Weird Fiction: A Genre Study 3030924491, 9783030924492

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Weird Fiction A Genre Study Michael Cisco

Weird Fiction

Michael Cisco

Weird Fiction A Genre Study

Michael Cisco CUNY Hostos Community College Bronx, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-92449-2    ISBN 978-3-030-92450-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Heritage Image Partnerships Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Genre and Judgement  1 2 The Supernatural 27 3 The Bizarre 57 4 Destiny 85 5 Case Studies121 Case Studies123 Bibliography319 Index327

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CHAPTER 1

Genre and Judgement

In “The Law of Genre,” Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell define genre as an exclusive category; that is, genre is defined by the fact that it must shut something out. The chapter opens with this observation: “As soon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded … a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do,’ ‘Do not’ says ‘genre’”1 and closes, predictably, with this: “it would be folly to draw any sort of general conclusion here.”2 My folly ensues below. The first thing to note here, before going further, is that when Derrida and Ronell speak of genre, they are following Genette and speaking of the differences between novels and short stories, plays and poems. Weird fiction is not a genre the way a novel is a genre, since we will include in the genre of weird fiction examples drawn from short stories and novels, poetry, plays, and screenplays; so there is already a bit of a mismatch between these two uses of the term genre. While Derrida and Ronell invert the more familiar, inclusive idea of genre, they don’t innovate in genre studies so much as they send us down a cul-de-sac, by defining genre negatively. The resulting definition is likely to be only whatever remains after performing all the genre’s exclusions, which was, perhaps, the point, since a definition also excludes possibilities. What is excluded from this definition of genre is an accounting for that exclusionary activity itself, which would necessarily address the appeal of a genre. Our definition of genre here is liable to do the same if we’re not careful to draw a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Cisco, Weird Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8_1

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general inclusion, such that the idea of genre remains open and dynamic, operating productively in terms of a selection. What is genre, positively speaking? What is it that selects which differences matter? Deleuze and Guattari, among other post-structuralist thinkers, complicate any territorial concept of definition.3 The difficulty is not that there is a territory established, since this is impossible to avoid: territories maintain themselves through our various logics and grammars. The difficulty is that art is constantly deterritorializing; in other words, it isn’t the same thing over and over, even if the each work of art is consistent with other works of art. Art persists through time as art by repeating, but not by repeating the same particular works of art. Instead, art exists in a condition of constant reinvention, albeit with ongoing relationships to established art, and so genre definitions are always more or less behind the times. Definitions are hard to make because they want to be able to predict the future, or even to judge the present, but so often they are basically only descriptions of what has usually been done up to now. Genre in fiction may posit a sort of model story, a transcendent one that we never actually read, but which seems to stand behind any given example. However, it is better to say that the model story is an aggregate of existing stories, coming about after the fact, rather than the cause of these actual stories. A weird tale may be written in keeping with such an aggregate model, but it is important to understand that this model is not fixed or determinative; in fact, the genre waits for stories that are very different. The genre then is not a transcendent identity, but a virtuality that is concretely immanent to weird fiction, which is an elaborate way of saying that the genre is in all the stories written to date; it is the selection that gathers certain stories into certain canons for certain readers and writers. We may come up with a checklist of common tropes in weird fiction; this is not a waste of time, but it is not the whole story, either, since such a list isn’t going to help us to understand the selections that produced it. So, this study will address the concept that guides the selection of what we call weird fiction. The end result still involves collecting various stories and grouping them as weird fiction. The difference, however, is that these stories are selected because they are germ cultures, which generate more stories. In this way, the productive aspect of weird fiction as a genre can be studied and we can understand that the genre exclusion process is part of larger productive process. Instead of thinking of a canon in terms of provisionally fixed genre boundaries, this approach will think of canonizations; whenever a certain

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culture of weird fiction develops, it organizes its own canon, and as new kinds of weird fiction are created, new canons arise and old ones adjust. Coming up with a concept of weirdness will not only make an understanding of the genre easier, it will also mean we can establish connections with works not considered weird fiction without being compelled to claim them for the genre, to the exclusion of other genres. The point of all this is to see if we can “have done with judgement,” in keeping with the recommendations of Deleuze and Guattari. That is to say, we are throwing away the cookie cutters of genre analysis. What would a genre study that has done with judgement look like? And would it make any difference? Would it entail a judgement banishing “general conclusions”? Having done with judgement means taking up the question of genre without treating it as a preconceived idea, but rather in a more investigative way. This monograph aspires to be that kind of criticism. As this work on the genre of weird fiction develops, it will also develop its own genre of criticism; this which may turn out to be nothing more than the author’s folly, but it will be a useful one even if it is only an example of how not to proceed. *** An immanent genre is one whose resemblances are reciprocal. They are understood less in terms of a fixed content or form, and more as repetitions with a shared orientation—that is, the desire or affect. Within genres, stories produce other stories without acting as transcendental models. Where stories are copies of other stories, or to the extent they are copies, they treat some prior story as at least locally transcendent, but where there is original work, there is a more rhizomatic branching-off. This study posits genre as an orientation, which is to say it selects and ranks certain affects, but those affects need not be considered transcendent, and, in fact, there is something about the repetition of the same that destroys affects. The repetition of the affect depends on a certain amount of difference. Criticism, as Derrida points out, insofar as it approaches genre as a logical problem, rests on a contradiction involving boundaries: is a boundary inside what it bounds, or outside? In defining what it must exclude, the boundary ends up including those exclusions. However, this is not really a difficulty for anyone trying to understand genre practically. Genre does seem to have a transcendent aspect, as it seems to sit above the fiction it categorizes, apparently defining it, judging what is in and what is out, but

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without our ever encountering the genre per se, only its examples. This is where judgement comes in. But this only means that a genre is an encounter with an example, a sort of logical distribution. We can parse the world in all manner of logical schemes, but the ones that are useful are the ones we keep. Merely being logical is not enough, nor does this logic produce new art. Weird fiction has its pillars, the uncontestedly canonical works like Dracula and The Turn of the Screw, but it’s also obvious that weird fiction is not constant through time, but changeable and adaptable. The genre and its canonical works support, reread, and rewrite each other. Derivative stories merely copy models; more original stories will extend the orientation of the genre further or develop a new way to travel in that direction, often from a starting point in other fictions, which then become canonical for that new story. The canon is a genealogical mesh, varying from one work to another, and exclusions and inclusions are carried out experimentally in order to find a way to travel. Travelling in a direction has no necessary connection to any idea, adequate or otherwise, of a destination, and often one travels only to see what there is to see in that direction. *** The genre of weird fiction is a means of production. With it, a writer produces stories which, as commodities, have a dual orientation, both use and exchange values. While, in this monograph, the orientation towards a use value will be more important—and rightly so, since it is the use value that involves something immanent to the work of art—the use value of a weird tale can’t simply be divorced from its exchange value without a word or two about it. Here use needs to be understood as the realization of desire, rather than the narrower realization of practical utility. Perhaps this means, depending on the story, only that the writer was prompted to write the story for pay.4 We should say, though, that the art-commodity produces forms, as models to be strictly copied. This is one locality where the boundaries between genres are actually policed as a kind of property right, although even here the policing may be restricted to a single venue. Sometimes a single venue’s rejection is enough. The genre of weird fiction is full of redundancy. Select any conventional theme, and there will be dozens if not hundreds of interchangeable stories on that theme, along with the noteworthy ones. What else can account for this, if not what we would have to describe as the promotion of exchange value and the demotion of use value. To produce redundant fictions in

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order to sell them to a market defined by that redundant model is to write copies of models, so that the market in weird fiction will set up a series of locally transcendent “popular” models. Innovative stories don’t simplistically oppose these transcendent models—they connect the stories to immanent forces that the mere copies ignore. They de-transcendentalize the stories. These innovative stories may or may not start off a new round of robotic copying, but they always arise in the midst of writing, not outside or at the beginning, nor do they necessarily involve some logical scheme of categorization. *** So, to return to the idea of a canon: if we designate a canon, or a period, for weird fiction, we find ourselves outside of it, trying to impose logical limitations on the genre externally. Then we have to somehow account for this position; we have to be able to say why we are in a position to do this, and do it in a binding way. However, in modern critical parlance, this idea of weird fiction and these works have arisen for reasons that must be at least partially immanent, and rather than try to come up with an external definition, it seems better to say that weird fiction is a way of writing fiction that arises out of the internal self-difference of religious, moralizing, and/or a certain strain of philosophizing fiction writing, when producing the bizarre becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end (that end usually being greater piety, more obedience, etc.). There are many examples of weird tales, such as “A Christmas Carol,” which contain sermons without being sermons. The story, in such cases, does more than illustrate a moral point, but has attractions of its own. While “A Christmas Carol” does function primarily as a kind of sermon, Dracula is not primarily a vindication of the cross. If structure simply means having some kind of organization, then genre is structure, but calling a genre a structure according to this definition is tantamount to identifying genre with structure and with organization, then calling it a day. This definition won’t help to explain why a given structure is different from another. So a genre is not just a plan, it’s an assemblage, collecting works and critical perspectives and connecting them together. The assemblage of weird fiction dynamically continues to produce a weird line, and to extend that weird line across breaks in genre conventions to reach new connections, which amount to deterritorializing weird fiction as a genre. The conventions have to be included in the

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scheme of the genre, but they do more than sit there; they are more than ad hoc content. Genre conventions can only repeat by differing from their past uses. This can mean making superficial alterations or it can mean making a more sophisticated use of conventions. The ghost in “Grayling; or ‘Murder Will Out,’” by William Gilmore Simms, is a spectre of guilt in a conventional narrative of supernatural justice that has little to surprise us and assures us that the cosmos is itself fundamentally just along Christian lines. The spectre of a murdered man identifies his killer and makes possible his capture and punishment. In Aura, Carlos Fuentes hits on the use of a ghostly presence as a way to capture nostalgia; something he is able to do because the ghost and nostalgia are both conjured by a particular desire. A solitary woman lives in a house haunted by the spectre of her younger self. Aura understands reality in the relativistic way that is, by now, rather old hat; a way that allows contradictions, such that the positing of a ghost is not controversial. Involving a ghost requires no justification, because the modern audience is expected to take for granted an idea of reality that does not exclude contradictory, localized differences. The ghost in Simms’ story seems, on the contrary, to insist on an absolute union between morality and reality. Neither story is unique in the use they are making of ghosts; their differences are typical of a development of the genre, although it’s possible to say that Fuentes has only retrieved the idea of the ghost from weird fiction and employed it in a “psychologically realistic” fiction. His realism is only augmented by the fact that he represents the psychological belief in ghosts. We could look at Aura that way, but is our reasoning prompted by the novella’s immanent characteristics, or by something else, like snobbery? The more important question is this: how do we account for the way the genre of weird fiction receives both “Grayling” and Aura equally well? *** Returning to “The Law of Genre” for a moment—Derrida and Ronell approach genre from a logical point of view, that is, they understand genre categorically and transcendentally. Derrida’s theory of genre is based upon the idea that within every categorization there is the implication of its Other, where genre is the normativity that (attempts) to keep contamination out or at bay. However, in attempting to police these boundaries, that Other is contained and produced by/ within that [category].5

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They are right to say that there is no mixing of genres, but only provided we look at genre from a transcendent position; genres, however, develop immanently, not transcendently, and exclusion fills a strictly secondary role in this process. It is involved only insofar as making a given connection precludes making some other connection. Certain things are excluded only insofar as certain things are selected, and the selection process excludes by affirming what is included. Weird fiction has a tendency to make genre itself behave bizarrely. If we try to categorize weird fiction by making the inclusion of what is usually referred to as the supernatural determinative, then we run into difficulties insofar as it is impossible to establish the terms of that inclusion in any categorical way. Instead, we might try to understand the genre in terms of the territory it selects for deterritorialization, which in this case would be reality. Weird fiction is weird because it gives us reality itself as a territory that can be deterritorialized, where it is taken for granted that this is not possible. What is weird about weird fiction? It is supernatural fiction, but it is not Fantasy (capitalized to distinguish the genre from fantasy as a daydream or desire). It is horror fiction, but it does not depend on real-life horrors, such as murder or torture. The horror of weird fiction is derived from the implications of a deterritorialization of ordinary experience, insofar as the ordinary is fetishized as “reality.” Ordinary experience can be deterritorialized by nonsupernatural experiences, so the supernatural aspect is not necessary to produce the deterritorialization. What makes the supernatural aspect necessary for weird fiction is the way that it allows fiction to deterritorialize in an ontological or epistemological direction, and so address reality more broadly, or more basically. Stories of crime horrify us with the prospect of what human beings are capable of, while stories of supernatural events threaten readers with the prospect of what experience itself is capable of, that is, our capacity to affect and to be affected does seem to extend well beyond the reach of our current understanding and may be impossible to understand sufficiently. The supernatural of weird fiction is not a clearly articulated causal system, acting as an alternative to, or as an esoteric expansion of, known causality; that, I would call Fantasy. Even where we encounter something like this idea, in fiction belonging to the “psychic detective” subgenre, for example, the system is never actually articulated by the author, but only intimated. To the extent that there is a system, the story inclines more towards Fantasy. The supernatural of weird fiction, unlike the supernaturalism of theology, cannot properly be a category; where it is a category, the story is

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Fantasy. Where the supernatural is not a category, but an opening out towards infinity in experience, then the story is weird. A weird tale is not weird because it describes events that may or may not fit into some category of the supernatural; they are events that weirdly fail to belong to any category. This is all the more alarming since there is, basically, only supposed to be one category available to stories set more or less in the here-and-now: the category of reality, or “realism,” or “naturalism.” All events occurring in an ordinary setting, the here-and-now of some historic epoch, “should” be real; the apparent supernatural event that is debunked turns out to be either a type of real event we call a hoax or a non-event like a hallucination or a mistake of the kind that the narrator makes in Poe’s “The Sphynx.” If the supernatural were a category of event, then its reality would be of the same kind as any other reality, whether that be ordinary reality or crisis reality, and this is how the supernatural functions in Fantasy. However, where the supernatural is weird, it is neither a real category nor a category of the unreal. The supernatural in weird fiction is a simulacrum of reality, insofar as reality is itself considered a category. This doesn’t mean it’s an illusion, because it can affect us, can act on its own. Plato must banish the simulacrum because it makes the real and the false too hard to tell apart; but this is exactly why weird fiction is fascinated with the simulacrum. It depends on this difficulty in distinguishing real and unreal for its characteristic effect, insofar as this difficulty is experienced and opens experience to broader possibilities, rather than insofar as the difficulty is merely a logical conundrum, as Todorov would have it. The target is always the stability of that real category, not the establishment of an alternative. The supernatural in weird fiction is a deterritorialization of category, with the intention of creating an open set where reality would seem to tend to close itself off. Weirdness is what we call the self-difference of the normal, opening out into the strange from the normal, rather than jumping from a normal track to a separate fantastic track. If weirdness is the contrast that makes the normal appear, it doesn’t do this from an external position or a negative position; weirdness is self-difference of the normal, not the lack of the normal. *** A genre is produced by literary works and contributes to the production of literary works. It is organized according to a logic of interests that keeps changing. Deterritorializations will reterritorialize right away, become

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memory-images, and repeat as new models. There is no concern for purity in the production or reproduction of a genre; that only arises in the logical definition of genre, which is a cite of contention for control of the reproduction of the genre. I’m not interested in developing and imposing a fixed canon of weird fiction, but understanding where weird fiction takes us, since it is the orientation of weird fiction that differentiates it from other genres. This is an immanent understanding, which is to say it sees weird fiction as arising from an internal self-difference in literature. For Derrida and Ronell, the genre boundary is basically neither inner nor outer, but a fold; here we will think of it as something related to the fold, as a reterritorialization; it isn’t a fixed place or thing, but an event that repeats. Naturally a writer picks their sources, their own canon, and, given that genre is a logical contradiction, this choice cannot be wrong or right when evaluated from the point of view of some overall logical definition of genre. Therefore we can dispense with the evaluation of this logical contradiction and survey empirically the use of the concept or conceit of genre. I repeat that Derrida and Ronell are right; genre is a matter of preventing mixing when we observe it from above and in pause. Their account of genre is another form of weird fiction. Things look different when the perspective is shifted to the level of production over time. If sense is a product, then the slipperiness of sense is the productive versatility of sense. The product keeps on producing, instead of remaining static; that is, a work of art will continue to develop meanings, but this isn’t a mistake, a failure to remain still, but a sign of life. Horace Walpole, inventing the Gothic in The Castle of Otranto, steers literature around back through the middle ages, going in reverse, bearing modern aesthetic values with him into the past, and revaluing and reinventing the medieval in an act of deliberate anachronism. That is, he produces “the medieval” as a rather haphazard contraction based on his personal tastes and uses this as his ground or setting. This orientation is sustained as a memory-image in future Gothic fiction, that is, it repeats, but with important differences—greater attention paid to naturalistic character psychology, supernatural manifestations toned down, inner life Romantically connected to landscape and weather. The contraction is repeated in The Mysteries of Udolpho and in The Monk, with some elements retained from Walpole, others added, yet others subtracted or altered. ***

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Claire Colebrook writes that a concept is an extreme, not an average.6 If we try to approach weird fiction as the averaging together of various literary works belonging to some canon, we fail to explain the formation of the canon or the selection of those terms we average. It is the concept of weird fiction that attracts readers and drives writers, and this concept must be an extreme. If we think of genre in terms of borders, then the borders of a genre understood as an average would be defined automatically by clichés, which are stupidities. A genre understood as a direction of travel would necessarily border on a conceptual horizon that is continually driven forward. No one ever reaches the horizon, but movement in the direction of the horizon continually discovers new things. Critics like Fredric Jameson identify ideology as the more or less inescapable foundation of all values, and Tzvetan Todorov writes that ideology shapes genres.7 If we take this to mean that, no matter what, we never leave the territory defined by ideology, then there is no accounting for the changes that do occur. If, on the other hand, we make ideology dynamic, how then can it remain prior or determinative? Deleuze and Guattari are sceptical about ideology insofar as it is transcendent; their idea of ideology is dynamic, without being inconsistent, because it is an immanent ideology. The immanent version of ideology is their “major” literature, described in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Major literature is the mode of expression proper to ruling elites, those who own the means of literary production (including platforms); it’s “major” because the elites, while a headcount minority themselves, are dominant in the majority of power relations. Minor literature, on the other hand, isn’t unimportant, an opposite, or a rival to major literature; it’s inside major literature. The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.8

Deleuze and Guattari associate genre with major literature where minor is regarded as being sui generis, but isn’t there a major and minor to genre, that is, major genre is transcendent where minor genre is immanent? Major literature is always in the service of a status quo, so it can’t say anything new. In minor literature we see something disappear the way

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Cezanne’s paintings disappear, but that is not simply the absence of an appearance, an exclusion. What disappears is the familiar, the known, but the familiar, which is major, must appear and then disappear, like the vicar in M.R. James’ story “A Tale of a Disappearance and an Appearance.” The local attributes of major literature remain present in the story, but their “major” character is made to vanish. Blanchot writes, for example, that the writer, understood as creator of minor literature, is dead, disappeared, writing about the disappearance of things, that literature is intimately connected with death. The creative author ceases to exist insofar as any reified idea of an author is concerned. The author must die as a stereotype pouring out clichés in order to disappear into something else not yet known, hence, alive. The creative author reinvents authorship. What the creative writer makes disappear is all that stupid trash, the truly dead world we find ourselves in all too often, all too damned often. This is why minor literature is so important: only through the minor does literature live and participate in the problem of living to its fullest extent. Innovation in major literature is more like marketing. The idea of major and minor can be applied to weird fiction in two ways. First, with respect to the genre’s standing as a whole relative to “legitimate” literature, and second, with respect to what is major and minor within the genre. There’s already been plenty of work done to establish the legitimacy of weird fiction in relation to other genres and to affirm its artistic value; this study takes that validity for granted and focuses more on the second question: what is major and minor within the genre? As “genre” fiction, what is there to weird fiction apart from recycling a handful of clichés? Major literature deals in clichés, but what matters more is the power to demand adherence to clichéd formulas and contents and to banish, bury, or co-opt work that re-animates these clichés, making them de-clichéd. This is the broader political question, which goes beyond even the implicit political content of particular stories to the actual politics of publications, critical acceptance, and so on. This is why minor literature develops; it doesn’t compete with major literature, it adopts its clichés in order to use them against themselves. As a genre, weird fiction will not be all major or minor, but will move in ways that have major and minor currents pulling it this way and that. Weird fiction frequently upholds pretty conservative, majoritarian positions. “A Christmas Carol,” for example, perpetuates the archetypical bourgeois fallacy that all social problems stem from the averaged consequences of individual moral choices, rather than from an

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economic and class system that is inherently exploitative and indifferent to individual choices. On the other hand, weird fiction often meets the three criteria for minor literature listed above; that is, weird fiction has its own weird ways of meeting these criteria. The deterritorialization of language occurs when the weird tale takes us towards the sublime, the indescribable, the ineffable, towards mad ravings, imaginary and transcendent languages. The individual is connected to the political in weird tales primarily through the recognition that, one way or another, there is a problem with reality, one that calls to us, either to escape reality and its attendant problems or to protect reality from these problems; in other words, while one might be tempted to dismiss weird fiction as apolitical escapism, this begs the question: what is it that the reader wants to escape, if not a situation that does have definite political dimensions and causes? The collective arrangement of utterance in weird fiction is the way in which this loss of reality takes place, a way that involves the reader, linking characters and readers, but also linking readers with other readers. Does the story disturb the delusional or hallucinating insane ones, even the daydreaming or fanciful—and therefore socially unproductive—ones, the drug-addled ones, the possessed ones, the emotionally oversensitive or overwrought ones, the mystics and other religious nonconformists? Or does it disturb the people who define themselves as the contraries of these things, as their mere negation in fact, even though they have difficulty identifying anything positive in this contrary position? If the normal is only the absence of the abnormal, then it is the abnormal that is real. To simplify this, we may come up with a basic spectrum for weird fiction: The major strain in weird fiction says: defend the normal. The minor strain says: beware the normal. *** Weird fiction involves the supernatural. This can then seem to be determinative for the genre, such that every story is understood in terms of a logical duel between the supernatural and whatever is considered to stand in opposition to the supernatural—generally, science or materialism. Weird fiction isn’t anti-science, may indeed be very much pro-science, but characteristically objects to imposition and dogmatism, to the arbitrary limits

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that our ideas of the world, humanity, and ourselves impose on imagination and desire. The major mode identifies two opposing poles, generally in order to identify the pretender and elect the real thing. Minor literature doesn’t do this—instead, it occupies the major work and makes use of it for its own ends. A story that frankly affirms the supernatural over materialism or science, or vice-versa, may be weird, but it is not minor. The minor form takes existing clichés, scientific or supernatural, and makes new use of them. Weird fiction isn’t an anti-capitalist genre, either, but it does often register an objection to the way capitalism not only forecloses choices but misrepresents the loss of possibilities as a kind of liberation. In its particular interest in destiny, weird fiction also addresses the way that capitalism divorces people from any grounding, by staging a kind of revenge of the ground. Weird fiction is not feminist or anti-racist and is often filled with prejudice, but it does also at times undermine the confining categories of sexism and bigotry. This study is not trying to compose two canons of weird fiction, one major and the other minor, although it will label the stories it studies major or minor. However, it is taken for granted here that a given story will have both major and minor tendencies, and that primary designation involves seeing which side of the balance tips further. A writer like Lovecraft will have more major stories and more minor stories, and, in those major stories, there will be minor moments; vice-versa for those minor stories. Lovecraft, as one of the principal theorists of weird fiction, can be used as an example here. His work is majoritarian in its racism and sexism, but minoritarian in its scepticism about progress, its more socialistic tendencies, its cosmicism, and its treatment of identity. The racism of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is oddly conflicted, given that the inhuman fish people have all the things Lovecraft valued most in his conservative conception of society: a highly sophisticated aesthetic sensibility and level of artistic expression, the continuity of generations over time, and an ironclad identity so solid that no amount of racial admixture with humans will prevent them from retaining their innate racial characteristics. It seems pretty clear that giving all the things he valued most to monsters rather than humans was part of the horror for Lovecraft, but that horror is inextricably bound to the horror of racist persecution. There are moments, both here and in At the Mountains of Madness, when Lovecraft seems to waver in identification between wholesome humans and monsters; identity is precarious and must be defended (major) but part of what we are defending it against is our own impulse to reject our identity, which is

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more minor. In The Lurking Fear, the narrator speaks of a desire to abandon himself to the nightmare, to become part of it, which is the fate of the narrator in “The Outsider.” This probably arises in the main from a desire to escape vulnerability by siding with the threat, becoming part of it, choosing a less vulnerable identity than that of an ordinary person. However, the ordinary identity is normally presented as natural, inevitable, healthy, and correct; it’s one thing to say that identity must face its contrary, the loss of identity, but if that contrary is not purely negative, not the absence of identity, but the presence of a different identity, then the necessity, the salubriousness, the superiority of the normal identity is no longer self-evident and automatic. The very defence of the normal makes us aware that it isn’t the only way. For all that the story has strong racist elements; “The Call of Cthulhu” is a call that anyone of sufficient sensitivity can hear. It can sound in anyone’s dreams, not just the dreams of the “lesser” humanity. The common thread in the minor mode is a desire for escape in an undefined direction, and generally what is to be escaped is identity. Kant’s noumena—God, the world, and the soul—are, for him, the indemonstrable limits of experience which act to ground all identity, understood here in the broad sense of a persistent self-sameness. These ideas percolate into English Romantic literature, mainly through Coleridge, and into weird fiction mainly from Coleridge through Poe. Weird fiction is minor insofar as it thematizes and confronts these limits, and challenges identity in that broad sense, in God, in the world, and in soul or ego. For major weird fiction, this is an attack on identity which must be resisted. For minor weird fiction, this a form of liberation, however frightening, from these limits, which appeals to readers who desire to be free of them. Weird fiction is distinguished from Fantasy in that the Fantasy world appears to provide the reader with an alternative identity, while weird fiction moves in an undefined, or less defined, direction.9 *** For Deleuze and Guattari, ideas produce differences creatively, while representations are those things which are merely indifferent rearrangements of the same old thing. Any genre will make use of both. Once weird fiction becomes a commodity, it must be produced in bulk, to reach a large market and to help drive the per-story cost down, but it must also innovate, in order to retain its audience or attract new readers. This pressure builds

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deterritorialization into the production process in the same way that other forms of capitalist production require technical innovation. Deterritorialization produces ideas, while representations constitute the territory. So, for example, the vampire is a representation. It first appears in folktales, which are not commodities. Bram Stoker deterritorialized the vampire when he transposed it from the medieval past to the modern day. Since every deterritorialization is immediately followed by a reterritorialization, Dracula the innovation becomes Dracula the cliché, a new representation. After Stoker, vampires are either Draculas or counter-Draculas. The 1979 film adaptation of Dracula, starring Frank Langella, deterritorializes Dracula by making him an anti-hero. The plot of the film is itself Dracula deterritorialized and infiltrated by Joanna Russ’ 1962 short story, “My Dear Emily” (see below) that does not involve Dracula the character at all. This deterritorialization is innovation, but it will nevertheless involve repetition, not only of the text that it takes as its original, but of other related or unrelated elements. Lord Byron was the model for Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, generally regarded as a forerunner of Dracula, but he does not seem much in evidence in the 1931 adaptation of Dracula, in which the vampire is presented as a kind of Continental seducer. Lord Byron clearly returns, however, in Langella’s realization of the character, a mordant and acerbic puncturer of sexual hypocrisy, redeployed to expose secular puritanism as a blind for a patriarchalist anxiety about controlling women’s sexuality. Where Stoker’s Dracula would seem to be in line with the conservative values of major literature, the 1979 adaptation makes him plainly minor, because in that version he comes to represent for Mina a kind of desperate escape from the living death of a conventional bourgeois existence. She is the only character in the film who meaningfully doubts his absolute villainy, and she is not saved in the end, when Dracula himself dies in what looks a little bit like a lynching. This version of Dracula would then be more on the minor side; “good” wins, but it doesn’t come out looking “good.” There are less heady examples. Given enough sequels, most franchise killers like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger become protagonists after a while. Mikhail Bakhtin described the carnivalesque as a literary moment in which the tension between high and low ranks becomes volatile and unfixed. It’s a kind of domesticated revolt of the low against the high, and there’s something of this in rooting for the monster. There’s a rejection of the canonical values which cast the monster as a strictly evil thing. The

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living dead are monsters, but, casually shooting Ben at the end of Night of the Living Dead, the sheriff and his posse seem no less mindless and monstrous. “Minor literature” and “Carnivalesque” are not equivalent terms, but they do interilluminate each other. We might note what appears to be a major/minor split in this passage from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: It could be said … that a person of the Middle Ages lived, as it were, two lives: one that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone and everything.10

This is not unlike descriptions of witches’ sabbath, that early strain of horror fiction that all too often had real and lethal consequences. Bakhtin’s carnival is, however, still a festival permitted and organized by the powers that be in order to further reinforce that first life. Deleuze and Guattari don’t see the minor as a rival power or counterforce to the major, but rather as a way of redirecting the major force back onto itself. Nevertheless, there is a kind of major/minor aspect to the carnivalesque. In a theatre or with a group of friends in the safety of a living room, watching a horror film will often be an experience like Bakhtin’s carnival square, looking onto that official life from the outside. The outsider is a horror to the insider, but then who is really inside, anyway? Perhaps this helps us to understand why weird fiction and horror films present us with images of that official, normal life. The struggle or experiment is to see if we can think the minor, the escape, without turning it into a representation. Is this the Latin Quarter of New Orleans, or is it Disneyland? *** Another difference between major and minor writing: major literature judges, minor literature warns. In weird fiction, and in Todorov’s false “choice” between the supernatural and the nonsupernatural, we have, on the one hand, a variant Platonism in which there is only one reality, for which the elimination of the other possibility is essential because it is false, and then, on the other hand, we also have a sort of latter-day Aristotelian variant, which can admit anything so long as it can find a stable category

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for it. Both of these variants involve making judgements based on preconceived ideas of what the overall condition should be, which is to say that this a matter of moral judgement, in addition to ontological or epistemological conceptualization. The idea that the cosmos must and can only be one is used to justify moral and Statist impositions of order, rather than as a motive to further observation and experiment in an open-ended scientific investigation. But a story of judgement is also a warning: the minor warns us about judgement. The ambivalent weird story does warn us away from judging whether or not the events are definitely supernatural, and to the extent that it questions the application of judgement to reality, it is minor. Major literature gives orders and renders verdicts. The minor warns us to avoid judgement as a negative understanding of difference. If we argue for the literary merit of weird fiction, there is a danger of forgetting that the negative difference dividing literature from writing that is not-literature is an illusion which reaffirms the idea of major literature. The key is to argue for the importance of the minor without making it major. Minor literature operates like a simulacrum of major literature, which means it does not put itself forward as an alternative candidate for literary status, but changes the way the elections are conducted and sabotages the existing parties. In Deleuze’s critique of Plato, the simulacrum takes on maximum importance, because it shows that the conditions for Platonic judgement are impossible. For Plato, reality is something that is determined by a judgement between rival claimants, one of whom is true, the other false. The simulacrum is something that is real and false at the same time, an impossibility in Plato’s system. It is real, because it is effective, actual, makes a difference, but not real in that it is not in keeping with a transcendent scheme of reality. This is why art troubles Plato; he needs it to be subordinate to the real. Art therefore cannot be both false and real according to him; it can only be a reality of an inferior degree. According to Deleuze, a copy of the real thing can’t be real if it makes no difference. If art is just a copy of reality, if genre is only a matter of copying a model story, then genre really would only be an averaging after the fact and unable to account for the genesis of the stories that belong to it. The stories wouldn’t make a difference, so they wouldn’t be real. This account wouldn’t be able to explain why everybody would copy a particular model story, instead of any other; it couldn’t say anything about the origin of the genre itself.

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This question is double for weird fiction, since genre in general and the genre of weird fiction specifically both tend to be defined negatively, in terms of judgement. Is literature just phoney life? Idealized life? If literature can have life, then what do we make of literary chimaeras, like vampires and ghosts? This point is not out of bounds for a genre study of weird fiction, because the question of the existence of the supernatural extends beyond the story. Just as a love story presents a specimen of a kind of interpersonal experience, so a supernatural story presents a specimen of a certain kind of bizarre experience. Weird fiction dwells exactly on this spot where judgement cannot stick, which is why it’s a waste of time to think of weird fiction in terms of a choice the reader is supposed to make about the existence of the supernatural—a choice which, empirical familiarity tells us, readers never bother to make. In Matter and Memory, Bergson identifies the distinction between materialism and idealism as a matter of judgement and goes beyond this distinction with his idea of the image.11 All things are images, a blend of subjective inner phenomena and objective outer phenomena, both. The Bergsonian image seems to be his version of a Spinozan idea; that the appearances of a thing in experience and in thought are two modes of existence of one thing. Using Bergson’s concept of the image as a springboard: “fantasy forges fictive causal chains, illegitimate rules, simulacra of belief, either by conflating the accidental and the essential or by using the properties of language to substitute” either for “the repetition of similar cases actually observed” or “a simple verbal repetition that only simulates its effect.” What’s more, “education, superstition, eloquence, and poetry also work in this way.”12 With this in mind, we find weird fiction at the intersection of Fantasy art, literature as what might be meant by poetry and eloquence, and superstition. Education may be included too, if we recall the idea that minor literature warns us, often about the limitations of what we learn in conventional, major curricula. Horror fiction says yes to whatever we say no to. Even if we feel Stevenson’s “leap of welcome,”13 an inclination to share in the horror, we enjoy our own outraged rejection of our own sanctioned impulses, and this is usually a reactionary aspect of the genre. It helps reenlist readers in the Victorian task of reproducing the self as something repressed. But to see it in these terms, while still involving ourselves with judgement, at least means beginning with an affirmation before moving to a negation, instead of the other way around. Weird fiction upholds the anti-difference bias, presenting difference as monstrous, but it also cannot do this without

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having to approach difference. The danger here is that this difference will turn out to be appealingly seductive, more attractive than repulsive, that it will have simulacrum-power, something positive about it. From the beginning of the Gothic tale, crime and outlaws, “knights and robbers,” have been every bit as important as ghosts in horror fiction, and there is an outlaw residue to weird fiction as well. Drawing near to the lawbreaker or rebel, whose archetype in this literature is Milton’s Satan, we are in danger. The danger is not so much that we will side with Satan, but that, in acknowledging that Satan even has a “side” at all, we will fracture an ideology which seeks to maintain a monopoly on our perspective, our selves, and our world. In other words, if we say that evil is more than the absence of good, but something of its own, then we have already been contaminated by the simulacrum. Evil can only be an inferior copy of the good, officially. If it is something on its own, then there is some other idea of the good. God is the source of all existing things. If evil is something on its own, then God created evil, which is impermissible for a perfectly good God. This religious reasoning outlives religious controversy and survives in homologies with science; that is, if the supernatural is irrational, then to assert its existence is to say that not all existence is rational, which requires us to affirm that science cannot ever explain all existence. If that’s the case—given that only reason can define the extent of existence susceptible to scientific understanding, and given that this assertion of the existence of the irrational as something of its own (and not just as the absence of reason) entails the limitation of reason—how is the sure extent of reason to be determined at all? *** Is genre structure? Necessarily? Couldn’t it be a machine, a vehicle, at least some of the time, and hence more dynamically continuing to produce a weird line, extend a weird line across breaks, or maybe via breaks, in genre conventions? The structuralist approach to weird fiction we find in Todorov identifies the unresolvedly ambiguous supernatural story as the true form, with two subsets which arise when a verdict is called for.14 That is to say, the structuralist study of the genre depends entirely on judgement, and where that judgement is impossible, it is all the more important, because the effect of the story depends on a presumed need for a judgement that we cannot make. This model originates in the negative. It begins with the

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supernatural understood as what is excluded from the category of the demonstrable, and then makes the typical genre story depend on what judgement, if any, is made about this indemonstrable event. If there is no call for a judgement, there is no tension, no effect, according to this model. Todorov’s scheme is dialectic in that it privileges the ambiguous story as a gateway to psychological fiction (and this is supposed to represent progress I suppose) which in turn makes the fantastic obsolete. Todorov bases his definition on the supernatural, then turns aside the question of the supernatural by changing the subject to psychology. For no reason this psychological reading is treated as if it ruled out an epistemological reading, even though weird fiction’s particular domain of affect is epistemological; in fact, weird fiction’s whole reason for being seems to be the creation of epistemological affects. Todorov can’t really account for the weirdness of weird fiction, except to say that it’s a primitive, pre-­ Freudian way of trying to think about psychology. So if Todorov is right and at least Victorian weird fiction is typified by an either/or—madness or supernatural—we see no such distinction in Macbeth, or in any of the other source material for Victorian weird fiction. How can there be shadings of reality, or even of reason? Aren’t these either/or? How can there be “and”? Reason and unreason at once, real and unreal at once? Weird fiction tries to give us precisely this. Not one or the other, as Todorov would have it, but both and neither. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote that tragedy is the fact that anything can be affirmed, even two contradictory things at once.15 Not one or the other, but both, because life is bigger than just one or just the other. If we follow the ambiguous definition of the fantastic as Todorov has it, then we cannot account for The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson; the novel can be classified easily enough as marvellous, since the reality of the haunting is bluntly asserted from the beginning, but there is consequently nothing whatever at stake in the judgement respecting the reality of the supernatural. That stake is simply dispensed with by Jackson, making the judgement of supernatural activity entirely beside the point. Nor is the supernatural aspect of the story merely an adjunct to a more important psychological portrait of Eleanor Vance. Hill House is a character, a kind of demon psychoanalyst, who manipulates Eleanor using her own neuroses. The aim in weird fiction must be this broader view, which makes life something primal, the ground from which structures are drawn, and not a structure itself.

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This goes further than presenting everything we are supposed to reject, only in order that we may reaffirm ourselves by repeating the gesture of rejecting it again. If that were all weird fiction did, then it would still be under the sway of what it was not. Todorov would be right; there would be no weird fiction, only bad psychological fiction. However, weird fiction does more than this; it begins with an affirmation of the greater scope of experience and then moves to a negation of limitations to experience, in order to affirm a boundless horizon. *** Major literatures compete with each other to the extent that they are major. Minor literature originates within its major regime, but escapes it. In weird fiction, we could say that the minor story is the weird tale of radical epistemological doubt, the kind that undermines any sense of solid reality, but then there is actually nothing to prevent the reactionary majoritarian forces in society from making use of the same kind of doubt. The doubt is not what makes the story minor. Very often, the epistemologically sceptical weird tale walks back its challenges by receding into a validation of bland conventionality, almost always with the same fucking quote from Hamlet, you know the one, about there being more things. This maintains an appearance of sceptical uncertainty, but it amounts to saying that we might as well rely on the usual verities, rather than go off on wild goose chases looking for new ones that will be no more reliable. Klossowski will call this “easy-going agnosticism”16 and there’s nothing radical or interesting about it. The story of posthumous justice, for its part, is no more necessarily major than the sceptical story is necessarily minor. Labelling of stories like “Grayling; or Murder Will Out” as conservative means flirting with a problem. The idea of a moral universe may be integral to a certain status quo, but it also makes that status quo vulnerable to moral critique. The shear between theory and practice in the application of the idea is a virtual transformation point. Kafka wrote stories of minority justice, set within the virtual transformation point, all the time, that justice being a justice that generates verdicts which are in turn only new beginnings. The destruction of Dracula is a major judgement in the novel, but a minor judgement, which is to say a kind of tragedy, in the Frank Langella film. The basis for the opposition lies in the idea that the major story recruits the ghost to act as a mere cypher for the self-serving “justice” of human

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ruling classes, but justice is too important an idea to cede entirely to the major. Is the epistemological story also a story of justice? Insofar as the epistemological story, by insisting on an open conception of experience, cautions us when it comes to judgement? Do we abandon judgement, or only bad judgements? Is abandoning judgement itself a judgement? Just because the weird doesn’t depend on the making of a judgement, that doesn’t mean that judgement isn’t involved at all (Wilde says that morality is involved in art, but only insofar as art shows us people thinking about morality, the art itself being neither moral nor immoral).17 And, if a more nuanced idea of judgement is better, isn’t it better because it is more just? The properly mourned dead are truly dead, because they more or less disappear from our experience in life; we may gaze on their likenesses, but these images are really no different from the noble abstractions of a hall of allegorical busts representing Statist ideological values like industry or sobriety. Seen from this perspective, official mourning is a second death for the dead, the death of our living image of someone, replacing complex living changeable beings with idealized mannikins; it’s a kind of ritual execution, which might call for a kind of justice that explodes in the haunting. Then the scandal of the haunting as such emerges, where the scandal is the rejection of the idealized image by the dead themselves, and not the crimes of which they were the victims in life. The restless dead are looking more like rebels who refuse to be silenced by banishment or to be co-opted by praise (see, e.g., “We Are the Dead,” by Henry Kuttner). The peaceful dead look a bit complacent and sad next to these vigorous protester-ghosts! Weird fiction walks a line with a conservative idea of a transcendent moral order as an important instrument for maintaining a political status quo on one side, and, on the other side, a radical idea of a cosmos that is inherently inimical to any status quo. It would be stupid, though, to miss the utility of the chaotic cosmos for a conservative status quo, or of the idea of a transcendent moral order for the radical side. Radicals call on eternal verities all the time, as Dr. King did, and conservatives have pointed to cosmic chaos to validate the importance of invented stability, as Lovecraft did. So the line weird fiction walks divides two tendencies in thought, but each tendency is itself able to go in two directions. With Nietzsche, Deleuze says judgement is priestly psychology, in that it demands total revelation of the complete story.18 This means, the totalization of a story and the closing of all its boundaries. But Deleuze also says, this time apropos of Kant’s third critique, that judgement can also

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emerge as a masterstroke of reason in a form of free play that does not seem to me to be able to coexist with the transcendence of total revelation. Priestly judgement is levelling all to one identity; an identity that is created by exhaustion, but this masterstroke judgement doesn’t seem to work like that. It’s more like the establishment of an excellent connection between things, rather than the isolation and categorization of a thing. In Nietzsche, the creator of laws is substituted as the more life-affirming alternative to the judge; which is to say that there is still a figure there with power, but that power is creative. It doesn’t consist in reducing new events to types of past precedents and so on, but continually reinvents the law, much as we see in Kafka. So what might be emerging here is an idea of the judge as one who reduces everything to a static arrangement on the one hand, and the creator who participates in the transformations of events. Law in this case becomes a negotiation, a contract, or bargain—a kind of minor law. The weird tale asks us to recognize these contracts for what they are, by speculating about the consequences of a discovery that nullifies those contracts. *** In a filmed interview, John Brunner defined genre as the repetition of an audience: “if one looks back at the historical record it makes far better sense to try and trace a continuity of an audience of this kind than it does to try and trace some kind of literary genealogy in which a writer of one generation specializing in or dabbling in marvel tales influenced directly a writer of the following generation.”19 While readers don’t write contracts for writers, they do decide which works within the marketing category of a given genre belong to their own personal canons, and thus influence sales and so on. This means that accounting for the production of a genre has to include the audience; the audience makes the genre. Genre is a contraction. For Bergson, the past is a contraction entailing all those things we find already around us, so the past is what we experience as it is understood. The present, for Bergson, is the arrival of difference in contact with the past, and concentrated in the present are all the mobile forces of change.20 The future is an expansion of possibilities brought into being by the transformations of the present moment. If we think of the time of literature, then genre would be something like a memory-image in which the contraction consists of a given canon of texts. However, since there is no actual image in this case, and the term “image”

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in the phrase “memory-image” is concretely associated by Bergson with images on a movie screen, a different term is called for here: “memory-­ reading,” where reading is a noun understood to mean a constellation of specific literary elements. Taking the typical definition of weird fiction, for example, the memory-reading would constellate together ghosts, psychic detectives, derelict mansions, and so on, but the memory-reading wouldn’t be confined to lists of familiar tropes—the content of the reading wouldn’t be determined by the type of content but by the distinguishing affects of the genre. The critic’s task can be a matter of justifying a given memory-reading before a critical tribunal, but this begs the question of how the memory-­ reading is compiled. Even where there is a preconceived idea of the content or the origin of a genre, the preconception remains to be accounted for. This study will examine how the genre’s memory-reading combines the supernatural, a concept of the bizarre, and a concept of destiny. Genre, from this point of view, will function as a principle of individuation as Gilbert Simondon described it: that which the individuation makes appear is not only the individual, but also the pair individual-environment. The individual is thus relative in two senses, both because it is not all of the being, and because it is the result of a state of the being in which it existed neither as individual, nor as principle of individuation.21

When writers, readers, and critics bring together the elements of the supernatural, the bizarre, and destiny, they produce weird fiction together by means of the genre. The genre produces individual stories as well as their “environment,” which is not only their audience or “theatre” but also the creative climate that perpetuates the genre. As it stands in any given moment, the genre does not cover all weird fiction, but only weird fiction as it is being produced, and as it relates selectively to past weird fiction. There is more in existence, namely the potentials for new weird tales. These potentials come into being with and in both stories and audiences. Stories introduce ideas and techniques which will be extended, challenged, supplanted, in new stories. Audiences become ready for new materials in time and make the repetition of the genre happen.

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Notes 1. Derrida, Jacques, and Ronell, Avital. “The Law of Genre.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (Autumn, 1980), pp. 55–81; page 56. 2. Ibid., page 80. 3. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; page 81. 4. “Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the other hand, a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the activity of his own nature. He later sold his product for £5 and thus became a merchant. But the literary proletarian of Leipzig who produces books, such as compendia on political economy, at the behest of his publisher is pretty nearly a productive worker since his production is taken over by capital and only occurs in order to increase it. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her song for money, she is to that extent a wage laborer or merchant. But if the same singer is engaged by an entrepreneur who makes her sing to make money, then she becomes a productive worker, since she produces capital directly”—Marx, Karl. Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. London: New Left Review, 1976; page 1044. 5. Frey, Renea. “The Law of Genre.” Devil or the Dictionary: Genre Theory Adventures. Posted 2/16/12. URL: genretheoryannotations.wordpress.com. 6. Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge Press, 2002; pages 15–16. 7. See Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” Modern Genre Theory. Ed. David Duff. NY: Longman, 2000. 8. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” Modern Genre Theory. Ed. David Duff. NY: Longman, 2000; page 18. 9. “the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names … are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God. … For personal uncertainty is not a doubt foreign to what is happening, but rather an objective structure of the event itself”—Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990; page 3. 10. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; pages 129–130. 11. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Digireads, 2010; page 22.

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12. Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books, 2001; page 41. 13. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Complete Stories. New York: Modern Library Classics, 2002; page 309. 14. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975; page 41. 15. See Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. 16. Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. London: Continuum Press, 2005; page 169. 17. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988; page 347. 18. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays, Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997; page 130. 19. Brunner, John. “John Brunner Speaks: 1/2.” Uploaded by syfysucks, 5/14/10. URL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=00TouBRitR0. 20. Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011; page 102. 21. Simondon, Gilbert. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Parrhesia vol. 7, (2009), pp. 4–16; page 5.

CHAPTER 2

The Supernatural

Where Fantasy introduces the supernatural as an aspect of another world, and so tends to avoid the question of the supernatural in the reader’s world, the purpose of weird fiction, on the other hand, is to produce the supernatural in the reader’s world. Here, when I speak of the supernatural, I mean a kind of infinite experience that challenges assumptions about the nature of reality. This is an experience that does not involve any question of the existence of supernatural beings or the supernatural character of some effect or other. Weird fiction not only depicts bizarre events, it does so in order to produce the supernatural as an experience for the reader, and this experience is the whole point of the genre. This helps us to understand how the genre comes about and how it endures. It responds to a desire for escape from a trap, life understood as a composite of probabilities, possibilities, reasoned and plotted out, predictable and stable. Weird fiction has something to offer these desires, something that is not at all vicarious, and which can lean towards the more major, solacing position, which is that stability is possible in chaos, that stability will win in the end, but the genre can also lean towards the more minor, unsettling idea that stability is only an illusion born of our ignorance and fear. *** In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov writes: “The fantastic … lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Cisco, Weird Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8_2

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who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from a ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion. At the story’s end, the reader makes a decision even if the character does not.”1 However, if reality is nothing more than “common opinion,” then how can it have the stability that seems to be entailed in the common uses of the term “reality”? Weird fiction takes notice of this and uses it to create aesthetic effects. It will also notice that “common ideas” are common because they are imposed. If, as Todorov says, the fantastic only lives as long as this hesitation lives, then, on the one hand, it will last forever, since there is no way to make a sufficiently strong decision on such matters, or, rather, this hesitation can never start, because it isn’t possible to hesitate when it comes to making an impossible decision. The weird tale exists to open the closed set of ordinary experience. Wrangling over ontological permission is not the point of the weird tale, which in practice makes brushing this question aside its most characteristic and important gesture. The moment we begin to map the supernatural, we are likely traversing a boundary or modal distinction into Fantasy, even if the setting is a familiar, mundane one. If the ambiguity is important, it is because it is a radical ambiguity, and this is why the possibility itself must be supernatural. When we speak of the supernatural, then, we have to be clear that this means something that makes the idea of reality ambiguous, rather than something that is of ambiguous reality. A distinction that presumes an inherently stable reality entirely misses the point. The Fantastic suggests we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, purely psychologically without accounting for the presence of the ghosts in the story and without considering weird fiction’s epistemological implications, which, if taken seriously, emphasize the impossibility of distinguishing between the marvellous and the fantastic in experience, no matter how readily these two options may be logically distinguished. The Fantastic can account for the influence of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel by means of a psychologically reductive reading, a more “realistic” reading, but this approach utterly fails to explain why the influence should take the form of a ghostly haunting, as opposed to simply remembering and imitating. Todorov’s approach also fails to see that the genre depends essentially on the way that logical categorization sits on top of experience; we look for logic in experience, but the logic we find remains descriptive, it doesn’t prompt the action. We have experiences, not realities; or, we might say that reality is a generalization from experiences. In a weird tale, the reader is under no obligation to

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experience a logical conundrum, let alone render a considered opinion about the existence of the supernatural, but the weird tale does, I insist, have to produce in the reader a clear impression that experience is not controlled by logic. This means at once that, however limited our possibilities may seem to be when enumerated logically, other possibilities do exist. This affirmation can be derived logically from the realization that our logical calculations of possibility all derive from given assumptions about our circumstances, more or less articles of faith unless they are proven by other arguments which themselves must be grounded in unproven givens, and so on. This is why the weird tale must include supernatural tropes, because it is through these means that it can home in on some of the most basic of those assumptions, about for example the continuity of time and space, or of natural laws. There is more food for logic in existence than logic alone can account for, which affirms even logic as a perennial activity rather than something that can exhaust truth and finalize itself once and for all. The story goes to the limit in order to give us a taste of what it might be like to escape possibility itself, understood as a kind of policing of our desires, disguised as natural or automatic logic in a fetishistic way of thinking. What is impossible is only impossible for persons, so it is therefore possible to experience the impossible if one ceases to be a person. *** Three possibilities: the supernatural is definitely involved in the story (marvellous), the supernatural is definitely ruled out (uncanny), or the supernatural is an open question. These are spurious differences. The supernatural is something that can only be asserted, never demonstrated. For this reason, its non-existence cannot be directly proven any more than its existence can. There may be any amount of circumstantial evidence ruling out the supernatural, but that’s as far as we can go when it comes to this question. So there really is no difference between these possibilities. We can say that the supernatural is definitely asserted in one kind of story and definitely rejected in another, while in some stories neither of these things occurs, but just what is being asserted or rejected or left alone in each case is always an open question. It is proximity to this openness that the weird tale offers its readers. Whenever a story introduces the supernatural, it produces the supernatural as an experience of the limitless possibilities of experience itself in distinction from the “common opinion.” How is reality derived from

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common opinion? On the contrary, common opinion is always wrong, and reality is constantly blasting it to pieces. Who says we “must decide”? Henry James? The author who made every effort to insure that no decision could be made? Who is demanding that reality be defined and settled in predictable and stable patterns and relationships? What right do they have to demand that? What difference does this decision about the story make to the story? And who, given a supernatural possibility in a story, would insist that the story was not about the supernatural? If, for example, we read a collection of William Hope Hodgson’s stories detailing the adventures of his psychic detective, Carnacki the Ghost Finder, some will involve actual hauntings, while others, which seem to revolve around a supernatural event, turn out to be red herrings. However, these nonsupernatural stories are only there to lend greater credence to the supernatural ones, by showing us that Carnacki isn’t a dupe or fanatic who insists on seeing ghosts where there are none. However, for the duration of the deception, the story is as weird in its affect as any story that does not debunk its supernatural content. Basically, the red herring story is only there to further demonstrate the infinity of possibilities as they arise in the other stories. *** [P]sychoanalysis has replaced (and therefore has made useless) the literature of the fantastic.2

Can a form of art be “replaced” and “made useless” by something else, whether it be some other kind of art, or something that isn’t art at all? Taking for granted the idea that psychoanalysis will necessarily debunk the supernatural in the world that we readers live in, this suggests that this in turn will make the literature of the fantastic unintelligible or hopelessly quaint to us. Perhaps the sustained interest in the genre is a sign that psychoanalysis has been insufficiently well propagated in the world? This brute-force approach to weird fiction is hopelessly impotent to account for the decision by Henry James, author of numerous literary works involving highly subtle and involved character psychology, to write The Turn of the Screw instead of a work of fiction on the same theme without any supernatural references. It’s almost as if James needed the idea of haunting spirits to arrive at his psychological portrait of the Governess. In

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The Haunting of Hill House, there is no “replacement” of the genuine haunting with the equally genuine psychological portrait of Eleanor Vance, nor does the psychological consistency of that portrait make the supernatural element in the story “useless.” The supernatural cannot be replaced with psychology, not only because they so often coexist in weird fiction and elsewhere but also because they plainly have different literary roles to play. No amount of insanity can account for the basic lability of our experience of reality. While there is a psychology of the supernatural, this doesn’t replace the supernatural any more than any other logical schematic replaces what it models. The interest in the supernatural, I have contended, is rooted in a desire for freedom from the constraints of experience, a desire that is susceptible to psychoanalysis, but this does not replace the literature of the supernatural any more than it replaces any other form of literature. Psychology itself is another set of potentially arbitrary limitations on experience, at least as it is commonly practiced, which may contribute to a desire for a supernatural escape from psychology’s limitations. Todorov’s argument is stupid. It amounts to saying that understanding desire somehow limits or controls it, which makes about as much sense as suggesting that authors of weird fiction begin with critical treatises on the subject and write their fiction according to the findings of critics. *** In weird fiction, two concepts interact to produce a “local” supernaturalism. Those two concepts are the bizarre and destiny. They are not supernatural concepts, but rather they produce the supernatural as a virtuality that the weird tale makes actual, that is, an actual challenge to the solidity of identity, reality, and the world. The bizarre event decouples the one who encounters it from whatever is considered natural or normal, and the weird narrative that includes this bizarre event and its aftermath all unfolds as a destiny. A character is marked and that character will thenceforth bear the destiny to change. So, rather than starting from an idea of the supernatural, the weird tale begins with the bizarre, through it finds a destiny, and so results in the production of the supernatural. The weird tale therefore does not affect the reader as an illustration of a familiar religious or metaphysical representation of life or the world would but rather as a shocking departure from familiarity as such.

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Readers of weird fiction are constantly encountering passages like this one, excerpted from the title story of Gerald Bullett’s collection, The Street of the Eye: [T]he supernatural story, as I say, is something of a test. Tell a group of new acquaintances some fairly well authenticated ghost-story, and they will fall apart and regroup in their special classes like a company of soldiers forming up into platoons. There will be the credulous fools on the one hand, ready to believe anything without question; there will be the materialist fools on the other hand, snorting in angry contempt. Between the two—truth is generally found midway between extremes—between the two, preserving a delicate balance between scepticism and credulity, doubting the story, perhaps, but admitting the possibility, will be the wise men.3

Remembering Claire Colebrook’s definition of concepts as extremes,4 we can see immediately that Bullett’s so-called wise men have no concepts. They think in averages and avoid extremes, according to an unexamined a priori principle, embodying Klossowski’s “easy-going agnosticism.”5 Here’s another example, this one from William Hope Hodgson’s story, “The Thing Invisible.” The speaker is Carnacki the Ghost Finder: I am as big a skeptic concerning the truth of ghost tales as any man you are likely to meet; only I am what I might term an unprejudiced skeptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things “on principle,” as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact. I view all reported “hauntings” as unproven until I have examined into them, and I am bound to admit that ninety-nine cases in a hundred turn out to be sheer bosh and fancy. But the hundredth!6

It is little wonder that the middle-way wisdom of the former quote should superficially appear to be the key to understanding the genre. But even if the stories don’t really engage with the problem implicit in this scepticism, they do raise it consistently. Hodgson’s ghost finder is the more a posteriori thinker, in comparison with Bullett’s smug narrator; so we find both angles under review in weird fiction. This is a problem in the Deleuzian sense of the word, which is to say an aspect of a concept.7 Taking this into account, weird fiction will often make the lack of a discernible choice between the supernatural and the natural itself supernatural, so that “suspending judgement” amounts to the same thing as a

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selection of the supernatural interpretation. Admitting the possibility of the supernatural is already enough. William James wrote “a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”8 Should any consistent supernaturalism appear in the story, however, it would begin to blur over into Fantasy; so weird fiction must be making a provisional claim about the reader’s reality as such, and not just with respect to some detail or other, while Fantasy falls more solidly on the provision of a condition that is patently unreal, but transposed to another world. If an understanding of the supernatural is what is wanted, rather than familiarity with what is typically thought of as being supernatural (which would only be a list of tropes), then a concept of the supernatural is required. But no concept can be extracted from the lazy neutrality of “wise men” as Bullett describes them.9 What Deleuze and Guattari call a concept is the product of philosophy, distinguished from percepts, which are produced by art, and propositions or models, which are produced by science (see What Is Philosophy?). Concepts are dynamic, immanent consistencies, rather than transcendent categories imposed on reality. The idea of the supernatural may be transcendent, may even be transcendence itself, but an immanent concept of the supernatural is also possible, and, what’s more, it can be found at work in the production of weird fiction as the result of a radical challenge to reality by experience. The discovery of an atrocity may challenge our idea of history or cause us to give certain events a different weight, a different causal background. However, it also can induce a sense of unreality that cannot really be accounted for by resistance alone; it isn’t a refusal to believe, but an inability to establish links between an extant idea of reality and the atrocity. In his Ethics, Spinoza describes the emotion of wonder precisely in terms of this unrelatedness. Wonder is an imagination of a thing in which the Mind remains fixed because this singular imagination has no connection with the others … the Mind, from considering one thing, immediately passes to the thought of another— because the images of these things are connected with one another, and so ordered that one follows the other. This concept, of course, cannot be conceived when the image of the thing is new.10

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This is not an affect for Spinoza, because it is merely the absence of any impetus to move on to another thought, so the Mind is in suspense until something familiar presents itself. However, this is not a “hesitation,” because there is no decision to be made. The new, strange event, the bizarre, expands the domain of experience by introducing something new. It is desired by those who want the new. If it is comprehensible, such that an analyst could anticipate it according to psychoanalytic theory, then it isn’t new. The feeling of unreality arises when experience goes beyond the arbitrary limits of reality, that “common opinion” that Todorov writes about. To watch as our reality changes is to recognize that it is in flux. Todorov is correct insofar as he identifies ambivalence to be an important aspect of weird fiction, but his is only a logical ambivalence about the existence or inexistence of an abstraction; the ambivalence of weird fiction has more to do with the mixed horror and attraction with which people experience becoming, an encounter with the new in familiar everyday places. It is the ambivalence of the experience of fear itself, fear in an ordinary setting. The supernatural cannot account for becoming—nothing can; there is no way to make decisions about the unknown. Rather the supernatural is a confrontation with becoming as a problem for the mundane, of experience as a problem for reality. The mundane must account for all becomings, all changes. The “common opinion” must be an average of all experiences. The disconnectedness of the bizarre event produces the supernatural, not as an alternative accounting system, but as the repetition of that disconnection; in other words, the self-difference of reality, which is the only constant. *** A supposedly impossible event arises out of the uncertainty of becoming and so points back to that uncertainty as an aspect of all becomings. The event in question is so bizarre, so apparently unconnected to any other, the consequences of its being what it seems to be are so dire, that the uncertainty which it otherwise would share with any other event itself becomes threatening. Hume pointed out that, while the sequence of events is perceptible, causality per se is not. We have said, that all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived

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entirely from experience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition, that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavour, therefore, the proof of this last proposition by probable arguments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question.11

That one thing follows another can be perceived, albeit with the assistance of a contraction of moments in the memory, but to perceive this is not to perceive causation, which must be inferred from perceived sequences. One of the challenges writers of weird fiction often face is the creation of an event that is perceptibly anomalous, disconnected in Spinoza’s sense, considered apart from any simple cause for alarm. An approach to weird fiction implying that the supernatural should be understood as a category of indemonstrable scientific propositions, and/or as a crude preliminary approach to a more scientifically psychological fiction, would eliminate the key distinction between weird fiction and science fiction. Science fiction creates art by experimenting with the percepts associated with propositions; Fantasy fiction goes yet another way, using percepts to formulate propositions and then to develop a world from them. As for psychology, the question of the observer’s sanity, that is, whether or not the witness of the supernatural event is hallucinating, does not generally take into account the Romantic tendency of weird fiction to present madness as a form of higher perception. The Romantic problem of insanity always has more to do with disobedience and forbidden knowledge than misunderstanding. In weird fiction, the supernatural is not a proposition. Deleuze derides as “infantile” the positivist tendency to measure concepts “against a ‘philosophical’ grammar that replaces them with propositions extracted from the sentences in which they appear. We are constantly trapped between alternative propositions and do not see that the concept has already passed into the excluded middle. The concept is not a proposition at all.”12 The excluded middle has nothing to do with the namby-pamby middle way of the passage from Bullett quoted above. It refers to any relation of mere negation, such as the typical one dividing the supernatural from the natural. Passing into the excluded middle means discovering a non-negative relationship between logical contraries. If the supernatural is a heretofore unknown aspect of nature, then it is just an aspect of nature that hasn’t yet been properly understood. That makes it a virtual proposition. Hence the supernatural is negated, ceasing to be anything on its own, if we take this

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as a given. Weird fiction often extracts a thrill from the reversal of this negation, so that the supernatural negates the natural instead. A supernatural experience is then supposed to expose the natural order as an illusion arising from hubristic overconfidence in human reason, unnoticed limitations to human sense capacities, wishful thinking that is naive and complacent, or just stupidity. The human coding of nature is shown to be a local artefact, much like human social values. Often in weird fiction, nature as a reliably predictable causality is negated, but the supernatural typically has no independent existence apart from this negation; it appears as a positive element not in its relationship to nature, but in the production of an open-endedness in experience. Where the supernatural appears as a usurping causality, it negates nature and becomes the new nature, negating itself as supernatural here as well by simply altering the limitations to experience instead of opening them. So, as a positive element in the story, the supernatural is weird fiction’s product. *** What relationship is there between the supernatural of weird fiction and the religious supernatural? Religion recruits the supernatural, encoding it, and elaborating it within codes. Historically, western Christianity, which has the most direct influence on weird fiction to date, has always been thoroughly ambivalent about the supernatural in a way that does not involve a strict separation of natural and supernatural, nor any effective uncertainty about the possibility of the supernatural, making it a “lawful” intervention in the natural order by the monarchical God who created that order. Weird fiction is a nineteenth-century extension of Gothic fiction, with its major mode—a pro-Enlightenment, anti-Catholic one which turns superstition into entertainment—and its minor mode, counterinformation to the sweeping rationalism of the Enlightenment, which it often tacitly or explicitly condemns as hubris a warning against the reconstitution of a new set of rigid parameters for experience. The prevailing tendency in weird fiction is towards the production of the supernatural without any clear link to religion. European and American religious establishments monopolize the supernatural and confine it to sanctioned expressions that connect the supernatural as a concept with morality and with the institutional power of the church. This does away with Spinozan wonder, since the supernatural

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event will then appear in connection with dogma. The disconnected supernatural of weird fiction arises, in part, as an answer to this. The effect of disconnecting, right before the reader’s eyes, the supernatural from dogma is a bizarre event, given the expectations of an audience raised with a conventional religious education, just as the disconnection from scientific cause and effect will be bizarre to those who misconceive science as another version of religion. This disconnection is plausible due to an ambivalence found in Plato. The mystical transcendence and cosmic unity of Plato’s empyrean was inherent in reason, rather than in charismatic authority. This means Plato allowed for a kind of “freelance” relation to the divine which, while it could be (and was) appropriated by an institution like the church when it came to extending rationalistic claims for theology, it could also undermine church authority insofar as it required all positions taken to be consistent and set forth the idea that oneness with the divine could arise without official permission. With respect to supernatural folklore and so on, the church was compelled to struggle for mastery of unseen forces and powerful symbols, employing a range of strategies from co-optation of sacred places and holidays, to the appropriation of gods and spirits in subordinated forms (demons, angels, and saints), to the outright suppression of folk religions and speculative experimentation alike. The ambivalence about the supernatural took the form of uncertainty regarding its provenance, since the devil had to be put to work accounting for all rogue usages of the supernatural. This ambivalence persists right through to Kant (see Kant’s remarks on miracles, e.g., in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone). The supernatural of Dante’s Divine Comedy is a feature of a vertical cosmic structure with God at its summit and Satan at its base. There are inconsistencies, however; Dante is a poet, and so not exactly authorized to speak about the divine. His guide is a virtuous pagan at first, then Beatrice Portinari, who likewise is without portfolio from the church. However, the overall effect—particularly for later generations—is to affirm Catholic doctrine from parallel sources, as if the official truth were impossible to avoid for any seeker of truth. The supernaturalism of the Divine Comedy is not meaningfully differentiated from Christian dogma of its time, which is why it really cannot be called weird fiction. However, by the nineteenth century, when weird fiction really comes into its own, the supernatural had already long since acquired another existence, separate from dogma of any kind, and had become much more

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horizontal, which is to say that the supernatural becomes the “beyond” for rational knowledge, a receding frontier, rather than a form of true but inaccessible divine knowledge. It’s as if the mystery that had at one time cowled the truth of religion had been hollowed out, evacuated, and left standing by itself. Infinity oscillates between being an attribute of God and the absence of God. As this takes place, the supernatural, rather than vanish altogether, endures into the nineteenth century as the unassimilable product of the bizarre experience. The supernatural comes to be thought of as “out there,” rather than above and below. It is less and less hidden or forbidden, and more and more simply out of sight, just over the horizon. Morally didactic supernatural stories, like “Grayling,” persist, but the connection between morality and the supernatural is no longer taken for granted, and the connection between even the moral supernatural and Christianity is largely soft-pedalled, or left to be inferred. Dickens’ story “The Signal-Man” has none of the moral uplift of “A Christmas Carol.” If there is a Christian God in “The Signal-Man,” He is unable to make any strong or clear impression on a modern man, a student of natural philosophy, but can only very faintly and imperfectly hint at what is to come, leaving his correspondent to ponder rationally on the meaning of those hints. Even in “A Christmas Carol,” the spirits, which are not designated in any specifically Christian way apart from their association with the holiday, and which have attributes derived from folklore, pagan imagery, and the accounts of early spiritualists or ghost-seers, corroborate Christian ideas as it were from elsewhere. They are not direct emissaries of God. This change in the character of the supernatural must have come about for a variety of reasons, but one of them could be the way Descartes’ radical doubt separates the mysteries of existence from the religious faith that was supposed to ground them, dramatizing in a hybrid way the sort of stark relationship between man and the unknown that will be presented more unilaterally by later thinkers. Descartes leaves us only with a confidence that God’s goodness is sufficiently reliable, but beyond the reach of any direct proof. The supernatural becomes the domain of radical doubt concerning the nature of existence, allowing radical doubt to adopt a new form, and showing us the world as this point of view must have it. From Descartes through Locke, Hume, and Kant, it is possible to trace the development of a certain line of thinking touching on the supernatural, if not specifically dedicated to explaining it. This timeline of thinkers is immanent to the supernatural because these thinkers are in explicit conversation with each other. Even Descartes, insofar as he strove successfully

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to be an inaugurator of a new kind of critical philosophy, sets himself into position; he is not arbitrarily placed at the beginning of this line of thinking merely out of some unexamined academic habit or for convenience. Locke’s thinking touches on the supernatural by centring thought on experience. Much of what Deleuze refers to generally as “the image of thought” was most influentially propagated by Locke in English-speaking countries13; that is, the idea that thought arises from a disinterested and individual will to truth. This is the air of rarefied and altruistic inquiry into the nature of reality that recurs throughout weird fiction; Ambrose, the reclusive urban mystic in Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” Algernon Blackwood’s mystic seekers, Lovecraft’s stoic uncoverers of hidden horrors, and Shirley Jackson’s Dr. Montague are all suffused by this atmosphere. Weird fiction is moreover typically built around the solitary individual who, cut off from institutions and thrown onto their own resources exclusively, confronts an event that seems to belong to what lies beyond the outer limit of human understanding. Seen from this point of view, it might not be too much to call weird fiction a basically Lockean genre, even taking his avowed materialism into consideration; in fact, such a designation would only be in keeping with Locke’s intellectual ubiquity in the US and in English philosophy. “[T]here being many things, wherein we have very imperfect notions, or none at all; and other things, of whose past, present, or future existence, by the natural use of our faculties, we can have no knowledge at all; these, as being beyond the discovery of our natural faculties, and above reason, are, when revealed, the proper matter of faith.”14 The post-Enlightenment idea of the supernatural introduces dialectically a domain intervening between these two poles, faith and reason, by reterritorializing a domain of scepticism which acts as a simulacrum to both alternatives. That is, it is a supernatural domain, one which can be explored rationally but not understood, and believed in without having any direct link to religious faith. Arguably the most important idea for understanding the universe scientifically is causality. Hume, however, throws causality into doubt. Therefore, there is no soundly rational way, according to Hume, to dismiss the supernatural event as an illusion, but more importantly, causal systems that make up the scientific understanding of the world, however consistent they may be, can never really be “nature” for human beings. People will always experience nature as something only putatively causal, according to Hume. This is the opening that admits the bizarre experience.

