Weird #30: “The Crowd” by Ray Bradbury (1943)

On February 22, 2021February 22, 2021 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, UncategorizedLeave a comment

https://pixabay.com/photos/crowd-of-people-crowd-people-blur-1209630/

Ray Bradbury’s weird tale “The Crowd” modernizes the weird tale by building a sense of paranoid, unreal conspiracy founded on a modern anxiety. In this respect, he is doing something that Johnson, Leiber, and Wollheim have also done, in their way. However, Bradbury enweirdens the city by basing the sense of conspiracy not on the supernatural or an exaggerated scientific phenomena but on a familiar, modern anxiety: the urban crowd.

Crowds are an interesting thing to think about these days, when many of us have not been inside one for months, or even for an entire year, owing to the social distancing restrictions designed to curb the pandemic. In the nineteenth century, when North American and European cities were rapidly industrializing and urbanizing, urban crowds were also a novelty, since rural residents were flocking to the cities for the first time to work at industrial jobs. It pays to remember that prior to those days, more people lived in the country, where crowds do not usually assemble in great size. In ancient and medieval times, even big cities would be considered small by today’s standards and vast crowds would have been very rare indeed.

The anxiety around crowds in the nineteenth century has inspired notable literary works, particularly Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd.” Literary theorists believe Poe’s story had an impact on the development of the detective story. Bradbury, a big fan of Poe (Poe even appears as a character in his story “The Exiles”), builds on this tradition.

Bradbury’s crowd is not a vast one. It is relatively small, consisting of a red-headed woman, a freckled boy, a old man with a wrinkled lip, and an old woman with a mole on her cheek. However, these characters are voyeurs who compulsively show up at the scenes of terrible accidents.

The story begins with a car crash. Mr. Spallner is tossed around and hurt. He feels funny and disoriented, when a crowd materializes. The people stand around gawking, asking each other about whether he is hurt–but not talking to him.

The crowd feels “wrong” (284), perhaps due to the intrusive sense of its voyeurism and its morbid curiosity. One memorable line that encompasses this feeling comes when Mr. Spallner first sees the crowd: “How swiftly a crowd comes …. like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere” (284).

When they seem to think he’ll survive, he has sudden faith that he will not die. “And that was strange,” he thinks (284). Later, he reflects to his doctor that “the way they looked down at me, I knew I wouldn’t die…” (285), and though the doctor is dismissive, Mr. Spallner becomes paranoid about the people he saw in that crowd.

Gradually, he looks through newspapers at photos of accidents and finds that certain individuals have shown up at other scenes in the area. Ordinary rubber-neckers also show up in these crowds, but there is a vanguard are always “the first ones” on the scene of any catastrophic accident (287).

“They have one thing in common, they always show up together. At a fire or an explosion or on the sidelines of a war, at any public demonstration of this thing called death. Vultures, hyenas or saints. I don’t known which they are, I just don’t know.”
(287)

Bradbury expressed the central paradox of crowds in this passage: humans are never more isolated from each other than when thousands of them are packed so close together. The fact that this alienation exists is what makes such voyeurism possible.

Just as Poe’s narrator in “The Man of the Crowd” tries to investigate and trail one solitary member of the crowd, Mr. Spallner investigates a handful of his voyeurs, hoping to uncover, detective-like, a sign of their motivation. The voyeurism of Bradbury’s crowd also has clear applications to our twenty-first century, Tik-Tok and Instagram obsessed society: so often, the instinct of the bystander is not to call for help or intervene but to snap a photo for social media.

Mr. Spallner’s sense of conspiracy develops to the point where he believes the crowd determines who lives and who dies at the scene of any accident. Often, this is done by just “innocently” moving the body, which can result in damage to the neck or spine and thus death.

As fate would have it, Mr. Spallner gets into a second accident on his way to the police station. The crowd gathers around him a final time, moving him as he lies injured on the road. He is essentially assassinated to make sure their cult or conspiracy should continue to go unnoticed.

In the final moment of the story, it is hinted that the voyeurs may even be ghosts. Mr. Spallner last words are: “It –looks like I’ll be joining up with you. I — guess I’ll be a member of your — group — now” (289). But ultimately, the story remains vague about whether these figures are truly the undead. Perhaps the conspiracy was all in Spallner’s head, or perhaps not, but it is this sense of a vaguely defined conspiracy based on a modern anxiety that makes “The Crowd” such a fine example of modern weird fiction.

As a final note, I’m beginning to notice patterns in the narrative structure of the weird tales I’ve written about most recently, especially with Bradbury, Johnson, Leiber, and Wollheim. Since weird fiction is often about introducing the reader to a strange phenomenon that exists within the world they already know, most of these stories can be divided in three parts: 1) the main character’s initial encounter with the weird, in which it disrupts the normal world; 2) a period of learning and experimentation in which the main character attempts to understand the weird phenomena rationally; and 3) the ultimate unveiling of the weird phenomenon, which may result in the main character’s death. In this final stage, the mystery of the phenomenon and the limits of knowledge are revealed, leaving questions lingering afterward. In many ways, it follows the structure of the horror story as defined by John Clute in The Darkening Garden, a structure that also maps onto fantasy literature.

Weird fiction may owe something to detective fiction as well, since detective fiction is also about rationally trying to investigate and explain an unusual phenomenon. In this way, Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and his Detective Dupin stories may have played a role, no less than his supernatural fiction, in the evolution of weird fiction.

Perhaps it is the influence of Weird Tales and the pulp markets that resulted in an effective, although formulaic narrative pattern to emerge in weird fiction. The weird tale seems to have gained a certain form that could be repeated for commercial purposes–part of the natural process for any commercial literary genre, detective fiction included, which also featured in pulps. It’s interesting to think of how a genre so closely tied to surrealism and breaking up norms could remain subversive in its content but develop a certain level of stability or even conservatism of form.

Next week I will be turning to William Samsom’s story “The Long Sheet” (1944).

Weird #29: “Mimic” by Donald A. Wollheim (1942)

On February 15, 2021February 13, 2021 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Donald A. Wollheim’s story “Mimic” captures the unveiling of a hidden world with remarkably succinct storytelling. The premise is simple enough: insects have evolved to survive in the rainforest through camouflage. We see it in how butterflies mimic leaves and in how certain beetles imitate army ants. But what if insects evolved a way to mimic the ultimate army ant, human beings?

A butterfly camouflaged as a green leaf. — A Brimstone butterfly mimicking a leaf. https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3296838

Wollheim tells his story using a bare number of elements. In the beginning, there’s a street man he remembers from childhood, a man in a black cloak who never talks to women and who remains very private, “a sight from some weird story out of the old lands” (280). He hammers metals sheets but remains a cypher.

