Rynosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) was a Japanese writer active in Taish period Japan and often called the ‘father of the Japanese short story’. His name loosely translates to ‘Son of Dragon’, as he was born in the year, month, day, and hour of the Dragon. He published his first short story, ‘Rashmon’, while still a student and wrote over one hundred more in his lifetime. Depression and hallucinations hounded him and he eventually committed suicide at the age of thirty-five. His dying words in his will claimed he felt a ‘vague uneasiness’. The story analyzed here, ‘The Hell Screen’ (1918), is a masterpiece, with the ‘weird’ always ever a glimmer in the background.

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When Sartre wrote “Hell is other people”, he echoed a sentiment expressed in 1927 by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa that “Life is more hellish than hell itself”^[i]. You’d be forgiven for thinking the life of the Japanese author resembled the pages of a gothic novel. His mother, declared insane in the year of his birth, lived the rest of her life hidden upstairs. Bullied and sickly at school, he dedicated his short life to literature, living through periods of great social upheaval in Japan. His adult life was marked with turmoil, including house fires, failed suicide pacts and affairs. In 1927, following ongoing mental health issues, he committed suicide by barbiturate overdose, falling “asleep while reading the Bible.”^[ii]

Yet to reduce Akutagawa’s life to the comparison of a literary genre is to do a disservice to his contributions to literature, both in Japan and abroad. His writing explores the liminal spaces, where the supernatural creeps into our world, a world where the devil transforms into a flying book, dragons appear from lakes, and a man awakes from the afterlife with his legs replaced by those of a horse. ‘Hell Screen’, published in 1918, epitomises this encroachment of the underworld into art, and offers us a heartbreaking metaphor for Akutagawa’s own life.

‘Hell Screen’ follows the classic horror narrative where moral degeneracy leads to punishment. In this case, the artist Yoshihide paints blasphemous images of the gods. His virtuous and beautiful daughter Yuzuki is the only person he loves. When Yoshihide is commissioned to paint a folding screen depicting the eight Buddhist hells for the Lord of Horikawa, Yuzuki is quickly offered a role in court; while Akutagawa leaves her story to subtext, her loss of virtue and fall from favour screams between the lines.

Told from the perspective of a servant who is quick to uphold the character of his master, Akutagawa contrasts this obsequious voice with the actions of the Lord. The Lord of Horikawa is acknowledged by the servant as a man with a “kind and generous heart”, yet when a bridge was damaged, “he offered his favourite boy attendants as human pillars to propitiate the gods.” This is listed alongside reprimanding spectres, walking among ghosts and a man giving thanks for being trampled by the Lordship’s ox. It’s written in such a praising manner that we can easily skip past the horror of the Lord of Horikawa. Who is this man who commands spirits and offers human sacrifices? Does not human life mean anything to him?

It immediately sets up the biased narrator, who praises his master, completely ignorant of his character failings. Only one other novel has captured this same repressed voice of servitude, which makes excuses for the master’s terrible transgressions: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. When the servant witnesses the sexual-assault and possible rape of Yuzuki by the Lord of Horikawa, he claims “On account of my inborn stupidity, I only understand what shines as clear as daylight under my nose,” and proceeds to sanction his master’s terrible crime by ushering the Yuzuki back to her room. In Akutagawa’s consistency with voice, he never explicitly outlines the crimes of the Lord of Horikawa; there is the untied nightgown, her unwillingness to name her attacker, and the receding footsteps of a man into the dark. Later, the Lord of Horikawa refers to her as a sinful woman, yet how would he know her sin unless he was a participant in it?

While his young daughter lives at the palace, Yoshihide continues his work on the hell screen. He is not convinced of the evidence of the spiritual world; he’s a cynic. When a woman delivers a horrifying message during spirit possession, he merely uses her as model for his paintings.

“Yoshihide did inconceivably sacrilegious things. In picturing the goddess Kichijoten, he copied the face of an abject courtesan, and in picturing the King of the Magical Science Fudo, the god that destroys all demons, he copied a thief’s figure…”

It is Yoshihide’s rule that he can only paint what he has seen. The supernatural encroaches on his waking and sleeping in the form of fox spirits and infernal torturers. Yoshihide abuses his apprentices for the sake of authentic illustrations; he chains one up until his circulation is cut off and “his thick body, face, chest and limbs had become red and then livid in no time.”  Another apprentice is mauled by a horned owl as Yoshihide sketches the scene. On discovering rotting corpses in the street, the artist sits down and paints them.

Yet these horrors are not enough for Yoshihide. There is one thing missing from the screen: a woman in a flaming carriage falling from a bridge. While you can see the end coming, it is in the intense detail of Yuzuki’s death as the Lord of Horikawa and Yoshihide watch on, that Akutagawa demonstrates his mastery of the short story. Details such as the “the length of her black hair intertwined with flames as she tried to shake off the spreading fire, the beauty of the cherry-blossom-coloured Chinese dress… among the red flames sprinkled with golden dust appeared the girl, biting on her gag and writhing to the point of breaking the chain that bounded her.” Akutagawa is willing to linger on this moment, to see it from every perspective. The reader feels the heat of the flames, Yuzuki’s cries and the shrieks of the monkey as they are both burned alive.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a horror story without a moral. In witnessing the final hell screen, the great priest expresses “Whatever talent they may have in any branch of learning or art, those who did not live according to the five virtues of Confucius, benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom and fidelity, are to be condemned to Hell.”

But Akutagawa’s messages are subtler; Yuzuki, the embodiment of purity, lives hell on earth. By the end of the story, the Lord of Horikawa sits on his throne, admiring the horror of his hell screen, unpunished by the evil he has commissioned. The servant still refuses to believe the rumours that the murder of Yuzuki was “vengeance for the Lord’s thwarted love,” despite witnessing first-hand evidence to the contrary. Having survived his daughter, Yoshihide hangs himself and is left to an unknown grave, covered in moss. Therein lies the horror; neither the pure can escape hell on earth, or the evil, hell in death.

It would be amiss not to compare ‘Hell Screen’ to Akutagawa’s later work, ‘Spinning Gears’, which offers insight into his own perspective of the story, and the impact of his mental health in writing ‘Hell Screen’. The narrator laments that “Politics, business, art, science: all seemed just a mottled layer of enamel covering over this life in all its horror.”^[iii]

Later he reflects that despite peaceful places of refuge, there is no escaping the real world. “I knew all too well what sins and tragedies had occurred here in the space of one short year. The doctor bent on murdering his patients by slow poisoning, the old woman who set fire to the home of her adopted son and his wife, the lawyer who tried to snatch his younger sister’s assets: for me, seeing the homes of such people was always like seeing hell in human life itself.”^[iv] His insistence that he has witnessed hell on earth infiltrated his stories; there are few with his ability to capture the borderline spaces where the supernatural infringes on everyday life. In knowing his struggles with mental health and suicide, his stories embody a melancholy sadness at such a tragic loss of life.

Haruki Murakami writes “What Akutagawa chose to do was to cloak human shame in the artifice of storytelling and a sophisticated stylistic technique: this was how he lived and this was how he wrote.”^[v] His influence on literature and art is not to be understated. He is most well known in the west through Akira Kurasawa’s film Rashômon, based on Akutagawa’s short story ‘In A Bamboo Grove’. The Akutagawa Prize, established in his honour in 1935, is one of Japan’s premier literary awards. Aside from this, his short stories are some of the most accomplished works of brevity, surgical detail and subtext in the 20^th Century.

In fiction, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa stands as Virgil, our guide to hell. Only this time the gates open inwards to our lives.

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[i] p. 219 Ryūnosuke, A., 2006. Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories. (J. Rubin Trans.) London: Penguin Classics.

[ii] Ibid. p. xvi

[iii] Ibid. p. 216

[iv] Ibid. p. 233

[v] Ibid. p. xxx

The post 101 Weird Writers #46 — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

K. J. Bishop (1972–) is an Australian writer and artist. In 2004, her neo-Decadent fantasy novel The Etched City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and she won the William L. Crawford Award, the Ditmar Award for Best Novel, and the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. Her work has appeared in several publications including Leviathan 4, Fantasy magazine, and Subterranean magazine. Most infamously, her novella ‘Maldoror Abroad’ appeared in Album Zutique; the story riffed on the original Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) by Isidore Lucien Ducasse under the pen name ‘Comte de Lautréamont’. Her tale ‘Saving the Gleeful Horse’ (2010) shares affinities with Decadent modes of writing, including the Alfred Kubin excerpt that opened The Weird. More can be found from Bishop at her personal website.

“Saving the Gleeful Horse” by K.J. Bishop

“A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.” (Kristeva, 4)

“Saving the Gleeful Horse” presents an interesting case of a story that is perhaps suitable to categorization as fable or, more specifically, the New Wave Fabulism subgenre; perhaps not. In it are “redemption” and strange bargains, magical women, princes, Rabelaisian gigantism and moments of the carnivalesque, and any number of other traditional landmarks that one might find. Molimus, the narrator, is 8 feet tall and lives under a bridge, where he collects refuse flowing downstream to sell and make something of a living. It seems the reader is invited to at least consider the possibility that the protagonist should be seen as a troll given these converging details; at the very least he is an abnormally large entity that in many other ways appears to be human. We know little of Molimus save through inferences we might make from his compassionate act of trying to save the “life” of the injured eponymous horse via extraordinary means and self-sacrifice. To do so, he seeks out a mysterious “woman or a woman-shaped thing” (174) with mysterious powers in a mysterious and secluded cloister—the Garth of the Aorist. There he engages in ritual and magical bargaining anchored in bodily exchanges that come at no small price to himself. The White Ma’at has goals of her own following her magical imprisonment by her enemy, Prince November, who operates at the periphery of Molimus’s desires and parodies the story’s pattern of bodily exchange and expulsion by drinking “knowledge from the vein on her forehead” (176). The landmarks and stage directions of a fable are all there, but there are more profound concerns than moral lessons at play, some of which are manifest even in the use of the phrase, “Garth (suggestive of containment and limitation) of the Aorist” (suggestive of being extensible and limitless). These concepts return later in the story as Molimus undergoes a transubstantiation into “the smoke of chimneys and bus exhausts” (180) and roams the town, untethered from both his bodily limits and his paltry living space beneath the bridge and the attendant debris collection.

Punctures

Apart from its fabulist qualities, “Saving the Gleeful Horse” can be read as a subtle and complex work of body horror, through which permeate anxieties of insertion, evisceration, corporeal dispersal, and the contingencies of bodily functionality, the narrative success of which follows from the use of convincing ambiguities of plot, setting, and character. The characters are divorced (but only partly so) from “real” human bodies by the use of carnivalesque pageantry, magical powers, unusual physical characteristics, and subterfuge in order to add complexity to the story’s formulation of corporeality, but, if nothing else, the motivations of the two main characters seem all too human even if they are in fact a giant troll and quasi-human witch. Bishop juxtaposes animate but ambiguous “persons” and inanimate (or should-be inanimate) items to create tension and purposely confound the reader’s sympathies in the incarnation of Molimus (either an impossibly large human or a troll) and the White Ma’at (either a “woman or a woman-shaped thing”). (174)

Our opening image in the story is that of a horse or horse-shaped piñata of sorts being bashed open and emptied of its contents by playfully indifferent children. Bishop takes care to explicitly note the action’s brutality as it is perceived by Molimus. The perception of vitality on the part of the story’s characters becomes an ordering of value. Soon, our narrator is introduced—an 8‑foot character who resembles a human but may perfectly well be a troll as we’re invited to suspect by his impossible dimensions. But before we find out anything about Molimus, Bishop has already set up ground rules that need to be traced throughout the narrative in an opening passage that might be easy to overlook but is nonetheless essential for understanding the story:

“Children are cruel. No one who has lived in the world need ask for proof of that. So it is nothing for them to beat a living creature—a rare, marvelous creature at that—to death. They do so in order to seize the treasure inside it, but one sees the pleasure they take in this assassination of life, even before the plunder starts. Their laughter bounces…until holes open in its body (emphasis added) and the prizes—caramels, toys, game money printed with pictures of wrestlers and cartoon characters—rain down into their hands”. (171)

What to the children is a mere lifeless object is, to Molimus, a living being that has been subjected to great violence and warrants his sympathies. Here, cruelty is both a normative and marginalizing force: it normalizes an order in which presumably human children occupy a privileged space in the world of the story while Molimus resides at the margins, sympathetic to the piñata/creatures the children perceive as inert. What the reader might likewise consider inert objects are assigned a vitality. Internal “vital organs” fall from the piñata bodies and are commodified “prizes” that carry a value for some but not others, the creatures’ evisceration a moment of delight to the children. When our protagonist discovers the Gleeful Horse, he describes it being “as full of holes as a sieve”. (172) (Though the sex of the protagonist is withheld and obscured through first-person narration, for the purposes of this essay the construction of Molimus’s name and mention of “men’s shirts” seem to suggest that the character is meant to be read as male. Yet there is certainly the possibility of reading the character otherwise or as purposely ambiguous.) Where an author like Ligotti imbues animation in things otherwise inanimate to make them supernatural, Bishop locates that which is dead or inert within the animate to explore anxieties about our mortality. At this juncture, it seems fruitful to turn to Kristeva’s discussion of the abject. The explicit connections in the story between refuse and vitality suggest that there are perhaps not so many distinctions as we’d like to think, and that there is a power exchange between them that creates a subject-object relationship. It is important to note that refuse, or “filth”, is “not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin. Matter issuing from them [the orifices of the body] is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. […] The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.” (Kristeva, 69)

Molimus, who “has a foot in both worlds” (175), is empathetic to the horse regarded as an object of the children’s destructive cruelty, and, seeking to save its life after its injuries, which he feels will restore happiness to the area, he consults with a mysterious woman “or woman-like thing” that once held power—the White Ma’at. It’s worth noting in the context of these dual worlds that “Ma’at” refers, among other things, to ancient Egyptian conceptions of truth, balance, order, and harmony, which were often personified as a goddess regulating stars, seasons, and actions of mortals. Molimus’s desperate empathy for the horse manifests itself in a manner coherent with the structure of the story’s use of illness when he states, “I feel sick…not for my sake but for the sake of my horse.” (177) The Ma’at reveals to Molimus the secrets of the objects he perceives as living things, whose internal plastic “organs” constitute “starlike pieces” and are essential to their survival. But those secrets apply to Molimus as well. The White Ma’at is imprisoned in a cloister after being overthrown from her position of power by Prince November, and she seeks to reclaim her position, a goal into which Molimus’s desire to save the horse is subsumed. His agency is both realized but also subverted through their magical bargain.

“Nevertheless, does not fear hide an aggression, a violence that returns to its source, its sign having been inverted? What was there in the beginning: want, deprivation, original fear, or the violence of rejection, aggressivity, the deadly death drive?” (Kristeva, 38)

By the conclusion of the story, a structural balance has been achieved in which the ignorant cruelty of the children visited upon “inanimate” creatures has been reversed and revisited upon them by Molimus in the form of a hollowing illness that he has become. Ironically, he seems just as unaware as the children did when inflicting torments on the creatures for which Molimus feels profound sympathy. Although he has achieved his own ends, the darker implication is that the sickness he inflicts on them will continue for the indefinite future—the apparent aim of the White Ma’at’s bargain.

Shame

To interpret “Saving the Gleeful Horse” as a kind of body horror fable by way of the abject, it is crucial to understand the places where the reader can identify connections between the characters’ bodily limitations and hierarchical positions within the story. For the Gleeful Horse and other inert-but-alive objects, junk goes in and junk comes out. Vital innards are simultaneously cheap plastic and starlike matter. Animate bodies are pushed into inanimate ones both in specific individuals and en masse, such as when the White Ma’at pushes her losing armies “into the chalk hills like raisins in pudding, so that they all died in the white dark” (176). The expulsion and consumption of bodily parts and fluids are a system of power exchange throughout the story that creates the hierarchies of the story’s world. As either an unusually large human or a particularly humanesque troll, Molimus is in a position of superiority to the pet / companion he is caring for; yet Molimus himself is in a position inferior to that held by the mysterious and powerful woman in the Garth of the Aorist. However, after Molimus learns of the functions of the plastic parts, he is induced to experience a shameful realization of his own corporeal limitations in a mirror of the toys he expresses concern for in an act of regurgitating a plastic piece from his own body.

