THE FANTASTIC IN WORLD LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

-i-

Boris Karloff as the Creature in Frankenstein, with makeup by Jack Pierce

of Universal Studios.

-ii-

THE FANTASTIC IN WORLD LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

Selected Essays from the Fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in
the Arts

Edited by Donald E. Morse

Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Number 28

GREENWOOD PRESS

New York • Westport, Connecticut • London

-iii-

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (5th: 1984: Boca Raton, Fla.) The
fantastic in world literature and the arts.

(Contributions to the study of science fiction and fantasy, ISSN 0193-6875; no. 28)

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Fantastic literature--History and criticism-Congresses. 2. Fantasy in art--Congresses. I.

Morse, Donald E., 1936- . II. Title. III. Series.

PN56.F34158 1984 809.3′876 87-7424

ISBN 0-313-25526-1 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright ã 1987 by Donald E. Morse

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique,
without the express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-7424 ISBN: 0-313-25526-1 ISSN: 0193-6875

First published in 1987

Greenwood Press, Inc.

88 Post Road West, Westport, Connecticut 06881

Printed in the United States of America

∞ + ⃝™

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the
National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

-iv-

Copyright Acknowledgments

From Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire and by Richard Howard. Translation ã 1982
by Richard Howard. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Boston.

From The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren translated by Joan Tate. Reproduced by
permission of the author and Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

From "Ars Poetica" in New and Collected Poems 1917- 1976 by Archibald MacLeish .
Copyright ã 1976 by Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Company.

From the synopsis, shooting script, and scenario of Thomas Edison film Frankenstein
( 1910). Permission granted by the Film Studies Center of the Museum of Modern Art.

From the typescript of Peggy Webling Frankenstein held in the British Library (LCP 1927
B). Permission granted by Edward L. Webling.

From The Last Laugh ( 1915) by Paul Dickey and Charles Goddard. Permission granted by
the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York, N.Y.

From Frankenstein--a play in three acts ã 1931 by John L. Balderston and Peggy Webling .
Copyright Renewal ã 1958 by Marion Balderston and Louis Drummond McRaye. Caution:
All rights reserved. This play is fully protected by copyright law, and any inquiries for the use
of the play in any media should be addressed to Robert A. Freedman Dramatic Agency, Inc.
at 1501 Broadway, suite 2310, New York, New York 10036.

Two photographs from Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre ( 1931) by Peggy

Webling. Permission granted by the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection, London,
England.

Photograph from Frankenstein ( 1910), from The Edison Kinetogram, 15 March 1910.
Permission granted by the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York, New York.
Two photographs from The Last Laugh ( 1915) by Paul Dickey and Charles Goddard .
Permission granted by the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York, New York.

Four photographs from Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel by Max Ernst .
Permission granted by V.A.G.A. ã S.P.A.D.E.M., Paris/V.A.G.A., New York, 1986.

-v-

To Robert A. Collins, who first brought us all together to celebrate the fantastic in literature
and the arts, and to Csilla Bertha, who helps me celebrate the fantastic in my life

-vi-

Contents
Illustrations xi
Preface xiii
Introduction: The Fantastic in World Literature and the
Arts
Donald E. Morse 1
I. THE FANTASTIC IN WORLD LITERATURE:
THEORY AND THEMES
1. From Providence to Terror: The Supernatural in
Gothic
Fantasy
Robert F. Geary 7
2. A Lesson in Xenolinguistics: Congruence,
Empathy, and
Computers in Joan Vinge's "Eyes of Amber"
Gregory M. Shreve 21
3. Continuity with the Past: Mythic Time in Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings
John A. Calabrese 31
4. Remembering the Future: Gene Wolfe's The Book
of the
New Sun
Peter Malekin 47

-vii-

5. The Ultimate Fantasy: Astrid Lindgren's The

Brothers
Lionheart
Clara Juncker 59
II. THE FANTASTIC IN WORLD LITERATURE:
INDIVIDUAL AUTHORS
6. Irony Grows in My Garden: Generative Processes 73
in
 Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths"
Ralph Yarrow
7. What Went Wrong with Alice?
Beverly Lyon Clark 87
8. The Figure of the Decadent Artist in Poe,
Baudelaire,
and Swinburne
Roger C. Lewis 103
9. Elements of the Fantastic in "La Granja Blanca"
by Clemente Palma
Nancy M. Kason 115
10. The Play-within-the-Play: A Study of Madness
in Hubert Aquin's Neige noire
V. Harger-Grinling and A. R. Chadwick 123
11. The Fantastic Dwelling in Jacques Cazotte's Le
Diable
amoureux
Juliette Gilman 133
12. The Living Past: The Mexican's History Returns
to
Haunt Him in Two Short Stories by Carlos Fuentes
Cynthia Duncan 141
13. Dissolution and Discovery in the Fantastic Fiction
of André Pieyre de Mandiargues
Joyce O. Lowrie 149

-viii-

III. FANTASTIC THEMES, FIGURES, AND TECH-

NIQUES IN THE ARTS:
COLLAGE, STAGE, AND FILM
14. Surrealist as Religious Visionary: Max Ernst's Rêve 167
d'une
petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (1930)
Charlotte Stokes
15. "The Foulest Toadstool": Reviving Frankenstein in 183
the
Twentieth Century
Steven Earl Forry
16. The Underground Journey and the Death and
Resurrection Theme in Recent Science Fiction and
Fantasy
Films
Donald E. Palumbo 211
Bibliography 229
 Index 241
About the Editor and Contributors 247

-ix-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-x-

Illustrations
Frontispiece Boris Karloff as the Creature in Frankenstein, with
ii
makeup by Jack Pierce of Universal Studios
Figure 14-1 Max Ernst, ". . . hop là! hop là! . . ." (Rêve d'une
172
petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, Plate 32)
Figure 14-2 Max Ernst, "Marceline . . ." (Rêve d'une petite fille
175
qui voulut entrer au Carmel, Plate 72)
Figure 14-3 Max Ernst, ". . . comptez sur moi! . . ." (Rêve d'une
178
petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, Plate 3)
Figure 14-4 Max Ernst, "Marceline-Marie . . ." (Rêve d'une petite
179
fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, Plate 55)
Figure 15-1 The Edison Kinetogram 186
Figure 15-2 Edward Abeles as the Creature in The Last Laugh 190
Figure 15-3 The Creation Scene from The Last Laugh 191
Figure 15-4 A "Scientific Thriller" 198
Figure 15-5 Dora Patrick as Katrine and Hamilton Deane as the
201
Creature in Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre

-xi-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-xii-

Preface

The sixteen articles included here were selected from over two hundred and fifty papers
presented at the Fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which was
organized by Professor Robert A. Collins and sponsored by Florida Atlantic University and
the Thomas Burnett Swann Foundation. The conference, which has grown to be the largest
single gathering of scholars focusing on the fantastic in the arts, meets in March of each year,
and, as this volume demonstrates, offers an international forum for the lively exchange of
critical ideas.

All of us who study and write about the fantastic in the arts owe a great deal to Bob Collins
for conceiving of, and for five years organizing and overseeing, the conference. It is a
pleasure here and in the dedication to acknowledge that debt.
The contributors to this volume have been unusually patient and forebearing as well as
cooperative. Without their quick response to urgent phone calls and letters, this volume
would not have been possible.

I wish to thank Marshall Tymn, General Editor of Greenwood Press's Contributions to the
Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy--of which this volume is a part--for his significant aid
and encouragement. It is a great pleasure to thank Deborah A. Szobel, Editor, Oakland
University College of Arts and Sciences, for her considerable help in editing individual
essays: contributors and the editor gained greatly from her painstaking attention to detail.
Thanks are also due to Cynthia L. Hemingway for her excellent typing of the

-xiii-

manuscript, and to Mary Hoisington for expeditiously handling the correspondence.

Whatever errors of omission or commission may occur are my own and are not attributable to
any of these colleagues.

-xiv-

THE FANTASTIC IN WORLD LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

-xv-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-xvi-

Donald E. Morse

Introduction: The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts

Fantasy begins with seriously entertaining the impossible: it exists in the imagination whether
that imagination be applied to the arts, literature, film, or drama. As the Irish writer Benedict
Kiely remarked, "Take what you see out of life and reshape it in your imagination. It is not
what happened which is important, but what should have happened."

Brian Attebury, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, contends that "any narrative
which includes as a significant part of its make-up some violation of what the author clearly
believes to be natural law--that is fantasy." All the essays in this volume reflect his definition,
but several qualify it in interesting ways. In fact, reading these essays reinforces George P.
Landow's caveat: "Fantasy and our conception of what is fantastic depend upon our view of
reality: what we find improbable and unexpected follows from what we find probable and
likely, and the fantastic will therefore necessarily vary with the individual and the age."

Reality does depend upon what one views as probable or even as possible, as V. Harger-
Grinling and A. R. Chadwick contend in their "Study of Madness in Hubert Aquin Neige
Noire." So does communication. How will we communicate with beings fundamentally
different from humans? With those whose sense of reality and of the universe may be not so
much antithetical to our own as entirely removed from our own? Gregory M. Shreve
considers this possiblity in A Lesson in Xenolinguistics," which discusses possi-

-1-
ble difficulties and opportunities in communicating between different beings.

If the real and the fantastic vary "with the individual and the age," so they will also vary with
the country where the literature or work of art originates. In rural Ireland the "little people"
are real, whereas to someone reading about them in New York, they seem fantastic, or at
most, a literary invention. Similarly, the critical term Magical Realism may appear, and often
is, oxymoronic in North America while in Latin America it accurately reflects a literary
tradition steeped in a worldview that includes the fantastic as part of everyday reality, as
Cynthia Duncan demonstrates in her essay on two short stories by Carlos Fuentes.

The writers, artists, and directors discussed in these essays use the impossible as a way of
presenting familiar problems and themes, such as the relation of the past to the future, or
human beings' attitude towards death, in a new light. Occasionally, authors will concentrate
on figures familiar from literary history--the decadent artist and the demon lover, for
instance; other times they may borrow less familiar ones, such as a god from an ancient
culture who appears unexpectedly on an otherwise normal day to disturb the comfortable
present of souvenir hunters; or they may invent new beings, as André Pieyre de Mandiargues
does with creatures who look like humans but who are miniature enough to inhabit a geode
and malevolent enough to destroy the unfortunate person who innocently splits open their
rock home.

While during much of the twentieth century the fantastic was relegated to the nursery and
prescribed only for children, today it fuels the adult's imagination as well as the child's, from
advertising and film to popular psychology and best-selling novels. Fantasy and what Roger
Schlobin calls "its young empirical stepchild, science fiction" have become two of the most
popular genres, which often translate into successful films. Donald E. Palumbo's essay, The
Underground Journey and the Death and Resurrection Theme," reviews several of these
popular fantastic films--many of which combine mass appeal with traditional literary themes.

Similarly, in our time, authors and artists often choose the fantastic as the most direct,
immediate, and challenging mode of expression available to them. The phenomenal
popularity of the fantastic in the arts may be found throughout the Western world.

-2-

The essays included here reflect the international appeal of the fantastic with studies on J. R.
R. Tolkien, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Lewis Carroll ( United Kingdom); Astrid
Lindgren ( Sweden); Jorge Luis Borges ( Argentina); Clemente Palma ( Peru); Carlos Fuentes
( Mexico); Jacques Cazotte, Charles Baudelaire, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues ( France);
Hubert Aquin (Frenchspeaking Canada); and Edgar Allan Poe, Joan Vinge, and Gene Wolfe (
United States).

Reliance on the fantastic has, in turn, given new impetus to critics who attempt to discover
how best to illuminate works of fantastic art. Beginning roughly in 1970, the body of
scholarship devoted to the study of the fantastic has grown exponentially. Several essays in
this collection suggest new or newly refined ways of approaching the fantastic; these include
Robert F. Geary's reexamination of the familiar horror tale from a theological perspective or
John A. Calabrese's use of G. S. Kirk's theory of myth to illuminate Tolkien's presentation of
time in The Lord of the Rings. Other articles focus on the visual and kinetic arts, including
Charlotte Stokes's discussion of the collage novel, a blend of visual and verbal fantasy, and
Steven Earl Forry's description of the various stage portrayals of Dr. Frankenstein's monster
from 1823 to Boris Karloff's definitive film performance in 1939. The essays collected here
truly reflect the flux and vitality of the current study of the fantastic in the arts.

-3-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-4-

PART I
The Fantastic in World Literature: Theory and Themes

Essays in this section focus on theoretical or thematic questions. Robert F. Geary deals with a
problem from literary history, "Why did the Gothic appear when it did?" while John A.
Calabrese tackles the issue of the effect time has in The Lord of the Rings, which, although it
appears to belong to no specific time, does possess its own internally consistent time. Other
critics focus on themes: Peter Malekin explores the relation of the past to the present and
future in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, Clara Juncker discusses the question of
death in or its absence from children's literature, using Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers
Lionheart, and Gregory M. Shreve explores the theme of communicating between different
beings from different worlds, as illustrated in Joan Vinge Eyes of Amber." While these
discussions are often specifically directed to certain literary works, they have wider critical
implications for the fantastic in both literature and the arts.

-5-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-6-

1 From Providence to Terror: The Supernatural in Gothic Fantasy

Robert F. Geary

Along with the resurgence of supernatural horror in popular literature, recent years have seen
numerous, sophisticated studies of the progenitors of the contemporary tales of unearthly
terror--the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from Walpole
Otranto to Maturin Melmoth. Yet for all this attention, the Gothic novel--that cluster of
elements involving antiquated settings, stylistic sublimities, a focus on evil, and, of course,
supernatural terrors--remains a difficult form to understand historically. 1 David Punter
recently framed the historical question neatly: "A yearning for the fantastic may in some
sense be ever-present, but it certainly is not ever-manifest, and it is a great deal more obvious
in English literature between 1765 and 1820 than it was, say, between 1720 and 1765." 2
Why, in short, did the Gothic appear when it did?

The fact that the question still must be asked points to the inadequacy of the older answers,
which simply lumped the Gothic in with "graveyard" poetry, the sublime, the sentimental
novel, and more, then proceeded to label the lot "pre-Romanticism" and were done with the
issue. More recent answers have not been without problems either. The usual explanations of
the Gothic (if I may oversimplify for brevity) tend in one or more of three directions. The
first view suggests that the Gothic represents a revolt against the rigidities of the Augustan
Age of Reason. One wonders how the age marked by Gulliver's Travels, The Duncaid, and,
say, Tom Jones--to say nothing of a determined stress on the limits of private

-7-

reason and metaphysical speculation--ever became stereotyped as being "dominated by a

strict concept of reason." 3 A second explanation sees the Gothic as a (covert) rebellion
against inherited authority, a form with spiritual kinship to the French Revolution. Such a
view is plausible for, perhaps, William Godwin, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley, but one has
trouble attributing rebellious sentiments to Walpole or the proper Mrs. Radcliffe, not to
mention Clara Reeve, whose intentions were determinedly anti-Jacobin. The third and most
common view explains the Gothic in Freudian terms as an exploration, increasingly self-
conscious, of the hidden sexual regions of the psyche. This approach embodies a concealed
teleology that sees, for instance, the Gothic reaching an "arrival at consciousness" with James
The Turn of the Screw. 4 Tzvetan Todorov draws such premises to their logical conclusion:
"Psychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the fantastic. There
is no need today to resort to the devil to speak of sexual desire." 5 Obviously, the supposedly
obsolete demons are still active and popular in a culture saturated with psychoanalysis and
sexuality: one questions, therefore, the premise. Indeed, even David Punter's Marxist and
Freudian categories cannot quite explain the form's popularity. If the Gothic is simply the
literary analysis by the bourgeoisie of its aristocratic predecessors and its own rise to power,
these concerns should long ago have been addressed and the form become defunct.

Although each of these explanations illuminates certain works, none fits the Gothic as a
whole, explaining its appearance, popularity, decline, and reformation in, for example, the
Victorian ghost story. I suggest that to advance in our understanding of the Gothic, we must
come to terms with its obvious, though often embarrassing, use of the supernatural. And to do
this, we need an approach that will explain, not explain away, the supernatural; that will find
textual support in the novels themselves, instead of reading back into them the concerns of
later periods; and, finally, that will relate the novels to changing cultural patterns. A proper
understanding of the specifically Gothic uses of the supernatural offers, in turn, clues to the
rise, the hesitations, and decline of this subgenre.

To understand the nature and the problems of the supernatural in the early Gothic fictions, we
would do well to examine Rudolf Otto's classic analysis of the "numinous" in his The Idea of
the Holy

-8-

( 1923). Otto proposed that at the root of the religious emotion is a sense of "creative feeling"
of absolute submergence of the self "before overpowering, absolute might of some kind."
That absolute might Otto called the "numinous," the "holy" (but without the moral and
rational connotations of the later term). The numinous is the mysterium tremendum that
inspires religious dread before the aweful majesty of the Wholly Other. The overpowering
energy of the numinous exerts a peculiar fascination:

the daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and
dread, but . . . it . . . no less . . . allures with a potent charm, and the creature,
who trembles before it, . . . has always at the same time the impulse to turn to
it, nay even to make it somehow his own. 6
That this complex of emotions approximates closely much of the supernatural terror of
Gothic novels has been noted by others besides Davendra Varma 7 and will be further
developed here. What has not, however, been discussed is the relationship of the numinous to
developed religious belief. Around the relatively primitive sense of the numinous, according
to Otto, there arise in mature religions concepts of morality and rational theological doctrines.
Such rationality distinguishes the mature religion from the primitive and fanatical, though
without any sense of the numinous a religion becomes arid rationalism. 8

Otto's work warns of an excess of rationalism draining religion of vitality but does not
speculate at length on what would happen to the sense of the numinous should a developed
religious synthesis weaken under secularizing influences. Presumably, however, at least three
possibilities exist. For many, the sense of the numinous would be lost in rationalism. Others
could form a religious reaction, seeking a new doctrinal hierarchy with more prominent
emphasis on the power and majesty of the deity and the unworthiness of man. But a third
possibility exists: the sense of the numinous, cut loose from a context of rational belief, may
return in its most primitive form, that of demonic dread. Otto suggests something like this in
a remark having particular relevance to Gothic tales of supernatural terror:

But even when this [the numinous] has long attained its higher and purer mode
of expression, it is possible for the primitive types of excitation

-9-

that were formerly a part of it to break out in the soul in all their original
naivete. . . . This is shown by the potent attraction again and again exercised
by the element of horror and "shudder" in ghost stories, even among persons
of high all-round education. 9

All three reactions did appear in the mid- and late- eighteenth century, along with a
continuation of older attitudes. And these reactions, or most of them, had literary
counterparts, helping to make the period difficult to categorize. In addition to the truculent
traditionalism of Johnson, one finds the sneering secular rationality of Hume or Gibbon. At
the same time, the Methodist countermovement was reorienting theological priorities to
emphasize original sin, even predestination, and the kind of direct, dramatic manifestations of
the supernatural previously played down in favor of explanations of providential operations
through second causes in ways not at variance with the new science. Wesley lamented that
"the English in general . . . have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old
wives' fables. I am sorry for it . . . the giving up [of] witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the
Bible." 10 For Wesley, "Any but a Particular Providence is no Providence at all," whatever his
increasingly secular countrymen might feel. But the Gothic novel was no literary counterpart
of the Methodist attack on religious rationalism and apathy. The novel of supernatural terror
could, in theory, be a vehicle for a more or less covert attack on a pervasive secular
rationalism. This, however, was not the case with the Gothic novel; had it been, the form's
procedures would have been quite different and its handling of the numinous far less
indecisive.

Instead the Gothic novel stands as a literary manifestation of the third possibility--that the
numinous may break free of an inherited doctrinal context, returning now as a pleasing
shiver, now as primitive dread. It is precisely the weakening, the suspension, or the absence
of such a context that enabled the novels to appeal to readers who were not invited by the
formal devices of the novels to endorse a belief in the reality of the otherworldly in order to
experience numinous awe or demonic dread. But the price of such a free-floating sense of the
numinous was an awkwardness and confusion that kept the Gothic a subgenre, one whose
supernatural elements seemed clumsy "trappings" because not grounded in any

-10-

coherent belief, and hence a type easily absorbed into the Romantic mode, which transformed
traditional religious patterns into a thoroughly psychologized context.

To illustrate the process whereby the supernatural became disengaged from the earlier
providential context, we need, first, briefly to examine supernatural elements of the sort
usually called Gothic as they appear in earlier, Augustan works. Such elements indeed are
present; however, fixed in a providential matrix, they are decidedly not "Gothic" in the true
sense. Addison Spectator 110 (for 6 July 1711) offers a particularly clear example:

I was taking a Walk in this Place last Night between the Hours of Nine and
Ten, and could not but fancy it one of the most proper Scenes in the World for
a Ghost to appear in. The Ruins of the Abbey are scattered up and down on
every Side, and half covered with Ivy and Elder-Bushes. . . . [T]he Place was
formerly a Churchyard, and still has several Marks in it of Graves and
Burying-Places. There is . . . an Eccho among the old Ruins and Vaults. . . .
The walk of Elms, with the Croaking of the Ravens . . . looks exceeding
solemn and venerable. These Objects naturally raise Seriousness and
Attention; and when Night heightens the Awefulness of the Place, . . . I do not
at all wonder what weak Minds fill it with Spectres and Apparitions. 11

Darkness, ravens, a ruined abbey, a graveyard and burial vault, even the mood of religious
awe--"Gothic" elements all--are here in profusion. But they are not "free-floating," not
allowed to create a shiver of numinous dread. Instead, the author carefully binds the
numinous elements within a psychological and theological context which removes the
"superstitious" while retaining enough awe to support certain basic (or lowest common
denominator) orthodox doctrines.

Addison first cites Locke Essay On Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 33, on foolish
maidservants whose bedtime tales to their charges leave children with an irrational, lifelong
association of darkness with the idea of ghosts and goblins. But Addison is equally careful
not to let rationalistic psychology lead him into freethinking territory. Having explained away
the superstitions of Sir Roger's retainers, the Spectator finds even more unreasonable anyone
who, "contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and prophane,

-11-

ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits
fabulous and groundless." Thus Addison achieves here a neat compromise, one permitting
skepticism of particular claims about ghostly apparitions without entailing doubt about the
immorality of the soul, a doctrine crucial to morality. He ends the paper with a story from
Josephus about the ghost of a former husband who appears to admonish his errant wife. The
tale is a microcosm of Addison's handling of the supernatural in the essay. He does not
endorse or deny the reality of the apparition; his interest is not in "the Story itself," but in the
concluding "moral Reflections" on the truth of "the immortality of the Soul, and of Divine
Providence" and the wisdom of not voicing doubts about claims of apparitions which
promote these virtuous doctrines. 12 Thus Addison is not separated from many of the Gothic
novelists by the lack of religious awe, or even "Gothic" scenery, but rather by the presence in
his work of what is weak or absent in theirs--a hierarchical context in which this religious
mood is subordinated to an essentially traditional belief in Providence.

Nor does truth lie in the belief that "neoclassic" writers rested complacently in the bland faith
in Providence, oblivious to the literary power of religious deed. Few critics could outdo John
Dennis in concern for rules for poetry, yet Dennis early championed the sublime and
maintained that "Enthusiastic Terror" contributes "extremely to Sublimity" and that such
terror "is most produced by Religious Ideas," such as the ideas of "Gods, Daemons, Hell,
Spirits . . . Miracles, Prodigies, Enchantments, Witchcraft, Thunder. . . ."--a whole catalogue,
in short, of Gothic trappings. 13 Dennis's remarks even bring to mind the accursed outcasts of
later Gothic fiction: "The greatest Enthusiastick Terror then must needs be deriv'd from
Religious Ideas: for since the more their Objects are powerful, and likely to hurt, the greater
Terror their ideas produce; what can produce a greater Terror, than the Idea of an Angry
God?" 14

These remarks on terror, sublimity, and religion (what would be called the numinous) do not,
however, bespeak a "Romantic mind"; they appear as subpoints in Dennis The Grounds of
Criticism in Poetry ( 1704), which argues for the essentially religious grounding of art. The
excitation of the passions, especially of sublime terror, thus can prove morally restorative.

-12-

The point is not that either Addison or Dennis is to be taken as spokesperson for some
monolithic neoclassicism. More important is that both critics, in spite of their differences,
saw a value to the stimulation of emotions of religious awe through means later associated
with the Gothic novel, and both subordinated or contained the numinous within a matrix of
key beliefs which Dennis lists as the existence of God, Providence, immortality, and future
rewards and punishments (almost identical to the doctrines Addison seeks to enforce in The
Spectator 110). 15

Other illustrations of the providential use of the supernatural can be found in Henry Fielding
Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of . . . Murder (
1752), which is mostly a republication of exempla from similar works of the previous two
centuries, and designed to show that "murder will out"-whether by natural or supernatural
means. 16 Or one may recall how Dr. Johnson (in ways more Augustan than were the
Augustans) refuses to exploit unearthly terrors when in Rasselas the prince's party visits the
pyramids and Pekuah fears the revenge of the dead whose tombs may be disturbed. Imlac,
though defending the possibility of ghosts, at once quells the fears of the nervous woman. In
Johnson's orthodox belief, Providence controls the spirits, protects the innocent, and thereby
dampens numinous terror. 17

This cluster of beliefs, centering on Providence and morality, dominated the first half of the
century, for it offered to the faithful a refuge against freethinking assaults on religion, against
charges of superstition, and against sectarian divisiveness. But when, for a variety of reasons,
it ceased to command a consensus, one paradoxical result was the release of numinous terrors
in the literature of an age more secular than was its predecessor, thus leading to the unease
early Gothic novels exhibit about the supernatural elements which waiver half-in and half-out
of a providential context.

The problem of dealing with the supernatural concerned Horace Walpole in his preface to the
first edition of The Castle of Otranto. What shall be done with the "preternatural events," at
once necessary to create "terror, the author's principal engine," yet also "exploded now even
from romances"? Walpole will not journey into pure fantasy, abandoning all attempts at
realism; for he wants a fusion of the imaginative scope of romance with the realism of
characterization and setting in the new form we have come to call

-13-

the novel. Thus he resorts to elaborate displacement, posing as the translator of a sixteenth-
century account of medieval events, an account perhaps the work of an "artful priest" to
foster popular superstition. 18

Yet there are clues in the preface that Walpole was not satisfied, sensing that the supernatural
elements still were generating problems. As "translator" he confesses dismay at the
inadequate moral that appears to arise from the tale--that "the sins of the fathers are visited
on their children to the third and fourth generations." His expressed concerns, that this theme
will not deter murderers (who do not think generations ahead) and is itself muddled because
prayers divert for a time what seems an implacable curse, can be too quickly dismissed as
fussy moralizing. However obliquely, the concerns point to a formal thematic dislocation in
the tale. For in Otranto the supernatural partly escapes from a providential context into which
the author tries to place it. In so doing it loses some of its "holiness" in the moral sense and
acquires or reverts to aspects of sheer numinous terror not compatible with the kind of divine
justice in which Walpole sensed his readers believed. The problem is thus deeper than the
author's seemingly simplistic terminology would indicate. He attempts to entertain with
supernatural elements of which the audience is half-ashamed but without sacrificing an air of
reality ("Nature") by moving totally into the realm of fancy. The displacement reduces but
does not remove the difficulty.

Within the story Walpole struggles to make the supernatural elements reasonably congruent
with Christian belief. The omens and prodigies thus become providential signs of a divine
judgment upon the villainous Manfred who is seeking by further crimes to secure his title to
Otranto, a title founded on murder. "Heaven itself declares against your impious intentions,"
warns Isabella, as she watches the giant plumes wave with "a hollow and rustling sound"
when Manfred first broaches to her his scheme to divorce his wife and marry her ( Otranto,
23). Manfred remains undeterred, seeing the hand of Hell, not Heaven, in these signs, as well
as in the chilling sighs emitted by his grandfather's portrait. So Isabella flees for safety into a
subterranean passage (another feature to become standard in Gothic novels). Providence here
is her guide through the labyrinth as she first meets Theodore, then discovers the escape door
by virtue of a single shaft of moonlight penetrating the gloom ( Otranto,

-14-

27). To the enraged Manfred, Theodore boldly proclaims the significance of Isabella's escape
to the church of St. Nicholas: " Providence, that delivered me from the helmet, was able to
direct me to the spring of the lock" ( Otranto, 29-30). Later Theodore again is saved when,
kneeling to be executed, he reveals the mark of a bloody arrow and is thereby recognized as
the lost son of Friar Jerome ( Otranto, 54). The friar, in turn, has found the courage to defy
Manfred, believing himself the "worthless instrument" of "the will of Heaven" ( Otranto, 48).
19

In the final sections of Otranto, however, the supernatural begins to lose its moral aspects as
it manifests itself not as providential protection of innocence but as pure, numinous wrath.
Once Theodore and Matilda fall in love, Providence becomes not their protector but the
blocker of their hopes. As Theodore renounces vengeance against Matilda's father, Manfred,
"a deep and hollow groan" interrupts him ( Otranto, 70). "Good Heavens," exclaims Matilda;
but the denouement strips this very goodness from the supernatural interventions as the
innocent lovers become victims of the curse upon the line of Manfred. The omens and dreams
thwarting Manfred's intrigues have as their purpose not the saving of Isabella and Matilda
from ruinous marriages, but a more primitive, more demonic, manifestation of supernatural
power--blood revenge.

The characters themselves question the ethical nature of the supernatural as the grim climax
nears. Hippolita, to palliate the guilty schemes of her husband, tells Matilda: "There is a
destiny hangs over us; the hand of Providence is stretched out. Oh, could I but save thee from
the wreck!" ( Otranto, 87). Primitive curse and Providence here merge. Later, Theodore
rebels when, signficantly, paternal and clerical authority in the person of Friar Jerome insists
that Matilda share Manfred's guilt and doom. "Will Heaven visit the innocent for the crimes
of the guilty?" he protests. But Jerome invokes the image of Alfonso the Good to press claims
of "sacred vengeance" over those of "charity." Jerome's deity is, in Otto's terms, more purely
numinous, more "wholly other," more purely terrifying than the usual rational, merciful,
ethical deity of developed religion. The "daunting and awe-inspiring character of numinous
wrath, the pure tremendum of the Other," says Otto, "must be gravely disturbing to those
persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love. . . ."
20
No wonder,

-15-

then, Walpole's characters express dismay at a providence that works not by protection or by
surgical punishments, but by terror.

Jerome's numinous deity, a Divine Will of power and wrath, manifests itself at the close
when Manfred mistakenly stabs to death his daughter, Matilda, at the feet of Alfonso's statue
in the church of St. Nicholas. Friar Jerome is the proper one to interpret the savage event:
"The blood of Alfonso cried to Heaven for vengeance; and Heaven has permitted its altar to
be polluted by assassination, that thou mightest shed thy own blood at the foot of that prince's
sepulchre." ( Otranto, 105). To this the dying Matilda, full of Christian charity and filial love,
may protest, calling Jerome a "cruel man . . . to aggravate the woes of a parent" and offering
her father forgiveness ( Otranto, 105). But there is no denying that Jerome's merciless words
better describe the workings of the supernatural than do Matilda's sentiments. The final
numinous manifestation is one of awesome power, demanding total submission to a divine
will working through "sacrilegious murder" ( Otranto, 107). As the castle walls collapse, an
enormous statue of Alfonso appears. (Once the embodiment of goodness, Alfonso is now a
figure of apocalyptic wrath.) Having proclaimed Theodore the rightful heir, the vision
ascends heavenward, leaving Matilda to die, Theodore to brood over her amid the ruins of his
inheritance (eventually in the company of Isabella), and Manfred to retire to a holy cell where
he will seek to avert "the further wrath of Heaven" ( Otranto, 108109).

Though the rightful dynasty has returned, the story ends less with a providential restoration of
order than with a terrifying and ruinous manifestation of numinous power. In this escape of
the supernatural from conventional contexts of fictional portrayal and providential belief,
Walpole's work points to problems which would arise again in the Gothic novel. For in
seeking to introduce into fiction more elements of the romantic supernatural for an audience
less willing than before to believe in preternatural manifestations, Walpole resorts to
procedures that no longer contain the numinous within a providential hierarchy, yet do not
supply a coherent new pattern. Appearing in the form of bizarre omens and prodigies, in
which neither author nor readers believe, the numinous cannot fit into the mode of
providential romance. Instead it veers incongruously toward primitive religious terror. In
Otranto, the super-

-16-

natural is at once part eighteenth-century providential conventions, part pseudo-Catholic

medievalism, part Old Testament angry God-an incoherent jumble. Emblematic of this
confusion is the gigantic apparition of a vengeful Alfonso the Good, floating above a scene of
"sacred murder," towards a St. Nicholas who could not prevail upon him to spare Matilda.
Ungrounded in any coherent context of belief or corresponding novelistic procedures, he
hovers ambiguously, half dreadful numinous power and half silly superstition, above a
faltering providential context--a sign of the uncertainty writ large of novelistic belief and
technique.

Later Gothic novelists would seek to end this ambiguity, whether by moving the vaguely
numinous back into a providential matrix, by evaporating it into the psychological, or by
releasing it altogether from lingering providential restraints to pour out unalloyed terror. But
none achieved unqualified success. In The Old English Baron ( 1777), Clara Reeve excised
Walpole's prodigies, thereby restoring the supernatural to an orthodox providential context;
but by retaining his temporal distancing device of the medieval setting, she created a tame,
providential fable of little resonance. The book lacks both the excitement of romance and the
credibility of a providential Augustan novel such as Tom Jones.

Mrs. Radcliffe's attempt to blend Gothic features with the Richardsonian novel's probability
involved more drastic alterations in procedures. Instead of radically distancing the
supernatural in time and place, instead of seeking to harmonize the supernatural with
providential belief, she rationalized it, explaining it away as a series of perfectly natural
deceptions. Thus she could locate Udolpho in a fairly contemporary setting and create a
credible heroine while retaining certain Gothic elements, including some numinous chills,
without committing herself to anything open to the charge of superstition. The result brought
her novel closer to the current of Richardsonian fiction but left the Gothic element no more
than empty trappings, finally irrelevant to the features of her book which were drawn from
the novel of sensibility. The terrors in Udolpho-whether from ghosts or pirates--remain, so to
speak, on a different track from the work's main concern with the prudential choices of a
young woman both proper and sensitive.

Reversing Mrs. Radcliffe's approach, Matthew Lewis made frighteningly real both the
elements of supernatural terror and de-

-17-

monic passion which Udolpho evoked but then suppressed. In so doing, The Monk actualized
the potential for numinous terror latent in Otranto, without taking over the sillier features of
Walpole's pioneering book. Yet The Monk achieved its considerable measure of terror by
intensifying, not resolving, Otranto's confusion between the supernatural as primitive dread
and as protecting Providence; for its blend of secular skepticism and the satanic supernatural
created a world where characters were terrorized by unearthly evil from without and by
hideous passion from within. The mixture was more horrifying than credible in an age for
which the supernatural had not become entirely a convention of literature. In the end, then,
The Monk, for all its horror, did not escape the confusion that beset the Gothic; for it asked
readers at once to believe and not to believe in the supernatural, to see saints as superstitions
and devils as realities.
By about 1800 the Gothic had become mired in popular sensationalism, from which neither
Mary Shelley's nor Charles Maturin's subsequent efforts could rescue it. Not until the advent
of the Victorian ghost story would the supernatural reappear in a significantly different mode,
one more successful and enduring. A century after Otranto, writers such as LeFanu,
Stevenson, and Bram Stoker would succeed in generating numinous terrors amid credible,
contemporary settings. Thoroughly detached from any providential context, their demons,
ghosts, and vampires would provide shivers of supernatural dread to a readership avid for any
intimation of a reality other--even terrifyingly other--than the soulless worldview offered by a
triumphant scientific rationalism. But the revival of the Gothic supernatural is another chapter
in the story of the endurance of this hardy subgenre.

NOTES
1. For a fuller description of the cluster of elements forming the Gothic, see
Francis R. Hart, "Limits of the Gothic: The Scottish Example", in Studies in
Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 3, ed. Harold Pagliaro ( Cleveland: Case
Western Reserve Press, 1973), 137ff.
2. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from
1765 to the Present ( New York: Longmans, 1980), 424.
3. Davendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic in
England ( London: Arthur Baker, Ltd., 1957), 210-11.

-18-

4. See Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction ( New York:

Columbia University Press, 1979), 106-61, 223, 239.
5. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre, trans. Richard Howard ( 1970; reprint, Cleveland: Case Western
Reserve Press, 1973), 159-160.
6. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey ( 1923; reprint,
New York: Oxford Galaxy Books, 1958), 10, 31.
7. See, for instance, Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk", ELH 40
( 1973), 249-263.
8. Otto, Idea, 141.
9. Otto, Idea, 16.
10. John Wesley, Journal of John Wesley ( 25 May 1768, III: 329-30; 6 July
1781, IV: 215; reprint, New York: E.P. Dutton's Everyman Library, 1913).
11. Joseph Addison, The Spectator (110 July 6, 1711), ed. Donald Bond
( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 453-56.
12. Ibid.
13. Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker ( Baltimore: Johns
 Hopkins University, Press, 1939), I: 361.
14. Ibid., 356.
15. John Dennis, "The Usefulness of the Stage", Part III, ch. 1, in Critical
Works I.
16. See Henry Fielding, Complete Works, Henley edition ( New York: Croscup
and Sterling, 1902), Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. III. Fielding drew very
heavily on Thomas Beard Theater of God's Judgments ( London: A. Islip,
1597) and William Turner A Complete History of the Most Remarkable
Providences ( London: John Dunton, 1697).
17. See Samuel Johnson, Rasselas ( New York: Henry Holt and Co. 1971),
chapter XXXI.
18. All references to Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story,
1765, are from W. S. Lewis's edition ( Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1969). For the citations from the "Preface to the First Edition," see 3.
19. For a full discussion of providential elements in Otranto see Leigh A. Ehlers
, "The Gothic World as Stage: Providence and Character in The Castle of
Otranto: A Gothic Story", Wascana Review 14 (no. 2) ( 1979), 1730. I do
not agree with Ehlers that the providential motif is finally coherent.
20. Otto, Idea, 19.

-19-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-20-

2
A Lesson in Xenolinguistics:
Congruence, Empathy, and
Computers in Joan Vinge's
"Eyes of Amber"

Gregory M. Shreve

The great difficulty with using language to communicate is, simply, that one does not always
know whether one has communicated effectively. Between the word as it is meant and the
word as it is understood lies a universe of difference. The "semantic gap" between speaker
and hearer is a very real aspect of human communication; even as speakers of the same
language, we are accustomed to a constant and familiar drizzle of misunderstandings and
miscommunications. Problems of meaning and understanding are only compounded when the
communicative act is complicated by crosscultural aspects and bilingualism. Speakers of the
same language may, at least, attempt to elucidate their "messages" by interpreting the many
cues of context and paralanguage that accompany the spoken word. A shared cultural
experience places the transmitted message in a familiar matrix of assumptions and
presuppositions, from which the most likely meanings of a given act of communication may
be deduced. Even when the !Kung bushman delivers a clicking message to the Aleutian
Eskimo, a shared context of universal human experience informs and illuminates the act of
speech.

Imagine, then, the profound difficulties that might confront two intelligent beings, not of the
same culture, not of the same species, not even of the same line of evolution on the same
planet, as they attempt to communicate. They would attempt to send messages not only
through the emptiness of space, but into a void of shared experience. The lack of shared
experience would place their act of communication in peril.

-21-

This fragility and uncertainty of communicating with the alien is a major theme of Joan
Vinge's excellent short story, "Eyes of Amber." On the human side is Shannon Wyler,
musician and linguist; on the alien side is Lady T'uupieh of Titan, noblewoman, outlaw, and
assassin. Ultimately a messsage passes between the two, overcoming the seemingly
insurmountable obstacles of place and experience. This exchange highlights Vinge's message
in the story--that communication is always possible--because at some level all intelligent life
is kindred. Some aspect of being alive, some quality of moving, breathing, and thinking
creates a matrix of common experience that can serve as the medium from which meanings
may be plucked.

In the story a probe of Titan's surface discovers intelligent life; its remote reconnaissance
devices establish a communication link; now the only problems are to communicate and to
understand. The difficulties are many. Some are mechanical and, hence, perhaps ultimately
solvable; others are less yielding. Vinge brings some new insights into the linguistic arena,
but their actual applications may be more difficult than she imagines. Ever since scientists in
the mid-1950s first thought that communication with another species might be possible (in
this case, the bottle-nosed dolphin, Tursiops truncatus), several thorny areas have arisen in a
discipline that we might, for lack of a better term, call xenolinguistics, the linguistics of
interspecies communication. Most of the problems of xenolinguistics center on three major
areas: recognition, translation, and empathy. Vinge deals with each of these areas in her short
story, and a discussion of each provides a simple format for the remainder of this text.

The xenolinguist undoubtedly must deal with a variety of obstacles. Certainly one of the
major obstacles will be the problem of recognizing and reproducing the alien voice; that is, of
course, if sound turns out to be the means by which the first extraterrestrial contact
communicates. In his Kirlian Quest trilogy, and in the novel Viscous Circle, Piers Anthony
speculates on a great variety of communication modes, from tinkling bells to flashing laser
lights and odor languages. Clearly the majority of the extraterrestrial community cannot be
expected to communicate in an auditory mode, much less an audible one. The problem of
recognition is bipolar.

-22-

First, the hearer (a human being) must be able to recognize that communication is taking
place--without any foreknowledge of the mode of communication, recognition could be very
difficult. Second, even if the hearer manages to recognize communication, he or she must be
able to reply in such a way that the speaker is able to determine the same thing. In "Eyes of
Amber," the aliens communicate in a fashion that is more congruent with the human mode
than might be some other mode that is popular in the universe. Titanide and human both use
sound and the nuances of sound to communicate; thus, a quality of congruence reduces the
difficulty of the xenocommunicative act. Speaker and hearer, however, use audible languages
at different levels of phonetic complexity. As Shannon Wyler comments, "Every phoneme
was formed of two or three superposed sounds, and every morpheme was a blend of
phonemes, flowing together like water. They spoke in chords, and the result was a choir. . . ."
1
This difference in complexity is, in itself, a problem that might require computer assistance
to resolve.

The machine processing of languages can be an important part of xenolinguistics. Although

Vinge appears to discount the importance of the computer in the recognition, translation, and
interpretation of alien languages, it is still an important tool, without which communication
with a completely alien species could be impossible.

Automated language processors will be particularly important in the area of recognition.

Human beings will be unable, without the prosthetic help of computers and computer-
directed instrumentation, to deal with languages that are distinctly noncongruent, that are
very highly phonetically or kinetically complex. The "synthesizer" that Shannon Wyler uses
to communicate with T'uupieh could not have been used without the prior involvement of
computers. In Wyler's hands the synthesizer "speaks" to T'uupieh in her own musical
language, yet it is difficult to conceive of Wyler learning the language in the first place
without the intervention of computers. In the initial stages of search and contact certain
conditions will prevail: (1) communication will be taking place in modes that will probably
be noncongruent; and (2) the patterning of signals in those modes most likely will resist
discovery without complex pattern recognition programs. Only computers will be able to
scan the wide

-23-

range of possible communication modes over the requisite (long) periods of time, and only
computers will be able to discern the subtle regularities that comprise the patterns of
language.

At this point, of course, the computer has merely recognized and identified patterns of sound,
light, or scent; the simple recognition of regularity does not determine the existence of a
language. Many natural phenomena emit regular patterns of various kinds of energy; some
patterns of activity are languages by virtue of their ability to act as a vehicle for meaning. The
Titan Probe attaches meaning to T'uupieh's musical chords (sentences) only because it is able
to enter into a communicative relationship in which the patterns of action and reaction in the
joint act of communication begin to attach meaning to the heretofore meaningless patterns of
sound. Unless the alien languages we first learn are isomorphs of human language, based on
sound waves, at our levels of phonetic complexity, and embedded in congruent life
experience, human beings will encounter great difficulty in constructing a lexicon or
dictionary without computer assistance.

Entering into the actual communicative relationship will require that at least one partner
adopt the communication mode of the other (as there will be, one assumes, no galactic lingua
franca for them to use). Thus, after we recognize an alien language, we must reproduce it.
Shannon Wyler's synthesizer is, ultimately, not a translating device, but a reproducing device,
neither creating nor extracting meaning, only carrying it. Reproducing an alien language is a
mechanical problem that, quite possibly, could be handled by human beings via natural or
mechanical means, without computer assistance.
However, some caveats exist here. If an alien language is at a sufficiently high level of
complexity, a human being will be unable to process all of the information in the message
fast enough or completely enough to engage in communication. Does the fact that Shannon
Wyler is able to engage in fluent conversation with the Titanides on his synthesizer make a
negative statement about the ability of computers to process and reproduce language, or does
it imply that Titanese language is in the same league as human language in its level of
complexity? The point at which a human being would be unable, without assistance, to
process the information in a single, complex, alien utterance, is unknown.

-24-

The recognition and reproduction of the patterns of alien language are, as we have said, only
two of the problems of xenolinguistics. Translation, the process of mapping the tokens of one
language to the types of the other, is another, perhaps more difficult obstacle. The ability to
attach meaning to the sound, light, or scent tokens of an alien language requires interaction
between communicating partners, but the process of compiling an English-Titanese lexicon
could be a monstrous undertaking if done unassisted. During the early stages of capturing the
details of an alien language, a computer would be quite indispensable. Shannon Wyler,
through the probe's many "demon eyes," prompts his informant, Lady T'uupieh, for her
worldview. Through his voice, the IBM synthesizer, he channels messages via a language
already captured by computer. Indeed, his entry into the Titan Project is his ability to use the
language, not necessarily his ability to translate and compile it.