The protagonist grows up and forgets him, taking a job at the entomology exhibit at a museum. As he learns the ways of science, a discipline still in its infancy, he learns all about how certain insects use camouflage to hide themselves–even one particular beetle that is marked to resemble “three ants walking single file” (281). The fact is that much is still unknown to science, and since there is an entire group of animals that mimic predators, what if human beings, the ultimate predator, also had mimics living alongside them?

Once this philosophical idea is expressed, the protagonist has a run-in with man in the black cloak. He hears a troubling sound in a room in the museum and bursts in to find the man dead. However, when he inspects his face and clothes, he is revealed to not be human:

What we thought was a coat was a huge black wing sheath, like a beetle has. He had a thorax like an insect, only the wing sheath covered it and you couldn’t notice it once he wore the cloak. The body bulged out below, tapering off into the two long, thin hind legs.
(282)

This man-beetle recalls Kafka’s cockroach, Gregor Samsa, and Wilbur Whateley, Lovecraft’s half-human creation of bundled-up inhuman organs and appendages. However, this beetle, unlike Kafka’s cockroach, has not transformed into a grotesque being from a human being: she’s a beetle through and through, who simply mimics human beings to survive long enough to lay her eggs. The beetle perishes in that room, after the natural end of her life cycle. When the protagonist unlocks the metal box that was also in the bare room, the beetle’s spawn swarm in the air, a reminder of all that which remains unknown to science.

The final sighting of this hidden world comes at the story’s end, when the narrator observes a chimney move and seemingly transform into a moth: “I saw it suddenly vibrate, oddly. And I saw its red brick surface seem to peel away, and the black pipe openings turn suddenly white” (283). The language used to describe this transformation calls to mind the poetics of metamorphosis in Ovid.

It’s this unpeeling that is so central to weird fiction: it reveals the surfaces of the world to be mere surfaces, with a writhing reality hidden underneath. The labels we use to categorize the world are only self-deception. The Other is hidden in plain view. I believe that this is one thing that weird fiction shares in common with surrealism: both reveal the falsity of the surfaces that define the reality to which we give our consent every day.

In all, “Mimic” manages to be both a powerful, visionary weird tale, while also being a focused science fictional extrapolation.

Next week I will be turning to another science fiction great, the legendary Ray Bradbury, in his story “The Crowd” (1943).

Weird #28: “White Rabbit” by Leonora Carrington (1941)

On February 12, 2021February 6, 2021 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A Leonora Carrington self-portrait (Wikipedia)

Leonora Carrington, a British-Mexican author and artist, is best known for her surrealist paintings and sculptures, but her literary output provides “a tantalizing glimpse of ways that surrealism might have had more influence on the weird tale” (277). Her story “White Rabbits” certainly gives a sense of dread and terror and decay in a “weird” way, while also exploring the violation of taboos in a surrealist way.

According to André Breton in his First Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, “surrealism is pure, psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing or in any other way, the true function of thought, thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations” (quote taken from Sufism and Surrealism by Adonis, “Extracts from Surrealist Writing”). Surrealism seeks to liberate the mind and break the taboos imposed on thought by social conventions, in an effort to capture thought in its purest state. Often, this means that surrealist art takes on a dreamlike quality, such as in Carrington’s own paintings.

Weird fiction and surrealism thus seem to be two aesthetic modes that pair extremely well together. Both can be used to question the social constructs that human beings use to regulate and control reality. Both can be used to fog the categories by which we classify objects. Both attempt to describe reality in a piercing way, through a prism that gives a clearer view of reality through its distortion of surface reality.

But what does a surrealist weird tale actually look like? The best way to answer that question would be to read “White Rabbits” itself.

In “White Rabbits,” the narrator moves into a dimly lit home in New York, where she encounters a woman who carries out a dish of bones to feed a flock of ravens, using her long, black hair to wash the dish when they are done. Already, several taboos are broken: the handling of the bones (no word that the bones aren’t human) and the dichotomy between dirty and clean, encapsulated by the washing of the plate with a part of the human body. These suggest the woman does not follow the rules of wider society and, depending on how you understand these behaviours, they might even cast doubt that she is a human being as we understand it.

The narrator and the woman exchange pleasant smiles. Then the woman casually asks the narrator for “decomposed flesh meat” (278). Not sure if the woman is joking at first, the narrator eventually decides to do her new neighbour a favour by buying some meat and letting it go to rot over the course of a week before giving it to her.

When she delivers the meat to the woman in her home, she feeds it to her pets: a group of carnivorous, white rabbits “who fought like wolves for the meat” (278).

Her husband, Lazarus, appears, stating that he is upset that the narrator has been permitted to enter the house. The woman defends her and then suggests that the narrator stay with them, in that house, forever: “In seven years, your skin will be like stars, in seven years you will have the holy disease of the Bible, leprosy!” (279).

The terrified narrator runs away, “choking with horror,” yet unable not to look back as, in one unforgettable image, the woman waves goodbye: “her fingers fell off and dropped to the ground like shooting stars” (279).

These images are charged and cannot help but produce a shudder in the reader. There is something unsettling and uncanny, in particular, about a white rabbit–a peaceful, vegetarian creature–that gorges on rotten meat like a wolf. Though comic images from Monty Python and the Holy Grail came to my mind while reading this story (an association that did not exist in 1942), they did not get much in the way of the raw, unsettling, remorseless way Carrington writes the image. White rabbits also carry certain connotations from Alice in Wonderland: the narrator narrowly avoids tumbling down a rabbit hole into a backwards, bizarre world.

As uncanny as the rabbits are, however, what might be more uncanny about this story is how Carrington twists the casual, neighbourly relationship between the narrator and the leprous woman into something twisted. Part of the process of moving into a new home or apartment is befriending one’s neighbours by doing them small favours. It’s a form of hospitality, a code to follow, and simply one of the kind things people do for one another. Carrington reimagines this relationship as an extreme, grotesque version of itself, rendering the homely unhomely.

The code exists as the artificial construct it is revealed to be, but the normality of it is stripped bare. The neighbour’s request for a piece of rotting meat hints that there is something strange about this relationship. What’s more, the neighbour’s attempt to trap the narrator into their creepy, abject way of life breaks the bond of hospitality completely, an ancient code that in the Western tradition goes back to the Odyssey. The neighbour is a Polyphemus who raises carnivorous bunnies and attempts to trap the narrator in her leprous cavern of a home.