“Why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement, or everything that is assimilated to them, from nail-parings to decay, represent—like a metaphor that would have become incarnate—the objective frailty of symbolic order?” (Kristeva, 70)

Steven Van Wolputte provides a useful anthropological overview of the history of conceptions of the body in relation to self, society, polity, and ideology that provides some insight into this reading of “Saving the Gleeful Horse” as a body horror fable. Throughout the recent history of critical analyses of conceptions of the body’s significance and modes of operation, Van Wolputte identifies a number of distinctions within the field of medical anthropology that might be applied in different ways to the story. In summation:

“The individual (note this shift from the “natural”) body is the domain of phenomenological analysis as it studies the “lived” or embodied experiences people have of their bodies. The social body, in contrast, relates to the ways the body (including its products: blood, milk, etc.) operates as a natural symbol, as a tool at hand to think and represent social relationships such as gender, kinship, and mode of production (see Featherstone et al. 1991). A third dimension states that power and control are embodied as well. This is the body politic: the human body as tool or weapon of domestication and disciplination and of identification, subjection, and resistance. These three bodies also constitute three levels of experience and analysis. What mediates between them, what according to the authors interarticulates nature, society, and individual, are emotions. As proto-symbols or proto-rituals emotions affect experience most immediately. Hence they can bridge the mind/body divide and bring the three bodies together.” (254–255)

The story interacts with all of these conceptions of the uses of the body—the ritualistic bargaining and exchange of bodily fluids, the White Ma’at’s exploitation of Molimus’s bodily transformation to exercise power and revenge on her enemies, the identification of bodily cruelty and the “lived” experience of evisceration in the context of a setting in which the inert is subjectively viewed as alive, and in the deliberate usage of bodily organs/plastic trinkets as commodity and item of transactional exchange. It is also important to note Kristeva’s own distinctions between intimate suffering [la douleur] and public horror in articulating abjection (see Keltner) and how those conceptually cohere to the anthropological perspectives outlined by Van Wolputte. Keltner summarizes Kristeva’s distinction succinctly: “abjection is the shape that the border between the intimate and the public takes; or rather, abjection is the fate of intimacy in the historical context of an unavoidable interiorization of public horror.” The description seems apt in the context of “Saving the Gleeful Horse.” Molimus’s bargain with the White Ma’at occurs at the physical site of bodily consumptive exchange that unalterably subjects the protagonist to of the Ma’at’s power; he becomes a literal public horror in the form of a sickness-inducing smoke. The agency he exerts to seek a cure for the Gleeful Horse appears to be subsumed by the Ma’at’s payment of her “debts” or revenge during this process.

Returning to Van Wolputte’s point that emotions “interarticulate” among these different levels of bodily experience, we must note that in Bishop’s story, there is a clear and explicit link between bodily mortification, emotion, and power relationships. The most readily identifiable indicators of emotional state within the story both involve bodily expulsion through tears and regurgitation, or exchanges of bodily fluid. We know little else of Molimus’s emotional life. Upon first encountering the Gleeful Horse, Molimus states:

“To see their poor empty bodies makes me cry into the water…the bodies last for very little time after they have yielded up the ghost.” (172)

Later, as he bargains with the White Ma’at for a way to save the horse and learns of the bodily fragility of both it and himself, there is a scene eerily reminiscent of the Kristeva passage that opens this essay. In this scene, Molimus encounters one of his own physical limitations, which establishes a set of conditions linked to shame and bodily expulsion under which the Gleeful Horse can continue to exist. The dual descriptions of these bits of plastic pieces and starlike matter echo the contradictions that underlie human waste as expelled (dead) matter and a byproduct of processes necessary for the continuation of life:

“I feel a qualm, as if conspiracy sits here with us…I am suddenly ill with a spasm that feels like shame (emphasis added). Whatever it is, here in the Garth of the Aorist it has the shape of a real, solid thing stuck in my gullet, making me gag around it. My tongue feels it as it comes up with a mouthful of bile. It is annular, with an embellishment on one side: a sort of ornamented sphincter. I spit the plastic ring out onto the floor…” (178)

What is shame if not a momentary realization of coerced submission to a learned order against which selfhood exists in spite of itself and that order, in this case that of animate over inanimate? Molimus’s expelled plastic toy is Kristeva’s expelled waste matter. We don’t know much about Molimus other than what we can infer from his motivations, but one of the few points at which there is an explicit statement of emotion occurs during this momentary realization of bodily limit. The discovery of the plastic ring in his mouth and its immediate expulsion induces a sense of shame, which serves as a subdued but cathartic reinforcement of his place in the story’s world just as such a private bodily expulsion serves as a persistent reminder of human limit and temporality.

“Nevertheless, does not fear hide an aggression, a violence that returns to its source, its sign having been inverted?” (Kristeva, 38)

While an exhaustive analysis of “Saving the Gleeful Horse” from Van Wolputte’s summarized anthropological perspectives is not within the scope of this essay, it is useful to identify these connections as they relate to the Kristevan abject. We can then understand why the story elicits a subtle horror in response to its pattern of bodily anxiety. Kristeva asks, “Why does corporeal waste…represent…the objective frailty of symbolic order?” And what better illustration of abjecting the self than the case of Molimus bargaining with body fluids and organs and thus becoming disembodied, his agency actualized in the shame of the realization of bodily limit and the subsequent process of subsumption into the larger will of the Ma’at, which recontextualizes the effects of his own agency in a manner not dissimilar from that which might occur through the catharsis of cosmic horror? In the order of power relations in the story, this moment of exchange subsumes his “person-” or “trollhood,” such as it is, by recontextualizing his agency. The transactional nature of bodily exchanges within the story subject Molimus to a process of sublimation; his corporeality is renounced in exchange for continuation in the abjected form of smoke. He seems to remain partly himself while transitioning to a form subjected to an order imposed by the White Ma’at as a condition of fulfillment. What might have been written as catharsis is instead subdued and anticlimactic, for Bishop extends the story beyond Molimus’s own body and to the bodily limits of the townsfolk from whom he pillages organs in an ironic structural parody of the callousness described in the opening paragraph of the story.

The theme of casual cruelty replays from Molimus’s new perspective as an incorporeal being whose consciousness is carried on wisps of smoke. In his conversation with the White Ma’at early in the story, he cannot comprehend how the children can be so cruel to creatures he perceives as living. To fulfill his bargain to save the Gleeful Horse, he must perpetrate the same kinds of acts upon others, seemingly unaware of his cruelty) Likewise, he does not seem to appreciate or have concern for the cruelty he in turn inflicts upon others even in service of preserving another life, and this seems a crucial point to identify. “…they say the smoke gives them (the Treasure Children) the dreams in exchange for their lives. The dreams…they confide about to friends and siblings before they are seized by the silence that comes with the hollowing (emphasis added) effect of the illness…” (181) The subjectivity of bodily value and perceived validity within a particular set of rules is precisely that which produces catharsis in a Kristevan interpretation, and it is a testament to Bishop’s restraint that she subdues this catharsis to conclude the story with the indefinite continuation of Molimus’s infliction of sickness upon the children. He is “the future” and represents a new ordering of the rules of this world.

“There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.” (Kristeva, 1)

Sick

Much of Bishop’s work is preoccupied with themes of disease and bodily hybridization, of “having a foot in both worlds” in some way or another. These notions ask questions common to all effective art: what is the self and its relationship to corporeality? What are the limits of existence? What are the conditions under which those limits might be tested? Often, the borderlands between differing species, living and dead, deformation and bodily integrity, sickness and health, are disputed territories entwined in transactional relationships with one another, as in “Saving the Gleeful Horse.” Disease also features in stories such as “The Art of Dying” and “Maldoror Abroad,” the latter of which suggests that illness consolidates impulses toward destruction of world and destruction of self into a united, disgusted rejection of the limits that have been prescribed by corporeality. And yet, even in a different story’s context, the bodily byproducts of illness are transactional:

“I’ve been on my knees in the toilet, vomiting all kinds of filth. These offerings (emphasis added) from my private ecosystem are flowing to the oceans of the world, and in time will enter the rain that falls everywhere. Close the entrances to your body; eat and drink nothing.” (“Maldoror Abroad,” 98)

In The Etched City, in which Raule, a healer and surgeon, encounters the transformative properties of illness juxtaposed with the transformative powers of art:

“…she had observed that in the view of the healthy, the sick often appeared as monsters. When the monstrosity was too extreme, whether in the form of disease, old age, madness, or deformity, the sufferer would be shunned regardless of whether their condition was contagious or not. She had concluded that it was human nature to superstitiously fear the transferral of misfortunate via some imagined, intangible but highly conductive medium. And now she knew that her own urge to study the frailties and failures of the flesh, and to understand their causes, was born of a primitive desire to immunise herself against them.” (61)

Sculptures such as Bishop’s Plague Doctor Bird distill the themes of human/nonhuman hybridization and illness.

Even as life has a value determined by social relationships in “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” illness and “the ill” as simultaneously a physical description and a social category are in constant conceptual flux—byproducts expelled by social and scientific process. Illness occupies an in-between borderland in a binary system of living and dead or animate and inanimate, perhaps not unlike Molimus’s bodily sublimation into an ephemeral smoke that seems to retain a kind of agency. To be ill is to be forced to directly confront, like Molimus and his plastic ring, the recursively vital and decaying conditions for life even as its embodiment necessarily moves toward death. To be ill is to be marginalized from life by being forced into a social category distinct from health and its implications of full participation, and the “hollowing” plague visited upon the Treasure Children becomes a balancing act for their own prior acts of marginalization of the Gleeful Horse and its kind. The asymmetry between the continuous flux of illness’s effect on the body and the static categories of “healthy” and “ill” is as rich a mine of anxiety to examine as any other, and the particulars of the social context in which illness exists, whether real or fantastical, leave open seemingly infinite ways in which this relationship might be presented. Even as Molimus seems not entirely aware of what his bargain means, the White Ma’at tells him, “The future will work through you.” (177) That future, for the Treasure Children, is illness and the marginalization it entails. In Dodie Bellamy’s mediations on illness, she states: “Julia Kristeva: There are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion.” (79).  As Molimus once was relegated to the space beneath a bridge, so now are the children confined to the margins as victims of the illness he brings to them. Perhaps, as Bellamy puts it elsewhere in a litany of prophesied power inversions exchanged between the healthy and ill through the mediations of language, “When the sick rule the world mortality will be sexy. When the sick rule the world, all writing will be short and succinct, no paragraphs will be longer than two sentences so we can comprehend them through the brain fog (emphasis added) the well bring to us daily.” (36)

______

Works Cited

Bellamy, Dodie. When the Sick Rule the World. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2015. Print.

Bishop, K.J. The Etched City. New York: Bantam Spectra, 2004. Print.

Bishop, K.J. “Saving the Gleeful Horse”. That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote. Self-published, 2012. Print.

Keltner, Stacey. Kristeva. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print.

Van Wolputte, Steven. “Hang on to Your Self: Of Bodies, Embodiment, and Selves”. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 33 (2004), pp. 251–269. Annual Reviews. 2004.

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Ramsey Campbell (1946–) is an award-winning horror-fiction author from Liverpool, England, mentored by Lovecraft protégé August Derleth. In his stories, largely evoking working- or middle-class settings, Campbell manages to update the weird tale and apply his keen ability to evoke both subtle supernatural horror and portraits of modern life in England. One of the preeminent writers of his generation, Campbell has also edited influential supernatural fiction anthologies; three of his top ten favorite stories are reprinted in The Weird (‘The Willows’ by Blackwood, ‘Smoke Ghost’ by Leiber and ‘The Hospice’ by Aickman). ‘The Brood’ (1980), as noted by the anthologist when first published, ‘has the cumulative effect of a nightmare from which one cannot awake’.

Grady Hendrix is a frequent contributor to Tor.com and author of the recent 80’s-inspired horror novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism. In this contribution to the Weird Writers series, Hendrix examines a story by an author who influenced him as a horror writer.

— David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers

Ramsey Campbell’s fiction is crazy. Not in the sense that it’s arrow-through-the-head wacky, nor in the sense that it’s over the top, but in the clinical sense of the word. Campbell writes horror that gets its mileage by deploying the effects of mental illness. His characters are gripped by depression, their perceptions can’t be trusted, inanimate objects are conscious, living creatures behave like automatons, personalities are overridden and replaced, consciousness is detached from physicality. More than that, Campbell seems determined to induce these symptoms in his readers. His style is his substance.

Born in Liverpool, much has been made of his childhood devotion to H.P. Lovecraft and his early career as a Lovecraft impersonator. His first published story, “The Church in High Street,” was set in the Cthulhu mythos, and his first collection of short stories, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, contained nothing but variations on Lovecraft, with their locations changed from New England to plain old England. But Campbell was done with Lovecraft by the age of 23. A far more fruitful way to think about his writing is to take seriously what he wrote in an essay at the end of his second novel, The Face That Must Die, “The object of writing is to tell the truth.”

Campbell writes the way schizophrenics think. His descriptions are crazy-making, full of visual miscues and the confusion of organic verbs with inorganic nouns. Porches “sprout tubular metal scaffolding,” and doors and suitcases are invested with agency (“The porch door had opened. When it had displayed its gap for a while, a suitcase emerged.”) and usually the narrative voice is linked to the distorted perceptions of characters who are delusional, dreaming, or mad:

“The clock was chanting: see you on Jan, see you on Jan. His mind listed places he must wipe, over and over. Had he forgotten one? The door. The doorknob. The table. The chair in which he’d sat. The cup — he must wipe all the cups, to make sure.”

All of the examples above are taken from his first two novels, The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and The Face That Must Die (1979), both of them slim volumes about psychopaths, neither of which was a financial success. Campbell was writing a lot of short stories at the time but his agent was convinced that all the money was in big fat novels, like the ones Stephen King was writing. In 1980, all the horror guys were publishing 400 and 500 page books and getting rich. Didn’t he want to get rich, too? And so Campbell wrote The Parasite, a big fat horror novel about a woman who experiments with astral projection and winds up becoming possessed.

There’s nothing wrong with The Parasite, but you get a much more concentrated dose of Campbellian terror in his short story “The Brood,” published that same year. Blackband is a depressed veterinarian, well on his way to total dehumanization by the vast metropolis where he lives, spending his days with pet owners he loathes, spending his nights staring out the window at the homeless people who shamble down his street like lost souls. He’s fascinated by The Lady of the Lamp, his nickname for a woman who trudges in circles around a streetlamp all night long. When she disappears he tracks her to her squalid home and enters her ruined basement where he finds disgusting worms, hatched from nearby eggs, feeding on a cat that may or may not still be alive (Campbell is typically vague on this point). Blackband goes to fetch gasoline and returns to burn the place down, but he winds up becoming food for this newborn brood.

The one Lovecraftian trick Campbell still uses is keeping his monsters offstage. When Blackband sees the creature that laid the eggs, Campbell describes it as “a stain” an “inverted coat” and he tells us what it doesn’t feel like (“something that was not flesh”) rather than what it does, much as Lovecraft prefers to go on about “indescribable horrors” rather than describing them. Which would seem to be the job of a writer. But Lovecraft, and Campbell, want to invoke a feeling in their readers, and Campbell had decided that the best way to do that is to mess with their minds.

“I do value the shift of perception fiction can achieve,” he said in an interview. “Within the narrative and within my mind.” If Campbell believes that “the object of writing is to tell the truth” then the fact that all perception is untrustworthy is the truth as he lived it. As he writes in an afterward to The Face That Must Die:

“For as far back as I can recall my mother showed signs of paranoid schizophrenia: she was convinced that radio programmes and newspapers contained secret messages for her; she would recognise people as someone quite different and insist that one was disguised as the other.”

He writes that this experience taught him, “That one’s perception of reality (or, in this case, my mother’s) need not be the same thing as objective reality.” Never was this more obvious than when he writes about his own experiences with altered states:

“At times my own indulgence in this [acid] brought me unnervingly close to my mother’s condition, especially when I suffered a protracted nightmarish flashback not long before I began to write this book [The Face That Must Die]. As I penned the tenth chapter I saw the words start to writhe on the page and found it difficult to continue, but I did.”

Campbell doesn’t want to describe actions, he wants to alter perceptions, and giving oneself over to his writing feels a bit like losing one’s mind. Sounds are heightened, perceptions are warped, hallucinations loom. Reactions are divorced from their causes so that they become alien and strange, and his descriptions of horror go hand-in-hand with descriptions of squalor. Reading his books, one begins to feel strongly that their room needs to be cleaned and that bugs are crawling over their skin.

Philip K. Dick

Seen in this light, Lovecraft pales as an influence and some of Campbell’s other favorite authors seem much more relevant. Philip K. Dick played with reader perceptions in some of the same ways and Campbell praises several of Dick’s stories for how they monkey with notions of reality and identity. Campbell’s twisting of words comes from Nabokov whom he cites as “a crash course in how much more you could do with language.”

The problem with Campbell’s work is that it’s hard to sustain this kind of effect for long without driving readers mad. The Parasite begins with a heady seance set piece in which a bunch of children lock a little girl in a dark room along with something unwholesome. By the end of this prologue the reader is wrung out, stressed out, and a little bit burned out. As Campbell said in an interview about this book:

“The problem I’d set myself, which I don’t think you can sustain for novel length, is that it’s from the viewpoint of the character to whom it’s all happening, and she’s aware of what is happening to her. All I think you can do is convey her sense of mounting terror and panic, but there’s a limit to how much you can do that.”

Campbell’s novels are good, but his style really shines in his short stories, each of which feels engineered for maximum intensity, to make the reader feel off-kilter, unable to trust his or her own perceptions, unable to trust the perceptions of the characters, unable to even trust the language on the page. They’re designed, in other words, to make you feel crazy.

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Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942) was a Japanese writer known primarily as one of the foremost poets of the Taisho and early Showa periods, movements substantially influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, and others within the Decadent and Symbolist movements. Hagiwara also published criticism and aphorisms, co-founded multiple magazines, and created a mandolin orchestra after having received one of the instruments from his parents in his teens. Many of these avenues came about against the context of struggling in and dropping out of university, as well as battling ill health and alcoholism.