The word translate is used here in a fairly technical sense, to refer to the initial cross-
mapping of languages when the types of each are linked to the tokens of the other. Machine
"translation" is one of the oldest areas of computer application in linguistics. Translation is a
problem in pattern recognition and pattern matching. An incoming "word" or language
"token" from the source language is matched against a list of known words in that language;
each word in the list has pointers to memory locations that contain the corresponding
language tokens of the object language. The compilation of such a list is an arduous task and
has occupied the lives of many anthropological linguists. Alien languages are unlikely to
succumb to linguistic techniques without computer assistance. A true translating program
must, of course, do more than simply match source and object language tokens. It must store
and apply various rules of structure; the "meanings" of words alter as a function of context,
inflection, pitch, and position. A translating program must parse an alien "sentence" into its
constituent parts, apply the rules of the alien grammar--discovered via a pattern recognition
procedure-and develop a likely translation for the sentence. Human beings, of course, go
through a similar process when they learn a language; the difference is that with an alien
language our ability to recognize and correctly parse sentences is likely to be severely
limited. Indeed, one might go so far as to suggest that there will exist in the universe
"spheres" of linguistic congruence. Some alien races may be

-25-

very similar to ours, and their languages might be learned as one now learns French, for
example. Other races may be profoundly, perhaps disturbingly different; our ability to
process their languages will be constrained by the level of that difference. The higher the
level of complexity, the greater the disjunction between communicative modes; the greater
the level of incompatibility in life experience, the less likely we will be able to communicate
without computer assistance. Shannon Wyler and T'uupieh have their difficulties in
communication but are ultimately enough alike to allow communication to occur in a more
direct mode.
Even after recognizing, reproducing, and, perhaps, translating an alien language, no guarantee
exists that we will understand what is being said to us. Every language is embedded in a
culture, in a particular worldview. Years ago Edward Sapir understood well the relationship
between language and culture when he said, "The relation between language and experience
is often misunderstood. Language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of the
various items of experience which seem relevant to the individual . . . but is also a self-
contained creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience . . . but actually
defines experience for us. . . ." 2

An alien language will both express and constrain the alien worldview. The language was
formed by, and in turn forms, the alien culture in which it is embedded. Perhaps of all the
obstacles facing the xenolinguist this is the most imposing. Sapir's words intimate that a true
understanding of a language requires an understanding of its cultural matrix, and vice versa.

Thus, the meaning of any sentence uttered by an alien will be bounded entirely by the alien's
life experience. If we cannot share in that experience, can we ever extract from the utterance
a meaning understandable to us? The ability to understand another being requires a certain
level of identification, a kind of semantic empathy. Each being is reasonably secure that a
common domain of reference bounds the meanings he or she seeks to express in words. The
alien has no such assurances. Only insofar as evolution and cultural history match, will our
languages be isomorphic; only then can we communicate on common ground.

A major theme of Eyes of Amber is that the problem of understanding an alien being may not
be insurmountable. In the

-26-

opening paragraphs of the story, Lady T'uupieh, parting from Lord Chwiul, brother of the
man she is to assassinate, says, "I shall certainly get rid of your watchman. He doesn't know a
lady from a beggar." ( Vinge, 313). These seemingly innocuous words underscore a running
thread in the story, that the world is changeable, a thing of mist and appearance, where all are
bound to play their parts as the great "wheel of life" turns. Thus, a beggar is a noblewoman
who is an assassin; a demon is a human being who is a rock star who is a linguist. T'uupieh,
on the eve of the planned assassination, says to her "demon": "The world melts and flows, it
rises into mist, it returns again to ice, only to melt and flow once more. A wheel has no
beginning and no end; no starting place." ( Vinge, 332). If it is true, as T'uupieh says, that
death is the only absolute, then what basis exists for communication between a demon and a
lady? Shannon Wyler keeps trying to interpret T'uupieh as if she were a human being,
ascribing to her words and actions meanings derived from human experience. As he laments:
" T'uupieh, whenever I think I love you, you decide to cut somebody's throat. . . ." ( Vinge,
314). Is T'uupieh a Robin Hood or a brutal barbarian? Is Shannon Wyler a demon or an
angel?

Ultimately, Vinge sees common bonds, and believes beneath the mist and meltwater of
experience are some constants. The bedrock of all experience, alien or human, is a set of
universal morals, a value system embedded in life itself, that provides a foundation for
communication and for the empathy that is required for full understanding. Living beings
must reach down and bring forth those core values, that animus that transcends the shell of
evolution and biology, what Shannon Wyler ultimately identifies as a soul. If souls exist, then
Vinge's contention that computers are not up to the job of handling the "translation" of alien
language and experience is probably true. Being inanimate, at least for the present, computers
have no bedrock, no basis for the empathy that is so necessary to communication. At one
point in the story T'uupieh tells her demon, "You are immortal, you have the power to twist
the wheel. . . ." ( Vinge, 331). What T'uupieh means is that the demon is not part of the
universe of life and is not subject to its laws. As long as the demon remains "outside" (like
the computer), there can be no understanding. Yet, ultimately T'uupieh and Wyler do
communicate; their success stems from the demon's entrance into

-27-

the realm of the wheel. When Shannon Wyler tells T'uupieh his name, he is saying to
T'uupieh: I too am bound to the wheel, I too can hurt and suffer and live and die. In the end,
real communication is between beings who live and die--regardless of biology or the random
turnings of evolution and culture.

Is mortality, then, the common bond that will ultimately allow understanding among the
creatures of the universe? If Vinge is right, we will, with and without computers, be able to
converse with even the strangest life-forms. But is mortality really universal? Do there exist
transcendent value systems whose commandments draw the line between "trust and betrayal,
right and wrong, good and evil"? Could the community of mortal beings be inside a sphere of
congruence, while outside, occupying yet other spheres, reside beings so incalculably
different that the concept of mortality scarcely applies to them? What will be the basis for
communication with these beings? Neither humans nor computers may ever make contact
with these beings, and by that act share in the beings' unique worldexperience.

Xenolinguistics and xenoanthropologists must ultimately view the universe as being

comprised of nested spheres of congruence. In the center of any sphere is the individual
human being surrounded by fellow humans. Races of similar biology and evolution are in a
larger, encompassing sphere. In yet larger, outer spheres are races that begin to diverge
profoundly from our own; as we move out from the center, computers and other prosthetic
devices will be necessary to establish communication. But, as we move even further out and
away, no device can help us, because the bases of our experience will be so far removed that
no foundations, no linguistic levers of Archimedes, will exist upon which to found our
discourse.

Even with her optimism, Vinge is not entirely sure of herself in the final analysis. Was the
message that Shannon Wyler sent, the message that Lady T'uupieh understood? Clear
indications in the final pages of the short story suggest that T'uupieh has understood a portion
of her demon's message, but just which portion is not entirely clear. Wyler thinks he has
communicated a message about the universal value of life and the need for compassion.
T'uupieh may or may not have understood this. She might also have interpreted the demon's
message as a surrender--a gift of power to uphold the "brutal philosophy" by which she lives.
Thus, Vinge con-

-28-

cludes enigmatically, with a problem that linguists and translators have struggled with for
years, a problem that will only compound as we go out into the great dark between the stars:
the ambiguity and uncertainty of language; the omnipresent division between hearer and
speaker.

NOTES
1. Joan Vinge, "Eyes of Amber", in The New Women of Wonder, ed. Pamela
Sargent, ( New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 318.
2. Edward Sapir, "Conceptual Categories in Primitive Languages", in
Language in Culture and Society, ed. Dell Hymes, ( New York: Harper and
Row, 1964), 128.

-29-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-30-

3
Continuity with the Past: Mythic Time in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

John A. Calabrese

"And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got--you've got some of
the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it,
we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?"

"No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and
go when their part's ended. Our part will end later--or sooner."

--Sam and Frodo on The Stairs of Cirith Ungol 1

J. R. R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings has the sense of sequential time usually associated
with the "great tales," especially those with the journey motif. Time not only "spurts and lags
with discernible rhythm," but includes intervals, notably at Rivendell and Lothlórien, where
its movement ceases altogether. 2 The time of the events is "both prehistoric and pagan,
although the primary culture is feudal, and such anachronisms as coffee and potatoes have
intruded." 3 The pagan and chivalrous qualities of Tolkien's world aid in depicting an age that
had passed before recorded history began. Anachronisms and mingled time frames help
produce a world belonging to no specific time yet possessing its own internally consistent
time.

Tolkien's preoccupation with chronologies and calendars assumes an essential structural

function throughout The Lord of the Rings. The chronologies in the epic are coherent and
consistent since they incorporate the events of the independently written volume The Hobbit.
4
When combined in the appendices, these chronologies show

-31-

that the history of Middle-earth extends over a period of six thousand years. The consistency
of these chronologies contributes not only to the effects of realism in the epic, but also, as
Ruth S. Noel has observed, to "the impression of fatedness: events flow simultaneously to a
single culmination, independently but inexorably." 5

In addition Tolkien has included detailed descriptions of the various calendar systems used
by the different races, since each race uses a different means of reckoning time. 6 Tolkien's
calendar systems carry superficial similarities to existing calendar systems that possess
mythic overtones. For example, the English names of the weekdays honor Teutonic gods and
heavenly bodies while the names of the Elvish weekdays reveal their reverence for the
heavenly bodies, the two primeval trees, and the godlike beings called the Valar (III, 388).
Another such example is Tolkien's use of one of the old Celtic quarter days, the solstices, and
the equinoxes. 7 The Celts celebrated the first of May, called Beltine or Cetshamain, with a
festival of purifying fires. 8 A traditional people like the Celts placed sacred sacrificial rites as
well as important events of their myths on specific dates. 9 By contrast, the events that
Tolkien commemorates are not, for the most part, sacred and are not always marked by
special ceremonies as is Beltine. In The Lord of the Rings, May 1 is the date of Aragorn's
coronation and later serves as the date for the marriage of Sam and Rosie. The autumnal
equinox roughly approximates both Bilbo's and Frodo's birthdays, the date they rode with
Gandalf and the Elves to the Grey Havens, and the date Sam departs for the Havens many
years later. The summer solstice is the date Aragorn and Arwen plight their troth and serves
as the date of their wedding. 10 By emphasizing calendar dates that were traditionally
significant, Tolkien indirectly draws parallels between ancient races that possessed
mythically oriented cultures and the inhabitants of Middle-earth.

Reckoning time into measured systems is only a surface manifestation of the comprehensive
and essential concept of time that permeates The Lord of the Rings. The preoccupation with
the importance of the past contributes to the meaningfulness of the major actions of the story.
Tolkien's attention to the many past ages of Middle-earth's inhabitants also nurtures the
mythic quality of the work. In addition, mythic time is structurally important throughout. The
extent of this importance will become evident through a

-32-

comparison of the temporal nature of each of the following types of myth and its functions:
narrative, charter, etiological, creativeera, and eschatological. 11

NARRATIVE MYTH

Under categories of mythic functions devised by G. S. Kirk, The Lord of the Rings resembles
the rare narrative type of myth. "This type usually exists as a simple, neatly-arranged tale that
elaborates an historical or ethnic fiction, such as much of the Iliad." 12 Kirk's definition of
narrative myth divides into three distinct points: It is a simple tale or an elaborate relic of the
past; it uses traditional memories as bases for dramatic narration; it presents dynastic
implications that include the unfolding of lineages. 13 Although The Lord of the Rings is by no
means a simple tale--its complexity resembles the interlace technique of medieval literature 14
--when considered as "an elaborate relic of the past," the nature of its temporal structure
begins to unfold. The events of The Lord of the Rings take place in the last year of the Third
Age of Middle-earth. When taken together the stories of The Hobbit and the epic occur in the
last century of the Third Age. Elaborate and important references not only to the Third Age
but to the First and Second permeate the work.

Tolkien creates many pasts. First and most noticeably, the events of the story, in comparison
with the modern world, exist in the distant past. Although anachronisms from the modern
world intervene, the primary impression the reader forms is of a world that resembles
medieval or barbaric Northern Europe, in other words a world which no longer exists.
Although the epic ends with the drawing of the age of Men, when the King finally ascends
the throne, allusions are made to the previous golden ages of all of the other inhabitants of
Middle-earth, such as Men, Dwarves, Elves, and Ents.
Some characters from the past have temporal structural importance. The unfolding of the
sequence of events must allow for anachronistic beings from the past. For example, Tom
Bombadil and Treebeard the Ent are not merely remnants of the First Age, they are
representative of the way things were in the First Age. Hence the sequential time of the story
line must allow on occasion for figures from the past to exist in the present.

-33-

As an indication of continuity with the past, many creatures have extremely long lives.
Bombadil and Treebeard guard remnants of the first great primeval forest of Middle-earth.
Both share the distinction of being the oldest living terrestrial creatures since they have
existed from the formation of Middle-earth. In one sense both exist outside of sequential time
since they are not directly concerned with the events of the world. To enhance this notion, the
Ring has no power over Bombadil, and he can see Frodo while the hobbit is wearing it. When
Pippin and Merry encounter Fangorn forest they remark as to its apparent age and attempt to
draw an analogy with aged things in hobbit terms. The utterance of Treebeard's real name
would take a long time since it is growing continuously. He also equates age with worth.

The major evil beings such as Sauron and the Balrog possess the greatest age since they
originate at the time of creation. 15 Neither is clearly defined physically. Sauron is defeated in
one form and in one age but returns in the next in another shape. Aragorn refers to things in
the world that are evil and of great age but are not in league with Sauron. In retelling his
struggle with the Balrog, Gandalf also refers to ancient evil creatures that still live. 16

Other major characters have longer lives than is normal for their species. Aragorn lives to be
210 years old, and Bilbo outlives the Old Took by reaching 130 years. Gollum is much older,
since his long possession of the Ring prolongs his life to many "lives of his small kind" (I,
267). Nothing is fleeting or transitory in The Lord of the Rings. An atmosphere of
monumentality and momentousness pervades Middle-earth as a direct result of the great age
of certain individual characters.

Although Tolkien sets the narrative within a historical framework, the characters are not as
historically conscious as the author would like the reader to be. The appendices with their
chronologies, which lend a partly historical realism to the epic, are for the reader's
convenience. The characters of the story do not view time as a succession of historical events,
but instead rely on traditional memories. Stories or tales rather than a sense of history exist in
the memories of each character's past. For example, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gandalf debate
the existence of Ents, or tree shepherds. Aragorn had believed that they "'were only a memory
of ancient days, if indeed they were even more than a legend of Rohan'" (II, 102).

-34-

Aragorn's belief refers to creatures that may have existed in the memory of a golden age and
may very well be only a legend. It also implies that even if they did at one time exist, they no
longer live at the time of the speaker. To Legolas the Elf, Ents are only memories for he
knows that they in fact did exist in a bygone age. He muses that if he were to meet one he
would feel young again and consequently he compares his age to the Ents and by implication
to Men. Gandalf dispels all error with the truth since he knows that Treebeard the Ent does in
fact still live and is the oldest living thing on earth.

Tolkien manipulates certain characters so that they challenge their own views about certain
tales of the past. For instance, subjects of what Éomer and Theoden considered as old wives'
tales become realities before their eyes. In one sense this serves to dispel false legends or
rumors and to clarify recollections. More accurately Éomer and Theoden do not discard the
old tales, for the truth of these tales becomes indisputable. The tales do not change. The
viewpoint of the person who erroneously considered them as old wives' tales thus changes,
while the past itself remains constant.

Mythic societies hand down traditional memories from one generation to another. Treebeard's
actual memory serves the same purpose when he tells the hobbits of the coming of the
wizards and recalls the beginnings of the mutant races of Orcs and Trolls (II, 76). Since his
long life spans three ages, Treebeard contrasts with the hobbits, Aragorn, and even Gandalf,
who all depend on tradition as a source of knowledge. His vast memory serves as a source of
knowledge that would ordinarily be traditional to the other races.

The purpose of lineage in narrative myths serves to establish the legitimacy of the ruling
house and the importance of a particular figure's claim to the throne. It also verifies and
heightens the significance of a particular individual, linking the present with the divine
sanction of the past. The story of Aragorn's claim to the throne of Gondor is, therefore, vital
to the epic's time structure.

Aragorn the ranger is a direct descendant of Isildur, who cut the Ring from Sauron's hand,
ending the Second Age. In the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn's identity remains
secret, but throughout his stature and importance grows. He inherits the shards of Isildur's
sword, Narsil, and has them reforged. His demeanor assumes heroic proportions by the very
difficulty of his task. Ara-

-35-

gorn does not merely ascend a throne or vie with others for their crown. He must reestablish a
line of kinds that has been dormant and all but extinct. Hence, his labor confirms in the
present a continuity with the sanctioned past.

Aragorn aspires to wed Arwen, daughter of Elrond, who is of extremely high and ancient
lineage. His marriage contributes to his heroic stature because the union is only the third of
the rare marriages between Man and Elf. Aragorn foreshadows the nature of his own
marriage when he tells the hobbits the tale of the hero Beren and Tinuviel the Elf maiden.
Their union was the first such union between the two races and it occurred in the First Age.
Arwen is described later in terms of her likeness to Tinuviel. Thus the marriage between
Aragorn and Arwen, two individuals of high lineage, imitates one that already had its roots in
the divinely sanctioned past.

Aragorn achieves greatness but not by performing anything new nor does he rebel against the
accepted order of things. All of his actions propel him toward establishing a continuity which
has been long severed. He is fated to reestablish the old order of things.

All of the races of Middle-earth possess significant lineages. Of Men there are the lines of
Rohan, the Stewards of Gondor, as well as their relationship to each other and the ancient
race of Númenor from which Aragorn's line originated in the Second Age. Each of the other
races, such as Elves and Dwarves, honor their ancestry in the manner of Men, by referring to
tales of great leaders, heroes, or warriors of the past or to the founder of the line such as Eorl
of Rohan, and Durin the deathless of the Dwarves. The Elves have descended from great
ancestors and have extremely long lives. They are immortal but they have lineages and
descend from the First Age.
The term genealogy rather than dynasty or lineage applies fittingly to hobbits since they are
the least mythic of all the races. Nevertheless the idea of substantiating them in the prologue
as an independent race is crucial to the structure of the story. Their recorded time begins in
1601 of the Third Age while the earliest known tales are simply about their migration. They
are oblivious to the outside world since they have no direct contact with Men or Elves.
However, the prologue establishes the fact that a relationship exists between the races of
hobbits and Men. The little folk are secretly

-36-

guarded by the rangers, or Dúnedain--descendants of Númenor, of which Aragorn is one.

The prologue also emphasizes the hobbits' characteristics of physical smallness, their
insignificance to the other races, and the important fact of their ordinariness and lack of
magic. In The Hobbit the fact that Bilbo has Took blood is significant because some hobbits
believe that "long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife" ( Hobbit, 11).
But Tolkien immediately confirms the ordinariness of the Tooks while qualifying their
character in the next clause: "That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still
something not entirely hobbit-like about them. . . ." ( Hobbit, 11). It is the ordinariness
stemming from their unassuming stature that helps in achieving the destruction of the Ring.

Things also carry lineages that not only heighten their importance but intensify the gravity of
the events with which they are connected. One of these things, is the arrow used by Bard to
slay Smaug the dragon: "Black Arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me
and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you
came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!" ( Hobbit,
262). Numerous references to the lineages of swords abound-when and by whom they were
forged, the deeds they are called upon to perform, the nature of the previous users, as well as
the individual who possesses them at the moment.

The Ring is by far the single most important object. Its power, danger, and effect are direct
extensions of its creator, Sauron, who forged it in the Second Age. Gandalf's recounting of
the Ring's entire history reveals that a direct consequence of extended possession of the Ring
is a temporal one for it prolongs life.

CHARTER MYTHS

Charter myths function by confirming customs, beliefs, and institutions, thus making them
valid. The validation process also occurs when rituals accompany myths. The repetition or
reiterative quality of rituals serves to produce a continuity with the divinelysanctioned past.
Throughout The Lord of the Rings, the subtle use of validation of events, situations, or beliefs
occurs by reference to or evocation of the past. For example, Tolkien is very clear about

-37-

the observation of promises attached to the Riddle Game. These promises were indisputedly
held sacred since ancient times and "all but the wickedest things feared to break them" (I, 21).

The races of Tolkien's world are in a premythic state since they acquire old tales or songs and
customs traditionally or remember them directly. There is no organized or codified mythic
system practiced by any of the races. Rather they all adhere to a loose structure relying at
times on memory and at others on a firm will to remain faithful to the past. For instance, for
the Elves of Lothlórien the name Galadrim means "tree dwellers." When the company
approaches a river, Legolas sings an old song of Nimrodel, a revered maiden of antiquity,
who bore the same name as the river. His story tells that she lived in a treehouse by this very
river. Legolas then comments that "'that was the custom . . . and maybe it is so still'" (I, 355).
He soon discovers the Galadrim living in the great Mallorn trees of Lothlórien. Although
Legolas does not say that Nimrodel initiated the custom, he equates her with an ancient
practice that has survived to the present.

Ritualistic devices confirm unmentioned institutions, thereby enforcing continuity with the
past. Both Bombadil and Gandalf invoke special actions in order to break ancient spells.
When Bombadil rescues Frodo from the Barrow, he brings its treasure out into the open air,
bidding it to be free. This action ensures the Barrow's destruction and prevents a wight from
ever returning. It is a direct manifestation of Bombadil's power, which is greater and far older
than that of the wight. Gandalfs deciphering of the spell that held the gates of Moria closed
confirms the validity of the past. The wizard has to assume the genial manner of the creators
of the spell, above and beyond the hostility and uncertainty of his current situation, which at
first leads him to hastily misinterpret the riddle (I, 320-21).

Faramir's moment of silence observed before meals resembles the ritualistic nature of prayer.
He explains the nature of the custom to the hobbits: "So we always do, . . . we look toward
Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome
and will ever be. . . ." (II, 284-85). Through the reiteration of this simple act, Faramir upholds
or confirms the continuity of an established order through past, present, and future.

Prophecies link the past with the present. In The Lord of the Rings, every mentioned
prophecy comes true, thus validating words from

-38-

the past. In caring for the apparently dying Faramir, Ioreth the nurse quotes the little-heeded
prophetic words of lore when she muses that the "'hands of a king are the bands of a healer.
And so the rightful king could ever be known.'" (III, 136). Aragorn heals Faramir and
proceeds to make himself known, fulfilling the prophecy. When Gandalf discovers that the
Lord of the Nazgul is actually the ancient Sorcerer King of Angmar, the wizard recalls the
prophecy that states that he shall not fall by the hand of man (III, 92). It comes to pass that
Eowyn, a woman, and Merry, a hobbit, succeed in killing the Lord of the Nazgul. Saruman's
parting remark to Frodo bears a prophecy of doom: "But do not expect me to wish you health
and long life. You will have neither. But that is not my doing. I merely foretell." (III, 299).
Frodo remains in Middle-earth for only one year and becomes ill on the anniversary of each
of the three crucial wounds he received.

ETIOLOGICAL AND CREATIVE-ERA MYTHS

Explanatory myths solve a crucial problem or paradox, whereas etiological myths present
causes that explain how the world came to be as it is now. 17 (This causal reference appears
most often in the names of things or persons because names contain true essences. 18 )
Creative-era myths function to reestablish or evoke the time of creation that causes the world
to remain constant or to maintain the order it achieved at its beginning. It also helps men to
partake of the creative power of that era. The functions inherent in these definitions, when
applied as criteria to The Lord of the Rings, shed more light upon the temporal structure of
Middle-earth.
The extent of the etiological function in the epic manifests itself in the use of names. On
certain occasions the power and meaning of names reveal the actual nature of the things
named. An entity usually bears a particular name because of a significant trait that established
its nature. Also a person or thing may acquire a new name or title because of a specific deed
or action that changes its nature. In either case names reflect how the thing came to be as it is
now, establishing continuity with the moment of inception. However, once something
acquires a name, its nature remains fixed. Whether intentional or not, it fosters continuity
with the stable past. Individuals acquire new names with significant changes in stature and
character but never relinquish their older ones. The newest

-39-

name merely eclipses the importance of the others. A case in point is Aragorn. When he
becomes king, he retains all of his former names and titles but receives a new name equal to
his distinguished stature (III, 245). Thereafter he is referred to as King Elessar.

Other examples include the Balrog and Sauron who, from the moment of their origins, bear
names that reveal their nature. These supernatural beings are most likely the eldest creatures
in Middleearth. 19 Their names reveal their character, which is consistent throughout their
long existences. Sauron's ancient name, Gorthaur, originated from two Elvish roots, gor,
"horror or dread," and thaur, "abhorrent." Thauron, a derivative of Gorthaur, was the first
form of Sauron. 20 The original form of Balrog, Valarauko, also stems from two Elvish words,
Vala, "spirit or one with power," and rauko (raug, rog), "demon." 21

Bombadil and Treebeard, who share the distinction of being the eldest terrestrial creatures,
have names that reveal varying aspects of time and continuity. Bombadil's Elvish name,
Iarwain, 22 means "old" and reflects his own description of Eldest when the hobbits ask who
he is. Treebeard, on the other hand, cannot reveal his real name for two reasons. Firstly, it is
too long, and he tells the hobbits it is growing continuously, indicating that the name is
synonymous with his entire being. Secondly, it would reveal all that he was and has become.
Whereas Bombadil's Elvish name fixes his most important characteristic and all that it
implies as Eldest, Treebeard's ever-growing name and his great age show that everything that
has happened to him from his beginning contributes to his identity. The former's name refers
to a fixed point in time, while the latter's indicates the process of duration and continuity
where nothing is relinquished. All of Treebeard's past comprises his true name.

Gollum's given name is Sméagol. He acquired the derogatory onomatopoeic name of Gollum
after he killed Déagol in order to have the Ring (I, 63). At that point his character changed,
and he began to make "a horrible swallowing noise in his throat" ( Hobbit, 83). Although
Frodo's kindness keeps the hope alive of the goodness that might have been Sméagol, the evil
nature emerges victorious and obliterates the former character. The gradual and constant
deterioration of Sméagol's character is overwhelming but not complete until
Sméagol/Gollum's internal debate, which takes place near the end of the epic.

-40-

Aragorn renames his famous sword when he has it reforged. Originally called Narsil,
meaning "shining fire," by Elendil, it shone with the light of the sun and moon, filling his
enemies with fear. 23 Aragorn renamed it Andúril, 24 which came to mean "Flame of the West"
(I, 290). Hence its new name insures its continuity with its past name.
The White Tree of Gondor functions as the primary example of creative-era continuity, for it
is the direct descendant of the primal tree Telperion. 25 The people of Gondor equate their
success with the flourishing of the White Tree. However, the seedling that died in the middle
of the Third Age was left standing until Aragorn's time. That period parallels the demise of
Gondor's power and the waxing of Sauron's great forces. After Sauron's defeat when Aragorn
and Gandalf discover a seedling of the White Tree Aragorn immediately interprets the
occasion as favorable for his kingdom as well as his dynasty. Through the White Tree,
Aragorn can partake of the creative power of that era, ensuring continuity with the past. 26

Frodo's phial which contains light from Earendil's star is another object with connections to
an act of creation. Furthermore, it directly originates with Telperion. Earendil was a mariner
who acquired a silmaril, or jewel, filled with the light of the two trees. When he reached the
Blessed Realm, the Valar made a special craft for him and bade him sail the void of the sky,
transforming him into a star. 27

The presence of etiological and creative-era functions does not bear directly upon the forward
action of the story. The functions do contribute to the overriding sense of fatedness that links
the continuity of Middle-earth with its past. Etiology illustrates continuity with origins made
manifest through names. The presence of creative-era time gives deep significance to major
actions, reinforcing them with meaning and purpose, ultimately recalling the time of creation.
These functions help to make actions flow to a single inexorable conclusion.

ESCHATALOGICAL MYTH

Contributing also to the underlying presence of mythic continuity with the past is the world
of the dead. In the epic there are four different manifestations of death. First is common
death; whether

-41-

beings have long or short life spans, their physical existence is terminated, most frequently in
battle. Second are the living dead, beings who have died yet still haunt the earth for evil or
other purposes. Third are those who pass through death to a resurrected state or changed state
on earth. Finally, fourth, are those who part peacefully, passing over the sea to the Blessed
Realm.

Common death is the only obvious reminder that most mortals come to an abrupt end that
destroys any continuity with the past or with existence in another world. 28 The ritual of death
consists of only a burial in the ground and a brief period of mourning. Such characters of high
standing as Aragorn, Arwen, Pippin, and Merry die and are buried.

Continuity with the past determines the fate of the undead and dead who are not at rest. 29 The
undead, or Ringwraiths, were Men whose bodies perished in the deep past but remain in
existence as imitative slaves of Sauron, who himself lost his physical form in the Second
Age. Since they possess the nine rings created for Men, their suspended existence depends
upon the fate of the One Ring that binds them to it. The One Ring can only be destroyed by
the same flames of Mount Doom, Orodruin, where it was forged. Sauron relegated much of
his power into the Ring, and its destruction ensures his as well as the Ringwraith's
obliteration. Consequently the continuity of the Ring's fate with its origins determines the
suspended existence of the undead. In contrast, the dead who are not at rest exist in torment
only because of an unbroken oath to fight against Sauron. When Aragorn musters them to
war, they fulfill their oath and return to rest in peace. The destroying of the Ring and the
fulfilling of the oath are similar in that they both break continuity with the origins of the
unnatural existences by rectifying the states of suspension. In contrast, the resurrection of
supernatural beings serves to ensure continuity by heightening their original characteristics.
Sauron passes away twice, each time returning as a force of evil having grown in power and
wickedness. Likewise Gandalf the Grey, who perishes in Moria, returns as Gandalf the
White, a greater and wiser leader but Gandalf nevertheless. 30

The ultimate example of continuity is the passing over the sea into the West by distinguished
characters, namely, the Elves, Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam. The passage is simply a
deathless journey to the eternal Blessed Realm with no identifiable change of

-42-

state. For the immortal Elves and Gandalf, it constitutes a return to their original state of
existence. For the hobbits, it becomes an extension of living existence, their privileged
immortality.

MYTHIC TIME

In summary, it is clear that a sense of mythic time exists in the very structure of the epic. The
search for basic mythic functions reveals continuity with the deep and sacred past in various
aspects of characterization, use of language, and construction of plot. Frodo's task of bearing
the Ring is a timeless or continuous struggle, for the Ring that he must destroy is a
manifestation of "the evil principle against which creation has always struggled." 31 Ages
overlap. When Frodo calls from the ancient Barrow for the even older Bombadil's help, or
when he later beckons to Elbereth for strength, he is calling from his own Second Age back
to the First. 32 The past is never clearly separated from the present.

NOTES
1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towen, The Lord of the Rings, 2nd ed. ( Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 321. The epic consists of three separate volumes:
The Fellowship of the Ring (Part I), The Two Towen (Part II), and The
Return of the King (Part III). All subsequent references will be to this
edition. Original publication ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954-55).
2. David Miller, "Narrative Pattern in The Fellowship of the Ring", in A
Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing,
1975), 104.
3. Ruth S. Noel, The Mythology of Middle-earth ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1977), 8.
4. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). All
subsequent references will be to this edition.
5. Noel, Mythology, 35.
6. For instance, Men and hobbits envisage time in twelve-month solar years,
while the immortal Elves reckon time with a larger unit, the yen, which
equals 144 solar years (III, 385). (Since Tolkien capitalizes the names of all
the races except for the hobbits, I will follow his practice.)
7. Noel, Mythology, 37. The Celtic quarter-day festivals date back to the
traditions of pre-agricultural herdsmen, while agricultural people such as the
ancient Egyptians observed astronomically significant days. See Larousse
Encyclopedia of Mythology ( New York: Prometheus Press, 1960), 244.

-43-

8. Larousse, 244.
9. Noel, Mythology, 39.
10. Ibid., 37-39. Noel lists the remaining astronomically important dates of the
epic.
11. G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures (
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 253-61. Kirk believes that
each tale that can be considered a myth performs specific functions. He
devises a typology that is comprised of the following categories of mythic
functions: narrative, validatory, explanatory or speculative, and
eschatalogical. Different types of mythic tales conform to each category. For
example, charter myths function in the validatory capacity, whereas
etiological and creative-era tales possess an explanatory function. See
25361. For further explanation of the types of myth, see G. S. Kirk, The
Nature of Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 40-67.
12. Kirk, Myth, 254.
13. Ibid.
14. Richard West, "The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings", in A
Tolkien Compass, 78.
15. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 31-32.
In the First Age, Sauron or Gorthaur is a lesser spiritual being in the service
of Morgoth, the prime source of evil. Morgoth is one of the Valar, or first
beings created. Balrogs are demons of fire that also served Morgoth.
16. Most noteworthy is the monstrous spider, Shelob, the last offspring of
Ungoliant, the ally of Morgoth. She does not serve Sauron since she dwelled
in the mountains of Mordor before he came. Bilbo fought her lesser
offspring in Mirkwood (II, 332).
17. The Silmarillion contains many detailed stories of how Middle-earth came
to be as it exists in The Lord of the Rings.
18. Kirk, Greek Myths, 59.
19. The Silmarillion states that Sauron and the Balrogs came into existence
before the creation of the world, 30-32. Treebeard and Bombadil appear to
 be only as old as the world. There is no evidence that they existed before the
world's formation.
20. Silmarillion, 364.
21. Ibid., 363.
22. Ibid., 360. His full name, Iarwain Ben-adar, means "old father," adar
resembling the Elvish atar, for "father," 357. In view of Tolkien's penchant
for etymology, Bombadil may be a corruption of Ben-adar.
23. Ibid., 294.
24. Ibid., 355-63. In literal Elvish: And is "long"; ur, "hot"; rill, "brilliant."

-44-

25. Ibid., 38-48, 99. At the time of creation, Yavanna, a Vala, made two trees in
the Blessed Realm--Telperion the white and Laurelin the gold. Since both
gave off light at different times, they were used as a means of regulating the
light of night and day. Varda, the Vala also known as Elbereth, created the
stars from Telperion's dew. When Morgoth destroyed the trees, Yavanna
rescued a flower from each and created the moon and the sun.
26. Although Aragorn performs tasks of healing before he discovers the
seedling, Gandalf notices that it had been growing for some time before they
found it (III, 248-50). Thus the king's capacity as healer is a visible sign of
power that is connected to the era of creation.
27. Silmarillion, 250.
28. There is only one indication that common death is a passage. On his
deathbed, the Dwarf Thorin reveals that he goes "'now to the halls of
waiting to sit beside my father until the world is renewed . . .'" ( Hobbit,
300-1). He alludes to, not so much another world, but rather a state of limbo.
29. The souls of the undead are perversions of both life and death. The dead
who are not at rest are simply tormented souls. It is vital to the outcome of
events that both states be corrected.
30. Sauron is one of the Maia, a supernatural being of great power in service to
the Valar. The Elves refer to Gandalf as Olorin (II, 279). The Silmarillion
states that Olorin, who took pity on Men and Elves, was also a Maia, 30-31.
31. Miller, "Narrative Pattern", 104.
32. Ibid., 105.

-45-
 [This page intentionally left blank.]

-46-

4
Remembering the Future: Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun

Peter Malekin

"It is my nature, my joy and my curse, to forget nothing."

-- The Shadow of the Torturer

Memory, the medium by which the present self contemplates past and different selves, calls
into question the nature of personal identity, the reality of time, and the status of the fleeting
life called reality, the life that is as solid as a vision. Memory, time, and the question of
reality run through all four volumes of The Book of the New Sun as a guiding leitmotif: while
the book is the narrative and structural embodiment of memory, time, and the question of
reality, the novel lives in the minds of its readers, and its structure can only be fully grasped
as a structuring of the consciousness of a reader. What that structuring is depends not just on
the book, but on what a reader's own consciousness might be.

Earlier I argued for a particular model of the mind, and here I do not want to repeat that
argument, but merely to point to the two essential characteristics of that model. 1 The first is
that the "ground state" of the individual mind is what W. T. Stace called "pure
consciousness," simple awareness with no subject-object relationship and therefore beyond
any awareness of the sequence of time. 2 When thought rises in the mind, it rises from this
timeless base, moving from immediate, total perception to linear, sequential perception.
Conversely, when sensory perception takes place, whether of a series of objects in space, or
notes in a tune, or words on a page, the mind, as Husserl pointed out, grasps the objects as an

-47-

abstract pattern, and thus carries them back towards that ultimate level of timeless, pure
awareness. 3 The more holistically an object is grasped, the less that grasp is dependent upon
temporal sequence. One of the characteristics of great art is to encourage the unification of all
aspects of awareness in such a holistic grasp, which includes the reasoning, intuitive, and
emotional aspects of the mind. Resistance on any level would impede the settling of
awareness into such a holistic quietness, and would impede the integrating, healing, or
"wholing" effect of art.

The Book of the New Sun exemplifies these ideas about the arts in a particularly interesting
way, since part of the subject matter of the book is the nature of reality and the nature of time.
Traditional literature, according to Coleridge, encouraged a willing suspension of disbelief:
The Book of the New Sun encourages a willing suspension of belief, belief in the solid reality
of everyday life. From the very opening, the fantasy world of the novel is constructed by a
process that systematically undermines the reader's faith in conventional reality. The probing
of fact and causality begins with the seemingly innocuous first sentence, "It is possible I
already had some presentiment of the future." Since the narrator, Severian, concludes by
going back in time to leave clues concerning the future that is by then the present, for his past
self to pick up, presentiment may indeed be a kind of suppressed memory of what is to come.
However this may be, the reader is deterred from too close an identification with the old
Severian, not only by his pastness but by the young man's alienating trade as torturer's
apprentice, a trade which, in fact, introduces another major concern of the novel, a necessary
balance of good and evil, compassion and cruelty in the world. The reader then almost
immediately is presented with the "locked and rusted gate" that "remains in my mind now as
a symbol of exile," a symbol at once powerful and relative, for the regretted, secure homeland
is a graveyard for a torturer to play in. The passing of the fixed roles of childhood leads to the
observation that "all that appears imperishable tends towards its own destruction," whereas
the moments of transition between apparent fixities live on in the mind, and this in turn
provides the basis for debating a questioning of conventional reality that is introduced
tentatively enough to avoid provoking resistance: "Certain mystes aver that the real world has
been constructed by the human mind, since our

-48-

ways are governed by the artificial categories in which we place essentially undifferentiated
things, things weaker than our words for them." 4

The idea that words create "reality" by imposing arbitrary boundaries upon the spectrum of
the objective reflects back naturally on the status of the word-spun world of the novel. The
story then passes on to a series of references to the raising of the dead and its associations
with religion, black magic, anthropological rites of passage, traditional initiation rites, and
Jungian symbolism. Severian, miraculously saved from drowning, becomes a man that day,
while in the swirling mist and shaft of green moonlight, the livid face of a dead woman
emerges, as Vodalus and his followers disinter a corpse with a view to eating it in order to
share the life experience locked in its cellular memory. The literalism at first seems
excessive, a kind of horror-film fantasy, yet it is not far from the practices of modern surgery,
or the traditional practices of cannibals who ate the dead bodies of their enemies to absorb
their warlike powers. Some Christians, in fact, still interpret the Eucharist as a symbolic
eating of the body of their Savior in order to absorb his supernatural qualities.

This episode is the first of many and varied resurrections in The Shadow of the Torturer--that
of Dorcas, that of Severian on the Sanguinary Field, that of the sage Apu Punchau in the
ruined town of stone, that of Hecla and past autarchs in the Autarch Severian the Lame. The
corpse-raising and the presentation of Vodalus's golden coin, which later turns out to have
been a fake, naturally leads on to the relation between human beings and their symbols: "We
believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped
by their hard, defining edges" ( Shadow, 17). People thus become statues cut by the tools of
symbolism, and to believe in the primacy of discursive reason is seen as a "most debased and
superstitious kind of magic": "The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure
knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all." ( Shadow, 17).

Implied in this subordination of reason and this acceptance of symbols is a sense of the world
older than our own and probably truer. Jung would have expressed it in terms of the
foundation of the conscious mind upon the unconscious, the latter guiding the destiny of the
former through its language of symbols. In express-

-49-

ing this idea Jung often notes but does not account for the surprising cooperation of the
supposedly objective world; thus he honors the overt breach between subject and object that
exists in European culture. However, the European mystics, many of the poets, and some of
the older philosophers regarded each thing and each event as microcosmic, the outer
expression of an inner world accessible to the imagination, so that a created work is a
happening of truth, an independent gloss on our rational and physical worlds, drawn from the
same source as them and interacting with them. 5 To have such a sense of reality is to doubt
the ultimate adequacy of conventional causation and the purely linear understanding of time.
The first chapter of The Shadow of the Torturer undermines conventional understanding; the
second then begins a reiterated intimation of alternatives.

The second chapter starts with an account of the birth of Severian, and implies that he was
ripped from his mother's womb, but it soon moves on to the two thoughts, near dreams, that
once obsessed him:

The first was that at some not-distant time, time itself would stop . . . the
colored days that had so long been drawn forth like a chain of conjuror's
scarves come to an end, the sullen sun wink out at last. The second was that
there existed somewhere a miraculous light--which I sometimes conceived of
as a candle, sometimes as a flambeau--that engendered life in whatever objects
it fell upon, so that a leaf plucked from a bush grew slender legs and waving
feelers, and a rough brown brush opened black eyes and scurried up a tree.
( Shadow, 22)

Light is the mediator of time. Time as linear succession, the scarves coming one after another
by some trick, ceases when the fight-source of the sun winks out, but the dead sun is
immediately supplemerited by a second miraculous light-source that creates life and
movement. Imaginatively this idea is very clever: imagination works from memory, and
whatever it creates--sound, form, or words--is based upon experience--hence something such
as pure consciousness is easy to imagine if experienced, but very difficult if not experienced.
Nevertheless, imagination is not bound by experience, but can work from it not just to form
new combinations of old experience, but towards totally new modes of experiencing.

-50-

Intellectually, the passage merges notions of time as sequence with time as effluence or
projection. The ramifications include on the one hand the place of time in the theory of
special relativity, for Einstein discovered the speed of light to be the only constant in a
universe where space-time varies according to the momentum of any given observer. On the
other the passage links with the traditional claims of mystics the world over that behind the
material sun lies a universal, intelligible light that is the ultimate source of all relative light
and all relative intelligence. This intelligible light is the light of the Intellectual Principle, the
self-knowing of the One, in Plotinus; the universal light that binds all things in unity, in
Dionysius the Areopagite; the sun of the Good that underlies subjects and objects, in Plato;
the light of the opening of St. John's gospel; the "luminous void, pure, naked mind without
center or circumference" of the Tibetan Book of the Bardö Plane; the Buddha of Eternal
Light; or the self-effulgence of life that is the light of Brahma, the creator in Hinduism. As
such, this light is the source of causality, but not the first cause, for to make it a first cause is
to place it within the categories of a partial intelligence.

This theme, of the light that cuts across the conventions of causality, pervades the book in the
light of the anticipated "new sun," an outflowing of energy from some higher universe, in the
creative light of Father Inire's mirrors, in the light of the Pancreator that informed the
historical and mythical Conciliator, in the light that burns in his jewel, the Peregrines' Claw
of the Conciliator, in the light that flashes from the claw-shaped thorn revealed when the
jewel is smashed, in the light of the similar thorn from the miraculous rose bush that fixes
itself in Severtan's flesh shortly before he becomes Autarch, and in numerous passing
references in the dialogue.

Integral to the light theme and the related sense of time (as more than, or in reality other than,
linear), is an imaginative transmutation of conventional notions of the role of polarity or
opposites in the universe. Böhme observed that "in Yes and No all things consist", 6 and he
called the ultimate infinitude a "Nothing," meaning that it was a "no-thing-ness," a thought
amusingly played upon in Hecla's remark: "One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and
nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction" ( Shadow, 80).

-51-

Contradictions abound in The Book of the New Sun. Severian, an executioner and torturer,
whose cloak and hood are of a blackness that renders him virtually invisible, is frequently
compared to death, yet at the end of the fourth volume he seems on the point of a successful
venture to reestablish life through the calling into being of the new sun. Similarly the
influence of the Conciliator works through an unconciliatory claw that either restores the
dead to life or burns them to ashes.

The complexity of the imaginative thinking is brought out throughout all four volumes in a
series of passages in which opposites are considered increasingly in terms of their sameness,
with light and sound expressing the basis of the universe. The whole series culminates in the
vision of cosmic time in The Citadel of the Autarch.

Early in The Shadow of the Torturer, Dorcas and Severian converse in the Garden of Sleep
by the side of the lake of the dead. The lake, whose dark waters combine features of Lethe
and Avernus, has just relinquished the resurrected Dorcas with hardly a memory of her past,
while its shores are inhabited by the Cumaean sybil, the wise serpent-woman whose mind has
a partial mastery of time. The wording of the conversation is ambiguous, but good and evil
are presented as opposite substances that are equal in quantity in the universe as a whole: evil
seems to be associated with the lake of darkness and death, although like Virgil's underworld
in Book VI of The Aeneid, from which souls reincarnate, the 'Garden of Sleep' suggests a
reawakening; good is associated with bending time backward, which suggests the strong
youth of the now dying sun. Since the new sun will be a rebirth of the old, the way back may
well be the way forward.

In The Sword of the Lictor, Severian, musing on the nature of knowledge and magic,
concludes that dark powers, which he has just witnessed and seen defeated in the person of
Decuman, imply bright powers; moreover, the universe is perhaps a long word of the
Increate's, but the word spoken, if it is to be distinguished, must imply the word that the
Increate does not speak, in other words those same dark powers. This idea is very near to
Böhme's sense that the No must exist in order that the Yes may be manifest.

Still further on in The Citadel of the Autarch, Master Ash remarks that light nourishes
everything, yet feeds upon destruction, that

-52-

perhaps men and women, plants, and all that exists are cultivated by the light so that they
may be set ablaze. Parallel to these remarks run all the references to time. In much of the
topographical detail of the novel, time is spatialized; in the soil that is full of artifacts from
the past; in the Matachin Tower, which is an ancient space rocket; in the city of Nessus,
whose ancient suburbs to the south lie deserted and ruined while its newest suburbs creep
ever northward; in the preserved corpses thrown up at the mine near Saltus; in the ruined
towns, carved mountain, and tiled wall that appears in the rock halfway down a precipice.

Time is also spatialized in many of the discussions. In The Claw of the Conciliator, the
Cumaean's apprentice explains that all time exists and we travel through it in waking
consciousness; in sleep or in trance we exist surrounded by our own lives. In The Sword of
the Lictor, Severian thinks of time as a fence of iron palings, past which we flow to the sea,
from which we shall return only as rain, and he knows the ambition to conquer time. In The
Citadel of the Autarch, Master Ash thinks of time as like a sea rather than a river, a sea whose
waves come and go while the currents run beneath them, rather as Shankaracharya in the
Vivekacudamani (verses 496-8) compares the universe to waves upon the ocean of Brahman
that come into being and are destroyed. Master Ash also compares time to a tapestry
extending forever in all directions, so that colors or threads may be traced in any direction.