Carrington’s charged images are highly effective, so much so that it leaves me wanting to read more stories like this. Why did surrealism not have a greater effect on weird fiction’s development? The combination of surrealism and the weird is clearly potent, and, in my opinion, is more unsettling than weird fiction that takes on the conventional structures of horror.

A white rabbit — Behold the face of terror. (Wikipedia)

Next week I will be examining Donald Wollheim’s “Mimic” (1942).

Weird #27: “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber (1941)

On February 8, 2021February 6, 2021 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Smoke Ghost” forms an excellent pairing with the previous story reviewed on this blog, “Far Below.” Both Fritz Leiber and Robert Barbour Johnson wrote modern, urban weird fiction, and while Johnson’s story takes place deep under New York City, the horror in Leiber’s story lurks on the rooftops. Leiber’s fiction is “a key forerunner of the urban weird of writers like Ramsey Campbell,” according to the editors (268).

To an extent, “Smoke Ghost” reminded me of the pioneering work of Charles de Lint, who virtually founded the genre of urban fantasy. De Lint’s fiction re-enchants the modern city, but it does occasionally find a place to describe for the horrors produced by our modern condition, in the same way that Leiber does in “Smoke Ghost.” I wrote a Master’s thesis on De Lint in which I explore how his horror locates the spectral and vampiric in the conditions of our capitalist modernity. The same could be said for Leiber in this story.

“Smoke Ghost” begins with Mr. Wran expressing a high concept:

Have you ever thought what a ghost of our times would look like, Miss Millick? Just picture it. A smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the uneasy resentment of the striker, the callous opportunism of the scab, the aggressive whine of the panhandler, the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns.
(268)

Gothic tropes about wispy visitors from the Beyond, dressed in white, may have worked for the Victorians, but they have little relevance to mid-twentieth century life. A horror greater than any that can be found in a pennydreadful arrived with the First World War and its ensuring crises. The horrors and stresses of the modern condition create ghosts out of the living. “It’s time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear,” says Wran. “They’d be no worse than men” (269).

This provocative idea is then followed by a telling of Wran’s earlier sighting of a shapeless black sack on the smoky, gleaming rooftops of the city. He sees it while taking the elevated train home for work in the evening, as he usually does. He has a vision of the thing leaping from the roof towards the passenger car in a “parabolic swoop” (271). He even sees it “huddle and roll across the gravel” (271). Hoping that he is suffering merely from a nervous condition, he consults a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist makes him recall his early childhood memories in which his mother exhibited him as a clairvoyant. Since childhood, he had always had a talent for seeing through opaque surfaces like brick walls. However, his mother was convinced he could also see the dead, even though he knew his talents did not extend so far.

Eventually, science experiments under controlled conditions were performed on him, succeeding at demonstrating his rare gift. When a big test is ready to be performed on him, the young Mr. Wran grows resentful towards his controlling mother and fails it on purpose, making fools of the scientists who’d discovered him and insisted his talent was real. Now he believes this long-repressed childhood skill has returned to haunt him.

This part of the story testifies to Leiber’s interest in Jungian psychology and psychoanalysis. In suggesting how it might be possible that supernatural phenomena could remain unacknowledged by the scientific establishment, even though they exist and are even empirically verifiable, Leiber suspends the reader’s disbelief. Like many weird writers, he suggests that the lens through which we view the world often has as much to do with what we find in it as the things we actually observe, even to the point of altering what is observed before it can be seen.

The actual creature that haunts Wran is “a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul” (268). Later, it possesses Miss Millick in a scene on the city rooftops, where Wran bows down and swears to worship it, acknowledging the modern spirit’s right to rule the world. This is a scene John Clute would label a Revel: that is, a moment of final revelation in horror where the values of the world reverse, in a carnivalesque fashion. Mr. Wran acknowledges the dominion of the thing possessing Miss Millick over the human race itself; the lord of misrule is crowned king of the world.

In a moment that will seem distasteful to some readers, the creature that haunts Wran is shown to be partly inspired by race fear, or more specifically, the fear of black skin. It is first sighted by someone other than Wran when the psychiatrist complains about a peeping tom at the window. Wran guesses it must be a “Negro” looking through the window (273). The nervous psychiatrist shuts the window and says that it was a white man, a voyeur dressed in blackface (273).

It seemed unnecessary for me for such details to be included, apparently gratuitously, but since the entity is described as “a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul” (268), a ghost with a face covered in soot may well have been mistaken for a white hooligan in blackface. Nonetheless, it still seemed to me to be a strange detail to include.

Friz Leiber and Katherine MacLean (Wikipedia)

I didn’t post the previous week, so I plan on making two posts for this coming week, to bring us back on schedule. This Friday I will be examining Leonora Carrington’s story “White Rabbits” (1941), followed by Donald Wollheim’s “Mimic” (1942) the Monday after.

Weird #26: “Far Below'” by Robert Barbour Johnson (1939)

On January 25, 2021January 23, 2021 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, UncategorizedLeave a comment

If I could point to a quintessential weird tale–a short story that has all the Lovecraftian features that have come to be associated with weird fiction–I would point to Robert Barbour Johnson’s “Far Below.” Not only is Johnson the first author in The Weird to mention Lovecraft by name as a fictionalized character in his story, but he seems to have deeply read his essay “On Supernatural Horror in Literature.” In Johnson, the Lovecraftian weird tale has solidified into its most stable form.

The opening line is an absolute classic: “With a roar and a howl the thing was upon us, out of total darkness” (260). The “thing” itself is nothing more unusual than a New York City subway car, but the way it is described estranges it, so that it comes to resemble a bizarre worm crawling though the darkness below the city streets.

But there is a monstrous threat below the city. As Inspector Gordon Craig of the NYPD informs the nameless narrator, “They” have been known to break into the tunnels. The threat remains vaguely defined: a race of pale white creatures who inhabit the darkness and appear similar to a human or a gorilla, yet not dissimilar to “some sort of giant, carrion-feeding, subterranean mole” (262).

“Far Below” actually precedes The Mole People, a 1956 film that popularized the concept of mole people living beneath the earth. However, the first example of mole people is probably the Moorlocks from H. G. Wells’s Time Machine in 1895, in which they were depicted as devolved forms of proletarian humans operating machinery far below the earth’s crust.

This story scores almost every tick in the weird fiction checklist, or, if you prefer, every square in the weird fiction bingo card. These mole people are a cosmic horror, a vaguely defined outside threat that the majority of human beings carry on their lives blissfully ignorant about. The NYPD are like the Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones fighting back the dark horrors of the night, though instead of a wall, they patrol the subway tunnels. And if they do find one of the creatures, they shred them to pieces with suppressed Maxim guns so no questions are asked about the hidden war beneath the streets.