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Gothic fiction does not arise as a response to the radical uncertainty of Hume, but instead seems to emerge out of a sense that the rational Lockean idea of the cosmos was turning out to be unacceptably limited. Certainly, dogma was taking its revenge on Locke and other thinkers too. That suffocating feeling of impossibility, intolerably confining a fierce desire for higher intensities of experience and discovery—Coleridge was the standard bearer for that kind of boredom—is a key element of Romanticism as well as Gothicism. There is a discrepancy between the extensive fantasies of a vivid imagination and the everyday, which can become acutely painful when all possibility of realization is dismissed out of hand. The disconnectedness of the fantasy from real possibilities becomes acutely painful in this time period of the mid- to late 1700s. It’s as if what had formerly been a Christian hope for an infinite future, guaranteed by an infinitely connected plan, had to find another infinite outlet for itself, but was baulked by science at every turn. While the arguments of Hume didn’t give rise to the Gothic, such arguments as he made were used to justify and understand a reorientation towards the imaginative that had already been taken. This would eventually lead to a discovery of the will as a problematic companion to the reason, in other words, to Romanticism. *** Kant undertook to address Hume’s scepticism, although, as Salomon Maimon pointed out, he did not really manage to rebut Hume. He strives to establish causality as a fundamentally immanent attribute of experience, but he cannot do more than make it a logical necessity. Kant challenges Hume’s denotation of the imagination as the faculty that produces ideas, and Kant’s philosophy plainly segregates and neutralizes the imagination. According to Deleuze,15 in the three critiques there are three different schemes involving the three different Kantian mental faculties. In pure reason, which produces empirical knowledge, the understanding legislates to the reason and the imagination. In practical reason, which is moral, the reason legislates to the understanding and the imagination. Given this apparent rotation among the mental faculties, one might expect judgement, the last procedure, to involve the legislation of the imagination to the other two faculties, but instead Kant describes judgement in the third critique as the free play of all three faculties without legislation. In no case does the imagination legislate to the reason or the understanding; it is at

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best a free partner, but more often it is only there to provide illustrations, helping rational thought without really participating in it. Kant situates the motivation for reasoning beyond reason, and hence could be said to place it in a supernatural position, close to God. However, any supernatural content is basically imaginary for Kant. For Hume, on the other hand, the supernatural is more like a lingering volatility in our concept of nature itself, based on the fact that we can only infer causality. Hume’s atheism made him only more susceptible to this volatility, not less. This sceptical doubt, both with respect to reason and the senses, is a malady, which can never be radically cur’d, but must return upon us every moment, however we may chace it away, and sometimes may seem entirely free from it. ‘Tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses; and we but expose them farther when we endeavour to justify them in that manner. As the sceptical doubt arises naturally from a profound and intense reflection on those subjects, it always encreases, the farther we carry our reflections, whether in opposition or in conformity to it. Carelessness and in-attention alone can afford us any remedy. For this reason I rely entirely upon them.16

(Poe is like Hume in that his justifications also only increase exposures.) This carelessness is perhaps a more candid version of the “wise” surrender recommended by Bullett and Hodgson, above. Hume, like Kant, found in the possibility of this sceptical doubt all the more reason to be suspicious of the imagination. Later in the Treatise, he writes: “Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.”17 Unlike Kant, however, Hume seems to have been less confident in the capacity of the reason to keep the imagination in check—he didn’t even separate them into different faculties. Kant’s instrumental imagination seems to be impotent to act on its own, while for the Romantics the imagination is possessed of a strength more than sufficient to overturn reason, not by rivalling it or negating it, but by acting as its simulacrum. When speaking of miracles, Kant likewise insists that, as miracles can serve no purpose other than to demonstrate the existence of God, and since that existence can be determined by persons rationally without recourse to supernatural reinforcement, a miracle is at best a kind of rap on the knuckles for a poor student. Here he is in agreement with Locke. Were an angel to appear to Kant and deliver a divine message to him, he

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would be compelled to evaluate that message drawing on rational criteria, in order to determine whether or not it was a true message and not merely a nonsensical hallucination, or, perhaps, a diabolical deception, courtesy of Descartes’ evil genius. If he is already in a position to determine rationally what he should do, which is entailed in his being able to evaluate a divine message, then that would make the divine message redundant. This relentless re-connection of the bizarre experience to other ideas produces a disenchantment of the experience, plainly contrasted to the ferocious search for wonder, for the strictly disconnected, among the Romantics. Their quest for the disconnected was minoritarian. An interesting analogue to this argument, coupled with Hume’s idea that causality is inferred, appears in “Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost,” by Grant Allen. I was as little inclined to believe in ghosts as anybody; but Harry seemed to go one degree beyond me in scepticism. His argument amounted in brief to this,—that a ghost was by definition the spirit of a dead man in a visible form here on earth; but however strange might be the apparition which a ghost-­ seer thought he had observed, there was no evidence possible or actual to connect such apparition with any dead person whatsoever. It might resemble the deceased in face and figure, but so, said Harry, does a portrait. It might resemble him in voice and manner, but so does an actor or a mimic. It might resemble him in every possible particular, but even then we should only be justified in saying that it formed a close counterpart of the person in question, not that it was his ghost or spirit. In short, Harry maintained, with considerable show of reason, that nobody could ever have any scientific ground for identifying any external object, whether shadowy or material, with a past human existence of any sort. According to him, a man might conceivably see a phantom, but could not possibly know that he saw a ghost.18

I bring this up with the assumption that Allen knew neither Kant nor Hume that well, if at all, and so this extract may be taken as an independent corroboration of my observation. It is curious in that it makes the ghost into a simulacrum, with the power of the simulacrum’s falseness, rather than a hallucination. There remains a residual Kantian problem with weird fiction. The problem for Hume and Kant would not appear to have anything to do with literary snobbery, but with a much more serious question involving the capacity of the imagination to produce non-empirical objects, and the

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division between imagination and perception. Just as Meillassoux points out the fact that one cannot prove it is possible that perception and reality can differ,19 it is likewise impossible to prove that there is a difference between imagination and perception; I might, for example, be perceiving the objects of my imagination. Does my imagination present objects to me in some way other than by perceptible attributes—sights, sounds, and so on? But if objects in my imagination are perceived, then that means we don’t perceive the difference between imagined objects and real ones, making reality, or imagination, or both, as much an inference as causality is for Hume. As Lovecraft wrote in the opening paragraphs of “The Silver Key”: “all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.”20 Whether he meant to introduce a variation on Kant, or simply misunderstood him, Coleridge was largely responsible for drawing a particular distinction between what he called fancy—that is, the imagination as it is most commonly used, a kind of visualizing or daydreaming ability which produces what Deleuze referred to as representations—and imagination proper, which for Coleridge was like extrasensory perception. He wrote: “Whenever I meet with an ambiguous or multivocal word, without the meaning being shown and fixed, I stand on my guard against a sophism. I dislike this term ‘nature,’ in this place. If it mean the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, it is an inapt term; for reason is supernatural.” As Leslie Brisman, who quotes this passage in her article, goes on to say: Coleridge borrows the term Reason from Kant, but all his own is its association with the Holy Spirit over and against the Understanding and the “natural” faculties of mind. Both the imaginative leap from ordinary sight to perception “into the life of things,” and the leap of faith from matters of the Understanding to the sweet reasonableness of Christian doctrine are leaps energized by the Holy Spirit—leaps of the Spirit.21

Along with Blake, Coleridge evidently regarded inspiration as something like prophecy. He treats the appearance of a new idea in the mind as a kind of supernatural visitation, precisely because the idea appears without connection to any other ideas; art may or may not discuss supernatural things, but its existence is itself the outcome of an unaccountable mental event, the kind that produces an object fully formed, without any conscious

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intention and without bricolage. Even though there may be some psychological accounting for this production out of the unconscious, there can be no accounting for the particular imagery that certain feelings or desires might give rise to; psychological analysis cannot anticipate the art that someone will make. In effect, Coleridge argues that the imagination is able to legislate as a charismatic faculty, and therefore fantastic art is actually mimetic to a higher order of being. Poe did not hesitate to purloin this idea from Coleridge, and via Poe this idea propagates itself throughout weird fiction. The thing that should not be: the existence of something in contradiction to some law of science or other, while it doesn’t bode well for the certainty of those laws, is not necessarily so scandalous. Only where the laws of science are adhered to in an absolute way is the scandal of the thing that should not be really felt in science. The fact that something exists in contradiction to the laws of science is no less necessarily neutral than that something exists lawfully, but there is a tendency for the subjunctive term to slide in a moral direction, so that what should not be according to the known laws of science becomes something evil, even without the addition of any evil action or expressed evil intention. The mere existence of the thing is evil. Why? Because it suggests that all of science is potentially only the careful record of illusory laws. As important as the implications of this unlawful existence are, this existence itself is the primary evil; implications and actions alike are derivative of it. This is why being devoured by a thing that should not be, like Walter Payne Brennan’s slime, is worse than being devoured by things that should be, like wolves or sharks. The devouring is compounded by a kind of basic betrayal, which had it on good authority that no such threats were possible, because nature is intelligible, if not quite good. This is how weird fiction may be distinguished from magical realism, which produces the supernatural without scandal. This scandalous aspect of weird fiction is what I call the bizarre, and discuss in Chap. 3. *** From at least the Enlightenment onwards, the supernatural, when considered at all, has been more or less identified with the limit of empirical knowledge, usually coming into play when absolute claims are made. Empirical knowledge is relative knowledge; the moment we make generalizations we seem to be laying claim to a knowledge beyond all possible experience. Kant will dispense with this problem easily, by pointing out

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that generalizations are formal elements of mind and that they are rationally entailed; but this explanation does not account for the presence of these elements in the mind, or the divide between the mind and any other object of contemplation. Empirical knowledge seems to run up against a difficulty when it comes to establishing stable identities for things, not only with respect to the complexity of nature. The supernatural could also become a name for this difficulty—the failure of identity to close entirely. The sublime could be a way to conceive of the supernatural, which comes up in connection with the sublime over and over again, beginning with Burke at the latest. But again, calling the sublime supernatural adds nothing of value, although we may see how very much more directly supernatural literature can call up this experience. For Kant, the true object of the sublime is the valiantly struggling mind, as it tries to understand what exceeds its capacity to experience. Kant is dauntless in the face of stupidity and exhibits an apparently boundless will to affirm reason. Horror tests the will to affirm; for Kant this can be no test, because reason as such cannot fail. The individual person can fail reason, but reality cannot—that’s all. However, Kant’s rational evangelism maintains that reason must pursue its own end, which lies beyond nature, and which the sublime prepares us to understand. This is another aspect of the way Kant necessarily posits the supernatural, if only as a placeholder, the beyond of reason and imagination both, which is also its telos. That this beyond is, for Kant, really only the outer boundary of reason, and not some other domain of its own, is not a distinction that writers like Coleridge seem inclined to retain from Kant. [T]his idea of the supersensible, which we can no further determine … is awakened in us by means of an object whose aesthetical appreciation strains the imagination to its utmost bounds … a feeling for the sublime in nature cannot well be thought without combining therewith a mental disposition which is akin to the moral.22

In a short dialogue called “The Power of Words,” Edgar Allan Poe, most likely drawing on Coleridge, transcribes a conversation between Oinos, a spirit newly arrived in the afterlife, and Agathos, a predeceased friend whom he meets there. This dialogue illustrates the disjunctive synthesis of knowledge and unknowing.23 Knowledge is presented here as reactive; it is a territory of information and theories, outraged at intervals by new discoveries. Thinking, learning, and discovering are, on the other

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hand, active; they deterritorialize knowledge, which reconstitutes itself in a reterritorialization of knowledge now including the new thing, to be studied and memorized in a revised catechism just like the old things were. Another way of stating this would be to say that we can conceive of a relationship between the unknown and the known that is not negative; one in which both coexist without cancelling each other. As Isabelle Stengers noted in Cosmopolitics One, science is also the creator of unknowns. The requirement to be able to rediscover the same, here or elsewhere, the same “man,” the same moral law, the same divisions between truth and fiction, between nature and culture, would be nothing more than an innocent obsession if the statements it engenders didn’t have the terrible ability to become code words, ready-made, migrating unimpeded from the philosophical search for fundamentals to the claim of the right to assert the universal anywhere and everywhere. … I have a very different kind of delocalization in mind: to bring into existence the experience of here and there.24

Weird fiction senses the reaction of knowledge towards this universal levelling and moves against it by emphasizing its vulnerability to further deterritorializations; if the story is major, then this is a terrible threat—if it is minor, then it is a tantalizing new opportunity. An ambivalence will remain, since it is clearly through these deterritorializations that the territory of science is enriched, but we can see that Poe has already anticipated the problem of progress, by insisting that there is no limit to the number of possible deterritorializations of a territory, no perfect defence against deterritorialization. Science often vigorously affirms theories subsequently shown to be wrong, which ironizes the idea of the scientifically explained world; for some, like Johann Georg Hamann, this makes religion seem more sure, since it does not change or seems not to, or changes in order to seem the same. For some, the volatility of science is a glorious liberation, while for others it is a terrifying plunge into an abyss. Not infrequently, it is both. In his story, “The Lurking Fear,” Lovecraft’s materialist-detective narrator experiences terror: [S]o mixed with wonder and alluring grotesqueness, that it was almost a pleasant sensation. Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over the roofs of strange dead cities toward the grinning

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chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to shriek wildly and throw oneself voluntarily along with the hideous vortex of dream-doom into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn.25

Weird fiction stops short usually of positing anything, or what is posited is only provisional; it will gesture towards chaos but only to alarm us about the uncertainty of reason; then it will stop. Reason is not actually critiqued, only complacent rationalism. So, instead of a judgement between the supernatural and the natural, weird fiction is better characterized by the ambivalence of affect, invoked above in the phrase “alluring grotesqueness.” The weird fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is especially deep because it is at this time that the supernatural achieves a breadth of ambivalence that can fully encompass both science and mysticism. Writers like Machen, Blackwood, and Lovecraft are able to include scientific explanations that do nothing to banish the mysterious, as well as mystical flourishes that do not invalidate science. This disjunctive synthesis already exceeds the scope of the structuralist analysis that comes after it and fails to explain it. The structuralist idea of the fantastic depends on a propositional use of the supernatural as a provable condition. The concept of the supernatural is never involved in the judgement respecting its existence, which means that reading literature involving the supernatural with this judgement in mind will always leave us in the exuded middle, while nevertheless insisting that a judgement is possible, that all weird fiction can do is assert the existence of the supernatural speculatively, leaving to the audience a decision it can’t justify, and which that audience normally never bothers making anyway. The reason the explained supernatural doesn’t work at all has less to do with some judgement on the supernatural that it makes and more to do with the absence of that tension of difference which, in weird fiction, is often both as radical as possible and made more pure by being equivocal, indifferent to historical identities. There’s more going on in the unresolved supernatural than a mere hesitation for effect. Nothing is missing except the justification, but if the absence of explanation is basically an absence of anything at all, then we’re assuming that nothing inexplicable can exist: no explanation means there’s nothing there. But the whole point of the weird tale is that something is there sometimes, even when there is no explanation and can be none. This can include events which have only pseudoexplanations, these being so lame, sketchy, dim, or just

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transparently wrong, that their inadequacy deepens the sense of inexplicability and the story becomes an account of the way people will embrace any answer just to avoid reflecting on an event. *** Returning to the opening of “The Silver Key,” the idea that “all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other”26 suggests that materialism is no less superstitious than idealism is. Here, Lovecraft comes independently very near Salomon Maimon’s critique of Kant, maintaining that thoughts cannot be true or false, because the mind can only know its own representations. For Lovecraft, the brain is materially affected more or less without mediation, as in Locke, but the interpretation is however always more or less arbitrary. The decentralization of humanity in the cosmos is a consequence of the adjustments to a common world-view that science demands. This demand is political and methodological. In giving us an idea of the scale and age of the cosmos, science affirms the human ability to discover reality even as it minimizes—in some ways—humanity’s position in the scheme of things. The cosmos of modern science is radically unlike the cosmos as understood by Christian tradition, although Christianity does continue to adapt. Weird fiction draws on the way the development of our knowledge, in showing us the extent of our former ignorance, tends to undermine our confidence in our current, transient understanding. But if the cosmos can’t be both intelligible and not, does that mean intelligibility exists, but not for us? In Stephen King, and elsewhere in modern horror fiction, the inability to prove the supernatural becomes itself supernatural. The menace is deliberately withholding evidence of its own existence. An especially good example of this is Philip MacDonald’s story “Private—Keep Out!” (see Chap. 5) in which the secrets of the universe actively defend themselves by deleting from existence those who learn them. But as long as we adhere to an idea of truth, we continue to crash on the rocks of the simulacrum; in stories like “The Small People,” Thomas Ligotti turns the cosmos into a complete simulacrum, recruiting the falseness of a fictional story as confirmation. ***

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One attribute of minor literature is that it seeks out lines of flight.27 For all that there is a strong majoritarian-conservative strain in weird fiction; this description should contribute to a better understanding of the tendency many have to classify Kafka’s fiction as weird. Kafka is far more radical than writers like Blackwood or Machen; however, the description above fits them all—only some more loosely than others. The impulse to escape is present in all, if more tentative, more signifying, for Machen or Blackwood. For them, the escape is often transformed into a return to a better, prelapsarian condition, the old ground of being, albeit a problematic one—an idea that is not absent in Kafka, but endlessly problematic for him in a way that it just isn’t for them. For writers of weird fiction, the supernatural emerges as a means to find the simple way out that signifies as little as possible. Signification here basically constitutes another barrier to escape; so the supernatural becomes in its vagueness an escape that itself escapes signification. It isn’t that the supernatural means whatever the reader wants it to mean, since the reader never has to make a choice, and there is nothing at stake in the choice as far as the reader’s encounter with the story is concerned, but rather that the supernatural is precisely unmeaning as an active element in the story. What the reader wishes for is the supernatural as that very openness. The haunted house is deterritorialized in both space and time. Discovering its meaning, which is to say, the reason it is haunted, as in countless tales like Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Haunters and the Haunted,” is often supposed to diffuse the haunting, but Shirley Jackson’s brilliant rebuttal to this idea, in The Haunting of Hill House, shows again how no amount of understanding ever banishes the unknown. At the opening of his connected series of short stories, In Search of the Unknown, Robert W. Chambers writes, via a transparent narrator, that he is “striking a blow at the old order of things” simply by writing his story.28 Much of the appeal of the supernatural is taken for granted, but the key seems to be this idea of striking a blow at the old order of things. That idea is not necessarily minor; the majority readily presents itself as striking a blow at the old order. The minor version is that this is the old order, right now. An old order is a world stripped of imaginative possibilities by stupid Statist, social, or religious rationalistic complacency without actual thought. The growing incredulity of the narrator is more than a ploy to make him seem reliable; it also presents the nonsupernatural or ordinary way of looking at things as a form of contagious complacency possessing an inertia of its own, which will reform itself after any violation. This will be a suppressive reterritorialization, where the new is cancelled and denied,

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rather than being assimilated. Weird fiction, particularly in the nineteenth century, relies entirely on this conception of reality as the product of a naive consensus, a form of denial. In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze writes that “the word law is itself compromised by its moral origin … the most serious error of theology consists precisely in its having disregarded and hidden the difference in nature between obeying and knowing, in having caused us to take principles of obedience for models of knowledge.”29 Chaos is understood as nature acting up in an immoral rebellion against order. Nature now with a will of its own, as opposed to nature as reason—but chance is mechanism in absence of intention, the opposite of chaos. Think of the disparagement of chance in supernatural fiction, where the bizarre event must somehow resist the imputation of coincidence: hence the importance of destiny, to be discussed in Chap. 4. The strikingly unfamiliar aspect of the supernatural is nature seen as living, and not subordinated to a transcendent will or reason. The moral element confused into the epistemological question has a counterpart in the tendency to cling to epistemological doubt as a weapon to use against a rationalism, which seems to some as if it existed solely to demoralize a demeaned and hopeless mankind. Where in Gothic fiction there was a double trend, towards moral demonstration on one hand, and towards the depiction of atrocities on the other, weird fiction gives its readers both those things-which-should-not-be while maintaining the possibility of escape from a cosmos that is fully understood. The possibility of the supernatural generates terror in readers, to one or another extent, by telling them they have more freedom than they guess. Weird villains are magnetic in part because, in carrying out their atrocities, in a way they are congratulating readers for not abusing their freedom as the villain does. The conservative strain in weird fiction amounts to the transformation of the ordinary life of the status quo into what looks like a deliberate choice, by opening up fantastically the possibilities for alternatives—often where none exist in reality. *** In The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll distinguishes between the fantastic, which is ambiguous, and horror, in which the naturalistic explanation must be abandoned for a supernatural one.30 What is an explanation, why do we want or need one? Is it an intense desire for knowledge that drives

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us, really, or isn’t it rather an intense desire to escape the regime of explanations that we’ve been trapped in since birth, and isn’t the point less the supernatural manifestation in its particularities—since the supernatural encounter could have the same effect were it to take other forms, while, for example, a love story involving different characters becomes a different love story—but rather the scandal of the supernatural as an event that is radically unprovided for, uncoded, much more so than a natural catastrophe? The problem isn’t the lack of an explanation, the problem is explanation itself. Deleuze and Guattari see society as a system of flows that have been organized, or “coded.” Uncoded flows are the “terrifying nightmare,”31 because they are the hidden, nameless subversion of the world. All the nebulous enemies of the status quo are “terrorists” in this sense of the word “terror.” Declared and recognized rivals are still part of the status quo. They present a danger to whoever has the upper hand, but no danger to the arrangement that gives people the upper hand. The enemy of the whole arrangement may be proclaimed a “witch” or a “communist, or a “terrorist,” but they may not operate outside the arrangement which labels them. One way to understand supernatural horrors as such is to see them in connection with this idea of the uncoded flow, which is not a matter of allegorizing weird fiction politically, but of abstracting to a common movement, and finding the supernatural in politics. Those who suffer under extant codes may want to see them rewritten in their own favour, or may instead want the uncoded, an end to codes, or they may want to lose themselves in such a profusion of codes as to achieve an effectively continuous flight. But where do you find that? The minor is in the major—the uncoded flow begins in the codes. The uncoded flow beneath religion, science, ideology is weird. The supernatural, magic, can be an uncoded flow only if it is not codified. Theology and occultism codify the supernatural. On the other hand, without codification, the supernatural is not thinkable, because only what is coded has a name and can be included in our thinking as something other than a beyond. Thinking starts with a break in code that’s already in place. So the supernatural, rather than being the equivalent to a primordial mythic chaos from which the slightly less murky structures of theology emerge, is more likely to appear in a story in connection with persistent yet derelict theological notions, or with illegitimate, “freelance” speculation, produced as someone, somewhere, tries to find a way out of the codes. Amulets and astrological charts are simulacra of diagrams. They may be

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uncoded flows of signs, or archaic codes. Working with a code that has been officially abandoned can give it a line of flight, and can make it minor, just as the archaic feudal symbol of the castle becomes minor in Kafka’s novel. One of the most important secrets of the status quo is that it actually must change all the time in order to maintain its position. It takes a great deal of continuous effort to maintain the illusion that the status quo is static, so bringing back elements that have been laboriously eliminated can be seen as a counter-effort, revealing how much has changed, and the work of suppression that hides the changes. In some cases, although not in all weird fiction, the whole point is to demonstrate the decodification of the supernatural. For weird fiction, ontology might be better understood not as the well-known conflict between the materialists and the idealists, but rather as a conflict between those who want to codify reality and those who wish to escape codification by turning to the uncoded supernatural as an antidote. *** The bizarre produces the supernatural as if it were a priori. Nature is approached as if it were made up of representations, which can elide particular differences in transcendent identifications. If the supernatural is a concept, and hence positive, then it would have to be possible to conceive of a relationship between the supernatural and the natural that distinguishes them through difference rather than negation: the supernatural as the simulacrum of nature. Everything that exists is true, which is to say that it can finally be reduced to the identical. Kant tries to get around this problem by affirming that, while simulacra exist, they do not destroy truth; on the contrary, simulacra arise because certain truths, like God, the Soul, and the World, while they are true, have their truth only negatively, as limits to thought, so any positive thought, any actual content for these purely formal ideas, must be a simulacrum. Hegel’s manoeuvre is to enlarge the circle of identity to incorporate contradiction as part of the true and identical so that the negative afterimage remains as a constitutive part of the truth as it develops triumphantly. The supernatural rises again in an atmosphere of scepticism about this. It doesn’t seem as though the untrue is the passive nothing that it is being made out to be, but possesses some untrue life of its own, which it illegitimately exerts to affirm itself.

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If consciousness is transitive, it is the alteration of state or condition resulting from encounters. So this is not like the distinct, fixed subject. Think of Bergson’s images, which are relations between subject and object, rather than properties belonging to one or the other or both as divided by an in-itself. The image is not thought of in terms of an opposition between truth and illusion, but, as Hume pointed out, as a process involving the movement from an illusion to a better illusion. It seems that, for Hume, any idea is just an as-yet undetected simulacrum, that which can only be discovered as being something other than what you thought it was. Instead of subjects and objects, we find only simulacra on either side. Knowledge for Hume might well be only disillusionment, the knowledge that an illusion is an illusion. The phenomenon is a manifestation of something beyond. Weird fiction is conservative in its reliance on phenomena, but liberating to the extent that it relies on simulacra. In The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale, Dorothea Van Mücke describes the “aesthetic delirium” of the fantastic tale32; this is the delirium of the simulacrum. It comes on as the idea of representation crumbles. Delirium arises when one is unable to resolve contradictions to first principles. The supernatural event is delirious insofar as it is an event that does not abide by first principles like causality. However, it is not a hallucination. When writers become aware that writing is simulacrum and quit trying to write “the truth,” but instead write real simulacra, then literature becomes more sophisticated and self-aware, more minor. This would be the aspect immanent in many kinds of literature, actualized by the gentrification of weird fiction. In weird fiction this self-consciousness is destiny, and the bizarre is the point of realization.

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Notes 1. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975; page 41. 2. Ibid., page 160. 3. Bullett, Gerald. The Street of the Eye and Nine Other Tales. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924; page 5. 4. Colebrook, Clare. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge Press, 2002; pages 15–16. 5. Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. London: Continuum Press, 2005; page 169. 6. Hodgson, William Hope. The Casebook of Carnacki—Ghost Finder. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2006; page 16. 7. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; pages 63–64. 8. James, William. Writings 1878–1899. New York: Library of America, 1992; page 649. 9. Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books, 2001; page 173. 10. de Spinoza, Benedictus. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; page 532. 11. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; page 115. 12. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; page 22. 13. For more on the central importance of Locke particularly for the thirteen colonies and the US subsequently, see Aids to Reflection, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 14. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New  York: Penguin Classics, 1997; page 612. 15. See Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 16. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; page 144. 17. Ibid., page 174. 18. Allen, Grant. Strange Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 1884; page 321–322. 19. See Meillassoux, Quentin. Time Without Becoming. Mimesis International, 2014. 20. Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness. Sauk City, WI: Arkham Press, 1964; page 408. 21. Brisman, Leslie. “Coleridge and the Supernatural.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 21, no. 2, 1982, pp. 123–159. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25600346; pages 124–125.

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22. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. New  York: Haffner Press, 1951; pages 108–109. 23. “Agathos.—… Not even here is knowledge a thing of intuition. For wisdom, ask of the angels freely, that it may be given! Oinos.—But in this existence, I dreamed that I should be at once cognizant of all things, and thus at once happy in being cognizant of all. Agathos.—Ah, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge! In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed; but to know all, were the curse of a fiend. Oinos.—But does not The Most High know all? Agathos.—That (since he is The Most Happy) must be still the one thing unknown even to HIM. Oinos.—But, since we grow hourly in knowledge, must not at last all things be known? Agathos.—Look down into the abysmal distances!— attempt to force the gaze down the multitudinous vistas of the stars, as we sweep slowly through them thus—and thus—and thus! Even the spiritual vision, is it not at all points arrested by the continuous golden walls of the universe?—the walls of the myriads of the shining bodies that mere number has appeared to blend into unity? Oinos.—I clearly perceive that the infinity of matter is no dream. Agathos.—There are no dreams in Aidenn—but it is here whispered that, of this infinity of matter, the sole purpose is to afford infinite springs, at which the soul may allay the thirst to know which is for ever unquenchable within it—since to quench it, would be to extinguish the soul’s self.”— Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales and Sketches, Volume 2: 1843–1849. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000; page 1212. 24. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics, Volume I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010; page 62. 25. Lovecraft, H. P. Dagon, and Other Macabre Tales. Sauk City, WI: Arkham Press, 1965; page 195. 26. Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness. Sauk City, WI: Arkham Press, 1964; page 408. 27. “[I]t isn’t a question of a well-formed vertical movement toward the sky or in front of one’s self … but of intensely going ‘head over heels and away,’ no matter where, even without moving; it isn’t a question of liberty as against submission, but only a question of a line of escape, or, rather, of a simple way out, ‘right, left, or in any direction,’ so long as it is as little signifying as possible.”—Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986; page 6. 28. “Because it all seems so improbable—so horribly impossible to me now, sitting here safe and sane in my own library—I hesitate to record an episode which already appears to me less horrible than grotesque. Yet, unless

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this story is written now, I know I shall never have the courage to tell the truth about the matter—not from fear of ridicule, but because I myself shall soon cease to credit what I now know to be true. Yet scarcely a month has elapsed since I heard the stealthy purring of what I believed to be the shoaling undertow—scarcely a month ago, with my own eyes, I saw that which, even now, I am beginning to believe never existed. As for the harbor-master—and the blow I am now striking at the old order of things—But of that I shall not speak now, or later.”—Chambers, Robert W. In Search of the Unknown. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1904; page 1. 29. Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001; page 106. 30. Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990; page 145. 31. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; pages 140, 164. 32. Van Mücke, Dorothea. The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003; page 140.

CHAPTER 3

The Bizarre

Weird fiction arises when bizarre events produce the supernatural as an opening in experience onto the infinite, where experience has been considered to be a closed set of finite possibilities, and where this supernatural takes on an aspect of destiny. The bizarre is not exhausted by weird fiction or by the question of the supernatural, but, as a genre, weird fiction is constituted primarily by the bizarre, because the bizarre event is the only effective means of production for the supernatural. The bizarre in weird fiction answers a reader’s desire to escape the limitations of the ordinary by indicating the infinity of experience from within the ordinary. Weird fiction brings the bizarre into the ordinary without therefore banishing the ordinary: it maintains that there is still only one world. This creates a line of flight, an escape route, connecting the ordinary to the new and unexpected, without losing this world; that enlarged version of this world is where the story destines you to go. The maintenance of the involvement with this world is essential, because it is through this, as much if not more than through vicarious identification with characters, that the reader is brought into the jeopardy which is the key affect of the weird fiction. The re-enchantment of this world that weird fiction creates depends on this. The supernatural explanation can also be a closed one, while the scientific explanation can, and perhaps properly must, be an open one. The question in weird fiction is whether an event genuinely throws a closed world open to desires that demand more of the world. I will use the term “bizarre” to describe such events. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Cisco, Weird Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8_3

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The minor exists inside the major and makes use of it, its language for example, for minor purposes. The bizarre should not be conflated with the minor, which is the larger of the two categories; the bizarre in weird fiction is the way the minor is viewed by the major, as well as the way the major is viewed by the minor. In those stories in which the weird menace looks back on the mundane world from its own point of view, both viewpoints may be present—this depends on just how developed the alien viewpoint is. Most weird fiction is not as formally strange and innovative as the minor literature of writers like Kafka or Beckett. Both the absurd and the weird tale situate bizarre events in ordinary settings and circumstances, but the absurd produces common sense as nonsense, typically without any alternative, while the weird tends more to imply an absconded limiting sensibility that points towards an idea of infinite experience. The absurd’s infinity is more circular; its line of flight makes use of extant boundaries, while the weird tale reifies a boundary while finding a clear line of flight tangentially across it. Kafka’s mystic, when he tells the seeker to “go over” and nothing else, gives the seeker the most perfect answer and leaves him with nowhere to go, because the seeker understands too late to take the first step, and so ends up standing still, mind running in circles within the instruction to “go over.” Weird fiction will forego understanding in order actually to “go over,” but without becoming Fantasy, remaining within the self-difference of reality. The characters “go over” without realizing it, and only realize afterwards that they had been warned. For weird fiction, the bizarre and the ordinary would have to be differentials from which values arise, rather than values themselves, so we have to distinguish between the ordinary, which is a kind of probabilistic idea of things as they usually are (an average) and more empirical, and the normal, which is a more normative or even moral idea of the way things ought to be, amalgamating the ordinary with a value judgement (i.e., every day should be normal). This question leads us in the direction of a commingling or confusion of judgements and moral values with empirical statements, although then we have to ask whether or not there isn’t already some moral element in empirical statements, like the way the truth can either mean the current state of our tested knowledge or what is untainted by dishonesty. In this study, the bizarre should not be understood as a subjective response to an event of a type not familiar to that subject, but as a mode of experience. The word “reality” here is nowhere near as scientific as it is

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moral. Science, for the most part, has no need of an overarching idea of reality towards which it must strive: it can explore and connect up localities while allowing the reality of averages to take shape accordingly. The quarrel between the bizarre and science diminishes when we eliminate a dogmatism that is largely inessential to both sides. Weird fiction often denies the existence of a whole cosmos, an overarching order; there is outsideness, but only relatively. Lovecraft, for instance, is looking for the maximum degree of outsideness to make the bizarre as acute as possible. The intensity of the outsideness indirectly shows the averageness of the ordinary, by implying that it can be escaped only by such extremes. Weird fiction develops in response to a suffocating feeling that everything “inside” has been explained and entertains a desire to crack open a closed world, wanting openness as such, perhaps as an extended field of possibilities for the realization of desire. The line of flight, according to Deleuze and Guattari, should always signify as little as possible, which means the destination of that flight is not anywhere or anything in particular. If that destination were particular, then the flight would not be a flight at all, only a transition to another pre-registered position within the territory. What really matters is not the destination, but the fact of flying away from the territory. So, instead of fixating on the destination, one should fixate on the departure, the way out, towards anything, towards the unknown. Weird fiction manages this by making the departure, rather than the arrival at the destination, the destiny of the characters. It is your destiny, as a character in weird fiction, to depart, to become weird. What that is, however, is more than can be said. The whole point of the story is establishing to the satisfaction of the reader that reference to that weird destination, or destiny, which tends to point towards something that cannot be described, is not a cop-out, but a thrilling, if alarming, discovery. *** Kristeva writes that horror involves a confrontation with the Other1, and Deleuze writes that, in general, the Other is an idea based on lack. That is to say, the Other is whatever lacks sameness to me; it is only a negative thing. But to be a discovery, that weird destination, or Other, has to at least seem to the reader to be more than just the absence of the ordinary. It has to seem like something real, on its own terms, whatever those may be. However, if those terms are spelled out too distinctly, then the story becomes Fantasy and shifts its setting out of the reader’s world. I

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believe this accounts for the vagueness or ambivalence that some attribute to the supernatural in these stories, but what confronts the reader is not a question about the reality of the supernatural in the story (which may arise, but which is not essential to the genre), but a question about the relation between the story and the reader’s own world. While Deleuze insists that the negative is only what does not exist, and that what is based on lack is negative, it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that Deleuze does without the idea of the Other; there is room in his philosophy for an idea of the Other that is not based on lack, but on difference. The relationship of difference is what he calls disjunctive synthesis, bringing things together on the basis of their differences rather than their similarities. Considered as something radically Other than the onlooker, does the horrific apparition challenge that idea of lack or only express it? Whatever lacks proof is not necessarily lacking in being. Lacking being is not the same as a lack of proof of being, unless we maintain that nothing can exist which cannot be proven to exist. Can we deny existence to the inexplicable without being compelled to regard the ability to conceive of something explicably as an aspect of the existence of a thing? If that’s true, then imaginary objects would be real, in some sense. If nothing inexplicable can exist, then existence and explicability can be conflated to some extent, and therefore conceivability would be reality already, and we would be back with the ontological proof of God. But if something can exist without that existence entailing provability—not just availability to proof, which would give us a loophole for what is too small, too large, too faint, and so on, to be subjected to proof testing given current conditions—but the possibility of being proven under any conditions—considering that proof necessarily entails a cause and effect demonstration—how can something exist without being part of cause and effect? If we agree with Spinoza that nature is one causal continuum, and that nature is all that exists, then to be outside causality is to be outside nature and therefore not to exist. Hence, what is Other to nature would have to be nothing, unless it were only an Other from the point of view of an inadequate idea of nature, and therefore a hitherto unknown part of nature, and therefore not really Other. Other for us, but not as such. If we argue that conceivability is an aspect of existing, then we seem to lose the distinction between ideas and things. If we argue that it is not, then we seem to fall into denying any real link between conceiving and being. The bizarre is whatever does not fit into our scheme of being, and it is introduced in order to frighten us with the idea that there may be no link

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between explicability and being. That disconnection, however, also thrills us with the possibilities for departure from this rigid scheme of the ordinary. *** Often, the apparition is roughly accounted for by religious dogma; this would include spectral victims, like the little girl in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” or the owner of the face in “The Face in the Mirror” by Helen Mathers, as well as figures of moral instruction, such as the phantoms that visit Scrooge. However, there are also much more cryptic apparitions, like the pursuing terror of M.R. James’ “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad,” or the theophanic presences in Blackwood’s “The Willows.” These other apparitions do not convey a message, they are the message. Dickens’ signal-man in particular is tormented precisely to the extent that he cannot manage to extract a message, a signal, from the figure he sees, apart from the minimal one—someone is doomed. “The Signal-Man” is a story that marks a transition, not so much for Dickens personally, but in weird fiction as a genre, towards a broader field that includes both the dogma-spectre of morals and the enigmatic spectre. Certainly E.T.A.  Hoffmann’s grotesque creations and de Maupassant’s Horla and the living furniture in “Who Knows?” are instances of the enigmatic apparition. A certain offshoot of weird fiction, which veers towards science fiction, involves the discovery of rationalistic principles underlying the supernatural, so that science explicitly replaces morality as the basis for explanations. However, it is possible that there may be a conflation of science and/or psychology with morality—this varies from story to story. In some other cases, the rationalistic explanation is a means to achieving a new and broader sense of the unknown. In magical realism, on the other hand, the bizarre event is not challenging; following Cervantes, the magical realist fiction begins with a much more fluid idea of reality, where weird fiction needs a solid reality to deterritorialize. Unusual things happen in magical realist stories, but nothing of importance is typically at stake when it comes to the reality of these things; the story has other interests. Philosophy both stipulates and struggles with a divide between experience and knowledge: the question of generalization from what happens to me at one or a few times, to what normally happens for most people, most of the time, to what must be true for all people, all the time. The inexplicability of the apparition, the indescribability of the bizarre event that

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forestalls any representation, seems to preserve the experience in its indeterminate, open condition, protecting it from reduction to an element in a schematic of the ordinary. The inexplicable apparition, such as the piratical sounds that haunt the former home of Mr. Deluse in Ambrose Bierce’s story, “The Isle of the Pines,” opens circumstances outwards in the direction of an undefined infinity, and weird fiction depends on the sense the reader gets of the actuality of this infinity. Mr. Deluse may be haunted by some past crime, but that doesn’t explain why, in his case, this memory, or perhaps this guilt, should become audible to others who know nothing about it, or what it is in reality itself that makes it responsive to the need to reveal the criminal, especially in the absence of any discussion of a transcendent God. The argument about the supernatural is impossible to conclude, and weird fiction depends on this, not because we want to hesitate, but because it’s that infinity, that openness, that we want from it. Wilkie Collins wrote that, having finished a story, the writer of weird tales “returns to the shadow from which he has emerged, and leaves the opposing forces of incredulity and belief to fight the old battle over again, on the old ground”.2 The territory of weird fiction is the shadow bordering on that old ground, rather than the ground itself, which means that the writer and reader of weird fiction may both look past the hoary contradiction of incredulity and faith to the shadow, which is what counts, and is really what is desired anyway. While considering the supernatural is indispensable in a discussion of weird fiction, no progress can be made through this impasse. The shadow is the only ground. The supernatural is the product, complete with disagreements, and indeterminacies. These are its most desirable features. *** Returning again to Spinoza’s definition of wonder: “Wonder is the conception (imagination) of anything, wherein the mind comes to a stand, because the particular concept in question has no connection with other concepts”.3 For Spinoza, wonder is not an inability to form a judgement between two candidates for truth, let alone any kind of battle; rather it is a recognition of what is new (or new to the one who encounters it, anyway), and hence, what can’t be judged according to any precedent except perhaps that of novelty per se, which cannot be a category, strictly speaking: “[T]he mind,” he continues, “from the contemplation of one thing,

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straightway falls to the contemplation of another thing, namely, because the images of the two things are so associated and arranged, that one follows the other. This state of association is impossible, if the image of the thing be new”.4 This is the bizarre: the unrelated new, arising under conditions of highlighted ordinariness. We wonder at the concept of the supernatural, but in effect any concept not connected to any other concept will induce wonder. A novelty is not recognized by its own characteristics, but by shock, which has no content apart from shock, since it is that “stand” the mind comes to. So the bizarre can’t emerge from some preestablished idea of the supernatural; the supernatural is the repercussion of the unaccountability and disconnectedness of the bizarre—its product, not its source. It is true that weird tales depend on stock menaces like vampires and ghosts. The novelty appears in a disguise, which only makes believe the ghost is familiar, but the manner of its manifestation is often an occasion for bizarre originality. The ghostly presence in “The House and The Brain” by Bulwer-Lytton is connected, somehow, to a sort of device. The device re-endows the familiar ghost with unfamiliarity, by throwing the door open again; ghosts, yes, but somehow technological, or hermetically scientific, this time. The bizarre message from outside, the content of which is simply that there is an outside, is masked as a familiar old symbolic menace. Even if the ostensible message is moral comeuppance or a rebuke to human hubris, or some roughly intelligible plan like the Horla’s (see de Maupassant), the provenance of that message—the bare fact of any message at all from the outside or from an outsider—is the really important content, because that’s what causes the shock. It’s that shock that makes the story weird, rather than the familiar or intelligible message. The weird tale often gives us the major in a form that is scandalous in major terms, and insofar as it does this—see Joanna Russ, for instance, in her rehabilitation of vampires in “My Dear Emily”—it would be minor literature. *** In Cosmopolitics, Isabelle Stengers writes5 that it may not be possible to demonstrate that two events are the same. This makes scientific repeatability a problem. Scientists, according to Stengers, might reckon with this problem by conceiving their task as the registration of the self-assertion of

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a thing or an event, in such a way that other people are obligated to acknowledge it also. The assertion, in that case, must be part of the event. Weird fiction posits encounters in which the social obligation to accept a person’s earnest testimony to an event commonly considered impossible conflicts with the obligation to affirm the reality of only certain well-­ defined generalities about what can and cannot happen. These generalities are taken to be the bases of experience, but, since there is no standard experience, what general basis for experience as such can there be? Deleuze and Guattari speak of “pure experience,” but they aren’t talking about some ideal or standard experience; instead, “pure experience” refers to the possibility of grounding that is immanent in all experience, and which is pure only insofar as it is not yet territorialized by means of a recognition or a representation. This purity is not a moral purity. Territory does not exhaust being. Simondon, whose work was saluted by Deleuze, wrote: “The individual … is not all of the being”.6 That extra something beyond the individual thing is the ground of pure experience that becoming entails. Weird fiction produces breaks in the territory of individuated identities, the regime of norms, and identifies what emerges with the supernatural. However, this supernaturalism, in its novelty, is not just a repetition of the same, a reiteration of norms in the form of personified moral forces belonging to a familiar moral scheme, unless the story is major literature. Even then, the supernatural in its morally didactic, major form is nevertheless pretty unruly: the demons are a little bit too much fun, the enticements of witchcraft are too appealing, the other side has a certain dark glamour, a certain point to make. The supernatural is morally policed in order to make it an instrument of further policing, but just as the policeman resembles the criminal, the moral supernatural necessarily brings with it a carnivalesque prospect of uprooted values. This is one of the reasons why it is possible to steer weird fiction in a minor direction. Pure experience is the possibility of a grounding for an experience. It is not a constructed foundation whose lines we can extrapolate in a Kantian sort of way, because grounding something changes it.7 The pure experience is the moment of becoming, which is not consciously available; consciousness is always a step behind becoming. “[Becoming] always eludes the present”.8 The experience of art is an affect. Pure experience in art is the moment it affects us, changes us; that affect is pure in its own moment. Identities subsume and interpret affects. So when art affects us, there is an experience, a flash of pure affect, and then a reterritorialization occurs in which that affect is interpreted. The moment of becoming, when

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something is no longer A and not yet B, is the moment when an affect, which is pure to the extent that it arises from outside any identity, is encountered. The experience itself (which is different from identity or subject) is independent in such encounters; it is without connections, and hence a wonder, according to Spinoza. The pure here means an intensity prior to name or category. Or is the supernatural of the weird tale already a recognition? This depends on whether or not the supernatural in weird fiction is being used in conventional, major way, that is to say, in a way that isn’t new, or whether the disconnectedness, or novelty, of a pure experience is being named supernatural, which is more minor. Mermaids are rather quaint superstitions until we read Caitlin Kiernan, whose mermaids confront us with a desire to become something incomprehensibly different from ourselves, a desire we may not have known we had—a desire we are perhaps not supposed to have. In her stories, the mermaid becomes affective in the minor way, within the existing folklore, the Disney film, not in exclusion of those things. We can’t look at “The Little Mermaid” the same way after we have read Kiernan, and that change is only possible because Kiernan’s mermaids are still related to folkloric mermaids. Hence this is minor literature, as opposed to another variety of major literature. The moment of actual change is perceived only after the fact, and this means that what we perceive is already undergoing a reterritorialization as part of our activity of perception and reception. This isn’t a consequence of a Kantian distinction between the subject and the thing in itself; it is a question of consciousness in time. Becoming is pure until one becomes conscious of it and begins looking to connect it to other events. Perception itself may also undergo deterritorialization. The conscious determination-­ reterritorialization of the experience may go one of a number of different ways, and the field or zone of leeway that permits for this assembly of virtual determinations is the ground of experience. So “pure” and “prior to or outside determination” have roughly the same meaning in this discussion of experience. *** Begging the question that it should or must be, how can weird fiction be distinguished from atrocity stories, which recount actual events, or events of an actual type? The bizarre event of weird fiction can never be simply historic; it eludes such categories, including those of possible

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atrocities. The bizarre posits overwhelming intensity out of the mundane. The history that plays a role in weird fiction is the history of the normal, not of the bizarre, which has no history. The unknown is not just a gap in knowledge; ignorance is indifference to the unknown, which is a troubling intensity that arrives with no foreordained associations, although identities confronted with the unknown will invent associations for it, will give it a history. We are invited to find relief from the terror the killer strikes in us by investigating their history—how they became a killer. This assimilates the killer to familiar forces, while showing how killers may be identified in advance, typed, diagnosed, neutralized. This is not to say that a weird tale cannot draw on historic atrocities, but must somehow re-activate them in a bizarre way, so that the atrocity, now taken for granted as just another historical fact, returns bizarrely. Weird tales can’t be atrocity stories, because the principle threat in the weird tale must strike at the reader personally, not simply vicariously. Pity may divide us from suffering and make it into a spectacle seen from afar; we can’t be said then to have participated in the suffering that we pity. Weird tales do something different, to the extent that they volatilize the connections of the world and the self under ordinary conditions, as opposed to the conditions of intense suffering in an atrocity story. In weird tales, it’s often difficult or impossible to tell that anything is wrong. The idea that our simplest experience is somehow grounded, however that grounding is rendered, is the real target, because what is grounded can be uprooted. What is forgotten or lost in time can be remembered, can be found. The dead can rise. The weird tale is a dream, not an atrocity. Atrocities fill us with fear that something of the kind might happen to us, but the weird tale is already something happening to us. No one, I believe, wants an atrocity; we read about atrocities, perhaps, in order to warn ourselves against them. However, the reader of weird fiction is looking for a different affect: a feeling of greater possibility, of freedom, not vulnerability to human atrocity, nor license to commit atrocities. These latter elements may occur in a weird tale, but their absence will not turn a weird tale into something else and their presence does not account for the weird tale as a genre. The bizarre isn’t really a hesitation, since the determination “bizarre” has already been made, but not all determinations are equally fixed. “Bizarre” is a more open-ended determination than “real” or “supernatural” and acts as a sign for the unmanageable purity from associations of the indeterminate, unconnected experience. Not every shock is bizarre; the

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bizarre is a hyperbolically unfamiliar experience within ordinary life. An atrocity is something that shocks us because it is connected to us, in terms of our vulnerabilities and capacities, according to historical precedents that are all too familiar. Weird fiction, on the other hand, by exaggerating the unfamiliarity of the event, especially in familiar circumstances, makes the constant presence of the ground of experience more sensible. Events that abruptly project people out of the ordinary segmentarity of their lives are dreamlike, even in the absence of anything overtly supernatural. A story like Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” will take on a weird cast as its mundane events pivot towards a bizarre last act, even if the story isn’t really a weird tale. Weird fiction may be said to take this tendency further, extending it not only to human behaviour but to the behaviour of nature or of the world, or the self as such. By the end of O’Connor’s story, it is clear that the world of the Misfit is the real one, and the family has been living in a kind of dream. The weird tale agrees with the Misfit—you could turn out all right if you had someone there to shock you every moment of your life. *** Our aim here is to get beyond the understanding of reality that places it in binary opposition to the imaginary, because: The question of whether particular events are real or imaginary is poorly posed. The distinction is not between the imaginary and the real, but between the event as such and the corporeal state of affairs which incites it about or in which it is actualized.9

The phantasms of weird fiction are bizarre and they relate to the corporeal state of the story from within, and also in a greater or lesser degree to the corporeal state of the reader. The effect of the weird tale is to situate its readers in their corporeal surroundings while disconnecting those surroundings, in their apparent innocence, from conventional associations. The normal process whereby the object of wonder becomes familiar through the establishment of connections between it and other ideas is reversed, such that the bizarre event threatens or breaks established connections, and attacks connectedness itself. In her excellent book, Deleuze and Horror Film, Dawn Powell’s “anomalies”10 seemingly answer to the same function as my bizarre, but,

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as she describes them, anomalies belong to an aesthetic category, while the bizarre in this study describes an aspect of experience, an affect, which then is given aesthetic form as anomaly. The anomaly is unnatural only relative to a certain idea of nature or possibility, one which presumes a given condition that is commonly assumed to be static. The bizarre is incompatible with nature as a transcendent ideal limiting the possibilities for natural events—that’s its whole point. Weird fiction is oriented in general towards the realization that all the laws of nature are generalizations. Any event which interferes with our generalizing as such, the pure event that the law can only describe in general terms which are obviously inadequate, lame, is bizarre. An anomaly may be bizarre, but the bizarre is anomaly as an affect. An anomaly may be explained; the bizarre, never. We know the law and the event are not the same thing, because we strive to bring them as close together as possible; there would be no reason to strive for this if they were not different. When Deleuze writes of the “anomalous” in Dialogues 2, he is closer to my idea of the bizarre: “The Anomalous is always at the frontier, on the border of a band or a multiplicity; it is part of the latter, but is already making it pass into another multiplicity, it makes it become, it traces a line-­ between. This is also the ‘outsider’: Moby Dick, or the Thing or Entity of Lovecraft, terror”.11 This study is designed to bear out the implications of this idea in understanding weird fiction. The anomalous in this passage by Deleuze exceeds both the scope of Powell’s more focussed aesthetic anomaly and the scope of weird fiction. I use the word bizarre to designate that aspect of Deleuze’s idea of the anomalous which is included in weird fiction and to distinguish that from Powell’s related idea of the anomalous. *** The concept of pure experience resembles that of the sublime, and both concepts involve a disparity between experience and conscious understanding. In his novel, The Hill of Dreams, Arthur Machen speaks of the work of art falling short of its idea: [H]e had seen an enchanted city, awful, glorious, with flame smitten about its battlements, like the cities of the Sangraal, and he had molded his copy in such poor clay as came to his hand; yet, in spite of the gulf that yawned between the idea and the work, he knew as he read that the thing accomplished was very far from a failure.12

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We might categorize this aesthetically as the sublime, but there is an important difference between the Platonic gulf that Machen writes of here and the disparity between pure experience and conscious understanding, provided we differentiate between copying something and creating something. The Platonic gulf between ideas and their adequate realization is often invoked in weird fiction in lines like “a whisper came to him from beyond the rationally knowable”,13 but the movement towards pure intensity is something else. It isn’t a gap, but a pull. Kafka, for example, gives us simulacra of ideas, such as the Law, which operate like shunts, pulling us among more simulacra. The striving and falling short that Machen describes seems to be happening in Kafka too, but the idea, for Kafka, is the dicey product, the work, not an established, well-understood, and recognizable goal, let alone a perennial value, like the Sangraal. There is binary calculation in Kafka, such as that between struggle and aim, but always with the understanding that the binary terms are provisional half-­ measures, subject to inversion or complete evacuation. The whole Platonic game of imputing stability to radically uncertain things by giving them binary determinators is exposed by Kafka in playing it out well beyond its customary limits. Self-reflexiveness is not permitted to close Kafka’s text, which remains always insistently open. So we may say that Kafka’s work is more advanced than Machen’s, in that there is no idea waiting at the end of the quest like Solveig waiting for Peer Gynt to return to her, but, if we do this, then we miss the fact that Machen’s great idea is inconceivable. It is an idea we might well already understand; it might even be a banal idea, like the Sangraal. Machen, however, does not point to mystic transcendence, or even redemptive art, as banalities when he talks about ideas. There is a continuous leaning in Machen towards the idea as an intensity, and this is minor, not major. The conventional notion of redemptive art is banal, but the experience of redemption in an overwhelming, devastating moment of artistic creation actually transforms banality and escapes it. Deleuze did not disdain the idea of redemption, which he describes as art beyond knowledge.14 The whole effect of The Hill of Dreams depends on the way the flaming Sangraal city of the narrator’s vision is transformed from a routine Gothic trope into a fundamentally deterritorializing intensity that forever alters the main character, allowing him to escape the power of banality. Machen’s fiction sets fire to all manners of common Gothic and fantastic tropes in this way, bringing them closer to the bizarre domain of pure experience.

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From this point of view, we might say that, in a way, what Kafka does is another mode of the same activity, involving parables and the law. *** Writers of weird fiction have to come up with an event not connected to common sense. The story has to bring its audience into contact with an intensity too great for a hitherto adequate territory, and this experience typically has been understood aesthetically to mean the sublime. The ensuing reterritorialization will then have to be open, if it is to retain an infinite intensity. This intensity can’t simply “be there” in the story, like charge in a battery. Infinite intensity would here have to mean that readers can take the story’s intensity as far as they individually can, that there is no barrier to that in the story. For Burke and Kant alike, despite other important differences, the sublime occurs when a discrete subject is overwhelmed by impressions. The difference between the sublime and the bizarre is the difference between an onlooker and a participant. As Simondon puts it: “Participation, for the individual, is the fact of being an element in a greater individuation”,15 where individuation may be more or less identified with becoming. Readers of weird tales may not be vicariously experiencing the acts described in the stories, but the affect of the story itself is experienced by the reader. Deleuze writes of the sublime in these terms, rather than in the eighteenth-­century way, saying that the sublime is the failure of all measurement. “[The sublime] brings the various faculties into play in such a way that they struggle against one another, the one pushing the other towards its maximum or limit, the other reacting by pushing the first towards an inspiration which it would not have had alone. … The faculties find their accord … in a fundamental discord”.16 If, as Kant maintained, reason is essentially the straining for what is beyond experience, the sublime is the moment when reason can know itself. On the contrary, Deleuze says that, in such moments, it is force, not reason, that we come to know. Perhaps it would not be wrong to identify force and intensity here, but then the idea of the sublime is no longer really being used in its typical sense, and the use of another term, the bizarre, would therefore be more appropriate. ***

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One of weird fiction’s techniques for achieving contact with pure experience is the use of micro-impressions, the accumulation of which prepares the way for the climax. Micro-impressions give us the converse aspect of the sublime; they are impressions that are too small for the mind, rather than too large. Weird fiction makes use of both the upper and lower thresholds of perception, by reaching for what is overwhelming and beyond us, while also drawing it up into reality from below, out of a pre-­ conscious territory of half-heard sounds, fleeting glimpses, nameless premonitory sensations, dreamlike associations, and so on. Stories frequently arise for writers from just such small impressions. Characters in weird tales are frequently arrested in the ordinary unfolding of quotidian events by impressions that are all the more disruptive to their peace of mind for being small, vague, and unobtrusive. Lovecraft is sometimes chuckled at for his italicized terminal sentences; this may be straining for effect by typographical gimmickry, but those sentences draw attention to the importance of endings in weird tales generally. The ending may be a surprise, but it can’t be a radical surprise without seeming arbitrary. Weird tales begin in order to reach a certain end; careful preparation of the reader for that predestined ending is one of the essential attributes of weird fiction, because the ending marks the moment when the affect of the story is generally strongest. Readers are not simply being misdirected in order to set up a surprise; nor is this just a question of laying out clues so that the reader can assemble a verdict by the story’s end. Preparations cause the reader to experience an unconscious or nebulous micro-impression, which is then confirmed and made explicit by the story’s outcome. In weird fiction, the horror, like the purloined letter, is not only hidden in plain view but by plain view. Horror is hidden by plain view, but it must emerge into plain view. The impression is murky and its force is overpowering. While this bears on the topic of destiny, which will be discussed later, the use of micro-impressions is also relevant to an explanation of the bizarre. The surprise ending of the detective story involves a resolution of confusion; the weird tale may resolve in the end, but the larger mystery of experience as such is much more starkly set out in the weird tale than it is in most detective stories. There often is a lingering mystery in the detective or crime story, but that in general turns on enduring moral, psychological, and/or social problems or uncertainties, more than on the nature of existence. Borges says as much towards the end of his story, “Ibn Hakam Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth” when he writes that,

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even in detective fiction, “mystery had a touch of the supernatural and even the divine about it, while the solution was a sleight of hand”.17 The development of micro-impressions is necessary for the production of the bizarre, because it makes plain the extent to which it is our inattention to micro-impressions that makes ordinary existence ordinary. The concept that experience is already much vaster than our ordinary consciousness permits us to realize is found in all manner of art; for all its sensationalism, weird fiction belongs to this department of art, with Rothko’s paintings and the “routine investigations” of Morton Feldman’s music. It varies from other art of this kind in that it supernaturalizes those micro-­ impressions via a bizarre encounter. The negative is impossible to find in experience. What is not seen or heard is not nonexistent; there are only shadings of perceptibility scaling down to a point below the level of human consciousness. The central character in a weird tale is typically an unusually sensitive person for this reason; the sensitive person has a lower threshold of awareness and consequently a greater scope of experience. They are also often deliberate intensity-­seekers. Supernatural death (or undeath) is not the absence of life, but life closer to zero, directly down against the lowermost threshold of perception. Poe’s work in particular is branded with this idea. As long as death is on a continuum with life, and not radically divided from it as a negation, then we cannot truly say life is entirely absent from a dead thing or that it cannot revive. This is bizarre, because it means that, in a way, being dead is being alive, greatly attenuated, but also that being alive is being dead, albeit in the least possible degree. The bizarre may be inexpressible, but this is not the inexpressibility of what is actually only negative, absent, and without causal efficacy—the “void.” Nihilistic horror is a form of crypto-Platonism to the extent that it turns in dismay from the polyvalent cornucopia of being to the fixed and unchanging void for answers, taking it for granted that fixity and indifference are indices of truth, albeit an inexpressible void-truth. The bizarre is a more satisfactory instrument for understanding weird fiction because it does more to affirm the heterogeneous pullulation of existence. The moment of becoming is not the intervention of the void, but infinity. The moment of reterritorialization is a finite selection, the actualization of a virtuality. Becoming then returns, and the infinity of virtualities is again contacted. This would mean that the virtual is actualized at a climax of intensity.

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Where binary opposites are customarily understood to stand in a relation of negation to each other, the bizarre appears when the stark line of negation is smeared into a broad zone of transitional shadings along an intensity gradient. In some cases, such shadings are taken for granted; where that happens, there is nothing bizarre. The bizarre happens where intensity reaches a local high water mark, where a customary and important relation of negation between binaries—like life and death, or male and female, or real and unreal, or sane and insane, and so on—becomes a zone. Kristeva writes that the Other upholds norms by contesting them.18 This is much like the idea of the bizarre presented here, but it must be realized that the idea of the Other as defined by lack is a norm that the Other contests by affirming itself as lacking nothing, often reversing that lack onto the supposed non-other, the normal. *** If the supernatural in weird fiction is a means of expression for the bizarre, then the precedence of the bizarre in this scheme warrants an explanation: the bizarre is the primary desire in weird fiction. The bizarre is an experience, while the supernatural is largely the resulting rapport between the bizarre experience and the banal one. Bizarre events attract the main characters of many weird tales. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s short story, “How to Fight the Devil,” opens with a passage that illustrates a common turn towards the bizarre as an escape from the everyday: “when a boy I always lived in the shadowy edge of that line which divides spirit-land from mortal life, and it was my delight to walk among its half-lights and shadows … to me this spirit-land was my only refuge from the dry details of a hard, prosaic life … the school-room … was to me a prison”.19 Alongside celebrations of progress, we find Victorian expressions of alarm and even despair in contemplation of humanity’s accomplishments, notably with scientific discovery and explanation. German kunstmärchen, the fantasies of George MacDonald or the William Morris School in England, and the tales of French authors like Charles Nodier or Edgar Quinet, all seem to owe something to this despair. They often maintain the idea that humanity has betrayed nature, often understood in terms of archaic ways of life associated with pastoral innocence. We might even include the exploitation of whole populations as they are “modernized” away from what are often represented, from the major point of view, as

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“natural ways of life.” Punishment for this hubris belongs to a twilight zone. The weird disruption of nature is provisional, but has infinite implications that far exceed any local concerns for the stability of the normal. *** Leibniz maintained that, in order for a thing to exist, it must be compossible with all other extant things; possibility is not a property of individual entities, but is strictly general and relative. The existence of a thing entails its universe. Something like this idea informs weird fiction by way of implications, which are like logical micro-impressions. The existence of a bizarre event must somehow be contained, because you can’t run an empire in a bizarre universe. In,20 Deleuze describes the way phenomenology’s positing of a “normal” perception gives rise to a definitional regression. Normal perception grounds the subject in the world, but only because the normal concept of the world is just a generalization from normal perception. Normal perception is understood to be what anchors the subject as a stable being in the world. If we accept this idea, then delirious people, blind people, unconscious people, neuro-diverse people have ceased to be normal subjects, from our point of view, while, from their point of view, they have lost a stable world. A child, of course, is unstable insofar as they have not yet been fully socialized in keeping with the world. That Macbeth is even able to want to betray Duncan seems already to threaten the natural order, and that a ghost can appear likewise threatens the normal as such, even as it affirms a moral order, because it shows that something is out of whack in what “should” be a strictly normal nature, where “dead” and “alive” are stable categories. What’s weird is that some desire this suspension of the normal. Oleron, the main character in Oliver Onions’ story, “The Beckoning Fair One,” may be retreating from reality, but he is also searching for some other reality. It is the way the bizarre is expressed by banal means that constitutes the exacerbation and expansion of this condition into something weird. The refrain of the eponymous song emerges from the noise of a dripping tap; the superb climactic revelation of the ghost is the sound of long hair being brushed in an empty room. Oleron may be the victim of a ghostly fascination, but not every person would be susceptible to that fascination; whether or not it is a conscious choice, plainly his attraction to the otherworldly is ingrained. This attraction is not a scandal in the way Macbeth’s desire to betray and replace Duncan is. The impulse is forgiven; rather it is

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the failure of self-oversight that is the problem; that, and possibly an insufficient sense of responsibility, mitigated by the neglect of his upbuilding literary work by a callous and unspiritual public. Everyone is permitted and maybe even required to fantasize, but it is considered morally wrong and/or psychologically unhealthy to seek the objects of fantasies in reality—let alone create them. Does Oleron find a ghost waiting for him in the house, or does he create it himself? Destabilization of the ordinary can also be a way to refurbish a desire for the normal and to call attention to the ordinary as something that is also produced, reminding good citizens everywhere of their responsibility to keep reproducing the ordinary. However, even if the intention is to validate the ordinary by frightening us with the prospect of its disappearance, there is always the risk that some might prefer another ordinary than the one currently prevailing. In Alice, the ordinary is bizarre, and the bizarre ordinary. Does this help us understand weird fiction’s appeal to, or interest in, children? Literature is full of innocent and sympathetic children, in part because they are the ideal victims, but children are also not yet fully ordinary. The unnamed teenaged girl at the centre of Arthur Machen’s great short story, “The White People” (see Chap. 5), tells several versions of a folktale in which a young girl, like herself, with bizarre attachments to fairyland foils attempts to marry her off to a mundane man. She tells these stories, apparently without noticing their common theme, which suggests an unconscious anxiety about marriage. Her will-to-the-bizarre seems to be aroused as the prospect of being a respectable Victorian housewife and mother, both a captive and an agent of the ordinary, draws closer. If wonder is, as Spinoza defined it, produced by concepts that stand disconnected from other concepts, and without associations, then the aversion to a rationalistic science which seems determined to connect all things into a single totalizing scheme can be seen as a vindication of the circumstances which produce wonder. For Coleridge, it is the indeterminate mystery of wonder that seems to open the mind to intuitions of cosmic significance; whether or not one places a great deal of value on these insights, or none at all, a deterritorializing opening of the mind might be said to have a value entirely of its own. Coleridge, and Poe with him, seems to have felt the closing off of imaginative possibility very keenly and to have believed that the infinite itself was at stake. The will-to-the-bizarre might well be understood as a form of philosophical claustrophobia then; desire, forced underground by social convention, takes refuge in fiction— but fiction often cannot satisfy, or even contact, desire, unless there is

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some prospect of its realization, and the closed horizons of knowledge threaten to extend the repression of desire to the domain of imagination as well. Perhaps this is the cause of Coleridge’s concern. Certainly Poe, in his “Sonnet to Science,” expresses this very apprehension. There is an attraction to horror because it drives you from the everyday, all fantasies collapsed in bitter disillusionment, so the only refuge or escape from the bourgeois reality in which you can only fail is the domain it has established negatively in what it denies. The weird writer is recruiting this denial in the story. Certainly this aspect of the will-to-the-bizarre is manifesting throughout modern weird fiction, which keeps the dream alive at the expense of happiness, so the fiction, since it is a confirmation of the worst, is inoculated against any accusation of wishfulness: enter the negative image or the inverted form of that normal world, instead of denying the real in favour of a vain fantasy whose realization is impossible. Enter that which is denied by social reality but still there—death, despair, impotence, disease, lack, decline, and failure. The dreamer’s revenge is in pointing out that the “realists” (using the term in its broadest sense) are unrealistic; they deny enormities and intensities, death-madness-chaos, timidly cling to commonplaces, and lazily truck in lame understandings; parody intellectuals, they are the vain ones. Poe’s sonnet echoes faintly in the opening paragraphs of “The Silver Key,” quoted above, depicting logical relations and processes as the associations which bind concepts, prevent them from appearing to us in their astonishing novelty, and so kill wonder. It is a truism of Romantic thought that the modern world is disenchanted; that it should be disenchanted, as if modernity were unworthy of enchantment, as if enchantment were grace. *** The bizarre is not just arbitrarily linked to destiny in weird fiction; it takes the bizarre event to make you aware of the identity you stand to lose and of the mark of destiny. The bizarre event compels the one who experiences it to adopt an ironic standpoint to everyday events which can lead to a better awareness. The weird tale will also thematize the existential problem that arises when a person in such ironized circumstances realizes that there is no real opportunity to act meaningfully on this discovery. As was true of Hume with his moment of vertigo, and with Lovecraft’s island of ignorance, there is a circular journey of discovery and retreat from discovery, so the weird tale may be said to centre on an experience of discovery

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which must change all of life, not simply one part of it. There is a problem of identity, both of self and of the world, that can’t be solved, but only lived with. Even if Eleanor had managed to escape Hill House alive, she would still be the person Hill House chose—she would feel the house always on her psychological horizon. In Norms, Discipline, and the Law, Francois Ewald writes: [T]he abnormal does not have a nature which is different from that of the normal. The norm, or normative space, knows no outside. The norm integrates anything which might attempt to go beyond it—nothing, nobody, whatever difference it might display, can ever claim to be exterior, or claim to possess an otherness which would actually make it other.21

This passage describes deterritorialization as it appears to a pessimist. The deterritorialized certainly can make no claim to being Other, not because it isn’t really different, but rather because only territories make claims. The deterritorialized, which includes the bizarre, is not different as a consequence of any claim. The normal is liable to the bizarre to the extent that there is a gap between actual differences and differences officially registered as a result of a claim, so it is easy to get mixed up and imagine that the claim makes the difference. Weird fiction emerges from the gap between the actual difference and the claim, rather than in an aporia among possible claims. Presupposing the state of affairs described by Ewald to be the case from the point of view of the normal, weird fiction then strives to produce the abnormal as the abnormal—the bizarre. Where weird fiction is behaving like minor literature, it captures the intolerable claustrophobia of pre-appropriation as Mark Fisher describes it and protests that there are margins allowing for our line of flight, so we aren’t just running in circles. Weird fiction in its minor mode is devoted to bizarre events falling outside authenticatable reality, which it sets up as a tyranny and then challenges from within. In modern weird fiction of the early twenty-first century, that challenge often takes the form of an absolute negativity, but it should be understood that the negativity cancels reality as an imposed, majoritarian category, in order to affirm reality as an experience. I don’t care what you say is real or not, I have had a real experience that exceeds in intensity anything that is described in your philosophy, even if that experience is an experience of nothingness. The experience of nothingness is not the absence of an experience.

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The bizarre is aesthetically new, as well as epistemologically open. The quaintness which is the conservative side of weird fiction, the reliance on dear old regionalisms and folklore, the backwards-looking religiosity, the revenge of old codes, sometimes act to soften the critique of modernity by assimilating the bizarre to what is old rather than what is radically new, but they also, in the minor mode, sometimes heighten that defamiliarization of the world which is the hallmark of weird fiction. The bizarre events of weird fiction are deliberately created. The perversity of the bizarre, of the mindset required to conceive it, satisfies the reader’s disreputable taste for it. The will-to-the-bizarre might then be a way to force a continual homoeopathic reterritorialization, which in this case would mean jadedness, resistance to shock, also conservatism of the Lovecraftian kind. This might be the most reactionary attribute of weird fiction, even as it is the motor that drives it to renew shock. Desmond Dosse writes, summarizing Deleuze on Lacan, “whatever is symbolically abolished returns in hallucinatory form”.22 This could be used in conjunction with Freud’s uncanny to explain the supernatural as a hallucination of what is socially repressed by means of symbolic abolition. What is genuinely new, though, cannot be symbolically abolished beforehand in any specific way, because the abolisher would then have to become aware of it in order to abolish it. The only possibility for a prior symbolic abolition would be generic; that is, it would abolish the new by means of a sweeping, general category, rather than with a specific marking. That way, anything that comes from an unexpected direction, so to speak, is automatically hidden and deflected. Then, the symbol becomes a cypher for anything that doesn’t fit an extant scheme. Weird fiction is trying to tell us not to assume that things are real when they’re ordinary, or unreal when they’re not ordinary; things are real when they’re strange (but this is not negative, not just the negation of the ordinary) and unreal or less real when normal. What’s real in ordinariness is your crazed never-ending frustration, your desperate impatience to escape it, and to avenge yourself on it too! Otherwise, the ordinary is only sleep, negligence. The ordinary is inducing the delirium of the bizarre. The cypher for what doesn’t fit an extant scheme has to be an open cypher, and that openness itself can be highlighted in order to show that the extant scheme is not total, that it cannot enclose everything in its comprehensiveness. Robert Aickman is the master of a persistent, nagging kind of openness that prevents his stories, which are written for an audience already

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familiar with weird fiction, from falling into what is ordinary for the genre, as well as the everyday ordinary outside our windows. “Escapist” is a pejorative term bringing with it an implication of irresponsibility and incapacity, but what are the readers of escapist fiction trying to escape from? What do we think of the epithet “escapist” after reading that? Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things.23

When it is minor, weird fiction draws on its horrors in order to elicit the courage to flee these false refuges, while, when it is major, it only challenges these false refuges in order to fortify them with an ersatz victory over a straw man. The bizarre encounter is threatening because it is a confrontation with becoming that has potentially infinite implications. “ENTITY = EVENT, it is terror, but also great joy. Becoming an entity, an infinitive, as Lovecraft spoke of it, the horrific and luminous story of Carter: animal-becoming, molecular-becoming, imperceptible-becoming”.24 The quest for the bizarre, or the bizarre questing for me, or the bizarre one questing for what’s normal, the loss of what’s normal; maybe it’s the events that run amok rather than the characters who cling to the normal for dear life, as in Stephen King’s “The Mist,” when banal consumer products become a lifepreserver for the characters’ sanity. Giving writing to the minor side, the dead, the “evil” impulses, the mad, the victim, the objects, the locations, and the moments. Hill House, on the other hand, is itself “not sane” independently of its ghosts, who never quite manifest themselves in the confines of strictly identifiable characters. The haunting presences escape clear identities. Horror often goes beyond death as a mere ending, extending the scale of experience outwards, like the prospects offered by Clive Barker’s Cenobites. Or, ghosts may show us what an eternal fixity of identity looks like—a lifeless, mindless, enchained repetition of the same. Desiring in death, desiring still going. Desire in a dead zone, the inversion of desire as lack, which would be the desire that sees in its own satisfaction only a way to extend itself still further, like the vampire feeding. Weird fiction may switch from desire as lack to desire in lack, or of lack, depending

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on which tendency, major or minor, is ascendant. If experience is infinite, then there can be no final experience—even death can’t be final, not entirely. For Deleuze, philosophy is about the bizarre in thought, which is the anti-common-sense thought, or, just thought. Clare Colebrook writes that,25 according to Deleuze, what is perceptible is commonsensical, major. What is imperceptible, or barely perceptible, though, is minor. Thought, in its really active sense, is bizarre. The major or minor tendency of a given piece of weird fiction depends on whether it presents one common sense in conflict with another common sense, or, on the other hand, common sense vitiated by thought. How vitiated? By the thought that, if existence is becoming, then all existing things are in flux, and hence our definitions are provisional. This latter is not a suspension of judgement before two contradictory possibilities; it is a suspension of judgement altogether. The bizarre experience is made very drastic and very strange in weird fiction, in order that it be felt very strongly, and so create a real impression of an event categorized among the least plausible. The contrast is maximal by design, and when the story is minor, it acts to bring judgement into doubt. When it is major, it acts to confine the jeopardy for judgement in an obviously fanciful episode. Common sense isn’t a matter of form or content, but of not taking a line of flight. Oleron doesn’t, and can’t, choose the ghost over the more everyday Elsie Bengough in “The Beckoning Fair One” nor does the unnamed narrator of the green book in “The White People” choose between a conventional marriage and an unimaginable union with something in the landscape, nor does the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” choose between the wallpaper world and her husband. In each case, these characters end up in situations that cannot be judged; they’ve left the frame. This could be weird fiction’s version of Kafka’s point of no return, in that everything depends on reaching that point. Not all weird fiction escapes judgement in this way; only when weird fiction is minor does the escape happen. What more can be said about the impulse to escape? In Creative Evolution, Bergson writes26 that vital forces are never fully developed but constantly in the process of developing, which entails the existence of reserves of as yet undeveloped potential for a living world. This potential is plainly visible, for example, in the stories by Onions, Machen, and Gilman, mentioned earlier; Oleron either is or could be a great writer, the unnamed girl of the green book is young and could become almost

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anything, and the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is rendered needlessly impotent in such a way that it simply isn’t possible she couldn’t be doing more with her life. In each case, the difficulty lies in the absence of any way for this development to happen in the major world. Arbitrary social common sense forbids such development and neutralizes it by separating these characters from what they can do. Much of the tragic power of these stories depends on the mysterious waste that they describe. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” according to Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself, was written “to save people from being driven crazy”27—not from simply going crazy, but from being driven crazy. One of the problems that weird fiction tackles is life’s struggle to express itself where becomings are prevented by norms. Where there are no common sense means of expression, expression that nevertheless occurs will have to be bizarre. This, it seems to me, is a deeper motivation for the creation and enjoyment of weird fiction than a desire for distraction, excitement, or a problematic, simplistic enjoyment of fear. Aidan Tynan28 noted that this potential, understood as a surplus of life, is not a surplus belonging specifically to my life, but to a life. My life draws from a life as experience from pure experience. Writers move against this grain, or close the loop, or spin the spiral again, by drawing a life from their lives; the movement towards pure experience is the literary or artistic movement. It can be found in all literatures, but in weird fiction it presents itself baldly. If the bizarre only negates the normal, we then are ceding too much ground to the normal. This violates the spirit of the bizarre, actually negating it in favour of the normal. The bizarre asserts itself as the more broadly valid idea of the two. Common sense is more negative than the bizarre. What is called “common sense” or “ordinary” experience is unconscious. There is an enduring suspicion, expressed using micro-­impressions, that the bizarre or imaginary is actually ultrasubtle perception and/or life at a higher level of intensity, or reality; it’s worth noting how being normal is valorized as healthy, an immunity to surprise, to the strange, a stupidity that helps shield us from the sublime. Explaining the will-to-the-bizarre is not as difficult as explaining the will-to-the-normal.

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Notes 1. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982; page 2. 2. Collins, Wilkie. Little Novels. https://www.fulltextarchive.com/page/ LITTLE-NOVELS1/. Accessed 7/17/19. 3. de Spinoza, Benedictus. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; page 532. 4. Ibid. 5. See Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics, Volume I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 6. Simondon, Gilbert. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Parrhesia vol 7, (2009), pp 4–16; page 5. 7. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; page 154. 8. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990; page 2. 9. The quote continues: “... Freud was then right to maintain the rights of reality in the production of phantasms, even when he recognized them as products transcending reality ...” -- ibid, page 210. 10. See Powell, Dawn. Deleuze and Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 11. Deleuze, Gilles, and Parnet, Claire. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002; page 42. 12. Machen, Arthur. The Hill of Dreams. Leyburn, Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 1998; page 34. 13. Abdullah, Achmed. “Wings.” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wings:_ Tales_of_the_Psychic/Wings. Accessed 7/17/19; page 16. 14. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986; page 270. 15. Simondon, Gilbert. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Parrhesia vol 7, (2009), pp 4-16; page 8. 16. Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; page xii-xiii. 17. Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. New York: Viking, 1998; page 260. 18. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982; page 15. 19. Stowe, Elizabeth Beecher. Oldtown Fireside Stories. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co, 1872; page 191–192. 20. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986; page 57.

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21. Ewald, François. “Norms, Discipline, and the Law.” Representations, Vol. 30 Spring, 1990; (pp. 138–161); page 178. 22. Dosse, Francois. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010; page 122. 23. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; page 341. 24. Deleuze, Gilles, and Parnet, Claire. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002; page 66. 25. See Colebrook, Clare. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge Press, 2002. 26. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Mineola: Dover Books, 1998; page 13. 27. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/literary-musings/charlotte-perkins-gilman-wrote-yellow-wallpaper/. Accessed 7/17/19. 28. Tynan, Aiden. Deleuze’s Literary Clinic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012; page 37.

CHAPTER 4

Destiny

“‘Ah, but are we not forgetting that such little misadventures are merely part and parcel of the general plan? The end-shaping process, as the poet puts it?’” “‘What general plan?’” —“A Recluse,” by Walter de la Mare.1

By destiny, I mean the message that no amount of precaution or planning can circumscribe the infinity of experience. Weird fiction gives us a bizarre encounter—the self-difference of the ordinary—in order to produce the supernatural—the renewal of the infinity of experience—by way of destiny—the mark that warns us against underestimating that infinity by making the impossible, carefully foreclosed event happen anyway. What is impossible is only something that a general scheme rules out of bounds, begging the question: by what right is this ruling made? However, it is the destiny of every given scheme to encounter what it cannot handle, and consequently, to change. Destiny means change. Destiny announces itself in a bizarre sign; the sign becomes intelligible as events play out, but those events occur in a strange way, underneath the canopy of this predicting sign. Even when the events have transpired according to the sign, the relationship between sign and event is no less mysterious. In Deleuzian terms, the omen functions as a virtuality which, in some unspeakable manner, has acquired efficacy in bringing itself into actuality. The sign is the mark of destiny, inscribed on one or more of the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Cisco, Weird Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8_4

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characters in the weird tale, so by “mark” I mean something like “the mark of Cain.” (In Genesis 4:15, the word that is translated into English as “mark” in the story of the mark of Cain can also be translated “omen.”) The major interpretation of destiny makes it synonymous with God’s will, which is always absolutely good. The major destiny is a judgement, with an associated reward or punishment, which must occur in a cosmos that is a domain of law where no crime goes unpunished, and a domain of contract, where no debt goes unpaid. The intention to reinforce social obligations and sanctions with transcendental oversight is clear in the major version. In minor literature, destiny is a warning against such assurances, or against a faulty understanding of them. If all events are connected, and if some events are bizarre, then we can never have a complete vision of the cosmic order. We cannot confuse average causal outcomes with something efficacious or normal. Destiny is major to the extent that it imposes a single, fixed identity—such as Cain’s ineradicable label, “fratricide”—and minor to the extent that it warns us against the fixity of identities, by telling us that events shape us, and will take shape without consulting us. Cain had no choice but to face this choice: become a fratricide, or accept a subaltern position in an established order that does not take him into account; it’s what he was born to do. If, for example, we read The Turn of the Screw in a minor way, then we see that, given that the Governess is who she is already, it will be her destiny, after the encounter with the ghosts, to fight for the children in order to retain her sense of herself as an upstanding Christian, and perhaps as a worthy mate for the master of Bly, even if the children themselves will be casualties in this fight. The warning that destiny brings is never what it seems to be; despite appearances, the warning is not only that ghosts might corrupt the children, but also that the fixed personal identity the Governess so depends on, the rigidity that she considers to be her strength, is a deadly illusion. From a major point of view, Macbeth is doomed to play out the consequences of a sinful ambition that is unaccountably stamped into his character. He is judged already, before the crime. In the minor mode, Macbeth is doomed to transform from a bold warrior, a loyal retainer to his King, a good friend to Banquo, and a generally honourable and esteemed nobleman, into his own opposite: a traitor, a cowardly friendless skulker who sends his minions to butcher children, and relies on magic charms to defend himself. He can become King this way, but only at the expense of ceasing to be the Macbeth who originally wanted to be King.

