a literary biography of Shirley Jackson and researching the depiction of domestic servants in American gothic popular culture. Phil Fitzsimmons is currently an educational consultant and independent researcher. Prior to this he was Assistant Dean Research at Avondale University College (Australia) and director of Research – San Roque Research Centre (California). His research interests include horror in literature and children’s spiritual development. Jeffrey Kahan reads and writes widely on all manner of speculative fictions. He has edited (or guest edited) the New Ray Bradbury Review and The Dark Man as well as Studies in Gothic Fiction and the Ben Jonson Journal. He is the author of Reforging Shakespeare (1998), The Cult of Kean (2006), Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (2010), Getting Published in the Humanities (2011), Shakespiritualism: Shakespeare and the Occult, 1850–1950 (2013), The Quest for Shakespeare: The Peculiar History and Surprising Legacy of the New Shakspere Society (2017), and Shakespeare and Superheroes (2018).

xii Contributors An updated third edition of his Caped Crusaders 101 is forthcoming. He works in California but quips that he lives in his own world. J. Patrick Mullins,  PhD, is an American cultural and intellectual historian specializing in cultural memory. He serves as assistant professor of history and public history director at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dr. Mullins is the author of articles on eighteenth-century American history as well as the 2017 monograph Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution. He is currently working on a monograph about the role of historical memory in the origins of the American Revolution and a collection of essays on the remembrance of the dead in American cultural history. Melanie Otto  is assistant professor in Postcolonial Literatures in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. She has published on Caribbean writing, the work of Keri Hulme, and postcolonial visual art, contributing chapters to Postcoloniality, Globalization, and Diaspora: What’s Next? (ed. by Ashmita Khasnabish, Rowan  & Littlefield, 2019) and Caribbean Literature in Transition, Vol. 1 (ed. by Evelyn O’Callaghan and Timothy Watson, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2020). Publications in journals include essays on plantation landscape in the work of Kamau Brathwaite and Annalee Davis (Journal of West Indian Literature, April 2017), and poet-shamanic aesthetics in the writings of Wilson Harris and Gloria Anzaldúa (CLR James Journal, December 2017). Together with Lee M. Jenkins at University College Cork, she has co-edited a special issue of Caribbean Quarterly on Irish-Caribbean Connections, published in the autumn of 2018. Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (PhD student) works at Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) – Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina) as professor in “Literatura de las Artes Combinadas II”. He teaches seminars on international horror film. He is director of the research group on horror cinema “Grite” and has published articles on Argentinian and international cinema and drama in the following publications (among others): Imagofagia, Vita e Pensiero: Comunicazioni Sociali, Anagnórisis, Lindes and UpStage Journal. He has published chapters in Divine Horror, edited by Cynthia Miller; To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post 9/11 Horror, edited by John Wallis; Critical Insights: Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Douglas Cunningham; Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema, edited by Francesco Pascuzzi; Reading Richard Matheson: A Critical Survey, edited by Cheyenne Mathews; Time-Travel Television, edited by Sherry Ginn; James Bond and Popular Culture, edited by Michele Brittany; and The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy, edited by Bruce Krajewski, among

Contributors  xiii others. He is currently writing a book about the Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir. Kasey Sease  is a PhD candidate in American History at William & Mary. Her research examines the intertwined evolution of nonprofits, public science education, and capitalism in the modern United States. In 2019, she was awarded a predoctoral research fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the National Museum of American History. She has also completed three fellowships in historical editing at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and was awarded the 2018 John E. Selby Teaching Prize from William & Mary’s Lyon G. Tyler Department of History. She enjoys sharing history with people of all ages and has interned for several public-serving institutions, including the Mariners’ Museum and Colonial Williamsburg. Christopher Tuthill is an associate professor and librarian at Newman Library, Baruch College, The City University of New York. He has published articles on JRR Tolkien and Ursula K. LeGuin, and his short fiction has appeared in The Mythic Circle, Dark Tales from Elder Regions, and Tales of Reverie. Cameron Wilson is an associate professor of English at William Jessup University in Northern California, where he teaches American literature, literary theory, and English composition. Cameron’s research interests include the fiction of the American South and the American short story.

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Acknowledgments

This volume of critical essays appears during the centenary of Ray Bradbury’s birth. The editors wish to thank the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Jason Aukerman, and Jonathan R. Eller for supporting this collection from the very start; they were invaluable in helping us gain access to materials and texts that are difficult to find. In addition, the editors wish to acknowledge our wonderful commissioning editor Michelle Salyga and the anonymous reviewers whose feedback helped to guide and shape this project. Miranda Corcoran wishes to thank the staff and students of the School of English, University College Cork, for their unwavering support during the development of this project. Numerous individuals assisted us in gaining access to relevant images and sources, and we are eternally grateful for their help. In particular, H. Kevin Miserocchi of the Charles and Tee Addams Foundation was especially generous with his time and knowledge. I would also like to thank my co-editor Steve Gronert Ellerhoff for his patience and dedication. Lastly, I would like to thank my friend and constant supporter, the late John James, who was always interested in my work, especially if it was related to the weird or the supernatural. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff wants to thank Miranda Corcoran, first and foremost. She conceived of this collection and kindly invited me to coedit the volume. It has been an enriching experience working together, and I am most grateful. Working with the assembled group of talented scholars on Ray Bradbury’s fiction has been a real treat. Both editors would like to thank our dedicated, hardworking, and endlessly insightful contributors for bringing their knowledge and enthusiasm to this project. This book is the product of their diverse ideas and insights on Bradbury’s work, and it is infinitely richer for this diversity. Lastly, the editors would like to thank the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, University College Cork. This publication was made possible by a generous award from the CACSSS Research Publication Fund 2019–2020.

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Introduction Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

Despite Bradbury’s indelible association with the gleaming chrome of rocket ships and brilliant panoramas of Martian sunsets, there is another, darker facet to his work. Beyond the irrepressible luminosity of his futurist visions of a spacefaring humanity casting off the bounds of this terrestrial world to explore the farthest reaches of the universe, a chilling rustle of leaves and the creep of shadows lurks within Bradbury’s writings. In a word, Ray Bradbury’s work is autumnal. It is the crisp night that freezes your fingers and reminds you of cold October evenings that race, in a flurry of orange and black, toward the crepuscular joy of Halloween; it is the warm orange glow that dances, alive and vital, in the cranium of a hollowed-out jack o’ lantern. Bradbury’s stories live in a world of twilit autumn evenings where plumes of smoke rise from chimney stacks like specters haunting the last gray days of the dying year. His work is inherently Gothic, and many of his stories demonstrate a deepseated preoccupation with those dark aspects of ourselves, and of our society, that we seek to repress, hide from, and wish away. In her essay “Ray Bradbury and the Gothic Tradition”, Hazel Pierce observes that in texts such as The October Country (1955), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), and The Halloween Tree (1972), Bradbury draws explicitly on the “conventions, themes, and mood of the Gothic tradition”, paying homage to this dark lineage while also “giving it fresh energy and new range” (166). Likewise, in an article titled “Poe and Ray Bradbury: A Persistent Influence and Interest”, Burton Pollin traces Bradbury’s central thematic and aesthetic preoccupations to a fortuitous incident at the age of eight when he simultaneously discovered a copy of the sciencefiction magazine Amazing Stories ensconced on a bookshelf near a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (2005, p. 32). It seems apparent then that, like Poe, Bradbury is an author who cannot be hemmed in by generic boundaries. He, too, fuses speculation on the development of society and technology with dark tales exploring the sinister side of human nature. Yet, for all this, the majority of critical material focusing on Bradbury’s work explores his immense contribution to the science-fiction genre, focusing less on his contributions to the development of twentieth-century

2  Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff horror fiction. The greatest attention thus far to Bradbury’s Gothic approach has come from preeminent Bradbury scholars Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce. Their book, Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (2004), forms the cornerstone of all twenty-first-century Bradbury studies and carries Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival through many of his supernatural works, while Eller has also addressed the author’s focus on horror in his biographies, Becoming Ray Bradbury (2011) and Ray Bradbury Unbound (2014). From the standpoint of literary theory, the most focused attention on Bradbury’s Gothic aesthetic can be found in two of Touponce’s books, Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Reader (1984) and Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys (2013). Thanks to Touponce, we understand that “the modern fantastic, as written by Bradbury, does not merely involve the laying bare of Gothic props and supernatural conventions … [but] is a question of having the reader respond to a world” (1984, p. 21). He also established that Bradbury specialized in opposing his era’s unease with fantasy and individuality: Throughout the 1950s, Bradbury’s stories expanded and “modernized” the genre potential of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, three of the oldest historical genres, by opening them up to the experience of modernity. … The suppression of fantasy and imagination by the conformist culture of the 1950s was … a widespread concern among science fiction writers, but as a theme it soon came to be identified as Bradbury’s own “specialty”. (2013, pp. 116–17) Other contributions include David Mogen’s Ray Bradbury (1986) and Robin Anne Reid’s Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion (2000). The most recent issue of The New Ray Bradbury Review, edited by Jeffrey Kahan and Eller (No. 6, 2019), recognizes Bradbury as a master of horror. To date, however, there has been no single critical volume dedicated to analyzing Bradbury’s contributions to the Gothic tradition. This collection seeks to fill this gap in scholarship by exploring some of Bradbury’s hugely influential, but critically neglected short stories: those focusing on the Elliott Family. Bradbury’s interconnected series of seven short stories about the Elliott Family were published between 1946 and 1994, and ultimately combined in 2001 in the fix-up novel From the Dust Returned. The present volume explores the career-length arc of Ray Bradbury’s development as a Gothic writer by analyzing the themes and images that dominate all of his works focusing upon the Elliotts. In doing so, the essays herein form an image of Bradbury as a writer who draws upon and reworks the older American Gothic tradition while also forging his own distinct literary corpus and a vision of American horror that would radically transform

Introduction  3 twentieth-century popular culture. Bradbury’s Elliott Family tales are preoccupied with themes of family, belonging and interpersonal relationships. The eponymous Elliotts are a monstrous family of vampires, witches and assorted ghouls who live in a large mansion in the rural Midwest. Each story, featuring one or more of the Elliotts and drenched in the iconography of the Gothic, tends to deal primarily with broader issues of selfhood, love, prejudice and longing. As S.T. Joshi (2011) observes in his Encyclopedia of the Vampire, the Elliotts seem to “suffer the same emotional problems that most families do” and, as such, they are simply “‘different’ from the average family unit, either physically or in the strange talents they possess” (p. 20). Consequently, these stories employ Gothic tropes and conventions in a host of ways. Yet, despite the diversity of their themes and the strangeness of their characters (an uncle with a huge set of wings, a grandmother who is also an ancient mummy), these stories inevitably and invariably return to the theme of family. Bradbury’s focus on the family unit is, of course, unsurprising considering the time period in which the stories were written. Bradbury began writing his Elliott Family stories in 1945, the year World War II ended. Four of them—“The Homecoming”, “The Traveler”, “Uncle Einar”, and “Trip to Cranamockett”—were intended for Bradbury’s first book, Dark Carnival (1947), though the last story “was pulled from the galleys and finally found its way into The Toynbee Convector as ‘West of October’ (1988)” (Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 426). While negotiating the specifics of Dark Carnival with publisher August Derleth, Bradbury also submitted one of the stories, “The Homecoming”, to Mademoiselle, a mainstream magazine of the day. There, unread for months, the story found its champion in a young writer who would also go on to become a major figure in American letters: Truman Capote, who was then an editorial apprentice with Mademoiselle, was at loose ends one day in the late winter of 1946 and found the story on the floor of the fiction editor’s office. He read it, loved it, and recommended it to Rita Smith, his editor. (Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 66) “The Homecoming” was published that October, in a special Halloweenthemed issue with an illustration by none other than Charles Addams. Intriguingly, Bradbury had previously submitted stories to the slicks under the pen name William Elliott, “fashioning the name from the Modernist poets William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot” (Eller 2011, p. 127). That the Family, which Bradbury would capitalize in the stories, shares the name Elliott casts a shadowy intertextuality, his clan of monsters living in a Waste Land of Hollow Men. It also suggests that their author—consciously or unconsciously—counted himself as one of their members.

4  Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Dark Carnival, which Stephen King has called “a marvellous and terrifying collection of a darker world just beyond the threshold of this one” (1981, p. 41), did not stay in print for long in the US or UK— indeed, today it is a true collector’s item, selling for upwards of $400 online. As such, most readers encountered the Elliotts through Bradbury’s collection The October Country (1955), which is still in print and includes “Uncle Einar” and “Homecoming”. These early collections in Bradbury’s career established his reputation as a significant new horror writer, but even then the Elliotts received no privileged spotlight within them. Indeed, reading all seven stories eventually published required effort on the part of a reader purposefully seeking them out. Along the way, variations in individual stories occur. Eller and Touponce have tracked the different revised versions of “The Homecoming”, “The Traveler”, and “Uncle Einar” as they were published in magazines, the two Dark Carnival editions, and the 1955, 1956, and 1961 editions of October Country (2004, pp. 85–6). Though, as both acknowledge, the complex publication history of the Elliott stories provides many opportunity for error and confusion to creep into art and, by extension, criticism (2004, p. 88). “Homecoming” has also been anthologized many times (See Eller and Toupounce 2004, p. 449). Given that Bradbury’s work always appealed to children, this story is one that hooked many who would become lifelong appreciators of his fiction—and even some who became influential fantasists themselves. Margaret Atwood describes Bradbury as “a writer who had been so much a part of my own early reading” and one who “sinks a taproot right down into the deep, dark, Gothic core of America”: It’s no accident that he was descended from Mary Bradbury, convicted as a witch in 1692, during the notorious Salem witchcraft trials, for, among other things, assuming the form of a blue boar. (She was not hanged, as the execution was delayed until the craze was over.) The Salem trials are a seminal trope in American history, one that has repeated itself over and over in various forms – both literary and political – throughout the years. At its heart is the notion of the doubleness of life: you are not who you are, but have a secret and probably evil twin; more importantly, the neighbours are not who you think they are. They might be witches, in the 17th century, or people who will falsely accuse you of being a witch; or traitors, in the 18th century, at the time of the revolution; or communists, in the 20th; or people who will stone you to death, in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”; or terrorists, in the 21st. (2012) The Elliotts fit this perennial American trope of the outside Other living next door.

Introduction  5 “My first experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradbury”, horror maestro Stephen King has shared (1981, p. 120). He places Bradbury in the tradition of naturalism, descending from Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson but bearing a stronger voice and greater hopefulness: “Dreiser’s people usually break, while Bradbury’s people remain, although changed, whole” (1981, p. 306). King is right to acknowledge Bradbury’s literary roots, for his work defies neat categorization. For King, Bradbury’s work is unique in its capacity to transcend broad generic labels: “Bradbury lives and works alone in his own country and his remarkable, iconoclastic style has never been successfully imitated. Vulgarly put, when God made Ray Bradbury He broke the mould” (1981, p. 349). As Atwood corroborates, He ducked classification and genre corrals as much as he could: as far as he was concerned he was a tale-teller, a writer of fiction, and as far as he was concerned the tales and the fiction did not need to have labels. (2012) And yet King sees in Bradbury an author of what he calls “moral horror” (1981, p. 309): “His best work, from the beginning, has been his fantasy . . . and his best fantasy has been his horror stories” (1981, p. 306). Moral horror, as King sees it, is not allegory; it presents horror tales in a mold that yields just desserts for the wicked and, in charting the boundaries of evil, prevents romanticism from being sentimentalized. Another early admirer is fantasist Neil Gaiman, who eulogized Bradbury as a writer he never grew out of, whose “horror stories remained as chilling, his dark fantasies as darkly fantastic … as they had when I was a child” (2012a) The first Ray Bradbury story that I read was called “Homecoming”, and it changed me. I was seven years old. The story was in a collection of SF I had borrowed from a friend’s father. “Homecoming” is about a normal human boy, Timothy, who lives surrounded by all the creatures of the night. I identified more with Timothy, the boy being brought up by a loving family of vampires and monsters than I had ever identified with any fictional character before. Like him, I wanted to be brave, to not be scared of the things in the darkness. Like him, I wanted to belong. (2012b) It takes an indeterminable span of time for a story to have an effect a reader considers lifelong; each reader’s experience and endearment to a tale or writer will manifest uniquely. The curious publication trail the Elliotts stories enjoyed ensured that young readers endeared to them in

6  Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff idiosyncratic ways, stumbling upon them here or there. The stories themselves have always been distinctive outsiders in the entirety of Bradbury’s prolific output. Even after the tales were collected and bridged in From the Dust Returned, the reading experience they provide remains para-textual in nature. Indeed, most readers will have missed the story “From the Dust Returned”, which showed the first inkling that the author might work to unite the tales in a single volume. Published in September 1994 in the pulp digest Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, in the story the Family are no longer Elliotts—Mother and Father are suddenly Jonathan and Priscilla Dark, while Timothy is Timothy Light. The surname Dark ties them to Mr. Dark of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, the evil carnival that invades Green Town in Bradbury’s Gothic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). Sharing a title, this final story forms the basis of Chapters 21–23, ending From the Dust Returned. And yet, when the novel appeared, the Elliotts who had become Darks and Light in 1994 were suddenly, simply, the Family. Was Bradbury, in revising this revision, seeking to avoid an incestuous link between the Family and Mr. Dark of Something Wicked? It remains an obscure point only Bradbury completists have been left to wonder. The eventual un-naming of the Elliotts cracks them open to freely archetypal associations, facilitating reader identification with them into the twenty-first century. But “The Homecoming”, we must understand, had an immediate effect when first published. After appearing in Mademoiselle, the story was anthologized in Prize Stories of 1947: The O. Henry Awards, one of the premier annual story collections of the time. Eller has drawn particular attention to the volume’s Introduction, written by editor Herschel Brickell, who “felt that Bradbury’s fantasy, and its closing promise of another dark family homecoming in 1970, might also play subconsciously into the world’s newfound fear of the atom” (2011, p. 186). Assistant editor Muriel Fuller and Norma Long Brickell (married to Brickell), the two women involved in judging the O. Henry prizes, vouched for the story to place third or second place, but the men knocked it down to the volume’s general prize-winning pool. Writes Fuller, it casts a spell. … It is not only the writing, which is excellent; it is the sheer imagination that created such a story, outlandish, ghoulish, horrible. It is a tour de force. … I place my money on this story. (qtd. in Brickell 1947, p. xiii) Brickell, seconding its merit, was compelled both to compare Bradbury to his American literary ancestors and speculate about nuclear anxiety in the character of the Elliotts’ mortal son: It is not very often that a contemporary short story harks back to the work of the early American masters and is able to stand unblushing

Introduction  7 comparison with the classics of the beginning period of the brief narrative in the country. Mr. Bradbury’s opuscule invokes the shades of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, all of whom would have understood at once what he was up to and would have admired his skill in achieving his purpose. … Is Mr. Bradbury merely telling us a tale, and doing it well enough to cause us to believe what he says, or is he really saying that Timothy, in his curious plight, stands for the human race at the present sad moment? Who’ll be at Salem in 1970 if all goes well with the plans for atomizing us in the meanwhile, excepting the goblins and Ghoulies, the witches and warlocks—not poor Timothy, and not us, either. (1947, pp. xiii–xiv) Clearly, the story touched a nerve in American adults upon its publication. This makes sense because “Homecoming” centers on the conflicts, dynamics and relationships existing among a Midwestern family, very much in keeping with prevalent discourses of the period. In the decades immediately following World War II, the American family would become resurgent. As the nation recovered from the fragmentation of both the war and the Great Depression that preceded it, family assumed a new importance in the American popular imagination. The marriage rate accelerated at an unprecedented level and, subsequently, the birth rate skyrocketed, producing the so-called “Baby Boom”. Women who had bolstered the Allied war effort by working in vacant clerical and production jobs were ushered back into the home, and the ideal of the nuclear family emerged not just as a vision of placid domestic comfort, symbolic of the unprecedented affluence that accompanied economic expansion, but also as a key facet of what became America’s Cold War ideology. For Americans traumatized by the specter of war and the threat of nuclear annihilation, the family offered a sense of safety and stability. It was seen, as the historian Elaine Tyler May has written, as a “secure, private nest removed from the dangers of the outside world” (1988, p. 1). The home was a retreat and a refuge, providing “security in an insecure world” (May 1988, p. 1). Moreover, the family was conceived of as a weapon against the encroaching communist menace that was then consuming Europe: strong families were the building blocks of a strong America, and children raised in comfortable, stable homes would grow up loving America and defending its values. In his Elliott Family stories, Bradbury engages with this ubiquitous vision of the post-war nuclear family, but infuses it with the aesthetics and thematic preoccupations of Gothic horror. Rather than pies cooling on window sills and impossibly green lawns bracketed by white-picket fences, Bradbury gives us a rambling mansion in the Illinois countryside adorned with spider webs and sarcophagi. Here, however, Bradbury does not simply engage with and subvert middle-class American ideals, rather

8  Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff he infuses his family saga with Gothic tropes and conventions in order to open up new and fantastic possibilities through which he can explore the key concerns of mid-twentieth century America: gender, community, nationality, identity. Moreover, as the century progressed and the unity of the post-war nuclear family gave way to the fragmentation of 1960s counter culture, as well as the escalating divorce rates of the ’70s and ’80s and the diversification of the once homogenous construction of the American family, Bradbury’s Elliott stories also transformed, incorporating new ideas and increasingly complex questions about the nature of family. Consequently, Bradbury’s fiction remains consistent with the sub-genre of horror often referred to as “Family Gothic”. Indeed, despite our initial apprehensions, family and Gothic are not inimical concepts. As Agnes Andeweg and Sue Zlosnik observe in their study Gothic Kinships, the Gothic “opens up a radically transformative space in which alternative relationships may be configured”, and, in doing so, the Gothic “may offer figurations of alternative kinship ties” (2013, p. 2). Bradbury’s Elliott Family exemplifies this type of “Gothic Kinship” or “Family Gothic”, as in their various appearances throughout Bradbury’s vast body of work, they interrogate and reconfigure traditional notions of family and provoke a host of questions about mortality, Otherness, gender and sexuality, and national or communal identity. The Elliott Family stories are also a part of Bradbury’s fictionalization of his early upbringing in Waukegan, Illinois. While his iteration of Waukegan, reimagined as Green Town in Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), has received greater attention with relation to his own life, it is well worth noting that the Elliotts also live in his native Illinois. As outsiders, they do not live in town. Their large house, so like the one Bradbury’s grandparents kept in Waukegan, sits out in the countryside. In most versions of the stories, the nearest town is Mellin Town, though the author eventually situated them close to Green Town in From the Dust Returned. Readers have long noticed the nostalgic tones in this semi-autobiographical narrative geography, so it is worth considering the Family’s placement just outside the small-town Midwestern community Bradbury idealizes elsewhere. The Elliotts live far enough from town to still hear the town clock’s chimes and, though working in town, they are very much distinct from the people who live in it. Waukegan, in reality, sits about forty-five miles north of Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan, existing today as a far suburb of the metropolis. When Bradbury was young, the town was considered far but very much connected to Chicago by train; the large railyard by the lake, mere blocks from Bradbury’s beloved library, is still in operation today. The big city and the great lake are not mentioned in the Elliott Family stories, giving the sense instead that their house stands on its hill inland, surrounded by prairie farmland on all sides. In a way, this increases the sense of their isolation, out there, in the countryside.

Introduction  9 There is no body of water they might soar or sail across, no large city for the characters to vanish into. Their rural existence suits their aims at hiding out or “passing” in the American Midwest, where their true nature would be perceived as threatening by the townsfolk—and is by the end of From the Dust Returned. This deliberate isolation heightens readers’ understanding of their bond as a family. The essays in this collection explore the Elliott mythos, its development over the course of Bradbury’s career and its relationship to changing American conceptions of family in the decades following World War II. The Elliotts have often been compared to Charles Addams’s more sardonic New Yorker cartoons of The Addams Family, which is appropriate enough. Bradbury and Addams knew and admired one another following their Mademoiselle’s publication of “The Homecoming”; Bradbury even bought the original painting done for the story, “paying $300 to Addams in payments spread across [1948]” (Eller 2011, p.  139). They hoped to collaborate on an illustrated series of annual gift-books about the Elliott Family, to be published each year in time for Halloween. Bradbury’s literary agent, Don Congdon, found interest in the project from Helen King, an associate editor at William Morrow and Company. King even “convinced [Bradbury] to write several new ‘Family’ stories for the illustrated book” (Eller 2011, p. 193), but a lack of confidence in its potential financial success caused Addams to drop out. Other artists, including Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake, were considered, but nothing came of it. In 1948, Doubleday decided “Bradbury’s off-trail conception of the vampire world would confuse as much as entertain” (Eller 194). The following year, Farrar and Straus dropped a package deal they had initially green-lighted, which would have included the story collection The Illustrated Man, an Illinois novel that eventually became Dandelion Wine, and the illustrated “Family” book. A body blow for Bradbury, he went on to publish “The April Witch” in 1952, but brought forth no new Elliott Family stories until the late 1980s. Meanwhile, the Addams Family became a household name. In any case, it is too simplistic to view Addams and Bradbury oppositionally as both were engaged in ongoing dialogue with the popular construction of the American family. As Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce observe, “Bradbury’s family is gentler and somehow more sympathetic in its construction of otherness than Addams’s Gomez, Morticia, and Uncle Fester, though it is none-the-less comic for all that” (2004, p. 428). Bradbury’s monstrous family exists as a continuation and expansion of his own fictive interrogation of America’s cultural mythology, with its ideals of family, unity and community bonds. In the pages that follow, this book explores the unique contribution that Bradbury’s Elliott stories have made to twentieth-century horror fiction, as well as how this ongoing family saga changed and developed over the course of Bradbury’s lengthy career (Figure 0.1).

10  Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

Figure 0.1 Charles Addams’s illustration for Bradbury’s 1946 story “Homecoming”, which was published in the October issue of Mademoiselle. Addams later gifted the painting to Bradbury, and it hung in his home until his death. In 2001, the image was used as cover art for the William Morrow publication of the fix-up novel From the Dust Returned. Unfortunately, following Bradbury’s death, the original painting has proved extremely difficult to locate and no one seems to know what became of it. (With thanks to H. Kevin Miserocchi of the Charles and Tee Addams Foundation for background information on the painting). © 1946 Charles Addams, Renewed 1973. With Permission Tee and Charles Addams Foundation.

Seeking to identify the origin point of the Elliott Family and their unique conflation of the domestic and the grotesque, Chapter 1 of this book explores the beginnings of the Elliott tales and their relationship with Bradbury’s other early works. Christopher Tuthill examines the connection between Bradbury’s Elliott Family and the depictions of small-town American life that dominate early works such as Dandelion Wine (1957). By analyzing the Elliott Family saga alongside Bradbury’s other literary depictions of small-town America, we can trace how the Elliott stories and their later compilation in the novel From the Dust Returned (2001) exist in dialogue with the Bradbury’s larger body of work, particularly through their parallel obsessions with Gothic horror and childhood optimism. Following on this dissection of the Elliotts’ origins, Chapter 2 explores the evolution and transformation of the Elliott Family over the decades since their inception. In an evocative delineation

Introduction  11 of the evolutionary wanderings of Bradbury’s family of ghouls, Phil Fitzsimmons argues that the process of writing and rewriting the Elliott stories, imaginatively transforming the Family’s narrative over the course of five decades, allowed him to engage with questions of identity, hybridity and in-betweenness. Moreover, Fitzsimmons interrogates the Elliotts in relation to the vampire archetype, and focuses his attention specifically on the hybrid figures of Timothy and Cecy. Moving on from the comprehensive overview of the birth and evolution of the Elliott stories, Chapter 3 features an essay by Jeffrey Kahan thoughtfully exploring how the Elliott mythos engages with themes of family, identity, belonging and imagination. In this chapter, Kahan focuses on Timothy, the adopted mortal son of the monstrous Elliotts. Although welcomed into a loving, albeit eccentric home, Timothy worries about both his own mortality and his lack of magical powers. Like so many young people, he feels an irreparable sense of alienation from a mostly loving family. Kahan’s essay charts Timothy’s desire to be special and interweaves this exploration of feared mediocrity with a study of imaginative afterlives, constructing a parallel between Timothy’s mother’s desire to imaginatively extend her son’s life and the reader’s own engagement with literary works. Carefully connecting fantasy and memorialization, Kahan illuminates how tales like “Homecoming” might serve as an “imaginary attic” in which relatives and friends lost to time can be transmuted into wondrous fictional beings. The next two chapters focus on the figure of Cecy, a seventeen-year-old witch and the beloved daughter of the Elliott clan. In Chapter 4, Miranda Corcoran analyses how Bradbury’s short story “The April Witch” both draws upon and reimagines many of the key tropes associated with adolescent femininity in the horror genre. This chapter evaluates how Cecy’s spectral flights and proclivity for possessing the bodies of others evoke the liminality and uncertainty associated with one of the most potent strains of horror—the uncanny. However, while Cecy’s supernatural abilities manifest as embodiments of pervasive social anxieties about the effluvial, uncontrollable, and potentially subversive nature of the feminine, Cecy is not depicted as some thoroughly monstrous Other. Instead, the character serves as a means to unravel the complexity of such archetypal constructions of femininity and pose questions about how adolescents navigate issues of identity and agency. Further expanding on the character of Cecy Elliott, Chapter 5 examines how Bradbury’s 1952 tale “The April Witch” interrogates post-war social norms and patriarchal family structures while also evaluating the story as an expression of folkloric liberation and playful subversion. In this chapter, Melanie Otto argues that the sort of magical realist ontology—the porous boundary between science and supernatural, reality and fantasy—usually associated with Latin America and the Caribbean can also be found in North American literature, in works by authors like Bradbury who incorporate

12  Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff elements of folklore and fantasy into their depictions of American reality. Otto’s contribution thus maintains that reading Bradbury in context with feminist writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Leonora Carrington highlights how his work challenges normative gender identities, the patriarchal family, as well as our understanding of the natural world. In Chapter 6, Cameron Wilson explores the deep philosophical nuances of Bradbury’s work through his analysis of the 1946 tale “The Traveller”. First published in Weird Tales, “The Traveller” also engages with the adolescent witch Cecy Elliott. However, Wilson’s analysis of the story shifts the focus away from Cecy and onto the individual she inhabits, a man referred to as Uncle John. In possessing Uncle John, Cecy takes on the role of John’s guilty conscience. As such, his conscience and his sense of morality is not his own, originating from the spectral witch inhabiting his body and mind. Wilson connects Bradbury’s work to the diacritical hermeneutics of Richard Kearney and Paul Ricoeur by suggesting that Otherness is a constitutive part of personal identity. As such, “The Traveller” uses the conventions of Gothic horror to question notions of identity and selfhood as self-constituted, revealing that Otherness or alterity exist as part of the self. In Chapter 7, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns continues this philosophical engagement with Bradbury’s work by investigating how the Elliott stories engage themes of mortality and the ecology of death. In a discussion of the role of death in Bradbury’s oeuvre, Pagnoni Berns describes Bradbury’s early memory of seeing a funeral procession approaching a carnival: “Until a few years ago, I’d forgotten about that funeral. But I was running away from death, wasn’t I? I was running toward life” (qtd. in Weller 2006, p. 20). The rest of the essay draws on this complex interweaving of life and death. In particular, Pagnoni Berns attempts to untangle the complex mirror images of growth and decay that define the Elliott tales in order to establish a cogent philosophy of death in Bradbury’s work. This theme of death and rebirth is further elaborated on in Chapter 8 as J. Patrick Mullins investigates how the specter of death emerges in Bradbury’s Midwestern Gothic tales. Mullins’s chapter uncovers the deep-seated fear of death embedded within the Elliott stories and positions these texts as fictive responses to Bradbury’s own early encounters with mortality. In particular, Mullins delineates the manner in which these stories function to resurrect Bradbury’s deceased relatives by fictively memorializing them as the occupants of the Elliott’s haunted house. Chapters 9 and 10 combine to reposition Bradbury’s Elliott stories within the broader social and cultural contexts of post-war America. In an illuminating take on mid-century American consumerism, Kasey Sease unpacks Bradbury’s ambivalent attitude toward technology and “progress”. Sease persuasively argues that Bradbury employs the immortality of the ghoulish Elliotts to question the role of technological advancement in modern America. In particular, Sease observes that

Introduction  13 the technological innovations of the twentieth century serve primarily to Other and alienate the ancient Elliotts. As such, their experiences mirror the conflicted relationships that many Americans developed with new machines in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the Elliotts perceive technology as antithetical to the traditions they carry from ancient corners of the world, it can also inspire awe for the monstrous clan. In Chapter 10, Dara Downey constructs an intriguing set of parallels between Bradbury’s Elliott stories and the domestic horror that defined the work of another iconic post-war writer: Shirley Jackson. Downey focuses primarily on Bradbury’s short story “Uncle Einar” (1955) and its depiction of an “inverted and dark and mildly different” marriage between the eponymous winged ghoul and a human woman, and uses this troubled relationship to investigate themes of privacy and domesticity in Bradbury’s Elliott Family stories. Downey highlights the manner in which the Elliotts’ strange domesticity only becomes deviant when compared to the homogenous standard of 1950s America, comparing this reimaging to the unconventional domesticity that dominates Shirley Jackson’s fiction, particularly Life Among the Savages (1953), Raising Demons (1957), The Sundial (1958) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). In Chapter 11, Cord-Christian Casper further expands upon the sociohistorical milieu that gave birth to the Elliotts by situating the uncanny family of ghouls within the larger, global political context of the post-war period. In doing so, Casper also connects Bradbury’s Elliott Family stories to more recent tales of monstrous clans in an attempt to interrogate the relationship between the “Family Gothic” and migrant narratives. Describing Uncle Einar’s displacement and the family’s general migrant status, Casper’s astute and thoughtful contribution explores the parallels between the Elliott stories and Alan Moore’s comic The Bojeffries Saga (1983–91). These texts, Casper argues, investigate analogous questions about the immigrant experience, prejudice, and assimilation through the use of Gothic tropes and conventions, asking whether or not the diaspora should conform to its adopted society. In the final chapter of the collection, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff explores the manner in which Bradbury’s Gothic fantasy illuminates the equally fantastic nature of the family ideal itself. Ellerhoff’s argument centers on the theories of archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who claimed, “psychology has discovered an entire demonology within family” (1991, p. 197). In a fusion of literary analysis and depth psychology, Ellerhoff builds from psychotherapist R. D. Laing’s construction of family as a fantasy and unravels how Bradbury’s clan of mismatched Gothic monsters exposes the collective myth upon which popular American conceptions of the family are built. Traversing disciplinary boundaries and incorporating perspectives derived from history, psychology, gender studies, philosophy and even ecology, Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction: Ray Bradbury’s

14  Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Elliott Family seeks to reposition Bradbury as a horror writer and complement the critical conversation about his work’s contributions to the science-fiction genre with a comprehensive investigation of his sustained offering to horror fiction by way of this softly monstrous family. Bradbury’s name is one that evokes the brilliance and optimism of the Space Age, the conflicted technological ambivalence of the Cold War, and the fantastic possibilities of imaginative new worlds. Yet, while his speculative fiction may reach for the heavens, there is also the darker, chthonic side to Bradbury’s work. His horror fiction is firmly rooted in chilly October evenings, fallen leaves, and apples decaying in damp autumn cellars. Bradbury’s horror constitutes an important facet of twentieth century popular culture. In his Elliott Family stories, the most consistent and emblematic of his horror fiction, Bradbury draws extensively on a long and storied tradition of American Gothic literature, conjuring up the ghosts of Irving, Poe, Hawthorne and Gilman. At the same time, however, Bradbury’s eerie tales are essentially products of the midtwentieth century. In their preoccupation with technology, domesticity, family and gender, they engage directly with the key cultural concerns of post-war America. In his uniquely creative manner, Bradbury takes these cultural obsessions and, as if by some ineffable sorcery, transforms the most familiar facets of American society into an uncanny phantasmagoria of witches, vampires and ghouls. In doing so, Bradbury stages a distinct and imaginative intervention into the key cultural conversations of the period, offering new insights and fresh commentaries on the values of the period. Describing the evolution of his Elliott saga, Bradbury (2005) once observed that it was born out of “Homecoming”, that first story sold to Mademoiselle in 1946, and “grew in rain and mist and arrived in fog” as the fully formed novel From the Dust Returned in 2001 (p. 163). The Elliotts persisted over five decades of Bradbury’s life. In the early 1940s, Bradbury complained to his friend and sometime publisher August Derleth that one of his main publishing outlets, Weird Tales, had warned him “not to write any more child fantasies, and this saddens me because I have ten or more of them finished or half finished. And I hate to write about vampires, darn it” (qtd in Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 54). Yet, as Eller and Touponce (2004) have maintained, Bradbury would soon conjure up his own “very special kind of vampire story” (p. 54). In these tales, vampirism was not inimical to childhood fantasies nor to the exploration of weighty questions about growing up, growing old and dying. It is perhaps the multivalence of the Elliott clan—their capacity to enfold within their monstrous forms a myriad of diverse meanings—that has caused them to endure across Bradbury’s expansive career. Consequently, while many of the Elliotts may rank amongst the undead, they are far from stagnant. “[Nothing] in Bradbury’s texts”, assert Eller and Touponce, “is absolutely dead” (2004, p. 432). Over the

Introduction  15 course of half a century, the Elliotts transformed and metamorphosed to reflect a changing America, they took into themselves the turbulent socio-cultural transitions of that dynamic epoch. At the same time, the Elliotts did not simply mirror the concerns of their culture, they also left an indelible imprint on that culture. Along with television programs like The Munsters (1964–66), The Addams Family (New Yorker cartoons 1938–88; television show 1964–66) and Bewitched (1964–72), Bradbury’s Elliott Family tales helped to create and popularize a new twentieth-century Gothic. This revised Gothic was not confined to images of horror and darkness, but instead fused its supernaturalism with comedy and warmth—even love. Would, for instance, Halloween Town in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the Draculas in Hotel Transylvania franchise (2012–18), or the Binewskis, the dysfunctional family of carnies in Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love (1988), have ever come forth if not for their literary forebears in Bradbury’s Family? In her most recent book, Catherine Spooner identifies a new manifestation of the macabre which she terms “Post-Millennial Gothic”. These are texts that stray from the mire of gloom, misery and terror that we commonly understand to be the principle domain of the Gothic. They are, as Spooner (2017) notes, “celebratory in tone” and frequently “hybridize Gothic with comedy or romance, or […] convert Gothic to lifestyle” (p. 3). Contemporary Gothic, Spooner argues, “can increasingly be described as comic, romantic, celebratory, gleeful, whimsical or even joyous” (p. 3). If twenty-first century Gothic exists as a malleable generic entity, capable of fusing the iconography of the grotesque with a spirit of humor and joy, it is not without a debt to the Elliott Family and their eccentric, loving warmth. Indeed, it could be said that Bradbury, alongside Addams and Edward Gorey, was largely responsible for popularizing this gentle, good-natured Gothic, unleashing the throngs of defanged vampires and fluffy werewolves that crowd our stores and ring our doorbells every Halloween. Certainly, Bradbury’s Elliott Family tales teach us that horror is about more than just darkness, the uncanny and the repressed; it can also be about family, identity, and community. In his stories of family strife and reconciliation, troubled adolescence and uncertain selfhood, Bradbury shows us that while horror can unsettle and frighten, it can also be inviting and affirming because there is comfort to be found in the shared experience of Otherness, in finding one’s own family of outcasts.

Bibliography Andeweg, A. & S. Zlosnik. (2013) Gothic Kinships. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Atwood, M. (2012) Margaret Atwood on Ray Bradbury: The Tale-Teller Who Tapped into the Gothic Core of America. Available at: www.theguardian.

16  Miranda Corcoran and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff com/books/2012/jun/08/margaret-atwood-on-ray-bradbury (Accessed: April 13th, 2019). Bradbury, R. (2005) Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars. New York: William Morrow. Brickell, H. (1947) Prize Stories of 1947: The O. Henry Awards. New York: Doubleday. Eller, J. R. (2011) Becoming Ray Bradbury. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Eller, J. R. & W. F. Touponce. (2004) Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Gaiman, N. (2012a) A Man Who Won’t Forget Ray Bradbury. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/06/ray-bradbury-neil-gaimanappreciation (Accessed: April 13th, 2019). ———. (2012b) Ray Bradbury. Available at: http://journal.neilgaiman. com/2012/06/ray-bradbury.html (Accessed: April 13th, 2019). Hillman, J. (1991) A Blue Fire. New York: Harper Perennial. Joshi, S. T. (ed.). (2011) Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend and, Popular Culture. Santa Barbara: Greenwood. King, S. (1981) Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House. May, E. T. (1988) Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books. Pierce, H. (1980) “Ray Bradbury and the Gothic Tradition”, in Greenberg, M. H. and Olander, J. D. (eds), Ray Bradbury. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co, pp. 181–2. Pollin, B. (2005) “Poe and Ray Bradbury: A Persistent Influence and Interest”. The Edgar Allan Poe Review 6(2), pp. 31–8. Reid, R. A. (2000) Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Spooner, C. (2017) Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic. London: Bloomsbury. Touponce, W. F. (1984) Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Reader. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. ———. (2013) Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Weller, S. (2006) The Bradbury Chronicles. New York: Harper Perennial.

1

Positioning From the Dust Returned in the Bradbury Canon Christopher Tuthill

Introduction In Ray Bradbury’s Green Town, readers are introduced to a nostalgic, perhaps rose-colored vision of small-town America in the 1920s, when young Ray was growing up in Waukegan, Illinois. Dandelion Wine (1957), his popular autobiographical novel, is so beloved by generations of readers and has had such a huge cultural impact that the Apollo 15 astronauts named a moon crater, Dandelion Crater, after it (Aggelis 2004, p. 124). In Douglas Spaulding, Ray’s twelve-year-old doppelganger, readers see something of a childhood ideal of youthful enthusiasm and love for family and small-town life, and though the novel has its dark moments with the Lonely One and some discussions of death, the book is nonetheless saturated with sentimental anecdotes and nostalgia for an American past that may be seen as more fantastic than realistic. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), with its supernatural carnival and themes of good and evil, shows Green Town in a more sinister light, with less of the sentimentalism of Dandelion Wine, as we follow the adventures of Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, two boys who are at the end of childhood. Yet still, even with Mr. Dark and his skillful manipulations of the town, we have a counterpoint with Charles Halloway, Will’s father, who epitomizes paternal love and becomes his son’s defender and protector. Both novels are tales of growing up, approached from different viewpoints, and set in America’s, and Bradbury’s own, mythical past, in Green Town. They lovingly portray the town, and Bradbury’s family, as sympathetic, kind people, battling time, age, and the dark carnival that comes to town. It is hard to overstate how important Green Town is to Bradbury’s thought and his career. He published stories set there from the 1940s all the way until Farewell Summer was released sixty years later, in 2006. The autobiographical nature of these tales can be seen as his “bones in the soup”—to borrow a phrase from JRR Tolkien—from which he mined an entire mythical world (Tolkien 2008, pp. 39–40). Though Tolkien meant that we shouldn’t examine fantasy too closely, lest we see its metaphorical “bones,” it is instructive to view Bradbury’s creation

18  Christopher Tuthill of Green Town as a way to explore his own childhood in Waukegan, Illinois. Wayne Johnson has written of Dandelion Wine that Bradbury “had come back to haunt his childhood memories that for many years had been haunting him” (Johnson 1980, p. 27). Through Douglas Spaulding, we get a sense of how a young, enthusiastic Bradbury engaged with both his family and his town, full of love and optimism, though also tinged with sadness. And through Will Halloway, we see a slightly older, yet no less enthusiastic young boy, excited by carnivals and dark secrets, his deep friendships, and his relationship with his father. It is interesting that The Halloween Tree (1972), another Bradbury novel, would explore some of these same things as well, though not in Green Town. From the Dust Returned can in many ways be seen as an addition to these Green Town stories. Bradbury had been working on the stories that comprise this 2001 collection for many decades. He spoke to Charles Addams and his editor Don Congdon as early as 1946 about this project, which he envisioned as a family reunion of vampires. Together, Addams and Bradbury hoped to create a seasonal book of Halloween tales, though the project was shelved for nearly half a century, as we will see. I would like to examine the Green Town novels Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and look at them in relation to From the Dust Returned, to demonstrate how this late career fix-up novel was informed by the rest of Bradbury’s work, and how we can think about the book in relation to Green Town, and to his whole career. There are many similarities between the Elliott Family and the characters we see in Green Town, from Douglas Spaulding and his family, to Will Halloway and his father. Though it may seem that the overtly Gothic Elliott stories share little in common with the nostalgia and sentimentality of Green Town, the two sets of stories have much in common and From the Dust Returned can be seen as an extension of Bradbury’s exploration of his own childhood memories, and a fitting capstone to his career. In the Elliotts, he found a perfect way to wed his love of childhood wonder with his own enthusiasm for the dark and mysterious Halloween worlds he was so prolific in creating. When read together with these earlier novels, From the Dust Returned can also be seen as an extension or addendum to the Green Town books.

Dandelion Wine Bradbury’s first Green Town book is a fix-up novel first published in 1957 and comprised of stories he had been publishing since 1946. Dandelion Wine is a tale of growing up, of a summer of innocence for Douglas Spaulding that leads, through fantastic, sentimental, and macabre tales, to his meditations on death. Many scenes and characters throughout the book deal with aging and the passage of time. For example, Douglas’s

Positioning From the Dust Returned  19 grandfather and Douglas’s love for him (and his knowledge by the end of the book that grandfather may be close to death), Mrs. Bentley and her insistence that she has always been old, the aged Colonel Freeleigh whom the boys deem to be a Time Machine, and Leo Auffman and his happiness machine all give the reader a sense of mortality, and of the fantastic in this small town in 1928, as well as the impression of how sensitive and inquisitive Douglas is, and how the steady march of time is affecting him. As well, the introduction of the Lonely One, the stalking murderer who was based on an actual criminal from Waukegan, brings a sense of foreboding to the town, even as Douglas often seems preoccupied with things like new tennis shoes, harvesting fox grapes, and other ecstasies of a twelve-year-old in a Midwestern town. Bradbury has said that Dandelion Wine is A rummage through a fabled attic or basement storehouse … I am not saying those were happier days, they were not. But I am saying that those days existed, look at them, know them, see them as well as you can, and further states that “I was doing more than time-traveling fueled by nostalgia” (Aggelis 2004, pp. 22–3). Early in the novel, Douglas proclaims to himself, “I’m really alive! I never knew it before, or if I did, I don’t remember” (Bradbury 2001a, p. 10). Much of what follows in the novel can be seen as Douglas’s celebration of life, and of the life of this small town. Lahna Diskin describes this awakening as a kind of “epiphany, a connection, a communion with the natural world” (Diskin 1980, p. 130). All of Douglas’s experience, and the support he receives from friends and family, complements his boundless enthusiasm for life. When Douglas says he’s not sure what he’ll be when he grows up, before giving him a pair of tennis shoes, Mr. Sanderson at the Shoe Emporium replies, “Anything you want to be, son, you’ll be. No one will ever stop you” (Bradbury 2001a, p. 26). With his friends, Douglas explores the town and gets into fantastic adventures. His friend Charlie Woodman breathlessly declares Colonel Freeleigh, an old Civil War veteran, a Time Machine, and together they listen in rapt attention as he regales the boys with stories of his soldiering days. Freeleigh was apparently “a composite of the Civil war veterans Ray recalled marching in Waukegan parades when he was a child” (Weller 2005, p. 242). The ravine, another real-life feature of Waukegan, and the Lonely One fire the boys’ imaginations to the point that when he is declared caught, they don’t believe the account, thinking the Lonely One has some kind of supernatural powers. The dandelion wine itself is seen by Douglas as a kind of magic elixir, “summer caught and stoppered”, and he reflects that “Since this was going to be a summer of unguessed wonders, he wanted it all salvaged and labelled” (2001a, p. 14).

20  Christopher Tuthill For a twelve-year-old, this is heady stuff. Knowing that the summer would be full of such wonders and ruminating on life and death so consciously may be precocious, but it is Bradbury’s skill as a writer that allows this all to work together. We know we’re not in plain old Waukegan, but in a fantastic world of childhood exuberance and energy, one that, like summer, must eventually end. Hints of darkness, sadness and death are entwined with the more upbeat scenes in the book. Bradbury explores death through the use of the Lonely One, of whom we first hear through Miss Lavinia and her friends, and later through Douglas’s worrying mother. Tom, his brother, accompanies Mrs. Spaulding to the ravine, concerned that Douglas is late to return home, and Tom reflects that all the happiness that they experience is “threatened by an ogre called Death” and that they are “so dark, so far away from everything” (2001a, pp. 46–7). In this moment, we see the family in terror that Douglas has been lost to the Lonely One, but Douglas soon reappears, to their relief, though his mother says he’ll get a “licking” (2001a, p. 47). While he starts off the book as innocence personified, Douglas slowly starts to think about mortality himself. After speaking with seventy-two-yearold Mrs. Bentley, who claims she was always old, Douglas decides that “old people never were children” (2001a, p. 77). Late in summer, he is afflicted with a fever and only with the help of Mr. Jonas’s magic elixir is he able to recover. He confronts the idea of his own mortality, writing in his tablet: “SOME DAY, I DOUGLAS SPAULDING, MUST DIE” (2001a, p. 210). This awakening to death is a kind of mirror image of his earlier awakening to life. Later, we also see Timothy in From the Dust Returned ruminating on mortality in a very different way; rather than fearing death, Timothy embraces it in the hopes of becoming more like his family. Bradbury also explores loss in a more mundane, earthly way through Douglas’s friend, John Huff, who is described glowingly as a perfect ideal of boyhood, whose feats of athletic prowess included jumping over “six foot orchard walls”, hitting baseballs into the trees, and who is faster and stronger than any boy Douglas knows: “the only god living in the whole town of Green Town, Illinois” (2001a, p. 114). This beloved friend is moving away, and in a brief, poignant chapter, Douglas tries to accept the reality that he is losing a friend. He insists first that the two boys will see each other every week, but when he learns the distance separating them will be eighty miles, he suggests they could call each other instead. John worries that he’ll soon forget everything about Green Town, so the boys play a memory game, but soon find that they can’t even remember the color of each other’s eyes (2001a, pp. 117–8). John eventually abandons their games to return home, since his family is getting ready to depart. In a fit of sadness and anger at this loss, Douglas shouts, “You’re no friend of mine! Don’t come back now, ever!” (2001a, p. 124). He goes home and seeing his younger brother, Tom, asks, “You

Positioning From the Dust Returned  21 may be my brother and maybe I hate you sometimes, but stick around, all right?” (2001a, p. 125). This tender, emotional scene is handled so sweetly, positioned between other chapters that deal with the fantastic, that the effect is to ground the reader in the reality of Green Town, and these boys struggling to grow up. For we know, of course, that much of Green Town is from Bradbury’s own experience. In his 1974 introduction to Dandelion Wine, Bradbury relates a story of his grandfather and the fire balloon they released together on July 4, 1925, when Ray was six. He writes that it is one of the last memories he has of his grandfather, that his own eyes were “filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, and I knew there would never be another night like this” (p. xiv). Ray’s reminiscence about his grandfather is mirrored in the book’s final pages, as Tom proclaims he will never forget the summer of 1928, that “I’ll remember what happened on every day of this year, forever”, and continues to ecstatically relate all the summer’s many adventures, as seen through the eyes of a ten year old. His grandfather replies, “It was over before it began”, but when Tom protests, Grandpa says, simply, “sure you will, Tom” (2001a, pp. 263–4). The ritual of making the dandelion wine, Tom says, is a “swell way to save June, July, and August” (2001a, p. 263). Here, we see Tom distilling the essence of this novel, in which Bradbury, through Douglas, was honoring the memories of his family and the wonder and mystery of his childhood. The dandelion wine in this ritual seems central to understanding Bradbury’s project. Finally, Tom, Douglas, and grandpa “carry out the last few rituals of summer, for they felt now the final day, the final night had come”, and as the chilly weather beckons, “the new cold touched Grandfather’s skeleton first” (2001a, pp. 264–5). Again, this recalls Douglas’s awareness of death, and implies his Grandpa’s closeness to it. Though Dandelion Wine explores themes of death, maturation, and the passage of time, it does so in a mostly sentimental, optimistic way. Green Town is a stand-in for a bygone, nostalgic memory of America that has no doubt resonated with many readers, no matter how artful or fantastic Bradbury might have made it seem. His sentimentality and his deep love for his family comes through strongly in this work, and through the eyes of Douglas and his brother Tom in their adventures.

Something Wicked This Way Comes The publication of Bradbury’s next Green Town book, and what is often considered his most complete, satisfying novel, came in 1962, when Bradbury was in the midst of changing publishers. Tired of what he felt was Doubleday’s lack of support for his work, Bradbury, with the help of his agent, Don Congdon, moved to Simon & Schuster to publish the novel. In their work on the publication history of this book, Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce demonstrate that Bradbury had been

22  Christopher Tuthill thinking about such a novel for many years, and point out that even the title of his first collection, Dark Carnival, hints at what was to come (Eller 2004, p. 155). Bradbury had wanted to write a short story called “Carnival” for the Dark Carnival collection, but it didn’t make the cut (Weller 2005, p. 258). Initially, Bradbury’s idea was to write a screenplay for the project, and he had written a draft of it as early as 1955 (Eller 2004, p. 158). For years, Bradbury had an idea about a magical carousel that sent its riders through time and had even thought of writing a novel based on the concept (Weller 2005, p. 258). The supernatural carnival set in Green Town, complete with a magical carousel, two demonic carnival owners, and two young boys, eventually made its way into print as Bradbury’s debut novel for his new publishing house. There are some significant differences to the Green Town we encounter in Something Wicked This Way Comes when compared to Dandelion Wine. First, and most importantly, the more innocent Douglas and Tom Spaulding have become the slightly older Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, who are both almost fourteen, best friends who live next door to each other and who were born minutes apart on Halloween. They’re a bit more mature than Doug and Tom, and though they may share the optimism and excitement of the Spaulding boys, the town they inhabit seems much darker. As Eller and Touponce point out, the boys are “a bit older than Bradbury was when in 1932 he encountered the Dill Brothers Combined Traveling Shows and Mr. Electrico dubbed him with the carnival blessing ‘live forever’” (Eller 2004, p. 162). Bradbury has spoken in interviews of this event, and how he felt blessed by the way Mr. Electrico singled him out for this honor. Rather than a tale of summer, the novel begins just before Halloween, as the carnival is arriving in town. Will’s father, Charles, is a more staid, distant adult than the Spaulding family members—he works at the library and is a reserved man who gets drawn into the supernatural drama in which the boys become involved. Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show comes to town, enticing Will and Jim to join in its fun, but it soon becomes apparent to the boys that this is a dangerous, dark place. The carnival arrives overnight and is an evil presence that soon sets out to entrap Tom and Will, and the people of Green Town. After hearing strange music in the night, the boys go to see the carnival set up, and see a “shadow faced” man exiting the train (Bradbury 2001b, p. 52). Everything about the carnival seems dark and unnatural. When they return to visit, they come upon their teacher, Miss Foley, who enters the Mirror Maze, only to end up screaming for help after seeing a girl who looked like her when she was young. Later, they see Cooger and Dark using the carousel, which turns Cooger one year younger with each revolution, until he is twelve. This is Green Town, but certainly not the one readers know from Dandelion Wine. Aside from this strange carousel, they also learn that Cooger and Dark’s mission is to corrupt the townspeople.

Positioning From the Dust Returned  23 Charles Halloway, who at first says, “Will … makes me feel so old”, eventually is stirred to action, and asks his son, “Why am I here at all? Right now, it seems, to help you” (Bradbury 2001b, p. 193). He must defend his son from the machinations of Cooger and Dark, and he does so in the library, where Dark and the Dust Witch nearly kill him. Significantly, it is only through Charles’s laughter that he is saved, as they lose power through this act of joy, and flee the library, “Chased, bruised, beaten by his laugh” (Bradbury 2001b, p. 229). Later, as Will and Charles struggle to free trapped souls from the carnival’s Mirror Maze, Charles Halloway falters when he sees an image of himself as a much older man. In response, Will grabs his father by the arm and shouts: “Oh Dad, Dad, I don’t care how old you are, ever! I don’t care what, I don’t care anything. Oh dad,” he cries, weeping, “I love you!” (Bradbury 2001b, p. 256). The power of his son’s love renews him, and together they are able to continue the fight. At the end of the novel, Charles and his son destroy the maze through laughter. The spontaneous joy that Charles demonstrates here can be seen in one sense as an affirmation of life. Bradbury described himself as an emotional, spontaneous writer, and so it is fitting that this demonstration of joy helps to banish Cooger and Dark from the town. In Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury writes, The faster you blurt, the more quickly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. (Bradbury 1992, p. 13) Considering Bradbury’s own feelings on writing, it is interesting to read Touponce’s essay on this novel; among other observations, he writes, Halloway realizes that the only thing possible to do is to push the ridiculous masquerade to its limits, toward a reevaluation of values. Halloway ends up, I think, in the playful surface of things…. Therefore the carnival can have no claim on him anymore. Laughter, and not the analysis of (unconscious) meaning, is what will defeat the carnival. (Touponce 1988, p. 21) So we have a story that ends up dealing with good and evil in a spontaneous burst of joy, without thought. This catharsis can defeat the evil that has come to Green Town. Critics have interpreted this scene in different ways, including, as Touponce says, Stephen King’s Nietzschean reading of this section of the book, and his own reading with Eller, viewed through Bakhtin’s

24  Christopher Tuthill writings on the carnivalesque. But it seems that in this essay, Touponce has touched on something interesting here, that from Halloway’s point of view as the librarian and keeper of the town’s knowledge, he has some insight into how he might defeat the darkness, and it is through playfulness. The sheer exuberant joy of life, a reaffirmation of life, defeats the darkness. This seems entirely in keeping with Bradbury’s own views on writing and life. Bradbury wrote and talked about being overcome with emotion as he worked, of the magic and spontaneity of writing. This novel, and Bradbury’s grappling with good and evil may be read in many ways, but no matter which theoretical lens we apply, it is on the playful, spontaneous level that this scene works so well for the reader, and through this playfulness Halloway is able to banish Cooger and Dark. Touponce also says that “No aspect of humor is too ‘childish’ or baroque for Bradbury to use in the war against high seriousness … it is this humorous aspect of the text and its excesses which appeals to young readers” (Touponce 1988, p. 21). Generations of young and old people who have loved this book can no doubt attest to this assessment. As in Dandelion Wine, this story becomes something of a meditation on evil and death, though much more overtly and in more fantastic ways than in the earlier book. As in Dandelion Wine, we see the other side of the nostalgia-drenched Green Town, a gothic morality tale in what had seemed an idyllic place. Will and Jim together, with the help of Will’s father, are able to stop the evil from spreading, though Charles explains that the evil will always return, perhaps taking different forms. Ecstatic that his father has saved him, Will exclaims, “Oh, Dad, Dad, you did it! You did it!” However, Charles replies, “We did it together” and adds, ominously, “God knows what shape they’ll come in next” (Bradbury 2001b, p. 287). Will asks, “How will we know them?” and Charles says, “Maybe they’re already here” (Bradbury 2001b, p. 287). In the end, though they’ve banished the evil carnival, the suggestion is that the monsters may be in Green Town anyway, that they require constant vigilance to overcome. Another manifestation of the more sinister themes found in Something Wicked This Way Comes is that unlike Douglas Spaulding, who is still a boy of twelve, Will and Jim are almost fourteen. This may seem a small detail, but of course there is a world of difference between these ages, as kids know, and as Bradbury knew. The end of Will and Jim’s childhood is nearing, and with it will come many of the difficulties of adulthood. Will is old enough that his father confides in him that he married old, at thirty-nine: “Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else” (Bradbury 2001b, p. 136). He further tells Will that “You take a man half bad and a woman half bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That’s you, Will, for

Positioning From the Dust Returned  25 my money” (Bradbury 2001b, p. 136). This prompts Will to tears, and Charles then begins ruminating on death with his son, and the two of them decide they must stay away from the carnival. It is hard to envision a scene like this in Dandelion Wine; this book is written with a different intent and with darker themes. Something Wicked This Way Comes can be seen as a seasonal work, like A Christmas Carol for Halloween, as Bradbury said he envisioned From the Dust Returned. The nature of evil is an enormous topic, and one that might support a variety of readings of this text, but certainly we can see this second Green Town book as a maturation of Bradbury’s style as well as a book about more adolescent and adult themes, rather than the exuberant boyhood of Douglas Spaulding that we saw in Dandelion Wine. Surprisingly, the novel was released to mixed reviews when it first appeared, with some critics disliking Bradbury, the science fiction writer, using themes of good and evil, but it was Bradbury’s favorite of his novels (Eller 2004, p. 180). Of all his Green Town books, this is the only one that was written not as a fix-up, but as an original novel, which accounts for how seamless and cohesive it feels, thematically and structurally, in comparison to his other Green Town works, with their interlinked stories. It would also be the last full-length novel Bradbury would write until his noirish Death is a Lonely Business in 1985. In 1972, Bradbury published The Halloween Tree, a short young adult novel originally meant as a screenplay; interestingly, this book also explores the life and death struggles of young boys on Halloween night, in a small town much like Green Town. Something Wicked This Way Comes has remained one of Bradbury’s best loved books since its release and was even adapted to a feature film by Disney in 1983, with Bradbury writing the screenplay.