Unfortunately, it also checks off the “racism” item on the weird tale checklist. The editors make it clear that some aspects of the story would appear dated today. The reasons for this is probably best encapsulated by the fact that the mole people are used to explain Indigenous burial practices that settler scientists cannot explain. (This particular details also checks off the pseudoarchaeology square on the bingo card.) The mole people are also used to explain the cheap price at which the original inhabitants of Manhattan sold the land to the Dutch settlers. Furthermore, there are certain reference to phrenology, or determining human intelligence by the shape of the skull or brain. These features show how the mole people inhabit settler fears of counter-invasion and counter-colonization, as well as White people’s fears of miscegenation.

Johnson is clearly a disciple of Lovecraft’s. As if the content of his story was not enough of a clue, he also has Gordon Craig directly say that he consulted Lovecraft’s writings himself when researching the history of these underground monsters:

Oh, yes; I learned a lot from Lovecraft–and he got a lot from me, too! That’s where the–well, what you might call the authenticity came from in some of his yarns that attracted the most attention! Oh, of course he had to soft-pedal the strongest parts of it–just as you’re going to have to do if you ever mention this in your own writings!
(264)

This passage is quite clever because of the way it plays with fictionality: the reader’s relationship to other texts and the reader’s relationship to the world outside the text.

Firstly, it posits that the story told by the character of Gordon Craig has been influenced by Lovecraft himself–but a version of Lovecraft that exists in Johnson’s fictional universe. This raises questions about the ontology of this version of Lovecraft. Is this Lovecraft the real Lovecraft known to scholars, who wrote made-up stories for Weird Tales? Or is it a Lovecraft who may be a slightly different version of himself, appropriate to Johnson’s world?

Johnson seems to want the reader to think that his fictional Lovecraft had “real” encounters with the weird things he wrote about. Since he blurs the line between the real and fictional Lovecraft, he implies that the real Lovecraft who lived outside the text also had these encounters: in short, that his mole people and the weird events of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” also happened in the reader’s world.

What’s more, Johnson subtly usurps Lovecraft’s own originality by saying he owes the authenticity of his own descriptions to the first-hand experiences of Johnson’s fictional character, Gordon Craig! This positions Johnson’s story as closer to the “truth,” while Lovecraft’s fiction is actually a second-hand report.

These rhetorical moves and blurring of lines between fiction and fact create not only the illusion of a shared reality outside the text that both Lovecraft and Johnson have written about in their fiction, but the illusion of the reader’s immersion in their shared universe.

The fact that Johnson’s narrator is never named strengthens the illusion that the narrator might be a fictionalized version of Johnson himself, who “really” travelled with Gordon Craig in the New York subway and recorded his story like a journalist would. Since encounters with real cosmic horror cannot be tolerated by most readers’ minds, perhaps Johnson wishes to make the reader think that he has chosen to tell his story through fiction only because of the shielding alternative it gives. If he had used journalism, perhaps readers would have thought him mad, or gone mad themselves.

Johnson may have intended the appearance of fiction to be seen as one the ways in which his narrator has softened the truth, just as Lovecraft supposedly softened it through fiction. By suggesting that not all of the truth was told, Johnson lets his readers posit that there is a “worse” reality behind his story, a reality the reader could discover for themselves if only they searched for it “out there.”

Each of these strategies of Johnson’s assists in creating the intertextual illusion that the the mole people might actually exist outside the story, in the grimy subway tunnels of Manhattan, where the reader is currently reading Weird Tales magazine as the dark tunnels zip by the plexiglass windows.

There’s a detailed discussion of Johnson’s story and his other inspirations on the Tor.com blog.

Next week, I will be examining Fitz Leiber’s story “Smoke Ghost” (1941).

Weird #25: “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass'” by Bruno Schulz (1937)

On January 11, 2021January 10, 2021 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Bruno Schulz’s “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” reads like someone telling you a vivid, detailed dream: a dream that they had while mourning the death of their father after an wasting illness.

Not everything that happens in the story makes sense after a first read. But the bizarre things the protagonist encounters seem to be symbols of his psyche, allegories of anxieties related to this period of mourning. When my grandfather died, I had dreams of him still being alive myself. But what if a Sanatorium advertised that you could meet your dead father again, if only you took the long train ride out to it?

This is that story and so much more. It is deliciously slow, languid, and bleak, constructing a mood of deadness and sleepiness from the first sentence onward. Yet the core of the story–a son who desires to meet and comfort his ailing father in the hospital where he’s staying–retains an emotional relateability that makes the story accessible, despite its dreamlike warping of time–and other, stranger appearances.

I think this may be my favourite weird story in the anthology so far. There are no ghosts or eldritch creatures here, unless the father can be counted a kind of ghost. Joseph, the protagonist, arrives at the Sanatorium after traveling a long railway line filled with labyrinthine cabins with almost nobody riding with him. One senses the train to be a kind of Charon guiding him into the underworld to see the shades of the dead.

Joseph has come to the Sanatorium to see his father, who has fallen gravely ill. However, when he meets Dr. Gotard, the doctor reveals that his father has actually died long before. He says, “You know as well as I that from the point of view of your home, from the perspective of your own country, your father is dead. [But] here your father’s death, the death that has already struck him in your country, has not occurred yet” (250). In effect, time is relative at the Sanatorium and his father exists in two simultaneous states: at home, he is dead, while here he is alive.

Alive and always very sleepy. Even at the Sanatorium, there are two versions of Joseph’s father: the father convalescing who sleeps in bed and the busy father who runs a small shop in the town centre. In the shop, the son insists that his father should take it easy, that he’s sick and working too hard, but his father resists the draw of sleep. “It was obvious that only the excitement of his feverish activity sustained him and postponed the moment of complete collapse,” Joseph says (253). But his father says the business of the stall beats back his dreadful boredom: “And so one manages somehow to live” (251).

He means it literally. It’s as if his work not only gives him a reason to live, but makes it possible for him to live at all.

This strange doubling of Joseph’s father is far from the weirdest thing in this story, which is filled with atmosphere and strangely jarring images. The door to Joseph’s father’s room opens “like unresisting lips that part in sleep” (250), a metaphor that captures the mood exactly. When Joseph receives a parcel with a letter saying his order for a pornographic book will be delayed, he receives a strange telescope in compensation, which envelops him and advances “like a large black caterpillar … into the lighted shop–an enormous paper arthopod with two imitation headlights on the front” (253). Though the image seems phallic, its sheer strangeness defies any reductive Freudian interpretation. Yet, this surreal transformation seems to follow the logic of dreams.