The discussion of time and the nature of the universe culminates in the visionary quality that
predominates towards the end of the last book. Severian, unexpectedly repossessed of the
Claw, suddenly sees the Increate as resting in all things, including the sand of the beach upon
which he is walking. "I drew off my boots," he said, "that had traveled with me so far, and
threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground." The vision of the
history of the universe that was given him before this awareness, but is recounted afterwards,
centers on the divine year and parallel universes. The seed of the last universe spreads out
and flowers through the infinitude of space, eventually diffusing to nullity and, through the
curvature of space, regathers its fragments at last, where it began, as a new seed. Some race
of humanity, however, has presided over the evolution of a species that has subsequently
become superior to it, compassionate and just, has escaped to the universe

-53-

that is higher than ours, and now presides over our evolution. Their messengers move through
the corridors of time; that is, they move from outside into our universe at whatever point of
space-time they choose, whether in what we regard as the past, or the present, or the future.
The hierodules, and other semi-supernatural beings in the novel, are their servants. Master
Ash, from one variant of the future, has a face like a hierodule's, only his face is superior in
life and humanity.

Relativity theory tells us that to move out of the universe would be to move faster than the
speed of light, which would require almost infinite energy. The success of the culturing of
evolution will be the New Sun, the outpouring of almost infinite energy through the light of
the sun into this universe from the higher one. In The Book of the New Sun, light is mentioned
at one point as the shadow of the Increate. Light is the shadow of the Increate that feeds upon
the destruction and causes the creation and evolution of the universes. The work tool of the
universe is time, though, like growth in a plant, it is written into the space-time design of the
universe; it is within the very substance of the universe, part of it, as space-time is integral to
physical objects. The destructive black hole and the blazing sun, seemingly opposites, are, in
fact, one and the same thing. Ordinary darkness is, as Severian speculates in the Garden of
Sleep, the randomization of energy whose final development is the black hole that is the seed
of light.

From this central and informing vision, other characteristics of the novel radiate. Laws of
causation on the gross linear level of space-time are mental approximations to the nature of
things and are treated as such. Moreover, as several of the spatial images of time suggest, like
that of the reader flowing past the iron palings of time, a personality is seen as a space-time
focus, like a traveling ripple on a river, or better still a system of traveling ripples. Many of
the characters are multiple personalities that mingle in one figure, as Hecla, previous
autarchs, and his past and future selves merge in Severian, or as Jonas merges with the dead
soldier. Moreover, minds merge as they do in the ceremony to raise Apu Punchau, himself in
part an alter ego of Severian.

With the dismissed illusion of the hard, isolated, self-contained thing as ego, a kind of mental
object, goes the dismissal of the equally illusory notion of a hard code of moral rectitude,
neatly

-54-

opposed as good to evil. Master Gurloes, the ideal bureaucrat, is a pillar of rectitude, a man
who keeps his oath, an embodiment of the rules and principles that uphold the system of
government. The system itself, like all systems, is a matter of pretense versus reality: the
Torturers are the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence; the tortured prisoners
haphazardly convicted, who have exchanged their documents and sentences, are tortured like
Thea's maidservant for information they do not possess, and are in some cases forgotten and
doomed to spend their lives in the cells.

Unlike Master Gurloes, Severian breaks his journeyman's oath and many later ones. He is
wayward and unreliable, capable of putting kindness above principle and law, and he sways
uneasily between conformity and impulsive defiance of the social system. Like the previous
autarch, who runs a brothel, Severian, too, is a criminal who has lived outside the law. Seeing
justice, society, and the law for what they are, he is the only one fit to be entrusted with their
direction. The same applies to the military organization, and to the political system that is
treated in such detail in the book. The alternative to this principled lack of principle is the
slave discipline of the Ascians, many of whom take the first opportunity to commit suicide.

The Book of the New Sun thus undermines conventional moral and social attitudes and at the
same time develops in us a new sense of time and the nature of personality. This development
is mirrored in two other features of the book: the archaic language of the future, and the
penumbra of mythology. The archons, lochages, peltasts, and a hundred other officers and
officals are drawn from the Greco-Roman past, while much of the fauna is named after
prehistoric beasts. At the end of each volume, the editorial persona from a yet more distant
future than that depicted in the novel appends an essay on the difficulty of translating
Severian's ancient narrative into the language of our own past and into the conceptual
framework of our understanding of our past. Similarly, the beasts and humanoid creatures,
genetically engineered or imported from the stars after the extermination of earth's creatures--
an extermination already begun in our own age--echo the fabled monsters of the ancients.

Our science, moreover, has developed to the stage of magic, and has then died, leaving doors
that open and machines that function

-55-

on a word of command, while our physiological magic of organ transplant and brain surgery
has mingled with a more ancient sorcery to resurrect the dead in the brains of the living.
Around this lies the penumbra of Abaia, Erebus, and other mythological figures who
represent an intellectually self-conscious mythology that is acceptable to twentieth-century
humans.

The Book of the New Sun is refreshingly un-simple-minded, transcending conventional moral
categorization and a conventional sense of character. While it retains enough surface
verisimilitude to be an intensely interesting story, it nevertheless uses imaginative power to
alter the reader's sense of space, time, and individual identity. The structure of the narrative,
moving from seed to seed so that the end anticipates the beginning, embodies the nature of
cosmic time, just as the Claw externalizes Severian's own inner power. Thus the elements of
the pattern interpenetrate, having some quality of the immediate total, and holistic
apprehension that characterizes the deepest levels of thinking. To create such a pattern, not of
detail coordinating into a unity, but of unity working out into detail, does not actually carry
one's awareness to the depths of mind, but does help to free one's awareness to accept such an
expansion. The reader is given an imaginative inkling not only of a different world, but of a
different mode of experiencing the fact of world as such, of any world. In this respect The
Book of the New Sun is a very substantial literary achievement.

NOTES
1. In my article, "The Art of Consciousness", read to the 1983 International
Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. See also my "Shakespeare, Freedom
and the Fantastic", in Forms of the Fantastic, edited by Jan Hokenson and
Howard Pearce (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986) 129-142, and
my "Wordsworth and the Mind of Man" in An Infinite Complexity, ed. J. R.
Watson ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 1-25.
2. W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy ( London: Macmillan, 1960), 85-6.
For an understanding of pure consciousness as the "ground state" of the
mind and of the subtlest levels of thinking, I am deeply indebted to
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
3. The transformation of sequential cognition into patterned relationships
through the aid of memory is discussed in Edmund Husserl
ZurPhänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins

-56-

Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins, ed. Rudolf Boehm (Haag:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1966 ). See especially 35-7.
4. Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer, ( London: Arrow, 1981), 11-12.
All further references are to this edition. The other volumes in the initial
tetralogy are The Claw of the Conciliator ( London: Arrow, 1982); The
Sword of the Lictor ( London: Arrow, 1982); The Citadel of the Autarch
(London: Arrow, 1983).
5. For a discussion of the happening of truth in art, i.e., the disclosure of being
(truth in the sense of essence, not equivalence), see Martin Heidegger , "The
Origin of the Work of Art", in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter ( New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), especially 35-78. Despite
 its phenomenological base, this discussion has some affinity with the
aesthetic of Plotinus, Enneads I:5, and V:8.
6. See Quaestiones Theosophicae oder Betrachtung Göttlicher Offenbarung,
question 3, paragraphs 2-8, pp. 6-8, Jacob Böhme, Sämtlǐche Schriften, ed.
Will-Erich Peuckert, IX ( Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1956).

-57-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-58-

5
The Ultimate Fantasy: Astrid Lindgren's Ae Brothers Lionheart

Clara Junker

"To die will be an awfully big adventure," said Peter Pan--but one he never embarked on. 1
Death has been banned from children's books for most of our century, though earlier periods
have been less reticent. Deathbed confessions were published as warnings to disobedient
children in the eighteenth century, and the Sunday school literature of the nineteenth century
includes items such as An Authentic Account of the Conversion, Experience, and Happy
Deaths of Ten Boys ( 1820). 2 Legends, sagas, ballads, and folk tales also have dealt with
death, as in the ending of Grimm The Death of Partlet: "Chanticleer was left alone with his
dead Partlet. He dug her a grave and laid her in it, and raised a mound over it, and there he sat
and mourned her till he died too. So they were all dead." 3 Children's rhymes have treated
death with similar matter-of-fact acceptance:

Look, look, mama!

What is that mess
That looks like strawberry jam?
Hush, hush, my child!
It is papa
Run over by a tram. 4

In children's play, the "Bang !Bang! You're dead!" is not taken seriously, either: as in the folk
tales, death is followed by restoration to life. 5 In twentieth-century children's literature,
however, the

-59-

taboo on death had only recently been broken when Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish writer of
children's books, published The Brothers Lionheart in 1973. 6 After the initial two chapters,
the story takes place in the Hereafter, which strongly resembles a fairy-tale world of heroes,
villains, and monsters. Like many fairy tales, Lindgren's book describes a manhood initiation,
but The Brothers Lionheart is also a religious and political document.

Astrid Lindgren is probably best known for her Pippi Longstocking series, named after the
fearless, anarchic girl-child of supernatural strength, who lives in her own house with a horse,
a monkey, and a unlimited supply of gold coins from a South Sea island. The protagonist of
The Brothers Lionheart is, in contrast, the sickly Rusky (later Karl Lionheart), nine years old
and about to die. During a fire, his valiant elder brother, Jonathan, jumps from their burning
house with Rusky on his back. The heroic Jonathan dies, and soon afterwards Rusky dies,
too. The brothers are reunited in the fantastic country of Nangiyala, where they inhabit an
idyllic farm in the Cherry Valley. In order to preserve this agrarian paradise, Jonathan and
Rusky participate in the liberation of the neighboring Wild Rose Valley from the evil tyrant
Tengil, who lives in the dark country of Karmanyaka with his dragon, Katla, and his black
Tengilmen. With great difficulties, the brothers free Orvar, the brave leader of the resistance
movement in Wild Rose Valley, just as Tengil is about to feed him to the dragon. In a final
battle between Tengil's supporters and the guerillas from Cherry and Wild Rose Valleys,
Tengil is killed, but Jonathan is wounded by Katla's deadly fire. In a reversal of the initial
jump from the burning house, little Rusky now takes Jonathan on his back and leaps down a
precipice in order to reach yet another kingdom of death, Nangilima:

Then night and darkness fell over Nangiyala, over mountains and river and
land, and I stood by the precipice with Jonathan holding on to me hard with
his arms round my neck, and I felt he was breathing on my ear from behind.
He was breathing quite calmly. Not like me . . . Jonathan, my brother, why am
I not as brave as you?

I couldn't see the precipice below me, but I knew that it was there, and I
needed only to take one step out into the dark and it would all be over. It
would go so quickly.

"Rusky Lionheart," said Jonathan, "are you afraid?"

"No . . . yes, I'm afraid. But I'll do it all the same, Jonathan, I'm doing

-60-

it now . . . now . . . and then I'll never again be afraid. Never again be afr . . ."

"Oh Nangilima! Yes, Jonathan, yes, I can see the light! I can see the light!" 7

Lindgren's book raised a heated controversy in Scandinavia. All critics agreed on the
excitement and artistic power of the fantastic universe, but whereas one critic compared the
book to "the brutal and beautiful world of the sagas," another called it a
"romanticdeterministic pipe dream." 8 Most divided were the critical opinions of the death
theme in The Brothers Lionheart. One critic praised Lindgren's "brutal directness" in dealing
with "death and the fear of death, the most central idea in the world of human thought." 9 The
Horn Book Magazine review, in contrast, concluded that "the subjectively emotional, often
ecstatic tone of Karl's first person narrative may make young readers uneasy; the book's
preoccupation with death and its hints about transmigration of souls may be confusing; and
the final, cool acceptance of suicide, too shocking." 10 Most negative were the critics who
stated that "the children's longing to escape their material and emotional misery becomes a
longing for death. Death is the positive and only solution." 11 This condemnation eventually
crystallized into a rejection of the fantastic elements in The Brothers Lionheart: "[One]
doesn't want to fight to improve one's situation. [One] escapes into fantasy instead." 12

The Brothers Lionheart admittedly could make entrance to the Hereafter a pleasant prospect.
As in the folk tales, Rusky and Jonathan are restored to life in a fantastic environment. "It's
almost like a fairy tale," says Rusky in the third line of the book, and Jonathan explains that
Nangiyala is "somewhere on the other side of the stars" ( TBL, 6). 13 When the Lionhearts
have reached Nangiyala, we are told that "the Earth star . . . wanders about somewhere far,
far away in space; you can't see it from here" ( TBL, 39).

Similar to the broken space dimension, the Kingdom of Death knows no time. When early in
the book Rusky worries about having to leave for Nangiyala without his brother, Jonathan
reassures him:

Jonathan said that there was no time in Nangiyala in the same way as we have
on earth. Even if he did live until he was ninety, then I wouldn't

-61-

think that more than two days at the most had gone by before he came. That's
what it's like, when there isn't any real time. ( TBL, 11)

The Lionhearts discuss the time concept further after their arrival in Nangiyala:

"They must be dreadfully olden days that we're living in here in Nangiyala,
mustn't they?"

"You could say that, in some ways," said Jonathan. "They're indeed olden days
for us. But you could also say that they were young days." ( TBL, 29)

After some contemplation, Jonathan concludes that the brothers now live in "a young and
healthy and good time, in which it is easy and simple to live" ( TBL, 30). 14 Similarly, the
authorial voice repeatedly refers to Nangiyala as the time of "camp fires, sagas, and fairy
tales" ( TBL, 8, my translation).

True to his fantastic surroundings and his heroic actions, Jonathan is described as a fairy-tale
prince: "His hair shone like gold and he had beautiful, dark blue eyes which really shone, and
beautiful white teeth and perfectly straight legs." ( TBL, 7) Also the children's clothes belong
to the more adventurous times of knights and pages ( TBL, 29), and their farm in Cherry
Valley is adorned with an old bench "that looked as if it had come from the Stone Age,
almost" ( TBL, 23). In their kitchen, the boys cook "directly over the fire, just as they used to
in the old days" ( TBL27). Lindgren thus communicates timelessness via time regression,
mixing the immediate past with the ancient past. In this fashion, the fantastic universe takes
on the idyllic, nostalgic quality which the critics labeled escapism.

The Brothers Lionheart shares more scary aspects with the original fairy tales, however.
Jonathan, the hero, is contrasted with Tengil, the villain, who represents evil incarnate:
"Suddenly he was quite close to me and I saw his cruel face and his cruel eyes. . . . The
costume he was wearing was as red as blood and the plumes of his helmet were also red, as if
he had dipped them in blood" ( TBL, 103). Also, Tengil's men resemble stock villains. Rusky
describes one of them: "I sat paralysed on my chair and just hated him, everything about him,
his rough hands and thick neck, and that wart on his forehead" ( TBL, 114). As in the fairy
tales, the heroes

-62-
are handsome; the villains, ugly. Lindgren completes her fantastic setting with a castle, a
dragon, and a sea serpent from ancient times ( TBL, 184), the props of what Jonathan calls
"evil fairy tales" ( TBL, 135, my translation).

Unlike most original folk tales, however, The Brothers Lionheart begins in a realistic setting,
and whereas the heroes of "once upon a time" "lived happily ever after," Lindgren's brothers
enter an uncertain future, to say the least. Furthermore, the objective, omniscient narration of
the fairy tale has been replaced by the subjective, emotional voice of little Rusky." 15 Finally,
the text of The Brothers Lionheart is self-conscious in its use of the fantastic. On his first
visit to the Golden Cockerel Inn, the meeting place of the people from Cherry Valley, Rusky
thinks it is "just like those friendly old inns you used to read about in books" ( TBL, 34).
When the Lionhearts are on their way to Karmanyaka to free Orvar, they ride through "one of
those fairy-tale forests, thick and dark" ( TBL, 126, my translation).

This persistent reference to the story's fantastic elements may be caused by Rusky's wish to
believe in a fantasy created by his own imagination. Whereas most critics take for granted
that Rusky and Jonathan both die twice in the book, another narrative perspective is possible:
Rusky may not die until the last page, and the events of Nangiyala then express his wish to
join Jonathan, who was killed during the fire in an effort to save his younger brother. 16 Egli
Törnquist, a Swedish critic, further explains Lindgren's technique:

Instead of describing what goes on in Rusky's febrile mind through some sort
of stream-of-consciousness, Astrid Lindgren chooses to describe in the fairy
tale's stylized form the feelings--fear, angst, hope, longing--which in turn seize
the sick boy and which, if we insist on the realistic point of view, could be
related to changes in his illness. 17

True to Freud's idea of daydreams, the sick Rusky's thoughts function as wish fulfillments.
Thus, when he arrives in Nangiyala, the ugly duckling has become a swan: he is healthy, he
can swim, his legs are straight, and he owns several rabbits and a horse. Rusky is himself
surprised: "Oh, yes, I could ride, and yet it was the first time I'd ever been on horseback--I
can't understand how things are just like that in Nangiyala, that you can do anything, I mean"

-63-

( TBL, 29). As Törnquist also points out, the boys' dwelling in Nangiyala consists of the same
rooms as the one on Earth, only "Knights Farm" is "at least twice as big as at home" ( TBL,
28). Similarly, Rusky's distant, overworked mother is replaced in Nangiyala with the
nurturing, retired grandfather, Mathias. 18

The transformation of little Rusky to Karl Lionheart describes a psychological development.

Initially, the nine-year-old is powerless and unheroic, like the young readers: "He liked me,
Jonathan, and that was strange, for I've never been anything else but a rather ugly, stupid and
cowardly boy, with crooked legs and all" ( TBL, 6-7). Upon Jonathan's death, however, the
withdrawal of his brother's unconditional love begins Rusky's maturation process:
psychologically speaking, he is afraid of being left behind in development and is thus
motivated to grow. When Rusky reaches Nangiyala, Jonathan names him Karl Lionheart and
spurs Rusky on to learn archery. When the younger brother gets a bull's-eye, his mentor looks
"so pleased . . . almost as if he had had a present . . ." ( TBL, 33). Rusky's socialization
continues, as in the following conversation between the Lionhearts, just before Jonathan
leaves for the occupied Wild Rose Valley:
 I asked Jonathan why he had to undertake something so dangerous. Couldn't
he just as well stay at home by the fire at Knights Farm and enjoy himself?
But then Jonathan said there were things you have to do, even if they are
dangerous.

"Why?" I said.

"Otherwise you aren't a human being, but just a bit of filth." ( TBL, 4950)

Once again Jonathan's departure forces Rusky to develop. After much hesitation, he decides
to follow his elder brother and immediately begins to feel more courageous: "My brother had
called for me, so didn't I have to go out and try to find him? . . . I was glad, and for once felt
really strong and brave" ( TBL, 53, 55). Like the youngest son of the fairy tale, Rusky
ventures out into the wilds, where he encounters both villains and wolves. This movement
away from innocence teaches the young hero to distinguish between appearance and reality.
Rusky has, up to this point, suspected the redbearded Hubert of being the traitor of Cherry
Valley, but learns instead that the seemingly friendly Jossi has betrayed the resistance

-64-

movement to Tengil's men. Rusky has reached a new plateau of knowledge and can
momentarily rest with Jonathan in the safety of Mathias's cozy home.

This peace does not last. Again Jonathan must leave, now for Tengil's country, Karmanyaka,
and again love for his brother prompts Rusky to come along. Mathias teaches him a final
lesson: "We're all afraid. . . . But sometimes you mustn't let it show" ( TBL, 123). Rusky's rite
of passage is symbolically represented by the dark corridors through which he has to crawl.
At the end of the last tunnel, Jonathan greets him with his "manhood" name: "'Well, Karl
Lionheart,' he said. 'Here you are at last'" ( TBL, 124). From now on, the two brothers travel
together, but Jonathan continues to be the heroic role model: "[W]hen we'd mounted and I
was sitting there with my arm [a]round Jonathan's waist and my forehead leaning against his
back, it was as if a little of his strength came through to me and I was less afraid" ( TBL,
158).

Like the fairy-tale heroes, the Lionhearts have to endure several tests of manhood on their
journey from innocence to experience, but towards the end of the story they confront the
dragon and the sea serpent in the land of experience, Karmanyaka. As in the fairy tales, the
monsters represent the existence of evil, which must be acknowledged in an adult world.
There are, in addition, hints of a mature, sexual knowledge when the boys watch the final
embrace of the now untied female dragon, Katla, and the male sea serpent, Karm, in the midst
of screams and blood ( TBL, 184-85). Worthy of his new name, Karl Lionheart can now
reverse the roles of the initial jump and leap into the abyss with the dying Jonathan on his
back. Karl's "I'll never again be afraid" ( TBL, 192) then expresses his satisfaction with
passing from cowardice to courage in his final test of "manhood." 19 As in the fairy tales,
restoration to life comes about through an act of love. 20

This fall from innocence to experience is underlined by a rich biblical symbolism, which
combines with the Hindu and Buddhist concepts of transmigration of souls 21 and karma
(Karmanyaka, Karma Falls) in The Brothers Lionheart into a vision of reincarnation and
resurrection. The Cherry Valley is, for example, as idyllic as any paradise:
 It was white with cherry blossom[s] everywhere. White and green, it was, with
cherry blossom[s] and green, green grass. And through all that

-65-

green and white, the river floated like a silver ribbon. . . . I stood quite still on
the path and saw how beautiful it was . . . ( TBL, 22)

In contrast, Karmanyaka is "a dreadful place . . . like no other place in heaven or on earth" (
TBL, 134). Its center, the Katla cavern, is described as "an underground kingdom of the
depths," an "eternal night" ( TBL, 147), with air "thick with old dried wickedness" and full of
"torment and tears and death" ( TBL, 149). Thus, when Jonathan rescues Orvar, the
imprisoned resistance leader of Wild Rose Valley, from the cavern, Rusky explains that his
brother "dragged Orvar through hell" ( TBL, 154). Tengil, the tyrant of Karmanyaka, is
appropriately "cruel as a serpent" ( TBL, 44). The people of Wild Rose Valley call Jonathan
their "Saviour," and his faithful younger brother functions as his disciple. Like Jesus,
Jonathan preaches nonviolence: in the final battle, he refuses to kill ( TBL, 171-72). He is
guided by a supernatural force, as when he finds the back entrance to Katla Cavern, and
Rusky speculates that "[p]erhaps everything had already been decided. . . . Perhaps Jonathan
had been named as Orvar's saviour" ( TBL, 146). Once Orvar has been resurrected from the
mountain, he takes over the role of Christ, whom he resembles physically: "His face [was]
scarcely visible for beard and hair. Only his eyes were visible; his strange, burning eyes" (
TBL, 157). Like Jesus, Orvar is betrayed by a Judas: Jossi, the owner of the Golden Cockerel
Inn, has caused his sufferings. With divine justice, Jossi never returns to the edenic Cherry
Valley, but sinks into the dark Karma Falls. Rusky explains, "I knew that there was no means
of saving Jossi" ( TBL, 168). Within this biblical reading of the text, the brothers' final jump
into the abyss becomes a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, and, as it turns out, brotherly love is
redemptive: the final light signals the Divine Presence.

The Cherry Valley functions not just as a paradise, however, but also as a political Utopia. As
Jonathan tells us, "Everything here in Cherry Valley is free. We give to each other and help
each other according to what is needed" ( TBL, 32). In addition to communal sharing,
Lindgren's social vision includes, most importantly, peace. Sofia, the Lionhearts' neighbor,
conducts her resistance movement by means of white doves, and Jonathan demands nothing
but a quiet, simple life for everyone:

"I like flowers and grass and fields and forests and beautiful small lakes. . . .
And when the sun rises and when the sun sets and when the

-66-

moon is out and the stars twinkle. . . . [I]f that's all people ask for, can you tell
me why they can't have peace and quiet without a Tengil coming along and
destroying everything?" ( TBL, 91)

The tyrant has nonetheless occupied Wild Rose Valley, which is now encircled by a guarded
wall. "If only I had a few peas and beans," signs Mathias, but Jonathan quickly reminds him
that "Tengil takes nine out of every ten beans in your field" ( TBL, 97). He also takes
bondsmen to build an immense castle. As Jonathan says, "[t]yrants are always afraid" ( TBL,
102).
The spirit of Wild Rose Valley has not been quenched. Mathias advocates solidarity as the
political solution: "What he doesn't understand, that Tengil, is that he can never subdue
people who are fighting for their freedom and who stick together as we do" ( TBL, 109).
Antonia, the widow of one of Tengil's victims, cuts off her long hair for bowstrings, and
Orvar and the Lionhearts become guerilla leaders. The courageous Orvar communicates to
his valley that "Orvar may die, but freedom never!" ( TBL, 145).

Yet there is no simple solution to the political struggle. Even though the tyrant is overthrown,
Mathias dies and Jonathan is paralyzed. Rusky, too, is discouraged at the end of the day's
fight: "I was tired and thought that I had never lived through such a long hard day in all my
life. From dawn to dusk, there had been nothing but blood and fear and death" ( TBL, 186).
Lindgren herself has in an interview expressed her political pessimism:

We learn early that disputes must be solved with violence. . . . Humanity may
progress but our destructive powers and technical possibilities of extinction
and suppression grow faster than the good, preserving forces. . . . Ever since
the Hitler era, I have been a pessimist. 22

In this context, Lindgren demonstrates with the ending of The Brothers Lionheart that there is
no room for children, or for love, in the world they inhabit.

The boys' final jump might also express their belief in other, more peaceful possibilities.
Contrary to the critics' expectations, most children experience the end of Lindgren's story as
happy. 23 The young readers who, of course, have identified with the fearful and dependent
first-person narrator throughout, gain confidence and hope from Karl Lionheart's courageous
jump. This optimism helps chil-

-67-

dren in their own development, as Bruno Bettelheim explains in The Uses of Enchantment:

With hope for the future established, the present difficulty is no longer
insufferable. . . . Thus the problems a child encounters and cannot solve at the
moment become manageable, because disappointment in the present is
mitigated by visions of future victories. 24

The tension between optimism and pessimism, both within The Brothers Lionheart and in the
critical discussions of the text, might thus be rooted in the difference between the adult's and
the child's perspectives. Whereas most adults tend to think of the fantastic as escapism from
the harsh realities of life and death, Bettelheim holds that "the child's fantasies are his
thoughts." He continues:

When a child tries to understand himself and others, or figure out what the
specific consequences of some action might be, he spins fantasies around these
issues. . . . To offer a child rational thought as his major instrument for sorting
out his feelings and understanding the world will only confuse and restrict
him. 25

The stylized form of the fantastic tale may better communicate complex problems to young
children than will rational explanations, or ambiguous, realistic characters. 26 Moreover, the
fairy tale is able to help children deal with their own monsters, whether in the form of sibling
jealousy, Oedipal conflicts, or death. The disguise of the fantastic story allows children to
grapple with their darker feelings and thoughts without embarrassment or blocks. Bettelheim
writes: "If our fear of being devoured takes the tangible form of a witch, it can be gotten rid
of by burning her in the oven." 27 Thus, when Katla falls into Karma Falls and Karl jumps
into the abyss, Lindgren's young readers may learn, like the Lionhearts, to master their own
dragons.

NOTES
1. Naomi Lewis, "The Road to Fantasy", Children's Literature 11 ( 1983),
205-206.
2. See Francelia Butler, "Death in Children's Literature", Children's Literature
1 ( 1972), 104, 115. See also Ying Toijer-Nilsson, Tro och Otro i Modern
Barnlitteratur

-68-

i Modern Barnlitteratur [ Belief and Disbelief in Modern

Children's Literature] (Karlskrona, Sweden: Verbum,
1976), 134.
3. Butler, Death," 106.
(I am quoting from
Butler, since The
Death of Partlet is
not included in
standard Grimm
collections.)
4. Ibid., 112.
5. Ibid., 105, 106.
6. Lewis, Road," 205;
Toijer-Nilsson, [
Belief] 134;
Charlotte Hasforth ,
"Snak om Døden"
[Talk about Death]
(Ballerup,
Denmark:
Bibliotekscentralen,
1980), [1].
7. Astrid Lindgren,
The Brothers
Lionheart, trans.
Joan Tate ( New
York: Viking,
 1975), 192
( Lindgren's
ellipses). Further
references will be
given
parenthetically in
the text as TBL.
8. Mary Ørvig,
"Reactions to Astrid
Lindgren's Literary
Work 19461975",
En Bok om Astrid
Lindgren [A Book
about Astrid
Lindgren], ed.
Mary Ørvig (Lund,
Sweden: Rabén and
Sjögren, 1977),
172, 173, my
translation.
9. Ibid., 175, my
translation.
10. Ibid., 178.
11. Niels Mors Nielsen,
"En ung og frisk og
god tid, som det er
let og ligetil at leve
i" ["A young and
healthy and good
time, in which it is
easy and simple to
live"], ( Bixen:
Tidsskrift om
Miljør og Medier
for Børn og Unge
[Bixen: Journal of
Milieus and Media
for Children and
Young Adults] 4. 1,
1975), 53.
12. Ørvig, 174, my
translation.
13. Joan Tate's English
text, while
generally
successful, is
imprecise in the
translation of the
Swedish "saga,"
which means "fairy
tale" and "saga." By
choosing the
English "saga,"
Tate loses many of
the fantastic
connotations of the
original Swedish
word. Therefore,
when necessary, I
have substituted my
own translation for
Tate's in this
limited context.
14. I have substituted
the word time,
which is used in the
Swedish original,
for Tate's days.
15. Egil Törnquist,
"Astrid Lindgren's
Halvsaga:
Berättertekniken i
Bröderna
Lejonhjärta" [Astrid
Lindgren's Semi-
Fairy Tale:
Narrative
Technique in The
Brothers
Lionheart], Svensk
Litteraturidskrift
[Swedish Literature
Journal] 13. 2
( 1975), 19.
16. Lindgren in an
interview has
confirmed the latter
reading of The
Brothers Lionheart
( Törnquist, [ Semi-
Fairy Tale] 20).
17. Törnquist, [ Semi-
Fairy Tale], 21, my
translation.
18. Törnquist, [ Semi-
Fairy Tale], 28.
19. The Brothers
Lionheart's
emphasis on
masculine courage
has been mocked in
a Danish children's
book entitled The
Sisters Mouseheart
by Keld Belert
( Copenhagen:
Borgen, 1978).

-69-

20. Butler, Death," 107-108.

21. Arne Olesen, "En Svensk Fantasidebat" [ A Swedish Fantasy Debate],
(Bixen: Tidsskrift om Miljør og Medier for Børn og Unge 3. 2 ( 1974), 8.
22. Sigrid Leljonhufvud, "Mörk Sage från Andra Sidan by Astrid Lindgren" [
Dark Saga from the Other Side by Astrid Lindgren], Svenska Dagbladet 4
Oct. 1973, p. 8, my translation.
23. Törnquist, [ Semi-Fairy Tale] 30; Eva Adolfsson, Ulf Eriksson and Birgitta
Holm, "Adjustment, Escape, Liberation: Children and Reality", En Bok om
Astrid Lindgren [A Book about Astrid Lindgren], ed. Mary Ørvig (Lund,
Sweden: Rabén and Sjögren, 1977), 53.
24. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance
of Fairy Tales ( New York: Vintage, 1977), 125.
25. Ibid., 119.
26. Bo Møhl and Maj Schack, Naar Børn Laeser: Litteraturoplevelse og
Fantasi [ When Children Read: Literature and Fantasy] ( Copenhagen:
Gyldendal, 1983), 90.
27. Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, 120.

-70-

PART II
The Fantastic in World Literature: Individual Authors

In our time and especially in Latin America, the fantastic thrives in literature and the arts as
may be seen in essays by Nancy M. Kason on the Peruvian author, Clemente Palma, and by
Cynthia Duncan on the distinguished Mexican author and diplomat, Carlos Fuentes. Palma
and Fuentes also continue in the tradition of nineteenth-century Gothic, which Robert F.
Geary discussed in the first chapter of this book. Palma's work in addition is indebted to the
aesthetics of decadence, which Roger C. Lewis outlines in his essay on Poe, Baudelaire, and
Swinburne. Another powerful influence on writers of the fantastic is the French tradition
initiated by Jacques Cazotte in Le Diable Amoureux. Juliette Gilman essay on Cazotte
describes his originality while assessing the impact his tale has on the reader. The French
traditions of surréalisme and mie-en-abyme are explored through revealing analysis of the
fantastic fiction of André Pieyre de Mandiargues by Joyce O. Lowrie, and of Hubert Aquin
by V. Harger- Grinling and A. R. Chadwick.

Ralph Yarrow, in his essay on Borges, extends the discussion of the relations of the reader to
the text by focusing on the process of reading itself as he leads us through the marvelously
complicated story, The Garden of Forking Paths." The reader is also the subject of Beverly
Lyon Clark essay, What Went Wrong with Alice?, in which she compares two versions of
Lewis Carroll's Alice books, drawing interesting conclusions about Carroll's career and his
relation to his intended reader.

The truly international appeal of the fantastic may be seen both in the authors treated here, for
they span several centuries and two continents, and in the scholars writing about them, for
these essays were

-71-

drawn from contributors in several countries on both sides of the Atlantic. The fantastic also
demonstrates the value of variety in literary scholarship, as these essays utilize structuralism,
literary history, biography, psychology, and comparative analysis to better illuminate their
subjects.

-72-

6
Irony Grows in My Garden: Generative Processes in Borges's "The
Garden of Forking Paths"

Ralph Yarrow
 "We must never forget that [Borges's] intelligence. . . . is at the service of
games rather than convictions. . . . The purpose of the game is not to discover
incognizahle reality; it has an aesthetic aim." 1

The "aesthetic aim" Jurado refers to suggests that Jorge Luis Borges is concerned with the
effect of his work, and that this effect may have something to do with the mental processes
that give shape to what is then called reality. To suggest that Borges is concerned with
stimulating the creative faculties of his audience appears legitimate; he says his work is a
means of "fusing the world of the reader and the world of the book." 2

This possibility implies an intention similar to Robbe-Grillet's demand for the active
participation of the reader in the creation of the work. More than that, it is--as with Robbe-
Grillet, or Proust or Coleridge before him--a recognition that "imagination" is precisely that
process of constructing significance for oneself. Borges's "games" are designed to extend the
"field of play" as far as possible and to make the reader aware that he or she is playing.
Borges is aware, too, that the way in which this happens is through the physical changes
induced in the brain by the demands made by his text: he states that "what is essential is the
aesthetic factor, the thrill, the physical effect brought about by reading." 3

Looking at what happens when reading a story by Borges, one sees that the work necessarily
and openly accepts the commitment made by the reader in entering the fictional sphere.
Although the

-73-

story may ultimately wish to correct the reader's notions about the relationship of fiction and
reality, it first of all welcomes the assumption that these spheres are different and similar in
the ways in which the reader has conventionally come to believe. The writer welcomes even
more the reader's desire to gain something from the reading. This drive may be blocked,
deflected, or turned upon itself, but it remains a necessity for reader and writer. The desire
rests on assumptions much profounder, perhaps, than even a belief in the ability of language
to signify--to say something meaningful about the world. It may reflect the sense that actions
move towards some kind of completion, that there is some kind of shape to a succession of
lived and willed events. That is, fundamentally, an intuition of order which is aesthetic in
nature rather than merely intellectual. Thus the satisfaction gained from reading a book in its
entirety has as much, if not more, to do with a grasping of pattern and plan, as with the simple
knowledge of "what happens in the end."

A book draws, then, on two kinds of rather crucial awareness-about the nature of reality, and
about the way in which relating to it is a matter of perceiving a growth of plan and order.
These concerns have perhaps become oversimplified and reduced to superficiality by
conventional ideas about reading (both the mental and the physical operations involved) and
by the large amount of easily "consumable" reading material available. So, in fact, Borges
and others may not be making totally new demands, but rather attempting to reestablish the
fundamental issues of reading; a "revolution" in the sense of returning to something. That
which has been forgotten must be reestablished, and in order for this to happen, the forgotten
must be highlighted. The text will, therefore, at first appear extraordinary; indeed it has to
appear extraordinary, so that people can see the process of reading as something "new" and
worth investigation. Shock tactics may be in order at this stage in the process. Just as Rilke
said that poetry needed to respond to the earth's wish to become "invisible," so reading must
become a new and strange experience in order for it to register. Readers must be made aware
of the fact that they are reading, otherwise they will never perceive the extraordinary richness
and importance of this old and familiar process. So Borges's work, like that of Robbe-Grillet
and Gombrowicz, hovers incessantly around the borders of the

-74-

"normal" and the "abnormal," constantly interrelating and juxtaposing the two.

The text needs, therefore, to be doing at least two things at once: inviting and stimulating the
sense that something is to be discovered, some "point" to the reading; and subverting or
distorting the over-hasty assumptions that tend to be made about how that point is reached. A
title may do the job quite well. Take, for instance, the well-known Borges story, "The Garden
of Forking Paths." 4

The title both seduces and subverts. Like other Borges stories, it offers a prospect of mystery
but also suggests the opposite of a closed or simple solution. The garden and the labyrinthine
implications have vaguely esoteric, Eastern, or exotic connotations. The detective format of
the story (like "Death and the Compass") is similar not only to G. K. Chesterton, whom
Borges certainly liked, but also to Robbe-Grillet (detectives in Les Gommes, La Maison de
Rendez-Vous, labyrinths in Dans le Labyrinthe, Topologie d'une Cité Fontôme). Butor
( Passage de Milan) and Beckett ( Molloy) also have something of the detective formula.
Detective stories traditionally play a kind of game with the reader; they also traditionally
offer a number of blind alleys, red herrings, spurious "clues," and so on. Whatever the "truth"
may be, it will not be reached easily. In addition, the nouveau roman and other post-
modernist writing (e.g., new American fiction in works like Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49)
often reverses the implicit assumption encoded into the structure of detective fiction and
deliberately refuses any single or definitive solution that will ultimately be "revealed"' to the
reader. All of these possibilities float about in Borges's title, promising in addition a kind of
intimate and bizarre pleasure. Getting caught up in the forking paths is a kind of Baudelairean
invitation au voyage, leading readers to engage both narrative and mental processes, and the
ways in which they may interact.

The story advertises its dubious wares clearly enough; it lays them out more fully in the
combination of seductive and suggestive settings, themes, and appellations which follow. A
summarization of the narrative in linear fashion is unnecessary, but the ingredients are clearly
chosen for their effect: a Chinese spy for the Germans; a sinologist holding the key to the
labyrinthine work of the spy's ancestor; a plot involving murder, attempted killing, and a
message

-75-

that will result in many deaths; the conjunction of modern ( 1916) war and Chinese culture;
the sending of a secret message. The structure of the narrative is a typical (for Borges, as for
RobbeGrillet) "Chinese-box" affair, moving from the apparent neutrality of the opening
paragraph ["On page 22 of Liddell Hart History of World War I you will read . . ." (
Labyrinths, 44)] to a statement by the Chinese spy-cum-professor, to the English sinologist
Albert's outline of Ts'ui Pên's work, to direct quotation from and involvement in that work.
Version is enclosed within version, each narrative with its own range of reference and
association, its own standards and horizons of "truth." Borges's fictional composition includes
and comments upon the confessions of a spy, the philosophical exegesis of an academic, the
traditionally inscrutable joke of a complex mind. The interference of the narratives incites
reference back and forth, setting up analogies between contemporary historical events and
cultural reflections, betwen the various levels of personal existence of Dr. Yu Tsun, between
nationalities, beliefs, and codes.

This interaction is deliberately sought after in the structure and detail of the narratives. It is
apparent even at the simple level of names and nationalities, with a Chinese-German spy, an
EnglishChinese expert, and an Irish-English secret service agent (who speaks German at the
outset). The Chinese spy was formerly "professor of English at the Hochschule in Tsingtao" (
Labyrinths, 44). The result of his actions in Staffordshire will be understood in Berlin and
translated into action in France. This confusion of nationality and identity can suggest various
aspects: the complexity of political interaction and its implications for national identity; the
increasing difficulty of simplistic notions about culture and genealogy; twentieth-century
doubts about the singleness and stability of personality; the issue of how much our behavior
is affected by the language we speak.

What happens, in general terms, is that each notation (here and in other Borges stories) works
less as an attempt to "clarify" someone's identity and role than as a kind of magnetic field for
associations. The stories are so short, and the details so few, that "realistic" character-
portrayal is clearly not intended. (The same is true for Robbe-Grillet's longer fictions:
"characters" frequently change names, and in La Maison de Rendez-Vous many of the names
they adopt are

-76-

aliases or have theatrical connotations, e.g. "L'Américain," "Lady Ava.") Names (and other
details), become a kind of vibratory charge--not so much a definite symbol as a means of
calling up associative possibilities (Chineseness, distinguished professorship) which
themselves are usually deliberately vague. In this respect, the brevity of Borges' stories
produces a highly-charged symbolism of doubt and possibility, which is intensified by many
other techniques including the switch between narrative levels--realism and fantasy, for
instance, or the confessional and the exegetic. Or the shifting or playing between
psychological exploration and fantastic inventiveness; or the typical Borges mixture of
genuine quotation and "spurious" scholarship. Uncertainty is produced whichever way you
"read" the story, and principally if one manages to read it all ways at once--which is what the
labyrinth at the center of the story suggests. It is "a labyrinth of symbols" ( Labyrinths, 50).
These symbols point, however, not to some definitive grand interpretative scheme, but to the
conjunction of apparently antagonistic possibilities: all four alternative endings, Albert
explains, are possible for Ts'ui Pên's work.

Yu Tsun, however, chooses one of the endings and shoots Albert, in order to convey his
secret message (the name Albert, as reported in the press, will also indicate the town in
France that the Germans must attack). He, by a combination of historical necessity and
psychological condition, opts for a single solution, which will inevitably result in his death as
a murderer. In Robbe-Grillet and Gombrowicz, as here, and elsewhere in Borges, killing as
closure is always suspicious--it is usually heavily ironized, and virtually never achieves the
kind of solution it promises.

Murder, then, or sudden death, is a means of presenting one of the two poles between which
the story oscillates. Mentioned also is that Yu Tsun's ancestor was murdered, and Albert
refers to excerpts from his book concerned with a battle and with the various possible
outcomes of a meeting between a man with a secret and a stranger. Albert claims that Ts'ui
Pên meant the reader to choose not one alternative outcome, but all of them: the book is
intended as a demonstration of what Valéry called noeuds and contemporary critical theory
describes as générateurs. That is to say, there are points in a text (any point, by implication)
where the reader, like the writer, may seize not only upon the self-perpetuating inventiveness
of nar-

-77-

rative and decide to draw on any prticular association or link to give the text a new twist, but
the reader or writer is also aware at that moment of holding within his grasp (in his
imaginative or magical power) the secret or possibility of all future developments of that text.
He is at the point where the paths fork. Any path is a potential murder/death because it can
lead to closure; but the dominating single-mindedness (obsession or terrorism, for Robbe-
Grillet) of each textual departure can always be arrested, and hauled back to any point from
which the plurality of possibility becomes available again.

Yu Tsun has a secret ( Albert's name) that he must encode and transmit. Albert has a secret
(the nature of Ts'ui Pên's book and of his labyrinth). The garden is a "secret" kind of location
(with medieval, Chinese, mystical, erotic, biblical-genetic connotations). Borges's story
teases us with its secretive atmosphere and offers a few clues (some helpful but hidden,
others unhelpful and overt) as the reader is put in the position of trying to figure out what Yu
Tsun is trying to do. In all cases, the real nature of the secret is generative rather than unitary.
(A brief aside to The Sect of the Phoenix, whose aura of arcane profundity and talk of the
Secret is a joke on the phoenix's propensities for sex.) Even Yu Tsun's message, when
transmitted, has more than one possible outcome, and is important to him in more than one
way. As an Oriental, he despises the Western conflict in which he finds himself caught up,
but he needs to complete his mission to justify himself (and by implication his family and his
race) in the eyes of his narrow-minded German boss (described as a "sick and hateful man--in
his arid office"-- Labyrinths, 45). The import of the secrets is that in messages, in wisdom,
and in all encoded texts (as shown by the successive frames of the story) reside not closed
"answers" but structures of possibility.

That kind of structure is represented by Albert's proposition (fascinating to Yu Tsun and

frequent in Borges) stating Ts'ui Pên's work reveals a conjunction of all time and identity.
That is to say, when you actually stand at the point where paths fork, you hold sequence and
causality in your power. This bifurcation is the "now" point of reading in contemporary
critical theory, the point where reader and text converge. (Do battle, as in Simon La Bataille
de Pharsale (= la phrase) or Ricardou La Prise (= la prose) de Con-stantinople

-78-

stantinople: hence the battle quoted from Ts'ui Pên, of which two versions are given, and the
battle Yu Tsun's act will influence.) It is the location of moral choice, in existentialist theory:
the place from which the self is constructed, or--consistent with phenomenology--
consciousness wills or intends a new perception and construction of reality.

Borges's games are not trivial, because as L. A. Murillo contends, "The conjecture is about
radical questions of human existence, time, personal will, consciousness, and destiny." 5 Such
questions are pertinent to the protagonist ( Yu Tsun) of The Garden of Forking Paths, and are
mediated through him, and through the structure of interlocking narratives Borges builds
around him, to the reader. Thus The Garden is a "representation of the very process by
which . . . events acquire their symbolical significance in the consciousness of the protagonist
and . . . reader." 6 The games, then, are centrally "about" the exploration by the reader (where
else can the story "take place"?) of certain states and procedures in consciousness: those
states and procedures that concern the way in which we invest our experience with
understanding or significance, by which we arrive at our ability to interact creatively and
purposively with our environment. The elements of game play that Borges uses here are for
the purpose of propelling the reader towards this exploration.

Murillo, in The Cyclical Night, suggests that Yu Tsun is presented as being in an ethical
vacuum: existentially aware of his responsibility in a world whose political, social, and
psychological upheaval has negated a priori values, and conscious of his need to locate
himself and make a choice that endows being and acting with meaning. Again one sees the
confusing intersection of personal, cultural, and historical identities in the story. The
"vacuum," also presented to the reader through the mystery, paradox, and symbolic
condensation of the narrative, demands to be grasped and developed as text, as another way
of pinpointing the source of moral choice.