From the Dust Returned: Timothy and Douglas From the Dust Returned, like other Bradbury works, has an interesting publication history. In 1948, Charles Addams and Bradbury talked about a Halloween themed book that would include Addams’s wonderfully macabre illustrations alongside Bradbury’s gothic stories (Weller 2005, p. 154). In the afterword to From the Dust Returned, Bradbury recalls that he “had grand meetings with Charles Addams in New York”, after the two of them collaborated on his “Homecoming” story for Mademoiselle magazine’s October 1946 issue (2001c, p. 202). “Homecoming” would become one of the seeds from which From the Dust Returned would grow, but the gestation period for this particular book would last many decades. Bradbury wrote in a letter to Addams at the time that he envisioned their book as “a sort of Christmas Carol idea, Halloween after Halloween people will buy the book, just as they buy the Carol, to read at the fireplace, with

26  Christopher Tuthill lights low” (2001c, p. 203). But, as Sam Weller writes in his biography of Bradbury, Addams’s fee for each of his drawings was three hundred dollars, a price that made the project infeasible at the time (2005, p. 154). Still, as with Bradbury’s idea of the dark carnival, he continued to revisit his beloved Elliott family, publishing stories about them through his career, beginning with “The Traveller” in 1946 in Weird Tales, and culminating with the publication of the fix-up novel in 2001. The cover of the novel is a painting of the haunted house that Addams had done for the original “Homecoming” story in 1946, and which he sold to Ray that year; it adorned Bradbury’s living room wall (Weller 2005, p. 322). Bradbury writes of the Family that all my characters are based on the relatives who wandered through my grandmother’s house on those October evenings when I was a child. My uncle Einar was real, and the names of the others … were once similarly attached to cousins or uncles or aunts. (2001c, pp. 203–4) This may not be Green Town, but its characters certainly seem to be of that world. Though Bradbury is drawing characters from his own life, they are radically different from the Green Town stories, since all the characters, aside from young Timothy, are vampires or monstrosities of one type or another. The reader does know that we’re in the same universe, and even the same state as Green Town: Cecy mentions in “The Wandering Witch” chapter that Green Town, Illinois, is “a few miles from here” (Bradbury 2001c, pp. 32–3). Bradbury set many earlier versions of his stories in “Mellin Town” but later changed it to Green Town. In Eller’s book, Becoming Ray Bradbury, he mentions that in the 1945 story “One Timeless Spring”, Douglas Spaulding kisses his friend, whose name is Clarisse Mellin. Eller’s quote from the story says, “I was laughing and crying all in one, and there was nothing to do about it, but hold her and love her with all my decided and rioting body and mind” (Eller 2011, p. 162). Perhaps there is a connection here, between Clarisse’s name and that of the town. The name Mellin Town changed to Green Town through Bradbury’s revisions, and perhaps the “green” referred to here is the naivete of the characters, especially Douglas, Jim, and Will, and maybe Clarisse, and their transitioning to adulthood. Whatever the case, Bradbury abandoned the name later on, and Mellin Town, so similar to Green Town, disappeared from his newly published works. Yet, we know that the Elliott stories take place in close proximity to Green Town, and are inextricably linked to it. Timothy is a striking figure in this work, since he is the one member of the Family who isn’t a vampire, ghoul, or undead creature, and he,

Positioning From the Dust Returned  27 like Douglas Spaulding, is trying to make sense of the world around him and to grow up. We learn in the “Whence Timothy” chapter that he was Found. Left at the door in a basket with Shakespeare for footprop and Poe’s Usher as pillow … You were sent, child, to write us up, list us in lists, register our flights from the sun, our love of the moon. (Bradbury 2001c, p. 37) Timothy, then, is the Historian of the family, as Grandmère calls him, a recorder of their haunted ways. With this in mind, consider Douglas Spaulding, and his running commentary on his family, his love of Ticonderoga pencils and notepads. Near the beginning of Dandelion Wine, Douglas informs his brother of his plan to “keep track of things” on his tablet, and that “I’m going to divide the summer up in two parts” (Bradbury 2001a, pp. 28–9). He then describes the different parts of the summer as Rites and Ceremonies, and Discoveries and Revelations, and gives examples of all these occurrences, labeling them as he sees fit (Bradbury 2001a, p. 29). Both Douglas and Timothy act as recorders and writers of their family histories, as stand-ins for Bradbury’s younger self, the boy who wanted to be the world’s greatest writer. Timothy shares a special relationship with his family, though he is an outsider. His mother asks him if he wants “to be like us”, and Timothy vacillates, saying, “Yes. No. Yes. No” (Bradbury 2001c, p. 56). This is similar to all children who are trying to grow up, but it also bears some similarity to the way Will Halloway at first feels some distance from his father, yet needs him as a protector and friend by the end of Something Wicked This Way Comes. It also recalls Douglas, who reveres his older family members, yet sees himself and his brother Tom as very different from them, writing in one of his Revelations, “The reason why grownups and kids fight is because they belong to separate races” (Bradbury 2001a, p. 29). In From the Dust Returned, this separation is made much more explicit and fantastic, with the contrast between the macabre family and Timothy, the normal child they’ve taken in. The book has many examples of this juxtaposition between Timothy and the rest of his family. The “Homecoming” chapter is significant to our understanding of Timothy and how he relates to his family. Uncle Einar, who as we know was modeled on Bradbury’s real-life uncle, uses his enormous wings to take Timothy flying, and Timothy “wept with delight” as they soar through the sky (Bradbury 2001c, p. 57). Bradbury described his real Uncle Einar as “The joy of my life. He was the loud, boisterous, drinking Swedish uncle who burst into our home with a cry and left with a shout” (Weller 2005, pp. 23–4). Timothy, excited by the prospect of becoming like the rest of the Elliotts, and of flying like his uncle, later drinks a “goblet of strange red wine”, bites his stepsister’s

28  Christopher Tuthill neck, eats a handful of toadstools, and flings himself from the top of a set of stairs, only to plummet straight into the arms of Uncle Einar, to the great amusement of the party (Bradbury 2001c, p. 62). Embarrassed by his failure, he slinks away and hides in the barn, feeling isolated. Yet the spiders and mice of the barn come to him, the spider cheering him up by perching on his nose, and the mouse “there in his blouse pocket, a small snug contentment to touch his chest and heart”, showing that even the natural world of the Family is supportive of him, and that there may be something magical about Timothy, after all (Bradbury 2001c, p. 63). His uncle then takes him flying again, and they soar through the sky all night together. Even when he is shown to be so different from his family, they love and nurture him in a way that would not seem out of place to Douglas of Dandelion Wine or Will in Something Wicked This Way Comes. After his nocturnal flight, Cecy, Timothy’s sister, who is just a few years older than him, takes her turn in consoling and mentoring her brother. Through Cecy, we can see Bradbury’s own Aunt Neva, whom he dearly loved, of whom he wrote and spoke fondly, and who introduced him to the magic of Halloween as a boy in Waukegan (Weller 2005, p. 7). Bradbury said of Neva in a 1964 interview: “Ten years older than myself, she was more like an older and loving sister … Halloweens, she dabbed me with makeup, dressed me as a witch or monster and let me scarify at her parties” (Aggelis 2004, p. 20). In “Homecoming,” Cecy has the power to transport herself into different people, an ability she bequeaths upon Timothy: “Cecy helped him into one body after another. Instantly, he felt himself inside an ancient cousin’s body at the door … With a snap, Timothy was behind another face, at the door, all farewells” (Bradbury 2001c, pp. 66–7). Cousin William, it turns out, is a werewolf, and after leaving his body, Timothy is transported into Uncle Einar’s, before finally he “slammed back into his own flesh” (Bradbury 2001c, p. 67). Though he loves all these family members and desperately would like to be one of them, his mother finally tells him, “We all love you. No matter how different you are, no matter if you leave us one day”, and in response, Timothy goes upstairs, “crying to himself all the way” (Bradbury 2001c, p. 68). Like Douglas Spaulding, Timothy is of a different race, only the chasm between he and the Family is unreachable. There won’t be the kind of love that we see between Will Halloway and his father, either, but Timothy will keep the Family in his memory. Like Thomas Spaulding, and his naming of all the wonderful summer events at the end of Dandelion Wine, in the “Return to the Dust” chapter, Timothy knows that he is nearing the end of his journey, and as he speaks with his Grandmère, he ritualistically “named all of the uncles and aunts and cousins and nieces who lived in the House forever” (Bradbury 2001c, p. 176). The Family must abandon the house, as they have been discovered by the outside world, and Timothy ultimately

Positioning From the Dust Returned  29 decides that he doesn’t wish to be like the rest of the family. The house burns as the Family departs, and Timothy is finally left as “The One Who Remembers” (Bradbury 2001c, p. 187). We see an echo here of young Tom and Douglas Spaulding, though Timothy is the last one left. Bradbury, through Douglas, was similarly his family’s recorder, left to remember the summer of 1928. One of the reasons, I think, that these novels are so beloved is that all of us cannot help but remember such childhood pasts, the family members now gone, and the children we were. The emotional impact of Bradbury’s writing, and the stirring nature of his remembrances become universal in his retelling; the success with which Bradbury tapped into this primal feeling is astonishing, even for readers who may have grown up in very different times and places.

Conclusion From the Dust Returned, as we have seen, deserves a central place in Bradbury’s career and his mythos. Green Town is every bit as important to Bradbury as The Shire was to Tolkien, or Yoknapatawpha County to Faulkner, and From the Dust Returned inhabits the same world as Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Green Town was the autobiographical place to which Bradbury returned in his fiction, time and again, from the earliest stages of his career, right until its end. The stories in this late career novel might be more macabre and fantastic than Bradbury’s Green Town stories, but they certainly inhabited the same universe. In many ways, they served a similar function to the stories of Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, through Bradbury’s fictionalized family, and his young protagonists, and the wonder and energy with which they view the world. Douglas, Will and Jim are young men who are struggling to grow up, and to come to terms with their families and the world around them in the same way that Timothy is. But Timothy, unlike the other boys, inhabits a different world, one that is in some ways inverse to what we see in Dandelion Wine. He wants to embrace the haunted world of his family, though he ultimately does not, and is instead fated to be the family chronicler, in much the same way that Douglas is. By looking at the family units in these novels, and the universal themes of life, death, and the fantastic that Bradbury explored in each, we begin to see how intertwined all of these works were for him, and for the reader. Bradbury himself has explicitly suggested this connection, and it is there for readers to see as they follow Timothy through his journey with the Family. Like Douglas Spaulding and Timothy, Bradbury documents the mystery of his own family and shows the love he has for them. Like the youthful characters in all these works, Timothy shows an exuberance and optimism, a love for life, that Bradbury himself displayed through his long career. If From the Dust Returned may not be

30  Christopher Tuthill considered a Green Town novel, but everything about it shows us that it was inspired by Bradbury’s family, and is tethered to his autobiographical fiction in every sense, it can even be read as a postscript to the Green Town books, an addition to that world that is very significant to understanding his life’s work.

Bibliography Aggelis, S. L. (ed. and introd.). (2004) Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Jackson: UP of Mississippi (Literary Conversations Series). Bradbury, Ray. (1992) Zen in the Art of Writing. New York: Bantam. ———. (2001a) Dandelion Wine. New York: William Morrow. ———. (2001b) Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. (2001c) From the Dust Returned. New York: William Morrow. Diskin, L. (1980) “Bradbury on Children”, in Greenberg, M. H. and Olander, J. D. (eds), Ray Bradbury. New York: Taplinger (Writers of the 21st Century Series), pp. 127–55. Eller, J. R. (2011) Becoming Ray Bradbury. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Available at: ProQuest Ebook Central. Eller, J. R. & Touponce, W. F. (2004) Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State UP. Johnson, W. (1980) “Green Town, Illinois”, in Ray Bradbury. New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Company, pp. 89–106. Tolkien, J. R. R. (2008) On Fairy Stories. London: HarperCollins. Touponce, W. F. (1988) “Laughter and Freedom in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes”. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 13(1), pp. 17–21. Web. Weller, S. (2005) The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. New York: HarperCollins.

2

Spiritual Threads of Memory, Meaning, and Mild Monstrosity The Evolutionary Wanderings of Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family Phil Fitzsimmons

Introduction, Frames and Filaments of the Personal This chapter explores the nature and meaning of the core “evolutionary threads” woven throughout Ray Bradbury’s “Elliott Family” vampire narratives. The term “evolutionary threads” was coined in the work of Gerald Alva Miller who, in discussing the interaction between the mind and the writing of narrative stated, “we string together one moment with the next, we connect important moments to our identity and personal history, and we revise our narratives concerning others as we continue to interact further with them” (Miller 2012, p. 2). Erica Johnson also indicates that these affective threads of memory in narratives often have a dominant line of “personal memory” (2018, p.  3). With regard to professional authors, and I suspect for all writers, these personal threads of identity as subtext can be at times on the surface or in other instances buried deep within the flow of register, grammar and text structure. In Bradbury’s science fiction, these threads clearly meld their way as waves above the text surface, barely disguised as personal links to historico-cultural American issues, while in his horror texts in general and his Elliott Family vampire narratives in particular, the personal threads are not as apparent. They are there as they always are in narrative, but buried in what Bradbury referred to as “the deep well” (Bradbury 1994, p. xv). From the outset, it needs to be made clear that digging into this deep well was facilitated by Bradbury’s belief that an author needs to understand the “ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go” (Bradbury 1994, p. 144). Bradbury fixated on the use of the masculine pronoun in this quote, as in this context, he was clearly talking about himself. However, the emotional facets were actually buried in what first appeared to be non-emotional textual frameworks. In many instances, finding a relationship between Bradbury’s long-term emotional drive and his writing, the concept of the deep well appears

32  Phil Fitzsimmons at times as enigmatically wide as it is deep. However, sieving through his supposed darker work, and the Elliott Family narratives in particular, in parallel with his own comments there are clear “transtextual” (Genette 1982, p. 1) and “intratextual” (Harrison et al. 2018, p. 1) connectors in his vampire narratives. It is clear that prior editorial and reading experience had provided him with a profound appreciation of other authors’ language, frames of narrative reference, and ideas. Thus, as a constant reflective editor of his own stories, it would appear he became appreciative of the previous “transtextual components” (Genette 1992, p. 82), borrowing concepts small and large that he transformed and retransformed into his own work. Beginning with his deep engagement in reading comics, and in particular the Buck Rogers comics, as he grew older and read more voraciously, he “read like a writer and wrote like a reader” (Smith 1983, p. 560). At around twenty-two years of age he realized that this process is not mere imitation of language and style but a deep transaction with the writing of others and a deeper sublimation of their language within his subconscious: “For years Poe was looking over one shoulder, while Wells, Burroughs and just about every writer in Astounding Tales looked over the other” (Bradbury 1994, p. 15). These transtextual indicators acted as further “can openers of meaning” (Fettterman 2009, p. 41), representing and leading to an ideological framework embedded in his writing related to Jungian psychology, and in particular the concepts of spirituality, mythos and mythology (Eller 2011, p. 108). To paraphrase William Doty, myth in this context is generally understood as referring to “the fundamental hermeneutic, religious or ideological beliefs of a culture expressed through the graphic or literary arts, and forming a constitutive part of a society’s worldview” (2000, p. 13). In both the visual and written texts, the belief elements are expressed polyvalently through narratives that “are often carried by and imbued with metaphor and other tropes” (Burnett 2013, p. xiii). These mythic markers typically surface in narrative through the process of drafting and redrafting with some degree of initial intentionality. However, it would appear that after a period of time, in the experience of fulltime writers such as Bradbury, the subconscious takes over. Professional writers often talk about the pen taking over and “finding themselves” (Bolton 1999, p.  19). It would appear that for professional writers of fiction, at some stage in the writing process, they enter a state of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi 2008, p. 4) or a point where their subconscious takes over. It is in this unfocused focus that deeper hermeneutic and mythic images of memory take over. As one professional author stated, it’s like “I enter a second sight, seeing the reality beneath the surface” (Fitzsimmons et al. 2018, p. 10). Further to this, skilled writers create further clues to these linkages through what is deliberately omitted. As Bradbury commented, “the core of an author’s greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out” (Bradbury 1994, p. 144). It must

Spiritual Threads  33 be remembered that Bradbury’s work in respect to his genuinely darker narratives was an evolutionary process, often lasting several decades in which he expanded on themes, edited out aspects found in earlier publications and toyed with blurring genres. Rather than being a negative, as some commentators have suggested, one of the keys to Bradbury’s overall success is his ability to obfuscate specific meaning. In other words, his work is full of “tell tale gaps” (Chambers 1996, p. 88). Obviously, there is no common ideational, temporal or spatial connection between reader and author, and so one of the key engagement factors that effective authors use is generating syntactic and semantic cues that allow readers to create their own meaning “in the gap between identification and monstration” (Chamberlain 2006, p. 56). Despite his constellation of writing skills and his keen sense of writing craft in putting these onto paper, Leslie Fiedler suggests that for writers such as Bradbury, it is not this inner textual framing that attracts readers, nor is it his employment of “architectonic skill or linguistic subtlety; nor even by their ethical or metaphysical insights, but by their mythopoeic power” (Fiedler 1983, p. vii). The genuine power in their work lies in their ability to provide easy reflective access to the writer’s unconscious “at the point where it meets the collective unconscious of us all” (Fiedler 1983, p. 13). Although regarded as one of America’s, if not the world’s “masters of science fiction and fantasy” (Bloom 2001, p. 1), Ray Bradbury’s cache of short horror stories still remain an enigma for many commentators and critics. Indeed, the genre and register of his writing is also a source of ambiguity and uncertainty. On the one hand, he is praised by devoted readers and some commentators for being “a poet in the fullest sense of the word” (Pierce 2001, p. 61), while for others Bradbury’s entire career “has been shot full of paradox” (Seed 2005, p. 2). Knight is even more direct: “His imagination is mediocre; he borrows nearly all his backgrounds and props, and distorts them badly; wherever he is required to invent anything—a planet, a Martian, a machine—the image is flat and unconvincing” (2000, p. 4). As I see it, the concept of flatness, or rather mildness has been applied at times to the vampire narratives of the Elliott Family. Williams (2018) sums up the apparent Elliot mildness when she writes, “Rarely have bogeymen been so benignly portrayed”. As these vampire narratives were so vastly different to the fantasy and science fiction narratives of the day, Bradbury was initially unable to sell these narratives, until the intervention of Michael Condon, a supporter of Bradbury and an editor at Simon and Schuster. However, there are snippets of comments from Bradbury himself that suggest that, on the one hand, this was a deliberate ploy and, on the other, it was a natural development in his writing. As with all of his narratives, constant iterations provided a platform for new insights as a “wanderer with Count Dracula’s American cousins” (Bradbury 1994, p. 57), and this seems to

34  Phil Fitzsimmons have had the knock-on effect of allowing his subconscious to rise and develop his “poetic imagination” (Touponce 2000, p. 40). This coterie of relatively mild vampires is perhaps one of the most esoteric aspects of Bradbury’s writing. While on the surface, the two Elliott children are not pure vampires, commentators and critics have never been entirely sure if the father, mother and extended family are actually active vampires. Certainly, the short stories in which they all play a part contain archetypal elements of the “undead” such as coffins and an aversion to daylight for some of the extended family members. However, there are also explicit indicators that many of the Family have become integrated into the broader communities in which many appear to reside. There are also many key missing aspects, not the least of which is the relative absence of blood. It perhaps goes without saying that blood should be a core metaphor and metonym of vampiric symbolism and its link to the human condition: “Blood’s messy, diverse, historically occulted circulations and eruptions through time unsettle continuity of being and break teleological movement, revealing that neither man nor his body is stable” (Stephanou 2014, p. 2). While forceful penetration of the body, and expulsion or seepage of blood finds its symbolic pinnacle in the vampire motif, Bradbury has inverted this typical archetypal vampire connection using the ideal of ingestion. With his developing mistrust of religion, it would appear that it is not too much of a stretch to see this concept portrayed as connected to the liturgical practice of transubstantiation. Although similar to the Bram Stoker’s 1897 (1997) portrayal of Mina’s response to Dracula through her transfusions and sucking of the Count’s blood, the two apparent non-vampire children represent two significant ideas. First, through them Bradbury forecasts the narrative change in vampire representations toward a milder “postmillennial transformation of the vampiric blood exchange” (Chaplin 2017, p. 10) that was to come sixty years later. Second, in relation to these apparently softer vampires, Bradbury clearly saw an opportunity to subtly signal a more immediate spectrum shift in which the vampire represented something far more dangerous: the melding of politics, business interests and conservatism. Thus, in a prescient form of denotation, Bradbury signified the commencement of what was to become “the divisive horrors in contemporary America” (Ní Fhlainn 2019, p. 6). Indeed, as Hughes would comment at the turn of the twentieth century, the enmeshing of the vampire with human emotions and form in popular culture embodies the worst form of vampire symbolism, as it suggests that “there is an assertion of coexistence, and boundaries become blurred” (Hughes 2000, p. 177). Drilling down further into this notion of coexistence, the Elliott children represent the zeitgeist of the time in which they were given literary birth. Timothy represents that side of the American post-war social spectrum in which “there was the feeling of lost agrarianism”

Spiritual Threads  35 (Elliot and Hughes 2007, p. 2). This group sought a return to the old institutions in a time of rapid technological change “marked by widespread upheavals that left the country profoundly changed” (Carlisle 2009, p. ix). Representing the desire to find supposed stasis in the past, Timothy ingests “a glass of warm red liquid” (Bradbury 1948, p.  21) and immediately nips his sister on the neck. “The crystal of warm red wine, wine that veins had distilled” (Bradbury 1948, p. 17) represents the chalice of Christ’s blood as a death intermediary. However, this particular context reveals, that like the memories of the pre-war years, it is a false and fleeting surrogate of salvation. Immediately after this attempt, and with everyone still watching, he tries to fly, and fails. On the other hand, Cecy invades and subsumes those she chooses to inhabit through psychic osmotic infiltration. Again, Bradbury has inverted the typical penetration motif “where the vampire takes sadistic possession of the traumatised heroine” (Creed 2004, p. 24). Although not an overt representation of the time, Botting (2008) believes that the metaphor of subsuming is one of the many layers of meaning that have could be applied to vampires since the inception of vampire narratives and lore. In particular, this motif represents a postmodern “condition in which judgments—aesthetic, rational, moral or legal—are subsumed by the flows of monetary exchange and performance optimization” (Botting 2008, p. 50). Thus Cecy represents the possibility of the future evolution of a new vampiric form, one that can enter a host but is only able to look through their eyes. As Ní Fhlainn (2019, pp. 11–2) notes, these forms “bring about new horrific possibilities and mutations. Vampire bodies are stretched and distorted, and become unbound from their previously fleshy and sanguine bodies”. Despite the esoteric nature of this supposed “undead” and their children, Bradbury made it very clear that this cohort were at least representative of his co-existence with his extended family, Along the way, I also re-created my relatives as vampires who inhabited a town similar to the one in Dandelion Wine, dark first cousin to the town on Mars where the Third Expedition expired. So, I had my life three ways, as town explorer, space traveler, and wanderer with Count Dracula’s American cousins. (Bradbury 1994, p. 57) It is this nebulous admission of synchronous wandering that is miseen-abyme ellipsis for Bradbury’s vampiric short stories, and which needs to be clarified in order to understand the impact of his early childhood experiences. As is the experience of many writers, this period is an epistemological crucible, as it is perhaps “the only occasion of their first hand experience” and is the precursor to later “being deeply preoccupied with things hitherto undreamed of” (Dillard 1990, p. 44).

36  Phil Fitzsimmons

Contexts of the Personal: Underpinning the Journey with the Cousins As briefly summarized in the introduction, the concept of “evolutionary threads” is defined as the lingering echoes of engagement with the creative vision, transtextual engagement with literature, and the developing presence of an author’s early “deep unconscious philosophies” (Bateson and Bateson 1988, p. 180) in their writing. While at first it may seem somewhat counterintuitive, these “lingering echoes” are often related to the context of the initial situation that framed writers’ very earliest years and adolescence. While the adult writer of course finds new creative avenues of narrative, it appears that even these are often grounded in their earliest memories. Little children may be small but their brains are not. Adult brains may be more developed but need writing or another artistic modality to release the child within, “thereby unconsciously activating an openness to receive new learnings” (Mills and Crowley 2014, p. 143). Frames of thinking are constantly sublimated by children at both the “preconscious, conscious and unconscious levels” (Bettelheim 2010, p.  11) and are threaded together by their natural existential development. Thus, in later years an author’s narratives can be seen as a glimpse of this as an epistemological mind map, of which death and horror are an integral component from an early age. As Kevin Corstorphine (2018, p. 1) notes, “In regard to horror, our fascination begins, it is tempting to say, from the first stirrings of our awareness of our own mortality”. There are two possible socio-emotional forces that generate these existential wonderings in the birth to adolescence timeframe, both of which are related to being immersed in what Gunther has termed the “broad ambit of the family” (1997, p. xi). The first force is the “habitus” (Bordieu 1989, p.  15) arising out of their “context of situation” (Harris et al. 2003, p. 4). In other words, “habitus” are the initial family predispositions and ensuing frames of society and culture that become translated and embedded in a writer’s work. While these threads are not always explicitly evident, notwithstanding their creativity and imagination, from the research arising out of the reflections of professional authors it would appear that, to paraphrase Halliday, the “little coterie of the family” (Halliday 1978, p. 1) has a profound, pervasive and osmotic effect regarding an author’s later texts. Stodola has found that writers such as Toni Morrison “had been learning how to write, unbeknownst to herself, since childhood. Growing up, storytelling was a way of life in her family” (2015, p. 18). Like many other professional writers, elements of these psychospatial-emotional concepts then emerge as narrative threads and ideals in their adult work. The second socio-emotional effect on children that impacts their beginning writing and in their ensuing years as a professional writer is that of the “context of culture” (Harris et al. 2003, p.  4). While language

Spiritual Threads  37 itself arises out of culture, informs culture and creates culture, children of all ages who are deeply engaged with writing and reading possess a transactional platform with the broader culture they grow up in. Thus, they appear to have not only a familiarity with the mechanics of language through the texts their culture produces, but also a deeper metalinguistic awareness. Rosenblatt (1995, p. 228) described this process as developing “enhanced perceptions”, out of which “may flow a sense of the human and practical implications of the information that has been acquired. This information is no longer words to be rattled off; the words now point toward actual human situations and feelings”. Eller (2011, p. 6) contends that Bradbury’s “largely unexamined biographical markers reveal the full extent of these cultural influences, and do so with a far deeper impact than his more generalized spoken anecdotes have ever revealed”. Having said this, key points arising out of interviews and explicit comments made by this author suggest that the nature and character of this vampiric family grew out of his familial “context of situation” and the “context of culture” in which he began to write as a pre-adolescent. This was his way “to move from loneliness to solitude, a necessary prerequisite to individuation” (Hollis 1993, p. 103). Snippets of Bradbury’s memories give voice to his early engagements with text partly engendered by his family situation. Forced to move to find work, his family was part of the working and migratory poor during the Great Depression (Eller 2011). It was during this time he experienced firsthand “life stripped down” (Cheetam 2013, p. 39) as the “Other” within American society. As a bookish child in a poor family that did not particularly value this trait in their own lives, they clearly accepted his difference to some degree, although without full understanding. An example of this sense of difference can be seen in Bradbury’s admission that the gothic had been lurking under his skin “since [he] first drew a skull and crossbones at age six” (Bradbury 1994, p. 20). As a mythic symbol of death, gothic horror, and a sense of spiritual loss, this drawing reveals not only the focus of his earliest thinking but also how natural it is for young children to be actually engaged with the existential and the horrors of everyday life long before they can articulate precise subjective meaning. These musings were never far from Bradbury’s thoughts throughout his life or his writing. As Knight observes, Childhood is Bradbury’s one subject, but you will not find real childhood here, Bradbury’s least of all. What he has had to say about it has always been expressed obliquely, in symbol and allusion, and always with the tension of the outsider—the ex-child, the lonely one. (Knight 2000, p. 8)

38  Phil Fitzsimmons Despite their lack of funds, Bradbury remembers going to the movies on Saturday afternoons, and claims to recall memories of earliest infancy and movie scenes from the age of three. Psychologists have long held the view that deep emotional experiences, especially visual elements, lie just underneath the psyche as “anticipatory imaginings and memory” (Mattingly 2016, p. 43). While it is often suggested that Bradbury had a relatively happy childhood, it is also certainly clear that the darker sides of the human psyche, such as notions of death and decay, never left Bradbury’s thoughts. It has been argued that a happy childhood can also include reflections on the supposed darker sides of life, and that it is healthy for children to externally deal with these through the creation of visual elements. While this is often the case for deeply reflective children and adults, Knight contends that thoughts of death, if not a death wish, became deeply ingrained in Bradbury’s psyche, as it “is one of the most recurrent themes in his writing” (Knight 2000, p. 5). According to Bradbury, his authentic connections with the writing process began at the age of nine when he realized that he felt trapped and needed to escape. This is not an unusual perspective with regard to childhood for many professional writers or indeed, apparently, many children. Even those in caring and stable families seem to have the need to reach out and extend themselves beyond the confines of the family circle. In what appears to arise out of early play, immersed in a readingwriting family circle with a creative mind, children who see writing as a means of searching for extra-meaning in their lives develop an increased internalized imagination well before others in their age group. This ideation becomes intrinsically linked to an interpersonal and textual meta-function, which they feel the need to externalize as narrative (Vygotsky 1978). If children are immersed in a risk-free and emotionally enabling literate environment in their early years they are able to touch the “full unresonated essence of their life” (Okri 1997, pp.  26–7) in their writing. This is particularly the case if they grow into engagement with reading and writing as adolescents. As Welty contends, “the writer’s past is in his (or her) point of view; his (or her) novel, whatever its subject is the history of their life’s experience in feeling” (1983, p. 143). Another key aspect of his transaction with text, and in particular multimodality, was with popular visual narrative. As Bradbury himself notes, “I became deeply engaged with comics, especially Buck Rogers” (Bradbury 1994, p.  6). These visual encounters remained ingrained in Bradbury’s memory, which supports recent research. Henri Bergson, for example, believes that deep engagement with images such as comics is the means through which memory is crystallized, and “prolongs the past into the present” (Bergson 2002, pp.  44–5). Bradbury published over five hundred varied forms of writing and, according to Knight (2017), the concept of childhood transliterated from his own family memories forms a continuous thread of mindfulness in his work. This creates an

Spiritual Threads  39 ellipsis of possible meanings in each narrative, especially the short stories, which appear to work toward an aporia of character identity, values and worldview. Woven constantly through his work is this sense of childhood as being an in-betweenness. It could be argued that Bradbury’s fiction forms a representation of deeply spiritual children who feel authentic loneliness, beings who are self-aware but who are not quite able to articulate their individuality or longing. Often explicit when asked about his sense of the past and his own work, Bradbury has stated that “children live in a world of their own” (Eller 2011, p. 134). To this there is an even darker side in that it is my contention that the narrative thread of being cut off from the family in some way is a continuing theme in Bradbury’s work. This is no more evident in his short story “Fever Dream” from A Medicine for Melancholy, where thirteen-year-old Charles is also cut off from his disbelieving family. The key wordage in this narrative appears to be an autobiographical concern: “You are not human. You are—children” (Bradbury 1948, p. 134). Likewise, when his older brother’s twin, Sam, died “Bradbury sensed an unspoken, and perhaps unconscious, desire within the family that he would grow to stand in for his brother’s lost twin” (Eller 2011, p. 10). In regard to the loss and death of friends and family he was to later state, The list is endless and crushing if we do not creatively oppose it. Which means writing as cure. Not completely, of course. You never get over your parents in the hospital or your best love in the grave. (Bradbury 1994, p. xiv) Despite the sense of dystopia that seems to appear in his work and Bradbury’s degree of nihilism, which some commentators dwell on, Bradbury seems to understand the importance of drawing on past memories “as senses to play with” (Bradbury 2017). He made it very clear that the overall sense of despair and doom that has pervaded the American psyche and metanarrative for some time was not a full component underpinning his work: Half of me is sunlight, half of me is shadow, and it has to be both. All I want is to be part of the fecund process by which the universe is trying to discover itself, and to have fun doing it. (2018) Again, as part of his apparent constant thinking about the past, present and future projected in writing, Bradbury was a worrier. Not the kind of worry that springs from trauma or depression, but the kind of reflection that arises from ensuring that the sublimation of the past within the present characters and narratives he was focusing on fully represented

40  Phil Fitzsimmons his intent. To draw on comments he made regarding his science fiction work, his writing was the representative tension “between the possible and the obvious” (Edelman 2010, p. 1). This tension and deep concern for his craft then emanated from his earliest days of writing, generating a lifelong “obsession with perfection” (Eller 2014, p. 7). It is also clear that Bradbury was an avid reader, and one with the eye of a writer seeking form and linguistic function that he could use in his own work. More importantly, Hazel Pierce references his connection to the gothic and the underpinning intent of his work, especially as it relates to vampires: In his reading of Poe, the youthful Bradbury could not have overlooked the awareness of what makes the hair on the back of the neck stand on end. What happens to reason when its ordered reality undergoes fission or fusion? These words with reference to Poe have to do with psychic or spiritual energy, not nuclear energy. (Pierce 2001, p. 59) Bradbury also referenced his own family and “the horrors that are not to be denied” (1994, p. iv) in daily life. He makes it very clear that he “tossed bright coloured orbs up with the dark ones” (1994, p. iv) as he relived his own life in transliterated print. What emerged, especially in his Elliott Family narratives, was very much a vampire life that was “stable and mundane” (Chawla and Rodriguez 2011, p. 60), which is a different but no less untenable horror. The previous researchers believe this “indicates the essence of universal liminality” (Chawla and Rodriguez 2011, p. 60). As Hein Viljoen states, this is truly representative of “the unknown, disorder, darkness, – in a word chaos” (2007, p. 194). In specific terms, these are indicators of people, places and socially imagined possibilities that are captured unknowingly between points of existential and axiological crises. Indeed, Bradbury understood the essence of any liminal space to be spiritual. This spatial identity or lack thereof was a personal aspect Bradbury came to grips with though the details he provided in his vampire stories. In the same way, the disparate notion of self in the Illinois psycho-spatial space, “a name with neither love nor grace” (Bradbury 1994, p. 83), was emblematic of the Elliott Family struggle to come to terms with their “in-betweenness” and their status as beings “who could be, but maybe were not vampires” (Bradbury 2002, p. 99). When it comes to writers and their texts, the context of culture can also be an all-pervading force: “We are socialized to specific ways of seeing the world and responding to it” (Mwaria 2009, p. xiii). In regard to those more attuned to a mythos ideology, Mark Danielewski (1992, p. 6) states that “Culture gives us our collective dreams, but daydreams grant us each the collective possibility of oneself”. In tandem with his deep reflective interest in the mythic existential at a personal

Spiritual Threads  41 level, Bradbury was also a consistent and intense observer of human interactions at the local and broader cultural levels. This intertwined focus provided ever-increasing and intense mind-food for Bradbury’s writing. Also, as a deeply reflective reader he could not help but incorporate these “reading discoveries” (Eller 2011, p. 3). While he began writing at an early age, this was in the midst of economic downturn and social upheaval. Bradbury lived his entire life through an ever-unfolding series of what he considered to be worrying shifts and changes in America and its involvement on the world stage. Related to this, Knight makes an interesting assertion in that he believes Ray Bradbury began writing professionally at the floodtide of the cerebral story in science fiction—in 1940, when John Campbell was revolutionizing the field with a new respect for facts, and a wholly justified contempt for the overblown emotional values of the thirties. (Knight 2000, p. 3) However, while the starting point is correct, Eller believes that, rather than following in this vein of cerebral text-type, Bradbury constantly used “his experiences and emotions for inspiration” (2014, p. 8). This is perhaps one reason for his success with the broader public in the United States. Drawing on his earliest emotional memories, personal drawing, and writing experiences, his initial writing focus in the 1940s is recognized as a dark period. This focus then continued for the rest of his life as he began writing other genres, and manipulated and added to all of these narratives. Eller believes that these “were fantasies of tales that for the most part reflected new interests that retained the characteristic oddness and cultural inversions that made him a keen observer of life” (2014, p.  62). He also contends that in 1949 Bradbury purchased Wertham’s disturbing case studies, titled Dark Legend and Show of Violence. These books had a profound impact on his imagination and his own creation of “light horror” (2011, p. 75). Continuing on through to the postwar years, Bradbury became increasingly concerned about socio-cultural drift of the United States. With the American narrative obsessed with war fatigue while simultaneously having its nation’s perceptions shift from an agrarian metanarrative to one of victory on the world stage, Bradbury was more worried about the conformity that was becoming the status quo. In discussing this period and Bradbury’s writing, Brooker contends the use of the term routinization captures the cultural feel, and the sense of stultifying pressure to conform that was central to the “right leaning” (Brooker 2001, p. 48) experience in America in the 1950s. He also believes that Bradbury, “repelled by the plastic sameness of it all” (108), clearly reacted to this through his book Fahrenheit 451.

42  Phil Fitzsimmons Interestingly, Brooker also believes that the families in this book and other related works reveal Bradbury’s belief in the family’s “vision of an eternal presence” (59). Without the benefit of editorial space, suffice it to say this overall idea of cultural shift and new cultures confronting the old has been recognized as being both an explicit and subtextual facet in his science fiction work, such as The Martian Chronicles. Both of these textual elements are clearly related to the invasion and “cleansing of the earth trope” (Brooker 2001, p. 59). It is the narrative of popular culture and the vampire that hold up a mirror to these less-than-perfect metanarratives and, through their own disruption and creation of anxieties of the present, demand a re-evaluation of “the liminal spaces limed with that past in which we now all walk and live” (Wisker 2013, p. 46).

Threads of Meaning In delving into the underpinning narrative stratum of the Elliott Family stories, it soon becomes clear that there are layers upon layers of intentional and tacitly placed meaning in Bradbury’s tales. Only the core entwined evolutionary threads related to Cecy and Timothy Elliott will be discussed in this chapter. Rather than being limiting, it is from these twin threads of personal “construction and projection” (Cohen 1991, p. 4) in creating narrative identity that Bradbury was able to “row along with them in the same boat” (Ricard et al. 2018, p. 38). Indeed, in discussing this family, these two characters were marked as being especially important by Bradbury who noted that “They’re all related to my family” (Grant 2001, p. 1). While the Elliott narratives are clearly related to his familial relationships, they reach far deeper than this as they are also related to “his need to deal with the fears and guilt of childhood through fiction” (Eller and Touponce 2015, p. 386). While these fears underpin all his work, it is no wonder that they are further realized in his vampire narratives, as this chimeric figure represents the ultimate signifier of the identificatory linkage between self, communal self, and self as the Other. Writing allows the outpouring and recreation of this psychical trinity through the release of the reflections kept hidden since childhood, those “accumulated silent things” (Bachelard 1999, p. 46). Understanding the complexity of connecting relationships between an author’s past, their childhood, and their written texts is always difficult, but throw into the analytic mix the enigmatic, such as Bradbury’s vampires, and, as Michael Chabon (2008, p. 58) suggests, the analysis is akin to entering “a shuffled deck of underlying premises”. Suffice it to say that “reshuffling the deck” and searching and sieving for micro and macro linguistic connectors between what has been explicitly said and implicitly written ultimately leads to the conclusion that what was not said was more important than the explicit. Indeed, Bradbury’s work was “metaphor rich” (Eller 2011, p. 2) to the point silence actually

Spiritual Threads  43 screamed transgression and not through the gurgling of draining blood. The implied architecture of this language was far richer than I suspect Eller realized. Not only did he bring “the horror tale out of its traditional settings” (p. 62), but he also did so with the greatest economy of words possible. If not silence, he used the most understated vampiric characteristic, the “ability glide effortlessly through doors, and [move] into and out of places with a speed and silence impossible to humans” (Picart and Greek 55). Indeed, this concept of silence is the “intratextual signpost” (Harrison et al. 2018, p. 432) that is found either explicitly or implicitly in the beginning each of the Elliott narratives. In other words, the key of silence is in the narrative door, which acts as mis-en-abyme entre, pointing to “echoes and structural patterns” (Sharrock 2018, p.  18) of the “involuntary memories of childhood” (Kearney 2014, p. 32). The Elliott Family characters focus mostly on calm vampirosity and all have a context that is openly reminiscent of Bradbury’s home in Illinois. In the same way that he characterized this psycho-space as a “name with neither love nor grace” (Bradbury 1994, p. 83), so too their relationships within this sphere also reflect this lack of disconnection, and lack of deep emotional content and support. Similarly, J. P. Telotte notes that from a broader cultural perspective, “Bradbury’s narratives resonated with the popular consciousness of the times” (2001, p. 75), all of which, according to M. Keith Brooker, “are concerned with alienation” (2001, p. 69). Written in an overall timeframe in which short stories in “pulp fiction” and magazines such as Harper’s and the New Yorker were becoming popular, narratives by women and about women were becoming less and less frequent, as these magazines in particular were also becoming more conservative (Wagner-Martin 2012, p. 96). Over his entire career, Bradbury was deeply concerned with the overall infiltration of conservatism and what he saw as the related issue of censorship. According to Guffey (1983), this issue reached a crescendo of outrage from Bradbury when he found that one of his publishers, Ballantine Books, had been censoring his work for some time without permission. While his reaction to conservative censorship was materialized in the reworking of this core point in the narratives related to Fahrenheit 451, according to Guffey, he was horrified to find that the copy editors at Ballantine had in particular changed anything vaguely sexual, seemingly blasphemous, or related to alcohol: “Nudity in the boudoir, no matter how abstractly described troubled them” (Guffey 1983, p.  102). As a particular case in point, Guffey notes that a sentence in Fahrenheit 451 was changed from “His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb” to “His wife stretched out on the bed” (Guffey 1983, p. 8). There were numerous instances of change to this text and the publisher excised anything they considered to be an overt sexual reference.

44  Phil Fitzsimmons Always prone to rewriting and extrapolating a point, it is little wonder that the most prominent and core evolutionary thread related to the Elliott family is that of Cecy Elliott. In the opening sentence of “The Homecoming”, as published in the 2001 fix-up novel From the Dust Returned, Bradbury reframes the same feminine instance previously mentioned so that she is also portrayed as “lying there flat on her bed” (Bradbury 2001, p. 1). While it is an obvious transtextual reference to Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury is also further linking his resistance to the developing metanarrative in which “America demanded a silence to all dissent” (Zipes 2008, p.  5). While Erica Johnson acknowledges there has been some advancement in the American psyche with regard to the feminine, by and large she concurs with Bradbury’s metonymic allusions in that in American narrative there has been an ongoing “construction of girl-being around silence, around that which is unspeakable and invisible, captures its traumatic essence” (2018, p. 20). Hence, it is the notion of the silence of the presence, place and space of Cecy Elliott that is the activating element of Bradbury’s vampire narratives. While she is the daughter of a vampire couple and a member of an extended vampire family, she has none of the blood-drinking drives or gothic characteristics of the undead. Neither does she have the outward markers of the vampire. On the surface, she has the apparent appearance of the feminine. However, it is in this “acceptable form” (Creed 2007, p.  103), or what Chawla and Rodriguez (2011, p.  60) contend is the “stable and mundane”, that the vampire motif is representative of the greatest danger for the culture in which the narrative is embedded. This female form of the undead is not only the essence of universal contradiction and liminality, but is also a linguistic placeholder indicative of an extremely unstable place or collective psyche captured between two crisis events. In Cecy’s disruptive, albeit quiet, ability to move seamlessly into another being’s mind and body, she becomes a form of both their living soul and the undead, as well as an unknowing elementary substance of creation material. Cheetam sees these narrative creatures and places defined by the metaphor of uroboric feasting, [whereby] the self-enclosed feeding of the soul upon itself is the opus circulatorum which mimics the circling of the sun and the Zodiac in the heavens, and the cycles of birth, death, and renewal on earth, as well as the mystery of God in the whirlwind. (2013, p. 41) To summarize further, Novalis believed this eternal cycle represented the “seat of the soul, where the inner world and outer world touch. Where they permeate each other, the seat is in every point of the permeation” (1989, p. 7). Cecy, in her state of taking over another, becomes another intertextual narrative account of Bradbury’s fascination with a

Spiritual Threads  45 boardwalk experience at Santa Monica in which, as a young teenager, he viewed “fetuses at every stage of development” (Eller 2011, p. 9). Thus, despite her apparent freedom, in the Elliot narratives Cecy is actually trapped as a liminal Other in other’s bodies, somewhat akin to Deardorff’s (2004, p. 27) “notion of permanent outsiderhood”. Hence, she illustrates one of the most terrifying forms of the female vampire, one that falls into the contrast and conjoining of the images of the “madonna/whore” (Goodnow 2010, p. 99). Having the air of normality, Cecy’s appearance at this level alone is a marker of the antithesis, subversion and inversion of the vampire form as “monstrous feminine” (Creed 2007, p. 2). However, her ability to move through time and space, and occupy another without the spilling of blood is indicative of the ultimate archetype of the abussos, the place of ultimate silence that acts as a pathway between heaven and hell, the site of “ultimate loss, death, yet at the same time always deferring it” (Parkin-Gounelas 2001, p. 105). As Erich Neumann points out, this ideal of “emptiness is the female’s greatest secret. It is something totally alien to man, the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin” (1970, p. 157). Although “lying on her bed” appears as a somewhat benign reference point and description, this simple sentence underpins a swathe of layered “choratic” meaning. Julia Kristeva (1987) describes this form of metaphor as a type of container. While having a reference to solidity, it is on the other hand an “essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases” (pp. 93–4). Positioned in the nighttime resting position of vampires, the glare of day does not bother Cecy as she is an out-of-body traveler. While she remains in a type of silent death sleep, she is able to glide out of her body and slip into any lifeform anywhere. Without the lifeform being aware they have been invaded and without the invitation often provided by those who are about to become part of the vampiric fold, she is able to peer out through their eyes, moving with the invaded host as a synchronous partner while understanding their thoughts. This latter ability is also characteristic of the choratic metaphoric application in narrative, as it is essentially pure energy “analogous only to pure rhythm” (Kristeva 1987, p. 94). Similar to the view of Neumann, Kristeva further contends that wherever this aspect is found in narrative it is also symbolic of the epitome of the “Other”. In this instance the “Other” is succinctly laid out as “the incomplete and the contradictory” (Eliade 1978, p.  285). Emblematic of a state of being that is characterized by personal and social entrapment of her vampire family, Cecy has chosen to utilize her creative power to break these bonds, as typified in Bradbury’s use of Jungian motifs, and move according to personal choice. While agreeing with the previous points to a certain degree, James Hillman believes that there are no redeeming features in these metaphors and motifs unless they are fully understood as “the darkenings and despairings that the

46  Phil Fitzsimmons soul requires to deepen into life” (Hillman 2013, p.  31). While Cecy represents a complete depth of immersion into another soul space, her family on the other hand represent an entire culture being entrapped in “depersonalization and psychic deadness” (Hillman 2013, p. 81). Elsewhere he describes this further, believing that texts such as Bradbury’s use mythic emblems to paint a word-picture of a world “sinking like an overloaded garbage barge” (Hillman and Ventura 1992, p. 51). Typically in narratives dealing with free or uncontrolled children such as this, especially females, they are layered with inflections of being feral and sexual. As well, the spaces “in which they inhabit are inscribed as being empty and evil, and susceptible of being filled with signifiers from either side of the binary opposites” (Scutter 1999, p. 251). As her vampire family sees her, Cecy is beyond their control. The uncontrolled female in vampire literature can be emblematic of “a destroyed happy home” (Sjoberg and Genty 2007, p. 32) and is portrayed as being sexually driven and even more susceptible to male inclinations of inflicting pain. To some degree Cecy fits this type, as she is seen becoming sexualized in “The Wandering Witch” in From the Dust Returned. Through the desire to be loved, she inhabits a nineteen-year-old’s body, and through her eyes and interactions with a young boy whom she does not like, for a brief moment he becomes an object of desire. In her silent gaze, and the occasional faint whisperings faintly gleaned by her host, Cecy is more a symbolic marker of the linkage to the female vampire, as both are “associated with castration and enigma of the female” (Botting 1995, p. 149). Bradbury used this metaphor consistently as a thread in a “gestalt forming cluster” (Isner 1980, p. 82) across his work. Extrapolating from comments regarding his science fiction work, this was “an attempt to solve problems by looking the other way” (Johnson 2001, p. 26). Thus, Cecy is an ongoing motif revealing Bradbury’s belief that conservatism “represented danger from encroaching governmental restrictions[…] and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves” (Touponce 2000, p. 49). In another reversal of the vampire modus operandi, in her flights to other places and invasion of others’ minds, to use a colloquialism, Cecy could be seen as giving up the ghost. Thus, while she has the vampiric hallmarks of being a “threshold figure – both emphatically of this world and a portal to another” (Creed 2017, p. ix), she returns to inhabit her body as she deems fit. As well, she has very little of “the consuming appetites for food or sex, which define the female vampire” (Stephanou 2014, p. 14). In fact she appears to never eat at all. Her entire sense of identity and raison d’être is more about being silently at home in the minds of others than with her family. In seeking to understand the specific focus, and the meaning underlying the introduction and narrative thread of Cecy, one has to look no further than Bradbury’s lifelong fascination

Spiritual Threads  47 with death, “the buried child-in-man” (Knight 2000, p. 5), and mythos as an intentional driving force and framework for his writing. Taking into account these aspects alone, it could be said that it is little wonder that Cecy emerges as a key thread in the Elliott Family narratives, just as the female element has naturally appeared in narrative for centuries. In very specific terms, for those writers who have genuinely resonated with the inner sense of self and their mythic imagination, the female form of vampirism has also been represented as the archetypal introduction of death and evil into the human context. Further to this, Joseph Campbell has argued that death is always at the forefront of human thought, as, at an early age and the commencement of reflective thought and wonder concerning the world at large, “the notion of death is the beginning human existential thought and narrative” (1991, p. 88). Clearly, Bradbury’s entire career was steeped in this reflection and he is a clear example of how the “earliest evidence of mythological thinking is associated with graves” (Campbell 1991, p. 89). In his early adolescence he encountered a bizarre collection of bottled fetuses about which he later wrote: “All the old terrors poured out of my fingertips into my typewriter. The old mystery had finally found a resting place, in a story” (Bradbury 1994, p. 22). In the same text, he also wrote that the old mystery was part of a binary of lifelong reflection, and that his writing was a “celebration of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young” (Bradbury 1994, p. 86). While there are often hints of sexuality throughout Bradbury’ work, and indications of his lack of awareness regarding sex and the female form, only Robin Reid (2000, p 73) makes the connection to Bradbury’s engagement with this facet, and even then it is the most cursory linkage, bound up with the role of adolescence within human development. However, Bradbury continued to work through his earliest gothic drawings and existential wonderings during a lifetime of writing and focus on death as a whole, but this was seemingly more concentrated in the vampire’s condition in the Elliott Family. As summarized by Eller, in a related transition, throughout his life he moved away from his Baptist roots and during his adolescence silently visited other Christian denominations, and Jewish and Buddhist temples (Weller 2010, p. 75). As was his predisposition, Bradbury was “always the observer and never the participant” (Eller 2011, p. 24). It was in the embodied form of Cecy, or rather the disembodied form, that we can see the encapsulation of his new ideal of death. “Bradbury was beginning to articulate a new myth for man” (Eller 2011, p. 156), one that also found a similar expression in his science fiction work. In effect and affect, he perhaps saw himself in Cecy’s ontological expression of escaping the sleep of death, and believed that this was in essence a way of finding new spaces and places in which to exist beyond the here and now. We find a transtextual echo of silence in his book From the Dust Returned: “Give no ear to the

48  Phil Fitzsimmons cannons’ cries and shouts. For what they shout is doom and death with no ghosts manifest and spirits given heart” (Bradbury 2001, p. 68). Linked to the previous thread is a parallel filament in which Cecy is contrasted with her brother Timothy. While held in contrast, they can also be seen as a narrative conflation as Bradbury had a writing habit in which main characters “can be read as the same person and based on Bradbury himself” (Reid 2000, p. 73). While Cecy represents Bradbury’s understanding of his existential or mythic sense of self related to death, Timothy is a holistic marker of the silence “of the child within” (Hollis 1993, p.  19). As such he is the other side of Bradbury, the child who holds all his existential questions within and who eventually succumbs to family and cultural pressure to not question, and becomes the odd one out: “The less seen or said of the imperfect son the better” (Bradbury 1948, p. 24). Not born into the Family or “entering by the High Attic window” (Bradbury 2001, p. 19), he was left in a basket, “to write us up, list us in lists, register our flights from the sun, our love of the moon” (Bradbury 2001, p. 19). Although Bradbury had loving parents, he still suffered from the forced silence of not entirely being able to ask questions regarding life, such as the shift into adolescence, death, and especially sexuality. As he recalled, And I suddenly realized, I was looking at the history of mankind. The whole thing chilled me . . . I knew nothing of life. I grew up in an age when we never discussed anything to do with sex or where children came from, or babies, or anything. (Eller 2011, p. 9) This notion of the “silence of the child within” was at the time of Bradbury’s critical developmental years, which was also a time when parents believed children should be seen and not heard. There comes a time, however, usually around adolescence, when young people seek “to outrun the underground pressures” (Hollis 1993, p. 8). Bradbury released these pressures to a degree through his writing as an adolescent and his professional writing career. It wasn’t only in the Elliott Family narratives that Bradbury used this double binary of adolescent silence; in other texts, such as Dandelion Wine, the same narrative form in the same Midwestern context is also used. In contrast, Cecy also acts as “Medusa mask” (Lloyd-Smith 1989, p. 117), or an inverted form of this monstrous type, in that Cecy does have a gaze that destroys and draws in the focus of the male gaze of her youngest brother, Timothy. She is another mirror in his life, as the only member of this vampire family who is allowed to physically have one. However, his gaze into her only validates his sense of disconnection and lack of identity. This is the only real vampiric characteristic

Spiritual Threads  49 he exhibits, and it is a singular failure to connect, whereby he shifts the gender subordination of this myth. He becomes the subservient and submissive, a position usually occupied by women in vampire fiction. Janet Lee and Jennifer Sasser-Coen believe that this subservient position is indicative of being “inscribed with the politics of the culture” (1996, p.  71). Bradbury’s concerns about America’s shift to consumerism, conformity and censorship were prescient, as the male vampire of any form, no matter how sleight, has come to represent the Western “sense of disenfranchisement with established religion and rampant consumerism” (Stephanou 2014, p. 167). Similar to Cecy’s experience, Timothy is rejected by his family as a whole because of his inability to connect with their vampiric ways and taste for blood. He is barely tolerated by Cecy. As a pre-adolescent and the only genuine, normal human in a family of vampires, he covets her freedom and her sense of seeing and knowing the world at large. More importantly, he also admires her complete disregard of their father and the rest of the Family. As indicated, the father is an old vampire, with the values and customs of patriarchy, who views blood as the elixir of the undead life, albeit sourced from a family member who owns a mortuary. However, Bradbury has painted a word picture where the old categories are being transformed. While on the surface there appears to be a male dominance in the Elliott family, Grandma and the Elliott children’s mother have a distinct voice of power. In particular, Cecy has followed in this shift as in her freedom of movement and invasion of human bodies she defies all of the vampire family’s structures and concepts of female identity. The notion of the willful or ill-fitting child is a well-worn motif in narrative and vampire genres, with these children often given a borrowed voice. As well, typical of narratives where the children are in family groups or interact as a pair, Bradbury has also created protagonists that “appear dichotomized and are actually revealed as contradictory and fluid” (Campano and Ghiso 2010, pp. 169, 170). While both Cecy and Timothy have their own voice very much in thought, only Cecy has taken her life into her own hands, with Timothy acquiescing to the power of the family mores and seeking to fit in. Clearly he cannot and does not. Bradbury continued this thread of cultural misdirection in one other critical way, through the use of the metaphor of the mirror. Timothy is the only one who has access to and uses a mirror in the Elliott house, as “his mother’s concession to his illness” (Bradbury 2001, p. 24). While vampires typically don’t use mirrors or have them in their place of residence because light simply passes through them and, in some narratives, mirrors are depicted as a potent form of capture. Additionally, the most ancient of mythic understandings is that mirrors also reflect the soul, and as vampires have no spirit, they do not wish to be reminded of their complete disconnection with any form of transcendence. However, for Timothy, while the mirror assents to

50  Phil Fitzsimmons his humanity, it is also emblematic of his displacement, emptiness and “Othering” within a family that typifies the epitome of the “Other”. In the Elliott Family stories, as a whole, there is a conjoining of binary opposites that typifies the vampire figure in the overwhelming majority of instances. However, Bradbury has taken this narrative device and twisted it, which “instead of familiarity, gives strangeness…, instead of reassuring, … disturbs” (Holquist 1971, p. 155).

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52  Phil Fitzsimmons Fitzsimmons, P., Kasler, J. & Lanphar, E. (2018) “Resonance with the Spiritual, Undergraduates Frames of Thinking in the Digital Age”. Proceedings of EUDLEARN 17, Barcelona, Spain. Available at: https://library.iated.org/view/ FITZSIMMONS2017RES (Accessed: December 2018). Fitzsimmons, P., Lanphar, E. & Morris, S. (2014) “Incubating Magic, Mystery and the Macabre: An Author’s View of his Writing Process”, in Fitzsimmons, P. & Pentikainen, J. (eds), Reimagining Writing, Interdisciplinary Practices. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, pp. 113–24. Futurism Staff (2018) “Ray Bradbury Interview”. Futurisk. https://futurism. media/ray-bradbury-interview (Accessed: January 2019). Genette, G. (1992) The Architext, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. (1982) Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Goodnow, K. (2010) Kristeva in Focus: From Theory to Film Analysis. New York: Berghahn Books. Grant, G. (2001) “From the Dust Returned, A family Remembrance”. https:// bookpage.com/reviews/2140-ray-bradbury-from-dust-returned-familyremembrance#.W4C_Qi2B1gc (Accessed: January 2019). Guffey, G. (1983) “Fahrenheit 451 and the Cubby-Hole Editors of Ballantine Books”, in Slusser, G., Rabkin, E. & Scholes, R. (eds), Coordinates: Placing Science Fictions and Fantasy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 99–106. Halliday, M. (1978) Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold. Harris, P., Fitzsimmons, P., McKenzie, B. & Turbill, J. (2003) Writing in the Primary School Years. Tuggerah, NSW: Social Science Press. Harrison, S., Frangoulidis, S. & Papanghelis, T. (2018) Intratextuality and Latin Literature. Berlin: de Grutyer. Hillman, J. (2013) The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Ballantine Books. Hillman, J. & Ventura, M. (1992) We’ve a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. New York: Harper Collins. Hollis, J. (1993) The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts. Toronto: Inner City Books. Holquist, M. (1971) “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post- War Fiction”. New Literary History 3(1), The Johns Hopkins University Press, November 2018. Available at: https://www.scribd.com/ document/245339641/Whodunit. Hughes, W. (2000) Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context. London: MacMillan. Isner, W. (1980) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London: Routledge. Johnson, E. (2018) Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, W. (2001) “The Invasion Stories of Ray Bradbury”, in Bloom, H. (ed), Bloom’s Modern Critical Reviews: Ray Bradbury. New York: Chelsea House, pp. 29–38.

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54  Phil Fitzsimmons Seed, D. (2005) Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sharrock, A. (2018) “How Do We Read a (W)hole? Dubious First Thoughts about the Cognitive Turn”, in Harrison, S., Frangoulidis, S. & Papanghelis, T. (eds), Intratextuality and Latin Literature. Berlin: de Grutyer, pp. 15–34. Sjoberg, L. & Genty, C. (2007) Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics. New York: Zen Books. Smith, F. (1983) “Reading Like a Writer”. Language Arts 60(5), pp. 558–67. Stallybrass, P. & White, A. (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. New York: Cornell University Press. Stephanou, A. (2014) Reading Vampire Gothic through Blood: Bloodlines, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stodola, S. (2015) Process: The Writing Life of Great Authors. New York: Amazon. Stoker, B. (1997) “Dracula 1897”, in Auerbach, N. & Skal, D. (eds), The Norton Critical Edition of Dracula. London: Norton. Telotte, J. (2001) Science Fiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Touponce, W. (2000) “The Existential Fabulous: A Reading of Ray Bradbury’s The Golden Apples of the Sun”, in Bloom, H. (ed), Ray Bradbury. New York: Chelsea House, pp. 39–54. Viljoen, H. (2007) “Journeys from the Liminal to the Sacred in South Africa”, in Viljoen, H. & van der Merwe, C. (eds), Beyond the Threshold, Explorations of Liminality in Literature. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 192–208. Wagner-Martin, L. (2012) A History of American Literature, 1950s to the Present. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Weller, S. (2010) Listen to the Echoes, The Ray Bradbury Interviews. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing. Welty, E. (1983) The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Vintage. Williams, M. (2001) “From the Dust Returned”, New York Times Archives. Available at: http://hp.myway.com/productmanualsguide/ttab02/index.html? p2=^CQW^sfr000^TTAB02&ptb=75C43CA9-6D2E-4DA3-8845-E6045504 C2F6&n=7858916f&st=tab (Accessed: 20 February 2018) Zipes, J. (2008) “Mass Degradation of Humanity and Massive Contradictions in Bradbury’s Vision of America in Fahrenheit 451”, in Bloom, H. (ed), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. New York: Infobase Publishing, pp. 3–18.

3

“Homecoming” and the Imaginary Attic Jeffrey Kahan

We often ascribe a joyful summer to Bradbury’s fictional boys, modernday Huck Finns, who endlessly play baseball, eat gumballs, ride their bikes, explore mysterious backrooms, meet creepy strangers, or run with kites through tall grassy fields. Joe Pipkin from Bradbury’s Halloween Tree (1974), is typical: The day Joe Pipkin was born all the Orange Crush and Nehi soda bottles in the world fizzed over; and joyful bees swarmed countrysides to sting maiden ladies. On his birthdays, the lake pulled out from the shore in midsummer and ran back with a tidal wave of boys, a big leap of bodies and a downcrash of laughs. (2015, p. 5) Yet for the protagonist of “Homecoming” (1946)—the fourteen-year-old Timothy—there are no friends, no eternal summers; the boy is unhappy, fearful, consumed by self-loathing. Timothy wants to be that child, the one who claims the center stage, the one who can sing show tunes, the prodigy who can bash out Bach on the family piano, but Timothy can do none of those things. He’s just a kid in a room of adults. All of them have stories of travels and adventures; he has nothing to add to any of their conversations. All he can do is stand around gawking at his visiting relatives, one more colorful than the other. I’m guessing that each of us has had such moments, visceral memories of sitting at the kitchen table, everyone laughing, but the jokes and places mentioned are meaningless, foreign; you sit, perhaps sipping a glass of milk, ignored. Worse yet for Timothy, his relations have brought no other children with them, no one to play with, and, worst of all, they are ignoring him on a kid’s holiday: Halloween. Did I mention that the visitors are all monsters—vampires, witches, shapeshifters, that even his sister and his mother are monsters? The only one with no talent is—you guessed it!—Timothy. Nonetheless, given the occasion, the visitors should all entertain the boy—that’s the general role ascribed to fiends, beasts, and blood-sucking ghouls on Halloween. At this gathering, however, the monsters want nothing to do with the unremarkable boy. Aside from some kind words by his Uncle Einar, he is

56  Jeffrey Kahan snubbed. Go away, leave me alone seem to be the most common statements directed at Timothy. And the unspoken rebukes are still worse: But Timothy, did he sleep in the wonderful polished boxes like the others? He did not! Mother let him have his own bed, his own room, his own mirror. No wonder the family skirted him like a holy man’s crucifix. If only the wings would sprout from his shoulder blades. He bared his back, stared at it. And sighed again. No chance. Never. (Bradbury 2003a, p. 304) Timothy will never sleep in a coffin or fly like a bat or transform into a werewolf. The kid is ordinary, and he knows it; knows it, hates it. If only he could be less like himself and more like someone, anyone, else. He confesses, “I want to do something at the party to make them look at me, something to make me good as them, something to make me belong…” (2003b, p. 314). And yet, not having fangs or wings, not being able to possess souls or ride the wind paradoxically makes Timothy unique, and, if not precocious, then at least precious, noticeable. Unfortunately, he’s noticeable in the way sick children are noticeable—as an object of pity, a Tiny Tim marked to die. As for the guests, only Uncle Einar tries to cheer him up: Don’t feel badly … How much better things are for you. How rich. The world’s dead for us. We’ve seen so much of it, believe me. Life’s best to those who live the least of it. It’s worth more per ounce, Timothy, remember that. (2003a, p. 316) Timothy is told to celebrate his fragility, that his limited life is a gift, that he’ll outrun the ruin of surprise, the dullness of eternity. But knowing that death is certain is not the same as living each moment fully, and, were you to do so, how much time would you or anyone else devote to frivolous pursuits, like reading books, or, for that matter, writing them? * Einar’s statement feels both heartfelt and half-truthed. Einar says that eternal youth is wasted on the immortal, but if eternity is so boring, then why doesn’t he seek out a means to die? It can’t be too hard. Einar could fall upon a crucifix, sit up and wait for the morning light, seek out Buffy or some variant. Is he lying? Possibly, but we can’t ignore the possibility that Einar may be in earnest. After all, Homer imagined Zeus weeping at the death of his half-mortal son Sarpedon: “to the earth he rained drops of blood/ honoring his beloved son, whom Patroclus was to/ destroy in Troy’s rich soil, far from the land of his father” (Homer; Alexander trans., 2015, BK 16: 459–61). So why shouldn’t monsters, even at a Halloween party, take notice of a sickly child and ask, as Scrooge does of Tiny Tim on

“Homecoming” and the Imaginary Attic  57 Christmas Eve, “Spirit … tell me if Tiny Tim will live” (Dickens 2003, p. 82)? But we all know the answer. Tiny Tim is mortal and, thus, will die. The real question is whether Tiny Tim will be remembered. His father, Bob Cratchit, has no doubt: “however and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim” (p. 107). Likewise, the Tim of “Homecoming” is promised that he too will somehow endure: ‘Timothy,’ said Mother. He stopped at the stairwell. She came to him, laid a hand on his face. ‘Son,’ she said. ‘We love you. Remember that. We all love you. No matter how different you are, no matter if you leave us one day,’ she said. She kissed his cheek. ‘And if and when you die, your bones will lie undisturbed, we’ll see to that. You’ll lie at ease forever, and I’ll come see you every Allhallows Eve and tuck you in the more secure’. (2003a, p. 318) As a way of memorializing her son’s life and her own heart’s timeless ache, Timothy’s mom promises to protect his bones for all eternity. There is a pathos here and a poetic interplay of the dead and undead; the real and the imagined. He’s dead; she undead. They are both somehow on the same side of the veil and, nonetheless, eternally parted. As melancholy as that may seem, all of these undead tears are all for something that is nothing. The undead mother here is mourning a son who isn’t dead, who isn’t even, in any traditional sense, ill. Philosophically, it begs the question: Can an immortal actually understand death? * My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. (lines 10–4) So wrote Shelley in one of the most famous instances of the forgotten explaining the inevitable passage of time to the living. Monuments of stone, like flesh, decay with time; weaker still is historical memory. Ozymandias, once King of Kings, is now completely forgotten. That shouldn’t surprise. “All the epithets of immortality”, the art historian Jacques Barzun writes, are nothing more than “brave lies” (1974, p. 86). But Timothy will not share Ozymandias’s fate. His grave will be perfectly tended forever. That sounds like a victory, but Timothy’s mother will express only simulated human mourning. Just weigh memento mori (Latin for “remember that you have to die”), and you’ll see what I mean instantly. The phrase was coined as a reminder to the living that death is inevitable. But that isn’t the case if you are an eternal being.