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If the bizarre is possible in reality, then it is also possible in “me” and in “you,” the reader. The mark of destiny must threaten to slide off the page, transferring itself from the characters to the reader. It is your destiny to stop being who you are now. Are you ready to stop being who you are now? Can you be ready, when the you that is ready is precisely the you that you will lose? *** Destiny must announce itself in advance of the event as a sign, which should be distinguished from a prediction, or a calculation based on current circumstances. The productive tension in the weird tale is often generated as characters interact with destiny, trying to get a jump on future events or avoid them. Usually, this is a matter of rejecting the sign as a sign. In other words, the characters struggle to transform the sign into a mere prediction, by connecting it to previous ideas or feelings, or they dismiss the sign as insignificant. This, for example, is what Scrooge is trying to do when he dismisses Marley’s ghost as the by-product of indigestion. Doesn’t work. The characters in a weird tale are often trying not to be in a story, trying to remain in the segmentarity of ordinary life. The story that takes shape around them does not develop within the parameters of their setting. Instead, it projects a destiny that comes from outside those parameters. In the major story, the characters must fall in line with events, and exhibit the preferred major traits attributable to their roles. In minor literature, the characters are driven by their own thoughts and desires, which must be unaccountable; Macbeth cannot account for his ambition, nor can Hamlet account for his hesitancy. They are not merely puppets of established ideas. Major art treats characters the way tyrannies treat subjects; minor art liberates characters to drive the action, in a way that allows what is uncalculated to speak. Weird fiction in the major mode gives us characters who are merely victims, like the ghost of Major Spencer in “Grayling,” while in the minor mode the characters actively advance to meet their destinies, to realize the sign, and break through the confines of the ordinary, although they may do this unwittingly. The unnamed main character in Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Demon Lover,” is actively pursuing an ordinary life, but only becomes more lost the more she persists in this activity. Characters confront and test a paradox, that destiny appears

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as a warning, and hence as a prompt to action, but it announces an event no amount of action can avert. In fact, the sign seems more often to act as a trigger, prompting the character to do what is required to bring it about, even as they struggle to avoid the outcome. Scrooge will end up dead eventually, but, given his reformation, the circumstances of his death will likely lose the dire aspect they had in his supernatural vision. His destiny is a judgement which is only still in formation; he has time to alter it. This is the major mode. He is only free to bring himself in line with stated societal values that were always really embedded in his personality anyway. In the minor mode, destiny warns the characters that they are free to do anything but stay the same. They are condemned to act, not to rest. Their destiny is not where they “end up,” but where they leave the frame. *** If I am referring to Macbeth as often as I am, it’s because Shakespeare is largely responsible for re-introducing the word “weird,” which was not part of common parlance in his time, into the modern English vernacular, although it should not be taken for granted that the word “weird” simply assumes its older meaning again in Macbeth. The Old English ancestor of the word weird, “wyrd,” means destiny, and is etymologically related to the word “wer,” meaning “to turn.” Hence a werewolf is one who turns into a wolf. When applied to persons, as it is to Shakespeare’s weird sisters, it indicates a becoming. The weird sisters were not originally “the normal sisters,” who then learned to be weird. Being weird is not a terminal state, nor is it some form or other of knowledge; rather, it is a condition of fungible identity. Holinshed, who provided the source material for Macbeth, maintains the weird sisters are either gods or faeries, while he attributed their future knowledge to “necromanticall science”.2 Do gods or faeries learn to read the future, by means of some technique that is dissociable from their own inhuman natures? Necromantical science cannot be science as we know it, but the self-difference, bizarreness, the fungibility of knowledge, a kind of unscience of unknowledge. Hence, learning this “science” entails less the acquisition of information, and more forgetting, and being forgotten, for example, by good Christians, or even by the human family. While they may lead distinct lives, as their gossip suggests, in the play the weird sisters act as a non-individuated compound being, lurking among mankind in a variety of guises, which gives them a shifting, becoming aspect. They produce visions which warp and fade, but lack

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substance in the way that all flux is commonly supposed to lack substance, given a major view of being as a static thing. The weird sisters are go-­ betweens, and don’t appear to have any essence of their own to speak of, unless their essence is “between-ness”.3 They speak out of deterritorialization, in deterritorialized language. *** It’s necessary to introduce a technical distinction here between prophecy, which is major, and the deterritorialized, minor language of the weird sisters. Prophecy is the will of God translated for mankind through a divinely appointed intermediary, with translation imperfections to excuse inaccuracies. It is the deputization, the personal transformation, rather than any technique, that makes us prophets. Priests study, while prophets are attacked by messages. Prophecy, however, tells us what we should know. In Europe, Christianity is imposed on and/or cultivated in societies that already have their own charismatic prophets, as well as diviners trained in techniques of one kind or another—haruspices, astrologers, and so on—all speakers for their own society’s major point of view, who will thenceforth be dismissed as frauds or as unauthorized messengers, demoted to lesser, if not necessarily minor, figures, like the witches. Their predictions are rejected as Satanic deceptions, with enough partial or occasional accuracy to help dupe the gullible into accepting them as authentic. Out of the puzzling contingency of events, prophecy reasserts the intelligible order of the cosmos, and reproduces the identities of whole populations; Christians, for example, are defined in part as those who wait for Christ’s prophesied return. At the same time, prophecy restricts full understanding of events to the divine sphere, so intelligibility exists, but not for us, not yet. On the other hand, omens, like the signs set forth by the weird sisters, are equivocal warnings with no moral content, albeit there is already something illicit about them. They tend to isolate their recipients, rather than integrate them into broad identities. Magical language in weird fiction is often random articulation, that is, a fitting of selected signs together subordinated to some other aim, like sounding mysterious and impressive, usually in order to achieve authority. This would be the major use of magical language. Becoming-signs like omens, by contrast, are more or less means for allowing the signs themselves imminently to lead and determine, which is more in keeping with automatic speech and oracular

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pronouncements. This is what allows for the freedom of the characters; rather than determining what they will do, the way a prophecy would, the omen determines that they will act, but it is the characters’ own will that selects which possible action to carry out. The difference between the prophecy and the omen would be the same as the difference between the Platonic idea and the simulacrum, with the same forbidden essence that Deleuze and Guattari detect in the latter. The prophecy is a command issued to someone who thereafter is marked as the executor of that command, a loyal subject. An omen is a challenge to someone who is singled out, and whose identity is thrown into question. Clearly there are examples that mingle these two aspects, but the point that there are two such aspects stands. A figure like Jeremiah complicates matters because, while he delivers God’s word, his message sets him in opposition to the King. Here, however, there is a competition not between major and minor, but between the true major position (Jeremiah’s) and a false candidate Zedekiah, a conflict that repeats the original discord between the prophet Samuel and Saul. The difference between prophecy and omens, for the sake of a discussion of weird fiction, hinges on whether or not the sign is bizarre. The sign that is pure experience will be a novelty, unaccountable, bizarre. The sign that reacts against novelty and reasserts a static idea of the cosmos is not bizarre, however startling it might be. Scrooge’s ghosts are not all that bizarre, because they point to a closed moral order. If the major sign, the moral commandment from God, were to be treated as bizarre—and something like this can be encountered in some weird fiction, like Gerard de Nerval’s Aurelia, or Leonid Andreyev’s story “Lazarus”—then this would entail a criticism of religious institutions, an assertion that people are shocked to discover the reality of what they had only pretended to believe; that the sign which was meant to be crystal clear to the eyes of faith is equivocal. Prophecy seems to imagine time as a pre-existing sequence of events which retroactively cause themselves; that is, the event happens because it has already happened in the text of a divine book of life, of which our reality is only an echoing realization, or copy. However, if this is true, then we get tangled in the theological question of predestination, which is not really what Macbeth is about. Momentous events, such as the usurpation of the Scottish throne, seem so large that they can’t be confined to a single tense, and so expand backwards, out of the future, towards the present. What’s more, such a major event, with so many repercussions, seems too

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big to be the result of any simple action on the part of any one person. It’s alarming, from the major point of view, to think that the stable order of a society could be overturned by a single individual, albeit under special circumstances. So the events seem to arise in a deficit of causality. Supernatural intervention may be called upon to balance the scales. This transcendent idea of events could perhaps already be called supernatural, insofar as it has to posit another reserve-time or pre-recording on top of the time we live, but in any case, certainly knowledge of future events is traditionally supernatural. Even the rational calculation of an outcome may have its own destiny, as is illustrated by the consequences of Macbeth’s calculations, derived from the second round of predictions, which he himself seeks out. What matters for weird fiction is the implication of this deficit of causality, which points back towards the infinity of experience. The first set of omens from the weird sisters is weird, while the second set only seems weird at first; as they come true, it becomes clear that they are major signs, prophecies pointing to the evil man’s comeuppance. However, it is not clear that they are the working-out of the effects brought about by his actions, and not foreordained condemnations. The whole exercise seems intended to show Macbeth that he has more freedom than he understands, that he can be anything, in order to see what he will do with his freedom. As sources of both minor and major signs, the weird sisters themselves are equivocal as an essential aspect of their weirdness. That they are not judged and punished in some way does not make the story of Macbeth incomplete. They bear no share of the blame for Macbeth’s actions. What do we make of the fact that it is the omens that shock Macbeth, while the prophecies only confirm his fears: or rather we come to understand that he interprets the prophecies in self-serving ways, seeing in them what he wants to see, when the images are themselves equivocal and therefore no impingement on his freedom, quite the contrary. A.C. Benson’s short story, “The Hill of Trouble,” is a prophecy, because it unfolds in a majoritarian, Christian way: virtue is rewarded and sin is punished.4 There is also a minor line in weird fiction that shies from judgement and even from allegory in its use of destiny, as in “The Room in the Tower,” by A.C. Benson’s brother, E.F. Benson.5 In the story, the sign—a recurring dream—is an omen, rather than a prophecy. E.F. Benson is careful to include, at the opening of the story, an example of a dream that is intelligibly prophetic, in this case, as an expression of an unconscious, customary expectation: the arrival of a regular letter from a friend. This he contrasts with the dream of the tower room, which, as it repeats over the

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years, tracks unknown changes to the family in the dream. Benson, the presumptive narrator, is not marked for punishment. He is being warned about something that is already real. *** The sign is a means of production that initiates activity, experimentation both in understanding and in action, if we consider acting as prompted by a sign to be a kind of experimentation with that sign. Often the story itself seems to be out to get a character, and insofar as this is one tendency in weird fiction, that means weird fiction helped to incubate the kind of literary self-consciousness that would later become characteristic of modernism. While major-mode weird fiction retains an older mythic or theological split-level structure, with a transcendent causal realm above the mundane world, when it is minor, it dispenses with transcendence while retaining its irony, by making the irony itself causally efficacious. That is, things happen in weird tales because they are ironic. This irony may begin with the mockery of the weird sisters or the gloating of Mephistopheles, but by the era of the modern weird tale, irony has largely divested itself of its traditional religious associations, and even turns on them. Instead, the irony originates, for example, in a dryly long view of human history, as in Lord Dunsany’s or Mark Twain’s fiction, or of human nature, as in Ambrose Bierce, or in the vast scale of space and time as science has come to know them, which was Lovecraft’s way; later still, the irony resumes contact with the unconscious of the Romantics, as it was refurbished by Freud; this we find all over the psychological horror story, noteworthily in Robert Bloch and particularly in Shirley Jackson and metastasizing in Robert Aickman. The world, or reality, is at stake in weird fiction, and many weird tales invoke the end of the world. This doom is also a kind of irony, doubling the world as its own ghost since we see it exists on borrowed time, anticipating it as empty. So then is this the big idea behind doom, a kind of ironical doubling? The Christian “book of life” is simply a list of the faithful, not a prewritten destiny, although there is a tendency to expand the definition in that direction, particularly under the influence of Calvinism. If one is to argue that moral cause and effect is like cause and effect as attributed to nature, and that therefore moral infractions meet with their comeuppance as reliably as an object dropped from the hand will fall to earth, then it is necessary that no infraction be unobserved, in the same way that gravity cannot

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fail to “notice” an object. The story acts as the recording of the infraction, in the major mode. In the minor mode, the story will often stand apart from the ordinary events of the main character’s life, like the curse attached to an act or an object which will play out for anyone who becomes contaminated by it. So, in that case, destiny gives the victim a new identity— an unwanted one—and this change is designated by a mark. It may be that the mark has always been there, but it will manifest a radically new identity at some point, like the birthmark that proves the peasant child is the true monarch. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth can provide an example of a communal destiny, a new identity for a whole New England town, one that brings with it a peculiar mark, the “Innsmouth look.” Writ large, in At the Mountains of Madness, this becomes a new identity for all of mankind. In a way, this is destiny, this clarification of the meaning of a sign bearing on an identity, the clarification may be abrupt or slow, but it is always ineluctable, and a violation of the existing identity: destiny is this actor, whatever it is that brings about the change. It is a mode of history, one that actively pounces on and claims people, like the discovery that an ancestor has committed a crime (to use an especially Hawthornian example). As a rule you cannot see your own mark; this history is therefore also a kind of predatory irony which shows you your own mark, like the mirror that shows the Outsider who he is. The moment of destiny comes when he realizes that what he had mistaken for a doorway was a mirror all along, and therefore the figure he mistook for someone else is him. The mark is a clue that prompts you to recognize yourself in an unfamiliar form and therefore to recognize yourself as changed. In modern weird fiction, the category of infraction is extended beyond obvious sins to subtler ones, such as the act of seeking to escape from causality, from normal life. Clark Ashton Smith was particularly devoted to this idea, and some of his best known stories, “Genius Loci” and “The City of the Singing Flame,” present us with a vision of doom that is particularly alarming since it is contacted by chance and inescapable once contacted. In “The Treader of the Dust,” the terrible demon god of decay, Quachil Uttaus, comes to those who harbour a secret, undesired desire for death. This is not the same thing as danger; Carmilla (LeFanu), Helen Vaughan (Machen), the judge’s house (Stoker), Varney the Vampyre (pseudonymous hack), Koko (Straub), It (King), and so on are all dangerous, but not inescapable. Smith’s characters escape doom only temporarily; their escape only prolongs and amplifies their doom. It’s actually part of their doom. Their personalities, their psychologies, have already marked

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them, perhaps, but Smith implies that this mark is not all that uncommon. The threat in Smith’s story is that one can be doomed without any conspicuous dooming act, without any patent guilt, and this is more minor, because it turns doom into a rapacious monster that’s out to get anybody and everybody, not just the wrongdoer. Perhaps, then, it can be difficult to distinguish between this menace and justice—a problem that anyone who doubts the major narratives of justice will understand. So Smith’s fiction may be said to be minor to the extent that it undermines the idea of a recorded infraction, by eliminating any cosmic moral scheme. By contrast, while Lord Dunsany’s fiction is also saturated with doom, it is philosophically broad and Stoic; absolutely everything is always already doomed as far as he’s concerned, and so his stories induce more disillusionment and ennui than fear, because they all take place, in a sense, after everything has been decided, and only our illusions are at stake. Change happens, but so what? This is the major mode as disillusionment and surrender. At most, Dunsany’s doom is a punishment for hubris, understood very punctiliously as more or less any degree of optimism. The contrast between Dunsany and Smith shows how important a position of innocence and safety is for Smith’s fiction. That is to say, Smith’s characters have something more to lose than a few illusions. There are other noteworthy examples of stories in which the attachment of doom to a particular character is arbitrary. There is no telling why warnings of a sort come to E.F. Benson’s narrator in “The Room in the Tower.” The signs the narrator of W.F. Harvey’s “August Heat” encounters actually help to bring about the situation they are pointing to. This is touched on directly in “The Signal-Man,” by Charles Dickens, when the titular character, tormented by warning visions, wonders aloud why they are not more explicit, so that he can prevent the predicted event. He is tormented because he has been chosen. “Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act?,” he asks wildly.6 The difference between such stories and the story of Macbeth, who is selected for prophecy perhaps due to his power to act, is a distinctly modern one. The contemporary weird fiction of Thomas Ligotti, Paul Tremblay, Nadia Bulkin, Laird Barron, John Langan, Caitlin Kiernan, Simon Strantzas, Helen Marshall, Elizabeth Hand, Steve Rasnic Tem, among many others, often gives characters a sign of doom that is meant actually to absent them from cause and effect. The sign points outside the domain of intelligible action, leaving them helpless to deal with an unaccountable problem. Minor literature shows how the causal order must inevitably

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destroy fixed identities. This is done by enclosing the rational understanding of becoming in a greater irrationality, not denying causality per se, but giving it no place to go, causing it to loop back on itself. This means that a character in a story like “The Visible Filth,” by Nathan Ballingrud, will work out a destiny foreshadowed by various weird signs, but the causal meaning of those signs is that no amount of causal reasoning will be sufficient to understand, let alone escape, what is going to happen. So, in effect, it has already happened. Realizing that, one is confronted with the possibility that the capacity of human beings for suffering is infinite, unbelievable, that there is no safe place, that youth, beauty, strength, worth, won’t be taken into account. The major idea of destiny as justice emerges as a pernicious lie. The beauty and tranquillity of a place are no sign at all of safety, as might once have been true in pastoral literature. The Great God Pan and “The Willows” definitely thematize this idea, as does Stephen King’s short story “The Raft.” In that story, the beauty of the predatory slime (its swirling colours) is taken for a mitigation of the suffering of being consumed by it, but we know it’s agony for the victim, and presumably a form of pleasure also, for the monster: therefore suffering, but also cruelty, all the worse for being mindless, which is to say, causeless. Kathleen Drover, the main character in Elizabeth Bowen’s story “The Demon Lover,” is simply marked. Her fiancé, the “demon,” simply tells her: “I shall be with you. … You need do nothing but wait” and, in the ominous note that announces his return: “In view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall rely upon you to keep your promise”.7 Kathleen Drover has, in the twenty five years since she last saw her fiancé, been married and raised three children; this cold assertion that nevertheless nothing has changed is a negation of her own choices. When the story reaches its end, she is not being punished for abandoning a dead man; something far less accountable is happening. As Nietzsche pointed out, suffering is not the problem for human beings; the real problem is causeless suffering. Modern characters in particular are caught up in a causal web that induces suffering that exceeds its causal underpinnings so far as to induce despair of ever finding an adequate cause. This deforms the major vision of a just world in the same way that the major vision of a fixed self is deformed by weird fiction. People once believed that intense suffering would be recompensed after death; what are we to make of incredible suffering in the absence of this idea? In weird fiction, jettisoning the idea of moral comeuppance is necessary to express the infinity of experience. The moral universe is coded, and hence

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limited. As this idea develops through the voluntaristic ideas of judgement that we find among the eighteenth-century Swedenborgians and the nineteenth-­century Theosophists, it passes into a more existential mode in the twentieth century, such that morality in an immoral society or cosmos becomes something that individuals are required to assert on their own. It’s a short step from this to the sort of self-assertion that is required of characters, for example in Stephen King’s It, where believing creates its own objects. However, it’s not clear that this attempt to compensate for a lost moral order is all that convincing; at any rate, it tends to turn weird tales into Fantasy stories. Weird fiction today tends instead to highlight the absence of any contravening moral power, instead. *** Destiny makes use of any sign, not just the outrageous apparition. Destiny is neither the sign, nor the event that is foretold, although we may also use the word to designate whatever established that event in its unique position in time. There is an arbitrary fixity of the connection between the person and the future event, such that chance does not abolish destiny. The destined event must somehow exceed its moment in time, and that larger event is the story, understood as something that contains its characters, like a maze. On the major side, then, destiny involves a fixed link between the event and its victim, an imposition of an identity made to appear utterly inevitable, while on the minor side, this relationship entails that the character is “loose” inside an unfolding event that seems to stand stably like an edifice in time, so that, within the story, the character’s own thoughts freely drive the action, and not the imposed form of the story. If destiny is supernatural, then the supernatural is as much at work in Moby-Dick as it is in “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Signal-­ Man.” The whiteness of the whale is a sign, as is Ahab’s scar and his ivory leg. The entire story, not unlike Melquiades’ untranslated parchments in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, is inscribed in the signs of Queequeg’s inscrutable tattoos. An allegorical story, like “The Masque of the Red Death,” might be set aside in a different category as well, because its supernatural happenings seem to be more a device for the delivery of a literary theme than they are supernatural events to be confronted as such by the characters, who are themselves basically devices. That said, it is still a supernatural story insofar as it demonstrates how human precautions cannot circumscribe the infinity of experience.

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The association with horrific imagery is essential, because the sign is uncoded, and the uncoded is “the nightmare”—at least, from the major point of view.8 The sign is typically subtle, like James’ figure in the carpet, in part so that any number of similar objects might transitively receive that signalling capacity. Destiny is impersonal, not a message from Apollo via Prospero or a ghost from Limbo, but an impersonal message whose origin is really the object of chief interest. A message confirmed by the occurrence of predicted events likewise validates the existence of an infinite “beyond,” since, insofar as the message entails no calculations, no reasonable prognostication, it seems that it can have no human origin. We speculate about what is “in” that beyond, but the story has already achieved its end simply by indicating it. Even in stories like A.C. Benson’s, where there are religious connotations, the gods follow destiny, and the weird sisters, seem only to administer it, without exercising any influence over it. Encountering them does not exhaust the beyond. As Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in her story “Sullivan’s Looking Glass,” with respect to those possessing second sight, “They don’t know nothin’ how ‘tis, but this ‘ere knowledge comes to ‘em: it’s a gret gift”.9 Omens are messages from a generally unspecified outside, almost self-­ produced or automatic meanings; weird fiction habitually divorces the omen from any specific source, divine or otherwise. The omens of “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” by M.R.  James, or Edith Wharton’s “Afterward,” are disassociated from morality to the extent that they are not religious warnings. In “The Room in the Tower,” by E.F. Benson, Julia Stone is assuredly evil, but Benson’s forewarning about her does not seem to come from a benevolent source; it could be attributed to some supernatural sense of self-preservation, or it could be a kind of magical trap woven from the evil of Julia Stone herself. Benson does not present himself as a person of special virtue or other gifts that might qualify him in particular for rescue; considering the amount of blood in Stone’s coffin, other victims were not so protected. “August Heat” invokes the possibility of crime without including any motive, as if the narrator’s murder already existed in time, and must take place, irrespective of the murderer’s own desires. Shirley Jackson’s Hill House is a kind of omen, a free-standing catastrophe waiting to take on the particular qualities that its next victim will require of it. When Eleanor Vance sees it for the first time, she has an immediate impression, “Hill House is vile, it is diseased” and goes on to think “get away from here at once”,10 more or less on the spot where she will later die. Hill House is not cursed as a consequence of

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unhappy events; on the contrary, it is simply and unaccountably insane. Eleanor Vance is vulnerable to the house because she lacks a home of her own, but this is no crime or secret sin that the house is punishing. The house seems more to mock her guilt than to condemn or even to comprehend it. Omens are part of a whole array of cultural tropes fortifying the idea that objective meaning exists independently of human effort, either unproduced and eternal, or self-producing. However, as Coleridge insisted, the message from outside also necessarily is a deterritorialization in meaning, which is indistinguishable from the moment of inspiration. No amount of calculation can produce or duplicate inspiration. Deterritorialization in itself is radically independent in Deleuze’s philosophy; although it will be subject to instantaneous assimilation. It is independent, in that it is causally mysterious, but it is nevertheless radically connected to the forces it affects. If the sign is understood to be a mental event like inspiration, then we find in this aspect of weird fiction a continuation of a line of thinking that, at least for English speakers, is somewhat faultily connected to Kant by way of Coleridge. In the major mode, the outside is recruited to shore up the inside in what is called destiny, homologous to the way the other shores up norms according to Kristeva. For various reasons, the distinction between inside and outside has to be maintained; usually, in order to preserve the socially determined idea of the subject as a distinct interiority, available for various duties. If the interior, however, is hermetic is too perfectly distinguished from the outside, then contact with the outside becomes difficult to explain and solipsism arises to challenge the validity or necessity of the idea of the outside. This interferes with moral training, insofar as morality is regarded as something that must be inculcated into the subject from outside—as an aspect of subjectification, in other words. The western moral imperative is usually rooted in revelation first. There is a deterritorialization of language in the babble of magic words and the elliptical unintelligibility of oracles; in fact, one could speak more broadly of a deterritorialization of signs in the supernatural. The message from outside has to be both intelligible and alien, which means it has to be a riddle, garbled, cryptically terse, or incomplete in some other way. If it is too alien, thought, it doesn’t really bridge the gap from outside to inside. If it is too familiar, then it doesn’t seem to originate from the outside. Seers cannot speak for themselves; they are only mouthpieces of a sign that deterritorializes the language and can actually allow the speaker to become alien.

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It may be that the sign appeared to the author, at least in imagination, and the author has only to transpose the sign into the altered context of the story. That is to say, some images occur in the imagination without any conscious effort, and can be presented to a reader untampered-with; such images seem to possess a positive existence superior to an image that is consciously composed out of parts. We might think here of Lovecraft’s dream narratives, which often present actual dreams. If there is a tentative impulse to include Blake among the outliers or forerunners of weird fiction, it might have to do not only with his bizarre spirituality, but also with his reliance on signs which he encountered as perceptions, rather than as fiat-creations or collages. Coleridge, who was more interested in dissertational analysis than Blake was, distinguished between the divine attribute of the imagination and the more mundane, recombinatory faculty of the fancy, which blends memory with choice.11 So imagination and choice are separated, and the true imagining is destined, insofar as it reflects a transcendent creation. Coleridge considered the appearance of unaccountable imaginings to be evidence of the possible existence of an intuitive faculty, distinguishing between imaginings that were merely whimsical recombinations of extant things, which he attributed to a sort of diminished faculty he called “fancy,” and those imaginings that deterritorialize from the “fixed and dead” objects of sense perception. These latter appear strangely complete in themselves, and generally unrelated to the objects and scenes of the thinkers’ surroundings or their ordinary train of thought. That is, they have the unrelatedness that Spinoza identified as the cause of wonder. They seem to come into the mind from outside, just as do the more mundane places and things we encounter in outward life. Signs that foretell future events will also seem to originate from outside. Coleridge’s associate, de Quincey, who of the two of them was the greater influence on Poe, spoke of “dreaming” as “the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy”.12 And Poe writes, in his review of “Thomas Moore” for Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, spoke of the “purely ideal” in art involving “little of fancy … and every thing of imagination”.13 This endures, reterritorialized onto Freudian psychoanalysis, in the experience of creation from the unconscious described by Andre Breton, and admirer of Poe, in The Surrealist Manifesto.14 What all these renderings of inspiration have in common, despite their very different origins, is Spinozan wonder: the idea appears in the mind without any connection to any other idea. So the

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omen and the inspiration both are significant in that they are produced immanently, but accounted for differently, as arising from some external influence, the set of which cannot be said to exclude the unconscious mind, which is impersonal, and beyond the ego. *** It is important to see that this schema, which has typically been taken for a form of translation from the unconscious, can also open outward into the unknown cosmos of the exterior. Unlike deliberately imagined things, the omen-sign appears in the mind arbitrarily, without, for example, the kind of harmonic calculation that requires a certain note in a certain place in a composition, or the calculation involved in painting perspective, or architectural design. Rather than attend primarily to this sign as the product of chance or the unconscious, however, as Dada and Surrealism tended to do, weird fiction is more interested in possible outer causes for the uncalculated sign. It may come from the unconscious, but who is to say that it originated there, that it was not placed there? Identifying particular causes is not as effective as simply opening the question of a possibly supernatural origin, so weird fiction does not often go much farther in the direction of an answer. Psychic phenomena in weird fiction will tend to infuse it with so much of a science-fictional character that the story’s genre orientation shifts; it becomes speculative, where weird fiction must strike at identity directly. We should note here in passing that inside and outside can refer to the mind or the world; however, while the interior of the mind and the interior of the world are two different things, it is not clear, in weird fiction, that the exterior of the mind and the exterior of the world are different and disconnected. The interiority of the individual mind as a unit and the interiority of the world both reciprocally support each other. If the world is not exterior to my mind, then it collapses into my fantasy. If the mind is not interior with respect to the world, then the mind ceases to exist as an independent subject, which is socially necessary. Instead, in weird fiction we find minds that are in contact with a world beyond the world, another world which is, whatever its other attributes or particularities, an outside world, a simulacrum-world. This contact is established by a visionary bridge that traverses the world without touching it, de Quincey’s “tube,” and so preserves the distinction between the inner mind and the outer world. The other world can’t be so other that it has no contact with this

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world, but can’t be so much like this world, even to the extent of being clearly describable as a world at all, that it ceases to be meaningfully alien. Rather, in weird fiction, the world is real and present, but self-different in the form of another world. For Coleridge, the modern Enlightenment assault on old verities was already inducing a reaction. He put faith in the existence of a prophetical and transcendent reason, above the level of the “mere” understanding, and thematized this in his poetry. This idea prompted a parallel elevation of imagination to the level of a legislative faculty, just like reason and understanding in Kantian philosophy. Poe seems to have thought along those lines as well, although, unlike Coleridge, he associated this transcendent kind of thinking with insanity: “the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect”.15 Here, madness is analogous to the omen in its immanence; the omen is a disconnected sign produced by a mind that apprehends reality beyond appearances, and hence less comprehensibly to those who rely exclusively on the understanding’s schematics of connected ideas. That madness may be interpreted does not account for its existence. That the existence of madness may be attributed to vague somatic malfunctions of the nervous system does not account for the actual ideas it produces. This elevation of the imagination to a crypto-reason is designed to address a dissatisfaction with the world as it appears to the understanding, and points to the unaccountability of the existence of the other faculty, reason, as an indication that the human mind transcends appearances. Satisfaction with the world as a grand scheme of connected ideas becomes a pointed concern in Romantic and Gothic literature, and weird fiction will sustain this concern in its discontents and instabilities. The question of satisfaction here is not quite the same as Christian lamentation over the evil of the world; it touches not on the world’s moral state, but on its ontological state and epistemological conditions: in particular, on its reduction to a limited set of interconnected ideas. *** If faith in higher reason is discounted, then a problem arises. With no stable anchorage point for the understanding, the modern individual is supposedly overwhelmed by the rapid rate of radical change, and the

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understanding, by dint of incessant defeats in its struggle to create a comprehensible picture of the whole by connecting ideas, will break down, leaving the individual stupefied and/or insane—but not in the visionary way. This madness involves an inability to form connections, or, just as bad, a tendency to see connections everywhere, so many connections that the connections become meaningless. In modern writing, it is taken more or less for granted that the understanding is incapable of arriving at a stable stopping point on its own, but can only fly blindly from one contradiction to the next, finding at best only provisional footholds where it meets with failure or resistance. If we assume a stable anchorage point is necessary for human sanity and happiness, even if it isn’t rationally possible to achieve one, this would mean that “the human race,” narrowly defined as thinking Western men, is faced with the stark duty to forge (in both senses of the word) an anchorage point. Lovecraft described this as a flight “from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age”,16 and something of the kind also occurs in Romantic Nationalism. The implicit idea here can be traced back from all major modern economics and politics through diverse western utopias and religious movements, through Transcendentalists and Romantics, Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, and back to the Republic. A vanguard of rationalists or inspired poets, or both, will fabricate a stable intellectual frame of reference and then more or less impose it on the people, who must be convinced that the inconsistencies they will likely note in that technocratic intellectual edifice are all just illusions produced by their own stupidity, and not the malfunctions they are. This could mean that the outside we encounter in weird fiction can be located in the shadow within which ideological or intellectual givens conceal their own repressed convenience, the fact that they are arbitrary starting points, and conceals also the arbiters themselves. This is the shadow LeFanu has mentioned, the one to which the writer is supposed to retire when faith and reason re-enact their formal duel to a foreordained draw. This also gives us a way to understand magic and other hermetic practices as something other than pretenders to scientific knowledge, but rather as a deterritorialization of the very idea of knowledge. An enchanter isn’t necessarily only a parody of a scientist; they ironize knowledge by treating it as knowledge in flux, in ad hoc characters, in all its fungibility. Why would a writer enter that shadow? One reason might be that the writer of weird fiction doesn’t accept the official story, the stable intellectual frame of reference, because they don’t trust officials; another reason,

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not inconsistent with the first, might be that the writer has a positive desire to experience a vertigo of the understanding, which, however frightening it might be, is a solid, a concrete thing. That vertigo can look surprisingly like freedom. If the normal world is just a fetish, the understructure of all ideology being about the normal and who owns it, where the normal is right, the way things should be, then a liberation struggle against the normal would have to take the form of an attempt to end the world, or leave it. It can unfold by treating ideology as part of the physical structure. Such a struggle would have to raise the problem of belonging to the world, and address questions like: Do I belong totally, genuinely to a world? Which world? Do I belong to more worlds than one? Does a world make an exclusive claim, and therefore do I find myself compelled to make a choice between one and another, and how will I, like the nameless girl in Machen’s “The White People,” be able to determine which one is which, and which one to select? Or will I find, as Robert Aickman’s characters do, that the world I believe in is already gone? The choice has been made for me, and I will never know what it was. *** How can we return to a new dark age, as Lovecraft imagined, when the old dark-age verities are already discounted? Deliberately taking up what was traditional for others is already a modern alteration. This is in part what Sartre meant by “bad faith.” The new dark age seems less like a deliberately dark arrangement, designed perhaps by some soul-blasted survivors who are looking to shield the rest of mankind from the truth, and more like a rejection of speculative knowledge. How much of weird fiction is nostalgia for a time of less power, less knowledge less responsibility? Or a fantasy of diminished responsibility: no need to figure out who you are or what life is—innocent stupidity, in other words? In his Metaphorology, Hans Blumenberg writes that17 knowledge in western Europe is not originally independent of a salvational role, and all non-­ soterial knowledge is therefore suspect or even irreligious. Archaic truth is supposedly received, not produced—a “gret gift”; the only labour in truth is supposed to be moral labour, perfection of self and martyrdom, to become worthy to receive the truth. Blumenberg also notes that, unlike ancient knowledge, modern knowledge is conceived to be a product, the result of specialized forms of labour.18 So, modern knowledge producers are only loosely bound to a vaguely sketched idea of reality and see

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themselves as making micro-contributions to a larger picture they are unable to see in its entirety. Weird tales affirm destiny, but they are seldom if ever Stoic, in that the Stoic intends to be worthy of what happens without seeing the plan in its entirety either, while the potentially doomed protagonist of the supernatural story is usually baffled to encounter destiny at all, and seems most often to wish to escape it. Destiny is supposed to belong to archaic heroes, not “modern man.” Capitalism generally replaces the idea of destiny with a fantasy of interminable progress and infinite accumulation with no end, no destiny except the more-ness of more. The modern image of the world is likewise a provisional sketch of a reality that can only be apprehended in bits and pieces. So, is weird fiction nostalgic for feudal culture, with its more stabilized idea of the world, and destiny as proof of it? Marx wrote that bourgeois economists—or at least the Physiocrats—see feudalism from a bourgeois perspective, and they also see bourgeois society as still feudal in certain ways.19 Dickens’ vision of the great chain of London’s social class seems like a feudal reproach to bourgeois society, as does Huysmans’ black mass Paris. Does this feudal vision vanish altogether in time? Does weird fiction do its part to keep feudalism alive? Think of all the stories that involve the trip to the archaic country from the big city—the Borgo Pass, Dunwich— that whole confrontation, Hawthorne’s American Claimant rejecting the feudal heritage in England, the explicit flight to or from modern problems, the heavy reliance on backwaters, and neglected social quarters take a variety of forms. If your class or community appear in a horror story, then you are probably marginal. *** Another one of modernity’s distinguishing characteristics is the peculiar value it places on novelty, largely driven by the need to expand fields of capital investment. This likewise entails an open-ended model of the world, which will come into constant conflict with a fixed transcendent model, such as the feudal one. The recourse to destiny in weird fiction is not exclusively reactionary, because there are countless examples of weird tales in which doom is embraced like a liberator. Cathy and Heathcliff are able to enjoy a posthumous togetherness that social pressures and boundaries denied them in life, and only the destruction of Rochester’s life, and nearly the man himself, can make it possible for Jane Eyre to select him, banishing social inequities that otherwise keep them apart. While change

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is something that people do sometimes long to escape or avoid, the ambivalence and wish fulfilment in weird tales can be seen in stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which the narrator embraces a certain change and successfully escapes, albeit in a horrific way. We miss the whole point of the story if we fail to see the warning in it: that a confined person will find a way to escape confinement, even when the prison is one’s own self. No amount of policing can prevent becoming, which always arrives from a point beyond our ability to calculate. Doom is archaic, often feudal, in its trappings, but it is too unknowably mysterious, like absolute novelty, to be really archaic. If it is a sign of infinity in experience, then it must originate from a fantasy middle ages, not from the real thing, otherwise, the sign would lose its infinity by steering us back towards something familiar. In the Grundrisse, Karl Marx writes that the archaic era affords people satisfactions, while modernity offers none, or at least, none that aren’t vulgar.20 The vulgar satisfaction is only a bit of refreshment on the ever-­escalating path of endless accumulation, while the archaic satisfaction is a “happily ever after.” So, if I read Marx correctly, he seems to be saying that feudalism conceived of society as a set scheme of fixed places, where one only had to stop or stay in the right place, whereas capitalism abolishes rest altogether, such that even the wealthy have to weld themselves to a never-­ending process of accumulation for its own sake. The feudal system—at least in hindsight—posits the possibility of infinite segmentarity, and capitalism replaces that with a segmentarity that is so completely provisional that it is always only just holding its form. Both are major schemes, but the minor scheme in a capitalist society is not going to be feudal, because feudalism is an archaic major scheme that to a certain extent continues to unfold in the current one. The minor scheme turns the major back on itself, rather than positing an alternative major scheme, even anachronistically. Nietzsche wrote that, when it first appears, the new must disguise itself as the old in order to survive.21 In a way, the novelty of literary modernism, or at least modern literary self-consciousness, may initially disguise itself as the pseudo-archaic element of destiny in horror stories. So, as far as genre is concerned, the weird tale is not simply about prophecy, but almost acts prophetically, by predicting—or, better, helping to produce— literary modernism using the tropes of old-fashioned ghost stories and Gothic romances. There were other predictors as well, but, out of that cohort, weird fiction has the most special relationship to destiny. ***

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“horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity”.22 There is ambiguity in weird fiction, but the defining ambiguity of the genre is not the indeterminacy of supernatural events—which can never be determined—but the ambiguity of fear that arises when we realize that experience is infinite. Returning to Spinoza, we find his definition of fear is: “inconstant Sadness, born of the idea of a future or past thing whose outcome we to some extent doubt”.23 The doubt of the outcome is the ambiguity that affects readers with fear, rather than the strictly logical doubt respecting the categorization of an event as supernatural or not. The supernatural rather is recruited to intensify the ambiguity of fear in a weird tale. This relates to destiny insofar as destiny, in weird fiction, produces fear by confronting characters with the prospect of experience that cannot be hedged within safe limitations. It is never your destiny to be ordinary. The “chosen one” is never normal. This may also help us to distinguish between weird fiction and atrocity stories, describing true or lifelike crimes or war crimes. Grotesque as they are, the events of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are not impossible; the film is terrifying insofar as it reminds us what human beings are capable of. It is not a weird film, by my definition, because its events point only to a moral infinity, where a weird film, like The Haunting, points towards the infinity of experience. The uncertainty surrounding a supernatural event deepens the doubt of the outcome, while crime is more certain; that crime happens is demonstrable and even obvious, so the only meaningful doubt is whether or not you will become a victim of a crime, or perhaps commit one yourself. Weird fiction depends on the vague horror induced by events that are more strictly determined to be impossible, and which happen anyway, arising out of ordinary circumstances. The contrast is clear: the horror of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre relies on the fact that nothing we are seeing is impossible for human beings; nothing in nature prevents these acts. *** Time plays a role in the development of the infinite affect of weird fiction. When we are in suspense, our present moment is isolated; characters in weird tales who receive a sign will find themselves in an infinite moment

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of becoming between the cause, which, as the sign indicates, has already occurred, and the effect indicated by the sign. The concept of time we encounter in Deleuze is largely inspired by Bergson, in that it conceives of time as infinite duration, and moments in time as contractions within that infinity. Suspense is the sensation of that contraction in infinity. Bergson dispensed with what might be called the common-sense or traditional concept of time, in which the present moment is all that exists, suspended somehow between a past that is only a memory and a future that can only be imagined according to a rationale of possibility and probability. For Bergson, it’s the past that exists. This, here, is the past, an accumulation of the past. The present is a moment of becoming which changes what exists, and hence changes the past. The future is a selection from infinity, made by the present event. Deleuze worked with this concept of time alongside the concepts of the actual and the virtual, and came to prefer the term “virtual” to “possible” when writing about becoming-actual. The possible, from this point of view, is not an aspect of becoming in the grand sense; it is a categorical allocation in a logical scheme. The possibility of an event does not determine whether or not it happens, and possibility does not participate in the infinite. The virtual is the ability of real things to become out of the infinite. Art, for Deleuze, allows us to see, to become aware of, the virtual. The virtual is neither supernatural nor transcendent in Deleuze’s philosophy; it seems instead more like a larger version of the present moment, a contraction of the present with the past. In other words, there is more being than is accounted for in the present and the past—here Deleuze is augmented by Simondon. For the sake of this study of weird fiction, this concept of the virtual can give shape to a concept of destiny; while weird fiction usually makes destiny supernaturally transcendent, and therefore a restatement of major values involving the mutual reinforcement of cause and effect in nature and in the social order, destiny can be given a minor configuration based in this idea of the virtual. It comes down to why things are supposed to happen. The major, transcendent model relies on a grand, top-down scheme, more or less all worked out in advance, where the minor, immanent model relies on small, local anomalies arising from a deeply buried, unknown fermentation, an ontological unconscious. Once we think of destiny as a form of the virtual, then we can see whether or not any weird fiction presents destiny in that way. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson writes that consciousness cannot experience two identical moments; likewise, you cannot assemble

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duration24 from parts. Frankenstein’s monster has a soul, and so partakes of duration even though he arises from parts, which is part of what makes him monstrous. He exists against major categories, like many of the uncanny figures in weird fiction. Victor Frankenstein shows us the ambition that human beings are capable of, but his crime is the production of a being without a category, whose very existence is disallowed. Creating the monster is not impossible, but the monster’s existence is an embodied contradiction. The supernatural is connected to or involved with the way the present orders and reorders the past as a series of steps, with destiny acting as a kind of mode of presentation or dramatization (or hyperbolization) of this idea.25 “We repeat the past by changing it”.26 Each action in retrospect advances the marked character towards a destiny. Varney the Vampyre shows this to us with unparalleled clarity, precisely because it is so amateurish; minor emendations make it possible for the author to repeat whole sequences, like the interrupted marriage ceremonies, and even Varney’s vampirism randomly fades in and out of the narrative. This is not so much infinity as it is “pulp” in Deleuze’s sense of the word, formlessness,27 but under more deliberate execution we might have reached this point through Varney. The virtual object is one not fully determined by the past; the future of the spirit, the future of the past, is at stake in the weird tale. Nietzsche describes two types of anguish: monotony and loss. The ghostly combines them, repeating monotonously a scene of loss, but in order to introduce a menace or tension in an unresolved narrative, like striking a minor chord in music. In both monotony and loss there is a foreclosure of the future, a destiny, but this by itself will only cause the present to lose its way forward, to “pool” in place, becoming infinite. To avoid this, it is important that the virtual object isn’t just anything, formless, whatever, it is a Thing, a concentrated infinity. So conceive of destiny as a time contraction, as well as a message from outside that contracts against the boundary of a speculative exterior of possibility as a preconceived domain. Destiny as a form of the virtual would be a contraction in time, such that the selection of a future event is made by a past event, rather than a present event. Destiny subtracts the present event from causality with respect to one very specific outcome. In the resulting exceptional and bizarre situation, the question of the selection comes down to a struggle to recover the selecting power in the present, which would mean cheating fate. The signal-man would have to stop the train at the right time, and do it with the assurance that

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this is not itself the foreordained act that brings about the catastrophe. Planning an action does not cause it; as Poe noted in “The Imp of the Perverse,” we may plan all we like, but we still end up waiting for a mysterious impulse to arrive that will set the plan in motion, and minus that impulse, nothing gets done. We can reason causally, but logic is not will. That susceptibility to the mysterious impulse will remain, and may admit another impulse, equally mysterious, therefore, one is never safe. This is another way that weird fiction communicates the infinity of action that no amount of logic can contain. *** Repetition is another aspect of the minor concept of destiny. The forecasted event is not necessarily a repetition of the omen, but often the sign is a dream or vision of the event before the event, which would mean that the event, should it actually happen, is a repetition in actuality of what had previously only happened in imagination or dream or in a moment of madness. In that case, the violation of norms that characterizes the minor weird tale would be repetition across the line supposedly dividing the real and unreal. That is, ordinarily each moment in time is a repetition, but the repetition, while it may take place on many levels, doesn’t involve any ontological variation: everything repeats at the same level of being. The weird tale, at least when it’s minor, asserts this idea too, but it does so by bringing the dream, vision, hallucination, delirium, onto the same level as the real, by making real events repetitions of dreams, visions, and so on. Thus demonstrating that these supposedly unreal events are actually also real, because they possess the same capacity for repetition as historically validated events. This is a way to show the infinity of experience. We are not limited to “waking” life. There is a kind of destiny in signs, their affinities and implications bringing something into consciousness out of either unconscious minds or circumstances, like a kind of prewriting. Nietzsche writes that our strongest inclinations, what we must want, will appear to us as if they wanted to seduce us. Macbeth’s actions repeat his unconscious ambitions, but only after they are brought into consciousness by a sign. This is another distinction between weird fiction and psychological fiction; in both, the unconscious impulse is identified by means of some sign which must be indirect because the impulse is not directly known to the consciousness, and in both the sign arises before the act, but in the weird tale, the appearance of

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the sign must be a bizarre event that at least suggests the involvement of an outward infinity. A psychological story may involve a bizarre sign, but the sign must always be reducible to an unconscious desire, limited to the finitude of something an Oedipal scheme. If Macbeth were purely psychological fiction, then the sign indicating Macbeth’s murderous ambition would have to be supplied by some anomalous act or perception of Macbeth alone, clearly originating from his repressed desire to become King. Instead, there is a visitation in the play of supernatural beings who are perceived by both Macbeth and Banquo, and who give valid omens to both. Banquo does not appear to possess any secret ambition for the witches to cater to, but that doesn’t stop them from informing him that his children will be Kings. The audience is not consulted as to whether or not the story is psychological or weird, since Macbeth harbours an unconscious ambition, and the weird sisters give signs to him. The one involves the desire to do something, the other involves a prediction that something will happen. The two coincide, but in a present that does not connect them causally. Macbeth does not suddenly want to kill Duncan as a result of the omen, and it seems more likely that the omen itself, rather than a hidden desire, prompts the weird sisters to appear to Macbeth. While the omen is a temptation, and presumably the weird sisters would not appear to someone who did not harbour that desire, they are not free to choose to whom they are to appear. Only Macbeth will succeed Duncan; since this is the sole content of the omen respecting Macbeth, this means that Macbeth will succeed Duncan irrespective of what he does or does not do, what he does or does not desire to do. Things would have been different if the omen predicted that Macbeth would kill Duncan. As it stands, the prophecy could be fulfilled equally well if Macbeth simply remained loyal until Duncan’s natural death. Read this way, Macbeth’s downfall has less to do with his ambition than with his impatience and recklessness in trying to bring about what is already fated to happen. His ambition is greater than it seems: he doesn’t just want to be King, he wants to be God. If Macbeth were purely psychological in the more rudimentary sense of the word, then it would have to show how it was Macbeth’s own desires that lead to his destruction. That, however, would limit experience, by saying we are only patterned by repressed desires. The weird sisters give signs to Banquo as well as to Macbeth, and they make sure to do so in front of Macbeth, to set up Banquo as well. This omen to Banquo likewise doesn’t entail any danger to Macbeth as King, but means only that Macbeth, who is childless anyway, will found no

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dynasty. The terms of the omen could be fulfilled entirely without any problem for Macbeth; with no children of his own, he could conceivably bequeath the throne to Fleance. Macbeth’s problem is philosophical, as well as moral, in that, for him, the delay dividing perception and cognition, on the one hand, from events and the unconscious, on the other hand, is a matter of life and death. The weird sisters’ first intervention causes Macbeth to confront his own ambition, their second, elicited by him, encourages him to persist. The second set of prophecies is what brings the irony of the transcendent into the play. These prophecies point to the comeuppance of Macbeth, and so finally acquire a major character by the end of the play, when order must be restored. However, their initially labile character, arising as they do from out of a delirium of events and ambiguity of signs, distinguishes them from anything like a divine judgement. The weird sisters are not Furies; they only comment. We might say that the major prophet acts also as a judge, while the minor seer is a witness. Macbeth is set adrift in freedom precisely by predetermination. No matter what he chooses to do, the outcome is fixed, so he can do anything, be anything, as long as he becomes different from what he was. Destiny is a magical story that writes itself as it will, but which must take shape in a certain way, which, owing to the gap between will and cognition, action and consequence, has to be invisible to us in the present. So destiny is a genre. Weird fiction is the destiny-genre that treats the virtuality of the invisible form as something bizarre. Destiny in weird fiction is this self-writing phenomenon read back from the point of view not of the writer but of a character living the story for the first time. The story relates how a character gradually becomes aware, always too late, of the story he or she is writing or living. The omen is like the recognition of immanence in literature, as a way of getting the immanence of time into narrative art. For a while, Deleuze wrote about two forms of time; the time of the event conceived in its web of causal circumstances, on the one hand, and on the other, the time of a surplus event, which overflows causality and overdetermines it. Destiny is the surplus of event that exceeds its moment in a causal succession, overflowing it in order to show us infinity. Destiny is also a Bergsonian memory-image; “pure memory” to set alongside the bizarre’s “pure event.” The repetition of ghosts points to the alteration of the world, out of joint with its own posthumous image. Time is out of joint because the past is decontracting. Where Macbeth is about a future that arrives too soon,

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Hamlet is about a future that does not come—a hauntological problem, to use the term from Derrida that has arisen in a new context in the work of Mark Fisher. China Mieville writes: The Weird, then, is starkly opposed to the hauntological. Hauntology, a category positing, presuming, implying a ‘time out of joint,’ a present stained with traces of the ghostly, the dead-but-unquiet, estranges reality in an almost precisely opposite fashion to the Weird: with a radicalised uncanny—‘something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and the returned from it’—rather than a hallucinatory/nihilist novum. … The Weird is not the return of any ‘repressed’ but seeks ‘to enWeird ontology itself.’28

It seems to me, however, that hauntology is primarily about a sense of disconnection from the future, and not at all out of place in the weird. It’s not so much that the past is hanging tenaciously on, so much as it is the future that has abandoned us, refuses to come, so we are left behind in a heap of old things that doesn’t so much devour us as receive us by default. Weird fiction often involves socially unacceptable and troubling desires, which are the chief objects of repression. Here I am not speaking about “death drive” because this reflects an idea of desire as lack, a desire to stop desiring, but rather about a positive desire for liberation from an identity that negates our desires. The weird protagonist is often caught between what Deleuze called the robot and the zombie or pulp: between the numbness of excessive segmentarity and the inertia of no segmentarity at all. There is in Deleuze and Guattari an idea that the vital force needs channelling, not so much towards an object as along a line of flight; only one line, the segmented line, is deadening automatism, but too many lines going in too many directions, or a line that is perhaps less a line than a sort of vague, broad swath, dissipates energy and results in no motion at all. The protagonist is typically more segmented than they want to be and yearn for escape from that segmentarity, invariably represented as socially obligated, although there are examples of personal segmentarity. “The White People” shows a person fleeing segmentarity into total formlessness, and we see that suicide in this case is supposed to have saved her from this formlessness, so we can’t identify death and formlessness if death can be an escape from formlessness. The formless is the unspeakable in language, the fate worse than death, and death can always be spoken, is very easily spoken. The desire to

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die is in no way scandalous for most societies, which in fact call on people to die by inches anyway; the formlessness is the escape into another form of life, not death, although death is readily metaphorized as a gateway to this other life. So this is not death drive, but a desire for escape from a claustrally segmented life that kills you; this desire is not exactly repressed either, but it is more diaphanized, turned into dreaminess, castrated or made harmless, then the weird tale gives that diaphanous dreaminess a chance to become concrete, to de-neuter itself. If, then, hauntology isn’t about the return of the repressed, it is rather about the failure of anything to return, since nothing can return until after it’s gone, and things aren’t going away, they aren’t moving, because the future won’t come and take them, or take us away from them. The weird is not so much about the return of a repressed desire as the transformation of a dreamy vague inclination away from segmentarity towards formlessness into a genuine prospect of real change, met with fascination and deep alarm. The signal-man doesn’t want to die, but he is deeply self-segmented; here it seems as though what we see is a rebellion against segmentarity on one level (impossible events are happening) and the hypertrophism of segmentarity on the other, such that this man tries so hard to vanish into his role as a signal man that he gets too much of what he wished for. The weird tale maps the frustration of personal segmentarity onto being as such, as if being were as impatient with our segmenting of it as we are. The weird tale presents the segmentation as only provisional, all of our own making. This allows for several conclusions that are generally taken from this as story strategies: the writer can create a different segmentarity, or suggest that a character’s fear directly forms their reality, or that there are gaps in a character’s reality that reflect the character’s own repressions, or suggest that there is to reality a hidden layer of vibration or dimension or time. All of these can be drawn upon to give the reader the impression that the weird mark of destiny may “slide onto” them directly. Destiny is the outcome of an encounter, while the prewritten prophecy is the transcendence of an encounter, its foreclosure. In both cases, it is the intervention of a harbinger, witches or a ghost, that disjoints time. Claire Colebrook explains the difference between exteriority, which is relative, and outsideness, which refers to a larger ground.29 Where there is exteriority, there is a relation to something else. Where there is outsideness, there is the discovery that we are operating within a subdomain of a larger, unknown region. The bizarre is always out of joint with segmented or managerial time; it could be understood as a domain or realm of bizarre

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time, whose existence is a minor sabotage of a major, managerial kind of time, which is always fashioned out of hatred. Destiny likewise always helps us think of time as a larger ground from which segmentations are drawn, and it functions like the revenge of this ground on those who would try to banish it. Benjamin writes that destiny is only parasitically temporal, not of time but in time,30 and this seems to be repeated by Colebrook when she points out that movement takes place with time, not in time. Destiny narratizes time, and so makes a story appear, just like the way a melody has to repeat in order to be detectable as a melody; genre is a time-image that works like a key register, or a conventional type of melody. So, to be less opaque, there is a time when one is reading and a time when one is not. Storytime comes and goes and comes back again. Destiny is a story element transposed onto unread, everyday time. It is not the eternal return of the same, it is unique; it is a time-shape for one person who is infinitely isolated in it. The isolation of Lucy in Dracula, or the monster in Frankenstein, is a more drastic version of this characterological individuation. A story is an incompletion that waits for a resolution that only one particular person can supply, and that one person is selected, individuated, by the story itself, and not, for example, by received categories like “businessman” or “good wife.” *** The bizarre warning tells you to flee from this sign. It initiates a line of flight, and that’s the story. If what the prophet predicts is predictable, then we are still within the domain of reason, and cheating fate involves trying to draw the line of flight into the circle of reasoning. This is the modus operandi of the psychic detective. If we assume a moral universe, then destiny is always just, which makes any attempt to cheat fate an attempt to cheat justice, and therefore already Satanic. One aspect of the weirdness of weird fiction is the confusion that arises when the confidence in a moral universe is undermined. Here it is interesting to distinguish a destiny from a curse. Curses also tie consequences to actions, but there is supposed to be something supernatural about a curse. If someone is in a position to impose a penalty on someone else, then is that penalty a curse? It might be, if the penalty were of a kind to compel others to impose it as well, like Hester Prynne’s letter.

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Otherwise, the penalty doesn’t seem to distinguish itself enough from the social background and people’s attitudes to be considered a curse. In weird fiction, curses are usually bestowed by persons who lack the political and social power to impose penalties for infractions against them. The witch in M.R.  James’ “The Ash-Tree” curses Sir Matthew Fell to avenge her own execution. The curse also inheres in places and things, and may fall arbitrarily on anyone tampering with them. The chief difference between curses and destiny is that curses originate with specific persons and are imposed by those persons. A curse has to be declared, which means that a cursed object, that is, any object or location that is unlucky but not specifically cursed by the will of an individual, is not exactly cursed according to this definition. We could say that a cursed spot is godforsaken, meaning God has cursed it, and this is indistinguishable from destiny, really. In the Balzac story, “The Elixir of Life,” glamorous women at a banquet “all told of passions, intense, but of various styles, like their beauty”.31 If Christian truth must be one, and we westerners are Christians, then truth has no style; beauty, on the other hand, is taken to be multiple, and so capable of many styles. What has style therefore cannot be true; the truth will out irrespective of style, emerging from it without any admixture in it, showing itself unalloyed to the enlightened observer. Balzac’s banquet, like Prince Prospero’s, is upset by the apparition of a messenger of death, albeit only the timing is at all uncanny. Don Juan becomes completely liberated, despising bourgeois limitations, and utterly cynical. He is “criticising the Apocalypse” in a manner reminiscent of Wilde. Don Juan is soulless, an ironist, an actor, and he, like Faust or the protagonists of other stories involving the Faustian bargain, such as Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer or Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, attempts to cheat or direct fate, play God, change the “rule,” or seize exceptional status, owning infinity. Even deliberately bringing about one’s own damnation is a form of cheating fate, since this means arrogation to the self of the condemning power. Ambrose, in the frame narrative to Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” explains that there are those who try to reach Heaven in the proper way, as set forth by God, and those who try to get into Heaven on their own, against God or going around God somehow, but this idea applies to the self-damned as well. Again, they want to own the infinite. This idea endures further in “Herbert West: Reanimator” and Frankenstein—the fixation with the idea of going against nature, where the supernatural becomes a devilish realm of defiance of God and his will

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as exemplified in the natural order. Lovecraft retains something like this, but for him going against nature is at once an attack on mankind, order, sanity, and also an irresistible lure for the imaginative and creative, for whom nature or reality is experienced as a galling check on their capacities, and who yearn for infinity. Destiny becomes a problem in weird fiction, because there are two ideas of destiny. One that abolishes chance and one that depends on chance—that is, destiny understood as your chance, your moment. Macbeth is told he will be king, but he takes his chances killing Duncan. Destiny as opportunity is present in most weird fiction, particularly as the dark opportunity. Becoming a vampire is horrific and attractive. The Governess is horrified by the spectres of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, but the haunting of Bly is also her opportunity to impress the Squire; likewise Hill House is Eleanor Vance’s opportunity to find a home. Hans Bellmer, in his astounding treatise The Doll, describes the “superrational and fearless horror of seeing chance confirm will”,32 and this can help us to see the way that destiny vitiates the difference between inner and outer worlds by making the coincidence of events and desires arbitrary. So perhaps this means there is another way to cheat destiny—by making it coincide with will, which is to make destiny indistinguishable from willed action, or vice versa. If we embrace the change, the way that the title character in Joanna Russ’ vampire story, “My Dear Emily” does, or the main character of Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Visible Filth” does, then the horror shifts its basis. This is Stoicism. Weird fiction doesn’t usually remark openly on freedom. Ahab’s character is fate, so there is an interplay, a connection between the character and circumstances. Personal psychology in weird fiction is usually understood as something not however susceptible to analytic cure; could the Governess be cured, treated? On the other hand, her religious and parochial backgrounds clearly predispose her to see ghosts and to cherish exaggerated ideas about human depravity. There is nothing in the story compelling us to decide between an actual conflict with ghosts and a displaced and personally allegorized struggle between repressed urges and a superego. The idea is more Humeian, the circumstances form the subject, but the subject also forms the circumstances insofar as the subject acts on their own conception of those circumstances; this is a cause of vertigo and anxiety in Hume and in weird fiction. The subject is supposed to enter the circumstances as a more or less fixed element with inherent characteristics, like the inculcated moral axioms of a proper upbringing, but actually the

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subject is every bit as labyrinthine as any other aspect of the world. In weird fiction, destiny is often a repressed desire projected into the outer world, but there would be no reason to incorporate the supernatural into such a story if a strictly or exclusively psychological effect were called for. Weird fiction draws our attention, by way of destiny, to certain problems that arise when we try to situate desire inside a person. This in turn makes us think again of the infinity of experience, in that we may once again wonder if we may be able to have what we really want, after all. *** A distinctive feature of the narration in a weird tale is that the author knows not only what will happen, something that is ordinarily within the compass of possible events and therefore something that the characters could plausibly anticipate, but also that what will happen will be impossible. This lends a special, dramatic irony to the narrative voice of a weird tale, which is available to the readers the moment they identify the genre of the story. Well in advance of any weird manifestation, characters will often advert facetiously to the supernatural, unaware of the genre of their own stories. This means that events in weird tales are often more important for the reader than they are for the characters. There are signs in the story, such as manifestations witnessed by the characters, but there are also signs in the writing, which are typically only available to the reader. There is also an intermediate level of narrative, the backstory or legend that the main characters may or may not discover; often such stories are supplied after the encounter with the apparition, as in “The Botathen Ghost” by Robert Stephen Hawker, or Edward Lucas White’s “The House of the Nightmare,” for example. In a weird tale, the story itself turns on its characters; it’s about characters finding themselves in a weird tale. This is an act on the part of the narrative itself, independent of any character, but often connected with a familiar supporting character, the sardonic horror host, the psychic sensitive, the elderly keeper of local history or legendry, or the eerie child eyewitness, to name a few. The sign expresses the immanent intention of the story itself. The story itself is a destiny because it ends. All stories end, but the weird tale draws attention to the fact that we assume that the ending of a story in any genre must be necessary; it does this by giving that necessity agency to bring itself about in the story, as destiny. The end of a weird tale has its own special silence.

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Notes 1. de la Mare, Walter. Strangers and Pilgrims. Leyburn, Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2007; page 308. 2. holinshed Holinshed, Raphael. Holinshed’s Chronicles. The Holinshed Project. http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/extracts2.shtml. Accessed 7/24/19. 3. “… it is not the gods which we encounter: even hidden, the gods are only the forms of recognition. What we encounter are the demons, the signbearers … power which only covers difference with more difference …” -- Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; page 144–145. 4. See Benson, A.C. “The Hill of Trouble.” Gutenberg.org. https://www. gutenberg.org/files/21536/21536-h/21536-h.htm#THE_HILL_OF_ TROUBLE. Accessed 7/24/19. 5. See Benson, E.F. The Collected Ghost Stories. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992. 6. Dickens, Charles. “The Signal-Man.” Edward Gorey’s Haunted Looking Glass. New York: Avenel Books, 1984; page 61. 7. Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Demon Lover.” http://omero.humnet.unipi. it/2006/matdid/201/DemonLover.pdf Accessed 7/24/19; page 3. 8. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; pages 140, 164. 9. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “The Sullivan Looking-Glass.” https://americanliterature.com/author/harriet-beecher-stowe/short-story/the-sullivanlooking-glass. Accessed 7/24/19; page 10. 10. Jackson, Shirley. Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 2010; page 264. 11. “… The imagination then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice. But equally with the

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ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association …” -- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; page 313. 12. “… The machinery for dreaming … in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connection with the heart, the eye and the ear, compose the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind …” -- de Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Literary Reminiscences. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1900; page 92. 13. Poe, Edgar Allan. Essays and Reviews. New York: Library of America, 1984; page 337. 14. “… One evening … before I fell asleep, I perceived, so clearly articulated that it was impossible to change a word, but nonetheless removed from the sound of any voice, a rather strange phrase which came to me without any apparent relationship to the events in which, my consciousness agrees, I was then involved, a phrase which seemed to me insistent, a phrase, if I may be so bold, which was knocking at the window …” -- Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972; page 21. 15. Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales and Sketches, Volume 1: 1831–1842. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000; page 638. 16. Lovecraft, H. P. The Dunwich Horror and Others. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House Press, 1963; page 125. 17. Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2010; page 20. 18. Ibid, page 35. 19. 50 Marx, Karl. Theories of Surplus-Value. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963; page 50. 20. Marx, Karl. The Grundrisse. New York: Penguin Books, 1973; page 412. 21. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin, 1959; page 231. 22. Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales and Sketches, Volume 1: 1831–1842. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000; page 217. 23. de Spinoza, Benedictus. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; page 534. 24. Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999; page 30. 25. Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 5

Case Studies

I contend that a weird tale involves a bizarre encounter, which is the self-­ difference of the ordinary, that marks a character with a destiny, which is change, in order to produce the supernatural, understood here to mean a sense of the infinity of experience involving the limits of reality, for the reader. In a way, this supernatural production amounts to the mark of destiny being found on the reader as well. The weird tale can unfold in a major or minor way. In the major mode, it will develop into a judgement against those who do not maintain and desire the standards of the everyday, while in the minor mode, the tale issues a warning: do not cling to identity, all experience is infinite, and so you will no longer be who you now are. The test of this theory involves looking at any given weird tale, ascertaining in what ways the story is major and in what ways it is minor, and then locating within it: (a) the bizarre encounter(s), (b) the destiny, with its mark, and (c) how the supernatural is produced. If my theory holds water, then it should produce a deeper understanding of any weird tale. The case studies that follow are intended to demonstrate this. I did not select these stories in order to prove my theory. On the contrary, my theory took shape as I read and reread these stories. I © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Cisco, Weird Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8_5

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present these case studies in no particular order and without much consistency when it comes to length. This collection is not meant to be definitively representative, but only provisionally adequate. While this study has dealt with weird fiction in a variety of forms, from this point forward I will restrict it to short stories. I’m not trying to privilege weird fiction in short story form, but only to find a consistent body of comparable works that I can discuss briefly. ***

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Case Studies “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Edgar Allan Poe “The Traveller with the Painted-Rag Picture,” by Edogawa Rampo “The Sand-Man,” by E.T.A. Hoffmann “The Signal-Man,” by Charles Dickens “August Heat,” by W.F. Harvey “The Disturbing Occurrences,” by Naguib Mahfouz “Luella Miller,” by Mary Wilkins Freeman “The White People,” by Arthur Machen “The Library Window,” by Margaret Oliphant “The Beckoning Fair One,” by Oliver Onions “The Demon Lover,” by Elizabeth Bowen “The Daemon Lover,” by Shirley Jackson “At the Gate of Deeper Slumber,” by Caitlin Kiernan “Private—Keep Out!,” by Philip MacDonald “The Little Room,” by Madeline Yale Wynne “A Recluse,” by Walter de la Mare “Lodgers,” by Joan Aiken “God Grante That She Lye Stille,” by Cynthia Asquith “The Thing on the Doorstep,” by H.P. Lovecraft “A Short Trip Home,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald “My Dear Emily,” by Joanna Russ “The Yellow Sign,” by Robert W. Chambers “Moses and Gaspar,” by Amparo Davila “The Horla,” by Guy de Maupassant “The Willows,” by Algernon Blackwood “Afterward,” by Edith Wharton “The School Friend,” by Robert Aickman “The July Ghost,” by A.S. Byatt “Senora Suerte,” by Tananarive Due

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“The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Edgar Allan Poe Beware the normal! Beware identity! It entombs living bodies! This story is minor in at least two aspects: first, in that it represents identity as a trap, as a kind of decay, and second, in that it creates effects for the reader that can only arise given an ironic distance from its Gothic tropes. That irony laps around on the reader; the tropes are introduced as tropes, but—and this is where we see Poe’s genius clearly—far from neutralizing them, this irony actually recharges the tropes by bringing that irony to bear on the reader as well, pulling us into the story rather than pushing us out. The bizarre encounter is the one between the narrator and the house and its inmates. The narrator is, like most people, an unwitting ambassador of the ordinary and is brought to the house more or less for the purpose of countering its weirdness, which is plaguing Roderick, as if his ordinariness could prevent or forestall the omened collapse, and the self-­ difference of the hack romance of Sir Lancelot Canning as it becomes real. The destiny is the doom of the house, foretold by the title, and its mark is that crack running through the building. This does not double the house the way the reflection in the tarn does, rather it halves the house, just as Roderick and Madeline are both reflections of each other and halves of something else. An omen is a crack in the ordinary facade of things. This mark will mark the narrator, who will see the crack open, as we do, and it will mark the reader as well, because the crack is not a fault in identity, but an essential part of it, meaning that all identities are “cracked” in this way. The supernatural is produced primarily by Poe’s use of micro-­ impressions, showing us an infinity that is at once too vast and too quiet for ordinary consciousness; the weird life of the fungus and the death-in-­ life of Madeline erase the crucial identification of animate and inanimate, which imparts to all existing things a hidden activity and consciousness. Identity blurs between Roderick and Madeline, between the family and the building, the living and the dead, drawing the reader towards an infinity of commingling and indeterminacy. Analysis “The Fall of the House of Usher” builds carefully to the final reading scene, in which hackneyed Gothic tropes take on dire implications within the narrative. It is an ingenious double gambit by Poe. The story takes on a self-aware quality, so that it seems to know it is being read, and invites a parallelism between the reader in the story and the reader of the story, bringing both onto the same plane in a culminating erasure of clear

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distinctions that then erupts in apocalyptic imagery, making the fall of the house an image for the end of the world. The world is the master identity; all other identities combine in it. At the same time, Poe has not only given his audience the Gothic business it clamours for but has linked each cliché to an original effect. While the stories in this set of case studies are not generally ordered in any particular way, it makes sense to begin with Usher, not because it is the first or even an early example of a weird tale, but because it so clearly exemplifies what the weird tale characteristically does. The title is already a destiny. A fall is coming. Then comes the epigraph, which presents the unprepared reader with a riddle whose meaning will become clear over the course of the story; the reader understands already that this is a story that will require a particular type of attention. There are hints of a greater significance running through the narrative—Usher’s books, his painting, his music—of an art within the art of the tale that the reader is meant to register and retain for a cumulative effect. All throughout the story, Poe shows a preference for long, clause-heavy sentences, which give us very precise and carefully considered meanings, requiring us to contract a variety of bits of information, like someone receiving intricate instructions. This enhances the credibility of the narrator, while distracting perhaps from the vagueness of his own identity, and involves the reader by making it clear that they must be themselves very hesitant about their conclusions, leaving the question open as further hints are promised. This is a micro-impressionist style, depending on touches that are not necessarily noticed consciously by the reader, but which thump quietly away in the background. Let’s look closely at the opening paragraph. During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was— but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to

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no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think— what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.1 The first sentence leads us, with a feeling of inexorability, through a series of clauses to arrive at the house. It’s autumn, so the fall of the year seems an omen for the fall of the house. The setting is limbo, a day that is dark and soundless, two words normally associated with night; the oppressively low clouds might make one think of confinement, of a low ceiling, or a lid. The day is not quite day, and the landscape is not open; the season is ambiguous, and things are dying but not dead. The isolation of the house is made clear indirectly, by the duration of the trip, and here too we find the Romantic trick of using emotional words to describe natural scenes, such as dreary, dull, and melancholy. The identity of the subject does not encompass the surroundings, but the mental state is not strictly located in the subject, either. The mood is an interaction of subject and place, and this interaction is what’s important. What in the landscape is interacting with what in the subject? A subtle influence on the one side and a subtle sense on the other. That this interaction is possible suggests an invisible, quasi-occult meshing of subject and object. The second sentence makes it clear that the emotion of gloom is not projected from the narrator onto the scene, but emanates from the scene and infects the narrator. The story will operate on the reader in the same way; if we retain Poe’s implication that consciousness acts as a filter, rather than a sponge. The impressions Poe describes would then be bypassing the

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filter and going directly into the unconscious centre of the mind. The gloom pervades his spirit, so it is spiritual, and its presence within him is complete, but it seems to come from physical things, so it may be that the depressing sensation is triggered primarily by the experience of spiritual contact with the material, which means that the spirit is not so strictly individuated, not absolutely separated into a different sphere from matter. This thematically essential blurring of the lines between spirit and matter, feeling and perception, landscape and artefact, observer and observed, is fully underway. The third sentence is a close analysis of feeling by a connoisseur who can distinguish between various aesthetic conditions, which is necessary if we are to follow the story. The narrator’s heart is also a suspended lute, which, while it is not as sensitive as Usher’s, is nevertheless sufficiently responsive to relay Poe’s micro-impressions to us. Most of the narrator’s activities involve perceiving, rather than carrying, out actions in a plotline, so that the reader can enter into this story at something closer to the narrator’s level. As Sean Moreland has argued, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a negation of the sublime.2 If the scene is not sublime, this means in part that Poe is not merely repeating Burke and the other Romantic aesthetic thinkers, but using their ideas to describe a different kind of impression overlooked by them, not unlike the perversity, overlooked by moral theoreticians, of “The Imp of the Perverse.” If there is nothing poetic about the house, even though it will be transformed into the haunted palace of Usher’s poem, this is another example of blurring: the distinction between aesthetic and spiritual impressions is hard to find, and in the process the reader and the narrator draw closer together as well. The fourth sentence provides several more subjective responses, by way of adjectives, that seem to arrive from outside the subject. The word “mere” suggesting that one would have assumed a house that is capable of striking someone with an insufferable impression would have to be sublime in some way, with “simple” doing much the same task. The vacant eye-like windows establish at once the symbolism of the house as Poe would have understood symbolism, but the house is not really personified here, because the windows are compared not to living eyes but to vacant ones, so the image empties itself out for you. The impression arises from an encounter with a void where a presence should be, but a void which therefore takes on, due to the strength of the impression, a paradoxical kind of presence, as if there were a malignant, invisible force at work stripping the presence away. Poe is going out of his way to show us that this is not a vision, not Romantic landscape rapture, but utterly dull, prosaic, real. This is crucially important, because it helps to maintain the sense of

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the self-difference of the ordinary that the weird depends on for its effect. As Poe will write later: “I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up.”3 This cannot be a Fantasy landscape, because then the reader would be more or less asked to enter the story without the relations to ordinary reality which are the story’s theme. We would no longer be reading about the human mind, which has presumably the same operating characteristics in any setting, but about some special location where special things happen to special people. The story would be an exotic, “what-if” tale, not the sobering reflection on consciousness that it is. The fifth sentence describes a physical sensation produced by outward observations which are not imagined, and which in fact actively resist any embroidery by the imagination, while the sixth directs us to thematically essential questioning and uncertainty. The story makes use of a Gothic trope, the emotionally affecting sight of the old house, but rejects the architectural extravagance of the Gothic, using prosaicness to achieve this effect. There’s nothing picturesque or dramatic about the house; it isn’t the standard movie haunted mansion, glowing with menace. Neither the emotions nor the building is in any way adorned in trappings intended to produce a given feeling; that this feeling is induced after all reflects a deeper, subtler form of influence. The subtilization of the Gothic is a key artistic goal for Poe in this story. The shadowy fancies of the seventh sentence are there to be grappled with, but unsuccessfully, because to grapple with them is to fail to experience them as shadows. Grappling with them would mean dragging them into the light, seeing them clearly, and that isn’t happening. In the eighth sentence, while the narrator insists on the physical reality of the influence he is experiencing, he does not therefore claim that the mystery is cleared up by recourse to physical causes, but rather, in a characteristic move for Poe, he draws the material into the domain of mystery also. The narrator’s exercise, gazing into the tarn, is an experiment with the scene, to determine if the emotions it produces can be aesthetically remodelled by flipping the image, but the resistance of the impression further reinforces the idea that it is not entirely aesthetic, but physical—not a matter of psychological associations, but of direct psychological impression or communication. In other words, this impression does come into the narrator’s mind from an exterior source. The image of reflection, of doubling, of a vacant-eyed house staring fixedly at its own image in dead water, captures Poe’s nightmarish conception of identity in this story. Identity is a horror, a fixed and imposed contemplation of a crumbling person, an image of

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misery that one is compelled to apply to oneself. There’s a hint of the ending of Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” in this version of self-contemplation. For Roderick Usher, terror is a paradox, a deep fear governed by reason in the form of law; the fancy that Poe writes about is introduced with coy denials which perform this reinforcement through the ineffective rational exorcism that he was just describing. The point is that, by now, even as early as this, it should be clear that the imagination is perceiving, that the supposedly imaginary exhalation is real, a materialized emotional state. The house is bizarre because it dislocates all those boundaries of identity that we take for granted. The physicality of emotion is realized, exaggerated owing to the long tenancy of the house by a single family of a singular character, so that each generation is just like the last one all over again without change. The persistence of identity here actually consumes the house and the people it supposedly designates; the Ushers are so much themselves that they are all one person. There is a deeply disturbing conclusion to be drawn from this: that long retention of a single identity is decay. “It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. … And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke.”4 As Jonathan Newell writes: “The Fall of the House of Usher” presents us with a kind of possession narrative, but here it is unclear who (or what) is possessing whom—is the house reflecting and exteriorizing the madness of Roderick and his sister, or is it actually causing their decline, as the story sometimes hints? The tale continuously blurs the boundaries between characters and setting, troubling conceptions of selfhood, agency, and humanness.5

The change appears in the intensification of the identity, rather than the loss of it; so then, is an identity only something that is steadily rotting away? The stasis of the characters and their situation then appears as a means for establishing a contrast, to show that, under these conditions of exaggerated stability, the decay of identity actually only becomes worse. The difficulty then is the inability of these characters to accept or accommodate change, their destiny; they are excessively dependent on the preservation of strict boundaries between identities—boundaries which, on closer examination, are not actually retrievable, except insofar as they involve change. The search for stability discovers only the greater and greater extent of instability.