At a later point in the story, war is declared. The nature of the conflict is unclear, but the enemy emboldens the discontented local townspeople. What follows is an ominous, dreamlike description of a fascist parade. The people

come out in the open, armed, to terrorize the peaceful inhabitants. We noticed, in fact, a group of these activitist, in black civilian clothing with white straps across their breasts, advancing in silence, their guns at the ready. The crowd fell back onto the pavements, as they marched by, flashing from under their hats ironical dark looks, in which there was a touch of superiority, a glimmer of malicious and perverse enjoyment, as if they could hardly stop themselves from bursting into laughter.
(257)

The swastika is not mentioned explicitly, but it’s clear that these men are Nazis. If the black shirts and white bands are not enough of a hint, then the ironic glances and air of superiority are enough. I’ve personally seen these same faces in newspapers and online images, only they were wearing red MAGA hats instead of black shirts. Schulz could be describing a civilian parade in support of the Nazis or the white supremacist mob that demonstrated in Charlottetown–or even the recent mob that stormed and looted the US capitol on January 6th.

The invasion of the Nazis into the bizarre dream world upsets the order of life. Suddenly, his father is in danger. The Nazis appearing is particularly ominous, given the fact that the author himself, Bruno Schultz, would eventually be killed by the Nazis only five years after the publication of this story.

Joseph’s father tells him to return to the Sanatorium, which is when Joseph encounters the most bizarre thing guarding the entrance, a surreal Cerebus–an attack dog that has the form of a man. The man-dog chases him until it reaches the end of its leash. Joseph unchains the man-dog, pitying it, and earning its sympathy. The man-dog then follows him around as Joseph tries to get rid of it and find his father. Then he fears what will happen when his father encounters the dog. This is when he remembers that his father is, actually, dead. The dream is ending. He escapes the Sanatorium by train just as he arrived, and he never leaves it, wandering the many carriages as a beggar wearing a railwayman’s uniform.

It’s quite striking how the appearance of the Nazi-like figures presage the end of the dream, as if the threat they pose also disrupts the Sanatorium’s privileged relationship to time. So many images in this surreal piece beg to be interpreted at length, and the whole story proceeds with an inner logic of its own that cannot be easily grasped, but which seems to make sense on the level of dreams.

For example, what could be the dog’s significance? A chained man who appears from a distance to be a dog reminded me of what a dehumanized Nazi prisoner might look like. Yet, the image is sustained: the man-dog is fully a dog, though he has the exterior features of a man: “his jaws [are] wide open, his teeth bared in a terrible growl, … a man of middle height, with a black beard” (258). Why does it attack Joseph and why is Joseph so eager to get rid of it after he frees it from its chains?

In the end, what could the railway itself symbolize, particularly given Joseph’s decision in the end to live on it “continuously”? (259) Does the train represent a return to ordinary life, or to a state somewhere between life and death? It is notable that Joseph is never said to return home, to his native country where his father has died. He remains suspended between worlds, on the heterotopia of the constantly moving train.

“Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” is a rich story with many dimensions to it, and worth noting for the mood it creates and its beautiful description of the bleak forest surrounding the Sanatorium. This has certainly been one of the genuinely “weirdest” short stories in this anthology so far. It is also a profound exploration of the dislocation of grief.

Next week, I will be examining Robert Barbour Johnson, a pulp writer for Weird Tales magazine, and his weird tale “Far Below” (1939).

Weird #24: “The Tarn'” by Hugh Walpole (1936)

On January 4, 2021January 3, 2021 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Literary fame and fortune is fickle. Hugh Walpole was a popular writer in the 20s and 30s who is mostly unread today. However, his ability to set a scene was excellent. He was well known for his historical novels, but also his supernatural fiction. The VanderMeers call “The Tarn” “a perceptive, clever, and all-too-true weird tale … our personal favourite” (241) and it can be seen why: it is a highly relatable tale of literary jealousy and sweet revenge.

Fenwick, the protagonist, is the author of a sombre novel, The Bitter Aloe, while his rival, Foster, wrote The Circus, a sentimentalist piece of garbage that is also a bestseller. The couple is a classic Ernie and Bert pair, with the addition that Fenwick is fantasizing constantly about brutally murdering happy-go-lucky Foster.

Fenwick blames the failure of his own book on Foster’s success. In the spirit of reconciliation, Foster invites himself over to Fenwick’s Lake District home, where he proceeds to pipe himself up with a false sense of modesty, saying that he has some talent “but not so much as people say,” before bragging that his success has allowed him to spend his time between the countryside, London, and “Italy or Greece or somewhere” (243). He’s also won a literary award: “Of course, a hundred pounds isn’t much. But it’s the honour,” he says (244).

Fenwick puts up with him quietly, giving every appearance of friendship and receptiveness, but secretly he wants to “push Foster’s eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smashing them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, bloody sockets” (243).

Fenwick invites Foster for a walk along his tarn, which is a small, but deep lake at the base of a hill. There Fenwick takes revenge–Edgar Allan Poe style. Fenwick and Foster could easily be standing in for Montresor and Fortunato from “The Cask of Amontillado.” Like Montresor, Fenwick seeks to redress insult after suffering injury, all the while never hinting that he bears his victim any ill will. (The tarn itself also reminded me of the one in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”)

Walpole suggests the unsettling nature of the tarn through descriptions and use of dialogue to set the mood. For example, while explaining to Foster what a tarn is, Fenwick says that “some of them are immensely deep–unfathomable–nobody touched the bottom–but quiet, like glass, with shadows only–” (244).

Later, he says, “Do you know why I love this place, Foster? It seems to belong especially to me, just as much as all your work and your glory and fame and success seem to belong to you. I have this and you have that. Perhaps in the end we are even after all” (245). This line communicates the depth of his loneliness and his bitter desire for revenge. He then leads Foster toward a jetty and drowns him in the shadows of the deep lake.

On the way home, Fenwick fancies that a man is following him back. He even believes that “it was the tern that was following him, the tarn slipping, sliding along the road, being with him so that he should not be lonely” (246). After all, Fenwick is a very lonely man, and he appreciates the tarn’s company whenever he spends time alone by the lake.

But Fenwick does not find peace that night. In the middle of the night, the tarn appears as an apparition in his own bedroom, filling up his room with water, until it grabs him by the ankle and drowns him. In the morning, all that is discovered is his body and “an overturned water jug” (247).

As a weird tale, “The Tarn” is well-achieved–it does what it does in a classic way, and it does it very well. The ghost is like the genius loci from Clarke Ashton Smith, a spirit of the tarn that gives Fenwick his just desserts. But the way in which the tarn moves, in its slithering, sliding way, into Fenwick’s second-floor bedroom, appears quite innovative. The apparition symbolizes Fenwick’s worst fears–and his unacknowledged regret at murdering his one and only friend.