58  Jeffrey Kahan So, what should we make of this promise to tend Timothy’s grave? In “Notes on Camp”, Susan Sontag wrote that Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater. (Sontag 1964, Epigram 10) Likewise, what Timothy’s mom promises here is not a tombstone but a “tombstone” by which she will not grieve but, rather, “grieve”; as Sontag suggests, the ritual here is a form of theater, one in which Timothy’s mom imagines and, through that imagining, experiences something akin to grieving, but she’ll never experience true memento mori. As such, she may grieve, so far as the eternally undead can grieve, but its form, its expression—the selection of casket, the ritual burning or burial of the body, the consolation of the apostolic funeral—will be alien and inauthentic, artistic but ersatz. Nor can Timothy’s mom take comfort in the possibility of a celestial reunion with her son. True, she may still conceive of mourning as an authentically literary experience, akin, for example, to experiencing Mars by way of Bradbury’s fictions concerning the red planet. But that would still be an imaginative act, an abstraction, a simulation of a physical experience. Since the Elliotts are immortal, they, with the noted exception of Timothy, cannot die, and, thus, their souls— if they even have them—will never lose their individuality, never merge with a greater godhood. The Elliotts may be related, but they will, except by way of poetic gesture, never be reunited with Timothy. * In a conventional sense, no one will grieve for Timothy; and while he has a tombstone, he will never leave much of a mark on the world. It is my belief that Bradbury’s life’s work was dedicated to avoiding Timothy’s fate. In his introduction to the Elliott stories, Bradbury writes that when you are twelve years old, “you discover [that] you are alive”, but, by age fourteen, you discover that “you can die” (2003b, p. x). I would further suggest that, like Timothy, Bradbury’s fear of death was connected to the fear of being forgotten. The anxiety is temporarily assuaged by a type-key and cartridge-ribbon solution: From the age of twelve I knew I was in a life and death match…. The only answer, then, was: write. …Death has not caught me yet. He will, eventually, of course, but for the time being the sound of my IBM Wheelwriter Number Number Ten electric typewriter puts him off his feed. (2003b, p. xi) 1

“Homecoming” and the Imaginary Attic  59 Writing as a weapon against death is a common trope, but only for the canonical. Even after years of practice, most writers go unpublished; most journalism is forgettable, most magazine stories are binned, most books go out of print. Bradbury, by the 1940s, was not yet a literary immortal. He was, at this point, merely a workaday scribbler, and an ill-paid one at that. Reviewing Bradbury’s accounts for 1946, Jonathan Eller reckons that during the first three months of that year, Bradbury sold three stories and was paid a penny a word. The author netted only $31 (Eller 2011, p.  126). That comes out to twenty-nine cents a day. “Homecoming” was written and sold in the same year. It may not mention money, but the exigencies of life must have weighed on the author. If Bradbury had any hope of publishing his way out of his predicament, he had to write something significant, praiseworthy, and financially remunerative. Four years later, with a growing family to support, his anxiety only increased. He writes that he had to choose between finishing a story or playing with his daughters:2 I chose to play, of course, which endangered the family income. An office had to be found. We couldn’t afford one. Finally, I located just the place, the typing room in the basement of the library at the University of California at Los Angeles. There, in neat rows, were a score or more of old Remington or Underwood typewriters which rented out at a dime a half hour. You thrust your dime in, the clock ticked madly, and you typed wildly, to finish before the half hour ran out. (Bradbury 1990, p. 69) You can almost hear Bradbury counting his coins. Nine days and $9.80 later, he had typed 25,000 words, a complete first draft of what eventually became Fahrenheit 451. If you calculate dimes to minutes, that’s 49 hours of writing; if you calculate words to the clock, that’s 510 words per hour, less than 10 words a minute. But what interests me here is the seemingly counterintuitive relationship between time and art. Bradbury suggests that he was inspired by the forest of books on the library shelves, their canonical and imperishable natures spoke to him, collectively and chorically: Between investing dimes and going insane when the typewriter jammed (for there went your precious time!) and whipping pages in and out of the device, I wandered upstairs. There I strolled, lost in love, down the corridors, and through the stacks, touching books, pulling volumes out, turning pages, thrusting volumes back, drowning in all the good stuffs that are the essence of libraries. What a place, don’t you agree, to write a novel about burning books in the Future! (Bradbury 1990, p. 70)

60  Jeffrey Kahan We have a pretty good idea which books Bradbury thumbed through. In his memoir, Zen in the Art of Writing (1973), he praises “Dickens, Twain, Wolfe, Peacock, Shaw, Molière, Jonson, Wycherley, Sam Johnson. Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Pope. …These are the children of the gods” (1990, p.  3).3 But gods and mortals are not co-equals. The shelved books will—like the great writers of past ages or like Timothy’s relatives—live forever. They have, in Fahrenheit 451 parlance, time to burn, whereas Timothy was running out of days, and Bradbury was running out of dimes.4 * Let’s return to UCLA. It’s 1950. There is Bradbury, staring at the timer of his tick-tock typewriter: You thrust your dime in, the clock ticked madly, and you typed wildly, to finish before the half hour ran out. Thus I was twice driven; by children to leave home, and by a typewriter timing device to be a maniac at the keys. Time was indeed money. I finished the first draft in roughly nine days. At 25,000 words, it was half the novel it eventually would become. (Bradbury 1990, pp. 69–70) I have no way of confirming the very sentence I am about to complete, so I’ll say some, rather than most or all, writers do not produce in spite of the pressures put on them but because of them. 5 Writing, in this sense, is a response to time; the writer generates an alternative to the hourglass—for example, “Once upon a time” or “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”. Yet, for most professional writers, beneath those fairy tale tropes there remains a financial darkness. Cinderella has to wash the dishes; Jack has to sell the cows; the big bad wolf is never far from the door; the typewriter demands its dimes; the ferryman his pennies. Simply stated: immortal authors are worshipped, but mortal authors—even if well-published—often go unrewarded. It gets worse: constant productivity demands that the writer must be eternally and infernally dissatisfied with his art. Indeed, for the desire to continue, the artist must emulate the unrequited lover, unhappy and ever in pursuit. Consider the myth of Apollo, the sacred god of poets, and his attempted rape of the nymph Daphne. Apollo is in hot pursuit but is thwarted by Daphne’s father, the river god Peneus, who turns his daughter into a laurel. Thereafter, the disappointed and frustrated Apollo dedicates the laurel sacred to all poets—thus, the term Poet Laureate. Bradbury, similarly longing for the literary bestowment of the laurel, has his own Daphne. If you want a prime example of a dissatisfied author, look no further than Bradbury struggling through his first draft of

“Homecoming” and the Imaginary Attic  61 Fahrenheit  451. He started the novel in 1950; he revised it for the next three years. The finished product was a bit over 50,000 words. So, he wrote 25,000 words in nine days and then took the next three years adding the same amount. If that isn’t chasing the laurel-leafed Daphne, I don’t know what is. * If Daphne was absent from much of the writing of Fahrenheit 451, she is present within the pages of “Homecoming”. She goes by the name “Cecy”. That’s an unusual name that gets odder the more you ponder it. The name is hydra-headed, Janus-like: it can be pronounced as C.C. or K.C. or C.K. My online sources inform me that the name is derived from the Gaelic cathasaigh, itself a clan name based on the Irish legend of Cas Corach—a harp-playing Orphic werewolf hunter who used music to spellbind his prey. (How is this not already a TV show?!) In another version of the myth, Cas Corach, having slain a pack of werewolves, switches careers and becomes a bard, a collector of stories (Jackson 2006, p. 136). Likewise, Bradbury’s Cecy accumulates tales; she inhabits the minds of humans and carbon copies their memories: “Inside this woman’s skull I am, looking out, watching the sea that does not move, and is so quiet it makes you afraid” (2003a, p.  313). There she will remain: “Until I’ve listened and looked and felt enough: until I’ve changed her life some way” (2003a, p. 313). Bradbury himself viewed writing as an act of possession akin to Cecy’s power to inhabit others, noting in Zen and the Art of Writing that And, after all, isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that…. (Bradbury 1990, p. 86) Perhaps I am reading too much into this, a critical indulgence and danger to be sure, but let’s take a moment here to investigate what Cecy does, how magical and how creepy. These possessions are uninvited; given the aforementioned attempted rape of Daphne, we might think of them as obscene liberties, violations. However, the gentle tone of the story suggests that Bradbury wants us to see Cecy as weird but not vicious or predatory. The cruelty here—no, let’s call it unkindness—is in her sense of humor. Cecy’s magic is in making her hosts aware of a spirit or Muse, call it a poetic soul, within. But in these instances what she offers is no more than a cruel joke: Cecy lives in her victims but never reveals herself to them; the upshot is that her hosts mistake her possession as their inner artistic voice. She fools them into thinking that they can be artists. She inspires them but, just as they put pen to paper, ditches them. She’s the Goddess of Writer’s Block.

62  Jeffrey Kahan Timothy is likely aware of the downside of being “changed” by Cecy, but he doesn’t care. Longing to be special, he begs his sister to possess him. In effect, he’ll become Pinocchio, she the string-pulling Gepetto, and, together, they will enact a spectacle worth remembering. It is just a trick, of course—all storytelling is—but then the Puckish side of Cecy reveals itself. Once she possesses Timothy and garners the family’s attention, she uses his voice to announce her possession of her brother’s mind and body: Timothy flailed whitely in the receiving arms. A voice burst out of his lips, unbidden. “This is Cecy! This is Cecy!” … Timothy tried to cut it off with his tongue. Everybody was laughing…. (2003a, p. 315) In short, the puppet play ends when Cecy maliciously pulls back the curtain to expose her brother not as the Great Oz but, rather, as a dummy, literally empty-headed. Timothy is understandably upset, humiliated: “Cecy, I hate you, I hate you!” (2003a, p. 315). Still, Cecy has kept her bargain. Her brother begged his sister to possess him, to turn him into a talented marionette. Well, he got what he wanted; the aunts and uncles who laugh at him will remember that episode, will recall it with mirth, and, in so doing, Timothy will be remembered. * Timothy fears death but he can’t die, not really; he’s not actually real— or is he? Do characters ever really die? If the literary experience is deep enough, meaningful enough, then we remain in dialogue with it and it with us. I’m reminded here of Samuel Johnson commenting on his first reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear: “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play” (Tomarken 1991, p. 89). Cordelia was strangled, yet, the event continues to play out in Johnson’s imagination; likewise, when Dickens’ fictional character Little Nell was in peril, 6,000 fans, anxious for word, stormed the piers of New York City and demanded of British sailors, “Is Little Nell alive?” When the seafarers replied that no, she was not, the crowd went into mourning (Cohen 2016, p. 27). But that wasn’t the end of it. As Dickens’ novel, Master Humphrey’s Clock, stated that Nell was buried in a picturesque graveyard in the West Midlands, fans, some coming from as far as America, began to visit churches in the area looking for her actual tombstone (“Verger in Tong”, 2010, online). When Sherlock Holmes “died”, his readers “groaned and cursed and wished the good right hand of Dr. Doyle had withered ere it had penned those final pages”. Emotionally fraught readers harassed the author. Doyle received

“Homecoming” and the Imaginary Attic  63 hate mail, more than 20,000 letters, from irate fans who commonly stated or implied that Holmes was an actual person and that Doyle was his Moriarty-like murderer (Starred 1918, pp. 106–7). Today, modern devotees have their own ways of defying their favorite authors or extending their relationships with their beloved characters. Researchers at Durham University conducted a survey of more than 1,500 readers, about 20% of whom reported that they were in direct communication with their favorite characters: Last February and March, when I was reading ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and writing a paper on it, I was feeling enveloped by Clarissa Dalloway. I heard her voice or imagined what her reactions to different situations [would be]. I’d walk into a Starbucks and feel her reaction to it based on what I was writing in my essay on the different selves of this character. (Alderson-Day et al. 2017, p. 105) Others stated that they felt as if they had become literary characters, that, in the words of one study participant, the authors of his favorite books “had started to narrate [his] world” (Alderson-Day et al. 2017, p. 105). The phenomenon is widespread enough for the Atlantic to have published a feature on “How to Talk to Shakespeare, H.G. Wells, and Emily Dickinson: Understanding the literary world’s recent obsession with communing with dead authors” (Fay 2012, online). And since many authors are also habitual readers, we shouldn’t be surprised that they too are haunted by their favorite authors. In Mansfield Park (1814), Jane Austen, by way of her character Henry Crawford, suggests that Shakespeare is a lifelong confrère and inward companion: “one gets acquainted with him without knowing how. … one is intimate with him by instinct” (Austen 2003, p. 265). Likewise, Philip José Farmer’s sci-fi series Riverworld (1971–83) features a cast of resurrected authors and historical figures, including Sir Richard Burton, Cyrano de Bergerac, Mark Twain, Jack London, Hermann Göring, an American astronaut, and a Neanderthal. As for Bradbury, he too implied that his characters have a life of their own: “The time will come when your characters will write your stories for you, when your emotions, free of literary cant and commercial bias, will blast the page” (Bradbury 1990, p. 152). So authentic was this belief in the seeming reality of Bradbury’s fictional others that the phrase or sentiment was often repeated. Biographer Jonathan Eller, for example, writes that Bradbury “let his characters tell their own stories” (Eller 2011, p. 95); O. Henry Prize Award judge Herschel Brickell praised Bradbury’s ability to invoke his chatty friends “Irving, Poe and Hawthorne” (Eller 2011, p.  185). In a weirdly Cecy-like moment, the novelist William Somerset Maugham convolutedly imagines Poe envying Bradbury’s

64  Jeffrey Kahan imaginative process: “it would have given Allan Edgar Poe [sic] a peculiar satisfaction to write [a Bradbury tale] himself” (Eller 2011, p. 61). These critics were not muddled. The aforementioned Eller doesn’t think that Timothy or the elder Elliotts are going to pop into his office for a cookie or a coffee; rather, he and his critical colleagues are participating in a Bradburian gambit of mixing historical authors and fictional characters. The most celebrated instance of this in Bradbury is, likely, the short story “The Mad Wizards of Mars” (1949), in which canonical authors and their characters exist side-by-side: Mr. Edgar Allan Poe stood in the tower window, a faint vapor of spirits upon his breath. “Hecate’s friends are busy tonight,” he said, seeing the witches, far below. A voice behind him said, “I saw Will Shakespeare at the shore, earlier, whipping them on. All along the sea Shakespeare’s army alone, tonight, numbers thousands: the three witches, Oberon, Hamlet’s father, Puck—all, all of them—thousands! Good lord, a regular sea of people”. (Bradbury 2005d, p. 334) While these canonical authors and characters don’t visit the Elliotts on Halloween, I am hoping that you see the connection. Timothy’s mom is, like Bradbury, imaginatively extending her son’s life. In this sense, whether Timothy dies in the story is irrelevant. Bradbury imagined a mother who, in turn, imagined her son’s death, and once imagined, that memory is real, at least to her. And if we empathize with her, then it’s also real to us. We might even call it a haunting. Even if you have not experienced this in reading “Homecoming”— imagining, as I have, the inner thoughts and motivations of Timothy’s mom and his sister Cecy, my guess is that you have experienced one or more literary events that were so potent that they affected you; that after reading a scary book, you were terrified by a creaking floorboard or the night wind; that after closing a comic novel, your mood was enhanced; that after the respective deaths of Little Nell or Sherlock Holmes or Dumbledore, you continued to think of them, mourn for them, as if they were part of your family; that you have discovered an author and devoured his or her entire oeuvre, hoping, even as you greedily consumed every page, that the feast would never end. Anyone reading this essay is odds-on likeminded. We’re the kids who gobble literary candy bars and chugalug favorite authors like chocolate milk. We can shed further light on this literary phenomenon by way of my very favorite Bradbury story: “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair” (1987). A couple meet by accident, watch Laurel and Hardy movies and then extend the filmic lives of those characters, even adopting Laurel and Hardy as endearing nicknames. He’s Oliver Hardy,

“Homecoming” and the Imaginary Attic  65 or Ollie, and she’s Stan Laurel. Careers pull them apart, but “Stan” promises to meet “Ollie” every year at the spot where they first met: Once a year I’ll show up at our flight of steps, … same time as that night when we first went there and if you’re there to meet me I’ll kidnap you or you me, but don’t bring along and show me your damn bank balance or give me any of your lip. (Bradbury 2005c, p. 162) Much like Timothy’s proposed grave, the flight of steps serve as memorial, a touchstone to their eternal love. But, after a time, one or the other forgets to show up or is waylaid by circumstances. Years later with their separate families in tow, Stan and Ollie meet and, unwilling to embarrass their spouses and kids, the once talkative lovers turn their Laurel and Hardy routine into a silent film: They walked on and he turned and looked back a final time. The woman with her husband and son turned at that very moment. Maybe he saw her mouth pantomime the words, So long, Ollie. Maybe he didn’t. He felt his own mouth move in silence: So long, Stan. (2005c, p. 163) To everyone else present, this couple is no couple at all; they are more like closed books filed on unrelated shelves; but silently, secretly, the relationship continues in Ollie’s imagination and our own. Bradbury did not write “he saw her mouth pantomime the words”; rather he wrote of a possibility—“Maybe he saw her mouth pantomime the words” (emphasis added)—and maybe is the well-spring of story. Though no longer physically present, Stan remains a presence in Laurel’s life; he, the Laurel poet, and she, his eternal Muse. * In a 1985 New York Times feature, Bradbury, by then a much- celebrated author, explained his writing process. He commonly sorted through a jumble of personal artifacts in his office or, as he called it, his “magician’s toy shop”, hoping to stumble upon a memory that could then be converted into a fantastical story (O’Connor July 2, 1985). Likewise, Bradbury counseled would-be writers to do the same with their literary experiences: “fill yourself up with motion pictures and poetry and essays, and art of all sorts, and just chock yourself full, and maybe they’ll all collide with each other”, and from those collisions, something new might rise, a “new metaphor”, a story, maybe even a character worth remembering (Bradbury 1990, p. 51). This technique sounds remarkably like the magical gift that Cecy bestows upon Timothy.

66  Jeffrey Kahan And what was that gift? Let’s recall that Cecy possesses her victims and then rummages through their minds. In effect, what Cecy comes away with is a storage locker of mental clutter, inner talk, bodily urges, haphazard and often hazardous emotions, fleeting images: a fish leaps, falls back, starlight edging it. The valley, the sea, the few cars, the wooden porch, my rocking chair, myself, the silence … I’m walking off the porch, toward the mud pots. Planes fly over, like primordial birds. (Bradbury 2003a, p. 313) Cecy also transforms memories; she takes tenancy of the mind and, to restate her words, remains there “Until I’ve listened and looked and felt enough: until I’ve changed her [or in Timothy’s case, his] life some way” (2003a, p. 313). What Bradbury here remediates into fiction is his own creative process, how he, like Cecy, can enter into the mind of another, even a fictive other, and come away not just with sensations but with stories ready to be reshaped by the imagination. In the case of “Homecoming”, inspiration might not have been a physical artifact or the collected works of Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Edgar Allan Poe but, rather, a memory of a Halloween from long ago, stored in what Bradbury dubbed the “attics of my imagination” (Bradbury 2001, p.  203). No actual vampires or body snatchers visited Bradbury’s childhood home, except in the author’s reimagining of those old holiday parties, where in-laws came with more than human speed from across the country and did, in this sense, fly; how, in telling stories around the kitchen table, the old folk did, in fact, conjure the dead and spellbind the living; how those same mummified men and women would nightly place their teeth in glass cups; how they slept on cots and crates, snoring loud enough to wake the dead. Might these prosaic events, as experienced by a child, seem frightening, grotesque, carnivalesque, hurley burley? Bradbury claims that “‘The Homecoming’ family is my Waukegan hometown family, surrounding me in my youth, prolonging themselves into shadows and haunts when I reached maturity…” (Bradbury 2003b, p. XI). By the time Bradbury wrote “Homecoming”, those relatives were all dead; it is only as the undead, as vampires, werewolves, and demons of every sort, that they now endure past living memory. “Homecoming” offers important clues to Bradbury’s creative process. After all, just who is coming home in “Homecoming?” Relatives visit, sure, but they don’t call the old house their home. As I read it, “Homecoming” is not about the Elliotts coming home but, rather, how Bradbury came home, finding in the memories of youth the stories that he revived and transmuted through his magical art.

“Homecoming” and the Imaginary Attic  67

Notes 1 On physical death thwarted by literary immortality, see Bradbury’s “Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-Made Truly Egyptian Mummy” (1981): What if I have a life chock-full of things, never bored, find out what I want to do, do it, make every day count, every night swell, sleep tight, wake up yelling, laugh lots, grow old still running fast, what then, colonel? “Why then, boy, you’ll be one of God’s luckiest people!” “For you see, colonel,” Charlie looked at him with pure round, unblinking eyes, “I made up my mind. I’m going to be the greatest writer that ever lived” (2015b, p. 327). 2 Bradbury is misremembering. In 1950, he had only one child, the infant Susan, born 1949. His second daughter, Ramona, was born in 1951. 3 The phrase “children of gods” is intriguing. Normally, we think of books as the offspring of their godlike, creative authors. Here, the author and the book are conflated. The author lives in the book, which, parent-like, is responsible for tending and preserving the author’s life. In this vein, we might here revisit “Ozymandias.” I initially said that the poem is an attempt by the forgotten to explain the brevity of memory to the living. Shelley was the poet who wrote the lines, but the poem itself has an inner life. If we enter into its fictional world, it seems logical to conclude that the epitaph—“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,” etc., etc.—was written by Ozymandias or someone who knew him. Since monuments are built to last, the poem is meant to speak to both the living and the unborn. So, Shelley has written not just a poem but also imagined a poet within that poem, one who imagines his own death and inevitable anonymity. The poetry will survive and, like an abandoned, dusty book on a library shelf, it can always be rediscovered, but, without the author’s identity or intent known to the reader, his claims to literary immortality fail. 4 In “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine” (1966), Bradbury describes libraries as literary temples to immortality. The prose-poetry, perhaps, heightens the literary significance: “The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were” (2015, p. 238). 5 Bradbury’s peer, the sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, habitually accepted the challenge to write a full story within twenty-four hours. Adding to the pressure, he would craft his new story while sitting in a bookstore with customers milling about. This process, an amazing writing stunt, took its toll: “I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My back was breaking. Cramped in that damned window, I was spacing out” (Ellison 1978, pp. 161–2). Cabined, cribbed and confined, a performing monkey hammering out a Hamlet a day, Ellison explained that by writing in public, he could show people that his art was just a rarified form of manual labor: “it’s becoming a filthy habit, but damned if I don’t get a lot of work done” (p. 162).

68  Jeffrey Kahan

Bibliography Alderson-Day, B., Bernini, M., & Fernyhough, C. (2017) “Uncharted Features and Dynamics of Reading: Voices, Characters, and Crossing of Experiences”. Consciousness and Cognition 49, pp. 98–109. Austen, J. (2003) Mansfield Park. Oxford World’s Classics. James Kinsley (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barzun, J. (1974) The Use and Abuse of Art. Bollingen Series, 35. [Princeton, NJ]: Princeton University Press. Bradbury, R. (1990) Zen in the Art of Writing. Santa Barbara: Capra Press. ———. (2001) “Afterword: How the Family Gathered”, in From the Dust Returned: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 199–204. ———. (2003a) “Homecoming”, in The October Country. New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, pp. 301–18. ———. (2003b) “Homesteading the October Country: An Introduction”, in The October Country. New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, pp. IX–XII. ———. (2005a) “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine”, in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 220–43. ———. (2005b) “Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-Made Truly Egyptian Mummy”, in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 315–37. ———. (2005c) “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair”, in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 156–63. ———. (2005d) “The Mad Wizards of Mars” (renamed “The Exiles”), in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 331–43. ———. (2015) Halloween Tree. New York: Alfred A, Knopf/Penguin Random House. Cohen, R. (2016) How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers. New York: Random House Publishing Group. Dickens, C. (2003) A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings. Michael Slater (ed.). London: Penguin Books Ltd. Eller, J. (2011) Becoming Ray Bradbury. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Ellison, H. (1978) Introduction to “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet”, in Strange Wine: Stories. New York: Warner Books, pp. 159–62. Fay, S. (2012) ‘How to Talk to Shakespeare, H.G. Wells, and Emily Dickinson: Understanding the Literary World’s Recent Obsession with Communing with Dead Authors.’ The Atlantic, March 14, 2012. The Atlantic.org. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/how-to-talkto-shakespeare-hg-wells-and-emily-dickinson/254471/ (Accessed: December 18, 2018). Homer (2015) The Iliad, translated by Caroline Alexander. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Jackson, K. (eds.) (2006) Celtic Miscellany. London: Penguin. O’Connor, J. (1985) “Ray Bradbury’s ‘Crowd’ on HBO”. New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/02/arts/ray-bradbury-s-crowdon-hbo.html (Accessed: December 20, 2018).

“Homecoming” and the Imaginary Attic  69 Shelley, P. B. (2003) “Ozymandias”, in Leader, Z. (ed.) The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Sontag, S. (1964) “Notes on Camp”. As study materials by Martin Irvine, Georgetown University. Online. Available at: https://faculty.georgetown.edu/ irvinem/theory/Sontag- NotesOnCamp-1964.html (Accessed: December 20, 2018). Starred, V. (1918) “In Praise of Sherlock Holmes”. Reedy’s Mirror 27, pp. 106–7. Tomarken, E. (1991) Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare: The Discipline of Criticism. Athens, GA, London: The University of Georgia Press. “Verger in Tong faked grave of Dickens’ Little Nell”. BBC Shropshire: 20 January 2010. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/shropshire/hi/people_ and_places/religion_and_ethics/newsid_8468000/8468580.stm (Accessed: December 20, 2018).

4

“I’ll Be in Every Living Thing in the World Tonight” Adolescent Femininity and the Gothic Uncanny in Bradbury’s “The April Witch”1 Miranda Corcoran

In the cultural lexicon of horror, the repository of images and ideas that serve as habitual expressions of our collective anxieties and deep-seated societal fears, teenage girls frequently function as manifestations of uncanny, transgressive terror. In a host of shadowy, unsettling works, young women such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s eponymous Carmilla (1872), Dracula’s Lucy Westenra (1897), and even the Arthurian enchantress Morgan le Fay are closely aligned with the supernatural, occult practices, and the vagaries of the spiritual realm. Running counter to our initial associations of adolescence with bright panoramas of hope and idealism, horror frequently conflates the transitory upheavals of the teenage experience with embodied notions of transformation, transgression, and uncertainty. Indeed, as Deborah Martin (2013) observes, “Adolescent femininity is central to the narrative economy of the gothic, both literary and visual” (p. 135). As a general concept, adolescent femininity is a liminal space: unstable, fluid, constantly in flux. More than a convenient demographic indicator of the vague period between childhood and adulthood, female adolescence represents a blurring of boundaries. It is a contested state of being, representing the ambiguous transition from child to woman, from subject to object. Numerous theorists have noted how, as both female and child, adolescent girls challenge societal constructions of what it means to be a “proper” subject (Martin 2013, p. 138). Moreover, adolescence, and female adolescence in particular, is a period of self-estrangement (Martin 2013, p.  135). Colin Wilson notes that this self-estrangement often correlates to supernatural occurrences, such as poltergeist activity, which tends to associate itself with teenagers and, in 95% of cases, is closely linked to teenage girls (2015, ch. 2). Moreover, Wilson notes that “sexual change or shock seems to be frequently associated with either the beginning or the cessation of the phenomena. Puberty and adolescence are thus the periods favorable to the effects” (2015, ch. 2). In more mundane terms, adolescence is, as Mary Pipher argues, a period of intense inner conflict when girls are generally expected to

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  71 sacrifice those parts of themselves that “our culture considers masculine on the altar of social acceptability” (qtd in Martin 2013, p. 140). It is a period of becoming, of moving between identities, trying on various masks and guises, learning to negotiate and embody the feminine ideal. As adolescence denotes a period of constant transformation, shifting between different roles and selfhoods, this transgression of identificatory boundaries mirrors broader cultural concerns regarding how femininity appears to refuse containment and elide categorization. The protean nature of femininity has, thus, long been depicted as both an existential and a biological contagion, an effluvial entity that cannot be hemmed in. It is cast as the abject; it transgresses boundaries. As such, femininity has accrued a myriad of biological connotations that emphasize this abject nature; it is associated with fluid, poisonous influence, miasma. Returning to Martin’s assertion that “adolescent femininity is central to the narrative economy of the gothic” (2013, p. 135), this fluidity, the transgressive force of the feminine, combined with the transformative nature of adolescence, casts the teenage girl as the archetypal embodiment of the uncanny. In horror, female adolescence encapsulates an unsettling sense of liminality. Throughout film and literature, female adolescence has been regularly associated with both psychic and physical transformation. It signifies a metamorphosis that breaks down the boundaries of identity and corporeality. Whether incarnate in the lycanthrope body horror of Ginger Snaps (2000), the diabolical proclivities of the adolescent protagonist in The Witch (2015), or in the eponymous protagonist’s ability to affect the external world with her mind in both Stephen King’s 1974 novel Carrie and its subsequent film adaptation (1976), 2 teenage girls signify a disturbing uncertainty, a unique capacity for transgression. In horror fiction, puberty is a metamorphosis whose monstrous implications are literalized. These maturations are abject; they erode the borders between childhood and adulthood, mental and physical, internal and external, subject and object. In this ambiguous space, adolescent femininity emerges as the apotheosis of the uncanny. Shrouded in the iconography of liminality, uncertainty, and doubling, horror fiction is uniquely equipped to explore the strangeness, the alienation, and the anxiety of adolescence. It gives literal form to a host of cultural concerns regarding the transgressive, mercurial nature of adolescent femininity, as well as engaging with a plethora of anxieties inherent in the experience of teenage subjectivity. Drawing on this perspective, this chapter will explore the construction of a uniquely uncanny view of female adolescence in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The April Witch”. First published in an April 1952 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, where it was bracketed by a long exposé on the high-Cold War scandal involving Whittaker Chambers’s “Pumpkin Papers” and a cornucopia of adverts for domestic appliances, “The April Witch” foregrounds a vision of teenage femininity that is beholden to Cold War anxieties about the nuclear family and the reactive domesticity

72  Miranda Corcoran of the postwar period. At the same time, however, its construction of female adolescence is fundamentally uncanny and cloaked in the visual signifiers of the gothic that challenge the utopian optimism of the period. I will herein argue that, while Bradbury utilizes a number of the key conventions of the gothic, aligning the experience of female adolescence with the transgression of boundaries and a spectral fluidity, his intention is not to construct the feminine as a demonized Other but rather to pose questions about female subjectivity and autonomy. As such, “The April Witch” unravels the notions of fluidity and abjection central to the gothic vision of female adolescence, questioning how these conceptions of transgression define the construction of adolescent identity. “The April Witch” is one in a series of short stories Bradbury wrote about a family called the Elliotts. Beginning in the 1940s, Bradbury wrote a number of tales detailing the lives of a strange family sequestered in a rambling ancestral home amid the vast plains of the rural Midwest. Eccentric, loving, and fundamentally supportive of one another, the Elliotts initially appear as little more than a somewhat quirky permutation of the traditional rural family. Yet, despite their proclivity for long walks in the countryside and boisterous family reunions, the Elliotts deviate from the rest of their rural Illinois community in that both the immediate and extended family is comprised of vampires, witches, and even the occasional mummy. As one of the Elliott children notes, “I’m one of an odd family that flies nights like black kites” (Bradbury 2001, p. 22).3 It might be helpful to view the Elliotts as midwestern counterparts of the more cosmopolitan Addams Family. Indeed, Charles Addams actually illustrated the Elliott Family story—“Homecoming”—in 1946 and planned to collaborate with Bradbury on an illustrated history of the Elliotts—a project that, sadly, never came to fruition (Bradbury 2001, p.  202). Moreover, like the Addams Family, the Elliott stories can be viewed as part of America’s broader wartime and postwar preoccupation with monstrous families in general (see also The Munsters) and the domesticated witch in particular. During this period, films and television shows such as I Married a Witch (1942), Bell, Book, and Candle (1958), and Bewitched (1964–72) reimagined the witch figure within a contemporary urban or suburban setting, where she served as a subversive figure, an agent of satire, or—through her matrimonial containment—as a manifestation of the era’s conservative gender roles and their sentimentalization of domesticity. The edition of The Saturday Evening Post in which “The April Witch” was initially published includes a contemporary advertisement for the “Magic Cycle” Self-Defrosting Kelvinator that could serve as a paratextual introduction to the story. The ad, which appears on the first page of the magazine, features a cheerful, wand-waving female magician—another domestic witch—whose joy at the aforementioned Kelvinator suggests that the domestic utopia of postwar America is wondrous and magical but also confining and limiting for women of the period. At the same time, such visions of consumerist plenitude serve

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  73 to situate the domestic witch within the cultural context of Cold War America’s unprecedented economic prosperity, perhaps even suggesting that the promises of suburban comfort and domestic convenience can tame even the most diabolical of creatures. Moving beyond this unique historical moment, it is clear that, in his writings on the Elliotts, Ray Bradbury drew on numerous gothic archetypes, populating his eccentric family with monsters derived from highgothic fantasy, Universal studio’s horror films, and local folklore. Like Bradbury’s more famous works The Illustrated Man (1951) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), there is an element of the carnivalesque funhouse to the Elliotts. Bradbury states that the story of the Elliotts “commenced when I drew skeletons, age six, to scare my cousins, [and] continued in secret when I helped redecorate my grandparents’ house with Halloween broomsticks” (Bradbury 2006, ch.1). A shadowy reflection of the ideal American family occupying a quaint country home adorned with spider webs and filled with a profusion of caskets and sarcophagi, the Elliotts embody the tendency of the American gothic to eschew broad social and historical horrors in favor of exploring the dark side of the American dream. It is, as Leslie A. Fiedler (2003) has written,

Figure 4.1 George Garland’s illustration for Ray Bradbury’s short story “The April Witch”. The story was originally published in the April 1952 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. “The April Witch” Illustration © SEPS licensed by Curtis Licensing Indianapolis, IN. All rights reserved.

74  Miranda Corcoran “a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (p. 29). As Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (2016) observes, the Elliotts “openly invert the imposing archetypal image of the American family, opposing its bland, white bread narrative of stability by presenting individualities ranging from vampirism to great green wings to the ability of assimilating with and directing another person’s soul” (p.  146). In doing so, they complicate the hegemonic image of the postwar nuclear family, undermining the images of consumerist domesticity and placid conformity promulgated in the Saturday Evening Post advertisements that bracketed the story in its original publication. In another Elliott family story—“The Town and the Place”—Bradbury draws heavily on the American gothic tradition, framing the ghoulish clan as something far older than the dream of America, housing them in an immense mansion that mysteriously “shaped itself long before sunrise as something dreamed of by Ramses but finished by Napoleon fled from dreaming Egypt” (Bradbury 2001, p. 8). As something ancient and ethereal lurking in the heart of the bright, golden Midwest, they signal the complexity and, indeed, the darkness underpinning the simplistic ideal of the American family. However, while the Elliott family is composed of a diverse menagerie of monsters and ghouls, perhaps the most interesting and multifaceted member of the household is Cecy, a teenager described as “the fairest and most special daughter of the Family”, possessed of a “talent for touching other people’s ears, thence inward to their minds and still further their dreams” (Bradbury 2001, p. 17). Just as the Elliotts embody a dark permutation of the nuclear family, a ghoulish reflection of midcentury America’s preoccupation with placid domesticity, so too does Cecy appear as a shadowy reflection of the postwar American ideal. As a teenager, Cecy seems to embody a new, decidedly postwar phenomenon. She is an adolescent at a time when a distinct teenager culture, with its own music, fashion, and slang, had just begun to emerge in the midst of newfound postwar affluence. However, Cecy exists outside the bright exuberance of postwar adolescence. She appears as something indefinable, transcendent, something that cannot be hemmed in by the boundaries of time and space. Her supernaturally inflected adolescence appears almost as a perversion of the smiling, radiant all-American girl that dominated popular culture during this period, while, at the same time, her morbidity seems emblematic of the nascent Cold War disquietude whose challenge to the period’s sunnily conformist attitudes would ultimately crystallize into youth counterculture movements such as the Beat Generation. Like many teenage girls, the physical borders of her world are her bedroom walls, as she passes her days in soporific fantasy. Yet Cecy’s physical confinement is undermined by a capacity for psychic wandering; she can escape her physical body and roam the world in spirit: So, lying asleep, Cecy inhaled the seasons and heard the rumorings of towns on the prairies over the mountains and if you asked her at

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  75 meals she would tell you the violent or serene occupations of strangers ten thousand miles away. Her mouth was always full of gossip of people being born in Boston or dying in Monterey, heard during the night as her eyes were shut. (Bradbury 2001, p. 18) In this way, Cecy can be viewed as the apotheosis of the uncanny.4 She resides in the liminal space between sleep and waking, physical and spiritual, tangible and intangible. She embodies the instability and ambiguity that are the essence of the uncanny. Indeed, Sigmund Freud tells that, as initially conceived by the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906, the fundamental experience of uncanniness is one of “intellectual uncertainty” (Freud 1919, p. 221). It is the vague disorientation that arises when one is faced with doubt about the nature of an object, that creeping sense of uncertainty about whether an entity is animate or inanimate, living or dead. The later Freudian definition of the uncanny moved beyond simple notions of uncertainty to locate the uncanny in the horrific return of the repressed, describing it as “that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud 1919, p. 220). For Freud, “[the] uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old—established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (p. 241). However, while Freud refined the definition of the uncanny, narrowing it down to a sensation of dread evoked by a disturbing re-emergence, his explication of uncanniness parallels Jentsch’s in that both are fundamentally preoccupied with the transgression of boundaries. While Jentsch’s conceptualization of the uncanny is beholden to notions of uncertainty, hesitation, and the blurring of lines of demarcation, Freud’s uncanny is born out of the unease surrounding those moments when something believed to have been locked away escapes its prison and confronts us in the light of day. In both formulations, the uncanny is centered on those things we attempt to hem in, categorize, or seal off but cannot; they refuse categorization, they ignore boundaries, they are fluid. Cecy’s liminal state, between sleep and waking, tangible and intangible, embodies this transgressive uncanniness. Moreover, her uncanny nature is directly tied to her status as a teenage girl. Her uncanniness is the manifestation of the liminality, the estrangement, and the metamorphic power of adolescence. Writing on the transformative nature of adolescence, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling (2002) observes that menarche, or the onset of puberty, often represents a turning point (p. 7). It is a time of transformation, of biological and emotional vacillation defined by a sense of alienation from both the body and the self. For young girls, it is, Kissling notes, coterminous with the dawning realization that one is fundamentally “female and Other” (p.  8). In a similar manner, adolescence is integral to the narrative and iconographic schema of the gothic. As David Punter (1999) argues, adolescence as an experience echoes many of the key concerns of the gothic

76  Miranda Corcoran (p. 6). Ever since its tumultuous birth in latter half of the eighteenth century, gothic fiction has regularly centered on the teenage experience in general and young women in particular (Byron and Deans 2014, p. 87). More specifically, Punter claims that adolescence is defined, like the archetypical conception of the uncanny, by uncertainty and the contravention of borders; teenagers “exist on a terrain where what is inside finds itself outside (acne, menstrual blood, rage) and what we think should be visibly outside (heroic dreams, attractiveness, sexual organs) remain resolutely inside and hidden” (p. 6). In this way, adolescence serves as the ultimate visual and corporeal metaphor for the gothic obsession with alienation, transgression, and transformation. It epitomizes these most uncanny concerns. Cecy’s relationship to her body clearly reflects this gothic uncanny. She is closely tied to her corporeality, sleeping for hours and ostensibly imprisoned within her physical being; yet she is also transcendent, shedding her physical form to roam spectrally. She is at once inside and outside, physical and spiritual. Bradbury highlights this uncanny component of adolescence through his alignment of Cecy with the figure of the witch. Born out of an association that stretches from seventeenth-century Massachusetts to contemporary films like The Craft (1996), teenage girls have long been tied to witchery and the occult. As the manifestation of burgeoning femininity, they have frequently served as the focal point for a plethora of cultural anxieties surrounding the relationship between women and the supernatural. In 197 CE, the early Christian leader Tertullian described women as “the Devil’s gateway” (qtd. in Thurston 2013, p. 65). Moreover, as Tarn Rodgers Johns observes, this connection between femininity and the diabolical was solidified in the fifteenth century by Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, whose infamous witch-hunting treatise Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches, 1486) argued that that since [women] are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come more under the spell of witchcraft. . . . The natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. (qtd. in Rodgers Johns 2016) Women represented a dangerous intersection of unpredictable mental processes, evidenced by their devious minds and their base, uncontrollable physicality. Consequently, as Sprenger and Kraemer would go on to expound at length, “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil” (qtd. in Kapsalis 2017). The knowledge possessed by women “with inclinations toward learning” is, therefore, dangerous and suspect.5 It is knowledge born not simply of the mental but also of the corporeal. In the popular imagination, women represent a suspicious interiority, both physically and mentally. As such, their knowledge is inherently transgressive. Cecy, like the hordes of

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  77 teen witches that abound in our popular culture, represents the dawning of this subversive knowledge, the moment of entry into an awareness that is at once physical and spiritual. Indeed, Cecy, who is described as a “last of summer witch”, is associated with an almost elemental knowledge: She, in sum, was a goddess of wisdom, and the Family, knowing this, treated her like porcelain, let her sleep all hours, knowing that when she woke, her mouth would echo twelve tongues and twenty sets of minds, philosophies enough to crack Plato at noon or Aristotle at midnight. (Bradbury 2018, p. 18) Like the prototypical witch described in the Malleus Maleficarum, Cecy is simultaneously fragile and powerful. She inhabits a dichotomous space, lingering in porcelain slumber while accessing preternatural knowledge. This dichotomy, Cecy’s position between physical and mental, echoes not only the dreamy, developmental stage that is adolescence but also reflects a host of social anxieties about female adolescence and burgeoning femininity. As with the witches of Sprenger and Kraemer, Cecy initially appears beholden to notions of corporeality. She seems trapped in her physical body, sleeping endlessly in an attic room. In this way, she embodies the historical view of women as defined by their relationship to bodies that are constructed as “as frail, imperfect, unruly, and unreliable, subject to various intrusions, which are not under conscious control” (Grosz 2011, p. 13). In her discussion of female adolescence in gothic fiction, Rodgers Johns (2016) alludes to the pervasive cultural narrative that has historically associated men with rationality and the mind, while women are invariably conflated with the corporeal, the natural, and the irrational. In this schema, “women are ruled by their bodily urges and functions whereas men are governed by rationality and self-control” (Rodgers Johns 2016). Porcelain-like and physically fragile, Cecy seems to function as a manifestation of this vision of femininity as bound to the corporeal, tethered to an imperfect body. At the same time, she also echoes the common folkloric archetype of the slumbering maiden, who, whether manifested as the fairy-tale princess Sleeping Beauty or in the horrific revenant form of Poe’s Ligeia (1838) or Madeline Usher (1839), embodies not only the cycle of life, death, and renewal but also the cyclical nature of female biology. However, while her physical form is indeed confined in its passive, slumbering state, Cecy’s fundamentally uncanny disposition, her ability to transcend the physical borders of her body, also represents an equally potent series of cultural concerns about the fluid, uncontainable nature of femininity. For all her motionless dreaming, Cecy possesses an almost unfettered freedom to traverse the countryside in her spectral form. Moreover, not only can she escape her own corporeality, but she is

78  Miranda Corcoran capable of penetrating the physical boundaries of other bodies, entering and taking up temporary residence in the forms of others. As she gleefully extols, “I can live in anything at all—a pebble, a crocus, or a praying mantis” (Bradbury 2001, p. 22). In her ability to flit between forms, Cecy represents an unsettlingly transgressive force. Indeed, her power of astral flight and her proclivity for possessing other beings is closely aligned with a mode of horror that is distinct from yet has its roots in the uncanny—the abject. According to the theorist Julia Kristeva (1982), the abject is that which “disturbs identity, system, order. [It] does not respect borders, positions, rules. [It is the] in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (p. 4). The place of the abject is “the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 1982, p. 2). The abject is a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, natural and unnatural, subject and object. Inherent in the human tendency to recoil from bodily fluids in general and blood in particular, the abject is a reminder of our corporeality, our status as physical objects vulnerable to external intrusions. Like the uncanny, the abject embodies disturbing notions of transgression and uncertainty. As such, images of abjection are a common motif in horror and gothic fiction. Writing on this connection between abjection and horror, Barbara Creed (2001) notes that the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film; that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject. Although the specific nature of the border changes from film to film, the function of the monstrous remains the same— to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability. (71) As Cecy transcends her own physicality, roaming the night as a disembodied spirit before settling into the body of another, she strongly evokes these notions of abjection. Her roving spirit disrupts the border between interior and exterior. Entering the bodies of others, she turns their internal space into her own spectral playground. Much of the story is concerned with Cecy’s adventures while inhabiting the body of an older teenage girl named Ann. As such, the text carefully portrays Cecy’s exploration of Ann’s interiority, drawing parallels between the witch’s wandering across the expansive midwestern landscape and her voyaging within Ann’s body: She entered into the dark head and gazed from the shining eyes. . . . She listened through the shell ears to this girl’s world. She smelled a particular universe through these delicate nostrils, felt this special heart beating, beating. Felt this strange tongue move with singing. . . . It was a good body, this girl’s. It held bones of the finest slender ivory hidden and roundly fleshed. This brain was like a pink tea rose, hung in darkness, and there was cider wine in this mouth. (Bradbury 2001, p. 23)

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  79 Cecy collapses the boundaries between inside and outside. Comparing Ann’s anatomy to aspects of nature and the physical landscape—her ears are shells, her brain is a rose—Bradbury evokes a perfect fluidity between interior and exterior. In this way, he evokes a long-standing association between femininity and the erosion of bodily parameters, as well as the concomitant fear that this bodily transgression also signifies a broader social transgression. Consequently, Cecy’s wandering both within Ann’s body and in various other forms harkens back to yet another historical conception of femininity as transgressive and fundamentally uncanny. As she untethers herself from her own physical form and passes into others, Cecy recalls a host of long-held cultural assumptions that figure women as both mentally and biologically subversive. Indeed, Cecy’s tendency to contravene the boundaries of her individual body in order to inhabit others ties into historically potent social and medical discourses that have consistently framed women as a sort of effluvia or pollutant. Commenting on the link between femininity and the supernatural that pervades horror fiction, Carol J. Clover (2015) notes that women have generally been viewed as more open, both biologically and spiritually (p. 77). The interiority of the female reproductive system, combined with the inherently abject nature of menstruation—its erosion of the boundary between inside and outside—creates a view of women as voids or vessels. Within this framework, the feminine is porous. Rather than a fully constituted, inviolable entity, women are presented as fluid selfhoods, possessed of no clear lines of demarcation. Even in their most basic biological construction, women resist physical containment: they seep, they pollute, they wander. Consider the four-thousand-year history of the hysteria diagnosis. Derived from the Greek hystera, meaning womb, the concept of hysteria defined the medical community’s attitude toward and treatment of women from around 1900 BCE until the 1950s (Kapsalis 2017). The Galenic humoral theory of hysteria defined women’s bodies as dominated and even polluted by their own excess of blood and by accumulations of “seed” (“female sperm”) in the uterine cavity; nearly all women were thought to be at risk for hysterical disorders. Spoiled menstruum and seed built up in the female body; if these fluids had no release through salubrious acts of intercourse . . . , they could produce harmful humors that would impart other effects. In Hippocratic theory, poisonous environments might provoke the womb to wander hence the notorious “wandering womb”. (Peterson 2006, p. 3) As Terri Kapsalis (2017) notes, the Hippocratic construction of hysteria was especially tied to the notion that women’s bodies defied containment because it was predicated on the belief that the uterus wandered

80  Miranda Corcoran around the body like an animal, hungry for semen. If it wandered the wrong direction and made its way to the throat there would be choking, coughing or loss of voice, if it got stuck in the rib cage, there would be chest pain or shortness of breath, and so on. Kapsalis (2017) goes on to note that the psychiatric and medical communities remained inherently preoccupied with the containment of the wandering uterus, which could only be achieved through the “triad of marriage, intercourse, and pregnancy”. Moreover, hysteria was linked to other transgressive tendencies, as it could be trigged by “reading novels (which caused erotic fantasies), masturbation, and homosexual or bisexual tendencies resulting in any number of symptoms such as seductive behaviors, contractures, functional paralysis, irrationality, and general troublemaking of various kinds” (Kapsalis 2017). Within this framework, anything that overstepped the parameters of conventional femininity could potentially trigger this biological malady and send the reproductive system roving throughout the body. In particular, diagnoses of hysteria foregrounded the dangers of fantasy or mental wandering common among young women with few other outlets for their desires. Cecy’s position, physically confined by her youth and geographical isolation to the microcosm of her bedroom yet capable of unimpeded psychic flights literalizes this view of fantasy as transgressive. Like the archetypal adolescent, Cecy lies in bed, willing herself psychically out into the wider world. She is able to break the bounds of her bodily shell to “[stretch] herself out on the ancient Japanese garden sands and let the small dunes shift her as the wind played the rooftop” (Bradbury 2001, p. 17). Languishing in her bed, Cecy hears the languages of weather and far places and knew what went beyond this hill, or the sea on one hand and a farther sea on the other, including the age-old ice which blew from the north and the forever summer that breathed softy from the Gulf and the Amazon wilds. (Bradbury 2001, pp. 17–18) Her capacity to escape her corporeal form literalizes both the fantasist tendencies of the adolescent and echoes the notion of such mental wanderings as transgressive, threatening to the natural order. This echoes the historical construction of the feminine as that which resists containment. Rather than simply sending her womb wandering through her body, Cecy’s desires and fantasies allow her spirit to break free of her physical body, inhabit others, and soar across distant landscapes. She is truly a witch in the sense that she embodies disturbing, uncanny notions of female transgression. In a similar manner, Cecy’s regular disruption of bodily boundaries in the service of her astral sojourns also recalls the pervasive, historically

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  81 potent conception of women as not only resistant to physical or biological constraints but also incapable of psychic or spiritual confinement. Imbued with the power to fly through the “cool night air, a million miles from people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills” (Bradbury 2001, p.  35), Cecy echoes the supposed power of witches to assume spectral form and roam the countryside. While her crepuscular flights through the midwestern plains may initially recall the aeronautical spectacles of broomstick-riding European witches hastening to diabolical sabbaths high in the western Alps, Cecy has far more in common with colonial American witches, whose propensity for mischief manifested in the ability to deduce the contents of sealed envelopes, spin preternaturally fine linen, or upend hay wagons (Schiff 2015a). Indeed, Cecy’s specifically adolescent witchery, its vaguely mischievous quality, casts her quite definitively as a descendent of the Salem witches whose specters roamed the Massachusetts woodland, signing demonic pacts with strange, hoofed creatures and slipping into darkened houses to torment more pious townsfolk.6 Although many of the invisible attackers who plagued the village were purportedly older women, many of the accusers were teenage girls afflicted with inexplicable fits (Schiff 2015b, p. x), bitten by intangible assailants, and pricked by ethereal pins.7 Moreover, many of these girls were not simply victims of malicious spirit activity but were often participants in the spectral harassment of others. Fourteen-year-old Abigail Hobbs, for example, was the second person to confess to witchcraft during the 1692 Salem witch trials and later became one of the main accusers, eventually sending both of her parents to prison (Schiff 2015b, p. x). Urged on by a menagerie of cats, dogs and semi-human animals, Abigail agreed to torment and pinch other village girls (Schiff 2015b, p.  118). Other accusers were viewed as possessing a unique spiritual sensitivity. A teenage servant named Mercy Lewis was described as a “visionary girl”, capable of divining the identities of invisible attackers (Schiff 2015b, p. x). Likewise, other Salem girls were valorized as healers and mystics, with one “prominent Bostonian [carrying] his ailing child the twenty miles to Salem, suddenly the Lourdes of New England, to be evaluated by the village girls” (Schiff 2015b, p. 323). Looking back at the terror that seized the small Massachusetts enclave in that dark year toward the end of the seventeenth century, the fears and accusations that gripped Salem appear all the more potent because they were unleashed by a cohort of adolescent girls: “At twelve and eleven, Ann Putnam Jr. and Abigail Williams . . . were the youngest under Satan’s supernatural spell. Nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis, the Putnam maid, and twentyyear-old Mary Warren, the wavering Proctor maid, were among the eldest” (Schiff 2015b, p. 130). In cases where these teenage girls admitted to an alliance with satanic forces, their demonic pacts were motivated less by the grand abstractions of power and influence than by the frustrated desires of young

82  Miranda Corcoran women approaching adulthood in the isolated environs of a harsh wilderness dominated by the dour strictures of Puritanism. As Stacy Schiff notes, “From those things the devil promised we can glimpse what the seventeenth- century girl dreamed of: splendid finery, travel abroad, fashion books, leisure, gold, a husband, help with the housework” (Schiff 2015b, p. 130). The fact that a horrifying succession of denunciations, imprisonments, and executions arose out of the fanciful desires of teenage girls calls attention yet again to the notion that the fantasies of young women could be a dangerous force. Moreover, the association of Salem’s teenage girls with uncontrollable spiritual forces was simply one occurrence in a chain of events and cultural constructions that framed young women as possessed of uncontrollable spiritual forces. Their fantasies, dreams, and intangible psychic selves were ephemeral potencies that could not be contained within the physical body and were, as such, capable of wreaking havoc in the external world. In a similar manner, the association of women with the spirit world spread beyond the Puritan enclave of Salem, Massachusetts, to become an enduring force in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of femininity. In 1848, two adolescent sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, claimed that they had made contact with a spirit (Warner 2012, p. 221), who informed them that his name was Mr. Splitfoot (Kahan 2015, p. 97). The girls claimed that the spirit communicated directly with them through rapping sounds, which were audible to an assembled band of neighbors and spectators. The peculiar sensitivity evidenced by the two girls, who were later joined by a third sister Leah, in their supposed communications with the dead not only ignited the religious movement known as spiritualism but also solidified the connection between women, especially young women, and the spiritual realm. As Jeffrey Kahan (2015) notes, observers were quick to connect the youth and femininity of the girls with their supernatural receptivity: “People began to fixate on the otherworldly qualities of the sisters, all of whom had long, dark hair, dark eyes, and, above all, ‘transparent paleness, such as we have observed in persons highly susceptible to mesmerism’” (p. 99). Growing out of the Fox sisters’ claims, séances spread throughout the nation, as attempts to contact the deceased multiplied, first, during the American Civil War and, later, during the First World War. Spiritualism, as both a religious philosophy and a form of late nineteenth-century radicalism, permeated every facet of American and Western European culture during this period, attracting numerous famous acolytes and garnering literary depictions in works including Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians, where mediums are aligned with such social reformers as “communists [and] vegetarians” (1998, ch.4). While séances were often diverse in both their methodologies— encompassing techniques such as trances, table-turning, and automatic

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  83 writing—and their participants, the typical séance was centered on the figure of the medium. Preternaturally attuned to the vibrations of the spiritual world, the medium was more often than not a young woman. In an era of rigidly delineated gender roles, the medium was afforded a level of freedom not usually extended to women. Under the guise of channeling spirits, young women not only garnered an unprecedented level of public attention, but they were also enabled to break social taboos or voice radical opinions.8 The medium was a liminal figure, a bridge between worlds. She was a conduit, a porous body through which spirits could enter the material realm. This liminality was given physical expression as numerous mediums appeared to excrete actual matter, physical evidence of spiritual possession. Derived from the Greek ektos, outside, and plasma, something that can be formed or molded, ectoplasm is the “viscous substance which is supposed to emanate from the body of a spiritualistic medium, and to develop a human form or face” (Warner 2012, p. 290). According to an 1833 entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, ectoplasm is “the substance from which spirits make themselves visible forms . . . alive, sensitive to touch and light[, ] . . . cold to the touch, slightly luminous and having a characteristic smell” (qtd. in Warner 2012, p. 90). The regularity with which this spiritual matter emanated from female mediums during nineteenth-century séances again returns us to the pervasive cultural notion that the boundary separating the female body from both the wider world and the spiritual realm is permeable. Moreover, ectoplasm “sometimes entered the world through [the medium’s] vagina”, a manifestation that appeared particularly unsettling at a time when, as L. Anne Delgado (2013) observes, “women’s bodies were under special scrutiny [… involving surgeries] designed to treat phantom ailments like nymphomania and hysteria” (qtd. in Watson 2016). These manifestations, transcending the divide between physical and spiritual through the corporeal bridge of the female body, suggest that there is something inherent in femininity that signifies transgression and the dismantling of borders. If we move forward into the twentieth century, the association of femininity with psychic receptivity remains an enduring preoccupation in popular culture. As Carol J. Clover (2015) notes, cinema in particular continues to align young women with psychic transgression, as films such as Firestarter (1984), The Fury (1978), and, most famously, Carrie (1976) link telekinesis and telepathy with prepubescent or adolescent girls (p. 71).9 These films posit burgeoning femininity as an uncontrollable force, as adolescent girls once again transcend the physical enclosures of their bodies to affect the external world psychically. Like the ectoplasm-emitting mediums of the nineteenth century or the roving specters of Salem’s witches, contemporary horror cinema constructs femininity as the apotheosis of uncanny transgression. Possessed of an unknowable interiority, women are uniquely receptive to supernatural influence. They can traverse the chasm between the living and the dead,

84  Miranda Corcoran gain power through satanic alliances, and work untold wonders. At the same time, however, femininity is both physically and psychically fluid; it cannot be contained. As such, it defies borders and challenges categorization. Archetypally uncanny, it provokes uncertainty and causes us to hesitate, unable to decipher whether it is internal or external, tangible or intangible, body or spirit. In “The April Witch”, the strain of uncanniness Cecy possesses is one long associated with teenage girls; it is the uncertainty and transgressive power that has cast them as key figures in both the literary and visual gothic. Describing Cecy’s nighttime flights, Bradbury strongly evokes this uncanny blurring of boundaries: Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, flew Cecy. Invisible as autumn winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. . . . She lived in dandelion ghosts or sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth. Farewell summer, thought Cecy. I’ll be in every living thing in the world tonight. (Bradbury 2001, p. 21) Moreover, Cecy’s uncanniness mirrors certain key concerns about the nature of adolescent femininity. Over the course of the story, she enters not only human and animal bodies but also merges with inanimate objects such as flowers and pebbles. In doing so, she repeatedly transitions between subject and object. Indeed, her vacillation between sentient and nonsentient forms enacts one of the key conflicts inherent to female adolescence—the sense that one is in the midst of transforming from a complex subject, a child possessed of a rich inner life, into a woman whose primary social function is to be an object of desire, admiration, or curiosity.10 In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes that women are invariably constructed as objects in opposition to the male subject: “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other” (Beauvoir 1956, p. xvi). Adolescence, as numerous observers have noted, is a period of transition during which young girls become aware of their status as object or as Other. The teenage years represent a dawning awareness of the materiality of the body, or, as Elizabeth Arveda Kissling (2002) contends, the embodied realization that one is inherently female and, therefore, Other, tied to the body in a way that reduces one’s identity as an autonomous subject (p. 8). Cecy’s roving between other forms, both conscious and nonsentient, serves to enact this process of negotiating one’s subjectivity in adolescence. Moreover, much of the text is preoccupied with Cecy’s attempt to navigate her own burgeoning sexuality. In the opening pages of “The

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  85 April Witch”, Cecy expresses a desire to fall in love and indulges in prototypical acts of adolescent sexual fantasy: But high in her attic room, Cecy had touched perfume to her throat and stretched out, trembling and apprehensive, on her four-poster, as a moon the color of milk rose over Illinois country, turning rivers to cream and roads to platinum. (Bradbury 2001, p. 22) The language Bradbury uses in this moment subtly evokes sexual desire and fantasy, creating continuity between Cecy’s act of touching perfume to her throat and the sensuality of a landscape described as echoing the hue and consistency of milk and cream. Unable to act on her desires, Cecy uses her ability to travel in astral form to project herself into the body of another young woman—a nineteen-year-old girl named Ann—so that she can attend a dance and experience the thrill of a first romance. While Cecy’s decision to possess Ann is inherently problematic in the sense that she gains control of Ann’s body and nullifies her agency, her actions are a manifestation of the adolescent proclivity toward fantasy and self-projection. As Elizabeth Grosz (1994) observes in Volatile Bodies, “The adolescent body is commonly experienced as awkward, alienating, an undesired biological imposition” (p. 75). As such, adolescence is the “period that the subject feels the greatest discord between the body image and the lived body, . . . the philosophical desire to transcend corporeality and its urges may be dated from this period” (Grosz 1994, p. 75). In her choice to inhabit Ann, Cecy identifies the older girl as an ideal self, a mirror version of the young witch, who appears more composed, more desirable, and more confident. Again, this action is very much a literalization of the teenage tendency to view one’s own body as ungainly, out of control, inadequate, and, therefore, to project one’s self mentally into the body of a fantasy double. Although grounded in the imagery of the gothic and strongly redolent of America’s historical entanglements with the figure of the witch, Cecy’s possession of Ann enacts a common mode of adolescent fantasizing. A quintessentially restless teenager, Cecy’s desire to explore both her burgeoning sexuality and the wider world are restricted by her youth and the strictures of family life. In typical fairy-tale style, her parents warn her, “We must not marry with ordinary folks. We’d lose our dark souls if we did” (Bradbury 2001, p. 22). However, Cecy’s ability to contravene bodily boundaries not only allows her to engage with her desires but also provides her with a means of rebelling against the limitations of family life. Indeed, like the archetypal seventeenth-century witch, Cecy’s spectral powers imbue her with the ability to overturn the norms of domestic life. As Stacy Schiff

86  Miranda Corcoran (2015a) notes, this emphasis on the subversion of domesticity differentiated the New World American witch from her European antecedents. For, while the witches that took to the skies over Germany and Scandinavia reveled in consuming the blood of unbaptized infants, or, according to one source, stealing the penises of unsuspecting men and keeping them in nests in trees (Kapsalis 2017), the American witch was content to sour milk, spoil harvests, or cause enchanted cattle to leap into the air (Schiff 2015a). American witches reveled in the mundane and upset the domestic order. Cecy’s uncanny nature, her capacity to dissolve the borders between self and other, sleep and waking, physical and spiritual, allows her to indulge in the acts of domestic subversion associated with the figure of the witch. Cecy’s preternatural ability to shift between tangible and intangible forms, to flit between bodies, and to cast off the limitations of corporeality thus embodies a host of anxieties about femininity. In her nocturnal roving across the vast topographies of both the American Midwest and the complex interiority of other beings, Cecy encompasses a series of potent cultural ideas surrounding women. Her capacity to travel in spectral form, negating the physical parameters of the human body, reflects a variety of social and medical discourses that have, throughout history, constructed women as transgressive, abject, and effluvial. In biological terms, women often represent that which cannot be contained. Like the associations between menstruation and pollution or the enduring image of the wandering womb of the hysteric, women have a long history of provoking anxiety because they challenge categorizations. They are biologically abject because they undermine rigid divisions between interior and exterior. Constantly flying free of her physical body, Cecy exists as the manifestation of this biological ambiguity; she cannot be hemmed in. Moreover, because she liberates herself from her physical form in order to experience the wider world, she also encapsulates the recurring conception of femininity as tied to a distinctly psychic transgression. From the roaming specters of the Salem witches to the nineteenth- century mediums who bridged the chasm between the physical and spiritual realms, women have been viewed as not only physically transgressive but also as spiritually or psychically transgressive. In this way, Cecy—a witch prone to spectral flights, unable to be contained within a single form—comes to encompass a wide range of historical anxieties about femininity as an inherently uncanny force, an entity defined by ambiguity, uncertainty, and the blurring of lines of demarcations. However, despite her construction as an uncanny reflection of longheld cultural anxieties about femininity, Cecy is not presented as some thoroughly monstrous Other. While Bradbury draws extensively on the language of gothic horror to give form to his wandering adolescent witch, Cecy’s uncanniness is largely focused on exploring feminine identity, questioning what the social and cultural roles associated with femininity

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  87 mean as she traverses the threshold of adult life. Existing within a state of liminality, Cecy is not simply a horrifying, uncanny specter but rather a multifaceted individual whose uncanniness raises a plethora of questions about the nature of female identity and the complex process of becoming that constitutes the adolescent experience. Eventually forced by the constraints of her powers to desert Ann’s body, the experience of romance by proxy has a profound but inconclusive effect on Cecy. It is not the end of her story. As an adolescent, she is still growing and developing. She will continue to navigate her own burgeoning identity. As such, Cecy’s Otherness, although tied into the generic tropes of horror, does not vilify her. The witch’s capacity to disrupt corporeal boundaries and take possession of others’ bodies underscores the metamorphic aspect of adolescence while also probing the issue of agency and autonomy. Moreover, like her antecedents in Salem or nineteenthcentury mediumship, Cecy embodies one of the key dichotomies of adolescent femininity—the fraught relationship between body and mind. Cecy’s uncanniness inheres in her capacity for transgression and effacing the boundary between ostensibly distinct states of being. In this way, she encapsulates but also transcends one of the key facets of the adolescent experience. Echoing the position of so many young women, she is physically restrained by her gender, location, and the strictures of family life. However, she is mentally and spiritually active; she divines vast knowledge through her psychic wanderings and is able break the bounds of her physical restraints. She possesses what could be considered an exaggerated literalization of the adolescent proclivity for fantasy and imagination that takes her beyond her confinement. She is the uncanny return of those long-held social anxieties about the uncontrollable feminine that have haunted Western thought from the hysterical womb through to the early modern witch hunts, and even up to the close association between adolescent femininity and telekinesis that dominate the twentiethcentury horror film. Cecy epitomizes how the rhetoric that defined these conceptions of womanhood closely aligned femininity in general and the fluid, transformative period of female adolescence in particular with uncanny manifestations of transgression and uncontrollability. Yet, despite his reliance on the tropes of gothic horror, Bradbury’s teenage witch is never resigned to the category of monstrous Other. Instead, she exists as a complex interrogation of these constructions of femininity. Through her power to break the bounds of physicality, Cecy represents not so much the horror of the adolescent as the horror of adolescence as an experience. She is a manifestation of the various tensions between body and mind, reality and fantasy, self and other that define the teenage experience. Returning to Deborah Martin’s assertion in “Feminine Adolescence as Uncanny” that adolescent femininity is central to the narrative economy of the gothic and that adolescence is inextricably tied

88  Miranda Corcoran to the uncanny, it is perhaps more accurate to suggest that the gothic uncanny, with its emphasis on the blurring of boundaries and disruption of conventional categories of being, is a mode of representation particularly well suited to the portrayal of female adolescence, a state of being which in itself is defined by fluidity, metamorphosis, and the transgression of borders.