Yu Tsun takes, perhaps, the easy way out. He opts for the single, deadly solution, though
knowing, as his wry admission at the end makes clear, that it is not really so simple. ("He
does not know . . . my innumerable contrition and weariness."-- Labyrinths, 54). The odd
adjective indicates Yu Tsun's acknowledgment of the chance

-79-

of plurality, a chance he passes over.) Yu Tsun tries, by recalling his murder of Albert, to
construct around the event a narrative that gives it the status of irrevocability (all incidents
seem restrospectively compelling and essential). His "confession" is thus fundamentally
spurious. Its format proposes an acquiescence that, in fact, is quite the reverse of the
confession's purpose. His narrated version, like his act of murder, seeks to impose a unique
and dominant reading.

That uniqueness and dominance is, however, undermined by the multiplicity of narratives
within which Borges frames the story. It is, moreover, further placed in perspective by the
contrast between Yu Tsun (actually Chinese but betraying his culture and his identity) and
Albert (a Westerner who is far more an incarnation of traditional Chinese wisdom). Yu Tsun
disregards or distorts Albert's possibilities; he uses him only as a cipher in a code of language
and action. Yu Tsun tries uneasily to justify his action as inevitable in terms of historical
necessity. Albert is, however, also the sign of many other possibilities, more inclusive than
the use to which his name is put as indicating a place to be destroyed. In addition to his grasp
of the fluid dynamism of the labyrinth, he seems to Yu Tsun a person of Goethean stature,
endowed with wisdom and easy grace. Living within the procreative garden, or labyrinth,
Albert is at the junction of East and West, uniting the contemplative and the active, the
English and the German, in a harmonious and lively balance, like that of nature and the
"sparkling music" through which he is approached. He is the kind of multiple possibility that
Yu Tsun ignores.

Murillo describes the labyrinthine structure by which consciousness is represented as a

"metaphysical ground" ( The Cyclical Night, 159). The "hesitation" ( Todorov's term)--
characteristic of postmodernist texts and here instilled by the confusions and paradoxes, the
ironic juxtaposition of versions, and so on--produced in protagonist and reader is the moment
of absence (of choice, significance) that impels selection of world and action. The
existentialist reading suggests that the motive force is an angst, a desperate need to fill the
vacuum by projecting anything. That is certainly one factor, and it may be the principal one
in Yu Tsun's case. But the contradictions, blocks, and ironic perspectives of the story's
structure, together with its repeated indications about the plural signifi-
 -80-

cance of secrets, and the balance of forces harmonized in Albert, offer an alternative mode of
response.

Such a response is also offered to Yu Tsun. As he moves towards Albert's house, he

experiences a kind of detachment combined with a liveliness of perception. The "slope of the
road . . . eliminated any possibility of weariness," and he feels himself to be "an abstract
perceiver of the world" ( Labyrinths, 48). At this point he becomes aware of the "living
countryside" and of an "almost syllabic music," which he later realizes is Chinese. Here, as
always in Borges, the topology is not realistic scene-setting but directions to a mental state.
Robbe-Grillet clearly works in a similar fashion in Topologie d'une Cité Fantôme, but the
parallel is not quite exact. Robbe-Grillet maps out with ironic geometrical precision the
moves of an imagination confined by its own obsessions and by a passion for linguistic
symmetry. Borges's landscapes have perhaps more in common with the terrains vagues of
Beckett: they present not so much a process as a condition in which a process may take place.
Beckett's world, for example, in Molloy, is one in which objects are cherished precisely
because they are "en voie de disparition": the protagonists are in the process of ridding
themselves of inherited assumptions about reality and its relationship with language. What
we have is a curious kind of precise vagueness, a very persistent and subtle attempt to render
a state in which "meaning" is loosening its hold, dissolving the links between word and
experience. (Everything dissolves or disintegrates in Beckett: bicycles, limbs, relationships--
the onions in Moran's Irish stew in Molloy: "On n'est pas lié?" is what the tramps in Godot
ask each other.) Borges's descriptions, though they are in a way more detailed, frequently
operate with a similar combination of the vague and the precise. That is to say, they are
attempting to pinpoint a condition of increasing "vagueness," or distance from the restrictions
of conventional levels of thinking and perceiving.

What increasing vagueness leads towards is exactly that moment when no single
interpretation is dominant and possibility has reestablished itself. Yu Tsun is in a kind of
suspended animation in which the possibilities of harmony present themselves most fully to
him. His state of physical ease matches the time of day (late afternoon) and the surroundings:
"the afternoon was intimate, infinite" ( Labyrinths, 48); his consciousness is freed from its
preoccupation

-81-

with limited ends--he feels that it is not possible to be the enemy of a country, in the sense
that he is now experiencing it. He is integrated with his surroundings, acting spontaneously,
and feeling at home (he instinctively accepts the music and does not remember whether he
knocks at Albert's gate or rings a bell). He is, in short, in a condition of very lively and
expanded awareness in which his doubts about identity are replaced by a kind of oneness
with nature as the source of order and mobility--"fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water,
sunsets." Yu Tsun's state is what brings him to the center of the labyrinth, and Albert comes
to open the gate, holding a symbolic lantern.

Yu Tsun is in fact blinded by the light, and cannot make out Albert's face. That is to say, in
this situation where he becomes aware of himself as a center of possibility, an organizing
potential, a consciousness which can shape and form, he is not able to pin Albert down as a
limited and thus expendable identity. This "awareness of awareness" 7 is both positive and
negative, a sense of hesitation in which simplistic single interpretations are found inadequate,
and the pluralistic is on the verge of presenting itself.
Thus the two versions of the battle in Ts'ui Pên's book offer as reasons for victory apparently
contrary states of mind: the warriors experience situations that make them feel either
existential angst or joy. On the one hand, individual identity is felt to be insignificant; on the
other it is merged in a communal celebration. In both cases an apparent negation of individual
significance leads to a "victory" or fruitful outcome. In a similar way, the post-modernist
"negative aesthetic" is a way of continually emphasizing the apparently negative in order to
reveal hidden possibilities. Whatever is said also provides a way of not saying everything
else: it puts off, conceals, and defers (différer, pace Derrida) all the other possibilities of
language. So what is said is frequently contradicted or revealed to be inadequate, in order that
it may be seen to have those other possibilities lurking behind or within it, as linguistic
history for example, or as association, or as alternative readings.

In the one "direct quote," Borges gives us from Ts'ui Pên's text, the warriors are referred to as
"heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die" (
Labyrinths, 52). The line might have come out of the Bhagavad Gita, an epic much concerned
with the problems of fighting in the proper way. (Al-

-82-

though Borges may not have actually taken it from there, he did use the Gita as one source
among many for esoteric references.) Taking a leaf out of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's
commentary on the Gita, Borges would probably interpret the quotation something like this:
"swords" refer to the "outer" organs of action, "hearts" to the inner state of mind. An
apparently contradictory condition here renders the mind still and the body violently active.
This condition actually allows the warriors to perform action without attachment to the result
(however drastic that may seem), and because of that the action is in fact most successful and
the warriors can be classified as heroes. Taking the gloss further, one can see that this kind of
neutrality, is the mark of being in the state where the possibilities are held in play. "Negative"
or "positive" outcomes (apparent surrender or destruction of one "side") are balanced, or
perhaps perceived to be equally false. At this point one is the master of the opposites (as
Thomas Mann puts it in The Magic Mountain), as is the figure of Stephen Albert and his
interpretation of Ts'ui Pên's narrative, and as is Borges with his construction of interlocking
versions, and as the reader may be.

This interpretation is not inconsistent with Borgesian practice, but it does suggest a further
point: "suspended animation" may be a more exact term than we suspected. It may be
necessary to look further at this condition, since it does seem to be represented both by Yu
Tsun and by the warriors. Useful parallels may be drawn between what occurs in reading and
in certain states of consciousness closely analyzed in psycho-physiological terms by
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. His theory, together with experimental evidence derived from
scientific investigation, can provide some interesting angles on the nature of aesthetic
experience. 8 One of the most crucial conditions for the experience is precisely the one in
which stillness and activity appear to be present simultaneously.

What appears to happen is that a kind of neutral expectancy may be produced, as a

background against which a variety of possibilities may be generated. I think this happens in
"The Garden of Forking Paths" and in other Borges texts as a result of what Murillo calls
"displacement." In a phenomenological reading of the story, the narrator is realized via the
narrative as a process; that is, as a succession of different vantage points, perceptions, or
versions: the various styles and readings are a record of successive states of con-

-83-
sciousness. (They move from the "outer" historical account of the war, through the
deceptively confessional spy story, to Yu Tsun's more intimate sensations on approaching
Albert's house, to Albert's gloss of Ts'ui Pên's work, and finally to the "direct quotation"
given above: a graded progression towards the condition described and which Yu Tsun then
reluctantly rejects.) The narrator presents this succession as a record of successive locations
of his being-in-theworld, much as, for instance, Sartre Roquentin in La Nausée tries out a
variety of styles in an attempt to express the shifts and variations of identity. But just as from
the mock-detective perspective, none of the versions offers the whole truth, so too each style
is relativized by the next frame that the narrative adopts. Each central symbol, theme, or idea
is assimilated into a successively more extensive context, which displaces it from central to
relative importance. In this way the reader is gradually pushed into a state in which he or she
doesn't totally accept or reject anything. The movement of the narrative into new frameworks
takes the reader along, and at the same time serves as a block to any once-and-for-all opting
for the previous perspective. One has to take part in the process by which meanings are
created, but one is prevented from attributing finality to any one interpretation. The
movement is something like closing and opening a pair of nutcrackers, as each possibility is
grasped, then released as its kernel is found to be generative rather than final. Murillo neatly
explains Borges' semi-invented locality for the 1916 battle in this vein: Serre-Montauban
suggests a tension between "compulsion" and "freedom" 9 --which is both that of Yu Tsun's
moral dilemma and of the reader's progress through the text. Interestingly, Ludovic Janvier
describes Robbe-Grillet's narrative as built around the "couple fascination-liberté." 10 This
"disengaging compulsion toward ironical displacement" 11 allows the reader both to
experience and to judge the progress of the protagonist/narrator. It further allows the reader to
locate the source of creative and moral action, but forces him or her to return again and again
to its nature as potential, and not to get carried away into one-sided choice.

The key to the production of this state is repetition. One reads on and on, and keeps getting
blocked. Readers are somewhere between remembering and not remembering, between
believing and not believing. They are in one sense getting lost in a labyrinth, and in another
discovering that the secret of a labyrinth can be found

-84-

only in that way. The reader becomes both active--in that she or he continues to read and to
weigh up further possible additions and outcomes--and nonactive, in that everything is
somehow held in abeyance, given a kind of nonfinite status, its seeming definitiveness
undermined in advance by the "let's wait and see" mood established at the center of our
consciousness. As a parallel to Yu Tsun's exposition of his state, with its moral and
psychological implications, the text operates its own aesthetic procedure upon us. The state
which Yu Tsun enters, in the labyrinthine center of Alb ert's enclave, but never fully
explores, is offered as the means by which the thematic and structural development of
Borges's tale can be most completely judged.

Irony gives more of a perspective so that more of the game can be judged. And yet one can
only judge by being involved as well as detached. "Critical distance," so often held up as the
aim of literary study, does not mean a kind of owlish glare that reduces a text to the status of
a dead mouse. It does not mean the cultivation of a spurious and self-delusive "objectivity"
swathed in biographical detail or critical jargon. It means, and it requires, precisely the kind
of participation in the reading of a text on all levels which Borges is here working to produce.
The reader must "get lost" in the text. Ts'ui Pên "renounced worldly power in order . . . to
construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost" ( Labyrinths, 48). The labyrinth is
the text, in the sense of the network of meanings through which people make the world
known to themselves. If we go on using this text unthinkingly, we never really own the world
at all, and perhaps never really experience it either. We have to make it our text, which means
first of all forgetting the one convention dictates, and secondly becoming aware of our own
propensity for memory and organization. Yu Tsun discovers his own past where he least
expects it. Borges's narratives weave their spell of mystery, symbolic density, suggestiveness,
and disruption in order to propel the reader into the area, the kind of mental activity, where
dream and memory and imagination operate. But more than this, the narratives offer the
chance to be and to perceive that operation in process. The reader must learn to manipulate
symbol, metaphor, strange registers, and rhythms; to familiarize himself or herself with the
most powerful properties, the generative structures, of language.

Reading this story can show us our own linguistic and moral

-85-

capacity. So "dreaming" is not evasion, but rather (as Borges suggests with inevitable irony in
"The Circular Ruins") a very precise kind of work. Playing this sort of game--especially if
engaged in repeatedly--could very well serve as useful training for everyday activity, even if
authors--and critics--tend to overplay the game for its own sake and forget the application.

NOTES
1. A. Jurado, Genio y Figura de Jorge Luis Borges, 60 ( Buenos Aires:
Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1966).
2. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952 ( London: Souvenir Press,
1973), 43.
3. Jorge Luis Borges, Obra poética, 1923-1967 ( Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1967),
prologue.
4. References will be to the Penguin selection of Borges: Labyrinths,
( Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970).
5. L. A. Murillo, The Cyclical Night ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1968), 130.
6. Ibid., 141.
7. Ibid., 131.
8. See for example: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on the Bhagavad Gita,
( Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 135-6 and 485; J. Farrow and D.
Orme-Johnson , eds., Scientific Research on the Transcendental Meditation
Program: Collected Papers, vol. 1, ( Rheinweiler: M.I.U. Press, 1978, esp.
108-133, 151-59. See also Ralph Yarrow, "The Potential of Consciousness--
Towards a New Approach to States of Consciousness in Literature",
Journal of European Studies, XV ( 1985), 1-20.
9. Murillo, Night, 159.
10. Ludovic Janvier, Une parole exigeante ( Paris: Munuit, 1964), 111145.
11. Murillo, Night, 121.

-86-

7
What Went Wrong with Alice?

Beverly Lyon Clark

Few critics have written about Lewis Carroll The Nursery "Alice." Anne Clark devotes as
much attention to the merits of the book as almost anyone does, when she says in passing that
Carroll "rewrote the text completely in an embarrassingly patronising picture-show style." 1
Perhaps other critics' reluctance to speak of the book also stems from discomfort with it.
Nursery is interesting as a document of social history and as a record of Carroll's thought, but
as a work of art it fails. What went wrong with Alice?

To gain some perspective on Carroll's failure it is useful to start with an early, successful
revision: from Alice's Adventures Under Ground to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. On
July 4, 1862, Carroll had gone boating on the Isis with ten-year-old Alice Liddell, her two
sisters Lorina and Edith, and Robinson Duckworth. As they went along, Carroll invented a
story of Alice's adventures underground. The story so enchanted his listeners that they
begged him to write it down. He did, and presented Alice with the manuscript of Alice's
Adventures Under Ground in 1864. Those who read the manuscript were similarly enchanted,
and encouraged him to publish the volume. In 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
appeared. Some of the changes Carroll made here reflect the change in audience from a
private one, primarily Alice Liddell, to a public one. Others are clarifications and
embellishments he probably would have made in any case, given the chance to revise.

____________________
This chapter first appeared in the ChLA Quarterly 11, no. 1 (Spring 1986):
29-33.

-87-

The change in audience is most clearly reflected in Carroll's elimination of episodes or

descriptions with which a larger audience would not be familiar. The longest excision of such
personal references is in Alice's encounter with the Mouse and other curious creatures, who
all want to dry off after swimming in the pool of tears. Later Carroll inserts the Caucus-race,
but in Under Ground the Dodo remembers "a house near here, where we could get the young
lady and the rest of the party dried," and the party proceeds along the river bank to this house,
where they sit by the fire, wrapped in blankets, and dry off. 2 The incident recalls a day when
Carroll and the Liddell girls got wet and stopped at a house to dry off, an incident that his
public readership could not draw on.

Yet Carroll must have changed the incident for more than just reasons of personal reference,
for he does not change other personal references. In this episode, for instance, many of the
characters correspond to people on the original boating expedition: the Dodo to Dodgson,
who stuttered, Do-Do-Dodgson; the Duck to Robinson Duckworth; the Lory to Lorina
Liddell (in both Under Ground and Wonderland the Lory insists that it is older than Alice--as
indeed Lorina was); the Eaglet to Edith Liddell; and Alice, of course, to Alice Liddell. These
references are retained; thus Carroll must have excised the personal references in the drying-
off passage not just because they were personal. The fact is, he managed to come up with a
much more entertaining episode in the Caucus-race, in which the creatures start and stop
running when they like, and all receive prizes, even Alice, to whom the Dodo solemnly
presents her own thimble.

Most of Carroll's changes are clarifications and embellishments that he probably would have
added in any revision. Sometimes he adds pronouns or resequences phrases, making a
sentence easier for the reader to process. Or he uses more precise words: for instance, the
Under Ground Alice Changes her size simply by breaking off a bit of mushroom, while the
wonderland Alice actually swallows it, a more precise rendering of what she must do for the
mushroom to take effect. He also clarifies details: when Alice, twelve or fifteen inches high
(in Under Ground and Wonderland, respectively), wants to hide the playing-card gardeners
from the soldiers ordered to behead them, she no longer hides them in her pocket (how large
can her pocket be?) but in a flower pot.

-88-

Carroll also improves the humor. In Under Ground Alice had to nibble the top of the
mushroom to make herself larger, and the stalk to make herself smaller. In Wonderland, she
nibbles two different sides of the mushroom--allowing Carroll to play with the notion of
finding the two sides of a circle. When Alice is trying to decide whether she is now a
different child, by reciting a geography lesson, the Under Ground Alice says, " London is the
capital of France, and Rome is the capital of Yorkshire, and Paris . . ." ( Under Ground, 14),
while the Wonderland Alice says, " London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of
Rome, and Rome . . ." 3 The nonsense is more elegant in the second version, with all the
terms being cities and with each proposition repeating the last term of the preceding one.

Even Carroll's longer additions result from an impulse to embellish. The "Pig and Pepper"
and "A Mad Tea Party" chapters are entirely new, as are large sections of the dialogue with
the Mock Turtle and Gryphon. These sections contain most of Carroll's wordplay, a kind of
secondary elaboration that he could develop more easily in the process of writing, as the tale
grew away from its oral origins.

In general, Carroll makes effective changes as he goes from Under Ground to Wonderland,
clarifying phrases and sharpening the humor. He also preserves an effective tone, as if he is
still close enough to his original audience--Alice--to know how to address her effectively. He
respected her and generally avoided condescension. He knew that she'd enjoy his play with
words and logic, as he did himself; he was therefore sharing his own interests with the child
reader, not imputing hypothetical ones. He knew too that she would enjoy an adventure story
about a complex child who both rebels and conforms. He did not give her instruction that
assumed her ignorance, nor did he give her moral pap that would teach her proper behavior.

But a few of Carroll's changes do not appear to be unabashed improvements. In fact, they
seem to anticipate some of the kinds of changes he would later make in preparing The
Nursery "Alice." Early in the book, Carroll adds "very" when Alice says, "I am so very tired
of being all alone here!" ( Under Ground16; Wonderland, 17). He adds "really" when she
says, ". . . for really I'm quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!" ( Under Ground, 35;
Wonder-land

-89-
land, 28 ). He adds "a word" when the Mock Turtle admonishes, ". . . don't speak a word till
I've finished" ( Underground, 80; Wonderland, 74). The words that Carroll has added are all
unnecessary; the meaning is clear without them. In most revising one would hope to move in
the other direction, to excise unnecessary verbiage. Still, all these examples are from the
book's dialogue, and in conversations people do throw in extra words for emphasis, not
revising as they speak.

Nevertheless such verbiage creeps in not only in the dialogue. In Under Ground, for instance,
the glass table and the little door "vanish," while in Wonderland they "vanish completely." In
Under Ground Alice "thinks something," while in Wonderland she "thinks it to herself." Thus
the narrator, too, pads his language, and I suspect that this kind of change reflects something
of Carroll's attitude toward his audience. He may have felt that in writing for children, in
registering points for them, he needed to throw in more words for emphasis. In doing so,
however, in not altogether respecting their understanding, he becomes a bit condescending.
Fortunately that trait does not predominate in Under Ground or Wonderland. It does,
however, predominate in The Nursery "Alice," published more than twenty years later for
children too young to appreciate Wonderland.

This condescending attitude, this sentimental image of the child, was a constant temptation to
Carroll. He yielded in the prefatory poems in the Alice books, but he confined this attitude to
the periphery of his work. Much later, in the Sylvic and Bruno books, Carroll again fell prey,
giving Bruno too-cute baby talk and rhapsodizing about love, with a sentimentality largely
unrelieved by the refreshing egocentrism and wit of the Alice books.

The Nursery "Alice," in any case, was aimed at a younger child than the Alice books were. At
least some of the changes Carroll made are bona fide simplifications, bringing the book more
within the range of the younger child. He simplified the vocabulary, changing, for instance,
"scurried" to "ran." Even such a gross measure of reading level as the Fog index, which
measures sentence length and the percentage of words of three or more syllables, suggests the
extent to which Carroll has simplified Nursery. A sampling of narrative passages in
Wonderland indicates a reading level of about fifteenth grade (junior year in college), while
Nursery has a reading level of seventh or eighth grade. I would argue about the grade-

-90-

level assignments--for after all, the books are stories about characters, not textbooks dealing
in abstractions-but the difference in grade level is suggestive. 4 Carroll has simplified his
sentences and vocabulary in Nursery. And, one could argue, appropriately so-though I have
some qualms about assumptions that young children need short sentences and need to
understand every word in a book, especially in a book meant, like Nursery, to be read to
rather than by children.

In any case, one could see at least some of Carroll's changes as suitable for his younger
audience, but I find other changes more questionable. Let me introduce these changes by
comparing the opening passages of the two books.

Wonderland
Alice was beginning to get very
tired of sitting by her sister on the
bank and of having nothing to do:
once or twice she had peeped into
Nursery
ONCE upon a time, there was a
little girt called Alice: and she had
a very curious dream.
Would you like to hear what it
 Wonderland
the book her sister was reading,
but it had no pictures or
conversations in it, "and what is
the use of a book," thought Alice,
"without pictures or conversations?"
So she was considering, in her
own mind (as well as she could,
for the hot day made her feel very
sleepy and stupid), whether the
pleasure of making a daisy-chain
would be worth the trouble of
getting up and picking the daisies,
when suddenly a White Rabbit
with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very
remarkable in that; nor did Alice
think it so very much out of the
way to hear the Rabbit say to itself
"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too
late!" (when she thought it over
afterwards it occurred to her that
she ought to have wondered at
this, but at the time it all seemed
-91-
Wonderland
quite natural); but, when the
Rabbit actually took a watch out of
its waistcoat-pocket and looked at it,
and then hurried on, Alice started
to her feet, for it flashed across her
mind that she had never before
seen a rabbit with either a
waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to
take out of it, and burning with
curiosity, she ran across the field
after it, and was just in time to see
it pop down a large rabbit-hole
under the hedge.
Nursery
was that she dreamed about?
Well, this was the first thing that
happened. A White Rabbit came
running by, in a great hurry; and,
just as it passed Alice, it stopped,
and took its watch out of its
pocket.
Wasn't that a funny thing? Did
you ever see a Rabbit that had a
watch, and a pocket to put it in?
Of course, when a Rabbit has a
watch, it must have a pocket to put
it in: it would never do to carry it
about in its mouth--and it wants
its hands sometimes, to run about
with.
Hasn't it got pretty pink eyes (I
think all White Rabbits have pink
eyes); and pink ears; and a nice
brown coat; and you can just see
its red pocket-handkerchief peeping
out of its coat-pocket: and, what
with its blue neck-tie and its yellow
Nursery
waistcoat, it really is very nicely
dressed.
"Oh dear, oh dear!" said the
Rabbit. "I shall be too late!" What
would it be too late for, I wonder?
Well, you see, it had to go and
visit the Duchess (you'll see a
picture of the Duchess, soon
sitting in her kitchen): and the
Duchess was a very cross old lady:
and the Rabbit knew she'd be very
angry indeed if he kept her
waiting. So the poor thing was as
 Wonderland
In another moment down went
Alice after it, never once
considering how in the world she
was to get out again. ( Wonderland,
7 - 8 ).
after it: and she ran, and she ran,
till she tumbled right down the
rabbit-hole. 5
Nursery
frightened as frightened could be
(Don't you see how he's
trembling? Just shake the book a
little, from side to side, and you'll
soon see him tremble), because he
thought the Duchess would have
his head cut off, for a punishment.
That was what the Queen of
Hearts used to do, when she was
angry with people (you'll see a
picture of her soon): at least she
used to order their heads to be cut
off, and she always thought it was
done, though they never really did
it.
And so, when the White Rabbit
ran away, Alice wanted to see what
would happen to it: so she ran

The narrator of Nursery has simplified the language, but at the same time he becomes more
intrusive, more willing to question and explain, to tease and cajole, to condescend. He
eliminates the details of peripheral actions--such as the thought of making daisychains--and
shortens and simplifies sentences and paragraphs. He

-92-

also uses locutions that may be especially familiar to the young child, such as "Once upon a
time." Similarly, the narrator says of Alice, "she ran, and she ran," a doubled construction that
Carroll also uses elsewhere in Nursery, a construction reflecting the kinds of sentences
children often produce, and perhaps feel comfortable with, a series of short clauses joined by
"and."

Some of the narrator's added explanations pertain to the book as a whole. For instance, he
gives the dream provenance of Alice's adventures right away, in the first sentence. In
Wonderland, we do not learn until the end that Alice is dreaming, and as a result we are
drawn into her adventures with greater immediacy. In Nursery Carroll sacrifices immediacy
for reassuring explainability. A similar impulse probably informs the preview of adventures
that he provides here, when he describes the Duchess and the Queen rather than plunging us
into adventures and letting us make what we can of them.

Some of the narrator's explaining is less global, more local. In the fourth paragraph, for
instance, he goes into elaborate detail concerning what is so unusual about a rabbit with a
watch and a pocket. He wants to make sure that we know what rabbits are ordinarily like, and
how this one differs (much as he later takes the trouble to explain what a Mock Turtle is and
why it has the head of a calf). His stance is further underscored by the increased use of italics
in Nursery--as if he wants to be quite sure the child follows the meaning. For she is such a
very ignorant dimpled darling that he must make doubly certain that his meaning is
absolutely clear. Such explanations and emphasis are condescending--after all, Beatrix Potter
felt no need to explain how her rabbits differ from those we are likely to encounter in our
own gardens.

Acknowledgment of some difference between the narrator and the child reader is not
necessarily bad, but this acknowledgment should be subtle, such as choosing subject matter
that a child will like and perhaps be somewhat familiar with. The author should also treat the
child as an equal. Sometimes in his revision Carroll makes appropriate reference to the child's
sphere of knowledge, without condescending--he notes that Alice has become the size of a
doll, and that the Dormouse's head is like a pillow, that discussions of cats and dogs in front
of a mouse are like discussions of lesson books and medicine in front of the child reader. But
overall tone is

-93-

important: one can write to the child as different but equal (perhaps writing to the child in
oneself) or write to the child as different and inferior (necessarily other than the self). Too
often Carroll does the latter in Nursery.

A clear example of such condescension appears at the beginning of the third paragraph. A
child does not need a whole sentence devoted to saying, "Well, this was the first thing that
happened." In later chapters the condescension becomes more blatantly insulting, when the
narrator says, "Well, you are an ignorant child!" or "Do you know anything?" ( Nursery, 13,
47).

Contributing to the narrator's condescension is his desire to shield children from external and
internal dangers. As soon as we are introduced to the Queen, with her threats of decapitation,
we are reassured that the heads are never really chopped off. We may eventually be given
that reassurance in Wonderland too--but only eventually, only after we have experienced the
thrill of worrying that Alice may offend the Queen and lose her head. Carroll has deodorized
Nursery, subduing the death hints, excising the suggestion that when Alice shrinks she might
go out like a candle, and not mentioning the Cheshire Cat's very long claws. Carroll is
behaving like those parents who want to shield their children from anything unpleasant, who
refuse to expose their children to, say, the terrors of Where the Wild Things Are or the
"morbid picture of death" in Charlotte's Web. 6

Likewise, Carroll shields the child from internal dangers, from unworthy impulses, and
makes Alice more of a model of good behavior. In Wonderland, Alice's fall down the rabbit
hole seems to be intentional, even if unconsidered: she doesn't stop to think of how she'll get
out again; she impulsively follows the rabbit. In Nursery, it seems accidental: she simply
tumbles down. She seems less willful. Similarly, later when she is in the White Rabbit's
house, the Wonderland Alice daringly drinks from an unlabeled bottle, while the Nursery
Alice drinks from a bottle labeled "drink me." The Nursery Alice is less willful, somewhat
better behaved. Thus she provides a more proper model for the young Victorian child, but
becomes a less enchanting character.
In shielding Alice from herself, from her willfulness, the narrator tries to teach the reader
how to behave--such didacticism is far more prevalent in Nursery than in Wonderland. The
narrator fre-

-94-

quently admonishes the reader, telling her to be kind to her puppy, telling her not to hold a
baby by grasping its left foot and right ear. At one point he introduces an academic lesson on
the derivation of the word "Fox-Glove"--by coyly urging the child reader not to be in a bad
temper, for "It's a very little lesson indeed!" ( Nursery, 34).

Another arena for the narrator's didacticism relates to the pictures, some twenty of which
have been retained, now colored. The fifth paragraph of Nursery describes the initial picture,
whose colorfulness encourages Carroll to become lavishly descriptive in his prose, pointing
out the Rabbit's pink eyes and ears, brown coat, blue necktie, and yellow waistcoat. Such
colors crop up in the text throughout Carroll's revision. The impetus is probably partly
didactic, to teach the child colors, much as later the narrator uses the pictures to teach the
child numbers, by counting the cups on the tea table, the roses on the tree, the jurors in the
jury box. 7 ( Carroll apparently assumes that his reader cannot yet cope with measurement,
though, for he eliminates such phrases as "ten inches high" and "nine feet high.")

In fact, large parts of Nursery appear to be a guided tour of selected Tenniel pictures, more
than redactions of Carroll's original story. His text may still predominate, at least in bulk, but
the provenance of the pictures often dominates the story, as Carroll's narrator takes on the
role of the adult reader, guiding the child through the pictures, rather than that of the
storyteller. Curiously, though, the pictures and story are not well-coordinated on the pages--
the narrator frequently comments on a picture that is not currently visible, a surprising
oversight in a writer as meticulous about printing as Carroll was; a writer who, for example,
refused to sell the first printing of Nursery in England because the pictures were "far too
bright and gaudy." 8 In any case, Carroll himself described Nursery thus: "pictures enlarged,
and coloured by Tenniel, and with explanations in easy words just as one would explain the
pictures to a child." 9 He seems to be moving closer to the children's picture book, in which
pictures dominate a very brief text, as in Beatrix Potter's pathbreaking work near the turn of
the century--but only gropingly.

The Mad Tea Party provides a clear example of how Nursery becomes a guided tour of
Tenniel. Here, as elsewhere, Carroll has

-95-

eliminated most of the dialogue and all of the wordplay. The only dialogue that he retains is
the Hatter saying, "Your hair wants cutting!"--which allows the narrator to question and gush,
"That was a rude thing to say, wasn't it? And do you think her hair does want cutting? I think
it's a very pretty length--just the right length" ( Nursery, 40). Instead of portraying the
madness of the tea party, through dialogue and wordplay, the brief chapter is focused on the
picture, the narrator counting the cups and wondering if the March Hare has a plate hidden
behind the milk jug and explaining the "10/6" on the Hatter's hat and the straw in the Hare's
hair.

Occasionally the focus on illustrations inspires Carroll to make a good addition, to create a
good piece of nonsense. In the introductory passage, for instance, he notes parenthetically of
the Rabbit, "Don't you see how he's trembling? Just shake the book a little, from side to side,
and you'll soon see him tremble." Later Carroll takes advantage of the position of two
pictures on contiguous leaves and plays with the implications of turning up the corner of the
leaf to look at Alice (anticipating recent children's books with partial pages that modify a
previous or subsequent scene). But just as often this focus on the illustrations leads Carroll
astray, most notably in his response to the picture showing a huge puppy and a tiny Alice. In
Wonderland, the scene is incidental, but in Nursery, Carroll devotes a whole chapter to it: he
tells a rather dull story about children who give their puppy a birthday treat of oatmeal
porridge.

Another curious consequence of focusing on the pictures is the abruptness of transitions

between chapters. Chapter 5 ends with Bill the Lizard and "How frightened he must have
been!"; Chapter 6 begins with "Well, it doesn't look like such a very little Puppy, does it?" (
Nursery, 20, 21). Chapter 11 ends with the Queen arriving in the garden: "And isn't she
angry? Oh, my poor little Alice!"; Chapter 12 begins with "Did you ever play at Croquet?
There are large wooden balls . . ." ( Nursery, 44, 45). Chapter 12 ends with the narrator
admonishing the reader to be careful about dancing with a Gryphon and a Mock Turtle, "Or
they'll be treading on your toes, as they did on poor Alice's"; Chapter 13 begins with "Did
you ever hear how the Queen of Hearts made some tarts? And can you tell me what became
of them?" ( Nursery, 48, 49). This abruptness contrasts with the care Carroll takes in
Wonderland (even more in Through the Looking-Glass) to bridge chapters: at the end of "The

-96-

Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill," Alice comes upon the mushroom on which the Caterpillar sits;
at the end of "Pig and Pepper," the Cheshire Cat points out directions to the Mad Hatter and
the March Hare; at the end of "The Lobster-Quadrille," Alice hears a distant cry of "The
trial's beginning!" Carroll might have thought that very young children would have such short
attention spans that they couldn't sit through more than a chapter at a time, and careful
bridging would be unnecessary. In any case, having cast aside much of his original text, he is
left with isolated pictures only.

In general, the Wonderland chapters that centered on wordplay and mangled verse (whose
originals Carroll may not have expected young children to know) have largely disappeared in
substance, replaced by tours of the pictures. Yet the chapters that centered more on action,
such as Alice getting stuck in the White Rabbit's house, retain much of that action. Carroll
largely pruned back to episodes from Under Ground, eliminating the secondary elaborations,
the ingenious wordplay. He returned to the oral origins, the narrator pretending to talk to the
child. Yet returning to oral origins is not necessarily bad. What went wrong?

Perhaps in attempting to write a book for the very young child, in experimenting with a new
mode, Carroll simply embarked on paths that later writers have abandoned: he adopts the role
of reader/guide rather than that of storyteller. For the narrator frequently interjects questions
like "What do you think it was?", "Don't you think she was right?", "Isn't it a little darling?"
He plays the role now reserved for the adult who is reading to the child.

Another possibility is that the aging Carroll lost touch with the child's perspective. One of his
early child-friends has acknowledged how sensitive he could be to his immediate audience,
often taking "his cue from her remarks--a question would set him off on quite a new trail of
ideas, so that one felt one had somehow helped to make the story" (quoted in Diaries, 343).
But such collaboration is absent from Nursery. Certainly he couldn't have collaborated
meaningfully with Marie Van de Gucht, to whom he dedicated the book-for Marie was
already eleven when he first met her in 1885, and sixteen when the book was first published
in England, much older than the intended audience of children aged five and under.

Carroll may also have been ill advised to address very young children, a group he had never
felt much empathy with. When asked

-97-

once to contribute verse on the occasion of the birth of a girl, he admitted to hating babies,
and his first contribution began:

Oh pudgy podgy pup!

Why did they wake you up?
Those crude nocturnal yells
Are not like silver bells . . . ( Letters I, 392)

Certainly his fondness for the very young did not increase as he grew older, for the ideal age
of his "child friends" increased. As he noted in a letter of 1894, when he was sixty-two,
"Twenty or thirty years ago, 'ten' was about my ideal age for such friends: now 'twenty' or
'twenty-five' is nearer the mark" ( Letters, II, 1008-09).

Perhaps too the aging Carroll lost touch with his own childhood, with the child in himself.
Maurcie Sendak, for example, has acknowledged that he writes for himself about concerns
that also happen to be those of children: "I write for myself, out of myself, and out of my own
personal problems, the lifelong problems of a middle-aged man. Perhaps, because of some
peculiar gift, they reflect back the problems or the life of a child." 10 In his early works,
Carroll pursues interests that he shared with children, interests in, say, logical absurdity and
the possibility of extinction. But in Nursery he tries more to give the child reader what's good
for him or her.

In short, Carroll may have aimed his work too much at a generalized image of the child,
rather than at a specific child. To borrow C. S. Lewis's words, Carroll wrote to "'children'
conceived as a strange species whose habits [he] ha[s] 'made up' like an anthropologist or a
commercial traveller," rather than to children conceived as equals. 11 One way to write to
children as equals is to write to a specific child, as Robert Louis Stevenson did, to his stepson
Lloyd, and Beatrix Potter, to the son of her former governess. Alice Liddell is clearly the
audience for Carroll's Alice books, as we know by the books' genesis and by specific
references in the books, including those to Alice, the Dodo, and a cat named Dinah. Marie
Van de Gucht has not, however, left much of an imprint on The Nursery "Alice," after the
dedicatory poem. In fact, she wasn't even the right age.

In writing a more general work to a more generalized child--a situation compounded by the
difficulties of experimenting with a

-98-

new mode-- Carroll apparently lost touch with the real children he thought he was writing for.
He may have been hoping that the "illiterate, ungrammatical, dimpled Darlings" would
thumb, coo over, dogs'-ear, rumple, and kiss the book (Preface, Nursery, xx). 12 Clearly he
felt the need to teach and to condescend. Yet when Carroll addresses a specific child in a
letter--when he has a strong sense of the individual reader--much of the old magic remains.
As late as 1896, fourteen months before he died, Carroll could write thus to a thirteen year
old, shortly after seeing her:

Having now allowed a year or two (more or less) to elapse, in order

to give you time to recover your courage, I write to ask whether
you are disengaged for next Saturday evening. . . . What do you
usually drink at dinner? My lady-guests mostly prefer draught-
lemonade. But you can have any of the following beverages:

1. bottled lemonade;
2. ginger-beer;
3. beer;
4. water;
5. milk;
6. vinegar;
7. ink.

Nobody has yet chosen either No. 6 or No. 7. ( Letters, II, 1102).

NOTES
1. Anne Clark, Lewis Carroll: A Biography ( New York: Schocken, 1979),
231. Martin Gardner, introducing the 1966 Dover reprint of The Nursery
"Alice" notes, "How sucessful is The Nursey "Alice" when read today to an
English or American boy or girl, upper or lower, ago 0 to 5? I prefer not to
guess. In some ways the language seems patronizing, but one must admit
that Carroll has retold Alice's dream in a way that is easily understood by
small children" (p. ix). Roger Lancelyn Green expresses a contrary opinion
in a note in his edition of The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, vol. II ( New York:
Oxford University, Press, 1954), 469: "As a book for children under five it
is only surpassed by the best of Beatrix Potter--and wellwritten, well-
illustrated books for children of that age are woefully scarce." Subsequent
reference to the Diaries is given parenthetically in the text, preceded by
Diaries.
2. Alice's Adventures Under Ground: Being a Facsimile of the Original Ms.
Book Afterwards Developed into "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" ( Lon-

-99-

don, 1876; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1932), 26.

Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text,
preceded by Under Ground.
3. Alice in
Wonderland:
Authoritative
 Texts of Alice's
Adventures in
Wonderland,
Through the
Looking-Glass,
The Hunting of
the Snark,
Backgrounds,
Essays in
Criticism, ed.
Donald J. Gray,
Norton Critical
Edition ( New
York: Norton,
1971), 17.
4. For excellent
discussions of
the limits of
readability
formulas, see
Jack Selzer
What
Constitutes a
'Readable'
Technical Style?
and Thomas N.
Huckin's A
Cognitive
Approach to
Readability,"
both in New
Essays in
Technical and
Scientific
Communication:
Research,
Theory,
Practice, ed.
Paul V.
Anderson , R.
John
Brockmann, and
Carolyn R.
Miller,
 Baywood's
Technical
Communication
Series, vol. 2
(Farmingdale,
N.Y.: Baywood,
1983), 71-89,
90-108.
5. The Nursery
"Alice", introd.
by Martin
Gardner ( New
York: Dover,
1966), 1-3.
Subsequent
references are
given
parenthetically
in the text,
preceded by
Nursery."
6. For a discussion
of censorship,
and of works
attacked by
adult censors,
see, for example,
Myra Pollack
Sadker and
David Miller
Sadker, Now
Upon a Time: A
Contemporary
View of
Children's
Literature ( New
York: Harper
and Row, 1977),
361-82.
7. Though he gets
the number of
roses wrong, as
Brian Sibley
 points out in
The Nursery
'Alice'
Illustrations,"
Jabberwocky, 4
( 1975), 93.
8. The Letters of
Lewis Carroll,
ed. Morton
Cohen, vol. 2
( New York:
Oxford
University
Press, 1979),
749, n. 1.
(Subsequent
references are
given
parenthetically
in the text,
preceded by
Letters.) They
would do for
Americans or
Australians or
the poor (see, for
instance, Anne
Clark, 233).
Witness also
Carroll's
concern, in a
letter to his
publisher, about
lining up type on
adjacent pages
of the published
version of
Alice's
Adventures
Under Ground:
"I am just
sending off a
copy to a friend,
and, on
 examining it, I
find that, at pp.
20, 21, pp. 46,
47, pp. 48, 49,
and pp. 80, 81,
the right-hand
page (judging by
the inner top
corners, which
are the points
that ought to
match) is a full
line higher than
the left-hand
page. The
artistic effect of
all such copies
is, to a great
extent, spoilt (
Letters, II,
658)."
Furthermore,
Carroll clearly
was not
completely
unaware of
where the
pictures in
Nursery fell, for
at one point he
invites the
reader to turn up
the corner of a
leaf, to see part
of the picture
underneath.
9. Ibid., 734.
10. Michael J.
Bandler,
"Childhood Is
Always with
Him", American
Way, May 1981,
 72. Sendak has
also said that
"all I have to go
on is what I
know--not only
about my
childhood then,
but about the
child I was as he
exists now"
(quoted in
Selma G. Lanes
The Art of
Maurice Sendak
[ New York:
Abrams, 1980],
27).

-100-

11. C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children", Proceedings of the
Bournemouth Conference ( London, 1952), reprinted in Only Connect:
Readings on Children's Literature, 2nd ed. Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, and
L. F. Ashley, eds. ( Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1980), 208.
12. In terms of recent research on writing, Carroll neglected to create a "rich
network of goals for affecting [his] reader," settling instead for a
conventional image of the reader ( Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, "The
Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem", College
Composition and Communication, 31 [ 1980], 30).

-101-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-102-

8
The Figure of the Decadent Artist in Poe, Baudelaire, and Swinburne

Roger C. Lewis

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to
us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary
monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. . . . Art is our spirited protest,
our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.
 -- OSCAR WILDE, The Decay of Lying

The Fall of the House of Usher ( 1839) provides us with a prototype for the decadent artist as
hero. Uncharacteristically, Poe uses a narrator who is not the protagonist in this tale, enabling
us to experience the ambiguous phenomenon of decadence from both a negative and a
positive point of view. That is, the pragmatic narrator is appalled by what he witnesses,
presenting the story of Roderick and Madeline Usher in pseudomedical terms as a factual
record of physical and psychological degeneration into perversion, madness, and death, the
final collapse of a family line and an ancestral mansion. In a moral or historical context, the
epithet "decadent" usually denotes decay of this sort. But in a literary sense, the term can
imply, as it does here, a certain glamour, even heroism. Usher does not view himself as the
prosaic narrator does: he chooses to live according to what might be called the decadent
aesthetic, anatomized at midcentury by Baudelaire and exemplified during the fin de siècle by
Des Esseintes, the hero of J. K. Huysmans' A Rebours.

The decadent aesthetic involves a fundamental rejection of the natural in favor of the
artificial. Usher has withdrawn from all that the narrator regards as normal. Like William
Wilson and Ligeia,

-103-

other Poe characters of this period, he has created a fantastic self who spurns contact with
conventional reality. Philosophically, he appears to be a pessimist of the Schopenhauerian
persuasion, recognizing that history has reached a point where happiness is only a nostalgic
memory, now unattainable in a universe subject to mechanical determinisms indifferent to
human desire--the dead world of nineteenth-century science and materialism evoked in
Usher's song, The Haunted Palace." Having renounced this world, he has taken the
Schopenhauerian escape route of aesthetic contemplation.

Just as the figure of the brilliant detective emerged virtually complete from Poe's brain in the
Dupin stories, so the decadent artist is fully embodied in Usher. Aristocratic and reserved, he
is "the last of the ancient race of the Ushers," his tainted heredity evident in his neurasthenic
languor and strikingly externalized in his house. He is "the ennuyé man of the world," a
dandy with elegant manners and exquisite refinements, a Fatal Man. His complexion is
"cadaverous" but his eyes are "large, liquid and luminous beyond comparison," his lips
"somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve." His nose, "of a
delicate Hebrew model," has "a breadth of nostril" but his "finely molded chin" speaks, "in its
want of prominence, of a want of moral energy." These features are crowned by a high
forehead and "silken hair," which "in its wild gossamer texture . . . floated rather than fell
about the face" so that the narrator could not connect "its Arabesque expression with any idea
of simple humanity."

Like nearly all decadents, Usher suffers from "an excessive nervous agitation" and a "morbid
acuteness of the senses." 1 Partly hereditary, this condition also derives from the quest for
evasion of boredom through refinement of sensations, often involving powerful stimulants.
What Baudelaire was to call "spleen," the melancholia of the decadent, is briefly sensed by
the narrator as the tale opens: upon seeing the house in its landscape, he experiences "an utter
depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the
after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous
dropping off of the veil." 2 Usher's voice is that of "the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable
eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement." Merely natural pleasures
irritate him: he can take only
 -104-

the most insipid food; "the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by
even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments,
which did not inspire him with horror." Above all, he is tortured by an apprehension of a
terminal struggle with "the grim phantasm FEAR." 3 As we learn at the tale's end, as well as
at the end of The Masque of the Red Death, for the decadent who lives in isolation on his
nerves, the ultimate threat is the fear of reality, and the reality of fear.