Walpole was clearly an writer familiar with literary fame, moving in the same circles as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. He may have been familiar with Fenwick’s gripes and probably experienced jealousy just as much as the fame and success Foster enjoys. Most serious, published writers probably feel some degree of professional jealousy at a given point in their careers. It’s never healthy to act on such jealousy, certainly not to the extent Fenwick does, but at the same time, the feeling is very real, and Walpole captures that feeling brilliantly.

A tarn.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Loughrigg_Tarn_-_Oct_2009.jpg

Next week, I will be examining Bruno Schulz’s “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” (1936), translated by Celina Wieniewska.

Weird #23: “The Town of Cats'” by Hagiwara Sakutarō (1935)

On December 28, 2020December 28, 2020 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, Uncategorized2 Comments

Hagiwara Sakutarō’s “The Town of Cats” comes as a slight change of pace. There’s no cosmological horror. No gruesome murders. No existential despair (well, maybe a little), and no ghosts either. There’s a mood of uneasiness, but it’s the uneasiness you feel when you’ve lost your way during a pleasant summer walk.

“The Town of Cats” is Sakutarō’s only short story. The author is known as an innovator of colloquialism and free verse in Japanese poetry, and although I have no acquaintance with the rest of his work, I can guess how “The Town of Cats” might express some of his ideas regarding the poetic imagination. For instance, “The Town of Cats” gives a sense of Sakutarō as a poet with definite metaphysical leanings: “All philosophers must … doff their hats to the poets when they discover that the path of reason only takes them so far. The universe that lies beyond common sense and logic–the universe that is known intuitively to the poet–belongs to the metaphysical” (236).

The narrator of this story is a poet and a drug addict who is currently recovering at a hot springs resort. Every day he takes a walk for his health. However, due to a condition of his inner ear, he has almost no sense of direction. He is even liable to get lost within a few meters of his own home.

One day, he happens upon a cheerful town that seems unreal, projected on a screen. Then he realizes this town is merely his own, familiar neighbourhood, but seen from a perspective where the compass points have all reversed. This change in perspective completely changes the way he imagined this space, leading to him seeing the boring old town in a new way.

All this is setup for his encounter with the Town of Cats. In a nearby town, he hears legends and folktales of two secretive towns: one said to be possessed by dog spirits while the other is possessed by cat spirits. Only a few have ever seen the okura, the spirits’ true form. The narrator does not believe the legends, but listens intently for “anthropological” purposes (235).

However, while on one of his walks, he loses his way and finds himself in a Borgesian “labyrinth of countless paths” (236). Searching for civilization, he stumbles upon a town beyond his wildest dreams: a marvelous town that is a picture-perfect image of a prosperous Japanese town, with a barber shop, photography studio, and an observatory, and plenty of shady, narrow streets. The town has a hushed, tranquil silence, a certain grace and sense of absolute harmony.

The town is described in terms resembling a poem. The narrator says it is “an artificial creation whose existence relied on the subtle attentions of its inhabitants,” just as a poem relies on the subtle attentions of the poet. “It was not just its buildings. The entire system of individual nerves that came together to create its atmosphere was focused on one single, central aesthetic plan” (238). This decadent description of the town reads like something out of Edgar Allan Poe, especially the meticulously designed chambers of Prince Prospero’s mansion in “Masque of the Red Death.” Poe once said that a short story should strive to produce one single effect in the reader, which sounds quite similar to Sakutarō’s insistence that every element in this town contributes to one aesthetic plan. Of course, this leads to the unanswered question of who’s aesthetic plan it is.

However, as with any poem, this rigid form of harmony is delicate and can be easily shattered into a million pieces by a single disruption. The sense of extreme uneasiness the narrator feels is the threat that it could all become undone if so much as one element drops out of place. This “extreme anxiety” causes the “serenity of the town [to] become hushed and uncanny. I felt as if I were unraveling a code to discover some frightening secret” (238). The smell of corpses fills the air. One senses an air of dystopia to this town, where everyone is made to confirm to a perfect ideal of not only aesthetic, but social harmony–an ideal that is impossible to sustain without a revolution threatening the sense of order.

After a sound like a kokyū, the truth of the town is revealed. A black rat appears in the middle of the street and then the universe stops “dead” (239). Cats appear everywhere: in windows, on the street. There are no longer any people in the town, just “cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, and more cats!” (239) This eruption of the underlying, spiritual reality of the town lasts as a brief sense of chaos and mischief–what John Clute might call a Revel (“The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror”).

When he regains his senses, the narrator sees that the town is just the same, boring town with “the same tired, dusty people who live in every country” (239). The narrator remarks that “an entirely separate world had appeared, almost as if a playing card had been turned over to reveal its other side” (239). There are other dimensions beyond the one we see every day, and this riddle has haunted the narrator since childhood.

By becoming lost during his walk, he crosses into another dimension and sees the cat spirits rise. Like Zhuangzi, who did not know if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man, he does not know which town was the “real” town. All he’s willing to say in the end is that the Town of Cats does exist, that it is not simply the delusion of a drugged poet.

Sakutarō defied the conventions of his time to become a poet of free verse. If the Town of Cats was a poem, it could be one of the meticulously crafted, but rigidly conventional Japanese poetry forms against which he was attempting to rebel. The existential fear felt by the narrator at contemplating the collapse of that perfection was an anxiety that must have haunted his experiments in free verse–a desire to sustain the harmony of form, while knowing such a thing is impossible.

In Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” such aesthetic perfection is desirable, but its static, corpselike lifelessness is all too suggestive of death, its very harmony merely presaging its inevitable collapse. Like Poe, Sakutarō evokes the same decadent sense of aesthetic harmony and lifelessness in his description of the Town of Cats.

Next week, I will be examining Hugh Walpole’s “The Tarn” (1936).

Weird #22: “Genius Loci'” by Clark Ashton Smith (1933)

On December 21, 2020 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Genius Loci” by Clark Ashton Smith is a striking inclusion in this weird fiction anthology. It is a much simpler, quieter story than Smith’s more famous pulp fantasy adventures. A significant influence on Lovecraft, Smith may be best known for his highly wrought prose style and his fantastic short stories and poems about vanished continents and civilizations.

I first grew acquainted with Smith by reading the The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, a Penguin Classics book. I picked it up in Toronto when I presented on my Master’s thesis for the Academic Conference for Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (ACCSFF) in 2019. During the same trip, I also had the chance to glimpse Clark’s artworks in a book held by the Toronto Public Library in the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy. Smith’s interests in painting and poetry certainly come through in “Genius Loci.”