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Roderick is also clearly marked by a destiny that takes paradoxical form— he cannot change, because he is so weak that any change would kill him, but he cannot stay the same, because this is decay, the very source of his weakness. Insofar as he registers this paradox, he experiences premonitory impressions that take shape in his art, which reflects Poe’s approach to the writing of this story. Roderick’s paintings produce shudders because they are vague, but who shudders at what is only vague? The vagueness here must arise where solidity is desired. Whether we are examining the painting of that underground corridor, or listening to a guitar played within very strict constraints, or reading a poem which culminates with an image of streaming exhalation, a kind of death rattle or mad raving, there is always a sense of canalization, reduction, and fixity. The narrator remembers, often with pain, all of Roderick’s art; it’s through art, as Wilde will say later, that self-awareness comes, the “full consciousness.” The mechanical, external form of reflection acquires, simply by long enduring, the character of self-consciousness; this introversion then becomes an attribute of the people belonging to the house, as a result of their exposure to its “atmosphere”—a key concept in weird fiction, which covers all aspects of micro-impressions. Something about the fixedness of the contemplation becomes an attribute of the identity; identity is yourself, but it also the way you see yourself. Where this self-awareness is fixed, there will be a constant effort to keep the self within its bounds. With the list of Roderick’s books, the story links the reflexivity of the house to the reflexivity of the story itself, as situated in this canon of phantastic and spiritually speculative literature. Jonathan A. Cook writes: One of the functions of the narrator’s reading of the pseudo-medieval “Mad Trist” [sic] which coincides with the return of Madeline Usher from the tomb, is to illustrate the disjunction between life and art in the experience of the sublime. If to the narrator “The Mad Trist” is an inferior species of antiquarian literature, to Usher it is an increasingly terrifying fulfillment of the anticipated return of his dead sister.6

However, the very point of the story is that there is no such disjunction: there is a rich irony in the fact that they are the same, that this potboiler is a potboiler that knows it’s a potboiler. That doesn’t make it less realistic, but more realistic to the extent that our own ideas of ourselves are potboiler ideas, clichéd ideas, static ideas. The reading of the Mad Tryst represents the apex of the story’s self-awareness: the narrator is reading a heroic piece of fantasy to a character in a fantasy, and the irony is that this lame story—Canning’s—is reality in Poe’s story, which is fiction. The

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Quixotic circularity of reflection is this irony; another irony is that this rather ludicrous fantasy is itself Poe’s own fantasy of a fantasy, a hoax book which a casual reader might consider to be real alongside the other real books Poe has carefully planted earlier in the story. The Gothic story, like the house, becomes too self-conscious of itself by long persisting in the same form, with the same tropes, decaying into clichés. However, a Gothic story that comes to realize this about itself, and furthermore to use it to achieve its effects, is something suddenly new! The effect in the story is that the tale is coming true somehow, not in its own terms of dragons and heroes, but in terms of the setting, which is itself a story. So then, is this an invitation to consider the events of “The Fall of the House of Usher” coming true in terms of the reader’s own setting? Roderick, by refusing to acknowledge that he had buried his sister alive, seems to have been trying to prompt his own death, as if he knew it had to come. The story ends on a note of relief, with the sense that a deadly spell has been broken; a house and a family that are already dead finally succumb to dissolution, like M. Valdemar. Roderick has seized control of destiny, but in order to bring it about, rather than escape it. That long painful self-contemplation is finally over; at the same time, Poe has torn down the Gothic tale in order to produce something newer—a weird tale.

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“The Traveller with the Pasted Rag Picture,” by Edogawa Rampo [Hirai Taro] Without venturing into the specific attributes of what might constitute a major or minor story in early twentieth-century Japan, we can note that this story destabilizes identity in a way that might present difficulties for any majoritarian assimilation. The brother’s face in the portrait exhibits “grief and agony,”7 which suggests that he is paying a terrible price for trying to live his dream. In this story, altering the way something is perceived also alters that thing, which might be related in some way with Buddhist philosophy, but what matters for our purposes is that the story does present the alteration of reality as something anomalous, which makes it something other than a didactically religious story. The bizarre event is the disappearance and appearance of the brother. While madness has a role to play in the story, it is impossible to attach it to any particular character. It’s an ambient madness that is presented as something inherent to all perception insofar as it fails to conform to a static idea of being. The brother vanishes from the family home every day and then returns. The old man who tells the story, the speaker, penetrates his secret, finds him, and watches him surreptitiously. Then he watches his brother vanish into the painting, only to find him again in it, now permanently visible. From this point forward, the speaker will be showing things, like passing scenery, to his brother, rather than looking at him or for him. Reversing the binoculars has made it possible for the brother to become a small image. There is a pattern of loss and recovery wherein recovery is achieved only by a reversal in circumstances which in turn alters what is recovered. What is recovered is not what was lost. We assume that this alteration is solely psychological, but in this story the alteration is both psychological and ontological. The mark of destiny in this story is the pair of binoculars, which are the mechanism by which the effect of perception on reality is made manifest. The painting is an ocular version of the witches’ promise to Macbeth that he will become the King—a tantalizing dream. In stories of love at first sight, or of obsession, like Hoffmann’s “The Sand-Man”—a story that has several key similarities to this one—the obsession involves the immediate identity of something exterior to a character with something hidden within the observer. It’s as if the observer finds in someone or something else an errant and vital part of their own identity; they discover that their identity is incomplete, and this seems to deprive them of it entirely. For example, in “Berenice,” the narrator, Egaeus, yearns to take possession of Berenice’s teeth because “I felt

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that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.”8 However, this identification always turns out to be a mistake, and the attempt to win possession of the alienated identity always results in its collapse. The identity is flawed, and this flaw destines the possessor to drastic change; the vision of a perfected identity, achieved by possession of the crown, or of Olimpia, or of the idea of Berenice, becomes the mark. The question is whether or not this flaw is a personal failing, which would be the more major version of this trope, or if it is actually the true nature of identity itself. It may be that the problem is in an excessively stable model of identity, rather than in the particular identity of an individual. When the character tries to realize their vision, they always find something else, the symbolic possession fails to work as a symbol and remains ironically just what it is—a set of teeth, a soulless robot, an actual crown. In this story, the brother wants something like what Nathanael wants in “The Sand-Man” but finds himself trapped in the moment of its falsification forever. He grows old, staring into the unchanging face of the woman who obsessed him. Where Nathanael discovers that Olympia is a doll, the brother, having made a similar discovery, chooses impulsively to make himself into a doll as well. He loses the scope of human choice, but he remains perishable and conscious. Nathanael’s crisis erupts when he realizes that his dream was never real and can never come true, while the brother discards the distinction between real and unreal, true and untrue. Nathanael’s crisis is personal, witnessed by loving friends. It’s madness, and while we all realize that madness can afflict anyone, it is understood to be a problem that arises from ourselves. The brother’s crisis is more impersonal, and rather than take the form of a madness that is rooted in our own psychologies, the problem in “The Traveller with the Pasted Rag Picture” seems to belong to reality. Reality is a form of madness rather than its antidote. This leads us to the way the story produces the supernatural, by introducing uncertainty into psychology itself so that the brother’s madness actually puts him into closer rapport with the nature of reality. The world becomes a supernatural thing, a kind of performance or gigantic doll house, in way that might well remind us of Ligotti’s stories. The fantasy is to lose oneself in an ecstasy of permanent visual contemplation, becoming part of the picture, but the brother doesn’t appear to have lost himself at all. The supernatural element is introduced in the reversal of the binoculars, the horror of it being the paranoid idea that one’s hidden intentions may affect others in permanent and appalling ways, a kind of deep mistrust of the self and of reality. Rampo hints that this is not just a fantasy of the weird traveller; the odd appearance of the man in the image, how oddly it strikes the

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narrator before he knows the story, the curious circumstances of the relation itself, and the way the two figures seem to acknowledge him are all examples. Even if there is madness here, it is indissolubly linked with the supernatural, because it’s a madness that can jump from person to person without any reason, a nonpsychological madness, which is a fundament of the world. Analysis The story opens with a statement that the speaker (vs. the narrator) must have been mad, provided the narrator himself was not dreaming or hallucinating—he does not go so far as to suspect his own sanity—so we are already in an indeterminate position relative to the narrative. However, the narrator then discards the opposition of dreams, hallucinations, the perception of madmen, all on the one side, and the supernatural on the other, brushing aside that supposed impasse altogether by speculating, as Poe did, that these wild perceptions might be more accurate rather than delusional. The story is set on a train conveying the narrator back home from a visit to a town known for its mirages, Uotsu, now called Uozu, but then the narrator’s trip there might itself be a mirage, since his friends deny that he’d ever been there and he has no proof. His only evidence depends on the claim that dreams are monochrome and this experience was vividly coloured, drawing on a kind of scientific source to substantiate his claim and focusing our attention on the picture, which is both the most unreal and the most vivid thing in the story. The narrator takes the time to tell us about the mirage he saw in Uotsu, the significance of this being that he knew it for a mirage when he saw it, suggesting that he is really seeing what he claims to see. We note too that he expected it to look like a painting, and it did not, so he is not seeing what he expected to see, not liable to project. The mirage looks like mountains projected on the sea, and he likens this to viewing something through a badly focused microscope, which is the first of several references to optical devices in this story, another link to “The Sand-Man.” What he finds especially eerie is the way you can’t measure the distance between yourself and the mirage; the thing keeps changing shape, which is another clue, as real things are fixed in shape. Each change seems to be brought about by the viewer’s attempt to focus on the image, or grasp it, giving it something like fixity; we are being shown something about the process of perception, the way it involves grasping, shaping, fixing, on the observer’s part. The narrator wonders if he was also hallucinating on the train, still experiencing the mirage, and whether it was an inner or outer phenomenon. There were many people present when he saw the mirage, in a place known for

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them, and while Rampo doesn’t describe their reactions, whether or not they see the same thing, they must be there to corroborate the mirage and substantiate the narrator’s reliability. Just before the mirage occurs, the narrator sees a white sail. The white sail reappears as he gazes from the windows of the train as well, just prior to his encounter with the speaker, and the coincidence is not marked or even noted. We are told that the day is airlessly close and warm; the scenery outside appears to flicker in dusk as they travel. The absence of other passengers, the conductor, or any of the train crew, combined with these other details, gives the scene a dreamlike quality, but the fact that the narrator notices and reports these things, commenting on their dreaminess in the moment, leaves us neither here nor there. I don’t believe that the oneiric flavour of the scene is sufficiently pronounced to justify any claim that the narrator dreamed the encounter with the speaker. Rampo presumably includes them in order to bring the reader into the proper condition to receive the story and to reinforce its theme. The speaker has dark hair but a wrinkled face; he wears outdated clothes, but he matches them somehow. The narrator is afraid of him and approaches him more because of this fear than in spite of it. So the speaker is introduced as a vector for disjointedness. The narrator reflexively closes his eyes rather than look at the painting, as if he were subconsciously identifying a threat, and when he does look, he refers to the painting as a “thing.”9 It’s like a little stage, dimensional, with cloth figures attached to a background in a different medium, protruding from the flat surface as if were crossing the implicit barrier between the fantasy of the image and the reality of the viewer, or caught halfway. This type of art makes the figures more important than the background; while Rampo describes the background first, it could also depict the idea that reality is like a theatre set, less real than the actors are. It may be that the story depends on this volatility: we may be inclined to think that subjects, as the shapers of reality, are more real than their surroundings, the stage set. However, if the set is real in a way that differs too much from the way the subject is real, then the disjunction becomes too pronounced and the two no longer have anything to do with one another. An entirely implied set is purely subjective, nothing more than whatever the actors’ mimicry would indicate. The movement is not towards the denial of existence but towards silence, an inability to say anything positive or negative about reality, which makes reality into a subjective mystery. The woman in the painting is dressed in traditional, old Japanese style and is flirting with the man in a stylized way reminiscent of the stage, so

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we know this is not a family portrait. It is a private scene, making its exhibition to a stranger seem inappropriate, but this also draws the stranger into an intimate moment and turns him into a witness or party to the story. The narrator thinks of using a magnifying glass to study the skin of the two dolls to see if their realism extends to actual pores, bringing optical instruments back again. They are “uncannily real.”10 Their “aliveness” is “permanent” and not the “fleeting” appearance of life that dolls sometimes have in puppet theatre, making them more alive than puppets (ibid.). After gazing at the painting for a while, the speaker asks the narrator if he realizes the truth now, breaking him out of his reverie. The truth in question must be that reverie; the speaker has noticed that the narrator has become so transfixed by the image that he seems to have entered into its reality while becoming oblivious to his own, as if the image were more real than the train. Rampo has been careful to reduce the reality of the train by various means and now we see why, it’s to facilitate this absorption—so the truth the passenger refers to would be the truth of unreality. There is no way to verify any hypothesis locating the limits of perception, no telling the extent or accuracy of it, right down to the bare existence of anything to perceive. The speaker then provides the narrator with his brother’s binoculars, which shrank him down to the size of the figures in the painting when, at his request, the speaker looked at him through the binoculars reversed. The narrator almost absent-mindedly puts the wrong lenses to his eyes on the train, and the speaker’s consternation is set down as a clue to the bizarre event yet to be described. When looked at through the binoculars, held correctly, the painting becomes “another world,”11 all but real or perhaps hyperreal. When he lowers the binoculars again, the narrator says it’s as if he expected to find himself waking up in bed instead of being on the train, so there again is the nightmare feeling of being lost. The affects of the figures, the amorousness of the woman, and the anxiety and pain of the man are the first indications of a real drama in the story; the drama emerges from the image rather than the quotidian events of the train trip. There is a brief discussion of sanity, but the narrator contemplates his own possible insanity and so seems less likely to really be insane, while the old man might be insane at that, although the experience of the viewing through the binoculars suggests that whatever madness he might have is more likely a result of these weird circumstances than their cause. The narrator is now avid to hear the old man’s story. The role of the frame narrative, it is becoming clear, has nothing to do with rendering an account of how the narrator came to know it and everything to do with placing us in

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this nondescript narrator’s position, so our circumstances in receiving the story are important to realizing its full effect. Is this just about making the story more plausible? Does Rampo lack confidence in the power of the story to affect us by itself, or does the frame tell us what to look for in the story? Does it ironize the story’s earlier events so that we see them as more than background noise, sensitizing us to the micro-impressions Rampo has woven into them? The speaker’s story opens with a flat declaration that he believes his older brother has turned into a doll in a painting. The vividness and precision of his memory again are meant to put off the impression of rambling madness, and now Rampo’s tactics make it possible for him to ballast his story with details that really aren’t significant, like a specific date, the occupation of the speaker’s father, the neighbourhood he grew up in, and so on. Whenever the speaker indicates his brother’s image as if it were his brother himself, “both of us must have been living in some strange domain far beyond the operations of the laws of nature.”12 The circumstances surrounding the telling of the tale are already supernatural and not just the events in the speaker’s story; this is an expression of my thesis about the way weird fiction not only describes but produces the supernatural for the reader. The speaker’s story is set in real places, the Junikai in Asakusa, Tokyo. Yoshikuni Igarashi wrote that, in Japanese literature of Rampo’s time, “Within this modern urban space, vision became the preferred trope of rationality while the other senses were relegated to a secondary status, confined to the private realm.”13 Rampo uses optics to disjoin rationality and vision in this story. The speaker says, “Ever since I could remember, I had felt a revulsion for all optical instruments. Somehow they seemed wicked to me.”14 Climbing the tower, following his brother, the speaker undergoes a passage from one frame of reference, on the ground, to another, high above the ground. From the top of the tower, Tokyo looks like a “weird jumble,”15 and the temple below is like a doll’s house. Not having any Japanese, I do not know if the term “doll” employed here is the same or related in any way to the term used to describe the figures in the painting, but the affinity of ideas is clear enough. Distance seems to turn buildings into toys and collapse people into heads with feet; this is accentuated when the narrator says his brother looked like a figure in a western oil painting, given the contrast between his black velvet clothes, black velvet being especially dark, and the sky against which he is standing. The impression is visual, but also emotional; western oil paintings make their subjects look “austere.”16

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The older brother is normally indifferent to women but becomes fascinated with a distant face that is uncannily beautiful, suggesting that he prefers an idealized fantasy vision of a woman he can never have but only admire at a distance; to see this woman in reality, if only in this weirdly distant way, produces a violent disjunction in his mind. Perhaps this is why he seems relieved, rather than upset, to discover she is only a painting. Unlike Hoffmann’s Olimpia, which represents an abstract woman with no clear model, the woman in the painting is an aestheticized version of a real person, Yaoya Oshichi, who is like a version of the older brother. When a fire in seventeenth-century Tokyo caused a temple page to run out of the temple confines in order to help put it out, Yaoya Oshichi saw him and fell instantly in love with him. In order to see him a second time, she set another fire. For this, she was burned alive. Later generations made her the subject of all kinds of embellished stories, including puppet plays. She is a woman whose reality has vanished into art, so it would not be entirely correct to say that the brother had fallen in love with Yaoya Oshichi. He loves this particular image, which is as much Yaoya Oshichi as any other, but which he particularizes as an individual. However, he does not love this image because he sees in it what he considers to be the true likeness of Yaoya Oshichi; he’s indifferent to the real woman and wants only the image. He wants to enter the painting, to live the dream, so, unlike Nathanael, he doesn’t care that the woman he loves is just a doll. Nathanael does not try to become an automaton, but flies into a kind of disjunctive fugue as if everyone were automatons, including himself. The speaker strangely doesn’t seem to care that his brother has transmogrified himself into a doll in a painting, but is happy for him. This, alongside the narrator’s glimpse of the misery on the doll’s face, creates an entirely implied narrative in which the younger brother, in deep denial, refuses to accept whatever happened to his older brother. Perhaps the brother’s torment is magnified by the speaker’s assurance that he is content in possession of his dream. In any case, the narrator seems to see expressions on the figures but of course this is neither here nor there, and the story ends without any additional twist.

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“The Sand-Man,” by E.T.A. Hoffmann This is a major story. Healthy sanity stands on one side with Clara, while Nathanael is presented to us as a cautionary figure. One doesn’t always adhere to the normal successfully, but it is possible and advisable to try. It isn’t clear that the inimical force that destroys Nathanael is a subversive one, although the choice of the lawyer Coppelius as its Mephistophelean emissary should be noted. That inimical force is a version of the radical disjunction that Kant situates between the perceiving subject and any object and this disjunction is treated here as a Satanic curse. The disjunction does raise serious problems, as Elizabeth Purcell notes, for moral freedom and public order; this is something Kant endeavoured to resolve, but the respectful objections of Salomon Maimon point to Kant’s final failure entirely to do so. A majority position can take this disjunction into account, but it remains always a nagging uncertainty, capable of undermining the major position. The bizarre event has several phases: Nathanael’s encounter with Coppelius and his father, his composition of a prophetic poem anticipating the moment Spalanzani throws Olimpia’s eyes at him, his encountering Olimpia, and the reappearance and attitude of Coppelius at the end. It might be that the initial night-time encounter was only a dream, but then we can’t overlook the way Coppelius not only calls for eyes but also examines Nathanael’s hands as if he were looking to make an automaton himself. There is nothing in the legend of the Sand-Man about fashioning human replicas. It seems a bit more than chance, too, that Nathanael’s friends should find him a new place to live that just happens to be opposite Spalanzani’s place, and Coppola’s arrival with “perspectives” (i.e., little telescopes) is also suspiciously opportune. Both the timing and the remarks made by Coppelius at the end also suggest something larger than Nathanael’s own psychology is at work in the story. Destiny is overtly thematized by Hoffmann, and while it is on the one hand treated as the projected effect of unconscious influences on a person, it is on the other hand also given an independent force, as I have intimated above. Its mark in this story is fire, but more particularly a fire in the eye. Everything is destined to change, to burn, at least for us, because we can only ever know things as they seem. The elusive reserve of the thing in itself is a constant threat, telling us that our perceptions are only circumstantially rooted in reality, if that. The one recourse is to the reality of other people, reliance on the correspondence of our perceptions with

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theirs, and the closer access to the person in themselves that we can hope to have with our fellow beings. This is why the illusion in the story must pertain to the simulation of another person, to attack that one recourse. “The Sand-Man” has no ghost or other overtly supernatural element, but it produces the supernatural nonetheless. We might say that nothing supernatural is called for, that we can assume young Nathanael has always been afraid of Coppelius and was thinking of him all along, suppressing this thought for no identified reason by hiding it behind the Sand-Man. Perhaps the Sand-Man is a familiar enough bogeyman that Coppelius, in trying to terrify young Nathanael, adopts his persona by calling for eyes, or perhaps Nathanael’s father has even previously mentioned Nathanael’s fear of the Sand-Man to Coppelius. I would say, though, that we have to read the story as it is written and pay attention to the sequence of points: the SandMan is introduced first, then Coppelius, even though he is already known in Nathanael’s house. If we have to construct elaborate scenarios involving all manner of facts not presented in the story, like Nathanael being terrified of Coppelius from the start, and Nathanael’s father having told Coppelius about his son’s fears, then we’re rewriting the story to suit our scepticism. We may say this sequence doesn’t reflect anything but Nathanael’s own experience of things, and we do appear to have reason to suspect him of being inaccurate, but if we are going to start assuming inaccuracy, then why believe that his mother isn’t a hallucination or question any of the other more ordinary elements of his story? The story simply breaks down if we don’t assume that Nathanael’s perception of things is no more distorted than is strictly necessary to make Hoffman’s point or achieve his desired effect on us, and, as we read, we learn that this point depends on Nathanael’s senses being at least adequately in agreement with those of others. Indeed, Hoffmann’s point is that the supernatural is not just a weird perception that could mean one thing or another, but it is something that directly affects perception. The supernatural is often presented as an anomalous appearance whose true character, natural or not, is impossible to perceive, and so its natural character must be determined by the application of rational principles—Kant himself said as much with respect to miracles. However, in the folktale, the supernatural Sand-Man blinds its victims, physically seizing their eyes, while in this story Nathanael’s desire to live his fantasy is what blinds him; the fantasizer still sees what everyone else sees, but imputes their own wishful meaning to it. His reason is blind, not his eyes. Everyone is initially fooled by Olimpia: she isn’t an obvious fraud, and while she baffles perception, she does this in the same way that any living

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person does. Nathanael’s shortcoming is not a perceptual one but a rational one; he doesn’t notice the various indications of her true nature that Hoffmann sprinkles everywhere. Instead, he rather rationalizes away her silence, her close confinement, her inertia. The Sand-Man from Nathanael’s point of view, no longer speaking folklorically, is this disjunction of perception and reality regarded as a curse, a supernatural block. While all this informs an idea of human psychology, it is not rooted in psychology but epistemology, which means the reduction of the supernatural to mere hallucination here is not a viable reading. Nathanael’s error is only exaggerated in order to make the point and not to make him out to be crazier than he is, since that would make this too much of a special case to be of any pressing interest to the reader. His understandable mistake about Olimpia’s reality is proof that the senses are not reliable even when they are working well. The fact that our senses can be altered, adjusted, and extended—by lenses for example—being another proof that scientific precision can render our experience of reality actually more plastic and fungible. The little telescope Nathanael buys from Coppola works as intended, with no distortion. The delirium of the story is induced by a being of exceptional regularity and fixity, a product of science in collusion with the more demonic forces of philosophical uncertainty. The weird upshot of Kantian philosophy, its delirium, with which Hoffmann was well acquainted, is that reality is a judgement rather than a perception. Analysis The story thematizes the idea that we carry images of people around with us, that we are malleable and subject to impressions that influence our lives. Nathanael writes about his fiancée Clara, “whose image is so deeply engraved upon my heart and mind.”17 Clara the Clear is rational, cool-­headed, in touch with reality. After Nathanael’s letter, we read her reply, which informs us that she has just read what we have just read, putting us as readers adjacent to her, a character, and her analysis of his letter models for us how we should read Nathanael for the rest of the story. This allows Hoffmann to plunge into a Werther-like identification with Nathanael, so as to do justice to his psychological state, while maintaining an external vantage point on him. Clara identifies Coppelius as the source of Nathanael’s own irrationality, since it is his irrational or unexplained hatred of children which, according to her, caused Nathanael to fear him. Influence appears here as a kind of partner to destiny; when Hoffmann writes about influences, he seems to mean something that has an effect on us without rational transparency,

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which she proposes to make use of deliberately. “I have resolved to appear to you as your guardian angel,”18 Clara writes. She is going to replace Coppelius, just as Coppelius replaced the Sand-Man. What we are being shown is the way that influence, once consciously recognized, can become a tool of deliberate manipulation, applied to rational or self-serving ends (assuming there is a difference between the two). So far, this is all psychology, but Clara also writes about a “dark and hostile power” which is at once “ourselves” and “foreign.”19 We can agree with Freud that this is the unconscious, it has to be, and there is a link between the unconscious and destiny that we can find going back to Macbeth, but the existence of this link does not therefore compel us to reduce the problem to an entirely psychological one. This is where critics like Todorov go wrong, in their suspicious eagerness to dispense with the supernatural. Certainly in this story, the psychological problem is only a part of a larger epistemological problem, the Kantian disjuncture I’ve been talking about. It turns out that, despite our expectations, our perceptions of ourselves are not privileged but only more copious and consistent, and the same process of analysis that we use to understand the reality around us must also be brought to bear on our own reality. My identity is a “thing in itself” even for me, and for all the special quirks that distinguish it from other objects, in this basic alienation it is no different from them. This levels the perceptual field irrespective of interior and exterior and also brings us closer to the fictional characters in short stories like this one, since we are, in both our own and their cases, compelled to read them and to read between their lines, as Clara is doing here, in order to understand the reality. The “strange forms” we encounter are reproduced within us, so we are carrying them around, images, but at the same time we do not strictly originate them, since they are the consequence of anomalous encounters. Nathanael begins by carrying around a fictional character, the Sand-Man, and Coppelius, a real person in this story, replaces him. Now Clara proposes to replace Coppelius. All this begs these questions: first, why can’t Nathanael freely choose his influences, and second, why influences at all? The answer to both is that the mind is not under the control of the self. In Nathanael’s letter of reply to Lothair, he says that his fixation with Coppelius should vanish, if Clara is correct, once he knows they are phantasms of himself, so this is a direct test of the capacity of human reason to overcome the unconscious, and it fails. I don’t think that Hoffmann is looking to discredit this possibility, since Nathanael is not presented as a

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typical case, an everyman, and since Clara seems to be able to do this herself. Instead, I think Hoffmann is trying to show us that things are not that simple, because reason cannot be verified in experience directly; Nathanael’s unconscious “impression” endures this debunking so that his affirmation of Clara’s rational analysis seems overstated, as if he were trying to convince himself.20 To return to the beginning, Nathanael writes that he is experiencing “dark forebodings of some awful fate threatening me,” triggered by an event, his encounter with Coppola who reminds him of Coppelius, even though thinking about this event elicits “wild laughter” from him.21 Rereading the story, we know where we will hear that wild laughter again, so the foreshadowing is verified. He also writes that the encounter with Coppola has had a “hostile and disturbing influence upon my life,”22 so all the major themes are in place right away. Coppola leads to the story of Coppelius, a lawyer, a go-between, a representative of something else, and also someone who drafts contracts like the devil, the prosecuting attorney. Coppelius embodies the disjunction separating reality and knowledge. It is interesting to note that the mother’s references to the Sand-Man have nothing to do with Coppelius per se, except insofar as she is apparently trying to hide his visits from her son.23 He doesn’t believe her, questions the mundane version of the story, and his investigation turns up the scary folktale, which he doesn’t entirely believe either, but which makes such a strong impression on his imagination that he is in effect terrorizing himself with the idea of a cruel person, the mere existence of real cruelty, which he has never really seen. It’s scepticism of mundane answers, which may be taken as distractions coming from interested parties who have something to hide, that leads to superstitious answers, which seem all the more credible for being generally dismissed. Young Nathanael knows his mother is not telling him the truth; the problem isn’t that she is withholding a folktale from him, but rather the identity of the mysterious visitor, whom Nathanael can hear. His mother gives him the image of the Sand-Man to cover the image of Coppelius, but it is Nathanael who, for reasons of his own, replaces the former with the latter. His uncertain fear of a being he knows doesn’t exist seems contradictory, but then he does hear the noises, and it may be his disturbance arises from being misled, having something hidden from him, and the implications, since they wouldn’t hide anything benign from him.24 Nathanael is not gullible or naive, but discerning; his fixation on the Sand-Man is a way of fixating on his parents’ duplicity and instability.

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Once he sees his father with Coppelius, and, in a way, becoming another Coppelius himself, he bears the image of Coppelius as well25 and it is on the basis of this that he reacts to Coppola. Coppelius is clearly identified with the devil; his monotonously cruel personality, association with fire, and his appraisal of hands and feet as if he were in a position to evaluate God’s handiwork or reduce it to merely mechanical cleverness are all early clues. When Nathanael’s father is buried, his face has become peaceful again, which is taken as a sign that he is not in a state of “everlasting ruin,”26 which I can only assume refers to damnation. Since he is a good man, as the reliable Clara avers in her letter, we can only assume his soul’s jeopardy arises out of his unaccountable association with Coppelius. Clara further supposes Nathanael’s father died seeking “higher knowledge”27 which is knowledge of a sort to reconcile perception and understanding and perhaps moral freedom as well. Nathanael dies in a similar quest, one involving Romantic love rather than alchemy. Both are consumed by a kind of fire, which is a disintegrative product of the disjunction between perception and understanding. In her article, “The Crisis of Subjectivity: The Significance of Darstellung and Freedom in E.  T. A.  Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman,’” Elizabeth Purcell writes: In the latter part of the eighteenth century, philosophers faced a problem with respect to moral freedom. They were concerned not only with an account of how one could be free in the Newtonian system of nature but also with how it might be possible to represent that freedom. The imagination provided an answer. The imagination, thought to have limitless potential through aesthetic experiences and judgments, provided the bridge between our abstract, intellectual understanding of the world and the conditions of our morality. In constructing a system of knowledge, the possibility of moral freedom set the rational limit to our abstract, intellectual understanding of the world.28

Moral freedom is nothing but madness unless we have the capacity to understand our circumstances and so make our choices deliberately, and this understanding is mediated; this is where the disjunction between perception and understanding takes on a malevolent character, as if reality were being deliberately withheld from us in order to lure us into evil actions based on our faulty understanding of the circumstances. Things

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are not what they seem, and things, as in alchemy, may be changed from what they only appear essentially to be. Strindberg tried diligently to prove that sulphur was not an element, but a version of another element, and alchemy adopts the same scepticism about the basic building blocks of matter, drawing them back into a hierarchical moral scheme. After the opening salvo of letters we switch to more direct, but not omniscient, narration. Hoffmann asks the reader: “have you ever experienced anything that completely took possession of your heart and mind.”29 This “anything” is the thingness of an essence and the possession it takes of you is actually your foredoomed struggle to possess it. Essence is not something you perceive, according to Kant, but something that takes hold of you from the inside: the essence is outside you, but its idea arises from within you and articulates itself in any communicable fashion it can find. You can only create an image and hope that somehow it will have the power to communicate the intensity of the idea—which in this case means being interpreted correctly by the understanding that apprehends the image. These may all be Romantic ideas we disagree with now, but they inform the story. One might think that the narrator is referring to Nathanael’s fixations, on Clara or Olimpia or both, but he is speaking, switcheroo, about himself and his need to tell this story.30 He gains credibility by speaking to us openly about his need to frame the story in the most affecting way, not as a flimflam but in order to communicate this strong impression to us fully; having done this, he then insinuates his real flimflam, pretending to know Lothair, although basically he has just told you this is all imaginary and I think the reader is meant to receive this as a pretence. “I may succeed in depicting Nathanael in such a way that you will recognise it as a good likeness without being acquainted with the original, and will feel as if you had very often seen him with your own bodily eyes. Perhaps, too, you will then believe that nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life.”31 Hoffmann levels fantasy and reality in a Quixotic way, in fact we may see in all weird fiction something that proceeds as much from Cervantes as from Shakespeare. We take it for granted that we can tell that a portrait is true without having seen the original, which is much like taking an idea to be true that we have never perceived in reality, and the impression of seeing Nathanael with bodily eyes suggests to me the possibility that we may come to perceive our own likeness to Nathanael. The result of this levelling is the supernatural, the idea that anything is possible, which opens our life onto fiction without

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asking us to accept either the fiction as fiction, the way Fantasy does, or the fiction as at least potential fact, the way science fiction does. Weird fiction opens a reader’s life to fictional possibilities in a way that seems to offer liberation from an ordinary idea of life that is too pat, unalive, and limited. The Kantian disjunction is one of the key techniques or sources for this move. Clara returns in a cloud of aesthetic associations and comparisons. She is not beautiful in a “technical” sense,32 but spiritually, she has retained childlike brightness into maturity, her eyes are the point of focus. The shift from Clara to Olimpia is a little like the transformation that Berenice undergoes, from rambling on sunny hillsides to sickly, rigid staring, although the horror in the Poe story is that she’s still alive in there, that she is not just an idea. Nathanael becomes a fatalist, a believer in destiny, in influences.33 Man is not free, and this as Purcell notes has a strong moral dimension, implying man has no capacity to choose the good or reject the evil, a kind of Calvinist gloom. Nathanael has gone to an extreme by denying the capacity of reason altogether; Clara says the problem is that he cannot get rational control over his own beliefs, not that Coppelius is after him, but Hoffmann would agree with them both, with the understanding that the problem is not so much Coppelius as the disjunction he represents, which makes this rational control impossible, since it demands a proof it cannot find in perception. Nathanael’s prophetic poem emerges from this cloud of influence. Clara’s eyes jump into Nathanael’s bosom, which is not exactly what ends up happening. The eyes that strike him are Olimpia’s, fashioned by Coppola. Like all other optical devices in the story, they operate by enhancing subjective impressions. Clara is replaced by Olimpia, whom he has not yet met, just as the Sand-Man is replaced by Coppelius. A position is established in the mind: enemy, beloved, and then different persons may be moved in and out of these positions in a bewildering, unconscious way. Nathanael’s reason will give way entirely when Olimpia’s eyes strike his chest, but this is because in that moment he is seeing reality, not an illusion; he is realizing that Clara’s vision is correct, and it is her vision that is striking him. The circle of fire makes its first appearance here, an image that will return to Nathanael later on. That Nathanael knows better in his heart of hearts is suggested by Clara’s remonstrance in the poem that what leapt in his bosom was his own heart’s blood, not his eyes, so a production of his own inner self rather than a defect in his senses. This idea stops the circle from spinning; it is sympathy, love, and mutual understanding that

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break the circle of individual, isolated understanding, which is often characterized as impersonal or abstract and therefore false or at least more likely to be false until corroborated. Nathanael himself is horrified at the voice he hears in his own poem, which is all the more shocking to him considering the great care, the apparent deliberateness and full consciousness, with which he composed it. Clara’s gaze is death, and this is another foretelling of events: she isn’t his enemy; what will destroy him is his utter failure to grasp reality, something he can only realize through the gaze of someone else. She advises him to burn the poem, returning it to the mad fire from which it came, and he angrily accuses her of being an automaton. From this, she concludes that he doesn’t love her because he doesn’t understand her: so he reproaches her for lack of feeling, as if being reasonable made her a lifeless automaton, and she despairs because of his lack of understanding, which is here associated in an interesting way with sympathy. Clara combines the intellectual and sympathetic aspects of what we mean when we tell someone else we understand them—to understand someone sympathetically is not a matter of analysis but of seeing from their point of view. She can see from his point of view, but without losing her own perspective. The vision of Nathanael that she returns to him, not unlike the voice in the poem that shocks him, is totally unpleasing to him; it is an insult to his pride as an individual considered here to be one who is responsible for his own thoughts and emotions. All the same, it’s crucial for this story that Nathanael’s problems are not stupid, transparent, obviously fixable; we are being asked to sympathize with his unsympathetic obsession, not without altruism perhaps, but mainly so that we will see the predicament as relating to that more basic problem of disjunction. Hoffmann brilliantly brings this philosophical problem to light in a realistic relationship. Things come to a head and Nathanael nearly duels Lothair, so death comes near only to be thwarted by Clara’s invocation of love. Both men are described as fiery, with Nathanael’s fire spreading to Lothair, and Clara puts it out, so we are getting a pattern here of fire being more than passion, but subjectivity, self-assertion, run out of control. Fire destroys Nathanael’s home; the fire started in a chemist shop on the ground floor, so there again we have something emerging from the inner properties of things to destroy and the idea of a small spark spreading and exploding outwards; the fire causes his relocation to lodgings he did not choose and which give him the view of Olimpia in Spalanzani’s place across the street. This is one of the workings of destiny in the story.

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Nathanael sees Olimpia clearly; he notes all the various tells distinctly, but misinterprets or fails to consider them. We hear of the “strangely fixed look about her eyes … as if they had no power of vision; I thought she was sleeping with her eyes open … perhaps she’s an idiot or something of that sort.”34 We learn that “she remained for hours together in the same position in which he had first discovered her” in an attitude of “stiffness and apathy.”35 Then Coppola appears and pours out spectacles before him “until the table began to gleam and flash all over,”36 which suggests fire again. Nathanael is fascinated by all these eyes, all these different perspectives, this sensory overload of sense instruments, all existing because perception is malleable and variable. The comparison to fire grows, so that the “blood red rays”37 enter his breast like the bloody eyes in his poem. Coppola then sells him a “perspective,” alternately translated “little telescope,” and Nathanael uses it to gaze on Olimpia; this scene is exactly mirrored in Rampo’s story, when the narrator is given the binoculars to use on the painted rag portrait. Seeing through the optic device seems to impart life to the inanimate gaze of Olimpia; Nathanael is using one of Coppola’s optic devices to examine another one, the eyes he made for Spalanzani. The extension of his power of vision calls forth a corresponding intensification of illusion; Coppola departs laughing, and this is a tell for us, a suggestion that he really is the agent of an evil destiny that does not capture us directly, but which instead provides us with the tools our weaknesses need to destroy ourselves. Without this little device, would Nathanael have become fixated on Olimpia? The perspective offered by Coppola is one that emphasizes the subjectivity of interpreted sensations, a failure to note what comes from the self and what does not. Having seen Coppola leave, Nathanael hears a dying man’s sigh only to realize he made it himself, so there is not only a presentiment of his own death, but a moment of self-alienation too; he leaps up to look at Olimpia again “urged by an irresistible impulse”38 and then sees her image everywhere, replacing Clara’s. The narrator is able to report whatever the main characters are doing or feeling, but, with respect to other characters and notably to Olimpia, he restricts himself to the vantage point of an onlooker, only noting with everyone else at her debut party that her movements are “stiff and measured”39 and following the tendency of the crowd to impute this to an excessively tight corset. The lights obscure her so Nathanael looks at her through the perspective and sees her apparently living again. He ends up telling her she has a profound soul

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that mirrors his own; so there is an irony here to the extent that this is correct for the wrong reasons and not just an error. When his poem comes true, the alienated perspective comes home again as the eyes strike his breast. Whenever his delusion is threatened, Nathanael becomes homicidal, like Norman Bates. Hoffmann is at some pains to let us know that most people had been taken in by Spalanzani and that only “a few preternaturally acute students”40 had detected the cheat. To see reality, one must be preternatural, that is, one must apply something invisible to the visible correctly. The professor of rhetoric analyses the story for us as an allegory, but his self-assurance and pomposity suggest that he has missed the real point, which is the disjuncture by which “an absurd mistrust of human figures began to prevail.”41 Nathanael is also not the only one to see this problem; his madness arises from seeing it all too clearly, after having failed to see it so utterly at first. The odd result of this is a humanization of relations, since the lovers now want women who speak their minds, and “the bonds of love were in many cases drawn closer in consequence.”42 Then we get a wonderful false recovery, but the problem is not solved. It can’t be. A happy ending is completely destroyed before our eyes, by the agency of the perspective. Nathanael happens to see Clara through the little telescope, and now the persona of reason becomes a seeming. Here again there is supernatural timing: Coppelius himself returns, not Coppola. The one is never decisively unmasked as the other, and their resemblance suggests the inimical force of seeming as such, pointing to Nathanael’s demise as the volatile consequence of a collision between psychology and epistemology. The timing of his arrival, his foreknowledge of the suicide, his ironic way of stating it so that no warning is given and no action taken, his pleasure at Nathanael’s suffering, all point to Coppelius being an actual devil, as does his disappearance once the task is finished.

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“The Signal-Man,” by Charles Dickens This story has major and minor aspects. It is minor in that it describes how a man suffers when treated as a means to an end, confined to a needlessly small social role; he chafes within his given identity, overflowing it, and this overflow seems to extend his efficacy in supernatural ways, while perversely refusing to manifest any practical utility. It is major perhaps in its sentimental treatment of this character as a martyr to that order, which is not otherwise questioned, as if its only flaw was that people were too devoted to it. If the point of the story is that we should uphold the normal valiantly even if this dooms us, then it is a major story, but the premise— that the ordinary can abandon you without cause—leads us in a more minor direction. The ordinary must be strictly reliable—but beware! It can fail you! The visions of the signal-man are the bizarre encounters in this story. What he sees is never that strange, just a figure making an everyday sort of warning gesture. What makes the event bizarre is the displacement of the figure from a “proper” sequence of events: namely, one which would include some action that would prevent the disaster. These events appear to be warnings, but there is no way to avert the evil they herald. Instead, they are warnings about the unpredictability of life, that we expect our demise to be something out of the blue, even knowing it will almost certainly be an encounter composed out of familiar elements. It is our destiny to be surprised. The words of the various warnings act as marks, and it is interesting to note that the narrator repeats “Halloa, below there,” and he interprets the gesture to mean “for God’s sake, clear the way!”—echoing the actual words the engineer will use. This shows that these warnings do not originate entirely within the mind of the signal-­ man. This whole story is a meditation on the sign and something like a Kafka story before Kafka. The signs do not have a function apart from existing as signs, and it is that existence that is so alarming from the point of view of the kind of system—such as a complicated rail system—that must control these signs. If we read the story in the major way, it would seem to impart a lesson: no amount of vigilance can truly anticipate the end, so bow your head and submit to destiny. The injustice of the death of the responsible and devoted signal-man only complements this message. On the other hand, the minor warning here is that these schemes we’ve constructed to give the ordinary its shape, from our names and identities, educational

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certifications, and time tables, retain their force only for us; they are carved into us, not into the world, which is under no obligation to honour or follow them. The limits of experience exist only for us; experience itself is infinite—supernatural. Analysis Robert Mighall, writing about Dickens and the Gothic, says, “Victorian Gothic fiction is obsessed with identifying and depicting the threatening reminders of scandalous vestiges of an age from which the present is relieved to have distanced itself”43; and, in her essay “La représentation paradoxale du chemin de fer chez Dickens: fantastique et mythe au service d’une peinture de la modernité dans Dombey and Son (1848) et ‘No. 1 Branch Line. The Signal-Man’ (1866)” Francoise Dupeyron-Lafay writes, “Somehow, it seems logical to resort to the linguistic and symbolic tools of the uncanny to represent new, unknown and destabilizing realities, as in ‘The Signal-Man’ … [the] train is presented physically, directly, only at the start, then as a power without a name, unidentified, quasi-formless, and elementary.”44 This is a story that encompasses both a Gothic atavism, as Mighall says, and alienation from modernity, as Dupeyron-Lafay argues. Dickens gives us a modern setting which ineluctably takes on a Gothic cast, as if to say that no human enterprise can achieve transparent, systemic rationality, because the human spirit or unconscious will necessarily endow it with Gothic attributes. The Gothic is here understood to mean all that is cut away and repressed by rationalism. The atmosphere of doom, the forbidding yet unadorned architecture of the tunnel and cutting, the zig-­ zag of the path down the grade to the tracks, the red light by the tunnel mouth, the acute hearing of the occupant of the zone, are all elements we have already encountered in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” None of them is strictly internal, so it would be wrong to say that the Gothic is strictly psychological. The setting plainly affects the characters. At the same time, we are discussing a man-made setting, so the Gothic remains a human phenomenon even if it is not entirely psychological. We open in the midst of things, with a call: “Halloa, below there!” For a moment, nothing is specified, and the reader is accosted directly. The actions of the signal-man, described from a third-person point of view, are then succeeded by the impressions of the first-person narrator, taking us from a possible omniscience to a limited, subjective point of view in the course of the first paragraph. The narrator is gazing down from a height, but more strictly speaking he is gazing down from the ordinary level of the

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ground at someone who stands at the bottom of an excavation; he is above the signal-man, but only because the signal-man is in an artificially lowered and separate level. The entire story thematizes the narrator’s efforts both to survey the signal-man’s circumstances from the top down and to raise the signal-man up from the depths to the level of ordinary existence. However, the ordinary world from which the narrator comes can only function through the efforts of the subterraneans like the signal-man. In a society as class-obsessed as England’s, an encounter between people of two different classes is always fraught with danger; slights, intentional and unintentional, are also micro-impressions. As the story opens, the signal man is in the act of signalling, nor do we see him do anything else; he is completely confined to his job, and yet he overflows it in his sensitivity and conscientiousness. In this story, the weird is not so much the return of a repressed desire as it is the transformation of a vague inclination away from segmentarity into a genuine prospect of real change, met with fascination and deep alarm. The signal-man wants to live; he doesn’t want to die, but he is deeply self-segmented in the service of his function. Here it seems as though what we see is a rebellion against segmentarity on one level (impossible events are happening) and the hypertrophism of segmentarity on the other, such that this man tries so hard to vanish into his role as a signal-man that he gets too much of what he wished for: signals from beyond, ultrasubtle signals, more responsibility than he can handle. It’s as if his conscientiousness were a form of hubris, thinking one can control everything, although it isn’t clear whether the hubris belong to him or to those who employ him. Does he die because his life is avenging his suppression of it in his devotion to his work? Is he punished for trying too hard? If identity is something that, as in the case of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” one can only lose, then perhaps by riveting himself, confining himself, so thoroughly to his professional identity as a signal-man, he is self-condemned to lose himself and die? The narrator descends to the signal-man’s level, feeling “as if I had left the natural world.”45 That the railway cutting and tunnel mouth are otherworldly is not simply a matter of atmosphere; these two men, ostensibly brought together by accident in this place, are mirror images. “In me, he merely saw a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, and who, being at last set free, had a newly awakened interest in these great works.”46 This inverts the character of the signal-man, who had originally studied natural philosophy, but was reduced by circumstances to these narrower limits, and whose interest in the great works is entirely

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occluded by his dread of his own responsibilities as part of them. Even more striking, though, is the narrator’s apprehension of this. While so much of the story is taken up with the signal-man’s efforts to make the narrator understand, here the narrator divines his attitude directly. The two men are reading each other’s signals. If this is the case, then the narrator’s difficulty in grasping the signal-man’s meaning takes on a different aspect and seems to become an attempt to avoid following the evidence to the signal-man’s conclusions. The narrator’s almost aggressive curiosity then might be regarded as a way of ferreting out some inconsistency that would allow for an alternate interpretation, one that he seems determined to discover. One wonders if it is for the signal-man’s sake alone that he strives to find a more conventional understanding of things. The narrator’s efforts do more than draw out details from the signal-man; they also help to make the supernatural explanation less fantastic, by contrasting it with a convoluted natural one. It may be that the narrator also has a presentiment of the signal-man’s fate, which might account for his desire to return the third time. While nothing is made explicit here, it is hard to see another reason for Dickens’ insistence, at the end of the story, on the way the narrator had anticipated the precise words the engineer used. The signal-man has very little to do; the ratio is curious, very great importance attached to a few infrequent, minor actions, and great deal of time to think. The opportunity for sustained thinking by oneself is an important feature of many weird tales, because introspection, far from making one more surely oneself, may often have the opposite effect, like the prolonged gazing of the House of Usher at its own reflection in the tarn. The signal-man has “taught himself a language down here.”47 Ominous wording. This is a language without sociability or conversation, as abstract as the mathematics he also toys with. We associate this kind of self-improvement with the Victorians, but in addition to acting as a social marker of abilities above his station, it also very neatly captures the image of a person trying to escape confining circumstances through a shift in language and through abstract ordering. He studied natural philosophy, only to end up in a place outside “the natural world.”48 This establishes his intellectual acuity, and it pre-acquits him of any charge of superstitious ignorance. He is excellent at responding to signs, and this is the problem, because he cannot ignore a sign. In what is perhaps the most Kafka-like aspect of the story, the signs he receives are bizarre in part because they are uncaptioned gestures of a sort that Kafka uses all the time—very definitely signs and clearly addressed to him, but without any clear content or aim.

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Listening to the signal-man’s account of events, the narrator keeps interrupting him to fix captions on them, only for the signal-man to remove those captions again the next moment. The disjointed presentation of events here very subtly deterritorializes reality, turning it into a series of events that have something added to them, some occluded connection. There is a logic to these events, but no discernible system. The signal-man’s paralysis at the end of the story is a mystery. “No man in England knew his work better.”49 It strongly suggests that he was more horrified by the signs than he was of the danger they were warning him about, even as the outcome brings these two things together. He dies with his back turned to the engine, walking on the tracks, paying no heed to the whistle or to the engineer’s call. Why didn’t he simply step two feet to one side and save his life? Considering that his entire problem was his inability to ignore warnings, how should he have suddenly come to ignore these? That he was not facing the engine, that he continued walking, that he ignored not only the voice, but the whistle, suggests that he resigned himself. To receive these signs is to be marked, and the train becomes a figure for his destiny, but he’d already met his destiny—it was his destiny to see, time and again, his own impotence, his inability to warn of danger ahead of time.

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“August Heat,” by W.F. Harvey This story is minor to the extent that it divorces agency from judgement, suggesting our actions precede our identities or ignore them. Beware the apparent innocence of everyday events, but even more so, beware of yourself! The bizarre encounter takes place by the headstone, when the narrator, Withencroft, sees his own name and birthdate engraved on it and then shows his illustration to the stone-carver, Atkinson, whose likeness he has exactly captured. Each has received an unlabelled premonition about the fate of the other, and it’s possible the outcome of the story will be in some way prompted by these forebodings. A sequence of events, as Hume noted, is all we can see; the reason for a given sequence is something that must be inferred. Harvey provides a sequence that seems to call out for some underlying reason and then stops short, making this mysterious sense of hidden causality the main affect of the story. The function of the ordinary is to sequence events predictably, but do we follow the plans, or do the plans follow us? No one sets out to map the ordinary completely in advance, for everyone to evaluate and ratify prior to becoming a part of it; the ordinary changes and is shaped by accidents as well as practices that are not themselves subjected to review. If we could see our future actions in advance, would they be intelligible to us as we are now? These questions point to the role that identity plays in maintaining the ordinary predictability of events by contracting them together in personal patterns and in particular to the importance of consistency or persistence in behaviour as a kind of moral requirement, an individual duty which contributes to the normal understood as a greater social good. This is clearly a story about destiny, which seems here to give a purpose to events that goes beyond the temporally local exigencies of convenience and order. Murder, being so out of the ordinary, acquires an almost supernatural quality. The consequences of murder are a garden of forking paths, all the lost possibilities of the victim’s future life are contracted into one object of contemplation, as are the prospects for the murderer as well. The everyday events of the story are suffused with an ominous tone that isolates them, emphasizing the mysterious forward impetus that bears the characters along even as that impetus is deprived of any sense. Withencroft is being led to his death, it seems, by the story itself. This implies the operation of some agency, guiding events towards a predetermined end,

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but it’s an agency with no clear purpose; in fact, far from avenging some past wrong, this implied agency is orchestrating a murder. From the major point of view, my actions must be mine and must have some sense. My identity exists, in part, as a means to insure guilt or responsibility. In this story, Atkinson’s implied action will have consequences for him if the picture turns out to be accurate, but the question of his guilt or innocence has nothing to do with those consequences. This is how Harvey frightens us, by rattling our sense of identity. If it is your destiny to become a murderer, one presumes that a motive for murder will arise at some point. However, if your destiny is to become a murderer no matter what, then either you will kill irrespective of motive or a motive will be more or less arbitrarily supplied to you in order to bring about the murder. In one case, the motive is superfluous, and in the other, the motive is not the cause of the murder, but an effect, something supplied after the victim has already been chosen. Is Withencroft being warned? If so, this is the story of a man who refuses to accept a supernatural warning, but at no point is there any distinct refusal. However, Withencroft keeps making note of the elements of this ostensible warning, so it can’t be said that he doesn’t notice it. It makes more sense to say that Withencroft is being guided to his death, rather than warned away from it. If this were a major story, then he would have to be in some way to blame for his own death; to do that, we would have to say that Withencroft deserved to die because he failed to police himself vigilantly enough, allowing himself to wander in a daze—a drastic punishment. This is why I think the story is minor; instead of dooming Withencroft for wandering, it points out instead that it is frighteningly difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish between wandering and not wandering. It is everyone’s destiny to wander, leaving the ordinary pathways, the ordinary intentional way of traversing space. The daze of the narrator is the daze of August heat, of the world, more than it is the confusion of an insufficiently well-monitored mind. Analysis That there is a record of events, with the added verisimilitude of a specific date and address, prepares us for the extraordinary, such that whatever is recorded here takes on a certain premonitory or ominous cast. The narrator is given a rather preposterous name, Withencroft, to make it the more unlikely that Atkinson could have hit upon it by chance. The state of his health, his age, this information is given in answer to unasked questions

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which pertain to mortality. He is a professional artist in black and white, suggesting that he is not a fanciful dilettante making vague sketches that could mean anything but instead a kind of human camera; this has the double effect of lending credibility to him as a narrator, as well as making it clear that the resemblance between the stone-carver and the man in the image could not be attributed to any vagueness in execution of the drawing. The story consists of short, telegraphic paragraphs, many only a single sentence long, and tending to stick to concrete details; this also conveys a sense of reliability. “The room, though door and windows were open, was oppressively hot, and I had just made up my mind that the coolest and most comfortable place in the neighborhood would be the deep end of the public swimming bath, when the idea came.”50 While for much of the story the heat acts as an incitement to delirium, we notice on careful reading that cold is also mentioned at important moments like this. The image comes to Withencroft when he is contemplating a cool swim. He hears the cold sound of the steel on stone when he first approaches Atkinson, and he will experience “a cold shudder”51 when he sees the inscription on the headstone. The cold contrasts with the familiar August heat, suggesting the intervention of something alien. Alongside the more conventional association of cold with ghoulishness or outsideness, this is the cold of alertness, surprise, alarm. The heat, on the other hand, is a ubiquitous oppression that is associated with the impetus of the story, the dazed, imperfectly conscious progress of events. Withencroft draws without any sense of the source of the image and takes the drawing with him “without knowing why.”52 The drawing, with its many plausible details, is his best work, the sort of judgement one makes about a complete body of work, suggesting that this may be his last drawing as well. Withencroft’s impulse to visit Trenton evaporates without being mentioned again, as if the heat were hypnotizing him, the heat which is like the story itself spotlighting this character. This heat is said to well up from below: “the awful heat that came up from the dusty asphalt pavement as an almost palpable wave,”53 giving it an infernal quality. The horror of the story begins to become clear: it is wandering to death, missing the hidden signposts. The passing of time is closely monitored, imparting urgency to what is after all only a careless walk; what is urging him on? The brevity of the story, its concentration, more or less demands of us that we associate this urge to walk with the urge to draw, that we give to these events an entirely supernatural unity. The same unconscious impulse prompts him

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to enter Atkinson’s yard. He recognizes the man from the drawing at first sight, which tells us that the likeness is exact. Atkinson greets him “as if we were old friends,”54 implying again that there is a deeper bond between them, although there is none in circumstance. Paying close attention to the description of the stone Atkinson is carving, we can see in it a figure for the story itself: the surface here is as fine as anything you could wish, but there’s a big flaw at the back, though I don’t expect you’d even notice it. I could never make a really good job of a bit of marble like that. It would be all right in a summer like this; it wouldn’t mind the blasted heat. But wait till the winter comes. There’s nothing quite like frost to find out the weak points in stone.55

Atkinson has a kind of future knowledge too, a professional understanding of stone that can detect flaws in what a lay person would regard as a “fine” surface. Isn’t this consistent with the idea of flaws hidden in the surface of ordinary events, or ordinary people, the kind that can produce violent ruptures? The cold cuts into the stone, in steel and in frost, cracks it, and ruins the image, which is an identity marker, a piece of stone used to mark and name the location of human remains. This marker is not supposed to be for anyone, but destiny will supply a customer for this very stone. Withencroft observes that the expression on Atkinson’s face is nothing like the expression of his double in the image; what it is now is destined to change, to become what it is in the image. Heat will become cold. When Atkinson first sees the drawing, “the expression of his face altered until it became more and more like that of the man I had drawn.”56 The drawing seems to be turning Atkinson into the man who will murder Withencroft; the record of a future event is bringing it about. By the end of the story, we have reverted to present tense, and it is not clear at all why Withencroft would elect to stay with Atkinson. By bringing the story to a close without resolution, Harvey communicates clearly to us that the outcome is not important; what matter is the way the story appropriates the agency of its characters. Does self-awareness give us greater control over ourselves? Or does it make us only hapless onlookers, watching ourselves act with a full awareness of the consequences, but unable to bring consciousness to bear on action in time?

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“The Disturbing Occurrences,” by Naguib Mahfouz A minor story, relating to an officially inconclusive investigation; every step the main character takes to resolve the mystery only deepens it. The search for an actually solid identity only continues to fail, until it begins to take on a supernatural aspect. The detective’s task is to pin the act to the actor, and our official documents establish our identities in order to make this possible, so if it is not actually possible to link the actor to the act, and if the effort to pin the one to the other only push the two further apart, then these institutions are not only useless but might actually be working against their own stated purposes. Identity is established in order to make everyone equally susceptible to guilt, but by dint of the fact that identity must be affixed to something that doesn’t have one yet. A crime must have a perpetrator and the guilty party must be punished in order to maintain social order, but everyone must be susceptible to guilt in order for this to work. To have an established identity is to be susceptible to guilt. The bizarre event in this story happens every time the nameless narrator interviews someone about his chief suspect, Makram Abd al-Qayyum. Each story contradicts the preceding one with bizarre regularity; that stories about someone may produce a heap of contradictions when aggregated together is not all that strange, as Abd al-Qayyum himself points out, but when these contradictions come in strict alternation, reliably, then it begins to seem as though some invisible controller were at work, deliberately frustrating the detective’s efforts to create a coherent portrait of the suspect. The mark of destiny in the story is the suspect’s name. As Mahfouz’s English translator, Raymond Stock, points out in his introduction to the collection containing this story, “Mahfouz’s characters are rarely, if ever, named at random.”57 I am not an Arabic scholar, but according to general information sources the name “Makram” connotes nobility, generosity, and self-respect, all consistent with the more positive descriptions of him. The last name, means “servant of God,” where God is specified using one of the formal Islamic appellations of God, al-Qayyum, which can be translated into English as “the independent,” “the self-originating.” Makram Abd al-Qayyum is an isolated figure; no one knows him well enough to be in a position to judge the plausibility of any allegations made against him. There is a vague impression of the supernatural around him, because he seems to have simply appeared in the world fully formed, self-originated, like a simulacrum of a person. However, the deeper point of this story may

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be that the identity of any person, taken in strict isolation, becomes less distinct when we try to grasp it. If Mahfouz shows us this, we can’t say he does it in order to convince us that identity is entirely determined by society, because Makram Abd al-Qayyum is not simply or only what other people think of him. The more we try to define him, and perhaps this is meant to be extended to all persons, the more we become aware of his identity only as that which escapes from definitions. This would mean presenting identity as the opposite of what it is usually believed to be and, more importantly, what our institutions depend on it to be. The mark of destiny then slides from Makram Abd al-Qayyum onto us if we can be persuaded that we are like the nameless detective, trying to pin someone down, that someone being ourselves. “The Disturbing Occurrences” produces the supernatural in an extremely subtle way, by strictly alternating the contradictory accounts of Makram Abd al-Qayyum’s character. The story seems actively engaged in baffling the detective, just as the narrative of “August Heat” seems intent on bringing about an unmotivated murder for its own sake. Here, the story is not so much guiding the detective as it is keeping him in orbit around the question of Makram Abd al-Qayyum’s true personality, heading off any possible conclusion while also preventing him from moving on. Analysis The al-Khalifa district of Cairo is trying to make sense of random acts of malevolence and benevolence, connected because they happen within this one particular area, by some undisclosed indications that they are all the work of one person and by their apparent lack of motive or connection to the beneficiaries and victims. It’s as though these events are also isolated and independent, linked to each other only, disconnected from everything else. The idea of crime presupposes the criminal, but the criminal identity is a special one because it isn’t of the same kind as any ordinary identity and doubles an ordinary identity. So the criminal identity is already a shadow self that can be attached to anybody. It’s just the negation of an official ordinary identity, making the criminal into a kind of false citizen, a simulacrum of a person masquerading as a normal type. The narrator becomes convinced of Makram Abd al-Qayyum’s guilt precisely because he can’t get a definite handle on who he is; it’s the inconsistency, the very ambivalence of who he is, that makes him a criminal.

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A problem, though, arises when we try to establish innocence, which is the absence of this negative identity. Makram is able to deal with the allegations that are being mulled over by the detective simply by answering questions and making statements. By asserting his identity as a normal citizen, he can prevent the criminal identity from adhering to him. Since that identity is a negative one, it can, all the same, never be wholly or definitively banished, which means it can continue to shadow Makram right up to the end of the story and in utter defiance of all positive evidence about him. If this is the case, then that shadow has nothing to do with him—it could attach to the detective just as readily, and in fact it could attach to anyone and everyone, and now the idea of the criminal identity has become so volatile that it becomes just as difficult to pin down as any positive identity, showing how any identity is always the identity of a suspect. It seems important to note that there is little to no attention paid to the disturbing occurrences themselves. They don’t matter. What matters is the way that Makram cannot be pinned down. The simulacrum throws the genuine article into doubt and threatens the validity of the police; this is dramatized when the narrator, having resigned over the case, ends up working for the very man he was trying to bring down. Now the detective’s role has oscillated over to the other side, all without any apparent inconsistency in his behaviour. Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud, in her article “Depth of Vision: The Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz,” writes that, around 1960, Mahfouz “discarded the narrative techniques of the naturalistic novel of the nineteenth century. … The same period has been marked by the author’s return to the short story. … His early short stories were obviously modelled on those of Guy de Maupassant. … His new short stories discard the shock tactics of the ‘short story proper’ of the nineteenth century.”58 There is something of the Horla in this story, the fear of being replaced giving way to the fear that one really never had a place at all. The detective narrates in hindsight; by the end of the story, we know that his current position is that of Makram Abd al-Qayyum’s lawyer. He now represents him, where before he had hunted him. We are not given much reason for the official assumption that the random acts of benevolence and malevolence are all the work of one person—are we meant to question this assumption or does this question only distract us? Lacking solid evidence that one person is behind these acts, then we have to trust the narrator, but it seems that other police hold the same opinion, and this bolsters the assumption. These acts go together in their unaccountability. Already, we are seeing how much is a matter of opinion; but, if one person

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can be this variable, what are the limits to identity as far as the range of possible acts is concerned? Are there any limits? The detective insists that criminal is crazy, but is also interested in understanding him, while his chief only cares about stopping the events. They are led to Makram Abd al-Qayyum by a tip that is as anonymous as the crimes they are investigating. Everyone has something different to say about him. “‘What if someday it were proved to you that he poisoned innocent people and went around setting deadly fires?’ Startled, the man exclaimed, ‘That would be a warning that the gates of Hell have opened!’”59 Another source responds to a similar question in a similar way, and I wonder if the association with Hell and with Satan are meant to suggest not just the idea of a terrible corruption, the downfall of a virtuous man, but the release of those invisible controlling forces that appear to regulate the strict reversals of each anecdote the detective records. The detective’s obsession grows with his certainty, which is undercut by the lack of any evidence other than the excessive lack of evidence: “The more I cut through the obscure character of his actions, the more the insinuation of his guilt took root inside me, and the instincts to investigate and take up the challenge became more deeply fixed within me.”60 So Mahfouz is focusing us on the narrator’s mentality, the way he regards Makram Abd al-Qayyum as a kind of nemesis or rival challenging him, and this emphasis leads us to wonder why he takes this so personally. He speaks elsewhere of his “rock-solid familiarity”61 with the case and the excessive zeal of this phrase likewise may engender doubts in the reader. Mahfouz is careful to maintain a minimum consistency in these descriptions, so that Makram Abd al-Qayyum is not made into too much of a chimera. Makram is said to have asked, “‘Do you think there’s really such a thing as history?’”62 The chief remarks, speaking to the detective: “You investigate this man and come to me with a clutch of contradictions that are more like the weird happenings themselves.”63 The investigation into the weird happenings is becoming weird, instead of regularizing weird events into normal ones, and this is happening because the detective is investigating with zeal. The more rigorous the investigation, the more disturbing it is, because it keeps failing to find the history it is looking for. The detective seems to be in a sort of trance, “the subject took control of both my waking mind and my dreams,”64 and his investigation becomes more and more dreamlike as it goes on. This dreamy quality is not introduced through any anomalous events—the detective never witnesses anything

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out of the ordinary—but becomes instantly overpowering whenever he tries to assemble the bigger picture. The story culminates in a dizzying speech from Makram Abd al-­ Qayyum himself, in which he attributes his actions to the contradictory nature of man while actually doing away with any contradiction. He turns the contradictory nature of his behaviour, taken as a whole, into proof of his innocence, saying that anyone will seem contradictory when looked at in that way. This claim should make him seem more likely to be an evildoer. He admits that everyone has inconsistencies and lapses, and so exonerates himself on the basis of human volatility. He then introduces a new reversal, one that Mahfouz has carefully prepared over the course of the story, by swinging the accusation towards the narrator himself. While this is technically a viable accusation, Mahfouz is not, I think, writing a story about a man who leads an unconscious double life and tries to frame an innocent victim for his own crimes, even as he investigates them. This possibility is raised, but in the end, as the detective himself says, Makram Abd al-Qayyum is really making an “accusation not only against me, but against all humanity.”65 We end on a contradiction within the narrator’s own character: he remains sure Makram is guilty and yet finds him too sublime to have committed any evil act, and this confirms the accusation of radical instability that Makram Abd al-Qayyum just made.

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“Luella Miller,” by Mary Wilkins Freeman Discussing “Luella Miller,” Lynda L. Hinkle, in her article “Bloodsucking Structures: American Female Vampires as Class Structure Critique,” writes: “Freeman creates a caricature of these women, who seem so frail but are actually monsters destroying all the workers who come into contact with them.”66 This helps us to see the minor aspect of this story directly. The weak compel sacrifice from the strong, transforming sacrifice itself into a weakness, and work into a degeneration. There is no threat of becoming like Luella Miller, who is unlike other vampires in that she is not contagious, but be on the watch for her. Some weird tales revolve around the discovery of a menace, but “Luella Miller” gives us the struggle to name a menace in plain sight, and its most dramatic moments involve confronting Luella Miller with what she is, even if the word “vampire” is not used. The normal is not all right here, but it is not in jeopardy—on the contrary, it is the vampire’s accomplice. On the other hand, there is a strong major thread running through this tale as well: a profound distrust of desire. This predominates, leading me to consider this a major story rather than a minor one. We need not wait for the apparitions to come for Luella Miller in the end; everything surrounding her is bizarre. While it is not strange that people would put themselves out for someone else, such total commitment, won so effortlessly and immediately, reflects a degree, and perhaps even a type, of desire that is inconsistent with the ordinary. A normal day is a day without intense emotion. Fierce, all-consuming desire is for special occasions, regulated, socially canalized into marriage, patriotism, criminal trials. Luella Miller is imbued with a power of passivity and helplessness, so that no one can bear to deny her anything; everyone is prompted by their own strength or capacity for activity to help her. Everyone wants Luella Miller. Nobody wants Lydia Anderson, the hard-working, self-sufficient narrator of the story. Anyone who helps Luella Miller is marked for death. There is something suicidal about the desire that she provokes in people, but it seems that, for Freeman—at least in this story—the intensity of any desire is an index of its destructive power. Desire kills. Lydia Anderson is a survivor because she renounces desire, doing nothing to oppose Luella Miller’s seduction of the man she loves and refusing to marry anyone else. Luella Miller is marked by a serpent-like quality that is identified with temptation, even if it is not Satanic; she is bait for death, meant to draw the

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innocent. While she herself is not innocent, Luella Miller is either only imperfectly aware of her vampirism or she denies it as much within herself as she does outwardly, making her passivity that much more perfect. The major judgement of the story is that one must overcome desire, deny the desire for Luella Miller, just as the narrator denies her desire for her man. One must always be bigger than one’s own desires. The minor warning is Nietzschean: don’t misunderstand weakness! The weak overcome the strong, not by becoming strong themselves, but by turning strength against itself. The infinity of experience, the supernatural, we find here in the boundlessness of desire, our dangerous capacity for desire that is bigger than we are. To be normal is to be frustrated, to live with vast, unattainable desires relegated to fantasy, while making do with what is merely satisfactory. Luella Miller is endowed with a devilish capacity to influence others, but this endowment is never explained, and there is no real cosmic comeuppance or moral intervention, in part because she can only affect people who want her anyway. She is what lies beyond the reach of ordinary satisfactions, which is why she is depicted as a fundamentally elusive, nebulous sort of person. It’s very clear that she does not in any way impose a desire to help her; she has to be given something to work with. Freeman has built her entire story subtly expanding on the idea that a vampire can never enter a home uninvited. Here, she gives us a vampire who does not hunt, but who is herself pursued. Analysis As is often the case in weird tales, the story is an eyewitness account of an event which is no longer in the recent past, but not yet quite complete. “In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller.”67 If the fear endures, then the object of the fear endures. The impersonal menace that made a vampire of Luella Miller is transferred, or confined, to her former home, and consumes a victim supplied by Freeman expressly to emphasize the imperfect connection between Luella Miller herself and the parasitic relationship that follows her. Lydia Anderson is more or less the reverse of Luella Miller, being spry, active, and honest. She is a real woman and Luella is a simulacrum. The horror of the story is, in part, that people prefer the simulacrum to the real thing. A simulacrum lacks essence, but still exists, throwing that which has

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essence into doubt. Lacking essence, the simulacrum is in a state of flux; it has boundaries, but these are easily and frequently shifted. The simulacrum therefore is better suited to follow the vagaries of desire. Luella Miller isn’t a chameleon who becomes whatever one wants her to become, but she is a sort of radiant yonder that draws people who will never reach her. Lydia Anderson is easily reached. Freeman marks her clearly, and with an admiring note in her voice, for her stability, being “a marvel of vitality and unextinct youth … she always went to church, rain or shine.”68 Lydia Anderson knows who she is. Her identity is firm whereas Luella’s is blurry. Having never married, her name has always been Anderson. Luella Miller’s name clings to her as well, but it is almost an onomatopoeia—“Her name before she was married was Hill. There was always a sight of ‘l’s’ in her name, married or single.”69 I’m not sure why the letter “l” should be significant, or why, for that matter, the narrator’s name should also begin with an “l,” unless this were another way for Freeman to show us that Luella Miller is a simulation, superficially resembling a real woman like Lydia, or like Lily Miller, who is another one of Luella’s victims. She is also compared to a willow tree, being both as drooping and as “unbreakable,”70 and this may also explain the prevalence of the double “l”s in her name. The narrator, while still in free-indirect mode, writes that “Luella Miller had been a beauty of a type rather unusual in New England,”71 while Lydia Anderson, speaking directly only half a page later, says that “sometimes I used to think that Luella wa’n’t so handsome after all,”72 reinforcing Luella Miller’s changeableness, as well as introducing the idea that her power of attraction depends on the viewer. If we return to Hinkle’s class critique for a moment, we can see that Luella Miller can have no identity in a society that identifies people with their work; this shows how identity is tied to function and operates as a kind of permission to exist. Luella Miller is scandalous in part because she exists without working, without a clear identity, always in the shadow of those who do her work for her, but all the more powerful for that. The class critique in this story homes in sharply on the ways workers are seduced into work, rather than coerced, showing that it is not simply in their capacity to work that workers are exploited, but also in their capacity to desire and to dream. Luella Miller also belongs to the family of fiendish substitutions. She replaces Lydia Anderson in the affections of Erastus Miller and then replaces the daughter of Abby Mixter. This daughter, Mrs. Sam Abbot, is the one to tell Luella Miller what she really is, and her reaction is

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“hysterics … there was Luella laughin’ and cryin’ all together … laughin’ and cryin’ and goin’ on as if she was the center of all creation. All the time she was actin’ so—she was keepin’ a sharp lookout as to how we took it out of the corner of one eye.”73 This is where we see that her innocence is not perfect, but her response is wildly incoherent, watchful and abandoned, laughing and crying. It’s as if contact with the truth, as thrown at her by Mrs. Sam Abbot, had caused her to reveal the absence of a true self, a watching in the middle of a formless cloud of contradictory emotional signals. What happens to Luella Miller when she is confronted will repeat in a literal, material way at the end of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, when Helen Vaughan, confronted with the truth of what she is, will undergo a violent, indescribable, and nightmarishly plastic physical transformation into a formless succession of forms. When Abby Mixter dies, and Mrs. Sam Abbot accosts Luella Miller again, she faints, “and there wa’n’t any sham about it, the way I always suspected there was about them hysterics.”74 This detail helps to cloud the subject of her innocence as well, suggesting that she is unable at bottom to face the truth about herself. This is Freeman’s genius at work in this story: Luella Miller is a simulacrum even to herself—even she sees herself in a false light. This makes Luella Miller a deterritorialization of the vampire in a very profound way; the suicide often becomes the vampire—this was evidently the case with Le Fanu’s vampire, Carmilla, who bears some resemblances to Luella Miller—but in Luella Miller’s case, she has no self to destroy. Ultimately, the true image is of an inert woman, not dead, who must be carried away to bed and tended, a sort of bare minimum human being. When Lydia Anderson bluntly accuses her, “You kill everybody that is fool enough to care anythin’ about you and do for you,”75 she exhibits some emotion, “a red colour came flamin’ all over her face,”76 but then as Lydia Anderson continues her diatribe, she disappears. “Luella she kept gettin’ paler and paler, and she never took her eyes off my face. There was somethin’ awful about the way she looked at me and never spoke one word.”77 She tries to avoid people, to reform, but fails. The drama has now shifted to a remote struggle with her own falseness, making her a victim herself. The most bizarre image is the procession. The supernatural manifests here as the boundless capacity of desire, the desire even of these past victims to serve Luella Miller, “helpin’ her along.”78 There is, however, a second vision, one that is not described. This is the sight that precipitates Lydia Anderson from her home to Luella Miller’s front door, where she is

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found dead. This has the ring of destiny; everyone who encounters Luella Miller in a serious way will die in connection with her. Lydia Anderson, while she retains her identity, seems to exist in this world primarily as a witness to these events. The implication, then, is that she too experiences desire as boundless, that her firmness of identity is a literal defence of self against a lure that she does feel after all—and this is indicated earlier by her impulse to help Luella Miller on occasion. In the end, her death reveals that she is also marked by Luella Miller.