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in Eller, Jonathan R. and Jeffrey Kahan eds (2019). The New Ray Bradbury Review, no. 6. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, pp. 121–41. Reprinted with the kind permission of Kent State University Press. 2 See Andrea Subissati and Alexandra West, “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”, Episode 10, The Faculty of Horror, webcast, aired November 26, 2013, 61 mins. For an engaging discussion of this topic, visit http://www. facultyofhorror.com/2013/11/episode-10-girl-youll-be-a-woman-soon/, accessed May 23, 2018. 3 My edition of From the Dust Returned uses the alternate title “The Wandering Witch”. However, to avoid confusion, I will be using the original title of “The April Witch” throughout this chapter. 4 For a detailed discussion of feminine adolescence and the Freudian uncanny, see Deborah Martin, “Wholly Ambivalent Demon-Girl: Horror, the Uncanny and the Representation of Feminine Adolescence in Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa”, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 17, no. 1 (2011): 59–76. 5 Bradbury connects witchcraft and knowledge in a manner that transcends gender, as Moundshroud expatiates, “So any man, or woman, with half a brain and with inclinations toward learning had his wits about him, eh?” Moundshroud goes on to link this word “wits” with the epithet “witch”, thus solidifying the relationship between knowledge and witchcraft. See Ray Bradbury (1972), The Halloween Tree (New York: Knof), p. 86. 6 Cecy’s position as a descendent of the Salem witches becomes even more apparent when we remember that Bradbury was himself descended from the accused witch Mary Bradbury. The story of Mary Bradbury is elaborated on in Stacy Schiff’s (2015) The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson), p. 294. Here, Schiff notes that Mary Bradbury was accused of “transforming herself into a blue boar [and] scrambl[ing] under a horse’s hooves, upsetting the rider”. In this way, Mary Bradbury’s ability to transform into animals echoes Cecy’s power to inhabit other living creatures. 7 See Kristen J. Sollee (2017), Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press), pp. 261–63. There is an enduring association between witchcraft and the crossing of the divide between girl and woman. Not only is the liminal space of adolescence closely associated with the transgressive power of the witch, but entering into the diabolical pact necessary to secure these supernatural abilities has long been viewed as synonymous with entering legal adulthood. As Sollee observes, “it was largely because of the witch trials that a woman’s testimony would come to be admissible. Up until that time, women were considered dependents of their husbands or male family members and were mostly ignored by European courts”. Sollee goes on to cite Anne Barstow, who writes, “European women first emerged into full legal adulthood as witches, [and] they were

Adolescent Femininity & the Gothic Uncanny  89 first accorded independent legal status in order to be prosecuted for witchcraft”. See Witches, Sluts, Feminists, Chapter 2. 8 For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Anne Braude (2001), Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 9 Clover (2015) notes here that, while The Fury depicts both male and female adolescents as possessing psychic abilities, the film nevertheless frames telekinesis as the purview of the feminine or feminized (p. 71). 10 See Martin (2013), “Feminine Adolescence as Uncanny”, for lengthy discussions of this topic.

Bibliography Beauvoir, S. de (1956) The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley. London: Johnathon Cape. Bradbury, R. (1952) “The April Witch”, in The Saturday Evening Post, April 5, pp. 31, 46, 51–52. ———. (1972) The Halloween Tree. New York: Knopf. ———. R. (2001a) “Afterward”, in From the Dust Returned. New York: William Morrow, pp. 199–204. ———. (2001b) “The Sleeper and Her Dreams”, in From the Dust Returned. New York: William Morrow, pp. 17–20. ———. (2001c) “The Town and the Place”, in From the Dust Returned. New York: William Morrow, pp. 7–10. ———. (2001d) “The Wandering Witch”, in From the Dust Returned. New York: William Morrow, pp. 21–36. ———. (2006) “My Demon, Not Afraid of Happiness”, in Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars. Kindle ed. New York: Harper Perennial, chapter 1. Braude, A. (2001) Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth- Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Byron, G. & Deans, S. (2014) “Teen Gothic”, in Hogle, J. E. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 87–103. Clover, C. J. (2015) Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Creed, B. (2001) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Ellerhoff, S. G. (2016) Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut: Golden Apples of the Monkey House. London: Routledge. Fiedler, L. A. (2003) Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Freud, S. (1919) “The Uncanny”, in Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 217–56. Grosz, E. A. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, H. (1998) The Bostonians. Kindle edn. New York: Oxford University Press, Kindle, chapter 4.

90  Miranda Corcoran Kahan, J. (2015) Shakespiritualism: Shakespeare and the Occult, 1850–1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kapsalis, T. (2017) “Hysteria, Witches, and the Wandering Uterus: A Brief History”. Literary Hub. Available at: http://lithub.com/hysteria-witches-and-thewandering-uterus-a-brief-history/ (Accessed: January 18, 2018). Kissling, E. A. (2002) “On the Rag on Screen: Menarche in Film and Television”. Sex Roles 46(1), pp. 5–12. Kristeva, J. (1982) The Powers of Horror, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Martin, D. (2013) “Feminine Adolescence as Uncanny: Masculinity, Haunting and Self-Estrangement”. Forum for Modern Language Studies 49(2), pp. 135–44. Peterson, K. L. (2006) “Historica Passio: Early Modern Medicine, King Lear, and Editorial Practice”. Shakespeare Quarterly 57(1), pp. 1–22. Punter, D. (1999) Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body, and the Law. London: Macmillan Press. Rodgers Johns, T. (2016) “‘Moist Caves’ and ‘Bloody Chambers’ — The Adolescent Female Body and Sexuality in Modern Horror and Gothic”. Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@trodgersjohns (Accessed April 20, 2018). Schiff, S. (2015a) “The Witches of Salem”. The New Yorker. Available at: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/the-witches-of-salem (Accessed: May 23, 2018). ———. (2015b) The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Sollee, K. J. (2017) Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Thurston, R. W. (2013) The Witch Hunts: A History of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North America. London: Routledge. Warner, M. (2012) Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watson, A. (2016) “Erotic Ectoplasmic Birth: Vaginas and Scientific Probing in the Age of Spiritualism”. Dirge Magazine. Available at: http://www.dirgemag. com/erotic-ectoplasmic-birth-vaginas-scientific-probing-age-spiritualism/ (Accessed: April 20, 2017). Wilson, C. (2015) The Occult. London: Watkins.

5

“Other Ways of Being” Ray Bradbury’s “The April Witch” in Conversation with Jamaica Kincaid’s “In the Night” and Leonora Carrington’s “The Seventh Horse” Melanie Otto

The Guyanese writer Pauline Melville opens her 2012 Edgar Mitteholzer Memorial Lecture with a reference to a peculiar empty space in the National Museum of Guyana in Georgetown. The museum, which is otherwise organized after the principles of Western science, had reserved this empty space for the nation’s ghosts and spirits, acknowledging that in the wider context of the national narrative the magical and the mundane coexist. In her lecture, Melville extends this idea to the continent of South America as a whole, arguing that the “marvelous real [lo real maravilloso]” of the Americas (Carpentier 1995, p. 84) offers different ways of being to that of the Global North.1 Caribbean and South American writers have often been vocal in proposing that theirs is a different world from that of the Northern Hemisphere, which is heavily influenced by Europe, and that the southern parts of the Americas are, in fact, creators of “autochthonous meaning” (Torres-Saillant 2005, p. 43). Following on from the previous chapter, which investigates “The April Witch” as an expression of post-war cultural anxieties about transgressive female adolescence, this chapter provides a complementary analysis of the folkloric facets of the tale, while also engaging with how Bradbury’s story queers normative gender identities and the patriarchal family. In this context, I read “The April Witch” as an expression of an alternative, spiritual, world order within the Global, and more specifically American, North. Drawing on the concepts of shapeshifting and dream journeying in creole and indigenous American folklore, I set “The April Witch” in conversation with Jamaica Kincaid’s “In the Night” and Leonora Carrington’s “The Seventh Horse” to highlight Bradbury’s creative kinship with writers whose work is an expression of the “marvellous real” of the Americas. 2 In an interview with Sheryl Gifford (2012) for Small Axe, one of the leading scholars on Caribbean feminist thought, Evelyn O’Callaghan,

92  Melanie Otto outlines her approach to teaching texts to students at university that thematize non-heteronormative desire: “My intentions [are] quite political; I want to open their minds, question certain things that they think about gender and identity in particular, and suggest the possibility of other ways of being [and/or] being woman”. O’Callaghan’s approach speaks to a broader reading of the Caribbean as a queer space, as, for example, articulated by Alison Donnell (2015): Certainly, in as much as it is marked by a proliferation of cultural overlappings and ethnic heterogeneities that not only undo the possibility for singular normativities or deterministic signatures of being, but also diminish the epistemological moorings that uphold such regimes of the normal, the Caribbean can be understood as a queer place. (par. 4) In other words, the Caribbean and—by extension—Latin America are spaces where the normativities of the North are performed incorrectly. In this case, incorrect performance is a deliberate but not necessarily blatant act of Southern Hemisphere rebellion and as such resonates with colonial mimicry. In The Location of Culture (2004), Homi K. Bhabha argues: “Mimicry is […] a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline” on the one hand (p. 122) and “an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” on the other (p. 123). Between “the demand for identity” and the need to maintain the “difference” between the colonial power and its subjects, “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (p.  122). What Bhabha calls “the menace of mimicry” (p. 126), i.e. the subversive power of a “flawed colonial mimesis” (p. 125), exists “at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept concealed” (p. 128). It is in this way that incorrect performance functions in Bradbury’s work. By introducing the Elliotts into the normative space of the North American family, Bradbury queers and deconstructs the patriarchal unit: the Elliotts mimic the normative American family and, as Bradbury highlights, perform this nuclear social structure incorrectly by living an alternative model. To begin with, they have a long tradition of female heads of the family. In addition, none of their members, except Timothy, are human but appear as such as they go about their daily business. The Ellliotts thus exist “at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept concealed”. Indeed, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (2016) argues: “We ought not to think of a monolithic American Family […] but rather of American families” as the families depicted in Bradbury’s stories “defy a reductive understanding of them as representative of all white middle class American families” (p. 111).

“Other Ways of Being”  93 “The April Witch” is one of the original Elliott family stories that appear dispersed across several of Bradbury’s collections, as well as individually in magazines.3 The seventeen-year-old Cecy has the ability to leave her body and send her spirit in magical flight over the countryside, where it can merge at will with any living or inanimate part of the universe. In “The April Witch”, Cecy expresses her desire to experience romantic love and, against the warning of her parents that she will lose her magical abilities if she marries a human, sends her spirit in pursuit of this desire. Yet, she does so vicariously and in keeping with her nature: she enters the body of a young woman, Ann, and forces her to attend a country dance with Tom, who is in love with Ann. Ann herself has no interest in Tom, but Cecy is drawn to him and, at the end of the story, invites him to visit the real Cecy at her home. Bradbury’s work tends to be read as postmodernist rather than modernist, yet “The April Witch” shares many stylistic similarities with modernist writing and is also among the most poetic of the original Elliott family stories. The lyrical cadence of the writing and dream-like atmosphere of the story are reminiscent of Dylan Thomas or Kate Chopin, the latter especially interesting in this context. Much of Chopin’s work deals with love and sex, and in terms of setting straddles the divide between North America and the Caribbean. Scholarship on Chopin’s short fiction in particular has noted the somnolent quality of her language, evoking the rocking of cradles, the rhythm of waves, and the sensation of “fingers on flesh” (Thrailkill 2008, p. 35), all of which are of importance too in The Awakening (1899). The cadence of Chopin’s prose together with its references to water and the physical movement of bodies lends her work a sensual and sensuous quality that is mirrored – in The Awakening – in the sexual awakening of the novel’s main character, Edna Pontellier. Bradbury’s use of language in “The April Witch” has a similar effect and serves the same purpose. The opening passage evokes Cecy’s dream-journeying nature, the rhythm of her flight, and her capacity to inhabit other forms of being: “She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew” (1977, p. 25). Later, when Cecy, in Ann’s body, is dancing with Tom, the language evokes the rhythm of the dance: The music whirled them in dimness, in rivers of song; they floated, they bobbed, they sank down, they arose for air, they gasped, they clutched each other like drowning people and whirled on again, in fan motions, in whispers and sighs. (p. 31) What is striking about this passage in particular is that both the rhythm and choice of language also suggest the sexual act.

94  Melanie Otto Cecy enters Ann to experience human love, which Bradbury casts as a traditional heterosexual romance by seemingly making Tom the primary focus of Cecy’s attention. However, Cecy’s experience and expression of sexuality across the Elliott family stories is closer to pansexual than heterosexual. “West of October”, published in The Toynbee Convector in 1989, is the most explicit of the stories in relation to Cecy’s sexuality, who is here described as “multitudinous as a pomegranate” (p. 64): I have been in a girl’s warm summer face and looked out at a young man, and I have been in that same young man […] gazing at that forever summer girl. I have lived in mating mice or circling lovebirds or bleeding-heart doves […]. (p. 73) Cecy has, in other words, experienced a woman’s desire for a man as much as a man’s desire for a woman and an animal’s desire for its mate, and has consummated that desire. The pomegranate was sacred to several ancient Greek goddesses, including Aphrodite, who was particularly associated with the aphrodisiac qualities of the fruit. The alignment of Cecy with the pomegranate in “West of October” thus implicitly associates her with Aphrodite, goddess of erotic love. At the same time, the fruit is also associated with Persephone and therefore the realm of knowledge forbidden to mortals: that of the dead and the underworld. This, however, is knowledge readily available to Cecy who is neither human nor mortal. In the case of Cecy, this knowledge can be extended even further to where it embraces both that of Persephone and Aphrodite: in her pansexuality Cecy has an understanding of the erotic that goes beyond the human and crosses over into the animal kingdom, thus becoming erotic knowledge that is transgressive and forbidden to humans. In “The April Witch”, however, Bradbury expresses Cecy’s transgressive desire in more muted terms, reflecting in part her inexperienced adolescence but also the more conservative environment of 1950s America: “It’s spring, thought Cecy. I’ll be in every living thing in the world tonight” (Bradbury 1977, p. 25); spring is, of course, symbolic of nature’s awakening procreative urge. Despite the seemingly tame expression of erotic desire in “The April Witch”, the character of Cecy remains transgressive in essence and as violent and cruel as she is in “Homecoming”, “The Traveller” and – to a lesser extent – in “West of October”, Cecy can be said to experiment with the idea of being human without fully engaging in human empathy, to the point that she kills one of her human hosts in “Homecoming” just for the pleasure of it (Bradbury 1998, p. 286).4 There are several other parallels with The Awakening, apart from the rhythmic language, that may be instructive to consider. Queer readings of The Awakening have suggested that while the narrative is constructed

“Other Ways of Being”  95 around the heterosexual romance between Edna and Robert, Edna’s sexual awakening is, in fact, triggered by the female characters around her. Beginning with Adèle Ratignolle’s caresses in the beach house early in the narrative and culminating in the quasi-orgasmic crescendo of Mademoiselle Reisz’s music, Edna’s sexual desire is activated by her intimate contact with other women (Weber 2014). Chopin describes Edna’s interactions with both women in great sensual detail, whereas her parting kiss with Robert seems almost chaste by comparison. In “The April Witch”, the romantic encounter between Tom and Ann/Cecy is similarly chaste, whereas Cecy’s experience of Ann’s body is described in almost erotic terms. Even the way Cecy enters Ann’s body has sensual overtones  – as water “lifted to the girl’s warm lips” (Bradbury 1977, p. 26), which in its central image (water) directly echoes Chopin’s text. The bathing scene that follows has a more direct erotic connotation, with “the flesh of [Ann’s] warm breasts moving in her hands” (p. 29). While it is clearly Ann who performs the bathing movements, it is Cecy who feels and experiences them in a sensual way.5 Cecy’s transgressive desire also manifests in her forced possession of Ann’s body, which can be read as an act of rape and, with reference to the pomegranate metaphor discussed a moment ago, an act of deflowering. In The Continuum Encyclopedia of Symbols (1994), Udo Becker writes that “[o]pening a pomegranate is occasionally also seen in symbolic relation to deflowering” (p. 239). In “The April Witch”, Cecy desires her own deflowering but, at least in the first instance, attempts to perform it on and through Ann. However, since it is Cecy’s spirit that possesses Ann’s body, the act is perhaps more closely related to various forms of spirit possession. Belief in spirit possession exists in a great number of cultures around the world, including demonic possession or possession by the Holy Spirit in some Christian traditions, but for the purpose of this chapter the Caribbean context of this phenomenon is of most importance. In Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santería, for example, possession by African and creole spirits is reciprocal. The spirits cannot communicate with the devotees unless the latter give themselves up “to become an instrument in a social and collective drama” (Dayan 1997, p.  19 in Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2011, p.  135). Spirit possession is, in fact, a fundamental way of connecting with the ancestral heritage of the African diaspora (Dayan 1998, p.  33 qtd. in Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2011, p.  116). Unlike Cecy’s possession of Ann, inviting spirits to take possession of the devotee or “horse” is a voluntary act on the part of the devotee and serves the purpose of spiritual survival and belonging. Moreover, in creole religions a female spirit may possess a male devotee and vice versa, turning the devotional space into a queer space. The principle, however, is similar to forced – demonic – possession: the “horse” is used as a vessel, a way for a spirit to participate in human life.

96  Melanie Otto Bradbury makes no direct reference to Haitian Vodou or any other creole religions in his work. However, in 1929, William Seabrook published The Magic Island, an account of his travels to Haiti. Seabrook was among the first to introduce an American readership to the figure of the zombie. The first American zombie films followed shortly after, most notably White Zombie (1932), the film version of Seabrook’s book, and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), a Caribbean retelling of Jane Eyre. It is likely that Bradbury had read or at least heard of Seabrook’s book and, with his life-long passion for and his professional engagement with the cinema, had seen both films. The otherness of Bradbury’s Elliott family and Cecy more specifically may be directly related to this context. Western popular culture has adopted the Haitian version of the zombie – the zombi corps cadavre or animated corpse (Davis 1988, p. 8). In Haitian folklore, the zombie is enslaved and controlled by a sorcerer through magic and as a result loses his or her personal freedom, autonomy, and sense of self – in short, everything that makes us human (pp. 8–9). The zombie is an apt analogy for how Cecy inhabits and controls her human hosts. The woman – or rather the seemingly soulless husk – who sleepwalks to her death in “Homecoming” after Cecy leaves her body is perhaps the closest any of the original Elliott stories come to referencing the idea of zombification. The zombie remained the most prominent figure from Caribbean folklore to be exported from its homeland. Yet in the Caribbean itself, the supernatural appears in a great variety of manifestations, and some of these have a central role in the stories of Jamaica Kincaid. “In the Night” first appeared in The New Yorker in 1978 and draws on Kincaid’s childhood in the Caribbean. The text forms part her 1983 collection At the Bottom of the River and is – like “The April Witch” – a narrative about a sleeping body and a dreaming, wandering mind. Many of the “stories” collected in At the Bottom of the River are closer to prose poems than narrative prose and in their poetic use of language and rhythm seem stylistically related to Bradbury’s writing. At the Bottom of the River as a whole is a coming-of-age narrative and explores other ways of being a young girl in the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of the narrative subtly subverts gender normativity in a racially stratified society with its roots in plantation slavery while at the same time seeming to uphold that same normative ideal. The book also rewrites the patriarchal narrative of the biblical Fall, retelling the story through the complex bond between mother and daughter who, in the process, eclipse the patriarchal God. Within this larger postcolonial and feminist critique, “In the Night” records a series of dream states narrated by the nameless girl protagonist, into which the equally nameless mother at times intrudes. The mother introduces the jablesse, a shapeshifting figure from French-Caribbean folklore that becomes one of the central images in the

“Other Ways of Being”  97 collection.6 In the first instance, the mother warns against the charms of the jablesse: It’s a person who can turn into anything. But you can tell they aren’t real because of their eyes. Their eyes shine like lamps, so bright that you can’t look. That’s how you can tell it’s a jablesse. They like to go up in the mountains and gallivant. Take good care when you see a beautiful woman. A jablesse always tries to look like a beautiful woman. (Kincaid 1997, p. 9) The jablesse is associated with gender deviance, a beautiful woman who pursues her own pleasure, but her independence and shapeshifting qualities also provide the girl with a model of resistance against the “proper”, i.e. passive and chaste, femininity implied in the mother’s warning. Shapeshifting here is not only a way of evading patriarchal and colonial control through magic but also a powerful metaphor for the girl’s coming of age, of a girl’s “shape” that is “shifting” into the shape of a young woman. The jablesse acts as the dreaming girl’s alter ego, the kind of woman the girl would like to become. Here too, as in Bradbury’s story, the figure of the jablesse is associated with sexual maturity and the pursuit of pleasure. Ann can certainly be read as an alter ego or more mature version of Cecy, though with some inversions: whereas Cecy longs for heterosexual romance, the pleasure the girl-jablesse pursues defies heteronormative desire. “In the Night” ends with the girl’s fantasy of living with another woman: “Now I am a girl, but one day I will marry a woman – a red-skin woman with black bramblebush hair and brown eyes, who wears skirts that are so big I can easily bury my head in them” (p. 11). The homoerotic undertone of this passage suggests that Kincaid’s text explores kinship patterns outside of the patriarchal family (see also Valens 2004). The older woman is also suggestive of an alternative mother figure to the one upholding gender normativity. Indeed, it can be argued that the maternal figure in the story herself shapeshifts from “good” mother to jablesse. In this way, the text suggests that there is no boundary between mother and daughter. This boundary confusion is also articulated at the level of the text itself: the passage in which the jablesse is first discussed begins with “What’s a jablesse?”, but it is unclear whether the girl or the mother is asking the question or who is answering, or who is speaking at any one point in the story. In a similarly fluid way, suggesting the fluidity of dream thought, the text speaks of the pink lips of a newborn, who subsequently morphs into a lamb and then draws the girl’s attention to the mother’s pink lips, the latter again evoked in an eroticized way (Kincaid 1997, p. 8). Cecy’s inhabiting of others similarly creates boundary confusion with her hosts and also, as we have seen, in an eroticized way. As such, the

98  Melanie Otto jablesse is a fitting alter ego for Cecy for this and other reasons. Jablesse is a feminized version of jab or djab, a creole form of the French diable, devil. Traditionally, the jablesse has the appearance of “a beautiful woman who lures men away from safety into harm” (Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2011, p.  180). She has a cloven foot which she hides under her long skirts, evoking the skirts of the woman the girl wants to marry. In Lafcadio Hearn’s “La Guiablesse” in Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), the jablesse’s true nature is revealed just before her male victim meets his fatal end (see also Gugolati 2018). Cecy, like the jablesse, appears to be human but is not. She hides her non-human nature by using human vessels. At the same time, Cecy possesses her hosts in the way the spirits of the African diaspora possess their “horses” or demons possess human bodies. It is in this latter aspect that Cecy acts, as a “female devil” or demon with regard to the unwilling Ann. The reference to the jablesse as a feminized version of the Christian devil also evokes the story of the biblical Fall. At the Bottom of the River as a whole, though “In the Night” to a lesser extent, reflects on Milton’s Paradise Lost, an important intertext of Kincaid’s work. In the later story “My Mother”, the mother herself is identified with the jablesse as she teaches her daughter to shapeshift into a snake. The snake of course evokes Satan, and the story mentions a “Garden of Fruits” reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. Yet the Garden of Fruits is not a forbidden place but somewhere where both mother and daughter can eat “to [their] hearts’ satisfaction” (Kincaid 1997, p.  56) without fearing the expulsion by a wrathful patriarchal God. In keeping with her response to the biblical story of the Fall, Kincaid alludes to the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Sometimes referred to as a pomegranate, it introduces Adam and Eve to pleasure but also to the kind of knowledge that is available to God but forbidden to mortals: knowledge of death and the underworld. Kincaid’s mother and daughter are free to enter and leave the garden as they please and taste of its aphrodisiac pleasures and forbidden knowledge alike without punishment. In addition, Kincaid’s depiction of the mother-daughter relationship evokes the bond between Demeter and Persephone, queer readings of which emphasize the erotic dimension and passionate love between the two women in the Greek myth (Downing 2006, pp. 201–4; Grahn 2000, pp. 33–5; Vanita 1996, pp.  65–7). Judy Grahn (2000) in particular relates the pomegranate to “female power, menstrual and clitoral” (p. 35), and Merlin Stone proposed in her 1976 classic When God Was a Woman: “Symbols such as serpents, sacred fruit trees and sexually tempting women who took advice from serpents may once have been understood by people of biblical times to symbolize the familiar presence of the female deity” (p. 198) of the pre-Christian Mediterranean and Middle Eastern goddess cults.

“Other Ways of Being”  99 This takes us back full circle to the jablesse, the female “devil” who has the power to shapeshift into a snake. In the Christian tradition, shapeshifting and hybridity are the work of the devil. In Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, Marina Warner (2002) observes that “[i]n medieval eschatology, metamorphosis by almost any process belongs to the devil’s party” (p. 35) and that “in the Christian heaven, nothing is mutable, whereas in hell, everything combines and recombines in terrible amalgams” (p.  36). In Kincaid’s postcolonial feminist and queer rewriting of the Paradise story, magical transformation is placed back into the very heart of heaven. This all-female space outside of the patriarchal order resembles Melville’s space reserved for ghosts and spirits in the National Museum of Guyana: a different world order, another way of being, that exists alongside the obvious and dominant one. Gardens, enclosed magical spaces, and interspecies hybridity are also at the heart of Carrington’s work. The Alcove, a painting by the Argentine artist and contemporary of Carrington’s, Leonor Fini, shows Carrington in the pose of romantic heroine with breast plate and wild hair, defending an intimate moment between two women at the far recess of the eponymous alcove. Executed – like much of Fini’s work – in the style of Italian Mannerism, the painting lends itself to a queer reading not only through its subject matter but also in its execution. According to The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts, Mannerism may have appeal for a queer audience due to “its long rejection by mainstream art history”, therefore representing a cultural marginalization that finds echoes in that of queer communities (Thomas 2004, p.  125). Fini’s painting suggests Carrington’s own queering of her gender and social position, showing the fellow artist defending – Joan-of-Arc style – an all-female intimate space. While neither Carrington’s visual work nor her writing exhibit any of the homoerotic suggestion of Fini’s painting, or indeed Kincaid’s and Bradbury’s texts, Carrington’s depiction of animal-human relationships and inter-species hybridity certainly critiques the gender roles implied by her upper-class English upbringing, on the one hand, and the stereotyping of women as muses and lovers by her male Surrealist contemporaries, on the other. “The Seventh Horse”, written in 1941, dates from a period of great personal upheaval and “multiple uprootings” for Carrington (Levitt 1996, p. 68). Fleeing the German invasion of France during World War II, Carrington had married a Mexican diplomat and secured passage to the US. She wrote “The Seventh Horse” in New York where the couple stayed before moving to Mexico, the country that was to become Carrington’s home for the rest of her life. All three of Carrington’s New York stories, “Waiting”, “White Rabbits”, and “The Seventh Horse”, thematize waiting, entrapment – a limbo existence – as well as the loss of love and companionship. Much of Carrington’s work has been read autobiographically, which inevitably brings with it its own critical

100  Melanie Otto limitations. However, images of violence, liminality, and disease that appear in these stories do to an extent reflect Carrington’s position as a refugee, her traumatic escape from Europe, and the loss of her great love, the artist Max Ernst. Thematically, too, “The Seventh Horse” is a transitional story between Carrington’s refugee experience and her settling in Mexico. As the last of the New York stories, it begins with images of entrapment but ends with metaphors suggesting release, freedom, and rebirth or, as Annette Shandler Levitt (1996) suggests, an emergence from conflict (p. 72). While animals abound in Carrington’s fiction, painting, and sculpture, this story has as its central character an animal-human hybrid, a horse-woman named Hevalino. The story begins in a garden with Hevalino caught among the bramble bushes and in a state of anguish. She is introduced merely as “[a] strange-looking creature” (Carrington 2017, p.  82) and Carrington never reveals what Hevalino actually looks like. However, Hevalino lives in the stable and appears in the company of horses. This, together with the horse-human child that is given birth to at the end of the story, suggests that Hevalino is part horse and part woman. In recent scholarship on animals in literature and in the wider context of the environmental humanities, animal-human hybridity is seen as queering the species divide. Queer scholarship more specifically sees a potential alignment between queers and animals (Teed 2015). As such, Carrington’s work can be read as anticipating these debates, though she was influenced primarily by the Surrealists’ interest in hybridity and figures such as the Minotaur, which was the movement’s symbol of choice. The horse appears consistently across Carrington’s visual and written work and acts as her own alter ego, an expression of her true spiritual identity (Colville 2009, p. 65). In her 1937/8 Self-Portrait, which is subtitled The Inn of the Dawn Horse, we see Carrington again with wild hair and in the company of a hyena, a rocking horse, and a live white horse galloping away in the distance. The hyena is a direct reference to the story “The Debutante” in which a young woman refuses to go to the debutantes’ ball but sends a hyena in human clothes in her stead, with disastrous consequences. The rocking horse gestures toward “The Oval Lady”, a story about a young girl and her rocking horse that turns out to be inanimate and alive at the same time and is later destroyed by her father. Both stories clearly speak to the end of adolescence and the initiation into heteronormative femininity, which all of Carrington’s protagonists try to resist. The horse more specifically is often read in the context of Carrington’s Irish heritage, where it is linked to the triple goddess of the Ulster Cycle. Of Badb, Macha, and Morrigan, it is Macha who is particularly aligned with the horse and fertility: “[…] she gives birth to twins as she is forced to race against the kings’ horses” (Mahon 2013, p.  136). This detail is instructive to consider in our reading of “The Seventh Horse”.

“Other Ways of Being”  101

Figure 5.1 “Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)” (oil on canvas, c.a. 1937–8), by the British-born Mexican painter and author Leonora Carrington (1917–2011). The image is currently in the Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, which is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, The Metropolitan Museum © Photo SCALA, Florence.

As powerful shapeshifters, the Irish goddesses also appear in the form of birds and are, in their wider association with witchcraft, linked to “wild landscapes” (Michelet 2010, p. 82 qtd. in Mahon 2013, p. 139). We meet Hevalino in a garden that belongs to the couple Mildred and Philip. The story tells us that Mildred and Hevalino are enemies, but that Philip and the male gardener have a fondness for the horse-woman. The garden is a tamed rather than wild landscape, and here also a space that is policed by Mildred, a character associated with chastity and the rejection of all forms of sexual desire. The thorns in which Hevalino is caught and from which the gardener frees her are suggestive of an attempt to tame the wildness and transgressiveness of Hevalino’s animal nature. Significantly, Mildred’s companion Miss Myrtle observes: “The creature seems to have no modesty” (Carrington 2017, p. 82), evoking the same transgressive desire manifest in both Cecy and Kincaid’s girl-jablesse.

102  Melanie Otto Significantly, Hevalino does not live in the cultivated part of the garden but in a wild area “where all the flowers, trees and plants grew tangled together. […] Nobody went there except Hevalino” (p. 83), who is followed by the six horses belonging to Philip. In addition, and similar to “The April Witch”, “The Seventh Horse” is set in spring, the season of burgeoning libido. The marriage between Mildred and Philip is characterized by a lack of passion, yet Mildred claims to be pregnant with Philip’s child. Bullied and infantilized by Mildred, Philip retreats first to the attic and then to the stables. The story suggests that Philip, “the friend of the horses” (p. 86), is also a hybrid creature, which in this instance gives full expression to his animal passions. Hevalino, the text implies, becomes the seventh horse of the story and Philip leaps on her back: “The mare galloped as if her heart would burst. All the time Philip was in a great ecstasy of love; he felt […] that they were one creature” (p. 86). The text clearly suggests sexual ecstasy between Philip and the mare Hevalino, an act that is in keeping with myths surrounding the Celtic horse goddess. The story ends with the birth of a foal and as such recalls the stories around the Irish Macha. After Philip’s and Hevalino’s night of passion, Mildred is found as if trampled to death by the horses, and one may speculate that the foal is Mildred’s child (see, for example, Levitt 1996, p.  74). Hevalino herself has disappeared. While the story remains inconclusive about the genealogy of the foal, Mildred is the only one who is mentioned in conjunction with pregnancy in the story. Philip claims not to have been with her sexually, so he is not a likely candidate for the foal’s paternity. This suggests that either Mildred too is a “lover of horses”, which is what the name Philip literally means in Greek, or Hevalino and Mildred are two parts of the same persona, alter egos, like the chaste and passive girl invoked by the normative mother in “In the Night” and the jablesse who pursues her own pleasure, like the unwilling Ann and Cecy who possesses her. The doubling of and boundary confusion between characters is something that all three stories have in common and is at its most pronounced in Kincaid, who also blurs the narrative voices. Caribbean writers like Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, and Kamau Brathwaite have emphasized that Caribbean reality is best understood through a non-binary way of thinking. The merging of cultures, races, and languages is, in fact, a central aspect of the region’s processes of creolization. The kind of spirit possession performed by Cecy on Ann falls in line with this as it shows parallels with the form of spirit possession found in creole religions. In addition, the idea of doubling also evokes Bhabha’s reference to the “menace of mimicry”, i.e. “its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (Bhabha 2004, p. 126). The blurring of categories and the play with hybridity was particularly attractive to Surrealism. Carrington’s horse-woman evokes a number of

“Other Ways of Being”  103 forebears among the male Surrealists. A woman with the head of a horse appears in Max Ernst’s illustrations of Carrington’s The House of Fear, and the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam began to develop his femme cheval in the early 1940s. Lam was aware of Ernst’s work, though his femme cheval, especially in its later manifestations, is most often read in the context of Santería, which became central to Lam’s work after his return to Cuba and where the “horse” refers to the devotee, as in Haitian Vodou (Sims 2002, p. 117). Carrington’s own interest in animal imagery deepened after she arrived in Mexico, as did her engagement with the indigenous mythology of her adopted home (Colville 2009, p. 65). Here shapeshifting from human to animal is associated with indigenous Mexican beliefs in naguals. The term nagual “originally refer[s] to a transforming witch” who temporarily uses “an animal or other form for the purposes of sorcery” (Kaplan 1956, p. 363). Linked to shamanic practices of shapeshifting, nagualism has at times been interpreted as a hybrid practice incorporating indigenous beliefs in animal totems (tonalism) as well as Old World beliefs in witches (p. 368). Moreover, some sources describe the nagual in a way that aligns very closely with both the Caribbean jablesse and with Bradbury’s mind-wandering Cecy: “The female witch can convert herself into a ball of fire; she has the power of flight, and at night will enter the windows and suck the blood of little children” (Orozco y Berra 1880, p. 25 in Brinton 1894, p. 18).7 In Kincaid’s “In the Night”, this figure – a soucouyant or female vampire, a sister manifestation of the jablesse – appears as “a woman who has removed her skin and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies” (Kincaid 1997, p.  6), while in “The April Witch” it is Cecy herself who says: “I can leave my plain, bony body behind and send my mind far out for adventure” (Bradbury 1977, p. 26). In addition, “the esoteric doctrines of Nagualism were related to the worship of the reproductive powers of nature” (Brinton 1894, p. 58), which resonates with the emphasis on sex in all three stories. For Carrington, the horse and its women-centered mythology represent a liberating narrative. Kincaid’s jablesse not only provides her charge with a different way of pursuing pleasure but also with a way to survive in a world that has inherited the violence of plantation slavery. Likewise, Cecy’s magical flight leaves her free to act out lives she would otherwise not experience. At the same time, the context of flight and shapeshifting speaks to a background of exile that all three stories have in common. Cecy is a wandering soul, spending most of her time in exile from her own body and inhabiting the husks and lives of others, ultimately unable (or unwilling?) to fully belong to human society, the animal kingdom, or the inanimate world. For Cecy, the freedom she possesses is therefore also tinged with loss. In addition, Cecy reflects Bradbury’s Swedish heritage and the Swedish diaspora in the American Midwest: in Sweden children dress up as April or Easter witches on

104  Melanie Otto Easter Sunday, knocking on neighbors’ doors for treats, similar to the Irish and American Halloween traditions (Dacey-Fondelius). The title of Bradbury’s story is suggestive of this custom as well as its proximity to Valborgsmässafton or Walpurgis Night. Hevalino, girl-jablesse, and Cecy are hybrid creatures, part human and part another species, part American in the hemispheric sense and in part from elsewhere. As such, they experience multiple forms of exile as they challenge their respective societies’ claim to normativity. Finally, the belief in and expression of a magical reality connects Bradbury to the world inhabited by Kincaid and Carrington. Magic challenges our beliefs in the order of things and gestures toward alternative ways of being. This returns our analysis to Melville’s observation of the museum space reserved for ghosts and spirits: in the National Museum of Guyana two systems of knowledge are allowed to coexist, and this too happens in “The April Witch”, “In the Night”, and “The Seventh Horse”. Bradbury’s story concludes with Cecy’s intention to continue the romance with Tom: she invites him to her real home, so that he may get to know the real Cecy. Ironically, engaging in human heterosexual love would deprive Cecy of her magical powers, though from the context of her own queer and non-normative existence – which for Cecy is frustratingly restrictive in this case – a successful love relationship with Tom would be the ultimate transgressive act. Yet, one wonders whether Cecy would not find a way to retain some of her former magical existence. After all, Uncle Einar does not fully lose his ability to fly, despite entering into marriage with a human woman. Ultimately, all three stories show distrust of binary thinking and propose alternatives. Just like Kincaid’s girl performs both passive femininity and rebellious jablesse simultaneously and Carrington’s Hevalino is both woman and horse, using each persona to navigate a world made by others, Cecy may hold on to both ways of being, thus granting her access to and survival in both worlds.

Notes 1 The Global North refers to the developed world, i.e. the First and most of the former Second World as centers of world political and economic power, as opposed to the developing or Third World of the Global South. 2 Not as unlikely a conversation as it may at first appear. Kincaid’s “My Mother” from At the Bottom of the River and Carrington’s “White Rabbits” were anthologized together with Bradbury’s “The Crowd” in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (2011) The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. 3 In 2001, they were collected and expanded in the characteristic Bradbury novel-in-stories, From the Dust Returned. In this chapter, I focus on the version published in The Golden Apples of the Sun. 4 My idea for this comes from my reading around the ogbanje or spirit children in West African Igbo culture. Misty Bastian (2002) defines ogbanje as follows: “Ogbaanje are, first and foremost, what my Igbo friends would call (when feeling charitable) ‘returning children’. Such a returning child

“Other Ways of Being”  105 embodies, in the human world, a mischievous, spiritual person – one who is interested in human life, who could almost be said to experiment with the idea of being human, but who is not him/herself human and who has little interest in committing to a human lineage” (p. 59). 5 It is interesting to note that this line does not appear in the 1952 or the 1985 Saturday Evening Post version of the story. 6 Kincaid was raised in Antigua, a British colony until 1981 when it became Antigua and Barbuda. Kincaid’s mother, however, was from Dominica, which underwent French as well as British colonization. As a result, both French creole and English are spoken in Dominica, with the folk culture of the slaves and their descendants heavily influenced by the earlier French presence in the island. See Braziel 2009 and MacDonald-Smythe 1999 for discussions of the jablesse in Kincaid’s work. 7 Orozco y Berra’s Spanish original reads as follows: “La bruja convertida en una bola de fuego, vuela durante la noche, y penetra en las casas á chupar la sangre de los niños pequeñitos”. Brinton must have done his own translation as he cites the Spanish source in his footnotes yet quotes the text in English.

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106  Melanie Otto ———. (1998) Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press. Donnell, A. (2015) “Entanglements of Root and Branches: The Queer Relations of the Caribbean Irish”, in Donnell, A., McGarrity, M. and O’Callaghan, E. (eds), Caribbean Irish Connections: Inter-Disciplinary Perspectives. Kindle edn. Kingston, Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press. Downing, C. (2006) Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love. New York: Author’s Choice Press. Ellerhoff, S. G. (2016) Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut: Golden Apples of the Monkey House. London: Routledge. Fernández Olmos, M. & Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2011) Creole Religions of the Caribbean: And Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo. Second Edition. Foreword by Joseph M. Murphy. New York: New York University Press. Gifford, S. (2012). “‘Other Ways of Being’: A Conversation with Evelyn O’Callaghan”. sx salon 8. Available at: http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/interviews/ other-ways-being (Accessed: April 7, 2019). Grahn, J. (2000) Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club. Gugolati, M. (2018) “La Djablesse: Between Martinique, Trinidad (and Tobago), and Its Pan-Caribbean Dimension”. Women, Gender, and Families of Color 6(2), pp. 151–80. Hearn, L. (1890) Two Years in the French West Indies. New York: Harper & Brothers. Kaplan, L. N. (1956) “Tonal and Nagual in Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico”. The Journal of American Folklore 69(274), pp. 363–8. Kincaid, J. (1997) At the Bottom of the River. London: Vintage. Levitt, A. S. (1996) “The Bestial Fictions of Leonora Carrington”. Journal of Modern Literature 20(1), pp. 65–74. MacDonald-Smythe, A. (1999) “Authorizing the Slut in Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River”. MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 2, pp. 96–113. Mahon, Al. (2013) “She Who Revealed: The Celtic Goddess in the Art of Leonora Carrington”, in Kissane S. (ed), Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist. Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, pp. 127–50. Melville, P. (2012) Guyanese Literature, Magic Realism and the South American Connection. Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lecture. Available at: https:// www.stabroeknews.com/2012/videos/11/30/mittelholzer-memorial-lecture/ (Accessed: April 7, 2019). Michelet, J. ([1863] 2010) La socière: The Witch of the Middle Ages. Fairford: Echo Library. Orozco y Berra, M. (1880) Historia Antigua y de la Conquista de México. Tomo Segundo. México: Tipografía de Gonzalo A. Esteva, San Juan de Letran número 6. Sims, L. S. (2000) Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923– 1982. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stone, M. (1976) When God Was a Woman. San Diego: Harcourt.

“Other Ways of Being”  107 Teed, C. R. (2015) Queering the Species Divide. MFA Thesis. University of Iowa. Available at: doi: 10.17077/etd.nmfw5twu (Accessed: April 10, 2019). Thrailkill, J. F. (2008) “Chopin’s Lyrical Anodyne for the Modern Soul”, in Ostman, Heather (ed), Kate Chopin in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 33–52. Thomas, J. A. (2004) “European Art: Mannerism”, in Summers, C. J. (ed), The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts. San Francisco: Cleis Press, pp. 123–5. Tinsley, O. N. (2011) “Songs for Ezili: Vodou Epistemologies of (Trans)gender”. Feminist Studies 37 (2), pp. 417–36. Torres-Saillant, S. (2005) An Intellectual History of the Caribbean. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Valens, K. (2004) “Obvious and Ordinary: Desire between Girls in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John”. Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (2), pp. 123–49. Vanita, R. (1996) Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press. VanderMeer, A. J. (2011) The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. London: Corvus. Warner, M. (2002) Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, S. G. (2014) Undermining Heteronormativity in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. MA Thesis. Cleveland State University. ETD Archive. 847. Available at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/etdarchive/847 (Accessed: April 10, 2019).

6

The Other in the Self A Hermeneutics of Otherness in Ray Bradbury’s “The Traveller” Cameron Wilson

The young protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s 1946 short story “The Traveller” can perform an incredible feat: while her body sits comfortably at home in her bedroom, her consciousness can travel from one mind to another, from the body of one being to the body of another. Cecy Elliott, the young woman with the ability to travel, also possesses the unique capacity to inhabit the experience of any animal, dog and crayfish alike, or even smaller life-forms, like amoebas pooled at the bottom of a glass of water. Cecy first takes flight in “The Traveller” from Weird Tales (1946), re-appears in “The April Witch” travels again in a revised version of “The Traveller” included in Collected Stories, and finds new life in Bradbury’s collection of Elliott Family stories, in the twentieth chapter of From The Dust Returned (2001).1 When the story opens, everyone is getting ready for bed. Cecy’s father complains that Cecy doesn’t contribute enough to the family—a charge that Cecy’s mother counters, saying that Cecy is the “most talented” (Weird Tales, p. 83) in the family, that she is “active” (p. 83). Cecy can run errands and gather useful information, extracted from “inside” the butchers or the town gossips (p. 83). Her father, though, wants Cecy to contribute more and plans on asking Cecy to find some kind of employment. Cecy’s mother suggests that he, the father, wait and sleep on it. Later, when Cecy wakes and eats breakfast, she catches her mother in a blank stare, and says that her father will change his mind and that she will demonstrate her usefulness. Cecy’s mother realizes that Cecy was inside her while she argued with Cecy’s father, and even says that she had “felt [Cecy] looking out from inside [her] head” (p. 83). Cecy returns to her room and begins to travel and shortly thereafter Uncle Jonn bursts on the scene. Uncle Jonn is an estranged member of the family, a man who turned in members of the Elliott family in exchange for remuneration. Uncle Jonn threatens to do the same to the rest of the Elliott family if Cecy, who can help Uncle Jonn exorcise his visions of the deceased family member he betrayed, will not help him. Cecy, however, is traveling, and Uncle Jonn leaves the Elliott home to go into town to find Cecy, who may be inside any one of the many people or animals in the town. The story switches to Uncle Jonn’s point of view, and we spend time with him in his paranoid state,

Other in the Self  109 as he feels threatened by every bird, statue, and person he sees, who may be hiding Cecy within. After more searching, and violence against birds and crayfish, Uncle Jonn goes to the sheriff to turn in the family, but fears that Cecy may be inside the sheriff. Uncle Jonn returns to the Elliott home, and upstairs, pleading with Cecy and Cecy’s mother, begging Cecy to return and help him, removes a knife from his pocket and stabs himself in the heart. Cecy returns to her physical form and declares that she was the “fear [Uncle Jonn] had in him” and that Cecy’s mother should report to father what she has done for the family by removing the threat of Uncle Jonn (p. 90). In all the Cecy stories, from Weird Tales to From the Dust Returned (2001), we find her navigating the challenges of her own life, with this incredible ability that both separates her from and binds her to others. Cecy’s character may change over the course of forty-five years and through numerous drafts, and the tone of the stories shifts as well, but her unique ability remains the same: Cecy can know first-hand what it feels like to be another being. Bradbury pays close attention to Cecy’s traveling, and invests several scenes with tactile imagery and vivid metaphors that construct a palpable internal world. The metaphors in “The Traveller”, in particular, are essential in sketching the subjectivities of the beings Cecy inhabits when she travels, and while the representations are not intended as precise phenomenological renderings, they do invite a number of important theoretical questions. Specifically, how does Bradbury deploy metaphor in figuring Otherness, in composing the mind as a space that we can inhabit, and then feel, from within, the sense impressions of that being? What theoretical tools are available to help us expose the richness of Bradbury’s figurations of alterity? How might figuring Otherness in a story lend itself to questions of an ethical relation to or regard for otherness? Diacritical hermeneutics, pioneered by the contemporary philosopher Richard Kearney, provides us with a tool for conceptualizing Otherness in such a way that Cecy’s traveling may be interpreted as more than just fanciful mind-hopping, but an interrogation of how we figure and interpret Otherness. Diacritical hermeneutics, with its dialogical model of the self-other relation, provides a means to interpret the Other that prevents the other from becoming “too foreign or the familiar too familiar”, avoiding “certain kinds of apophatic mysticism and deconstruction [that] run the former risk, [and] certain forms of psychoanalytic and New Age immanentism [that] run the latter” (Kearney 2003, p. 11). Diacritical hermeneutics, then, practices an “art of interpretation that respects the irreducible necessity of difference”, and the “crossing-over” of dialogue between self and other “does not imply the absorption or effacing of otherness”. It is “across … difference”, Kearney suggests, that we “find our semblables, similar in dissimilarity, dissimilar in similarity” (p.  22). For our purposes here, contact is useful in our examination of Otherness in Bradbury’s story,

110  Cameron Wilson and the idea and image of contact helps us synthesize three important elements in our exploration: the role of figurative language in calling attention to the embodied origins of metaphor, and the way that metaphor creates contact between a known (source domain) and unknown (target domain); the exploration of and emphasis on the lived experience of being another, as captured in ‘The Traveller’; and Kearney’s investigation into how an identification of self with Other invites the self into the domain of the ethical. In “The Traveller”, Otherness is presented in the form of a parallel first-person experience. Cecy’s traveling is a mechanism to lift the reader from his or her own first-person experience into the first-person experience of another. Bradbury clears the pathway from one to another, by creating a figurative space, framed as a container from within which we can peer out and see, touch, and taste the world. From inside this other subjectivity we experience the world around us, sketched in rich phenomenological detail, from the sensations of being a crayfish, breathing in the dusty water, to being another human, whose consciousness has been lifted and transferred into the body of another. In this internal space, Cecy can access the direct and unmediated experience of the occupied being, and in so doing turns our attention to the basic mechanisms of metaphor. Metaphor, put simply, operates by mapping features from a source domain to a target domain, from one discrete thing onto another. The conceptual metaphor, however, is a particular category of metaphor that cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Turner (1989) tell us maps features of something concrete (source domain) to the workings of something amorphous (target domain), thereby taking something complex and rendering it interpretable by a more concrete image. Additionally, conceptual metaphor provides a foundation for other details to be mapped, or for other metaphors to emerge to capture the more detailed processes of a complex process or object (Lakoff and Turner 1989, pp. 38–9). Lakoff and Johnson furnish the example of economic inflation, which, viewed as an entity, invites us to see “a particular aspect of it, see it as a cause, act with respect to it, and perhaps even believe that we understand it” (1989, p. 26). One of the most common conceptual metaphors, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is the “mind is an entity” metaphor, which provides a means of conceptualizing the complex workings of the brain in terms of a static, demarcated, or easily defined entity, like a machine (1989, p. 27). “Mind is an entity” forms a structure that allows a number of other observations about the mind to take shape. Under this broad and encompassing metaphor we can fit more specific metaphors, like “the mind is a machine” or “the mind is a brittle object”, which, in turn, carry with them clusters of associations and possible meanings (Lakoff and Turner 1989, pp. 27–8). The machine metaphor, argue Lakoff and Johnson, provides a means of thinking of the mind as possessing a set of features: it can be turned off and on, can be efficient or inefficient, serves some purpose,

Other in the Self  111 requires and uses energy, among other characteristics (1989, p.  28). Further, Lakoff and Johnson explain that, because we are embodied beings who are “bounded off and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins” (Lakoff and Turner 1989, p. 26), we experience the world as something external to us. We are containers with a surface that forms our outside, and this delineation between inside and outside provides for our own bodies the grounds for perceiving an inside- outside dimension to objects external to us: in sum, we “project our own in-out orientation” onto other objects in the world (Lakoff and Turner 1989, p. 29). Lakoff and Johnson explain that, even when there is no clear physical boundary to the object one hopes to understand through metaphor, one “impose[s] boundaries — marking off territory so that it has an inside and a bounding surface — whether a wall, a fence, or an abstract line or plane” (1989, p. 29). In ‘The Traveller’, Bradbury turns to a bounded physical space to map the internal space and processes of his characters who are inhabited by Cecy. In one fitting example from the story, Uncle Jonn, passing through town, casts suspicion toward every animal, human, and inanimate object in his field of vision, worried that Cecy may be inside any one of them, looking out. Uncle Jonn wonders if Cecy is perhaps far away, exploring the minds of patients in the psychiatric ward, where she could be found “touching their minds, holding, turning their confetti thoughts” (1946, p.  86). The minds of the patients are represented as physical spaces where Cecy can enter, look out from the inside, and interact with the more abstract contents of the brain (i.e. thoughts) as if they were tactile objects (e.g. confetti) (Figure 6.1). “The Traveller,” with its rich exploration of body- and mind-hopping, probes the experience of otherness, of being another being, and invites us to examine the metaphors used in figuring Otherness. In his figuring of Otherness in “The Traveller,” Bradbury relies on conceptual metaphors that figure the self as a physical space, one with traversible spaces with which one can interact. The metaphorical master-category or conceit is that of a cabin, house, or room where internal physical space is mapped onto mental processes. Through this conceit, Bradbury invites us into an imaginative contact with Otherness by presenting being an other as occupying a physical space, at times in one’s own physical form, at other times in a more abstract transcendence of physical form. We enter the inner world of other beings, however estranged that inner world may initially seem. Bradbury’s imagery keeps the other from becoming, borrowing Kearney’s language, “too transcendent”, where we risk “los[ing] all contact” (2003, p. 11). Figuring another mind as a bounded physical space in which Cecy can then absorb sense experience is the first step in keeping Otherness from slipping into the unsayable. As Thomas Nagel explains in ‘What Does It Feel Like to Be a Bat?’ (1974), there are real epistemological challenges in determining what it feels like to be another creature, but adds that we may conceive of the “distance between oneself

112  Cameron Wilson

Figure 6.1 Illustration for Ray Bradbury’s 1946 short story “The Traveller”, originally published in Weird Tales with artwork by Boris Dolgov. Image is currently in the public domain.