The 1917 publication of his poetry collection, Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon), is considered by critics to have broken ground for new, freer forms by using language that had a notable contrast to the intellectual, traditionally structured verse that dominated Japanese poetry. Hagiwara published numerous other collections of poetry and criticism until his last major collection in 1934, after which followed ‘The Town of Cats” (1935), his only short story. He taught at Meiji University from this period until his death in 1942 of “acute pneumonia,” which, however, may have been misdiagnosed lung cancer.

With ‘The Town of Cats,’ Hagiwara examines disorientation and the illusory nature of reality, an intersection of related topics that he explored throughout his career. Madness, hallucinations, obsession, and abnormal psychology often figure in his works, and he conveyed these themes using techniques he’d pioneered in his poetry: a rejection of naturalism, colloquial language, impressionistic images, a sense of personal intimacy, and subject matter contemporary to the time period. The concepts and problems that drove much of Hagiwara’s writing continue to resonate with today’s readers and writers, such as Thomas Ligotti, who has cited ‘The Town of Cats’ as among his favorite stories.

— Christopher Burke, editor of 101 Weird Writers

It’s a landscape as melancholy as a cat
a lonely balloon rises straight up
and see, there’s a flicker of personages wearing linen.
Already for quite a long while
nobody thinks about a wharf like this.
And from the sea-corner with stunned cranes
many various organism-consciousnesses have faded
    away.
Besides, the sailing ship gets loaded with cotton
and it’s in the offing fluffy and plump thinking isn’t it.
These are all indescribable
memories that make your hair stand on end   give you
    gooseflesh.
Ah God   there’s no way of getting it back anymore
and for worm-eaten recollection like this   I’ll always
    be weeping like an infant.

Hagiwara Sakutarō, “A Melancholy Landscape” (Trans. Hiroaki Sato)

Welcome to Japanese writer, poet, and critic Hagiwara Sakutarō’s cat-prowled grounds. Today we circle the Weird-collected tale of “Cat Town”. Hagiwara’s literary world is an assortment of marginal places, “a landscape as melancholy as a cat.” But this isn’t a kind of anthropomorphic feline world enmeshed within everyday human affairs such as Sōseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat (1905–6) or E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1819–1821). Nor is it akin to the viral web media popularizing Japanese “cat islands” Tashirojima and Aoshima. Such spaces displace the human from socio-political vision; they certainly seem like fascinatingly inhuman communities. However, “cat islands” are no posthuman utopia, just as Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” is no fable for the future. In any case, technocultural utopias are too sleekly silvered for the weirdly inclined. Give us the blood’s recoil, the ineffable terror, the cat’s piercing eyes.^[1] Unlike these places and tales, “Cat Town” conjures up a history of weird displacement in which the Anthropocene finds its conceptual feet by confronting an abyss of the real. As it does so, it offers a way for us to see the constructed symbolism of the contemporary world: a world of cats!

Written after a prolific career in which he published many books of poetry and criticism, “Cat Town” is Hagiwara’s only short story. His vision of a world inhabited by cats reveals something other than clickbait-chum. Here are some lines from his earlier poem, “Blue Cat”:

What’s asleep in this large city night
is the shadow of a single blue cat
the shadow of a cat that speaks of the sad history of mankind. (Sato 75)

The cat’s shadow displaces specifics of urban colors and forms but also “speaks” of history. What lurks in a cat’s shadow? What is “the sad history of mankind”? To begin answering these questions, this instalment of the Weird Fiction Review’s 101 Weird Writers series will examine Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” and its later echo in Haruki Murakami’s “Town of Cats”. To complement these sites of prose exploration, I will also look at Hagiwara’s poetry and criticism. A modern city’s nightmares yield strange sights. Cats, squids, and even a dog will appear as we travel through Hagiwara’s melancholic landscape.

Weird literature and poetry’s febrile expression often react in a crucible shaped by madness and illness. Intense periods of mental disorder interrupted Hagiwara’s writing, most evidently from 1913–1915 in the years immediately before his first book of poetry was published in 1917. He even attempted suicide during this time. “I clearly see and hear with indescribable terrible memories the lips of a faintly white woman who laughed after copulation and my abominable act and language that I uttered while drunk,” Hagiwara wrote to a close friend in 1915. He continues, “each time I have the terrible pain that seems to tear up my nerves, because I dashed my head against a column many times yesterday it still hurts this morning, I even thought I was going mad” (qtd. in Rothenberg and Joris 159). Parsing the images of reality become nearly impossible when everything seems too real—hyperreal. Perhaps this “terrible pain” sensitized Hagiwara to the “metaphysical problem” that his protagonist in “Cat Town” later describes, namely, “that a given phenomenon can possess a ‘secret, hidden side’” (Angles 235)? Tracing the disappearing edge of the chasm between images reveals the fracture that the weird often takes as its familiar guise.

The conspiracy between madness and the weird invokes a history of art’s opposition to reason. Names such as Cervantes, Bosch, and Bruegel should provide sufficient evidence. But this is also a very modern relationship that continues to influence contemporary ideas about identity and subjectivity. In many ways, the modern person continues to be a Romantic subject, someone thought of as individual, emotional, and confessional but also as an ill or ailing body. Susan Sontag points out that, for the German Romantics in whose time this tendency became apparent, “[s]ickness was a way of making people ‘interesting’—which is how ‘romantic’ was originally defined” (35). Think Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, or even Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work upholds an “extreme and passionate defense of the romantic image of the creative soul as a thing apart, a solitary, suffering, and preternaturally sensitive organism” (Scott 75).

Without question, Hagiwara’s poems are written in the shadow of a past that was, as their author writes in the preface to his first collection Howling at the Moon, “a painful memory […] an ominous nightmare of frustrations, inaction, and a suffering body and flesh” (1917 [Tsuki ni hoeru], Sato 7). Wilson links German Romanticism with Hagiwara by observing that the Japanese poet’s work demonstrates a similarly “pure but desperate lyricism” (16–17). How to then proceed? When the narrator in “Cat Town” asks readers for their trust, we can recognize that he, like his author, knows his hallucinations. Illness has given him insight. The story is no delirium; it is something else—something more real. That’s why it’s so weird.

We must be careful not to fetishize madness, especially since, when it comes to weird fiction, the parallel discourses of weird aesthetics and biographical madness or illness are often accompanied by patronizing assumptions of literary training and merit. Japanese poet Hinatsu Kōnosuke, for instance, observed that “Hagiwara has no literary training, that’s the fellow’s strength more than anything else” (qtd. Sato xxi).^[2] To say that an author’s work is powerful because it is the product of madness, illness, or idiot savantism debilitates critic and author alike, but we can certainly recognize the influence of madness. Along these lines, more generously than Hinatsu, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Loris observe that while “poetry & illness were not the same for [Hagiwara], there was a constant interplay between them [in his work]”, lending his language a jagged immediacy and vivid power of imagistic fervor (159).

I leave for another time the topic of how weird writers negotiate their literary territory against the mental and physical illnesses that sometimes mark their lives—we could discuss Leonora Carrington, H.P. Lovecraft, or Unica Zürn.^[3] At present, it is enough to say that, when words such as “hallucinatory” are applied to Hagiwara’s work, readers recognize not only how he keenly understood reason and hallucination, but also that he aimed for more than symmetrical alternations between the two. In Howling at the Moon, Hagiwara wrote that the “purpose of poetic expression is not simply to express an atmosphere for the sake of atmosphere […] Nor is it to describe a hallucination for the sake of hallucination” (2014: 3). At its best, the weird dispenses with an alternating play of realist description and fevered hallucination.

Before we look directly at the material, a brief note on translations is necessary. In addition to Jeffrey Angles’s translation of “Cat Town” in The Weird, I am aware of two major translations of Hagiwara into English. Most recently, Hiroaki Sato has revisited Hagiwara’s work for the New York Review Books Poets series (Cat Town, 2014) and New Directions (The Iceland [Hyōtō], 2014). Graeme Wilson’s adaptations for the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works in 1969 remain the volume that introduced Hagiwara to many English readers.^[4] Below, I cite Sato when referring to his NYRB translation, Wilson when referring to his UNESCO translation, and Angles when quoting The Weird. Poems will occasionally be given in each translation so that readers can draw their own conclusions.

“Cat Town” to “Town of Cats”: Travelers in the Modern City

Hagiwara’s world is riddled with the decisions of urban travel—crossroads, intersections, meeting places, and so on (Sugimoto 31). It is also suffused with the ghosts and hauntings that constitute modern life and in their own right “make up the strange and immense silent vitality of an urban symbolics,” to quote French theorist Michel de Certeau (137). So, with the narrator of “Cat Town”, let’s get lost. In the forbiddingly massive Tokyo, arranged in compact units interpenetrated by mass and individual transit with competing “big picture” strategies for getting around, navigation becomes a challenge. But travel offers a way to perceptually map our surroundings and helps us understand the world in which we live. Walkers in the modern city observe and define its practical existence. As de Certeau elaborates in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), walking around a neighborhood allows a person to read the symbols of urban culture from the ground up. If you become dislocated in networks of urban disarray while walking, you might see something new—perhaps something disconcertingly different to what the normal, everyday world usually offers. You might see something irreducible to reason.

Artificial aids have long offered the ability to redefine existence through “trips.” The narrator of “Cat Town” knows well the travels induced by drug-induced hallucinations. “As for the countries I traveled in the ecstatic dreams induced by narcotics, I don’t have enough room to detail them here,” he says, sounding much like a fellow flâneur, French poet Charles Baudelaire. (Baudelaire’s chosen drugs included opium, hashish, and wine; Hagiwara reputedly loved beer.) The narrator lingers on well-travelled dreams: “Even after returning to normal, I would cling to those visions and relive them again and again in the world of reality” (Angles 234). But be on guard for the explanations that return even courageous thinkers to normative life. William Tyler argues that Hagiwara’s narrator numbers among a turn of the century series of Japanese figures all “seduced by visual illusions” and “intrigued by tricks created by prisms, binoculars, mirages, illusions, and hallucinations” (328). If you need an escape hatch, this is it: morphine flashbacks cause the strange sights in “Cat Town”. Nothing weird to see here. Move on.

Such an escape does “Cat Town” an injustice, however. Hagiwara’s story describes the lived perception of urban spaces with great psychological clarity. For instance, the first half of “Cat Town” exemplifies the phenomenon of jamais vu, the eerie sense of seeing a familiar situation as so completely new that nothing can be recognized. When this happens in language, it is called “semantic satiation” or word collapse: all you can see are strange letters that look weird or wrong. Accordingly, linguistic stability dissolves when symbols become “hyperreal” and dislocated from their usual symbolic coordinates. Have you ever walked into your home and thought “this isn’t where I live at all”? In jamais vu, familiar perceptual reference points are lost and, as a result, you see something as if you’ve never seen it before. No hallucination necessary.

The phenomenon extends to navigation within the city. It starts with getting lost. The narrator explains that, while “walking through the usual area around my home, […] I slipped into an unfamiliar alley, and going the wrong way, I lost all sense of direction” (Angles 234). The result of becoming lost? He sees a neighborhood of dreamlike beauty. There are two easy explanations for this vision. First, the narrator writes, “a fox must have bewitched me”; or, second, he may have fallen prey to “a disturbance of the inner ear” that disrupted his “sensing direction” (Angles 234). Jamais vu produces at first mystery—an unexpected vision—and then a sudden deflation. Unpredictably dislocated by the hyperreal, the vision known as “real life” reasserts itself with disappointing regularity.

The narrator’s first loss of perceptual control functions as an interpretive prophylactic. Once his mistake is realized, he shows himself capable of discerning his own fallibility. “The mysterious and magical transformation of this place into a beautiful town had occurred simply because I had mixed up my directions”, he admits (Angles 234). This realization normalizes the story. Strategic ideas about how to operate in the modern city are deconstructed when ground level tactics reveal unexpected sights, but the normal way of seeing things feels “natural.” Even the clearest maps may be turned upside down to look utterly bizarre. But few would keep them so inverted and, thus, in a transformational flourish, those alternate worldviews disappear. Similarly, “[t]he mysterious neighborhood that I had seen a moment before existed in some universe of opposite space where the compass was reversed” (Angles 235). Only after deflating estranged possibilities and reminding readers of his ability to discern between hallucination and the modern world will the narrator’s second and much more dramatic episode ring with enough truth to be truly weird.

The second spectacular episode in “Cat Town” deserves to be encountered in all its glory. The narrator loses his way on a “narrow road [that] continued for some time, then disappeared into the depths of the woods” (Angles 237). Be careful when walking into an unknown forest, especially when you’ve warned of nearby “possessed villages” (Angles 236)! Having become dislocated, the narrator finds himself in what seems the usual situation—an urban landscape too spectacular to be true. Knowing the alarming precarity of such visions, he tellingly describes the city as “a perilously fragile structure of thin crystal” (Angles 238). “This realization suddenly made me extremely anxious,” he remembers. Everyone is suddenly tense. “The air surrounding me was electrically charged, and in it I felt the anguish of the inhabitants’ nerves stretched to the breaking point” (Angles 238). A calm. Someone falls. Cue the explosion.

Terror’s revelation erupts with sublime thunder. Just like a joke, the timing of terror is crucial. In the fracture between a spectacular, beautiful vision and a recognizably dour urban modernity rushes the violence of the weird, a perceptual fissure that consumes the eye and the mind with its irreparable incongruity. “My senses had lost their balance. The universe was collapsing around me” (238). This dislocating revelation is neither jamais vu nor déjà vu, neither never seen nor already seen. Between the two opens an abyss: a sight of something more real than “reality.”

And also, for some reason, cats.

The curious are encouraged to see for themselves. Hagiwara’s narrator defends his story in the same way Hagiwara defends his own poetry. “People smile coldly at my tale. They say it is the demented illness of a poet or a nonsensical hallucination born of absentminded daydreaming” (240). He can only defend himself through testimony. I was there. I saw. I know madness, but this is different. Believe me. Fantasy often offers some elfin token for the traveler as “proof” of other realities; the weird is not so easily sated.

Let us turn to another modern traveler and another cat-ridden town. In Haruki Murakami’s “Town of Cats” (2009), a stand-alone excerpt from 1Q84 (2011) published in the New Yorker, narrator Tengo Kawana is another urban navigator. Like Hagiwara’s narrator and many of Murakami’s other protagonists, Tengo travels through Tokyo as if unconsciously. In general, “Town of Cats” revolves around alienated travel. Tengo’s father resides in a sanitarium, his vitality apparently drained through long employment for a Japanese transportation agency in addition to the severe disinterest of his own son, Tengo.

In turn, Tengo loves abstractions like language and math, which he compares to “a magnificent imaginary building.” He most prefers the “vast magical forest” of literature. Abstractions offer him a refuge; more than that, words have less structure and fewer solutions than mathematical theories. Literature allows him the belief that his “real father” might be different from the man he will visit in the sanitarium. It is disappointing that the virtual play of literary possibilities is constrained in an old Victorian straightjacket of inheritances and hidden orphans, but there it is.

Each character in “Town of Cats” is lost in a labyrinth of dislocations. While speaking with his father (in what might be code or madness) at the sanitarium, Tengo remembers a story called “Town of Cats” that Murakami describes as a “fantastical piece by a German writer”. In this remembered tale, a traveler gets lost in a town where cats emerge once the sun is down. Sound familiar? There’s a twist: although the traveler of “Town of Cats” is at first upset, he realizes that this is “the place where he is meant to be lost.” The thought is reassuring for Tengo in Murakami’s own “Town of Cats”, as he is desperate to settle the question of his paternal filiation. A similar revelation would suggest that his Sunday travels were “meant” for him to discover that his father is not his father, as he has believed all along. When Tengo and his father do talk, however, the mise-en-abymes of nothingness and vacuums occupies them. Questioning why the urban landscape of the remembered “Town of Cats” is populated by cats, his father says, “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.” The story becomes its own cipher encoded in Oedipal handwriting.

What is most interesting about “Town of Cats” is that it redirects its affiliations with Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” through a purportedly German predecessor. Sure, Tengo could be misremembering the origin of his “Town of Cats”, but Murakami’s purposeful distance from Japanese antecedents is complicated by the remarkably strong precedent of “Cat Town.” Murakami walks us around but does not open the most interesting cryptic image: why cats, specifically? Once more: “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”

To move us to the next section of this argument, it is merely necessary to say that Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” is designated not a “short story” but instead a “Roman in the Style of a Prose Poem.” What kind of poetry is this?

Poetries of the Weird: Hagiwara’s Modanizumu Images

Hagiwara’s work is renowned for its role in modanizumu, the period of cultural activity in Japan between 1913 and 1938. In a statement that readers of “Cat Town” could attest extends to Hagiwara’s prose as well, critics argue that Hagiwara “invent[ed] a vernacular lyricism appropriate for a modern world filled with skyscrapers, consumer goods, mass culture—the new urban setting of Tokyo”—and to which the poet then applied the panacea of illness as a “remedy” to modernization’s many forms of alienation (Sugimoto 20–21). Cities are planned with a certain kind of rational urban symbolism that enumerates, commodifies and alienates individuals with nightmarish results. In this space, writing offers a potential tactic for liberation—or at least the recognition and abandonment of these late capitalist strategies as “occupied places” (de Certeau 196). For Hagiwara, poetry is a “heresy of the modern, a kind of corrupting illness” or, succinctly, “a symptom of madness in modernity” (Sugimoto 23, 25). Of the genres of writing, poetry’s affinity for madness allows it to challenge modern theories of Enlightenment rationalism and the oppressive real hierarchies that historically accompany them.