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“The White People,” by Arthur Machen This is a story about a teenaged girl, who is coming to a crossroads in her life—an illicit one, that isn’t supposed to be there. It should be her destiny to become a Victorian matron, to marry a Victorian man of her own or better class, keep a Victorian home commensurate with their station, entertain her family’s Victorian allies, and raise Victorian children. However, this unnamed girl does not really want to become a Victorian matron; the idea doesn’t seem real to her, and while she is not defiant, not determined to thwart society, this is because she is not a part of society, but only tenuously linked to it. The stories she tells herself over the course of this remarkable narrative are all the same: they’re all about people, mostly women, who don’t want to (or cannot) get conventionally married, because they are already married or promised to some other. This character is in a singular position; her circumstances allow her to believe she has a choice that is not supposed to be possible, which is the choice not to choose, to remain a child, and therefore to stay undefined, a denizen of faerieland. That this choice is at all enticing, even granted her naiveté, that there should be any sympathy at all for her reluctance, however understated, to become a Victorian matron, takes us in a minor direction. If we read this as the story of a thwarted virgin birth, then the minor aspect is that much greater still. The horror then, in part, is that she cannot avoid being compelled to choose. Ambrose and the narrator, it stands to reason, would not find her story so arresting if they had no share at all in a similar desire for release from the constraints of this ordinary world. Ambrose declares that the sinner’s desire is aimed at heaven, not hell. This said, given that she comes to a bad end and that she is too naive to realize the implications of her weird experiences, we have to locate “The White People” more on the major side. The normal will be upheld; the girl will internalize the moral order and kill herself, the idol will be blown up. The girl is wrong, even if she is an innocent sinner—the opening section of the story goes to some trouble to set up this category for her—and the message is that one must stay normal or take the direst of consequences. Choosing not to choose is forbidden. That staying normal is something one does to the neglect of more exalted desires, that it is something you do with a sigh of resignation, should not be overlooked; the tension between desire and the necessity of conformity and ordinariness, whose appeal here is utterly lacking, is a productive problem for this story. Machen refuses to reject the bizarre and to accept boundaries

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unthinkingly. He may well do this in order to bring the reader back around to the idea that a conformity that is chosen with a clear vision of the alternative is all the stronger, but he makes the bizarre so precious, and he defends the ordinary so feebly, that we might have to say that this story is a failed major story, if not quite a minor one. The main bizarre encounter of the story takes place between the reader and the green book, in the contrast between the unnamed girl’s sense of the ordinary and our own. Christopher Anthony Camara, in his 2013 dissertation, Dark Matter: British Weird Fiction and the Substance of Horror, 1880–1927, writes that Machen’s weird fiction narrates encounters with what he calls “the outside of the outside world.”79 Camara’s point is that Machen, at least in this story, takes something like Hume’s position that the world is not empirically understandable, because the senses cannot fully perceive it. The complete idea or “picture” can only be inferred, which is why experience is infinite. Machen, exploiting this idea artistically, installs a layer of realer reality which can only be hinted at, because it exists entirely at the level of that secondary inference. However, it is objectively final, like the thing in itself. The mystic impulse to telescope the sensory world into the transcendent is something we find in a counter-major (not typically minor) Platonic strain of Christian theology, one that the church was inclined to make use of with considerable caution. While insisting on the spiritual significance of sensory experiences, such that the world becomes a kind of cipher, this approach can dangerously increase the importance of material things. Machen hasn’t got much use for organized religion at least in his fiction, so he, I think, tended to favour the Platonic-­ Miltonic-­Blakean direct approach, dodging around the priesthood, resorting instead to inspired art and nature for mediation. Mysticism can be minor, insofar as it ironizes institutional dogmas, but there is nothing necessarily minor about mysticism. Generally, the ironic meaning only supplements, and often even reinforces, the institutionally exigent meaning. Ambrose’s definition of sin may not be quite in line with church dogma, but he does not challenge the concept of sin per se. The narrator of the green book is an unwitting mystic, so there can be no question of her playing a role or deriving her mysticism from any anti-­ institutional orientation. She is marked; it is her destiny to fall between the ordinary way and the weird way. She will try to avoid making a choice, but she is confined to human identity and cannot become as unlimited as her experiences are. Her human identity will avenge itself, through her, in suicide. This is the major judgement of the story. The nymphs of the story

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are like Homer’s Sirens, who sing the song of Odysseus’ own life to him. The ordinary life, looming near in time, is not really alive. Death, in “The White People,” is like a third way between the ordinary as death-in-life, dying to oneself and living for the world, and the bizarre as life-in-death, dying to the world and living without a self. She commits suicide to save herself from this loss of self, whether or not a virgin birth is entailed. Again, there is a minor aspect to this: preserving identity is a kind of suicide. The imperative to die comes from a world that depends for its existence on a general suppression of desire, on the replacement of what is desired with substitutions and on a consistency of self that cannot allow one to deviate too far, since this means there can be no way back. The witchy women in the narrator’s stories replace real men with demon lovers specifically where and when the world demands that they replace the demons of their desire with ordinary, limited men they don’t desire. Machen, by making the narrator unworldly, disarms any judgement of her. She is innocent, like Jervase Cradock, the quasi-human hybrid in Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal,” and unlike Helen Vaughan, Pan’s child in The Great God Pan, whose identity is only a series of masks and whose villainy amounts to failing to commit suicide before first driving others to the same. Helen Vaughan is something more strange than a murderer; she is someone who induces other people to kill themselves, by causing them to become something other than themselves, something they can’t live with, irreconcilable to their identities, which they must in the end reject. It is the narrator’s destiny to go through this herself. She performs her part in the rite, but without understanding what she is getting into, with the sort of reflexive imitation that allows her to undergo a kind of low-key apprenticeship to a latter-day witch without knowing it. She is marked by her lack of fixity or solidity in identity, which enables her to become like the nurse and then like the stones she encounters in the landscape. Her flaw, then, is the lack of a rigid identity, which in turn is attributable in part to her father’s indifference and her mother’s death. Her story will become another one in the collection of tales about women who are inexorably bound to the other side. The upholding of the bargain, or persistence of it, is another dimension of destiny at work. Almost all the events are omens and the stories are all prophecies more or less of the upcoming ravishment or proposal or delivery; by the end, they all converge to bring the girl into the moment of crisis. The danger is also amorphous, lacking a clear identity. She may become a mother, but she will not be a recognizable mother.

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The supernatural is produced in the scale of the divergence between our ordinary and the girl’s weird ordinary, measured by the ellipses and lacunae of her account. The final judgement is that she killed herself in time to prevent a kind of damnation, but still more so it is a judgement on one who fails to maintain an adequately rigid identity, with the understanding that this entails a life of minimized becoming. Identity then becomes an acceptance of lack, a negative thing, a compendium of everything you can’t do. This is a form of self-sacrifice, a moral duty. The supernatural opens too in the gulf that separates us from the girl, the ellipticism of the style, in that we see the infinite implications of what she takes for granted. She is a small, but unique, figure traversing vast, bizarre countryside of implications. Of course, this could all be her delusion, and her remoteness from everyday events could greatly amplify her active imagination, but we do have, for example, the mysterious incident with the cook in the kitchen and of memories dating back to early infancy. There is a strict consistency between the bizarre events that she recounts and the folklore to which she refers, extending back to experiences she had in her crib and extreme youth, well prior to the time when she might have plausibly begun to understand any stories at all. There is often an implied consistency among all these bizarre sights and sounds that she herself is not aware of. All of these things tend to suggest that madness is too simple an answer in her case. Analysis In The Weird Tale, S.T. Joshi characterizes Arthur Machen’s body of work as “inspired by one idea and one only: the awesome and utterly unfathomable mystery of the universe.”80 No one will feel any awe at the unfathomable mystery of the universe, however, unless they need to fathom it. Is this need an innately human one, or is it an accident of character? Does it have a political aspect? This mystery involves becoming aware of the drastic difference in scale between the individual and the universal, and it is affecting generally insofar as we feel called upon to fix our identities in the grand scheme of things. This need brings out another aspect of the infinity of experience. This is why the genre cannot be defined entirely in terms of a vicarious danger or even sympathy with the characters; while these may be present, they do not define the genre. The defining attribute of weird tales is that they attempt to produce an unfathomability that engulfs the reader every bit as much, and in exactly the same way, as it does the characters. This begs a

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question that is partnered with the previous one: why would anyone want to be engulfed in the unfathomable? “The White People” describes a young woman surrounded by mystery and quite at home in it. While she doesn’t reject ordinary life, the magical life alone has any appeal for her; perhaps this means that, for her, the ordinary is a depressing compromise that sacrifices intensity—of pleasure, of beauty, of meaning—for mere stability. This has to remain conjecture, though, since she doesn’t really discuss ordinary life much. Joshi goes on to write: “it could be said that the weird tale is an inherently philosophical mode in that it frequently compels us to address directly such fundamental issues as the nature of the universe and our place in it.”81 This directness is crucial, but the weird tale cannot compel us to do anything; it can only offer us a way to think about these questions if they are already important to us. There must be a desire to address these issues, and something at stake in them: identity, whether it be a particular individual identity or our identity as human beings, and desire. Nicholas Freeman, in his article “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany,” cites Machen’s 1902 essay titled Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature, which was written more or less in the same phase of Machen’s career as “The White People” was: Great literature, he argued, gives us ‘an overpowering impression of “strangeness,” of remoteness, of withdrawal from the common ways of life’ and ‘in that withdrawal is the beginning of ecstasy’ (p. 57). ‘Ecstasy’ was an elusive concept—Machen discovered it in both The Pickwick Papers and the Odyssey—and he glossed it as ‘rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown’ (p. 21). His theory was dramatised in stories such as ‘The White People’ (1904), which opens with the claim that ‘Sorcery and sanctity’ are ‘the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.’.82

So here, Machen recognizes that there is a “desire for the unknown,” which in context is in keeping with an implied discontent with the narrow constraints of “the common ways of life,” as well as with what we know of Machen’s Gnosticism. Some might say that Machen’s mysticism is largely just nostalgia for a fantastic middle ages, but who is nostalgic for the middle ages? The exploited peasants? Their descendants? Perhaps the nobility misses those days, but it seems that nostalgia for the middle ages is largely a middle-class ailment. The nurse in “The White People” sustains the old

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cunning ways of country people, who are not identified as peasants so much as people of the land, like elves, but it’s the lawyer’s daughter who is embraced as queen of the nymphs. This could be read as a symptom of the anxiety surrounding middle-class identity, which has less stable roots, less to do with the land, a desire for relief from the task of maintaining one’s own status, which takes the form of a medieval fantasy of socially fixed and perennial identities, but this anxiety metastasizes here to embrace all identity as such. In his essay “About My Books,” Machen writes that he planned “The White People” at a time “just after I had left Literature [the literary magazine]. Indeed, I think that the strongest literary impulse that I have ever received arose from the joy and relief that I experienced on being rid of the detestable office life. I daresay that all offices are tiresome places,”83 so it is not unreasonable to suspect that these feelings found expression in the story. The narrator wants flux, whatever she wants whenever she wants. Perhaps this is what being a “fairy” means: belonging to the ground out of which distinctions are drawn in free play, rather than one of the beings growing out of this ground and determined by it. While we may speak of a kind of nostalgia for paganism in Machen, his paganism seems to stand outside history. “The White People” is not about the revival or survival of the cult of Pan as it actually existed; the Pan of this story is a Victorian’s idea of Pan. *** The story opens: “‘Sorcery and sanctity,’ said Ambrose, ‘these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.’”84 Ambrose we may take to be Machen’s spokesperson in the story; there is never any reflection on his commentary that would open up a dimension of difference or criticism. According to him, reality can only be experienced as an ecstasy, which is a release from identity. Identity and intensity therefore cannot coexist, at least not stably. Where Lovecraft gives us the refuge of our island of ignorance in a sea of horrific truth, Machen gives us a storm cellar of identity in a hurricane of intensity. Desire is a threat; it leads us out of ourselves, with the danger that we might not come back. Machen in this story presents reality as a deterritorialization of the ordinary as such, one which he fears could become permanent, without ever reterritorializing again. Becoming is denied as an illusion or rejected as an error; it is asserted as an abomination. The beyond does exist, but you shouldn’t go there. You can change, but you shouldn’t, because you will

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lose yourself without gaining a new self to be. Change is therefore understood to be lack, which is the major position. Ambrose goes on in a de Quinceyan vein to characterize saints and sinners as original artists, saying: “great people of all kinds forsake the imperfect copies and go to the perfect originals.”85 That’s the conservative side, Machen’s Platonism, but the problem is that the Christian scheme tends to favour a binary arrangement of good and evil, and there is a lasting confusion about evil as being merely an inferior copy of good, and therefore without essence of its own, or a simulacrum, something in itself, something else. Evil is a fundamental loss of self, but so is good. A major judgement and a minor warning are both bound up here very close together; we can see how Machen derives his effects precisely from seeing how close to the minor he can get while remaining reassuringly major. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning? Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.86

Sin is not just deviation from moral law, but from natural law. It vitiates the natural order of identities in the characteristic mode of weird fiction, threatening the reader’s identity as much and in the same way as the identity of the characters is threatened. For that matter, to be placed by this means onto the same level of reality as a fictional character is already an implied danger to identity! At the same time, we should not miss the conservative idea of spheres with boundaries that are forbidden without being actually impermeable. We are morally required to be normal physically as well as spiritually. The boundaries of body and spirit are drawn, but in order for this to be some kind of duty, it must happen in front of our eyes. The boundaries can’t be drawn without first being erased, as they were in Helen Vaughan’s death scene, which is something we ordinarily are not permitted to believe can be done. Machen may have missed this: Ambrose says sin and virtue are unnatural, and we would know them if we were more natural. If we are unnatural, in our numb common materialistic lives, this unnaturalness is somehow not the unnaturalness of sin and virtue, according to Machen, since it isn’t

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an ecstasy. Unless being ordinary is an ecstasy without intensity, a deficit of self rather than an overflowing of the self? The unnaturalness of the sinner or saint has to be unconsciously noted as micro-impressions because, as Ambrose says, the unnaturalness surpasses understanding; it is perceived but not recognized. This means understanding is confined to the other, lesser, unnatural state of numb materialism. Does this mean that the higher order does not partake of understanding? Is it therefore utterly irrational, or is it that it is rational on a higher level incomprehensible to us, as usual? A simulacrum of understanding? And if evil is the passion of a lonely soul, it would be the soul of someone bound in the isolation of a fixed identity and struggling to escape it, not by building a new, more gregarious life, but by dissolution of the identity entirely in a fierce intensity without understanding, and from which there is no return. The whole point of the narrative that follows is in the girl’s absence of understanding, her failure to see, as we do, that she is passing a point of no return. *** In the “green book,” a girl of about seventeen describes a voyage through an increasingly fantastic landscape which culminates in a mysterious encounter in a sacred grove. The implication, especially given the stories of marriage or illicit partnerships that preoccupy the girl, is that returning to the grove will result in a transition for her, making her part of faerieland forever, a “nymph” perhaps, but, more importantly, it is suggested that she has become a virgin mother, pregnant like Mary in The Great God Pan. The girl, however, on discovering that this transition involves a consummation, a marriage to something inhuman, or giving birth to something inhuman—and this moment is not narrated—commits suicide and escapes. She chooses not to go on at all, rather than undergo a deterritorialization of self, that promises a reterritorialization on another plane. This is not quite the story of a girl who is seduced with false promises; on the contrary, if she had gone through with “it” she would have received more than she was able to accept. She remembers remembering things before she was born, apparently possesses second sight, and is able to understand the inhuman Xu language without being taught it. Given that she does not seem to be inhuman in any way, Machen does not present her to us as a changeling or hybrid like Helen Vaughan. Her identity is vague from the very beginning, and she grows into a girl with no clear outlines around her as far as

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socialization is concerned. Her namelessness underscores this. There are no friends mentioned, her father is aloof, her mother died when she was 12, and the only person she has anything much to do with thereafter is her nurse. The nurse is given no ulterior motive for teaching the girl witchcraft; it seems she is only raising her as she herself was raised, but if the girl had not exhibited signs that she had a connection of her own to the supernatural, perhaps the nurse would not have been so attentive to that aspect of her education. The story is not titled for the landscape, the grove, the trees, the stones, the statue, or the girl, but for the white people, who are encountered earlier in the story rather than later, making their appearance less the culmination of events and more a point of departure. White faces from a white place visit her crib and speak to her as a baby; this, I think, suggests ghostliness, perhaps of beings beyond life and death as we know it, but these are not the ghosts of bygone individuals; they are foreign, they have their own language, they are not familiar in the ways ghosts usually are. The white people are another kind of people altogether, who live in ecstasy, in pure intensity; she sees a man and a woman emerge from the woods and the water, after the nurse and the tall man enter the wood and vanish for an assignation. As they fool around, the white people appear to “play and dance and sing.”87 They are like children, but melancholy with self-­ awareness, and they seem to be somehow enacting in a sort of spiritual way something like the intercourse happening in the wood. They are not like the “black man” or the “black pit”; they are benign, if not “good” where the black elements are malign, if not “evil.” The nurse’s reservations about the girl being asleep are another sign of adult secrecy surrounding sex, but it would be wrong to reduce the mystery of the story to sex, or indeed to reduce sex to something less than a mystery. Certainly it seems likely the nurse knew that the white people might appear, and that this girl, in particular, would be susceptible to see them if they did. Her reaction to the girl’s story does not indicate much surprise. The white lady is described using the adjectives “kind … grave … sad,”88 and, the nurse “was looking something like the lady had looked” (ibid.) and cries when she realizes the girl had seen everything. The girl asks her “why she looked like that” (ibid.), and that’s a good question. What is this sadness? Perhaps this: the white lady and her man seem to be a prelapsarian couple, innocent, white, childlike, yet grave, who appear and engage in play, dancing, singing, while two all-too-earthly mortal counterparts have unsanctioned sex in the forest like beasts, so this sadness

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could be mourning for a lost Edenic state, in which an innocent sexuality expresses the spiritual harmony of being. There is a suggestion of the limited survival of a superior, transcendent identity that was lost with Paradise. As we remember Ambrose’s definition of sin as taking heaven by storm, we may see in this encounter a sort of debased (from Machen’s point of view) attempt to recover a vanished idyll. The main events of the girl’s narration take place on what she calls the “white day.” All throughout the story it is clear that white means anything but the colour white. Perhaps it is the intensity of whiteness that Machen is trying to convey, but, as with the whiteness of Melville’s whale, the white is also a positive blank where blackness is a negative one. It is too full, not too empty, an overflowing, not an emptying out. The white day takes place when the girl is nearly fourteen. Wandering in the countryside, she finds herself in increasingly strange surroundings. Why, then, does she push on through the landscape, despite being torn by thorns and branches, and the way being so very long, so that she is crying when she emerges from the thicket? This implies she is being beguiled, drawn like the huntsman after the hart, which is possible only if there is in her some desire that can be beguiled, a yearning for a “new country.”89 The pain is also important because, had the passage been easy, then it would have been less like an initiation. Her exploration is a progress in intensity, because of that pain that left her “smarting all over.”90 The girl is enjoying her pain, singing and laughing as she is stung by nettles, and the deadness of this silent landscape only makes her feel more alive. On the other side, she finds a portentous country, oddly unified in the impression it gives, without independent moving parts like animals (with one exception) or birds, dead and wintery, populated by ugly stones. This is the country of childhood, in a sense. In her essay, “Beyond the Veil of Reality: Mysticism in Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People,’” Emily Foster notes the similarity between Machen and the girl with respect to a childhood tendency to imbue the landscape with “magical power.”91 Now the vista itself is “sad” and inert, but also “wicked.” The girl is vulnerable, an object of desire. The stones are rapacious men waiting to capture her; however, she escapes their influence by imitating them, embracing the strangeness, or at least blending in with it, rather than fleeing it. By suggesting that there are procedures that can help you negotiate the bizarre—such as imitating the stones, or the charm the girl repeats in the hollow—the bizarre itself is preserved as a simulacrum of cause and effect. The horror is that the innocent girl is being corrupted without her knowledge, singing wicked songs without

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seeing their wickedness, posing her body in alignment with the stones, even though these stones are men, hard men, who want her. Machen stages and restages the same menacing scene of innocence and corruption throughout the story in order to prepare us for an ending without explanations. If she is not carried off by desire, then she is carried off by a lack of any resistance to whatever it is that desires her, the sort of enforcement of her own boundaries that chastity requires. Identity then might be understood as a kind of chaste marriage to the self, fidelity to the self. The feeling of alienage is masterfully developed over the succeeding paragraphs. The English landscape becomes another planet, the natural rocks form unnatural, esoteric patterns, a hidden order that can never be understood, because it is only a simulacrum of order. Machen uses protracted sentences to induce vertigo, the feeling of being carried away by impressions, alternating with shorter, more telegraphic sentences, to give us a combination of an intensely excited desire to describe and communicate with an inability to find language commensurate to what it describes. When she comes to the “green wall”92 where there is nothing but the wall and the sky, like the green boards of this notebook, she has reached “the end of the world” even as the phrase “for ever and for ever, world without end, Amen”93 comes unbidden into her mind. Machen is doing something tricky, trying to indicate connections between the pagan universe and the Biblical one, linking the two through the Garden of Eden. There are the strange Adamic white people who emerge to meet the nurse and the tall man, the formation of a living thing out of clay, a sinister being who offers forbidden knowledge, the mysterious living landscape suffused with spiritual significance, the conjuring of life by magic, as opposed to the formation of life in the labour of pregnancy and childbirth (at least so far), an escape of the divine punishment laid on women. Christian civilization will insist on the truth of the story of the Fall, even if it is softened to a symbolic one, and adverting to religious dogma is another way writers of weird fiction can include the reader in the danger, insofar as these dogmas form part of reader’s own identity as well. The fantastic story of Eden is part of Christian identity, but how? How much of that story is fiction, how much is not? How much of a Christian’s identity, or indeed any identity, is fiction? Is identity itself fiction—real, effective in the world, and fiction? As she is reflecting on and repeating the long journey she took to get here, as if she were compelled by circumstances to reconstruct herself in memories, we see that the whole of her past has become the grey rocks. She may not be able to return home, since her point of origin is now

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forever transformed by dint of this experience. It is home that is changing. It can never again present itself as the whole of reality, which is the sine qua non of the ordinary. So now conventional reality is a simulacrum, the weird stones, while this wild country is the real thing. She wonders “how I should get home again, if I could ever find the way, and if my home was there any more, or if it were turned and everybody in it into grey rocks, as in the Arabian Nights.”94 It’s one thing to read fantasies, but living them is another thing. They hold out to us a life of unlimited creative possibility without a fixed identity, since these stories do not have a single protagonist, and living them would entail drastic changes in us from one story to the next, since they always start from scratch. It may be that this change is exactly what we want, but perhaps we are free only to imagine it, making “The White People” a sequel to Don Quixote—a story about a girl who wants to live in a story, while she is living a story without realizing it. This dramatic irony may be turned on the reader, though, if we ask ourselves why we are reading this story, or why we do not live our fantasies, of if this story, “The White People,” is our fantasy. It could be that we are afraid to lose our homes, or to become lost in time and space relative to our homes, in an inhuman, pagan eternity of paradox and unending deterritorialization. To live in the fantasy would mean to reverse the states of life and death, real and unreal, such that home becomes the dead landscape of grey rocks. A flowing brook draws the girl, and nymphs haunt the pools and streams in the country she discovers. “I drank the water with my hand, and it tasted like bright, yellow wine, and it sparkled and bubbled as it ran down over beautiful yellow stones, so that it seemed alive. … I felt sure it would not be common water.”95 Here is the return of the “common” of “common life.” Three sentences later, “for ever and for ever, world without end, Amen.”96 Is this water turned into wine? Is it living water? Will there be another kind of transubstantiation and communion here, a pagan one? It’s as if Machen couldn’t possibly adopt a non-dialectical Christianity, that he needs the pagan in order to be the Christian, even though the two cannot coexist in one individual. If this solid identity, rooted in nothing less than direct revelation from God, still requires this paganism, this falseness, this primitive burlesquing of nature, then isn’t that a reduction of the revelation to yet another fiction? Beyond the wall, the girl enters a play-landscape: “It looked as if earth-­ children had been playing there.”97 Beyond this is the grave-like hollow; entering this hollow, the girl enters into a memory, the story of the girl

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and the faerie gems. The black man doesn’t seem to like the object of any wish fulfilment fantasy—marrying the prince would presumably lead to the sort of life the girl in the story evidently wants—while the arrival of the black man feels like doom and is described as a rape and a murder. The girl of the story has received gifts from the other side; their value isn’t exactly false, but they are simulacra of earthly valuables, having value only as illusions, or only on one side. Having received them willingly, she cannot disavow their source. It is when she breaks faith with the other side that she is taken away, attacked; there is nothing to indicate that she would have been attacked if she had remained true and rejected all suitors. The girl who wrote the green book takes this story as a warning not to receive any gifts, saying: “I thought I would do a charm that came into my head to keep the black man away.”98 As unworldly as she is, the girl knows her way around this world pretty well. Her motive is only to avoid the black man, not to preserve herself for anyone else; she is not trying to maintain her footing, her marriageability, in the ordinary world. The girl leaves the hollow and goes on to “the end,”99 a high place from which she can make out patterns in the earth, the mounds of primordial England. “it looked from where I was standing something like two great figures of people lying on the grass.”100 Is this a sexual image? Or are these two figures lying prone, like corpses? She compares them to the stones she’d seen earlier, which suggests something like suspended life, the sleepers who wait, but later on they will be compared to Adam and Eve. What is sleeping here is sex, considering that she proceeds from this point to the discovery of the secret wood. The juxtaposition, the image of something like sexuality, something like death, emerging out of the landscape she has just traversed, we are perhaps being told that it was for this purpose, a consummation or transubstantiation out of common life, that she came here, as if she found this spot by following the contours of these giant, parental bodies. A curiously generic “little animal,” a living thing that she does not know how to classify, leads her through the thorns to the “open place,”101 like the centre of the ritual labyrinth, a kind of uterus. There she sees “the most wonderful sight I have ever seen,”102 which she does not describe, and she runs from it in order to avoid danger that might keep her there and in order to think about the beauty at home, which again suggests that she does not choose, does not want to choose. Once she is back home, the vision takes on an “impossible” cast, but only when she tries to imagine it; so what is impossible, the vision, or imagining the vision? Where is the limitation on this possibility, in reality, or in the subject? If

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the girl is innocently telling us, writing only for herself of course, that she can’t imagine these events, then that makes her more plausible. In general, the use of stream of consciousness in the green book also reinforces its verisimilitude. If the book is not edited, then this is the more raw or real, written as it were from moment to moment with no conception on the girl’s part of any overall plan or implication. We always supply the big picture, correlating the contents of the girl’s experiences. Her house after midnight seems empty of anyone living, and it casts a shadow like “a prison where men are hanged.”103 The house is compared to a prison and it feels lifeless, like a house of death or an abandoned place; these comparisons follow directly on mention of her father and of the clock ringing midnight: time, adulthood, her father’s expectations, being in between, the home is a prison, maybe even a cell for the condemned. She cannot remain a child forever. She will have to die as a girl in order to be reborn as a matronly woman. Her problem is not that she chooses faerieland over responsible Victorian motherhood—Machen is subtler than that; fidelity to faerieland, which is the embodiment of unfixed becomings, means choosing not to choose. The girl does not want the personal responsibility that comes with having a name and an address, parents and a dowry, children, debts, an identity. Perhaps what she wants is something impossible: an identity without limit. This prompts another recollection of the encounter with the white people and the nurse. The girl writes that her nurse had already told her stories about the white people before she saw them, which implies that she might have been drawing on the stories for a fantasy, but then she says she forgot those stories. “I wondered whether she had been the white lady.”104 The resemblance of the nurse to the lady could mean that the lady is a fantasy version of the nurse, but somehow the effect is different; it seems rather to make the white lady more real than less, by a suggestion of kinship, as if she were an ancestor, Eve. In any case, the girl doesn’t assert that the nurse and the white lady were one person, because earlier she described the way they entered the wood in different places. As for the tall man, the girl doubts he could be the white man, because if he had been, she “couldn’t have seen that wonderful secret in the secret wood.”105 Why is she able to see the secret because she saw two different male beings on that day, instead of one being in two guises or forms? This is baffling, but it might mean that there would be no need or reason for that wonderful secret if it were possible for someone (the tall man) to revert to an Adamic state (the white man) in some other way. The story of the stag is brought up next, and it has the effect of recontextualizing extant fairy tales,

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validating them, while elaborating on some of themes touched on in the episode of the white lady and the white man. The mortal man who dwells with the fairy queen is permanently altered; he has taken an entirely unknown line of flight. The young man’s pursuit of the stag is prompted by his own desire to conquer and claim a beautiful nature, to own it, to win fame, to elaborate an identity as a hunter, but it also resembles the girl’s exploration of a landscape she shares with no one else, at least, no one human. It is the male version of the story of the girl with the faerie gems. The stories the nurse learned from her great grandmother clearly link these events and activities to paganism. Certain facts, like the celebrants touching each other or swaying or the communion-like meal, only an eyewitness could know, and evidently there is no way for an outsider to see this, since the way into the circle vanishes once the group is complete, so this must be inside information. The nurse has witches, people who are not entirely real, in the family; the story of the strange man introduces yet another parallel to the story of the stag and the girl in the hollow, and links the witches and fairies. It also brings our attention back to barriers, and doorways, between the two worlds; the ordinary man, the man of affairs like the prince, cannot go there, and having been near, they are no longer that practical. The creation of the doll involves a blasphemous imitation of God’s act of creation, and the invention of a simulacrum, an idol the nurse worships in what might be a sexual way. “she did all sorts of queer things with the little clay man, and I noticed she was all streaming with perspiration, though we had walked so slowly, and then she told me to ‘pay my respects’ and I did everything she did.”106 The doll may be used to influence another that it resembles, which would make it a weaponized simulacrum, threatening to destabilize the identity of another by reflecting and connecting. The doll must be left behind for a time and then found again; by the time we finish the story, we understand that the secret in the wood is an old Roman idol, which the girl treats much as she does this doll—she must leave it and return to it. The nurse and the tall man conjure a white woman and a white man. The nurse makes a little man doll. There is a theme of magical doubling or reproduction running through this story. It is more clearly thematized in the story of Lady Avelin, who makes a doll into a man for herself while using dolls to destroy the real men who are courting her. She does this with a malice that is entirely foreign to the girl, and the deaths of the suitors are tragic in the story, not liberating, but the point seems to be the

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amorality, or the durable innocence, of the fairy domain. “the lady could do a lot of other things as well, but she was quite fixed that she would not be married.”107 She is fixed in her determination to remain free, unfixed. Does this indicate that there is a kind of choice here, that she can either do these magical things, and produce an egg by lying down among snakes (the “glame stone”) but that marriage would rob her of her magic? This story involves an angry father, and no mother, not unlike the girl’s situation, nor is this the first time that it is suggested she might become a sort of Lady Avelin herself. It is interesting to note that here the men go away and come back to marry, not unlike leaving the doll for a while, or leaving the statue and returning; this coming and going seems to be very important, since the main character wants more or less to be like the lady in this story, living among men but not being of them, while not yet going over to the other side either: going and returning. The narrator thinks about the story until she seems to be in it, and identifies explicitly with Lady Avelin, burned as a witch. If she thinks of herself this way, it does suggest that she understands to a degree that what she has learned from the nurse is rejected by church and the state, the monopolists of identity. “I once told my father one of her little stories, which was about a ghost, and asked him if it was true, and he told me it was not true at all, and that only common, ignorant people believed in such rubbish.”108 She is being instructed here to act not only her age but her class, which is evidence also that her father is policing her ordinariness, that he is identified with conventional, respectable, tepidly Christian society. When she returns the way she came, her vision, if it was one, is exactly recapitulated: something not ordinarily true of dreams. Now she understands that the two figures in the landscape are Adam and Eve, “and only those who know the story understand what they mean.”109 In this story, knowledge comes from stories. When she finds the object without seeing it, then she knows all is true; not-seeing is believing, but she must return when the time is right in order to be “happy for ever and ever.”110 Looking into the well, she suddenly knows who the white lady was—presumably, herself, fully matured, and yet not a woman, but rather someone on the other side: Lady Avelin, the Queen of the Nymphs, a stable yet infinite identity. “I understood about the nymphs; how I might meet them in all kinds of places, and they would always help me, and I must always look for them, and find them in all sorts of strange shapes and appearances.”111 Is this a vision of the happy future offered to her by the nameless rite? ***

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If the girl is a changeling, then she is a sort of gnostic one, and, from the gnostic point of view, all human beings are in some way alien to the material world. Ambrose associates her magic with alchemy, again understood metaphysically, and puts scientistic underpinnings around the story so as not to divorce the material and spiritual, but to spiritualize the material in a way more in keeping with Victorian thinking. Ambrose reveals the father to have been a lawyer, dealing in deeds and leases—who owns what. The natural interpretation is that the girl eloped, and so she did, but not with a man the gnostic line runs through the story steadily and both the scientism and the Gnosticism act to reterritorialize the girl’s account. In a letter to J. Vernon Shea, Lovecraft averred that he believed that the girl in the story—“though without contact with any creative element— became pregnant with a Horror”112 and poisoned herself to avoid delivering it, and when Ambrose says “not a word could be said against her in the ordinary sense,”113 I take this to mean that she was found upon posthumous medical examination to be a virgin. Since her suicide took place “about a year after she had written what you have read,”114 this suggests that the events described involve her becoming pregnant in a supernatural manner, and that she returned to the image specifically in order to commit suicide in its presence, possibly as the time to deliver drew near. The horror for Machen might have been encompassed in the idea of an innocent girl becoming a dark counterpart to the Virgin Mary, but beyond this there is the depressing idea that the girl is as much an instrument, rather than an end in herself, for the other side as she is for the ordinary side. Lady Avelin had no children, but perhaps she became a child again; she emerges as a unique figure in the story, because she is a woman who has taken control of her identity, who uses it for her own ends, to satisfy her own needs. If this is so, then what is to be said for the destiny of the girl who wrote the green book? She has become a victim of identity.

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“The Library Window: A Story of the Seen and Unseen,” by Margaret Oliphant This is a story about yearning, which is to desire with a strong complement of fantasy. The thrill of psychological blending and the very subtle climax, aligned with the utter indifference of the narrator to her own marriage since there is nothing said about it, means that the fantasy cheats better than it should, the simulacrum is strong enough to endure judgement and marriage and widowhood. This is therefore a more minor-­ tending story, which tells us to beware of the normal. The decisive event is not the narrator’s marriage, but the narrator’s encounter with reality as something that is not an everyday thing, even if it is with us every day. The everyday is an illusion which might be necessary for our safety, and/or an inevitable consequence of our inattentiveness or lack of energy; it conceals from us the fact that history is not the status quo, but a kind of passion. The bizarre event in this story is delivered by the tendency to mistake things like the number of windows, to be uncertain of what we’ve seen, and the sense too that micro-impressions must be at work telling us that there is something significant about an ordinarily and apparently insignificant thing. These are the tells that make us realize that the everyday is an inertial blur. Throughout the story there is a very strong thematization of differences, involving both the variability of perception from person to person and the variability of perception for a single person over time and in different circumstances. Perception here is more than Lockean receptivity to stable elements; it is alarmingly volatile. The diamond ring is the mark of destiny in this story, the disillusioned eye that sees without caring, the one point of view that can remain stable because it is no longer involved. The one who sees what no one else sees is marked, and will be responsible for making restitution; this is why, perhaps, society is a system of baffles designed to inhibit perception, to conceal imbalances. The one who comes to understand this has an implicit social duty to maintain the kayfabe of reality for the sake of others, so that they may not be torn from their comforting illusions too roughly. We may be surrounded by tragedies that unfold at the subconscious level. This might mean that, in this story anyway, the mark of destiny is the human mark, because, if we agree with Spinoza, to be human is to be called on to help others. Oliphant’s version of destiny involves justice, but it also involves this other element, which is not the usual idea of mercy as a

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pendant to justice, but the larger concept of humanity to which justice belongs, what might be considered the meaning of justice. The mark slips onto the reader as we see what the narrator sees, and this is true of much of weird fiction. In this case, the narrator sees things because she is yearning for something that convention has set beyond the scope of what is permissible for her. What is impermissible is deliberately screened from view as if it were impossible, because it is even more important to maintain the fiction that it is possible to forbid desire. We can’t know what we haven’t encountered and, since this yearning is precisely for something not encountered, it is at the very least a sort of contradiction to desire it; but the counter-argument to this is that we cannot help yearning for what we don’t have because we don’t yearn for what we have, so it is actually foolish to pretend we can avoid this yearning, and wisdom demands we take seriously the need to make that yearning real and respect it when it fails, instead of condemning or dismissing it; hence the older characters who all seem marked by thwarted yearning. The diamond looks, but it also winks knowingly. Simon Cooke argues: “Conventionally framed as a classic ghost story, ‘The Library Window’ is better understood, I suggest, as a case study of ‘female madness’, as defined by male theorists. This interpretation links it with Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892), and James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898).”115 I would go further, and say that the supernatural in this story is produced in the interstices of what we notice, a very subtle and influential idea that rejects the crude opposition of the psychological and the supernatural. Analysis We note the street that serves as the axis of the story’s setting, between the house and the library, is not one of the noisier places; even when there’s activity and sound, it is, all the same, filled with a stillness that is by implication always present. It isn’t abandoned and devoid of life; but it isn’t so busy that our impressions become too confused. It is just quiet enough that we can perceive the various aspects of life more clearly there. The main character is in a particularly conducive position for weirdness, being in an alcove that isolates her from activity within the house and makes her privy to what goes on outside without participation. It seems clear that this alcove is a dangerous place, a ghostly vantage point adjacent to life. It’s like a social bathyscaphe, and it is chiefly used by the narrator for reading books and for scanning the exterior of the house, taking

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readings of another kind. The figure she will see in the library window will be writing, and she will be reading. The narrator is a young woman introduced into a household chiefly characterized by senile sameness, so perhaps it is the friction between this and the narrator’s youth that compels her to withdraw into a neither-nor point between the house and the street. It is a dreamer’s refuge, and this invokes all the usual warnings about “dreaming” too much, which is really a prohibition against desiring too much. The narrator’s problem is that she is not so much dreaming as daydreaming, which means that she is more susceptible to outside stimuli than she would be if she were fully asleep. Daydreaming in this story, and perhaps for Victorians generally, is a psychological threshold state in which impressions are not neutrally received in Lockean ways, but are infected by desire, which operates like a different map or model of the world than the social consensus map. The narrator hears what goes on in the street and what her aunt’s elderly visitors have said, while the words she reads are still somewhere in her proximal memory. The house is also a refuge from the narrator’s mother, who subjects her to an oppressive regime of forced busywork. Fantasy is castigated as usual, so this story will vindicate dreaminess as an extraordinary sensitivity, while prosaic ordinariness will be presented as drudgery. For the most part, the narrator’s observations accompany her reading, so the parallel between reader and narrator is quietly established. What pierces the dreamy haze of amorphously wishful daydreaming is the flash of the diamond. Lady Carnbee’s diamond on her pointed hand is like a glittering poignard or sting, a deadly weapon, or magical ornament; and her Spanish lace might point to mourning, something funereal, ascetic. White and black, with a flashing dart, contradicting Mr. Pitmilly, negating. The diamond is a colourless stone of transparent brilliancy, like a lens, which does not colour the light that shines through it. Lady Carnby is an anti-witch who threatens to disenchant the narrator; in her advanced age she could be said to exemplify the way life compels us to abandon our fantasies. The aunt is sure the narrator has heard every word they said, so that would include the very soft “now” that the aunt included in her statement that the window is only a momentary diversion for her. This gives us an indication of something outside the flow of events, waiting to be resolved, and having to do with the narrator’s entrance into adulthood, via marriage. The stage is set then, with the conflict clearly established: just as in Machen’s “The White People,” the supernatural is summoned in moments

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when the possibilities of life are about to be choked. The narrator hovers in the twilight, the timelessness of the evening; her undirected attention is open to outward impressions without defence, and this with the assistance, not the interference, of reading. The twilight is as colourless as the diamond, but its light is soft, not pointed or darting; this is the kind of light one reads by. It also does not colour what it illuminates, but the dimness allows desire to lend its colours to what it sees. The light by which she sees the window does not appear to be actual daylight, so is this the light of the imagination? She’s in a window, looking for someone else in a window. Windows allow us to see across domains, from the public street into the private home and vice-versa; she does not want to belong to any one world, but to participate freely in various worlds from a position of play that borders on them all, and, if she must fix herself in a given marriage, then wouldn’t it be perfect if somehow she could make her marriage in a window, rather than in the house? You can never see into mysterious places—like people’s eyes—during the day; that diurnal vision is only the ordinary mode of seeing, which entails a corresponding blindness to the intensities of life. Everything in daylight is as clear “as if every object were a reflection of itself,”116 but then are we seeing the things themselves, or their reflections? If she is imagining things, why does she imagine these things in particular, and why not everything at once? Why should the vision appear so gradually? The narrator becomes aware of the living motion in the room across the way, perceived abstractly, with no object, but distinguished from the dead inertia of the furnishings. This helps us to see why Oliphant introduces the visionary scene little by little. If the entire scene were suddenly there, fully formed, then the story would be making a choice for the narrator and for us, where what is wanted is a question. Given an invitation to see, rather than a distinct sight, that we see and what we see will show us something about ourselves, our inclination to see. The room responds to the observation of others; at the end of the second portion of the story, the same window appears differently to different people and differently to the same person at different times. There is a strong contrast between the presupposition of habitual stability and this very mundane and ordinary thing which quizzically does not seem fully under the sway of that stasis. There is a clear parallel between socially thwarted love and the outside interference preventing her from perhaps seeing more of what is there.

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Later, the narrator is startled out of a reverie devoted to her book, so this sets up a contrast between her fanciful South American adventure tale and this ghost story, and further indicates that she is not staring at the window and willing herself to see what she wants to see, since she is taken by surprise as by a true encounter. Oliphant makes certain that we do not dismiss the narrator’s impressions by showing us the really sophisticated way she keeps track of her own impulses; for example, when she becomes aware of her impatience and contempt for the visitors, those negative feelings give way to compassion for their frailty. Someone as self-aware and candid as this is not likely to be fooling herself about a man in a window opposite, is she? For all the minor elements of the story, Oliphant does seem chiefly concerned with warning against an excessive dreaminess, so the narrator’s candour and self-awareness do seem to have limits. If she gives way to a temptation, it is a very understandable one. Melissa Edmundson wrote, “This idea of an uncomfortable, incomplete ‘between-ness’ is also suggested by Oliphant’s own religious views. … As Margaret Gray says of these supernatural stories, ‘Mrs Oliphant’s beings from beyond the grave have a mission to help mortals in some specific way, or attempt to bring humans to a clearer understanding of the inevitable consequence of their present way of life.’”117 In this case, the message involves replaying a past tragedy, but the real “help” here comes from the narrator herself, who must put a past injustice right. By the time of the party, she is so enraptured that the ordinary world is unavailable to her, but this is not a story about the evils of art, any more than “The Sand-Man” is. On the contrary, and unlike “The Sand-Man,” this encounter with art and fantasy is a rite of passage, and necessary. The climactic moment comes when the narrator demands her window, and can’t find it; but if this were a cautionary tale about imagination, then the window would have to be pure delusion, wouldn’t it? However, the man in the window responds, opens the window with a sound that people in the street can hear, clearly breaking the barrier between the everyday and what is beyond it in a consummately accomplished climax bringing imaginary and real together indistinguishably. Even the baker’s boy sees the ghost. The story ignores the narrator’s marriage as being largely beside the point. She can’t tell whether she’s seen that ghostly man again or not; she does not trust herself anymore, and the story ends with a bitterness that will not allow us to see virtue rewarded or convention vindicated here. That man’s face has replaced the diamond. Where the one was a harbinger

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of future disillusionment, the other, his face, is the seal of a completed sacrifice that is resented all the more for its having been impossible to avoid. The confrontation with the ghost in this story has nothing to do with the question of possible survival after death—that is taken for granted—and everything to do with the question of whether or not it is possible to have what one wants.

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“The Beckoning Fair One,” by Oliver Onions The desires of Oleron in “The Beckoning Fair One” are not simple nor transparently sympathetic, and the supernatural consequences of his pursuit of these desires are more tragic than punitive; that is, they arise from Oleron’s own fundamentally conflicted character, rather than from somewhere beyond. Oleron is impossible; he does not begin his story in comfortably stable circumstances, but in transit, even in retreat. Onions writes about his desires with sympathy; there is no sincere reproach directed at Oleron for wanting something more than the humdrum; there is an unconvincing attempt to maintain that his beautiful fictions are spiritually uplifting exemplifications of major values, and his desire for the ghost is monastic, not lustful. The story might read like a judgement on a daydreamer, but it is actually the tragedy of a finite person in finite circumstances who yearns for the infinite. However, the story reverts to a major perspective in the last analysis, because it makes the relation to the infinite a terrible form of disintegration. While there is sympathy here for those who have difficulties conforming, there is no criticism of norms. Elsie Bengough can be forgiven her “mannishness” because it is physical, she can’t help being a bit large, and it is also a sort of practical defence measure in her line of work. Oleron can be forgiven his “femininity” to the extent that it is an inborn temperament and a renunciation in the name of art, the gentleness and celibacy of a priest. The supernatural is produced in the host of micro-impressions at the point where Oleron’s subtler perceptions begin to affect the balance of powers in him: the contradictions that, for example, enable him to remain Elsie Bengough’s friend. This friendship requires that he never notices her desire for him; this is something he’s hidden from himself so he won’t have to deal with it. He would have to deal with it if he were to acknowledge and name it. Instead, he defers this moment endlessly, and tortures Elsie with his vagueness. The infinite in the story is personified as the enemy that disintegrates us because we affix our desires to it rather than to some finite object, capable of reciprocation. Oleron wants to attach himself to the infinite directly, bypassing art, although for a time he is deluded into thinking that this attachment is simply a higher form of art. He has already tried to translate Elsie Bengough into a character, Romilly Bishop, an imaginary being that resides entirely within himself, and now he is trying to undergo a similar transformation, to vanish into his own imagination.

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To be clearer: this is not, as Oleron himself believes, the story of a man whose choice of a ghost over a woman is a metaphor for choosing art over life. Instead, his preferring the ghost to the woman is his attempt to escape both art and life. While this is a major story, it is not conventionally major in its approach to the imagination, which is not at fault here; Oleron’s problem is not that he is overly imaginative or impractically devoted to art with a capital A, but that he is trapped by the terms of a deep denial about himself, not just a failure of self-awareness, not just an active effort to maintain his identity by means of denial, but an active, although unconscious, attempt to escape himself altogether. In a way, he seeks the infinite identity that the nameless girl in “The White People” wanted. The bizarre event is the manifestation of the ghost, of course, but among the bizarre attributes of this haunting are the means of the manifestation, and, perhaps most important of all, Oleron’s reception of the ghost. The ghost emerges through mainly auditory micro-impressions. There is no traditional explanation for its presence, so that it need not be considered the ghost of anyone; it is simply ghostliness. It is a kind of siren, which lures victims to their ruin; any idea that the haunting might be entirely in Oleron’s mind is refuted by his discovery, after his encounter with the ghost, that the house has a reputation for being haunted, and that a previous tenant was also a victim. However, the identity of the ghost is not part of this history. The to-let boards are the mark of destiny, and Oleron’s destiny is sealed the moment he falls in love with the house. Elsie Bengough is doomed by the love that binds her to Oleron. Her end is so impossible to cheat that she will be murdered in the house even though the only persons present who might be able to do the deed are a disembodied ghost who is just about strong enough to move a comb, and a half-starved, virtually bedridden man. Oleron is not doomed because he is an artist, but because, having already more or less turned his back on life, he loses track of art also, lapsing into nebulous dreams. He becomes what Deleuze would call “pulp,” or a “zombie.” Onions attacks the whole idea that reality is a neutral blur of overlapping, everyday perspectives; the blur isn’t neutral, it’s dangerous, it’s where the most important things get overlooked and lost. We look to reasons and interests to account for our actions and we fail to find the connection. This means that we do not truly possess ourselves, and this is the mildly subversive element of this major story. The key to “The Beckoning Fair One,” which is very easy to miss, lies in the fact that Oleron becomes aware of the ghost by introspection.

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Analysis The to-let boards look like “wooden choppers, ever in the act of falling upon some passer-by, yet never cutting off a tenant for the old house from the stream of his fellows.”118 The threat of death here is associated with separation of a tenant from his fellows, and it’s this ominous sort of division that hangs over the entire story. Connections with the world are interrupted or suspended, and with them goes the coherence of a character. These same boards recur at significant points during the story, menacing Elsie Bengough as she leaves after her injury on the stairs,119 and striking Oleron’s eye as he is carried away at the end. Oleron is marked by his odd name. He shares it with an island off the coast of France, connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, but I can’t do more than conjecture about any association there, any more than I could respect the resemblance to the name of fairy-land’s King, Oberon. He is frequently described in feminine terms. He uses his grandmother’s furniture, supervising its installation with a pleasure that is “almost spinster-­like.”120 The creation of a character in his mind is likened to physical conception, “one day he felt her stir within him as a mother feels a quickening”121 and elsewhere the term “gestation” is used. When he first becomes aware of the haunting, he thinks indignantly of “women who came into a man’s place.”122 He doesn’t use the word “ghost,” but characterizes the presence as “an invisible woman.” So what upsets him is the infiltration of his space by a woman, any woman, since he refers to “women” here. Now, is this a man asserting a gender boundary in space? The word used is “place,” not “house,” “home,” “domain,” “property.” She is taking his place? Or simply entering into it with him? Does this mean that he is upset at the prospect of a confusion about the place, or is it that he is already in some measure an example of a woman in a man’s place? It isn’t necessary to go so far as to apply any label here, and it would be missing the point to do so in any case, since the problem for Oleron is not that he thinks he possesses one distinct identity when he actually has another, but that his identity is largely a matter of denial, of negation. Being Oleron means positing very little, as little as possible, existing in a state of subtraction. He doesn’t even want the entire house, only half of it, leaving the other half empty or, as is implied, half occupied by someone else. Later on, Onions will note that the house “had a tenant other than himself.”123 Oleron is all halves. Half in the world, half involved with Elsie Bengough.

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His friendship with her is half enmity as well: “As Elsie she was to have gone into the furnace of his art, and she was to have come out the Woman all men desire.”124 So he needs to burn her up, purify her; this free indirect narration is all implicitly a reflection of Oleron’s point of view, and so we have to ask ourselves who is concerned with Woman in preference to particular women? Since there is no such thing in life as Woman, we have to wonder if the furnace in Oleron is his art, or is simply pure annihilation. Later on, we are told that, for Oleron, “the mere thought of Elsie was fatal to anything abstract.”125 This points to a conflict in him. She is not the enemy of abstraction; he is the enemy, insofar as he fails to remain focused on abstract things and reverts to thinking of her. However, he mistakes her for the cause of this problem and fails to ask himself why he thinks of her. Oleron is kind of bad at asking the question why? Onions makes masterful use of micro-impressions, especially auditory ones, throughout this story. When Oleron pries open the window boxes, the resounding echoes seem to be awakening something in the untenanted portion of the house. Many of these impressions are generated by Oleron himself and registered by Elsie, for example, when she says “anybody’d think you were going to get married,”126 she is identifying something in his mood. Elsie doesn’t like the house and knows intuitively that he won’t be able to create anything there. The significance of these micro-impressions deepens with the introduction at the beginning of the fourth chapter of the idea that discussion gives rise to what it names, and that to speak of possible difficulties is to make them. Rather than understand this in purely psychological terms, along these lines: “Oleron invents the haunting by interpreting subtle impressions in keeping with a subconscious death wish”—which would only explain the story by turning it into something that it is not—we have to remember that the house has a prior history of haunting not yet known to Oleron, and take the idea of articulating things out of unreality and into reality more seriously. When, later on, Onions writes of the “arbitrary distinction between that which has life and that which does not,”127 this is the slippage of identity that opens on the supernatural. The scandal, as usual, is that this slippage should not be possible, because things are supposed, majorly speaking, to retain their identities automatically. Our wishes, our suppressed desires, are likewise supposed to stay properly suppressed, and even the psychoanalytic task of identifying them in their disguised, alternate expressions is often just another way to extend and maintain that suppression. Onions is describing a condition in which to become aware of something in oneself is already a

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frightening event, because this anomalous internal presence cannot be related to the established identity of the self, and so acquires the hue of an external invader—but then the boundary between internal and external is no less arbitrary than the distinction between what is alive and what is not. This provides for his own “fancy” of becoming so identified with the house as to haunt it himself; this is a bit like the cryptic prophecy in Macbeth, a hint of things to come, couched in terms that are more to do with the character’s wishful thinking than with any merely mechanical imperative to keep the audience guessing. The irony here is that Onions is showing us that Oleron is aware of the ghost, but ascribes its existence to himself, his own fantasy. Oleron’s sensitivity, his awareness, is never at fault, only its orientation. It is clear that the protruding nail that rips Elsie’s arm is not a detail that Onions included with the idea that we would come to question Oleron’s awareness of his surroundings, but as an incongruous oversight for someone so particularly attentive to them. It is a manifestation of hostility to Elsie, which is perhaps imputable to Oleron, but then prompts a reaction from him which leads to the only scene of anything even approaching physical intimacy between them; the full manifestation consists of both elements, a hostile expulsive motion that prompts a reaction which brings them closer together. The passion, however, is entirely on the side of hostility as far as Oleron is concerned, since he never exhibits the least sign of any desire for Elsie. There is no question of this being the work of the ghost or the house, since it is clear that he never loved her, and is incapable of it. The void in his life is not the absence of a loving partner he pines for, but a pining for his own absence. The house does not so much fill that void as become it. When Oleron becomes aware of the haunting, he flees it only briefly. One would think that he would embrace the haunting, but first he must overcome the idea that the ghost is an intruder; he has to ascribe a character of his own making to the ghost in order to turn what is in actuality an invidious external presence into a creature of his own imagination, a domestic partner. This is Onions’ amazing inversion of the usual ghost story—rather than trying to prove a ghost is not a figment of someone’s imagination, he writes about trying to establish intimacy with an enigmatic ghost by turning it into an imaginary character. During his flight, his short sojourn in the pub, Oleron is faced with the decision to join in with the people there in the quotidian life of the city, or to return to his haunted house, and he chooses the latter. His identity to date has been defined

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more in terms of avoidances and refusals than with anything positive; he doesn’t want this everyday identity, and he is not condemned by the story for this, but his artistic identity is no longer strong enough to replace it. We note here the length of the story, the idea of a protracted process, so that the individual details are sufficiently distributed in time. If they all came close on each other’s heels, there would be an emergency; it would not be plausible for Oleron to continue in this overtly supernatural situation. So we are given to understand that his own way of thinking works against his recognition of the threat, and this goes beyond any simple scientific or philosophic complacency or overconfidence. He has an unrecognized weakness that prevents him from resisting the beckoning; he is not Odysseus lashed to the mast, an intrepid explorer, he is a man whose intense artistic and spiritual sensitivity makes him incapable of attaching himself firmly to the world, and in some ways he is too good for the world, in others he is not enough. Some of Onions’ most noteworthily artistic effects arise here: we are never allowed to divide Oleron’s thoughts or actions between himself and the house, they are all meshed together indistinguishably except in those moments when Oleron resists the house. By the time of the second manifestation, which is the imprint of a body on the coverlet, his resistance is already so low that the event is glossed over, barely noticed by Oleron. This shows us, without telling us, that he has accepted the haunting, and this not in despite of his thinking about it, but because of that thinking. All that thinking has only been a tactic that allows him to seem, from his own perspective, to address something while refusing to acknowledge or even register the utter absence of any real will to do anything about it. Rather than give us a decisive scene in which Oleron decides to stay in the house with the haunting, or implying the occurrence of such a scene, both of which would lose the nuanced supernatural psychology that is the essence of the story, his decision is made without his being aware of it, and registered by his failure to react to the impression on the sheet. At the story’s centre, Onions pulls back from Oleron’s level to see in his life an expression of a broader philosophical problem, using language that Lovecraft would apply to a very different story. He shifts from a narrative to a more sermonizing tone, describing how mankind, out “of the immediate and small and common and momentary things of life, of usages and observances and modes and conversations … builds up fortifications against the powers of darkness.”128 In a turn that is typical of weird fiction, and which is a bit at odds with his tone, what opposes the Satanic powers

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of darkness in this passage are everyday things, rather religious things, or rather we are invited to see how everyday things may be turned into a religion of normality. Here, however, where the major values are pretty bluntly articulated, there comes something of a minor intervention, because Onions goes on to point out that the same ordinary measures also protect us against joy, and furthermore, that the end result of this is the “breaking down of terms and limits that strikes … at the welfare of the souls of all.”129 This is exactly my thesis when it comes to weird fiction and identity; that the only guarantee of identity is habit, which makes it a civic duty to maintain habit, and “treason,” to use Onions’ own term, to deviate. Oleron falls between the two Herculean poles of duty and pleasure and so lapses into “mists and confusion.”130 He has treacherously chosen not to choose, but he has chiefly betrayed himself, since this is not a Satanic act of resistance but rather the faltering of his own weakness. There is in this important page also a clear identification between inspiration and supernatural tampering. Who fears that they are not the real source of their own thoughts, if not someone who must maintain a strictly closed and bounded identity? At one point in the story, Oleron intercepts Elsie on her way to the house and dashes out to meet her with a phoney story about having to go away. Onions very deftly gives her initial dialogue indirectly, as if her voice were muted and unable to reach Oleron except through a sort of translation process, emphasizing his alienation. She notes that he’s lying, as if he had a mistress, but this also exemplifies his fear that she, or indeed anyone else, might know him better than he knows himself. “A flush of pink had mounted to his cheeks. He noticed that the wind had given her the pink of early rhubarb.”131 Why are they both turning pink? There is a sort of communion linking them together, one that he wants to sever. He resorts to conventional sexism as a resource, thinking of her as one of the “businesswomen … unconventional … [who] came and went freely, as men did”132 but who are only pretending, since in the end they cease to be men or manlike and betray their essential femininity by falling in love. He more or less tells her she is too manlike, too independent, for him, but this doesn’t ring true either; consistently, throughout this passage, he is the pretender, and she is genuine. He only reveals his discontent at the idea that she might put aside her assumed manliness and fall in love with him, even though Onions has never missed an opportunity to point out how

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feminine she is. The problem on the contrary is that she no longer allows him to pretend that he is unaware of her as a woman. It is only after this scene, and Oleron’s discovery of his passive allegiance to the house, that he learns about Madley, his predecessor. We know that Oleron will go the same way, and we should reflect on what that way is—starvation, a slow, dwindling death, that involves cutting oneself off from the outside. It is not a decisive death. Confusion is involved as the body declines. It is a death that involves either great volition, a monastic will to death, or an utter failure of the will. The self is allowed to wither, rather than destroyed in some emphatic gesture. The remarkable scene involving the grandmother’s portrait follows. What is especially creative here is that Oleron seems to be able to prolong contact with the ghost by pretending not to be aware of it, or by at least taking its presence for granted, treating it as if it were ordinary. This is a philosophical innovation whose implications are not fully realized by Onions. Whether he knows it or not, Onions derives from the idea that all identity has nothing to sustain itself but the mere endurance of habit, a kind of inertia rather than anything positive, the logical conclusion that identity is therefore ghostly, that the ordinary is a pretence. The problem is that pretences are not alive, not living, which means that the ordinary is not alive—it is a domain of cancelled intensities, neither great griefs nor great joys. Oleron is trying to make pretence itself live, rather than trying to give life back to itself through art. All the signs of the story are inferences drawn by Oleron, and we are even given a comparison of his face with the narcissi.133 His face there glimmers white, showing us himself as a ghost—the ghost is referred to just above that as “his own Shadow.” If identity is nothing but habit, and habit is merely negative, inertia, then identity is dead, a kind of ghost, an image of what one is supposed to be, an idea, but not a living, inventing being. Oleron struggles to bring his art to life so that Romilly Bishop will be herself a living, inventing being, not a heap of habitual qualifiers, an exemplar of artistic inertia, only to fall apart himself into a heap of nothing, just his habits, his taste in home decorations. When something like action looms near, it is hopelessly lost in weakness and dreaminess. Did he rise from his bed and kill Elsie? But then, who called his name? When did she die? None of it matters. What comes instead is a peroration on his failure both to love and to write, with an allusion through those repetitions of the word “morrow” to Macbeth’s monologue on the death of his wife.

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“The Demon Lover,” by Elizabeth Bowen While there might be a judgement against the main character, Mrs. Drover, it’s hard to see it distinctly. The promise she breaks is extracted from her under confusing circumstances, and with false pretences. This story is minor to the extent that the ordinary life that Mrs. Drover creates for herself, identity and all, can never be complete, and hence can never be truly secure. This implies that the ordinary is not regular in its own terms. The effort to remain within the limitations of the ordinary is part of a larger task, and wherever denial is given the bulk of this work to do, strangeness is not eliminated or even banished, but simply ignored. This may help us to understand why “The Demon Lover” is not a comeuppance story about breaking a promise; Bowen’s attention is dedicated more to the role that promises play. A promise is an attempt to bind the future self to what will be past circumstances. Promises are always momentous and formal in that they represent a challenge to destiny and defiance to chance; they are attempts to exempt something from flux. Mrs. Drover has found stability in her marriage to Mr. Drover, but there is another claim that predates and invalidates that promise. There is a part of Mrs. Drover that is promised to chaos. The question then is—and this is where the opportunity for a minor reading creeps in—why her? The answer is—why not? The bizarre event in this story is the appearance of the note from her former fiancé, and more specifically the utter helplessness of ordinary events and the passing of time to prevent the intrusion of the bizarre. That is to say, part of the ordinary, one of its most elemental aspects, is that the past is past, that events come in fixed sequences that move in one direction. Even the return of something is part of an intelligible sequence; Christmas doesn’t take anyone by surprise. In effect, the consistency with which ordinary things repeat is the absence of surprise, of novelty, of real change. Therefore, the return of what had been relegated to the past is more than merely unexpected; Bowen’s interest in this story might be in warning us that we might come to mistake it for impossible. There’s something bizarre, too, in considering how the stodgy respectable middle class of today is the result of a battle or a love affair, some past trauma. It brings to mind all our own sleepless nights and brushes with madness, and reminds us that everyone has these experiences, in the process showing us how respectable maturity may be a mask, or even a kind of absence of self. Destiny’s role here is very clear and unusually radical. What marks Mrs. Drover for the intervention of destiny? It is not her promise to a dead man. She has entered into a demonic pact either without realizing it or, as

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it seems more correct to me, without fully acknowledging to herself that she was doing. The pact itself is demonic. The demonism comes in its relentlessness, severity, and inescapability. Demons use language in slippery ways, but that’s because they are bound by language; everything they do takes place in the slip-zone between different readings of the same word. The promise is never specified, but it seems clear that, at least as far as the future Mrs. Drover was concerned, that she promised to marry a young officer if and when he returned from the war. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be entirely unnecessary to stipulate that the officer return alive. The problem, however, is not that she broke faith with K, because she was not herself when she made that promise, any more than the man she promised was really a man. The whole thing was unreal. He was reported missing, and Kathleen, in time, became Mrs. Drover. There is no point anywhere in the story, past or present, that could be construed as a wilful violation of the promise. Destiny marks Mrs. Drover for a far more basic infraction: forgetting about destiny. As Roberto Calasso pointed out with reference to the religion of the Ancient Greeks in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, the Gods did not so much demand that human beings follow any particular moral instructions, like the Ten Commandments of the Hebrews, but only that mortals never forget them. Destiny is like this: it is like a memory engraved in events, rather than in persons, which reminds us of itself. Mrs. Drover is watched from the very start; a destiny is waiting for her, unmoved, reaching out from her past. As is often the case, destiny manifests as a baulked escape, this being more or less the clearest way to state what destiny is, inexorable, the inescapable, the hunter you cannot avoid because you have chosen that hunter somehow. The slip happens to the extent we have made heedless, hasty commitments. The pact terrifies us with its insistence on linking together past and present, that past events will insist on their “right” to affect the present in their own time. For Mrs. Drover, the supernatural is a past that refuses to pass—the “unfamiliar queerness” that “silt[s] up … unused channels.”134 The infinity of experience takes the form of a past that does not close its doors to the present. Analysis The story opens with this ominous observation: “In her once familiar street, as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up; a cat wove itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs. Drover’s return.”135 She has returned, but she is withholding herself from

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this return; she isn’t there to stay, only to snatch a few things out of the past to bring with her into the present. She’s there, really, to ignore the past, not to return to it. Familiarity develops over time, and it will likewise dissipate over time, but a once familiar street has lost something that an unfamiliar street never had. That dissipation does not restore the street to its former, unknown condition. What has actually dissipated is memory, but, in this story, the dissipation of memory is an opportunity for experience to deviate from expectations. It’s as if, in becoming unfamiliar, the street has become resentful of her neglect, and so has wilfully estranged itself from her, responding to her withholding of herself by withholding itself. The “unfamiliar queerness” is a positive substance, rather than a mere absence of familiarity, and in this sentence the queerness is associated with the menacing gaze of “no human eye.”136 Of course, this refers to the cat, but then why should it be necessary to point out that a cat’s eye is not human? Or is this turn of phrase nothing more than an elaborate way of saying that there are no witnesses to her arrival? We are being put on our guard with this phrase, to look for further ironies, and to watch Mrs. Drover in a similar way, a knowing way, a familiar way. We should pay attention to the door she opens: not only is it locked, but the lock is stiff enough with disuse that it requires some effort to turn the key; the door is warped and must be forced open, which again suggests disuse, as does the dead air from within the house. A seal is being broken, and a case for supernatural intrusion is also being made. Mrs. Drover is a “prosaic woman”137 who is alarmed by the traces of her former life in the house. It’s as though being prosaic meant living only in a kind of oblivious present of mundane tasks and immediate plans, without any sense of the larger scope of experience. That, in this story, is tantamount to forgetting the Gods. This passage establishes that she has entered a somewhat chaotic scene to restore a measure of order here, as if the past had no rights before the present, and so has put her own orderliness, which is all of a piece with the limited scope of experiences that she permits herself, at risk. There is nothing impossible about the letter itself, only its provenance there in the house. Is it an intrusion? Or is she intruding on a past in which this letter is all too at home? As she prepares to read the letter, and prior to having even glanced at its address, Bowen pauses to describe the disappearance of the sun, the darkness billowing outside, and the immanence of a rain that she knows is coming, so that we know that this letter is the mark of destiny in this story. It is attended by outward circumstances connected

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to the place, inimical to Mrs. Drover. This letter gives us both her first name, Kathleen, and the demon lover’s initial, K. That both should have K-names could mean any number of things, but in any case it designates the two of them as closely linked. The only character in this story is Kathleen in the past and Mrs. Drover in the present, so the K-name might indicate a connection with that former self, the one she has forgotten. This might be the primary bizarre aspect of the story, that the same person could be so different, that a different person could be so much the same. The wording of the letter is strictly weird, in that its prosaic vocabulary and dryness only create estrangement. A flowery or distraught letter would have prompted us to take the story in a different direction. This letter prompts a self-exam in the mirror, which unfolds most of the details of her ordinary life. This life is remote from the house she now stands in. She has lived it numbly, without seeing it, any more than she is directly visible in the glass until she wipes the dust away. In this, she resembles the narrator of “The Library Window,” who passes over her marriage in silence. Mrs. Drover looks to see if her face has lost its familiarity the way the street had. Does what we forget resent us for it? The flashback to the moment in the garden is not triggered by the letter—at least, not at once—but follows the ringing of the surviving church clock and the descent of the rain, a complex image combining the arrival of something portended, which in this case is a memory, and the survival of something from the past, a church that has survived the current war so far, and, as a church, perhaps an emblem of promises, marriage, but also of the other world, the larger domain of mortality. There is a past moment that has refused to pass, but which has haunted her, apparently of its own accord, without any conscious recollection or consideration on her part. In the memory, she is a young woman; we are watching her memory from our point of view, or perhaps she is revisiting this memory without being familiar enough with it to recognize herself readily in it. She wishes he was already gone, to spare herself the pain of separating from him, but also of being with him, and this seems of a piece with the character we have before us, who seems content and even eager to remain within a circle of tepid safety, even if it is a narrow one. The circle is like the “safe”138 embrace of her mother’s arms, the drawing room shining through the window, while she is trapped for the moment out in the garden with a strange man, already marked for chaos and destruction, and seeming to carry it with him. It’s like a stark reminder that vows are tragic, historical

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things, which cost people their lives, even as they are also the anchors of a stable life. The demon lover’s terrifying dialogue with Kathleen tells us he is already speaking to her from across a divide that he will one day drag her over, too. There is no question of this being her fantasy; he speaks in the quietly threatening style of the letter. Returning to the security of her family, she feels the “unnatural promise drive down between her and the rest of all humankind. No other way of having given herself could have made her feel so apart, lost and forsworn. She could not have plighted a more sinister troth.”139 How is the promise to marry someone unnatural, unless, as this strongly suggests, he is somehow already dead? Or never alive? Her fiancé was “set”140 on her without really loving her, and she promised to marry him on his return because she was intimidated by him, and unable to bring herself to reject someone who could very well be going off to die in battle. Bowen does seem to imply that Kathleen is almost hoping the war will kill him, so she won’t have to go through with the wedding, and this could cast the return as a punishment for that evil wish, but punishing wishes with death is plainly not justice. However, this promise has somehow acquired the power to brush her entire life aside, so that he can return after an arbitrary interval of 25 years, putting this in 1941, the middle of the second war. The consequence of her fiancé’s reported disappearance and presumed, but undocumented, death is “complete dislocation from everything”141 for her. It’s made clear that this isn’t grieving, but a mysterious failure of life. She marries late, and seemingly by chance. Time and disuse erase the gap between the past and present, but without undoing the promise, without dissipating that past moment. It’s still there, just unfamiliar. Kathleen moves forward into a time that, for Mrs. Drover, is not really the past. There’s a supernatural gap between the two, which has arisen in and with her forgetting. We see too how her normal actions and thoughts of escape are all inexorably taken into consideration, not by K, whatever he is, but by destiny, by circumstances. The horror of this story is not only a violent act that happens to her, but the inescapable observation, the way that her ordinary regularity can be turned against her. The refuge of the impersonal cab is a trap. She is given a last look at the “ordinary flow of life,”142 transformed now into something precious, because it can be taken from her all at once. Mrs. Drover is described as looking harried, not content. She is the sort of person who rushes on from hassle to hassle, without relishing the ordinary life she participates in. If she forgets destiny, it’s because she forgets life itself, and only remembers its

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value when it’s too late. The moment of recognition is timeless, a moment when past and present disappear and “eternity,” an infinity, is manifest, absorbing Mrs. Drover in a “hinterland” of ordinary streets become bizarre.143 The entirety of that time in the past involves an eclipse of her identity as well as his. In the same sentences in which she realizes the full implications of her inability to remember his face, she also acknowledges that her entire personal identity was suspended during their last days together. She cannot break her promise, because she was not herself when she promised, and she made her promise to a man who wasn’t there. In the end, she does not exactly recognize him; instead, she gazes into his eyes for a long time, and then begins to scream. The only detail presented about his personal appearance, apart from his generic uniform, were the “spectral glitters in the place of his eyes”144; this would likely be the one way she has of knowing him for who he is, which is to say, death, and not a person at all. However, this is not a story about a woman who denies death only to be caught by it anyway: Mrs. Drover is not a special case. The warning here is that forgetting destiny is forgetting life, the long chains of events that cannot be severed, even when there is no deliberate attempt to sever them, but only a passive slackening, in the hopes that the chains, while still intact, will not bind.