Other in the Self  113 and other persons and other species” (p. 442) as falling on a continuum, with other persons falling nearer on that continuum, and other species landing further. “Even for other persons”, says Nagel, the understanding of what it is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. (p. 442) And as Lakoff and Johnson argue in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), our metaphors emerge from our sensorimotor experience of the world, from our being embodied creatures who function in a physical environment (pp. 43–4). Our abstract ideas are, for the most part, metaphorical, and metaphor, in turn, is derived from our physical orientation in and with relation to the physical world. Metaphors are reminders of our own embodiment, and the bridge between our foundational physical experience of the world and our most abstract ideas about it. Kearney never asks what it is like to be a bat, let alone what it feels like to travel from one consciousness to another, but his work is useful for us in furnishing a theoretical model of interpretation that suggests Otherness is available for interpretation and understanding, however partial that understanding may be. At the core of Kearney’s work is the idea that we are always “creating and recreating all of the time”, and “there is practically no moment of our lives when we are not figuring, refiguring, defiguring or configuring the meanings of our existence” (Ó Murchadha 2004, p. 670). In Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, Kearney interrogates the national and cultural narratives that figure Others as strangers, gods, and monsters, and examines how groups mobilize scapegoating mechanisms in an attempt to fix and stabilize group identities. In On Stories, Kearney suggests that, against the grain of postmodern skepticism about the effectiveness of narrative to represent the past and meaningfully alter our lives, stories engage the imagination in a process that weaves together the life of the reader with the life of the text. Narrative, then, according to Kearney, ‘works for us in the present as well as being as true as possible to the sufferer’s own past’ and is both ‘therapeutic and referential in its claims’ (2002, p. 46). Kearney pairs the insights of Ricoeur on the narrative imagination with the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on diacritical perception, and out of this combination emerges Kearney’s diacritical hermeneutics. In Kearney’s words, diacritical hermeneutics understands “sense as primal interpretation, reading between the lines of skin and flesh” (2011, pp. 3–4). The sensing includes “sensation, direction, meaning” and runs from “thought to touch and back again” (2011, pp. 3–4). Summarizing Merleau-Ponty, Kearney explains that “insofar as perception is thus structured like a language in its nascent state it is diacritical”, and so “[d]iacritical perception is … the sensing of meaning as it expresses

114  Cameron Wilson itself in the intervals between such infra-things of our experience” (2011b, p. 6). Diacritical perception is perception of “identity through differentiation rather than differentiation through identity” (2011b, p.  6), just as structural linguistics suggests that meaning inheres not in the words themselves but in their relationships to one another. Diacritical perception, then, avoids essentializing its subjects by suggesting that interpretation occurs not when one has arrived at a finalized portrait of the subject, but through a kind of dialogue with difference (and differentiation) itself, from which we perceive an identity. Further, diacritical hermeneutics provides a means of conceptualizing otherness as both difference and similarity, held in an unfinalized tension, which Kearney argues provides us a means of remaining in contact with the Other without understanding the Other as either a projection of the self, or as pure alterity. Unlike champions of differánce Jacques Derrida and John Caputo, Kearney suggests that a meaningful exchange with the Other is possible, and that a bridge, not occlusion, exists between the two discrete points of self and other. As John Rundell explains, Kearney criticizes deconstruction because “deconstruction lands, ultimately, on this abyssal indifferent to every determination”, and this leads to a “position that remains completely outside the gesture towards and claims of human suffering” (2003, p. 100). While differánce prevents one from composing a finalized image of the Other—which Kearney agrees in principle is a noble aim of deconstruction—it also precludes the kind of identification of self with Other that makes available a meaningful recognition of shared experience, which Kearney argues is problematic (Rundell 2003, p. 100). Some psychoanalytic approaches, on the other hand, conceive the other as “too immanent”, whereby they become “exempt from ethical relation” and “indistinguishable from our own totalizing selves (conscious or unconscious)” (2003, p.  11). And, as Kearney asks, why should we be beholden to others who are nothing more than projections or refracted images of the self? Diacritical hermeneutics pursues an alternative to postmodern (“radical”) and psychoanalytic (“romantic”) views of the Other and advocates “the practice of dialogue between self and other, while refusing to submit to the reductionist dialectics of egology governed by the logos of the Same” (Kearney 2003, p. 18). Rather than positing an “abyssal indifference to every determination that falls short of words” (Rundell 2003, p. 100), Kearney advocates for a view of the Other that falls “between the logos of the One and the anti-logos of the Other”, what Kearney calls the “dia-logos of oneself-as-another” (Kearney 2003, p. 18). Elsewhere, Kearney explains this in the image of the stranger being welcomed into one’s home: one can welcome the stranger in and, while hosting the stranger, never fully dissolve their alterity (Kearney and Semonovitch 2011, p. 14). Kearney, building off of Ricoeur’s work on metaphor, provides a means of asserting that contact is possible, and that, like metaphor,

Other in the Self  115 interpreting otherness is not an act of psychological projection or a futile grasping for the unknowable sublime, but a tentative contact, exchange, or dialogue. Metaphor is a crucial support for Kearney’s bridge between self and other, not only in explanations of his diacritical hermeneutics, which lean heavily on metaphors of contact and dialogue, but in connecting self and Other in his theoretical framework. Kearney, following the lead of Paul Ricoeur, suggests that it is through “metaphors, symbols or narratives” that we have “‘imaginative variations’ of the world”, which provide us means to reimagine the world in new configurations, opening the door to transforming the world (2004, p. 42). According to Ricoeur (1991), “without imagination, there is no action”. Ricoeur explains, And it is indeed through the anticipatory imagination of acting that I ‘try out’ different possible courses of action and that I ‘play,’ in the precise sense of the word, with possible practices. (p. 177) For Ricoeur, as it is for Kearney after him, metaphor and the imagination are coextensive, as the process of imagining is itself a process of thinking one thing as another, and imagining something in light of possibility, of what it could be. Through its “linguistic disjuncture”, metaphor creates a “mode of ‘seeing as’ which can be extrapolated to encompass a mode of ‘being as,’ from a figure in the imagination to a possibility in the real world” (Joy 2013, p. 73). Figuration plays a further crucial role in the “transfer by analogy”, which “enables us to transport ourselves into alien or eclipsed moments, refiguring them as similar to our present experience” (Kearney 1995, p. 96), which is necessary for recognition of others as fellow selves. Restated and perhaps oversimplified: Others become fellow selves, and one is refigured as oneself-as-another (Kearney and Semonovitch 2011, p. 20). By the transfer by analogy we are taken into experiences that are foreign or alien to us, and refigure those experiences in such a way that they resemble our own, fitting within the horizon of our own experience and understanding (Kearney 1995, p. 96). A close-reading of “The Traveller” reveals a parallel project of figuring the foreign as familiar at work in Bradbury’s story. In “The Traveller,” the dissimilar, whether the lived experience of a dog or amoeba or crayfish or train conductor, is rendered similar in its being figured by ontological metaphors, which, as we established earlier, map a physically bounded space from a source domain to the target domain. Just as Kearney’s diacritical hermeneutics aims to restore a relationship, however tentative, between self and the Other, so too does Bradbury’s “The Traveller” invite exploration of the experience of the Other through its figurations of otherness. In framing the inner world of the beings Cecy inhabits, Bradbury turns to the ontological metaphor: the ontological metaphor here crosses difference to find similarity, but always occludes

116  Cameron Wilson some similarities as it discloses others. In other words, a mind is not a room, and thoughts are not confetti, but mapping a room to our concept of the mind or mapping confetti to thoughts can produce a new way of thinking about consciousness, or give us a new way to think of interiority. In the story’s descriptions of inhabiting other subjectivities, Bradbury’s images cluster around prepositions, reinforcing the spatial orientation that organizes his metaphors for other minds and other conscious experiences. Consciousness, in particular, is limited, demarcated, located in a bounded physical space. In one of the backstories of “The Traveller”, Cecy enters the mind of a young woman named Marianne, described as shy and awkward. Cecy enters “like a fist into [a] glove” (pp. 30–1); after living inside of Marianne for an unspecified length of time, she departs, and some of Cecy stays “on like a fossil imprint on soft shale rock” (pp. 30–1). Marianne is a container, into which another self can enter and, in turn, influence, leaving a lasting impression on the host. Even the word “impression” supplies a tactile image, something that can be visualized and traced with an imagined finger, and felt through the senses. Marianne, still marked by the impressions of Cecy’s former presence, discovers how to recreate the sensations formerly produced by Cecy, and is described as “a corset animated . . . by a memory” (pp. 30–1). Marianne is changed, now reanimated by the memory of Cecy, able to dispel her former shyness, changed by this encounter with another being. If we may be permitted a brief digression to another Cecy story, “The April Witch”, first published in 1952 and later collected in Bradbury’s Collected Stories, we may witness Cecy’s traveling on display again. Cecy inhabits another young woman, Ann, who loosely resembles Marianne from “The Traveller”. In “The April Witch”, though, Cecy experiences love through the body and brain of her host Ann. The tactile images are back, and Bradbury’s descriptions evoke and sustain a sensuality through the entire story. The world of Ann does not belong to Cecy, and to Cecy it is an initially strange place: Cecy “listen[s] through the shell ears to this girl’s world” and “smell[s] a particular universe through these delicate nostrils” (1980, p. 248). Bradbury relies on repeated deictics (“this girl’s body”, “this brain”, “this body”), placing us there with Cecy in Marianne’s body. “Being in this body, this head”, we are told, “was like basking in a heart fire, living in the purr of a sleeping car, stirring in warm creek waters that flowed by night to the sea” (pp. 248–89). Cecy’s traveling is described as an “entrance into”; she “often entered into the heads of crayfish” (1946, p. 87), and “would live in” wells and amoebas. When Cecy’s mother, speaking to Uncle Jonn, describes the many places Cecy may be found, she uses an inside-outside orientation, marking a bounded physical space, and suggests that Cecy may be “right here inside me now”, “looking out” (p. 84), as if Cecy’s mother is a container with a passage or window that opens to a view of the external world. Cecy, while traveling, is still herself, discrete from the being she

Other in the Self  117 inhabits, while inhabiting another, allowing her to navigate these internal spaces (we are told that “water, amoeba, Cecy and all rose up the throat of the well”) (p.  87). Later, Ralph, the town butcher, describes having his mind “borrowed” like “a cup of sugar”, and being “sifted … down” into the body of another person (p.  88). When Cecy enters the “soft-shelled grayness of the mandibled heads of crayfish”, she “peeked out from” their eyes, and felt “the creek sluice by her, steadily and in fluid veils of coolness and captured light” (p. 87). Cecy breathes in dusty particles afloat in the water, and feels her “horny lichened” claws, which she holds before her like “some elegant salad utensils, swollen and sharp as scissors” (p. 87). We tap into the sense experience of the crayfish—from the twitch of tail and claw to the coolness of shade and warmth of the sun. We probe sensations alongside Cecy, inside the cabin of each being’s consciousness, where the focus on metaphor dissolves to the lush phenomenological descriptions of physical sensations. Cecy, in the crayfish, holds her “claws before her, proud of them”, feeling the “creek-water [as it] filled her bubbling mouth, cool, cool, cool—” (p. 87). Shortly after, Bradbury describes how Cecy would find herself “in an amoeba darting, vacillating deep down in the old, tired, philosophical dark waters of a kitchen well”, and from inside would see the birds “like bronze stamps”, and hear a slammed door that rings like a “rifle shot”, everything both distorted and magnified by her small size relative to that of the world around her (p. 87). By means of Cecy’s traveling, Bradbury’s story draws us into a constant imaginative stretching to convey the experience of an animal or another human. In Poetics of Modernity, Kearney writes of the ethical ramifications of the “imaginary transfer”, when one imagines the life of another. Ethics is distinct from the imagination, and Kearney is careful not to conflate the two, but the two are not so distinct that they do not inform or shape one another. Ethics, suggests Kearney, is always entangled in matters of imagination: when one represents oneself as another, configuring the self as one self among other selves, one can both preserve identity and respect difference while graduating to a higher ethical plane where self-interest no longer limits one’s ability to recognize others as other selves (1995, p. 104). As Kearney suggests, “There is neither love nor hate, care nor concern, without an “imaginary transfer of my ‘here’ into your ‘there’”” (1995, p. 104). The “extension of the circle of selfhood involves an ‘enlarged mentality’ capable of imagining the self in the place of the other” (1995, pp. 104–5). In On Stories, Kearney concludes that there is no narrated action that does not involve some response of approval or disapproval relative to some scale of goodness or justice — though it is always up to readers to choose for ourselves from the various options proposed by the narrative. (2002, p. 155)

118  Cameron Wilson Stories, says Kearney, “alter our lives as we return from text to action” (2002, p. 156). Paraphrasing Paul Ricoeur, Kearney suggests that the “formal configuration of the text is followed by the ethical refiguration of the reader” (The Other Journal, 2012), and after we have interpreted the text, we return to the world, altered by our encounter with the text and its demands upon us. Bradbury’s young traveler opens new vistas for the reader, and invites identification with a number of characters in the text: we identify with the crayfish, with Marianne or Ann, and even with Uncle Jonn, expanding our own horizon of experience to accommodate the texture of the experiences of Bradbury’s characters. Kearney argues that when we recognize that, while stories may bear witness to the Other, the Other remains, in the end, “irreducible.” The story does not fully capture the Other, dissolve the mystery of the Other, or eliminate the unknown. Ethics enters the equation when we realize that, while there may be full “poetic license within the imaginary”, when we consider the Other and the “irreducible otherness” of the Other, we are bound to answer something that stands beyond the text (“the other beyond the text”) that remains beyond our capacity to represent or figure (1995, p. 101). From the metaphors that make it possible for Bradbury to conceptualize the conscious mind as a physical space, to the lived-in feel of his phenomenological detail, Bradbury’s story achieves a goal parallel to Kearney’s approach to understanding Otherness. Kearney writes that diacritical hermeneutics changes the “ego into a self-as-another” but allows for the Other to preserve “a basic fluidity and equivocity” (2003, p. 81). Diacritical hermeneutics “keeps in contact with the other”, avoiding the “sameness” suggested by some psychoanalytic approaches, or the “exile” suggested by some postmodern theories (2003, p. 81). In “The Traveller,” we are lifted from one mind to another, like Bion the butcher being lifted from his own body and transplanted into the undertaker. 2 Cecy’s traveling provides occasion for us to consider the ways in which we conceptualize otherness, at the level of figurative language, and in our larger theoretical questions about self and other, similarity and difference. Midway in his search for Cecy, Uncle Jonn ponders whether Cecy may be far away, inhabiting the world of a train engineer, rocketing across the countryside, “stretch[ing] the contact” (p. 86) between her supine body at home and the body of the engineer who grows ever distant by the second. The image is telling: just as Cecy provides us a means of occupying the inner world of other characters in a story, creating contact and stretching it, so too does Bradbury, in his stories, create those imaginative spaces where readers experience the intersection of metaphor, narrative, and ethics, where figurations of others and otherness invite the reader into contemplation of the rich variety of experiences, human and crayfish alike.

Other in the Self  119

Notes 1 In this essay I will be examining the earliest published version of “The Traveller”, first published in Weird Tales in 1946. 2 In “The Traveller” from Collected Stories, Bradbury modifies the characters of the town butcher and the undertaker. In the 1946 Weird Tales version, Bion the butcher is relocated to Timothy the caretaker’s body, and vice versa. In the Collected Stories version, Bradbury specifies that Bion Elliott is Cecy’s brother, and that he has had his consciousness swapped with that of Cousin Ralph, the town butcher.

Bibliography Bradbury, R. (1946) “The Traveller”. Weird Tales 39(4), pp. 82–90. ———. (1980) “April Witch”. Collected Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. (2001) From the Dust Returned. New York: William Morrow. Gedney, M. (2006) “The Hope of Imagination: Richard Kearney’s Conversational Journeys”. Religion and the Arts 10(1), pp. 89–100. Joy, M. (2013) “Explorations in Otherness: Paul Ricoeur and Luce Irigaray”. Ricoeur Studies 4(1), pp. 77–91. Kearney, R. (1995) Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination. NJ: Humanities Press. ———. (1996) Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action. London: Sage Publications. ———. (2002) On Stories. London: Routledge. ———. (2003) Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. London: Routledge. ——— (ed.) (2004) On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited. ———. (2011) “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, University of Calgary. Available at: https://journalhosting.ucalgary. ca/index.php/jah/article/view/53187 ———. (2015) Carnal Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press. Kearney, R. & Kuipers, R. (2012) “Evil, Ethics, and the Imagination: An Interview with Richard Kearney, Part I”. The Other Journal 20. Available at: https://theotherjournal.com/2012/03/06/evil-ethics-and-the-imagination-aninterview-with-richard-kearney-part-i/ Kearney, R. & Semonovitch, K. (eds.) (2011) Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality. New York: Fordham University Press. Lakoff, G. & Turner, M. (1989) More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ———. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books, New York. Nagel, T. (1974) “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83(4), pp. 435–50. Ó Murchadha, F. (2004) “A Conversation with Richard Kearney”. Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 8(3), pp. 667–83. Ricoeur, P. (1991) “Imagination in Discourse and Action”, in From Text to Action. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Rundell, J. (2003) “Imaginings, Narratives and Otherness: On the Critical Hermeneutics of Richard Kearney”. Thesis Eleven 70(1), pp. 97–111.

7

Dark Ecology in From the Dust Returned Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

Death is part of life. Humanity, however, took the decision to run away from the inevitability of our mortality. The ever-present fear of death must be repressed in Western culture. Even Ray Bradbury admitted this, when in an interview he evoked a moment when he was twelve years old and decided to escape the memories of a funeral; he did so running toward a carnival, a place of life and joy: “Until a few years ago, I’d forgotten about that funeral. But I was running away from death, wasn’t I? I was running toward life” (Weller 2010, p. 20). The awareness of death is necessary not just to give a meaningful ethical value to life as a precondition of existence (Jaspers 1970), but also as an ecological necessity. The delicate balance of the environment is sustained by death: that of animals, plants, and humans. The corpses of animals and dead vegetation become fertilizer; plagues and global catastrophes keep overpopulation under unmanageable numbers. Cremated or decomposed human bodies release elements that are recycled by nature, such as carbon or phosphorus (Mims 2014). As poetically argued by Walt Whitman in his “Song of Myself”, the corpse is good manure; “but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons” (1980, p. 80). Thus, there is an ecological component of death, one that keeps life afloat. This dark realization is mostly kept at the margins of human thought, which keep existence rotating around “the minimal condition of happiness: being alive instead of dead” (Morton 2016, p. 51). Life, joy, and external displays of happiness are enthroned as the main reason of existence or, better said, of good existence. Death, like climate change, is split between knowledge and denial. Claire Colebrook has noted this particular blend of cognitive dissonance: “the human species would remain complacent about its catastrophic history and future as long as it continues to forget that its situation is catastrophic” (2014, p.  11). In parallel, our current world is also shaped by such a dichotomy: “death anxiety leads the patriarchal ego to deny its relationship with nature” (Zimmerman 1994, p. 55). This applies as much to attitudes about the mortality of the ecosystem as it does to attitudes about human mortality. “Dark families” such as the Addams or the Munsters are distorted

Dark Ecology in From the Dust Returned  121 mirrors of this general ethos: rather than denying death, they embrace it. As argued by Agnes Andeweg and Sue Zlosnik in the introduction to their edited collection Gothic Kinship, the Gothic opens up “a radically transformative space in which alternative relationships may be configured” (2013, p. 2), normative categories scrutinized and norms violated. The dark souls who comprise these Gothic families outline parodies of clean-living households, transferring values to death while showing that “society may be civilized, but it has dark undertones of violence and death” (Hakola 2015, p.  85) lying underneath. The Elliotts, the dark family created by Ray Bradbury, were no exception to this subversion of social and cultural conventions. Rather than denying and unhealthily repressing the existence of death amidst the nuclear happy family and community―two complementary forms of kinship (Andeweg and Zlosnik 2013, p. 3)―these families embrace its presence. The different members of the family are creatures of old, people who live eternally as undead beings, death being their lovely companion. There are interesting zones to explore in the intersection between death and the posthuman. If the posthuman philosophy attempts to dethrone the human, death reveals the rotten carcass, the insignificant remains that cannot claim any kind of superiority against all other living creatures such as animals or vegetal life. What the Elliotts bring to analysis is a posthuman ecological conscience: undead humans, cats, spiders, and mice are part of the Family. Cecy, a female youngster in appearance, can project herself into others, including animals and objects, revealing a posthuman attitude that decenters the anthropocene. Death, plagues, transmutation, ghosting, and aging are accepted—rather than rejected—as part of life. Human beings live to die. As Grandmère says, “we are the granaries of dark remembrance” (Bradbury 2014, p. 112), i.e., evocations of life being born and the infinite processes of dying. Human life is predicated on the death of living beings. Timothy Morton calls “dark ecology” this depressing “ecological awareness” (2016, p. 5), which intermingles death and the uncanny with the environment. In this chapter, I will trace the many instances in which dark ecology engages with the uncanny and death within Bradbury’s From the Dust Returned, a work composed of the different stories of the Elliott family the author wrote through the years. In this respect, we need to embark on a notion of death and extinction that includes a radical alteration of knowledge to accept the very possibility of coexistence with this bleak reality. Life is a necro-ecology which, as stated by Morton, is both dark-uncanny and dark-sweet.

Posthumanism and Ecology: Darkness within Nature The posthuman turn comes to intellectual disciplines with the main goal of decentering the anthropocene as the measurement of all things.

122  Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns The anthropocene means a social, cultural, and ideological construction that focalizes existence solely in the human, provoking inequalities which posthumanism tries to dismantle. Western thought constructs life through the politics of humanism and the anthropocene, which are efforts to describe reality in terms of human superiority. Humanists would argue that humans are superior because of some “essential” traits, such as intelligence or having a soul. Humanist ontology established that human characteristics were built on the difference against all that was not human: the environment, animals, plants, and machines, all of them coded as “essentially” inferior to human beings. As inferior, they are “thingified”, becoming objects to be mastered by humans. The center of any system of thought, for humanism, is the human. “Human”, however, does not mean “any human”, but those who actually construct the systems of thought they want to naturalize. The “human” usually ends up meaning the white, heterosexual, Christian, Western bourgeois man. Women, people of color, homosexuals, and so many others end up pushed out from the sphere of humanity as inhuman beings or, at least, not entirely humans, as though they lack humanity in some way. This humanist thinking, in turn, produces hierarchical strata of prejudice. Being considered as object-like, animallike, and even female-like becomes “bad” because they constitute a lacking, the impossibility of reaching complete humanism, complete “perfection” (i.e., the Western white man ideal). And being “less” implies a destiny of bondage to those considered—according to their own terms—“better”. Posthumanism favors the constant shift between the human and the non-human, offering an impeccable illustration of Foucault’s critique of humanism in The Order of Things in which “man” is just a discursive construction, “no more than a kind of rift in the order of things” and, as such, doomed to disappear: man is “a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a wrinkle in our knowledge, and he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form” (1974, p. xxiii). To the politics of posthumanism, humans are just another species sharing the world with animals and plants. As Robert Pepperell explains, “Post-Humanism is not about the ‘End of Man’ but about the end of a ‘man-centred’ universe or, put less phallocentrically, a ‘humancentred’ universe” (1995, p. 176). The importance of posthumanism in studies on ecology has not been analyzed widely. There is a rich encounter between the two disciplines as both try to suggest new social and cultural interactions while downplaying the “natural” importance of the human in the fabric of existence. Posthumanism decenters the human by placing it in relation with the technological (the machine, the cyborg, implants, etc.) and the ecological (nature, the animal, the vegetal, etc.), offering new, non-hierarchical senses of humanity (Parham 2015). The term “nonhuman animal”

Dark Ecology in From the Dust Returned  123 elevates animals to the category of humans and “downplays” humans to the category of animals. Branches such as deep ecology suggest the rich potentialities of blending posthumanism with environmentalism: a post-anthropocentric ecology of posthumanism that rejects differentiation between the world and the human self, thereby erasing dualisms or mere identification to enhance the unification of the ecosphere with the human (Katz 2001). Emmanouil Aretoulakis (2018), however, argues that deep ecology is still humanist insofar as it presupposes a harmonious mixing of humans and the non-human. Dark ecology, on the other hand, is interested in the ecosphere without the intermingling of the human. It is a kind of ecology predicated on the death of the human. Like in posthumanism, human superiority crumbles down here as well; in dark ecology, however, the human is completely erased. The nihilistic dark ecology sees humanity as a disease, a virus that should be eradicated since it destroys the fabric of life with wars and pollution. Dark ecology does not advocate exterminating humans as a given fact, but imagines a future without human presence. We might consider modes of deconstruction in which the future is not hospitable and affirmative since there “is no shortage of data regarding the possible or inevitable absence of humans” (Morton 2016, p. 44): terrorism, new sophisticated forms of war, and climate change predict apocalyptic scenarios. Dark ecology, then, “is not an overcoming of the human but takes a similar form to the structure of nihilism” (Morton 2016, p. 159). Morton’s “dark ecology” consists of environmental awareness that responds to the presence of “anti-ecological” truths such as the fact that “we live in a universe of finitude and fragility” (2016, p. 6), a situation that produces uncertainty about our fate and that of the world. The philosophy of dark ecology, according to Morton, was born during the Cold War era, a time when American citizens struggled to live with the menace of the atomic bomb as a constant weight upon their shoulders (Morton 2012). This actually ties in with some of Bradbury’s science fiction tales such “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950), which imagines a world without humans, or “The Million-Year Picnic” (1946), in which a father takes his family to their new home in the Martian canals as a way to reject the human lifestyle. Still, no tale clarifies better the dark ecology of the postwar than “The Vacation” (1963), where a man dreams of pushing a button that could obliterate everyone from the surface of Earth: Nothing violent. Just have everyone vanish off the face of the earth, just leave the land and the sea and the growing things, like flowers and grass and fruit trees. And the animals, of course, let them stay. Everything except man, who hunts when he isn’t hungry, eats when full, and is mean when no one’s bothered him. (Bradbury 2012, p. 549)

124  Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns This is a future without humans. Further, dark ecology is “a vision that is defined by its capacity to contain the negative as well as the positive” (Daw 2016, p. 121); thus, it becomes total, including as part of the ecosystem the threat of death pending over our heads together with the most pastoral images of nature. Still, “compared with the injunction to flee from death and eventually even from the mention of death, everything else is just accidental” (Morton 2016, p. 51). Interestingly, Morton finds a relationship between dark ecology and the weird: “Ecological awareness is weird: it has a twisted, looping form” (Morton 2016, p. 5). Ecological phenomena are all about loops, as we destroy the Earth and the Earth, in turn, destroys us (Scranton 2018). Following Morton, weird also means strange of appearance and, more strikingly, “there is a route between the term weird and the term faerie” (Morton 2016, p. 6), the latter meaning supernatural creatures—such as the Elliotts—coexisting in the same plane with us. The concept of dark ecology can be said to have three main threads: nihilism, the uncanny, and a sweet, almost humorous darkness. This sweet, ironic final twist is related to the fact that we all live with the effects of global warming and amidst ecological catastrophe and the awareness of it. Dark ecology acknowledges that we produce it and we should therefore embrace this milieu of possible extinction rather than insist on running away from it. “Rather, then, than continue a late Romantic project of re-enchanting the world” through a bucolic sense of “fixing” Nature, Colebrook suggests “that what is required is a more intensified disenchantment and evacuation of meaning” (Colebrook 2014, p. 55). This involves accepting a nature indifferent to human “supremacy”, a future without the human, an acknowledgment of our fragility within a fragile ecosystem. Bradbury wrote most of his best-regarded work in the postwar years, especially the fifties, a time rife with Cold War anxieties and the menace of waking up someday to discover that humanity has been erased completely from Earth’s surface. As K. Hoskinson argues, Bradbury’s main characters in his novels and short fiction were imbued with a dichotomous nature: optimism and nihilism cohabited in the same narrative. The optimism was granted because atomic energy could take man to new heights of improvement and welfare; nihilism because the bomb was an impending menace. This dichotomy shapes “stances of peace and aggression” (2001, p. 136), which would be replicated in the Elliott family. This family is composed of what humans commonly call “monsters”: there are vampires, invisible men, ghosts, ancient mummies, etc. They answer Universal Studios’ corpus of monsters at a time when the familiar creatures were parodied in films such as Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein (Charles Barton 1948). Horror and the menace of death that comes with it were slowly retreating into obscurity, progressively being

Dark Ecology in From the Dust Returned  125 replaced by light science fiction films through the 1950s. Dark horror, however, was lurking at the corners, just waiting to make its comeback. There is a beautiful and popular picture circa 1954 that synthesizes the feeling of the era: Maila Nurmi dressed as TV hostess Vampira―a character inspired by the New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams―greeting/frightening two little children in broad daylight. The children are a little scared, but also excited. They are aware that the undead monster is a woman donning a costume. The monsters of yore, like the Elliot family, were fading into obscurity and invisibility. The excitement of the children greeting Vampira certainly speaks to the inability of the old monsters to frighten in the new world of the Atomic Age. They are the undead, the creatures of the night, the dark souls. They reek of death. The family, however, is not evil. Unlike the Universal monsters they mirror, they do not kill, neither do they willfully harm others. They want to be left alone but cannot avoid engagement with humans. They live at the margins of the “happy”, sun-drenched society that rejects the reality of death. The Elliotts are, in brief, the evocation of human finitude, the realization that death exists in our society and culture no matter how much we pushed it aside. Further, the Elliotts’ evocation of death is framed by a posthumanist ecological awareness that recognizes the frail status of the human. Thus, the presence of the Elliott Family works as the return of the repressed: no matter how much people work to entomb their fears of death, it always will find a way to return even from the fringes of narratives of happy life. This rejection follows Sigmund Freud and his notions on repression as explained in his famous essay “The Uncanny” (1919): traumatic experiences, anxieties, and social/individual fears must be shoved aside—out of sight and out of mind. Our steadfast rejection of human finitude can be described in psychological and ecological terms: behind a shining surface of pastoral conscious peace, dark subconscious storms await to wipe life away.

A Familiar Death: The Elliotts The central horror of the grouped stories that form From the Dust Returned is the fragility of the anthropocentric discourse that wants to create traditional dichotomies between human/animal, tamed/untamed, feminine/masculine, pastoral/savage. According to Greg Garrard, the pastoral image preceded “the perception of a general crisis in human ecology” while, at the same time, shaping the first “conventions and cultural assumptions” (2004, p. 38) of nature as “friendly”, a giver of gifts to humankind. From the Dust Returned reverses this classical image. The novel opens with an evocation of calm, beautiful images of nature: in the attic “the rain touched the roof softly on spring days” and people “could feel the mantle of snow outside” (Bradbury 2014, p. 6). This image of nature as a gentler companion is contradicted some lines

126  Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns later, when Great Grandmère, the matriarchal mummy who leads the family, is described as a “dried plum tree” (Ibid), a natural element that does not provide fruit anymore. Death intersects the imagery once more: each time the mummy speaks to Timothy, the only “real” human at the house (a child charged with the task of documenting the Family’s history), dust falls from her dried lips. There is no life, just dryness; nature intersects with a mummy who only holds the memory of countless deaths, of humanity developing and collapsing through history. Rather than generous with rain, all that nature can give here is a dry spell. Further, the humanist paradigm that privileges a phallocentric point of view is downplayed when the major figure in the house is not a man (undead or alive) but a matriarch. As one of the main narrators, Grandmère reorients the narrative from the exclusive masculine point of view to the acknowledgment of difference. In the opening paragraphs, Grandmère asks Timothy, her interlocutor, if he fears her. He says yes. It remains unstated whether that fear comes from her uncanny nature as a mummy or her gender. Since everyone in the house is an uncanny creature, gender seems to be the weightier matter. Further, Timothy seems to fear his sister Cecy as well. Within the Otherness that monstrosity is, gender adds another layer of difference. There is a sense of sexual dread, overlaying horror and monstrosity across the uncanny female body. Life as part of a social and communal order is further displaced as the story progresses. Life-as-civilization begins with the arrival of settlers who group together in a natural area to build a community. Chapter 1 of From the Dust Returned evokes the image of entire families traveling in wagons while looking for a beautiful, perfect natural landscape where they can settle down and start communal life. To Morton (2016), the great divide between culture and nature was delimited, historically, in this “agrilogistic” moment: the first settlements shaping a set of oppositions regarding culture/nature, and out of which models of humanity emerged. What Morton calls “agrilogistics” refers to a combination of effects, such as settlement, civilization, economy, and technology, and for the author, this form of logic—the human/nature divide—is responsible for the anthropocene. The pastoral was an important paradigm, as this aesthetic and philosophical turn established the idea of nature waiting for men’s conquest. The pastoral imaginary provided a narrative of occupation and national identity through the defeat of the mythical wilderness and the barbarism lurking within. In the pastoral, nature is turned into a confined space, a garden built to serve humans, complicit in the development of civilization. From the Dust Returned, however, fabricates a form of civilization, the Family, who are akin to the feral creatures lurking at the threshold of wilderness even while living within a house.

Dark Ecology in From the Dust Returned  127 The pastoral crisis continues as the history of the Family’s house is told to readers. A portmanteau-storm of uncanny proportions and great strength lifted any moveable object between the fort towns of Indiana and Ohio, stripped the forests in upper Illinois, and arrived over the asyet-unborn site, settled, and with the level hand of an unseen god deposited, shakeboard by shakeboard and shingle by shingle, an arousal of timber that shaped itself long before sunrise. (Bradbury 2014, p. 10) Rather than being constructed using the fruits of nature such as wood or clay, the Family’s house was built by a furious storm. Camille Paglia argues that the ideal of nature as peaceful and beautiful is just human, Apollonian invention: “The idea of ultimate benevolence of nature and God is the most potent of man’s survival mechanisms” (1991, p. 1) against a world which is, indeed, indifferent to humanity. For Paglia, real nature (not the pastoral one) is linked to lust, violence, filth. Nature is daemonic (p. 6), chaotic, and ugly. If one scratches the surface—the real natural world—one of amorphous darkness, swamps, and violence will erupt. The Family’s house, their existence in the world, thus, comes not with winds and sunshine but storms. Bad climate, one of humanity’s worst enemies, made the family appear in the world. Like the Family itself, there is something dark, daemonic in the roots of their existence. Extreme weather conditions such as tsunamis, heatwaves, dry spells, or polar waves lead us to think of “apocalyptic convulsions” (Gomel 2010, p. 155), with a foot in science fiction and the other firmly stuck in reality. As the environment deteriorates thanks to human actions, Earth increases its impetus for erasing the very agent that triggers this unbalance: the human. This dark ecology is furthered as the story progresses. The house sits alone, waiting to be inhabited. It waits for years until someone finally comes: Anuba. This one being, however, is not a human, but a nonhuman animal: “The cat came first, in order to be absolute first” (Bradbury 2014, p. 12. Author’s emphasis). Anuba, a royal cat straight from ancient Egypt, is the original foundation of life in the house, the first member of the Family. It is not by chance that the first creature to arrive is a cat, a non-human animal that lives at the fringes of culture and civilization. Felines are coded as independent beings, pets which are also holders of human-like attitudes and, as such, are closer to culture: “Cats weirdly symbolize the ambiguous border between agricultural logistics and its (impossible to demarcate) outside. I mean we don’t let dogs just wander about” (Morton 2016, p. vi). After her, more non-human animals come: a spider and a mouse, together with Cecy—“the wandering witch” is the first real person to arrive at the house, slowly giving shape to the Family.

128  Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns In Max Horkheimer’s aphorism “The Skyscraper” (1978), the author emphatically calls for the visibility of animal suffering. In the text, Horkheimer establishes that our Western society is like a skyscraper with a peak inhabited by the power party that can subdue any other (basically, capitalism), while the basement or cellar is a slaughterhouse where human cruelty toward animals—creatures that support human life with their own lives—is obscured, remaining at the margins of society. As described by Adam Lowenstein (2014), slaughterhouses sit on the outskirts of populated cities, outside of a soothingly familiar world that comforts us. Through this aphorism, the human is the essential peak of history. The Family, however, is slowly constructed avoiding any hierarchical edification that localizes the human at the crest. After a non-human animal (the cat), the second to arrive is Cecy, a human being (albeit a supernatural one). Soon, more animals enter, all of them without a discernible position within the boundaries of the house or the hierarchies of the family. All of them—human (Timothy), the uncanny (Cecy, Grandmère) and non-human animals—are regarded simply as part of the Family. Neither the spider nor the mouse is considered a “pet” or “pest”; instead, they are important integrants of the Family. Cecy, the sleeper with the ability to travel out from her material body and touch other people’s dreams and minds, is described in terms rife with evocations of the natural world. Cecy heard the languages of weather and far places and knew what went beyond this hill, or the sea on one hand and a farther sea on the other, including the age-old ice which blew from the north and the forever summer that breathed softly from the Gulf and the Amazon wilds. (Bradbury 2014, p. 16) She is a creature with a striking affinity with nature. Still, she is considered by the Family as the goddess of wisdom. Thus, rather than following the humanist linkage that connects women with nature through irrationality as the great humanist divide argues, nature is here invested with knowledge (wisdom) of its own about how the world works. Like Anuba the cat, Cecy is capable of walking through the fringes of culture and nature, as her soul leaves her body behind to travel through the world to take possession and control not only of other people, but of a water droplet or an amoeba as well. Amidst this cohabitation of nature and culture, death makes its nest. It is not only the matriarch who is an (un)dead being, but everyone (un)living at the house―vampires, mummies, zombies, and the rest―represent our collective fears about death and abnormality. Besides the presence of supernatural undead creatures, death appears as a “hyperobject”.

Dark Ecology in From the Dust Returned  129 Following Timothy Morton, a hyperobject evokes the power of the uncanny (2016, p. 11) and the weird (2016, p. 12), as this kind of object is incommensurable to any form of human measurement and conceptualization. The hyperobject is so massive that it becomes inaccessible. According to Morton, the hyperobject is a concept that nicely fits the current ecological worries, as events of such a world-wide scale as global warming cannot be measured correctly in terms of both its global size and the exact moment when it began. People of the world can grasp the gigantic nature of ecological disaster, massive deaths, and global events only through timid little “chunks” of these events. Thus, we cohabit with global warming, always expecting “the worst” (a turn of events that would put the globe upside down), without completely grasping the fact that those ecological disasters have already begun. Like an iceberg melting, the degradation of our world and life are not visible at common temporal and spatial scales. Large scale famines, holocausts, and mass death are hyperobjects, events that turn the ecological into a necro-ecology that could result in mass extinction and the end of life on earth. The bubonic plague attacked humankind in the fourteenth century, pushing humanity to the brink of becoming a social corpse, a world populated with ghost-like, moribund bodies that resembled the uncanny nature of the Family. The mouse that comes to the house arrives with the haunting of past extinctions, as he “at last fled free when some curious Bonaparte soldiers broke the seal and let out great gusts of bacterial air which killed the troops and confused Paris” (Bradbury 2014, p. 26). Indeed, Napoleon’s army was ravaged by the bubonic pestilence in Jaffa. Napoleon ordered his physicians to “end” the suffering of the affected soldiers and the numbers of those killed are still uncertain today (Falk 2015). With the mouse, a past of human extinction comes to the house, establishing a relationship between death and the animal. The ecology becomes intrinsically destructive, pointing to the frailty of human life facing an unhelpful world. The presence of social corpses is highlighted in “On the Orient North”. The tale/chapter revolves around Miss Minerva Halliday, an old nurse heading north on the Orient Express who spots a sickly man who is worsening at each passing minute. Soon, she is attending him and diagnoses him as being dead, a ghost who still haunts the living. She accompanies him to visit the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where he regains some strength and, later, to the Family’s home. The ghost, however, is corporeal: other passengers can see him and talk to him. Further, he is tangible and cannot move through material. He is not the cliché, transparent, and immaterial ghost. He is a walking, unburied corpse. The materiality of the cadaver evokes the necessity of burying it or cremating it. “The corpse may be dead”, as Russ Castronovo says, “but it is nonetheless a body, one that recalls a life of social and political

130  Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns engagement” (2001, p. xiii) with culture and the ecosphere. The corpse is a violation of life, a breach into the fabric of life-as-happiness. He is a material manifestation of death cohabiting with living citizens rather than existing merely on another transcendental plane. Further, the ghost recoils at the vision of happiness and joy. At the hearing of laughter, he shrinks and gets sicker. He suffers “a disease—of people!” (Bradbury 2014, p. 59). This shapes a heavy contrast between life as happiness, joy, and laughter, and, on the other hand, sickness, pain, and frailty. Rather than opposite spheres, both cohabit, two faces of the same coin: the living and their future, the corpse. Death, burial customs, and forms of grief inform human existence. Happiness is unable to erase the thinking of death. As a material reminder of death, the ghost ends up living with the Family, a necro-family. In this scenario, the Père Lachaise Cemetery encapsulates this uneasy cohabitation between death and life, the negative and the positive: the cemetery is the land of the dead, but also one of the most visited places in Paris, as tourists from all over the world make a stop at this site completely devoid of life and, at the same time, so filled with the joy of traveling. Life as part of death and vice versa is illustrated with the strange story of Mademoiselle Angelina Marguerite in Chapter 18, “Make Haste to Live”. She is an evocation of the cycle of life and death, of the uncanny loop mentioned by Morton as a constitutive part of the dark ecology. The uncanny loop “is one in which two levels that appear utterly separate flip into one another” (Morton 2016, p. 7). Angelina Marguerite is a corpse, a zombie who rises from the death. But unlike the popular image of the undead, this woman starts to rejuvenate as the days go by, right at the point of becoming, again, a child, a babe in arms. There is no further explanation of what will happen with Angelina Marguerite. Will she start to grow up until old age to die again? Will she becomes part of the ecosystem, as she becomes younger and younger, right up to the point of becoming a strand of DNA, a molecule, a mere atom? Angelina Marguerite illustrates the fact that we are born to die and, equally important, we die to live, to allow life to circulate through the world. Life on earth can persist only if people die. Only through high numbers of people dying, can the planet avoid overpopulation, famines, and the acceleration of the deterioration of the environment. As argued by Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths, “extinction is normal. Species go extinct all the time” (1999, p. 205). But in ecologically disastrous episodes, ecology does not discriminate in favor of species. Rats, one of the most humble animals, pushed humanity to the brink of extinction as carriers of disease. The bubonic plague showed how easily Earth can cast off pesky humans if necessary. The bubonic plague is not the only biological form of extermination mentioned through the chapters. Death by pox is mentioned as well: smallpox is a disease of unknown origin with earlier evidence dating

Dark Ecology in From the Dust Returned  131 back to Egyptian mummies (Hopkins 2002, p. 14). Grandmère, as an Egyptian mummy, is linked to this sickness (as well as the bubonic plague spreading in Jaffa) and the finitude of the human. Further, subtle references to the World Wars and even the Ottoman-Hungarian wars lead by Vlad the Impaler are scattered through the work. Wars, mass deaths, and ecology are intermingled: The wars in Europe have ravened the sky, shredded the clouds, poisoned the winds. Even the west-to-east oceanic currents of the heavens are redolent of sulfur and brimstone. The trees of China, they say, from their recent wars, are bereft of birds. (Bradbury 2014, p. 110) Men’s actions poison the planet which, in turn, becomes inhospitable for human life. Even the supernatural Family runs the risk of becoming extinct if humanity stops believing in the marvelous. As modern medicine and science push the superstitious mind to the fringes of existence, the Family is in danger; they exist if people believe in the boogeyman, in the uncanny. It can be argued that this situation mirrors the increasing disavowal of the powers of death in our contemporary modernity. Like The Addams Family or The Munsters, the Family was adamant about keeping the dark at center stage. We, human beings, share life and the world with the horrible, the monstrous, and death. Rather than cynically negating the existence of this darkness, we should embrace its sweet taste. In embracing an awareness of ourselves as one of many species, in accepting our cohabitation with death and a frail ecosystem that we always let down, Morton argues that humans can move away from depression into a kind of dark sweetness. Indeed, full life might need to include earthquakes, storms, rats, dust, and bacteria: “For this is what we should task ourselves with: thinking future coexistence, namely coexistence unconstrained by present concepts” (Morton 2016, p. 27). Our cohabitation with the dark, with human death and an ecology that keeps going on thanks (in great part) to human finitude, will take us to a state of freedom from the desperation born from our awareness of ourselves as just another species. We must die so the planet can survive. Still, the planet will die, nevertheless. Death acts because it is structural to life. Life is following its right course; through natural disasters and plagues, the world is shaking off our presence because we oblige it to do so. In the last chapters of From the Dust Returned, the Family flees from the house as people with torches and pitchforks hunt them down, another callback to Universal monsters. As always, humanity chases away what humans do not understand, what people fear. It is not the monstrosity of the Family that scares “normal” people but the fact that they are death. Explains Grandmère, “They hate me because I am the accumulation of

132  Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns the knowledge of Death. That knowledge is a curse to them instead of a useful burden” (Bradbury 2014, p. 179). Morton asserts that such an acquaintance with the idea of ecological disaster and human finitude should not be a curse; we must coexist with this knowledge. Further, as Grandmère puts it, we accumulate. We are wise with farewells. Would you not admit, child, that forty billion deaths are a great wisdom, and those forty billion who shelve under the earth are a great gift to the living so that they might live? (Bradbury 2014, p. 180) People, however, insist on denying the powers of the dark, represented in the dark ecology and in the Family. The last chapter/tale, “The Gift”, takes place in an archaeological museum, the place being a reservoir for the accumulation of memory of death. As such, it is the “only safe place in the world” (Bradbury 2014, p. 122) for Grandmère. As Timothy explains to the curator, the mummy has many things to say to those eager to hear. The curator asks, “What is it she, mainly, says?” “Everything there is to say about death, sir.” “Everything?” “Four thousand four hundred years, like I said, sir. And nine hundred million people who had to die so we can live.” (Ibid) The phenomenology of life and death/death and life is discussed again, for the last time, in the novel. Morton’s book is subtitled “for a logic of future coexistence”; what is, concretely, this coexistence? It is the awareness that nature is not helping us and it never did. It is not our friend, but alien to our too-human wishes and needs. Coexisting means “keeping the unpredictable one open” (Morton 2015, p. 2). Our lives are fragile. We are constantly dying and that is good for the ecosphere. The Elliott Family knows that; that is why they are comfortable around death. As already stated, they are “the granaries of dark remembrance”. It is important to note the fitting metaphor: granaries. The Family accumulates death as humans accumulate food. Death is their subsistence. Coexistence needs to be “unconstrained by present concepts” (Morton 2015, p. 27) such as death or horror. Death is part of life and people live if we die first. Still, only those who, like the curator, bend themselves to hear the soft voice of Grandmère and pay attention will hear about death and how beneficial it is. We must coexist with its dark, sweet embrace. Most people, however, still choose to chase the death away with torches and pitchforks.

Dark Ecology in From the Dust Returned  133

Bibliography Andeweg, A. & Zlosnik, S. (2013) “Introduction”, in Andeweg, A. and Zlosnik, S. (eds), Gothic Kinship. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–11. Aretoulakis, E. (2014) “Towards a Posthumanist Ecology”. European Journal of English Studies 18(2), pp. 172–90. Bradbury, R. (2012) “The Vacation”, in Bradbury, R. (ed.), Ray Bradbury: Stories. Volume 1. New York: Harper, pp. 548–52. ———. (2014) From the Dust Returned. New York: William Morrow. Castronovo, R. (2001) Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Durham: Duke University Press. Colebrook, C. (2014) Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library. Daw, S. (2016) “The ‘Dark Ecology’ of the Bomb: Writing the Nuclear as a Part of ‘Nature’ in Cold War American Literature”, in Schneider, R. (ed), Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture. Lanham: Lexington, pp. 119–34. Falk, A. (2015) Napoleon against Himself: A Psychobiography. Virginia: Pitchstone Publishing. Foucault, M. (1974) The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House. Freud, S. (1919) The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003. Garrard, G. (2004) Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge. Gomel, E. (2010) Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. New York: Continuum. Hakola, O. (2015) Rhetoric of Modern Death in American Living Dead Films. Bristol: Intellect. Hopkins, D. (2002) Smallpox in History: The Greatest Killer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Horkheimer, M. (1978) Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969. New York: Seabury Press. Hoskinson, K. (2001) “Ray Bradbury’s Cold War Novels”, in Bloom, H. (ed), Ray Bradbury. New York: Infobase, pp. 125–40. Jaspers, K. (1970) Philosophy, Vol. 2, E. B. Ashton (tr.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Katz, E. (2001) “Faith, God, and Nature: Judaism and Deep Ecology”, in Landis Barnhill, D. and Gottlieb, R. (eds), Deep Ecology and World Religions: New Essays on Sacred Ground. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 153–68. Lowenstein, A. (2005) Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma: National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Mims, C. (2014) When We Die: The Science, Culture, and Rituals of Death. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Morton, T. (2012) The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. (2016) Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Paglia, C. (1991) Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickson. New York: Vintage Books.

134  Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns Parham, J. (2015) Green Media and Popular Culture: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pepperell, R. (1995) The Post-Human Condition. Exeter: Intellect Books. Scranton, R. (2018) We’re Doomed. Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change. New York: Soho Press. Sterelny, K. & Griffiths, P. (1999) Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Weller, S. (2010) Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing. Whitman, W. (1980) Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, Volume 1, 1855–1856. New York: New York University Press. Zimmerman, M. (1994) Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

8

Remembrance of Death, Family, and Place in Ray Bradbury’s “Homecoming” J. Patrick Mullins

Ray Bradbury opened his 1950 short story, “The Exiles”1, with a psychic assault against a spaceship from Earth upon its approach to the planet Mars. The astronauts in their spacecraft are tormented by horrible hallucinations ripped from the pages of another era’s Gothic literature: “a bat with a man’s face”, “white skulls that screamed”, “a white wolf … [s]hot with a silver bullet”, “a thing rotting underground in a black box” (1997, pp. 119–22). This attack on the minds of men of science originates from “the Emerald City” of Oz, standing at the brim of a “dry Martian sea” (1997, p. 123), and it was directed by Edgar Allan Poe, observing the approaching ship from the Emerald City’s highest tower. Poe struggles to organize resistance by the writers of fantasy, and their characters, who had taken refuge on Mars: William Shakespeare, along with Oberon, Hamlet’s father, and the three witches of Macbeth, a sardonic Ambrose Bierce and fretful Algernon Blackwood, Charles Dickens, accompanied by Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, as well as Santa Claus, growing emaciated and ragged due to the cynical disbelief of Earth’s “lonely, factual people” (1997, p. 131). Earth authorities had banned the reading and writing of works of the imagination, and ordered the old books burned. So long as someone on Earth read their stories, if only “some boy in a discarded attic” (1997, p.  130), the writers and their characters continue to exist, living in the minds of the reader (and taking corporeal form on Mars). When the astronauts land, the captain burns a stack of books he brought with him. Each of the Martian exiles dissolve to ashes as the books burn, until the Emerald City itself vanishes into the red dust. Bradbury offered “The Exiles” as a tribute to the authors—L. Frank Baum, Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Charles Dickens— who had first stirred within him a love for literary fantasy during his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois. “The Exiles” was also a shout of defiance against the literary realists of the post-World War II years who dismissed fantasy as a foolish distraction from the hard truths of the human condition, such as sickness, war, oppression, and exploitation. Throughout his career as an adult writer, Bradbury maintained that fantasy was, on the contrary, an irreplaceably practical tool which humans

136  J. Patrick Mullins create to cope with precisely such hard truths. Paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche in his poem, “We Have Our Arts So We Won’t Die of Truth”, Bradbury contended that we “need our Arts to teach us how to breathe/ And beat our blood; accept the Devil’s neighborhood, /And age and dark and cars that run us down” (1996, pp. 173–4). Through ghost stories, fairy tales, and science fiction adventures, he believed, humans can confront the implacable realities of violence, loss, age, and death in metaphorical forms—vampires, witches, fairy kings, Christmas ghosts, and Martians—which we can control imaginatively. We can triumph over death in our minds, for instance, by plunging a stake through the vampire’s chest. Such art is one way of “making do with death”, rendering our pain and fear manageable, lest we become paralyzed with despair and unable to survive as a species (Aggelis 2004, p. xii). Fantasy was not mere escapism for Bradbury. By working through such primal emotions as fear, rage, lust, and envy within safely controlled cultural forms, we are less likely to act them out in the real world. Fantasy literature can, then, not simply mask but mitigate the grimmer aspects of the human condition (Eller & Touponce 2004, pp. xii, xvi). Bradbury believed moreover that artists could and should find an inexhaustible source of inspiration by tapping into their own inner darkness and channeling it into their art. He sustained throughout adult life that childhood love for Romantic writers like Poe and Baum who shared with him the belief in the importance of fantasy literature to the emotional lives of their readers—as well as the usefulness of painful memories as a spur to creative work. It is well known that Edgar Allan Poe turned his personal anguish—especially from the untimely deaths of his mother and wife from tuberculosis—into tales of terror. But L. Frank Baum had his own demoralizing griefs. Of his eight siblings, five were carried away in childhood by such afflictions as diphtheria (Loncraine 2009, pp. 8–9, 35, 182–3). While Poe responded to the loss of his loved ones by inventing a perpetually dark and gloomy world of murders, tortures, and premature burials, Baum responded to similar pain by inventing a perpetually sunlit fairyland in which no one died naturally, “the children remained children always, … while all the babies lived in their cradles and were tenderly cared for and never grew up” (Baum 1918, p. 157). It was fitting that Bradbury placed Poe in the high tower of Baum’s Emerald City, railing against the book burners who would deprive people of the cultural tools—horror stories and fairy tales alike—they need to endure the loss of loved ones, comprehend their own mortality, and grapple with the evils that stalk the world. 2 Part Poe and part Baum, Bradbury found the journey of life to be “[e]xactly one half terror, exactly one half exhilaration” (1996, p. 50). He learned early in his career as a professional writer that he could free himself from the constraining examples of his favorite writers and generate original stories by drawing inspiration from his own lived experience,

Remembrance of Death, Family, and Place  137 both terrible and joyful. His most intense and compelling memories were of his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, an industrial suburb of Chicago on Lake Michigan, where he lived with his family from 1920 until 1934 (except for short residences out west in 1927 and 1932–33). Bradbury recollected keenly both the playful dreams and dark shadows of his small-town, Midwestern boyhood and turned them into fuel for his long life of literary production. Imaginatively recreated as “Green Town, Illinois”, Waukegan served as the setting for overtly autobiographical tales of boyhood and growing up which culminated in the novels Dandelion Wine (1957) and Farewell Summer (2006). Less overtly, Bradbury employed recollections of his Waukegan years as the basis for supernatural fiction, such as his cycle of stories about the Elliott family, which began with “The Homecoming” (1946) and climaxed with his novel From the Dust Returned (2001). Through these weird tales of a supernatural family, Bradbury allowed himself to reflect on the loss of his relatives to disease and age, but he leavened these painful memories with equally powerful recollections of exhilaration, whimsy, family endurance in the face of trial, and the victory of love over death. The synthesis of these two impulses—part Poe, part Baum—is one of his great fictional creations: the Elliott family, a loving clan of vampires, witches, werewolves, shadows, and mummies who gather on Halloween in a family home located in an “upper Illinois” town. Like his Green Town stories, the Elliott family stories are based on autobiographical recollections of family love and loss, albeit in the metaphorical dress of traditional Gothic literature. As he explained in the afterword of From the Dust Returned, “all my characters [in the novel] are based on the relatives who wandered through my grandmother’s house on those October evenings when I was a child” (2001b, p. 203). By the time he finished the novel, almost all of his Waukegan family had passed away. But his supernatural fiction served as their memorial in perpetuity. “Though long dead”, Bradbury added, “they live again and waft in the chimney flues, stairwells, and attics of my imagination, kept there with great love” (2001b, p.  203). Like the fantasy authors (and their characters) who enjoyed a kind of second chance at life in their Martian exile, Bradbury kept his family alive in his own mind and endowed them with literary immortality by resurrecting them as undead creatures. This chapter of Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction: Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family aims to illuminate Bradbury’s methods and motives for creating this cycle of vampire-family stories in the historic context of his childhood and family life in 1920s Waukegan. For Ray Bradbury, childhood was protected, enlivened, and constrained by the power of family and place. His closely knit, extended family lived in the same small, Midwestern town, all within a mile of one another. His father’s father, Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, Sr., was

138  J. Patrick Mullins an old-stock Yankee, while his mother and her siblings emigrated from Sweden with their parents in 1890 and arrived in Waukegan in 1898. The Bradbury family homestead was a two-story, plain, clapboard house at 619 Washington Street, on the corner of Washington and South Saint James Street. Behind the house, at 11 South Saint James, was a smaller home owned by Ray Bradbury’s paternal grandparents, where he lived with his father, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, Sr. (usually called Leo), his mother Esther, and his older brother Leonard, Jr. (later called Skip). Leo’s brother Bion Edward Bradbury and his wife Edna lived on 618 Glen Rock Avenue, directly behind Leo and Esther’s house. Washington Street, Saint James Street, and Glen Rock Avenue intersected to form a triangle in the city grid. Within a mile of the Bradbury family’s triangular neighborhood lived Esther’s parents Gustav and Hannah Moberg, her brother Inar Moberg with his wife Arthurine and daughter Vivian, and her older brother Philip Moberg with his wife Doris and their children Philip and Shirley. The Moberg grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were regular visitors to the Bradbury triangle, which provided the warm, welcoming core of Ray’s boyhood world. (Weller 2005, pp. 24–25, 48) The close proximity of the Bradbury and Moberg families meant that sorrows as well as joys were theirs to share. Leo and Esther’s first children were Leonard, Jr., and his twin brother Sam, born on July 17, 1916. Destroying a hundred million people worldwide between 1918 and 1920, the influenza pandemic claimed two-year-old Sam on September 30, 1918 (Weller 2005, p. 24). On a troop ship en route to France for service in World War I, Leo’s twenty-three-year-old brother, Captain Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, Jr., contracted pneumonia. He died in a military hospital in Brest on October 17th and was buried in France, just fifteen days after his toddler nephew was buried in Waukegan’s Union Cemetery (Robinson 1920, p.  1876). Determined not to lose another child, Esther Moberg Bradbury was obsessively protective of the health of her third son, Ray Douglas Bradbury, born on August 22, 1920. He was sometimes fed with a bottle as late as age six. Such nervous efforts to keep disease at bay did not prevent her fourth and last child, tenmonth-old Elizabeth Jane, from succumbing to influenza on February 8, 1928. Esther Bradbury’s anxieties for her son Ray must have become frantic when, only a few months after Betty Jane’s death, he contracted whooping cough and had to be kept from school. From an early age, Ray Bradbury was afraid of the dark and preoccupied with the macabre. As he related to his biographer, Sam Weller, “I have a feeling my mother infected me. She was a very fearful woman. I think a lot of her fears were transferred over to me. She was afraid that something might happen to me” (Weller 2005, p. 25). Having lost two of her four children within a decade, such maternal worries were understandable. Death was an unwelcome and too frequent caller at the Bradbury houses. Although Ray Bradbury never got to meet his uncle, the handsome

Remembrance of Death, Family, and Place  139 and dashing captain, or his brother Sam, he was born into a family haunted by their untimely deaths, and he was made to feel their absence. Conceived soon after Sam’s death, Ray “could never quite escape the bizarre sensation that somehow he was expected to replace Samuel as a twin to Leonard” (Weller 2005, pp. 32–3). In his whimsical poem, “I Have a Brother, Mostly Dead”, Bradbury cited his dead toddler brother as a “muse” whose death provided creative inspiration for his ghost stories. Little, absent Sam was “[m]ost of my life, mostly unseen, /And yet I feel with him I’ve been/A cohort playmate friend of Poe” (1982, p. 21). Sam’s death was unseen by his younger brother but no less real to him for that. Ray Bradbury’s first personal encounter with family death was that of Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, Sr. As an adult, he remembered saying goodbye to the grandfather he adored, while the sixty-eight-year-old lay dying from meningitis in the upstairs bedroom of the house on 619 Washington Street. He recalled seeing Grandpa Sam’s body displayed in its casket at the funeral parlor, ready for burial on June 7, 1926. Ray’s brother and grandfather were joined by Betty Jane in the Union Cemetery on February 10, 1928 (Mengeling 2002, p. 20). In his short story, “The Night”, Bradbury recollected the moment that he found Betty Jane deceased: Death is your little sister one morning when you awaken at the age of seven, look into her crib and see her staring up at you with a blind blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. (2001a, p. 287) As Bradbury once related to an interviewer, “The graveyard was a part of my life. I was raised with a lively sense of mortality”. Decades after these painful family deaths, Bradbury offered tribute to them in “Their Names in Dust, Their Dates in Grass”, a poem relating a visit, at middle age, to Waukegan’s Union Cemetery. Crouching over the graves of his grandfather and siblings, “suddenly not large or old but young and small, /[I] Put forth my hand to let them know/That I am here who loved them so” (1982, pp. 64–5). He dedicated a 1974 poetry collection to the memory of his paternal grandparents and his two siblings who died young, “long lost in the years but now remembered” (1982, p. 152). Through active and earnest remembrance, Bradbury kept his departed relatives alive in his imagination, like those authors of fantasy exiled to Mars, living beyond the grave in the minds of their readers. While ghosts of the dead lingered at 619 Washington Street and 11 South St. James Street, there was also joyfulness in the Bradbury homes, much of it the work of Sam and Minnie Bradbury’s youngest child. Born on March 10, 1909, Nevada Marion Bradbury—known as Neva to the family—was only eleven years older than young Ray, and he later

140  J. Patrick Mullins described her as “more a sister than an aunt” (2010, p. ix). After her brothers Sam, Jr., Leonard, Sr., and Bion moved out of their parents’ house and got married, Neva remained. Exercising her lively imagination in art and theater as a high school student, Neva took classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and became a commercial artist and dressmaker, working as a set and costume designer for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Turning the attic of the 11 St. James Street house into her art studio, she painted windows on the walls with cityscapes and landscapes beyond the imagined panes. Downstairs, Leo and Esther Bradbury were quiet, hard-working, fairly colorless parents, “normal knitting and smoking people”, as Ray later put it (Weller 2005, p. 39). Thanks to his young, artistic, vivacious aunt with the flapper bob, Ray Bradbury could recollect having been “born into this, an atmosphere of the twenties, half Gatsby and half Dracula” (2001a, p. 461). Whether building miniature stage sets in her studio or roller-skating with her under autumn leaves, Aunt Neva was the primary source of delight in Ray Bradbury’s Waukegan childhood. Sam Weller has gone so far as to say that Ray Bradbury was “Neva’s greatest creation” by helping to “foster and steer him” toward creative expression (2005, p. 29). Neva Bradbury was tireless in her efforts to champion fantasy in a workaday—and too often tragedy stricken—household. For Christmas in 1925, she gave her five-year-old nephew his first introduction to literary fantasy, a collection of classic fairy tales edited by Katherine Lee Bates called Once Upon a Time. In the wake of Grandpa Sam’s death in June 1926, Neva began reading to Ray from her collection of Baum’s Oz books about the fairyland where “no one. . . ever died” (Baum 1918, p. 156), except the occasional wicked witch, vanquished by a Midwestern child with a bucket of water (Weller 2005, p. 30). Then came Betty Jane’s death on February 8, 1928, and Ray recollected in his story “The Night” “stand[ing] by her high-chair four weeks later and suddenly realiz[ing] she’ll never be in it again, laughing and crying” (2001a, p. 287). The empty high-chair, combined with his bout of whooping cough a few months later, may have prompted in young Ray his first sense of his own mortality. During his convalescence, Neva began reading to the boy Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, illustrated luridly by Harry Clarke. Neva handed him the hefty volume, and when he placed it on a table, it flipped open to “The Cask of Amontillado”. “I plunged in and got drunk immediately”, he recollected, “I was nine years old and had never read anything like it; I fell in love completely with Edgar Allan Poe” (2010, p. x). Fantasy literature provided a cathartic mechanism for young Ray to purge anxieties which might otherwise have been destructive to him psychologically. Within the secure fortifications of the Emerald City, under the protection of Poe, he could confront and process hard truths of life and death difficult for a child to comprehend and accept.