Poetry might be just the tonic needed, for it sharpens the pharmakon of writing: poetry’s subtle knife mixes the otherwise incompatible elements of poison and remedy, madness and rationality. In “Cat Town”, the narrator observes that the “universe that lies beyond common sense and logic—the universe that is known intuitively to the poet—belongs to the metaphysical” (236). It is difficult to argue with the material force of consumer culture and brutal skyscraper architecture, not to mention the violence of major urban highways, but the refuge of linguistic abstraction offers a tactical realignment and a new way of seeing things. Allow me to extrapolate from Hagiwara’s narrator’s observation: in narrative prose, traditionally anchored by realist discourses, the weird arrives to depart in an imagistic flash—a moment when the bottom drops out of your world. In poetry, however, an image can be held through an intensity of thought that extends the space of perception. An abyss may disclose a face for its subject.

At which point you might want to know about the specific kind of weirdness that Hagiwara’s poetry brings forth. One answer involves cats. Try Hagiwara’s “The Lonely Blue Cat” in Sato’s recent translation:

Here’s a blue cat. And a willow is being blown in the
wind, and over the graveyard the moon is up.

This is the weird with a finger to its lips: caution. However, This modern tanka’s brief lines unfold with images at once innocuous and uncanny, rational and mad. What moon is this? What willow, what wind? There’s a cat again, disappearing into the graveyard’s dark shadow.

Of course, reading in translated English is a problem. Comparing the work of Wilson and Sato reveals insoluble interpretive quandaries. Take Hagiwara’s “Green Flute”.

Wilson’s earlier adaptation of 1969 strongly emphasizes rhyme and image, while Sato’s later translation modulates its images with quieter language. Words such as “stagger,” “ghostliness,” or “death’s menagerie” become mannered: “lumbering,” “elephants,” and “an illusion.” What similarities exist seem cut from the same cloth as “The Lonely Blue Cat”. Each poem focuses on a graveyard in which its speaker wonders about tarrying too long; in each looms a cat’s inhuman presence. Look too close and a mirage will vanish, or you may see more than you bargained for—you may see something “more nasty as it nears.” Hagiwara’s images are decidedly weird.

To his contemporaries, Hagiwara disrupted formal shapes and sounded very modern. As a result, much criticism on Hagiwara (as well as his own critical writings) emphasizes the historical reception of European influences by Japanese writers during modanizumu. What is missing from this exemplary critical conversation? A new vision of Hagiwara’s work is as simple as wondering about poetic images—Hagiwara’s most exquisite delight and poison.

In this regard, weird thinking also profits from examining the criticism that Hagiwara himself wrote. Take, for example, the following passage, which Sato cites as proof of Hagiwara’s critical acumen. In it, Hagiwara reads a haiku by Japanese poet Yosa Buson (1716–1784):

Buson:
A squid-shaped kite: where yesterday’s sky used to be

Commentary: In the wintry sky where a northerly wind blows, a kite is up. In the same wintry sky, yesterday, too, it was up. The dreary season of winter. The wind blowing through a frozen dull sunlight, screaming sadly. The glassy cold blue sky. Up in that blue sky was a lonely kite yesterday, as it is today. Buzzing nonchalantly, boundlessly high, sorrowing in the globular sky, there’s always a single distant memory drifting!

In the poesy of this haiku is revealed the most Buson-like nostalgia and romance. Pay attention to the fact that all the poetic qualities are contained in the deep emotion of the expression “where yesterday’s sky used to be.” Yesterday’s sky is no longer today’s sky. Yet in that different sky the same kite is up, as always. In other words, in the space always changing, in the time always passing, a single kite—an image of memory—exists in the globular sky constantly, sadly, desolately. Viewed in this haiku, philosophically representing Buson’s leitmotif as it does, contrasts with Bashō’s famous “An old pond.”

I should add that attention should also be paid to the fact that the locution, “where yesterday’s sky used to be,” is wholly a symbolist technique shared by the poetry of modern Europe and that it is a distinct feature with no precedent in the Japanese literature of the past. Buson’s mastery is that he, like today’s poets, had a European lyrical method, born though he was in the Edo period when there was no intercourse with foreign countries. (trans. and qtd. in Sato xviii-xix)

Hagiwara’s rhapsody is a marvel of intense reading; it sustains the poem’s attention on images with logico-hallucinatory precision, teasing and pulling from the haiku’s density a world of complex emotion and literary tradition. The dangers that run like a live current throughout weird literature enliven this “image of memory”—remember that, for Hagiwara, “the past” rings with pain, and it is therefore not surprising when the wind blowing through frozen sunlight is “screaming sadly.” His finger still covers his lips, however, guarding his weirdest secret: the squid-shaped kite. A squid! Even if a common shape for kites in Buson’s or Hagiwara’s time, this apparition from the deep water reminds us that mysteries are aloft above. It is Lovecraftian, perhaps, but also a nostalgic, mannered return to a subject of shunga erotica, such as Hokusai Katsushika’s woodcut series Kinoe no Komatsu, or The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814).

As a kite, the shunga image (if that is what it resembles, a squid or an octopus) has lost its titillating, educational cache, but it has retained the sensuality of its original, namely its qualities of “unrestrained imagination, but humor too, and refinement” (Baucheron 99).

Things of the sea, extra-terraceous by definition, look odd in the sky but also along the shoreline where nebulous sea-bodies wash up to deflate and rot. Translating Hagiwara’s “Song of a Hermit Crab”, Sato gives us the following line: “it’s a cloud-like image   a lonely hermit crab’s ghost, / you see” (97). The mesh of images grows discomforting and timeless, lost in ever-fluctuating immensities. Reminders too rise up of Hagiwara’s “Moonlight and Jellyfish” in Wilson’s adaptation, where the titular jellyfish reflects itself as “A thing transparent, a chilly thing, / [that] Flows in the water, knows no end …” (69). The sea offers many such strange inhuman things. Another is the titular “thing most cold” in “Sea Shell” whose “teeth / Flow in the water, and its hands / Flow in the water underneath / Things colder than it understands” (Wilson 70). And then there is the shellfish of “Enchanted Graveyard” that appears alongside other weird creatures—a cat, a ghost—as the “common kindred of this sullen coast” (Wilson 62). Along this coast, assumedly, is the subject of another of Hagiwara’s poems, “Rotten Clam”, left on the beach flats “where sadness broods, / From entrails on the rot / The putrid breath protrudes, / Flickeringly” (Wilson 44). Not a pleasant place, these shores of shifting time. They collapse fate in space to leave revealed to sight things slimy, rotted, and weird. For Hagiwara’s poetry, shore and air alike are possible extensions of the abyss that “Cat Town” sees in urban and feline figures.

To search for the power of the weird is to discern in normal forms and images things unexpected and surprising. Examining signs and symbols for guidance, like the narrator of “Cat Town”, we sneak around the obstinacy of the work of art and modern life, using one to answer the other, asking questions, stealing glances, getting caught seeing images. Weird reading may not ascertain the whole picture. Should it? What is “whole” can only be individuated because it has been cut from the cloth of things with ration’s shears. “Cat Town” poses the weird as a dividing line-become-abyss plucked from a momentary sight, a descending bottomless image that, if examined too long, could cause a madness like and yet utterly distinct from hallucination or illness.

I want to return to cats but with a new twist, because figures can change in the night: they might be dogs. Is this portrait, an image of marginal life enters through our window. Should we look?

Concluding Thoughts: Toward A Weird Poetry

To my knowledge, there is no widely recognized tradition of contemporary poetry within genres such as fantasy, horror, or science fiction. Granted, contemporary awards and individuals are seeking to change this situation; examples include the Rhysling Award, Eric Basso, and, as Desirina Boskovich recently pointed out, Nancy Hightower. But it has been a long time since the enormously popular allegories of Edmund Spenser and Christina Rossetti. These are prose genres, no question. They unspool social philosophies and construct to examine scintillating structures of the mind and imagination. Thus does the weird Roman of “Cat Town” become Murakami’s “Town of Cats”: what is first a tale of dislocation’s hyperreal shock settles into a tale of comfortably dreamlike prose structures.

In contrast, the evanescent music of lyric poetry opens wounds in human subjectivity. Poetry’s concision grants its a song a sharp edge with which it allows us to keen. Such a statement sound romantic, even wistful, as indeed may the poetry it seeks to evaluate. But when it comes to a writer such as Hagiwara we can recognize a sharp insight into the hyperreal in his work, however depreciating its author might have been. “Someone like me is no more than a miserable blue cat’s nightmare,” Hagiwara wrote in his Preface to Blue Cat (1923 [Aoneko]). In the same Preface, Hagiwara observed that his poetry’s “essence […] lies in the pitifulness of yearnings with no apparent cause for the world of reality. Thus I breathe into the fife’s mouth hole, trying to play a mysterious and sensuous life” (Sato 63, 61). We don’t talk much about poetry and the weird because the language of poetry is already so unfamiliar and intense.

Prefacing his earliest poems, Hagiwara speaks to the desire to use language as a tactic for survival within a nightmarish world where late capitalist structures dominate urban life and push to the margins its shores and graveyards, its animals and alienated peoples.^[5] (Although “Cat Town” is weird, cat cafes, catering to urban bourgeoisie, are becoming de rigeur. All things can be sold.) For Hagiwara, language offers a way to pinpoint so as better to see and to escape the shadows that haunt him. “I want to nail my own gloomy shadow into the moonlit earth,” he wrote; “Lest the shadow follow me forever” (Sato 7). Affiliating himself with the nightmare of a blue cat and, before that, with a howling dog that sees its own shadow, Hagiwara’s images offer powerful and sensuous dislocations of identity wrenched from its human mask. All of which raises a last question: what do we look stripped of our symbols?

In Hagiwara’s literary remains we have a marvelous weapon that might shear humanity from its mad rationalisms, but also a flute that plays to the heart of a most surprising genre: a poetry of the weird. “Cat Town” exposes the hyperreal fracture between jamais vu and déjà vu; it cuts our eyes open with the same suddenness as a glass shatters. An image from the nightmare of an abyss explodes into view. In the debris, we see the ground on which strategic maps of the world are built. Nothing after is the same. At times the image, that thing looks like an animal: now a cat, now a dog. Now only a face.

Works Cited

Baucheron, Éléa and Diane Routex. The Museum of Scandals: Art that Shocked the World. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2013. Print.

Breton, André. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Ed. Franklin Rosemont. New York: Pathfinder, 2002. Print.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. “Tanika and Poe: The Grotesque and the Quest for Supernal Beauty.” Comparative Literature 29.3 (1977): 221–40. Print.

Murakami, Haruki. “Town of Cats.” The New Yorker. Trans. Jay Rubin. 5 Sept. 2001. Web. 3 Apr. 2016.

Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. 1964. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: 1965. Print.

Norfield, Tony. The City: London and the Global Power of Finance. London: Verso, 2016. Print.

Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: Volume One, From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Print.

Sato, Hiroaki, trans. Cat Town. Sakutarō Hagiwara. New York: New York Review Books, 2014. Print.

Scott, A.O. Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth. New York: Penguin, 2016. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Melancholy Objects.” On Photography. New York: Anchor, 1973. Print.

Sugimoto, Mike. “The Illness of Prose: Hagiwara Sakutarō and the Status of Poetry in the Modern.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 4.1 (2002): 20–37. Print.

Tyler, William J. Introduction to Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938. Ed. William J. Tyler. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Print.

Wilson, Graeme, Trans. Face at the Bottom of the World and Other Poems. Sakutarō Hagiwara. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1969. Print.

____

[1] Cats, Japan, and weird fiction: it is worth noting that Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843) was quite popular in Japan. Poe’s influence extends to Natsume Sōseki, Ueda Bin, Iwano Homei, Baba Kocho, Hirata Toboku, Tayama Katai, and Nagai Kafu, all stemming from Aeba Kōson’s translation of the story in the November 1888 issue of Yomiuri Shimbun (Lippin 221). Hagiwara acknowledged a debt to Poe, as did Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose 1918 “The Hell Screen” also appears in The Weird, albeit with caveats for both writers (Lippit 223).

[2] Many critics objected to Hagiwara’s work with thinly-disguised prejudice. Wilson summarizes these criticisms: “the startling originality of its themes and imagery is no more than a direct reflection of the poet’s persistent physical ill-health and of his spiritual and intellectual neurasthenia. His poetry’s consequent aura of irremediable malaise, the argument continues, inevitably appeals to our own distempered times but it disqualifies Hagiwara from a major place in any healthy tradition” (26). However Wilson too wonders whether Hagiwara lost his edge through excessive alcoholic drinking. For a parallel case, see the slighted reputation of Irish writer Flann O’Brien. If weird criticism can make progress on this state of affairs, it must refuse to oppose the “healthy tradition” of normative health with the aesthetic fascination with the sickened, ill, or mad—the two are two faces of the same flipping coin. Instead, weird approaches put the coin on its edge; they make it disappear, mutter about old gods, and slip into shadows. (Your coin is a dream.)

[3] We could also refer to the Surrealists for whom, as André Breton and Louis Aragon wrote in La Révolution surréaliste, mental crises such as hysteria could “be considered a supreme form of expression” (qtd. in Breton 321). In his The History of Surrealism (1964), Maurice Nadeau argues that, with their poetry especially, Surrealists sought to prove “[t]hat there exists no barrier between the normal man and the so-called ‘ab-normal’ man; that there exists no state starting from which one can be certain that this man is mad and another rational” (188). The effort continues.

[4] Sato’s and Wilson’s versions read very differently. Such friction between translations recalls the twentieth-century English literary tradition’s fraught early relationship with translated East Asian literatures. W.B. Yeats’s creative adumbration of Japanese Nō drama and Ezra Pound’s appropriative usurpation of Ernest Fenollosa’s translations of Chinese poetry for his own Cathay (1915) represent warnings and seductions alike, proof of the alluring power of adaptive cross-cultural distortions.

[5] Ascertaining the role of finance in contemporary global capitalism and asking both “what kind of world works like this?” and “[w]hy should the lives of millions of people be influenced by the vagaries of financial market prices?”, Tony Norfield answers with the same logic that drives the nightmare of Hagiwara’s skyscraper-defined, consumer-driven modernist city: “This only looks normal, rather than weird, because we are used to it” (8).

The post 101 Weird Writers #41 — Hagiwara Sakutarō appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

William Sansom (1912–1976) was an idiosyncratic English writer known for applying a surrealist’s sensibilities to the weird tale. Obscure today, Sansom enjoyed a brief period of acclaim in the 1940s and 1950s, when the fresh originality of his stories earned him a place in leading British literary magazines. A firefighter in London during the Blitz of World War II, Sansom managed to transform his experiences in a way that garnered him comparisons to Franz Kafka. Sophisticated yet passionate, his stories reward repeated readings. ‘The Long Sheet’ (1944) was published before the English translation of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ and yet in their use of weird ritual to illuminate society the two stories share some similarities.

— David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

“Have you ever wrung dry a wet cloth?” begins William Sansom’s “The Long Sheet”. “The muscle of your arm swells like an egg – yet the wet drop remains a pinhead!”

Well have you? Have you truly felt the pain of drying clothes by hand, so that not a drop remains? Only then can you begin to feel the dizzying pain, the torture and absurdity of the “captives at Device Z”.

With an innocuous beginning reminiscent of 1940s advertising copy, an anonymous narrator describes the task of wringing a long wet sheet in a humid room. Once the captives have wrung the sheet dry, they are assured of their freedom. Divided into four groups, each takes a different approach to their work. What begins as a simple exercise becomes a nightmare of human demoralization.

The wardens make the process as difficult as possible, pumping hot steam into the rooms to moisten the sheets. “Daily they encouraged the efforts of the captives with promises of release; but daily they turned on the steam cocks.” This Sisyphean effort bears comparison to Albert Camus’ classic work of absurdist philosophy: The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus’ philosophy is integral to readings of the weird, particularly work from the first half of the 20^th century. Many influential works delight in the absurd, with Kafka’s work inspiring part of Camus’ philosophical treatise. While The Myth of Sisyphus wasn’t published in English until 1955, absurdist philosophy emerged into English speaking culture during the 40s and 50s. The period during and directly proceeding World War II marked a shift in philosophy; a denial of God and search for meaning in a world marked by the crimes of a totalitarian state.

Although “The Long Sheet” was published in 1944, it is not improbable that Sansom could have read Camus in the 1942 French edition, as Sansom worked in Germany and also wrote a biography of Proust. Despite authoring six novels, and more short stories, little biographical detail is available on Sansom.

Throughout “The Long Sheet”, Sansom addresses the same question that Camus poses at the start of Sisyphus: suicide. Camus’ posed that “judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” and it is this question at the heart of “The Long Sheet”. What defines a quality life? Is it action, or the attitude towards those actions? And why do these captives not simply cut the sheet into strips and hang themselves?