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“The Daemon Lover,” by Shirley Jackson The real problem in this story is not primarily the unreality of James Harris, but of the unnamed protagonist. She is unable to gain anything better than a precarious grip on ordinary life, which is the only form of life that has any socially accepted claim to be real. She can’t be real until she is married, and preferably a mother as well. In his essay, Wyatt Bonikowski writes: At the home of the Roysters—a married couple who might have rented their apartment to Harris while on vacation—she sees a disorderly space of ‘suitcases half-unpacked’ and a table ‘spread with the remains of a meal’, the opposite of her hygienic apartment of clean sheets and clean towels, and she listens to them bicker incessantly as she tries to get information from them. … Later, in front of a block of houses, she meets an exhausted woman ‘pushing a baby carriage monotonously back and forth’ and her twelve-year-­ old son, who not only teases her about whether she will divorce the man she is looking for but also extorts money from her before telling her which building he saw the man go in. … In both cases she sees but does not recognize the inverse of the golden future she wishes for, the reality of marriage in all of its dreary disorder and unfulfillment.145

While this is true, the protagonist, however, doesn’t comment on the condition of the Roysters or on the marriage of the woman with the baby carriage, so I don’t know that we can draw conclusions about her opinion of marriage from these scenes; that is, whether she “sees but does not recognize,” or sees and does not care. The respect owed to wives and mothers as such is not uncommonly tied directly to the difficulties they face, understood as a kind of dues-paying. Their work and their travails earn them a self to assert and grounds for complaint if they are slighted, while the protagonist’s life is a zero-sum game that only leaves her enough room to remain in limbo from one moment to the next, instead of vanishing altogether. If the only alternative to being a miserably unhappy wife is nothing at all, then she would rather be an unhappy wife. If we read “The Daemon Lover” as the story of a naive woman who seduces and abandons herself, we fail to notice its minor dimension, which amounts to a pointed critique of the ordinary. This critique is a plane of consistency for Jackson’s fiction. The ordinary is the default setting for everyone; it is supposed to be universal, constant, consistent, transparent, when in experience it proves to be discriminatory, arbitrary, erratic,

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exclusive—even mendacious. The protagonist is all but cut off from reality for no misdeed, for no reason whatever, and is compelled to pursue what only pretends to be freely available to all, the common possession of all beings. The protagonist’s reality is on permanent probation; it can be yanked away from her at any moment. If we decide that James Harris is nothing but her fantasy, then Jackson strongly implies that we’ve picked up a rock and are getting ready to throw it. And if we don’t, then how are we any more real than she is? Let the one who is real cast the first stone. Jackson’s bizarre element is reminiscent of the bizarre in Mahfouz. The vagueness around James Harris and the pattern of misdirection generated by an apparently random sampling of people in the street amount to something more like the machinations of an external will than mere chance. The vagueness is cultivated ruthlessly from the first lines, and as it accumulates, we find the bizarre emerging from supposedly everyday encounters. The protagonist is compelled to interact with other people she would not normally come into contact with, or in unusual ways, without the cover afforded by something like a commercial transaction. Jackson is careful to give us no hallucinatory moment, because there can be no suggestion of hallucination in association with the protagonist if she appears before the reader in the correct light. If this is nothing more than the story of a strange woman’s hallucinations, then its applicability to the reader is lost, and all we can do is feel sorry for the poor lady. The mark of destiny in this story is the name, James Harris. It is the emblem of the protagonist’s problem. James Harris is not her fantasy, but he isn’t real either. He is an emissary of dreams and desires, which are virtual things, real but unrealized. He is the interval of suspense between dream and a realization that may never come, which inflates to engulf the entire remainder of the protagonist’s life. Her dream was more real than she was; it had a name, she didn’t. She wanted that name; in applying it to herself, she becomes real, too. What is James Harris? A writer. What has he written? A dream. Analysis The title overshadows everything with its implications even before we begin. The protagonist is introduced in a flurry of activity, that tells us this is a deeply anxious person, and yet she is also listless and dreamy. In the first four paragraphs, she acts “fitfully,” “anxiously,” “helplessly,” she is “feverish,” “worried,” she experiences “sudden horror,” “revulsion,” and

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“dismay.” We are told that she “hesitated” three times, and four times that she performed some task “carefully.”146 If Jackson is inviting us to approach the protagonist from a psychological standpoint, this does not rule out the operation of outside forces, any more than it does in the case of The Haunting of Hill House. We begin, in this case, to notice a pattern; the protagonist tends to cancel incomplete tasks, starting a letter to her sister, then discarding it, having only coffee rather than either a proper breakfast or nothing, and this points to a halfwayness, like being a grown woman but unmarried, which seems to ally her more to things that are only half real. When she runs downstairs to the drugstore, she leaves her coffee “half-finished.”147 At the same time, these mundane tasks are charged with magical significance as she tries to ready her apartment to receive her new husband, who will bestow a new life and reality on her. Her current condition is illustrated by the framing of the narrator in the dark hallway, the way the superintendent and his wife stand in the doorway of the home they share, “regarding the dark hall”148 rather than her. Their comfortable married closeness helps to push the narrator out into that freezing nowhere that Jackson writes about so often. The darkness of the hall is mentioned twice again, as if it were accumulating around her, and there is something cruel in the way the superintendent’s wife seems to control the light from their apartment, swinging the door open and shut on the protagonist. Much of the horror of this story arises as she goes from person to person, hopelessly; simply interacting with people in a slightly unconventional way where she has no credibility to lose, where not even a crumb of credit will be extended to her. This in turn might prompt her to insist on herself more emphatically than is consistent with what she really believes to be the case; we are told, for example, only after speaking to the shoe-shine man: “For the first time she was really sure he would be waiting for her.”149 There are two ways to discuss the very subtle supernatural aspect of this story; one is psychological, the other meta-textual. The psychological angle: if this is the story of one woman’s madness, then we are being asked to believe that she became so hysterical with the experience of her own loneliness that she hallucinated a man for herself. So why doesn’t she hallucinate a husband instead of a fiancé? Wouldn’t it be more consistent with textbook delusional behaviour for her to assign to herself the name of “Mrs. Harris,” and to account for her husband’s absence with equally imaginary business trips or other pretexts? Why should someone so desperate to belong, to arrive at a place of stability, hallucinate the existence of a fiancé, that is, of someone is only almost

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hers, rather than a husband who is definitively and legally hers? There are additional complications with the delusion thesis: if she did hallucinate James Harris’ visit of the night before, conjuring him out of nothing with her loneliness, why wouldn’t she hallucinate him again in the morning? Isn’t her loneliness, her yearning for him, even greater then, and mounting all the time? If her loneliness empowers her imagination to impose on her senses, then she should be talking to someone no one else can see, going to city hall to fill out paperwork with an invisible man, and so on. These are the kinds of hallucinations we’ve been introduced to in the work of such writers as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but they arise under entirely different circumstances. The protagonist is an independent woman, and we are given considerable evidence of her basic competence, since she has not only managed to make a life for herself, it is clear that she has done so without any friends or relatives to help. No friends are mentioned, and the only relative is a sister who is far enough away that she must write her letters. Her parents are not mentioned at all. Their absence on her wedding day might be an indication that the whole thing is a fantasy gone out of control, but there are other plausible reasons for their absence, too. The point is that the protagonist has evidently moved to a distant town where she knows no one, found and kept a job, and established herself alone in a small apartment she keeps so tidy and well stocked with fresh linens that she can replace her towels three or four times. It seems more likely that this protagonist, if she were to begin hallucinating, would simply assert that she was already married to a Mr. James Harris, who is currently away somewhere on some plausible, time-consuming errand, rather than see herself cast in the role of an expectant fiancée. Like Mrs. Drover in Elizabeth Bowen’s story of the same name, the protagonist here seems to have suffered a kind of lapse between the moment of engagement and the present, but, where Mrs. Drover has forgotten a promise that she could barely be said to have made anyway, and which turns out to be anything but an illusion, Jackson’s protagonist may have mistaken a vivid fantasy for reality, and the pain of disillusioning herself with respect to this false memory is too much for her to face, so she runs here and there asking the world to confirm or deny the story for her. The unaccountable element in her madness might actually be its weakness, its inability to sustain the delusion. If the delusion were “better,” the protagonist’s uncertainty would not arise. The supernatural dimension here develops not so much in the possible veracity of the shoe-shine man’s claim to have seen Jamie, or the florist’s

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story about selling chrysanthemums to him, but from the point of indiscernibility where who we are meets who we are supposed to be, or the life we want clashes with the life we have. These everyday events have existential implications for the protagonist, whose personal reality is now contingent on the reality of James Harris. We can’t fail to notice how suppositions like the idea that he is the man who lived in the Royster’s apartment, or that he stopped to buy flowers, become a certainty, which strongly implies that James Harris is another plausibility that she takes for a certainty, but ultimately we can’t account for the appearance of James Harris in the protagonist’s life. Even if he is only her fantasy—why him? Jackson’s supernatural is not a personal force; Hill House was a haunted place before anyone ever died there, for example. Instead, it is a kind of inviting passivity, an image or a place, an idea of a person, that beguiles people with the genuine infinity of experience, while at the same time making it impossible for them to ignore how very little of that infinity they are in a position to grasp. Jackson gives that inviting passivity a little jolt of independence and malevolence, not as a repressed desire in the minds of the characters but as a simulacrum of their object of desire, a seductive bait dangled by reality itself. This shows us that it is a waste of time trying to determine whether or not Jamie is real, just as the identification of Hill House as haunted in the first paragraph of the novel sets that question aside as firmly answered from the start. Jamie is real, but not in the right way. The ending of the story is another pseudo-choice as well: a “choice” between a ruined, empty attic room and a locked door—what is the choice? Can she decide that Harris was only an illusion and laugh it off, or go seek psychiatric help? She is already beyond the point at which she would be able to make that choice, but, while she does have psychological problems, they are not the reason that decision is beyond her power. Such decisions are beyond anyone’s power, because experience is so much vaster, more infinite, than we are. The meta-textual angle draws our attention back to the title, and to the name James Harris, which recurs throughout this collection of stories in keeping with the subtitle of the collection. Jackson’s decision to include this name, and its connection with the folkloric title of the story, must indicate that we are meant to regard this supernatural figure as an actor in these events. Combine this with the psychological angle and we see that the protagonist’s behaviour is more consistent with a scenario in which she has been led astray by someone else than it is with delusional behaviour. This someone else is always James Harris, a djinn-like figure who

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embodies the desires of certain special individuals. His influence on them is predicated on their own desires, but, at least in the case of the protagonist of “The Daemon Lover,” those desires are not enough in themselves to account for the events of the story. There is a kind of slip, the very briefest and most innocent, nowhere near the cataclysmic and yet clear break of a psychotic episode, which can estrange us from the ordinary, and that is the essence of the weird.

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“At the Gate of Deeper Slumber,” by Caitlin Kiernan This story is minor because it dismisses the solidity of the ordinary while using ordinary language and comprehensible character motivation. We have to acknowledge that the ordinary makes people invisible, gives them nowhere to go, no way to be together, but that doesn’t make the bizarre into a viable refuge. Kiernan’s characters shift into occulted zones adjacent to familiar, everyday places, but instead of finding a new home there, they are instead forced to confront their yearnings and problems more directly than they can under everyday circumstances. They are often people whose problems are ordinarily denied. The supernatural element in her stories often permits these characters to assert their rights to have their own problems on weird ground. In this story, the bizarre event has somehow already happened, and the main character is dealing with its aftermath. The weirdness in this case is the persistence of life, with both its usual and unusual attributes, after the decisive moment. Rather than show us the weird as it unravels the ordinary, she shows us the way the ordinary re-assembles itself around an anomaly, focusing on the reterritorialization that necessarily always follows a deterritorialization. If the new normal is the result of a prior deterritorialization, a weird event, then the normal is only a convalescence. The weird eruption determines of the ensuing order. The current normal is the weird of the past. This means that the destiny to change is built into the ordinary. The main character can do nothing but forestall what is a foreordained change for Suzanne, and a foreordained loss for her, and by telling the story in reshuffled segments, Kiernan is able to open with this moment of loss in a first-person narration without having to retell the events of the story in hindsight from this moment. “I am not contained in any single moment, and the assumed order of the world is lost on me.”150 The story comes equipped with a quietly omniscient over-narrator who selects the numbered moments and presents them in such a way that Suzanne’s destiny is present in all the events leading up to it. If the narrator were telling the story in sequence, Kiernan would have to set up a more conventional plot and the story would unfold in the ordinary world until we reached the end; the sequence Kiernan selected enables her to root the story in the bizarre moment first and then refer to the ordinary scenes. These ordinary moments land with greater force because the narrator is still as oblivious to their implications as she would have been in the ordinary sequence. When the narrator catches up to herself, as well as to us, the narrative

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circle closes just as the circle surrounding and preserving Suzanne must be closed and redrawn. In a way, the narrator’s incessant activity, redrawing the circle, acts out the secret of the ordinary, which is that the apparently static order of the everyday is really the consequence of continuous labour, and that identity is produced by policing boundaries, blocking exits, denying or undoing changes, and not because it is a reflex or an inert essence. The magic circle is the mark of destiny in the story. Once everyone, narrator past and future, as well as the reader, are all in the same place, the scene is given an infinite designation rather than a number. This is the production of the supernatural. The circle is erased because, at this point, there is no ordinary left in Suzanne, and consequently there is nothing left to preserve. She has become infinite, in the sense of being outside boundaries. “This, I suspect, is why the charcoal symbols on the floor dissolve almost as quickly as I can draw them. They were never more than symbols, never anything more vital than wishful thinking.”151 The supernatural is produced to the extent that we recognize that post-event experience, the recognition that we have already passed the point of no return. The normal and ordinary are prizes to be won even though they are also prisonlike, which relates “At the Gate of Deeper Slumber” to stories like Shirley Jacksons’ “The Daemon Lover.” The references to Lovecraft and to other weird fiction in Kiernan’s stories repeat this at the level of composition, since she is returning to now-familiar genre tropes that have become the ordinary of weird fiction and deterritorializing them by asking what comes next. Nothing is supposed to come next. The unnamed girl in “The White People” is dead by suicide and nothing comes next. The narrator of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” returns to Innsmouth and transforms, going on to lead an alien life that Lovecraft curtains off as something too horrifying even to imagine. If we write sequels to these stories, following the characters into another existence, then how do we avoid turning the story into a Fantasy that loses any affective relationship to the first story? “At the Gate of Deeper Slumber” might give us an answer—we give that girl a friend who participates vicariously in her change and witnesses its after-effects. In that way, the story does not abandon the world that the reader lives in, and thematizes the reader’s own fascination with the girl’s experiences through the witness. Analysis Fantasies of personal tragedy, fiction and reality are blended by the self-­ consciousness of the narrator. The first-person narrative is unreliable, as

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Poe showed us, but it is also more reliable insofar as it acknowledges its limitations, making no pretence of an omniscient overview. This story has a Lovecraftian structure, in that the narrative consists of one person’s inner life and an implied story that is left to conjecture, impressionistic as its details are labile. The pattern seems to be fascination with another character who must be protected from something too dire to be described, and often the point of view character is more dedicated to that defense than the one to be defended. The threat to the normal takes the shape of an attack on a particular character, and the normal world makes itself felt mainly through the idiomatically contemporary dialogue. While this might remind us of a story like Cynthia Asquith’s story, “God Grante That She Lye Stille” or a film like The Exorcist, which achieves its weird effect primarily by employing a flat documentary style, the normal doesn’t have the gravitational pull in Kiernan than it does in either Asquith’s story or Friedkin’s film. It is necessary to read this as a sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” in order to appreciate the way Kiernan has adopted not only the lore of the Shining Trapezohedron, but also the distant relationship between Blake and the reader. Blake only addresses the reader directly through the last scrambled jottings he made. Even though Lovecraft tells the story in the third-person singular, he only refers to what Blake must be going through, and avoids any detailed narration of his increasingly strange experiences. We can follow him into the church, but what he undergoes subsequently is only summarized, as if the impersonal storyteller has only Blake’s own elliptical diary and reports of his behaviour to go on. Kiernan falls back on this distant relationship and gives us an anguished onlooker who is struggling to understand, and marked by guilt. Suzanne isn’t dying. Death is “finality,”152 and her transformation is a change away from finality itself, which includes the finality of stable relationships, fixed identities, even of species. The narrator is frantically trying to preserve a border around Suzanne as a way to keep her, a protective inscription that has to be continually redrawn, which ties the preservation to the act of writing and rewriting. The lack of finality is thematized, too, in Kiernan’s use of a Lovecraftian figure, the gate of deeper slumber from his dreamlands stories; Lovecraft does not get the final word about this, any more than he does with respect to the Innsmouth folk that Kiernan also writes about. Kiernan writes past the end of the conventional story or before the beginning, although not quite in the way that Aickman does. Where Aickman gives us a strangely alienated cast of characters, Kiernan’s

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characters confront aftermaths with much more comprehensible character psychology, bringing this together with the perspective of people who were already outsiders to begin with. What happens when you discover you are one of Innsmouth’s special families, and return there? The discovery that is final in Lovecraft becomes in Kiernan the revelation that it is your destiny not to end but to change. Part of the problem is that the ordinary world is not vanquished, that it is still there. “She is alone in there with the metal box and what it contains, and I am alone out here, with all the world about me. It only seems as though the world has gone away.”153 The story is told in weird time. The backdrop is a moment of sorrow that is dilated and interminable, and which bursts out in recollected scenes that flash by. The story mutely assembles itself out of those scenes in the larger zone of loss that is established at the beginning. The writing is self-­ admittedly futile, just wishful thinking, and there’s no mercy, which would include an ending. The story has five sides, and the box containing the Shining Trapezohedron has five sides; so the story is also the box, and its contents, the gem, are actually a void opening onto somewhere else. In Lovecraft’s story, Blake begins to experience difficulties distinguishing himself from the Haunter of the Dark; his journal records perceptual inversions of light and darkness, as if he were seeing with the Haunter’s senses, and the last thing he sees, according to his journal, is the Haunter’s own eye looking at him, looking back at it. In this story, Suzanne mingles with something on the other side in a way that resembles the enigmatic marriage in the folk tale recounted by the diarist in “The White People.” The finality of death or even of the apocalypse would be “easier”154 than the disappearance of Suzanne under these circumstances. At the end of the story, the narrator can do nothing but rub out the traces altogether. At the same time, she brings back the tracings of older literature by quoting Eliot; the passage includes reference to a common inability to imagine a future with no destiny, but this is only possible from a vantage point within destiny. This story can teach us more about destiny, by showing us that the state of loss is the eye of the storm, where the only thing that can happen is the repetition of the same, because nothing more can come from the one you have lost. The narrator repeats her reply to Suzanne, “It’s a beautiful day. The sky is blue. There are no clouds, and the sky is blue”155 at the story’s end, “‘It was a beautiful day,’ I say, and at first the sound of my own voice startles me. ‘The sky was blue, Suzanne. There were no clouds, and the sky was blue. I think it will be a beautiful night.’”156 The relationship of loss involves an endlessly renewed negation; otherwise, it would be forgetting.

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“Private—Keep Out!” by Philip MacDonald This could be read as a major story: don’t look past appearances, remain normal. The normal is an illusion, but a necessary one. There is truth, but not for us. This mistrust of appearances is generally a major tendency. Minor literature doesn’t take appearances for granted, but regards them as entities unto themselves. The idea that the cosmos masks a truth that only the initiated can see is major; in the minor reading, the initiates are at best only better suited to managing surfaces. There is no identifiable menace in this story, apart from the universe itself. The bizarre encounter does not involve any apparition or encounter with a monster, but rather with radical differences in the ordinary, like a park where a house should be, or a different actor playing a film role made famous by someone else, an old friend of yours that no one else can remember. The changes are not in themselves bizarre—the park is an ordinary park, the actor is just another actor. This makes “Private—Keep Out!” a remarkably clear example of the bizarre as the self-difference of the ordinary. The capacity of the ordinary for this self-difference, the fact that anything can become ordinary by mere persistence, which means that the ordinary is arbitrary, throws it open to destabilization at all points. The attack is a form of editing, and it can come at any time, in any place. The ordinary itself is the monster. This is the minor mode of the story: the ordinary is safe only because we don’t really see it, or indeed see anything. It is not safe in itself; in fact, it is not ordinary, it is a ruse. This induces a maximal deterritorialization that encompasses the reader’s reality as well. To see through the limitation that identity marks you as one who can no longer be fully real, can no longer see identity as anything other than a provisional matter where it is essential to see identity as fixed and stable. Moffat is becoming a simulacrum. The world becomes a simulacrum of itself, because the essence of the world and of identity is inertia. If there is no fixity, then what is the self? The self, any self—including the reader’s— participates in the fixity of the normal world. Where the ordinary is monsterized, all identities become false or monstrous. Moffat must assert and affirm himself, but for negative reasons, out of fear of erasure, and as a way of playing things safe. He is marked by a tendency to vanish, to recede into shadows and indistinctness, but what makes this story so brilliant is the way MacDonald makes ordinariness itself into a mark. To be out of the ordinary is to be marked for destruction, since the illusion must be maintained, but to be ordinary is also to be marked by that illusion, reduced to

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an illusion. This isn’t destruction; it’s voiding individual reality from the outset. You never really were. The only reason it isn’t destruction, therefore, is that there is nothing to destroy but the mistaken idea that there is something to destroy. Identity, in this story, depends on other people’s memories, on recognition by others, which is highly contingent. The supernatural element in the story is less the perfectly vague menace pursuing Moffat, and more the infinity that opens as we realize there are no absolute guarantees. This is terrifying, not a liberation from an onerous identity, and so the story is balanced between major and minor. The ordinary is the monster, but there is no line of flight one can take, there is no escape. The supernatural opens experience outward to infinity, but MacDonald sees to it that this infinity is empty. Analysis The opening sentence establishes the story’s terms right away: “the world goes mad and people tend to put the cause of its sickness down to man.”157 The world possesses mental states normally attributed to subjects. There is a fear of being blamed for madness, blamed for a madness that is not yours but the world’s, and fear of a world gone mad, all mingled here. The universe knows and listens to us, watches our every move, hears our thoughts, and quietly removes those who have seen through its ruse. The resulting disappearances are bizarre for their aggressively negative quality; there are no associated “special effects,” visual or audible. The person is not only not there, but never was. For the narrator the whole tale is an omen; Moffat has blundered innocently into the precinct of ultimate reality, an error that anyone could make, since it is a matter of pure chance. MacDonald encounters Moffat by chance: “I used to get to the studio about ten and leave at five forty-­ five, but on this particular evening—it was Wednesday, the eighteenth of June—I was a little late getting away.”158 If he’d only left on time, MacDonald is off his schedule, already a little outside the lines, and it is here that he encounters Moffat. MacDonald is very cagey here, telling the story as himself, so as to blur the line between fact and fiction in a story that’s all about the way a fact could become a fiction, if the universe so decided. Moffat seems to have been waiting for him in the dark of the “tunnelled hallway … standing there in the deepest part of the shadow”159 like a presage of oblivion and a hiding place from some divine scrutiny at once. “an odd sort of feeling”160 reinforces MacDonald’s impression that, unlikely though it seems, Moffat’s been waiting specifically for him. This

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is a micro-impression, as if MacDonald were becoming aware of a thinning of reality around Moffat. “I couldn’t place him. It wasn’t one of those half-memories of having once met someone somewhere. It was a definite, full-fledged memory which told me this man had been a friend closely knit into my particular life pattern, and not so long ago.”161 The memory is genuine, but screened off by something that is not memory, not even MacDonald’s own mind. Moffat’s presence is off-putting. “I felt … uncomfortable. … I went on babbling rubbish; trying to talk myself out of the … the apprehensiveness which seemed to be oozing out of him and wrapping itself around the pair of us like a grey fog.”162 While this affect seems to emerge from Moffat himself, he isn’t doing anything to foster or communicate it, which means there is something impersonal about it, not unlike the insanity of the world that MacDonald mentions at the opening of the story. This is more than the unsettled feeling one can get around someone who is a little different; there is a suggestion here that this weird feeling emanates from the world itself, as if it were trying to prompt MacDonald to make some excuse and avoid further conversation with Moffat, or, more passively, perhaps this is an immune response, a disattractiveness attached to Moffat but not of him. The whole of their initial exchange unfolds at the level of feeling, with a veneer of ordinary conversation on top of it. MacDonald relates his dialogue to the reader in general remarks about its superficiality and one-sidedness, while every remark from Moffat is imbued with special significance. He is guarded, and this extends to his physical gesture of clinging to the briefcase that is the repository of the documents that confirm his identity, right down to his existence. MacDonald is dramatizing Moffat’s struggle to retain his personal identity by giving him this briefcase to police and protect, to clutch and to guard no matter how exhausting his vigilance is. “[W]hat was he afraid of? And why should I be feeling in the most extraordinary way, that life was a thin crust upon which we all moved perilously?”163 These questions have the same answer. During Moffat’s momentary absence, MacDonald exchanges some banalities with the barman, “a placid crustwalker,” saying “I answered him eagerly, diving into a sunny sanctuary of platitude.”164 As is so often true of weird fiction, here the ordinary becomes a precious sanctuary to be clung to and cherished, even because and to the extent that it is stupid and routine. When Moffat returns and begins to unpack himself, asking MacDonald if he had ever wondered about “the answer to … to everything,”165 he will hem and haw

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a little first. Then, as he says, “I stopped pretending,”166 indicating that he was deliberately trying to remain superficially banal, in order to avoid the subject. He speaks about wondering over what he calls “the Universal Answer, and you know it’s amazingly simple and you wonder why you never thought of it before”167; if the answer were elaborate and complex, then it would be less likely that anyone, the reader included, might stumble across it by chance. MacDonald continues: “and then you find you don’t know it at all. It’s gone; snatched away.”168 Something can’t be snatched away unless there is someone there to do the snatching. This story is characterizing the ambiguity and mystery of the universe as a game of keep-away, a malicious silence, in a way that repeats in a great many other weird tales as well. When Moffat rises to make yet another one of his cryptic phone calls, he offers MacDonald his briefcase. Again using the adjective “extraordinary,” which in this story has a special significance given the monsterization of the ordinary, MacDonald is “suddenly extremely loath to open the thing.”169 The briefcase is now a thing, unspeakable, not at all an ordinary briefcase, and the repulsion “permeated me”170—an emphasized verb which suggests the feeling originates outside MacDonald, in order to keep him from studying the blasphemous contents of the case. Weird fiction reposes infinite trust in documentation, so that the evidence collected in the briefcase has particular weight. The contents of these seemingly innocent papers correlate in pointing to a distinct void in the world where Adrian Archer once was. As with the barman before, the waiter twice interrupts their dialogue in ways that seem suspiciously well-timed to interfere with Moffat’s account. However, as Moffat continues to tell his story, the narrator’s grip on reality begins to slip, culminating in this moment: “‘Then what?’ said my voice. ‘Then what?’”171 His voice is speaking, not himself. It’s as if his self were on hiatus, or in danger, and there is a strong implication here that he continues listening, prompting more explanation, against his own best interests, against himself. By the time we reach the climax of the story, the most vehement moment comes as Moffat reads an ordinary sign, “KEEP OFF THE GRASS!”172 At this moment, MacDonald says “the crust felt thin beneath my feet.”173 The cosmos itself is telling you, directly, and yet without any extraordinary event, to stay ordinary. The ordinary is the means by which the cosmos expresses its secrecy. In the story’s last few lines there is concentration of speech into the first person that is as smooth as possible, so for a moment Moffat, who is not real, MacDonald, who is

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real but who (one hopes) is injecting himself into a fictional scenario for plausibility’s sake, and the readers who certainly think of themselves as real, more real than Moffat after all, and, if not more real than MacDonald, then experiencing events more real than the events of this story—all of the above seem to speak with the same voice.

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“The Little Room,” by Madeline Yale Wynne This story is predominantly minor, a radical warning against assurance of any kind. The ordinary is a trap, a ruse! It is nothing more than a consistency of memory, eliding the divide that separates one event from another. Madeline Wynne has created the self-difference of the ordinary perfectly, such that the more mundane the event, the weirder it is. Everything in the story hinges on whether or not someone finds an ordinary room or an ordinary closet in a particular place where only one of those two things could possibly be. The characters are destined never to know for certain just what is there, let alone why one person should encounter a china closet where another person discovers a little room. The two aunts who live in the house, Hannah and Maria, are anti-witches, ultra mundane, so normal they’re weird, so grey they’re strange, and they mark their guests with a sort of paradox: total uniformity in contradiction. While they now maintain the room has always been there, and now again maintain that the closet has always been there, their affect, even their language, is identical in each episode. They never remark on previous misunderstandings. As was true of “The Disturbing Occurrences,” it’s this pattern that constitutes the bizarre event. The pattern includes the reactions of the aunts, but it also includes the circumstances that, for example, prevent two characters who have seen two different things in that one place from seeing the same place simultaneously at a later time. The mark of destiny in this house is the appearance of strictly unvarying stasis. Everything always seems the same, even when it isn’t. Since destiny means unavoidable change, we might say this mark, rather than acting as an exemption from change, actually exacerbates change by volatilizing reality. Since there is no accounting for the reason or mechanism of this change, we might have to attribute it to destiny, especially since what one sees is apparently determined by who one is. Here is a change that conceals itself as no change at all. The supernatural is produced by this story when the house burns down, as if the proximity to a solution prompted a deus ex machina to sustain the mystery. While it is much more of a minor story than “Private—Keep Out!,” “The Little Room” likewise makes the world a jealous entity with an existence and a volition that is treacherously independent from humanity, and which actively resists being known. In MacDonald’s story, the resistance arises in response to the discovery of the ultimate secret of reality, but here the resistance is much more in keeping with a tyrannical,

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totalitarian idea of reality, in that the “secret” is inconsequential, making the elusive character of reality something essential, rather than a tactic designed to keep a more specific secret. There is nothing to understand, except that reality cannot be fixed. Analysis Roughly the first half of the story is exclusively dialogue between newlyweds Roger and Margaret Grant, situating the entirety of the initial exposition in a domain of storytelling. Far from being a haunted chamber, the little room is the only pleasant one in a house on Stony Hill, a bleak place where the narrator’s mother was raised by her two stony hardworking aunts, Hannah and Maria. When Margaret asks her husband not to speak too loudly of their recent marriage in the rail car, she adds, “I want my happiness all to myself” and Roger asks, “Well, the little room?”174 This juxtaposition seems to identify the room with a personal freedom or pleasure, an escape. When, much later in the story, the couple meet the aunts, “Maria seemed for a moment to tremble on the verge of an emotion, but she glanced at Hannah, and then gave her greeting in exactly the same repressed and non-committal way.”175 This tells us that Hannah is herself repressed, and that she communicates this repression to Maria. All this is prefaced by remarks like “She is New England—Vermont, New England— boiled down.”176 The aunts “are simply workers … they will die standing.”177 Their “decorum” is mentioned, as well as the “strict” way they had with Margaret’s mother, and their home is Stony Hill. This repression and stoniness has no purpose outside itself and is tied to the maintenance of identity. The narrator’s mother is supposed to have merely dreamed the existence of the little room, linking it to an implied yearning to escape the humdrum everyday business of keeping house, or perhaps worse, the coldness of the aunts. If we are inclined to see a resentment behind this coldness, we should remember that “Hiram had told [Margaret’s mother] that Hannah could have married the sea-captain if she had wanted to.”178 This indicates that Hannah did not want to. The mother remembers the room from childhood, only to find nothing there on returning but a china closet. “They both said the house was exactly as it had been built—and they had never made any changes.”179 On a later visit, Margaret discovers the room as her mother remembered it, and shows it to her. “I called out to Aunt Hannah and asked her when they had had the closet taken away and the little room built. … ‘That little

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room has always been there,’ said Aunt Hannah. … ‘No, there has never been any china-closet there; it has always been just as it is now …’.”180 This alone precipitates the mental collapse of Margaret’s mother. As she dies, she says “your father knows now all about the little room.”181 Since Margaret’s father was killed in the war, this suggests more than a mere wandering in her mind, but that something about the existence of the room belongs to the supernatural, as a domain beyond human understanding. Wynne accumulates a wealth of plausible details about the room, which all point to the absence of any obvious difference between true and false anecdotes, and the way that we always depend on evidence that is itself second hand even when we see with our own eyes so to speak, since we can dream our way out of or into anything. Margaret and her husband “concluded”182 that the room was entirely imaginary, but, given the uncertainty of knowledge in general, this is almost an act of petty hubris. That it should be necessary to make such a decision indicates the uncertainty surrounding the imagination, and Wynne also ties this to a general lack of confidence in a woman’s grasp of reality. Rather than coming to doubt a wild story, however, here the story, which is commonplace enough in its details, is presented as dubious from the beginning, but the problems with it are themselves problematic, and so this tends to undermine the criticism and throw us back onto uncertainty with masterful simplicity. We note too the kind of childhood memory involved in the story: young Margaret feeling important to herself, having a room of her own, not closed off because the things in it are from far away, and with the shell she can hear the ocean. The room offers her a personal vantage point, not a tale of terror, and this benign aspect makes it also more plausible. The next phase of the story shifts from dialogue to narrated action. There is no room. There is only the china closet. Her husband “didn’t believe her,”183 declares everything “ended” (ibid.), and refuses to take her hand, as if he resented her. The room is destined to separate people. Now, in addition to the room, even the story about Margaret’s mother has become chimeras: “‘I don’t remember that your mother ever asked about any little room,’ said Hannah.”184 This is a remarkable touch: these are witches who erase the past instead of predicting the future, anti-witches who never allow anything to change, whose refusal to give any sign is itself a sign. Things pass, but life—normal life—goes on as if nothing ever passed. This is what “normal” means; a radical denial of change, of the possibility of change, that extends to a denial of any activity of suppression

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of change. Change is banished, but so is the idea of stasis. These witches do nothing but housework, which is primarily about establishing and maintaining a fixed condition of cleanliness and order. In the end, another pair of characters is introduced to bring the story to its climax. Nan and Rita are in danger of undergoing another separation over the question of the little room, but resolve frankly to test the matter by going to the house together. Since one saw the room and the other saw the closet on previous, individual visits, this one will necessarily confirm one or the other—or it would have, if the house had not burned down in the meantime. It is interesting to note that there is no word about Hannah or Maria; Wynne writes only that “the house burnt down last night, and everything in it.”185 Are we to include the two aunts among the things pertaining to the house (I do not factor the sequel into this analysis)? The genius of the story lies in its distillation of the weird, exhibiting it without any additional flourishes. The more ordinary and mundane the circumstances, the more unaccountable the meaningless variation in experiences is. The two maiden aunts implacably circumscribe events in a way that strongly suggests a sort of malevolence, such that Maria seems to struggle against an impulse to explain, or at least commiserate, which is checked by the more imperious will of Hannah. The weird economy of the story is perfect: the identity which must be preserved has no content or significance of its own, there is no hidden injustice to correct or menace to defeat, only the menace of a sinister ordinariness. The ordinary, while it is only a negative thing here, only a lifeless sameness, takes on an insidious and active interest in suppressing change. The little room is more significant than the china closet, given the associations linking its decor with fantasy, so is its appearance a lapse that reality must repair, even retroactively?

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“A Recluse,” by Walter de la Mare At the end of this story, the narrator re-enters ordinary life entirely too easily. It would stand to reason that he would be less glib and urbane had he gone through anything as disturbing as the events he narrates, but rather than throwing doubt on his story, which we have been through with him, somehow de la Mare manages to suggest that the transition back to ordinary reality is smooth precisely because it is only an apparent transition. This is perhaps the most minor aspect of the story. What happens at Montresor belongs to a special category of events that can never be said definitely to have happened or not; even a participant or an eyewitness can say no more than that this kind of event may have happened. The bizarre event in this tale is the entire encounter with Mr. Bloom, who may be very ordinary for all his apparent strangeness. He does not possess secret wisdom, however much he may choose to imply otherwise; there is nothing behind him, in fact, as is illustrated in that moment when he extinguishes himself in front of the narrator’s eyes, he is almost less than an apparition consisting of nothing but a surface. He has hidden shallows, which is to say he is a simulacrum of a person, a bundle of idiosyncrasies unified only by an ambivalence where an identity is supposed to be. The strange voices and the disembodied head all seem to emanate from his enormous body, his gluttonous appetites, his glozing talk, and easy treachery. The narrator’s acceptance of these weird events after the fact is also bizarre, as if he hadn’t entirely gotten the point. In time, we gather that his name is Charles Dash. At first, I thought that Mr. Bloom was gently mocking him by nicknaming him Mr. Dash, that is, someone who wants to get away. If we listen to the story read aloud, we might imagine that the reader is pronouncing “Mr. _____,” so his name suggests both an inclination to run away and an identity that has been withheld for political reasons. This might refer to his function as a placeholder for the reader as well, but this depends on the existence of a plane of consistency linking us to Mr. Dash. He is marked by the decision to be adventurous, and by his name. The mark of fate here is the missing key to his car, which is the means of conveying him to and from Montresor, and the key that locks him in place for the night. The supernatural is produced in this story by the pattern of uncertainty, the way that any definite idea of things is not simply absent or inadequate but almost perversely withheld and sabotaged. Mr. Bloom’s elusiveness is

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only part of this pattern, not its cause. There is no “lore” for this story apart from the sort of thing that any reader might casually know about occultism; the supernatural emerges from the lack of explanation. Analysis De la Mare’s style is so slippery, so very sharply aware of words, that we are already on our guard before anything really strange is described. It pays to note the way he uses certain words in this story, like “vacancy,”186 the way both the narrator and Mr. Bloom will blurt out dismissive judgements about the current topic of thought or conversation—“ridiculous!”187—or the way he will repeat words that have just been said or implied. De la Mare weaves together all manner of unrequited suspicions not just for their own sake, but because this is the real substance of the encounter with the supernatural, not definite answers, not a look behind the mask—just the mask, that’s all. Mr. Bloom may bloom, that is, open, but there’s nothing to see inside, no fruit. Mr. Dash is the narrator, but his name hints at a kind of double entendre honesty, as if he were being honest about not being anything more than a narrator in a story. He is a narrator who refuses to speculate, or even to investigate. He begins the story by scoffing at the idea that the best things in life are found at its edges. Since, according to him, the centre is explored, safe, corroborated, and a place where you know where you are, the edge would presumably be unknown, dangerous, disorienting, and unique (since corroboration implies a series of similar experiences). Mr. Bloom was at the edge, and is now over it, which means he is beyond the borderline, dead, and yet not dead, since the verb “to be” is used in the present tense in his case, and this reference to his ongoing posthumous existence is brought up both in the middle and at the end of the story, in connection to the family friend, Miss Algood. The edge is not beyond the border, it is the border, so the edge here is being conceived of as an ambivalent territory, like a line with no volume that is somehow occupiable anyway, and this is the miracle of the supernatural: not being or going beyond, but somehow turning what should be a line into a zone, producing and living in an ambiguity where a clear polarity ought to be. Mr. Bloom is “a pace or so beyond the threshold” of his house188 when Mr. Dash first sees him, but then Mr. Dash is already well over the borderline surrounding the property, having invited himself onto the grounds. Mr. Dash has only an ordinary share of curiosity, and the discovery of unsettling and suggestive clues only disperses it.

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Why does sight of Mr. Champneys’ slippers, which Mr. Dash was forced to take in lieu of his own shoes before dashing from the house, prompt the question of whether or not it is discreet to refer to the house as imposing? De la Mare is the master of this kind of question, which takes the entire narrative for granted before we read it, and which exists only to establish connections between elements of the story as if those connections were somehow pressing themselves on his awareness from outside. In retrospect, knowing whose slippers they are, and the various other attendant circumstances, we are no more likely to see a connection here than we are when we read the story at the outset in ignorance of these things. This suggests to me that de la Mare is not writing, as it may seem, for a second read-through. It is more consistent with his thesis, that of the radical superficiality and paradoxical spiritlessness of spiritualism, to allow seemingly significant questions to wither in bathos than to suggest any more profound answers. He likes to write both questions and propositions that seem to be something adjacent to what they really are. So, with respect to Mr. Champneys’ borrowed slippers, Mr. Dash isn’t wondering if the house is imposing, but if it is discreet to call it imposing, which is to say that it is imposing, but that it might not be quite right to say so. What that has to do with slippers I don’t know, but perhaps this is the point: a double attack, combining an adjacency in phrasing, which causes the meaning of what is being said to slide around under our gaze, with a begging of questions, like the relevancy of the slippers, which would require us to know the story in advance. De la Mare is speaking with great precision, and even niceness, when he describes Mr. Bloom as vague and inconclusive; to be vague is to possess a surplus of meaning. “A Recluse” is the story of Mr. Bloom as told by Mr. Dash, someone who is not, and does not want to be, in a position to answer pressing questions. It describes a situation without conclusions, even where death is concerned, owing to that surplus of possibilities. If vagueness is surplus of possibilities here, then it is not just a smoke screen behind which the supernatural may be lurking, but the supernatural itself, at least with respect to physical reality, life and death. Mr. Dash comes across Montresor while on a drive directed by chance. While there is a symmetry in the story, since he sets out on his journey by escaping from the room of a sick friend only to end up in the room of another sick man, Mr. Champneys, this doesn’t seem like destiny, or rather, it seems to say that chance is our destiny, at least when we leave the centre for the edges. The chance element is more or less underlined by the

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inclusion of the horseman, although he is also associated with machinery when he is referred to as an “odd mechanical creature.”189 He is included, it seems, to point to the uncertainty of the narrator’s perceptions, mistaking, as he does at first, the man for a bird, the description of the man being both vague and arbitrary so that we wonder if the vagueness belongs to the sight or to the seer—and he also acts as a sort of edge-marker, like the keeper of a boundary. Montresor stops Mr. Dash in his tracks because it is diffident, that is, self-effacing: “then one looked again, and it looked back—with a furtive reticence as if it were withholding itself from any direct scrutiny.”190 So, if it is an imposing house, it imposes on you by hiding, implying depths that aren’t there, drawing you in on the basis of your own tendency to want to see more in things, to supply the surplus yourself. This is what Mr. Dash has only just done with respect to the horseman, who reappears to give him a mute, minimal warning, one that, as was true of the horseman himself, is mostly supplied by the narrator. His response: “naturally, it increased my interest.”191 Looking for a mystery need not be the same thing as looking for the solution to a mystery; some of us want the mystery for itself, that is, the lack of answers in a place where one would expect to find them. The association of Mr. Bloom with Montresor is very close; he named the house himself, he is as “empty-looking” and de la Mare goes on to say that “if his house had suggested vacancy, so did he.”192 Mr. Dash chooses to trust Mr. Bloom because “it would be monstrous to take this world solely on its face value,”193 but, while this would seem to mean that we mustn’t be taken in by appearances when they are off-putting, the story finally vindicates this bad impression. Since, however, Mr. Dash recounts his story in hindsight, this is apparently still his unchanged opinion; he evidently believes it is simply human to wish for there to be something behind a facade. Of the two men, it is Mr. Bloom who is the monster, taking the world at face value; his occultism is not an attempt to pierce the veil, but to become the veil or to treat everything as if it were a veil. Glyn Pursglove writes: “‘[A] Recluse’ is perhaps best seen not merely as a tale of the supernatural but also as yet another of those meditations on metaphysical problems that are to be found everywhere, irrespective of genre, in de la Mare’s work.”194 In this case, the question is identity. Speaking of Mr. Bloom later on, Mr. Dash will speak of him as “extortionately substantial, and yet in effect … elusive and unreal. … What indeed constitutes the reality of any fellow creature? The something, the someone within, surely.”195 Not soul or self, but something or someone—so

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identity is a vagueness. Given the characterization of the more innocent spiritualism of Miss Algood,196 for Mr. Dash, occultism is stupid and pointless, but not therefore unreal. He does not say he doesn’t believe, but only that this particular approach to the other side, whose existence he neither denies nor challenges, is empty as far as he’s concerned, as if it were a matter of personal taste. Furthermore, he states that his seance experiences diminished his interest in the ordinary world as well. This is opposed to the idea of the occult as a way of spicing up the ordinary; here it is a way of dragging the ordinary even lower. The occult message is not subconscious, but something even more sub—so sub that it isn’t even clear what it is under. This is by no means the kind of story where the sceptic gets his comeuppance, nor does Bloom disagree exactly. He says that, while spiritualism is futile,197 you do get somewhere, and he follows this with a demonstration. He goes somewhere: not a particular place, just somewhere, a place with no special meaning. The face of Mr. Bloom is, at that moment, “uncurtained too, bleak and mute as a window,”198 so the comparison to the house is once again made explicit, and the word “mute,” along with the previously repeated word “vacant,” will be repeated in the description of Mr. Champneys’ room.199 Mr. Bloom disappears without needing actually to disappear; this isn’t a deep demonstration, it’s a shallow one, that is to say, a trick, and a pendant to the appearance of his mask later on. All the same, Mr. Bloom seems to be indignant at the suggestion that his occult investigations have anything to do with Miss Algood’s sentimental spiritualism; he has invested money in the project, for one thing, retaining Mr. Champneys at 300 pounds a year, and has kept track of the progress of their research in the bound volumes of their Proceedings. He insists on the depths of his own research, in comparison with Miss Algood’s “banal” approach, and we have no reason to doubt his commitment. It is pretty plain that his emptiness, his masklike blankness, his voice muffled behind the heavy beard, and his eyes locked behind thick glasses are either a constitutional aptitude for the occult or a result of occult investigation. In “Ghostly Sensations in Walter de la Mare’s Texts: Reading the Body as a Haunted House,” Yui Kajita writes: In “The Supernatural in Fiction,” an unpublished lecture given on 22 February 1923 as part of his Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, de la Mare considers the potential of ghostliness, as if to search for the boundaries of how far he can stretch out the concept without falling prey to imprecision. “Yet surely,” he says, “but one still slow glance cast into the

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quiet of a solitary room makes one remotely aware of ghostly occupants. To be the slave of one’s nerves is one thing; to refuse to believe in their whispered evidence quite another. Unless, indeed, we are mere machines, then these bodies of ours are themselves haunted houses. A brief hour of solitude, and darkness; a furtive unfamiliar sound out of the unknown, the screech of an owl, a sigh of wind in the chimneys—and the restless ghost within us stirs, awakes, hearkens.”

Rather than a device to scare the reader for the reader’s amusement, de la Mare’s ghostly “shivers” transfer to the reader the sensations of restless impermanence and awaken within the reader’s own body and consciousness the furtive stirrings that his characters listen for. Through reading his texts, one’s body becomes haunted by “strange visitants”—ghosts of characters, phantoms of texts, almost inaudible sounds, or the ghostly sensations in the embodied experience of reading—and it makes the reader aware of how one might haunt the texts one reads. The reader internalizes the texts, and the texts, in turn, seem almost to internalize the reader: an effect that only the individual reader can recognize when one returns to the texts oneself, as if by a personal mark or footprint. “What are we all but ghosts—of something?” his stories ask us. The “whispered evidence” in his texts seems to invite the reader to share in a collaborative reimagining of the stories themselves: “And who’s telling this story for you, pray, but your ghost of me?”200 When discussing the occult, Mr. Bloom notes “no human beings ever see perfectly eye to eye”201 about the topic. In light of de la Mare’s own remarks above, it is no overstatement to say that this amounts to renaming the inability of human beings to see eye to eye “the occult.” Mr. Dash is put into Mr. Champneys’ place. There before him, neatly arranged, are the volumes of their occult Proceedings—he ignores them. He notes only the last page of Champneys’ diary, which insists “not me,”202 but does nothing to investigate what led up to this cryptic remark. When Mr. Dash does explicitly consider what lies beyond science, the supernatural, far from weighing the possible validity of Mr. Bloom’s occultism, Mr. Dash questions his own weird intuitions about the room. He never sees Mr. Champneys, but he senses his presence. He meets and talks with Mr. Bloom—at tedious length in fact—without there ever being a strong sense of Mr. Bloom being present; even in his conversation, Mr. Bloom continually interjects a phrase like “why not?” or repeats a word, weighing it or dismissing it, as if he were talking to himself, or reading a

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transcript of Mr. Dash’s terse replies sometime after their conversation. The lifelessness of their dialogue, described as “automatic,”203 shows also that this is a feigned connection. Mr. Bloom is hiding his own dread of some visitor who evidently is less likely to appear when Mr. Dash is present, while Mr. Dash is going through the motions, partaking of none of Mr. Bloom’s horror. He only begins to feel something strange when he awakens in the grey morning and experiences chills. Then he is vividly awake; although he is definitely not dreaming, everything around him communicates its impermanence to him, scientifically. It’s an amazing touch; he sees the room as it would look to someone who was intensely afraid, but abstractly. He is aware of fear as something present but not yet active in him, and remains numb to it in order not to realize and be paralysed with it. He is dodging an identity that would fix him in a particular moment, not the identity of Champneys per se, but perhaps the role Champneys played in Mr. Bloom’s life. He awakens before hearing the voices, they do not wake him—so, a premonition—the visitor. To escape, he dons Champneys’ robe and slippers and is “not exactly himself”204 in them, not Champneys either, a nonesuch and slippery in his slippers. De la Mare might be saying that we become someone else when we are “ready for action.”205 Both voices sound like Mr. Bloom’s, so we have a ghost that is also someone’s other half, that is, the fact that the other one originates in the onlooker is no solution, no repudiation of the supernatural. It is like the iconic image of the pelican piercing its own breast to feed its young, which decorates the gates of Montresor; this is something Mr. Bloom has done to himself. Bloom’s voice is heard calling out that he’s coming, and then he is there, or rather, his mask appears in the bed, although the narrator insists it was a hallucination. Mr. Dash calls it a hallucination with too much confidence, the whole point of a hallucination is that you aren’t sure whether it is one; but what he is hallucinating is a mask, the illusion of an illusion; the mask is the real face, and therefore to be real has nothing to do with depths. The house is not haunted, but infested. A haunted house is one that receives visitors, coming and going, a presence that will not or cannot go, but something infested is always occupied by something that melts into its substance and pervades the whole thing. A haunted house opens onto something beyond or contains a hidden dimension, but an infested house is simply rotten. It appears that Mr. Bloom needed human company because he was both human and all too human, despite his wizardry. Miss Algood’s odd return at the end, her hungry eyes, present us with a face that has

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something real behind it: longing, a frustrated desire for life that has to find an outlet somewhere, entirely the opposite of Mr. Bloom’s timid, disaffected blankness. Hungry eyes want to batten on something, and while Mr. Bloom wanted to get hold of Mr. Dash, this was not out of any interest in him personally, but only so as to avoid whatever was coming for him. Miss Algood missed the world, while Mr. Bloom, a recluse, rejected it.

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“Lodgers,” by Joan Aiken This is a minor story about socially induced impotence and confusion, which virtually prevents Rose Burdock from doing anything about the nightmarish Colegates. Aiken’s story shares its contour with another, perhaps more familiar kind of weird tale, in which general disbelief in the supernatural hinders the characters from taking action against it. However, in “Lodgers,” the problem is that Rose herself is not reliably real enough to be capable of action. All the relationships in this story are permeated by selfishness, although in Rose’s case that selfish desire is attenuated down to a mere longing for relief. Even at the end of the story, the Colegates are never unmasked, since they’ve never really been masked at all. While there are all manner of odd events in the story, the turning point, and the definitively bizarre moment, comes when Rose finds the withered, whitish things in the Colegates’ birdcage. These things have been produced by the Colegates somehow, for some reason. Considering Mr. Colegate’s intense interest in the cemetery, his remarks about the susceptibility of freshly dead souls to capture, his manifest disappointment at hearing that Rose’s dead husband never lived in the house, the excessive and unhealthy attention both he and Mrs. Colegate pay to the two sick children, and so on, this seems to imply that the two of them are essentially vampires who capture dead souls and somehow embody them in dolls or whatever those whitish things are. The graveyard is the mark of destiny in this story; Rose lives beside it, the Colegates are constantly associated with it. The succession of torments visited on Rose, one on top of the other, and her inability to find enough stability beneath her feet to do more than manage them might seem like a potentially deadly spiral, but the story is not about Rose’s attempts to avoid death, or even to save her children. Primarily, it is about her attempt to escape her life, which entails just barely scraping by in one emergency after another. Aiken produces the supernatural by the buildup of micro-impressions, so that we know what’s going on without ever having it clearly spelled out to us. Unlike the quiet impressions that encroach on the silent attentiveness of the characters in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” these impressions are in plain sight, but they whirl past at such a speed, and are replaced by other pressing concerns so quickly that the opportunity for action can’t arise. So Rose Burdock is not a feeble character undermined by her own weakness, but more like a minor figure, bullied from all directions. Here

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the infinity of experience takes the form of a demoralizing shapelessness, an inability to distinguish between what is or isn’t supposed to be possible. The story is structured in such a way that we are led to expect a moment of realization that doesn’t come; Rose never confronts a fully revealed crisis, but sees only its moments. This is a point of contact between Aiken and Aickman, the difference being that Aiken provides us enough clues, drawing on established weird tropes, to put together some kind of idea about what the Colegates are, while Aickman is known for his tendency to swerve around such tropes, or to oversaturate the implicative side of the story with them as a way of bringing them in without making any limiting decisions. Analysis This story is a masterpiece of innuendo, building through a series of micro-impressions that come so thick and fast that the experience is materially smothering. Rose Burdock is single-handedly managing two very sick kids and a demanding job, then she takes in lodgers who are creepy and vaguely menacing to the children: are they witches? Vampires? Why the constant association of the two of them with the graveyard? Why does Rose accept these two weirdoes: is it only a matter of weakness? Rose is constantly pushed around; she seems to exist only to have orders barked at her by the doctor, her boss ordering her to expel the Colegates, the demands of her children. In an establishing scene, the doctor is brisk and callous, Rose is dull, gazing out at the graveyard wishing for death: “how peaceful, she thought, to be lying stretched out in one’s bones under there.”206 Rose “drags” herself everywhere, like a burden (ibid.). She’s so worn out she doesn’t notice the ironic signs that Aiken flashes all around her. Mrs. Colegate is almost the embodiment of her misery, a droopy faceless person, connected with her through her heartless employer, or at least claiming to be. There’s an association established here between the Colegates and the graveyard that will be borne out later, and, when it becomes clear that Mrs. Colegate is there to ask for lodgings, she is suffused with light reflecting from the frozen graveyard such that she takes on a slightly angelic appearance. Since there is no one to whom she could appear this way apart from Rose, we have to assume that we are being given free indirect access to Rose’s perceptions, and this is true throughout the story. We are confined to Rose’s perspective, and are compelled to confront events at the same rate as she is, but with the difference that comes simply by virtue of

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reading articulated descriptions. This affords us access to a dimension of irony that Aiken never allows us to forget, but of which Rose is not aware. So, when Mrs. Colegate, whatever she is, remarks on Rose’s lodgings, she chooses to say: “this would suit us down to the ground”207 as she stands is illuminated by a glow from the frozen graveyard. Rose warns Mrs. Colegate that her children are both afflicted with common childhood diseases, and Mrs. Colegate replies that “mumps and measles are nothing to us” as if they were another species. Her voice is too shallow and Mr. Colegate’s is too high; she is tall, he is short and fat. They are simulacra, poor copies of real people, bad impostors, but this is patently obvious from the start, even if there is no socially plausible way to confront them with it. Mr. Colegate remarks that there is nothing to fear from the graveyard, not because ghosts aren’t real, but because it’s so old, as if there were a time limit on hauntings. “spirits wear out” he says, which is another thing Rose already knows, and spirits also “distill energy.”208 His knowingness on the topic, his certainty, also contributes to the impression. He then goes on to say “I believe I hear my wife down below,”209 referring of course to the first floor, while making it seem as though the house were already a graveyard. The allegation that they might be alcoholics only diminishes her concern over their excessive quiet, their Charles Addams-­ esque attitude of predatory listening, the impropriety of the Colegates attending on the children of the contrary gender to them, introducing them to a card game called Spider. There is simply no question of deception here, although it does not seem that Aiken intends us to believe that Rose has abandoned her children to these monsters. The theme of powerlessness is explicitly invoked in the story: after the Colegates move in, the power goes out, the fuses keep blowing, the phone disconnects. However, the Colegates themselves represent another, illicit form of power. Rose does eventually resolve to throw them out; however, not only does this decision come too late, it comes considerably later than too late. We have learned that Mrs. Colegate knew Peter Finn, the young boy who died inexplicably in South Dean, her old neighbourhood. Mr. Colegate has a puppet that moves by itself, is eager to show it to Rose’s son, who was more accepting of the Colegates and is also getting worse. There is mysterious crying in the house, which Rose simply dismisses as her own imagination. Mrs. Colegate appears carrying an exotic flagon covered in beads with the scrambled letters OATNES as part of a sort of crossword. This is reminiscent of the magic square that reads ROTAS

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across the top and TENET down the centre; although these particular letters are also an anagram for EAT SON. The letters are there, the information is present to the eye, but it’s the vision here that’s scrambled. Mrs. Joubert herself more or less orders Rose to expel the Colegates from her house, and Rose is nonplussed, paralysed. Is her resentment of Mrs. Joubert now preventing her from throwing the Colegates out? Or does she genuinely want them to remain with her? Up to this point, we could see Rose as the victim of circumstance, someone too overwhelmed by events to present adequate opposition to them, but this puts her character in a different light. At one point during her second conversation with Mrs. Joubert, Rose is given some time off to deal with the situation, and she remarks on this offer with inward acerbity in “a small, detached, ironic corner of her mind.”210 These could be the most significant words in the story, because they describe the way Rose as a subject has been turned into something less than herself. Most of her mind consists of pre-set coping mechanisms, lists of things to do, people to call, responsibilities, all of which arise in reaction to circumstances, and all of which crowd her, Rose the person, into a corner of her own mind. She is like her own lodger. It might not be too much to suggest that this is expressed in the way she lives, crowded to the margins in her own home, which is entirely maintained by her own efforts. She maintains the home, the children, and lodgers, in lieu of herself. This leaves Rose in a position not unlike Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House, who is compelled to a form of invisible, chronic, and protracted self-sacrifice, such that she enters the story haunted by her own life. All that’s left to Rose is a corner, which is detached, small, and ironic. From the standpoint of this corner, it is possible for her to gather together the elements of her life to form a more coherent picture, but at the cost of being able to do anything about it, and this may be the horror of the story—a certain form of subjectivity. That is, a form of subjectivity that involves reducing the individual to an eavesdropper on their own life, able to assemble clues from an ironic standpoint, but unable to act on those clues. The supernatural then opens up in the vacuum created around her; anything can happen to her because there is nothing in her, she is already a sort of fiction.

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“God Grante That She Lye Stille,” by Cynthia Asquith Ruth Weston observes that “The unique contribution of Asquith’s work is its recording of traumatic connections between writing, ghost, and woman. Her female ghosts penetrate the defenses of (dominate) their weaker alter egos not only because of genre rules of ghostly fiction but because of a self-declared female ghost’s longing for control, resulting in a power struggle that is seen in both the autobiographical and the fictional texts.”211 However, here the lapse of control is terrible, reminiscent of Helen Vaughan’s dying transformations in The Great God Pan; the threat to identity is horrible. The evil of Elspeth Clewer is entirely inferred; we know only that she is associated with vice, violence, and cruelty, and that her own mother was relieved when she died after being thrown by a horse. The result is a story that is ambivalent about its more minor implications; one identity is too weak, and another is too strong, even though the latter identity is only described in vague generalities. Identity is conceived of almost as a kind of weapon that can be used to harm you unless you have one of your own. This is a far more psychomachian idea of identity than we encounter in other stories from the same era. The ending is determinedly anti-life, which tends to be the majoritarian or reactionary position; the minor inkling here arises to the extent that Margaret’s magical appeal seems to proceed from her changeability and fragility. This actually makes her more desirable than a fixed and definite character would be. To a considerable extent, this can be attributed to her “receptivity,” which is to say that she pleases others by understanding them and reflecting them. She says of Dr. Stone that the self that she becomes in response to his presence is one of the better ones, for example. However, when Dr. Stone says that her company refreshes his sense of his own humanity, which had lately been reduced largely to an appendage of his official function as a country doctor, then there is another implication at work that tells us that Dr. Stone may feel the stony weight of his own fixed identity as oppressive and may be attracted to Margaret Clewer as an exemplar of a freer spirit. What is curious, though, is that Margaret seems all that much more unique, individual, strong in her identity, because of this special quality; and she acknowledges this. Is the danger really in the prospect of a weak identity, or is it the idea that identity exists as a multiplicity? Perhaps the problem is that something outside Margaret insists that, on pain of death, she can’t be both Margaret and Elspeth, but only one or the other. As far as Margaret herself is concerned, the real sorrow

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is that she is nobody without someone else; which is to say that she experiences a vehement form of the problem of identity per se. She suffers from what she considers to be a lack of an essential guaranteeing power which insures that she retains her “Me,” and relies on others to fulfil this function for her. The first bizarre event is the manifestation of the name on the headstone, since Margaret’s failure to see her reflection is distinctly a dream. The rejection of the dog, the sudden terror of the nurse, and the repetition of Elspeth’s dying words are all a little short of what is truly bizarre; they are only puzzling. The most bizarre event is the indescribable transformation from which Dr. Stone averts his eyes towards the end of the story. Margaret’s destiny is apparent from the inscription on the headstone, which calls on a fatherly authority to keep the dead woman in place. Who is asking God to grant that she lie still? Does Margaret ask this? Margaret is linked to Elspeth by blood and by her father’s name, the cursed name of Clewer. The mark will slip on to her. Asquith produces the supernatural by presenting identity as dangerous and unstable in its own terms. The danger here is not so much that identity will be invaded or replaced by something that is not identity at all, as was true of Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” or The Great God Pan, but that identity as such has no stable guaranteeing power. In this story, identities make themselves felt by flying away from their proper places. The narrator is defined largely by his feelings for Margaret, which fly after her. She is not absent, but always flying away, and he flies after her. It’s as if Asquith were saying that what both of them really want is to fly together, perhaps not out of life, but out of this particular life, with its limitations, towards some other, unknown life. That impulse to fly seems to me to register a yearning for the greater expanse of possibilities that I think constitutes the supernatural and even includes the paradoxical yearning for the impossible. The pessimism of the story identifies this yearning with a death wish, and locates the possibility for gratification outside of life. It makes ontology and epistemology stand opposed to desire. The name on the headstone appears on its own, but is the name the identity already, or an attempt to fix something in a stable form, to give an identity to an “it”? Elspeth Clewer’s name has a power of its own; in a way, her name, as distinct from her person, is the vampire in this story. It will attach itself to Margaret just as it formerly attached itself to Elspeth, a bad name, like a parasite finding a new host. Naming a thing involves giving shape and fixity to it, but then, what are these nameless somethings, and

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where are they, waiting for their names, or escaping from their names? What were they before they were named? For Asquith the existence of the unnamed thing is frightening, but naming it is tragic. Behind the name, and the social meaning attending on it, is there a real you? Is Margaret ever Margaret, if she can become a “thing on the bed.”212 Analysis This is a beautiful story and a vicious one too. Margaret Clewer has too weak a grasp on her identity, her body, and an ancestress of ill repute— Elspeth Clewer—whose grave is very close by her bedroom, is evicting her and taking control of her body. The narrator, Dr. Stone, who relates these events in hindsight, allows us to infer the fate of Margaret from the beginning, so that her character is always limned in doom. If we are inclined to look cynically on the narrator’s feelings for her, then we might imagine this doomed quality infuses her with a special glamour from the point of view of someone who is more interested in idealities than in realities. While he was not aware of her fate in advance, we may imagine that his foreshadowings are meant to give us a version of the doomed impression that she made on him prior to the event. There is something morbid about loving what is fragile and evanescent, if those are the loved qualities. This would be a point of similarity between the narrator and Oleron, in “The Beckoning Fair One.” Does the narrator want to share his strength with Margaret, is he incapable of loving anything strong and dynamic, or—and I think this is Asquith’s idea—does he love her for the strength that her fragility demands of her? In that case, what he loves is not some simple attribute of strength or fragility, but the relationship between these conditions that arise within Margaret’s personality. Asquith does not present Margaret in a negative light; she is not like, for example, Luella Miller. We are meant to see and love her as the narrator does, and to admire the fortitude with which she bears her own fragility. Everything in the story suffused with affect, a paranoid environment rife with micro-impressions, where everything is warning you. Nothing exists but what impinges on persons. The Manor House has a thick atmosphere that is “cloistered and self-sufficing.”213 We are told “this house appeared to have a face, an actual countenance that might vary like that of a beautiful woman. Yet could any building look more remote, more strikingly aloof?”214 The house is a repository of time that is satisfied, full of life, not connected to the present or the future. The mirroring of setting and main character is one of the more Gothic aspects of the story. Asquith

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is telling us that Margaret Clewer’s condition is effectively congenital and hereditary, not an anomaly. She will be haunted by the past, but that idea can be established simply by pointing out how old the house is; additional details, like the potentially variable expression of the house likened to a face, as well as its remoteness and aloofness, are not necessary unless they add to our understanding of Margaret’s character by showing us the environment that formed it. The Clewer graves are all heavily ornamented and adorned with all manner of indications of grief and mourning except Elspeth’s. At night, the distinctness of the tombstones makes them stand out, while during the day they sort of heap into the green landscape. In both cases, what is obscure is made more conspicuous than what is plain; this models the way we glimpse the obscure side of identity, which is to say the mysterious something that seems to stand behind the gestures and utterances of an individual, giving them a hidden consistency. There is an aspect of identity that is clearer in the dark, and this aspect is not only private but not actually assimilable into the ordinary. Margaret’s beauty is “unending. Changing as the sea changes with the sky, her colouring had its special response to every tone of light, just as her expression varied with every shade of feeling. It was a fluid, unset loveliness, suggesting far more than it asserted.”215 Asquith explicitly revokes the category of the ordinary with respect to Margaret, and she makes Dr. Stone imagine trying to capture her beauty in the impersonal official language of documents, as if he were somehow obligated to think in impersonal, nonsubjective terms. She says she feels as though her heart were moving around inside her, and, given her ironic self-awareness, it seems likely she would choose to put things this way with the understanding that she is really describing her fear that she has no set “Me,” no essence, no sense of separate self which would enable her to resist her own tendency to reflect others. Instead, they have the power to, as she puts it, “edit” her.216 That she understands her condition is further emphasized by Dr. Stone’s observation that there is something about her that strikes him as “initiated”217 which is a wonderfully resourceful way to suggest that, while she is not innocent, in the sense of being ignorant of the real sufferings of life, she is not therefore guilty either. Her receptivity, to be clear, is not really the problem; the problem is that she tends to vanish when she is alone. On more than one occasion, she has failed to see herself in the mirror, but has seen herself as standing apart from her own point of view, gazing in at her, or lying inert. The second time she sees herself lying on

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the sofa, and as she looks again, she says “It still lay on the sofa.”218 There is a version of the title in this phrase which helps to reinforce the foreshadowing, and there is a sense too that the self is understood to be something like a picture or a figure, a fixed image, rather than a verb, a way of doing things. One of the keys to this story is the characters’ inability to communicate what matters to each other. Their intimacy is already established, but only through nonverbal or indirect cues. They have a kind of intimacy which would actually be destroyed by direct assertions, but then we have to ask why a direct assertion, emanating from the heart of identity, would actually drive persons apart rather than bringing them together. If identity is understood monolithically, then perhaps any assertion of it requires the suppression of adjacent identities; certainly, this seems to be the case when it comes to the relationship between the identities of Margaret and Elspeth. The tragedy of the story would then be, in part, the way that this monolithic quality prevents the two lovers from expressing their feelings for each other directly, precisely for fear of cancelling the identity of the other. Margaret’s feelings should be decisive in this case, but she is only able to manifest her willingness to see the narrator, and her fear of losing herself. The old manuscript is the prop that gives us corroboration of the haunting. The real sign is not any one thing but the concatenated alienation of the dog, the intense, nearly crazy terror of the nurse, and Dr. Stone’s own unaccountable horror at Margaret’s changed voice. Margaret becomes “the thing on the bed” before managing to reassert herself with the help of Dr. Stone, whose love for her gives her the power to return and overcome Elspeth. Elspeth’s appetency, her longing for life, makes this story seem a bit like Ligeia as told from the point of view of someone more sympathetic to Rowena. Elspeth has no aim in mind apart from living and experiencing things, and she has no clear identity apart from the general condemnation of her behaviour. She isn’t a witch, this isn’t a curse or a spell. It is an opportunistic resurrection. I think it would be wrong to see in Elspeth a repressed side of Margaret; Margaret is not an incomplete character. It is identity that is not complete nor can it be complete, although it can be closed and sealed, as is true of people like Dr. Stone. Ruth Weston argues that “the strong spirit does not attack a male oppressor but the weaker image of herself.”219 In that case, the spirit is attacking itself. Weston argues that the narrator is condescending and loves Margaret only for her weakness and distance, which casts his feelings

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for her in a more predatory light until we remember how he himself is anything but dominating. He is also tenuous and hesitant, at least with respect to Margaret, and ultimately he is happiest when they are engaged in a kind of intercourse so rarefied it’s actually completely tacit. We might say this is a minor love story, one which adopts the language and style of the Romantically Gothic tale of doomed lovers, but in order to produce the problems of identity, rather than supply a familiar, if melancholy, enjoyment.

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“The Thing on the Doorstep,” by H.P. Lovecraft Lovecraft’s fiction is generally characterized by an intractable ambivalence towards majority values. His characters, stifled by the confines of ordinary life, go in search of the extraordinary, find it, are overwhelmed by it, and must struggle to return to or preserve a normal life that has suddenly acquired a new, if strictly negative, value. If Lovecraft’s fiction, for all its conservatism, is minor despite itself, it is because it struggles to ascribe any positive value to the ordinary. The highest value for Lovecraft might be continuity of the kind he describes in his sonnet of that name, but while this continuity is the conservative preservation of identity, particularly cultural identity, it is conceived of by Lovecraft in contrast to cosmic duration which necessarily exceeds the scope of any identity. So, in a sense, he is less a conservative than he is a fatalist. The loss of identity is a particularly distinct theme in Lovecraft. As a rule, this loss is initially understood to be the replacement of one distinct identity by another, but the fact that such a replacement is possible points to the unfixed character of identity, which, by its usual definition, is not supposed to be unfixed. This in turn leads Lovecraft towards a more total and vertiginous assault on identity as such, which will take the form of an intensification of the original horror. In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” first we find that Innsmouth has lost its proper identity as a New England town, then that its inhabitants have ceased to be human, and finally we discover that the narrator himself is party to that loss. The character of the narration itself changes with this disclosure. In “At the Mountains of Madness,” the displacement of humanity as the pinnacle of intelligent life on earth is not the climax, but only a preparation for the real horror, which is the displacement of intelligence itself by a formless simulacrum. Above the mocking figure of Nyarlathotep, there is the identity-less amorphousness of Azathoth, whose messenger he is. We see this in “The Thing on the Doorstep” as well, where the message acquires additional power for being delivered in the guise of a domestic story. Asenath Waite is taking over Edward Derby, but Asenath is actually Ephraim, and, as the story makes reasonably clear during the harrowing night-drive passage, Ephraim might not really be Ephraim either. There is no reason to assume that the being known as Ephraim Waite might have acquired that identity by means of the same magic that permitted it to take over the body of Asenath. “The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some damnable, utterly accursed focus

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of unknown and malign cosmic forces. … This man, for all my lifelong knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger—an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.”220 What occupies Asenath’s body could be something that predates humanity, or it could be the mind of a human being who has utterly abandoned humanity as nothing more than a limit with no real essence of its own. In either case, this other being is a nameless essence that is stronger than identity as we know it, a kind of meta-­ identity. The thing on the doorstep may be Edward Derby’s mind in Asenath’s corpse, but the real “thing” in this story is a nameless, animating will. If the human identity, the everyday identity, is nothing more than a concatenation of negatives, of limits, then Lovecraft is positing the horror of an identity that is more than a mere set of limits. The real dread is produced by presence. The attack mounted on identity in this story, as is so often true of Lovecraft in contrast to other weird writers, never falters or establishes a consoling counterforce. Identity is ultimately an illusion maintained more or less by force of habit or convention. Lovecraft’s conservatism is strictly this: to maintain consistency by forbidding or banishing whatever undermines it. If identity were what it claims to be, that is, a sorting out of beings by innate characteristics, then why should it require any external reinforcement? Decay, on the contrary, is built in to Lovecraft’s idea of identity, as it is in Poe’s: identity is that which can decay. Plainly the arrival of the corpse messenger is the bizarre event, given that the story follows the experience of the narrator, but the full power of the story, which culminates in Derby’s last visit, is not available to anyone who hasn’t run through the implications of Derby’s alteration during the night drive. Derby is doomed by his personality to fall out with the world, because he will not remain within its limits. He cannot be satisfied with stability. The mark of destiny is Derby’s distinctive signal; a meaningless little habit which survives by virtue of its triviality, and which forms the consistency of a recognizable identity. That’s what we are, according to Lovecraft; not so much immortal souls as bundles of distinctive quirks. This mark slips on to us, if we pause to consider to what we choose to ascribe our own individual identities; that perhaps we are nothing more than a sort of illusion of persistence generated by a collection of habits. Analysis We are reminded again at the outset of the importance for Lovecraft of “correlation” which is the process by which incredible claims are given

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weight by means of an ominous, steady accumulative process. The horrific effect is always entirely deliberate and pre-planned, to be established in the narrative by way of a constellation of documentary evidence and what Lovecraft often called “glimpses.” While the physical evidence is uncertain, that uncertainty doesn’t disqualify the mystery but only deepens it, largely on the strength of a correlative sequence which unfolds with the implacability of fate. The narrator may advert to his possible madness, but this, in an inversion of the technique Poe used in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” only makes his sanity more plausible. “There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.”221 Even though it involves the idea of supernatural evil, this statement conforms to a model of sanity which equates it with a form of moral agency involving the production of axioms and the adherence to a personal idea of duty. The narrator is a responsible figure, an architect—one of the most highly esteemed of Lovecraftian professions—and a father, unlike Derby. Derby has an affinity for literature, particularly the fantastic, and cannot grasp the more objective disciplines of science or math as they are taught in university. This characterizes him as an unworldly, impractical man, but not quite in the way one might expect. For Lovecraft, art and science are typically restrained by a prosaic lack of vision, and find their use in conventional circumstances. The scientific or artistic visionary is a tragically heroic figure for him; these persons are called outside the confines of the conventional island of ignorance to make genuine discoveries, by venturing out into black infinity. However, since the island rises out of the sea, finds itself there, and is in a way grounded in that sea, by discovering something about it, or even simply by becoming aware of its sheer scale, the visionary is also making discoveries about the scale of the island, the conventional world. The unworldly man is then more than someone with a basically accidental inaptitude for everyday life, a lack, but someone who has engaged a surplus of existence such that they cannot pay attention to everyday things. On the other hand, being as conversant as he is with outside things, Derby is able to call upon some magical knowledge of his own and get the better of the possessing entity. While he has no practical knowledge of the ordinary world, he does therefore have practical knowledge of the unworld. The secretive inner life of Derby seems to make him susceptible to the influence of the zones of shadow. He is weak, but he is also open to the

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outside in a way that a more stolidly responsible man is not. Lovecraft will often associate unworldliness with a tragic freedom. It is interesting to note here that Lovecraft divides his narration between the narrator and Derby in a way that he seldom does in his other stories. Derby and the narrator have both been called upon to make sacrifices in order to preserve themselves, which brings us back to identity as limit, rather than as the positive presence of some essence. Derby in particular is only himself when he is lacking that strange purposiveness that characterizes the entity as an anonymous will. However, Derby is already an outsider—that’s why he fell into this predicament in the first place. In order to save himself and become normal, he would have to abandon everything he is, and, in effect, cease to exist in another way. The possessing entity has a purpose—what purpose does Derby have, or Upton, or any of the ordinary human characters in the story? This purpose constitutes a positive reason to exist, a key aspect of identity. Architecture is a field that requires both artistic and mathematical skill; Upton seems to act as a foil to Derby, not as the practical man in comparison with the impractical man, but as someone who has managed to balance the practical and the visionary. If he were strictly practical, then any close friendship or confidence between them wouldn’t be possible. Upton’s son is named Edward, making Derby his quasi-son and also showing us the proper manly continuity in contrast to the unmanly wizardly continuity of pure sameness that the possessing entity practices. An odd psychological malady affects Derby after his mother dies, suggesting a dependence on her as an aspect of his weakness, while Upton mentions his own father, skips his wife and mother, and has a son, so he is sort of a version of what Lovecraft might have been if he had conformed to the social expectations attached to a “viable adult.” This could suggest that Derby’s problem isn’t a visionary inclination, but weakness, exemplified by his inability to keep women out of the way, as Upton does. The triangle here consists of solid man Upton, weak not-man not-boy Derby, and not-anything Asenath. She is not herself, not fully female, or fully human, and, in fact, she hardly existed at all, being always only a little girl who died in her own father’s body. In the Bible, Asenath is the mother of Ephraim, so it would appear he considered her a vessel of his own future rebirth from the start. Death, in this story, is also an identity, maybe even the identity, reflecting the influence of Poe in the resiliency of the doubt that death could actually be death. Lovecraft departs a bit from Poe in that he is less concerned here with knowing death than he is with knowing

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other people; Ligeia’s identity so transcends death that she is even recognizable in another body, while Derby has only his little jingle to vouch for himself. Lovecraft’s cosmicism is not absent from “The Thing on the Doorstep.” The island of ignorance can’t be removed from the black sea of infinity. Can I be sure that I am safe? Ask yourself, too, because this is an attack on identity as such. If identity is limitation, infinity may mean death to identity, but not to life. The prospect then is life without limit, understood as an identity perpetuating itself through flux rather than through consistency. Any identity, then, is only a fleeting and accidental state of affairs, enjoying no external, transcendent guarantee of the sort that religion and historical continuity are asked to ground. Only persistence establishes identity. Nothing comes to the defence of identity except for those scraps of insight that are themselves snatched from the experience or knowledge of the unworld, a greater understanding of chaos or decay which grants to the initiated visionary some measure of control over their own dissolution. Upton’s primary purpose in killing Derby’s body is to preserve the peace and comfort of the world; the normal is something you take for granted until it’s gone, and then you work to recover and preserve it, if not for yourself, then for others. This is the essence of weird fiction.