As an aesthete, Usher revels in all forms of the fantastic, but his intellect is nevertheless
"lofty and spiritual," for the decadent artist is heroic in the quality and intensity of his
commitment to idealism, to the pursuit of what Poe calls "supernal beauty." 4 This quest for
the unattainable appears in Usher's bizarre infatuation with his twin sister, Madeline. His
androgynous appearance suggests that he is a Narcissus-figure, absorbed in an isolated
reverie of self-contemplation while seeking to merge his ego with the identity of his twin. He
is a poet, musician, composer, and painter, combining these arts to produce works
characterized by the narrator as fantasias, improvisations, and rhapsodies, none of which owe
anything to nature. His paintings are nonrepresentational designs reminiscent of Fuseli that
throw the narrator into "an intensity of intolerable awe." 5 His song, "The Haunted Palace,"
impresses the narrator as the calculated production of a craftsman, "the result of that intense
mental collectedness and concentration" that Usher achieved when he was in a state of "the
highest artificial excitement." 6

These criteria, intensity and artificiality, suggest Poe's own aesthetics, as expounded in The
Poetic Principle ( 1850). There he spoke of "the poem per se. . . written simply for the
poem's sake." As Gautier in his Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin ( 1835) had sought to
rescue French art from the fetters of respectability, utility, and progress, Poe denounced what
he called "the heresy of The Didactic," attacking the orthodoxy that imaginative literature
should always have a pragmatic bias towards moral and intellectual statement. He denied art's
mimetic function as well, claiming that the representation of natural human passion in poetry
is more degrading than elevating. During the fin de siècle, Oscar Wilde warned that any
moral or ethical sympathy in the artist was an unpardonable mannerism of style, good and
evil being merely colors on the art-

-105-

ist's palette. For Poe, as for Wilde, art is not a mirror, but a veil, through which we may
glimpse that supreme icon of the decadent aesthete, Beauty. 7

In defining poetry as "The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty" Poe insists that this Beauty is "not
a quality, . . . but an effect, . . . that intense and pure elevation of soul--not of intellect or
heart." 8 Clearly, as M. H. Abrams has noted, Poe is talking about what Longinus called the
sublime, in its literal meaning of "elevation." 9 A preference for quintessential or "pure"
poetry leads us, Poe maintains, to regard a long poem as "a flat contradiction in terms," much
inferior to a lyric that has been purged of the verbiage that Verlaine and the Symbolists later
characterized as "éloquence" and "littérature." In Poe's system of Platonic idealism, Beauty is
the transcendent reality that may be glimpsed through the imagination and that renders the
material world of nature unreal, or at least trivial. Poetry is the language of this spiritual
reality, but it is a language that can only be mastered by a conscious artist, a craftsman who is
not dependent upon the vagaries of inspiration. Poe's preoccupation, in The Philosophy of
Composition ( 1846), with the intricacies of technique in relation to language foreshadows a
similar decadent concern. As Paul Valéry wrote, echoing Poe: "A poet's function is not to
experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others." 10

The Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones once declared, "The more materialistic
Science becomes, the more angels I shall paint," epitomizing the defiance of the decadent
artist against the ugly and stupid world he is forced to inhabit. 11 Poe's heroes often take
intellectual dandyism and perverseness to an extreme. In The Cask of Amontillado, an
aristocrat executes a murder as though he were an artist creating a masterpiece, striving for
that formal perfection that Poe characterizes as "unity of effect"; his victim is the mortal
enemy of the decadent artist as hero--the philistine as bourgeois. In The Black Cat, Poe
illustrates another notion central to the decadent aesthetic, that there exists "an innate and
primitive principle of human action, which we may call perverseness. . . . the unfathomable
longing of the soul to vex itself--to offer violence to its own nature--to do wrong for the
wrong's sake only. . . ." 12 By grounding his plots in psychological rather than supernatural
causes, Poe changed profoundly the nature and direction of literary

-106-

fantasy. Denying that he was merely an imitator of E. T. A. Hoffmann, he declared that

"terror is not of Germany, but of the soul." 13

Baudelaire's discovery of Poe was Narcissus finding his reflection; he wrote to a friend:

Do you know why I have so patiently translated Poe? Because he was like me.
The first time that I opened one of his books, I saw with terror and delight, not
only subjects I had dreamed of, but SENTENCES I had thought, and which he
had written twenty years before. 14

However, the narcissist, according to Freud, may love not what he or she is but what he or
she would like to be. In his writings on Poe, Baudelaire freely embellishes Poe's career in
order to present him as poè'te maudit and martyr to the cause of decadence, a word which is
clearly honorific in this context. As decadent artist, Poe becomes a typically Baudelairean
figure, a Miltonic Satan rebelling against the American God, Mammon. To the Frenchman,
Poe seemed an aristocratic dandy among the rabble, as desperately marooned as the courtesan
Manon Lescaut had been in the swamps of Louisiana. The first poem in Les Fleurs du Mal,
ironically titled "Consecration," shows the poet victimized by "those he longs to love": his
wife, who seems to be partly Salome, goddess of Decadence, and partly the cruel Sphinx,
turns herself into a gilded, baleful idol whose response to his adoration is to rip open his chest
and sink her talons into his beating heart. Like Prometheus, though, the decadent artist can
renew his vital organs; his endless suffering is recorded in his supremely disciplined art.

Central to the development of the decadent aesthetic is the cult of the dandy. From Beau
Brummel to Max Beerbohm, aesthetic criteria are paramount: when the aesthetic is detached
from theories of morality and ethics, the aesthetic itself becomes a theory of both. Baudelaire
comments in his journal:

A dandy doesn't do anything. Can you imagine a dandy speaking to the

masses, except to scoff at them?

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable. Also, she is always vulgar, that
is, the opposite of the dandy.
 The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live and
sleep before a mirror.

The more a man cultivates the arts, the fewer erections he gets. 15

-107-

The dandy's discipline of self-purification releases a fantastic persona, which rises superior to
the contemptible natural personality, an aesthetic identity uncontaminated by a degenerate
civilization. With Milton's Satan the dandy can say: "The mind is its own place and in itself /
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n." 16

The decadent aesthetic belongs in two historical contexts, the literary and the psychological.
Most theorizing about imagination and fantasy, from Coleridge to the surrealists, is
interwoven with the history of the unconscious from Herder to Freud. For Baudelaire, the
imagination was an instrument of discovery, and the unconscious a reservoir of truth.
"Poetry," he said, "is the most real of things; it is what is completely true only in another
world." 17 More than other French writers of his age he followed the Coleridgean view that
the imagination is a God-like creative power that also yields knowledge by its penetration
into the unconscious. It is, Baudelaire claimed, "the most scientific of the faculties, because it
alone comprehends universal analogy," the correspondences between the natural and ideal
realms. 18 Thus, even the poet as dandy holds himself aloof from his environment, his work
possesses value and meaning for others because poetry is the language of spiritual reality.

The world as it was conceived by an earlier generation of European Romantic writers was, at
midcentury, no longer available to Baudelaire. After the corrosive skepticism of
Schopenhauer, Strauss, and Renan, religious faith was nearly untenable. The grand Romantic
ideal of love seemed to Baudelaire a mere psychosis, a hoax perpetrated by the bestial sex
instincts. Woman must be idealized, or idolized, to be made bearable: her flesh hidden by
cosmetics and her natural allure replaced by the sterile luster of jewelry, she becomes the icon
of decadent beauty, "a dream of stone." 19 The persona of Les Fleurs du Mal, a metaphorical
identity containing both poet and reader, seeks always le nouveau frisson. Straining to
perceive the slightest tremor from his unconscious, he is frequently engulfed by the horrors
that erupt from that source. Sometimes with hashish or wine he reaches the luminous abyss,
but always when the vision fades, he is left with the realization that it has been an exercise in
narcissism, that he has merely become his own God. Fantasies of violent passion set in Rome
or Byzantium mingle with

-108-

utopian dreams of a Paris from which all traces of nature have been eliminated. Finally, the
bored and sated decadent falls prey to spleen:

silent hordes of obscene spiders spin their webs across the basements of our
brains;

-And giant hearses, without dirge or drums parade at half-step in my soul,

where Hope, defeated, weeps, and the oppressor Dread plants his black flag on
my assenting skull. 20

The "spleen" poems illustrate what Paul Bourget meant in 1881 when he described
Baudelaire as a mind breaking down and analyzing its own sensations. Following
Baudelaire's lead and speaking for modern French writers, Bourget said: "We accept, without
humility as without pride, this terrible word decadence." 21 From Bourget's critique of
Baudelaire, we learn that decadence is at once a grave spiritual crisis and the dawn of literary
modernism. The ambiguity derives from two different metaphors underlying this term.
Traditionally, decadence refers to a modern falling-off from classical standards as part of the
life cycle of a cultural organism that flourishes during a golden age, matures, and then
decays. Baudelaire and Bourget still use decadent to mean breaking down or falling apart, but
they have replaced the passive vegetable metaphor with the image of culture as an instrument
actively shaped by conscious, deliberate choice; the antonym of decadence is no longer
classical civilization but progress. For these artists, decadence becomes antienvironment or a
counter-myth that reveals the falseness of the progress myth and other orthodoxies hostile to
art. Decadence as a program means showing that the emperor's new clothes are not there.

While the decadent artist may break down prejudices, break away from moribund
conventions, and break up traditional literary audiences, he also runs the risk of breaking
down himself. W. H. Auden and D. H. Lawrence have both claimed that Poe was one of the
first modern writers because he suffered consciously the impact of the disintegration of the
traditional community and its values. 22 Baudelaire, alternately amused and nauseated by the
modern spectacle of universal futility, was able, according to T. S. Eliot, to walk

-109-

"secure in this high vocation, that he was capable of a damnation denied to the politicians and
the newspaper editors of Paris." 23 That is, he was one of the "lost violent souls" rather than
one of "the hollow men" in Eliot's famous poem. Yet Baudelaire, who wrote in his journal
that "the theory of true civilization . . . lies in the diminution of the traces of original sin,"
perhaps deserves better than Eliot's faint praise; I prefer these lines that Auden wrote in 1939
in memory of Freud:

[He] showed us what evil is: not as we thought Deeds that must be punished,
but our lack of faith Our dishonest mood of denial The concupiscence of the
oppressor. 24

Swinburne's role as a star performer in the decadent theater of bloodlust and blasphemy has
been documented in Mario Praz's compendium of decadence, The Romantic Agony.
Swinburne was also, during the 1860s, fervent but nearly solitary champion in England of
Poe, Gautier, and Baudelaire. Guy de Maupassant thought Swinburne looked like Poe; Praz
notes that the standard verbal description of the English poet suggests Roderick Usher: thin,
pale, delicate lips, excessive development of the forehead, and habitual trembling. 25 Yet
Swinburne seems to have had more impact on the decadent aesthetic as a virtuoso poet, a
stylist, than as a debauched aristocrat. For all the fire and flamboyance of the legendary
personality, Swinburne's style is marked by a peculiar impersonality. Many readers find a
jarring disjunction between the beautiful flow of language and the disturbing, sometimes
disgusting content of his more lurid work.

In 1872 the pamphleteer Robert Buchanan attacked Poe, Baudelaire, Gautier, Rossetti,
Morris, and Swinburne as "the Fleshly School of Poetry," accusing them of promoting the
idea that "poetic expression is greater than poetic thought, . . . and sound superior to sense." 26
As applied to Swinburne, this charge seems oddly just; Arthur Symons, a critic quite
sympathetic to these poets, nevertheless identifies this same feature in his essay on Meredith:
"What decadence in literature really means is that learned corruption of language by which
style ceases to be organic and becomes, in the pursuit of some new expressiveness or beauty,
deliberately

-110-

abnormal." 27 With Swinburne, style became impersonal, breaking up the organic unity
between form and content, language and meaning. "In art," Swinburne once wrote, "the one
question is not what you mean but what you do," anticipating Archibald McLeish's verse
aphorism, "A poem should not mean, / But be." 28 A literary chameleon and linguistic
prodigy, Swinburne mastered all the traditional styles of English poetry as thoroughly as
James Joyce later mastered the whole range of English prose style. An astonishing technical
control allowed Swinburne to build up new verbal universes out of fragments of the old ones
he had broken down, just as Aubrey Beardsley, having broken down drawing to lines and
white spaces, created a new world of graphics. Bourget identified this method as decadent:

A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to

give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed
to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to
the independence of the word. 29

Like Dali's disappearing bust of Voltaire, Swinburne's poems seem to be the work of a
sorcerer; he transforms the material world into what it is not, into language. Hopkins
dismissed him with the comment, "words only are only words," but Eliot formulated the
matter with more precision:

When you take to pieces any verse of Swinburne, you find always that the
object was not there--only the word. . . . The world of Swinburne does not
depend upon some other world which it simulates; it has the necessary
completeness and self-sufficiency for justification and permanence. It is
impersonal, and no-one else could have made it . . . the object has ceased to
exist, because the meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning, because
language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric
nourishment. 30

Thus, the decadent aesthetic is present in Swinburne's work, but as language rather than truth,
as structures of metaphor rather than statements of doctrine.

The persona of the decadent artist in Swinburne's poetry is one in whom paganism lives, the
paganism of the Greek philosopher of transience and flux, Heraclitus, and of the fourth-
century Roman

-111-

Emperior Julian, who renounced Christianity. Swinburne's hymns to Pan and Proserpine
affirm a metaphorical pantheon dominated by the anarchistic conception of "love, the beloved
Republic," which will come into being, now that "the supreme evil, God," is dead, through
the apocalyptic transformation of a degenerate world grown gray from the breath of Christ.
Swinburne's homemade cosmogony, like those of Poe Eureka, Wagner Ring, and Yeat
Vision, represents the world of unlimited human desire projected as fantasy. The elegy in
memory of Baudelaire reaches its pagan climax when the traditional elegiac search for
consolidation breaks down with the realization that the poet can do no more than echo the
words of Catullus over his brother's grave: in perpetuum . . . ave atque vale; Nature cannot
help either, being merely the womb and tomb of life, "blind gods that cannot spare."

In Thalassius, Swinburne's verse autobiography, the poet tells us that he is "the suns child
and the sea's," consequently "a fosterling and fugitive on earth," alienated from his
materialistic society. Unlike most of the Victorian literature of spiritual crisis, this poem
records no final discovery of purpose leading to a secure orientation. The reward given to the
Thalassian poet by Apollo, his father, is permission to go on being a poet, to create works of
art with aesthetic integrity and perhaps to participate in that integrity, to be "no more a singer,
but a song." 31

Swinburne's eagerness in 1867 to publish his elegy celebrating the achievement of Baudelaire
signals his willingness to assume the mantle of the decadent artist, just as Baudelaire had
promoted and identified himself with Poe's work shortly after the death of the American poet
in 1849. These three poets, together with other midcentury avatars of decadence, such as
Gustave Flaubert and Walter Pater, help during the fin de siècle and Yellow Nineties to
originate the aesthetic trend that exalts artifice over nature and the fantastic over the merely
actual. More broadly, decadence arose as a countermyth to reveal and attack the nineteenth-
century myth of progress: in behavior it led to dandyism, in politics to anarchism, and in
literature to symbolism. Interpreted as a metaphor of organic process, decadence suggests
only the irreversible end of a birth-to-death cycle; however, when this metaphor is identified
with creative human action, it indicates the deliberate metamorphosis of worn-out
romanticism into modernism.

-112-

NOTES
1. Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison
( 1902; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1979), III, 275-80.
2. Poe, Works, III, 273.
3. Poe, Works, III, 279-80.
4. Poe, Works, III, 292.
5. Poe, Works, III, 283.
6. Poe, Works, III, 284.
7. Poe, Works, III, 266-92; Oscar Wilde, "Preface to The Picture of Dorian
Gray," in The Portable Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington ( New York:
Viking, 1946), 138-39.
8. Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition", in Works, XIV, 197.
9. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp ( New York: Norton, 1958), 136-
37.
10. Paul Valéry, "The Art of Poetry", trans. Denise Folliot, in The Collected
Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Jackson Mathews ( New York: Pantheon, 1958),
VII, 60.
11. Edward Burne-Jones, quoted by Jerome H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper (
New York: Vintage, 1964), 164.
12. Poe, Works, IV, 147; V, 146.
13. Poe, "Preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," in Works, I, 150-
51.
14. Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, letter to Théophile Thoré, c. June 20, 1864,
quoted by Maurice Schroder, Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French
Romanticism ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 201.
15. Baudelaire, "Intimate Journals", in Poems and Prose of Baudelaire, ed. T.
R. Smith ( New York: Modern Library, 1925), 225-26, 230; "the more . . .
he gets" quoted by Schroder, 209.
16. John Milton, "Paradise Lost", John Milton: Complete Poems and Major
Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes ( New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), Book
I, lines 254-55, 217.
17. Baudelaire, quoted by Schroder, Icarus, 193.
18. Baudelaire, in a letter to Alphonse Toussenel, Jan. 21, 1856, quoted by
Schroder, Icarus, 194.
19. Baudelaire, "Beauty," in The Flowers of Evil, trans. Richard Howard
( Boston: David Godine, 1982), 24.
20. Baudelaire, "Spleen (iv)", in The Flowers of Evil, 76-77.
21. Paul Bourget, quoted in Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination 18801900,
trans. Derek Coltman ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 11.
22. W. H. Auden, "Introduction" to Selected Prose and Poetry of EdgarAllan
Poe

-113-

Allan Poe ( New York: Rinehart, 1950), p. xvi; D. H. Lawrence, "Edgar

Allan Poe", in Studies in Classic American Literature ( New York:
Doubleday Anchor, 1951), 74.
23. T. S. Eliot, "Baudelaire", in Selected Essays 1917- 1932 ( New York:
Harcourt Brace and Company, 1932), 344.
24. W. H. Auden, "Intimate Journals", 237; The Oxford Book of American
Verse, ed. F. O. Matthiessen ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1950),
1049.
25. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson ( London: Oxford
 University Press, 1970), 440-41, 453.
26. Robert Buchanan, The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of
the Day ( London: Strahan, 1872; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1975), 32.
27. Arthur Symons, "A Note on George Meredith", Studies in Prose and Verse (
1922; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1975), 149.
28. Algernon Charles Swinburne, review of Victor Hugo L'Année terrible in
Victorian Poetry and Poetics, ed. W. E. Houghton and G. R. Stange, 2nd ed.
( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 686-87; Archibald MacLeish, in Oxford
Book of American Verse894.
29. Bourget, "Baudelaire", quoted by Havelock Ellis in his Introduction to J. K.
Huysmans, A Rebours ( New York: The Modern Library, 1930), 22.
30. Eliot, "Swinburne as Poet", in Selected Essays, 284-85.
31. All quotations of Swinburne's poetry are from The Poems of Algernon
Charles Swinburne, ( New York: Harper and Brothers, 1904), 6 volumes.
"Hertha," line 190, Volume II, 73- 81; Atlanta in Calydon, line 1151,
Volume IV, 259-363; "Hymn to Prosperine", line 35, Volume I, 74-81; "Ave
atque Vale," line 22, Volume III, 52-60; and "Thalassius," lines 454, 484
and 474, Volume III,311-328.

-114-

9
Elements of the Fantastic in "La Granja Blanca" by Clemente Palma

Nancy M. Kason

Peruvian author Clemente Palma ( 1872-1946) experimented in many different areas of

literary expression that had their roots in nineteenth-century Gothic and Decadent aesthetics,
especially Fantastic fiction. Among the eight short stories that belong to this genre, his finest
is La Granja Blanca." 1

To produce the fantastic, an author must first create a "realistic" world in which certain laws
of empirical reality are observed, such as a rational presentation of the categories of time,
space, and human consciousness. 2 The author may then recognize these elements and
transform them by altering one or several. Through the destruction of the logical, scientific
order of things, the author threatens the laws of reason and points toward the possibility of a
third, supernatural reality. According to Louis Vax, the irruption of a supernatural element
into a "real" world produces fear in the reader, and provokes a feeling of disquieting
strangeness. 3 As a result, the reader is in a state of vacillation, doubt, and ambiguity caused
by an oscillation between the known and the unknown. The fantastic is based upon a human
world of reality as we know it, but it also is dependent upon a sudden or gradual change in
that familiar reality. Fantastic literature, therefore, often contains supernatural elements that
deform and disfigure reality.
Several critics, including Augusto Tamayo Vargas, Alberto Escobar, Estuardo Néñez, Kessel
Schwartz, Donald Yates, and Earl M. Aldrich, Jr., have recognized the mastery with which
Palma creates the fantastic in his short stories. The Peruvian theorist of the

-115-

fantastic, Harry Belevan, affirms that Clemente Palma is the initiator of the fantastic narrative
in Peru. 4 In La Granja Blanca," Palma offers no explanation for the supernatural events, and
the reader is left in a clearly fantastic state of doubt, hesitation, vacillation, and ambiguity.

In La Granja Blanca," an anonymous narrator married his cousin, Cordelia. The couple
decided to live at the Granja Blanca, a palace that belonged to the narrator's family, but
which had been uninhabited for over two centuries. About a month before the wedding,
Cordelia was stricken with malaria, and when her fiancé went to her house, he was informed
that she had died. The shock produced a tremendous pain in his head, causing him to faint.
He did not know how long he had been unconscious before he woke up in his philosophy
professor's house, but immediately he returned to Cordelia's home to find her alive and well
in the garden. A month after this incident, the couple were married and departed for the
Granja Blanca where, at the end of one year, their daughter, also named Cordelia, was born.

On their second wedding anniversary, Cordelia unveiled a selfportrait that she had done at
her husband's request. That night, at about one o'clock in the morning, the narrator woke up
to discover his wife was gone. He knew that he would never see her again, yet felt that
essentially nothing had changed because all that had happened during the past two years had
never really occurred.

Suddenly, his old professor arrived to deliver a letter from Cordelia's mother. On her
deathbed two years ago, Cordelia had asked her mother to send to the narrator, on the second
anniversary of her death, the wedding ring, the ivory cross from her coffin, and a miniature
portrait of her. When the narrator told his professor that Cordelia had died the previous night,
and not two years ago, the old man demanded proof. The professor was stunned when he saw
the baby, and slowly arrived at the horrifying conclusion that the narrator would probably
take his daughter as his wife when she grew up. To avoid such an incestuous relationship, the
old philosopher threw the baby out of the window, causing her to smash her skull on the patio
below. After the professor left, the narrator heard the sound of wolves chewing the baby's
bones. He then set the Granja Blanca on fire, with the old, deaf housekeeper still inside, and
rode off on his horse, never to return.

-116-

The first element of the fantastic to strike the reader is the title, La Granja Blanca ("The
White Country Estate"), which refers to the isolated setting where the couple lived magically
for two years. The original title, "¿ Ensueño o realidad? . . ." ("Daydream or Reality?") was
much less effective because it directly identified the central thematic conflict of the narrative.
La Granja Blanca," by contrast, presents an image that stimulates the reader's curiosity and
introduces the geographic location in which the supernatural events take place.

The use of an anonymous first-person narrator is vital to the story because the intimate
descriptions of the two years of marriage would have been impossible had a different
perspective been employed. The deeply psychological characterization of the narrator is well
developed, while his physical appearance is irrelevant to his role in the work. Cordelia, on the
other hand, is carefully described physically and is compared to a resurrected daughter seen
in a painting titled La resurrección de la hija de Jairo. (The Resurrection of the Daughter of
Jairus) This painting is a repeated leitmotif that introduces the fantastic theme of the dead
who return to life, and foreshadows the resurrection of Cordelia. Her personality is of lesser
importance, since it is her very presence at the Granja Blanca that creates the fantastic.

The old philosophy professor functions to provide the narrator with a vehicle through which
he is able to evaluate the metaphysical implications of his situation. In addition, the professor
acts as a catalyst, precipitating the destruction of the entire fantastic environment at the end of
the work.

Temporal and spatial considerations also enhance the fantastic world in this story. Exactly
two years elapse, during which time the narrator and his wife live in a state of bliss at the
Granja Blanca. The fact that a considerable amount of time transpires eliminates any rational
explanation concerning a possible hallucination produced by the ingestion of alcohol, drugs,
or, as in this case, the severe emotional trauma in the narrator's psyche caused by the death of
Cordelia. The longer duration also gives the reader an opportunity to become better
acquainted with the personality of Cordelia, thus creating a more realistic existence for this
fantastic creature.

The shifts in setting further intensify the element of the fantastic. As the story begins, the
narrator is in his old philosophy professor's

-117-

home, where a realistic ambience is created. The Granja Blanca is slowly introduced through
short trips made there over a period of one year, during which the betrothed supervise the
renovation of the estate. This prepares the reader for the transition from the reality of the
initial urban setting to the fantastic world of the country palace. When the narrator and his
wife move to the estate, they isolate themselves from the rest of the world. This self-
contained and self-sufficient mansion has a fantastic environment seldom disturbed by
outsiders. This isolation becomes significant when the palace burns, effectively eliminating
all traces of Cordelia's life after death. Since the old housekeeper perished in the fire, the only
witness who could testify that Cordelia had returned from the dead is the philosophy
professor, whose murder of the child assures his silence.

The narrative structure, which Palma divided into ten numbered sections, closely relates to
the shifts in setting. The first segment offers some philosophical considerations about the
meaning of life that are challenged in the rest of the tale.

Do we really live, or is life a prolonged illusion? Is our existence that of

autonomous and independent beings? Are we in effect travelers in the journey
of life, or are we mere characters that inhabit someone's dream, entities of just
apparent form, tragic and grotesque shadows that illustrate the nightmare or
happy dreams of some eternal sleeper?

¿Realmente se vive ó la vida es una ilusión prolongada? ¿Somos seres

autónomos e independientes en nuestra existencia? ¿Somos efectivamente
viajeros en la jornada de la vida o somos tan sólo personajes que habitamos en
el ensueño de alguien, entidades de mera forma aparente, sombras trágicas y
grotescas que ilustramos las pesadillas ó los sueños alegres de algún eterno
durmiente? 5
The second and third sections introduce Cordelia and provide background information
concerning her relationship with the narrator. In the fourth section, the fantastic is initiated
when the narrator believes his fiancée is dead, yet quickly discovers, in the next segment, that
she lives. This crucial transition is executed smoothly, without disturbing the reality
established, since the author suggests that the narrator could have imagined, while
unconscious, that Cordelia had died. After this moment of uncertainty, Palma lulls

-118-

the reader back into a state of security in sections six and seven, which describe the couple's
ecstatic married life. The only tension evident in these two segments 'involves Cordelia's self-
portrait, which ultimately precipitates the destruction of their isolated paradise. Throughout
their idyllic marriage, Cordelia makes several references to a time limit, which alludes
possibly to a pact she may have made with the devil. This idea is reinforced when the narrator
overhears her pleading while working on her self-portrait in a locked room. Cordelia's
nocturnal disappearance in the eighth section heightens the dramatic tension. At the end of
the penultimate section, after a further intensifying of the tension, the professor's invasion of
the couple's world adds an unexpected twist. This uninvited guest, a man of intellect and
rationality, disrupts the equilibrium of the Granja Blanca by challenging Cordelia's fantastic
existence after her death. At this point, the disoriented reader vacillates between what was
assumed to be reality and the denial of it all by the rationalist. The climax occurs when the
baby girl is shown to the old philosopher, because she represents a concrete physical link
between the fantastic and real worlds, and irrefutable proof that Cordelia had, in fact,
returned from the dead. The denouement does not resolve the reader's uncertainty, because all
physical evidence of their married life is destroyed. The portrait of Cordelia was left blank,
except for the areas where her eyes had been. The baby's body was totally eaten by wolves so
that not even her bones remained; the deaf housekeeper died in the fire; and any other
physical proof that Cordelia did, indeed, spend two years at the Granja Blanca was
obliterated. The philosopher's silence is guaranteed because, were he to bring up the subject,
he could be convicted as a murderer.

In La Granja Blanca," Palma develops what Todorov describes as a traditional theme of the
supernatural, a pact made with the devil so that an anguished soul may perform a certain
action in order to achieve peace. 6 The narrator very subtly adumbrates this Faust theme in
exchange for his fiancée's life:

The curses and petitions, the blasphemy and the prayers were following one
another on my lips, demanding my Cordelia's health. Whether it was God or
the devil who gave her to me, it didn't matter. What I wanted was Cordelia's
health. I would have purchased it with my soul, my life, my

-119-

fortune; I would have committed the most criminal act; I would have brought
the indignation of the Universe and the eternal curse of God upon myself; I
would have thrown all the blood of humanity into a kettle, from Adam to the
last man of future generations, and made a dish in Hell with the fire destined
for my condemnation, if by doing so I would have been able to obtain a drug
that would have returned my Cordelia's health.

Las maldiciones y las súplicas, las blasfemias y las oraciones se sucedían en

mis lablos, demandando la salud de mi Cordelia. Diéramela Dios ó el diablo,
 poco me importaba. Yo lo que quería era la salud de Cordelia. La habría
comprado con mi alma, mi vida y mi fortuna; habria hecho lo más conmudo y
lo más criminal; me habría atraído la indignación del Universo y la maldición
eterna de Dios; habría echado en una caldera la sangre de toda la humaniclad,
desde Adán hasta el último hombre de las generaciones futuras, hecho un
cocimiento en el Infierno con el fuego destinado a mi condenación, si así
hubiera podido obtener una droga que devolviera á mi Cordelia la salud. 7

Absolutely no direct contact, however, is made by the narrator with a Mephistophelean

figure, nor does he continue to invoke supernatural intervention. On the other hand, it is quite
possible that Cordelia herself made a pact with some supernatural force in order to be granted
a span of two years after death. Cordelia, after "recovering from her illness," tells the narrator
that of course she did not die, "Die without us having been happy!" ("¡Morirme sin que
hubiéramos sido felices!") 8 Their marriage and the birth of their daughter represent the
fulfillment of this promise as well as immortality for Cordelia in her young double. Once
these things were achieved, she was able to rest peacefully. Unfortunately for Cordelia, her
entire phantasmagoric world is destroyed in the final holocaust. 9

La Granja Blanca," Palma's most outstanding contribution to the fantastic, leaves the reader
in a completely irresolute state. The life of the narrator and his resurrected wife at their
country palace is presented in a masterful fashion that obliges the reader to accept it as
reality, yet Cordelia's death two years earlier is also irrefutably confirmed in the letter from
her mother delivered by the professor. The link between the two worlds, the child Cordelia, is
broken when she is murdered and eaten by wolves. At this precise point, the reader,
abandoned by the narrator, is left in a perplexed state that is never explained or resolved.

-120-

Palma created a world in which he established certain norms of reality and then reorganized
those natural elements until they were no longer verifiable. A supernatural event provokes in
the reader a feeling of disquieting strangeness and places him in a state of continuous
oscillation, doubt, and uncertainty vis-à-vis the fantastic experience portrayed, until the laws
of reason are challenged and destroyed.

NOTES
1. Clemente Palma, "¿Ensueño o realidad? . . ." El Ateneo 2.11 (mayo 1900):
427-44; the title was later changed to La Granja Blanca, in Cuentos
malévolos ( Barcelona: Imprenta Salvat y Cía., 1904), 115-44. All
translations are my own.
2. Characteristics summarized in Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A
Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard ( Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), and Louis Vax, Arte y
literatura fantásticas, trans. Juan Merino ( Buenos Aires: Editorial
Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1965).
3. Vax, Arte, 14.
4. Harry Belevan, Antologia del cuento fantástico peruano ( Lima:
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1977), xlvii.
5. Palma, La Granja Blanca," 107. This passage foreshadows stories such as
Las ruinas circulares," by Jorge Luis Borges. Luis Leal recognized that, in
La Granja Blanca," Palma anticipated Borges in the creation of dreamed
characters. Luis Leal, Historia del cuento hispanoamericano, 2a ed.
( México: Ediciones de Andrea, 1971) 56.
6. Todorov, The Fantastic, 100.
7. Palma, La Granja Blanca," 115.
8. Ibid., 117.
9. The idea of a dead woman returning to life is reminiscent of Edgar Allan
Poe's Ligeia," and Palma possibly was influenced by the American's story
when he wrote La Granja Blanca."

-121-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-122-

10
The Play-within-the-Play: A Study of Madness in Hubert Aquin's Neige
noire

V. Harger-Grinling and A. R. Chadwick

The theatrum mundi metaphor, with its implications that the world is a stage and life but a
dream, operates traditionally as a mise-enabyme. This figure in poetry or novels frequently
takes the form of an object whose details mirror the essential elements of the main text. In
painting, the device was popular in the Renaissance period in the form of anamorphosis, a
technique of distorting the perspective of the whole or part of a canvas, which then could be
deciphered by placing in front of the painting a convex mirror to correct the distortions, or by
changing the point from which the work of art was viewed. While anamorphosis was in
antiquity a technique derived from the practical need to make allowances for the distortion of
perspective in large-scale works, it had become by the Renaissance one of the avenues for
exploring the boundaries of reality and fiction, certainty and doubt. One of the best-known
examples is Holbein The Ambassadors, which Hubert Aquin used as an intertextual and
intergeneric device in an earlier novel, Trou de Mémoire. In a detailed, realistic painting
showing two human figures standing in front of a display of Renaissance artifacts, Holbein
has incorporated a symbolic picture of Renaissance learning--the quadrivium and the trivium.
However, undermining the apparent confidence in man's knowledge is the anamorphic
memento mori of a human skull, whose presence, lacking the anchor of the traditional
perspective that governs the rest of the painting, strikes at the certainty of man's knowledge
of the tangible. 1 Anamorphosis thus had metaphysical ramifications that encompassed the
preoccu-

-123-
pations of the period: reality and fiction, certainty and doubt, reason and folly.

The equivalent of anamorphosis in the theatre is the play-withinthe-play, which authors have
used subtly and ironically to comment on the principal action of their plays and on the nature
of acting or the style of other playwrights. The device, following the practice of medieval and
Renaissance art of showing truth revealed behind a curtain, was used by playwrights to
indicate that the content of the play-within-the-play depicted the reality that was to be used to
unmask the fiction of the remainder of the play. Aquin chooses as the focal point of Neige
noire a modern adaptation of this device.

In most novels the metaphor drawn from the theatre does not normally sit well, since the
novel, especially in the twentieth century, looks to images drawn from its own genre. The
reflective stance that the mise-en-abyme figure affords the writer is traditionally expressed by
a writer/protagonist who records his reflections in a journal, or who discusses his writing with
other characters. One of the clearest examples of this device may be found in André Gide Les
Faux-Monnayeurs in which Edouard, one of the two novelists within the novel, maintains a
journal in which he drafts certain sections of his story and discusses the problems he has
encountered in writing it. The introspective nature of this device is underscored by the title of
Edouard novel: Les Faux-Monnayeurs. The mirror images created by the duplication of the
titles are further compounded by the existence of the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, which
Gide kept during the course of composing his novel, in much the same way as Edouard does.

Thus the possibilities for exploring introspectively the psyche of a character by means of the
mise-en-abyme have not escaped the notice of novelists. The distance, which the mise-en-
abyme establishes between reader and protagonist on the one hand and the protagonist and
himself/herself on the other, helps maintain a reasoned order in the portrayal of madness,
while seeming to present directly the experience of the protagonist. It is particularly suited to
the presentation of schizophrenia since the formal division of self from the world represented
in the figure of the mise-en-abyme mirrors aesthetically the situation of the protagonist. In
Neige noire, Aquin compounds the mirror images and multiplies the relationships as he
explores the theme of madness--a state that he describes

-124-

as the only way to live in a world of platitude and falsehood. In the film produced after his
death, Deux épisodes dans la vie d'Hubert Aquin, 2 Aquin says that madness is a desirable
condition to achieve since to be mad means to obtain delirium, the only way to live. Nicolas's
absence from the conclusion of Neige noire may therefore be interpreted as an indication that
Aquin's protagonist has reached that desired state and has been borne away on the wings of
madness.

While Neige noire is subtitled roman, it is in fact a curious admixture of theatre, novel,
television production, and film scenario. With its confusion of plot, imagery, and genre,
Aquin negates each of the fictional realities he presents. Central to this confusion is
Shakespeare's Hamlet, which serves as a stimulus and a pivotal point for the Aquin work. The
Shakespearian play-within-the-play is a metaphoric key that helps the spectators, both
fictitious and real, to decode the surface of Claudius's court to reveal the corruption. The
presence of this play within the novel Neige noire, and its distortion into film scenario and
television text, connote the negation of the novel, and provoke alienation for the reader and
protagonist alike.
When Aquin committed suicide in 1976, the date he chose carried political and literary
overtones. After the Parti Québécois came to power, Aquin believed that instead of realizing
an ideal, René Lévesque had disappointed the expectations of the nationalists in that province
and had lost the heroic stature he had attained before his political victory. One could not fail,
then, to notice the allusion to Shakespeare Julius Caesar embedded in Aquin's choice of
March 15, the Ides of March, as the date of his suicide, associated with the theme of
deception and betrayal. Aquin/ Caesar felt betrayed by Lévesque/ Brutus, and Aquin's self-
appointed death was the realization of the metaphorical murder of nationalist hopes that
Lévesque's political disappointment represented. In Neige noire, the last published work
before his death, Aquin anticipates that deception in his elaboration of a world where purity
of intention is sullied by a corrupt society, where unity of personality is replaced by
fragmented selves, and where insanity and violence have become a spectacle for the masses.
While exploring the themes of corruption in society and madness in the individual, Aquin
reverses the Hamlet universe, deconstructs Shakespeare's play, and deemphasizes the main
character.

-125-

The structural role of Hamlet in Neige noire is complex. As a television production of the
play, it operates as an element in the intrigue. At the beginning of the novel, Nicolas Vanesse
is in the final stages of this production in Montréal. Indeed, the tension that Nicolas
experiences as a result of the production, as well as the attraction he feels for Norway
because of his fascination with the character of Fortinbras, prompts the departure of Nicolas
and his new bride Sylvie for Scandinavia, where they will spend their honeymoon. Towards
the close of the novel, a crucial scene takes place as Nicolas and Eva Vos are watching the
broadcast of the production. The milieu of acting in Neige noire furnishes the theme of
doubling, for which Hamlet acts as a condensed reference since, in addition to containing the
play of The Murder of Gonzago," it also includes not only the discussion of acting styles
between Hamlet and the Player King, but also the various references to roleplaying, seeming,
and the nature of reality. However, Aquin replaces Hamlet, prince of Denmark, as the
primary interest of reader, protagonist, and thus of Aquin himself, with Fortinbras, prince of
Norway--the character portrayed by Neige noire's Nicolas Vanesse. In Shakespeare Hamlet,
Fortinbras is a man of action, and not the contemplative character represented by Hamlet, the
main character. The role of Fortinbras is to restore order after the carnage of the last act. As
the model of the new man--young, unrestrained by practical considerations--Fortinbras's
appearance in the play prompts Hamlet also to be "bloody, bold and resolute" and sets in
motion the final sequence of actions. The displacement of emphasis onto the secondary
character in Neige noire reveals the desire on the part of Aquin's character also to be a man of
action. Aquin, however, situates Shakespeare's positive image of Fortinbras in such a
contorted network of negative and inverted images that Shakespeare's original purpose is
quite obliterated. Similarly, even while the Nicolas/Fortinbras dédoublement is prominent
within this character, traits of Hamlet are revealed, a confusion of roles reflected structurally
within the novel.

Boundaries of space, time and action are dispensed with while seemingly kept within the
presented limits, emphasizing the irony of Hamlet's "I know not seems." This is illustrated in
the scene where Nicolas and Eva make love while watching the broadcast of Hamlet. Their
sexual gymnastics leave first Eva, then Nicolas view-

-126-
ing the television set upside down: "Nicolas rests his cheek on Eva's stomach and sideways
watches this tragedy that Eva can see only upside down like a spiegelbild. For her, the
players' feet stick to the ceiling." 3 Nicolas reacts with pleasure to this topsy-turvy world, a
fact that, when linked to Nicolas's left-handedness, underscores the inversion of values in the
world created by Aquin. Eva, on the other hand, finds viewing the upside-down world
disquieting and is relieved when this inverted work is physically righted. This reversed image
of the Shakespearian play that she is forced to watch reflects a mirror world of dissemblance
and confusion that is not so easily righted as the novel progresses.

This primary inversion of Hamlet in Neige noire is doubled by the device of the film scenario
that constitutes the principal level of the narration. Thus the lines spoken by Nicolas and Eva
in this scene are distanced from the reader by being placed on the same plane as those from
Hamlet: Nicolas and Eva have now become characters in Nicolas's proposed film. But to add
to the complexity, the formal inversion of images does not remain detached from the future
viewer of the film. Rather it is Nicolas's intention, as expressed in the scenario, that by rapid
intercutting, the two perspectives of Nicolas and Eva be superimposed, thereby creating for
the viewer of the film a double vision of the spectacle on the television screen. As a further
disordering device, this double vision will be intercut with shots of Eva and of Nicolas. At
this particular juncture, the play-within-the-novel, the "film-outside-the-novel," and the novel
itself are bound tightly together in an intermingled figure that mirrors the copulation of Eva
and Nicolas, and the incestuous nature of all relationships within the works involved. For
Aquin, such promiscuity of genres is clearly the epitome of madness, as expressed by
Fortinbras in a line which has no equivalent in Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Men are by necessity
so mad that one would be mad by another trick of madness not to be mad." 4

Through its orderly progression, Nicolas's writing in the scenario conceals the chaos of his
mind while simultaneously revealing the chaos through its content. The clarity of the
execution is thus confused with the madness of the intent. What seems invention and
hallucination is an expression of a darker side of reality and a negative order. Conversely, it is
from this negative image--"the field of meaning always exceeds that of reality" 5 --that the
positive will

-127-

appear. In Hamlet, the play at folly and of course the play-withinthe-play hide lucidity on the
part of the protagonist and reveal the madness of the court around him. In Neige noire the
seemingly violent and chaotically unreasoned death of Sylvie is a ritualistic act to cleanse her
of her past and of her incestuous ties to that past, symbolic on a grander scale of Québec
itself. Similarly, the abolition of space and time in the fjords and white snow of Norway in
the Québec novel implies the necessity for a reinvention of these elements, the need for a
reinterpretation of history and, simultaneously, of Hamlet.

The Kierkegaard quotation, which forms the epigraph of Aquin's novel, presents an
interesting Nordic interpretation of the Hamlet story. "Je dois maintenant à la fois être et ne
pas être." In the disordered world of Nicolas's consciousness, madness and lucidity are
reversed as in a film negative, like the "black snow" of the title, prompting the desire, in such
a mad world, to seek madness itself since lucidity has such a debased value. The boundaries
between reason and unreason, fiction and reality, become irrevocably blurred for Nicolas and
for the future spectator of the film:

But the process of entrapment must be blocked, and the two feverish bodies
transform into statues of salt, leaving the spectator to his own unsatisfaction
 and the demands of habeas corpus. Instead of spreading through Eva's mucous
lining, the nectar will flow through the winding pathways of the spectator's
imagination and will climb to the invisible crowns of being. 6

Creator, narrator, actor, and spectator/reader become one as Aquin refuses to leave the reader
esconced in the complacent comfort of an armchair. Instead of pandering to the voyeuristic
instincts of the reader/viewer by completing the scene textually, Aquin transforms Nicolas
and Eva into statues of salt (a reference to the story of Lot and his wife, who were fleeing
from Sodom before its destruction by God) and leaves the reader/viewer to complete the
scene with his/her own imaginative resources.

As disquieting as this scene is for the reader, it marks only a stage on the road to the aesthetic
completion of the novel. With the end of the broadcast of Hamlet, Nicolas is freed from the
geometric manipulation of perspective or the simple inversion of Shake-

-128-

speare's play. Pursuing imaginatively the Hamlet theme, he "discovers" in a book a different
version 7 of the story from the one set out by Shakespeare, a version that has Hamlet and
Fortinbras as twin brothers who were separated shortly after birth, thus justifying the
identification of Nicolas with both Fortinbras and Hamlet. Gertrude in secret has maintained
contact with the banished Fortinbras, visiting him each summer, with the result that the
relationship develops to the point of incest. The play-within-the-novel that was Hamlet has
now ceased to be a simple intertextual reference maintaining a metaphoric relationship with
Aquin's text. Rather, a complex set of textual and "paratextual" segments has taken on a force
of its own.

These intertextual references prompt a change of direction in the intrigue of the

novel/scenario of Neige noire. With the introduction of a new character, Michel
Lewandowski, Aquin adds the further complication that Nicolas's wife, Sylvie, had been
maintaining an incestuous relationship with her father Michel Lewandowski, a relationship
that purportedly continues even after Nicolas's return to Montréal following Sylvie's death.
Clearly, the situation defies conventional logic, but it does force on the spectator/reader a
bifocal view of the relationships between characters, the result of which is to increase the
layers of personality in Nicolas and to emphasize the corruption in society. For, in addition to
being Fortinbras, he has now become Hamlet, by virtue of his being Hamlet's twin brother,
and Claudius because he married Sylvie (who, by reason of her incest has been transformed
into Gertrude). Set in the double framework of the play-within-the-novel and the film-
outside-thenovel, with each framework providing its own distortion and inversion of the
world of Shakespeare's play, the image of madness presented by the character of Nicolas is
bewilderingly compelling.

In this way, the seemingly sane and lucid Nicolas has gradually revealed himself to be insane
according to the norms of society, while Shakespeare's Hamlet, of course, supposedly mad
and playing the fool, is shown to be sane in a world of madness, violence, and destruction. By
means of the play The Murder of Gonzago," Hamlet has offered to his public a reality
concealed beneath a fiction, while Hamlet himself remains a spectator. Nicolas in the
scenario of his future film describes a murder that he himself has probably committed.

-129-
The imaginative superimposition of Shakespeare Hamlet, the intrigue of Neige noire, and the
film scenario make of Aquin's work one vast metonym. The play-within-the-play, or any
equivalent device of mise-en-abyme, in a traditional work operates as a metaphor, one of
whose qualities is that the comparison thereby established is entirely external. By the
juxtaposition of The Murder of Gonzago and the court of Claudius, Hamlet hopes to catch the
conscience of a king. But Gonzago is never intended to be taken for old Hamlet. The
comparison remains linear. In like manner, in Holbein The Ambassadors, the distorted image
of the skull does not materially transform the human figures. Instead the metaphor draws its
effect from the way in which the public image the painting presents to the viewer is
undermined by the presence of the skull. In order to make sense of the anamorphic element,
the viewer is obliged to move to the right of the canvas in order to find the viewing point for
the skull. The metonymic device of Aquin's novel does not require the reader to change
perspective, but the result is the conclusion that Nicolas is mad since he is the nexus of so
many personalities.

Thus ironically, Aquin has used the Shakespearian device of the play-within-the-play
employed as metaphor by taking Hamlet itself and making of it a metonymic metaphor of the
act of creation and revolution. Similarly he has changed the emphasis from Hamlet as
contemplative, tragic hero to Fortinbras/Nicolas, man-of-action, with the implication that
action is preferable to contemplation, a comment perhaps on Aquin's own failure in life, or
what he felt to be his final failure in literature.