Like a documentarian observing his subjects from on high, Sansom objectively reports the living conditions at Device Z, noting the number of people in each cubicle, their genders and their attitudes towards work. Claustrophobia perpetuates the story, from his detailed description of the wringing chambers, six-foot wide, six-foot tall and a hundred-feet long, divided into four metal cubicles.

Room Three contains “those who sought outside”, two married couples and a young Serbian grocer. “That the task was unproductive did not worry them,” as they were used to regular working hours. “It was as if they commuted regularly from their suburbia (the steel sleeping corner) to the office (the long sheet).”

Problems arise in Room Three when the workers wish to take an afternoon off for good behavior, allowing the sheet to get wet. They allow routine to “predominate the work itself”, not putting enough effort into the wringing of the sheet.

Room Two, “those who sought in and out and around”, contains five individualistic men, who set about their work with individual mindsets. There is the excuse maker, the quiet worker, the shortcut taker, the fumbler and the pervert. Their inability to work together means that the sheet will never be wrung dry.

Room Four contains “those who never sought at all”, with seven people including a twelve-year-old child. These people languish and refuse to work. Sansom writes that:

“Perhaps the real tragedy of these dispirited people was not their own misfortune, to which they had grown accustomed, but that their slackness had its effect on those whose ambitions were pure and strong.”

Room One, full of “those who sought inside”, represent the pursuit of philosophical freedom through manual work. The successful group strives for seven years to wring the sheet dry. Once dry, the sheet is drenched with water again. When asking for their freedom, the omnipotent warden replies:

“You already have it… Freedom lies in an attitude of spirit. There is no other freedom.”

This line is most emblematic of the absurd, where to rebel against futility creates meaning. Camus writes:

“Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences which are my revolt, my freedom and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death – and I refuse suicide.”^[i]

There is the revolt, the decision to wring the sheet in spite of the alternatives; the passion, the effort with which they approach the task; and freedom, the final gift of obtaining consciousness through futile labor.

In discussing Sisyphus, Camus makes a point equally applicable to “The Long Sheet”. The gods, or in this case the wardens, believe that there is “no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”^[ii] The tragedy comes from the consciousness of the hero. “If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?”^[iii] The great trial is not the first wringing of the sheet, but the second and the third, to pursue the end goal despite the futile conclusion.

Comparisons have also been made between “The Long Sheet” and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony. While the stories deal with similar themes of dehumanization and torture, Kafka’s story is very different in approach. Kafka takes a ground view perspective, with the Traveler observing and interacting in the situation. Sansom’s story is perpetually removed from the subjects, so far that they do not have names. Kafka’s story is meandering and overly long, with terse monologues from the Officer. Sansom’s story is short and swift, expertly edited and executed. While Sansom’s stories have not held the same longevity as Kafka’s, some of Sansom’s short stories and books have been re-released through Faber Finds.

While Camus’ concluded “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,”^[iv] there is no such hope at the end of “The Long Sheet”. Although the reader affiliates with the pain of the captives, Sansom’s cold voice never wavers, simply leaving us with the cutting remarks of the wardens, “You already have [freedom]”. Only one sentence remains. “And the skylights silently closed.”

_____

[i] Camus, A. (2005). The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin. p. 62

[ii] Ibid. p. 115

[iii] Ibid. p. 117

[iv] Ibid. p. 119

The post 101 Weird Writers #40 — William Sansom appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

We’ve got an eclectic list of writers lined up for 2016 and beyond but for now we thought we should recap by compiling a list of the first 38 entries so that readers could peruse them at their leisure. These articles contain fantastic tidbits of knowledge about the Weird along with great insights and analyses so be sure to check them out.

1. Bob Leman: A Window into the Work of an Underrated Story Writer
2. Augusto Monterroso: A Journey Into the Weird World of “Mister Taylor”
3. Julio Cortázar: Examining the Strange Transformation of “Axolotl”
4. Dino Buzzati: Interpretations of Buzzati and “The Colomber”
5. Eric Basso: The Dissolving World of “The Beak Doctor”
6. Brian Evenson: Strange Salvation in “The Brotherhood of Mutilation”
7. Georg Heym: The Expressionistic Power of Heym and “The Dissection”
8. Mercè Rodoreda: The Weirdness and Estrangement in “The Salamander”
9. Margaret Irwin: The Monstrous Allure of “The Book”
10. Tanith Lee: The Triumph of the Unseen in “Yellow and Red”
11. Luigi Ugolini: Uncanny Nature in “The Vegetable Man”
12. Mervyn Peake: Umbrageous Legacy — Mervyn Peake’s Portrait Gallery
13. Jerome Bixby: Strange Survival in “It’s a Good Life”
14. Charles Beaumont: The Nature of Evil in “The Howling Man”
15. Elizabeth Hand: Trauma and Connection in “The Boy in the Tree”
16. Kathe Koja: Weird Bodies, Weird Language of “Angels in Love”
17. William Gibson and John Shirley: Strange Tribes in “The Belonging Kind”
18. Leena Krohn: Change and Transformation in Tainaron
19. Algernon Blackwood: Strange Wilderness in “The Willows”
20. Jamaica Kincaid: The Weird, Realism & Intensities of Language in “My Mother”
21. Caitlín R. Kiernan: The Slippery Reality of “A Redress for Andromeda”
22. George R.R. Martin: The Colonial Nightmare in “Sandkings”
23. Laird Barron: Stages of Horrific Vision in “The Forest”
24. Olympe Bhêly-Quénum: Dreams, Death & the African Weird in “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts”
25. Bruno Schulz: The Fragile Reality of “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”
26. Octavia Butler: Strange Symbiosis in “Bloodchild”
27. Joanna Russ: Female Identity in “The Little Dirty Girl”
28. Gahan Wilson: Hearts Like Oysters in “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be”
29. Michael Cisco: Elements of Degeneration in “The Genius of Assassins”
30. Margo Lanagan: Spectacle and Shame in “Singing My Sister Down”
31. Fritz Leiber: Grit and Social Dynamics in “Smoke Ghost”
32. Marc Laidlaw: Art, Death, and Strangeness in “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio”
33. Stephen Graham Jones: The Metaphysical Prisons of “Little Lambs”
34. Amos Tutuola: “A Nightmare of Indescribable Adventures”: Style and “The Complete Gentleman”
35. Robert Aickman: May Bury You (On Robert Aickman’s “The Hospice”)
36. Saki: What the Weird Knows — Conradin’s Secret Arts
37. Kelly Link: Sex, Death and the Man-Omelet in “The Specialist’s Hat”
38. Leonora Carrington: Seeing Rabbits and Falling Fingers

The post Weird Writers Recap appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts.

Leonora Carrington (1912 — 2011) was a British-born Mexican surrealist painter. In addition to being an artist, she also wrote several novels and short stories. Her work was influenced by Max Ernst, who she met in 1937 and began living with in Paris. Ernst was arrested soon after the Nazi occupation of France as his art was deemed “degenerate”. Carrington fled to Spain and then later to New York. In 1941, while in New York City she published “White Rabbits” which was later included in The Weird.

After being granted asylum in Mexico, she resumed her work as a surrealist painter and writer. In 1963, she created a mural called El Mundo Magico de los Mayas, which, like much of her art, was influenced by local folk stories. It resides today at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. Carrington passed away in 2011 in Mexico City at the age of 94.

—David Davis

That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open.
William S. Burroughs, 1965

Metaphysics – I – The Surreal Image

Leonor Fini, La Gardienne des Sources (1967). Oil on canvas. Fig. 1.

What would you do if your eye was cut open? And what if your organ of sight, split in two, could still see – what if the first thing you saw was your eye’s distressing division? In surrealist art and literature, as in weird fiction more generally, the eye is a privileged site of conflict. The narrator of Leonora Carrington’s “White Rabbits” tells us that she can see anything in the gloom of Pest Street, the neighbourhood in which she lives. As she explains, “my eyes have always been excellent.”^[1] But the sights she sees are bewildering: tiny white teeth tearing apart rotting flesh; the human body, cloistered away and subject to leprosy; and then, in the story’s last, beautiful image, an apparition of a woman waving her hand over a gloomy balcony: “and as she waved it, her fingers fell off and dropped to the ground like shooting stars.”^[2] This is an important and transformative image. To recognize it as such, we will need to examine a brief history of ideas of severance and sight, and especially of how a perceived fissure or disconnection with the world one sees can prompt a reinvigorated sense of agency. Severance and sight are our guides to “White Rabbits” and to Carrington’s surrealist artist and metaphysical thinking.

Leonor Fini, Self Portrait (1968). Oil on canvas. Fig. 2.

Artistic representations of sight in traditions associated with surrealism are often startling. Just look at the work of Leonor Fini (1907–1996), the Argentine-born Italian feminist whose adolescent years were spent with her eyes wounded and bandaged, and whose friendship with Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst in the late 1930s was influential and important to all three artists. Spending her teenage years severed from the possibility of sight prepared Fini for an aesthetic that channels vision through blindness, which is to say that her art declares its interest in the insights of closed eyes and the declarative statements made by open sight, all of which are refracted through an erotic charge and a compelling palette of colours.

Following this interest, look at the eyes in Fini’s self-portrait, La Gardienne des Sources (1967) [Fig. 1]. These eyes meet those of the viewer in a direct line of sight. Despite their position at the side of the painting, they are bold black spaces in the painting’s otherwise rampaging colour. Equally startling are the eyes in Fini’s very similar Self-Portrait (1968) [Fig. 2].

Leonor Fini, L’Entre Deux (1967). Oil on canvas. Fig. 3.

Unlike the painter’s earlier L’Entre Deux (1967) [Fig. 3], a canvas that pays lush homage to the style of Gustav Klimt and, importantly, a painting in which all its subjects’ eyes are closed and relaxed, the boldly open eyes of La Gardienne and Self-Portrait make for startling viewing: proclaiming themselves, open eyes direct the attention; closed eyes, meanwhile, invite speculation about what imaginative proceedings are happening behind shut eyelids. Open eyes are risks represented in a mirrored ocular faculty and investments in the trade of direct vision for blindness and insight: so often twin stars in the same system.

Photographer unknown, “Les deux Leonor “surréalisent” (1952). Black and white photograph. Fig. 4.

Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington were friends in the period directly before the Second World War. At that time, Carrington was living in Europe and Surrealist art was at its cultural ascendancy, but even then life was not easy. In a famous photograph of Fini and Carrington from 1952 [Fig. 4], the two stare directly at the camera. It is a dare: armoured resistance against easy interpretations and assumptions. Not for nothing did Fini paint representations of herself with armour, as in The Ceremony (1939), and of Carrington with knight’s garb in The Alcove: An Interior with Three Women (1939). Herself wary of labels, Fini was never comfortable with the mostly male Surrealist movement and preferred instead to call Carrington a revolutionary. Neither she nor Carrington quite saw eye to eye with Surrealists of their time. Some protection was necessary.

René Magritte, “Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt” in La Révolution surréaliste (1929). Photomontage. Fig. 5.

That said, Carrington’s acceptance within Surrealist circles was a result of genuine hospitality, and her story, “The Debutante”, stands as one of two contributions by women to André Breton’s influential and immediately-banned Anthology of Black Humour (1940), a book dedicated to exploring what Breton conceived of as one of Surrealism’s central tenets. For Carrington and Fini, however, art also served as a defense and a challenge to the growing violence of Second World War-era Europe. Art extended the possibility to see things clearly amid fragmenting visions of society and situations that were directly, materially hostile.^[5] Possibilities for sight were vexed (and vexing) when split or closed.

Still from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). Film. Fig. 6.

Be alert to art that places itself along the path of eyesight. The surrealist tradition of the cut-up eye and severed line of sight inevitably returns with an almost gravitational pull to a foundational image, specifically, an important superimposition of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou (1929) [Fig. 6].^[6] This film began to cut open its viewer’s minds with an image that slices through conventional and settled views on the real and that proceeds from an almost-ironic title card familiar to any fable (or act of fabulation): “Il était une fois / Once upon a time.” In the film, a calf’s tears of vitreous humour fall to anxious unease, while Simone Mareuil’s face – her left eye held open with soft but firm force traceable through the lines of her skin – lingers in the mind. What does the surrealist image ask us to see? Why is the cut made to a woman’s eye? With the frictional power of a natural pair violently divided, the two eyes of Un Chien Andalou express very different possibilities. With cynical power, one keeps itself slitted; the other, subject to medical power, discomfortingly opens beyond its control. Mareuil’s subjectivity splits before the brandished razor. Did you flinch?

Leonora Carrington, “Portrait of Dr Morales” (c. 1943). Drawing on paper. Fig. 7.

Let me rephrase the question in order to refocus our attention on Carrington’s work. A young English woman of Irish descent, she lived with German Surrealist Max Ernst in Saint Martin d’Ardeche, France for some time in the late 1930s. After Ernst was interned at Largentière, then in Loriol and in the Camp des Milles during World War II, Carrington fled. Her estranged, mistrustful family had her committed to a Spanish mental asylum in Santander, where she was treated with Cardiazol, described today as “a violent thunderstorm” of a drug for its intense similarity to electroshock therapy. Cardiazol split her vision, for sure, and as such it was the realized nightmare for Carrington, whose antipathy to normal class, gender, and social roles was deeply entrenched.^[7] Years later, Dr Luis Morales, the Spanish doctor who treated her at Santander expressed some doubt about the veracity of Carrington’s initial diagnosis by other, more conventional Catholic doctors: more likely that, in 1941 and given the collapse of both personal and public structures, her surrealist philosophies were a sane way to adapt to violence in society, he believed [Fig. 7].^[8] For Morales, hindsight proved clearest.

Fortunately, Carrington escaped from asylum and her family’s clutches through clever thinking and an arranged marriage to Picasso’s friend, the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc. With Leduc she fled to New York where so many other Surrealist artists at the time also lived. It was at this period in her life, adrift on a new continent and torn between her new husband and her old lover Max Ernst, also in New York but in a relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, that Carrington published “White Rabbits,” in an American journal, View (Dec. 1941/ Jan. 1942). The city was not enough, and from New York, she left with Leduc to Mexico. There, eventually, they divorced, although she lived there until repressive governmental violence in 1968 forced her back to America for a time.

Carrington’s life was a series of dislocations, some violent, some chosen. How can a person cope with the violence of a fissure that suddenly makes what you see an untrustworthy guide to the nature of the things around you? What can you do when epistemology and ontology are so greatly opposed? The answer provided by Carrington’s work of images and language is that of a rich play of metaphysics in art: transformations and metamorphic drifts that work to process the happenings of life into explanatory models made from symbols and images. The philosophy of metaphysics addresses itself to “first” concepts such as “being” and “the world.” Yet metaphysics is so slippery that, for some, it is in disrepute entirely, while for others it serves as a preeminent site of thought about life.^[9] The abstract certainty of metaphysical pronouncements makes it attractive for artists, writers, and spiritualists, as well as for the Surrealists proper. In the twentieth century, Italians Giorgio De Chirico’s and Carlo Carrà’s “metaphysical art” wagered that nothing less than reality itself must be liberated from the “real.” Metaphysical thought applies itself to very broad circumstances.

Playing with metaphysics can be dangerous and banal in turns, as today’s new age movements illustrate, but it is often necessary in desperate or critical situations. The Surrealists turn to metaphysics in order to reveal a vision of reality liberated from what they saw as the disturbing fictions that distort modern life. For Carrington, the Second World War and ongoing frictions in gender and history, on the one hand, and Surrealist adoptions of old languages of magic and superstition on the other challenged her vision of the world through both microscopic and macroscopic lenses. In consequence, art permitted Carrington space and time for understanding these influences. She defines surrealism as “an approach to a reality that we do not understand yet.”^[10] Compare her father’s definition of art. For him, a successful businessman of the time, painting was “horrible and idiotic” and “you didn’t do art; if you did, you were either poor or homosexual, which were more or less the same sort of crime.”^[11] Contrary to her father’s beliefs, the things Carrington saw and the world’s changing faces demanded an explanation which, for her, took the form of art: the work of metaphysics. And yet where metaphysics promises to explain, it often succeeds only at making matters inscrutable or, at best, arcane. Apuleius, whose Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass stands as a particularly clear instance of the metaphysical art of understanding the world, offers a warning: “I have told you things of which, although you have heard them you cannot know the meaning,” he says.^[12] In the best scenario, metaphysical art distributes the work of understanding among cultural traditions and symbolic systems, and it is along these lines that Carrington’s work has been described as a productive combination of Mexican, Egyptian, Hebrew, Celtic, Greek, and Mesopotamian elements. Her paintings, plays, and stories mix the symbols of alchemy, astrology, Tarot, herbalism, magic, witchcraft, and a personal iconography.^[13]

Xul Solar, Jefa (1923). Watercolour on paper, set on cardboard. Fig. 8.