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“A Short Trip Home,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald This story is major in the way that Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Haunter and the Haunted” is, but vastly more subtle in its execution; here we can really see the way the moral, criminal, social underworld slides into the supernatural from a strictly normative point of view. It’s a Gothic story; there is a judgement on the naive young woman rescued from the dark glamour of an outlaw by her paladin, a selfless, chivalric lover. Nevertheless, there is still a faintly detectable minor streak that all but methodically dissects a concrete, social magic, the precise means by which upper-class men control servants and women. Since this is presented entirely uncritically we can’t really call this minor. Fitzgerald’s message seems to be: don’t look, stay normal, but be ready to defend your ordinariness. The bizarre event is the contagion of evil that emanates from Joe Varland, a man who is not named until his death has been confirmed. He himself is a kind of demon, spontaneously produced by the bad side of town almost like a genius loci. The mark of destiny is Ellen’s beauty and purity, which make her a target. She struggles within the role of the upper-­ class woman, taking advantage of her position and money, but without taking into consideration her duty to maintain class respectability. As in The Great Gatsby, society is depicted as a struggle to establish one’s rights over wealth and privilege, presented here as a psychomachia for a trophy woman. Ellen is an upper-class beauty. Joe Varland isn’t so much interested in seducing a pretty college girl as he is in undermining society by corrupting one of the exemplary class. As Derek Lee wrote in his article “Dark Romantic: F.  Scott Fitzgerald and the Specters of Gothic Modernism”: “Varland is hence a figure of class difference whose indigence poses an existential threat to society.”222 The supernatural is produced the moment Joe Varland is declared dead by Eddie Stinson on the train. This amounts to the discovery that the underclass is not constituted in the way that the upper class is; the former constitutes the latter, without consulting them. However, there is another underclass that defines itself, and this underclass does not appear on the radar of the upper-class consciousness, which can only see the underclass it has itself formed. That other underclass therefore emerges out of nowhere, noplace, like ghosts. There’s a reason it is referred to as the underworld. From the privileged point of view, members of this nameless, fugitive class are like people from another country, even another world. Joe Varland is a vampire. The mark of destiny here may slip onto the

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reader if there is some danger of a similar corruption. The worlds must not mix. Someone like Gatsby may attempt to gain entry into the upper class, but he can only do this by devoting himself to the cult of their respectability. The outsider is not allowed into kingdom, not as an outsider. Presumably, this story was not written for the outsiders, but for the insiders, and warns them not to mix their worlds, to beware of letting anyone in. Analysis The story opens in the middle of everything, already setting the reader among the characters rather than above them, clearly situating Ellen at the centre and establishing the characteristic Fitzgeraldian-Hawthornian position of the narrator, in a courtly bubble of unrequited and unspoken devotion. Age and more notably sexual maturation are bearing the cultivated young woman off towards an unknown world; she must be steered back to the proper companion and guardian. Ellen is between two worlds, not unlike the narrator of the White People, but rather than choosing not to choose, she instead will become the stake in a battle between the dark man and the golden boy. They begin the story with a practice elopement, foreshadowed by the storm door hanging open as if the visitor were the storm. His presence affects the world itself; he is the demon lover as he would appear from the point of view of a jealous man. The labour of male domination is very clear in this story. The interloper is described as inhuman, animal-like, outside the social web; he does not originate from the archaic order of old aristocracy, like Dracula, but from the underworld. He is a nomadic hunter, someone who lives by predation, not cooperation, although have his place in a loose network of criminal alliances. This story dramatizes and concretizes the idea that someone who is not part of the normal social order, someone who just hangs around, is wild and dangerous. He belongs to a “dim borderland”223 and is more of a type than an individual, lacking the subjective independence that is demanded of the autonomous subject. This vampire crook draws you into his dream world, a shapeless realm without the articulating skeleton of social class. Notice how thoroughly this not only takes for granted, but apotheosizes, the ordinary. Ellen comes away from her encounter with him in a daze. Her actual desire is treated as if it could only be a hallucination or delusion. She only believes she wants Joe Varland; she wants only a fantasy. Ellen lies about having warned Joe. Then she warns Eddie, the narrator. Her secrecy, her privacy, and her discretion when it comes to telling the truth, or at least

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the whole story, are treated as dangers. Her temptation is clearly intimated, and is only readable because she is so young and inexperienced. Her behaviour is represented as a kind of unaccountable corruption, so, like the idea that Helen was only borne off to Troy in effigy, she must be insulated by the idea that she is acting under a kind of ghoulish fascination directed at her by the bad man. There is a struggle within her between her native, and correct, softness and an alien hardness; this adjective migrates from Varland to her as an indication of an incipient corruption, as the lowering of her eyes indicates a kind of stupefaction. Meanwhile, Eddie is under her spell. Joe Varland entrances you by making you believe he can offer you what you’re dreaming of, while Ellen really is the dream, and Eddie’s love for the dream is pure. Once Varland arrives on the scene, everything Eddie experiences feels weird. He describes the experience by comparing it to awakening from an afternoon nap and realizing “something had gone on in the interval that changed the values of everything and that I didn’t see.”224 Suddenly the big dance is just bullshit, just childish games—reality is all out there, in a desperate confrontation with the vast formless outside. This is a very subtle alienation, not weird because not quite supernatural, but so close that it prepares us for the transition to the supernatural later on. The very existence of people like Joe Varland throws the reality of the elite into a new light, making it seem like a precarious illusion, a bubble which is too beautiful. This bubble has its own people, its Eloi, who believe it is the whole world, and, far from being disillusioned and educated about the truth, these people must be sheltered from the truth, or at least introduced to it very cautiously, very gradually, with a firm, guiding hand. They must not be initiated by Joe Varland, whose very existence is fundamentally fatal to the existence of that beautiful bubble, that paradise. Part two takes us to the “vague”225 part of town. Eddie’s investigation happens during a time of some shapelessness for himself, since he is on vacation, there’s no chapel, and so he is on his own. Joe Varland’s part of town is a halfway place with no inclusive name. It is not the poor part of town, the slums, the workers’ quarter. Eddie can’t get straight answers here; everyone speaks bent, or in hints, like seedy ghosts. No one acknowledges seeing Varland at the pool hall, so was he really there? Was he anywhere? But, if he isn’t real, who struck Joe Jelke? Who drove Ellen to the party? Was he only real at the time? Eddie is thinking hard about Ellen; could his thoughts have conjured this man from the crowd of other men of his type, loitering in front of the pool hall?

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Not having found Varland, Eddie goes after Ellen. His boldness in pursuing her to the train station is accounted for by the fact that his family owns the land the train station stands on. The train station is not vague, and it is her turf by title deed. He notes changes in her face, and his refusal to accept them initiates a new phase of the power game. Now he will take ownership of her, not for his own sake (or so he says), but for hers, in order to deny it to Varland. The conflict is nearing its crisis: there is “a contagion of evil in the air.”226 In a medium now of hostility and antipathy to the comfortable world they come from, Eddie feels himself becoming alienated from everyone, being drawn into the other world. He must now fight, as he puts it “this thing” in order to validate his “faith in the essential all-rightness of things and people”227 which Eddie calls his sanity. This is about far more than the fate of one young woman; it amounts to validation of the world that Eddie knows, and his way of knowing it. If he can’t defeat Joe Varland, and save Ellen, then things and people aren’t essentially all right. There must be something wrong with reality if a man like Joe Varland can seduce Ellen Baker. Eddie demands to know where Varland is from; this is the insistence that the subject be a fixed identity. Varland replies with a soundless laugh; he is not an integral identity, he materializes out of recognizable details, the figure of a man, but not a man, and seen by no one else. His voice is muffled as if he were actually a long way off, because such a man is never truly anywhere, even here. It is from this alienage in person, and not from any archival research or anecdote, that Eddie learns Joe Varland is dead. Now he is locked in a struggle to maintain the fixity of his own identity, which of course depends on that essential all-rightness. Far from being a mere capitulation to social peer pressure and a conformism, being normal is actually an accomplishment, a struggle, a moral duty, a spiritual quest. However, in order to valorize the ordinary in this way, Fitzgerald has to sacrifice the idea that it is the only way to be, and this is already a potentially subversive possibility. Varland’s power depends on his ability to make other people accept his existence, this very possibility. In the end, right prevails, and the infinity of experience is invoked only to be declared off limits to the wise.

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“My Dear Emily,” by Joanna Russ A masterpiece. This thoroughly minor story in its inversion of the horrific, its shifting of the menace from the outsider, the monster, to the insider, the authorities; a feminist vampire story in which the male vampire is not a liberator any more than the male authorities are. As Samuel R. Delaney pointed out, “Russ’s point here is the man the oppressor and exploiter of women is not … defined by biological sex but rather … constituted by socioeconomics as a power structure at work on what Foucault would call a biopolitical field.”228 This power structure and this biopolitical field are the real menace in this story, making it an interesting pendant to “A Short Trip Home.” The bizarre event here is the discovery of the vampire, which leads Emily to realize who she really is, and to discard her contrived ordinary identity. She does not discover a true identity all ready-made and waiting for her so much as she learns the truth about identity; namely, that it is plastic, variable, and political. Vampirism becomes a line of flight away from the familiar field into unknown territory, so her encounter with Guevara, whose name doesn’t seem to have been accidentally chosen by Russ, is a deterritorialization. Where once, in the weird fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the encounter with the uncanny would usually be introduced as an anomaly to be corrected, in “My Dear Emily” this encounter throws the validity of the ordinary world into disarray and confusion. Emily finds herself in a predicament that is more familiar to us from more recent weird fiction in that she is no longer able to see the ordinary any more. The horror that once was attached to an estrangement from a particular ordinary milieu is now elicited by an alienation from oneself as a product of that milieu. This becomes the more modern destiny, which is not so much a judgement of any kind as it is a loss of guaranteed ground for any judgement. Emily is marked the moment blood is spilled on her copy of Emerson’s poems, as if to say that her education about Emerson’s self-reliance and freedom will go beyond theory and into practice. That blood marks the price of putting theory into practice, which is to say, of nonconformity, taking up a practice of living that is determined by oneself and in keeping with one’s own impulses. It’s one thing to pay lip service, as everyone does in the US, to these values, and a bloodier thing to bring them to life. The image strikes Emily in a certain way, and micro-impressions arising from her own unconscious reactions endow her with an ironic second self, the one Guevara sees and responds to.

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The supernatural is produced as Emily’s true self is produced. This true self is a desiring being, an appetite or appetency, rather than a categorically defined person. In a way that resonates with Caitlin Kiernan’s work, this directs the reader’s own inner ear towards those appetites or inclinations that lean away from the socially produced waves of sameness and towards the genuinely different, that find identity in difference rather than in sameness. We are all marked by blood, and in a weird way our conformist identities are the real living death while the underground identity is the real life. The limits to experience, which had seemed to be established in nature—gender, for example—turn out to be socially established. This of course means they can be altered as society alters, but it also means that there is no ground beneath any identity. The story of a woman’s awakening to a new idea of herself, free from patriarchally imposed limits, does not require the involvement of vampires. The supernatural element is only required insofar as we are to investigate just what identity is and is not. Analysis “My Dear Emily” works as a weird tale because the extremity of the alteration in Emily’s world makes plain the precarity of the world concept and its dependence on authority, its utility being greater for authority than it is for the individual with other desires. Personal identity is articulated in terms provided by a world identity. Much of weird fiction, and most of its more major stories, will examine what happens when the former is at odds with the latter, where the world is largely taken for granted. Minor weird fiction explores the interdependency of these two identities, world and self. The world, whether or not it is all that fragile, is still an edifice, built to sustain, in those literary markets we’re studying, a grid of identities largely controlled and reproduced by a hegemonic, patriarchal authority. This authority is every bit as much at work in the formation of the identities of powerful men. We see this right away, in the extract from Will’s letter which informs us that Emily has been away at school, and in Will’s dismissive attitude towards her education. He speaks of her as a “learned lady,” as if that were a thing to marvel at, but reassures her patronizingly that he knows she has not changed.229 He writes of her in the third person, saying “she must not be proud (as if she could be!).”230 In Emily and Charlotte, we can recognize Stoker’s Mina and Lucy; the one adventurous, the other more staid, but Emily’s prompt reproval of Charlotte’s interest in seeing “savages”231 in the landscape suggests that she is dutifully fulfilling a role that has been

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established for her, and acts out for us what Emily is expected to do on the inside as well: she must watch her own thoughts vigilantly in order to stifle any improper impulses, which would not be necessary if there weren’t any improper impulses to stifle. Russ extends this, making it a narrative tactic as well. When Emily begins to cry “totally without reason,” it is clear that there is a reason, but it is a reason which must be denied, and more, she must pretend never to have had this reason, that this reason not only has not but cannot exist in her. We are much closer to the supernatural already, with something that exists even though it cannot. We may infer the reason from the more proximate details: the letter from Will, the engagement, Emily’s passivity. The image of her blood is a reminder that she is alive, something she would not need to be reminded of if she were really living, so who is the undead in this story? She is being passively conducted home to the arms of her Will, who does clearly does not truly know her. His mention of her father in the letter shows us that this marriage is a male conspiracy and a kind of sale. What is most striking perhaps in this first passage is Emily’s question, which she asks “helplessly.”232 We are only helpless in predicaments, so Emily’s predicament is that she does not want to ask this question. When she speaks, she is already no longer the person she was only a few paragraphs earlier, shutting down Charlotte’s “foolish” behaviour. She looks at the closed opera glasses and asks why they close. Behind this question there is another one: why would anyone want to stop looking around? Charlotte’s talk of “savages” plainly has more to do with fantasy than reality, and Emily’s responses suggest that she is trying to set her own fantasies aside in order to face the mundane reality of a life she does not want at all, and, while propriety and morality are on her side, she does not find their consolation sufficient. Guevara’s nightly resuscitation inverts this scene, someone struggling back to life from a living death. We are told that his heart is as painful “as a man’s”233 which would seem to indicate that he is not, or no longer, a man. This builds to a triumphant return of life, which stands in contrast to the deadened, lifeless life that Emily is being offered. When we return to her, she is still conducting herself in a passive way, being shown this and being shown that, and feels like a “hypocrite” when she insists to Charlotte that she loves Will.234 By now, we may already have noticed that Charlotte’s resemblance to Lucy Westenra is not so perfect, since she actually seems more mature and more knowing than Emily is; she looks at Emily “oddly” when that profession of love is made, evidently discerning the truth. This scene ends with Emily’s recoil from Will, one which neither of them clearly understands.

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When Guevara meets Emily, he calls her “the lady of the house,” as if he were letting her know he has noticed her subtle confinement, the way she is treated as a piece of valuable furniture. Russ is looking directly at the question that Machen skirts in “The White People” when he condemns the unnamed girl to suicide. Emily is not committing suicide by responding to Guevara. Taking up the mantle of a married woman is, for her, actually the suicidal option. Guevara is an escapist, as he puts it; he can get out of anything, he is the master of the line of flight. He mentions getting out of engagements, and then tells her he can get her out of anything, too. Emily’s fiancé, Will, stands opposed to him. Not to put it too crudely, Emily is being asked to submit to Will, which entails a suppression of her own will. The scene with Guevara ends when Emily throws the word hypocrite at him, unwittingly linking the two of them in a Baudelairian couple. Their relationship develops in the same darting, now here, now there, now you see me, now you don’t style that Guevara cultivates, leaping across moments of intervening time. It’s as if Emily were only alive and aware at certain moments herself, those moments when she comes closest to seeing what she really wants. Those moments she spends in denial are themselves denied in the story, omitted. When Emily tells Guevara “you’re not people” he answers “No. We’re not … We’re a passion!,”235 and goes on to identify passion, desire, and life. The murderousness of the vampire is transformed by Russ into a passion to bring people to life out of a living death, a denial of desire and a passionless existence. She must go underground, not so much to find an alternate, fixed identity which is nothing but the reverse image of the one she would have had if she had surrendered to the various fatherly authorities in the story, but to find a new “biopolitical field” to exercise her own appetites in. This desiring, independent kind of person must, from the viewpoint of the world she comes from, appear to be inhuman, cruel, shapeless, elusive, and even soulless, but this is because that world produces the soul as a kind of immobile image which is impersonal and unreal from the viewpoint of desire. What is striking here is that Emily begins to use her major accomplishments in a minor way: “Emily meets Mr. Guevara at the Mansion House at seven, having recovered an appearance of health (through self-denial) and a good solid record of spending the evenings at home (through self-control).”236 These ends have become means. We see this also in the development of her “hypocrisy,” as she becomes a changeable actress in dealing with the other characters. Hypocrisy becomes an attribute of life, and a rebuke to the idea that life can be restricted to a

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single meaning, logically denied the freedom to contradict itself, or that life cannot sustain multiple meanings. When dawn comes, the story, taking her perspective, speaks of “the natural order reversed,”237 which is to say that she is now living an inverted existence, naturally nocturnal, but also that the mundane life of the daytime, which is the life of Will, is also the natural order reversed, an unnatural suppression of life. Emily has by now undergone a class inversion as well, or rather she has escaped her class without becoming trapped in another one, just as she escapes from the barker who tries to turn her, if only by attribution, into a street-walker. By the end of the story, it is pretty clear that Emily is not an innocent girl who is done in by her naive susceptibility to the blandishments of an exotic seducer, but a woman with desires. It is equally clear that Will and Emily’s father are not at all fazed by the prospect of restraining her; they seem to take her alteration largely in stride, and without any inner trouble at all, as if they were mentally impermeable thinking machines. Losing Guevara does not annihilate her, although in much vampire lore the death of the male vampire means death for his brides. The feelings that drive her originate from within herself and are addressed to the world at large, and Guevara’s importance is not that of a male liberator but of a figure through whom she is able to realize and live her desire for the world. By making Guevara a vampire, and by making this into a weird tale, Russ forecloses the kind of reading that would tend to reduce this to an account of a sexual awakening or some other relative break with convention. While there are elements of sexual awakening in the story, sex is not the new frontier for Emily. When convention breaks with her, she does not fall apart at the prospect of losing her world, but turns instead with a new excitation towards a completely new world of non-canalized desires, without a name and without conventions.

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“The Yellow Sign,” by Robert W. Chambers Writing about this story, Scott D. Emmert noted that “Art, science, and religion—the mainstays of civilization—cannot prevent or explain away the horror of death.”238 Chambers presents art as a spiritual gamble, which stakes our faith in the world as it is against the discovery of some fragment of perennial beauty. Beauty and ugliness acquire moral dimensions in major literature like this, but “The Yellow Sign” isn’t about punishing jaded bohemians for irreverence, or for elevating art above religion. It’s a tragedy; Scott and Tessie are not singled out for destruction, because the doom here is simply death itself, which comes to everyone. They are artists who cultivate beauty, but they are not condemned for this, nor is it wrong from the point of view of the story. If anything, Chambers seems to be telling us that the cruelty of beauty is that we have to leave it, eventually. The perishability of beauty is the tragedy, and The King in Yellow destroys its readers simply because it is so beautiful. Unlike the Necronomicon, which it likely helped to inspire, The King in Yellow is a work of art, not a hermetic treatise, and its supreme artfulness destroys its readers. To put it another way, it does not tell you the hermetic truth of reality, but rather it tells you that all that is beautiful is not simply perishable, but that the perishability of beauty is one of its essential attributes. Beauty can never be normal. This is perhaps why the main characters in this story must be artists, because the artist’s task is to memorialize beautiful impressions, to produce beauty. The immortality of the artist might be a kind of eternal dying, the memorialization of the perishability of beauty. The author, or source, of the immortal play is anonymous. It lasts, but the author doesn’t. In fact, it is strongly intimated that this play came from another planet, another epoch, and was translated into earthly language and idiom by an unknown clairvoyant. In any case, the play is a complete anomaly, coming into people’s lives with only an absolute past. The existence of The King in Yellow is already a bizarre event, and the yellow sign is a hieroglyph that registers an intensity, a beauty, that transcends death, transcends the being of all mortals, by becoming death. The yellow sign is clearly the mark of destiny, and brings with it the recurring dream, the watchman, and the corruption of the painting. This story produces the supernatural certainly in the baffling of the doctor at the end, but also in the implication that there are secret messages, veiled emblems of death surrounding us and whispering to us in colours, and dreams and

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unaccountable associations. The yellow sign will slip right out of the story and attach itself to you, if you find it beautiful. If there is a minor tendency in this story, it is in the idea that there is something unaccountable in beauty that cannot be marshalled to serve as a transparent medium for the transmission of moral axioms and cultural norms. The beauty of the art overwhelms and displaces the message it supposed to convey, and idolatry suddenly reappears in an altered form, no longer a primitive mistake but a profoundly sophisticated reasoning. Is the danger of art that it lures us into a hopeless search for transcendence, or is it on the contrary, that it shows us that the surface is actually everything, and transcendence is just an apotheosis of art? Analysis The opening verse gives us red and blue, the other two primary colours (Chambers was an accomplished painter), recreated as gods with emotion and subjectivity. The red dawn will have to guess at what we’ve done by the end of the blue night; something or someone will be through by dawn. The exclusion of yellow is suggestive, as if it were a colour requiring more attention than these few lines can provide, and hence the story that follows. Perhaps it was the yellow that came between blue and red. Speaking very impressionistically, the associations might point towards the idea that the dawn of new life arises inexorably, and has no need to acknowledge or even to remember the life of the preceding day, expiring through the night and dead in an unseen flash of yellow. The very first line points to the inability of the mind to understand the world. Art complicates philosophical considerations of this problem; because art is man-made, presumably it is more accessible to understanding than objects that arise naturally. However, after Romanticism at the latest, art has become even more complicated as the unconscious mind is taken into consideration. By the time we reach Chambers, it is not uncommon to regard the artist as a dubious magician who creates impressions by playing on our unconscious desires. This question is important to the story both thematically and aesthetically, considering that Scott is a Baudelairian figure, the sort of artist who looks to find unconscious correspondences between events and among things. These correspondences belong at once to a gnostic domain of supernal meaning and to a psychological unconscious, although Chambers does not take a position with respect to whether or not one is nested in the other, or if they are one and the same. The main characters are art-people, meaning both that they are unnatural, in the sense of being deliberately unconventional, and that they

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are fictional characters. Excruciatingly sensitive, liable to be destroyed by ideas—which is the price they pay for being able to experience ecstasy— they live in dreams and this is a betrayal of the ordinary that it cannot tolerate. The ordinary is jealous and it wants to be all of reality, all of experience. Chambers has too much sympathy for his characters to bring the full weight of social disapproval down on them, and he’s careful to give them more or less conventional, if slightly loosened, sexual morality, so what might, in another’s hands, be a matter of punishment becomes instead a tragedy of inescapable death. Death is so horrifying, in fact, that the rather limited licence these characters give themselves is far too small an infraction; the horror of death is in proportion to the beauty of life, and who feels that beauty more keenly than artists? This might explain why the figure of death is watchman, who stands in wait, rather than a more predatory figure. The passivity of the watchman is in contrast to the vehement hatred he engenders, like the thought of death. This is a kind of intimate attack that offends by its softness and closeness; the voice communicates an impression which the imagination makes clearer without embroidering, and introduces the yellow sign. When you find what you are looking for, you die. The watchman guards the beautiful place without being susceptible to its power; he observes unmoved the ecstasy of others, their grief and religious rapture. Given the preamble of the story, the watchman’s appearance is already foreshadowing, not only for us, but for Scott as well; this sets up the associations the narrator will have with the watchman, who will terrify him not by any direct action, but by simply being there. Readers will not experience terror simply because the author states that a character is terrified, and it is important also to establish that Scott’s terror is not a fanciful extravagance of his own, so Chambers describes the impressions which prompt Scott’s terror. Even in 1895, Chambers is still working through Coleridge’s dichotomy of fancy and imagination. Artists are more sensitive, but what they are sensing is actually there. This implies that the world and its events have a higher significance to which ordinary people are numb; this is not a criticism of ordinariness, not only because these impressions are presented as dangerous, but more importantly, because it is this division between ordinary and artistic, sensitive people that constitutes the ordinary, and this division is not challenged by Chambers. He makes a point of stating that the initial encounter was significant without being too overwhelming, so that the reader will not assume that Scott is investing the watchman with menace, and this point

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would only be necessary in a story that was preparing further encounters. When he next sees the watchman, he is a part of the landscape, included in the sweep of Scott’s listless glance. Scott doesn’t look at him; he simply absorbs him along with everything else he sees. His greater attention involves a “perfectly involuntary movement.”239 There is no implication that the watchman is influencing his behaviour, or even aware of him. He is not the author of Scott’s doom, but only its passive instrument. He does know he’s being seen, and raises his head to meet Scott’s gaze as if he were waiting for him, but why wait? For whose signal is he waiting? When he turns away, his gaze remains, gnawing at Scott. The contamination is immediate and it turns Scott’s art into anti-art. The memorial of the living impression becomes a premonition of death, or rather, that aspect of art, the death which is to be overcome by this memorial, reasserts its dominance. Scott refers to the blemish on the painting as a plague spot and as gangrene; Tessie asks repeatedly if it’s her fault, and this suggests to me that she is in danger of contamination herself. The corruption is spread by what attempts to erase it, just as the attempt to put an evil thought out of your mind will only strengthen it. All of this implies that Scott’s gaze has become contaminated by morbidity. The figure, meanwhile, reminds Tessie of a dream, which she is not sure is a dream, and which involves the narrator: her dream arises from an empty state of mind, again suggesting reception of an outward impression more than the projection of an unconscious fear, already latently present in the mind. Recurring dreams like this one, or the dream in Benson’s “The Room in the Tower,” are representations of destiny, a sequence of events waiting to happen, under rehearsal in the future for the present to realize. Scott will receive his own dream warning as well, although he says he is too good a Catholic to believe in dreams. Catholicism is, in this story, represented as an equivocal promise of release from the destiny of death. We could read the sale of the church, its division into artists’ studios, as a commentary on the succession of art to the spiritual domain established by religion, with the idea that art alone cannot quite fulfil that role. However, it cannot be said that the story takes this idea especially seriously. There is a volatility to the question of religion as “The King in Yellow” presents it, since religion and art are not necessarily distinct. The relationship between Tessie and Scott is one of the elements that makes this story unusual for its kind. Scott is evidently waiting in hopes that the Sylvia he mentioned before is coming back to him; that is, he was waiting for an event over which he has no control to determine his future.

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But what is destined is always change. Scott declares a love for Tessie that springs on him from nowhere, and, in the structure of the story, this is the moment his fate is fixed. He is with her, and he will share in her fate. As their lives bloom, and as they endeavour to establish themselves in life, their stake in life will grow, and they will have more to lose, as if living more fully were a provocation for death. Their intimacy grows. The story’s weirdness is heightened by this plausible romance, rather than by the usual sort of everyday details involving say moving into the apartment, getting used to the church next door, and so on. It is Tessie who will give Scott the yellow sign, which she found the day she had the first dream. The reader puts things together before the characters do, and this throws an ironic darkness over the idyll that follows. The story then presents Tessie with The King in Yellow—Scott has a copy, but doesn’t know why or how. He doesn’t seem to have been aware he had it. The comparison between the book and the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is explicit, but there is no tempting devil unless it’s the story we’re reading. “The King in Yellow” ends with the disintegration of these vital living characters into a shapeless slurry of corruption, along with the messenger himself. Death is a corruption of form. Life is the necessary flaw in matter which makes it susceptible to corruption. Life is a corruption that becomes aware of itself as such in the moment of death, so the awareness of corruptibility, however understood, becomes the agency of corruption. To know form as transient is to lose form.

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“Moses and Gaspar,” by Amparo Davila This is a minor story that gives us no respite in its account of doom without justice or reason. The speaker, Mr. Krause, is destroyed by a curse that has no source. He comes to replace his brother, and to share his fate, as if there were no real difference between them; his identity as a distinct individual from his brother is softened, while Moses and Gaspar have no identity at all apart from their names. They are clouds of detail without any defining centre, but the speaker’s presumably more robust identity is no protection against a kind of dark fate that circles him round into his brother Leonidas’ position. The bizarre event occurs when the speaker feels he’s being watched and turns around to find Moses and Gaspar there. His bond with them is established in that moment, and this bond is the bizarre element in the story. We will never be allowed to know what Moses and Gaspar are, so there’s no point in puzzling over that question. Davila isn’t feeding us bits and pieces of a coherent answer; whatever she asserts about them will always either thread itself between several possibilities, or reverse whatever was last suggested about them. The real riddle is the speaker’s bond with them. This bond is destiny’s agency in this story, and the mark of the bond is the gaze of Moses and Gaspar. Meeting or returning it seems to be enough to bind the speaker to them. It is his destiny to undergo the same change that his brother went through. The establishment of the bond is mysterious, but still deeper is the mystery of the bond itself, the way it becomes a force of hatred and despair on its own. Why can’t the speaker abandon Moses and Gaspar? No visible external power compels him to stay with them, but, given that he openly hates them, there is no visible internal power compelling him, either. By depriving both the speaker and us of these compelling powers, Davila compels us to wonder, as if the bond were ultimately only the need to understand its own absence. The supernatural is produced in this story by that bond, which is imposed somehow by Moses and Gaspar. The circling back that both Leonidas and the narrator complain about, the inexplicable tethering to Moses and Gaspar, is the overpowering magic. It implies that studying the patterns of events will not show us clear lines of cause and effect, but only meaningless resemblances, repetitions of the same mistakes that seem to perpetuate themselves independently of human will, so that we find ourselves, with our eyes open and all the knowledge we need, tumbling into

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inescapable traps we can clearly see in advance. What prevents the story from becoming a strictly psychological investigation of the way hatred, guilt, or other unconscious feelings can create an indissoluble bond is the sense that this bond belongs to a larger scheme of events, a destiny, which somehow favours Moses and Gaspar. Leonidas is fatalistic; he does not fight against what he perceives to be his lot, and the story asks whether or not his utter lack of fight does him in. Leonidas is not unusual in succumbing to destiny—if it is destiny, then what else can anyone do but succumb to it? Leonidas may however have simply attributed his situation to destiny and resigned himself to it without a struggle. How do we know some event was destined to happen? Usually this can only be established to our satisfaction, assuming we accept the idea of a destiny at all, by struggling and failing to escape or overcome something. Is this a psychological story about passive people who simply attribute things to destiny as a way of hiding their own cowardice or laziness from themselves? But that’s a story that could easily be told involving nothing unusual, and here we have Moses and Gaspar, with what appears to be a mysterious power to baffle and to dominate. We aren’t given much information about the two brothers, Jose and Leonidas, but they aren’t afflicted by anything else in their lives as they are by Moses and Gaspar. They aren’t presented to us as characteristically weak in all things: in both their lives, Moses and Gaspar appear as anomalies. Analysis Davila doesn’t use foreshadowing often; her stories are usually told in a linear, straightforward manner. Here however, Jose tells us that, returning to his brother Leonidas’ apartment, “as I climbed the stairs I thought I was approaching eternity, an eternity of mist and silence.”240 This is also a circular eternity of confusion and lack of meaning. The story keeps inviting us to speculate about Moses and Gaspar, knowing full well that the more we do, the less we will understand. We are also compelled to accept Moses and Gaspar, precisely because there is nothing there for us to hang on to but equivocal hints. Jose remembers Leonidas calling on Moses and Gaspar, saying “let’s celebrate”241 as if he were speaking to them and expecting them to understand him. We are told they have to be fed by someone else; does this mean they can’t feed themselves, or are they helpless, or pampered, or too dangerous to permit to feed themselves after their own preferences? We learn that Leonidas always fed them first, before his own meal, which substantiates something like pampering or a threat to

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him personally. They are at the feet of his corpse when his body is found, and this implies that they were contemplating eating him at least as much as it implies devotion. Leonidas expresses his fatalism with respect to changing jobs to accommodate the needs of Moses and Gaspar, saying “It’s useless to resist; we could circle around a thousand times and always end up where we began,”242 and this phrase will itself circle around to repeat at the end of the story. Leonidas seems to believe that we have to pay for our happiness, and this strongly suggests the idea of an outside force guiding human lives, keeping people away from real change, exacting a tribute of suffering in exchange for any happiness, and this force is irresistible, can only be surrendered to. We are told that this philosophy gives Leonidas his serenity, but it is impossible to conclude, given the precise arrangements that clearly indicate that he took his own life, that Leonidas was really serene. Even if the calmness, the lack of violence, surrounding his death and his preparations imply serenity, why kill himself in the first place if all is well? There is no mention of the word suicide, and Jose doesn’t give any thought at all to the question; he’s either thought about it all already, or refused to think about it. Jose enters Leonidas’ apartment and sits in Leonidas’ spot, in the very seat his body was found in. Finally alone, he gives way to his emotions, only to be surprised by the abrupt appearance of Moses and Gaspar. They were not physically concealed in the apartment, so much as they were forgotten, or overlooked, by Jose. They emerge from an oversight, like the fatal blunder that trips up the classical hero. Moses and Gaspar weep in silence, showing human emotion but without sound. When it comes time to relocate, they must travel in the baggage car like animals, but they are disgusted by this in a way that an animal would not be; an animal might be upset at having to separate from a familiar human, or at confinement, or at being in a strange place, but they wouldn’t be disgusted. However, no human being, no matter how deformed, will be transported as baggage. Jose is compelled to speak to them, to make excuses “they couldn’t, or didn’t want to, understand”243—an animal couldn’t, a human might not want to, but does an animal refuse to understand things? Is it that Jose insists on anthropomorphizing them, or is he beastializing human beings? The latter seems too wicked for a character like Jose, who in any case seems to lack the force necessary to compel others to accept a bestial position. The former possibility begins to seem pathological, which might be the intention, but if we begin to ascribe pathologies confidently to Jose,

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the whole story begins to melt away to nothing. Perhaps he’s wrong about their moods, their weeping, their silence, but then again perhaps he’s hallucinating everything, and Leonidas was too, or perhaps Leonidas is also a hallucination, and so on. The story is not constructed to be unravelled in this way. Moses and Gaspar eat fruit and cheese, not really fare for most domestic animals, and they sleep on blankets Jose tosses on the floor, which is neither here nor there. They pace up and down the apartment loudly enough for him to hear in his bedroom, so that means they aren’t likely to be small animals or birds. The two alter his life, and he is afraid to make them angry, so there is a threat of violence. They continue to grieve for Leonidas, like people, and he speaks of seeing the change of expression on their faces, also like people. Jose writes “I would have liked to know what they were thinking then. The fact was that I hadn’t explained anything to them when I went to pick them up. I don’t know if Leonidas had said something to them, or if they knew.”244 Jose maintains a relationship of sorts with the cashier Susy, an element of his established, regular life; he has no wife, no stable relationship, only an expedient, transactional exchange of friendly services, while she has “other engagements”245 besides his. They are not really intimate, but seem to be gratifying themselves with the absence of the other, so in his personal life Jose is also a figure in a series of substitutions, and seems to prefer things that way. This would again incline us towards a psychological reading of the story, until Susy sees Moses and Gaspar. When this happens, “she turned so pale that I thought she was going to faint, then she screamed like a lunatic and dashed down the stairs. I ran after her and had a hard time calming her down.”246 Would she react this way to a couple of people? Would he allow two human beings to linger in the bedroom, or even in an apartment that is sufficiently small that he can hear them walking to and fro in it through his bedroom door, when he’s bringing a woman home? Here Moses and Gaspar seem more like dangerous-looking exotic animals, familiars, or even ghosts. After this encounter, Jose calms her down, and they continue to see each other, albeit without returning to his apartment; would she do that if he were keeping monsters in his apartment? Wouldn’t she have some serious reservations about him from that point forward? There’s never any indication of secrecy or furtiveness on his part, nor is there any curiosity about Moses and Gaspar coming from anyone else, not even the idle curiosity that a neighbour might have about the leopard next door.

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Then the noise episode reverts the implications again; Moses and Gaspar scream, move furniture, and dump out the contents of the kitchen drawers, which is hard to imagine without the use of dexterous hands or poltergeist-like supernatural powers. The image247 of Moses throwing pots at Gaspar while Gaspar is “laughing” would make it difficult to doubt that we are speaking about human or human-like beings. Jose shouts at them as if they were human, and when he returns they have evidently cleaned up their mess. None of this proves anything; Davila’s keep-away approach will never permit us to decide just what Moses and Gaspar are. When Jose loses his bed to them, again without any resistance on his part, he links this back to something he’d noticed happening to Leonidas. This is the first really clear instance of repetition, although, unlike Leonidas, Jose has no one to leave Moses and Gaspar to, he is alone. As time goes by, he sees hatred in the eyes of his neighbours, fears for the safety of Moses and Gaspar, but in the end he hates them, too.248 “I felt uncomfortable in their presence, as though I were always being watched,”249 he writes. Do people claim they feel like they’re being watched when they are in the presence of others they can see and who can see them? This discomfort can only intelligibly arise in reference to some other feeling of surreptitious watching, which might refer to the reader, but which almost certainly refers also to a hidden presence, a destiny-recorder or supernatural watcher. The feeling alone only shows that Jose has this thought, but the unaccountability of Moses and Gaspar substantiates the idea, as does the complete absence of any reason for Leonidas’ initial custody of them. Finally, Jose has to move away to a broken down farmhouse to economize, since Moses and Gaspar wrecked him financially, and for their own safety. In this new home, they will be “tightly joined by an invisible bond, by a stark, cold hatred and an indecipherable design.”250 The indecipherable design is destiny; even hatred is a kind of destiny here. Jose hates Moses and Gaspar for ruining his life, but the bond was there before. It’s as if the hatred had been there before as well, waiting for him in Moses and Gaspar. Jose says “I would be afraid to plumb the shadowy mystery of their being”251 so even he, their keeper, doesn’t know what they are. Our lack of information about them reflects the absence of information in Jose’s account, and this is not a mere oversight. He doesn’t know what they are and he doesn’t want to know—he’s afraid to know. They for their part are interested in what he’s thinking just as he is interested in what they’re thinking, but they know, don’t they? He speaks of killing them as if it would be a straightforward enough thing to do, so they’re dangerous,

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but not so dangerous he couldn’t kill them readily. He wonders if Leonidas bequeathed them to him as a kind of posthumous curse, one with no justification or reason. Here, however, he is unusually sure: “I know it is something stronger than we are … it was meant to be”252 and he then quotes Leonidas; words about “end [ing] up where we began.” Is this where Jose began? Can you know where you are going if it is a return to where you began? Can you know where you began? If not, how can you know you’ve returned there? If so, then why do you return there thinking you’re going somewhere else? Perhaps this is the important question in this story: do you know where and when you began? Considering how important this question is when it comes to establishing our personal identities, we can say that this destabilizes his identity directly. Without an understanding of the way something began, like the acquisition of Moses and Gaspar, we have only the empty persistence of the status quo, as if that were somehow perpetuating itself of its own accord and in defiance of any explanation or origin. This is a story about destiny as repetition. Even Moses and Gaspar are repetitions of each other, since it seems absolutely certain despite any evidence that they are two of a kind even if the only evidence really is that their behaviour is nearly always identical. They also seem to sense his desire to destroy them, although this is not explicitly fantastic, and it’s as if they love to be hated, to cause suffering. They do not want to destroy him; they want to compel him to destroy himself, the way Leonidas did.

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“The Horla,” by Guy de Maupassant This may be a subtly minor story. While the absence of God is meant to be horrifying, and that horror is a major one, this story depends on the violation of a major faith in the benign bias of progress, and in the future as an improved image of the present. We find everywhere in European and American discourse of this period, and later on as well, the dogma that excuses current evils by seeing, or pretending to see, in them the growing pains of a new and better era to come. In this story, the change comes out of the blue, from a colonial source that is doubly exotic since Brazil is not a French colony, and the Horla has not been dispatched by a cosmic moral order to replace mankind with a new chosen people. The Horla is simply a being with certain advantages over humanity, and, since the natural order is an order of such advantages, this means the pre-eminence of mankind is now in danger as a result of an amoral contest. This is not a denial of evolution; it doesn’t seem to me that de Maupassant is calling on his audience to repudiate the idea. This is also not the usual horror story involving evolution, since it is not about Lovecraftian revulsion at the thought of our non-human ancestry, but rather this is about a new species come to displace us. I suppose we might see in the Horla a kind of supernaturalized version of a type of racial or conspiratorial thinking which scares Europeans with the prospect of being replaced in one or another way, but such stories always involve a sense of biological injustice, since the white European is supposed to be the superior family of human beings. Here the Horla really is superior, and this kind of reversal is more the sort of thing one would expect in a Twilight Zone episode; we can imagine a story about a white supremacist who justifies his racism by insisting that white people are biologically superior and that the law of nature therefore coronates white people as the masters above all others, only to be confounded to hear his own arguments used against him by invading extraterrestrials who are vastly superior to any human being. There is some exploitation of the possibility that the narrator is a hallucinating madman. Read this way, “The Horla” becomes a frightening story about what it would be like to believe yourself hounded by an invisible antagonist. Nevertheless, there remains the idea that it is what you cannot see that matters, and we are still admitted to the perspective framed above by the narrator whether he is mad or not. Very few readers will explicitly choose to believe that the narrator is sane or insane, and there is the additional possibility that he is both insane and correct about the

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Horla. Perhaps sanity is only blindness to the real nature of things, as Poe suggested. If de Maupassant is asserting this, then he is not doing so out of a Romantic celebration of madness as transcendent reason which cannot express itself intelligibly because it is trapped in the limited vocabulary of a merely human understanding; in this story, insanity would be a genuinely broken, malfunctioning mind, damaged by its exposure to a truth that is hidden but not transcendent to nature or the human order. Rather this truth originates in a rival order that will overcome mankind on its own plane. As Nathan Snaza writes: “the Horla stands for an unknown future in which man is superseded, and which approaches inexorably with each passing moment—although, to realize this is in effect to see man superseded already, insofar as the concept of man entails hegemonic mastery— this makes the story Lovecraftian, in that it places man in a larger continuum in order to achieve the supersession early, and it also makes it Mark Fisher-­ ian or Hauntological, since it is about the disappearance of the future.”253 I don’t think that the Horla is meant to stand in for the conditions that Mark Fisher was writing about, since he placed more emphasis on the mystery surrounding the disconnection from the future, that so many should fail so utterly to be able to imagine it. In this story, mankind has no future to disconnect from. The bizarre events are the various unaccountable experiences that commence after the passage of the Brazilian ship, or more precisely the clear implication of a developing pattern. If these were hallucinations, they would have to be hallucinations all proceeding from one unconscious delusion that keeps opportunistically signalling the narrator. If hallucinations are usually assumed to be random, then it seems unlikely that someone would, merely by chance, undergo a series of discretely separate hallucinations all exclusively restricted to events that would suggest the activities of an invisible interloper. The destiny in the story is the destiny of mankind, which is to vanish. Whether humanity will disappear in one way or another, any study of nature will point towards an eventual extinction. The mark of this is the arrival of the ship from Brazil. Perhaps de Maupassant chose Brazil because it is the jungle of the New World, but the primary significance of the ship is that its appearance is an incursion from outside. Contact with the border dividing inside and outside leads to confusion: which is which? Perhaps we are on the outside, and the true insiders are some others. I would like to quote at length here from Katherine D. W. Kiernan’s article, “L’Entre-Moi: ‘Le Horla’ De Maupassant, Ou Un Monde sans

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Frontières”—“The Between-Me: ‘The Horla,’ De Maupassant, or a World without Frontiers”: Perhaps the most frightening thing for each of us is the indirect recognition that the self could be nothing more than a textual figure, and that without the acts of reading or writing, it would entirely cease to exist. The narrator discovers not only that the boundaries of the self are drawn by the self, he also recognizes that the self is not established in absolute terms, but in the very moment of speech, or better, of writing. The narrator asks himself a question that seems impossible to answer conclusively: who is the subject who speaks, who writes? The Horla: between historical time, literary time, the present, and the future; between the house, the mind, and the page; between life, writing, and reading. If “The Horla” appears to belong to the genre of the fantastic, it’s only insofar as it tells the story of a man who discovers the fantastic character of reality. It’s the fantastic discovery that being is neither given, nor stable, but a fantastical web that extends infinitely in all dimensions, some of which overlap and grow, some which do not come into contact with each other because they lack a point of coincidence, of agreement, because they lack a subject, the means by which they can be brought together.254

I agree with this appraisal, although I would say that the self is a multiplicity that includes text but which is not exclusively text. Whatever the self is, as depicted by de Maupassant, it is drawn by the self, but another element (and the reference to history may cover this) is social determination; even if the self is only understood as a text, we have to concede it has a genre. There are types—the language and the writing system, the grammar and syntax, are social, and even political, too. If we’re being really thoughtful, we have to acknowledge this social basis as a relation between the society and the self. So the textual character of identity is only one of many characters that can open out onto a variegated idea of reality, with its possibilities. Analysis The use of the first person is essential, not in order to preserve our uncertainty about the actual existence of the creature, but to create an experience that is vicariously accessible. The opening situates the narrator as firmly as possible in familiar and ordinary circumstances, and, at the level of micro-impressions, is deliberately silent, so that, when the bizarre comes, it arrives with a strong impression of difference. If the narrator is

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going mad already, then this silence is his unconsciousness of this fact, but then again, most stories that use a narrator’s own voice and observations to indicate a mental instability that they cannot see will use micro-­ impressions to indicate this. It’s hard to imagine another way to do it. The silence of micro-impressions is, I think, more likely a sign that the narrator is sane, at least for now. De Maupassant reverses the usual transition. Instead of assailing the firm redoubts of sanity with weirdness, he instead shows us that sanity never was a firm redoubt in the first place, or that sanity is only firm insofar as we do not examine or think about it. Sanity vanishes under scrutiny; we do not have a clear standard of mental balance that we can use to measure mental imbalance. So sanity is only the struggle against insanity; it has no resting state or essence apart from insanity. As the story opens, the narrator’s identity dilates to connect him to everything around him via his so-­ called roots, which link him to the people, the landscape, even the air. This invites us to imagine the projection of himself into this air, or a gesture towards empty air that is not actually so empty. It also shows us the way a place can seem to have a disembodied or implied identity, as if it were impersonally haunted. The narrator still lives in his childhood home, so his sense of self is thoroughly buttressed by his circumstances, and he lives in close contact with his own past. Then, like clockwork, there is a bit of fever for misdirection, and a rumination on the mysterious influences, micro-impressions, that act on us. The narrator is thinking about unseen presences, as in fact he has been all along—his childhood home is presumably peopled by memories of the absent and the dead—we are tracing the development of an obsessive idea, which may or may not prove true. Since the Horla came on the boat that passed at the opening of the story and is already there in France, it may be that the narrator is unconsciously aware of it. Having set up the site of memory, and added childhood recollections, de Maupassant now adds the story of the wind-voices and the folktales about the hauntings that account for them. Many writers of weird fiction, including Machen, Blackwood, and Lovecraft, will treat folktales this way, as a record of regional micro-­ impressions embroidered with imaginative explanations, and so insinuate that there is a grain of truth in them which is liable to a more accurate explanation. While “The Horla” is borderline science fiction, it isn’t really interested in the aspects of the question that would be foregrounded in a science fiction story. As an all but disembodied presence, the Horla is the voice of a fundamental fear or mystery; de Maupassant is not especially

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interested in the scientific plausibility of an invisible creature. The torment of the servants works in parallel with the folktales, being another record of micro-impressions originating among uneducated people who, from a classist perspective, are not supposed to have the intellectual apparatus necessary to conceive of something like the Horla. There is a decidedly minoritarian passage early in the story when de Maupassant, through his narrator, comments on how the people are swayed by airy nothings like flags and anthems, while the leaders are vacuous dullards who stupidly obey fixed principles. It is important to sound a note of scepticism in order to make the narrator more credible, but this also reinforces the idea that order and sanity are unsceptical and blind. This is a masterful bit of composition by de Maupassant, because it makes scepticism, rather than credulity, bring about the discovery of the Horla. We begin not with a visitation of the Horla which the narrator will then have to reconcile with the ordinary, but with the narrator’s scepticism about the world as he sees it, and in particular with the fixity, stupidity, and conformism of those who define it. There must be more going on. It must be what is unseen and unexplained that matters, but he manages to say this in a way that is not mystical or tending in an allegorical direction, of the kind that would lead us gently back to church. It is in this light that the narrator considers what madness means. You can’t bring in the rational, orderly interpretation of events without introducing more chaos along with it. Does a madman lucidly consider the possibility of his madness? Knowing rationally that you are hallucinating isn’t madness, it’s tripping—and it’s also like reading a weird tale. You may know rationally that what you are reading is fiction, but then this tends to make the recognition of fiction a guarantee of sanity, and if you can’t demonstrate that the fictional elements of the story, indeed the most fictional element of all, are impossible, then it might exist, and this makes the fictional status of the story uncertain, which in turn makes the reader’s own sanity uncertain. This is key, the slipping of the mark of doom onto the reader, the experience of feeling the ambivalence overtake you, that is the one thing that matters most in weird fiction, which is not in any way about clear categories of the ordinary and the supernatural, the hallucinated experience versus the real one, but instead entirely about reaching a point at which these distinctions no longer can be made, and actually don’t matter anymore. The narrator’s conflict boils down to this: he can kill the Horla, or kill himself. Why would he want to kill himself? He remarks that the Horla

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would reduce mankind to livestock. Because man is not man if he is just another animal, and the Horla will make men into domesticated beasts, attacking the identity of man by itself becoming man, taking that identity as the superior, master beast, for its own. The Horla at one point stands between the narrator and the mirror and obscures his reflection, so seeing the Horla means seeing your own disappearance. By the end we may say that the narrator is mad, but is this the madness that produced the Horla or is this produced by the Horla?

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“The Willows,” by Algernon Blackwood “The Willows” is minor insofar as it warns us that identities, from nationalities to personal destinies, are not rooted in place but occupy a position in a greater continuum of change. The power massed against the ordinary is amoral, beyond good and evil, which is to say that good and evil are contained in the ordinary, which is itself understood to be a compartmentalization of reality. The ordinary in this story is too precarious and limited to be in keeping with major literature: the valorization is not strong enough, the triumph is not firm enough, the normal looks more like stupidity, obliviousness. Also, the dependence of the ordinary on the weird is too patent here; the ordinary is more exceptional than the weird. Blackwood seems to be saying that the cosmos as a whole is strange, that it is only locally ordinary. As Anthony Camara writes: “‘The Willows’ depicts the cosmos as an outside space that continually infiltrates, un-­ grounds, and subverts nature, subjecting it to strange transformations and eruptions of novelty that cause nature to exceed humans’ limited conceptions and definitions of it.”255 Throughout the story there is a vigorous struggle between major and minor tendencies across a deep ambivalence. Clinging to the normal for its own sake isn’t enough, or rather we cannot uphold it consciously and deliberately without betraying it, since that allows for the possibility of the strange taking over. Camara makes note of the use of fluidity in “The Willows” as a sign of the consistency of strangeness, writing that Blackwood uses “liquidity as a covert elemental transport system that facilitates the dispersion of ‘outside elements …’.”256 We have to beware of the normal because it is an illusion, everything is in flux, and all stability is only apparent. The ground beneath our feet is eroding and there is no way to repair it. Blackwood creates a series of events that define a bizarre territory, such that nearly every event takes on a bizarre quality until it is the ordinary thought that is out of place. The effect of this is to imply to the reader that this fleeting, inconsequential ordinariness is the essence of our lives. The main mark of destiny in the story, and it is even named as such, is the funnel-shaped hole in the corpse, the sign of the otter and the peasant in the boat, which returns as the drowned man in the end, their scapegoat. The other mark here is the boundary they cross: what’s interesting is the way Blackwood will speak of them straying, only to say that where they have strayed to is a place from which they fear they will be pulled over yet another boundary. So this means they are between boundaries.

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The supernatural is produced in this story in a very clear and full vision of the infinity of experience understood as a domain of change on a sublime scale. In a letter to Peter Penzoldt, Blackwood wrote: “all that happens in our universe is natural; under Law; but an extension of our so limited normal consciousness can reveal new, extra-ordinary powers etc., and the word ‘supernatural’ seems the best word for treating these in fiction.”257 According to this quote, extended consciousness discovers powers, rather than regions or divinities, so this could be taken to mean that Blackwood conceives of the supernatural more or less in terms of the sublime, rather than in terms of secret areas on a map or secret participants in a larger drama. It is power that must be discovered, and by its nature discovering power means entering into some kind of relationship with it, not just observing it from afar. In discussing the supernatural, Blackwood is describing the kind of encounter that directly alters the one who experiences it. This is like the difference between the traveller who merely observes and the one who becomes a part of what is observed; this latter kind of traveller is not simply taking an identity around the world to introduce it to other identities, but is travelling away from their own identity. Analysis From the outset we’re in Poe country, the landscape of the House of Usher, with its singular loneliness and motionless expanse of water. Jonathan Newell understands the peculiar character of the landscape of this story in terms of disgust: “authors of weird fiction exploit the viscerality of disgust to confront readers with the impermanence and instability of a subject polluted by nonhuman forces which seep into it from the world around it.”258 For my part, I don’t see Blackwood’s willows as alien alterity in life so much as I see them as a visual scintillation field of indeterminate living being. The appeal of this landscape is its shimmering flux, which allows it to assume all manner of different aspects; Blackwood is one of those writers who are fascinated by wilderness as a place that dissolves personal boundaries. This is related to fiction describing the ordeals people face in the wild, where their social outlines fade and their physical or even animal attributes acquire new importance. This is a shapeless landscape, which is to say that it may take on now this shape, now that. If we approach this landscape from a Romantic point of view, the visitor might expect to become shapeless there, becoming one with this desert of water and leaves, losing one’s identity-shape. So if this is Poe country, it is also Machen country, the British psychedelic pastoral of Lewis Carroll and

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Arthurian legends. The narrator’s initial tone, which is consistent with the kind of travel writing that specializes in collecting quaint bits of local colour, provides a sufficiency of ordinariness to generate self-difference later on. Everyone knows that willows are trees, but in this story, they aren’t— they don’t grow beyond the size of shrubs, they lack the rigidity of trees, and their foliage remains close enough to the ground to conceal it. There’s an explicit comparison between them and the river, which leaves its “stern banks”259 and becomes formless, no longer a river, just a nameless body of water, not a sea, not a river, not a lake—a swamp, but not a permanent one, since the flooding is seasonal. So far, every significant feature of the landscape can only be given a provisional designation; the trees aren’t trees, the river isn’t a river, nothing is fixed. Blackwood’s customary prose style is (perhaps unwittingly) well-suited to express this idea of flux. Note how the long sentences, riddled with semicolons, contribute to the sense of shapeless momentum and a flowing-­ away of meaning. The reader has to hold on to the subject, and work a little to establish a connection across many lines of print, contributing a more direct impression of the pressure of speech, the steady, heedless flow of things which will not allow us to reverse course and take a second look at what has just flashed by. Furthermore, the willows are seldom mentioned without comparison to something else, waves, applauding hands, and so on, which supplants them with a series of approximate affects, giving them to the reader less as nouns than as verbs, less as objects and more like a mode of motion. The characters experience unease in confrontation with their own insignificance, but it is a vague feeling the narrator cannot trace to its source— right after a wordy digression about following the Danube from its source. Is it a vague fear with a name he simply hasn’t come up with yet, or is it fear of vagueness, of shapelessness? To be insignificant is to be small and trivial, but it is also to be something that does not signify, or rise to such a level of importance that it becomes necessary to give it a name. The party is not homogeneous, consisting of a Swede and an Englishman with a Canadian canoe and “gypsie” tent, but these distinctions, while significant for human beings, are meaningless here. The narrator makes constant reference to the way things around him appeal to or play on his imagination, as if it were an independent sense. When he speaks of the sublime feelings associated with other natural things like mountains, his sentences become brief and clear, because he is

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speaking of nameable emotions. Mountains are permanent and unchanging, but here even the islands shrink and melt away to nothing; the only permanent feature in this anti-mountainscape is sweeping, headlong movement. Holding your own in this environment takes a deliberate praxis of being normal. The Swede only appears to correspond to the national stereotype of whimsyless, prosaic dullness; actually he works diligently to keep himself within his boundaries, which transforms being ordinary into mental hygiene, a kind of talisman, a religious practice. It doesn’t take very long for the contrary powers to make themselves felt: the otter seems like a living corpse, and the man who passes them, although he is just another ordinary human being, seems like an exotic, otherworldly visitant. The incessant swirling activity around the narrator induces a delirium of reading. Everything becomes significant, connected, and portentous. Shapes form and melt back into the wind-tossed willows, bronze titan figures with hidden faces flow together, braided into a column that rises to vanish into the sky. The bronze resonates with the references to the Romans earlier to suggest pagan gods from a prior epoch, but these are gods that act like the river or the wind. The narrator sees a fountain of divine substance in which gods are fleetingly individuated and then dissolved. We’re familiar with other stories, like Merimée’s “The Venus of Ille” or perhaps “The Last of the Valerii” by Henry James, in which we read of ancient survivals of paganism, but Blackwood goes beyond those stories here by trying to capture the process of empaganization as a vertical river of only quasi-differentiated god-being, complementing the horizontal Danube of streaming matter. There is a different standard of reality in the domain of the gods from “the little standard of the known,”260 because it is a place that is only available to a deterritorialized mind, such that the barriers normally dividing imagination, reason, feeling, and perception into separate compartments are all vitiated. Here, “what one says, happens,”261 and the normal world will vanish too unless one holds it together, remains firm for the world’s sake, instead of the other way around. This is necessary because the weird presence in the landscape, which expresses itself through the willows, is just the opposite: “Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us,”262 which is to say that they have become simulacra of the ordinary, such that the more ordinary they appear to be, the more dangerous they really are. The landscape cries out with a chiming sound that seems to resonate from within, and this cry is a protest against the intrusion of human beings, who

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pollute the unknown by reducing it to material utility and human dimensions, by reading it. The physical threat to the narrator and the Swede is nothing compared to the existential threat to their minds, which is a threat that can be extended much more readily to the reader. The danger is not death but “a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution—far worse than death, and not even annihilation.”263 Here my thesis is spelled out very plainly: the danger in weird fiction is a threat to identity. Blackwood posits a new order of experience, the unhuman and unearthly, the infinity of experience which is everywhere, hence the lability of the man in the boat, the otter, and the willows. In these circumstances, it is insignificance that protects us; what is significant, symbolic, is part of this uncanny world, and the insignificance of our ordinariness is safe, because it has no hidden dimension. The symbolic world acts through the willows by using them as symbols, so instead of materializing in the willows, the willows are being diaphanized and turned into something immaterial, symbols. For Blackwood, the divine realm is a domain of independent, autonomous, uncreated symbols, rather than, for example, Platonically perfect ideas. What the narrator discovers, through direct experience, then, is a transcendence where meaning precedes being. I, as an identity, have a fixed symbolic meaning: my name is me, and that’s that, fixed, while with the willows the symbolic recovers its unfixed, fluid essence, which points out that this attribution of meaning is always fundamentally arbitrary, fixed only by circumstances, not in its essence, so what you see is not the truer symbol here but the truth of symbols. It is part of the essence of a symbol that it be applicable to a variety of things and meanings. This supernaturalism is generated philosophically, and the ensuing warning is a minor one. When the Swede tries “going inside to Them”264 in the way of water and wind, that is, of formless rushing, it’s as if the stiffer, less-yielding character is more vulnerable than the waffling uncertain one, since he is sort of already swirling while the Swede is brittle and might break. So the warning is: identity can only endure in flux, not in resistance to it.

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“Afterward,” by Edith Wharton A minor story emphasizing the inadequacy of ordinary consciousness, the impotence of the ordinary to assert any positive power to protect you against the bizarre. There is a major strain, too, in the hypostatized abnormality of immorality, the warning to stay moral in order to stay normal, but this warning is one that an inadequate consciousness cannot fully obey, and the ordinary will not step in to point out any oversights. The bizarre event, to be clear, is not the apparition or the ghost, because no one perceives it to be a ghost at the time. The bizarre event is the later realization that the stranger was a ghost, and the accompanying idea that a ghost need not advertise itself by any sign. If this is true, then ghosts may be everywhere, in plain sight. What is horrible in this story for Wharton is not seeing a ghost, but recognizing one, and this is only possible if identity is not something one perceives the way you might see a colour or hear a musical timbre, but rather something produced and attributed to something that, by itself, is a nonesuch, a nobody waiting to become someone. The ghost then takes on the aspect of a depersonalized person, and perhaps it is the possibility that such a thing might exist at all which is liable to frighten someone reading “Afterward.” The whole story is about destiny, starting with a prophecy in the first line. It’s a warning you can’t act on because you can’t know when it comes into effect, but more than that, it is an offhand remark that does not present itself as a full-fledged prophecy. It is the situation of the remark—in the opening line—and not anything about the statement itself, which makes it prophetic; by that I mean that there is no accompanying clap of thunder, the speaker is not someone with a weird reputation or outwardly prophetic attributes a la beard-and-blindness. So any offhanded remark may be prophetic, even or perhaps especially where there is no conscious intention to anticipate events, because our consciousness tends to dismiss micro-impressions. The micro-impression is an observation or resonation at the unconscious level, useless to the conscious mind unless something forces the micro-impression to register as an impression, and even then the impression always tends to organize perceptions according to received categories. This is why the micro-impression is so important in weird fiction: it is the only kind of impression that might elude that categorization. The gap between experience and consciousness is radical, and the microimpression confirms it by signalling across that gap.

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The title of the story is the mark of destiny. It is our destiny to change, but it is also our destiny to miss the signs of change until that change is already underway. Wharton’s great accomplishment in this story is to turn the simple word “afterward” into a curse. She dwells on the way something like a crime, a disappearance or whatever, will suddenly endow all the ordinary events preceding it with a special significance, making them all into signs of a destiny. It is our destiny to see without understanding until later, when the thing is no longer present to be seen, and it is our destiny to forget, and then to remember, having forgotten. “Even Mary Boyne’s consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of velocity. It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat. There were moments of overwhelming lassitude when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.”265 The mind cleaves to the ordinary, so that even Mary is lulled into thinking about other things as time passes. This is how the story produces the supernatural, by pointing to the way our ordinary consciousness is of necessity a form of unconsciousness with respect to deeper things. Analysis Right away, there is a warning, but you won’t recognize it, so this thematizes destiny from the outset. Something beyond your understanding is ordering your affairs, determining your life. It is a warning about warnings, which is to say that depending on whether or not you remember a warning—a warning which specifically is a warning to remember something—is no better than to commit yourself to chance. The omen is never remembered or recognized until that which was warned against has appeared, and it’s too late. So the main character, Mary Boyne, is in two moments at once: the day she heard it, a bright promising day in June, and the grim December day when she thinks of it again. These two selves call to each other across a gap in consciousness. Jeffrey Weinstock noted something like this in Wharton’s other supernatural fiction, and his observation is germane to “Afterward” as well: “Implicit in Wharton’s tale, however, seems to be a critique of Romanticism itself as a narrative form unable to communicate effective cultural critique due to its distance from ‘reality’.”266 Lyng House is Romantic in its isolation, but in this story the distance from reality is an illusion; reality, here meaning guilt, commerce, and

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crime cannot be escaped. So Romanticism’s shortcoming in distancing itself from reality is that this distance is illusory, and reflects an attempt to escape the ordinary. This would be a major-aspected criticism of Romanticism if it weren’t for the way the story shows us that it is just as impossible to achieve Realism. One may not be able to distance oneself from reality, this may be only wishful thinking, but Wharton seems to be saying that reality per se remains distant from us, albeit in a different way. When we eventually discover Boyne’s crime against Elwell, we learn that this entire story is taking place “afterward.” The ghostly visit punctures the Romantic illusion of distance from reality, but what does it mean when it is a ghost that brings us back to reality, if not that reality is already ghostly? It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they had often called England so little—“such a confoundedly hard place to get lost in.” A confoundedly hard place to get lost in! That had been her husband’s phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official investigation sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore … now the little compact, populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife’s anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something they would never know!267

At first, Ned and Mary are irreverent about ghosts and regard the past as something amusing, something to vacation in, charming. All the real trouble, the struggles of the past, is safely in the distance. The characters see the ghost without realizing it, fixing our attention as readers on the experience of looking back at something with a total reversal of perspective. The fact that this is possible underlines an inevitable uncertainty about events and insists that the past is not safely behind us, but still contestable. Even past events have a destiny. They change too. On hearing the story about the unrecognized premonitions associated with Lyng House, she has an impression she compares to something rising from a cavernous depth of divination, like the sibyl, or the oracle. Brushed by an intenser memory, the house lends its character to the life of the people who live there, which makes life there a repetition. The story of the ghost is not detailed enough to be called a legend, but this vagueness makes it more credible, because this story produces the supernatural out of human psychology rather than folklore. Ned notes how ghostly

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everything is there, which makes it, as he supposes, more difficult for the ghost to distinguish itself; it’s this generality, or abstractness, about the ghost which enables it to affect strangers not connected with the place, since we’re not asked to believe that people in more or less the same situation as the ghost’s just happened to move into the house. Ned’s ghostly feeling, in hindsight, is most likely his own haunting guilt about Elwell, but he is the only person in the story who will recognize the ghost in its own presence. There is one other witness—the house itself also sees the ghost. The house gives the occupant an awareness of the ghost, making the house independent somehow; this independent power is the hauntedness of the place, which amounts to its age and isolation. An inconspicuous old place is part of the landscape and history, the perennial backdrops, and between that and its isolation it is a place of concealment. The existence of the secret passage, which leads to a lookout post, shows us that watchful concealment is the purpose of the house. The figure that Mary sees from this vantage point is grey and blurred, but this is attributed to Mary’s vision. Is she perceiving something distinct in a vague way, or is she distinctly perceiving a vague something? The inability, in the moment of presence and perception, to determine whether the attribute perceived is in the perceiver or the perceived thing, is a consequence of the gap between experience and understanding that Wharton employs throughout the story. Even though Mary cannot be sure of much about this figure, she is able to assert that he’s foreign, “unlocal.”268 The first term introduces a purely negative identity and the second intensifies it. He isn’t from anywhere. His only attribute is that he is foreign, which implies he is foreign everywhere. Later on, Mary feels her first significant concern about her husband’s honesty, when he claims it was Peters that she saw. The foreign, unlocal figure did look like Peters, so this is enough mud to explain away Mary’s lack of deeper suspicion. When Mary sees the grey outside, she then thinks it’s the ghost, only to find that it’s her husband. This neat reversal not only suggests that the figure on the road had been a ghost, but that Ned is connected with ghostly things or is ghostly in some way, linked with death, and that she is not seeing him distinctly. Mary and Ned nearly fight about seeing things; he seems relieved having gone through his mail, and then she finds the clipping about the suit Elwell brought against him. After their exchange she feels strangely secure, another odd effect, as if she were entering into the spirit of being deceived for her own good, and this is what brings her into the greatest harmony

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with the house. Lyng House is a lying house; this makes it a precursor of sorts to Hill House, in the way it reflects the psychology of the people who visit it. Where Hill House is predatory, however, Lyng House is a manifestation of denial, particularly of moral faults. Only after this is established do we have an encounter with the ghost, at the midway point of the story, making it the central event. Mary both sees and speaks with the ghost, without realizing it. His appearance brings about her husband’s disappearance. What is unseen appears, and what has been seen vanishes. Wharton is not interested in suffusing the ghost with too much ambiguity. The maid vouches for the existence of the visitor, and it’s by recognition of the portrait photo in the newspaper that Mary identifies Elwell as the ghost. Of course, Mary never saw nor knew Elwell so she couldn’t have imagined him out of whole cloth, and did not even know he was dead. Mary stays at Lyng House because it knows what happened. She wants to see if she can learn the answer, but her motivation is not clear. She can’t accept the idea that the house knows and she doesn’t, and she won’t allow the house to keep this information from her. It’s as if the house owes her an explanation, but this is the peculiar power of withholding that her husband exerted over her as well; by remaining in the house, she remains in close proximity to a denial that she knows has something to deny, even if she doesn’t know what. It may be that we are meant to see in her a person who has devoted her life to ferreting out the truth, but this would mean she had completely abandoned her former personality. Mary doesn’t know anything about her husband’s business due in part to sexist assumptions, but she does not complain about this exclusion, nor does she try to find out what he’s been up to by other means, or by cajoling him. The more disquieting possibility would be that Mary remains in Lyng because she takes that strange comfort mentioned earlier in knowing she is being lied to. Here is perhaps the one circumstance in which it is possible to know the truth: when you are being deceived, you know the truth is something other than what you experience. You may not know what the truth is, but you know what it isn’t. Rather than trust to appearances, Mary is taking solace from the fact that appearances can never be known, or at best, only afterwards. This, however, is hardly the major line, because this is the triumph of the simulacrum, the defeat of the very possibility of establishing a legitimate candidate for the truth.