NOTES
1. For a detailed discussion of the tradition of anamorphosis, and the central
role of Holbein's work, see J. Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W. J.
Strachan ( New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1977), 91-114.
2. The film was produced by Jacques Godbout for the National Film Board of
Canada in 1982.
3. All translations are our own; the original French is included in the notes for
reference. Nicolas appuie sa joue sur le ventre d'Eva et regarde
obliquement cette tragédie qu'Eva ne peut voir qu'á l'envers comme un
spiegelbild. Pour elle, les pieds des personnages adhèrent au plafond.
( Aquin, Neige noire [ Montreal: La Presse, 1974], 181-82).

-130-

4. Ibid., 185. "Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous que ce serait être fou
par un autre tour de folie de n'être pas fou."
5. Ibid., 87. "[L]e champ de signification dépasse toujours celui de la réalité."
6. Ibid., 185. "Mais il faut interrompre l'enlisement, transformer en statues de
sel les deux corps fébriles et laisser 29 spectateur à son propre
inassouvissement et aux instances de l'habeus corpus. Au lieu de se
répandre dans la tunique muqueuse d'Eva, le nectaire s'écoulera dans les
voies serpigineuses de l'imagination du spectateur et remontera jusqu'aux
chapiteaux invisibles de l'être.
7. Ibid., 202-204.

-131-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-132-

11
The Fantastic Dwelling in Jacques Cazotte's Le Diable amoureux

Juliette Gilman

Eighteenth-century writer Jacques Cazotte is recognized as the initiator of the fantastic in

French literature; that is, the true fantastic, as it differs from the wild and extravagant
inspiration of the fairy tales and oriental stories that captivated earlier generations of readers.
A short work of fiction published in 1772, Le Diable amoureux, 1 established Cazotte as a
ground-breaker in literary history, and over the last two centuries, a number of critics have
called it one of the best and most original pieces of eighteenth-century French literature.

The basic plot element, namely the Devil in human disguise, using beauty and material
advantages in an attempt to seduce a mortal, echoes a long folklore and literary tradition well
established by the Middle Ages. The novelty of Le Diable amoureux ties elsewhere. Edward
Pease Shaw, Jacques Cazotte's biographer, explains:

Cazotte's success in the genre of the fantastic and the cabalistic conte was as
great as the failure of his predecessors because he wrote a tale in which the
characters are no longer lifeless or superhuman creatures, moved about by the
author's will, but well-drawn, animated human beings. Moreover, the events of
his tale . . . are motivated by psychological causes. 2

As for Cazotte's message, writes Shaw, it is "symbolically associated with the narrative
elements of his work and is revealed only after an interpretation of the characters, the
episodes, and the detail of the plot." 3

-133-

Critics such as Shaw himself, Pierre-Georges Castex, Dominique Aury, and recently Max
Milner, have indeed sought to interpret Cazotte's meaning or message through studies of the
characters and of the episodes and details of the plot. 4 However, the domain of the
descriptive elements in Le Diable amoureux remains as yet largely unexplored. The purpose
of this paper, then, is to examine the varied backdrop of the tale, with special emphasis on the
fantastic dwelling, to arrive at a more complete understanding of Le Diable amoureux and of
its impact on the reader.

The story begins in Naples, in a room where several officers from the army of the King of
Naples have assembled for the evening. The conversation turns to the occult and rapidly
degenerates into a cacophony of diverging opinions. A young Captain, Alvare, who presents
Le Diable amoureux as a first-person narrator, remains conspicuously quiet. When all the
guests have retired, save for Alvare, the latter confesses to his host, the mysterious Soberano,
his ignorance of the topic discussed as well as his ardent curiosity. Soberano thereupon
signals his willingness to share with him his own knowledge, and to introduce him to the
science that allows human beings to communicate with the spirits and to rule over them.

The fantastic makes its first appearance at this time. Soberano, to demonstrate his powers,
strikes his pipe three times to empty the ashes, puts it down, and says in a loud voice, "
Calderon, come fetch my pipe, light it, and bring it back to me." 5 At that very instant, the
pipe disappears from sight and swiftly reappears, lit and ready for further use. This
astonishing scene, succinctly and soberly rendered, is immediately followed by details
pertaining to everyday garrison life. However, the return to the realm of the fantastic is
foreshadowed by Alvare's curiosity, now aroused to a feverish pitch. When the young man
boasts that were the devil to appear to him he would remain unafraid and would pull the
devil's ears, Soberano yields to his impatience and agrees to lead him, with an escort of two
companions, to the place of invocation: the ruins of Portici.

Ruins have always served as eloquent testimony to the frail and ephemeral nature of all
human constructs and of all existence, confronting mankind with the ultimate mystery of its
destiny, and these ruins fill Alvare with appropriate awe. Portici, near Naples, is in an area of
volcanic destruction under Vesuvius. Neighboring Hercu-

-134-

laneum and Pompeii were both discovered in Cazotte's lifetime, and his contemporaries'
imaginations were vividly affected by the findings of the ongoing archeological digs.

Within the ruins, Alvare is led to a dark cavern, and the evocative power of the setting is
further enhanced. Although the description does not stray from the realm of plausible reality,
its aura of connotations and resonances possesses a rich potential for awakening certain
phantasms, which in turn play an important role in the alchemy of the fantastic.

Further examination of the elements of the setting reveals some of these connotations and
resonances. For instance, according to J. E. Cirlot Dictionary of Symbols, the cave or cavern
"appears fairly often in emblematic and mythological iconography as the meetingplace for
figures of deities, forebears or archetypes, becoming therefore an objective image of Hades."
6
Cazotte's cavern is characterized, as caverns often are, by utter darkness. Cirlot suggests for
darkness the possible connotation of "undeveloped potentialities" and, not surprisingly,
mentions that "it is traditionally associated with the principle of evil and with the base,
unsublimated forces." 7 Myth and popular lore have established a strong mental association
between dark caverns and demonic elements. We realize how prevalent that association is
when we see it used metaphorically, for stylistic effect. As one example of such usage, a
sentence excerpted from Alan M. Olson Disguises of the Demonic warns of "the danger of
looking for the Devil only in the dark caverns of human experience [emphasis added]." 8

Thus, in a gloomy cavern in the forbidding ruins of Portici, a backdrop from which a wealth
of symbolic meaning emanates, Alvare is about to receive the initiation he had been longing
for. By the flickering light of a candle, Soberano traces a circle on the dusty ground, and a
few mysterious characters inside that circle. The young man is then instructed to remain
within the circle until, in his mentor's words, "all has been subdued by you," 9 and warned
that a premature move would involve "the greatest of risks." Cirlot maintains that "enclosing
beings, objects, or figures within a circumference has a double meaning: from within, it
implies limitation and definition; from without, it is seen to represent the defense of the
physical and psychic contents themselves against the perils of the soul threatening it from
without, these dangers being, in a way,
 -135-

tantamount to chaos, but more particularly to illimitation and disintegration." 10

At last, Soberano reveals to his protégé the formula to utter, with further instructions to issue
a call three times repeated to Beelzebub. He also adds: "And above all, do not forget what
you promised to do.""I remembered that I had boasted of pulling his ears," notes Alvare. "I
shall keep my word," 11 he answers. He is now left alone and surrounded only by owls, the
sinister inhabitants of the cavern, and an ancient Egyptian symbol of night and death. The
terrified young man, sustained by the hope that this scene may yet turn out to be a hoax,
pronounces the fateful words. At this time, after the process of literary stage-setting, the
fantastic and the fantastic dwelling make their major entrance into Le Diable amoureux.

A window appears and flies open. A torrent of light streams through and the Prince of
Darkness appears. He presents himself as a hideous camel's head, and, in a tone as forbidding
as his appearance, he asks: "Che vuoi?" 12 ("What do you wish?") Alvare regains his
composure with supreme effort and commands the apparition to turn into a spaniel. The
odious camel thereupon disappears after disgorging a silky, white spaniel who calls Alvare
"Master."

The young man, whose terror has turned to audacity, steps out of his magic circle with what
may seem premature confidence, in the light of Soberano's warning. Furthermore, as he tries
to pull the dog's ears to comply with his promise, it wiggles away and out of his reach. Alvare
does not reflect upon the incident, as now the groveling spaniel begs for his command.
Relieved and emboldened, he orders for his waiting companions and himself a collation of
the finest food and drinks, to be served in a beautifully appointed hall, and accompanied by a
virtuoso harpist's recital. He states that "I see my orders executed more swiftly than stage
props can be set up at the Opera." 13

As one optical illusion replaces another, the den of horrors turns, within a concise paragraph,
into a luxurious salon. Its features come instantly into focus, lit by "eight crystal candelabra,
each containing three candles." 14 Alvare's companions are described as "seized by the reality
of the scene to the point of rubbing their eyes." 15

The suspension of disbelief is adroitly pursued by Cazotte. So deftly does he blend the entire
range and shadings of the observable and the believable with the fantastic, in the fluid
interplay, that the

-136-

reader is compelled to merely acknowledge the account, as he follows Alvare through the
multiple settings of Le Diable amoureux. So far, these settings have featured the familiar
realism of the soldier's quarters in the opening scene, where the fantastic makes its first
irruption; then the realism with symbolic and fantastic connotations of the cavern in the ruins
of Portici; followed by the fully developed fantastic of the cavern, as it becomes the dwelling
of the infernal apparition. Now, we see the fantastic endowed with all the attributes of reality,
in the depiction of a graciously decorated eighteenth-century salon, upon the metamorphosis
of the sinister cavern.

As the narrative progresses, the setting of the story becomes reassuringly realistic. At the
same time, the demonic camel-turnedspaniel has undergone yet another transformation, into
the lovely maiden Biondetta, who succeeds in winning Alvare's affections. She accompanies
him, as his faithful personal attendant, through a series of engagingly authentic settings:
Alvare's military quarters in Naples, a comfortable suite at an inn in Venice during the
Carnival, and a charming house on the river Brenta. As in a picaresque novel, the backdrop of
the protagonist's adventures is ever-changing. In the now fully established realism of the
setting, Biondetta schemes to seal Alvare's doom by possessing him in every sense of the
word, and claiming his soul in damnation. As the story moves towards this terrifying
potential climax, the fantastic dwelling soon reappears.

On their way to Spain, where Alvare hopes to secure his devout mother's blessing, the
travelers are beset by an improbable number of accidents and obstacles. As they finally
approach their destination, their coach breaks down. Alvare and Biondetta discover a lone
structure in the desolate landscape, a farmhouse, which gives every appearance of being
completely innocuous. There, they are told that since the young farmer is in the midst of his
wedding celebration, help would have to wait until the following morning. They accept a
hearty invitation to join the festivities, and the occasion is described in great detail. As the
evening of merriment ends, the travelers, taken to be married, are led to a small bedroom,
modestly but pleasantly furnished. There Biondetta wears down Alvare's last resistance to her
charms, and subsequently reminds him--and the reader--of her true identity.

-137-

The rustic guest room in the festive farmhouse undergoes a sudden, eerie transformation,
similar to the one that took place in the cavern. The horrible camel's head takes Biondetta's
place next to Alvare, and with a thundering voice utters once more "Che vuoi?" 16 Repuslive
slugs fill the room with their bizarre gyrations and gruesome, phosphorescent light effects,
while Alvare, in a paroxysm of terror, seeks refuge under the bed. (Slug infestations were
considered in medieval France to be a form of demonic possession, and as such they were
subjected on occasion to exorcism by due ecclesiastical process; Cazotte may well have read
or heard about that.) The frenzied movements of these creatures in the nightmarish scene, and
the oversized tongue that the camel darts out, are elements classifiable by contemporary
psychoanalytical insight as sexual phantasms. 17 Presumably Cazotte had no such awareness.

Once more the unleashed fantastic triumphs, again with great economy of descriptive detail; a
single paragraph describes the metamorphosis of the room. This time, a cozy farmhouse, not
an ominous cavern, becomes the Devil's dwelling. The fact that this most reassuring of all
settings, a farmhouse, hosting the most heartwarming of occasions, a wedding feast, should
be the object of such a metamorphosis, makes the shock of the event all the more gruesome
for being less expected.

In the surprise ending, Alvare is awakened by the newly wed farmer, who finds him lying on
his bed and not under it. He is informed that he has overslept, that Biondetta has already paid
for the coach repairs, and has left and would meet him along the way. Had the Devil and his
den been no more than a terrifying dream? He wonders, hopes, and speeds homeward in a
trancelike state, seeing no trace of Biondetta. At last he arrives at the haven of his loving
mother who informs him, upon his full confession, that the farmhouse, with its farmer,
guests, and wedding celebration, does not and never did exist. It was all an illusion. This
revelation leaves the reader almost as stunned as Alvare is.

Both episodes, that of the vanishing farmhouse and, at the beginning of Alvare's adventure,
that of the Devil-turned-wriggly-spaniel, whose ears the young man never did get to pull,
bring to light what may well be the strongest underlying theme of the tale, namely the
elusiveness of the Devil, grand master of illusion, and greatest of all escape artists.
Furthermore, Cazotte may be suggesting to us

-138-

that the evil spirit's vanishing act might be the most deceptive, and thereby the most
powerful, of all his tactics in his pursuit of everpossible victory. This view is consistent with
the saying that the Devil's most clever trick is to make us believe he does not exist. The
closing lines of Le Diable amoureux's first edition seem to validate this interpretation, but
Cazotte's contemporaries objected to the unsettling overtones of the fanciful and charming
tale. In the definitive edition of 1788, 18 in response to strong reader action, the author
obligingly softened the ending toward lighthearted reassurance concerning Alvare's definitive
deliverance from Beelzebub's pursuit.

At the end of the discarded original version of Le Diable amoureux is the warning that a
venerable doctor from Salamanca, summoned for a consultation, addresses to Alvare: "This is
a lesson for the future. When your enemy will present himself again, for this was not his last
mask, send him away abruptly, and above all do not ever go looking for him in grottos." 19

The realism of the farmhouse, which was described as nestled among the trees of the
countryside then further described with all the details of the wedding banquet, that descriptive
realism represents--in light of the shocking ending--an eerie mockery of realism, all the more
frightening for having taken on such a benign mask. The fantastic dwelling of the Devil,
when it meets our expectations of horror and terror the way it does in Portici, in a cavern
among the ruins of a volcanic landscape, is not as sinister as it is when found in the mock
realism of a vanishing farmhouse.

The fantastic can indeed have its most chilling impact when it mimics a familiar and
reassuring, but illusory, reality. That notion, whether or not consciously held by the author, is
strikingly illustrated in Le Diable amoureux and plays no small part, I believe, in making
Jacques Cazotte the first master practitioner of the fantastic in French literature.

NOTES
1. Jacques Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux: nouvelle espagnole. ( Naples [i.e.,
Paris]: Le Jay, 1772).
2. Edward Pease Shaw, Jacques Cazotte ( Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1942), 62.

-139-

3. Ibid., 60.
4. Pierre-Georges Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à
Maupassant ( Paris: Corti, 1951); Jacques Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux,
(Préface) by Dominique Aury ( Lausanne: Guilde du Livre, 1957), 7-22;
Max Milner, Le Diable dans la littérature française de Cazotte à
Baudelaire, 2 vols. ( Paris: Corti, 1960). Also, Jacques Cazotte, Le Diable
amoureux, chronologie, preéface, bibliographie et notes, edited and
annotated by Max Milner ( Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979).
5. Cazotte ( 1979), Le Diable, 56."'Calderon, dit-il, venez chercher ma pipe,
allumez-la, et rapportez-la-moi.'"
6. J. E. Cirlot, Dictionary of Symbols, ( New York: Philosophical Library,
1962), 38-39.
7. Ibid., 73.
8. Alan M. Olson, Disguises of the Demonic: Contemporary Perspectives on
the Power of Evil ( New York: Association Press, 1975), 15.
9. Cazotte ( 1979), 58."Quand tout vous sera soumis; mais avant ce temps, si
la frayeur vous faisait faire une fausse démarche, vous pourriez courir les
risques les plus grands.'"
10. Cirlot, Dictionary, 46.
11. Cazotte ( 1979), 58."'. . . et surtout n'oubliez pas ce que vous avez promis de
faire.' Je me rappelai que je m'étais vanté de lui tirer les orielles. 'Je
tiendrai parole,' lui dis-je' . . ."
12. Ibid., 59.
13. Ibid., 60. ". . . je vois mes ordres s'exécuter plus promptement qu'une
décoration ne s'élève à l'Opéra."
14. Ibid., 60-62. "Huit girandoles de cristaux, contenant chacune trois
bougies."
15. Ibid., 63-64. " . . . saisis par la vérité de la scène au point de se frotter les
yeux."
16. Ibid., 119.
17. The sexual symbolism of Cazotte imagery in Le Diable amoureux is briefly
analyzed by Max Milner in Cazotte, Le Diable (Garnier-Flammarion), 39-
41.
18. Jacques Cazotte, Oeuvres badines et morales de M. Cazotte, 7 vols.
(Londres, 1788).
19. Cazotte ( 1979), Le Diable (Garnier-Flammarion), 187.

-140-

12
The Living Past: The Mexican's History Returns to Haunt Him in Two
Short Stories by Carlos Fuentes

Cynthia Duncan
The fantastic in Mexico has never had the immense popularity it enjoyed in the River Plate
region, the Río de la Plata, estuary, between Uruguay and Argentina. As Luis Leal, eminent
critic of Mexican letters, has noted, the fantastic is "not well adapted to the psychology of the
Mexican, a realistic man by nature." 1 Cultivated by a select minority who renounced,
ignored, or feared the indigenous side of Mexico as something alien to their own perception
of reality, as something unworthy of literary consideration, the fantastic became a mode of
expression inextricably linked to "escapist" literature. Despite their New World surroundings,
these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers maintained a European point of view
and looked to Western civilization to shape their thoughts and behavior. For them, the
fantastic was a means of expressing solidarity with Old World traditions.

Since the 1950s, however, fantastic literature in Mexico has gained new appeal and has
attracted the attention of some of that country's best-known authors. For many of them, the
fantastic is no longer a way of escaping reality, but rather of penetrating it and uncovering
new dimensions. It has sometimes carried an explicit message: it reminds the Mexican that
the past is not dead, that indigenous Mexico has not been smothered and buried under the
mask of European culture and that it will come back until confronted and dealt with in a
direct and honest way. The fantastic has become a vehicle of self-criticism and self-
examination for these Mexican writers and for their reading public. The fantastic manifests
itself in the theme

-141-

of the "living past," which comes back to haunt the contemporary Mexican, and it goes hand
in hand with the real-life search for the national and literary identity that has characterized
that nation since the first European set foot on its shores.

Two moments in history are especially intriguing to contemporary Mexican writers: the
conquest of the Aztec empire by Cortés and his army in the early sixteenth century, and the
period of French intervention ( 1862-1867), in which Maximilian and Carlotta played
romantic and tragic roles. Both historical events represent attempts by Europeans to assume
political and cultural control over Mexico. Both are periods in which Mexico was made to
wear a foreign "mask" and to conceal her native heritage. Beneath the surface of European
domination, however, indigenous Mexico struggled to survive and to assert its influence on
the attitudes and beliefs of the people. Native culture was concealed at times but never
eradicated, and, throughout history, even the most cosmopolitan, westernized Mexican could
not escape the feeling deep within of not fully belonging to the same world as the European
cousin.

Forebodings about the fragility of the European facade that covers the true face of Mexico
have lingered on in the twentieth century and continue to haunt the contemporary Mexican.
Beneath the glittering surface of the modern capital remain echoes of ruined civilizations that
reach far back in time. The shattered empire of Maximilian and Carlotta, the ruins of
Tenochtitlán, and the remnants of Toltec and Teotihuacán civilizations have provided the
foundation upon which the skyscrapers and busy highways of Mexico City have been built.

Most fantastic stories dealing with the theme of the living past are set in the modern day
capital city, for no other place in Mexico encapsulates so much history. In these stories, a
contemporary Mexican is confronted with a fantastic being or experience which puts him or
her in direct contact with the past. Often, the figure of Carlotta or Maximilian, or some
indigenous god or warrior, returns to threaten twentieth-century Mexico and remind her of
how easily foreign models can suppress a more authentic national image and lead the
Mexican away from self-discovery. When confronted with a reminder of their dual heritage
or of their history, the protagonists are shocked, sometimes terrified, to discover that below
the calm exterior of everyday life in Mexico exist cultural conflicts and tensions yet to be
resolved. These characters are eventually de-

-142-

stroyed because they have turned away from Mexico's turbulent background and from their
own Mexicanidad. They have lost touch with the mythic past and with the beliefs of their
indigenous ancestors. They have forgotten that their heritage is made up of two cultures, the
Spanish and the Indian, and they have completely adopted the worldview of the Western
European. Having turned their backs on their native heritage, they live only in the present,
ignorant of the fact that in Mexico, the past is quite literally alive.

In 1954, the literary career of Mexico's most celebrated contemporary novelist, Carlos
Fuentes, sprang to life with a modest collection of short stories entitled Los Días
enmascardos ( The Masked Days.) 2 Of these early works, only two presage the grace and
skill of the mature writer: Tlactocatzine, of the Flemish Garden and Chac Mool." Both have
become classic examples of the fantastic in Mexico and have yet to be surpassed in their
treatment of the theme of the living past.

Tlactocatzine is presented in the form of a diary by a nameless first-person narrator. Classic

motifs, such as the haunted house and the enchanted garden, create an atmosphere
reminiscent of nineteenth-century horror tales. Structurally, the house and garden function as
a bridge between two worlds for, as we discover, the narrator-protagonist is trapped between
the past and the present, Europe and Mexico, the dead and the living, and the fantastic and the
"real" world.

The protagonist is an ordinary man, out of step with society, who lives a solitary life built
around dreams and disillusions. Accustomed to a quiet, meditative existence, he welcomes
the opportunity to withdraw from the outside world when a wealthy acquaintance asks him to
act as the caretaker of a charming old mansion dating back to the reign of Maximilian and
Carlotta. The narrator immediately feels a spiritual union with the house and the century it
represents. He feels a tender melancholy for days gone by and spends most of his time lost in
idle daydreams which spring from his active imagination. The small, walled garden at the
rear of the house especially fascinates him because it is so different from anything he has
seen in Mexico. The trees and flowers were imported from northern Europe and reflect the
changing seasons, which normally go unnoticed in warmer climes. Very gradually, the
narrator is overcome by the strange sensation that he is not in Mexico at all, but instead in
some private world. At the same time, he becomes

-143-

aware that he is not alone, for an elderly, darkly clad woman begins to make regular but
inexplicable visits to the house and garden. Something about the woman strikes fear into the
narrator, yet he cannot muster the will to leave the house. Instead, he attempts to exorcise his
fear through logic and reason. As always, he is more inclined to thought than action, and it is
this inability to act that ultimately traps him in a static existence.

The fantastic suddenly erupts and overwhelms the narrator as he discovers that he is unable to
escape when the terror reaches unbearable levels. The doors have been sealed and he is
trapped for eternity in the Flemish garden with a madwoman. Even more horrifying is the
realization that she is not a living being, but the ghost of the Empress Carlotta, who believes
the narrator to be her dead husband, Maximilian. The motif of the sealed door reinforces the
idea that the protagonist cannot return to the other side once he has crossed over into the
world of the fantastic.

Many clues are given throughout Tlactocatzine as to the identity of the mysterious old
woman, but the clues are subtle and aimed at the well-informed reader. For example,
Tlactocatzine, of the story's title, is a Nahuatl word meaning "leader," and was the form of
address used by Mexico's indigenous population to address the Emperor Maximilian. Both
Maximilian and Carlotta had strong affiliations with Flanders, the place mentioned in the title
of the story. Carlotta was, by birth, a Belgian princess, and Belgium has occupied, since
1830, part of the territory previously known as Flanders. Maximilian's family, the Hapsburgs,
ruled Flanders and the lowlands for three hundred years. Many other fleeting references are
made in the text to Flanders, Belgium, and the Hapsburg seat of power, Austria.

In Tlactocatzine," Carlotta symbolized the seductive quality of foreign cultures that have
lured Mexico away from the development of an autochthonous heritage and led the nation
into a mad course of action: from the conquest through the twentieth century, Mexico has
aped foreign models and defaced national pride. Although of a much shorter duration than the
conquest, the epoch of the French intervention also left lasting marks on Mexico. Long after
the French were expelled and Maximilian executed, many Mexicans continued to look to
Europe for standards in culture and knowledge. The narrator of Tlactocatzine exemplifies
those Mexicans who do not feel at home in Mexico. His love of European culture

-144-

and his nostalgia for the past make him easy prey for Carlotta, who sensed in him a strong
attraction for a lost era, and a growing lack of interest in his contemporary world. Carlotta,
however, is a victim as well, and her crimes do not go unpunished. At the end of the story, in
her madness, she lapses into the Nahuatl tongue, a reminder that the indigenous forces,
though buried, remain alive in Mexico and will exact vengeance from all who turn away from
them.

"Chac Mool" is also set in contemporary Mexico City and features as its protagonist a
seemingly "ordinary" inhabitant of the capital, who blends in with the thousands of white,
westernized Mexicans who are his neighbors there. But suddenly and unexpectedly, the
fantastic invades his life, destroying his complacency and reminding him of the "other,"
indigenous Mexico, which has been left to smolder beneath the surface of the modern-day
nation. In this case, his confrontation with the past does not invoke the ghostly figures of
Maximilian and Carlotta, but rather an ancient Mayan rain god who gives the story its title.
"Chac Mool" begins with the announcement: "A little while ago, Filiberto died, drowned in
Acapulco" ( Los Días enmascardos, 7). A friend of the hapless Filiberto goes to the coast to
collect the body and transport it back to the capital. As he sorts through Filiberto's
possessions, the friend discovers a diary in which Filiberto had recorded the final months of
his life. This diary, narrated in the first person from Filiberto's point of view, provides the
central narrative thread of the story, while the friend's comments and reactions to Filiberto's
death and the events described in his journal present another point of view. Structurally, the
friend's first-person narration acts as a counterpoint to Filiberto's bizarre revelations.

Filiberto, a lonely, middle-aged bureaucrat, allows himself few luxuries in life, but he enjoys
collecting indigenous Mexican art. He is delighted one day to find a life-size replica of Chac
Mool, a preColumbian rain god, in a flea market where he is able to buy the object at a
modest price because of its doubtful authenticity. Filiberto takes the statue home and installs
it in the basement of his house, where he keeps his other trophies, but Chac Mool seems to
bring him bad luck. Filiberto notices, for example, that soon after the statue's arrival, the
plumbing in his house stops working, the pipes constantly break, and the basement is always
flooded. The perpetual dampness causes the statue of Chac Mool to take on a repulsive but
oddly human appearance. When Filiberto starts to

-145-

hear strange noises at night, his worst fears are confirmed: he awakens one night from a
troubled sleep to find Chac Mool alive and hovering over him.

After the initial shock of this encounter wears off, Filiberto overcomes his terror and accepts
Chac Mool as a companion. Chac Mool slowly assumes the dominant role, however, and
Filiberto is resentful of the former statue's tyrannical behavior. Filiberto becomes a prisoner
of the rain god and, when he finally manages to escape, Chac Mool brings about his death.

The second narrator is incredulous as he reads about these events. He attempts to explain
Filiberto's remarks as the ravings of a mentally unstable man but, to his surprise, he is greeted
at the door of Filiberto's house by a strange being who so closely resembles the description of
Chac Mool that the formerly rational narrator is left shaken and doubtful. The reader has been
lulled into a sense of false security by the second narrator, who was convinced that Chac
Mool did not exist. At the end of the story, when this narrator comes face-to-face with a
person who is apparently Chac Mool, the narrator hesitates, and so does the reader. Unlike
Filiberto's testimony, no previous warning has been given, no hints have been dropped to
prepare the reader for a shock. Unlike Filiberto, who states outright that Chac Mool
transformed himself from a statue into a human being, the second narrator's concluding
remarks are vague.

Chac Mool is portrayed by Filiberto as a character who is bitterly resentful of the present. He
was once a god, a highly respected deity, but in the intervening centuries he has been
desecrated and forgotten. He resents the attitude of modern Mexicans who have abandoned
their nation's indigenous heritage and are ignorant of their cultural history. Filiberto is guilty
of this crime; he has purchased Chac Mool as a curiosity piece and has treated him in an
irreverent manner. He has no real knowledge of the culture that Chac Mool represents and he
feels no spiritual bond to him. Ironically, as Chac Mool gains vitality and becomes a living
being, he loses the immortality he had as a statue and begins to grow old and corrupt. He
loses his dignity and divine poise, and develops petty bourgeois tastes.

The creature who opens the door to Filiberto's friend at the end of the story appears to be the
same tainted and aged image of Chac Mool described by Filiberto earlier in the narrative.
Dressed in Fi-

-146-

liberto's bathrobe, Chac Mool exudes the odor of cheap cologne and hair tonic, and his face is
covered with poorly applied makeup. The humanization process has been one of corruption,
for when Chac Mool gave up his ancient ways and adapted to the twentieth century, he lost
both his dignity and his identity. He becomes a culturally hybrid character who, rather than
benefitting from the blend of two heritages, adopts and maintains the worst characteristics of
both. He is treacherous, despotic, and fickle, a pathetic imitation of something totally alien to
his essential being.
Symbolically, Chac Mool can be seen as the representative of many contemporary Mexicans.
Like them, he turns his back on his indigenous heritage and forgets his ethnic pride. He
eventually adopts the values he earlier berated for disparaging the importance of indigenous
cultures. The transformation undergone by Chac Mool is not unlike that undergone by
millions of Mexicans since the conquest: it is an act of self-deception and self-denial that has
spread like a cancer throughout the Mexican psyche.

The fantastic allows Fuentes and other Mexican authors to voice their preoccupations with
their nation's turbulent and violent past, and to suggest some ways in which the modern-day
Mexican might come to terms with history. The writers treat the theme of the living past in a
way that provokes fear and doubt. The protagonists are caught up in the past against their will
and are unable to understand the uncanny events that disrupt the placidity of their daily lives
and threaten to destroy them. Eventually, they are destroyed, or sacrificed, in keeping with
the ancient patterns of violence and aggression that have repeated themselves throughout
Mexican history. The theme of the living past has provided contemporary Mexican writers
with an excellent vehicle for self-expression and an effective tool with which to fashion a
more authentic national identity.

NOTES
1. Luis Leal, Breve historia del cuento mexicano ( Mexico: Ediciones de
Andrea, 1956), 129.
2. Carlos Fuentes, Los Días enmascarados ( Mexico: Los Presentes, 1954).
"Chac Mool", 7-28; "Tlactocatzine, del jardin de Flandes", 37-50.

-147-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-148-

13
Dissolution and Discovery in the Fantastic Fiction of André Pieyre de
Mandiargues

Joyce O. Lowrie

"It's freezing hard enough to split rocks!" ("Il gèle à fendre les pierres!" 1 ) Pieyre de
Mandiargues begins his short story "The Little Stone Women" ( Les Pierreuses) with this
seemingly innocent idiomatic expression. He thereby situates the reader simply but
dramatically inside the mind of his protagonist. As Pascal Bénin, a young schoolteacher,
walks home from school on a bitterly cold day, the opening sentence resounds gratuitously
inside his head. It "lacerates" his thoughts, tearing apart myriad images he has tried to create
in its stead. But the words keep intruding, they "link themselves together," "tyranically," and
enter through an opening or "fault" in his brain. They penetrate "as if they were foreign
bodies."

"Laceration" versus "linkage"; decomposition versus composition; dissolution versus

discovery: in one introductory paragraph Mandiargues not only prefigures the action in this
fantastic tale but also alludes to the dualistic tensions that pervade life, language, and
fantastic literature.

The notion of words penetrating into a person's mind from the outside, as if through a fissure,
is the starting point for the creation of "The Little Stone Women." The process soon becomes
reversed when words emerge "literally" from inside a stone. As Pascal Bénin walks by a pile
of rocks, he believes he hears a cry ring out from one of them. Picking it up, he notices a
fissure around the rock's circumference. Unable to open it, he takes it home, splits it with a
knife, and discovers three bright red naked miniature women inside

-149-

the amethyst geode. One of them brazenly exhibits her voluptuous little body and
aggressively addresses Pascal in decadent Latin.

She and her sisters are "the stone women," she says, and they are 2,000 years old. They had
been thrust into Being by the great "solar, antique, Mediterranean" Mother-Deity; they had
lived, since then, inside the geode; but as a result of Pascal's curiosity (there are echoes of
Pandora here), they would soon die. And due to a noxious gas that the split geode had
emitted, their decomposition would precede Pascal's own death by only a few hours.

After delivering her spirited invective, the tiny prophet and her sisters participate in a triadic
dance while shouting Latin songs at Pascal. At the height of their hieratic rite, they burst into
flames and disintegrate into a minuscule pile of ashes.

After returning the ashes to the geode, Pascal reconstitutes it and glues it back together. He
wonders if he has dreamed, or if, perhaps, he has misunderstood the little creature. Why
couldn't she speak simply, like his students? This hesitation between reality and dream,
between comprehension and the possibility of misunderstanding constitutes the fantastic,
according to Tzvetan Todorovin The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.
The reader, too, hesitates, when at the end of the narrative Pascal Bénin throws himself on the
bed and tries to rest. The question is asked by the narrator: "What good would rest do him,
now that he would remain there until the increasingly imminent moment of his own
destruction?" But the point here is not to determine whether this text fits into the genre of the
fantastic, but to analyze the dualistic tensions that characterize the story's deep structure and
hold it, as it were, together. These structural tensions do not, in themselves, constitute a genre
characterization. But they do characterize all of Mandiargues's fantastic tales, and many other
fictions of fantasy as well.

One of the meanings of the word dissolution is "separation into parts; disintegration;
decomposition" (O.E.D.). Pascal's brain is "lacerated" or parted by words at the beginning of
the narrative. The geode is "fractured." The words fissure, break, crack, shatter, appear
throughout the text. When the little women dance, the geometric patterns they form are "no
sooner constructed than they are destroyed." At one point, Pascal must "reassemble" his
spirits. The effort to recompose broken parts underscores the ruptures them-

-150-

selves. Like many of the surrealist painters who were close friends of Mandiargues, Pascal is
particularly adept at creating collages and "uniting into fragile constructions pieces of mirrors
and fragments of broken plates." He uses a special "soldering-sandstone" glue to reconstitute
the two parts of the geode.
"Fragile constructions"; "pieces of mirrors": the references to Pascal's constructing mirror
collages represent the text as a structured and carefully wrought reflection of itself, a
linguistic assemblage in which words, or separate particles, are bound together like amethyst
crystals in a geode. Mandiargues believes in surrealist rêverie, in dreams, in chance as a
source of literary and artistic creativity; he mirrors his own process of discovery by showing
how words, or phrases, enter the head of the protagonist gratuitously and become the starting
point for a text. Mandiargues's short stories frequently exemplify this technique. In "The
Student (L'Etudiante)" the narrative begins with this observation: "The word 'student'
embodied itself once, for me, when I was thinking about the last of the czars." 2 The narrator
explains the phenomenon by saying that "words are much freer than one is usually willing to
admit: they become incarnated where they will" (" Student," 95). "Embodied"; "incarnated":
the process of discovery and creativity is linked to words in Mandiargues. The narrator of
"The Little Stone Women" also exhibits how individual fragments, or words, are
microcosmic units that comprise the bases for larger linguistic structures such as idiomatic
expressions, simple sentences, slang expressions of secondary school students, quotations in
late Latin. Diatribes, prophecies, invectives, and songs are also self-consciously
foregrounded. Double meanings and literatisms are emphasized. Upon rereading, for
instance, the reader links words that penetrate "as if they were foreign bodies" with the little
"foreign bodies" that come out of the stone. Signs of danger, or portents of destruction,
appear throughout the text as linguistic semes that the narrator interprets in parentheses. As
Pascal walks home, black crows write the letter M against the sky with widespread wings.
When this sign is scribbled on someone's wall in Italy, the narrator explains, it signifies the
opposite of evviva, "Live!" and means, consequently, "Die!" ( Mandiargues's fondness for
visual puns is reflected in Evviva, which contains three v's, two of which form the letter w,
(w, = vv). An imaginative interpretation might give linguistically erotic signifi-

-151-

cance to these voluptuous little red v's, or triangles.) Because M, in Italian graffiti, is a seme
for death, or the opposite of sexuality, it also reflects Mandiargues's constant use of the
Eros/Thanatos dyad in all of his fiction.

After hearing the little stone woman's explanation of her origins, Pascal (or the narrator) says:
"All that was gibberish, but since it was stated in such persuasive tones (and the little babbler
proffered, so roundly, her minuscule nudity), it was not difficult to perceive some reality
therein." The word gibberish, or the French charabia, which Mandiargues uses here, is a
Provençal word that is borrowed from the Spanish word algarabía. It means "the Arabic
tongue," or metaphorically, "bizarre or unintelligible language." Pascal faces a bizarre and
unintelligible, that is, a "fantastic" situation. Little red women ordinarily do not live for 2,000
years inside a stone and then pop out and deliver diatribes on cosmogony in late Latin. But
were they to do so, what they might say would be characterized as fascinating "charabia."
According to Eric Rabkin's theory in The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1976), the narrative makes a 180 reversal, and violates or contradicts
expectations when the sound resounds inside the stone or the little red women appear. The
narrator seems to suggest that, in spite of gibberish or the violation of expectations, it is "not
difficult to perceive some reality" within the fantastic because of the "persuasive tones" of the
utterance. Mandiargues is not only mirroring his own reader's reading at this juncture; he is
also claiming that the énoncé (what is told) depends upon the énonciation (how it is told). He
thus uses the fantastic to say something fundamental about literature itself.

This short story accentuates language in every form. Thinking, speaking, singing, reading,
writing, understanding, interpreting, all of these linguistic activities come to the fore.
Mandiargues thus points to language and literature as constructs, even while showing how
destruction functions as a mirror of the internal tensions that exist within a text between
silence and words, life and death. When Pascal, whose name is not insignificant, opens the
geode, we read: "Had the knife broken, the man, perhaps, would have been saved; but it had
been written, somewhere, it had doubtlessly been decided in some place, that the man would
be lost." 3 A man's being! for Mandiargues, is not only a fate decided upon by the stars; it is

-152-

also a code to be deciphered. Pascal Bénin's destiny had been "written down somewhere,"
and that "somewhere" is the short story itself. The last word of the text is "destruction." When
Pascal's end is signaled, the end of the text is signaled as well: "the imminent moment of his
own destruction" applies to the ending of both protagonist and text.

So we come to a second meaning of the word dissolution. Besides separation into parts,
decomposition," the word also means "termination of life; death, decease" (O.E.D.). Both
meanings are related in "The Little Stone Women." As for "separation into parts," not only is
a system of binary oppositions established in the thematics of the text, to use Claude Lévi-
Strauss's categories (life is juxtaposed to death, male and female, microcosm to macrocosm,
black to red, reality to dream) but the structure of the story opposes one part to the other. The
second part is the reverse of the first: while words go into the mind and "lacerate" at the
beginning, they come out of the stone after its having been "lacerated" in the second part.
Both structure and thematics mirror each other's binary oppositions. All of these elements
work together, in dyadic tension, to keep the text intact, so to speak. All of these doubled
parts are kept together by the author's art, by his language, by his special "soldering-
sandstone" glue. Destruction and construction go hand in hand; the text is both threatened and
secure.

Mandiargues' work frequently reveals a longing for a universe that precludes dichotomies, a
universe in which geodes have no fissures, in which texts have symmetries and closures, and
in which the cosmos is united, perfect, round, intact, and whole. However, the "other side" of
perfection, a Manichean notion, constantly intrudes into his fiction, so as to make the reader
acutely conscious of pain, blood, violence, torment, sadism, dismemberment, decomposition,
and death. After all, death comes to Pascal Bénin because the geode has been split asunder.
An opposite term for this side of Mandiargues's work is "Persons in Pieces", a chapter title
that Leo Bersani uses in A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. 4 Bersani
looks to Lautréamont as the author most responsible for creating "the destructured self' in
modern literature. He begins by reminding us that scalping and skinning were favorite forms
of torture in Les Chants de Maldoror. "[Maldoror] likes to reach down (and up) into people's
insides and rip their organs out.

-153-

He is also a great bloodsucker and enjoys cutting off a young man's wrist or throwing him
into a sack and flinging him against a stone wall." ( Future, 192).

While dismemberment, in various forms, appears throughout Mandiargues's fiction, one

novel in particular, The Englishman Described in the Enclosed Château (L'Anglais décrit
daus le château terme), reveals the excesses to which he can go in butchering his characters,
in tearing them, Dionysically, apart. Producing a sadomasochistic, erotic book, or novel of
transgression, seemed to become required writing for some of the surrealists and their
entourage. Jean Paulhan's mistress wrote Story of O; Aragon wrote Le Con d'Irene; Georges
Bataille wrote Mme Edwarda and Story of the Eye; Jean de Berg wrote The Image; and
Mandiargues wrote The Englishman Described in the Enclosed Château. Not only were these
writers trying to outdo each other; they were trying to outdo Sade.

In his introduction to The Englishman, Mandiargues describes his delight in sharing a meal of
crabs with his friend, Hans Bellmer. The enjoyment of crustaceans, Mandiargues says,
depends "as much, if not more so upon anatomical takings-apart, upon dissection and
dismemberment as upon simple gastronomy." Bellmer, the surrealist engraver who also took
apart dolls and put them back together in disordered combinations, agrees with Mandiargues
that crabs should be "catalogued among Sadean foods." 5

Dismemberment in The Englishman takes place in a particularly horrifying manner. While

Bérénice Valentin, the mother of an infant, is tied to a St. Andrew's cross, her baby is
suspended upon a trapeze-like apparatus so that mother and son face each other. An
enormous black man named Caligula is instructed by Sir Horatio Mountarse, the owner of the
title's château, to proceed with the torture. Caligula caresses the mother, then moves toward
the child. With his finger he carefully draws a line down the middle of the baby's face. Then,
taking a knife, he slits the child from top to bottom, "seizes both edges of the wound at the
place where the nose had been, pulls the skin, violently, with both hands, to the right and to
the left, flaying the infant's face in two seconds, before his mother's eyes" ( The Englishman,
143). He does the same with the rest of the child's body, and after plunging the knife into
what is left, he throws the remains to the crabs. He then rapes the mother, who has, according
to the narrator, the sexual climax of her life.

-154-

Eros/Thanatos: nowhere has Mandiargues more vividly nor more horribly depicted that
conjunction than in this Sadean novel in which one hears echoes of Huysmans' descriptions
of Gilles de Rais's activities. The Englishman is not a fantastic novel per se. It does not, to use
the words of Roger C. Schlobin, "embrace the empirically impossible." 6 But it does reveal,
by taking a tendency to its extreme, the Mandiarguean usages of dissolution in both meanings
of the word: "dividing into parts," on the one hand, and "extinction," on the other. The ironic
tone of the novel, and the excessive quality of the tortures lead one to think that Mandiargues
is parodying (or mirroring) Sade as well as himself. The novel is filled with binary
juxtapositions, with male/female, life/death, white/red, Eros/Thanatos dichotomies and
junctures.

One of the many reasons for the disquieting effects that The Englishman produces is the
methodicity that Mandiargues employs in the representation of spectacles of cruelty. Each act
of erotic violence is carefully planned. Each is set into motion by a metteur-enscène. There
are stages, elaborate stage settings, actors, and spectators. The novel's narrator plays the role
of the public by viewing the spectacles, by engaging in them at times, and by retreating to
ponder over them at others. He flees in the end. But in the meantime, Mandiargues'
meticulous method of representation, like Sade's, is juxtaposed to cruelty and chaos.

In a Yale French Studies article that is negatively critical of Sade Style and Rhetoric," (No.
35, 20-28), Mark J. Temmer calls attention to the "frigid form" that contrasts with what he
calls Sade's "hot" topics. 7 Sade's "impersonality," his too "well-structured syntax," his
"abstract enumerations," his "diagnostic spirit" are stressed and decried. But what Temmer
fails to take into account is that this was a deliberate method used specifically to evoke
disquietude. "Hot" topics presented "coldly" were doubtlessly thought by Sade to be more
erotic, more intellectual, and more gripping, precisely because the convolutions of the body
were being controlled by an analytical mind. While Sade's tableaux are often tiringly
repetitive, his style is, nevertheless, frighteningly compelling because his énoncés and his
énonciations are opposite from one another.

Mandiargues also enjoys turning things upside down and inside out. In Memory's Disorder
(Le Désordre de la memoire), he tells us that even as a child, while strolling along the beach,
he knew how

-155-

to catch an octopus and flip it inside out. "I often did this," he says, "when I went fishing at
low tide. . . . You pull one out of a hole in a rock. . . ., you stick both thumbs, simultaneously,
into the orifice of the sack that comprises the [octopus's] body, and you flip the sack upside
down very quickly; this causes an inky ejaculation to spew forth the moment the creature's
guts are bared to the open air." 8 Mandiargues refers to this action several times throughout
his work. The octopus's inky projection might be interpreted as a metaphor for the writer
whose task is that of exposing the underside of existence.

A further example of reversal occurs in one of Mandiargues's bestknown fantastic short

stories, The Diamond (" Le Diamant"). Sarah Mose, the daughter of a Jewish jewel merchant,
is asked by her father to examine and judge the quality of a large diamond he has just
acquired. The ritual Sarah goes through before examining the stone is initiatory and
alchemical in character. She must be totally naked to confront the stone. The opening of the
safe (reminiscent of a geode) where the stone is kept, is endowed with symbolic significance:
the safe's lock can only be turned by the composition of a word, and that word is haras, or
Sarah spelled backwards: "The word, she well remembered (and she recalled the joy she'd
experienced when her father had told her of it) was haras, her own name turned inside out,
'like a glove,' she thought, 'like a sac, like an octopus that had been caught and tortured, its
guts exposed,' her own name reflected in a mirror." 9 The word haras, in French, means
"stud-farm" or "stud," and when Sarah, who is a virgin, examines the diamond, she suddenly
feels faint, becomes miniaturized, falls inside the stone, and succumbs to a most powerful
bright red lionman (his head is that of a lion while his body is that of a man), who appears in
a brilliant ray of sunlight. Before penetrating this "virgin of the race of the prophets," he
informs her that their union will bring forth a being who will "glorify the long persecuted
race" ( The Diamond," 186).