Such bewilderingly syncretic systems held under fluid control resemble the otherworldly aesthetic of Argentine artist Xul Solar (1887–1963), friend to Jorge Luis Borges and devoted esoteric thinker. Jefa (1923) [Fig. 8], for example, shows the play of one of Solar’s invented cosmic languages across a female patroness’ face. In this fantastic fusion of elements designed to make sense of things by focusing on the creative, the esoteric, and the numinal, we find weird fiction and mid-twentieth-century painting hand in hand. Another of Xul Solar’s paintings, The Aleph (1930) [Fig. 9], prompted Borges’ story of the same name published some fifteen years later (Andrew Hurley’s classic translation is collected in The Weird). Whereas Xul Solar went east from Argentina only to return to the Americas, however, Carrington eventually went west from Europe for good. Each artist’s work draws from the surrealism of aesthetic metaphysics in response to severed systems of sight and dislocation. For Solar and Borges, in the pre-war sun, vision was compromised as well, and the draw on metaphysics and “the languages of the Southern Hemisphere of Tlön” make for strange thinking.^[14] For each artist, the dizzying play of metaphysical explanations bridges cultural systems of representation and belief.

Xul Solar, The Aleph (1930). Oil, minerals, and metals on canvas. Fig. 9.

Why is this so? Because metaphysics speculate and express not just ways of seeing the world, the space of epistemology, but more acutely the ways in which people justify existence. And within every appropriation of the real—the “this is how things are done” mentality—is an element of fantasy, a reminder of its ultimately metaphysical lineage in something beyond the visible and the real. Guyanese writer Wilson Harris speculates that even within a text of “so-called realism” exist elements of “curiously subversive fantasy,” so that, as readers, we can “perceive realism and fantasy as a threshold into evolution and alchemy.” “That threshold,” Harris writes, “is a component of the ‘mental bridge’ within and across cultures.”^[15] In 1935, Bronislow Malinowski, one of the twentieth century’s ground-breaking anthropologists, considered magical words in the hospitable space of ethnographic theory. He argued that cross-cultural communication operates along a “coefficient of weirdness” opposed to a “coefficient of reality”^[16]—optimally, the two will work in tandem. However, as Surrealist and metaphysical art suggests, when distorted and ideological impressions of reality become oppressive and overbearing, a surge of weirdness might answer the impending disaster of a world grown grey, pinched, and purchasable.

We can thus explain the observations of Edward James (1907–1984), the incredibly rich art patron, critic, and writer, who wrote that to him Carrington’s paintings “are not merely painted, they are brewed. They sometimes seem to have materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight, yet for all this they are no mere illustrations of fairy tales.”^[17] The Surrealist precedent of the severed eye of Un Chien Andalou is no fable. While the image of “White Rabbits”—severed fingers, seen falling—does resemble the fabulous, or the fantastic, something has changed. Carrington has drawn her audience close: not to the comforts of the fantastic, but to something more, something that might express how vision is bifurcated and unsettled, and must come to terms with strange images. As it is with her paintings, so too her prose. For the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, Carrington’s artistic works offer “a gay, diabolical and persistent struggle against orthodoxy, which Leonora conquers and disperses with imagination, always multiple and singular, an imagination which she communicates with loving pride.”^[18] Ample material to provoke a reader of the weird, whether one looks to images or to words while addressing the unquenchable thirst for the metaphysical justification served by art.

Leonora Carrington, The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (1947). Tempura on wood panel. Fig. 10.

Carrington works as a metaphysical engineer whose structures blend human forms with animal shapes, and whose images occupy the ever-transforming threshold of the grand philosophical statement. In her The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c.1947) [Fig. 10], the most famous of her works, Carrington’s play of evolution and alchemy takes audiences out of their comfort zone and into a place of colours and darkness; her work confronts an audience’s blindnesses with visions hitherto unthinkable. But like the distortions of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), itself a text of vision and visions, the scale is always subject to revision and (with a threat of violence) further justification (can you see the dull blades of the tiny haters trying to cut down the spiritual giant?).^[19] This is the prerogative and risk of metaphysics which appear graceful but conceal great violence. Explanations are weird, for they draw neither from sight nor facts but instead operate along another principle to pronounce upon the other two. Never fear them. Never trust them either, for there are jagged jaws, tiny knives, and little teeth in the darkness, waiting for the giant edifice of the human to fall to ground in rapture, astonishment, ignorance, or simply sleep. Something might eat you while you’re wondering at clouds and colours, sheltering what is precious to you all the while. “White Rabbits” indeed. We can now ask: what else runs into the underground with us—chasing Alices to find alluring rabbits in some darkened and lost-looking glass world—only just ahead?

Gently Falling Fingers – II – Never Enough “White Rabbits”

At this point, it should be noted that for the Weird Fiction Review this story is familiar territory. In a tour de force of interpretation, S.J. Chambers describes “White Rabbits” using an admirably visual explanatory model. Therefore, it would not do to dwell on Carrington’s story along the same lines. But another look at the story seems earned for the 101 Weird Writers series. What follows will engage with the story as a peculiar textual affair lodged in the chasm between seeing and its objects of sight. The events discussed occur under the oddly hostile sign of New York, where the narrator is and where Carrington was when writing the story. The city is described as “so hot that I got palpitations when I ventured out into the streets, so I sat and considered the house opposite and occasionally bathed my sweating face.”^[20] In this sweltering heat, vision changes and falls subject to mirage.

“The time has come that I must tell the events which began in 40 Pest Street,” our story begins. While the narrator’s reason for telling her story is obscure, her voyeurism is clear. She sees strange things in the house opposite hers and gets too involved, bringing rotting meat to the neighbour’s door. Disconcertingly, on encountering the physical object of her gaze she feels the house itself recoil from her fingers. The door is violently hidden under a sudden “cascade of something,” then implodes at her touch, its bell ringer falling to the ground when, subject to her “angry push,” the door “caved inwards, admitting a ghastly smell of putrid meat.”^[21] The smell is what she’s brought, stinking and decomposed: “flesh meat.” She has brought it for the house’s inhabitants, Ethel and Lazarus, who live a strange life. There are the rabbits, for a start, and then there is Ethel’s dead white skin, speckled with what look like stars.

First the rabbits. So many rabbits. A hundred rabbits, all with unblinking large pink eyes. What is their role in this story, these strange interlopers? Animals remind us of the strangeness of flesh before the fact of death when they exist in such close proximity to the human body—when, as in Carrington’s paintings, the human and the animal are bands along the spectrum of living shapes that blend or shift before your eyes. Comparing the similar situations of human beings and animals, Carrington argues that “We both live the best we can and then we die, and we don’t know anything about what happens after death, maybe nothing. […] We are in the same situation as animals.”^[22] Perhaps the more pressing question is this: why do they eat rotting meat? Rabbits are herbivores, but these ones emerging from the dark corners of this almost-abandoned, disappearing house have changed without explanation. We know only the sudden clutch of fear and the desire “to get out and away from these terrible silver people and the white carnivorous rabbits.”^[23] What happens when you see something that challenges your instruments of vision? You run. What if that sight is a woman turning to stars and a horde of animals setting to an unnatural feast? The order of things differs from what it was thought to be; her gift of dead animal flesh leads her to the task of making new metaphysical concepts that might explain what was previously hidden from her.

Against the beastly play of collapsing logical syllogisms and frail-to-breaking metaphysics, Carrington’s figures dance, sometimes with great visceral joy in matters of the flesh but, more often, with weird and unsettling pain or sometimes, increasingly, with a fragile beauty. Let us return to hands—a magician or sleight-of-hand artist knows that the gestures traced by a hand lead the eye to belief. That’s how they trick you. Look again at these hands, delicate and celestial, and see behind them how Ethel’s green silk dress pales against her “dead white” skin that “glittered as if speckled with thousands of minute stars.” Is there a universe within her? A “whole world,” as they say? If you don’t run when seeing such a sight, you might remain to face the mystery. “Do you not want to stay and become like us?” the woman asks. “In seven years your skin will be like stars, in seven little years you will have the holy disease of the Bible, leprosy!”^[24] Biblical references and the seven years of famed magical property: an esoteric language is being called to account for the fullness of human life, having been dismissed by others out of hand.

Leonora Carrington, detail from Samain (c. 1951). Oil on canvas. Fig. 11.

There are other hands in Carrington’s universe. See, for instance, Samain (c.1951) [Fig. 11]. Look at the delicately tapered white hands of the feminine figure in the bottom right of the painting. They trace an absent egg, perhaps the one seemingly dropped to the figure’s lower left… hand, where a foot might be. Incidentally, for a connection between eyes and eggs, look no further than Georges Bataille’s Story of An Eye (1928), where Simone muses on the similarity between the two: egg reminds her of a calf’s eye, she says, “because the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball.” Only shortly after, Simone speaks “about broken eggs, and then broken eyes.”^[25] The parallel seems exact. In Carrington’s Samain, having seemingly dropped the egg, the figure’s hands are still holding something immaterial, still making the gesture. Fingers are how hands hold objects, make gestures, and interact with the world in general—they are the tactile method through which we shape the meaning of what we say. This is how “White Rabbits” ends, with the vision of Ethel’s hand above a balcony, “and as she waved it, her fingers fell off and dropped to the ground like shooting stars.” What do you see? A declension of stars? A text somehow celestial? The flesh leprous and translucent? What kind of sight is offered? An otherworldly image where, catalyzed by a gift of rotting meat, the hidden things of the world are quietly separating into a metaphysical opposition of bodies heavenly and beastly.

Leonora Carrington’s “White Rabbits” is an entry in a Surrealist ledger of works that inscribe visions of a fractured world within a singular point of view engaged in clear metaphysical labour. The story returns its audience to a conception of literary reading itself wherein symbols and signs mean exactly more and less than they appear: where the ocular vision of a reader is split between the meaning of a word and the graphical shape of ink on the page, in other words. As Peter Mendelsund argues, both the “notion that readers are ‘see-ers’” and the conventions used to describe reading are derived from metaphysical traditions of “visitation, annunciation, dream vision, prophecy, and other manifestations of religious or mystical epiphany.”^[26] Carrington’s stories, like her paintings brewed on an alchemical crucible, suggest that a divided vision might arrive at new ways of seeing things: not as they are, but as they might mean. Symbols are made to betray the mystic operation of their signification.

It is thus that the distended and broken parts of the human body fall to the ground as shooting stars surrounded by hordes of brilliantly uncanny white rabbits—white rabbits that, as we know, eat rotting flesh such as that of the woman whose delicate, disintegrating hands prove so alluring to the narrator’s eye. If the image of an eye severed is surrealism’s gift to our aesthetic consciousness, then Carrington’s image of a body turned to stars falling among red-mouthed rabbits must also be accorded its place in a surreal sequence of remarkable images.

One more thing. After an eye reassembles its vision, it confronts a harsh truth of the world—transitory beauty will be eaten and consumed by beasts that fit no rational order. Like the narrator of “White Rabbits,” we will run from both beasts and beauty. In the end, Carrington’s fateful image raises another question: what if it isn’t just the eye that is cut? What if one’s fingers themselves are severed?

Every time I see the eye cut open—its vitreous humours spurting—I flinch. What should I expect? The sight is the painful afterimage of a wound: a wounded vision of the real. An intensity of feeling occupies the place of meaning or message. When I read about those falling fingers, it’s beautiful, but also oh-so-achingly weird.

_____

^[1] Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941/1942, in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, eds. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, New York: Tor, 2011: 277.

^[2] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 277.

^[3] This gendered twist is common: Luce Irigaray, for example, remarks that “‘femininity is a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity,” The Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985: 84.

^[4] See a full discussion of this image in Rudolf E. Kuenzli’s “Surrealism and Misogyny,” Surrealism and Women, eds. Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, Cambridge: MIT, 1991: 17–18.

^[5] Alyce Mahon, “She Who Revealed: The Celtic Goddess in the Art of Leonora Carrington,” in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 132–33.

^[6] In a garrulous story, Alejandro Jodorosky describes the only time Carrington and Luis Buñuel met. While I take the liberty to quote the story, I retain reservations as to its authenticity: “She had a mythic reputation among Mexican painters; she was an incarnation of the most extreme surrealism. During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington’s beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o’clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: It looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again,” Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo [Mu: Le maître et les magiciennes], 2005, trans. Joseph Rowe. Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2008: 25–26. The relationship between the Chilean filmmaker and Carrington (he staged her play Penelope in 1957, for instance) is described with such verve and invention that all readers of the weird are directed to Jodorosky’s work for more.

^[7] N. McCrae, “‘A Violent Thunderstorm’: Cardiazol Treatment in British Mental Hospitals,” Historical Psychiatry 17 (2006): 67–90. Here is Carrington’s description of what Cardiazol induces, and what she called “the Great Epileptic Ailment”: I learned later that my condition had lasted for ten minutes; I was convulsed, pitiably hideous, I grimaced and my grimaces were repeated all over my body.” In “Down Below,” The House of Fear, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988: 192.

^[8] Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art, Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2004: 46.

^[9] Those interested are directed to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s page on “Metaphysics”: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/metaphysics/.

^[10] Leonora Carrington, Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “An Approach to a Reality That We Do Not Yet Understand,” in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 165.

^[11] Quoted in Aberth, 20.

^[12] This citation from Apuleius is quoted in the foreword of Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954), a text which Carrington appreciatively read. See also Teresa Arcq, “A World Made of Magic,” trans. Jonathan Brennan, in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 32.

^[13] Arcq, 19.

^[14] For more in whimsical but very accurate analysis, see Maria Bustillos, “Lot 51: Borges, Xul Solar, and the Occult,” Paris Review 18 June (2015): http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/18/lot-51/.

^[15] Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space, Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1983: 69–70; see also Steven Slemon, “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

^[16] Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic Vol. 2, London: Unwin Brothers, 1935.

^[17] Edward James, “Leonora Carrington,” in Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculptures 1940–1990, ed. Andrea Schlieker, London: Serpentine Gallery, 38. For Carrington, the question of alchemy opens to political structures. As she described the Irish Sidhe, in words told to her by her grandmother with clear parallels to Ireland under English rule, there are “descendants of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political and religious ideas. They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold,” from an interview with Mexican journalist Manuel Avila Camacho López in “Max Ernst me enseño nueva forma de vivir,’ Excélsior, 10 February 1974, and quoted in Aberth: 12. Aberth also points out that, for Carrington, alchemy was connected to Herbert Read’s Surrealism (1937) and the artistic education she received while 19 at Ozenfant Academy. Cf. Aberth 22–23. It must be regarded as a principle irony of the artist’s life that her artistic investment in a transformative and theoretical prosecution of alchemy parallels the occupation of her estranged and even hostile father, Harold Wilde Carrington, a principle shareholder of Imperial Chemicals Industries (ICI). The line between alchemy and chemistry, aesthetics and commerce, runs like a finely sharpened knife within the Carrington family.

^[18] Carlos Fuentes, “Leonora Carrington, or Ironical Sorcery,” in Leonora Carrington: Exposición de óleos, gouaches, dibujos y tapices, Mexcio City: Instituto Anglo-Mexicano de Cultura, 1965.

^[19] For connections between Carrington and Swift, see Kissane 61–69.

^[20] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 227.

^[21] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 278.

^[22] Leonora Carrington and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “An Approach to a Reality that We Do Not Yet Understand [Interview],” Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 160.

^[23] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 279.

^[24] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 279.

^[25] Georges Bataille, L’histoire de l’oeil [Story of the Eye], trans. Joachim Neugroschel, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987: 38–39.

^[26] Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read, New York: Vintage, 2014: 350.

The post 101 Weird Writers #38 — Leonora Carrington appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts.

Kelly Link was born in Miami, Florida, and is the author of numerous short story collections, most recently Get in Trouble from Random House. In 2000, she and spouse Gavin Grant co-founded Small Beer Press, an independent publisher of fantasy, weird, and other forms of speculative fiction, whose releases have been nominated for numerous awards in the field. She is a graduate of Columbia University and UNC-Greensboro, and has taught writing workshops at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Bard College, Clarion East, Clarion West, and others.

Link’s work has been described as magical realism, slipstream, and weird, amongst other categories. “The Specialist’s Hat,” included in The Weird, originally appeared in Event Horizon in 1998 and was subsequently collected in her debut collection Stranger Things Happen. It was selected for multiple Year’s Best… anthologies and received the World Fantasy Award in 1999. She has won numerous other honors, such as the Locus and O. Henry Awards. Link’s other collections include Magic for Beginners and Pretty Monsters, and her debut novel is forthcoming. She lives in Massachusetts. More information can be found at www.kellylink.net.

– Christopher Burke

***

“The Specialist’s Hat” has become a touchstone for a number of overlapping literary movements (magic realism, slipstream, interstitial, metafiction, fabulation, weird fiction), and there is good reason for this. It infuses tropes drawn from Gothic tales such as Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or ghost stories such as M. R. James’s classic “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” with a playfully postmodern sensibility. The story has a peculiar lightness to it, as it weaves together children’s games, fairy tales, oral histories, and snatches of poetry whose deliberate awfulness amuses us even as it unsettles us. This sort of brilliant cognitive dissonance is a hallmark of Link’s particular brand of fiction.