Remembrance of Death, Family, and Place  141 Neva Bradbury turned family celebration of Halloween into an extravaganza by bringing her talent for costume and set design to 619 Washington Street. While she always made Halloween special for her Bradbury and Moberg nephews and nieces, Ray Bradbury considered the Halloween of 1928 to be his most memorable. As he related in one 1975 reminiscence, Neva started planning the celebration with eightyear-old Ray around October 20th. Together they designed costumes for all of the family members—Leonard, Jr., as Quasimodo, Leonard, Sr., as Edgar Allan Poe—then cut and sewed the costumes in her studio. Neva and her nephews and nieces painted masks one night, made apple cider another, pulled taffy, and selected the “spookiest music”. She, Ray, and Leonard, Jr., took the family Model A Ford out to an uncle’s farm to gather pumpkins and corn shocks for decorating Grandma Minnie’s house, along with black crepe serpentine from the Woolworth’s fiveand-dime store downtown and autumn leaves from Union Cemetery. On Halloween night, when the house party began, they placed leaf planks from the dining-room tables on the staircases for children to scramble up or slide down and extinguished all the lights, providing a string to guide visiting children through candlelit mazes (1975, pp.  129–32). Neva, her “hands smeared with horrible tallow, leered from shadow pantrys”, while Ray, dressed as a witch, would jump out to frighten those who passed his closet lair (2001a, p. 461). The frightened boy had become the frightener. It seems that Neva Bradbury took such pains to make that Halloween the “grandest” in her nephew’s memory as her answer to Betty Jane’s palpable absence (1975, p.  130). The celebration of 1928 was not wholly successful in banishing from the family’s minds the pain of loss and the fear of death. Amidst all the hilarity, Ray could not forget, as he and his aunt drove away from Union Cemetery with their bag of leaves, that the graveyard had “real cold people in them, [his] brother and sister”, which reminded him of “the true, deep sense of Halloween” (1975, p.  131). He recollected, upon leaving his grandmother’s house after the Halloween night party and crossing the lawn to his parent’s house, diving into a pile of raked leaves, and then thinking, “This is what it’s like to be dead. Under grass, under dirt, under leaves” (1975, p. 132). Halloween, as a carnivalesque ritual, commemorates the dead but seeks to turn sorrow into delight, terror into exhilaration. As mortality is sewn into human nature, the victory over death can never be complete or final, except insofar as we can live forever in the minds of future generations through art. Beginning with “The Lake” in 1942, twenty-one-year-old Bradbury found inspiration for writing supernatural stories that were original in style and plot by applying a method of word-association to plumb his subconscious for vivid memories from his Waukegan childhood. 3 He produced a body of supernatural short stories based on boyhood

142  J. Patrick Mullins recollections, including “The Night”, “The Man Upstairs”, and “The Emissary”, many of which were published in the pulp horror magazine Weird Tales. The magazine’s editors urged him not to write “any more child fantasies” and stick to conventional horror stories. He told writerpublisher August Derleth, “I hate to write about vampires, darn it” (Eller & Touponce 2004, pp. 54–5). At Derleth’s suggestion, Bradbury began work in 1944 on his first book, an anthology of tales of childhood fright first titled A Child’s Garden of Terror (an eerie homage to Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry collection, A Child’s Garden of Verses), and later redubbed Dark Carnival. Recalling the 1928 Halloween, with the house dark and decorated, and his relatives in costume, Bradbury could playfully conceive of himself as having been “raised in a house of vampires” (2001a, p. 461). In 1945, he sought to preserve in print this treasured memory and, by the same process of creative remembrance, generate an original, unconventional story about vampires. The result was “The Homecoming”, his first story of the Elliott family. Predictably rejected by Weird Tales, he submitted one version to Mademoiselle, and its October 1946 publication proved his big break into slick magazines. He revised it as the lead story for the Dark Carnival anthology. A carnivalesque inversion of the traditional Gothic conventions,4 Bradbury imagined a haunted house that is home to a loving family of vampires and monsters. The Elliott family house would be an Emerald City remodeled for Poe, a whimsically weird space in which no one ever died because the residents were undead. Readers enter this unfamiliar environment through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Timothy Elliott. A stand-in for Bradbury, Timothy has the same first name as the character in Dandelion Wine who serves as Bradbury’s younger self (1996, p. 60). Having submitted stories under the nom de plume William Elliott, Bradbury gave this surname to his family of inverted Bradburys and Mobergs. Just as young Ray often considered himself—wracked with fears of the dark and preoccupied with fantasy—out of step with his prosaic parents and older brother, so Timothy Elliott is the misfit of the clan. Miserable as “the imperfect one, the sick one” (2001a, pp. 4–5), he has flat human teeth instead of vampiric incisors, sleeps in a bed instead of a coffin, recoils at the thought of drinking blood, and lacks any special gifts, such as flight or telepathy. Timothy’s desperate, but still conflicted, yearning to be accepted fully by his family is the central conflict of the story. The story opens with Timothy’s eagerness at the impending arrival of his scattered Elliott kin for the grand reunion scheduled for Halloween in the family homestead, a haunted Victorian mansion in the countryside of a small Illinois town. Among the relatives named (but not developed as characters) are “Frulda and Helgar” and the winged “Lotte” (2001a, pp. 3, 18), likely allusions to Gus and Hannah Moberg’s daughters, Signe Moberg Schoenke and Victoria Moberg Duffie, the aunts

Remembrance of Death, Family, and Place  143 whom Bradbury recalled as the “Swedish sisters” (Weller 2005, p. 23). Another is “Cousin Vivian” (2001a, p. 3), Bradbury’s hat tip to his favorite first cousin, Vivian Moberg Gnewuch, the daughter of Inar and Arthurine Moberg. Sketchily developed members of the Elliott family include Timothy’s adult brothers, “Bion and Leonard and Sam” (2001a, p. 4), an homage to his brother Leonard, Jr., his deceased baby brother Sam, and his uncle, Bion Bradbury. Indeed Leonard Elliott teases Timothy about his fear of darkness, just as Leonard, Jr., would tease Ray about his own fear. In “The Homecoming”, Sam is a scholar, while Bion and Leonard operate the town funeral home. Rather than disposing of the blood drained from the human bodies they prepare for burial, they bring it home as food for the family, as inoffensive a vampire lifestyle as one could imagine, considering the alternatives. In clear allusions to the Bradbury Halloween celebration of 1928, the Elliotts are busy around the house preparing for the annual family reunion. Bradbury described “black crepe going up in all the halls and on the ceilings and doors”, while the “smell of black tapers crept up the banistered stairwell” (2001a, pp. 4, 5). Timothy’s sister Ellen hangs “imitation wolfsbane”, while Bion walks in carrying “vast two gallon jugs”, which contain not apple cider but mortuary blood (2001a, pp. 5, 8). Timothy’s grandmother and grandfather lived in the house, along with his father and mother. Bradbury inverted the short, plump, and frumpy Esther Moberg Bradbury as a dark lady who was “gracious and tall and beautiful” (2001a, p. 18). Once the party began, the house was dark, lit only by candles, like the 619 Washington Street house. While his Bradbury relatives wore strange costumes on October 31, 1928, the party guests in his story take far stranger forms, such as a mouse that transforms into a beautiful woman, “Great-great-great-great and a thousand more greats grandmother” wrapped as an Egyptian mummy, cousins with “devilish faces” and “half-girl, half-boy bodies”, and a shadowy “[s]omething” which “sighed and wept and tapped continually” at the kitchen window (2001a, pp.  17, 11). They danced to “outlandish music” and played party games, using coffins in place of musical chairs (2001a, p. 11). Timothy is most eager to meet his fabled uncle Einar Elliott, who can soar through the sky by flapping the wide, green, bat-like wings sprouting from his shoulder blades. Uncle Einar’s arrival at the house is explosively joyful, as he seizes Timothy, throws the boy into the air, and then flies him around inside the high-ceilinged house, providing him for a moment with his wish for wings. Uncle Einar, one of the most vivid characters in “The Homecoming”, was Bradbury’s loving tribute to Inar Moberg, whom he described an interview with Donn Albright as “fantastic”, “my favorite super-uncle” (2001a, p. 255). An employee of the Snow White Laundry Company, Inar would “come to the house at least once a week, and deliver our laundry” at a discounted  rate.

144  J. Patrick Mullins “He’d  come  by the back door”, Bradbury related, “and he’d come in, and his laughter would ring through the house, you know” (2001a, p. 257). One might fairly speculate that Uncle Inar would also grab his young nephew by the waist and throw him into the air now and then. A welcome contrast to his quiet and reserved parents, Bradbury celebrated Inar Moberg as a larger than life figure in his boyhood, the “happy, Swedish, loud, wonderful uncle” (2012, p.  69). Bradbury included in Dark Carnival his short story “Uncle Einar”, which further developed the character from “The Homecoming”. In a kind of private family joke about his uncle, the laundry delivery man, the story opens with the winged uncle grumbling because his human wife Brunilla insists that he dries the laundry by flying it through the air. Bradbury reported that, when he published “Uncle Einar”, Inar Moberg was “the first person I took it to” and “he loved the story” (2012, p. 75). After Timothy, the most prominent character in “The Homecoming” is Cecy Elliott, a telepath. She can project her own consciousness into the brains of other creatures—humans, animals, and her supernatural kin—and see the world through their eyes, without their even knowing. This telepathy empowers her to see anything she wants to see around the world, as she flits instantly from host to host. While possessing a host, she can also operate the person’s body and direct her or his will. In deference to Timothy’s desire to see the approaching relatives, she jumps from mind to mind and reports their progress, before telling her brother to leave her alone so she can “travel in the places I like best” (2001a, p. 3). When Timothy is in despair over his exclusion from the Halloween festivities, Cecy fulfills his wish. She possesses his body and directs his will to perform acts he would not otherwise do, such drinking blood, hypnotizing his sister Laura in fine Dracula-style, and then nipping her neck while the astonished family members look on. But even Cecy is not without mischief, and she shouts through his mouth that it is she directing his actions, not Timothy. Timothy is humiliated by the prank, but Cecy makes it up to him, enabling the boy to sing with the family “songs that were four hundred years old, songs Timothy did not know” (2001a, p. 19). As the party ends and the relatives depart the house, Cecy takes Timothy’s mind out of his own body and places it into Uncle Einar’s, so he can truly fly for the first time, if only for a moment. Despite the efforts of Cecy and Einar to make Timothy feel special, the story concludes with the boy weeping as he faces his own mortality, which will forever separate him from his family. Bradbury did not indicate if Timothy would take to heart Einar’s wise observation that, for the undead Elliotts, “The world’s dead for us. . . all one color: grey” (2001a, p. 17), and the world is so much richer for Timothy because of his mortality. “Life’s best to those who live the least of it”, Einar tells Timothy (2001a, p. 17). While the bat-winged Uncle Einar is an overt tribute to Inar Moberg, the preponderance of evidence points to Cecy Elliott—one of the most

Remembrance of Death, Family, and Place  145 memorable and recurring figures in Bradbury’s body of work—as Bradbury’s stand-in for Neva Bradbury. Like young Ray and his aunt, Timothy enjoys a special connection with Cecy in “The Homecoming”. Like Timothy, she sleeps in a bed rather than a coffin. His relationship with her is warmer and more loving than with any other Elliotts. In From the Dust Returned, Bradbury went much further, saying of Timothy and Cecy, “they were as one” (2001b, p. 43). While Neva resided in her attic studio at 11 South Saint James Street, Cecy resides in “the upstairs room” from Timothy (2001a, p.  3). In From the Dust Returned, Bradbury specified that she lived in “the High Attic” of the Elliott house, making the allusion to Neva’s attic studio clearer (2001b, p. 15). Cecy is Timothy’s older sister, while Neva was Ray’s aunt who seemed more like an older sister to him. Timothy and Cecy are fourteen and seventeen in “The Homecoming”, but Bradbury changed their ages to ten and seventeen in From the Dust Returned, bringing the age difference closer to the eleven years which separated him from Aunt Neva. In characterizing Neva as a supernatural member of the Elliott family, it was fitting that Bradbury styled her a witch (as Cecy is dubbed in his follow-up story, “The April Witch”). Bradbury dedicated his 1953 short story anthology The Golden Apples of the Sun “to Neva, daughter of Glinda, the Good Witch of the South”, one of the most memorable recurring characters in the Oz books she read her young nephew. In “A Second Homecoming”, preface to the 2012 volume Shadow Show, Bradbury inadvertently revealed that Timothy’s sister Cecy was a stand-in for his favorite aunt, alluding to the “loving, winged uncles” and “doting, telepathic aunts” in “The Homecoming” (2012b, pp. 9–10). Ray Bradbury commemorated his Bradbury and Moberg relatives in his Elliott family stories, but above all this cycle of supernatural fiction served as a thinly veiled monument to Neva Bradbury from her devoted nephew. He featured Cecy Elliott as the main character of the vampire-family tales, from “The Homecoming” and “The April Witch” to “The Traveler” and “West of October”. Bradbury also enhanced her telepathy, such that she could not just project her mind (or a willing subject’s mind) into humans, Elliott relatives, birds, or crayfish, but anything at all, including the moon itself. Casting Cecy Elliott in “The April Witch” as a seventeen-year-old girl yearning to experience love for the first time, and in “The Traveler” as a teenager lazing about in her room to her father’s aggravation, Bradbury ultimately exalted her as the most powerful member of the family. In From the Dust Returned, Cecy is “the fairest and most special daughter of the Family”, the “marshal” of the family homecoming, and nothing short of a “goddess of wisdom” (2001b, pp. 17, 54, 18). Shifting his focus to the roles of Cecy and Einar in his revision of “Homecoming” for From the Dust Returned, he reduced allusions to other Elliott relatives. Sam, Leonard, and

146  J. Patrick Mullins Bion disappear, along with references to drinking blood or worshipping “the Dark One” (2001a, p. 7). He also expanded the role of Timothy in the plotline. Originating as an awkward and insecure child with the “disease” of normality, Timothy becomes in From the Dust Returned a foundling adopted into the family and cultivated by Cecy as the “historian” of the Elliott family (2001b, p. 37), whose task is to remember the family and record their stories. When a mob burns the family house and the Elliotts’ bodies within, the Elliotts survive, living on in Cecy’s mind and in the family history Timothy prepares to write. Like Timothy and Cecy at the conclusion of From the Dust Returned, Ray and Neva Bradbury were the last survivors of the Bradbury triangle era. She died on March 29, 2001, at the age of ninety-two, living just long enough to see the novel’s completion. He died eleven years later. The fantasy writer, and the aunt who helped him become one, “were as one” to the end (2001b, p. 43). Burdened in his childhood by the dread of mortality, Bradbury worked through that fear by writing fantasy, a tool Neva first gave him in the forms of fairy tales and ghost stories and Halloween. The writer concluded, like his protagonist Timothy, that physical immortality is not desirable, were it attainable. “I have to accept the fact that I must die”, Timothy concludes in From the Dust Returned (2001b, p. 183), adopting as his new imperative: make haste to live. He no longer experiences terror from mortality and learns to find exhilaration in living to the fullest. Timothy purges his dread of separation from the family through their literary commemoration as family historian. And so too Bradbury, recollecting that vanished boyhood world of “uncles and aunts and my grandmother” in 1920s Waukegan, resolved that “some of it should be caught on paper to be kept forever” (2001b, p. 200). He resurrected an extinct generation of Bradburys and Mobergs through the method of creative remembrance, preserving his memory of them and love for them in his Elliott family stories. Like Poe, Dickens, and the other fantasy writers exiled with their fictional characters to Mars, so Einar, Cecy, and the other uncanny Elliotts survive in perpetuity in books, and their nephew with them.

Notes 1 In an earlier essay in this collection, “The Exiles” is referred to using the title “The Mad Wizards of Mars.” The story was originally published, in 1949, with the latter title and reprinted the following year in revised form as “The Exiles.” 2 On a personal note, writing this chapter has been a profoundly gratifying exercise for me as a mechanism for managing the pain of loss. I would like to dedicate it to the memory of Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) on the occasion of his 100th birthday and to my father John P. Mullins, Jr. (1938–2019) on the occasion of his death at the age of 81. Just as Ray Bradbury first sparked within me the determination to become a writer, so my father, an avid reader of Bradbury in his teenaged years, fanned that spark within me and kept it

Remembrance of Death, Family, and Place  147 burning. I would not have written this chapter, or anything at all, without their inspiration, for which I will always be grateful. 3 For one explanation of his word-association method, see Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing, (1996, pp. 15–19). 4 For analysis of the Elliott family stories as carnivalized Gothic, see Timothy Jones, The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture (2015) Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 106, 113–4, 119; one should note that “carnivalization” is the central interpretive concept in Eller and Touponce (2004) Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction.

Bibliography Aggelis, S. L. (2004) Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Baum, L. F. (1918) The Tin Woodman of Oz. Chicago: Reilly & Britton Co. Bradbury, R. (1975) “Tricks! Treats! Gangway!” Readers Digest October, pp. 129–32. ———. (1982) The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury. New York: Ballantine Books. ———. (1996) Zen in the Art of Writing. Santa Barbara, CA: Joshua Odell Editions. ———. (1997) The Illustrated Man. New York: Avon Books. ———. (2001a) Dark Carnival. Springfield, PA: Gauntlet Press. ———. (2001b) From the Dust Returned. New York: William Morrow. ———. (2005) The Halloween Tree. Springfield, PA: Gauntlet Press. ———. (2010) “Foreword”, in Scott Manning (ed), Bound To Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, pp. ix–xii. ———. (2012a) Greentown Tinseltown. Hornsea: Stanza. ———. (2012b) “A Second Homecoming”. Shadow Show: All New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury. New York: William Morrow. Eller, J. R. & Touponce, W. F. (2004) Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent and London: Kent State University Press. Loncraine, R. (2009) The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum. New York: Gotham Books. Mengeling, M. E. (2002) Red Planet, Flaming Phoenix, Green Town: Some Early Bradbury Revisited. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse. Robinson, W. (1910) Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, Supplement, Volume VI-B, 1910–1920. Saginaw, MI: Seemann and Peters. Weller, S. (2005) The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. New York: William Morrow.

9

Innovating Nightmares Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family and the Horror of Technology in Modern American Capitalism Kasey Sease

In a 1980 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, Ray Bradbury explained that his opinions on technology were “mixed” (Aggelis 2004, p. 100). He argued that “an automobile is a destroying mechanism and it’s also a happiness machine, depending on how it’s used” (Aggelis 2004, p. 100). He urged his fellow authors to “examine both sides” of technology, “and then write perhaps a third story, which will give us solutions combining both, so that we can get away from the nightmare and move toward the delights in the future” (Aggelis 2004, p. 100). When Bradbury wrote about the Elliotts of Illinois—a rural family of monsters—he used a nightmare to complicate readers’ perceptions of technology. Bradbury first inked his haunting characters into existence as a young man in his twenties. However, the inspiration for this family “who were most strange, outré, [and] rococo” began simmering in the budding writer’s brain at the age of seven (Bradbury 2001, p. 200). As a child in northern Illinois, Bradbury read frightful tales by Edgar Allan Poe and repeatedly visited his local theater to watch Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony skeletons dance by projected moonlight (Bradbury 2001, p.  187; Isabouts 2001). He celebrated Halloweens with his beloved aunts and uncles, visited his grandmother to hear stories from her youth, and attended world’s fairs and carnivals as they passed through Chicago and the surrounding industrial cities (Bradbury 2001, pp. 199–200; 2004, p. xxvii). He also lost loved ones—including a sister—and coped with death by contemplating the character of Dracula and other spooky spirits of early cinema (Aggelis 2004, p. xii). In the Afterword of From the Dust Returned, Bradbury (2001, p. 200) related, “Out of this background of uncles and aunts and my grandmother, I began to see that some of it should be caught on paper to be kept forever”. The Elliotts—who, apart from their adopted human son, Timothy, “could be, but maybe were not, vampires”—lovingly emerged from Bradbury’s own childhood on the early twentieth-century streets of Waukegan (Bradbury 2001, p. 200).

Innovating Nightmares  149 This essay explores how the technological innovations described in From the Dust Returned and previously published short stories featuring the Elliott family simultaneously Other and captivate Ray Bradbury’s supernatural protagonists. As relatives gather for ghostly reunions and engage in otherworldly shenanigans, these fictional monsters encounter trains, boats, automobiles, and other electric or fuel-powered mechanisms. While Bradbury’s tales are fantastic, the Elliotts’ reactions to technology mirror the conflicted relationships that Americans developed with new machines in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like Bradbury’s own opinions on technology, the Elliotts’ are mixed. Some members of the Family, particularly the elders, view most machines as antithetical to the spine-tingling traditions they carried from ancient corners of the world. Younger generations, in contrast, are overwhelmingly awestruck by the horrific potential of these new automated monsters. Technology, in their eyes, could provide the scare tactics of tomorrow. Most scholars who examine Bradbury’s characterizations of technology, including Marvin Mengeling and M. Keith Booker, focus on the dystopian or futuristic settings he constructed in works such as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. This essay, in contrast, delves into one of Bradbury’s gothic horrors to illuminate the author’s own experiences with innovations in modern America. Ultimately, the Elliott Family interacts with much of what Bradbury did throughout decades defined by the rapid evolution of American capitalism. By telling their stories, he recounted his own entanglements with large-scale systemic change in a small town and beyond.

Scholars on Ray Bradbury’s Opinions of Technology Several scholarly and critical evaluations of Bradbury’s writings in the 1960s and 1970s claimed that the eclectic, hard-to-categorize author of science fiction and fantasy outright distrusted technology (Knight 1967; Lundwall 1971). In their eyes, Bradbury shied away from consistent, scientific descriptions of mechanical innovations (Knight 1967) and, worse still, opposed change of any kind (Lundwall 1971). This overwhelmingly negative response to Bradbury’s stories prompted a series of academic rebuttals in the 1980s. Marvin Mengeling (1980, p. 86), for example, asserted that Bradbury only objected to technology that was “used to deny individual freedom or the democratic spirit” and “disrupt or destroy a nuclear or extended family structure”. David Mogen (1986, p.  94), in contrast, tempered the evaluations of earlier scholarship by arguing that Bradbury’s science fiction stories had “changed in emphasis over the years, increasingly adopting a tone of celebration rather than of warning”. In their attempts to resuscitate praise for Bradbury’s unique perspective, these scholars focused exclusively on the science fiction that he wrote as it garnered the most criticism.

150  Kasey Sease In the last decade, academics have begun to challenge the existing scholarship on Bradbury’s shifting, or contingent, views of technology. These twenty-first-century scholars approach Bradbury’s writings as people looking for answers to present-day challenges, such as the effects of rapidly evolving consumer capitalism or ever-more-capable artificial intelligence. M. Keith Booker (2013, p.  76) compares Fahrenheit 451 to M. T. Anderson’s Feed to demonstrate how both “present us with strongly capitalist dystopias in which the oppressive system described largely involves the use of the media to further the consumerist agenda of the powers that be”. He equates the “general suspicion of technology” exhibited by current science fiction authors with Bradbury’s “unusual” distrust of machines “among the science-fiction writers of his generation” (Booker 2013, p. 79). By consistently casting “technology and modernity in general in a negative light”, Bradbury predates the twenty-first- century “expectation that advanced technology is inevitably dehumanizing” (Booker 2013, p.  79). Guido Laino (2017) begins his examination of Bradbury’s feelings toward artificial intelligence with a lighter interpretive hand than Booker. He challenges earlier scholars who characterized Bradbury’s opinions on technology as neutral by arguing that “things are far more ambiguous” in his science fiction tales, “perhaps even beyond the author’s intentions” (Laino 2017, p. 90). Nonetheless, Laino (2017, p. 96) ultimately observes, “In a metaphorical interpretation, Bradbury’s stories always address the gradual dehumanization of technological society, whether the actual use of technology could be recognized as positive or negative”. Both Booker and Laino seize upon Bradbury’s descriptions of technology as alienating or brutalizing to indicate an overarching pessimism toward mechanical innovations. However, by rejecting the characterization of Bradbury as a technological optimist in favor of a pessimistic reading, this scholarship has not escaped the problem of only interpreting Bradbury in absolute, either/or terms. This essay privileges a historical interpretation of Bradbury’s stories to make sense of his often-conflicting positions on technology that scholars have identified so far. As opposed to delving back into his science fiction, I will turn the pages of his gothic-horror tales in From the Dust Returned to excavate and contextualize the author’s complicated views on technology. For Bradbury, writing fantasy served different purposes than his more ubiquitous science fiction. He identified the most important of these differences—perspective—in a 1979 interview with The Washington Post. He explained that authors “write science fiction because it puts us at one remove from the reality we exist in” (Bradbury 1979). It is easier, he argued, to get readers to think about the problems of their present, and the possible effects on their future, if a writer sets their story “ahead 40 or 60 years” (Bradbury 1979). Writing science fiction, in other words, was an inherently forward-looking exercise for

Innovating Nightmares  151 Bradbury. It started in his present and moved into the future where his analyses, predictions, fears, and hopes manifested themselves into characters, settings, and plot. In contrast to future-facing science fiction, Bradbury used the fantastic horror tales of the Elliott Family to look back into his past to craft lessons for, or make sense of, the present (Bradbury 2001, pp. 199– 204). Characters in “The Traveler”, “Homecoming”, and other Elliottcentered tales are not “traditional ghosts”, but beings “who discovered the skeletons inside themselves and were terrified of that skeleton” (Bradbury 2001, p. 201). Bradbury’s (2001, p. 3) own metaphorical skeleton was made up of bones from his past and present, collapsing upon themselves into a pile of conflicting experiences that ultimately inspired his cobweb-strewn tales about Cecy, Anuba, and “A Thousand Times Great Grandmère”. When he finished rewriting and compiling stories about the Family—his own family—Bradbury offered readers a remembrance full of the sometimes-contradictory opinions of a twentieth-century American. In its pages, Timothy and his monstrous relatives try to make sense of technology in a rapidly changing world; not the world of a far distant future, but the very past and present Bradbury lived through.

Hostility, Mysticism, and Awe: The Family’s Encounters with Technology From the Dust Returned opens with a familiar scene from Bradbury’s childhood: a grandmother recounting to her grandson tales of how things came to be. “Tell me, Grandmère”, Timothy begs his ancient, mummified elder, “how it all began, how this House was built and where we came from” (Bradbury 2001, p. 5). As the time-worn and bandaged Beautiful One shares myths and memories with her adopted progeny, readers get access to more than critical exposition on the mysterious Family. Bradbury introduces a key theme that engenders conflict and comradery between his characters: generational divides. Some of the author’s monsters, like Grandmère, walked the Earth for several millennia before settling down in Illinois. Others, such as Cecy, may have only haunted the rural region for a couple hundred years or less. Bradbury uses this wide range of lifespans to communicate and explain the differences of opinions, actions, and qualities between his characters. One central fault line that separates the older and younger Family members is their understanding of technology. Timothy’s elders are mostly suspicious of, or hostile toward, machines and innovations throughout From the Dust Returned. For example, Grandmère’s earliest descriptions of her family’s history are laden with bitter characterizations of technology and the rapid change it can initiate. In Chapter 2, she tells the story of Anuba—an ancient royal cat from Egypt—who travels across land, on water, and through time to arrive at the Illinois abode

152  Kasey Sease (Bradbury 2001, pp. 12–13). Along the way, mummified cats are used as fuel to power machines and industry: “These packets of bones and flammable tar churned the stacks in what was called the Nefertiti-Tut Express” (2001, p. 12). As the locomotive chugged toward the west coast of Africa, “the black smokes firing the Egyptian air were haunted by Cleopatra’s cousins who blew off, flaking the wind until the Express reached Alexandria” (2001, p.  12). At that point, “the still unburned cats and their Empress Queen shipped out for the States, bundled in great spools of papyrus bound for a paper-mashing plant in Boston” (2001, pp. 12–13). Upon their arrival, the cats shed the cocoons which were “unleafed among innocent stationery printers”, resulting in the death of “two or three hundred profiteers with terrible miasmal bacteria” (2001, p. 13). Amidst the pandemic, the surviving cats walked to their final destinations in the Midwest, including Anuba. Technology indiscriminately consumes the past along Anuba’s journey to Illinois. The Egyptian mummies represent an ancient time out of place in the industrializing world of Victorian Europe and America. Instead of being revered in their tombs or propped up in museums, the cats are burned into energy until their souls—and stories—dissolve as clouds of haunted smoke in the sky. The late nineteenth-century people who break down these relics for their own gain are not left unscathed. Bradbury (2001, p. 13) deploys the word “miasmas” to describe the diseases that descend upon those who transform papyrus into profits via mechanical presses. This outdated term associated with contagious illness before advances in germ science demonstrates the limits of innovation amidst the chaotic destruction of history that Bradbury describes. Though Anuba survives the capitalist culling of her companions, she is still changed by her travels. When the cat takes her first steps into the Family home, “her fur [is] a sooty fire, her whiskers like lightening sparks” (2001, p. 13). The dynamism of the weary feline traveler starkly contrasts with the silent, empty farmhouse lit only by firelight. The building has more in common with the tombs of Egypt, with its many rooms and dark corridors, than the bustling, destructive, yet powerful industrial processes that brought Anuba to the United States. By recounting the cat’s travels to Timothy and readers alike, Grandmère shows how the modern environment of machines and markets Othered the first generation of Family immigrants. The story she tells mirrors the experiences of America’s earliest immigrants in the nineteenth century. At that time, global industrialization was a double-edged sword; it lured citizens of Italy, Germany, and elsewhere to Lady Liberty’s feet with the promise of economic opportunity while simultaneously rendering generations of small artisans insolvent by the rapid manufacture of cheaper goods (Bodnar 1985, pp.  30–4). Thousands of immigrants left behind identities steeped in decades of feudal family trades as they traveled across lands and sailed to shores undergoing capital-fueled transformations.

Innovating Nightmares  153 In Bradbury’s tales, the experience-laden monsters took refuge in the Illinois House, a structure absent of the electric lights and mechanisms that gobbled up the past. Grandmère’s evaluation of technology continues to sour as the nineteenth century marches into the twentieth. Over the course of Timothy’s life—a fictional stand-in for Bradbury’s—much changes in Illinois and beyond. Most notably, Americans use new inventions, like cars, radio, and television, to shrink their world and shine probing lights into its dark and seemingly empty corners. According to Grandmère, the Family depends on those very spaces to maintain their spooky existence. In Chapter 21, “Return to the Dust”, she explains to Timothy that their home is destined to be demolished by their neighbors carrying ‘fire and torches’ (2001, p. 178). She warns that the attack will come within the night, as It is the age of discovery and revelations. The pictures that fly through the air. The sounds that blow in the winds. Things seen by many. Things heard by all. Travelers on the road by the tens of millions. No escape. We have been found by the words in the air and the pictures sent on light beams into rooms where children and children’s parents sit while Medusa, with insect-antenna coif, tells all and seeks punishment. (2001, p. 177) In Grandmère’s shrouded and ancient eyes, technology amplifies the conditions that render monsters like her harmless, even nonexistent, to human beings. Cars, radio, and television allow users to learn more about their world and explain the unexplainable. If creatures of the night avoid total revelation to spark fear, then these devices pose a tangible threat to their existence. Technology can also distract, or entrance, people, preventing monsters from getting enough attention to scare their mortal audience. Grandmère laments that sometimes when a family watches television, “the children sit with their parents behind them, frozen in an artic spell of unwanted gossip and unneeded slander” (2001, p.  177). In this environment, “the dumb will speak, the stupid will assume, and we are destroyed” (2001, p. 178). Regardless of the ways that humans interact with their new inventions, it becomes clear to the Family’s most respected elder that, by book’s end, their House is no longer enough to cloak its inhabitants in shadow and mystery. While Timothy’s parents and time-worn relatives mostly agree with Grandmère’s assessments of twentieth-century technologies, there are crucial exceptions to this rule that highlight the importance of personal experience to Bradbury’s spooky stories. Not all elders in From the Dust Returned feel alienated or endangered by mechanical innovations. Some, like the ghostly passenger in the chapter “On the Orient North”,

154  Kasey Sease possess an affinity toward more mystical machines. Unlike the ravenous engine that consumes mummies in “Anuba Arrives”, the train in Chapter 12 harbors a haunting spirit of its own, throwing open doors, clanging silverware, and swaying commuters with the occasional jostle of its cars. On this supernatural ride is a spectral subject attempting to escape the too-rational unbelievers and skeptics supposedly populating Eastern and Western Europe. Ever since Max Weber (1993, p.  270) published his sociological studies of religion, people in and outside the western academy have parroted the falsehood that nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans wholly abandoned their mystical understandings of the world in favor of logical, even scientific, explanations. Yet, historians of spiritualism have pushed back against this conclusion, revealing a Victorian reality of séances and the social sciences (Josephson-Storm 2017, pp. 1–5). Unfortunately for the Orient ghost, Bradbury filled his train with several of these mythically rational specimens; a typical horror trope birthed by the very Victorian spiritualists who melded reasoned observations with acknowledgments of the strange and the sacred in their own ghost stories. The doubtful train passengers sap the spirit of his energy until an aging nurse extends a sympathetic hand. When Minerva Halliday reaches out to the ghost, telling him “You are not sick. And you are not dying … You are … a ghost”, she is interrupted by the “whistle on the Orient Express” as it “wailed a long way off” (2001, p. 94). Bradbury (2001, p. 94) further describes the train as shrieking through the “night, fog, [and] mist” as the living and dead continue to converse. The ghost reveals that he is taking the train to “some safe, rain-drenched castle keep where men are properly frightened by soots and smokes of wandering souls” (2001, p. 96). Here, Bradbury establishes a kinship between the ghost and the coal-guzzling locomotive he rides. The train haunts the countryside as the ghost frequents its cabins, and yet the mortal passengers aboard—apart from Minerva—take no notice of either’s scares. The specter and his delightfully superstitious companion encounter another mystical machine along their journey. When the train reaches a waterside stop, it pauses to allow transferring passengers to board an incoming ferry. At this point, the ghost’s spirits are worse-off than ever, and Minerva attempts to conjure a cure for his debilitating malaise. She leads him into a play nursery full of children whose parents await the arrival of the boat. The ghost is horrified until the youth excitedly shout that they believe in the supernatural and crave scary stories to dispel their boredom. The “Orient gentleman with the frozen eyes” happily relents and shares his spine-tingling tales until the boat arrives (2001, p. 105). As the ferry powers down its engines, and “stops shuddering its delicious shudders”, silence fills the air “as if [the boat] had listened, heard, and deliriously enjoyed the long-before-dawn tales” (2001, p.  105). Bradbury likens the mechanical ferry to the children;

Innovating Nightmares  155 both embrace the supernatural. While the Orient ghost exploits the age gap between the kids and their parents to elicit much-needed scares, a kindred spectator, enveloped in the mystery of deep waters and lowlying fog, joyfully eavesdrops. By forging connections between the ghost and its transportation, Bradbury imbues his theme of generational divides with rich complexity. In a 1974 interview with Genesis magazine, the author explained that he saw his world differently as a child (Bradbury 1974). The “old docks and harbor facilities” in Waukegan were ugly to him as an adult, but when he was younger, “a heap of coal [was] beautiful” (1974). It looked like “a ton of black insects” shimmering with “blue meteorite glints” (1974). In “On the Orient North”, Bradbury fills the fictional children with the very wonder he experienced as a child. Furthermore, he instils the haunting mysticism that captivates kids in the machines that the ghost encounters. Mechanical trains and ferries are young when compared to the centuries-old specter, and yet they offer the ailing spirit comforting familiarity despite their differences. “On the Orient North” is a textual bridge between the young and the old. It does not undercut Grandmère’s warnings about technology, but reframes them with a plea to, on occasion, embrace pure wonder and acceptance. Bradbury reveals more to readers about the youthful perspective in From the Dust Returned through Cecy’s actions and preferences. The teenage witch (in monster years) is enthralled with trains, cars, and other machines. In her eyes, technology is awe-inspiring and monstrous. The metal-antennaed Medusas that Grandmère fears excite her—they provide the scares of tomorrow. In “Homecoming”, Cecy takes one of her many spiritual travels across the United States. On these excursions, she propels her consciousness into the minds of animals and people as her body lies asleep in the Family’s attic. Timothy asks the slumbering Cecy where she is traveling while a once-in-a-mortal-lifetime reunion of the Family commences downstairs. Cecy is behind the eyes of a farmer’s wife who sits alone on her porch overlooking a sulfurous mud pit. Through the pupils she sees planes overhead, flying “like pterodactyls on huge wings” (Bradbury 2001, p. 60). In the distance, “a steam shovel Tyrannosaurus stares at those loud reptiles flying high”, completing the scene of “prehistoric cookings” as fossils transform into crude oil deep underground (2001, p. 60). Amidst this terrible, yet grand, setting, the woman commits suicide by stepping into the mud pit shortly after Cecy leaves her skull and settles into a bird flying by. The dinosaur-like-machines at home in the oily mud transfix Cecy. The planes’ engines roar past the large and lumbering steam shovel, creating a dynamic show that the young witch can share with her brother. Timothy thirsts for the adventures she enjoys, and her descriptions of mechanical behemoths in a kind of prehistoric industrial park enthrall him. Bradbury, a lover of extinct terrible lizards since the age

156  Kasey Sease of five, frequently melds dinosaurs and machines together in his fiction. The most notable example is his 1951 short story “The Fog Horn”, which was, a few years later, adapted into the film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eller 2011, p. 229). In an interview with NPR, Bradbury explained how a trip to the abandoned Venice Pier in California inspired his tale of the dinosaur who mistakes a mechanical foghorn bellowing from inside a lighthouse for another prehistoric beast. While there, he witnessed the ruins of a rollercoaster, “all the bones and the skeleton, the tracks and the ties … lying there in the sea” (Bradbury 1988). He remarked to his wife, “I wonder what that dinosaur is doing lying here on the shore?” (Bradbury 1988). In “Homecoming”, Bradbury deploys this imagery to infuse Cecy and Timothy’s characters with the same childlike awe that he sometimes felt for great lizard-like machines. Still, he does not surrender the chilling tone of his gothic novel. The goliaths only hold Cecy’s attention until the farmer’s wife adds her own horror to the spectacle, succumbing to one of Bradbury’s greatest fears: death. The planes and steam shovel in “Homecoming” operate in a similar way to the train and ferry in “On the Orient North”. Machines appear to have much in common with the monstrous Family—if members are willing to see them through the eyes of younger generations. However, Bradbury complicates this lesson by revealing a darker side to childlike wonder. Excitement and fun can transform into recklessness and harm without careful attention. He presents Cecy’s relationship with cars as a telling example. “The Wandering Witch” relays yet another cerebral adventure of the sleeping adolescent. This time, Cecy embeds herself in the mind of a young woman to experience her first date. Cecy’s parents warn her to avoid romantic entanglements with mortals, but she defies their wishes and forces the unknowing girl to “be in love” (2001, p. 24). When Cecy first whispers the command to her host, Ann, …a great roar sprang up from the road, a clatter and a ring of wheels on gravel. A tall man drove up in an open car, holding the wheel with his monstrous arms, his smile glowing across the yard. (2001, p. 24) Tom’s exit from the vehicle inspires Ann to recoil, clearly put off by his presence. Cecy quickly alters Ann’s behavior; the young witch is “stirred as with some dream in her bed” by “the smell of leather on his hands, the smell of the open car from his clothes” (2001, p. 25). Cecy forces Ann to accept an invitation to a local dance from the dashing motorist. The imagery of fast-driving Tom mirrors the unruliness with which Cecy possesses and animates Ann’s body. Cecy sporadically thrashes Ann about throughout the chapter for fear that stillness will break her

Innovating Nightmares  157 hold. “Ann Leary must be kept moving”, Cecy desperately thinks as she readies the girl for the dance (2001, p. 27): “Doing, acting, wash here, soap there, now out!” (2001, p. 27). Briefly amidst these rushed preparations, Cecy enters the mind of Tom who is “roaring down the pike” in his car, “the rooms of the farmhouse jump[ing] to life” as he zooms by (2001, p. 26). Cecy completely disregards Ann’s agency as Tom carelessly speeds across the countryside. It is no coincidence that Bradbury chose to associate an out-of-control, open-topped car with Cecy’s night of wild rule-breaking and mischief. The author was disgusted with the regular carnage created by automobile accidents, opting to hire drivers throughout his life as opposed to operating a vehicle himself (Eller 2014, p. 15). Yet, he did not believe the automobile was purely evil. Indeed, Tom’s car is both a “happiness machine” and a “destroying mechanism” in “The Wandering Witch” (Bradbury 2004, p. 100). It represents a good thing—love—gone wrong. Jonathan Eller and William Touponce (2004, p. 72) argue that Bradbury could sometimes craft “a seemingly innocent puzzle of everyday life that suddenly reveals a darker side”. In the case of Cecy’s first romantic encounter, a joyful evening of driving and dancing is turned upside down by a teenager’s irresponsible indifference toward consent. Bradbury polarizes, not neutralizes, the car on Cecy’s twisted date. The good and bad of inexperienced love crash together in his tale of reckless abandon. Bradbury’s metaphorical machine soberly exposes the limits of childhood wonder to readers in “The Wandering Witch”. Ann and the car are two vehicles at the hands of minors who still have much to learn about their world. While Bradbury cherishes the inspiration of youth in From the Dust Returned, trudging through his chapters as a variety of metal dinosaurs, he also communicates the value of experience acquired in adulthood. As he told Genesis about his short story “All Summer in a Day”, where children on the planet Venus lock a girl in a closet to prevent her from enjoying an entire season, kids read that and know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m talking about them and their own evil, their own genetic evil, which we have to learn to control as we grow up. (Bradbury 1974) The young can be monsters in Bradbury’s fiction, as can the machines they admire. The tale of Cecy, Ann, and Tom lends credence to their elders’ knowledgeable warnings, including Grandmère’s pessimism toward technology. Bradbury’s veneration for older generations, however, is not total; indeed, the Orient ghost finds no respite until he subjects himself to the worldview of children. The author’s opinions on technology are similarly mixed in From the Dust Returned, revealed to readers through the trials of generations navigating changes in life—and death.

158  Kasey Sease

Making Sense of Bradbury and Technology in From the Dust Returned: A Historical Perspective Ray Bradbury’s complicated, sometimes contradictory, thoughts on mechanical innovations are indicative of the history he inherited and experienced as a twentieth-century American. Technology fell in and out of favor with people across decades of change in the modern United States. This tumultuous flux of opinions operated in tandem with the rapid evolution of American capitalism—a totalizing for-profit environment, constantly formed and reformed by the individuals it influences socially, culturally, politically, and economically. Americans used machines and technological innovations to alter that environment, often hoisting them up as symbols for the advances and failures of capitalism. When Bradbury reached into his past to write From the Dust Returned, his own experiences in this charged atmosphere collapsed into the characters of Cecy, Timothy, Grandmère, and other members of the Family. As a child in the 1920s, Bradbury lived in a nation still grappling with the effects of nineteenth-century industrialization. At that time, Americans expressed excitement and fear in response to new technologies like trains, telegraphs, and factory machines. Indeed, scholars of the period have found that many of their emotions were entrenched in uncertain, mystical imagery. John L. Modern (2001, p. xxix) argues that modernizing, nineteenth-century America was “haunted … in the contemporary necessity of coming to terms with and providing terms for ghosts” or the objects and phenomena that were real but difficult to explain, prove, or sometimes even identify. From Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick with its “language of steam and electricity” (Modern 2001, p. vxi) to spiritualists’ claims that machines ran on “spirit-power” (Modern 2001, p.  31), “technology was passionately engaged rather than visibly seen or reasonably understood” (Modern 2001, p. 298). By the turn of the century, progressives built a reform movement upon this unsure foundation that promised social and economic improvement at the hands of innovation and rationality. However, their eventual domination of the nation’s political narrative did not destroy the messiness with which Americans thought about technology. Bradbury captures this left-over cultural ethos by juxtaposing the train rides of Anuba and the Orient ghost. The former unforgivingly consumes of the past, while the latter envelopes the passenger in otherworldly familiarity. Trains are multilayered symbols in American culture because people attempted to define their ghostly, automated qualities throughout a century full of spirituality, uncertainty, and rapid industrial change. In the early twentieth century, those who celebrated or doubted the potential of mechanical innovations were united by the reality that, as one historian (Pursell 1995, p. xiv) asserts, “the federal government stepped in to help transfer technological innovations (radios, automobiles,

Innovating Nightmares  159 airplanes) to public use, feeding the great burst in sales of consumer durable goods during the 1920s”. The tragedy of the Great Depression inspired a large-scale distrust of technology across the country. Bradbury’s life changed dramatically as the U.S. attempted to forcefully mature consumer capitalism. He read comics about space exploration and alien adventurers while traveling between Illinois and Arizona in a car as his dad looked for work in the failed economy (Mengeling 1980, p. 89). It was on these trips that he witnessed several deaths by automobile accident. The technology-filled science fiction that Bradbury grew to love during his adolescence was further complicated by America’s involvement in World War II, epitomized by atomic bombs leveling Japanese cities (Mogen 1986, p. 95). In light of the author’s upbringing in the disillusioned years of the early-to-mid twentieth century, majestic metal dinosaurs and killer cars come together in a whole new context. Bradbury’s own childhood wonder smacked against years of industrial mismanagement and technological destruction. By the time he began writing the Elliott stories as a young man, Bradbury had experienced and contemplated the limits of mechanical innovations. The author’s adulthood amidst the Cold War further colored his opinions on technology. Historian Jessica Wang (1999, p.  1) explains how American hegemony after World War II “seemed no guarantee for stability and prosperity” as “the destructive force of the atom suggested that any future international conflict could prove so cataclysmic as to be too horrible to comprehend”. With the rise of the communist Soviet Union, the U.S. government embarked on a redefinition of the militaryindustrial complex that positioned capitalism at its ideological center. As a result, the research of scientists was “swayed heavily by the technological needs of the Cold War” and largely depended upon a working, intimate relationship with the state (Wang 1999, p. 3). Rockets carried tax-funded warheads and astronauts to new heights, mixing Bradbury’s newfound fears of atomic destruction with his youthful desire to explore the galaxy. NASA’s moon landings and space walks reminded the author to marvel at some innovations while acknowledging how others could cause harm, a lesson that he communicates to readers through Cecy’s heart-felt awe of machines and dangerous disregard for boundaries. Throughout his career, Ray Bradbury emphasized a vital connection between personal history and good writing. He believed that creators did “the most important research” for their projects simply by living day-to-day (Bradbury 1992, p. 14). The prolific author, responsible for hundreds of stories, lived many days in an ever-evolving capitalist environment full of new machines with a mix of meanings. When he looked back into his past to write and rewrite tales of the Family, he distributed those meanings across generations of nightmarish ghosts, mummies, and vampires. Swift-moving trains and high-flying rockets playfully zoomed through the author’s brain as he penned some chapters, while speeding

160  Kasey Sease cars in their reckless, uprooted abandon skidded across the pages of others. Bradbury (2010, p. 188) once referred to himself as “a conglomerate heap of trash” that “burns with a high flame”. The clash of opinions on technology in From the Dust Returned should spark fire in the minds of readers, burning down their presuppositions with the author’s lifetime of conflicting experiences.

Bibliography Aggelis, S. (2004) Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Bodnar, J. (1985) The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Booker, M. K. (2013) “Compare/ Contrast: Media Culture, Conformism, and Commodification in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and M. T. Anderson’s Feed in Booker, M. K. (ed), Critical Insights: Dystopia. Ipswich: Salem Press, pp. 73–87. Bradbury, R. (1974) ‘Ray Bradbury interview’, interviewed for Genesis, May. Available at: https://futurism.media/ray-bradbury-interview (Accessed: March 30, 2019). ———. (1979) ‘Interview with Ray Bradbury’, interviewed by Stephen Banker for The Washington Post, 23 September. Available at: https://www. washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1979/09/23/interviewwith-ray-bradbury/f2a4ba44-eadf-4f84-88b5-d983e2bde2ec/?utm_term=. aa74ae81db7d (Accessed: March 30, 2019). ———. (1988) ‘Ray Bradbury: “It’s Lack that Gives us Inspiration”’, interviewed by Terry Gross for National Public Radio. Available at: https://www.npr. org/2012/06/08/154524695/ray-bradbury-its-lack-that-gives-us-inspiration (Accessed: March 30, 2019). ———. (1992) “Bringing Dreams to Reality”. Research & Development 34(11), p. 14. ———. (2001) From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance. New York: HarperCollins. ———. (2010) ‘Ray Bradbury, the art of fiction no. 203’, interview with Sam Weller for The Paris Review, Spring, p. 187. Eller, J. (2011) Becoming Ray Bradbury. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. (2014) Ray Bradbury Unbound. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Eller, J. & Touponce, F. (2004) Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent: Kent State University Press. Isbouts, J. (2001) Walt: The Man Behind the Myth, DVD, Walt Disney Home Entertainment, Burbank, CA. Josephson-Storm, J. (2017) The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knight, D. (1967) In Search of Wonder. 2nd edn. Chicago: Advent Publishers. Laino, G. (2017) “A Golem in the Family: Robotic Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Ray Bradbury’s Short Stories”, in McGiveron, R. (ed), Critical Insights: Ray Bradbury. Ipswich: Salem Press, pp. 90–105. Lundwall, S. (1971) Science Fiction: What It’s All About. New York: Ace Books.

Innovating Nightmares  161 Mengeling, M. (1980) “The Machineries of Joy and Despair: Bradbury’s Attitudes Toward Science and Technology in Greenberg, M. & Olander, J. (eds), Ray Bradbury. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, pp. 83–109. Modern, J. (2001) Secularism in Antebellum America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mogen, D. (1986) Ray Bradbury. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Pursell, C. (1995) The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wang, J. (1999) American Science in the Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Weber, M. (1993) The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press.

10 “Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different” Gothic Domestic Relations in Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson Dara Downey Towards the end of Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial (1958), two men who have been invited to a party in the grounds of the large, hyper-secluded house at the center of the novel (before the owners, the Hallorans, plan to retreat forever inside its walls, believing the end of the world to be imminent), discuss the events surrounding the building of the mansion. Mr. Peabody and Mr. Atkins, from the nearby village, who were both children at the time, mention that a workman was run over and killed by a wagon when the house was being built, and Mr. Atkins adds, as an apparent aside, that he remembers that “there was a little carnival came to town, two or three wagons and a pony ride, maybe it was, and a fortune teller and what not; well, they set up their kind of little camp right down there where that rose affair is now, and folks were coming around, buying tickets and looking at the fortune teller—come to think of it, there was a tattooed man along with them—and they were giving the kids a pony ride, and he [old Mr. Halloran] comes raging out with his gang of bullies and chased the whole pack of them down the road. ‘Let ’em stay off my land’, he says, ‘let ’em stay off my land’.” “And then he build the wall”, Mr. Peabody said. (Jackson 2014, p. 198, italics in original) What this discussion points towards, I would argue, is an opposition between the ramshackle, heterogeneous, nomadic carnival, characterized by an esthetics of spectacle and display, and the rigorous privacy sought by the original Mr. Halloran (the father and grandfather of the current inhabitants), who employed his considerable fortune to “set up his own world” (Jackson 2014, p. 8) in as lavishly ornate a fashion as possible. Certainly, the novel itself would seem to imply that his descendants are so eccentric, so out of step with, and so ill-suited to talk to the villagers, that self-immurement is the best option available to them. The current inhabitants include Mr. Halloran’s now-elderly daughter Aunt Fanny; her invalid brother and arrogant sister-in-law Mrs. (Oriana)

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  163 Halloran; Mrs. Halloran’s recently widowed daughter-in-law Maryjane and pre-pubescent granddaughter Fancy; and assorted domestic staff, unwanted guests, and hangers-on. The Hallorans are by no means a united family, except when it comes to their relationship with the inhabitants of the nearby village, who are very occasionally invited over to attend grand celebrations, but never permitted inside the house. Viewing them in much the same light as an aristocratic family would its peasants, the Hallorans barely seem to recognize the locals as fully human, despite the resoundingly middle-class origins of their own prosperity. Consequently, few of the mansion’s occupants display any remorse at the thought that the entire population of the world outside of the house is, they believe, doomed to perish in an impending cataclysm, predicted by Aunt Fanny following a seemingly prophetic vision of her father. In other words, where we might expect as readers to sympathize with a group of people burdened with the knowledge that the entire earth is to be annihilated, this is a novel about people who are so misanthropic that they are probably better off secluding themselves from the rest of the world. The book largely remains within the bounds of realism—the looming apocalypse is relegated (if it happens at all) to a point beyond the novel’s conclusion, which sees the family and their random collection of visitors and employees waiting for the end, and, apart from Aunt Fanny’s vision, nothing overtly supernatural takes place. However, the Hallorans and the other characters are by no means a conventional family, and their misanthropy borders at times on the monstrous; Mrs. Halloran appears to have pushed her only son down the stairs to his death, and later on, the youngest character, Fancy, who repeatedly utters terrifyingly chilly assessments of other people, seems to do the same to her grandmother in order to ensure her own inheritance of the mansion. Old Mr. Halloran’s excessive reaction to the visiting carnival is therefore a telling one; in order to maintain the family’s monstrous, murderous privacy, the carnival’s cheerful display of freakery, abnormality, and rejection of settled, bourgeois norms (see Fahy 2006, p. 2) must itself be violently rejected. In other words, Mr. Halloran cannot admit any possible kinship between his own gaudily decorated way of living and theirs, and the novel therefore establishes a brief but telling distinction between the two. An identical opposition—between carnival display and domestic privacy— can be identified in Ray Bradbury’s roughly contemporaneous (and, in some instances, somewhat later) Elliott-Family stories. These stories, published in various magazines and collections throughout Bradbury’s career, revolve around an even more eccentric family, one even less well-equipped to deal with the mundane facts of mid-century America than the Hallorans. As we are told in “The Traveler” (originally published in 1946 as “The Traveller”), this “strange, cross-bred family” of “[n]ight

164  Dara Downey siphoners and flume-fearers […]” ( Bradbury 1976, p. 71) is made up of werewolves, vampires, and other, less easily defined, more-than-human creatures, who are depicted as strange, even wicked, but not evil (Jones 2015, p. 114). Nonetheless, they are forced to hide their strangeness to the extent that none of the Family looked like what they were. There was naught of the fang, the foul, the worm of witch-wind about them. They lived in small towns and on farms across the world, simply, closely re-aligning and adapting their talents to the demands and laws of a changing world. (Bradbury 1976, p. 71) Nevertheless, Bradbury’s Elliott-Family stories (and indeed a number of other examples of mid-twentieth-century American writing, by Truman Capote, Richard Matheson, and Carson McCullers, as well as by Jackson) engage with the instability of this opposition somewhat more explicitly than does The Sundial. The repeated evocation of carnivals, circuses, “freak shows”, and sideshows in these texts suggests that the kind of privacy sought and practiced by mid-century American culture’s non-normative, reclusive fictional figures is itself profoundly theatrical and spectacular. Domestic privacy therefore emerges in these texts as being far closer to the carnival and all it connotes than middle-class ideology might wish. Indeed, carnival is in many ways central to Bradbury’s own accounts of his genesis and practice as a writer. In an apparently unpublished interview from the 1970s, he tells of his childhood meeting with a fairground performer called Mr. Electrico, who invites the young Bradbury into his tent. The story runs as follows: he looked at my face and said, Would you like to meet those people in that tent over there? Those strange people? And I said, Yes sir, I would. So he led me over there and […] took me in, and the first person I met was the illustrated man. […] I also met the strong man, the fat lady, the trapeze people, the dwarf, and the skeleton. They all became characters. […] When I left the carnival that day […] I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. […] I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped. (Weller 2012) The fact that Bradbury is here remembering an event that took place some time before his first Elliott-Family stories were published is important, in light of the shift in attitudes towards the carnival and the

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  165 circus in the first half of the twentieth century. The combined effects of the Great Depression and World War II included a sense that traditional gender roles had been dangerously destabilized, while the threat of communism became associated with deviant sexuality. The 1940s and 1950s therefore saw an increased emphasis on the heterosexual family in an effort to return America to a vision of “financial and social successes” (Fahy 2006, pp. 110–11). At the same time, changes in the working week and the rise of the cinema and other forms of entertainment, as well as the increasingly shabby, non-educational nature of the sideshow (as opposed to earlier “museums” such as P.T. Barnum’s) meant that the popularity of freak shows began to wane. By the mid-twentieth century, the ploys became less compelling, less able to mitigate the problems of viewing, and the sideshow grew increasingly distasteful – something that respectable people avoided and that parents kept from their children. (Fahy 2006, p. 10) As the century progressed, “the experience [became] less extraordinary and hence less meaningful”. No longer something special or magical, it was instead “a relic from a distant past” (Fahy 2006, p. 12), and therefore essentially gothic—out of time, and no longer fitting comfortably with middle-class “values”. In particular, the images of anti-normative bodies and sexualities on display in the sideshow began to seem especially unsavory (Fahy 2006, p.  111). These spectacles, along with all family configurations that did not conform to the heterosexual, nuclear norm, were, in this climate, all but “anti-American” (Fahy 2006, p. 114). As Helen Davies argues, the marginalization of the carnival and the freak show continued into the late twentieth century and into the twentyfirst, and even those recent authors who attempted to reconstruct fictionally the previous centuries’ popular entertainments for the purposes of challenging that marginalization are uncertain about the ethics of doing so, and about what this might say about attitudes towards those being displayed (Davies 2015, pp. 200–01). An increasing discomfort with the associations connected with such spectacles is also evident in the development of Bradbury’s writing, and particularly in the evolution of his story “Uncle Einar” (originally published in Dark Carnival (1947)). The titular uncle, a key and indeed beloved figure in the other stories, is set apart from the rest of humanity by his “vast green” “silk-like wings”, but here finds himself married to and fathering children with a human woman, after hitting a “high-tension tower” on his way home from a family party (Bradbury 1976, pp. 127–8) and landing in her farm. He despairs of ever being able to return to Europe, his family’s homeland, because the nighttime is now filled with unseen technological obstacles. He laments, “[i]f I flew by day, I’d be seen and—miserable joke—maybe

166  Dara Downey shot down! Or kept for a zoo perhaps, what a life that’d be!” (Bradbury 1976, p. 131, italics in original). The young woman’s solution to avoiding such degrading objectification is marriage, a domestication of this monstrous yet kindly figure, who is afraid that his appearance ensures that humans can see him only as a threat or a source of amusement. The solution appears to be a satisfactory one, and the narrator informs us that The Family came for the wedding. In a great autumnal avalanche of maple, sycamore, oak, elm leaf they hissed, rustled, fell in a shower of horse-chestnut, thumped like winter apples on the earth, with an overall scent of farewell-summer on the wind they made in their rushing. The ceremony was brief as a blank candle lit, blown out, and smoke left in still in the air. Its briefness, darkness, upsidedown and backward quality escaped Brunilla, who only listened to the great tide of Uncle Einar’s wings faintly murmuring above them as they finished out the rite. (Bradbury 1976, p. 131, italics in original) To a certain extent, the imagery of this passage, its emphasis on ceremony and ritual, could be read as antithetical to the need for concealment that is stressed earlier in the story. We are assured, for example, that Uncle Einar is one of the few in the Family whose talents were visible. All his dark cousins and nephews and brothers, hid in small towns across the world, did unseen mental things or things with witch-fingers or white teeth, or blew down the sky with fire-leaves or loped in forests like moon-silvered wolves. They lived comparatively safe from normal humans. (Bradbury 1976, p. 128) Nevertheless, matters are complicated somewhat by the fact that the passage quoted above describing the wedding stands in mark contrast to the much more terse, almost obfuscatory account in the heavily edited version of “Uncle Einar” that appears in Bradbury’s 2001 “fix-up” novel, From the Dust Returned. In this later text, we are merely told that their ceremony is “brief, if a little inverted and dark and mildly different to Brunilla, but it ended well” (Bradbury 2002, p. 149). Here, the wedding does not compromise or conflict with the Elliott Family’s concealment of their true nature for the sake of safety and privacy. Brunilla is protected by the narrative from much of the oddness of Einar’s relatives here, as is the reader, and there is little sense that the Elliott Family have staged the kind of gothic quasi-religious spectacle implied in the earlier version. As I demonstrate in the rest of this essay, this shift

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  167 from the carnivalesque, “brief, dark, upside-down and backward” image of the Elliott Family and their practices to the merely “inverted and dark and mildly different” version is in fact a central tension in the stories themselves more generally, and especially those originally published in The October Country—that is, “Uncle Einar” and “Homecoming”. The spectacular, baroque nature of the original wedding scene indicates a close relationship between the Elliot Family’s closely guarded domestic existence and its apparent antithesis—the roving, attention-grabbing life of the traveling show. As demonstrated in this essay, this uneasy relationship informs both Bradbury’s and Jackson’s writing. Reading the two writers together helps highlight the extent to which Bradbury’s later efforts to stabilize the opposition is a symptom of the ongoing marginalization of this (often deeply problematic) form of entertainment. While the carnival manifests in both positive and negative forms throughout his oeuvre, Bradbury’s later writing renders the carnival less pleasingly gothic, more exploitative, and less easily integrated into domestic privacy, forcing the Elliott Family to adopt drastic measures to ensure their survival in an overly rational modernity marked by surveillance and prejudice. Jackson’s The Sundial is useful as a way into this evolving attitude towards carnival, not least because Richard Pascal sees the novel as a fictional expression of “the socially sanctioned impulse to retreat to ‘American miniatures’, or small, exclusive enclaves of communal, familial, and individual sanctuary from the claims of the larger social universe” (2000, p. 99). An examination of contemporary attitudes to home and privacy, as well as their manifestation across Jackson’s oeuvre, followed by an exploration of the role of carnival in Bradbury’s work, therefore allows for a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which the Elliott-Family stories negotiate the complex relationship between privacy and display in mid-century America.