The action, in this short story, is the reverse of that witnessed in The Little Stone Women."
Instead of coming out of a stone, Sarah falls into it. Instead of a tiny, bright red woman
pronouncing grave and mortal prophecies, creative sexual union takes place and the
discovery of a hope for the future predominates. If we put these texts back to back (they
appear as the third and sixth stories in the

-156-

same collection, Fire of Embers [ Feu de Braise]), we might say that they are "held together"
dyadically, by virtue of one's being the opposite of the other: damnation versus salvation.
These contrasts occur not only within the structure of one particular Mandiarguean text or set
of texts, but also within the structure of his work as a whole. The entire corpus is "glued
together," like a geode that has been severed and recomposed, by virtue of Mandiargues'
Gnostic, indeed, Manichean vision of the universe. After discussing eighteenth-century
English manor gardens in Second Belvedere ( Deuxième Belvedere), for example, the author
says the following: "Truth to tell, the categories of the natural and the artificial are so
inseparable that doubtlessly there is no better example than this one to illustrate the ancient
idea, whose source is Manichean, that nothing exists that is not supported by its opposite." 10

In his discussion of "Gnostic Allegory," Hans Jonas, author of The Gnostic Reliqion, points
out how outcasts in the Bible are elevated to honored positions in Gnostic texts: the serpent is
glorified and Cain exalted. "Instead of taking over the value-system of the traditional myth,"
Jonas explains, "[Gnosticism] proves the deeper 'knowledge' by reversing the roles of good
and evil, sublime and base, blest and accursed, found in the original." Thus, the truth of
certain texts can be brought out "by turning the intended meaning upside down." 11
Mandiargues's fictional practices fall into place when we interpret them as twentieth-century
manifestations of the Gnostic tradition.

Sarah Mose's use of the expression "a name turned inside out 'like a glove'" invites exegesis
in two further respects: it calls attention to the importance of the isolated fetish-object in
surrealism, and it leads to an examination of, what I shall call, Mandiargues's nostalgia for
synecdoche.

Surrealist artists were especially fond of representing dismembered parts of the body. Hands,
fingers, feet, heads, torsos, as well as the emptied out representations of these members--
gloves, boots, mannequin's or doll's heads, breasts, legs, and so on--appear consistently in
surrealist paintings, engravings, sculptures, and collages. The glove, in particular, was a
favorite surrealist fetish-object: De Chirico's The Song of Love, for example, depicts a
surgeon's rubber glove next to a plaster head of Apollo. Magritte Panic in the Middle Ages
exhibits a headless body whose arm forms the leg of an-

-157-

other headless body whose leg forms the leg of yet a third. Another painting of Magritte's
shows a pair of boots depicted as empty feet. In leafing through a book on surrealist art one
gets the impression of stumbling into an anatomy class--after dissection.

Like the visual art of many of his surrealist friends, Mandiargues's work is replete with
disjointed members. In During the Sordid Years, ( Dans les annés sordide) a leper and a
monkey pick away pieces of each other's flesh and throw them to waiting swans who gobble
them up. 12 In the same volume, a man who has seen "the other side of the coin" scratches
himself, and covers everything with a white powder "which is his own body" ( Sordid Years,
125). In The Archeologist," (" L'archéologue") Conrad Mur watches his fiancée slowly
disintegrate, as a result of her having observed the hideous spectacle of "the little wax
Caesar-girl." (This was the wax museum statue of a young girl whose stomach had been slit
to reveal a prodigious amount of red strawberries.) Standing by his fiancée's bedside, Conrad
notices that "a hand hangs down" beside the bed. 13 Without the possessive here, it is not "her
hand." It is not "sa main" or "la main" that he sees, but "une main," "a" hand dispossessed, in
prefiguration of death. It droops over the side of the bed, like a glove.

In one of the strangest of Mandiargues's stories, The Capital Vision (" La Vision Captale"),
Hester Algernon is awakened in the middle of the night, in a bizarre château to which she had
been invited, by an emaciated old man holding in his arms the bloodied, decapitated head of
an old woman. Hester screams and the old man disappears through the window, carrying his
hideous trophy with him. The following morning, Hester finds out that her "vision," or what
she had thought to be a nightmare, had not been a nightmare at all: the man had escaped from
an insane asylum, had sawed off the head of one of the château's servants, and had carried it
around throughout the night. Todorov would call this an example of the étrange, or of the
fantastique expliqué, of the fantastic's having been dissipated by virtue of having been
explained away. But this notion of Todorov's would be somewhat facile here, for Hester
Algernon concludes her narration by saying that "the only thing I can say with certainty now
is that my present life has taken on the appearance of a dream--ever since I saw brutally
incarnated into the real world that which I believed to be visible only within the realm of
dream." 14 The Jungian term enantiadromia, or "conversion to the

-158-

opposite," perhaps expresses what happened to Hester Algernon. 15 As "the other side" of
"Sarah" is "stud," so the other side "reality," Hester says is, "fantasy" or "dream." In this
"capital vision," Mandiargues renders vivid the notion of reality's being both severed from
and confounded with the realm of the visionary. Everything is represented by its double, by
its opposite. Reality and fantasy are both opposite and complementary.

The title also demonstrates Mandiargues' capacity for double meanings: a "capital" vision
means a "principal" or "most important" vision; it also implies its purely etymological sense
in that "capital" grimly stands for caput, the Latin word for "head." Thus Mandiargues brings
together the metaphorical with the literal meaning.

Because Hester Algernon is obsessed by her vision, she can do nothing but tell her tale. She
says: "This story is the only link that still subsists between me and the world" ( Capital
Vision," 176). Her testimony thus becomes a metaphor for the writer and his visionary craft.
Language, or storytelling, is the tie that joins two realms. Fiction creates links even as it
reveals a sundered world. To find that The Capital Vision was partly inspired by Max Ernst's
1929 novel-collage, La Femme 100 têtes, would be no surprise. Note the wordplay of the
numeral cent (one hundred), with the preposition sans (without): the woman with 100 heads
and/or no head at all. In that novel the themes of dismemberment, torture, disruption,
shipwreck, foreground the revolutionary, or "explosive," processes of collage. Thus The
Capital Vision is a polysemic metaphor for the role of fiction itself.

In much twentieth-century fiction and art, a manifest severance has occurred between the
part and the whole. Individual "parts" stand alone; they do not stand for a whole that could
be assumed, for example, in ancient and Renaissance cosmology, in a world in which "the
smallest thing was inseparably connected with the total." 16 Therein, man and cosmos were
related. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson says in The Breaking of the Circle, "There was basic
correspondence between man's body and the body of the world, between man's soul and the
soul of the universe" ( Breaking, 3). "Our ancestors . . . found everywhere fresh proof of the
design of a 'metaphysical' God in the intricate repetitive patterns of man, the world, and the
universe" ( Breaking, 6). The round head of man was related to, or stood for, the circular
globe, or for the circle that

-159-

existed in the spheres of the planets, or ultimately, for the circle of perfection that was the
symbol of God. But in our day the disjunction that has taken place between these realms is
manifest in the variously dismembered parts of the body that appear with such frequency in
art and literature. "A" hand, such as the one Conrad Mur sees hanging over the bedside in "
L'Archéologue," appears to belong to no one. The synecdochical "hand that rocks the
cradle," in our day, has been cut off at the wrist. The signifiers, in modern and postmodern
fiction, poetry, and art, have been severed from their signifieds. For Mandiargues, the
synecdochical vision is a nostalgic wish for a universe in which things "did not fall apart,"
where there were connections between parts and whole, where the center did, indeed, "hold."

In Second Belvedere, one of Mandiargues' three books of short essays on a number of

disparate subjects, his statements about his friend Dubuffet's collages could be applied to
much of his own work:

[ Dubuffet's] opinion is that man is deceived when he believes he has a vision

of the whole or of the exterior world; after all, he only perceives details by the
thousands or by the millions as if they were so many little reflections in a
mirror; he only disposes of knowledge of nature that is completely
fragmentary, or, so to say, kaleidoscopic. He dupes himself, or he dupes
others when he tries to extend his point of view from the part to the whole. . . .
The collage or the assemblage of tiny little natural elements, the bringing
together of strictly restricted imprints, the coalition of small images or the
comparison of small suggestive recollections, permit one to create a more
honest reconstruction of the universe that is accessible to our senses. 17

In The Future of Eternity: Mythologies of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Casey Fredericks
says that both science fiction and fantasy depend upon dislocation, discontinuity, and
estrangement for their inspiration. 18 C. N. Manlove, in The Impusle of Fantasy Literature,
states that fantasy exhibits a recurrent theme: "this theme is its insistence on the celebration
of the separate identities of created things." 19 One can take a cue from Manlove and say that
Mandiargues's fantastic fiction emphasizes, even if it does not always celebrate, "the
separate identities" of things.

-160-

Because "the center does not hold," slidings and slippages occur between the animal,
vegetable, and mineral realms in Mandiargues's fiction. The fantastic is a genre in constant
metamorphosis. Metamorphoses also play an important role in the fantastic. In Mandiargues,
similes abound in which man or woman is compared to beast, the animate world to the
inanimate, the natural to the artificial. Transformations of man or woman into animals or
hybrids are frequent: in The Pommeraye Passage (" Le Passage Pommeraye"), 20 a man is
transformed, by a mysterious creature with a beautiful, scaly arm, into "l'homme-caïman," or
the crocodile-man; the "Parc Monceau Man," in a story by the same name, transforms himself
into a rubbery "human wheel" or circle that rolls, like a ball, all over the Parc Monceau in the
middle of the night. Stephanie Gern, in Adive," 21 is entranced by a woman in a métro and
follows her home; as the two women make love in a darkened room, Stephanie becomes
aware that the other one is not a woman at all, but some type of animal. She turns out to be
something "which could be a bitch or a type of small wolf or a large fox" ( Adive, 145 ).
Ambiguity also characterizes Mandiargues's use of metamorphosis.

Mandiargues signals an exploded universe, a shattered world. Because the Greek philosophic
movement from the Many to the One seems not to be true for him, he finds resolution in a
dualistic, Manichean vision. His mentor, André Breton, expresses the chief aim of surrealism,
in the Second Surrealist Manifesto, as the bringing together of dualities, the joining of
contrary entities. He thus states:

Everything leads to the belief that a certain point exists in the human spirit
from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future,
the communicable and the incommunicable, cease being perceived
 contradictorily. In vain should one attribute to Surrealist activity an aim other
than the hope of determining that point. 22

Mandiargues frequently paraphrases this famous declaration: "I am seeking the point that is
equidistant from day and from night, from evil and from good." 23 Breton, and Mandiargues
after him, state as their aim what the alchemists called a coniunctio oppositorum, the
conjunction of antinomous parts. If the part cannot represent the

-161-

whole, the conjoining of disparate entities is an ideal for which to aim.

Mandiargues frequently resolves dualities in his fiction by creating rites and rituals of
initiation that depend, for their motivating imagery and significance, upon alchemy, upon
Hermetic and esoteric lore. A third meaning of dissolution is "to become liquid, to melt."
This meaning corresponds to the nigredo, or the melting down of substances in the first stage
of the alchemical opus. Symbolically, this blackening, or putrefaction, which is tantamount to
torment, is a primary step in the eventual purification of the prima materia, or of the self.

The final stage of the process, or of the Great Work, consists of coniunctio, the resolution of
oppositions, the mystical marriage of sun/moon, black/white, male/female. Many of
Mandiargues's texts exhibit the first two meanings of "dissolution." The third meaning, a
positive one, is then revealed in his resolutions of dyadic severances. In The Diamond," the
mystical marriage of sun and moon, of male and female, of passive and active forces, occurs
within the stone, or through the intervention of the Philosopher's stone, the "pierre" de
Mandiargues. Sarah Mose's coupling with the lion-man, who is the alchemical symbol of the
sun, leads to the overcoming of duality by the procreation of a new being, the text itself. This
short story exemplifies Mandiargues's own " Alchimie du Verbe," his Alchemy of the Word."
His creative act manifests a linguistic quest for Wholeness that reflects the alchemical Way
of Perfection. It entails the use of dissolution in all three meanings elaborated here and
achieves what Breton calls, in La Lampe dans l'horloge, "revolutionary truth." 24 This truth is
discovered by means of "rupture et dépassement," the breaking with the real but going
beyond it, at the same time.

Mandiargues's nostalgia for synecdoche is expressed in and resolved by the formal

properties of his art. He deals with fragmentation by ordering his assemblages, by carefully
constructing his fiction. This order and construction is precisely what makes him an inheritor
of a recognizably French tradition. The excessive qualities of his texts are controlled by his
will to oppose the chaotic elements present in the cosmos: he creates order in the very face of
death.

-162-

NOTES
1. André Pieyre de Mandiargues, "Les Pierreuses", Feu de Braise ( Paris:
Bernard Grasset, 1959), 55. All translations of titles and passages are my
own. Texts are cited in their French editions. Page numbers whose
references are obvious are incorporated into the body of the article.
2. Mandiargues, "L'Etudiante", Soled des loups ( Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 95.
3. Cf. Stirling Haig "André Pieyre de Mandiargues and 'Les Pierreuses", The
 French Review, 39, 1965, 275-280, for a discussion of the classical sources
of this short story.
4. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature,
( Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1976), Chapter 11.
5. Mandiargues, L'Anglais décrit dans le château fermé ( Paris: Gallimard,
1979), p. 15.
6. Roger C. Schlobin, The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art ( Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press and Brighton: The Harvester Press
Ltd., 1982), x.
7. Mark J. Temmer, "Style and Rhetoric", Yale French Studies 35, 2028.
8. Mandiargues, Le Désordre de la mémoire: Entretiens avec Francine Mallet
( Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 53.
9. Mandiargues, "Le Diamant", Feu de Braise, 158.
10. André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Deuxième Belvédère ( Paris: Bernard
Grasset, 1962), pp. 46-47.
11. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 92.
12. André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Dans les années sordides ( Paris: Gallimard,
1948), 11.
13. Mandiargues, "L'Archéologue", Soleil des loups, 54-55.
14. Mandiargues, "La Vision Captale", Soled des loups, 175.
15. Cited by Casey Fredericks The Future of Eternity: Mythologies of Science
Fiction and Fantasy ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 42.
16. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of
the "New Science" upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry ( New York: Columbia
University Press, 1960).
17. Mandiargues, Deuxième Belvédère, 181.
18. See Fredericks, op. cit., cf. Chapter II, "Estrangement in Mythology and
Science Fiction".
19. C. N. Manlove, The Impulse of Fantasy Literature ( Kent, Ohio: Kent State
University Press, 1983), ix.
20. Mandiargues, "Le Passage Pommeraye", Le Musée noir ( Paris: Galli-

-163-

mard, 1946). Cf. Mary Ann Caws, A Metapoetics of the Passage:

 Architextures in Surrealism and After ( Hanover & London: University
Press of New England, 1981), for a discussion of the importance of "the
passage" in surrealism.
21. André Pieyre de Mandiargues, "Adive", Mascarets ( Paris: Gallimard,
1971), 145.
22. André Breton, Manifests du Surréalisme ( Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert,
1962), 154.
23. Joyce O. Lowrie, "Entretien avec André Pieyre de Mandiargues", The
French Review, LV, ( Oct. 1981), 78.
24. Cited by J. H. Matthews, The Imagery of Surrealism ( Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1977), 115.

-164-

PART III
Fantastic Themes, Figures, and Techniques in the Arts: Collage, Stage, and
Film

The essays in this section focus on the visual arts in their several forms, as
each essay attempts to comment on the involvement and reaction of the
audience to a particular performance or work. Charlotte Stokes illuminates the
strangely comic yet serious vision of Max Ernst through an examination of
one of his collage novels, Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel.
Steven Earl Forry takes us on a tour of various portrayals of Frankenstein's
monster on the stage and in film from 1823 to what may be the twentieth-
century's definitive performance: Boris Karloff in Universal Studio's
Frankenstein. Along the way he comments on the many stage adaptations in
this country and abroad. Bringing us into the 1980s, Donald E. Palumbo
reviews several popular fantastic films of recent years demonstrating how they
draw their theme from one of the most familiar from literature: death and
resurrection.

-165-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-166-

14
Charlotte Stokes
Surrealist as Religious Visionary: Max Ernst's Rêve d'une petite fille qui
voulut entrer au Carmel (1930)

Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel ( The Dream of the Young Girl Who
Wanted to Become a Carmelite Nun) is probably one of the most Catholic works of avant-
garde art in the twentieth century. Its maker, Max Ernst, and other surrealists were devoutly
anti-Catholic; nevertheless the form and the rich symbolic language of this "dream" are
tributes to the Catholic experience. Ernst did not admire the lives of those personages of the
church who have been raised to mythic stature by contemporary fiction--the conservative
parish priest, the repressive teacher nun, the bureaucratically-bound bishop. Rather, Ernst
pays tribute to the nonrational and fantastic threads within the fabric of Catholic thought; he
pays tribute to the visionary experience of the mystics.

Ernst was a surrealist artist, an artist of the twentieth century, raised in a devout Catholic
family in a small Rhineland town during the last years of the nineteenth century. These
aspects of Ernst's life are reflected in his Rêve dune petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel,
his second collage novel. (A collage novel is a book of collages, made from bits and pieces of
cheap nineteenth-century engravings, accompanied by poetic commentary.) Ernst recreated
the spiritual acrobatics of the religious mystics that had so affected his father. But Ernst also
became a psychology student during his years at the University of Bonn. Through eyes
educated by twentiethcentury psychology, he saw the visionary experience as a recasting of
Catholic symbols into the rich and irrational inner truths that Freud had explained. These
truths too are found in his "dream."

-167-

In choosing to reveal the visions of a "young girl," Ernst referred not only to the visionary
experience of female saints, but also to the young women who were the primary subjects of
Freud's work on hysteria. (The visionary experience may be any one of a number of mental or
spiritual states--such as ecstasy, trance, or prophetic dream--as well as seeing or feeling a
vision.) André Breton also paid a surrealist tribute to the young female mind in a disordered
state in his novel Nadja.

Because the experience of visions was one of the symptoms of hysteria, the surrealists found
the disorder an especially admirable mode of thought. In an editorial for a surrealist
publication, Breton and Louis Aragon celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of
hysteria. After describing its recent history in medicine and its much longer history as
visionary experience, they close their essay by saying that "in all respects [hysteria may] be
considered as a supreme means of expression." 1 But for Ernst the visionary experience
became more than just a fascinating process to be observed in mental patients and saints. It
became his metaphor, if not his model, for the creative disordering of the mind that he, as an
artist, practiced.

The Freudian brew of religious allusions, symbols, and stories cooked up in the overheated
imagination of Ernst's young girl is, of course, a satire of the Catholic church. Specifically,
Ernst's book is a parody of Histoire d'une âme ( The Story of a Soul), the autobiography of St.
Theresa of Lisieux or, as she called herself, "the little flower gathered by Jesus." St. Theresa
was born in France in 1873, entered a Carmelite convent at the age of 15, and died of
tuberculosis nine years later. She was canonized in 1925 by popular demand. Her
autobiography tells of her childhood and, as does Ernst's book, the trials that prepared a girl
for "taking the veil." Ernst made more than one direct reference to her in his book; his "young
girl" is a latter day follower of St. Theresa of Lisieux, or even what St. Theresa would have
been had she lived in 1930. 2

For his young girl, Ernst chose the Carmelite order because it was St. Theresa's order, and
also because it was one of the most strict in maintaining the physical asceticism that dated
back to the early desert monasteries: isolation from the world within the cloister (as in the
desert); the rule of silence; a heavy, rough habit; no personal possessions; rigorous and
simple manual labor; meager and

-168-

meatless meals; straw pallets to sleep on; and backless stools to sit on. This life was designed
to focus the mind on the main activity of the order, prayer, which results, at times, in
visionary experiences.

Although the surrealist artists and poets did not deny themselves physical pleasure, they did
enter the surrealist group with the sense of vocation of those entering a holy order. Absolute
commitment was demanded of each surrealist, and to a greater or lesser degree each member
acquiesced. Not for nothing was Breton called surrealism's "pope." But perhaps closer to the
central issue of Ernst's philosophy was the deliberate degrading of his own highly-trained
mind by refusing (or seeming to refuse) to let intellect direct his creative activities. Instead,
he piously denied his own individual and conscious creative powers by crediting his work to
subconscious drives that were, according to Ernst, creative forces shared by all human beings.
His artistic methods--such as his acceptance of chance occurrences--were like the religious
practices of the ascetics in that they were techniques to humiliate the more sophisticated
aspect of his own nature.

Whether or not Ernst reached such esoteric conclusions by reading St. Theresa's
autobiography, there is little chance he could have escaped the knowledge, or even the
influence, of the little nun who died when he was a child. His family was too concerned with
religion not to have read and discussed Histoire d'une âme, which was translated into many
languages and, from its publication in 1898, was immensely popular. Further, as a German
soldier for all four gruesome years of World War I and as a friend of former French soldiers
after the war, Ernst heard more of her in a quite different context: French soldiers had called
on Sister Theresa for protection; French gunners had named their batteries for her; French
pilots had given their planes her name; and whole regiments had been dedicated to her. 3 She
was not just any saint, but the saint of the bourgeois French patriot.

One of St. Theresa's biographers said that Histoire d'une âme appeared, superficially at least,
"sweet, pale and fragile" and exuded a "faintly perfumed air." 4 The little saint accepted
chiding over a vase accidentally broken by another nun; she smiled at a nun whom she
disliked; she bore the splashing of dirty water as clothes were washed next to her. The trials
and the humiliations are so small! An im-

-169-

mature girl's obedience and middle-class good manners seem to be elevated to a saintly
sphere. Both this glorification of bourgeois values and the patriotic zeal with which she was
venerated would have made St. Theresa a lightning rod for the surrealist's anger.

Ernst's satiric poke at St. Theresa is effective because he appropriated the imagery, and even
the tone, of Histoire d'une âme. For example, St. Theresa of Lisieux described her
relationship to Christ:

. . . vous savez les flammes, ou plutôt les océans de grâces qui vinrent inonder
mon âme, aussitôt après ma donation. . . . 5
 (. . . you know what flames--or rather what oceans of grace--flooded my soul
immediately after I gave myself. . . .) 6

Compare this to the beginning of the prayer Ernst gave his young girl:

Seigneur chére, câlinez-moi comme vous saviez le faire dans l'inoubliable nuit
où . . . --Plate 44 . . . mon âme fut inondée de la rosée céleste . . . --Plate 45

(Dear Lord, fondle me, as you knew how to do so well, during the
unforgettable night when . . . --Plate 44 . . . my soul was flooded with
heavenly dew . . . --Plate 45)

The physical excitement of a sexual encounter with Christ as the bridegroom is

acknowledged, yet purged of carnal awareness, by the "little flower" in the following:

Ah! qu'il fut doux le premier baiser de Jésus à mon âme! Qui, ce fut un baiser
d'amour! Je me sentais aimée, et je disais aussi: "Je vous aime, je me donne à
vous pour toujours!" 7

(Oh, how sweet the first kiss of Jesus was! It was a kiss of love. I knew that I
was loved and I declared: "I love You and I give myself to You for ever!") 8

The immature Theresa even goes so far as to give us the text of the wedding invitation for the
celebration of her marriage to Christ. Histoire d'une âme contains imagery that is both
religious and sexual, as does the autobiography of that other Carmelite, St. Theresa

-170-

of Avila, Bernini's St. Theresa. But the naïve musing of the young and inexperienced French
Carmelite of the nineteenth century cannot compare with the visionary, yet worldly, St.
Theresa of Avila's full-blooded and heady description of her encounter with God's angel:

I saw that he had a long golden dart in his hand, and at the point there seemed
to me to be a little fire: I thought that he pierced my heart with this dart several
times. . . . The pain hereof was so intense, that it forced deep groans from me;
but the sweetness which this extreme pain caused in me was so excessive, that
there was no desiring to be free from it; nor is the soul then content with
anything less than God. This is not a corporal but a spiritual pain, though the
body does not fail to participate a little in it, yea, a great deal. 9

In the richness of his sensual imagery--both violent and sexual-Ernst makes the visionary
experience as vivid as the visions of the Counter-Reformation saint. The dream of Ernst's
young girl is as direct as St. Theresa of Avila's account, but far more knowing in the area of
sexual symbolism. Ernst gives the following to his "young girl," Marceline-Marie (author's
translation):

Marceline-Marie: "Under my white dress, come with me, crows and harpies.
Take burning coals in your beaks and . . ."--Plate 26

"hop, là! hop là! . . ."--Plate 27

 Marceline-Marie coming out of a man-eating sea: "All my joys have an alibi
and my body is covered with a hundred profound cracks . . ."--Plate 28

". . . under my white dress, come with me, you very insensitive and mitered
rats. And you, beetles, who pick up the suburban garbage, follow me with
your little bells and . . . "--Plate 29

" . . . hop là hop là . . ."--Plate 30

" . . . under my white dress, come with me, you terrible newspaperreading
grasshoppers! Widen your little eyes and . . . "--Plate 31

" . . . hop là! hop là! . . ."--Plate 32

" . . .under my white dress, dear little rabbits, keep quiet at my soul's door.
Knock without coming in or going out . . . "--Plate 33

". . . under my white dress, in my columbodrome, you'll never be poor,

tonsured pigeons. I'll bring you a dozen tons of sugar. But don't touch my
hair!"--Plate 34

-171-

Figure 14-1. Max Ernst, d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel,
1930. ". . . hop là! hop là! . . ." Plate 32. Courtesy S.P.A.D.E.M.,
Paris/V.A.G.A. New York

-172-

Ernst's collages and poetry--his visual and verbal communication of these visions--strengthen
the reality of the experiences for his readers, who see and hear the visions. Within Ernst's
collages themselves is the collision of fragments from different realities; as in a vision, in a
collage one reality superimposes itself on and changes another. Ernst's "dream" of
fragmented images is held together by a running parody incorporating snatches of pious
platitudes.

Ernst's parody is divided into four chapters: "La Ténébreuse", "La Chevelure", "Le Couteau",
and "Le Céleste Fiancé" ( "Child of Darkness", "Tresses", "Knife", and "Celestial
Bridegroom"). The title of the first chapter, "La Ténébreuse"--which cannot be precisely
translated into English--is suggestive of Byronic gloom, moral taint, tenebrism (the dark
manner of painting), and tenebrae (the nighttime service of holy week). In this chapter, the
first step leading to divine acceptance, Ernst's young girl first dreams in darkness; above the
bed she dances the dance of darkness with her dream lover in Plate 10. But, like her
counterpart in Histoire d'une âme, she must undergo interviews with unsympathetic clerics:

Mon curé, devenu fou entre deux messes: "Vous êtes celle qui infeste les
navires et qui court, la nuit, sur les passagers endormis. Vous répandez une
douce odeur dans mes plus intimes profoundeurs. Vous êtes . . ." (Silence
religieux.)--Plate 21. (My priest, gone mad between two masses: "You're the
one who infests ships and crawls over sleeping passengers at night. You give
 off a sweet smell in my most intimate depths. You are . . ." [Religious
silence.]-Plate 21.)

The most noteworthy aspect of the "Child of Darkness" chapter is that the "young girl,"
whose name is Marceline-Marie, is split into two personalities, Marie and Marceline:

(. . . hold this hand condemned to vegetate in a cell. Listen to me, my child,

baldness awaits you." Marceline-Marie splits in two. [Anguish and cries.]--
Plate 4)

The name Marceline-Marie itself rings with meaning within Ernst's own life, and certainly
within the context of parody of Histoire d'une âme. Marceline is a pun on the French ma
(my) and the name Cé-

-173-

line. Céline, who was much discussed in Histoire d'une âme, was one of the saint's beloved
sisters, who also became a Carmelite nun. Indeed, many of St. Theresa's letters to her sister
begin "ma Céline. . . ." 10 Marceline is also the feminine of Marcel, as in Marcel Duchamp,
the great Dada artist, well known to Ernst. The second name, Marie, is the French variant of
the Latin Maria, the name of Ernst's older sister and close childhood companion, who died in
1897, the same year as St. Theresa. According to his writings, the death of Maria caused the
young Ernst to experience hallucinations that he would later explore in paintings and
collages. Another of Ernst's sisters, Louise, had become a nun. 11 Further, at the time he
created Rêve dune petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, Ernst was married to a young
Frenchwoman, devout and convent educated, who also had a typically middle-class
hyphenated name, Marie-Berthe.

Perhaps most suggestive is Ernst's own name. Maria is not only his sister's name, but his own
middle name. Like his little heroine, Marceline-Marie, he possessed two names beginning
with M; his full name is Maximilian Maria Ernst. The web of sisterly associations in the
names binds Ernst to his young girl and gives credibility to the notion that this book of
collages and poetry was a tribute to the dream states and visions that he considered the
parents of his own artistic creativity.

Although a "good girl" and a "bad girl" would seem the most likely result of the split into the
Marceline and Marie personalities, little clear or consistent difference exists between the alter
egos. They arc just close sisters. However, this split does permit Ernst to use illustrations
from popular nineteenth-century novels, such as Eugène Süe Wandering Jew, describing two
girls, the best of friends or sisters, who have a long series of adventures (See Figure 14-2 ).
But, far more important, these cheap, melodramatic novels provided Ernst with a flood of
violent and sexually provocative images. Yet these clearly nineteenth-century engravings
appeared archaic by 1930. Above all they evoked the period of Ernst's own childhood and all
the psychological implications of that experience.

After the darkness, Marceline-Marie passes into the second stage or chapter, which is
dominated by the physical attribute of long hair or "tresses," La Chevelure. In this chapter a
purposeful confusion of imagery centers on Marceline-Marie's obsessive concern

-174-
 Figure 14-2. Max Ernst, Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel,
1930. Marceline:"D'où venez-vous, céleste époux?" Le céleste fiancé: "Je sors
du nom d'une constellation. J'ai franchi cinq horizons. Je ne suis pas une bête
féroce. Je suis le produit d'une cerveau très estimé." (Marceline: "Where did
you come from, celestial husband?" Celestial bridegroom: "I came out of the
name of a constellation. I have crossed five horizons. I am not a ferocious
beast. I am the product of a very respected brain.") Plate 72. © S.P.A.D.E.M.,
Paris/V.A.G.A. New York, 1986.

-175-

with her hair. She is placed in a coffin by figures, two of whom have their heads wrapped in
great folds of hair:

Marceline-Marie:"Mais pourquoi, ma chevelure, pourquoi es-tu partout?"

La chevelure: "C'est pour mieux te mettre à ta place, mon enfant."--Plate 39

(Marceline-Marie: "But why, my tresses, are you everywhere?"

Tresses: "The better to put you in your place, my child."--Plate 39) 12

Long hair, because it denotes virginity and penitence, is one of the most important
characteristics of the female saints. Yet cutting the hair, as monks and nuns have done for
centuries, is a sign of renouncing worldly concerns. Ernst shows the physical burden of long,
heavy hair, while demonstrating Marceline-Marie's fear of having her hair cut off when she
takes the veil. Long, beautiful hair is so strongly associated with powerful femininity that
female power seems absent from the shorn head. It seems to have endured a violent act:

Le pigeon mitré: "De vos cheveux, bien chère enfant, le ciel est jaloux."
Marceline et Marie (d'une seule voix): "Déicides! Déicides!"--Plate 35

(Mitered pigeon: "Heaven is jealous of your hair, dear child." Marceline and
Marie [with one voice]: "Deicides! Deicides!")

The third chapter is called "Le Couteau" ("Knife"), the cutter-albeit an awkward cutter--of
hair. The knife seems to stand for all the phallic weapons--knives, swords, spears, arrows,
and the like-by which female saints met their martyrdoms. Of special relevance is the death
of St. Ursula and her companions, which Ernst recalled in later autobiographical writing:

Eleven thousand virgins gave up their lives in Cologne rather than give up
chastity. Their gracious skulls and bones embellish the walls of the convent-
church in Brühl [his home town], the same one where little Max was forced to
pass the most boring hours of his childhood. Maybe their company was
helpful to him. 13

The event that Ernst referred to is the martyrdom by barbarians of St. Ursula and her virgin
companions, who were killed when they disembarked at Cologne on their return from a
pilgrimage to

-176-
Rome. Ferguson closes his account: "The leader of the Huns offered to spare Ursula if she
would become his bride. When she refused, he drew his bow and drove three arrows through
her body." 14 Ernst's collages and text recall both the violence and the erotic coupling inherent
in this martyrdom. Typical of Ernst's dreams, however, there is a confusion; the barbarians
are the ones in trouble at the hands of the young virgin saint (author's translation):

Shipwrecked barbarians: "Come and admire the view from the top of the
mast."--Plate 64

First shipwrecked barbarian:--"Strike, my child, for you are the young

saint . . ."--Plate 65

". . . and everything is inhuman."--Plate 66

Shipwrecked barbarians in chorus: "And the day exists nowhere."--Plate 67

Marceline and Marie (with one voice): "It seems to me the sky is falling into
my heart . . ."--Plate 68.

Knives are much in evidence in the collages of this chapter. The last lines just quoted imply
that such phallic weapons are the means by which God communicates with the spirits of
female saints.

Ernst was thinking not only of St. Ursula, but also of St. Theresa of Avila. In honor of St.
Theresa's vision, the flaming sword has become the emblem of the Carmelite Order. As
might be expected, Ernst presents a travesty of Bernini's famous work, showing the angel
standing above St. Theresa with the golden arrow (Plate 63).

The last chapter, the pinnacle of divine experience--the mystic marriage with Christ himself--
is called "Le Céleste fiancé." Appropriately enough, the chapter begins with an image of that
bridegroom in the guise of a young priest: "Marceline et Marie (d'une seul voix): 'Quel doux
réveil! . . .'"--Plate 70. ("Marceline and Marie [with one voice]: 'What a pleasant awakening! .
. .'"--Plate 70) In this collage, angels flank the young priest; the collage has the hieratic
composition of an ancient altarpiece. The actual appearance of the divine lover in the
matrimonial bedroom in Plate 72 (See Figure 14-2 ) evokes yet another type of religious
painting, the annunciation.

Indeed, throughout the novel Ernst both evokes and makes glorious send-ups of that
important part of the devotional life of Catholics, religious pictures. Caravaggio Conversion
of St. Paul meets

-177-

Figure 14-3. Max Ernst, Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel,
1930. ". . . comptez sur moi!" Marceline-Marie:"Ma tenue me semble
indécente, papa, en présence du Père Dulac. L'épreuve la plus délicate pour
une Enfant de Marie . . ."Le R. P.: "La joie sera près de vous, mon enfant!"Le
Père: "Laissez-moi pleurer et . . ." (". . . count on me!" Marceline-Marie: "My
clothes seem indecent in the presence of Father Delac, Papa. The most critical
test for a child of Mary . . ." R. F.: "Joy will he yours, my child!" Father: "Let
me weep and . . .")-Plate 3. © S.P.A.D.E.M., Paris/V.A.G.A., New York, 1986.

-178-

Figure 14-4. Max Ernst, Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel,
1930. Marceline-Marie:"Ma tenue, mon céleste époux, me semble indécente."
Le céleste époux: "De vos mains flexibles, allez laver mon costume dans le
Rhône au grand matin."("Marceline-Marie: "My clothes, celestial husband,
seem indecent." Celestial husband: "At dawn go wash my suit with your flexible
hands in the Rhône.")--Plate 55. © S.P.A.D.E.M., Paris/N.A.G.A., New York.

-179-

its match in Plate 42. The popular subjects of the Temptation of St. Anthony and the Raising
of Lazarus are treated in Plates 3 (See Figure 14-3 ) and 19, respectively. The crucifixion, the
image that dominates saintly visions, is itself among the most important images in the novel.
In the collage for Plate 40, a bride in nineteenthcentury finery stands ready near what looks
like one of the thieves that was crucified with Christ. She is, indeed, the bride of Christ, but
the hoped-for moment of purity and happiness is juxtaposed with an act of the profoundest
cruelty. In Plate 47 the kneeling bride of Christ is centered between the crucifix and a sexy,
nineteenth-century chorus girl, who mocks the position of the crucified. The collage in Plate
55 (See Figure 14-4 ) makes a clearly satiric, even sacrilegious, statement, but it also exposes
the erotic nature of the inner forces that Ernst believed resulted in the visionary experience.

For centuries, visions had been explained in religious terms. But in the twentieth century, the
vision slipped from the church into the psychiatrist's office. There the therapist drained the
magic from the visionary experience, while forcing it to illuminate the workings of the mind
of the visionary. Ernst returned to the vision its power to awe.

Unusual in surrealist art and literature, Ernst's collage novel goes beyond satirizing the
Catholic church. While Ernst actively rebelled against the authoritarian and dogmatic
structures of the Church, he continued to think in a system of images clearly derived from the
Catholic experience. Indeed, the artist played light and free with the stories of St. Ursula, St.
Theresa of Avila, and St. Theresa of Lisieux, but the effect of Rêve d'une petite fille qui
voulut entrer au Carmel is of someone in the grip of powerful inner, or psychological, forces
that have taken the highly poetic and vivid form of religious visions. And it is for this creative
power of the human mind that Ernst had reverence.

NOTES

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

My thanks to the Department of Art and Art History of Oakland University, Rochester,
Michigan, and to the University's Research Committee for providing funds for the
photographs for this article.

1. Louis Aragon and André Breton, "The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hys-teria"

 -180-

teria, La Révolution Surréaliste, 11 ( 1928); reprinted in

translation in André Breton: What is Surrealism? Selected
Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont ( New York: Monad Press,
1978), Book 2, 320-321.
2. In his introduction
to Rêve d'une
petite fille qui
voulut entrer au
Carmel, Ernst
refers to his
"young girl's"
enlisting under
the banner of
Saint Theresa and
to her transports
during the
benediction of a
cast-iron statue of
the "Little Saint of
Lisieux." Plate 23
of the novel refers
again to the town
that is the
backdrop for St.
Theresa's saintly
life:

La
voix
du
cimeti
ère de
Lisieu
x:
"Dor
mez,
dorme
z mon
enfant
." Ici
Marce
line-
Marie
se
réveill
 e,
vérifie
sa
tenue
qu'ell
e
troupe
décent
e et
s'endo
rt de
nouve
au.

(Voice
of the
Lisieu
x
Cemet
ary:
"Sleep
, sleep
my
child.
"
Here
Marce
line-
Marie
awake
ns,
exami
nes
her
clothe
s,
which
she
finds
decent
, and
goes
back
to
sleep.)

The introduction and

text of Rêve dune
petite fille qui voulut
entrer au Carmel is
reprinted in Max
 Ernst, Ecritures
( Paris: Editions
Gallimard, 1970),
186-220. All
subsequent
quotations from Rêve
dune petite fille qui
voulut entrer au
Carmel are from this
source. All English
translations from
Rêve d'une petite fille
qui voulut entrer au
Carmel are mine.
The Plate numbers
are irrespective of
edition; Plate 23 is
the twenty-third
collage in the novel.

3. Frances Parkinson
Keyes, Thérèse:
Saint of a Little
Way ( New York:
Julian Messner,
1950), 170.
4. Ida Friederike
Görres, The
Hidden Face: A
Study of St.
Thérèse of Lisieux
( New York:
Pantheon, 1959),
8.
5. St. Thérèse,
Sainte Thérèse"
de l'Enfant-Jésus:
Histoire d'une
âme (Lisieux,
France: Office
Central, [ 1937?]),
148.
6. St. Thérèse, The
Autobiography of
St. Thérèse of
 Lisieux: The Story
of a Soul, trans.
John Beevers
( Garden City,
New York:
Doubleday, 1957),
111.
7. St. Thérèse,
Historie dune
âme, 59.
8. St. Thérèse, Story
of a Soul, 52.
9. Saint Teresa, Life
of Saint Teresa:
Written by
Herself, trans.
Rev. John Dalton
( Philadelphia:
Peter F.
Cunningham and
Son, 1870), 264.
10. Some editions of
Histoire d'une
âme include
letters from St.
Theresa. The
edition cited here
begins with her
letters to Céline,
317-342.
11. Patrick Waldberg,
Max Ernst ( Paris:
Jean-Jacques
Pauvert, 1958),
21-22.
12. "Tresses" seemed
a truer translation
of "la chevelure"
than did "hair."
Ernst used both
the more common
 word for hair, "les
cheveux," and "la
chevelure"
throughout the
chapter.
13. Max Ernst, Some
Data on the youth
of M. E. as told by
himself," View,
Special Max Ernst
Issue ( April
1942), 28.
14. George Ferguson,
Signs & Symbols
in Christian Art
( New York:
Oxford University
Press, 1966), 146.

-181-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-182-

15
"The Foulest Toadstool": Reviving Frankenstein in the Twentieth Century

Steven Earl Forry

"Melodrama," remarked the actor, leaning tragically upon his carefully folded
gloves and cane, "melodrama is ruined! . . . Blessings upon the head of
whoever first invented moving pictures."

-- The New York Times, 20 March 1919

After 106 performances at the Gaiety Theatre in London, Frankenstein; or, The Vampire's
Victim by Richard Butler and Henry Chance Newton (pseudonym: Richard Henry) closed on
27 April 1888. Its closure brought to an end sixty-five years of dramatic adaptations of Mary
Shelley Frankenstein, for Vampire's Victim proved to be the last dramatization of the novel
undertaken in the nineteenth century; twenty-seven years would pass before drama again took
up the themes of Frankenstein. 1 With the advent of the twentieth century, moving pictures
increasingly encroached upon the heretofore unchallenged domination of the theater. As early
as 1873, photographic methods were used in New York City to entertain audiences with
images of Frankenstein. 2 Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that the first twentieth-
century adaptation of Shelley's novel would occur in film. Its adaptation in 1910 revived
interest in the novel and led indirectly to the 1931 filming of Universal Pictures Frankenstein,
starring Boris Karloff. The circuitous road to Karloff, however, winds through three early
films, a farcical drama, and a melodrama that was rewritten twice by one author and once by
a second before ultimately forming part of the Universal film-which itself went through two
directors, two conclusions, an un-

-183-

successful two-reel test film, and at least three screenplays. The present study focuses on
three twentieth century pre-Karloffian treatments of the Frankenstein myth--one cinematic
and two dramatic--in an effort to elucidate its transformation from a grotesque travesty of
nineteenth-century prototypes to a powerful cult image that eclipsed all previous
interpretations. 3

The perfect medium for interpreting the "sensation dramas" of the 1880s and 1890s, cinema
unveiled special effects impossible to dublicate on the stage. Cinema also proved the perfect
medium for terror. For example, audiences viewed a beheading in Alfred Clark The
Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots ( 1895), and a bandit pointed and fired a gun at the
audience in Edwin Porter The Great Train Robbery ( 1903). The success of the Selig
Polyscope Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ( 1908) and of Nordisk Company's The Necklace of the
Dead ( 1910) and Ghosts of the Vault ( 1911) proved that horror could also be successfully
exploited. In 1910 cinema made its first inroad into Shelley's story with the Edison Company
production, Frankenstein. 4 Directed by J. Searle Dawley from his own screenplay, the film
was registered for a copyright on 18 March 1910 and consisted of one reel of 975 feet. 5 The
cast included Charles Ogle as the Creature, Augustus Phillips as Frankenstein, and Mary
Fuller as the fiancée.

In reaction to adverse reviews of the film, of which perhaps no more than one hundred copies
were struck, Edison removed it from Nickelodeons soon after its release. Since that time,
cinema historians have wondered at its disappearance; in 1980 the American Film Institute's
archivists even placed it on a list of the ten most important "lost" films. 6 Over the last twenty
years several historians have pondered the disappearance of the film, 7 but it was not until
1979 when Al Bates discussed a purported copy that expectations peaked. 8 Recently a print
was located in the collection of Alios F. Dettlaff, a Wisconsin film collector. 9

In many ways, the Edison Frankenstein resembles the tawdry melodramatizations of the
novel undertaken in the 1820s in that, as in so many early silent films, it is dominated by
nineteenth-century staging and acting. For example, every piece of music from the film's
score derives from popular stage pieces of the preceding century. Twice, Lady John Scott
Annie Laurie ( 1838) accompanies the action, and at the beginning of the film when
Frankenstein leaves

-184-

behind his loving family in pursuit of higher goals, the tender music of Then You'll
Remember Me from Michael William Balfe The Bohemian Girl ( 1843) is played. Balfe's
music fades in the next scene when Frankenstein enters his laboratory. The music then
changes to a moderato, followed by an agitato that resonates throughout the creation scene as
the Creature assumes his form in a frothy vat of chemicals. The main selection, one played at
every entrance of the Creature, derives from Weber Der Freischutz, the opera that perhaps
influenced the music of gothic melodrama more than any other. Like the early
dramatizations, every character in the film has been cast as a melodramatic stereotype.
Elizabeth is the victimized heroine; Frankenstein plays the mad alchemist whose evil
ambition is conquered by love; the Creature appears as the antagonistic opposite of Elizabeth.
The film even presents a laboratory assistant, although the script fails to delineate the
servant's character beyond the cryptic remark "Servant appears--monster disappears"--almost
as if the Creature is subsumed by the servant. Mirroring the early melodramas, the demonic
Creature bursts through the laboratory door immediately after his creation. Interestingly
enough, the synopsis of the Edison film forecasts quite remarkably the treatment of this scene
by later cinematographers:

Frankenstein realizes that he has created a monster and tears himself away
from the door to stand watching in terror. The iron bars are broken from the
doors. Door slowly opens and the hand of the monster appears as Frankenstein
dashes off.

And finally, just as all previous dramatizations exaggerated the Creature's horrifying features,
so the Edison Frankenstein quickly seized upon the Creature as a powerful image of horror.
Charles Ogle as the Creature appears as a hideous wretch--more terrifying than any previous
stage creature (See Figure 15-1 ). His Kabukilike expression, deformed visage, and
protruding, bulbous eyes instill fright, and his misshapen body, malformed--or unformed-
hands, patches of mangy hair sprouting from cadaverous arms, and tattered clothing all
suggest a Creature from beyond the grave. Once again, Shelley's intentions are sacrificed to
the exigencies of mass appeal.

Eighteen of the film's twenty-five scenes are tinted yellow and

-185-

Figure 15-1. Charles Ogle as the Creature in Edison Frankenstein, from The
Edison Kinetogram, 15 March 1910 ( New York, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,
New York Public Library).