Though it can be easy to criticize Smith’s artworks as amateurish and his prose as overwrought, some of his artworks and short stories (especially his poetry and prose poems) do more than tell a story: they conjure a specific mood that Lovecraft considered essential to the weird tale. “Genius Loci” does this but on a much quieter scale than his other works.

Like so many of the preceding stories, this is also a survivor’s tale told by the narrator, who is a writer living in the countryside with Amberville, a renowned painter. Amberville becomes fascinated with a particular spot in the landscape that seems to ooze with an undefinable sense of menace and evil. The painter is both attracted to, and repulsed by, the dreadfulness of the bony, dead willow growing above a stinking, scummy pool. “The spot is evil–it is unholy in a way that I simply can’t describe,” says Amberville (223). Yet, the spot takes over his mind. The painter can soon think of little else than visually and artistically pinning down exactly what gives the site its awful appearance.

A genius loci, Latin for “spirit of a place,” was considered the guardian of a place in Roman religion (Wikipedia). In modern architecture, it refers to the concept of that un-nameable quality that gives a building its unique feeling. In a sense, it is a personification of a place. The habit of seeing an inanimate setting as having human features recalls pareidolia: the mind’s habit of seeing human faces in non-human objects.

Initially at least, this seems to be what Amberville has experienced in this particular spot on the Chapman estate. When describing his composition, he says he was “impressed immediately by a profound horror that lurked in these simple elements and was expressed by them as if by the balefully contorted features of some demoniac face … The evil conveyed was something wholly outside humanity–more ancient than man” (224). Later on, he remarks that the Genius Loci “has the air of a thirsty vampire, waiting to drink me in somehow, if it can” (226).

Why is it that seeing faces in of animate things can create such a disturbing sense of horror? It may have something to do with the fact we are inherently disturbed to see faces in things in which we do not expect to see them.

This spotting of the familiar in the unfamiliar Freud called unheimlich–unhomely–which in English is often translated as “uncanny.” The uncanny can serve to explain why we feel uncomfortable when we see a staircase in the middle of the forest, or see a face in a piece of wood. But in my opinion, the uncanny alone cannot explain the specific sense of dread and menace that Amberville sees on the Chapman property. For example, a benevolent Genius Loci would still be uncanny. So what can account for the overpowering sense of evil?

A suggestion of what might be at work here, and in a great deal of other weird fiction, can be found in Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject.

In Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection, Kristeva’s opening paragraph describes the abject, a term whose relevance to weird fiction should be apparent:

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.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection, 1

Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” describes the weird tale as requiring an “unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces,” which in light of Kristeva, actually maps well onto the abject as she describes it above (“a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable”). The painter in “Genius Loci” is seduced by the malignant, outside force of the landscape he desires to paint; in addition, there is also a powerful urge or necessity to resist seduction and resist the evil.

Indeed, Chapman’s grove could be said to be “an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned.” The painter is both repulsed and summoned by the Genius Loci, as many weird tale protagonists have been, from Ewers’s “The Spider” to Merritt’s “People of the Pit.” And like the fates of Bracquemont and Stanton, whose desires are only satisfied in death, the painter is drawn towards the Genius Loci as a moth to a flame, where he drowns in the stagnant pond, becoming part of the haunting landscape himself, where his presence continues to haunt the narrator of the tale after death.

Since the abject is a useful term that I may be returning to in future posts, I should write a little more about it here. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, the abject is defined as “what the subject’s consciousness has to expel or disregard in order to create the proper separation between subject and object” (2069). The abject remains unconsciously desired, but is transformed into something filthy and disgusting in an act of repression. For example, “both matter and mother are abjects for the fantasy of self-creation” (2069). In establishing any identity, there must be a thing rejected because it is seen as filthy or evil.

The abject often manifests when this separation between self and other breaks down in moments of horror. Horror fiction is often based on the violation of boundaries and taboos: the boundaries between the human and the material, the human and the animal, the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, and the self and other. According to Wikipedia, for Kristeva,

the abject […] is used to refer to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self and the other.
Powers of Horror, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Powers_of_Horror&oldid=995069481

This breakdown occurs in “Genius Loci” when Amberville sees the face of Chapman, an old man, in the branches of the dead willow. The reason this pareidolia produces such revulsion in Amberville is thus not only because he’s “seeing things” that aren’t there but because he has witnessed that the division between a human being and the material world has dissolved. This has implications for his own humanity, since if another human being could become so transfigured by the vampiric glade, then he can be transformed too.

Seeing a dead body produces a similar feeling in us. We see the stiffness of the body and recognize the fact that it is made of matter as material as grave dirt. Then we realize that we ourselves also inhabit a body, which is, in reality, just as material as the dead one. For most of our lives, we repress this reality and express our revulsion of the body, especially the dead body, because we will also cease to exist except as a material body. Belief in the eternal soul is a symbolic belief that rejects the permanence of the body as abject–but when you look a dead body, you become aware that there’s not so much difference between the dead body and you, whatever your beliefs about the soul.

However, having an abject is necessary to maintain our functionality and perhaps our sanity as well. Arguably, it is the abject that keeps us sane, because it instills the human mind with “the inability … to correlate all its contents” (Lovecraft “The Call of Cthulhu”). In a way, one aspect that makes the followers of Cthulhu insane is their contact with the Real–what Lovecraft identified with the true, cosmic scale of the universe, terrifying in its vastness.

To return to “Genius Loci,” if Amberville notices that there is now no difference between Chapman and the landscape, then it could mean there is no difference between himself and the landscape either, except on a symbolic (not “Real”) level. He sees the landscape as evil because it is an abject for him, so that he can retain his own sense of self. However, as an abject, the Genius Loci is also unconsciously desired, leading to the back-and-forth repulsion and attraction that draws the painter inexorably nearer to the landscape and to his death.

As I read more and more weird fiction, the more I’m noticing that this pattern seems to be a key dynamic of the genre.

Next week, I’ll be discussing Hagiwara Sakutarō’s “The Town of Cats” (1935).

Weird #21: “The Shadowy Street'” by Jean Ray (1931)

On December 14, 2020December 21, 2020 By matthewrettinoIn The Archaeology of Weird Fiction Project, UncategorizedLeave a comment

*The Great Fire*, 1842 painting by Peter Suhr (from Wikipedia)

Jean Ray’s story “The Shadowy Street” is the second by the same author published in the VanderMeers’ anthology The Weird. Known as the French Edgar Allan Poe, his work remains largely unknown to English-language readers.