Domestic Gothic at Mid-Century With the return of the American GIs following World War II, generous government loans made marrying, setting up home, and having children a reality for so many young men (and, by extension, women). Unbuffered by the class divisions and historical landscape of the Old World, America found itself transformed into a vast desert of single-family homes. Buttressing the spread of such dwellings out into the American countryside over the course of the twentieth century was what Scott Donaldson (1969) terms “the suburban myth”. The myth promulgated the vision of suburbia as a semi-pastoral utopia, a haven from the noise, dirt, crime, and immorality of the city, but still far from the perceived isolation, backwardness, and degeneracy of rural areas. A happy

168  Dara Downey convergence of the goals of the sanitation movement and modernist architecture in the opening decades of the twentieth century permitted this simultaneously nostalgic and progressive vision to be more or less realized on the level of the individual family home. In order for this to happen, however, a grand-scale housecleaning was imperative, in the form of a major re-thinking of the appearance, function, and meaning of the house. Specifically, they sought to purify domestic space of secrecy, grime, and darkness by replacing enclosing walls with vast sheets of glass and open-plan interiors, and substituting hard, washable surfaces for dark, dust-ridden upholstery (Horsfield 1997, p. 90ff; and Kern 1983, p. 187). As Anthony Vidler puts it, the objective of the modernist architectural project was to “escape history”, to “erase its traces” and those of “nineteenth-century squalor” (1992, p. 63) from the built environment. In particular, [a]t the scale of the house […], its roof removed and replaced by a garden, its cellars filled in and its first floor open to the park, its horizontal windows and terraces encouraging the ceaseless flow of light and air, modernism proposed to consign the cluttered interiors and insalubrious living conditions of centuries to oblivion. (1992, p. 63) Undergirding such thinking were the increasingly widely disseminated ideas of Sigmund Freud, married to an assumption that to “fix” the home was likewise to fix the individual, rendering the psyche as clean and open as the space it occupied. According to Vidler, An open, fresh-air existence would finally address the causes of those pathologies so painstakingly treated on post-Freudian couches, purging society of its totems, taboos, and discontents. If houses were no longer haunted by the weight of tradition and the imbrications of generations of family drama, if no cranny was left for the storage of the bric-a-brac once deposited in damp cellars and musty attics, then memory would be released from its unhealthy preoccupations to live in the present. (1992, p. 64) In particular, Freud’s discussion in his essay “The Uncanny” (1919) of the meanings of the German words heimlich (homely) and unheimlich (uncanny) can be read as implying that earlier, more enclosed forms of domesticity were inherently “uncanny”. Freud notes that, according to Sander’s German Dictionary, heimlich has two, not entirely mutually contradictory meanings. The first is “[i]ntimate, friendlily comfortable; […] arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house”. The other, however, is “[c]oncealed,

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  169 kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others”. This second meaning shades into that of unheimlich, roughly translated as “‘the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’” (Freud 1955, pp. 223–4, italics in original). Consequently, “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or another a subspecies of heimlich” (p. 225). The literary sources that Freud employs here therefore depict the privacy associated with domestic space as rendering that space mysterious and even frightening. He quotes, “The Zecks [a family name] are all Heimlich”. […] “‘Heimlich? … What do you understand by ‘Heimlich’?” “Well, … they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again”. “Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich’; you call it ‘heimlich.’ Well, what makes you think that there is something secret and untrustworthy about this family?” (Freud 1955, p. 223, italics in original) Here, the very essence of bourgeois family values and private property produced a shudder of disquiet in those who were on the outside looking in. Indeed, Gaston Bachelard argues that shadows are precisely what transforms a house from mere bricks and mortar into a shelter for selfhood and privacy, and into a place that allows the free play of the imagination. As he puts it, the real houses of memory, the houses to which we return in dreams, the houses that are rich in unalterable oneirism, do not readily lend themselves to description. To describe them would be like showing them to visitors. We can perhaps tell everything about the present, but about the past! The first, the oneirically definitive house, must retain its shadows. (Bachelard 1964, p. 13) What all of this suggests is, in essence, that the status of domestic space as welcoming or unnerving is very much a matter of perspective. That which is, as Freud’s source material would have it, [c]oncealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it, withheld from others’ when observed from outside, can, from the inside, seem to be ‘intimate, friendlily comfortable; […] arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house. (1955, pp. 222–6)

170  Dara Downey In both cases, the house is most definitely heimlich, but for those who are not permitted within those four walls, both privacy itself and the things that are revealed when that privacy is violated can all too easily begin to seem disturbingly unheimlich. In other words, homeliness and familiarity can only be experienced as such by those who belong in a particular place. As Freud’s sources suggest, domestic privacy can be so successful in producing an isolated world, safely secluded from all around it (as Mr. Halloran seeks to do in The Sundial), that those who intrude upon it find, not a snug nest protected from all that is harsh and alien, but a nest of vipers, hissing venomously at the intruder. This idea was neatly illustrated by Charles Addams, the twentieth-century cartoonist who had a close working relationship with Bradbury. The “Addams Family” cartoons, which are all but a visual version of Bradbury’s slightly later Elliott-Family stories, first appeared on August 6, 1938, with a cartoon in The New Yorker featuring a vacuum-cleaner salesman attempting to convince the woman we now know to be Morticia Addams to purchase his merchandise (Miserocchi 2010, p. 48). The joke is that we see this encounter take place from inside the house, which is gloomy, festooned with cobwebs, and features a bat at the top of the staircase. The conventions of middle-class family life—cleanliness, shopping, the role of the housewife—are therefore contrasted here with the eccentric but perfectly happy gothic family within. To us, the cobwebs are creepy, a sign of neglect and disrepair, but for Morticia and her kin, it is precisely these qualities that make the place home. Similarly, in Bradbury’s “Homecoming” (originally published in 1946), an Elliott-Family party is prepared for with an unsettling but endearing mixture of macabre imagery and cozy domesticity: Downstairs were exciting and mysterious sounds, the slithering black crape going up in all the halls and on the ceilings and doors. The sputter of burning black tapers in the banistered stair well. Mother’s voice, high and firm. Father’s voice, echoing from the damp cellar. (Bradbury 1976, p. 165) In many ways, this idea is central to Shirley Jackson’s work as well. For example, her two semi-autobiographical works, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957), about the joys and oddities of family life, were her most straightforwardly popular books, untroubling as they were, despite their titles, to her white, middle-class readership (Franklin 2016, pp. 222–6 and 364–71). As with Brunilla’s domestication of Uncle Einar’s monstrosity, then, her work can be read as being about the relationship between domestic privacy and monstrosity, an idea that certainly underpins We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). The reclusive sisters Constance and Merricat (Mary Katherine) Blackwood find their domestic privacy invaded by their odious Cousin Charles, who

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  171 is clearly angling to marry Constance in an effort to secure the family fortune, as the rest of the Blackwoods have been poisoned, it seems by Constance, though the trial was by no means conclusive. Merricat employs very Bradbury-esque language in her fantasies of scaring Charles out of their beloved home: I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider’s web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him into a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. I could bury him in the hole where my box of silver dollars had been so safe until he came; if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet. (Jackson 2006, p. 89) In an effort to banish Charles’s presence from their father’s room where he has been staying, Merricat first scatters earth and twigs on the furniture, and then sweeps the still-smoldering pipe into a waste-paper basket. This ritual exorcism inevitably leads to the burning down of their house, and to the villagers finally finding an outlet for their dislike and mistrust, an outcome which, initially at least, appears to signal the end of the sisters’ carefully constructed existence. However, the events of the novel ultimately succeed in turning this catastrophe and its terrifying aftermath to the sisters’ advantage. After putting out the fire, the villagers begin, spontaneously and gleefully, to throw rocks at the windows, breaking dishes and ornaments, tearing curtains, and spilling food, soiling and smashing. They taunt the girls, implying that their house should have been burnt down long ago, before dancing around them and singing doggerel verses made up by the village children about the poisonings. They even go so far as to threaten to throw Merricat and Constance back into the house and watch them burn, and are only prevented from doing so when Merricat leaves the center of the circle, approaching a group of the villagers who start back in irrational fear, allowing the sisters to escape. From here, the sisters succeed in putting back together what they can of their home, and never leave it again, living (more or less) happily in the ruins. Gradually, the men from the village begin to leave baskets of food prepared by their wives on the doorstep at night. As Bernice M. Murphy contends, the offerings of food are “inspired more by fear than by remorse”, since “the sisters have become the witchlike, shadowy figures they were always believed to be, and the villagers fear some sort of preternatural vengeance” (2005, p. 123). What has changed is that the villagers’ previous leering curiosity has become a profound sense of unease, ensuring that the sisters now have far more privacy. Never seen again by the villagers, they rapidly gain a reputation as supernatural beings,

172  Dara Downey “ladies” who live in darkness, who see and hear everything, evoked by parents to frighten children into obedience, but also a source of numinous dread for adults. This is made possible by the fact that the Blackwood house has become an almost literal Gothic castle, “turreted and open to the sky” (Jackson 2005, p.  120), externalizing both the fear that the villagers have always attached to it and the defensive nature that its inhabitants sought to convey. Merricat notes that “[w]e learnt, from listening, that all the strangers could see from outside, when they looked at all, was a great ruined structure overgrown with vines, barely recognizable as a house” (Jackson 2006, p. 146). To a certain extent, then, the elements that made their house public property, always liable to intrusion by unwelcomed, preying visitors, eager to enter so notorious a space, have been burnt away. What is left is the core of homeliness and protection, though, paradoxically, this has been made possible by the transformation of the house and its inhabitants into a sort of tourist attraction. The very ruined, “turreted” exterior therefore simultaneously ensures the sisters’ privacy and attracts those who wish to gape at its gaping roof. It is, in other words, precisely the kind of “opened-up”, successfully psychoanalyzed modernist house that Vidler describes, and yet, for the Blackwood sisters, it has become the ultimate in gothic privacy, allowing them, like the Elliott Family, to be as monstrous as they wish. As this suggests, the apparently paradoxical relationship between privacy and semi-theatrical display was in fact central to the ways in which domestic architecture was understood around the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. As Grant Hildebrand argues, Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs for private homes, many of which were built around this time, and which were used as models for much cheaper, mass-produced, suburban houses for middle-class families (Donaldson 1969, pp. 169–77), owe much of their enduring popularity to their adherence to the characteristics that create an ideal living space. Such a space must suggest and provide a refuge in which the occupant cannot easily be seen; […] from that refuge the occupant must be able to identify and move to a prospect setting; and […] the prospect setting must suggest and provide an unimpeded outlook over a considerable distance. (Hildebrand 1994, pp. 30–1) This state of prospect and refuge, or “seeing without being seen”, is precisely what the Blackwood sisters achieve, and is intimately bound up with mid-century notions of familial privacy. Elaine Tyler May describes “the legendary family of the 1950s”, “complete with appliances, station wagons, backyard barbecues, and tricycles scattered on the sidewalks”, as representing “the first wholehearted effort to create a

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  173 home that would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life” (1988, p.  11). Instrumental in the creation of such a society was the then-popular “ranch house” design—a single-story, single-family home, low and flat, with a substantial basement, often presenting an almost-windowless façade to the street. These rigidly private structures codify the nuclear family as a bastion of individuality and safety, hiding from an intrusive world, and closely resemble bomb shelters (Engelhardt 1995, pp. 106–7). At the same time, as Tom Engelhardt argues, mid-century American suburbia was in effect a “‘mass society’ from which there might be no exit for the individual”, because there was nowhere to hide (1995, pp. 187–8), even as the sanctity of the family and the bunker-like dwelling that enclosed and symbolized it became increasingly enshrined in popular discourse. As mentioned above, the modernist architectural predilection for vast expanses of plate glass, aiming for “universally transparent exteriority”, had its basis in a conviction that transparency would “eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny, and above all the irrational” (Vidler 1992, p. 151 and p. 168). In the hands of developers under pressure to build quickly and economically, the vast sheets of glass that brought light and air into the exploded modernist home manifested in the form of the “big picture window”, sometimes set at the front of the house. Immortalized by John C. Keats in the title of his 1957 anti-suburbia polemic The Crack in the Picture Window, this particular socio-architectural predilection resulted in suburban homes that closely resembled department stores, or indeed carnival sideshows. Privacy was therefore at once insisted upon and relinquished in favor of a continuous display of respectability and domestic felicity for the benefit of all who passed by (Donaldson 1969, pp. 169–77; and Kern 1983, p. 187).

Bradbury’s Carnival Unlike the Elliott Family, Jackson’s Blackwood sisters are essentially human, and only rendered monstrous in the eyes of those who stare at their ruined house in terrified fascination. A far more direct engagement with carnival display and spectatorship as a useful trope for understanding mid-century domesticity and privacy is evident in Bradbury’s work, and it is therefore useful to consider the connotations of the term “carnivalesque”. Mikhail Bakhtin theorizes the carnivalesque as fundamentally linked to pre- and early-modern carnival. He figures the “grotesque” in literature and culture as a positive, democratic, creative, and community-building set of tropes and imagery. The carnivalesque is, for Bakhtin, the “temporary suspension […] of hierarchical rank”, which “created during carnival time a special type of communication impossible in everyday life”—specifically, communion between those who social structures would usually divide from one another (1984, p. 10).

174  Dara Downey In other words, by temporarily inverting and indeed subverting the social order, a restoration of that order is made possible, precisely because those tensions arising from difference and hierarchical privilege are allowed a moment of release, before order returns, with all of the negative impulses purged (for now) (Jones 2015, p.  35). This process repeatedly emphasizes the materiality of the body, and carnival imagery dwells in particular on non-normative or taboo bodily functions and forms (Bakhtin 1984, p. 18). Doing so, Bakhtin argues, creates a strong sense of community, since “[t]he unfinished and open body […] is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects” (1984, pp. 26–7). However, such deformed, decayed, or exaggerated bodies only retain the positive associations of the carnival spirit as long as they take place within the context of the united (if stratified) community; when isolated and individualized, they take on far more negative and destructive overtones (Bakhtin 1984, p. 23). Bakhtin asserts that, in later centuries, when carnival was transformed into mere extensions of state power and control, it lost these more positive effects and functions (1984, p. 33). At the same time, Romantic literature rejected this generative, communitydriven form of misrule and disorder, instead transforming the carnivalesque into a purely individualistic vision of (now threatening, gothic) Otherness. The result was “a terrifying world, alien to man”, one that revealed (rather than exorcized) the chaos lurking beneath the apparently secure, ordered universe (Bakhtin 1984, pp. 37–9). Rosemarie Garland-Thompson argues that, in the United States during the nineteenth century, freak shows did in fact result in the kind of democratic unification that Bakhtin asserts was no longer possible after the seventeenth century. Such spectacles, she asserts, produced a united American citizenship through the communal experience of viewing those excluded from that community (Garland-Thompson 1996, p.  10; and Davies 2015, p.  11). In particular, the “Siamese Twins”, Chang and Eng Bunker, a staple of early freak shows, were frequently depicted as literally embodying American unity, particularly during the Civil War (Pingree 1996). As discussed above, by the middle of the twentieth century, matters had become somewhat more complex. As public attitudes refigured the freak show as “something shameful”, writers and artists made use of “the freakish body as a tool for exploring problematic social attitudes about race, disability, and sexual desire in American culture” (Fahy 2006, p. 13). The freak had therefore become the go-to symbol for the social outsider, those who fail or refuse to fit in, providing “a language for seemingly deviant behaviours and bodies” (Fahy 2006, p.  109) even as the phenomenon itself was becoming an increasingly disreputable form of public entertainment. Perhaps the most well-known example comes in Carson McCullers’s novel A Member of the Wedding (1946). In a social world that valued

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  175 feminine smallness, the female protagonist’s pre-adolescent body is large, unpredictable, and awkward, making Frankie unpopular with her peers and uncomfortable in her own skin, even as she deliberately embraces androgyny by refusing to call herself “Frances”. She recalls an obviously formative moment, at a fair featuring carnival rides and sideshows, including “the House of the Freaks”. Here, she is confronted with a spectacular version of her own perceived bodily abnormality, when she visits a tent displaying a “Giant”, a “Midget”, a “Pin-Head”, and a “Half-Man Half-Woman, a morphidite and a miracle of science” (McCullers 2008, pp. 25–7). We are told that Frankie […] was afraid of all the Freaks, for it seemed to her that they looked at her in a secret way and tried to connect their eyes with hers, as though to say; we know you. She was afraid of their long Freak eyes. “I doubt they ever get married or go to a wedding,” she said. “Those Freaks”. (McCullers 2008, p. 27) Far from identifying potential kindred spirits in the “freaks”, then, Frankie rebels against the freakishness in herself (see Grosz 1996, p. 65; Davies 2015, p.  7; and Adams 2001, p.  31). As this passage implies, she sees her brother’s impending wedding as offering her possibilities for community and belonging. This is set in opposition to any possible sense of camaraderie with the freaks, which she rejects and fears. Similarly negative encounters with “freaks” and carnivals occur in Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and in Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man (1956). In both, a male protagonist meets a diminutive woman at a carnival and is all but seduced by her beauty and daintiness. While Matheson’s Scott Carey realizes that a long-term relationship with Clarice is impractical (as he is continually shrinking and will soon be smaller than her), Joel in Capote’s novel is more repulsed by Miss Wisteria’s advances. Ultimately, he rejects her offer of a life on the road for the apparently equally “freakish” world of his father’s house, inhabited by an assortment of barely related people who make Jackson’s characters in The Sundial look positively sociable. The novel therefore sets up a sharp distinction between the showy, uncomfortably sexualized “freakishness” of the carnival (see Davies 2015, p. 9 and pp. 121–58) and the private “freakishness” of Skully’s Landing, Joel’s adopted home, peopled as it is by those ejected from the magic circle of middle-class, mid-century normality by failing to match up to the white, heterosexual, able-bodied norm. Bradbury’s Elliott-Family stories, understood in this context, essentially employ the imagery of carnivalesque monstrosity as a means of literalizing such “freakishness”, while also, like Charles Addams’ cartoons

176  Dara Downey and indeed Capote’s novel, transforming it into a vision of domestic privacy and happiness that both gestures towards and rejects the normative impulses of contemporary thinking about the home and the family. The carnival associations of the Elliott Family are particularly evident in “West of October” (originally published in 1988), in which the family are described in the following terms: To say that some of them slept days and worked at odd job nights, would fall short of commencement. To remark that some could read minds, that some fly with lightnings to land with leaves, would be an understatement. To add that some could not be seen in mirrors while others could be found in multitudinous shapes, sizes and textures in the same glass, would merely repeat gossip that veered into truth. They were just about every colour you could mix in one restless night. […] In all, in numbers, background, inclination and talent, a most incredible and miraculous mob. (Bradbury 1989, p. 63) This “miraculous mob” of mind readers and fortune tellers, of “freaks” who look like the images in fun-house mirrors, and who fail to match up to white-collar patterns of employment, strongly calls to mind the vanishing world of mid-century carnival. As Bakhtin (1984) suggests, however, after the seventeenth century, the literary and cultural associations of carnival are by no means always positive. Specifically, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, carnival spectacles became agents of social control and the assertion of social boundaries, hierarchies, and norms, rather than the democratic release described by Bakhtin (McGowan 2001, p.  5). By staging the display of racial, sexual, and physically composed “Others”, Philip McGowan argues, a white, heterosexual, middle- class, “able-bodied” “norm” was essentially created, relegating these Others to the spectacular but otherwise invisible margins of the social order (2001, p. 8). In other words, the very form of community that Davies (2015) argues was created by the act of viewing sideshow spectacles was, as McCullers’ Frankie realizes, inherently predicated on the creation of a class of “outsiders”, monsters who shore up a sense of community by giving visible form to a “them” who can be defined against “us”. The term “monster” comes from the Latin monstrum, meaning a sign or portent, showing and revealing something to be different from (and implicitly threatening to) the surrounding community, which is healed through this revelation and consequent expulsion (Cohen 1996, p. 4; and Ingebretsen 1998, p. 94). Through the revelation and display of difference, “the monster is first identified and then ritually effaced”, in a ritual that “is a crucial agency of civil formation” (Ingebretsen 1998,

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  177 p. 109; and Cohen 1996, p. 18). Thus, while McGowan and Rachel Adams argue that viewing the “freak” body strips that body of individual subjectivity (McGowan 2001, p.  7; and Adams 2001, p.  31), in fact, this process over-individualizes the body that is on show, in order to produce the viewing citizens as a community, transforming them into a homogeneous, undifferentiated mass, brought together by rendering hyper-visible that which they exclude. It is for this reason that, in his wider work, Bradbury distinguishes positive carnival (associated with the imagination and acceptance of difference) from negative carnival (figured as empty, exploitative, tawdry display that unites only through prejudice and exclusion). In Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), Mr. Halloway, the father of one of the two adolescent male protagonists, tells the boys to avoid the sinister carnival that is attempting to take over their small town in Illinois, because For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life […]. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. […] They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles – breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them. (Bradbury 1999, p. 172) This might sound just like the Elliott Family, and, as Timothy Jones points out, throughout Bradbury’s work, “the monstrous October state is preferable to the American real” (Jones 2015, p. 106). However, there is a crucial difference. Mr. Halloway goes on to tell the boys that The carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But … Nothing? Where do you hit it? Has it a heart, soul, butt-behind, brain? No, no. So the carnival just shakes a great croupier’s cupful of Nothing at us, and reaps us as we tumble back head over-heels in fright. Oh, it shows us Something that might eventually lead to Nothing, all right. That flourish of mirrors out there in the meadow […]. Enough to knock your soul sidewise in the saddle. (Bradbury 1999, p. 172) In other words, negative carnival has no heart, whereas the eerie, monster-haunted house in “Homecoming” and From the Dust Returned is, like Capote’s Skully’s Landing, a space of love, welcome, and mutual understanding, much like the ideal house described by Bachelard (1964).

178  Dara Downey However, in a 1970 piece on horror film, Bradbury notes that later twentieth-century American culture is being leached of the imaginative qualities that make possible the form of private, positive carnivalesque monstrosity that the Elliott Family embody (see Jones 2015, p.  7 and pp. 100–6). He writes, We have fallen into the hands of the scientists, the reality people, the data collectors. […] Instead of imagination, we are treated [in recent horror films] to fact, to pure raw data, which cannot be assimilated, which cannot be digested. […] Those who offer us the cut throat or the asphyxiated face stuffed in a plastic bag offer only reportage and not their reactions, their philosophy, about that reportage. […] To fantasize is to remain sane. (Bradbury 1970, pp. 272–4) It is here that we return to Shirley Jackson. Bradbury’s language in this piece is strongly reminiscent of the famous opening line of The Haunting of Hill House (1959), which states that “[n]o live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality” (Jackson 2010, p. 243). In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the fire and its aftermath permit the Blackwood sisters to evade the harsh light of “absolute reality”, potentially for the rest of their lives. They now appear to be occupying Merricat’s long-standing fantasy of “living on the moon”, where, she imagines, “we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world” again (Jackson 2006, p. 16). Now that they have effectively become monsters, safe from the villagers even as they are themselves a kind of tourist attraction, she imagines herself on a “winged horse”, bringing “emeralds and close, cloth of gold and cabbages” to her sister (p.  133). This carnivalesque profusion, which exists outside the bounds of consensus reality, as they themselves do, is only possible because of this ambiguous privacy that they have achieved, which in many ways resembles that embraced by Capote’s Joel, and indeed by Bradbury’s Elliott Family. It is the erosion of this quality of imagination, which allows carnival to remain positive, that underpins the conclusion of From the Dust Returned (2001), depicting the Elliott Family’s effective defeat by these forces. Timothy, the “normal”, mortal member of the Elliott Family, is finally forced to bring the family matriarch, Grandmère (Grandma in the earlier versions), complete with Egyptian sarcophagus, to a museum to ensure the preservation of the family secrets, in the face of impending war and the loss of belief among the American public (Jones 2015, p. 113). This is something of a theme throughout the stories as a whole, but is made far more explicit here. For example, in “Homecoming” (1946), the party ends as Timothy watches his beloved monstrous relatives “embracing and crying and thinking how the world was becoming

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  179 less a place for them. There had been a time when they had met every year, but now decades passed with no reconciliation”. We are told that “[w]ith one last withering blast, away they all went, […] so many whining and clustering noises, so many midnights and insanities and dreams” (Bradbury 1976, p. 177). The Family is depicted as a vision of carnival togetherness here, but we are not permitted to forget that they are imperiled by modernity, an issue also central to “On the Orient, North” (Bradbury 1989, p. 42). The later “fix-up” novel tries to find a solution, but must move away from carnival privacy (in the home) towards a version of exoticized carnival display (in the museum—what Leslie Fiedler refers to as the “ultimate invasion of privacy” (1978, p.  18)) in order to do so. In the absence of a cultural imaginary, the positive sense of carnival is no longer possible. Evoking Walter Benjamin’s idea of an art object’s quasi-religious “aura”, Jones notes that “[a]n object appreciated for its cult value will be more likely to hold some kind of aura, whereas an object in a gallery will not necessarily do so” (Jones 2015, p. 111). While a full exploration of the changes made to the individual stories in From the Dust Returned is beyond the scope of this essay, it is also worth noting that the book seems to shy away even from positive carnival. As noted above, Uncle Einar’s wedding is significantly truncated and de-spectacularized in the later book, implying that the carnival showiness of the earlier version is no longer acceptable in a modern world where the magic has gone out of the sideshow, leaving only the associations with exploitation, prejudice, and ostracism. The book itself is therefore apparently forced to disentangle the Elliotts from their more overt connections to carnival, even the positive kind, and they themselves are forced to retreat to the equally spectacular but far less imaginatively rich sepulcher that is the public museum. Uncle Einar fears being put in a zoo if he is discovered; in From the Dust Returned, Timothy might choose a similar fate for Grandma as a form of preservation of his family’s affection oddities, but she becomes a tourist attraction all the same.

Bibliography Adams, R. (2001) Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Bachelard, G. (1964) The Poetics of Space, translated by Jolas, M. New York: Orion Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984) Rabelais and His World, translated by Iswolsky, H. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press. Bradbury, R. (1970) “Death Warmed Over”, in Haining, P. (ed), The Hollywood Nightmare: Tales of Fantasy and Horror From the Film World. London: Macdonald, pp. 267–6. ———. (2001) From the Dust Returned. New York: HarperCollins. ———. (1976) The October Country. St Albans: Panther. ———. (1999) Something Wicked This Way Comes. London: Gollancz.

180  Dara Downey ———. (1989) The Toynbee Convector. London: Grafton Books. Capote, T. (2012) Other Voices, Other Rooms. London: Vintage. Cohen, J.J. (1996) “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, in Cohen, J.J. (ed), Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1–25. Davies, H. (2015) Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Donaldson, S. (1969) The Suburban Myth. New York and London: Columbia University Press. Engelhardt, T. (1995) The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. New York: BasicBooks. Fahy, T. (2006) Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Fiedler, L.A. (1978) Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. New York: Simon and Schuster. Franklin, R. (2016) Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. London: Norton. Freud, S. (1955) “The ‘Uncanny’”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, translated by Strachey, J. London: Hogarth and Institute of Psychosis, pp. 217–56. Garland-Thompson, R. (1996) “Introduction: From Wonder to Error – A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” in Garland-Thompson, R. (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary. New York and London: New York University Press, pp. 1–19. Grosz, E. (1996) “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in GarlandThompson, R. (ed), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary. New York and London: New York University Press, pp. 55–66. Hildebrand, G. (1994) The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Horsfield, M. (1997) Biting the Dust: The Joys of Housework. London: Fourth Estate. Jackson, S. (2010) The Haunting of Hill House, in Oates, J.C. (ed), Novels and Stories. New York, Library of America. ———. (2014) The Sundial. London: Penguin. ———. (2006) We Have Always Lived in the Castle. London: Penguin. Jones, T. (2015) The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture. Cardiff, University of Wales Press. Kern, S. (1983) The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 1918. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Matheson, R. (2014) The Shrinking Man. London: Gollancz. May, E.T. (1988) Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Harper. McCullers, C. (2008) A Member of the Wedding. London: Penguin. McGowan, P. (2001) American Carnival: Seeing and Reading American Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Miserocchi, H. K. (2010) The Addams Family: An Evilution. San Francisco: Pomegranate.

“Inverted and Dark and Mildly Different”  181 Murphy, B.M. (2005) “‘The People of the Village Have Always Hated Us’: Shirley Jackson’s New England Gothic”, in Murphy, B.M. (ed), Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson and London: McFarland. Pascal, R. (2000) “New World Miniatures: Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial and Postwar American Society”. The Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 233, pp. 99–111. Pingree, A. (1996) “American’s ‘United Siamese Brothers’: Chang and Eng and Nineteenth-Century Ideologies of Democracy and Domesticity,” in Cohen, J.J, (ed) Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 92–114. Vidler, A. (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Weller, S. (2010) “Ray Bradbury, the Art of Fiction No. 203”. The Paris Review. Available at: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/ray-bradburythe-art-of-fiction- no-203-ray-bradbury#.UPQWwSrvV9c.twitter (Accessed: August 31, 2019).

11 “No Place in All Europe for Him” Monstrous Migrations in the Family Gothic Cord-Christian Casper

Some do not make it to the “Homecoming”. Towards the end of Bradbury’s key story of the extended “Family”, the revelers account for absences: “And Carl?” “The one who lives under bridges? Poor Carl. No place in all Europe for him. New bridges are rebuilt with Holy Water blessings! Carl is homeless. There are refugees tonight beyond counting”. (Bradbury 2001, p. 75) At this point in the story, genre expectations of the fantastic are firmly in place. The reader is cued to a whole host of ghoulish deviations from “actual-world encyclopedias” (Doležel 1998, p. 177), which lack ghostly vapors, mind-projecting teenagers, or bewinged vampires. The final sentence, however, broadens the reading beyond the fantastic: “there are refugees”, in its apodictic generality, veers away from the predicament of a bridge-dwelling ghoul. The statement invites a broadening of the rubric of “refugee” beyond the supernatural storyworld, with more overt complements to the “actual world” re-entering the fictional world. The scope of the story shifts as reference to actual-world refugees lands with all the force of a breach of genre agreement. The result is not allegory, at least not in the simple sense of a “figure based on similarity” (Elleström 2002, p. 95). After all, the displaced bridge-dweller is not like a refugee, but one among their uncountable number. The following reading, accordingly, proceeds from a position of speculative literalness. That is, to take the Family members at their word, the following reading proposes that Carl is a refugee, and From the Dust Returned is centrally concerned with migration, refuge, and diaspora. Between these two poles—external reference to the refugee condition and internal elaboration of the fantastic storyworld (Roberts 1999, p. 42)—the metaphorical status of the Family does not settle. Its members stand in for refugees, metaphorically evoking the status of somebody “unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  183 of a political group, or political opinion” (UNESCO 2010 [1951], p. 3). At the same time, the stories make it clear that the monsters literally are refugees, and cross borders to escape pogroms that are decidedly real within the story. This latter dimension of diegetic, monstrous refugees will be analyzed as the representation of the monster-as-migrant. In contrast, the metaphorical valence of Bradbury’s Family as stand-ins for the status and conditions of refugees in post-WWII modernity will be discussed with reference to the migrant-as-monster. The “monstrous” here indicates that the novel is concerned with the process by means of which modernity labels as deviant and ungovernable any group that does not befit a homogenizing logic of progress. It is because of its unclassifiable status that the Family emerges as a set of migratory figures in-between categories, suspending the validity of both semantic and topographical borders. Consequently, this essay will (1) show how the Family performs and amplifies its unclassifiable status; afterwards (2) I will consider the allocation of the epithet “monster” under the conditions of modernity, and its relation to a global refugee regime. The Elliotts’ refusal to adapt—and, medially, their denial of adaptation—will, (3) finally, be read as a “travelling concept” (Bal 2002) that structures the negotiation of the migrant-as-monster in the Addams Family and Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga (Figure 11.1).

The Monster as Migrant: Evading Categorization Who are the Elliotts, exactly? As compound figures suggesting various literary ancestors, they elude well-worn generic templates. More specifically, the Family suggests several storytelling modes at the same time, thus offering a number of possible applications of Gothic, horror, and fantasy tropes in order to “reduce the unexpected to more manageable proportions” (Fludernik 1996, p. 46). In the popular genre vernacular, Carl, for one, appears as an in-between figure: the aversion to Holy Water is vampirical, while the bridge-dwelling habits evoke folklore of trolls and other liminal figures of passage (Watts 2007, p.  383). This inconclusive generic frame intersects with the placement of the relative in amongst “refugees in Europe”. The elaboration of diegetic monstrosity, I want to argue, shades over into the question of the composition of the contemporary group of refugees—which is, then, immediately counteracted by the reminder that the displaced are “beyond counting” (Bradbury 2001, p. 75). The difficulty of classifying who, precisely, the Elliotts are in generic terms, and who they stand for in allegorical terms, will be shown to present an affirmative part of the Family’s own cultural practices. They traverse classificatory boundaries and play with stereotypes affixed to the monstrous. In this, the family achieves de-categorization, strategically ensuring their status in the interstices of taxonomy.

184  Cord-Christian Casper

Figure 11.1 The Bojeffries Saga is a British comic book series created by Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse. Featuring an eccentric family of monsters, the series has much in common with Bradbury’s Elliott stories (and with other monstrous families like the Munsters and the Addams Family). The Bojeffries Saga ©Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse, reprinted with kind permission of Top Shelf Productions.

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  185

Against Categories In regimes of migration and asylum, categories matter. The rubric applied to an individual and a group determines legal status, material circumstances, inclusion and exclusion (Bradley 2019, p.  271). As Schrover and Moloney (2013) point out, “states differentiate explicitly between categories of migrants (e.g. colonial, refugee, labor and family), and they differentiate implicitly according to categories of analysis, such as gender, class, religion and ethnicity” (p.  7). For state-bound functional systems, such categories appear indispensable, not only for the delineation of “imagined communities” and their excluded groups but also regarding the imagined possibilities of assimilation and integration. Thus, Dracula already responds to a departure from liberal asylum laws in Britain, according to which “any practical distinction between ‘immigrant’ and ‘refugee’ had little administrative importance” (Glover 2018, p. 89). It is a process of demonization that replaces this categorical laissez-faire with the “redeployment of the old legal term ‘alien’” (p. 90), an ascription of undifferentiated otherness which finds condensed expression in the Transylvanian interloper. What is crucial for our purposes is the form that these discourses assume in their legal and political formulation: they give rise to categorizations of groups of arrivals. The 1905 Aliens Act, a paradigm shift in so-called immigrant control, sharply distinguishes asylum seekers from “undesirable immigrants”. An individual in the latter slot cannot support him or herself, has committed a non-political “offence”, or else is a “lunatic or an idiot” (Aliens Act 1905, p. 3). This punitive classification presumes to respond to fears of an immigrant threat, to a cultural imaginary which alleges the unclassifiable status of arrivals. Fantasies of disorder and the legal imposition of categories go hand in hand. US immigration policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century makes the question of race a cornerstone of immigration debates. The composition and transmission of traits across generations furnishes a central criterion for the projected success of any given group in the New World. In this, as Joel Perlmann has shown, explanations “based on blood and socialization” (2018, p. 399), respectively, vie for precedence. More pertinently for the 1946 publishing date of “The Homecoming”, “blood”, as a moveable sign of supposedly “essential” traits, is also invoked in debates about refugees in the aftermath of WWII. This period saw the rise of the category “ethnic group” over “race” in immigration policy. Blood remains, however: a subcommittee tasked with clarifying what, precisely, ethnicity entails again fell back on sanguinary conceptual metaphor. The Office of Statistical Standards, for one, treated the “blood quantum”, i.e. the “proportion of (white) American blood derived from each ‘national origin’” as “a metaphor for cultural origins”

186  Cord-Christian Casper (Perlmann 2018, p. 319). At the intersection of ethnology, policy, statistics and projections, sanguinary tropes are still considered necessary to delineate group identity. If “belonging” is to be written in the blood, however, Bradbury’s Family refuses inscription. The ghouls repudiate blood-based collective identity. After all, their own belonging is a matter of metonymical chains and performance rather than discernible similarities. In this, neither do they reinforce “the biological basis of kinship ties” (Andeweg and Zlosnik 2013, p. 2), nor do they “turn” others into the members of a social formation that would reflect or invert normative family bonds. Transmission of vampirism, after all, would only establish a relationship of similarity, a template reproducing itself as newcomers are “sired”. Against such fantasies of replication, the Family posits its internal variability as an anti-foundational premise. There is no essence underlying these relations: “whether they were ethereal, sussurance of spirit, reminiscence of ghost, ambience of light […], none could say” (Bradbury 2001, p.  181). Rather, commonality in difference emerges from a shared experience of displacement, making the Family resemble a condensed version of Bradbury’s Los Angeles, marked by “Hispanic and Pacific rim immigrants” and “the increasing number of European intellectual refugees fleeing wartorn Europe” (Eller 2011, p. 48). Blood and soil have no place in a commingling of this kind, in which the home itself, in its present incarnation, is a recent immigrant: “[s]o the House arrived first” (Bradbury 2001, p. 9) before “[t]hey came from far places to live there” (p. 181). If the Family is a “minority, defining self as well as being defined” (Hughes 2012, p.  207), Bradbury’s emphasis is on the former, on a circumstantial self-definition refusing reduction to a metaphor of blood. In keeping with the refusal of blood-ties, for all their coffin-sleeping, night-flying habits, the Elliotts evade any association of parasites on the body politic. They refuse denigration in Bram Stoker’s terms of an “awful creature … simply gorged with blood” or a “filthy leech, exhausted with repletion” (2011 [1897], p. 51). Such parasitic imagery, after all, invariably leads to the destruction of those who are maligned as consumers of the national “lifeblood”. Fantasies of eradicating the vampire/parasite cannot retain their innocence after World War II. In light of genocide, reconstituting “bourgeois identity” against the “parasite” scarcely appears as a step in a necessary course of progress. Indeed, getting rid of the monsters to bring forth an unblemished, collective self begins to appear deeply suspect in “an epoch which unsurprisingly shattered the bourgeois reformist daydreams of ineluctable progress-through-rationality” (Miéville 2009, p. 241). The Elliott stories bear out this skepticism. Considered as a diasporic community, the ghouls make few concessions to the categories of the endemic or native, opting instead for gleeful traversal of classificatory borders.

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  187 The Family members, that is to say, insist on their continued difference—from each other, from the surrounding society, and from the categories on offer: the parlor chairs were seated with aunts and uncles with odd genetics and the kitchen crone had helpers who walked more strangely than she, as more aberrant cousins and long-lost nephews and peculiar nieces shambled or stalked or flew into pavanes about the ceiling chandeliers and feeling the rooms fill below and the grand concourse of unnatural survivals of the unfit. (Bradbury 2001, p. 61) This is just a selection from one of Bradbury’s characteristic, paratactic enumerations of beings jostling against each other, a metonymic logic “felt below” rather than seen. The monsters are distributed across and between the sensible, rejecting in the process family descent on linear and genealogical lines. Theirs is an “odd genetics”, ungraspable by discourses of eugenicist control which sought, as Evans and Schairer have shown, to limit “the immigration of people from eastern and southern Europe, the places thought to be the source of ‘bad’ genes” (2009, p. 350). The oddness of the Family functions as a rebuke to this type of “progressive reform” with its Social Darwinist resonances. As “survivals of the unfit”, its unclassifiable (and indescribable) members militate against any pseudo-evolutionary simplification, denying an entire biopolitical agenda of improved life. Against nature and nurture alike, their shambling, stalking ways make a claim to the undead as a realm of the staunchly non-progressive, rejecting an entire regime of visibility in the process: traits keep piling up, applying to an uncountable number of beings that subsist without ameliorative designs. In this way, the undead occupy a position that cannot be bettered in the name of life, and hence evade the very ideology that has produced death in the pursuit of its dreams of purity. To understand the Family, we are called upon to stop counting traits, and to resist the assignment of origin or future trajectory to this unstable, peculiar group.

Acting against Blood Coming back to the “categories of migrants” and “categories of analysis”, then, it is not clear which box Carl and the other assorted ghouls and vapors, faerie and witches would tick in a census of Gothic monstrosities. In light of this skepticism of both parasitism and genealogy, it is only fitting that several concretizations of the vampiric nature of the family are cut from the fix-up novel version of “Homecoming”. In particular, references to blood and the family’s consumption of it are excised or de-emphasized as the stories are assembled into a halting,

188  Cord-Christian Casper uneven plot. In the October Country “Homecoming” (1955), in contrast, that Timothy “doesn’t like blood” (p.  282) is still subject to an extended interrogation by Uncle Jason, “who peered back at Timothy over his caped shoulder” (p. 281). In the Dark Carnival (1947) version, meanwhile, Timothy’s brothers carry blood home from their morticians’ business, “in gallon casques for mama and papa and all of us” (p. 8). This twist on the vampire template shifts the metaphor from direct “parasitism” on the living to an economy of the dead. Their blood is a remainder, otherwise unusable material that circulates through the family as a by-product put to new use; presented as a mildly humorous scam, this operation is a far cry from “possession as such, indifferent to consumption” that makes Dracula, in Franco Moretti’s terms, a “totalizing monster” (1997, p. 84). However, in terms of the need to evade classification, the very association of the vampire with the consumption of blood carries too many associations of parasitism, stereotypes best avoided if a case for the value of staunch Otherness is to be made. Considering Bradbury’s characterization of a Family that “could be, but maybe were not, vampires” (Bradbury 2001, p. 232), de-categorization hinges on the “maybe”, the refusal to allow us to affix a label to the Elliotts, be it a generic or allegorical one. Even repurposed blood of the dead, in other words, may still hew too closely to John, the antagonist whose betrayal spells the end of the ghouls’ temporary diasporic zone. The difference between the aptly named John the Unjust and the Elliotts is presented as a moral one, since “The Family was strange, perhaps outré, in some degree rococo, but not a scourge, a disease, an annihilation such as he represented” (2001, p. 232). More importantly, however, he presents a formal problem for the family: he comes with distinct storytelling templates and a predictable set of xenophobic associations. Hailing “from dark lower Europe” (2001, p. 191), his border-crossing is a conventionally eventful one, lacking any of the topological complications of “Homecoming”. The Elliotts’ story, after all, features a return to a home described as a set of shared practices rather than any determinate place, a return to a diasporic enactment that cuts across the distinction of old country and new. In true Dracula-fashion, in contrast, John represents the emergence of the old in the new global center. Arrayed in all the attributes of vampireness (“crimson eye, razored teeth, taloned claw”, p.  187), John is defanged by dint of such generic slots, which fit his snarling, threatening ways to a T. As a generic vampire, he functions as a figure of familiarization, making it possible to accept his supernatural status “without comment as the norm both for the protagonist and for the reader” (Mendelsohn 2008, p.  182). In the phrase “an annihilation such as he represented” it is, thus, “representation” that threatens the unclassifiable status of the Family as much as the destruction he wreaks in the storyworld. By becoming representable and legible in terms of

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  189 the genre of vampire fiction, John provides everything necessary for the procedure that Jacques Rancière—an inveterate critic of the concept of “representation”—calls “the police”: a “distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible) whose principle is the absence of void or supplement” (2010, p.  36). John the Unjust, in other words, stands for a tight coupling of name and epithet, of tenor and vehicle, and, finally, of genre and type. It is not surprising, then, that in addition to the “distribution of the sensible” effected by the sheer attempt to represent a diaspora of “uncountable” members (and thus to diminish a constitutively unrepresentable, expanding set of migrants and refugees), John also literally reports to the police: “The Family is!” cried the staggering, raving man. “The House is!” (p. 200). It is this devastating representational speech act that the ghoulish clan resists throughout the novel. They are not, strictly speaking, at least as far as a straightforward vampiric template, its xenophobic associations, and representability in a legal framework is concerned. In terms of any of these categories, the monsters are uncountable, offering, for all their dispersal, a way of (non-)life that resists any normative distribution of the sensible.

Performing Alterity What is the result of the attenuation of blood, both as a vampiric accoutrement and, as shown above, an imposition of conformity ascribed to immigrant identity? First, its removal reduces a source of recurring, anti-Semitic and xenophobic stereotypes embodied by vampires. In particular, as Roger Luckhurst points out in his introduction to Dracula (2011), fabricated stories of “blood libel” and later notions of racial purity imperiled by racially coded, parasitic figures constitute a recurring element of alterity condensed in the vampiric figure. However, Jack Halberstam rightly cautions that any establishment of a linear connection between fictional beings and anti- Semitic stereotypes risks an unwitting essentialization of the very tropes that are to be deconstructed (Halberstam 2000, p. 88; cf. also Butler 2010, p. 44). Bradbury, precludes such essence; against the naturalization of stereotypes of the denigrated other, the removal of the blood makes the reduction of the compound metaphor “vampire” to one of its destructive, racist strands more unlikely. As a result, the removal of the family’s residually blood-dependent nature ensures the production of “monstrosity as never unitary but always an aggregate of race, class, gender” (Halberstam 2000, p.  88). This aggregate, however, by no means only includes whatever society disavows. On the contrary, the Family affirms its aggregate status—celebrates it, in fact—turning its lack of essence into a matter of self-description. If “Gothic monsters […] transform the fragments of otherness into one body” (Halberstam

190  Cord-Christian Casper 1993, p.  337), Bradbury’s Family reverses this process. Its  members and their generic fragments are dispersed centrifugally, with no center to pull them together—and no blood to encode them. As a metonymy for this process, it is Cecy who is positioned against the policed representation instigated and embodied by John the Unjust: “The realization that she might be near, in squirrels or chipmunks, or even . . . my god, think!” (198). Against blood-based identity and the impending removal of aberrant “blood”, she demonstrates that the Family is not governed by any one identity, but distributed widely, across categories and ungovernable by any authoritarian reckoning. In exemplary fashion, such dispersal of qualities is performed in a play put on by the family in the Dark Carnival version of “The Homecoming”: Laura and Ellen, over and above the wine-sated tumult, produced a parlor drama with Uncle Fry. They represented innocent maidens strolling, when the Vampire (Uncle Fry) stepped from behind a tree (Cousin Anna). The Vampire smiled upon the Innocents … He was just preparing to attack one of them (at the river) when the Innocents, whirling eagerly, knocked him flat and drained him vacuumdry of his blood. They sat down on his carcass as on a bench, and laughed and laughed. (1947, pp. 17–18) In this performance, the Family presents to itself the very process by means of which a Gothic figure comes to “signify an ever expanding and changing host of despicable others” (Cain 2006, p.  7). This is a repetition-with-a-difference; however, the stage-vampire does not cohere as the product of xenophobic fears of foreign deviance spoiling the alleged purity of the host society. Instead (plot twist!), the Innocents bite back, with a comically exaggerated version of the consumption of blood to boot. There is no Us/Them scheme in the Family play, only redoubled representations and degrees of deviance. On the face of it, a “distribution of the sensible” (as per Rancière’s “police”) is impossible, as is the establishment of bourgeois stability against monstrous deviation. In a reversal of John the Unjust’s exclamations, no identity (“the family is”) or location (“the house is”) can be established on the basis of the play. Instead, by “monster-ing” both the attacker and the “maidens”, the play re-stages circulating images of the migratory other in a metonymical manner: the enacted vampires interact within the same conceptual domain, exchanging positions with a pulpy relish that precludes somber, xenophobic similarity-mongering. Even the Family’s self-image, that is to say, has no truck with essentialism, not even of the strategic variety: stereotypes are taken up, staged, and defused with laughter at any mainstream society that would reduce complexity in such a farcical manner.

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  191

Performing Memory Although this anti-representational, dramatic reckoning with stereotypes is absent from the fix-up novel version, in the Dust “Homecoming”, the Family also emphasizes its changeability against classificatory inflexibility. This hinges on the work of remembrance. During the gathering, the various beings form a momentary aggregate by performatively actualizing collective memories. The ghoulish diaspora enacts what Aleida Assmann has called “functional memory”, which selects from variously stored memories in order to confer communal identity, a process ‘renewed by rites and festivities’ (1999, p. 140). Radically dispersed as they are, the Family members “flying in from all over the world” (p. 4) perform a non-propositional “diasporic identity” (Ciubrinskas 2013, p. 108) encoded in rituals and speech only half-understood by their one human member, Timothy. In keeping with their status in excess of categories, however, heritage can itself not constitute one coherent narrative. Accordingly, references to the “old country” as an origin still maintained in The October Country (“in trooped Grandmama and Grandpapa, all the way from the old country!” (p. 281)) are replaced with origin as performance in From the Dust Returned: “This past week the whole small Family had lived as in their old countries, sleeping by day” (Bradbury 2001, p.  56). Instead of one origin, they hybridize storage and enactment of a cultural reservoir, so that “memory is attached to a series of diasporas and old countries, each of which has left sedimentary traces” (Abramovitch 2002, p. 9). The template for this negotiation is the deposition of the burnt cousins’ consciousness in the body of the grandfather: farcically jostling for control, ultimately they each inhabit a “different territory of Grandpère’s sun- or moonlit attic keep” (Bradbury 2001, p. 100). In this internal diasporic movement, Peter took up residence in a remembrance of 1840 in Vienna with a crazed actress; William lived in the Lake Country with a flaxenhaired Swede of some indefinite years; while Jack shuttled from fleshpot to fleshpot—Frisco, Berlin, Paris—appearing, on occasion, as a wicked glitter in Grandpère’s eyes. And Philip, all wise, locked himself deep in a library cell to con all the books that Grandpère loved. (p. 100) Male-centered and misogynist as this iteration of the archive is, it nonetheless offers a farcical realization of a nested and heterogenous archive, one that is determinedly performed and does not purport to capture a literal past. Every act of collective remembrance is also a translation into the terms of the present, in the course of which shared experience is expressed ever anew.

192  Cord-Christian Casper Bradbury’s Gothic version of migrant remembrance, then, blurs the boundaries between storage memory and its active, functional recuperation. For the globally dispersed group, material things cannot be presumed to persist as “collective storage of knowledge and material data medium” (Assmann 1999, p. 21). Diminished in numbers and farflung, the stability of signs of the past is unreliable. Instead, retaining a sense of collectivity amidst the impermanence of migration and diaspora is a process that obviates distinctions between the stored and the actualized, the archival and the performed. As the migrating pathetic fallacies assume their Homecoming form, the recreation of diasporic memory “generation by generation” is rendered staunchly synchronous. Everybody is already there, with “A Thousand Times Great Grandmère” (Bradbury 2001, p. 74) presiding over the renewed generation of identity. The history of the Family, like her, is not revived for the occasion, but unfurled and briefly integrated into proceedings, “her fragile archaeopteryx bones” (p. 74) involved in the temporary identity formation as just another archival instance. Her identification with the ancestral, even pre-human extends the bounds of the family assemblage. This imagery makes the family appear as a “hyperobject”, in Timothy Morton’s term for “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton 2013, p. 1). The consistency of this distribution does not rely on an unbroken line, but produces an imagined simultaneity across time, one that is brought to the fore in the gathering but pre-exists it. The archaeopteryx is a metaphor, but only just: its extension hyperbolically extended beyond the human, the family archive exceeds classification by contingent, merely human state formations—by anyone, in fact, but themselves. As long as past and present can be combined in one constellation that gleefully oversteps the bounds of the “historical”, imagined groups can emerge from the animals and things, ghosts and monsters assembled in the house.

The Migrant as Monster: Diffracting Modernity Lists form a crucial instrument for the classification and localization of migrants. Immigration control and political measures against refugees both depend on an expandable paradigm: who is coming into a country, which characteristics are assigned to the respective groups, and how do they relate to “national norms”? Prominently, the List of Races and People—by means of which European immigrants were slotted into separate groups (Perlmann 2011, p. 4)—had a longstanding discursive afterlife. This list “produced ‘race-based’ statistics, which legitimized a racial hierarchy of assimilation”, becoming in the process a “discretionary tool that survived, despite criticisms, as an unofficial instrument of racial discrimination, when the law did not always permit such bias” (Weil 2003, p.  274). The use of this list, which tracked immigrants,

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  193 “foreign-born” Americans and their descendants “throughout their lives” (Perlmann 2011, p.  2) continued until 1952, three years before the initial publication of The October Country. It is only fitting, then, that Bradbury’s narratives of migratory monsters feature an extensive concern with lists, inventories—and how to evade them.

Listing the Monstrous As opposed to the subversion of categories outlined above, the list retains a certain strategic appeal for the Family: it promises an account of those that remain, in the face of an overwhelming tendency to erase the monstrous figures from the course of a history conceived in terms of an unbroken, progressive development. This image of inexorable historical necessity is represented by Timothy, perhaps surprisingly. The human family member’s account is only superficially like starbound Thomas Wolfe’s in Bradbury’s short story “Forever and the Earth” (1950), in which the writer displaced in time lives up to the challenge of transcribing the wonders of the universe. While there is a parallel—infant Timothy is deposited in front of the Elliott mansion with a volume of Dickens and Poe—the boy is presented as a figure bound to classify rather than narrate with carnivalesque abandon. Grandmère informs him, “You did not come, child. You were found…. You were sent, child, to write us up, list us in lists, register our flights from the sun, our love of the moon” (Bradbury 2001, p. 39). For all the celebration of the power of the written word, the reader has ample reason to call into question the tautological insistence to “list in lists” what emerges as eminently unlistable in the short stories assembled after this prelude. That it is possible, let alone desirable, to create and verbalize a paradigm of the intermingling, vaporous beings that make up Bradbury’s uncertain bestiary is far from certain. The call to list not-quite-vampires is introduced under duress. It is prompted by a [s]econd Homecoming? Was the world coming to an end? And yes, it was, their world, anyway. This rain of souls, this storm of lost people, clustered on the roof, brimmed the basement among the wine kegs, and waited for some sort of revelation, which then caused the members of the Family to meet in council and welcome one by one those people who needed to be hidden from the world. (p. 102) This gathering adds to the overall plot of disenchanted modernity leading to the threat of erasure of whomever is considered beyond the pale of rationality. Such repetition with a difference of the initial “Homecoming” shifts the terms of the ghoulish significantly. Where previously the “flood of shadow and cloud and rain” (p. 61) that make up the relatives

194  Cord-Christian Casper was placed in long metonymic conjunctions of objects, the second homecoming requires a measure of individuation; the monsters become addressable individually as they hide from persecution. This is no longer a temporary monstrous zone, in which their self-descriptions intermingle in a performance of “the family’s carnivalized meanings” (Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 427). Rather, the sheer ethical appeal of a need for shelter serves to create a new requirement to anchor that meaning in a speaking subject, thus turning the uncountable mass of signs and matter into identifiable interlocutors: “people who needed to be hidden from the world”. Instead of a dispersed people performing their defiant diaspora, the “clouds of oppression and disbelief and discontent” (Bradbury 2001, p. 102) shift the metaphor in the direction of refugees. That these distinctions between types of displacement are incited in the first place already shows the classificatory questions thrown up by the repetition of what, the first time around, was a perfectly self-contained, elegiac “Homecoming”.

Persecution and Modernity It is in the context of persecution, too, that the Family is described in terms of lists once more: The list was long, the need was manifest. Manifestations of need took many shapes and forms. Some were solid flesh, some were evanescent ambiences which grew on the air, some partook of the clouds, some the wind, some merely the night, but all needed a place to hide, a place to be stashed. (p. 157) The list, crucially, is created in response to a “need” shared by each entity approaching the house once more. As a need for shelter and protection, this shared element emerges as the semantic overlap between beings otherwise determined by their radical heterogeneity and circumstantial performance of a shared history. In contrast to the first “Homecoming’s” assertion of difference, this second gathering recalls the “shared needs of refugees” specified by the 1951 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (p. 14). This shared need is “manifest”—in the sense of obvious and visible—yet also surreptitiously manifests beings that otherwise feature as an unnameable substratum outside of consensus reality. Finally, the “manifest” can also be read as a synonym of the “list” in the phrase preceding it. Even the determination of a shared protection status, from this perspective, is the begrudging imitation of a call to self-identification in the manner of the Steerage Act (1819), which required the delivery of a “manifest” to the Collector of Customs, with the information passed on to the Secretary of State and Congress (Miyares and Airriess 2007, p. 29; cf. also Bromwell 1856). The vaporous

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  195 beings fleeing to the house, in other words, are fully identified with their needs, a reduction of complexity (listable in manifest form) that introduces “police”, the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2010, p. 36), into the Gothic space. The problem besetting the Family is one of negation—or rather the absence thereof. Defined by their affirmation of otherness, the ghouls are confronted with a logic of modernity in which no positive beliefs are spelled out—and, on the flipside, no mythical alternative to the prevailing logic of an ideology of disenchantment and instrumental rationality can be formulated. It is this counter-position which ought to be occupied by those excluded from progress and development. However, according to the self-exegesis of the Father of all Darkness, even this dubious prerogative of those outside of the sweep of modernization can no longer be maintained: “The world is at war. They do not name us the Enemy, no, for that would give us flesh and substance. You must see the face or the mask in order to strike through one to deface the other” (Bradbury 2001, p. 136). This modern “war” is not determined by an antagonistic conflict, in other words, but by the cancellation of all opposition. Paradoxically, then, the “traces of otherness” to be dispelled are created by the “influx of capital from all over the world” (following the model by Gottlieb 2016, p. 86) in the first place. The sense that the pre-modern (and its representatives) are to be destroyed is, thus, a matter of self-directed violence, with modernity erasing the very inclusions and exclusions thrown up by its own, global logic of linear development. This contradiction cannot, however, be faced, let alone formulated in terms of political opposites. Antagonism, after all, at least maintains recognition of competing interests, with a residual acknowledgment of ideological rifts. Conversely, the abolition of the possibility of competing interests denies an ‘outside’ of modernity, with the result of an all-encompassing annulment of negation. Instead of facing up to the dependence of modernity on its Others, the sweep of history now co-opts alternative forms of life altogether, replacing them with “heavens … redolent of sulphur and brimstone” (Bradbury 2001, p. 127). A topological distinction between high and low is denied as much as the possibility of setting continuing “Darkness” against myths of lofty perfection: the heavens produce their own brimstone in this image of homogenization, presenting an inescapable totality. Once more, it is worthwhile to not immediately dissolve this destruction of antagonism in allegorical terms, and to pinpoint instead the consequences for the migrant situation as represented in the novel. The distinction of “face” and “mask” that the father claims for pre-modern monsterhood still establishes a disjunctive connection between the normative and its excluded: processes of rationalization process their opposite, nation states produce “surplus populations” not amenable to their economic order. Without this recognition of a connection between modernity and its discontents, what remains is the denial of any relational

196  Cord-Christian Casper definition of modernity whatsoever: “they war against us by pretending, no, assuring each other we have no flesh and substance” (p. 136). It is this rescinding of even a negative position in a symbolic order, finally, that makes fantasies of wholesale destruction possible, according to this implicit theory of displacement and—with specters hiding in basements from processes indifferently erasing their right to exist—genocide. This is not a civilizational break but an outgrowth of its inexorable process; “No reason is needed” (p. 208), as A Thousand Times Great Grandmère explains to Timothy. This erasure of the incommensurable is encapsulated by technological progress. The denial of the existence of anything beyond the representational scope of mass media is indistinguishable from the urge to destroy the excluded groups thrown up by modernity: “It is just the revelation of the hour, the meaningless alarms and excursions of the week, the panic of the single night, no one asks, but death and destruction are delivered” (p. 208). In addition to the monstrous traits ascribed to figures of otherness, thus, the threat to refugees develops out of mass society homogenized by technological fiat. From the Dust Returned repudiates any notion that as “the discursive complexity of the world dramatically increases…, the ability to create the grand scapegoating narrative is diminished” (Voth 2016, p. 41). On the contrary: what changes from the perspective of Bradbury’s fictional diaspora is merely that the scapegoat is not even granted existence while it is attacked. Looking back to the radio binding together an imagined Volk with its “insect-antenna coif” (Bradbury 2001, p. 208) and forward to television and mass media, Bradbury’s novel asserts the imminent production of quasi-fascist unity—which threatens to supersede the constitutive instability of the migrant monsters. The situation, in Adorno’s terms, is one in which the “multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter” (2002, p. 4). In the face of an Enlightened world that brooks no outside to its all-consuming logic, which possibility of reconstituting negativity—the “reverse blessings” (Bradbury 1947, p.  7) in the Dark Carnival version of “The Homecoming”—can still be pursued? As a first step, it is shown to be imperative not to copy the very logic that threatens the existence of the Family—the production of a list of ghouls and monsters. It is this step that Nostrum Paracelsius Crook advocates in the wake of the Second Homecoming: “we must know. You must know. Over the centuries we have given no name, found no label, that signified self, which summed up the totality of … us. Let us begin” (Bradbury 2001, p. 128). In light of the preceding emphasis on classifications undermined, such production of an inventory, however, only reproduces the logic of refugee regimes and immigrant control. On the level of textual history, the very suggestion of a name undoes the elision of the Family name “Elliott”, which was specified in earlier stories yet remains conspicuously

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  197 absent in From the Dust Returned. As the interludes of the novel extend the members of the family to a “storm of lost people, clustered on the roof” (p.  102), the organization of that unruly set along genealogical lines, with a branching family tree named and classified, appears evermore restrictive. That is to say: the “totality of us” advocated by the ghoul is already part of the unimpeachable facticity of Enlightened modernity. The list, on the novel’s own terms, is rightly interrupted by the chorus stating “Don’t tell me who I am. I don’t want to know” (p. 128). What is more, Crook is mercifully stopped in his tracks by the “ghastly passenger”, who introduces an entirely other set of questions. This ghost embodies a renewed focus on negation rather than docile inventorizing, introduced as he and his companion are by a “great silence at the front portal of the house, such a silence as might come from the repercussion of a thunderous knock never delivered” (p. 128). Instead of reduction to fact, the arrival, thus, hovers between the actual and the possible, the present and the absent. His resonant silence is a programmatic statement against any cooperation with the police order and its ‘distribution of the sensible’. Even the most affirmative listing of traits cannot but suborn the migratory monsters under an order fundamentally inimical to the continued assertion of diasporic difference.

The Monstrous Part of No Part In contrast to the list, then, what is required is what Rancière calls an “atomic subject of politics”, formed by the “supplementary part in relation to every count of the parts of the population” (2010, p. 33). This countermeasure to police order returns us to the beginning of the essay and unclassifiable Carl, displaced amidst an uncountable group of refugees. The “part of no part” also opens up an inroad back to the parlor theater of the Dark Carnival “Homecoming”, with its doublings and multiplications directed against the condensation of aberrance in one, visible figure of the migratory vampire. Scrambling the distribution of the sensible, after all, requires artifice: “the metaphor of political subjectivization for Rancière is that of a theatre, the logic of a staging” (Arsenjuk 2007, p. 5)—in this case a staging that produces and emphasizes the supplementary status of the migrant and the refugee. Without such artifice, a position in a partition of the sensible is all but assured, with an identifiable set of procedures and a legal status in tow. Against this logic, the new arrival interrupts the “totality of us” and its implication in lists and accounts that make visible and distribute those deemed outside of history: the “ghastly passenger had arrived with all the answers” (Bradbury 2001, p. 128). Strictly speaking, these are no answers at all, but merely a bevy of new questions: “‘Am I one of you, or with you?’ the ghastly passenger replied. ‘And what are you, or we, or us? Can it be named? Is there a shape?” (p. 128). Questions and alternatives

198  Cord-Christian Casper accumulate as the ghost traverses categories, questioning any overarching identity emerging from the concatenation of monsters. The passenger multiplies the Family once more, reconstituting the insubordinate Gothic stage. Whichever closure is chosen for the family, either within the story (‘the totality of us’) or metaphorically is not capable of fully transforming the ‘reverse rituals’ of the family into mappable totality. If there is a “shape” to the Family, then, it is not one that can be listed—or, if so, the traveler’s questions form what Eco calls “a swing between the poetics of ‘everything included’ and the poetics of the ‘etcetera’” (Bradbury 2009, p. 7). It is precisely at this point, however, that the Family can be represented again, on the condition that the label not apply to the entirety of the monstrous set: “there stood at long last the first of a fine new batch of immigrant members of the Family: the ghastly passenger with Minerva Halliday, looking remarkably dead for someone so dead” (Bradbury 2001, p. 41). The tautology is programmatic, with the dead appearance of the dead reconstituting the redoubled ‘vampireness’ of the parlor drama. What is more, the new “batch” may look remarkably like immigrants, but they are added to a family with an undetermined immigrant status, and only constitute the first in a seriesto-come: “a new batch” inaugurates a new “etcetera”. In contrast to the “manifests” listing the traits of ship-bound migrants, the Illinois arrivals form a “part of those who have no part” (Rancière 1999, p. 9). Thus, against the dual strategy of a regime that renders visible the hidden while insisting on its non- existence, the “batch of immigrants”, together with the expandable list of questions, serves to introduce the possibility of re-categorization from within—by taking on and repeating with a difference the very categories of classification brought to bear on dispersed peoples. This dovetails with changes in US immigration policy after World War II, which saw “support for the idea of human rights … translated into demands for the admission of refugees and the elimination of the discriminatory national origins system” (DeLaet 2000, p. 37). These were tentative, however, so that Bradbury’s immigrants likewise cannot rely on categories based on inclusion and exclusion by quota or origin. Indeed, the sheer fact that these arrivals are un-human destabilizes any rights-based status, not least the human-rights based one. These rights, too, are subject to exclusions and can be revoked, so that they by no means replace the traveler’s expandable questions. The ghastly traveler is allowed to haunt the Elliott mansion not because of any shared “signified self” (Bradbury 2001, p. 128) but rather as a result of an urgent need to “beg merciful lodgings for a thousand nights” (p.  131). This ethical immediacy trumps any categorization of shared traits; it is because he counts himself among “those who nameless wander” (p. 131) that he is allowed to cease wandering, a part of no part entrance into an incomplete set: “a chorus of ‘ayes’ soared up like rain reversed” (p. 131). This type of inclusion, which allows for maintenance of

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  199 difference, contrasts with the initial demand that Timothy “list in lists” (p. 39) the monstrousness of the migrated figures. That request, complicit as it is with the very technology of homogenization decried as genocidal elsewhere, is followed up by an immediate countervailing narrative by A Thousand Times Grandmère herself. Her own mode of telling is posited against registering and grouping. Instead, as she describes the house, the very objects it consists of are determined by genealogical vignettes, with ancestral times attaching to each: “some ceilings were high enough to allow flights with rests where shadows might hang upside down. The dining room nested thirteen chairs, each numbered thirteen so no one would feel left out of the distinctions such numbers implied” (p. 41). As against lists designed to classify, exclude, and evaluate, this description allows for singularities only: a space of “some” characteristics in states of ever-present difference. The proliferation of ‘thirteen’ is based on the potential use of the space, allowing for inclusion on the basis of what anyone might ‘feel’ rather than their number in an inventory. It is this status as a place of potential and affordances that takes the place of the demand to “write up” the Family. In the House thus conceived, even an innocuous hinge can speak, acquiring “perambulating squeaks and grindings” (p. 162). Against a ceaseless march of history, that is, proper times accumulate, micro-genealogies that effect a “weirding”, what Berry calls “a way of alienating the past from its present purposes, releasing the past from its present work, and returning to the past a measure of its original ‘foreignness’” (2011, p. 5). It is this uncertain time, brought forth in a newly “weirded” space manifested by the needs of dispersed peoples, that is temporarily restored in the wake of the ghastly passenger’s arrival. That the Family has to flee once more, spreading out to haunt the Midwest, does not detract from this reversal of the “refugee-as-monster”—in which a community based on needs defies an inventory of traits.