The story begins easily enough. Samantha and Claire are twin sisters, aged ten. Following their mother’s death, their father has relocated them to Eight Chimneys, a typical Gothic mansion complete with exactly one hundred windows, three-stories, and a supposedly haunted forest. It is revealed that the girls’ father has been studying the literary stylings of the house’s previous occupant, Charles Cheatham Rash, who wrote “three volumes of bad obscure poetry, and an even worse and more obscure novel” (888). While their father works, the twins are cared for by the nameless babysitter, fourteen-years-old, who comes and goes as she pleases. Their favourite game is playing Dead (“When you’re Dead…you don’t have to brush your teeth…”; “When you’re Dead…you live in a box and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.”) (888). One day they discover the Specialist’s hat hanging on a nail in the attic, apparently made by the poet Rash out of the fifty-two teeth of a range of exotic creatures as well as those of his own vanished wife. The Specialist’s hat, we are told, looks like nothing, but it can sound like anything. The plot of the story itself follows a kind of dream logic that makes it difficult to précis; but its effects creep up on you, a sort of shivery, nerveless numbness, the mental equivalent of knocking your funny bone badly. Is it a love story? A ghost story? Does it end happily or not? Most readers would agree the story is fundamentally disquieting; but few, I think, could agree on why.

You Can’t Make a Hommelette…

While searching for a way to explain the curious effects of “The Specialist’s Hat”, I found myself recalling “Troubles with the Real”, an essay written by the Marxist philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, which I first encountered as a graduate student. The essay, a strange piece of Gothic-tinged criticism in its own right, discusses a monstrous figure first described by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan as the lamella or the hommelette (the “man-omelet”), a membranous creature that apparently flies off the moment the foetus emerges. It is extra-flat, moving like an amoeba, capable of surviving any division, and, for all intents and purposes, immortal. “Well!” exclaims Lacan, “This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep…” (197–98)

Suppose, indeed! What a horrifying thought! That element of horror was something Žižek picked up on in Lacan’s account of the lamella, leading him to make the leap between the psychoanalytical concept (the lamella represented for Lacan the libido or the “death drive”) and the horror genre. For Žižek, the lamella—indivisible, indestructible, and immortal, an “entity of pure surface…first heard as a shrilling sound, and then [popping] up as a monstrously distorted body”—is undead, possessed not of a “sublime spiritual immortality” but rather the “obscene immortality” of a zombie. It is a creature which cannot die; it recomposes itself in the face of violence and clumsily staggers on. It is unstoppable, a representation of “an uncanny excess of life”; it is the urge to persist beyond the natural cycle of generation and corruption. Žižek memorably compares the lamella to the face-hugger in Ridley Scott’s Alien, an indestructible creature which multiplies when it is cut into pieces, and whose extra-flat body can suddenly fly up and envelop your face: “In it,” he writes, “pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence.”

So far, so terrifying—but what does it have to do with Kelly Link? In rereading “The Specialist’s Hat” for the umpteenth time, I noticed a striking similarity between the eponymous piece of clothing and Žižek’s lamella:

Hanging from a nail on the nursery chimney is a long black object. It looks lumpy and heavy, as if it were full of things. … There are holes in the black thing, and it whistles mournfully as [the babysitter] spins it. “The Specialist’s hat,” she says.

“That doesn’t look like a hat,” says Claire. “It doesn’t look like anything at all.” (893)

And then:

Claire snatches the hat off the nail. “I’m the Specialist!” she says, putting the hat on her head. It falls over her eyes, the floppy shapeless brim sewn with little asymmetrical buttons that flash and catch the moonlight like teeth. (893)

Is this not an eerily evocative description? The lumpy, shapeless, toothy object which emits a strange sound and creeps over your face in order to seal it up? “Yes,” you might cry, “but so what? What does it mean?” Or better yet: “Why does it frighten me?”

Here we might return to that classic ghost story I mentioned at the beginning of the essay: “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M. R. James, a tale with a rather similar uncanny presence. When Professor Parkins arrives for an off-season visit at a seaside hotel, he wanders into the vicinity of a ruined Templars’s church where he discovers an ancient whistle engraved with the words QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT (Who is this who is coming?). The sound of the whistle fascinates Parkins, but as he sleeps he is haunted by a terrifying vision of a long stretch of shore, absent of any distinguishing features except a man, fleeing.

So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been shown; but now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters. It would stop, raise arms, bow itself toward the sand, then run stooping across the beach to the water-edge and back again; and then, rising upright, once more continue its course forward at a speed that was startling and terrifying. (20)

The subsequent night, Professor Parkins discovers the entity has invaded his room, taking up residence in the empty second bed, a rustling and shaking thing to be described later as “a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen” (26). In a fit of panic, Parkins dashes for the whistle which he has left by the window:

This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the personage in the empty bed, with a sudden smooth motion, slipped from the bed and took up a position, with outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front of the door. Parkins watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of getting past it and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could not have borne — he didn’t know why — to touch it; and as for its touching him, he would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. (26)

For all intents and purposes, the monstrous apparition of James’s story possesses the very same qualities as the Specialist’s hat: it is formless and flat, nothing more than crumpled linen and yet somehow indestructible, indescribable and intensely horrible. Like the lamella, it emits a strange noise, and it can move at a terrifying speed. It unsettles because its lack of form speaks to its monstrous immortality; how would you destroy such an entity? Is it even possible? What is it? If we return to the inscription on the whistle, we discover our question is only repeated back to us: Quis est? Who is this?

This is precisely the question that Link returns to in the chilling conclusion of “The Specialist’s Hat.” Claire and Samantha have worn the Specialist’s hat, they have allowed themselves to enter a strange stasis, somewhere between the Death of their childhood game and real annihilation. “He’ll be coming soon,” the babysitter tells them. “It will be coming soon” (894). But who is the Specialist? There are only vague hints and suggestions.

Who’s there?
Just air. (894)

No one is there. Nothing is there. Or rather nothingness is there. Death.

And then the front door opens. Samantha and Claire huddle together as they listen to someone creeping up the stairs. “Be quiet,” the babysitter commands them “It’s the Specialist.” And then we hear him ourselves:

“Claire, Samantha, Samantha Claire.” The Specialist’s voice is blurry and wet. It sounds like their father’s voice, but that’s because the hat can imitate any noise, any voice. “Are you still awake?” (894)

Is it their father who has come for them? Or is it, as the babysitter suggests, the Specialist? And is this what we find terrifying in the story: the disappearance of the father, his replacement by a simulacrum, almost identical, someone who pretends to love them but who is fundamentally a stranger? Quis est? Perhaps this is part of the terror, but it isn’t everything. What leaves us most disturbed, I think, is not their father’s transformation into the Specialist but rather their own transformation, facilitated by their interaction with the Specialist’s hat—the lamella. And in fact it is the lamella that they themselves seem to become. Think about it. They gain the ability to move strangely, to vanish up the chimney and fly, if they want to, from the bed; they are trapped in a kind of pre-sexual stasis between ten and eleven; they are indivisible:

Last year they were learning fractions in school, when her mother died. Fractions remind Samantha of herds of wild horses, piebalds and pintos and palominos. There are so many of them, and they are, well, fractious and unruly. (894)

Their mother’s death has left them in this state, but they have also chosen it; as a game, as an escape, as a way of liberating themselves from the need to grow up. Like the zombie, the alien, and the spectral presence, they have taken upon themselves an obscene form of immortality; they are undead.

…Without Breaking a Few Eggs

But what then is “The Specialist’s Hat” about? At one level, this is a story invested with enough sexual imagery to make it any psychoanalyst’s (wet?) dream. We begin with Samantha and Claire, two prepubescent girls who lose their mother, only to find that their widower father has recently met a woman in the woods. We learn that the woman is a distant relation of Rash; we know by this point that Rash had a pretty wife who met another man “who wanted to go with her” (889). When Rash’s wife finally agreed, her husband found out and tricked her into drinking the blood of a snake:

And in about six months snakes created in her and they got between her meat and the skin. And they say you could just see them running up and down her legs. They say she was just hollow to the top of her body, and it kept on like that till she died. (889)

This is the first explanation we hear of what sex might mean in the context of the story: snakes, hollowness, and eventually death. The image of the snake reoccurs throughout the story. One of Rash’s poems tells how he met a woman in the wood, and “her lips were two red snakes” (890). The Specialist’s hat makes a noise like a snake. Most importantly, when the girls’ father comes stumbling into the bedroom, he claims “I think I’ve been bitten by something. I think I’ve been bitten by a goddamn snake” (894). The sense of this image is clear: the snake is a symbol of consuming sexuality, a creature that hollows you out, and eventually kills you. Only the twins, who escape as ghosts through the chimney, remain untouched.

So what might Žižek say about this? Recall that the lamella is itself a representation of the libido in Lacanian theory. He describes it as the irrepressible sexual urge, the death drive, the drive for “an uncanny excess of life.” It is also something thrown off from the foetus, amoeba-like, the thing without any sex of its own. It is pre-sexual. The symbolic resonance of the snake as a representation of the lamella is obvious. What haunts Samantha and Claire is the fear that their father has become fundamentally different because of his libido, somehow alien to them; he has vanished into the woods to meet his lover, and he has been bitten by the snake; it will kill him—or worse yet, it will change him.

But the real anxiety, I think, is not simply what the snake has done to their father, but what it will do to them. Sexual women become dead women in this story: Rash’s wife, their own mother. And so they must find a way to stop themselves from growing older, from falling into the inevitable trap of puberty. “Samantha doesn’t care for boys that much,” the story reminds us.

She likes numbers. Take the number 8 for instance, which can be more than one thing at once. Looked at one way, 8 looks like a bent woman with curvy hair. But if you lay it down on its side, it looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth. This is sort of like the difference between being Dead and being dead. (894)

For Samantha, the image of the number 8 oscillates between the form of the bent woman, the sexual woman, and the snake devouring itself. Becoming a sexualized woman is like being Dead: it is liberating, the Dead fear nothing, the Dead can move as they will. But the snake also symbolises true death or annihilation: “The morning comes not, no, never, no more” (892). When the twins put on the Specialist’s hat—the ultimate vagina dentata—they gain control of their sexuality, or rather, they gain the power to annul their own sexuality, to control it. The Specialist’s hat, then, is both a sign of what haunts them and the mechanism by which they learn to escape it.

But the horror of the lamella extends beyond a purely sexualised reading of the story. It is truly disturbing, Žižek might say, because it represents the intersection between the imaginary and the Real; it reveals the Real in its most terrifying dimension as the primordial abyss which dissolves all identities and swallows everything. This concept of the Real will be familiar to readers of weird fiction. It is represented in a range of literary guises from Poe’s maelstrom to the horror at the end of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Lovecraft’s elder god Cthulhu, a creature who presents such a dangerous vision of the universe that he cannot be seen without causing madness:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (139)

The critic Benjamin Noys identifies in Žižek’s critical writing a true Gothic sensibility. For Lacan, the Real is inscribed into the notion of human sexuality, but for Žižek, the kernel of reality is horror, the horror of the Real—an encounter with the universe as it really is, stripped of imaginative protection and representation.

“The Specialist’s Hat” terrifies us in much the same way that Lovecraft terrifies us: it hints at an encounter with something which is beyond the realm of our experience—death—and yet which is simultaneously so deeply embedded in our own nature that it is always already there. Beneath the awfulness of Rash’s obscure poetry is an insight we recognise as fundamentally true: we are dying, we have always been dying, and sex, which seems to promise immortality, is not a way out of that trap, but rather a way further into it. Sex is the disappearance of the self, just as death is; there is no immortality, there is only the restless seeking after it, the repetition of the journey into the woods, the bite of the snake, and the hollowing out of the body as skin pulls away from meat, as you grow accustomed to slowness, as your eyes sink in, your flesh decays…

This repetition, this annihilation, this image of the future is what terrifies us—because we know it is true. The twins embrace another kind of formlessness—Death—as a way to ward off or sublimate the vision of natural death they witnessed when their mother passed away. The ambiguity of the ending comes not in the identity of the father—whether he has turned into the Specialist—or indeed in whether something awful has happened to the twins. Rather it comes in the irresolution of the twins’ stasis: like Peter Pan, will they choose Death forever? Or will they accept life with all its dangers, its delusions, and its ultimate dissolution?

Bibliography

James, M. R. “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” In Great Horror Stories: Tales by Stoker, Poe, Lovecraft and Others. Ed. John Grafton. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006.

Kay, Sarah. Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Print.

Kelly, James Patrick and John Kessel, eds. Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2006. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. Print.

Link, Kelly. “The Specialist’s Hat.” Event Horizon November 1998. Reprinted in Stranger Things Happen. Brooklyn, NY: Small Beer Press, 2001. Print.

Lovecraft, H. P. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin, 1999. Print.

Noys, Benjamin. “The Horror of the Real: Žižek’s Modern Gothic.” International Journal of Zizek Studies 4 (2010). <http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/274/372>.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien.” Lacan.com. 2009. <http://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=180>.

The post 101 Weird Writers #37 — Kelly Link appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his nom de plume Saki, was a British writer known for his macabre stories that sometimes satirized the Edwardian society to which he belonged. Munro was born in British-controlled Burma to a father who served as Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police. Munro followed his father into the Indian Imperial Police but after contracting malaria, returned home to England where he began a career in journalism and writing. Munro is considered to be a master of the short story having influenced diverse authors from A. A. Milne to P. G. Wodehouse. Munro died in battle during the First World War.

– David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!”

– Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), pen name Saki, was no stranger to disorientation. Born in Akyab, Burma to a family serving imperial British interests in Southeast Asia, he was only two years old when his mother, Mary Frances Mercer, died from complications related to a miscarriage caused by a runaway cow in Devon, England.

Studies of Saki often repeat this odd story as an introduction to the writer’s sometimes strange works, but – as readers of the weird will know – oddness is often no cause for levity and death no simple matter. The immediate consequences of his mother’s odd demise were hardly humorous for Munro. He and his fellow bereaved siblings were taken from Burma and left to the cruelties of the British school system by their father. “What bearing this tragedy had on her son’s later preoccupation with animals that attack women we can only surmise,” John Carey offers in a recent introduction to Saki’s work – “but it can hardly have been insignificant” (ix). In his stories that would follow, guardians and women must always be aware.

Wrested from colonial exoticism into the hellish grasp of boarding school and suddenly bereft of his mother through a strange accident, Munro was, it is fair to conclude, permanently affected by childhood events. He had his share of complications as an adult, perhaps more. Biographers make much of signs of ambiguous sexuality in his life, for instance. But in some things he was very straightforward, and much like his contemporary, Rudyard Kipling (who also shared his occasional proclivity for ghost stories and the weird), Munro believed deeply in the dangerous myths of nation and empire. A dedication to these values led Moore to enlist as an overage soldier in World War I. Refusing easy postings, Munro bravely insisted on joining the infantry. It was a fateful decision. In November 1916, he died in the trenches near Beaumont-Hamel on the Somme.

Before his death in war, Munro was a police officer in India, satirist, occasional historian and, most pertinent to our purposes, a writer under the pen-name of “Saki.” The pseudonym is less a name and more properly a designation. Assumedly, Munro took it from Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It refers to a boy who serves wine and, for Munro, seemed most compelling as a symbol for a spiritual guide (Gibson 11; cf. Carey xiv). Of Munro’s writing, of which there is much – journalism, satire, and humour in nonfiction, plays, and short stories – only the fiction bears the name of Saki. The impression of the strange is indelibly cut, however. Sandie Byrne judges that Saki’s stories show a bracing “lack of sentimentality about children, animals, or anything else.” A flair for cruelty and an ugly antipathy toward other cultures, especially Jewish and Slavic peoples, and the working classes grievously mar Saki’s work (Byrne 11).

A chasm separates Saki’s fiction from Munro’s biography, and contradictions between the two abound. To Brian Gibson’s eye, “Saki satirizes the urban bourgeois world which the gentleman, journalist, and soldier Munro inhabited, addressed in his articles, and fought for” (17). Despite the difference in attributions, both endeavours issued from the same man. The tormented relationship between Saki’s targets of satire – British politicians, strong women, and Edwardian society more generally – and his strong belief in Queen and country goes some way toward explaining moments of conflicted cruelty. So too we might account for his turn toward animals and children as figures of moral superiority. Saki’s children are often valorized just as the stupidity of adults is exposed. The three major themes that occupied his writing are 1) the myth of England, 2) the British Empire, and 3) “the feral ephebe, the sleek young male killer in his several forms” (Byrne 15). It is the third that most concerns readers of The Weird, and so it is to the devilish triangle of knowledge, secrecy, and children that we must turn, for biography can only take us so far.

The Secret Arts of Knowing Children § An Open Window, A Cage

Contemporary readers may be most familiar with Saki by way of his anti-ghost story “The Open Window” (1914) The delight of this story, in which a nervy young man (Framton Nuttel) is played like a fiddle by a teenage girl named Vera’s cunning lies, is the way in which it tells you from the beginning that its operations will be more than transparent. Better than a pane of glass, materially resistant to its illusory translucency, vision through an open window will be entirely unobstructed. So too the ghost story, where the ghosts are entirely see-through, which is to say that they are the bodies of the living: no ghosts at all! So too the story exposes the fiction of narrative. Vera’s ghost story is a spectacular lie, the story tells us, and therefore one should not trust stories, but only take pleasure in them (as the reader of “The Open Window” does). Unlike poor Framton, ostensibly the protagonist at the story’s beginning, in this fiction of anti-fiction readers are more aligned with Vera, a “very self-possessed young lady of fifteen” (102, my emphasis) with a penchant for cruel and inventive storytelling. Not insignificantly, Saki repeats the description of Vera as self-possessed on the next page. Only when making her deadly emotional ploy to Framton does Vera’s voice “los[e] its self-possessed note and become falteringly human” (103). Could the self-possessed child in control of narrative manipulations be somehow inhuman – perhaps another uncanny face of the weird?