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“The School Friend,” by Robert Aickman This is the story of a pair of friends, one of whom may be a result, and/or a component, of a hideous scientific experiment, conducted by her sinister father. As is true of Aickman’s strange fiction in general, it produces a unique effect on the reader, rooted in a deep horror of human adaptability. The idea that we can get used to anything, no matter how bizarre, how wildly strange, that we can accept anything, reconcile our identities with anything, is one of the keys to Aickman’s fiction. We are shocked by what people in Aickman’s stories are prepared to accept, rather than what they fight against, turning the traditional weird tale on its head. “The School Friend” largely plays out as the aftermath of a bizarre encounter that dominates the story without ever being described in any particular way; Aickman is less interested in disruptive events as he is in their aftermath, the insidious ways the ordinary reasserts itself without negating the bizarre. This seems to turn all manner of ordinary things into doubles of themselves; the more normal they are, the more frightening the implications. Both the narrator, Mel, and Sally Tessler, the eponymous friend, are marked by the ordinary, destined to return to the same old things, no matter how weird those things get, no matter how unlike themselves they really turn out to be. As the story opens, both have come back to their old childhood homes, their old friendship resumes as if nothing had happened in the meantime, because nothing—not even the craziest, the most disturbing events—will prevent them from remaining ordinary. The supernatural is produced in this story by the gap between the bluntly weird—the apparition of the father, the stone-lined room—and the proliferation of possible interpretations without end. As experienced readers of supernatural fiction, we begin reading this story as we do any weird tale, responding to clues, looking to collate our impressions and arrive at a discovery—the house is haunted, or Sally Tessler is a homunculus, or Sally Tessler was impregnated by her father, or his ghost, and gave birth to a monster, or Sally Tessler is an endlessly self-reproducing science experiment who periodically becomes pregnant without intercourse and gives birth to a new version of herself before withering away. As the story unfolds, however, we realize that these are pointless speculations. The strange occurrences of “The School Friend” have their reasons for happening, but knowing these reasons makes no difference. In fact, rather than bringing us closer to a complete picture, each clue in an Aickman story causes that complete

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picture to recede. Aickman deprives us of reasons by supplying us with too many, rather than by withholding them. The strange and the ordinary are in a reciprocal relationship here, not in a struggle; knowing and not knowing grow together, rather than one at the expense of the other. Aickman never misses an opportunity to imply possibilities familiar to readers in the genre, but without providing any resolution; his stories move towards becoming “pulp,” towards shapelessness from the point of view of a hypothetically typical genre story. They volatilize the genre by orbiting it without ever landing in it, addressing the weird genre as a whole, and producing effects not by falling into a recognizable destiny, but by bringing a whole multiplicity of destinies into immanence. Aickman sacrifices a clear resolution for the queasy dissatisfaction of boundless uncertainty, but he supplements this with the numbed acquiescence of his characters, which is the real point. Reality, in Aickman’s fiction, can’t manage to remain within a genre; Aickman is one of the truly great masters of the simulacrum because even his stories are simulacra of stories. Hence “strange stories,” as he called them. “The School Friend” involves no moral order; it warns, without judging. How would any judgement be possible in a story like this? If, by the end, we are shocked when Mel more or less decides to go away with Sally Tessler, is this because we feel that she has failed morally? How can we judge Sally Tessler, or Dr. Tessler, without actually knowing what they did? In this story, destiny is a process, not an end; it produces ends, plural, a never-ending sequence of endings. As Sonya Taaffe observed, Aickman’s stories seem to begin after the ending. The ordinary is an oblivion of infinitely being-used-to something, which means it can only exist where there are constant jars and shocks to get used to. The ordinary depends on the strange. As Matt Cheney wrote: “Much of Aickman’s best work obliterates any certainty between real and unreal, dream and waking reality. In one of his greatest stories, ‘Into the Wood’ (in some ways an ars poetica), an insomniac tells the protagonist: ‘Dreams … are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses this support of dreams, life dissolves ….’”269 Analysis Like most of Aickman’s fiction, this story is a labyrinth of implications that are not in the least intended to coalesce into any given idea of the “real” or “complete” story. There is no amount of content-correlation that can be made to account for these events. Where other weird tales hint at an

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imperfectly understood narrative that will eventually become clear, this story draws the reader’s attention instead to their own eagerness to draw out implications, to find the weird in the ordinary, to rush to the most appalling possibilities. Is that what the reader wants? What is revealed is not the right speculation among many, but the proliferation of speculations around any event. Aickman doesn’t exactly baulk his readers; his stories are still satisfying, because rather than feeling cheated, we come to understand that the proliferation is the point. Since none of the story’s effects depend on understanding anything else, Aickman’s refusal to identify any one cause does not disappoint, and in turn produces a distinct effect of its own: we see the ordinary, in Aickman, become only the accidental resting place of understanding, rather than the result of some rational consensus. It isn’t actively produced, but passively surrendered to. Examining the plot, we can sum up roughly what the story seems to be about: Sally Tessler has been produced by her father in a strange, unknown way, involving some form of science that is perhaps also witchcraft, but in any case is horribly wrong. Sally Tessler’s pregnancy is also horribly wrong, and in some way related to her own illicit creation. This story is composed as a series of variations on a theme of variation. Sally is not one person, but a series of versions of someone who never fully existed—a simulacrum. The horror here seems to be located primarily in the way these versions come about, like a biological curse, but that may not be the heart of it. The essential horror may be the horror of the simulacrum, the way that the simulacrum invalidates the supposedly authentic models, while at the same time this is a simulacrum who knows she’s not quite real, and has to live with that somehow. Since it is a story of versions, it is not necessary to conduct an exhaustive review of all the implications. We can identify a maze without having to run every inch of it. All the same, it is important to go through many of them, in order to show that it is an element of style. The epigram from Princess Bibesco (the sister-in-law of Cynthia Asquith and a good friend of Marcel Proust) claiming that women secretly wish to be “taken advantage of” sets off the implications, rather than the plot. It seems intended to apply to Sally Tessler—perhaps in her relationship with whoever impregnated her—but a moment’s reflection will not only suggest that this applies at least as much to the narrator as well, but also that it may be Sally Tessler who will take advantage of her. The story opens with both characters paired, both bright, both about the same age; one falls away while the other does well, at least in the eyes of the world. This suggests twinning, the good and the bad; it seems to be saying that

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these two girls were of a kind. Sally’s intellectual qualifications are established—precocity, acute intelligence, and so on. “Like many males, but few females, even among those inclined to scholarship, Sally combined a true love for the Classics, the ancient ones, with an insight into mathematics which, to the small degree that I was interested, seemed to me almost magical. … She was always two years or more below the average age of her form. She had a real technique of acquiring knowledge.”270 She is good with calculation both of numbers and in language, since so much of Greek and Latin scholarship involves a kind of algebraic manipulation of words through conjugations and declensions, that is, versions of themselves. The second paragraph shifts our attention to the ominous Dr. Tessler. His daughter is brilliant, so we assume he is also brilliant. There is a “tale” about him, to the effect that he “had once been the victim of some serious injustice, or considered that he had,”271 which is supposed to account for his reclusive way of life. Aickman implies that Dr. Tessler is a latter day Victor Frankenstein, but without commitment. He is either a victim of injustice, or a paranoid who insists on placing that interpretation on any reversals he might encounter. Sally was raised by him alone, according to a “regimen … reading, domestic drudgery, and obedience.”272 Are we to assume that Dr. Tessler is something like a Prussian taskmaster, coldly engineering his child? Sally Tessler can’t remember anything about her mother, and “had never come across any trace or record of her.”273 This suggests that Sally has not only speculated about her mother, but might have researched her. The failure of any trace to turn up suggests that she might not have had a mother at all; perhaps she was produced by her brilliant father in some other way. Perhaps the development of this other way involved horrific experiments, and he might have been expelled from wherever he came from as a consequence of them, making this is the contretemps that he regards as an injustice. Given the emphasis on study and training, it is implied that Sally is not permitted to develop a personality of her own. “When Sally first appeared at school, she had much more than a grounding in almost every subject taught, and in several which were not taught.”274 What subjects were those, and why weren’t they taught? This could apply, for example, to the study of Akkadian, or advanced physics; subjects for specialists, or obsolete or discredited subjects, like alchemy, for example. It could however also apply to illicit subjects, which would not be taught in any school. What has Sally Tessler seen at home? This is a technique initially perfected in weird fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne: referring to a

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rumour, to what “was said” of someone or something, to create an atmosphere of paranoid attention, to place the reader in a circle of speculators. Our understanding of Mel, the narrator, only develops in the interstices of her description of Sally Tessler; the structure of the story reinforces the speculative association of these two characters. While Sally is foregrounded as the object of interest, details about Mel begin to emerge. She notes Sally’s age to the month, and immediately relates it to her own age. After meeting Sally, the narrator tightens up and keeps pace with her academically; this indirectly reflects on the narrator’s own intelligence, and suggests a rivalry, only to drop this line and turn almost at random to a discussion of Sally’s Teutonic appearance. If we linger over the question of their intellectual parity, we notice the remark that, while she “more or less kept pace with the prodigy,” Mel goes on to say “this, perhaps, was for special reasons.”275 Mel brackets this reference to herself in parentheses, as if it were important to maintain the distinction between her story and Sally’s—why? Is there any danger the two will be confused for one another? Or mixed together? Is there an anxiety about identity in this story? More pointedly—“special reasons?” Such as? This might mean that Mel had non-academic reasons, such as jealousy, for trying to keep up with Sally, or it might mean that Sally held back in order to allow Mel to stay with her. Mel raises this point saying “I owe it to myself to say”276—does she owe it to herself to testify to her own intelligence, which would favour the first of those interpretations, or to testify to Sally’s attachment to her, which would favour the second? Sally has beautiful hair, indifferently done and “untidy”277; this suggests maintenance and convenience, without much thought for social graces. Her figure is “precocious,”278 and this seems to link her intelligence with her sexuality, an equivocal indication that sex, or at least some aspect of reproduction, would be among the subjects not taught in school that Sally already has more than a grounding in. Mel compares her to Tessa in The Constant Nymph, a teenaged girl who dies as a result of a conflict with her sister over a man. Her precocious figure is mentioned probably to reinforce the idea that she will look much the same at any age, and to convey the impression that she might belong to a category that partakes of both adult and child. Her clothing over time is only a succession of steadily enlarged versions of the same outfit; she has an identity that is all the more false for being so rigidly the same. Sally isn’t a little girl growing into adulthood, she’s just a body that grows larger. Her sameness in manner, appearance, her steady application, her plain clothes, all suggest a lack of

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self or at least of traditional self-assertion, an excessive submissiveness to her father. The comparison between her and “publications” that are renewed and enlarged from time to time makes her out to be an edition of some original as well. Aickman lingers over her appearance and her manner perhaps in order to introduce the character of Sally in a predominantly external way, so that the reader is left to conjecture about her. Mel, on the other hand, is not described at all, and withholds information about herself. We are told that Sally is charming and that she “seemed kindly and easy-going in the extreme”279; if this is how she seemed, is she actually kindly and easy-­ going? And is her obliviousness to her own beauty attributable perhaps to the fact that it isn’t really hers, considering she is not exactly herself, but a version of something? This level of consistency simply can’t be accidental. This is Aickman’s gift: the development of micro-impressions in speculation as well as in sensory information. Sally gives Mel a copy of Faust, which seems a little on the nose, and Mel later discovers it to be “a rebound first edition.”280 Not unlike Sally herself in that. The two of them study an illustrated edition of Petronius, the libertine author of Satyricon; the remarkable drawings suggest something pornographic, the “subject illustrated.”281 Sally knows all about it, but in a “disinterested” way, as if the subject were “botany.”282 Mel says this knowledge “influenced my life, so to say, not a little.”283 Does this have any bearing on the failure of Mel’s marriage, which precipitates her return home? After a single paragraph, detached from what comes before and after, summarizing their separation, we take up the story when Mel is 41. Dr. Tessler’s funeral corresponds with Mel’s return, more or less, which means that Aickman has not provided us with any indication that Mel ever saw Dr. Tessler alive. Since Mel recognizes, uncertainly of course, his ghost later on in the story, we have to wonder where she would have seen Dr. Tessler before. Perhaps it’s his resemblance to Sally that makes the identification likely? The funeral causes Mel to think about Sally for the first time in a long while, and this seems to cause Sally’s appearance at her front door, uninvited. Events in the story have a dreamlike way of unfolding, as if the association conjures the thing, blurring the distinction between Mel’s personal identity and the world around her. Sally appears to Mel like a projected memory, unchanged. “Father really died before I was born,”284 she says. This alludes to the injustice that was mentioned before, but Aickman’s

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style goads us into considering a literal interpretation. Is this the same Sally Tessler or a new one? Was the father’s death a precondition of her birth? She was told that her father is ill by “a friend”285 even though Mel is supposed to be her only friend; later on, Mel will refer back to this moment, saying “I had always wondered about the mysterious informant of Dr. Tessler’s passing.”286 Are we to wonder if Sally is lying, and that she received word in some other way that she is not able to discuss? Or did that travelling Sally never return, and is this a replacement, somehow come into existence at home? Mel’s life is over, Sally’s is a mystery; Mel writes, Sally edits, and studies potsherds. Sally has in some way gone unchanged all this time, has been away, but at an archaeological dig rather than in some new community, and Mel has run through life and has come back around again to where she started, as if her foray into adulthood had failed. Dr. Tessler’s house has “tessellated” risers; is Dr. Tessler someone who does something like tessellation, which refers to repetitive ornamental tile patterns? Is he also a repetition of something else? The house is marked by a “depressing” exterior,287 reminiscent of the House of Usher, and by the tessellations that bring Dr. Tessler’s name to mind; a Tessler might be someone who makes repeated patterns. Sally, on this visit, is at last different—perhaps radically different. Whether or not she is Sally, she is not the same. Both she and the house make complementary, negative impressions on Mel. “I had expected eccentricity, discomfort, bookworminess, even perhaps the slightly macabre. But the room was entirely commonplace, and in the most unpleasing fashion.”288 Like Poe’s narrator, she finds the prospect depressing in a way that lacks any romance, even the romance of the grotesque or the terrible. When Mel returns to the house later on and finds the traces of something horrific, and even a room converted into a Gothic stone vault, the result is not unlike the ironically self-aware Gothicism of The Mad Tryst. In this first visit, however, we are being subtly encouraged to imagine that this commonplace room is a blind, a mere set, designed to throw Mel off. It’s as if Sally were aware of Mel’s proclivity for speculating about her, and was looking for a way to nip it in the bud by making a show of normalcy that she simply isn’t capable of sustaining in a convincing way. Aickman is producing a weird effect in the failure of the normal to be convincing, rather than by interpolating something outrageous into the ordinary. Aickman makes a point of telling us that Sally was alone in the house. Why specify this, unless to induce doubt? This is another aspect of Aickman’s technique; he tells us things to clarify a mysterious impression,

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rather than to clear one up. Sally seems faded; is this the original from which others are copied? If so, why would the tessellated copy invite her to meet the battered original? Is Sally’s current model wearing out? Is it time for a new one, perhaps to be generated by gestation? Or is she new, and still in the process of taking on full blood and colour? In any case, there’s no rapport between these so-called friends; in fact, this Sally is almost a stranger. Sally has to “get things going in the house”289 before she can start to work. What things? She goes on to say “Father never went out of his library,”290 which could mean that he is still there. Is he what she needs to “get going”? Mel asks if the house isn’t rather large for only one occupant, and Sally responds by “staring before her. Although it was more as if she stared within her at some unpleasant thought.”291 Shortly thereafter, Sally gulps, addresses Mel, and then stops herself, perhaps from confiding or confessing something. So, she may have a secret; she has a reason not to share it with Mel, although she clearly wants to. By the close of this interview, Mel seems to believe that Sally is suffering as a consequence of being in “that horrible, horrible house,”292 situating the problem in the house, rather than in Sally herself. But, what is the horror, if Mel has only seen the exaggeratedly banal room? Does she want to save Sally from that banality? Or does she already see the banality as a screen for something worse? Even though Sally has told Mel that she wanted “to see much more” of her,293 she then drops Mel, and even mis-addresses some correspondence to her, which suggests further deterioration. She’s much more dissipated when Mel runs across her in the store, but she simply tells Mel not to look at her “like that” adding “After all, Mel, you’re not my mother.”294 Since we know that Sally did not know her mother, or was not supposed to anyway, we have to assume this is not a reference to some hypothetical memory involving Sally and her mother, but a way to return to the uncertainty about who Sally’s mother really was. The questions are the answer; there’s no point in trying to figure out which one is the real or most likely answer when Aickman’s approach entails getting you into a position to ask these questions and entertain the upsetting scenarios that go with them. Sally’s accident might have been a suicide attempt, or an attempt to induce a miscarriage—or both. Everything happens offstage, so that what we know always comes filtered through the imperfect understanding of some witness. Since the accident occurred as Sally was returning from the post office, was she spurred on by some message? Did she send a farewell letter? Discovery of her pregnancy threatens Sally’s reputation, and it is for

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ostensibly altruistic reasons, service to Sally, that Mel agrees to go over her house. The place is locked up, humming with secrecy and danger; the locks are heavy, to resist extreme violence. And yet it is not the danger or the powerful locks, but Mel’s own strange incuriousness that keeps her from examining the dark room or going through the papers upstairs. Where a Lovecraftian protagonist is often motivated by an unalloyed need to know, Mel seems primarily interested in preserving the integrity of her own life. Since this life includes Sally Tessler, she must find out about her, but primarily in order to re-integrate her own identity, given Sally’s importance as a kind of shadow self or competing self. However, in the process, Mel is only finding more gaping holes, or worse—actual answers that she knows she won’t be able to handle, which threaten to blow her own identity apart. This thematizes Aickman’s own reticence in Mel’s refusal to draw conclusions; the barricaded room upstairs, the mutilated toys pantomime a violent scene involving something like a monstrous child, an idea that Sally’s pregnancy has prepared us for even if we were not prepared to wonder if perhaps the render of the toys was also the father of Sally’s child—or an immature Sally? We wonder about both fathers and mothers in this story. When Mel reports back to Miss Garvice, it is clear that they are both withholding information from each other about Sally; while we may understand why Mel might not know how to explain what she found to Miss Garvice, it is notable that she does not speculate about any of these clues to herself either. They are all presented as mere facts. Mel speculates “extensively”295 about the contents of Dr. Tessler’s library, but aren’t there more pressing things to speculate about than that? The library seems at last to be the macabre gothic-in-the-suburbs sort of place that Mel apparently expected or wanted to find when she first visited Dr. Tessler’s house. The bed has been occupied, like the bed upstairs. That comparison is made right away, to indicate the presence of another person sleeping in the house; so it is implied that Sally, Dr. Tessler, and/or perhaps a weird violent infantile person all live here together. Sally is not described as a smoker. The presence of her pyjamas is more unsettling, since it suggests she may sleep down here with someone else—perhaps the smoker; Mel speculates that she sleeps in this reinforced room, so a narrative takes on very slightly more shape: an escape from the upstairs room, Sally leaps out of bed in alarm, or is pulled violently from the bed. Thenceforth she sleeps in the reinforced library, suggesting that the escaped upstairs inmate is still a threat, particularly at night. How and why a stone vault should come to be constructed there—a question one might

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reasonably assume would be among the first to come to mind—is never discussed. Mel dares to assemble only some of the pieces of the puzzle, indeed not recognizing or refusing to recognize elements like the stone room as pieces of any puzzle at all, and, as if this were a kind of invocation, she now sees an apparition of Dr. Tessler. He’s in the sitting room, the most mundane room of the house, and the only one, so far, in which Mel has ever seen anyone. Mel thinks that she has seen Dr. Tessler, and then thinks not; since the story lacks effect if Mel’s experiences are dubious, even if her interpretations are, this has less to do with casting doubt on her judgement and more to do with volatilizing Dr. Tessler’s identity. That she saw someone is never in doubt, nor is it in doubt either that this being was not present in the natural way. It appeared; it disappeared. Mel responds by bringing her own father into the story, as if she were compelled to parallel Sally’s life. Just here, where a conventional horror story would be narrowing down to an ending, Aickman introduces a new character, resisting the sort of shaping that requires a story to climax with a revelation. The living father almost pities Mel for her curiosity and her faltering desire to know, and encourages her to accept, to overlook, and to go on as usual. The story continues after the main character sees a ghost, not to mention all the other strange things she has seen, and what’s more, the story continues to unfold in the usual mundane way. Mel ends up accepting the implications of the events without breaking down, without any particular stress at all. The clues add up to nothing, where in the typical weird tale they usually would; what Aickman gives us instead is like Borges’ garden of forking paths seen from above, with all the possibilities but none of the decisions, none of the differences, no one path. When Mel finally visits the house again, she feels ill, enters, goes downstairs feeling worse, hears someone following her, and passes out. When she comes to, there is a bestial noise coming from upstairs, and Sally is with her. Is that noise coming from her father, or from the escaped inmate, or both? Mel has fallen into the gap between the event and the speculation. What happened to her in that interval? How is it that Sally, who was supposed to be hysterical and confined to the hospital, should be released the very next day, and now calm? She’s dressed curiously, refers to the house as hers, and her hand is “changed … become grey and bony, with protruding knotted veins.”296 She is therefore more like her father now. She offers to show Mel her baby, which, in another kind of horror story, would be the culminating moment, in which all the clues would be placed into a pattern at last, but Mel demurs. However, when Sally assures Mel

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that “it’s possible for a child to be born in a manner you’d never dream of.”297 Aickman comes as close to an explanation as he’s prepared to go. By now, Mel is fighting not to know, to hang on to an ordinary idea of life no matter how much denial this may require. In the end, Mel thinks she will end up joining Sally on her Greek island—in the Cyclades, of course, given the cyclical nature of Sally’s weird existence. Mel is encountering her destiny, which is freely to choose to go along with something almost certainly horrible simply in order to avoid losing all sense of the ordinary. If we now ask whether or not to situate this story on the major or the minor side, we must say that it is one of the more extraordinarily clear examples of minor weird fiction. The ordinary is not banished, not set alongside of some fantastic yonder, but is invaded, infested by itself. The ordinary is purely horrible, and in no exotic sense. It is a kind of stupor, of surrender, of failure.

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“The July Ghost,” by A.S. Byatt A minor ghost story in which the living, rather than the dead, are frozen, trapped in the past, and repeating themselves automatically. From the perspective of the characters, the ordinary seems to be precious, and takes on the appearance of something that can never be recovered once lost. The story itself, however, has a different point of view, in which the ordinary is oblivious repetition. The characters sometimes believe they are struggling to retain something that is already lost, at other times they believe they are struggling to regain something that cannot be regained, and, perhaps most grimly, they believe they have moved on when they haven’t moved at all. The bizarre event is the apparition of the child, or, more specifically, the benign ordinariness and ease of that ghost in comparison with the conflicted, dark, miserable living characters in the story. The story climaxes in the failed sex scene; this is where their denial is at its thinnest. The visitation of the ghost opens for them the possibility of recovery, but they are unable to achieve it. Much of this story’s power comes from the way it situates happiness among the impossibilities that a supernatural encounter can encompass. The ordinary, as a kind of mindless automatism, is incompatible with any experience, happy or sad, and in a way this is the impossibility that the bizarre event conjures up in Byatt’s story: a happy ordinariness. The story is filled with weird implications of the destiny of the characters, centred on Imogen. The mark of destiny is the boy’s smile; it is the sign that will be taken as an invitation, but which will seal the destinies of both characters. Destiny is the certainty of change, but these characters don’t change, and won’t change. The destiny here is precisely that circumstances will change around these unchanging characters, and they will not be able to adapt. They are not strictly passive; they do struggle to escape, and whatever complacency they might feel about the moves they are making towards change is self-deceiving. The smile of the boy’s ghost marks them because they can’t return that smile. They only believe they are changing. The supernatural is produced by the idea that we, like these characters, trap ourselves, and that reality is in our blind spot, especially when we believe we know it. By pointing to the desire in ourselves for things to be unworldly and open, beautiful, Byatt is also showing us how this displacement actually wants happiness to be ineffable and impossible, since

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otherwise our indubitable unhappiness would be in some way attributable to us, instead of an unalterable fact of life. In that case, we might have to change our beloved selves, with all our cherished misery, in order to be happy. It’s much easier simply to yearn for an impossible happiness. Happiness, as these characters conceive of it, is supernatural. It manifests in the return of the nameless boy’s smile at the story’s end; it’s an emblem the unnamed narrator will reach for, but only so as not to have to get up and actually go towards it. Analysis Sylvie Maurel writes that Byatt deals with vulnerabilities in her fiction, both by writing about them and by incorporating vulnerabilities into her poetics.298 In this story, we are introduced to a pair of characters who are struggling with their own vulnerability, trying to become invulnerable. The theme of impotent, ghostly repetition as a coping mechanism is immediately established. The nameless main character, generally only referred to as “the man,” tells the American woman he meets at a party, “I think I must move out of where I’m living.”299 He is currently renting living quarters from a woman named Imogen whom he met at a party, and to whom he said, “I think I must move out of where I’m living.”300 On the former occasion, he was leaving the apartment he’d shared with a woman, Anne, who had just left him, making this encounter with the American woman the third in a series, after Imogen. The American woman is in London because she is walking away from an unfulfilling relationship with a married man. All the characters in the story are marked by their failed attempts to move past loss towards a smiling vision of the future. When the American woman says to herself: “Problems are capable of solution”301 she speaks with the pragmatic optimism that was once considered stereotypically American, but there is also a Proustian irony to the phrase as it is situated in this story. The characters only deepen their problems by their attempts to solve them, and while this has something to do with human short-sightedness and something to do with the limitations of human understanding or foresight, in this story, Byatt implies that people come to identify with their problems to such an extent that they really don’t want them solved, and their attempts to solve these problems are unconsciously intended to prolong or worsen them. Anne abandoned the man, our narrator, leaving him without warning. He came home one day to find a “Dear John” letter waiting for him. He responds to this by moving out, taking advantage of Imogen’s invitation,

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because he imagines Anne returning to their old apartment and finding it locked, and him gone. However, it is clear, even to him, that this is not going to happen, so why go to the trouble of moving, unless it is a way to pretend that he is actually the one leaving her? There is something analogous to this in Imogen’s destruction of all the photos of her dead son, and her refusal to grieve for him, as if she were abandoning him, rather than the other way around. In a way, she has to abandon him in order to be able to want him back, because this makes his return seem dependent on a reversal of her decision to shut him out, rather than the answer to her anguished prayers. The characters in this story seem to suffer more from the idea that they have lost something than from the loss itself, but they also must hide their own selfishness from themselves as well as from others. We know that Imogen’s pain is intense, because she screams when her husband unwittingly repeats the sequence of events leading up to the announcement of her son’s death. The son is never named, his images have been destroyed, and there don’t seem to be any other remnants or traces of him in the house, but this has only transformed him from a painful memory into an ever-present absence, something to which she binds herself all the more tightly by dint of her ceaseless effort to forget him. The man’s loss is not as intense; he can name Anne, and it seems as though he suffers less for missing her as he does for feeling rejected. While Imogen seems to be erasing her son, when her husband shouts: “Nothing will shift you, will it, you won’t try, will you, you just go on and on”302 at her, Byatt is showing us what her loss looks like from the vantage point of her husband, who suffered the same loss. It’s clear that he looks for solace in work and constant travel, and that these two parents are unable to give each other any peace. These overheard words tell us that Noel is trying to move on, and that, from his point of view, Imogen is not. She did not, for example, move out of the house. Imogen tells the man “no illusions are pleasant,”303 which indicates that she is trying to live without them, that she thinks of herself as a disillusioned person who sees reality as it is, thanks to a traumatic loss. We could infer from this that she regards her life prior to her son’s death as an illusion. It also tells us that she likely considers her own demeanour to be a kind of deliberate illusion, and wants the man to know that the effort to appear as if she were not suffering is only compounding her suffering. This would mean that she actually does want people to see her suffering. What she doesn’t want is to give the impression that she wants people to see her suffering, even though she does. If

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she didn’t, why would she make dark comments about illusions not being pleasant? Irony suffuses the man’s encounter with the boy. At first, he is concerned for the boy’s safety, up in the tree. The boy is perfectly safe, since he is dead and beyond harm. When he first speaks to the boy, he asks him if he’s lost anything—the irony here is plain, but this is more than a wink at the audience. It would seem that, now that he’s lost his life, the boy is beyond loss, or happier for having lost his life, perhaps lost a false life, an adult life he would have had, like the grown-ups around him who are all miserable. We should note, too, the man’s reaction to the revelation that the boy is dead. He remarks on how much information Imogen is now prepared to give him, the extent of his intimacy with her, and also feels a bit resentful that she hadn’t told him before and so left him open to embarrassing himself. What he doesn’t do is express or feel any real compassion. He barely registers her loss, and there is certainly no thought of the tragedy—a dead boy. He’s thinking of how she’s opening up to him, and so sees an opening for himself, and also thinks of the figure he cuts, about his own embarrassment. Imogen speaks of her loss, her desire to see the boy, but, as she says, she’s too rational. She wants to see him and doesn’t; she wishes she had gone mad and was able to hallucinate him, but then does that mean she would be satisfied with an illusion? If she’s making wishes, why not wish he was still alive? She doesn’t wish him alive again. She only wishes to see his ghost. To this, we must add two details from the story—first, that she did see him, almost right away, but refused to believe she’d seen his ghost. This implies that her denial is preventing her from seeing him, and that complicates matters. She says she dearly wishes to see him, but it’s her own denial that apparently prevents this. What’s more, and this is the second detail, she destroyed all the photos of him, so she couldn’t see him—at least, not in pictures. Does she really want to see him? Or is she playing a part for her own benefit? Is she pretending to await, stoically, the vision of her son, when that vision would only repeat the loss she suffered before? Imogen must be sensible, rational, and controlled. We see her striving to remain ordinary, and we see how strong her feelings are because they can explode in a scream or a faint. We note too that she screams when she remembers Noel’s arrival with the bad news, but we don’t hear of her screaming when her son actually died. When her son was killed, she was thinking about death going on and on; his death is something that happened to her. She doesn’t seem to think much about what it meant for

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him. The ordinary is something people cling to, but it is a form of blindness. At the same time, Imogen clearly wants other people to see her struggle to remain ordinary; if she were blithely happy and ordinary, then everyone would assume she weren’t suffering, so she has not only to act in an ordinary way, but also to dramatize this ordinariness as a tragic inner struggle that she can only imperfectly conceal. She wants to be admired for the way she bears her loss, which means she has to act ordinary with visible, deliberate cracks or falterings intended to give away the terrible pain she is experiencing, but hiding. This is the reason for remarks like “no illusions are pleasant,”304 but this isn’t a cynical portrait of a hypocritical mother so much as it is a more general comment on human psychology. Imogen’s loss is real and deeply painful—nothing about her behaviour makes sense unless we assume that. So she is, in a way, distracting herself from her real loss by welding her attention onto appearances. We know Byatt is speaking generally because all the characters engage in the same sort of low-key theatrics, and it’s actually this sense of drama, more than their actual losses, which link Imogen and the man. They are both trying to get control over a painful loss, and what links them—this is Byatt’s sheer genius—is the “emotional vacuum” between them.305 That is, they are linked not so much by loss but by its negation; the loss is a presence in their lives, in fact, it makes the person lost in each case too present, overpoweringly present, and so, in self-defence, or vanity, these characters have to overmaster their missing persons by negating the loss, and this is what they have in common. The man is a shit. We know this because he thinks his loss of Anne is worse than Imogen’s loss of her own son, because Anne chose to leave. However, because he has lost someone too, this makes him more appealing to Imogen because they can relate. She does not sympathize with him over Anne at all; but just as Anne is with someone else, not him, so Imogen’s nameless son is seen by him, not by Imogen. Not unlike the judge in Joyce Carol Oates’ story, “Night-Side,” it’s as if these characters can’t afford to see each other, and the ghost becomes an illusion that enables them to play out a reunion with someone they were never that deeply unified with in life. The man finds the proximity of the boy’s ghost “calming and comfortable,”306 while, in Imogen’s presence, he finds “her anxiety and disturbance very hard to bear.”307 He does not rise and fetch Imogen when the boy sits next to him all day long. This ghost is not elusive. He comes right up to you, looks you in the face, and hears you speak. The man doesn’t even try to summon Imogen, even though she seems to

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spend much of her time in the house and is almost certainly at home and within call. Instead, he fulfils his so-called promise to tell her he had seen her son, using a kind of legalistic logic to get out of admitting that he hadn’t wanted her to see him herself, most likely because this would make him superfluous to her, remove him from the position of power he enjoys, owning the image of her son. A false intimacy develops between them. They dither away their time in a stupid bit of casuistry about ghosts and clothing, as if somehow it were possible that someone might come back but not their clothing, and this leads to the equally specious idea that somehow he is seeing her memories. She agrees vehemently, so they both are trying to put the boy back in his grave, to insist he is dead, while creating a would-be intimacy between the two of them as a shared denial. She thinks perhaps she is projecting a madness she is too sensible for on to him, by way of their shared experience of loss; although, their losses are incommensurate and what really unites them is denial, specifically the denial of their own more self-serving motives. The irony is very deep: their false intimacy papers over a real one that could unite them if it weren’t for the fact that they both have to deny what they really want. In a characteristic move, the man interprets the boy’s behaviour to mean that he and Imogen should have sex and produce a new child. There is nowhere in any of this any contemplation of the future, whether or not this would entail marriage, for example. The man is using Imogen’s own desire to forget her loss as a way to get into her bed. He imagines that a pregnancy will allow the ghost to “peacefully vanish”308 into a new child. In bed she is cold, stiff, like a tomb effigy, she has rigour mortis, and this she attributes to her need to keep a “grip” on herself.309 While the man is not described in similar terms, we can see how Byatt is presenting the maintenance of identity as a kind of mortal petrification. We might say that this is an extreme case, but I would argue that the extremity is only a matter of making what is always subtly present more visible. The man’s interpretation of the boy’s behaviour is entirely self-serving throughout the story, and increasingly so; the reader is never given anything but equivocality from the ghost. However, the boy does indicate that there is something he wants, leading the man into the house, but that’s as much as we know until the ending. The story of the American woman has blended in time with the story of Imogen, because these events are repeating themselves. While there is no final moment, there are repeated attempts to arrive at one; so the story has a series of endings. It could have ended at

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each of the last two breaks, rather than pressing on to the actual ending, which is open. Byatt is leading us to believe we are reading a sort of bittersweetly melancholy and inconclusive ghost story in which the ghost simply melts away, leaving the characters in final, tragically dignified positions, but then abruptly pops the ghost back out at us. He’s right there in the man’s room, frowning. The man is abandoning him. The living are pushing the dead away. The boy smiles at him in response to his question as to whether he should stay. The dead do not bind us, but invite us to remember them. Perhaps the smile is an ironic one from the point of view of the story, rather than from the boy’s point of view, meaning that no one can abandon happiness, no matter how elusive it is. But the simplest interpretation would be that the boy’s smile shows us that he isn’t going anywhere. These characters, perhaps mankind in general, cannot abandon loss, or get control over it by leaving or by other stratagems. The loss remains the loss, no matter what.

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“Senora Suerte,” by Tananarive Due This story, told from the point of view of a Cuban exile, a marginalized elderly stroke victim, a loser, is minor. “no one listens to our kind.”310 While it doesn’t directly indict life, it does spell out a sustained meditation on failure and destiny. It comes closest to challenging the idea of reality when it invokes the importance of pure luck, which is the moment when the orderly sequence of cause and effect fails to be predictable. In a bingo game, a game of chance, this is by design, as the story emphasizes; the idea of destiny is delineated in especially clear relief because it gives us the curious combination that destiny constitutes, its unaccountability combined with inevitability. Whoever is touched by Senora Suerte will win the bingo game and die that night, without fail—first they win, then they lose. The bizarre event is the reliability of the prediction of death. The apparition the narrator sees is variable and unstable, being at once a nurse, an angel, and an orisha, and no one else sees it, which means that it is not that significant in itself. The pattern of correct prediction is established and amplified, since the second victim, unlike the first, dies without any outward cause of death, in order to add the necessary element of unaccountability. This story introduces a new approach to destiny. As is often the case in Due’s stories the ending comes before the destined event, the death of the main character in this case. This is an unusual move in weird fiction; usually we see the destiny happen, and of course we do see it with respect to the other characters who predecease Gilberto, but then the question is whether or not Gilberto is like or unlike them in his unluckiness, and by extension whether he is or is not like us. It may be that the decision to end prior to the resolution of Gilberto’s destiny is what will help the mark slip from him onto us; that said, it is important to see that the story ends as it does because it has already accomplished what it has set out to do, and perhaps also because Gilberto’s death cannot be narrated by Gilberto himself unless he is given a posthumous existence that would be too much like another failure, or unless an additional voice is introduced to narrate his death from outside. If the story had ended in either of these ways or in some other conclusive way, the result would be a closed story, where Due gives us an open one. Bingo is the mark of destiny here, the cry and the game, the idea of pure chance, a game that requires all our attention, and which may spell out success for us without our being aware of it if we are sloppy. A game

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that serves as a pastime for the old while they wait for death, with nothing left to do but distract themselves. It’s also a game that will reliably produce a winner; so the question in Bingo is not whether or not you win, but how and when. The supernatural is produced not by the description of a psychic vision but by the imputation to chance that there is some guiding awareness or design behind it, one that may seem evil to some and benign to others. To be clear, this doesn’t seem to be a divine providential plan, but rather a deliberate arbitrariness. The death that Senora Suerte brings is not redemption or punishment. The supernatural arises out of the understanding of chance, that once again there are no external guarantees at work to maintain an intelligible order; in fact, Senora Suerte is an external force that scrambles the intelligible order, skipping over the man who wants to die, who has nothing to lose, and taking others instead. She doesn’t let the game choose, she chooses first, and then the victim wins the game, so her choice seems to undermine chance by fixing the game, but what’s really happening is that the larger selector, life, is becoming apparent to the one who is best able to see it precisely because he has been excluded from it, and lesser forces like the random sequence of bingo fall in line with it. Analysis Gilberto alternately believes the games are a brilliant or inane idea; his feelings about them vary with his medication, so his attitude is also randomly determined by an outside force, the drugs he’s taking. Senora Suerte will be associated with this pharmaceutical brain-scrambling throughout the story. The players are all losers, and the idea seems to be that the strictly empty victories at bingo will somehow distract them from contemplation of all they’ve lost in life. The story’s tone is conversational, although there is no one for Gilberto to talk to; the lack of an interlocutor stands at the head of a long list of things he’s lost, including his homeland, a child also named Gilberto (which doubles his loss311), a career, and two wives. He claims that mentioning the death of his son has gotten him laid, and this seems to be the earliest invocation of a theme of lesser compensation that runs throughout the story. Lose a child, get laid, without making another child. We aren’t asked to condemn him for using this loss to gain something, because of course human beings universally tend to treat suffering of all kinds as ground for recompense—an idea we encountered much more bitterly in Byatt’s story. This idea becomes especially poignant when applied to the elderly. Gilberto goes on to insist on the use of his full

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name, so as not to lose any of that to an abbreviated nickname like “Gil, “and he complains elsewhere of the way his nurse addresses him by his first name only, stripping him of his family name. In general, Gilberto is defined by loss—the loss of his son and his country in particular. In the rest home, he is completely identified with his stroke. He states that everyone in the home is just a bed, an empty and interchangeable space, rather than a person, and the people here are helpless, having lost not only their capacity to take care of themselves, but the dignity that goes with that capacity. Being defined by loss means being presented as a survivor, reduced but unaccountably still present, despite a loss; so there is an odd compensation at work, but one that only rebalances the scales after a setback in order to preserve an equilibrium at a lower level of overall value. We learn that something of the sort happened with Gilberto’s two marriages. He lost his first wife, who was beautiful but cruel to him for reasons even she couldn’t explain—so, one attribute in the good column and one in the bad. In his dreams, he forgives her, and seems to receive forgiveness himself for rejoicing at her death, which is already a kind of rebalancing of the scales. Then he marries Camila, a woman he loves more truly, who is good but plain. One in the good column, one in the bad. It seems that she helps to compensate for the suffering he endured in his first marriage, as if the world wanted to keep him in the game. Her kindness is something more, however, “a feeling we don’t find in this world”312 which makes it too much, something he now is in a position to lose. The value of the present kindness too far outweighs the insignificant debit of her plainness. Camila’s kindness is the only blessing to come to Gilberto in this story, and it appears as an anomaly. Bingo! While Gilberto mentions God, there is very little here about God, and Senora Suerte seems to originate in another model of the universe, one that does not follow an overarching providence. Although he does call her an angel,313 specifically he calls her “my angel, “ which might mean that he sees her as belonging to him, as an emissary of the universe as he conceives of it, rather than as an emissary of the established God of churches. A little later he speculates that she might be the candomblé orisha Oya; since this could have any number of different associations, I won’t try to read anything more into this myself, but as an orisha she would also be a compensatory symbol for those who might worship her in connection with a catholic saint. This syncretism was generated by African slaves as a way to maintain their old religion within an imposed one. When she arrives, the light turns to golden twilight and the walls sing, so there is a

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transformation to an image that is associated with transitional shadings and dying. He at first believes she is a hallucination induced by his drugs, again connecting the two, so there is some measure of uncertainty and a reassuring doubt on his part that makes it clear he isn’t merely delusional. This is further substantiated by her ordinary appearance, behaviour, and name. However, given that this might take us too far in the other direction and cause us to wonder if he isn’t simply projecting something magical onto a real nurse, then we get a description of her eyes, which shine darkly, making her both beautiful and menacing: her gaze “blessing us with personhood.”314 Does this mean that death gives these losers their personhood, or rather that being a person means having a destiny, being a player in the game of chance? Only then does Gilberto see her transfigured, becoming a floating face, like an abstract personhood looking for a host. Her gaze electrifies him and gives him life; part of the depressing aspect of the rest home is the sense that nothing but death can bring change into it, that life, being change, somehow misses it. She attends the Bingo game, like everyone else. “Bingo, you see, is not a game of skill, nor of will. There are no true choices—only luck.”315 While Bingo is appropriate to the setting, it is also appropriate to the theme. “I do not blame the others for not seeing it as I do. They would have to see her.”316 It’s not clear how the others see it; although it seems Due is implying they regard the game as a matter of skill. If the game is life, then this is a fatalistic idea of life that says that there is no skill or will, only luck. He can see this, and Senora Suerte, because he embodies this fact. “her eyes gave me access to the truer vision of her.”317 It’s worth noting that her eyes are what endow him with vision, suggesting he sees things the way she does. Pedro dies after having been marked by the angel’s touch. His oxygen was unplugged, and some people guess that he unplugged it himself to go out on a high note, two victories in Bingo; this only highlights the despair of the inmates who have nothing more to expect from life than this. Afterwards, Gilberto’s confidence in his vision declines. He places more emphasis on the possibility that she was only a hallucination, and things are further complicated by the implication that he might be subject to premonitions, given a family history and a sense of foreboding before his son’s death. This means, mainly, that he is losing the sense of hope or excitement that his vision gave him, and thereafter he experiences a second stroke which costs him what little progress he had made in walking or standing. “I lost my spirit of play”318 he says after this loss and renounces

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the idea of magic. This means that the idea of magic is precisely a desire for lifting of limitations, where here the limitations are getting the better of his desire. However, things change when the game receives a new, more “animated” Bingo caller,319 and in contrast Gilberto is more helpless than ever. Out of this tension the visitation recurs; the vision includes a “spiral shape”320 which seems to reinforce the idea of spinning in place, endless expectation, the rebalancing of the scales without any real progress. We note too the way that the visiting being is consistently associated with Camila, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. While this may indicate that Gilberto is only hallucinating, that would not account for the accuracy of his predictions. It may be that grace or benevolence is the connection, since the discovery of Camila must have been a kind of windfall, a stroke of luck. Bingo! In the end, there is no accounting for the selection, which is in part why Gilberto may hope it falls on him at last.

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Notes 1. Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales and Sketches, Volume 1: 1831–1842. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000; page 397–398. 2. See Moreland, Sean. “‘Torture [d] into Aught of the Sublime’: Poe’s Fall of the House of Burke, Ussher, and Kant.” Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings, edited by Alexandra Urakova. Cranbury: Lehigh University Press, 2013. 3. Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales and Sketches, Volume 1: 1831–1842. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000; pages 400–01. 4. Ibid., page 401. 5. Newell, Jonathan. The Daemonology of Unplumbed Space: Weird Fiction, Disgust, and the Aesthetics of the Unthinkable. Thesis. 2017; page 77. 6. Cook, Jonathan A.  Poe and the Apocalyptic Sublime: “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Papers on Language and Literature. 48.1 (Winter, 2012). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012; page 3. 7. Rampo, Edogawa. Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1956; page 208. 8. Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales and Sketches, Volume 1: 1831–1842. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000; page 216. 9. Rampo, Edogawa. Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1956; page 203. 10. Ibid., page 206. 11. Ibid., page 207. 12. Ibid., page 210. 13. Igarashi, Yoshikuni. “Edogawa Rampo and the Excess of Vision: An Ocular Critique of Modernity in 1920s Japan.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 13, no. 2, 2005, pp.  299–327. Project MUSE, muse. Jhu.edu/article/186808; page 299. 14. Rampo, Edogawa. Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1956; page 219. 15. Ibid., page 213. 16. Ibid. 17. Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Sand-Man and other Night Pieces. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2008; page 1. 18. Ibid., page 11. 19. Ibid., page 10. 20. Ibid., page 12. 21. Ibid., page 1. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., page 3.

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25. Ibid., page 7. 26. Ibid., page 8. 27. Ibid., page 10. 28. Purcell, Elizabeth. “The Crisis of Subjectivity: The Significance of Darstellung and Freedom in E.  T. A.  Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, pp. 44–58; page 44. 29. Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Sand-Man and other Night Pieces. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2008; page 13. 30. Ibid., page 14. 31. Ibid., pages 14–15. 32. Ibid., page 15. 33. Ibid., page 16. 34. Ibid., page 13. 35. Ibid., page 21. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., page 22. 38. Ibid., page 23. 39. Ibid., page 24. 40. Ibid., page 31. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Mighall, Robert. “Dickens and the Gothic.” A Companion to Charles Dickens, edited by David Paroissien. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, page 26. 44. Dupeyron-Lafay, Françoise. “La représentation paradoxale du chemin de fer chez Dickens: fantastique et mythe au service d’une peinture de la modernité dans Dombey and Son (1848) et ‘No. 1 Branch Line. The Signal-­Man’ (1866).” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 2010; page 11. 45. Dickens, Charles. “The Signal-Man.” Edward Gorey’s Haunted Looking Glass, edited by Edward Gorey. New York: Avenel Books, 1984; page 49. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., page 51. 48. Ibid., page 49. 49. Ibid., page 64. 50. Harvey, W.  F. “August Heat.” Edward Gorey’s Haunted Looking Glass, edited by Edward Gorey. New York: Avenel Books, 1984, page 37. 51. Ibid., page 41. 52. Ibid., page 38. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., page 39. 55. Ibid., page 40. 56. Ibid., page 42.

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57. Mahfouz, Naghuib. The Seventh Heaven: Stories of the Supernatural. Translated and Introduced by Raymond Stock. New York: Anchor Books, 2005; page ix. 58. Moussa-Mahmoud, Fatma. “Depth of Vision: The Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 2, 1989, pp. 154–166. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3992747; page 162. 59. Mahfouz, Naghuib. The Seventh Heaven: Stories of the Supernatural. Translated and Introduced by Raymond Stock. New York: Anchor Books, 2005; page 60. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., page 62. 62. Ibid., page 63–64. 63. Ibid., page 68. 64. Ibid., page 69. 65. Ibid., page 75. 66. Hinkle, Lynda L. “Bloodsucking Structures: American Female Vampires as Class Structure Critique.” MP: An Online Feminist Journal, July 2008; page 24. 67. Freeman, Mary Wilkins. “Luella Miller.” American Fantastic Tales, Volume I, ed. by Peter Straub. New  York: Library of America, 2009; page 255. 68. Ibid., page 256. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., page 259–260. 74. Ibid., page 262–3. 75. Ibid., page 264. 76. Ibid., page 265. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., page 267. 79. Camara, Christopher Anthony. Dark Matter: British Weird Fiction and the Substance of Horror, 1880–1927. Dissertation. UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013. https://escholarship.org/uc/ item/4ns5q1fv. Date accessed: 8/12/19; page 71. 80. Joshi, S.  T. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990; page 13. 81. Ibid. 82. Freeman, Nicholas. “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany.” Literature and Theology, Volume 24, Issue 3, September 2010. Pages 242–255; page 242. https://doi-­org.hostos.ezproxy.cuny.edu/10.1093/litthe/frq032

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83. Foster, Emily. The Secret Ceremonies: Critical Essays on Arthur Machen. Edited by Mark Valentine and Timothy J. Jarvis. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2019; page 51. 84. Machen, Arthur. “The White People.” Arthur Machen: The Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2017; page 357. 85. Ibid., page 358. 86. Ibid., page 360. 87. Ibid., page 368. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., page 369. 91. Foster, Emily. The Secret Ceremonies: Critical Essays on Arthur Machen. Edited by Mark Valentine and Timothy J. Jarvis. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2019; page 203. 92. Machen, Arthur. “The White People.” Arthur Machen: The Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2017; page 372. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., page 372–3. 95. Ibid., page 372. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., page 373. 98. Ibid., page 376. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., page 377. 104. Ibid., page 378. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., page 384. 107. Ibid., page 386. 108. Ibid., page 391. 109. Ibid., page 395. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid., page 396. 112. Lovecraft, H.P. Letters to J. Vernon Shea, Carl F. Strauch, and Lee McBride White. Edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2016; page 82.

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113. Machen, Arthur. “The White People.” Arthur Machen: The Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2017; page 399. 114. Ibid., page 398. 115. Cooke, Simon. “Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Library Window’ and the Idea of Adolescent Insanity.” Victorians Institute Journal, Vol 34 (Middle Tennessee State University, January, 2006): p. 243. 116. Oliphant, Margaret. “The Library Window—A Story of the Seen and Unseen.” http://public-­library.uk/ebooks/56/38.pdf, last accessed 8/5/20; page 6. 117. Edmundson, Melissa. “The ‘uncomfortable houses’ of Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant.” Gothic Studies, 12.1 (Manchester University Press, May 2010): p. 51+; page 51. 118. Onions, Oliver. Widdershins. New York: Dover, 1971, page 1. 119. Ibid., page 28. 120. Ibid., page 6. 121. Ibid., page 19. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid., page 31. 124. Ibid., page 19. 125. Ibid., page 38. 126. Ibid., page 11. 127. Ibid., page 21. 128. Ibid., page 36. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid., page 37. 131. Ibid., page 42. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid., page 57. 134. Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Demon Lover.” http://omero.humnet.unipi. it/2006/matdid/201/DemonLover.pdf—last accessed 8/5/20; page 1. This story is a like a minor version of “The Rose-Wood Door,” by Oliver Onions, which describes the whirlwind romance of a soldier returned from World War I after being missing for 12 years, and an atavistic doom that rises out of the past to destroy both him and the protagonist. The term “demon lover” is used in the Onions story. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid., page 2. 139. Ibid., page 3. 140. Ibid., page 4.

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141. Ibid., page 3. 142. Ibid., page 5. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid., page 2. 145. Bonikowsky, Wyatt. “‘Only one antagonist’: The Demon Lover and the Feminine Experience in the Work of Shirley Jackson.” Gothic Studies, 15.2 (Manchester University Press, November 2013): p66+; page 66. 146. Jackson, Shirley. Novels and Stories. New York: The Library of America, 2010; pages 10–12. 147. Ibid., page 13. 148. Ibid., page 14. 149. Ibid., page 22. 150. Kiernan, Caitlin. Houses Under the Sea. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2018, page 225. 151. Ibid., page 215. 152. Ibid., page 213. 153. Ibid. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid. 156. Ibid., page 228. 157. MacDonald, Philip. “Private  – Keep Out!” Black Water 2, edited by Alberto Manguel. New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1990; page 600. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid., page 600–601. 160. Ibid. 161. Ibid. 162. Ibid. 163. Ibid., page 603. 164. Ibid. 165. Ibid., page 604. 166. Ibid. 167. Ibid. 168. Ibid. 169. Ibid., page 605. 170. Ibid. 171. Ibid., page 610. 172. Ibid., page 615. 173. Ibid. 174. Wynne, Madeline Yale. “The Little Room.” American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps. Edited by Peter Straub. New York: The Library of America, 2009; page 219. 175. Ibid., page 225.

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176. Ibid., page 219. 177. Ibid., page 220. 178. Ibid., page 222. 179. Ibid., page 220–1. 180. Ibid., page 223–4. 181. Ibid., page 225. 182. Ibid., page 221. 183. Ibid., page 226. 184. Ibid., page 227. 185. Ibid., page 231. 186. de la Mare, Walter. Strangers and Pilgrims. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2007; page 291. 187. Ibid., page 294. 188. Ibid., page 290. 189. Ibid., page 287. 190. Ibid., page 289. 191. Ibid., page 288. 192. Ibid., page 291. 193. Ibid. 194. Pursglove, Glyn. Reference Guide to Short Fiction. Detroit: Gale Group Inc., 1999; page 291 195. de la Mare, Walter. Strangers and Pilgrims. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2007; page 295. 196. Ibid., page 300. 197. Ibid., page 301. 198. Ibid. 199. Ibid., page 304. 200. Kajita, Yui. “Ghostly Sensations in Walter de la Mare’s Texts: Reading the Body as a Haunted House.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, vol. 61 no. 3 (ELT Press, 2018) pp. 374–388; page 385. 201. de la Mare, Walter. Strangers and Pilgrims. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2007; page 304. 202. Ibid., page 305. 203. Ibid., page 307. 204. Ibid., page 311. 205. Ibid. 206. Aiken, Joan. “Lodgers.” 65 Great Spine Chillers. London: Octopus Books Ltd., 1988; page 9. 207. Ibid., page 11. 208. Ibid., page 13. 209. Ibid. 210. Ibid., page 20.

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211. Weston, Ruth. “Woman as Ghost in Cynthia Asquith: Ghostly Fiction and Autobiography.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 6, no. 1 (University of Tulsa, 1987) pp. 79–96; page 79. 212. Asquith, Cynthia. “God Grante That She Lye Stille.” https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/search/label/Cynthia%20Asquith. Last accessed,8/7/20. 213. Ibid. 214. Ibid. 215. Ibid. 216. Ibid. 217. Ibid. 218. Ibid. 219. Weston, Ruth. “Woman as Ghost in Cynthia Asquith: Ghostly Fiction and Autobiography.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 6, no. 1 (University of Tulsa, 1987), pp. 79–96; page 79. 220. Lovecraft, H.P. Tales. New York: The Library of America, 2005; pages 705–706. 221. Ibid., page 692. 222. Lee, Derek. “Dark Romantic: F.  Scott Fitzgerald and the Specters of Gothic Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature. 41.4 (Indiana University Press, Summer 2018): p. 125+; page 125. 223. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “A Short Trip Home.” http://www.gutenberg.net. au/fsf/A-­SHORT-­TRIP-­HOME.html Last checked 7/8/20. 224. Ibid. 225. Ibid. 226. Ibid. 227. Ibid. 228. Delany, Samuel R. “Joanna Russ and D. W. Griffith.” PMLA, vol. 119, no. 3 (PMLA, 2004); page 302. 229. Russ, Joanna. “My Dear Emily.” The Dark Descent. New York: Tor, 1987; page 516. 230. Ibid. 231. Ibid. 232. Ibid., page 517. 233. Ibid. 234. Ibid. 235. Ibid., page 521. 236. Ibid., page 532. 237. Ibid., page 530. 238. Emmert, Scott D. “A Jaundiced View of America: Robert W. Chambers and The King in Yellow.” Journal of American Culture. Vol. 22, Issue 2 (Bowling Green State University, Summer, 1999); page 39.

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239. Chambers, Robert W. The King in Yellow. New York: Ace Books, 1982; page 83. 240. Davila, Amparo. The Houseguest and Other Stories. New  York: New Directions Press, 2018; page 3. 241. Ibid. 242. Ibid., page 5. 243. Ibid., page 7. 244. Ibid., page 8. 245. Ibid., page 9. 246. Ibid., page 10. 247. Ibid., page 11. 248. Ibid., page 12. 249. Ibid., page 7. 250. Ibid., page 13. 251. Ibid. 252. Ibid. 253. Snaza, Nathan. “‘The Reign of Man is Over’: The Vampire, the Animal and the Human in Maupassant’s ‘Le Horla.’” symploke. 22.1–2 (University of Nebraska Press, Winter-Spring 2014); page 215. 254. Kiernan, Katherine D.  Wickhorst. “L’Entre-Moi: ‘Le Horla’ De Maupassant, Ou Un Monde sans Frontières.” Littérature, no. 139 (2005); page 60. 255. Camara, Anthony C. “Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows.’” Horror Studies, Volume 4, Number 1, 1 April 2013, pp. 43–62; page 43. 256. Ibid., page 53. 257. Penzoldt, Peter. The Supernatural in Fiction. New  York: Humanities Press, 1965; page 229. 258. Newell, Jonathan. The Daemonology of Unplumbed Space: Weird Fiction, Disgust, and the Aesthetics of the Unthinkable. Thesis. 2017. https:// o p e n . l i b r a r y. u b c . c a / c I R c l e / c o l l e c t i o n s / u b c t h e s e s / 2 4 / items/1.0345621 Last accessed 8/7/20; page ii. 259. Blackwood, Algernon. “The Willows.” In The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird. New York: New York Review of Books Press, 2002; page 179. 260. Ibid., page 199. 261. Ibid., page 211. 262. Ibid., page 213. 263. Ibid., page 222. 264. Ibid., page 231. 265. Wharton, Edith. “Afterward.” Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. New York: Modern Library, 1994; page 559.

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266. Weinstock, Jeffrey. Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women, Fordham University Press, 2009. http://ebookcentral.proquest. com/lib/hostos-­ebooks/detail.action?docID=3239440. Last accessed 7/8/20; page 10. 267. Wharton, Edith. “Afterward.” Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. New York: Modern Library, 1994; page 557–8. 268. Ibid., page 542. 269. Cheney electricliterature.com. Cheney, Matt. “The Strange Horrors of Robert Aickman.” Electricliterature.com, 10/28/16. Last accessed: 6/6/19. 270. Aickman, Robert. The Collected Strange Stories, volume I.  Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, and Durtro, 2001; page 73. 271. Ibid. 272. Ibid. 273. Ibid. 274. Ibid. 275. Ibid. 276. Ibid. 277. Ibid. 278. Ibid. 279. Ibid., page 74. 280. Ibid. 281. Ibid. 282. Ibid. 283. Ibid. 284. Ibid. 285. Ibid. 286. Ibid., page 79. 287. Ibid., page 76. 288. Ibid., page 77. 289. Ibid. 290. Ibid. 291. Ibid. 292. Ibid., page 78. 293. Ibid. 294. Ibid. 295. Ibid., page 82. 296. Ibid., page 86. 297. Ibid. 298. See Maurel, Sylvie. “Representing Precariousness and Vulnerability in ‘Raw Material’ by A.9. Byatt.” Études britanniques contemporaines. No. 53 (2017).

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299. Byatt, A.S. “The July Ghost.” The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories. New York: Penguin, 1984; page 499. 300. Ibid., page 500. 301. Ibid. 302. Ibid., page 501. 303. Ibid., page 502. 304. Ibid. 305. Ibid., page 506. 306. Ibid., page 507. 307. Ibid., page 508. 308. Ibid., page 509. 309. Ibid., page 511. 310. Due, Tananarive. Ghost Summer. Germantown, MD: Prime Books, 2015; page 332. 311. Ibid., page 326. 312. Ibid., page 324. 313. Ibid., page 325. 314. Ibid., page 326. 315. Ibid., page 327. 316. Ibid. 317. Ibid. 318. Ibid., page 330. 319. Ibid. 320. Ibid.

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Snaza, Nathan. “‘The Reign of Man is Over’: The Vampire, the Animal and the Human in Maupassant’s ‘Le Horla.’” symploke. 22.1–2 (University of Nebraska Press, Winter–Spring 2014): p215+. de Spinoza, Benedictus. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics, Volume I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Complete Stories. New  York: Modern Library Classics, 2002. Stowe, Elizabeth Beecher. Oldtown Fireside Stories. Boston: James R.  Osgood & Co, 1872. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “The Sullivan Looking-Glass.” https://americanliterature.com/author/harriet-­beecher-­stowe/short-­story/the-­sullivan-­looking-­ glass. Accessed 7/24/19. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” Modern Genre Theory. Ed. David Duff. NY: Longman, 2000. Tynan, Aiden. Deleuze‘s Literary Clinic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Weinstock, Jeffrey. Scare Tactics : Supernatural Fiction by American Women, Fordham University Press, 2009. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ hostos-­ebooks/detail.action?docID=3239440. Last accessed 7/8/20. Weston, Ruth. “Woman as Ghost in Cynthia Asquith: Ghostly Fiction and Autobiography.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 6, no. 1 (University of Tulsa, 1987), pp. 79–96. Wharton, Edith. “Afterward.” Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. New York: Modern Library, 1994. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988. Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Wynne, Madeline Yale. “The Little Room.” American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps. Edited by Peter Straub. New  York: The Library of America, 2009.

Index1

A Abnormal, 12 “Afterward” (Wharton, Edith), 97, 279–283, 315n265, 316n267 Aickman, Robert, 78, 92, 103, 214, 234, 284–294, 316n269, 316n270 Aiken, Joan, 233–236, 313n206 Alice, 75 Allen, Grant, 42, 54n18 Andreyev, Leonid, 90 Aristotelian, 16 “The Ash-Tree,” 115 Asquith, Cynthia, 214, 237–242, 286, 314n211, 314n212, 314n219 Atrocity, 33 At the Gate of Deeper Slumber, 212–215 At the Mountains of Madness, 13 “August Heat” (Harvey, W.F.), 94, 97, 155–158, 160, 308n50 Aurelia (de Nerval, Gerard), 90

B “Bad faith,” 103 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15, 16, 25n10 Ballingrud, Nathan, 95, 116 Barker, Clive, 79 Barron, Laird, 94 Baudelairian, 255, 258 “The Beckoning Fair One” (Onions, Oliver), 74, 80, 192–199, 239 Becoming, 34 Bellmer, Hans, 116 Benjamin, Walter, 114 Benson, A.C., 91, 97, 260 Benson, E.F., 91, 92, 94, 97 Bergson, Henri, 18, 23, 24, 25n11, 53, 80, 107, 111 Bierce, Ambrose, 62, 92 Bigotry, 13 Birth of Tragedy, 20

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Cisco, Weird Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8

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328 

INDEX

Bizarre, 5, 18, 24, 27, 31, 34, 37–39, 42, 44, 50, 52, 53, 57–81, 85–88, 90, 99, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 121, 124, 129, 132, 136, 139, 150, 153, 155, 159, 164, 167, 169–172, 178, 186, 193, 200, 203, 205, 207, 212, 216, 221, 225, 233, 238, 244, 248, 252, 257, 262, 269, 270, 274, 279, 284, 295, 302 Bizarrely, 7 Blackwood, Algernon, 39, 47, 49, 61, 271, 274–278, 315n255, 315n259 Blake, 43 Blanchot, 11 Bloch, Robert, 92 Blumenberg, Hans, 103 Bonikowsky, Wyatt, 312n145 Borges, Jorge Luis, 71, 293 “The Botathen Ghost” (Hawker, Robert Stephen), 117 Bowen, Elizabeth, 95, 200–205, 209, 311n134 Brennan, Walter Payne, 44 Breton, Andre, 99 Brisman, Leslie, 43, 54n21 Brunner, John, 23, 26n19 Bulkin, Nadia, 94 Bullett, Gerald, 32, 33, 35, 41, 54n3 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George Earle Lytton, 49, 63, 248 Burke, 45 Byatt, A.S., 295–301, 303, 316n298, 317n299 Byron, Lord, 15 C Calasso, Roberto, 201 The Call of Cthulhu, 14 Calvinism, 92

Camara, Anthony C., 274, 315n255 Camara, Christopher Anthony, 170, 309n79 Canon, 2 Capitalism, 13 Carmilla (LeFanu), 93 Carnacki the Ghost Finder, 30 Carnivalesque, 15 Carroll, Lewis, 275 Carroll, Noel, 50, 56n30 The Castle of Otranto, 9 Category, 1 Cenobites, 79 Cervantes, 61, 145 Cezanne’s, 11 Chambers, Robert W., 49, 56n28, 257–261, 314n238, 315n239 Cheney, Matt, 285, 316n269 Christianity, 36 A Christmas Carol, 5, 11, 38 “The City of the Singing Flame,” 93 Colebrook, Clare, 10, 25n6, 54n4, 80, 113, 114 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 14, 43–45, 54n13, 75, 76, 98, 99, 101, 259 Collins, Wilkie, 62 Cook, Jonathan, 307n6 Cooke, Simon, 130, 187, 311n115 Cosmopolitics One, 46 Creative Evolution (Bergson, Henri), 80 Crime, 7 D Dada, 100 Dante, 37 Davila, Amparo, 262–267, 315n240 de Balzac, Honore, 115 de la Mare, Walter, 85, 225–232, 313n186, 313n195, 313n200, 313n201

 INDEX 

de Maupassant, Guy, 61, 63, 161, 268–273, 315n253, 315n254 de Nerval, Gerard, 90 de Quincey, Thomas, 99 de Spinoza, Benedictus, 54n10, 60, 62, 65, 75, 99, 106 Death, 11 Delany, Samuel R., 252, 314n228 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 3, 10, 14, 16, 17, 22, 25n3, 25n6, 25n9, 26n12, 26n18, 33, 35, 39, 40, 43, 50, 51, 54n4, 54n7, 54n9, 54n12, 54n15, 55n27, 56n29, 56n31, 59, 60, 64, 68–70, 74, 78, 80, 90, 98, 107, 108, 111, 112, 193 Deleuze and Horror Film (Powell, Dawn), 67 Demon, 20 “The Demon Lover,” 87, 95, 200–211, 213, 311n134, 312n145 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 3, 6, 9, 10, 25n1, 112 Descartes, 38 Destiny, 13, 24, 31, 50, 53, 57, 59, 71, 76, 85, 121, 124, 125, 129–132, 141, 142, 146–148, 150, 154–156, 158–160, 168–171, 185, 186, 193, 200–202, 204, 205, 207, 212, 213, 215, 221, 227, 233, 238, 244, 248, 252, 257, 260, 262, 263, 266, 267, 269, 274, 279–281, 285, 294, 295, 302, 305 Dialogues 2, 68 Dickens, Charles, 38, 61, 94, 104, 150–154, 308n43, 308n44, 308n45 The Disturbing Occurrences, 159–163, 221 Divine Comedy, 37 The Doll, 116

329

Dosse, Desmond, 78 Dracula, 4, 5, 15, 114 Due, Tananarive, 302–306, 317n310 Dunsany, Lord, 92, 94 Dupeyron-Lafay, Françoise, 151, 308n44 E Edmundson, Melissa, 190, 311n117 “The Elixir of Life,” 115 Emmert, Scott D., 257, 314n238 Entity of Lovecraft, 68 Epistemology, 238 Ethics, 33 Evil, 15 Ewald, Francois, 77 Eyre, Jane, 104 F “The Face in the Mirror” (Mathers, Helen), 61 “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 96, 124–131, 151, 152, 233, 307n6 The Fantastic, 26n14, 27, 28, 54n1 Fantasy, 7, 8, 14, 18, 27, 28, 33, 35, 58, 59, 96, 128, 130, 146, 213 Faust, 115 Feldman, Morton, 72 Fisher, Mark, 77 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 248–251, 314n222, 314n223 Folklore, 37 Foster, Emily, 178, 310n83, 310n91 Frankenstein’s monster, 108 Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 164–168, 309n67 Freeman, Nicholas, 164–167, 173, 309n82 Frey, Renea, 25n5 Fuentes, Carlos, 6

330 

INDEX

G Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 96 Gaskel, Elizabeth, 61 Genesis 4:15, 86 “Genius Loci,” 93 Genre, 1–14, 17–20, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 32, 39, 57, 60, 61, 66, 79, 100, 105, 106, 111, 114, 117, 172, 213, 228, 237, 270, 285 German kunstmärchen, 73 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 80, 81, 187, 209 God, 14 God Grante That She Lye Stille, 214, 237–242, 314n212 “Good Country People” (O’Connor, Flannery), 67 Gothic, 9, 124, 125, 128, 131, 151, 239, 242, 248, 290, 292, 308n43 Gothic literature, 101 Gothic romances, 105 Grayling; or Murder Will Out, 6, 21 The Great God Pan, 95, 167, 171, 176, 237, 238 Grundrisse (Marx, Karl), 105 Guattari, Felix, 2, 3, 10, 14, 16, 25n3, 33, 51, 54n12, 55n27, 56n31, 59, 64, 90, 112 H Hamann, Johann Georg, 46 Hamlet, 21 Hand, Elizabeth, 94 Harvey, W. F., 94, 155–158, 308n50 The Haunters and the Haunted, 49 The Haunting, 106 The Haunting of Hill House, 20, 31, 49, 208, 236 Hawker, Robert Stephen, 117 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 287 Hawthorne’s American Claimant, 104

Hawthornian, 93 Heathcliff, 104 Hegel, 52 Helen Vaughan (Machen, Arthur), 93 “Herbert West: Reanimator,” 115 The Hill of Dreams (Machen, Arthur), 68 “The Hill of Trouble” (Benson, A.C.), 91 Hinkle, Lynda L., 164, 166, 309n66 Hodgson, William Hope, 30, 32, 41, 54n6 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 61, 132, 139–149, 307n17, 308n28, 308n29 Holinshed, Raphael, 88 The Horla, 268–273 Horror, 7 “The House of the Nightmare” (White, Edward Lucas), 117 House of Usher, 153, 275, 290 “How to Fight the Devil,” 73 Hume, David, 34, 38–43, 53, 54n11, 54n16, 76, 116, 155, 170 100 Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez, Gabriel), 96 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 104 I “Ibn Hakam Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth,” 71 Identity, 2, 13, 14, 23, 25n9, 31, 45, 65, 76, 77, 79, 86, 88, 90, 93, 96, 100, 112, 121, 124–126, 128–130, 132, 133, 142, 143, 150, 152, 155, 156, 158–162, 166, 168, 170–176, 178–180, 182–185, 193–200, 205, 213, 216–218, 222, 224, 225, 228, 229, 231, 237–244, 246, 247, 251–253, 255, 262, 270, 271, 273, 275, 278, 279, 282, 288, 289, 292, 293, 300

 INDEX 

Igarashi, Yoshikuni, 137, 307n13 “The Imp of the Perverse,” 109 Insane, 12 Insanity, 31, 35, 101, 136, 218, 269, 271, 311n115 In Search of the Unknown, 49 Inspiration, 43 Introduction to Metaphysics, 107 Islamic appellations of God, 159 “The Isle of the Pines,” 62 It (King, Stephen), 93, 96 J Jackson, Shirley, 20, 39, 49, 87, 92, 97, 206–211, 312n145, 312n146 James, M.R., 11, 61, 97, 115 James, William, 33 Jameson, Fredric, 10 Joshi, S.T., 172, 173, 309n80, 310n112 The judge’s house (Stoker), 93 The July Ghost, 295–301, 317n299 K Kafka, 21 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 10 Kajita, Yui, 229, 313n200 Kant, Immanuel, 14, 37, 38, 40–45, 48, 52, 55n22, 64, 65, 70, 98, 101, 139, 140, 145 Kiernan, Caitlin, 65, 94, 212–215, 253, 312n150 Kiernan, Katherine D. Wickhorst, 269, 315n254 King, Stephen, 22, 48, 79, 93, 95, 96 Klossowski, Pierre, 21, 26n16, 32, 54n5 Koko (Straub, Peter), 93 Kristeva, Julia, 59, 73, 98 Krueger, Freddy, 15 Kuttner, Henry, 22

331

L Lacan, 78 Langan, John, 94 “Lazarus,” 90 Le Horla, 315n253 Lee, Derek, 248, 314n222 LeFanu, Joseph Sheridan, 93, 102 Leibniz, 74 Lewis, Matthew, 115 The Library Window, 186–191, 203, 311n115 Ligotti, Thomas, 48, 94 “The Little Mermaid,” 65 The Little Room, 221–224, 312n174 Locke, John, 38–41, 48, 54n13, 54n14 Lodgers, 233–236, 313n206 Lovecraft, H. P., 13, 22, 39, 43, 46–48, 54n20, 55n25, 55n26, 59, 71, 76, 78, 79, 92, 93, 99, 102, 103, 116, 129, 174, 185, 197, 213–215, 238, 243–247, 271, 310n112, 314n220, 315n259 Luella Miller, 164–168, 309n67 The Lurking Fear, 14, 46 M Macbeth, 20, 74, 86, 88, 90, 94, 109–111, 116, 132, 142, 196, 199 MacDonald, George, 73 MacDonald, Philip, 48, 216–221, 312n157 Machen, Arthur, 39, 47, 49, 68, 69, 75, 80, 93, 103, 115, 167, 169–185, 188, 255, 271, 275, 309n82, 310n83, 310n84, 310n91, 310n92, 311n113, 315n259 Madness, 20, 35, 76, 101, 102, 109, 129, 132–134, 136, 137, 144, 149, 172, 187, 200, 208, 209, 217, 245, 269, 272, 273, 300

332 

INDEX

Mad ravings, 12 Magic, 51 Magical realism, 44, 61 Mahfouz, Naghuib, 159–163, 207, 309n57, 309n58, 309n59 Major, 10–18, 21, 22, 27, 36, 46, 51, 58, 63–65, 69, 73, 77, 79–81, 86–98, 102, 105, 107, 108, 111, 114, 121, 132, 133, 139, 143, 150, 156, 164, 165, 169, 170, 175, 192, 193, 198, 216, 217, 248, 253, 255, 257, 268, 274, 279, 281, 283, 294 “Major” literature, 10 Major Spencer, 87 The mark of Cain, 86 Marx, Karl, 25n4, 104, 105 Marshall, Helen, 94 “The Masque of the Red Death,” 96 Matter and Memory, 18 Mathers, Helen, 61 Maturin, Charles, 115 Maurel, Sylvie, 296, 316n298 Meillassoux, Quentin, 43, 54n19 Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 115 Melville, 178 Mephistopheles, 92 Metaphorology (Blumenberg, Hans), 103 Micro-impressions, 71 Mieville, China, 112 Mighall, Robert, 151, 308n43 Milton, 25n4 Milton’s Satan, 19 Minor, 10–18, 21, 23, 27, 36, 46, 49, 51–53, 58, 63–65, 69, 77–80, 86–94, 96, 105, 107–109, 111, 114, 121, 124, 132, 150, 155, 156, 159, 164, 165, 169–171, 175, 186, 190, 198, 200, 206, 212, 216, 217, 221, 225, 233,

237, 242, 243, 248, 252, 253, 255, 258, 262, 268, 274, 278, 279, 294, 295, 302, 311n134 Minor literature, 10 “The Mist” (King, Stephen), 79 Moby Dick, 68 The Monk, 9 Moore, Thomas, 99 Moralizing, 5 Moreland, Sean, 127, 307n2 Morris, William, 73 Moses and Gaspar, 262–267 Moussa-Mahmoud, Fatma, 161, 309n58 My Dear Emily, 15, 63, 116, 252–256, 314n229 The Mysteries of Udolpho, 9 N Newell, Jonathan, 129, 275, 307n5, 315n258 New Orleans, 16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20, 22, 23, 26n15, 95, 105, 108, 109 Night of the Living Dead, 16 1979 film adaptation of Dracula, 15 1931 adaptation of Dracula, 15 Nodier, Charles, 73 No. 1 Branch Line, 151, 308n44 Normal, 8 Norms, Discipline, and the Law (Ewald, Francois), 77 O O’Connor, Flannery, 67 “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad” (James, M.R.), 61 “The Old Nurse’s Story” (Gaskell, Elizabeth), 61

 INDEX 

Olimpia, Hoffmann, 138 Oliphant, Margaret, 186–191, 311n115, 311n117 Omen, 85 Omens, 89–91, 97, 98, 110, 171 Onions, Oliver, 74, 80, 192–199, 311n118, 311n134 Ontology, 238 Other, 6, 59, 73, 77 Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost, 42 The Outsider, 14 P Peer Gynt, 69 Penzoldt, Peter, 315n257 Philosophy of Horror, 50 Plato, 8, 17, 37, 69, 72, 90 Poe, Edgar Allan, 8, 14, 41, 44–46, 55n23, 72, 75, 76, 99, 101, 109, 124–131, 134, 146, 214, 244–246, 269, 275, 290, 307n1, 307n2, 307n3, 307n6, 307n8, 312n174, 315n259 Polidori’s, 15 Powell, Dawn, 67 The Power of Words, 45 Private – Keep Out!, 48, 216–221, 312n157 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 16 Prophecy, 43 Prynne, Hester, 114 Pseudonymous hack, 93 Purcell, Elizabeth, 139, 144, 308n28 Pursglove, Glyn, 228 Q Quinet, Edgar, 73

333

R Racism, 13 “The Raft,” 95 Rampo, Edogawa, 132–138, 148, 307n7, 307n9, 307n13, 307n14 Rasnic Tem, Steve, 94 Reality, 6–8, 12, 16, 17, 20, 21, 27–31, 33, 34, 39, 43, 45, 48, 50, 52, 58–62, 64, 67, 71, 74–77, 81, 87, 90, 92, 101, 103, 104, 112, 113, 116, 121, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141–147, 149, 154, 170, 174, 175, 180, 181, 186, 193, 195, 206–210, 213, 216–219, 221–232, 250, 251, 254, 257, 259, 270, 274, 277, 280, 281, 285, 295, 297, 302 “A Recluse” (de la Mare, Walter), 85, 227 Religion, 36 Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 37 Repetition, 109 Republic, 102 Robespierre, Maximilien, 102 Rochester, 104 Romantically, 9 Ronell, Avital, 1, 6, 9, 25n1 “The Room in the Tower,” 91 Rothko, 72 Russ, Joanna, 15, 63, 116, 252–256, 314n228, 314n229 Ruthven, Lord, 15 S Salomon Maimon, 40, 48, 139 The Sandman, 132–134, 139–149, 190, 307n17, 308n28

334 

INDEX

Sanity, 35, 79, 102, 116, 134, 136, 139, 245, 251, 271, 272 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 103 The School Friend, 284–294 Schultz, David E., 310n112 Science, 12 Science fiction, 35, 61, 146, 271 The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale, 53 Senora Suerte, 302–306 Sexism, 13 The Shadow Over Innsmouth, 13 Shakespeare, 88, 145 A Short Trip Home, 248–252, 314n223 The Signal-Man (Dickens, Charles), 38, 61, 94, 96, 150–154, 308n44, 308n45 The Silver Key, 43 Simms, William Gilmore, 6 Simondon, Gilbert, 24, 26n21, 64, 70, 107 Simulacrum, 8 The Small People, 48 Smith, Clark Ashton, 93, 94 Snaza, Nathan, 269, 315n253 “Sonnet to Science (Poe, Edgar Allan), 76 The Sphynx, 8 Spinozan, 18 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 33–35, 50, 186 Statist, 17 Stengers, Isabelle, 46, 55n24, 63 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 18, 26n13 Stock, Raymond, 159 Stoker, Bram, 15, 93, 253 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 73, 97 Strantzas, Simon, 94 Straub, Peter, 93 The Street of the Eye, 32

Sublime, 12, 45, 68–71, 81, 126, 127, 130, 163, 275, 276 “Sullivan’s Looking Glass,” 97 Supernatural, 6–9, 12, 13, 16–20, 24, 27–39, 41, 43–45, 47–53, 57, 60–67, 72, 73, 78, 85, 88, 91, 96–98, 100, 104, 106–108, 110, 114, 115, 117, 121, 124, 133, 134, 137, 140–142, 149–151, 153, 155–157, 159, 160, 165, 167, 172, 177, 185, 187, 188, 190, 192, 195, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 208–210, 212, 213, 217, 221, 223, 225–228, 230, 231, 233, 236, 238, 245, 248, 250, 253, 254, 257, 262, 266, 272, 275, 280, 281, 284, 295, 296, 303 Surrealism, 100 The Surrealist Manifesto, 99 Symbols, 37 T Taaffe, Sonya, 285 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 106 The Thing Invisible, 32 The Thing on the Doorstep, 238, 243–247 Time, 106 Todorov, Tzvetan, 8, 10, 16, 19–21, 25n7, 25n8, 26n14, 27, 28, 31, 34, 54n1, 142 Tragedy, 20 Transcendentalists, 102 The Traveller with the Pasted Rag Picture, 132–138 “The Treader of the Dust,” 93 Tremblay, Paul, 94 The Turn of the Screw, 4, 28, 30, 86, 187 Twain, Mark, 92 Tynan, Aiden, 81

 INDEX 

U Unreal, 8 Unreality, 33, 34, 136, 195, 206 V Van Mücke, Dorothea, 53, 56n32 Varney the Vampyre (pseudonymous hack), 93, 108 “The Visible Filth” (Ballingrud, Nathan), 95 Voorhees, Jason, 15 W Walpole, Horace, 9 We Are the Dead, 22 Weinstock, Jeffrey, 280, 316n266 Weston, Ruth, 237, 241, 314n211, 314n219 Wharton, Edith, 97, 279–283, 315n265, 316n267

335

What Is Philosophy, 33 White, Edward Lucas, 117 “The White People” (Machen, Arthur), 39, 75, 80, 103, 112, 115, 169–185, 188, 193, 213, 215, 255, 310n84, 310n92, 311n113 “Who Knows?,” 61 Wilde, Oscar, 22, 26n17, 115, 130 Williams, James, 26n20 “The Willows” (Blackwood, Algernon), 61, 95, 274–278, 315n255, 315n259 Wonder, 33 World, 4 Wynne, Madeline Yale, 221–224, 312n174 Y The Yellow Sign, 257–261 “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 80