Adaptation That Bradbury’s ghouls evade classification at every turn sits uneasily with the development of a decidedly classifiable subgenre of popular Gothic fiction in its mold. As far as cultural ubiquity is concerned, the semantic core of the fuzzy genre would be constituted by Charles Addams’s Family Gothic, with the intermittently published Elliotts barely a blip on the cultural radar in comparison. If the Illinois clan is determined by its performance of alterity and its denial of monstrosity assigned from without, this raises the question in how far its generic fellow-travelers have featured migrant families diegetically adapting to mainstream society. In both the comic strips and the television version of the Addams Family (as well as the Munsters), the families are, after all, marked by a bygone “old world”. As shown above, such an origin in a determinate homeland is de-emphasized in the successive versions of

200  Cord-Christian Casper “Homecoming”.  The  TV  families, however, at least inflect the status of the monsters with connotations of foreign origins. While in contrast with Bradbury’s concern with “refuge in a disbelieving world” (Bradbury 2001, p. 144), their immigrant origins are adumbrated at best, Morowitz shows that the sitcom monsters are “set apart in their more complex ethnic identities”—they are shown to be using occasional Yiddish words and “descending from Spanish and French aristocracy respectively” (p. 43). What is more, similarly to the multiplication of vampires on the Elliott Family stage, the plot often revolves around mistaken identities and refusals to adapt. Gomez Addams, for instance, has to regain his “outré” traits after an accident that momentarily aligns his behavior with that of a regular sitcom father figure (“Amnesia in the Addams Family”, 1965). “Fear of irreversible denormalization” (Link 1997, p. 25), thus, gives way to assimilation as the plot-motivating abhorred event. In this, the Addams contest the sitcom formula developed in The Goldbergs (1949–55) or Mama (1949–56), which display various “ethnic” groups resolving “in twenty-eight minutes of air time” conflicts resulting from a “division of characters into an older generation encrusted with cultural survivals from the old country and a younger group of super-Americans” (Cripps 2003, p. 34). For the Addams, the monstrous stands in for an ongoing self-reproduction of culture, one that does not measure itself on a temporal scale of throwback or adaptation. In the comics, too, the humor is often derived from too much adaptation; instead of acting out the “unfit” family strangeness in now-familiar fashion, for instance, Pugsley rebels by joining the boy scouts and saluting his own image in a cracked mirror (Addams 2010, p. 88), much to the chagrin of his parents. Even if the stakes are lower than for the Elliotts, and the Addams mostly inhabit their alterity with unchallenged gusto, the degree to which difference can be upheld circulates beyond Bradbury’s stories. The greatest imaginable threat in the Family Gothic, then, is the loss of the performative unwillingness to adapt. This is the running theme of Alan Moore’s and Steve Parkhouse’s 1983 series The Bojeffries Saga. In this comic, the monstrous family lives in a British industrial environment of factories and terraced houses. In the first storyline in particular, for all the absurdity generated from that constellation, a genuine sense of unclassifiable strangeness is maintained in the face of a single-minded rentman, a figure of overdetermined, absurd normativity. The grandfather, a tentacular Old One of cosmic horror, sees to it that this interloper is “TRANSMOTTLED AND ENGRUTTED” (Moore and Parkhouse 2014, p. 23)—and transformed into a geranium. Such performance of the gleefully alien, however, is shown to offer little resistance to a racist state. While uncle Raoul—coded as a migrant by his ‘broken’ English— changes into a werewolf, the police, in a grotesque literalization of the “distribution of the sensible” beats up a black co-worker instead. The police order thinks it “Fairly obvious what the source of trouble is here”

“No Place in All Europe for Him”  201 (p. 35) and distributes otherness along racial lines, leaving the werewolf behind, listlessly classed as white, with no estranging features remaining, apart from his pointed ears. Categories subverted in Bradbury’s Illinois are applied with mundane predictability in Moore’s England. This process culminates in a dramatization of the homogenizing effects of mass media, for which Moore reserves as much scorn as Bradbury in the latter’s account of TV “antennae” issuing in motiveless, malign violence. In a 2008 return to his monstrous family—assembled into a fix-up graphic novel along the lines of From the Dust Returned— Moore presents an environment in which any performance of cultural difference is precluded. The family members become reality show contestants, with the comic presenting TV as far more grotesque than the Gothic Family could ever hope to be. The disenfranchised are commodified and sold back to themselves, according to Moore’s blunt cultural critique—from which his own Northampton diaspora is hardly exempt. As a result, in contrast to the multiple stagings of Bradbury’s vampire play, the monsters cannot hope to stand out. As Uncle Raoul encounters a roomful of identical Reality Show contestants, it becomes clear that the recovery of negativity no longer works. Where Bradbury allows his figures a measure of immigrant self-definition, no “transmottled and engrutted” strangeness can be upheld in austerity Britain. Without normative “canonicity”, in other words, there is no “breach” (Bruner 1991, p. 11)—least of all one embodied by the migrant monsters. As the council flat is bulldozed overnight around the squatting, homeless Raoul, the “weirding” potential of the Family Gothic is finally relinquished. In post-Thatcher Britain, there are only monsters, leaving no room for the inflection of norms that alone can serve as the basis for immigrant performances of shared cultural archives. After the dispersal of Bradbury’s family, Timothy’s decision to give his adopted grandmother to a museum at the end of From the Dust Returned is an ambivalent coda at best. Wrested from the diasporic enactment and displayed as she is, this musealization of the undead archive counteracts the sophisticated techniques of de-classification that came before. Similarly, in The Bojeffries Saga, such compliant display leads to a normalizing grotesque, as the erstwhile monsters immerse themselves in a hypermediated modernity in which they do not stand out. The comic cannot muster storyworld consistency anymore, with its reality effect exchanged for on-the-nose allegory, a graphic rant about the homogenizing effect of the modern world that no diaspora, no renewed migration can escape. The analysis has shown the degree to which both the performance of otherness on the part of the monster-as-migrant and the imposition of monstrous traits on the migrant-as-monster is subverted by the Family Gothic. There remains, however, a fundamental skepticism inscribed in the subgenre: no matter how long ghosts haunt the Midwest and refugees escape classification, a slot will, ultimately,

202  Cord-Christian Casper be found for the unruly monstrous. Before that happens, however, the narratives present the Family as a foil against which modernity can appear as the contingent formation that it is—for a while, the migrating monsters become unclassifiable.

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12 Family Fantasy and the Family Divining the Elliotts through Depth Psychology and the Phenomenology of the Fantastic Steve Gronert Ellerhoff If, as archetypal psychologist James Hillman put it, “psychology has discovered an entire demonology within family” (1991, p.  197), Ray Bradbury’s Elliotts can be understood as enfranchising family’s dark side with gentleness, goodness, even love.1 Hillman criticized psychology’s focus on the deviant underbelly of family, citing everything from incest to familial homicide, in an effort “to turn the vice of entrapment in the personal family into an archetypal recognition of family as the supreme metaphor for sustaining the human condition, whether you have a family or not” (2017). In complementary ways, Bradbury’s Family— capitalized with archetypal significance—forms a shadowy group of horror-show personalities that functions ably as a family, unconsciously implying that seemingly normal American families of the twentieth century were quite at home with an array of monstrosities gathered under their own roofs. It was at his grandparents’ home in Waukegan, Illinois, that Bradbury fell in love with the individualities expressed by the members of his own family. His beloved aunt Neva fostered his love of fantasy literature from a young age. She was also queer in an era when being so was greatly suppressed. “I don’t think anyone ever guessed at it”, Bradbury said, “I never discussed it with her, ever. We talked about everything else, though” (Weller 2010, p. 192). Also present were relatives of Scandinavian descent, carrying names sounding strange to American ears—names like Inar, an Old Norse name meaning “lone warrior” that shares the same root of “the word for the slain warriors in Valhalla” (Behind The Name 2019). In his afterword to From the Dust Returned, Bradbury recalled their lasting inspiration: “Though long dead, they live again and waft in the chimney flues, stairwells, and attics of my imagination” (2001, p. 204). Living to advanced age, he experienced the eventuality whereby one’s beloved relatives from childhood pass, with death, into a realm of memory and fantasy. Because Bradbury presented family as fantasy throughout the Elliotts’ story cycle, readers encounter three distinct relationships to the Family’s shared image of itself in the characters of Cecy, Uncle Einar, and Timothy.

206  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Psychotherapist R. D. Laing’s view of family as a fantasy shared by its members finds a happy home when considering the Elliotts: The family as a shared fantasy image is usually a container of some kind in which all members of the family feel themselves to be, and for which image all members of the family may feel each should sacrifice themselves. (2013, p. 9) In this light, the protracted composition and hopscotch publication history of the Elliott stories reveals the theme by which they could all be assembled together as From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance. Prior to the 1994 publication of the short story titled “From the Dust Returned”, 2 readers can sense an author in decades-long throes of wondering how to bring the Family together into a single volume. That story, wherein the Family’s typically human son, Timothy, finds his purpose as a Family member, caps the story cycle. Roles are a crucial part of family life. In discovering his role, Timothy at last is able to share in the Elliotts’ shared fantasy image of themselves as a family, the only one left to accept and understand his place; his sister Cecy asserted her belonging in “The Traveler” and Uncle Einar found his in the story named for him. “Homecoming”, “The April Witch”, and “West of October” reinforce their roles, but it took fifty years before Timothy’s found its way into print. Hillman observed, “[Family] love allows family pathology, an immense tolerance for the hopeless shadow in each, the shadow that we each carry as permanent part of our baggage and that we unpack when we go back home” (1991, p. 201). Bradbury’s stories about the Family fully support this view, whereby the gothic mismatch of family members who accept one another reveals the family myth. The freak in this Midwestern American family is the mortal boy who, in any other family, would never suffer such a crisis of belonging on account of being downright average in nearly every capacity. And yet his longing for acceptance is something many can relate to. “Isn’t it strange how one wants to be accepted, taken in, recognized by family members?” Hillman asked. “Very, very strange” (2017). Bradbury’s stories often present metaphors broaching concepts of phenomenology. Taking the lead from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, psychologist Roger Brooke defines phenomenology as “essentially a method for studying the essences of phenomena, and the method has four overlapping characteristics: description, phenomenological reduction, the search for essences (eidetic reduction), and intentionality” (2015, p. 32). The most sophisticated explorations of Bradbury’s techniques along these lines have come from William F. Touponce, who credited him with invigorating genres: “Throughout the 1950s, Bradbury’s stories expanded and ‘modernized’ the genre potential of horror, fantasy, and

Family Fantasy and the Family  207 science fiction, three of the oldest historical genres, by opening them up to the experience of modernity” (2013, p. 116). Touponce found Bradbury writing out of a personal philosophy of childhood, which “allows the reader to explore existentially his own capacity for reverie” (1984, p.  39). That is, Bradbury’s fantasy work offers readers the chance to rediscover imagination and revitalize their lives through it. Touponce championed a phenomenology of the fantastic, whereby one explores “the experience of fantastic worlds as a process of self-discovery, historical understanding, and social criticism” (1984, p. xvii). One of the theorists crucial to Touponce’s framework is French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Indeed, Bradbury’s presentation of the Family exemplifies what Bachelard deemed “the supremacy of dynamic over formal imagination” (2011, p. 82). Dynamic imagination enlivens a reader by causing him or her to imagine images in wholly new ways, each often offering at least two or three interpretations; it is expansive, constellating a reading experience whereby the individual’s imagination is enriched by having to encounter and process archetypal contents. Formal imagination is dictated by known and worn-out tropes in the arts, perpetuating imagery, metaphors, and figures of speech, which have become cliché; in terms of storytelling, it is reductive and offers nothing new, being the work of hacks, marketing algorithms, and business models. As Touponce assessed it, “the modern fantastic, as written by Bradbury, does not merely involve laying bare of Gothic props and supernatural conventions” (1984, p. 21). Instead, he subverted stock images with ambiguity through the Family, which he described later as “most strange, outré, rococo—who could be, but maybe were not, vampires” (2001, p. 200). In so doing, Bradbury brought forth new ways for readers to imagine family throughout the half-century following World War II. “Bradbury’s fantasy texts eventually foreground the oneiric level”, Touponce asserted, and ask the reader to perform his own reverie by linking together images produced by the structured blanks and negations of the text, its indeterminacies. Our reverie prolongs and metamorphoses these images, finally linking them together in a coherent aesthetic response. (1984, p. xx) By rendering the Family as ambiguously and divergently vampiric— even mummified, in the case of the great, great, a-thousand-timesgreat grandmother—space is left for the reader to wonder even more about the loving and even healthy dynamics depicted in this family of monsters. While toying with reader expectations of the Gothic, Bradbury also used the form of the story cycle to explore varieties of experience within

208  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff the theme of family. Consilient with Hillman’s thought on family as the supreme metaphor for sustaining the human condition, James Nagel, an expert on the American short-story cycle, has concluded that “there could be said to be an equivalence between an analysis of the themes that unite the stories in contemporary cycles and the ideas that consolidate American society” (2001, p. 258). In the stories, the Family lives in or near Mellin Town, Illinois, yet another literary variation of Bradbury’s native Waukegan.3 Descended from Europe and Ancient Egypt, their stories play out against a backdrop of Midwestern American normalcy. Those in the community around them do not know they are different, and the Family’s efforts to conceal their difference captures the American practice of “passing”—as white, though it is never explicitly stated that way.4 Prejudice, in the United States, is commonly understood to be violent and deadly, especially by people of underrepresented groups that have historically borne the brunt of it. In folklore and literature, vampires—which the Elliotts seem to be even though they are not identified by that word—are constantly threatened by being hunted and found out. Bradbury’s Family carries on in a diasporic hiding: “They lived in small towns and on farms across the world, simply, closely re-aligning and adapting their talents to the demands and laws of a changing world” (2010, p. 36). No two experiences of such conditions are precisely the same. The literary form of the story cycle provides a means for amplifying multiple points of view about a family from those living within it. Individual anxieties around being discovered as different by the community and belonging within one’s family both find expression and development in Bradbury’s story cycle.5

Coming Home The Elliotts are such a diverse sort of family, not at all the nuclear one bought and sold via American middle-class advertising, magazines, and television in the postwar years. Their bond is less genetic, more overtly mythological—including in their lineage a mummy, vampires, and even a foundling mortal. As such, a shared fantasy image of the Family becomes more obviously significant and crucial to its survival. Regarding the real-life American family, “There is no objective set of relations”, according to Hillman, “There is a fantasy of a family going on in each person in what’s called a family” (2017). Indeed, an attempt to draw a family tree for the Family quickly fails because Bradbury does not provide readers with the details of unions and births, which are necessary to accomplish that task. Grandmother and Grandfather appear in “Homecoming”, but it is not stipulated if they are Mother’s or Father’s parents. Likewise, aunts and uncles are never acknowledged as Mother’s or Father’s siblings. Cousins walk in and out of the stories without mention of parentage—there are even

Family Fantasy and the Family  209 “three young girl-cousins” who go entirely unnamed in “The Traveler” (2010, p. 38). All the members of the Family know each other and how they happen to be related, but this knowledge is withheld from readers. And so the Family stretches out vastly in the imagination, amorphous, the sense being that there are a great many other relatives who are not even mentioned. This trick of indeterminable scale gives the Family a touch of the sublime in its very nature as a family. It is a reminder to readers, too, that so many of us are not well-acquainted with entire branches of our own lineage. Many of us can never remember whether certain cousins are second cousins or second cousins once removed; the official designations, too confusing to follow, simply shorten to “cousins”. Each person in the world belongs—or doesn’t belong, due to interpersonal circumstances—to a chain of reproductive history made up of other people. This chain mysteriously reaches back through time and is composed predominantly of the umpteen dead. Even when a family member charts out our ancestry, there comes an inevitable dead end, beyond which no knowledge or records can be found. Similarly, poring over just such a chart always raises more questions than answers: We have their names, their dates of birth and death, their apparent relations via birth or parentage, but who were all of these people? Bradbury replicates the awe of this fact by dropping the connective information necessary for a reader to understand how all of the characters are related. At the same time, through this artistic decision to withhold information, the Family maintains its guardedness against revealing too much about themselves. “Homecoming” depicts a sacred ritual for the Family’s members, one which affirms the importance and inclusion of each individual as a beloved member. The Family’s vast diversity when coming together at predetermined intervals on Allhallows Eve provides its opportunity to cohere and reify the image by which all understand themselves and each other to be a part. “In the family”, Hillman notes, just where you might expect to be with those most like you, you encounter instead a collection of the strangest folk! At any large family gathering there come together the most extraordinary behaviors and most incompatible opinions, yet all this is in the same clan. … [L]arge family affairs, rather than being scenes of convention, are actually performances of high comedy, outrageously funny, which also serve to encourage one’s own peculiarities. (1991, pp. 198–9) Hosted this time by the Elliotts, the Homecoming is a family reunion whereby relatives from as far as the other side of the world convene and parade their strangenesses in celebration, without fear of reprisal. “Every family”, in Hillman’s estimation, “is a hearth of similarities and

210  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff a centrifugal force whirling each member to competitively assert his or her differences” (1996, p. 148). The Family members strut their stuff in just such a way: Grandmother and Grandfather arrive as “an approaching, probing, sucking tornado, funneling and nuzzling the moist night earth” (2010, p. 20), Niece Leibersrouter turns into a white mouse, and of course Uncle Einar enters with “his wings like sea-green tarpaulins tented behind him” (2010, p. 22). Parading the multiplicity of forms and gifts is the Family’s way of showing off its own dynamism to itself. This is how its pride is collectively expressed. The arrival of Family members to the Elliott home sets an atmosphere of awe and disquiet: Banging of doors, laughter, the sound of liquid pouring, darkness, sound of wind, the webbed thunder of wings, the padding of feet, the welcoming bursts of talk at the entrances, the transparent rattlings of casements, the shadows passing, coming, going, wavering. (2010, p. 20) The mix of Gothic and family imagery in this sentence alone is illustrative of observations Hillman makes about a family’s willingness to harbor its members’ skeletons: Shadows come rushing out of the closet and join the party without moral opprobrium. A large family reception receives, in magnificencia et gloria, all shadows; all events, whether good news or bad, associated with family members, are magnified and glorified, thereby extending the size of the family’s heart. The measure of a family’s magnanimity is not what it gives to charity but rather its capacity to shelter the shadows of its members. (1991, p. 199) As such, the Elliotts embrace a range of anathema behaviors within their ranks. Cecy, as “the one who Traveled” (2010, p. 36), takes a break from festivities to psychically steer a farmer’s abandoned wife to her suicide in the mud pots at the Salton Sea, site of a manmade ecological disaster in Southern California, some two-thousand miles away from Illinois. Brothers Leonard and Bion Elliott “operate the undertaking establishment in town” from which “[t]hey bring home sustenance for Mama, Papa and all of” the Family, save Timothy, who “doesn’t like blood” (2010, pp.  20, 21). According to Hillman, such perversions, literarily exaggerated here into the comic grotesque, are all in the family: Attempts at businesslike communication, reasonable discussion of problems, and structuring a new paradigm all overlook fundamentals of the source of family life: the deep-seated and indestructible

Family Fantasy and the Family  211 complexes of the psyche, once called demons, ghosts, and ancestors, whose place is in the home and who continue to force home-life into mythical proportions. (2017) The Family has no qualms about its dark dimensions, honoring itself by reveling in behaviors that are criminal and horrific to the greater community. The implication here is not so much one of enfranchising families to engage in grievous acts; rather, the Elliott stories present the idea that families are not lived as a homogenous image, but are composed of weird people who do weird things behind closed doors— and that is okay. Without a capacity for acceptance, denial will do its worst to a family trying to solve its own problems, and risk tearing it apart.

Aerial Imaginatrix One of the worst threats to any family is one that arises from within. This problem is explicitly explored in “The Traveler”, which addresses both familial betrayal and contribution. Cecy’s usefulness to the Family is proven in this story when she puts an end to Uncle Jonn. This thematic tension is set up at the outset, in a conversation between Father and Mother, which is altogether typical for parents of teenagers. Father is dismayed by the way Cecy stays in bed all the time while Mother defends her as “one of the most adjustable members of the Family” (2010, p. 35). Father displays the get-a-job mentality so often associated with the American dad: “‘But if she’d only contribute more,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask her to find some sort of work’” (2010, p.  36). Comedy underscores this family dilemma when, going to sleep in their mahogany boxes, Mother and Father wish each other “Good morning” and go to sleep (2010, p. 36). Cecy’s efforts to prove her worth, however, defy the story’s initial light tone by pitching the narrative into madness, suicide, and the notion that a family must be protected at all costs. Uncle Jonn’s crime against the Family is one of selfish self-preservation, having ratted out members in the past by scapegoating them to paranoid townsfolk ready to rid their community of vampires. The family Judas, he is said to have been “paid a hundred dollars for each of the Family [he] pointed out to the law to be staked” (2010, p. 40), a claim he denies. He surfaces in Mellin Town, having been plagued for weeks by bells ringing in his head. Presuming Cecy can cure him of these intrusive thoughts, he comes to the Elliott family home only to find she has vacated her body on one of her astral travels. Mother wards him off by letting him know the Family would not want her to help him. In turn, he damns the Family, stomping “the floor like a huge, brutal child” (2010, p. 40). Dashing out, fearing for his own

212  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff sanity, he scrutinizes every living thing to see if Cecy’s consciousness is inside it. Uncle Jonn fails to grasp, however, that Cecy is the source of his mind’s tolling. Perhaps her most successful trick is a haunting image cast in his peripheral vision: “Out of the corners of his eyes he thought he saw an old woman, wrinkled as a dried fig, naked as a thistle-seed, floating among the branches of a hawthorn tree, a cedar stake driven through her breast” (2010, p.  43). This image, laden with associations, is one of dynamic imagination. In thinking he sees the image, its presence is not confirmed materially, throwing off his sense of reality. A naked woman who is also old is a transgressive sight in American culture,6 one poised to shock Jonn. Being wrinkled, her physical age calls to mind accounts of old witches dancing nude in the moonlight. Being as a dried fig evokes Adam and Eve shamefully fashioning clothes from fig leaves and Christ cursing the fig tree en route to throwing moneylenders out of the Temple.7 In Judeo-Christian symbolism, the fig tree is accursed for “the knowledge which it contains or fails to contain” (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1996, p. 377). Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant also report that, “Stuffed with countless seeds, the [fig] fruit is a fertility symbol” (1996, p. 378). Add to this an understanding that the thistle “has become the emblem of austerity, of some degree of misanthropy and of vengeful spirit” (1996, p. 990). And so the image unites an array of aspects in subtle, surprising ways: old age and fecundity, dangerous knowledge and vengeance. That she has a cedar stake through the heart suggests she is one of the Family whose murder brought Uncle Jonn monetary profit. Cedar has long been symbolic of “incorruptibility” and “immortality” (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1996, p. 172), reinforcing the mortal world’s claim to purity in opposition to the Family’s impurity. That she floats in a hawthorn—itself associated with fairies and “magical and protective powers” (Mac Coitir 2012, p. 53)—gives her a supernatural, watery, aerial presence, placing her an untouchable distance above him, simultaneously drowned and flying. Bradbury’s economy is so effective that the haunting image of the betrayed dead bears no further mention, letting it hang in the periphery of both Jonn’s and the reader’s imagination. It is displaced by sudden action: a scream and a blackbird tearing out a lock of Uncle Jonn’s hair. But the reader’s eye drags back to that preceding image; the sentence can be read again and again, its amplification reliant upon archetypal associations. As such, it fulfills both functions of Bachelard’s definition of a literary image: “to mean something different and to make readers dream another way” (2011, p. 249). The ambiguity of its source further enriches its mystery: is she truly a manipulation projected by Cecy or a manifestation of Uncle Jonn’s repressed guilt—or a bona fide ghost? By replacing the sheriff’s consciousness with her Mother’s, Cecy catches Uncle Jonn in the act of reporting a “wicked family, living under false pretenses” (2010, p.  47). He is driven more desperate when the

Family Fantasy and the Family  213 officer of the law speaks with his sister-in-law’s voice. Delirious and plagued—like a Poe character—by bells louder than ever, he returns to Cecy’s bodily side, declaring, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt anyone any more [sic]” (2010, p. 47). Cecy shows no mercy, however, leading him to plunge a pocket knife into his own heart. Knowing that she has the power to swap other characters’ consciousnesses, one of the most unsettling images in the Family story cycle comes when Cecy’s voice speaks from Uncle Jonn’s cadaver, declaring herself to be the puppeteer behind the incessant bells in his head and his agonizing fear. “Tell Father what I’ve done”, she says to Mother, “Maybe he’ll think me worthy now….” (2010, p.  48). She repossesses her own body, and the story ends with her reminding Mother that it is time for supper. And so the mild family drama surrounding Cecy’s contribution to the Family laid out at the story’s outset comes full circle, clapping shut, normalcy arriving swiftly on the heels of Uncle Jonn’s death. Is it a suicide or is she a killer? Uncle Jonn breaks family law by offering the Family up for sacrifice at the hands of mortal society; Cecy proves her invaluableness to the Family by sacrificing her time and energies to uphold and protect it from the uncle who would readily destroy it. The internal threat is met and quashed within the family. Cecy’s power is considerable throughout the stories. In “The April Witch”, she obliterates consent by causing a mortal girl to reignite a relationship she had ended, just so Cecy can experience what romance feels like. In “West of October”, apart from boasting about sexually voyeuristic escapades, she transplants the psyches of three cousins whose bodies immolate in a fire to various assignations within their grandfather’s four-hundred-year-old memories. In order to accomplish these feats, she must vacate her own body, leaving it in a state mimicking sleep. Her gifts manifest in dreaming herself into other people and living beings—“complete separation from one body environment to another” (2010, p. 37)—from amoebas to “the soft-shelled grayness of the mandibled heads of crayfish” to “a lime-green frog, cool as mint” to “new April grasses” (2010, p. 44, p. 300). Her movement replicates that experienced in dreams of flight. Take the opening of “The April Witch”: Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from the twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. (2010, p. 300) Cecy’s astral movement exemplifies Bachelard’s assessment of the unique perspective granted in dream-flight: “the shift from motion in the soul to the whole soul in motion is precisely the great lesson of oneiric flight”

214  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (2011, p.  48). Furthermore, her freedom of movement—especially her intrusion into Ann Leary’s love life—speaks to Bachelard’s sense of aerial imagination’s motivations: “The dream of flight is the dream of a seductive seducer. Love and its images cluster around this theme” (2011, p.  20). Cecy is an unseen sylph, taking pleasures she wants from the beings she flies into, her vampirism expressed in becoming a parasite to others’ experiences. By not announcing herself while possessing, she commits acts secondhand, easier than actually living them out authentically. And she typically vacates bodies just before the going gets tough. Riding an amoeba past the dentures and into the mouth of an old woman, “Then, and only then, did Cecy withdraw” (2010, p. 45). She waits “until I’ve changed her life in some way” to abandon the farmer’s abandoned wife, entering a bird just as she plunges into the boiling mud pots (2010, p. 24). Then she is “flying home, swift, swift, swift!” (2010, p. 24). “[T]o love is to fly”, Bachelard says, “oneiric levitation is a more profound, more essential, less complicated psychic reality than love itself” (2011, p. 35). When it comes to the motivations of witches, psychotherapist Donald Kalsched points also to the way they seek embodiment out of the condition of their own disembodiment: [W]izards and witches in mythology live a disembodied “daimonic” existence, always isolated from the community, always out of time and space in a magical world, stuck in “enchantment.” Consequently, they are always trying, so to speak, to capture real-life humans— usually children or beautiful (vulnerable) maidens because it is their very invulnerability that keeps them perpetually disembodied. We might say they are trying to “embody”—to enter time and space and limitation. (1996, p. 188) More often than not, Cecy flocks to situations where she is free of the complicating factors of responsibility—while also tapped into the distinct limitations of others, which make up the stuff of life itself. At the same time, she holds formidable power, taking out one of the greatest threats posed to the Family by doing away with Uncle Jonn. In reality, of course, these behaviors are deemed pathological. But metaphorically speaking, it makes us wonder to what extent families accept certain degrees of pathology in their members. Cecy reminds us that families carry neuroses, often enough quite ably, even lovingly.

Being for the Benefit of Uncle Einar It is written that “none of the Family looked like what they were” (2010, p. 36). This is a most telling piece of narration when considering Uncle Einar, who cannot hide his difference: “beautiful silklike wings hung

Family Fantasy and the Family  215 like sea-green sails behind him” (2010, p. 29). As “one of the few in the Family whose talent was visible” (2010, p. 29), he is exceptionally vulnerable when moving through the mortal world. He shows great avuncular affection to Timothy in “Homecoming”, but struggles on his own in the story named for him. He is not quite as bad off as the decrepit angel in Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”,8 whose “huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked”, are “strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds” (1999, pp. 218, 219). Einar’s wings are not so tattered, though a collision with a high-tension tower does ground him into convalescence and a marriage with Brunilla Wexley, the woman who finds him. The accident—a twentieth-century power line sizzling his mythological body—robs “his delicate night-vision” and “winged telepathy” and delivers a devastating realization: “he knew he’d fly no more in the dark again ever” (2010, p. 31). Uncle Einar moves into living life with a disability, and his adjustment to day-flying strikes him as psychologically difficult. So if no one in the Family is what they appear to be, and Uncle Einar more or less fits the basic description of a demon, Uncle Einar is not a demon. He does, however, grapple with demons—namely, those of mortal society and his own. “For a well-dynamized aerial imagination”, Bachelard writes, “everything that rises becomes awakened to and involved in being. Conversely, everything that falls is dispersed into empty darkness and becomes a part of the void” (2011, p. 74). This contrast of heights and depths, of exuberance and despair, plays out in “Uncle Einar”. His internal troubles are made more difficult because his experiences prior to the accident were resplendent with nocturnal risings. In the natural world, bats are the great mammalian hunters of the night air. Given that the Family is implicitly vampiric and the vampire bat of Central and South America is an icon of vampirism, readers may imagine Uncle Einar’s wings as being bat-like, though direct connection is never made in the text. The closest description comes when Brunilla “stroked his large green membraned veils with careful envy” (2010, p.  31).9 Bachelard dismisses the bat’s wings as counterfeits of avian grace: many imaginations consider the bat a sign of an ill-fated flight, one that lacks sound, color, or upward movement … Forced to beat its wings, the bat does not experience the dynamic restfulness of gliding. ‘In it,’ says Jules Michelet, ‘we see that nature is searching for a wing, but till now has found only a hideous membrane that nonetheless functions as a wing’. (2011, p. 74) All of this smacks of prejudice against the bat—but it is true that there is a typical human discomfort when it comes to them. This makes Uncle

216  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Einar’s descriptions all the more intriguing, as they work around comparisons with bat wings. His are green, like sails or a fan, a parasol, repeatedly compared to tarpaulins. When his future wife finds him incapacitated after his accident, she says, “A man. In a camp-tent” (2010, p. 30). Associations dart in many specific directions to help the reader dream something new in Uncle Einar’s wings. A few details may have dovetailed predictably in the imaginations of Americans following WWII; green, camp-tent, and tarpaulins evoke basic features of the American Army experience. Uncle Einar’s healing, occurring with profound frustration, is not unlike that of veterans returning wounded from the war and struggling to adjust to civilian life. Unable to fly by night anymore or fit into society, he suddenly finds himself with a wife and three children—something that happened to plenty of discharged soldiers in the late-1940s and ’50s. Family, however, is what saves Uncle Einar. His despondency is genuine, mirroring the frustrations of wounded veterans after WWII; no longer able to perch high in branches, “here he was, festering under the apple tree, grown impatient and unkind” (2010, p. 33). Loss of aerial freedom in the interest of personal safety has delivered a psychological blow as great or greater than the loss of his extra sense. So dire is his pain, “[h]e was shut of love, the children of love, and the love of children” (2010, p. 34). And yet his breakthrough comes in the notion of disguising himself as a kite his children can fly with other kids from Mellin Town. Bitterness lifts upon this compromise with circumstances. But he also achieves something unique in the Family by wedding an ordinary woman and becoming father to four seemingly ordinary kids— none are born with wings, a possibility which had inspired “fear, all on his part” (2010, p. 33). Though readers do not find out how this union between the undead and a mortal is received, members of the Family do show support by attending the wedding, arriving “[i]n a great autumnal avalanche” of leaves and horse-chestnuts (2010, p. 32). Uncle Einar remains hidden from the mortal world—even in plain sight, in pretending to be a kite—but the implication is that his loving wife and children are accepted by the Family, even though they are not vampires. In From the Dust Returned, this is changed to Uncle Einar becoming stepfather to Brunilla’s fatherless four children, which wipes away the intergenerational dynamics of miscegenation in a twentieth-century American context. All the same, an urgency to assimilate is present and blocked by the worry that people could react to his form violently. He is lucky Brunilla found him, as “she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone” (2010, p. 30). Bradbury implies that many people have been hurt and as a result fear others, which then sparks violence. But Uncle Einar is rather stuck where he is. Unable to fly back to his native Europe, he lets go of his continental origins, feeling “Europe grow faint and melt away in the distance” (2010, p. 32). In some ways, along with

Family Fantasy and the Family  217 those shades of likeness with battle-fatigued war veterans, his experience resembles that of European settlers of the American Midwest. His life becomes that of an immigrant’s in the United States of America, which has always redefined, expanded, and threatened families coming to it. Through him, the Family’s fantasy grows in an unexpected—and American—way by incorporating seemingly mortal descendants into the fold.

Listening to the Dead Timothy is the entirely mortal Family member, raised as an Elliott in their Mellin Town home. In From the Dust Returned, his presence is explained—he is a foundling—but in the stories, his status is ambiguous. Being mortal and squeamish about Family practices sets him apart. His dislike of blood casts him as a picky eater. His habit of sleeping at night and lack of supernatural powers mean, in the Family’s eyes, he is the runt, sickly and “delicate” (2010, p. 21). Much of the conflict in “Homecoming” arises from Timothy’s wish to belong within the Family. He confesses to his sister Cecy his desire for “something to make me good as them, something to make me belong” (2010, p. 25). She responds the way many siblings do in such situations, by appearing first to help her brother … only to purposefully embarrass him in front of everybody at the Homecoming. In a way, this cruel treatment is maybe even more indicative that he truly is a member of the Family than if she were to coddle him— sibling pranks at the expense of the youngest are marvelously familial. Mother touchingly comforts him, insisting upon how loved he is, but this does not seem to alleviate his sense of being an outsider. The satisfaction of that out-of-place feeling within the Family arrives through his relationship with the “Egyptian mummy, this great times twentytwo greats Grandma” (1994, p.  33). Bradbury twined the Family’s fate together through its youngest and eldest members in “From the Dust Returned”, the 1994 story. Revising the Family, renaming them from Elliott to Dark,10 the characters are the same though Bradbury was not. He had aged some forty years since last devoting completely fresh attention to them. Mortality—both individual and in relation to an entire family— provides the means by which Timothy’s sense of belonging can come forth. Hillman’s view of family draws from family’s role as a place for life, death, and imagination: Beyond both the bourgeois and the heroic is the primordial metaphor of family itself. We’re born into a family and at the last we rejoin its full extension when gathered to the ancestors: family grave, family altar, family trust, family secrets, family pride. A death in the

218  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff family is often where we first meet death. And we are made from the imaginations of our families, not just from the genes or the bodies of our families. (2017) This sense of being connected to an ancient lineage of the dead finds a voice in the Family’s ancestral mummy. She waxes on the virtues of the dead—time, eternity, remembrance, and the act of keeping—when Timothy and Cecy ask her if death can be remembered: Oh, yes. But only by the dead. … Would you not admit, child, that forty billion deaths are a great wisdom, and those forty billion who shelf under the earth are a great gift to the living so that they might live? (1994, p. 38) Pioneering psychologist Carl Jung, whose fantasies through active imagination culminated in The Red Book, envisioned similar lessons from the dead, down to the Egyptian motifs. Jung determined the living owe it to “the thronging dead of human history” to “listen to their lament and accept them with love” (2009, pp. 340, 344). Their lament is one of going unheard due to western civilization’s uneasiness regarding the dead, as well as its persistent death denial. Hillman, siding with Jung, called the dead “all the depository of the accumulation of human psychic history” (Hillman and Shamdasani 2013, p.  175). Jung historian Sonu Shamdasani contextualizes relating to the dead within the phenomenology of life and death: one has to conceive of one’s life both in response to the dead and in terms of one’s own becoming dead, so there is a sense of suspension as between two mysteries, which relativizes one’s own existence. … [Life] becomes a kind of working space suspended between a larger continuity. (Hillman and Shamdasani 2013, p. 178) Everyone will be dead far longer than they will be alive, making engagement with our ancestors a gateway to our destiny in joining them. As the youngest member of the Family, Timothy is placed in a position to learn from its eldest. The night that mortals come to burn down the house, having discovered monsters in their midst, the mummy imparts the sense of purpose and belonging Timothy has yearned for: “Know. I will teach, and that knowledge, important to the living because only death can set the world free to be born again. That is your sweet burden. And tonight is the night when your task begins. Now!” Touponce and Jonathan Eller show how she communicates in the “registers” of

Family Fantasy and the Family  219 “life and death”: “She speaks to Timothy in the present while her body is covered with ancient hieroglyphics representing the family, which he has to learn to read” (2004, p. 431). Under her tutelage, Timothy suddenly accepts that he does belong to the Family, “whose historian he becomes” (2004, p. 427). He is also its protector when normality arrives to destroy it, carrying the Family mummy under his arm and deflecting attention by saying the bindle of papyrus wrappings is his collection of old newspapers and comic strips: “Great junk, swell trash” (1994, p.  40). He takes a risk and finds an ally in Dwight William Alcott, a museum curator professionally committed to Egyptology. Timothy wishes to entrust the mummy’s care to Alcott on conditions: a Visitors Card good for after hours and for Alcott to “listen to her” once a day, for she says “[e]verything there is to say about death” (1994, pp.  42, 43). Indeed, the final line in both “From the Dust Returned” and From the Dust Returned is Timothy’s instruction to Alcott—which mirrors Jung’s: “‘Listen,’ said Timothy” (1994, p. 43; 2001, p. 197). The fantasy which lives within Timothy, which provides him the focus and drive to come to a creative solution in terms of saving his lineage, is the family fantasy. For, as he explains when Alcott susses out the mummy’s ownership, “It works both ways, sir. It owns me, I own it. We’re family” (1994, p. 42).

Conclusion: Blood Is Thicker Than Water If every family relies upon a fantasy of itself to hold together, Bradbury was on to something in toying with the genre of fantasy to explore family dynamics in the Elliott stories. Family is an ancient theme in literature—from the House of Atreus to all those begetting in the Old Testament—and yet in reading Bradbury’s stories, as Touponce notes, “We experience something new, which in the case of fantasy is the experience of the archetypally rich and strange” (1984, p. 12). “As an archetypal reality”, Hillman says, the experience of family feels so often unreal because family is permeated through and through with eternal exaggerations, an impossible too-muchness or mythic dimension, which is the stuff of the symptoms we suffer and also the stuff of much or our culture’s stories, novels, and dramas. (2017) When Eller and Touponce observe that “the family has many myths and legends about itself” (2004, p. 428), this is true, by and large, because all families do. Even extremely dysfunctional families cohere through a family mythos, often enough to an even greater degree than seemingly functional families—in fictional narratives, think of the Skywalkers,

220  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Anne Rice’s vampires, J. D. Salinger’s Glass family, the Binewskis of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. The Elliotts, strange and frightful as they can be, inspire admiration for the care they show one another. Hillman sees “odd fellows and peculiar ladies” as essential to enriching the acorn of one’s soul, arguing for the necessity of knowing and relating oneself to fantastic people: The acorn needs living personifications of fantasy, actual people whose lives seem pulp fiction, whose behaviors, speech, dress carry a whiff of pure fantasy. For me, an “extended family” means not simply more interchangeable caretakers among the many relations; it means extending relations beyond the perimeter of what is customary, an extension of imagination from the familiar to the fictional, to those figures talked about, told about, rarely seen—in jail, in a foreign land, disappeared years ago. Fictions of faraway folk conjure up images of possibilities for the potentials in the acorn. (1996, p. 169) Timothy, Cecy, Uncle Einar, and the others belong to just such a family—but if Hillman’s perspective stretches outward into reality, the Family can stand in for just such an “extended family” in a reader’s life. Readers often take characters to heart and speak of loving or hating them the way they do their own families. Bradbury’s Elliott Family story cycle enriches Hillman’s notion of family being “the supreme metaphor for sustaining the human condition” (2017). They show how a family soaring with the demonic and perpetually threatened by normality can believe in their own family fantasy. If a family of vampires and mummies can love one another, there is plenty of hope for mortal families, too.

Notes 1 Shirley Jackson made her own connection along these lines in titling her second memoir about parenting and family life, Raising Demons (1957). 2 In Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Sep. 1994). 3 His best known iteration of Waukegan is Green Town, the setting of Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). 4 Similarly, the supernatural is employed as a means of “passing” in the sitcom Bewitched (1964–1972), forming the show’s premise about navigating life in white suburban America. 5 For the purposes of this essay, the versions of “Homecoming”, “Uncle Einar”, “The Traveler”, and “The April Witch” that are discussed are those published in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, as collected and lightly revised in 1980. 6 The image of the nude crone has been used to frighten or unsettle audiences in film and television, as seen in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), The Witch (2015), IT: Chapter 2 (2019), and the character of Melisandre after

Family Fantasy and the Family  221

7 8 9

10

removing her enchanted choker in Game of Thrones (2016, Season 6, Episode 1). See Genesis 3:7 for the Adam and Eve’s use of fig leaves; Christ’s curse of the fig tree occurs in Matthew 21:19–22 and Mark 11:13–14, 20–5. Originally published in Spanish in 1955, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” first appeared in English in 1972. To further stress the role of subjectivity in the reading experience, Miranda Corcoran shared with me that she always imagined Uncle Einar’s wings as being a bit moth-like. Her imagined Einar sparks my memory of the seafoam-green wings of the Luna moth, which I am fortunate to have seen in the wild. This expands my own way of seeing Bradbury’s character in my mind’s eye, speaking to the significance of sharing and discussing our reading experiences with others. Indeed, let us never forget, that is the very basis of literary criticism. Mother and Father are stripped of their archetypal role-names, as well as the surname Elliott, to be Priscilla and Jonathan Dark. Timothy is named Timothy Light. Cecy and Uncle Einar retain their monikers. The great grandmother is named Nef, short for Nefertiti, an Egyptian queen from 1353 to 1336 BCE. Most curiously, in From the Dust Returned, the Elliotts are no longer Elliotts, the name excised from the manuscript altogether.

Bibliography Bachelard, G. (2011) Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications. Behind The Name. (2019) Einar. Available at: http://www.behindthename.com/ name/einar (Accessed: May 14th, 2019). Bradbury, R. (1994, Sep.) “From the Dust Returned”. Fantasy & Science Fiction 87(3), pp. 33–43. ———. (1988) The Toynbee Convector. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. (2001) From the Dust Returned. New York: William Morrow. ———. (2010) The Stories of Ray Bradbury. New York: Everyman’s Library. Brooke, R. (2015) Jung and Phenomenology. New York: Routledge. Chevalier, J. & Gheerbrant, A. (1996) The Dictionary of Symbols. London: Penguin. Eller, J. R. & Touponce, W. F. (2004) Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Hillman, J. (1991) A Blue Fire. New York: HarperPerennial. ———. (1996) The Soul’s Code. New York: Bantam Books. ———. (2017) Myths of the Family. New York: BetterListen! Hillman, J. & Shamdasani, S. (2013) Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book. New York: W. W. Norton. Jung, C. G. (2009) The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Kalsched, D. (1996) The Inner World of Trauma. London: Routledge. Laing, R. D. (2011) Politics of the Family. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Mac Coitir, N. (2012) Irish Trees: Myths, Legends & Folklore. Cork: The Collins Press. Márquez, G. G. (1999) Collected Stories. New York: Perennial Classics.

222  Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Nagel, J. (2001) The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Touponce, W. F. (1984) Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Reader. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. ———. (2013) Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.

Appendix

The Elliott Family Bibliography

This appendix is offered as a means of tracking the publication history of each of the Elliott Family stories. It has been ordered chronologically according to the first publication of each story leading up to From the Dust Returned. This information was painstakingly compiled and published by Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce in Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (2004).

1946 “The Traveller” First publication: Weird Tales (Mar. 1946). Reprints: Weird Tales (May 1946, Canada). Collected: Dark Carnival (1947) as “The Traveler”. Dark Carnival (1948, UK edition) as “The Traveller”. October Country (1961, only in the Ace UK edition). The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980), as “The Traveler”. Dark Carnival (2001, limited edition) as “The Traveler”. Anthologies: Beyond Midnight (1976). Witches and Warlocks (1989). In From the Dust Returned (2001): Rewritten as Chapter 20: The Traveler. (See also Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 447) “Homecoming” First publication: Mademoiselle (Oct. 1946), revised version. Reprints: Avon Fantasy Reader 3 (1947). Argosy (Sep. 1949, UK). Famous Fantastic Mysteries (Dec. 1952), as “The Homecoming”.

224  The Elliott Family Bibliography Collected: Dark Carnival (1947), as “The Homecoming,” original version. October Country (1955), revision of revised version. Per Eller and Touponce (2004, p. 449): “The October Country paperback (mass market only) includes Bradbury’s final revisions, introduced in galleys pulled between the hardback and paperback editions, and corrects a major transposition error introduced in the hardback edition; unfortunately, this error carries through to the recent Ballantine trade paperbacks and Avon hardbound editions”. The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980). Dark Carnival (2001, limited edition). Anthologies: Prize Stories of 1947: The O. Henry Awards (1947). Best Black Magic Stories (1960, UK). Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum (1965). The Evil People (1968). The Supernatural in Fiction (1973). Dying of Fright (1976). The Vampire (1985, UK). Asimov’s Ghosts and Monsters (1988, UK). Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1991). The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (1994, UK). Virtuous Vampires (1996). Vampires, Wine and Roses (1997), as “The Homecoming”. Comics adaptation: The Ray Bradbury Chronicles vol. 3 (Nov. 1992). In From the Dust Returned (2001): Rewritten as Chapter 9: Homecoming. (See also Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 449)

1947 “Uncle Einar” First publication: Dark Carnival (1947). Reprints: Argosy (Oct. 1949, UK). Read (Sept. 1, 1963). Weird Worlds 8 (1981). Collected: October Country (1955), revised version. R is for Rocket (1962). The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980). Classic Stories 1 (1990). Dark Carnival (2001, limited edition).

The Elliott Family Bibliography  225 Anthologies: Haunting Tales (1973). Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (1988). Daybook 7 (1999). Comics adaptation: Ray Bradbury’s Tales of Terror Special 1 (May 1994). In From the Dust Returned (2001): Rewritten as Chapter 15: Uncle Einar. (See also Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 451)

1952 “The April Witch” First publication: Saturday Evening Post (Apr. 5, 1952). Reprints: Argosy (Mar. 1953, UK). Saturday Evening Post (June 1985). After Hours 6 (Spring 1990). Stand-alone: The April Witch (1987) Mankato, MN: Creative Education. Collected: The Golden Apples of the Sun (FBA, 1953) Twice 22 (1966). To Sing Strange Songs (1979). The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980). Classic Stories 1 (1990). Anthologies: Fantasy Tales (1977–78). Young Witches and Warlocks (1987). The Ultimate Witch (1993). A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Related Readings (1997). Comics adaptation: Ray Bradbury Comics 5 (Oct. 1993). In From the Dust Returned (2001): Rewritten as Chapter 5: The Wandering Witch. (See also Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 467)

1988 “On the Orient, North” First publication: The Toynbee Convector (1988). Collected: Bradbury Stories (2003). TV adaptation: Ray Bradbury Theater (Apr. 30, 1988). In From the Dust Returned (2001): Rewritten as Chapter 12: On the Orient North. (See also Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 494)

226  The Elliott Family Bibliography “West of October” First publication: The Toynbee Convector (1988). Original draft: (1946) as “Trip to Cranamockett”. Per Eller and Touponce (2004, p. 494): “pulled from galleys of Dark Carnival. Subsequent manuscript title: ‘From the Dust Returned’; retitled for publication in Toynbee Convector. This story also becomes the title piece for the French edition of Toynbee Convector, published as A l’Ouest d’Octobre”. Anthologies: The Vampire Omnibus (1995 UK), (1996 US). In From the Dust Returned (2001): Rewritten as Chapter 10: West of October. (See also Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 494)

1994 “From the Dust Returned” First publication: Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Sep. 1994). In From the Dust Returned (2001): Rewritten as Chapter 21: Return to the Dust, Chapter 21: The One Who Remembers, and Chapter 23: The Gift. (See also Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 497)

2001 From the Dust Returned First publication: New York, Morrow: Oct. 2001. Paperback: New York, Avon: Sep. 2002. (See also Eller and Touponce 2004, p. 501)

Index

Adams, Rachel 177 Addams, Charles 3, 9–10, 18, 25–6, 72, 170, 175, 199 The Addams Family 9, 15, 72, 120, 125, 131, 170, 183–4, 199–200 Adorno, Theodor 196 Amazing Stories 1 Anderson, M. T. 150 Anderson, Sherwood 5 Andeweg, Agnes 8, 121 Aretoulakis, Emmanouil 123 Aristotle 77 Assmann, Aleida 191 Atwood, Margaret 4–5 Austen, Jane 63 Bachelard, Gaston 169, 177, 207, 212–15 Bakhtin, Mikhail 2, 23, 173–4, 176 Barnum, P. T. 165 Berry, Stephen 199 Barzun, Jacques 57 Bastian, Misty 104 Bates, Katherine Lee 140 Baum, L. Frank 135–7 Beauvoir, Simone de 84 Becker, Udo 95 Benjamin, Walter 179 Bewitched 15, 72, 220 Bhabha, Homi K. 92 Bierce, Ambrose 135 Blackwood, Algernon 135 Bonaparte, Napoleon 129 Booker, M. Keith 149–50 Bradbury, Esther 138, 140 Bradbury, Leonard Spaulding 138, 140–1 Bradbury, Mary 4, 88 Bradbury, Nevada “Neva” Marion 28, 139–41, 145–6, 205 Bradbury, Ray, Books: Dandelion Wine 8–10, 17–22, 24–5, 27–9, 35,

48, 137, 142, 220; Dark Carnival 3–4, 22, 142, 144, 165, 188, 190, 196–7; Death is a Lonely Business 25; Fahrenheit 451 41, 43–4, 59–61, 149, 150; Farewell Summer 17, 137; From the Dust Returned 2, 6, 8–10, 18, 20, 25, 27–9, 44, 46–7, 104, 108–9, 121, 125, 126, 131, 137, 145–6, 148–51, 155, 157–8, 160, 166, 177–9, 182, 191, 196, 201, 205–6, 212, 216–17, 219, 221; The Golden Apples of the Sun 104, 145; The Halloween Tree 1, 18, 25, 55; The Illustrated Man 9, 73; The Martian Chronicles 42, 149; A Medicine for Melancholy 39; The October Country 1, 4, 167, 188, 191, 193; Something Wicked This Way Comes 1, 6, 8, 17–18, 22, 24–5, 27–9, 73, 177, 220; The Stories of Ray Bradbury 108, 119–20; The Toynbee Convector 3, 94; Zen in the Art of Writing 23, 60–1, 147 Bradbury, Ray, Short Stories: “All Summer in a Day”, 157; “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s a Friend of Mine”, 67; “The April Witch”, 9, 11, 71–3, 84–5, 91, 93–5, 102–4, 108, 116, 145, 206, 213, 220; “Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-Made Truly Egyptian Mummy”, 67; “The Crowd”, 104; “The Emissary”, 142; “The Exiles”, 135, 146; see also “The Mad Wizards of Mars”; “Fever Dream”, 39; “The Fog Horn”, 156; “Forever and the Earth”, 193; “From the Dust Returned”, 6, 206, 217, 219; “The Homecoming”, 3–7, 9–11, 25–6, 44, 55, 57, 59, 61, 64, 66, 72, 96,

228 Index 137, 142–5, 151, 167, 170, 177, 187–8, 190, 197, 199, 206, 208–9, 215, 220; “The Lake”, 141; “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair”, 64; “The Mad Wizards of Mars”, 64, 146; see also “The Exiles”; “The Man Upstairs”, 142; “The MillionYear Picnic”, 123; “The Night”, 139, 142; “On the Orient, West”, 179; “There Will Come Soft Rains”, 123; “The Traveler”, 3–4, 12, 26, 94, 108–12, 115–16, 118–19, 145, 151, 163, 206, 209, 211, 220; “Trip to Cranamockett”, 3; “Uncle Einar”, 3–4, 13, 144, 165–7, 215–16, 220; “The Vacation”, 123; “West of October”, 3, 94, 145, 176, 206, 213 Bradbury, Sr., Samuel Hinkston 139–40 Brickell, Herschel 6, 63 Brickell, Norma Long 6 Brooke, Roger 206 Bunker, Chang and Eng 174 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 32, 135 Campbell, John 41 Campbell, Joseph 47 Capote, Truman 3, 164, 175, 176–8 Caputo, John 114 Carrington, Leonora 12, 91, 99–104 Castronovo, Russ 129 Chabon, Michael 42 Chevalier, Jean 212 Chopin, Kate 93, 95 Clover, Carol J. 79, 83 Colebrook, Claire 120, 124 Condon, Michael 33 Congdon, Don 9, 18, 21 Corcoran, Miranda 221 Corstorphine, Kevin 36 Creed, Barbara 78 Danielewski, Mark 40 Davies, Helen 165, 176 Delgado, L. Anne 83 Derleth, August 3, 142 Derrida, Jacques 114 Dickens, Charles 60, 62, 135, 146, 193 Diskin, Lahna 19 Disney, Walt 148 Donaldson, Scott 167 Donnell, Alison 92

Doty, William 32 Doyle, Arthur Conan 62–3 Dreiser, Theodore 5 Dolgov, Boris 112 dried fig 212 Dunn, Katherine 15, 220 Eco, Umberto 198 Electrico, Mr. 22, 164 Eliot, T. S. 3–4 Eller, Jonathan R. 2, 9, 21–2, 26, 41, 43, 47, 59, 63, 147, 157, 218–19 Ellerhoff, Steve G. 74, 92 Elliott Family: Angelina Marguerite 130; Anuba 127–8, 151–2, 158; Bion 119, 143, 146, 210; Carl 182– 3, 197; Cecy 11–12, 26, 28, 35, 42, 44–9, 61–2, 64–6, 74–81, 84–8, 93–8, 101–4, 108–11, 115–18, 121, 126–8, 144–6, 151, 155–9, 190, 205–6, 210–14, 217–18, 220–1; Cousin Anna 190; Cousin Jack 191, 213; Cousin Peter 191, 213; Cousin Philip 191, 213; Cousin Ralph 117, 119; Cousin Vivian 143; Cousin William 28, 191, 213; Ellen 143, 190; Father/Jonathan Dark 6, 208, 211, 213, 221; Frulda 142; ghost (unnamed Orient passenger), 129–30, 153–6, 158, 197–8; Grandfather/Grandpapa/ Grandpère 191, 208, 210, 213; Grandmama/Grandmother 191, 208, 210; Grandmère/Nef 27–8, 49, 121, 126, 128, 131–2, 143, 151–3, 155, 158, 178–9, 192–3, 196, 199, 207, 217–19, 221; Helgar 142; Laura 144, 190; Leonard 143, 145, 210; Lotte 142; Mother/Priscilla Dark 6, 49, 57–8, 64, 208, 211–13, 217, 221; Niece Leibersrouter 210; Nostrom Paracelsius Cook 196–7; Sam 143, 145; Timothy 5–7, 11, 20, 26–9, 35, 42, 48–9, 55–8, 62, 64–6, 92, 126, 128, 132, 142–6, 151–3, 155–6, 158, 178–9, 188, 193, 196, 198, 201, 205–6, 210, 215, 217–21; Uncle Einar 13, 27–8, 55–6, 104, 143, 145–6, 165–7, 170, 179, 205–6, 210, 214–16, 220–1; Uncle Fry 190; Uncle Jason 188; Uncle John/Jonn 12, 108–9, 111, 116, 118, 188–90, 211–14 Ellison, Harlan 67–8

Index  229 Engelhardt, Tom 173 Ernst, Max 100, 103 Farmer, Philip José 63 Faulkner, William 29 Fiedler, Leslie 33, 73, 179 Fini, Leonor 99 Foucault, Michel 122 Fox sisters 82 Freud, Sigmund 75, 125, 168–70 Fuller, Muriel 6 Gaiman, Neil 5 García Márquez, Gabriel 215 Garland, George 73 Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie 174 Garrard, Greg 125 Gheerbrant, Alain 212 Gifford, Sheryl 91 Gorey, Edward 15 Gothic 1–4, 7–8, 10, 12–13, 15, 18, 25, 37, 121, 135, 137, 142, 147, 149, 167, 172, 183, 189, 192, 195, 198–201, 207 Grahn, Judy 98 Green Town 6, 8, 17–26, 29–30, 137, 220 Griffiths, Paul E. 130 Grosz, Elizabeth 85 Halberstam, Jack 189 Hardy, Oliver 64–5 Harper’s 43 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 7, 63, 66 Hearn, Lafcadio 98 Hildebrand, Grant 172 Hillman, James 13, 45, 205–6, 208–10, 217–20 Hobbs, Abigail 81 Homer 56 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 60 Horkheimer, Max 128 Hoskinson, Kevin 124 Hotel Transylvania 15 Irving, Washington 7, 63, 66 jablesse 96–9, 101–4 Jackson, Shirley 4, 13, 162, 164, 167, 170, 173, 175, 178, 220 James, Henry 82 Jentsch, Ernst 75 Johnson, Erica 31, 44 Johnson, Samuel 60, 62

Johnson, Wayne 18 Jones, Timothy 147, 177, 179 Jonson, Ben 60 Joshi, S. T. 3 Jung, Carl 218–19 Kahan, Jeffrey 2, 82 Kalsched, Donald 214 Kapsalis, Terri 79–80 Kearney, Richard 12, 109–11, 113–15, 117–18 Keats, John C. 173 Kincaid, Jamaica 12, 91, 96–9, 101–5 King, Helen 9 King, Stephen 4–5, 23, 71 Kissling, Elizabeth Arveda 75, 84 Knight, Damon 33, 37–8, 41, 47 Kraemer, Heinrich 76 Kristeva, Julia 45, 78 Kubrick, Stanley 220 Laing, R. D. 13, 206 Laino, Guido 150 Lakoff, George 110–11, 113 Lam, Wifredo 103 Laurel, Stan 64–5 Le Fanu, Sheridan 70 Lee, Janet 49 Levitt, Annette Shandler 100 Lewis, Mercy 81 Lowenstein, Adam 128 Luckhurst, Roger 189 Mademoiselle 3, 6, 9–10, 25, 142 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 6, 220 Malleus Maleficarum 77 Martin, Deborah 70–1, 87–9 Matheson, Richard 164, 175 Maugham, W. Somerset 64 May, Elaine Tyler 7, 172 McCullers, Carson 164, 174, 176 McGowan, Philip 176–7 Melville, Herman 66, 158 Melville, Pauline 91, 99, 104 Mengeling, Marvin 149 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 113, 206 Michelet, Jules 215 Miller, Gerald Alva 31 Milton, John 98 Moberg, Inar 143–4, 205 Modern, John L. 158 Mogen, David 2, 149 Molière 60

230 Index Moore, Alan 13, 183–4, 201 Moretti, Franco 188 Morowitz, Laura 200 Morrison, Toni 36 Morton, Timothy 121, 123–4, 126, 129–32, 192 The Munsters 15, 72, 120, 131, 184, 199 Murphy, Bernice M. 171 Nagel, James 208 Nagel, Thomas 111, 113 Neumann, Erich 45 The New Yorker 9, 15, 43, 96, 125, 170 Nietzsche, Friedrich 136 The Nightmare Before Christmas 15 Novalis 44 Nurmi, Maila 125 O’Callaghan, Evelyn 91–2 Orozco y Berra, Manuel 105 Paglia, Camille 127 Parkhouse, Steve 184, 200 Pascal, Richard 167 Peacock, Thomas Love 60 Peake, Mervyn 9 Pepperell, Robert 122 Perlman, Joel 185–6 Pierce, Hazel 1, 40 Pipher, Mary 70 Plato 77 Poe, Edgar Allan 1, 7, 27, 32, 40, 63–4, 66, 77, 135–7, 140–2, 146, 148, 193, 213 Pollin, Burton 1 Pope, Alexander 60 Punter, David 75–6 Putnam Jr., Ann 81 Rancière, Jacques 189–90, 197 Reid, Robin Anne 2, 47 Rice, Anne 220 Ricoeur, Paul 12, 113–15, 118 Rodgers Johns, Tarn 76–7 Rundell, John 114 Salem witches 4, 7, 81–3, 86, 88 Salinger, J. D. 220 Sasser-Coen, Jennifer 49

The Saturday Evening Post 71–4, 105 Schiff, Stacy 82, 85 Seabrook, William 96 Shakespeare, William 27, 62–4, 135 Shamdasani, Sonu 218 Shaw, George Bernard 60 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 57, 67 Smith, Rita 3 Sontag, Susan 58 Splitfoot, Mr. 82 Spooner, Catherine 15 Sprenger, Jacob 76 Sterelny, Kim 130 Stoker, Bram 34, 186 Stone, Merlin 98 Tertullian 76 Thomas, Dylan 60, 93 Tolkien, J. R. R. 17, 29 Touponce, William F. 2, 4, 9, 21–4, 147, 157, 206–7, 218–19 Turner, Mark 110–11, 113 Twain, Mark 60, 63 Vidler, Anthony 168, 172 Viljoen, Hein 40 Vlad the Impaler 131 Wang, Jessica 159 Warner, Marina 99 Warren, Mary 81 Waukegan, Illinois 8, 17–20, 28, 66, 135, 137–8, 140–1, 146, 148, 155, 205, 208, 220 Weber, Max 154 Weird Tales 12, 26, 108–9, 112, 119, 142 Weller, Sam 26, 138 Wells, H. G. 32 Welty, Eudora 38 Wertham, Fredric 41 White, Carrietta 71, 83 Whitman, Walt 120 Williams, Abigail 81 Williams, William Carlos 3 Wilson, Colin 70 Wolfe, Thomas 60, 193 Wright, Frank Lloyd 172 Wycherley, William 60 Zlosnik, Sue 8, 121