Like “The Mainz Psalter,” which I wrote about last week, “The Shadowy Street” is told in a nested narratives. The principle narrator is a man who riffles through a pile of different destroyed papers confiscated by customs officials near a Rotterdam dock. Among the manuscripts, which have been cut in two but still provoke a certain curiosity, he discovers a book bearing the name of Alphonse Archipetre, consisting of a French and a German manuscript, each detailing a horror that turns out to be two perspectives on the same phenomenon.

Accounts discovered in manuscripts seem to be as much a staple of weird fiction as fear of unknown threats beyond one’s ken. Several stories that I’ve examined so far have used this trope, and, when it’s not a manuscript, it’s likely to be a transcription of the last words of a lone survivor. Perhaps the reason weird fiction writers use discovered manuscripts as a narrative strategy is because it renders the story more credible. The narrator can remain a detached, rational observer, merely reporting what the hard, concrete evidence of the manuscript reports, while not directly making any claim to truth. Like in archaeology, the artefact speak for themselves.

The French manuscript is a complete horror tale in and of itself, written by a woman who moves in with a group of sisters staying at the house of Councillor Hühnebein on the Deichstrasse in Hamburg. In it, the night itself steals into their home from the street outside. Frida reports that there is a “fear” in her room and when Eleonore ridicules her and goes to investigate, she does not return. She disappears.

The sisters soon see that the darkness is to be avoided. They drive the darkness back by lighting their house with all manner of light fixtures. But Hühnebein becomes murdered as darkness enters the room, their candles snuffed out. The women are not alone in experiencing this horror. The entire city is being wracked by a series of murders, so many deaths that the city becomes “indifferent” to them (210).

The narrator of the manuscript encounters the “invisible monster” and pities its cries of “Moh… Moh…” (211). She carries pitchers of milk in the hopes of placating it and lies to Meta, who wishes to root out the ghost, about seeing anything. In the end, she is discovered betraying the household, and Meta stabs her through with a rapier. Suddenly, the house catches on fire spontaneously, and the last thing she sees is a tall, old woman with horrible green eyes.

The second, French manuscript is Archipetre’s own account, and it details how he discovered that Saint Beregonne’s Lane, a street he has noticed in his city, is not known to anyone else but himself. In fact, the street exists in another dimension, and no one other than he can see it or step into it. He wonders how this could be and then thinks it might be the gift of sight given to him through his maternal grandmother, a tall woman with piercing green eyes.

Archipetre’s first venture down Saint Beregonne’s Lane ends with him taking a sprig of viburnum back into the normal world, which has “an enormous philosophical significance” because “it was ‘in excess’ in our world,” an total addition to the total number of twigs in the ordinary universe (214). In a sense, he has total, absolute ownership over the spring of viburnum, because the place where it was taken exists only for him.

Finding himself poor and wanting to woo the daughter of an Mediterranean sailor, he then makes regular forays into this parallel dimension, making a paltry living selling whatever loot he can steal from the alternate dimension to which only he has access. In one house in particular, every night he steals the same tray, which reappears the next day in precisely the same spot. Every time, he sells it to Gockel, a pawnbroker The street has a bizarre quality to it, though its visual appearance is ordinary: there is a sound of harmonious dissonance coming from far off, which sets him ill at ease.

When the series of murders and disappearances grips the neighbourhood, Archipetre is left with a unique insight: all the crimes had been committed along the line the street covers. Confiding with Anita, he is devastated when she disappears, perhaps another casualty of a murderer who uses the darkness of the shadowy street to commit his crimes. Archipetre arranges for Gockel to leave him with a cart of gunpowder and oil so he can burn the houses on the street down and take his revenge for Anita’s loss.

The fire he sets is the same fire that destroys Councillor Hühnebein’s house on the Deichstrasse. He later finds the German manuscript in the same house from which he had stolen the trays, suggesting that Archipetre might have been the ghost that so haunts the coucillor’s house in the first, Germna manuscript.

The last line of Archipetre’s manuscript is one of ecstatic horror: “Vampires! Vampires! Vampires!” (221).

The principle narrator who discovered the manuscripts then visits Lockmann Gockel, who explains that the antique dealer in the manuscript was his grandfather. Archipetre died the day after the great fire of Hamburg (a real event that occurred on 5 May, 1842). He survived the fire, but died the next day when his own house burned down, though no surrounding houses were harmed.

Gockel then reveals what might be the strangest thing about this story: “the story compressed time, just as space was compressed at the fateful location of Saint Beregonne’s Lane” (221). He says that the accounts of the crimes and disappearances, which happened before the fire in the manuscript, actually happened during the fire, according to accounts in the Hamburg archives. The perpetrators who used the darkness of the street to hide their crimes actually did it so within the brightness of the Hamburg fire of 1842. To explain this, he alludes to Einstein’s theory of relativity and the law of contraction put forward by Fitzgerald and Lorentz.

I suppose this testifies to the impact Einstein’s theories had at the time. Old assumptions about the nature of reality were being questioned. Reality could stretch, shrink, or appear different depending on the observer’s position, and this theory of relativity is certainly a device that Ray makes use of in this story. Archipetre is an observer who can look and step into another dimension, where time and space follow different rules–a trait shared with his grandmother, whose transcendence of space and time can also be attributed to this phenomenon.

The apparent normalcy of the world is perhaps due to the fact that we can never see how anyone else truly sees the world we share in common–so we assume everyone must see what we see. If one man uniquely sees something that doesn’t exist for anyone else, one can only integrate their perspective into one’s own by asking them what they see, listening to them, and trusting that they’re reporting what they see accurately. But even then, the listener is only receiving the information second-hand. The two observers do not inhabit the same reality, since under Einstein’s theory of relativity, reality is relative to the observer.

Yet, when the positions of two observers and their perceptions are analyzed, some truth may be discovered in how they overlap. That’s precisely the logic behind “The Shadowy Street.” The German and French manuscripts each report an observation by a different observer on the same series of events, and each come out as very different experiences. Together, they undermine our certainty that we share a common reality.

As the final kicker, it is said Gockel became rich because a tall, old woman with terrible green eyes purchased the trays and candlesticks brought to him by Archipetre with gold. The things haunting Gockel will remain with his family because “they come out of their gold, which we keep, and which we love in spite of everything; they rise from everything we’ve acquired with that infernal fortune” (222). The haunting continues so long as they continue to possess what was acquired through Archipetre’s trans-dimensional theft.

Next week, I’ll be discussing Clark Ashton Smith’s “Genius Loci” (1933).

Archaeologies of the Weird

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