Named for speaking truth (Saki’s game is satire, never forget), Vera plays on the feelings of the adults who listen to her tales spun from ghosts, cemeteries, and the grotesque. The person closest to knowledge seems to be the person whose lies manipulate the too-gullible adults surrounding her. To be self-possessed is to embody a knowledge not shared with others. In this, Vera, like many other children, is a gothic child who “knows too much,” as Steven Bruhm writes, an observation made acute when he notes that the self-possessed child’s “knowledge makes us more than a little nervous” (103). The most haunting thing about Saki’s “The Open Window” is the power of the young to dance a sharp knife along the exposed nerves of adults. Inventive, keen-witted, and cruel, the young simply know more than their more aged competitors. More than this, they have the will to play. The theme is at the heart of a long line of fictional treatments surrounding a central object: the ambiguously knowing child.

Before turning to Saki’s brilliantly brief “Sredni Vashtar” (1912) I want to briefly recall another short story published just prior to Saki’s work, Henry James’s “In the Cage” (1898). The pairing is odd but fruitful. James was no stranger to stories of distressingly strange children who know exactly too much or who seem to know something, at least. This is clear in What Maisie Knew (1897), for example, but also in the archetypical ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898), in which an ambiguously motivated governess comes to grief in the service of two children who seem to know something she does not. Or perhaps the children, normal and knowing nothing extraordinary, are terrorized by their paranoid governess. A ghost story refuses simple readings. This is also the time of Sigmund Freud, for whom, as Bruhm suggests, “the child is always defined by conflicts, desires, and aggressions, instinctual drives he located in the human being’s animalistic ‘id’” (99). In these and other stories, the Victorian child’s seeming innocence rapidly gave way to gothic or macabre reminders served by children such as Vera (or our Conradin). Not only “naterally wicious,” as Dickens’s Great Expectations suggested, disturbingly knowing children are possessed of some kind of secret – perhaps the secret.

Henry James’s “In the Cage” describes a telegrapher who stumbles on a secret which, for a brief window of time, dispossesses her: an affair between two of her aristocratic customers, Lady Bradeen and Captain Everard. Fascinated by the secret, the telegraphist puts her own impending marriage to a grocer, Mr. Mudge, on hold as she begins observation of Everard. In the end, it is the telegraphist to whom Everard will turn when he worries about a wire from Bradeen that might have compromised the two. Could their coded letters have betrayed their secret? But no, they are safe, the telegraphist confirms. All parties never see each other again. The telegraphist will marry Mudge. Back to reality – or so it seems.

James’s short story is comprehensively riddled by what Thomas Laughlin calls “James’s phantom signifiers—his undisclosed secrets, mystifying enigmas, and transient ghosts” (155). In their famous reading of “In the Cage,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari linger over the uncanny moment of telling that betrays to the listener or reader what Deleuze and Guattari call “the form of the secret” (196): not the secret itself, nor the matter of the secret, nor even the fact that secrecy exists, but a certain knowingness that disrupts structures and the foreseen. The moment in which the form of the secret is revealed is an epistemological change that happens when the London telegraphist, reading a coded telegraph, “ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything. There were no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only glare” (qtd. in Deleuze and Guattari 197).^[1] “You cannot go further in life than this sentence by James,” the French theorists argue. Operations of the self-possessed unknown in texts devoid of inherent meaning are signified by failures of interpretation. In turn, these failures and lacunae make visible the shape of untraceable secrets. “As Kierkegaard says,” Deleuze and Guattari conclude, “nothing distinguishes the knight of the faith from a bourgeois German going home or to the post office: he sends off no special telegraphic sign … yet he is already moving on a line no one even suspects” (197). The moral of the story is this: to be self-possessed is to know secrets, and the most others might gain from observation is to understand not secrets themselves but how to discern the form of the secret.

Our detour through “The Open Window” and “In the Cage” should remind us that prose is a mysterious thing. Words and the images they conjure are certainly not straightforward; neither are matters of knowledge and interpretation. Beyond the figural knowing children and oblivious adults who appear in the spectralized stories, prose is a matter of paths to understanding, of secrets and of the forms and bodies that hold them. Turning to the weird, it will be a matter of guarding ourselves, as readers, from the strange device in play, for we as adults might find ourselves open and vulnerable to the story at hand if we seek out only secrets and not their forms. What does weird fiction know that we do not? The je ne sais quoi of art?

To discover what someone knows we must evaluate how the fact of their experiences and knowledge are presented to us. How does knowledge testify? The knowingness of our little Conradin precedes that of Stella Gibbons’s Ada Doom in the faux-gothic Cold Comfort Farm (1932). As a child, Doom infamously saw “something nasty in the woodshed.” Unlike Gibbons’s child, who comes face to face with her horror and is destroyed by it, Conradin and the reader of “Sredni Vashtar” are anchored to the window and see nothing of the events that transpire inside. In this, he is more like Ian McEwan’s Briony Tallis of Atonement, who watches over without seeing a scene of her own fervid imaginings come to life in horrific fashion. Like the weird, Conradin straddles worlds, piercing borders with transgressive unconcern. He is fateful and strange, true, but he is more like us than we may care to admit. He may pray to the polecat-ferret Sredni Vashtar, but this devotion to the unknown and the inhuman resembles more and more readerly devotion to the text, especially that use of a text that asks for knowledge. A text is an assemblage of signs and pages, after all. Don’t get bitten looking for secrets.

Sredni Vashtar in the Woodshed § What the Weird Knows

About “Sredni Vashtar” I will say comparatively little and leave the reading for readers. It is a classic. Charles H. Gillen observes that this blinking-short story is one of Saki’s most frequently reprinted tales, and that, “because of its balefulness and horror, it stays in a reader’s memory ever afterward” (87). What more can be said? Better question: what is the worst that can happen?

Only remember this: Conradin is a knowing child, one of the devilishly dreadful who observe few social niceties. Sredni Vashtar went forth. A child will use you just like a spiritualist medium would at a séance. You won’t even know you’re being exploited for an other’s ends. His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white. But you might feel a little weird. After all, reading the story re-enlivens Conradin’s chant, “the hymn of his threatened idol” (55). His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death. While the reader recites the chant something is happening in the little shed, out of sight but not out of mind. Does Conradin know what is going to happen? Does he hope against hope, praying to his demigod for the devil to deliver himself? Even the child fears the polecat-ferret whom he worships – and for good reason. Devotion betrays its object of worship. It is in fact Conradin’s visitations with red offerings (red flowers, scarlet berries) that clues in his guardian, Mrs. De Ropp, and leads to the removal of Conradin’s beloved hen. De Ropp’s blind act blithely violates Conradin’s only object of affection and leaves him the sole consolation of Sredni Vashtar – “his most treasured possession”, but also a beast he little understands (54). From that moment, all Conradin’s faint knowledge flies out the window in the form of a yearning prayer. “Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar,” he pleads. Show a sign. Signify yourself.

For us, watching the mouth of the shed with Conradin, Sredni Vashtar’s passing can be followed only by mundanities and mysteries. Taste “the slow enjoyment” of eating toast, for instance, one of Conradin’s near-forbidden pleasures. Or hear the “quick spasms” of noise outside the dining-room door. Footsteps, entreaties, cries, voices, an unmysterious “heavy burden,” but also, as anyone who enjoys toast will know, the soft crunch of buttered bread. As the story tells it, then, the body’s burden is a wyrd knowledge predicated on the sight of nothing and a false prayer to animals cast as demigods, but it has not let go of toast and our own recognizable reality. To read of Conradin is to know this and to see it, not in sordid little details, but in form alone. Some secrets are not worth telling. In this case, the weird knows feeling. We proceed to the last question: of what destiny or fate does Saki’s wyrd tell?

If you do find something strange about Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar,” you’re one of the lucky ones, for its pages host the weird in its feral self-possession. As Ann and Jeff VanderMeer write of the weird: “I know it when I feel it” (xvi). The good thing is this: you can still feel. Otherwise you might be an insensate body. Worse, you might be asleep, dispossessed of feeling and possessed of an insensate or distracted mind ready to accept whatever comes. If you’re not feeling a little odd, you might find yourself unpleasantly surprised. Taken by ferrets even, or by the baleful misogyny of a knowing child. In a blink of the eye you too might have to be carried inside.

Conradin may not be right about everything, and his little god may have run off, but don’t tell him about the body. He knows. Sredni Vashtar, the Beautiful. The weird, red in tooth and claw.

Works Cited

Bruhm, Steven. “Nightmare on Sesame Street: or, The Self-Possessed Child.” Gothic Studies 8.2 (2006): 98–113. Print.

Byrne, Sandie. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H.H. Munro. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

Carey, John. Introduction to Short Stories and The Unbearable Bassington. Saki. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. vii-xxiv. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [Mille Plateaux]. 1987. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2003. Print.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. London: Chapman and Hall, 1861. Print.

Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm. London: Longmans, 1932. Print.

Gibson, Brian. Reading Saki: The Fiction of H.H. Munro. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Print.

Gillen, Charles H. H.H. Munro (Saki). New York: Twayne, 1969. Print.

James, Henry. “In the Cage.” 1898. Collected Stories Vol. 2. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 787–940. Print.

Laughlin, Thomas A. “The Double Life in the Cage: The Queering of the Social in Henry James’s Late Short Fiction.” Henry James Review 31.2 (2010): 154–168. Print.

Ross, Shawna. “‘You cannot go further in life than this sentence:’ Deleuze, Guattari, Henry James.” Modern Languages Association Conference, Los Angeles, 2011. Academia.edu. 2011. Internet. 25 June 2015.

Saki [H.H. Munro]. The Best of Saki. London: Bodley Head, 1952. Print.

      . “Sredni Vashtar.” 1912. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Eds. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. New York: Tor, 2012. 53–55. Print.

VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff. Introduction to The Weird. Eds. VanderMeer. xv-xx.

____

[1] Ross points out that this line is multiply distorted, first by Deleuze and Guattari, who are quoting a 1925 French translation of James’s text, and then by Brian Massumi, the English translator of Mille plateaux, whose revised version again fails to include crucial words that the French translators had in the first place picked up on. With four versions of these two absolutely crucial lines – James’s original, the 1925 translation, Massumi’s version into English, and Massumi’s erroneous repetition of the original – we arrive at a situation where “Each time we turn to the Jamesian text, we return to it through a text […] that exists virtually, not on the line of hard segmentarity but in the micropolitics of Jamesian style, in the molecular currents of “In the Cage,” whose use for Deleuze and Guattari is to give a model for abstraction that abandons interpretation and stratification in favor of a productive eternal return” (Ross).

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(The city of Pearl, from The Other Side)

The work of Austrian Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) fits loosely within an Expressionist/Decadent/proto-Surrealist tradition. A highly praised artist, he produced only one major work of fiction: The Other Side, published in 1908, and excerpted in our The Weird compendium as an early precursor or influencer of modern weird fiction. Although still underrated, the novel has managed to retain a cult status simply because it has long been a favorite of a variety of writers and artists. It would be hard to believe, for example, that Mervyn Peake had not read Kubin prior to writing his Gormenghast novels. (The Other Side is perhaps most akin in tone to Peake’s Titus Alone.)

The details of Kubin’s life relevant to his fiction are these: his mother died when he was ten, he had a sexualized relationship with an older, pregnant woman when he was eleven, and his father was a tyrant whose death in part triggered the writing of The Other Side. Kubin, in his nonfiction, is amazingly frank about all of these personal issues, giving us rare insight into motivation and influence.

These events, as well as unhappy romances, contributed to his uneasy, melancholic state, which manifested itself in unique visions, which then manifested in his art as the truest way of portraying the nightmares occurring in his head. Kubin had no internal editor telling him “no, this is too much.” Moreover, he may not even have realized that what he was creating might startle people. Did it amuse or horrify him when gentlemen and ladies who viewed his art reportedly fainted?

There’s the sense, too, in reading the praise of Kubin’s contemporaries that they found him too rough, too flawed, and yet it’s impossible to separate out the “good” from the “bad”–a condition common to some of the best “weird” writers and artists. As Austrian critic Richard Schaukal noted in a 1903 review, “He has not studied drawing. That is clear at a glance. But what does that tell us when confronted with this stunning oeuvre!” Given these underpinnings of Kubin’s inspiration, it’s perhaps remarkable that The Other Side has as much story as it does; not merely a series of images strung together, it is a true masterpiece of rising tension and horror.

The Other Side tells the tale of a Munich draftsman asked by an old schoolmate named Patera to visit the newly established Dream Kingdom, somewhere in Central Asia. Patera rules the Dream Kingdom from the capital city of Pearl. The wealthy Patera has had a European city uprooted and brought to its new location, along with sixty-five thousand inhabitants. The narrator, after some hesitation, agrees to visit and travels with his wife through Constantinople through Batum, Batu, Krasnovodsk, and Samarkand—Samarkand being the last of any identifying landmarks on their journey.

The narrator soon finds that the Dream Kingdom is, well, a kingdom of dreams. People experience or live “only in moods” and shape all outer being at will “through the maximum possible cooperative effort.” A huge wall keeps out the world and “the sun never shone, never were the moon or the stars visible at night.…Here, illusions simply were reality.”

Over time, strange rituals and aberrations have sprung up. Pearl also shifts in odd ways, and in this sense has a kinship with M. John Harrison’s far-future Viriconium, which also functions from more of a metaphorical than a chronological foundation. This doesn’t bother the narrator at first, but as the city’s changes become more and more grotesque, it’s clear that the Dream Kingdom is faltering, descending into madness.

Despite the claustrophic atmosphere and unseen horrors that form the emotional foundation of the novel, The Other Side is remarkable not just for its vivid imagery, laden with surrealistic subtext, but for how the relatively modern aspects of the novel—American tourists, for example—are perfectly integrated into a timeless, festering milieu. The battle that occurs between the irrational and rational as the Dream Kingdom disintegrates takes on an updated Grand Guignol quality that oddly enough has the texture of modern-day war. It’s almost as if the novel channels Apocalypse Now by way of Hieronymus Bosch.

Where did The Other Side come from, other than from Kubin’s visionary art? Consider this tangle of influence: Kubin had been commissioned to illustrate a book of Edgar Allen Poe novellas by a Munich publisher in 1907. At roughly the same time, Kubin met with Gustav Meyrink to discuss illustrations for Meyrink’s novel-in-progress The Golem. When Meyrink hit a snag in finishing The Golem, Kubin took his preliminary sketches and found ways to use some of them in The Other Side. Not long after publication of The Other Side, Franz Kafka read and enjoyed it, and then later used elements from it in the creation of his own The Castle. (Kubin might have been aware of Kafka’s early work, as well.)

Labels like “outsider artist” aside, Kubin was definitely connected to the creative communities of his day. Indeed, when Kubin arrived in Munich,Germany, to study art as a teenager, who should he be discovered by than the iconic Franz Blei, who was also one of Kafka’s friends.

Blei gives us a semi-amused description of Kubin as a “frail young boy who was always dressed in black and had a pale face that was always straining a little to grow dark and pretending to be as shy as a young world that had been dragged from a hollow into the light.”   (Blei was a bit mischievous, his bestiary of modern literature describing Meyrink, for example, as “the only mooncalf who dropped to earth and which is now in captivity…Officers of the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army and German Deputies wanted to ban the public exhibition of the Meyrink because, so they said, it gave a distorted reflection of them in its one big eye.”)

That Kubin was a creator who either “was compelled by forces that guided his hand,” or trained himself to be so compelled, is clear even from his description of his reaction to an exhibition of Max Klinger’s etchings in Munich in 1882:

I grew moody…And now I was suddenly inundated with visions of pictures in black and white–it is impossible to describe what a thousand-fold treasure my imagination poured out before me. Quickly I left the theater, for the music and the mass of lights now disturbed me, and I wandered aimlessly in the dark streets, overcome and literally ravished by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations.*

In that context for Kubin’s inspiration, there’s perhaps no finer evocation of the effect Kubin achieves in his art and in The Other Side than this 1903 description from the Berliner Illustrirte: “This art always dreams of the last things in apocalyptic fantasy; its beings and forms are not of this world, and you cannot measure them by the ruler of correctness or anatomical possibility; they are complete distortion, total gruesome exaggeration; just as their landscapes dream away in the eternal twilight behind time and space. But you will always find one thing in this art, which dispenses with every depiction, every illustration of being, it has a convincing power to make things present and will grip you and sweep you away, conveying to you ideas and moods of uncanny reality that will burn themselves into your brain as if with hot iron punches…the suggestion of this foreboding art of the soul, the rare, the distant, the lustfully dreadful…is always powerful and enduring.”

The Other Side still appeals to a modern reader because of these qualities, after many novels initially seen as more enduring have faded from memory.

All quotes not attributed taken from the excellent and highly recommended Alfred Kubin: Drawings 1897–1909 (published by Neue Galerie).

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