-186-

orange, and the penultimate scene, blue. Although prints of earlycentury silent films were
commonly tinted--blue tint, for example, was used to represent a night scene--Dawley utilizes
tinted scenes to suggest Frankenstein's altered states of consciousness. The tinting achieves
its most powerful effect in the creation scene where it is coupled with close-up shots of
Frankenstein and medium shots of a fluid-filled vat in which the Creature transubstantiates
from primeval elements into a sentient being. The "fluid" obviously alludes to an alchemical
elixir vitae, but the juxtaposition of scenes is surely meant to symbolize the formation of an
evil subconsciousness. The script reads:

SCENE 7--ROOM-IN[TERIOR]--SHOWING THE DOORS OF THE VAT--

FRANKENSTEIN LOOKS IN--ORANGE & YELLOW-SCENE 8--VAT--
MONSTER FORMING--ORANGE & YELLOW-SCENE 9--ROOM--IN--
VAT--FRANKENSTEIN LOOKS IN--ORANGE & YELLOW-SCENE 10--
VAT--MONSTER FORMING--ORANGE & YELLOW-SCENE 11--ROOM-
IN-VAT--FRANKENSTEIN LOOKS IN--ORANGE & YELLOW-SCENE
12--VAT--MONSTER FORMING--ORANGE & YELLOW-SCENE 13--
ROOM--IN--VAT--FRANKENSTEIN LOOKS IN-ORANGE & YELLOW-
SCENE 14--VAT--MONSTER FORMING--ORANGE & YELLOW-SCENE
15--ROOM--IN--VAT--FRANKENSTEIN LOOKS IN-ORANGE &
 YELLOW-SCENE 16--VAT--MONSTER FORMING--ORANGE &
YELLOW-SCENE 17--ROOM--IN--VAT--FRANKENSTEIN LOOKS IN-
ORANGE & YELLOW-SCENE 18--VAT--MONSTER FORMED--
ORANGE & YELLOW--

This realm of narcissistic self-projection culminates in what the synopsis describes as a

"closing scene which has probably never been surpassed in anything shown on the moving
picture screen." This climax presents the Creature gazing into a mirror in a veiled reference
both to the novel and to Paradise Lost:

-187-

[W]e see the remarkable sight of the monster's image reflected instead of
Frankenstein's own. Gradually, however, under the effect of love and his
better nature, the monster's image fades and Frankenstein sees himself in his
young manhood in the mirror. His bride joins him, and the film ends with their
embrace, Frankenstein's mind now being clear of the awful horror and weight
it has been laboring under for so long. 10

By casting the Creature as Frankenstein's double, Dawley's film quite remarkably forecasts
one of the central themes in twentiethcentury interpretations of Shelley's novel. The
doppelgänger theme has so preoccupied modern critics that the editors of the best collection
of essays on the novel "assume rather than argue it." 11 But whereas the novel treads
ambiguous ground in suggesting tragic analogues between every character--even between the
Creature and Elizabeth--the film follows melodramatic precedent by reducing them to moral
contrarieties. 12 Thus, the Creature and Elizabeth represent antipathetic and absolute divisions
of good and evil in the solipsistic mind of Frankenstein. As beauty and the beast, they form
diametric opposites locked in a spiritual battle for Frankenstein's soul. Only through
Elizabeth's virtuous intercession does Frankenstein survive. As the synopsis specifies:

[T]he story of the film brings out the fact that the creation of the monster was
only possible because Frankenstein had allowed his normal mind to be
overcome by evil and unnatural thoughts . . . [W]ith the strength of
Frankenstein's love for his bride and the effect of this upon his own mind, the
monster cannot exist.

In retrospect, the gothic elements of Edison Frankenstein seem almost to have been written to
be filmed. Cinema's special qualities--double exposure, track shots, dissolves, long shots, and
most especially, the close-up--adapted horror perfectly to celluloid.

Twentieth-century drama's first inroad into Frankenstein adaptations occurred in 1915 when,
on 29 July, the Thirty-Ninth Street Theatre presented a farce entitled The Last Laugh. Written
by Paul Dickey and Charles Goddard and produced under the management of the Shuberts,
Last Laugh ran only fifty-two performances, de-

-188-

spite predictions by at least one reviewer that it would be a "smashing hit" that would "last a
year." 13 The truncated run seems surprising because the play had enjoyed outstanding
reviews upon its premiere in New York and in both of its out-of-town previews, first in
Atlantic City at the Apollo Theatre (29 April), and then in Boston at the Court Theatre (12
May). 14
Dickey and Goddard's play ignores any philosophical and psychological interpretations and
dismisses out of hand the possibility of animating dead tissue. The plays's central plot, from
which emerge two minor plots, culminates in a practical joke--the last laugh. This plot
concerns Dr. McElroy Bruce ( Henry Harmon) who, fully realizing the impossibility of
animating dead tissue, sets out to deceive his mean-spirited associates into thinking he has
constructed and animated a creature. In actuality, Dr. Bruce has simply employed a cadaver
in order to teach anatomy to young Dr. David Francis ( Everett Butterfield), the fiancé of Dr.
Bruce's daughter. The curtain rises on the day Dr. Bruce plans to "animate" the creature. Prior
to the curtain, however, Dr. Bruce has surreptitiously replaced the cadaver with his chauffeur,
Mike, whom he has anesthetized. In one of the minor plots, Dr. Francis replaces Mike, whom
he believes to be a real cadaver, with a young jockey named Jim ( Edward Abeles, the star of
the show) in an effort to avert a failure in what he wrongly believes is Dr. Bruce's final effort
to save his reputation. In the other plot, Jim attempts to secure from Dr. Francis his payment
of 1,000 dollars for posing as a cadaver, while trying to avoid his termagant wife, Marie
( Louise Corbin). The replacement of Mike for Jim prepares for a farcical recognition scene
between the two "corpses." Moreover, when Mike regains consciousness and pops out of a
large crate into which he had been stuffed, only Dr. Bruce realizes the substitution--the rest of
the cast assumes that Dr. Bruce has actually succeeded in imparting life to the cadaver. The
play bristles with other farcical stage business. The most riotous scene in the play occurs
when Jim, as new-born progeny, panders for attention from his gullible young nurse, Eugenia
Bruce ( Figure 15-2 ). The Herald Tribune described the scene:

If any audiences have laughed harder than did last night's when Edward
Abeles lay back in his chair pretending that he was a full grown baby just

-189-

Figure 15-2. Edward Abeles as the Creature in The Last Laugh, Thirty-
Ninth Street Theatre, 1915 ( New York, New York Public Library, Billy Rose
Theatre Collection).

brought to life, his head and body swathed in bandages, a pretty girl who
believed that he really was a baby cuddling him, and his wife all the while
hurling furious insults at him, those audiences will be hard to recall.

But farce is not the most interesting aspect of Last Laugh. After all, many nineteenth-century
dramatizations employed farcical scenes. Frank-in-Steam; or, The Modern Promise to Pay
( 1824), for example, concludes when Frank-in-Steam shoves an irate bill collector (a
"Spectre Bum") into the boiler of a ship, and Model Man ( 1849) ends with the Creature
dancing on stage to the music of a magic flute in a parody of Congreve's observation on
music's power over the savage breast. Rather, the most interesting aspect of Last Laugh is its
abandonment of every popular conception of the myth that had developed through the
nineteenth century. Not only does it douse skepticism over the very possibility of animating
the dead, but its twentieth-century setting excludes all gothic trappings. Dr. Bruce's
laboratory is that of a modern scientist. The police officer

-190-

who enters with Jim's wife is dressed in an "up-to-date uniform." At one point a character
refers to the Woolworth building across the street. And although its music occasionally
strikes a melodramatic chord--the first act opens to "weird music"--all of the play's selections
derive from popular music of the day. Most importantly, nowhere in the play is the name of
Frankenstein mentioned; several reviews even confuse creator and created. For example, the
Sun (30 July) noted that "the sufferings of the substitute Frankenstein [ Edward Abeles] are
more humorous to others than to himself." Another review remarked that "Edward Abeles
appeared as funmaker extraordinary and Frankenstein pro-tem." And whereas all previous
dramatizations present the act of creation as a solitary undertaking pursued by a "mad" young
scientist in an alchermist's laboratory, the Frankenstein figure in Last Laugh is an aging
anatomist whose act of creation is witnessed by three assistants: Dr. Francis, Dr. Dunlop, and
Eugenia Bruce, Dr. Bruce's daughter ( Figure 15-3 ). And rather than a lonely and mysterious
project, Dr. Bruce's un-

Figure 15-3. The Creation Scene from The Last Laugh ( New York, Billy
Rose Theatre Collection).

-191-

dertaking is currently under discussion in leading medical journals. The first stage description
reads: "Act I--Curtain goes up to reveal Dr. Bruce reading medical journal article: 'Aged
Surgeon's pitiful folly': ' McElroy Bruce, once America's leading Anatomist, tries again to
create life.'" And finally, in place of Frankenstein's desire to "penetrate into the recesses of
nature," Dr. Bruce is driven by nothing more than the paternal desire to insure that his
daughter marry a successful surgeon.

In keeping with its modem setting, and marking its most important innovation, Last Laugh is
also the first adaptation in which electricity rather than alchemy provides the primary means
of animation. The script devotes three pages of description to the laboratory and its supplies
and one and one-half pages to the electrical props. One early reviewer concluded his article:
"The scenic effects of the play are impressively realistic; in fact, the operating room, with its
electrical machines buzzing, [and] the oxygen tanks sizzling . . . are all suggestive of the
gruesome." Another noted: "There are enough instruments and apparatus around to give the
average layman the creeps." Actually, electricity figures as the final step in a five-stage
process of rejuvenating the "Creature's" senses. But, as the process has nothing to do with
animating dead tissue, it serves merely as an stage gimmick. In Act Two the characters gather
around Dr. Bruce, who presides over the elaborate ruse:

Dr. B.

Now, gentlemen, we have stimulated the various senses. The eyes with light,
the nostrils with ammonia, the cars with sound, the lungs arc filled with
Oxygen. There remains but one thing more the final stimulus. When you am
ready, Doctor (Meaning Dr. D.) We will apply the current to the nervous
system . . .

(LIGHTS TO BLUE.)

(Then he goes to C, upstage, starts motor, and works lever, reads dial as
lights go on, this dial is worked by Electrician off.)

Dr. D.

(Reads dial.)
 66--85--90--

(One Bulb lights on each number called. Dial stops.)

Dr. B.

110 doctor--110.

Dr. D.

(Reads.)

-192-

110--(dial moves notch on each number) 105--110--

(Stops dial. All six bulbs non, on, stay on till later cue.)

Dr. B.

Ready now, doctor?

Dr. D.

How long a shock?

Dr. B.

Until I stop you.

(Dr. D. turns on switch on control table, Dr. F. comes down with Electrode.
Long glass tube, connected to Frequency machine and stands ready at L. end
of case.) Now!! (Dr. F. puts electrode against the band of iron around Jim's
feet.) (The purple flame shoots, thru glass tube, Jim arches his back in case,
Jumps convulsively, at end of shock)

Dr. B.

(Raises his hand, speaks loud.)

Stop!! Stop!! (Dr. F. takes off electrode, hangs it up on bracket up stage.

Current still shoots thru Electrode.)

Dr. B.

(Dr. D. shuts off Resonator, switches on control table.) ((Liqhts ready)) It

moves, it moves . . . Do you see it? That's not electricity. The current is off the
case. That's life, my creature lives!

Not until Peggy Webling Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre ( 1927) would
Shelley's novel again be dramatized. Analogous to the stitched-together being that
Frankenstein created in his "work-shop of filthy creation," the play itself underwent a series
of radical transformations. 15 Originally composed as a companion piece for Hamilton Deane
Dracula ( 1925), Webling's play conveniently brings full circle the histories of Lord Ruthven
and Victor Frankenstein, two fictional characters who enjoyed a symbiotic relationship
throughout the nineteenth century dating back to the summer of 1816 when, at the Villa
Diodati and Maison Chappuis respectively, John Polidori composed The Vampire and Mary
Shelley began Frankenstein. In the present case, Deane Dracula can be linked not only to the
premiere of Adventure, but to its revision in 1930 by John Balderston, and ultimately to its
incorporation into Universal Pictures' Frankenstein ( 1931). Hence, a brief overview of Deane
Dracula will help to illustrate the genesis of Webling's production.

Allardyce Nicoll speculates that Deane dramatized Bram Stoker's novel inspired by José
Levy's Grand Guignol playiets presented

-193-

during the early 1920s at the Little Theatre. 16 Another plausible source would be F. W.
Murnau Nosferatu ( 1922). In any case, fearing, as Arthur Lennig notes the disdain of
sophisticated London audiences, Deane premiered Dracula in Wimbledon on 9 March 1925.
17
The play succeeded and toured the provinces for two years before finally opening in
London at the Little Theatre on 14 February 1927. As Deane had suspected, some critics
derided the production, 18 nevertheless, the play enjoyed a successful run of 391
performances. 19 The play crossed the Atlantic in 1927 after being purchased by publisher and
theatrical producer Horace Liveright, who had traveled to London from New York "in search
of bestsellers and dramatic hits." 20 Liveright most probably hoped to purchase a novel or the
performance rights to a play that would allow him to achieve the kind of success he had
experienced in 1925 when he published and then produced at the Fulton Theatre in New York
Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy. Film contracts were also a possibility since, as
Walter Gilmer indicates, the dramatization of An American Tragedy was undertaken
specifically to entice a Hollywood studio ( Gilmer, Liveright, 139). Liveright returned to the
United States with several projects, although according to Gilmer Dracula was the only play
optioned in England that he ever produced ( Gilmer, Liveright, 150). With the American
performing rights in hand, Liveright commissioned John Lloyd Balderston, whose Berkeley
Square had recently enjoyed success on both sides of the Atlantic, to modernize the dialogue
and to tighten the plot ( Lennig , The Count, 66). Featuring Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, the
play premiered first at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven on 19 September 1927 before
opening officially on Broadway at the Fulton on 5 October. The "lousy little play," as
Liveright later called it ( Gilmer, Liveright, 180), ran 261 performances before closing on 19
May 1928 and going on tour for two years.

Back in London the tributes to Dracula were not lost on Peggy Webling, a friend of Hamilton
Deane. On 16 November 1927 she submitted to the Office of the Lord Chamberlain a play in
three acts and a prologue entitled Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre. On 25
November, the play received a license, and in Preston on 7 December it premiered alongside
Dracula with Deane playing the role of the Creature. The two plays toured together for two
years, during which time Webling continually revised it. Finally on

-194-

10 February 1930, Adventure opened at the Little Theatre in London. 21 Although it did not
achieve the same success as Dracula, Adventure still enjoyed seventy-two matinee and
evening performances.
At the very least, Dracula kept Adventure afloat until its discovery by Liveright. Certainly,
Hamilton Deane played an important role, for, just as T. P. Cooke inaugurated both the role
of the Vampire and the Creature in the first successful dramatizations of those stories, so
Hamilton Deane inaugurated the most important roles in Dracula and Adventure. And as in
1823 when Bell's Weekly Messenger (3 August) noted that Presumption was "something in
the style of the Vampire, which was so attractive last season," so critics in the twentieth
century immediately linked Dracula and Adventure. An anonymous review states that during
the run of Dracula "hospital nurses paraded the auditorium on the lookout for fainting
subjects. They had better get their uniforms ready again for Frankenstein." 22 And while a
reviewer for the Sketch labelled the play a "junior Dracula," another began his review: "It
seems that we are in for another Dracula." 23 That Dracula preceded and, more importantly,
succeeded on Broadway proved that the horror genre was welcome on American shores.
Accordingly, on 7 September 1928 Webling submitted one of her final revisions for an
American copyright. By the time Adventure closed at the Little on 12 April 1930, Universal
was only a few months away from its first treatment of Dracula. And less than two months
after the film debut of Dracula, Liveright had commissioned John Balderston to revise
Webling's play for Broadway.

Utilizing the London script, Balderston undertook the revision with apparently little
assistance from Webling; according to the Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1931 (1:3, no.
1614), however, the revision was undertaken with the stipulation that it would be copyrighted
in the name of both playwrights. 24 Unfortunately, Balder ston's revision was never
performed. Less than one month after he filed for a copyright, Universal purchased the rights
to his dramatization as well as that of Webling for $20,000 plus one percent of the world
gross. Gregory William Mank specifies that the copyright contract "engaged Balderston to
provide Universal with a screen adaptation of Miss Webling's play." 25 Nevertheless, so little
of Balderston's dramatization appears in the final print that it seems

-195-

highly possible Universal purchased the rights simply to forestall any unnecessary
competition; that is, so that two adaptations of Frankenstein would not play simultaneously in
New York in 1931, one at the Fulton and one at the Mayfair, where the film opened on 4
December. Perhaps also the script went through so many alterations that elements of
Balderston's play became barely recognizable. This second option seems likely, especially
since on its way to the Mayfair the film went through two directors ( Robert Florey and
James Whale), two conclusions (one in which Frankenstein died and one in which he lived),
two Creatures ( Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff), one disastrous two-reel test film by Florey;
and at least three screenplays: one by Garret Fort and Robert Florey; one by James Whale,
who incorporated Florey's ideas, including for the Creature the substitution of a criminal
brain (which removes culpability from Frankenstein), and the final conflagration at the
windmill; 26 and one by Garret Fort, Francis Edwards Faragoh, and John Russell. German
Expressionist cinema also figured as an important influence. Both Florey and Whale
reviewed many Expressionist films in preparation for shooting Shelley's novel. A final
important influence was Universal Studios' makeup artist Jack Pierce. Obviously influenced
by the physical characteristics of the Creature in Paul Wegener's Der Golem ( 1920), of
Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ( 1920), and of the Phantom in The Phantom of the
Opera ( 1925), Pierce sculpted a cult image--the icon of what Mary Shelley's Creature had
become in the hundred years since he first appeared on the stage (See frontispiece). 27

These sources severely reduced the influence of Webling and Balderston on the final
screenplay. As released, the film cast the Creature in the mold of a nineteenth-century dumb
show character, added scenes of grave robbing and mountain pursuit, and transformed
Frankenstein's home into a Gothic castle and the humble living room in which the creation
scenes of Webling and Balderston had occurred into a cavernous laboratory located, as in the
early melodramatizations, at the top of a flight of stairs. (In fact, Peake Presumption may
have been as a source for the screenplay because in the Universal film the character of Fritz
makes his first appearance since the 1820s.)

The genesis of Webling's play aside, it should be noted that the play's tone and content differ
from any previous dramatization of

-196-

the novel. To a large degree, the play can be seen in the context of the theatrical ferment and
general disillusion following World War I and preceding the Great Depression, events that
validated some of the worst scenarios of the Frankenstein story. Indeed, Webling's play may
be viewed in terms of an age frightened by a spectre of its own creation. It thus presages the
most popular modern theme associated with the novel: society's ability to destroy itself. For
only in the twentieth century does the Frankenstein myth fully achieve its apocalyptic
dimensions, and only in this century do the topoi of the myth climax in the image of the
robots of Karel Capek R.U.R. ( 1921). However, unlike a challenging piece like R.U.R.,
which pursues with unrelenting fervor the ramifications of a society capable of destroying
itself with its own technology, Adventure imbues its plot with a religious diatribe contrary to
the novel. In a review of Adventure, The Sketch ( 19 February 1930) immediately noted the
indebtedness of R.U.R. to Shelley's novel and the manner in which Webling had failed
Shelley. As the reviewer observed:

But the difference between the robot play and the Frankenstein "adventure in
the macabre" . . . is that, in R.U.R. the imagination of the authors created a
semblance of reality, whereas this melodrama is merely a pile of horrors with
a gruesome central figure on top, and around him a group of "feeders" who
utter bombastic language in order to lead up to terrorizing incidents.

At its best, Adventure is the first dramatization to revise completely several popular notions
of the Frankenstein myth. But even though it was inspired in the spirit of Levy's Guignol
pieces, Adventure contains a ponderous three-act format that belies the striking effects
achieved in the Guignol playlets. In truth, it contains only an occasional horror and is a pretty
dreary treatment of the novel.

Unlike the novel, in which Frankenstein renounces alchemy in favor of "new science" only to
animate the Creature with what seems to be a combination of both, Webling's Frankenstein
never relinquishes his associations with alchemy. As Victor Moritz exclaims to Frankenstein
in the first scene: "You wanted to be an alchemist in those days, studying how to turn base
metals into gold, or discover the elixir of life." 28 These alchemical influences recall many

-197-

nineteenth-century Gothic melodramas, and, therefore, it seems a misnomer to label

Adventure a "scientific thriller," as does a caption published with a photograph of the London
premiere ( Figure 154 ). Science first enters this dramatization in John Balderston's revision,
in which Frankenstein animates the Creature through a combination of alchemy and science.
The first scene of Balderston's play presents a "large intricate machine--like a galvanic
battery" that dominates the stage. The animation itself may have influenced the Universal
production:

Henry

Now is the supreme moment, shall I triumph or shall I fall? (Attaches wires of
galvanic battery to arm, machine fizzes and gives off queer lights, and sends
out sparks. HENRY rushes to cupboard, brings out small bottle, and pours
contents down throat of the body)

Victor

What is that?

Figure 15-4. A "Scientific Thriller," Photograph from Frankenstein: An

Adventure in the Macabre ( London, Mander and Mitchenson Theatre
Collection).

-198-

Henry

The Elixir--the Elixir of life! I found some of the formula in those old black
letter books--I worked out the rest for myself. Look--look--both of you.

(They approach fascinated)

Victor

(Whispers hoarsely)

In the name of religion, Dr.--no! But in the name of Science--do you want him
to succeed?

Waldman

(Enthusiastically)

Yes! Yes--no! God forgive me, what am I saying?

(Silence)

You have failed Henry, and I thank Heaven for it.

(Pause) (Thunder and lightning)

Henry

(With a scream)

I have succeeded.
 (The body very slowly clenches and unclenches the right band that has
dropped to the side of the stretcher, makes a guttural sound, half a groan, half
a breath, lifts right arm stiffly, lifts head a few inches, stares at Henry, then
drops back. They all stand motionless)

Henry

(In wild exaltation)

I have made life, out of matter that was dead.

Waldman

You make yourself equal with God--that was the sin of the fallen angel!

(As Curtain falls--he drops on knees mumbling)

God forgive him, (etc.)

CURTAIN on SCENE ONE

Dr. Waldman's prominent appearance in this scene may be traced to Webling's play, where he
appears for the first time in any adaptation. In her play he figures as a moral cynosure,
thereby attaining a prominence never accorded to him in the novel where he merely mediates
between the scientific rationalism of Dr. Krempe and the romantic ideals of Frankenstein.
Balderston imbues this role with some of the attributes of Van Helsig in Dracula, which, as I
have noted, he had just rewritten for Hamilton Deane. Balderston also expands Waldman's
role by polarizing the play between science and religion--Frankenstein rejecting the latter and
Waldman, cast as both a scientist and a priest, representing the perfect moral balance be-

-199-

tween the two. Hence, Webling and Balderston inject into their dramas an active arbiter of
morality akin to the figures of divine intervention encountered in countless nineteenth-
century melodramas.

A few of Webling's alterations proved significant. For example, no previous dramatization of

Shelley's novel had employed the doppegänger theme. Nonetheless, as in the Edison film, it
is employed mainly to illustrate a Manichean battle within the mind of Frankenstein. As
Frankenstein observes to Waldman: "I was driven on and on by the pride of Lucifer, and in
the minute of my triumph I fell! As Frankenstein came to life, my heart died in my breast."
Not only does the Creature assume the surname of his maker--"I call him by my own
name,"Henry Frankenstein says. "He is Frankenstein"-but he appears on stage clothed like
him as well. Made in his creator's image, the Creature is nevertheless quite hideous. Victor
Moritz remarks to Frankenstein that he cannot stand looking at the Creature: "He is strangly
like yourself in gesture and movements . . . but a sullen devil looks at me out of his eyes." On
19 February these similarities assumed their most outrageous form when Punch lampooned
them as clown-like buffoons.

Webling extends this doubling to include almost every character in the play. The Creature
experiences an overwhelming attraction for Frankenstein's angelic sister, Katrina ( Figure 15-
5 ). He also feels drawn to Frankenstein's fiancée, named Emily by Webling and Amelia by
Balderston. The fiancée even experiences an attraction to the Creature and a temptation to
respond to his advances. "There was some call from his body to mine that I could not deny,"
Amelia tells Frankenstein in Webling's play. Furthermore, Victor Frankenstein and Henry
Clerval in the novel have now become Henry Frankenstein and Victor Moritz, suggesting a
doubling between the two male companions. Balderston's conclusion carries the doubling
even further when after Henry Frankenstein's death Amelia seeks shelter in the arms of
Victor Moritz, exclaiming, "Don't leave me, don't ever leave me." ( Frankenstein in this
version has after all stolen the heart of Amelia from Victor, to whom she was originally
engaged. 29 ) Perhaps we should also see sexual ambiguity in Justine Moritz's surname being
applied to the Clerval of the novel.

Breaking with Mary Shelley, Webling and Balderston dismiss out

-200-

Figure 15-5. Dora Patrick as Katrine and Hamilton Deane as the

Creature in Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre ( London, Mander
and Mitchenson Theatre Collection).

-201-

of hand her Rousseauistic conception of the Creature as a Noble Savage; instead, they cast
their Creature as a loutish brute imbued with a child's longing for pleasure and acceptance.
While his demeanor has been elevated one notch above the dumb show Creatures of the
1820s, his attraction for Frankenstein's sister and fiancée mirrors the Beauty and the Beast
episodes of the earlier dramatists. And contrasted with the Parliamentary rhetoric of Shelley's
Creature, who reads Volney and Goethe and who cogitates on the implications of Milton
Paradise Lost, the Creature of Webling and Balderston mumbles inchoate syllables, becomes
excited by pondering the word kill, and prays to the sun. "Sun worship--fire worship," scoffs
Frankenstein to Waldman in Balderston's version, "he is going through all the instinctive
processes of primitive man-both in religion and behavior. Growing children do it too." In this
context, "primitive man" has a closer relationship to Hobbes than to Rousseau.

The most important revision made by Balderston to Webling's play concerns the third and
last act. Act 2 of Webling's two versions concludes with the Creature's accidental drowning
of Katrina. Act 3 then opens the following dawn in the Jura mountains, where the Creature
has fled for seclusion. Balderston rewrites Webling's play so that Act 2 closes with the
Creature's demand for a mate. Act 3 opens six months later in a hut in the Jura mountains on
the day in which Frankenstein finally plans to bring the mate to life. Dr. Waldman arrives in
time to persuade Frankenstein to abandon his operation and to destroy the being. When the
Creature discovers the mutilated body of his mate, he kills Frankenstein by breaking his back.

Waldman then approaches the Creature and enlightens him as to the nature of
Christian repentance and forgiveness. In sorrow, the Creature stands and
stretches his arms in supplication: "God help me." (Lightning strikes but--
some of which crumbles. Lamp goes out--darkness but for brazier.
FRANKENSTEIN falls, dead, face near brazier, look of peace.)

By borrowing from the novel the demand and partial creation of a mate, Balderston
introduces for the first time in any adaptation the theme of self-propagating evil. 30 In terms of
the doppelgänger, however, this conclusion has broader implications. For whereas Fran-
 -202-

kenstein is capable of engendering the male image in the Creature, he cannot project that of
the female, the anima, the image that the Creature also lacks. Frankenstein's effort cannot
succeed: in terms of Shelley, his failure embodies a renouncement of the Romantic quest; in
terms of Balderston, only God can project both the male and the female image. The self can
only engender the self in a parthenogenetic and even homoerotic form of creation.

In conclusion, the melodramas of Balderston and Webling culminate over 100 years of
dramatizations of Frankenstein; after 1931 the influence of the first Universal film revitalized
the myth and echoes through every sphere--dramatic, cinematic, and literary. Over seventy
films and almost an equal number of dramatizations have been completed since 1931. 31
Furthermore, whereas before 1931 Frankenstein had only been translated into French, Italian,
and German, since that date the novel has appeared in at least thirty-eight separate
translations of nineteen languages--including Urdu and Sanskrit. 32 Finally, whereas almost
thirty editions of the novel were published between 1818 and 1931, after that date over twice
as many appeared. Given the continued vitality of the Frankenstein legend, it is interesting to
note that after reading Frankenstein upon its publication in 1818, William Beckford turned to
the flyleaf of his copy and scribbled the contumelious remark: "This is, perhaps, the foulest
Toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the present times." 33 Foul
toadstool it may at times be, but it has proved to be a rather resilient toadstool nonetheless.

NOTES
1. Between 28 July 1823, when Richard Brinsley Peake Presumption or, The
Fate of Frankenstein opened at the English Opera House, and 24 December
1887, when Vampire's Victim opened at the Gaiety, Mary Shelley's novel
was staged seventeen times. Several studies have concerned themselves with
these early dramatizations. For a brief bibliography, see Steven Earl Forty
"The Hideous Progenies of Richard Brinsley Peake: Frankenstein on the
Stage, 1823-1826", Theatre Research International 11 ( 1985): 29 n. 1 and
"Dramatization of Frankenstein, 1821-1986: A Comprehensive List"
forthcoming in English Language Notes. Excluded from this estimate is the
anonymous Frankenstein: ou, Le Promethee moderne ( 1821), which was
never performed and is extant today in a fragmentary manuscript. For a brief
discussion of this play, see "The Hideous Progenies ofRichard Brinsley
Peake"

-203-

Richard Brinsley Peake, 29 n. 2. Douglas William Hoehn

"The First Season of Presumption!; or, The Fate of
Frankenstein," in Theatre Studies 26-27 ( 1978-81): 79-88,
concludes with the rather shortsighted observation: "The
significance of Presumption! from an historical standpoint lies
in its relative importance in certain theatrical careers and in its
relation to a trend toward melodramas of the preternatural in
the London popular theatre of the 1820s," ( Hoehn, First
Season," 87). The theatrical careers of the major actors--T. P.
Cooke, Robert and Mary Ann Keeley, and James Wallack--
were all established before Presumption! whose significance
lies in its impact on popular conceptions of the Frankenstein
myth rather than its impact on melodramas of the
preternatural.
2. George Odell
notes that at the
Olympic Theatre
"ProfessorTobin's
illusion of
Frankenstein was
shown on
February 3rd"
( Odell, Annals of
the New York
Stage [ New
York: Columbia
University Press,
1937] 9:274). The
New York Times
(3 February)
merely lists
Tobin's
"wonderful
Optical Illusion"
(7) among a
series of nine
other
performances
comprising a
variety show
entitled
Alhambra, which
ran eight
performances
during a oneweek
engagement
beginning on that
date. No mention
of Frankenstein
appears either in
the Times or the
New York Post
during this week,
 but the words
"Optical Illusion"
must indicate
some sort of
projected image.
3. Two minor
cinematic
versions will not
be dealt with
here: Joseph W.
Smiley's Ocean
Film Corporation
production
entitled Life
Without a Soul
( 1915) and
Eugenio Testa's
Albertini Film
production
entitled Il Mostro
di Frankenstein
( 1920). No prints
of these two films
are believed to
exist. Il Mostro di
Frankenstein,
directed by
Eugenio Testa
from a scenario
by Giovanni
Drovetti, starred
Luciano Albertini
as Frankenstein
and Umberto
Guarracino as the
Creature. In Mary
Shelley: An
Annotated
Bibliography
( New York:
Garland, 1975)
224, W. H. Lyles
indicates that his
correspondence
with the Cineteca
Nazionale in
Rome and the
Museo Nazionale
del Cinema in
Torno verified
the existence of
the film, but
failed to locate
either a synopsis
or even
photographic
stills. A rather
troglodytic beast
is presented in an
early
advertisement for
this film, which
Donald Glut
reproduces in
The Frankenstein
Catalog
(Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 1984)
178. In his
Reference Guide
to Fantastic
Films: Science
Fiction, Fantasy
and Horror ( Los
Angeles:
Chelsea-Lee,
1973) 2:316,
Walt Lee notes
that in the film
Frankenstein
"pieces together a
creature out of
parts of dead
bodies and brings
it to life." His
comment is not
documented,
however, and
probably reflects
 an assumption on
the nature of any
story of
Frankenstein.
Life Without
Soul ( 1915)
appears never to
have been
copyrighted,
although the
procedure was
uniformly
adopted for
motion pictures
in 1912. Directed
by Smiley from a
screenplay as
Jessie J.
Goldberg, the
film featured
William Cohill as
Frankenstein and
Percy Darrell
Standing as the
Creature. The

-204-

five-reel, fifty-five minute melodrama was filmed on

location in parts of Georgia, Florida, and Arizona.
Smiley even filmed on a steamship in the Atlantic, which
must have served as a backdrop for Walton's ship. The
film compromises the novel, however, by including a
postscript that explains that the story was simply a
horrific dream-vision.
4. In Motion Pictures
1894-1912
( Washington: Library
of Congress, 1953) 21,
Howard Lamarr Walls
lists a film entitled
Frankenstein's Trestle,
produced in 1902 by
the American
Mutoscope and
Biograph Company
(copyright 21 May
1902, H 17964). In
Motion Pictures from
the Library of
Congress Paper Print
Collection 1894-1912
( Berkeley: University
of California Press,
1967) 289, Kemp
Niver specifies,
however, that
Frankenstein's Trestle
is a 16mm newsreel
named after the city in
which it was filmed:

The camera
was placed
at a
distance
from a
trestle to
photograph
the full
span. The
trestle is of
a unique
design. A
steam
locomotive,
which does
not appear
to be of
American
manufactur
e, pulls
four cars
toward the
camera
position
and crosses
the trestle.
The film
was
photograph
ed in
Frankenstei
 n, New
Hampshire,
in the
White
Mountains.

5. The Edison
Kinetogram 2.4
( 1910):3 and The
Bioscape ( 5 May
1910):40. A working
scenario dated 14
January 1910 indicates
a pre-production
estimate of 700 feet.
See also Walt Lee
Reference Guide to
Fantastic Films ( 1:
148), and Einar
Lauritzen and Gunnar
Lundquist American
Film-Index 1908-1915
( Stockholm: Film-
Index, 1976) (204),
both of which record
the second figure.
6. Boxoffice Magazine, 5
May 1980. For years it
was believed that the
only extant documents
relating to the film
were held in the
archives of the
Museum of Modern
Art in New York,
which preserve
typescripts of the
shooting script,
musical score, and
press releases, and in
the Edison Archives in
North Orange, New
Jersey, which preserve
a copyright file that
 contains four bromide
paper prints of scenes
from the film and a
letter from the Library
of Congress indicating
the receipt of material
for copyright. In their
Focus on the Horror
Film (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.:
PrenticeHall, 1972),
Roy Huss and T. J.
Ross reproduce the
Museum of Modern
Art scenario.
Moreover copies exist
of The Biograph ( 5
May 1910), which
prints a description of
the film, and of both
the 1910 American
and English editions
of The Edison
Kinetogram, the cover
of which bears a
photograph of the
Creature ( Figure 15-1
). All quotations from
material held in the
Modern Art Museum
are used with
permission. The
Kinetogram also
contains a detailed
plot synopsis as well
as two small stills
from the film: one of
Frankenstein in his
laboratory and one of
the Creature in
Frankenstein's sitting
room.
7. See Edward Connor,
"The Saga of
 Frankenstein Screen
Facts" 1 ( 1963): 15-
30; Frankenstein--
1910" Famous
Monsters of Filmland
23

-205-

( 1963): 44-45; "The First Frankenstein" The Monster Times 21

( 1973): 15; and Robert Quackenbush, Movie Monsters and
Their Masters: The Birth of the Horror Film ( Chicago:
Whitman, 1980).
8. Al Bates,
"Thomas Edison
Created a
Monster:
Edison's
Frankenstein is
Found" Clouds
21 ( 1979): 8.
The existence of
the film was
confirmed to me
in 1980 when
Ted Newsom
wrote in private
correspondence
that late in the
1970's Alios F.
Dettlaff, who
presented
himself as an
anonymous
entrepreneur,
had traveled to
Los Angeles
where he held a
private
screening for
several
associates of
Newsom,
including
 Forrest J.
Ackerman. Both
Newsom and
Ackerman
provided timely
encouragement
and invaluable
assistance in my
search for the
Edison film.
9. Acquired thirty,
years ago from
the grandmother
of Dettlaff's
wife, the film
has a running
length of 16½
minutes at silent
film speed. In a
telephone
interview
conducted on 10
June 1986,
Dettlaff
indicated that
when he
purchased the
film stock it had
already
undergone an
8% shrinkage.
To preserve the
delicate nitrate,
he struck prints
on 35, 16, 8, and
super 8 mm film
and on video
cassette. The
Museum of
Science and
Industry in
Chicago, the
Modern Art
Museum in New
York, and the
Ford Foundation
have offered to
buy the film, but
their "low
offers" have
continually been
rejected. At
some future
date, Dettlaff
plans to donate
the film to the
American
Academy of
Motion Picture
Arts and
Sciences. In
1985 the
Academy
planned to use a
portion of the
film on its
Academy
Awards show,
but producers
could not find
time for a three-
minute excerpt.
Therefore, the
only circulating
footage of
Edison
Frankenstein
exists in a
British
documentary
produced in the
late 1970s by
Polydore, which
paid $2,000 for
a three-minute
excerpt. For
other sources of
information on
Dettlaff and his
 Frankenstein
film see: the
Milwaukee
Sentinel for 17
December 1976
and 18 March
1985, and The
Milwaukee
Journal for 18
March 1985.
10. The Biograph
shortened the
text, corrected
its many
solecisms, and
published it on 5
May 1910 as a
review of films
released for that
week. "The
Return of
Frankenstein",
in Famous
Monsters of
Filmland 10
( 1974): 61,
reprints the
synopsis of the
15 March
Kinetogram.
11. George Levine
and U. C.
Knocepflmacher
The Endurance
of Frankenstein:
Essays on Mary
Shelley's Novel (
Berkeley:
University of
California Press,
1979) 15.
12. In "Thoughts on
the Aggression
 of Daughters",
Knoepflmacher
observes: "Yet
the beautiful and
passive
Elizabeth and
the repulsive,
aggressive
monster who
will be her
murderer are
also doubles--
doubles who are
in conflict only
because of
Victor's
rejection of the
femininity that
was so essential
to the happiness
of his 'domestic
circle' and to the
balance of his
own psyche" (
The Endurance
of Frankenstein,
109).

-206-

13. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to and quotations from reviews of
Last Laugh derive from clippings in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the
New York Public Library, which has also given permission to quote from
the play.
14. For Atlantic City reviews see The Dramatic Mirror (5 May), The Press (30
April), and The Morning Telegraph (30 April). For reviews of the premiere
in New York see the New York Herald, Eveninq Sun, Globe and
Commercial Advertiser, Evening Telegram, New York Tribune, New York
Press and Sun for 30 July. See also Billboard (5 August), and the New York
American (9 August).
15. Peggy Webling two versions of Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre
will be distinguished by the city of their debut; thus, the 1927 play will be
called the "Preston version," and that presented at the Little Theatre in 1930
 will be called the "London version." Where no version is indicated, it is to
be assumed that both versions are intended, as is true for the versions of
Webling and Balderston. The Preston and London versions may be read in
typescripts located respectively in the British Museum (LCP 1927 B) and in
the Library of Congress (D86282). Balderston's revision may also be read in
a typescript in the Library of Congress (DU 9603). Quotations from these
plays are made with permission of their respective libraries.
16. Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama: 1660-1900 ( Cambridge
University Press, 1955) 6:205-06.
17. Arthur Lennig, The Count: The Life and Films of Bela "Dracula" Lugosi
( New York: Putnam's, 1974) 65. Lennig's account also contains an
excellent discussion of the filming of Dracula.
18. A critic for The Times (15 February) attacked the "dreadfully stilted style of
speech" that "was so obtrusive that it almost seemed to be an intentional
device to assist in making the flesh creep" (10). The critic also noted
Hamilton Deane's "moderately efficient performance," while pointing out
that the other performances "were not very satisfactory."
19. This figure derives from Alice Katharine Boyd The Interchange of Plays
Between London and New York, 1911-1939 ( New York: King's Crown,
1948) 90. The Stage Year Book of 1928 indicates that the performances
were spread over four theatres: the Little (from 14 February), the Duke of
York's (from 25 July), the Prince of Wales's (from 29 August), and the
Garrick (from 10 October).
20. Walter Gilmer, Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties ( New York:
David Lewis, 1970) 150.
21. The conclusion to this play can be contrasted with that of the first registered
version as a good example of the type of revision Webling undertook. In the
Preston version, the Creature commits suicide by leaping

-207-

from a rock, and Frankenstein is forgiven for his

transgressions. When the play opened in London it
concluded with the Creature moaning over the body of
Frankenstein, whom he has just killed. The Creature then
rises, cries out to God, and is quickly struck dead by a
lightning bolt from Heaven.
22. Clipping (11
February), Enthoven
Collection, Victoria
and Albert Museum.
The process of
introducing nurses
into the theatre was
obviously for
publicity. It was also
tried in New York
where publicity
proved especially
important due to
heavy competition
from other plays on
Broadway. As
Gilmer notes:

Worried
by the
competit
ion of a
Theatre
Guild
producti
on
schedule
d to
premiere
on the
same
night,
Liveright
and his
theatrical
manager,
Louis
Cline,
hired a
seventy-
five man
claque to
appear at
their
opening
applaudi
ng and
shouting
vocifero
usly. The
critics
fell for
the trick,
 and the
next
morning,
while
they had
some
reservati
ons
about the
play,
they
duly
reported
that it
had
elicited
cheers
and an
ovation
from the
audience
. (148)

23. Anonymous
clipping (11
February), Enthoven
Collection, Victoria
and Albert Museum.
24. The copyright
contract between
Universal and the
two playwrights
clarifies the fact that
Balderston alone
was responsible for
the revision.
Undertaken by
Universal in
preparation for
rewriting
Frankenstein into a
screenplay, the
contract was
executed on 8 April
1931. In it the
playwrights
assigned to
Universal "the sole
exclusive, free and
unencumbered
motion picture
rights . . .
throughout the
entire world" to the
following:

(a) The
dramatic
composit
ion
entitled
"Franken
stein"
based
upon the
novel by
Mary
Wollston
ecraft
(Mrs.
Percy B.
Shelley)
which
said
dramatic
composit
ion was
registere
d for
copyrigh
t in the
United
States of
America
by and in
the name
of
PEGGY
WEBLI
NG,
Septemb
er 7th,
1928
under
entry
NO.
D86282.
(b) The
 dramatic
composit
ion as
adapted
by . . .
JOHN L.
BALDE
RSTON
based
upon the
aforesaid
dramatic
composit
ion,
written
by
PEGGY
WEBLI
NG,
which
said
composit
ion was
copyrigh
ted as
follows:
by and in
the name
of JOHN
LLOYD
BALDE
RSTON
and
PEGGY
WEBLI
NG
under
date of
March
11th,
1931
under
Entry
No.
D89603

25. Gregory William

Mank, It's Alive!
The Classic Cinema
Saga of
Frankenstein ( San
 Diego: Barnes,
1981) 13.
26. The idea for the
windmill
conflagration came
to Florey as he
gazed out the
window of his
apartment on Ivor
Street in
Hollywood. Below
his window stood
the windmill
trademark of the
Van de Kamp
bakery. As Florey
later commented on
his alterations:

Je
dissimul
ais, dans
mon
histoire,
le
laboratoi
re du
chimiste
Frankens
tein dans
une
ruine de
moulin à
moitié
detruite
depuis
plus d'un
siècle. Je
bâtis
ensuite
l'episode
de la
substituti
on des
cerveaux
et de la
création
du
 monstre;
mille
details
des films

-208-

macabres des vieux films muets allemands, des situations

grand guignoles du Théâtre de l'Epouvante française, tous
les récits d'horreur que nous absorbions en cachette,
autrefois, au collège me revenait en tête, mais j'évitais de
me laisser aller à ces reminiscences trop faciles en tâchant
de créer du nouveau, d'écrire dans le domaine du
fantastique quelque chose d'une peu different.

Florey, Hollywood D'Hier et d'aujourd' hui ( Paris: Editions

Prisma, 1948) 164.
27. For an
interesting
discussion of
these
influences, see
Albert J. La
Valley's "The
Stage and Film
Children of
Frankenstein: A
Survey", in The
Endurance of
Frankenstein,
243-89. See
also Mank
excellent It's
Alive, and John
Stoker's The
Illustrated
Frankenstein
( New York:
Sterling, 1980).
28. In Preston and
in London,
Frankenstein,
whose given
name Webling
 altered to
Henry,
administers the
elixir before
wheeling the
Creature on
stage where he
comes to life.
When it reached
London, the
scene for some
reason had been
rewritten into a
remarkable
anticlimax in
which the
Creature
clenches and
unclenches his
hand, groans
slightly, lifts his
head-and faints.
29. Universal very
clumsily retains
a hint of this
attraction when
Victor informs
Elizabeth: "You
know I'd go to
the ends of the
earth for you."
To which
Elizabeth
replies: "But I
shouldn't like
that. I'm far too
fond of you."
Victor then
muses: "I wish
you were." The
only hint of the
doppelgänger
that Universal
retains occurs
 when the
Creature and
Frankenstein
gaze at each
other across the
spinning cogs of
a wheat grinder
in the burning
mill.
30. It must be noted
that Vampire's
Victim ( 1887)
includes a
vampiremate
for the Creature.
In that play,
however, the
situation is
employed
simply to
burlesque the
frustration of
the mate, who
cannot suck
blood from the
veins of her
terra-cotta
husband.
Therefore,
procreation is
not really an
issue.
31. See Steven Earl
Forry,
"Dramatizations
of Frankenstein,
1821-1986: A
Comprehensive
List". See also
the following
filmographies:
Michel Boujut ,
"Preface and
 Filmography",
Frankenstein
(Levallois-
Perret: Cercle
du Bibliophile,
1969); Carlos
Clarens, An
Illustrated
History of the
Horror Films
( New York:
Putnam's,
1967); Denis
Gifford, Movie
Monsters
( London:
Dutton, 1969);
Gregory
William Mank,
It's Alive!; and
John Stoker The
Illustrated
Frankenstein.
32. These figures
derive from my
own research,
that of Lyles in
his Annotated
Bibliography, 6-
20, that of
Frederick S.
Frank in "Mary
Shelley's
Frankenstein: A
Register of
Research",
Bulletin of
Bibliography40
( 1983): 163-88,
and that of Glut
in The
Frankenstein
Catalog.
33. Howard B.
Gotlieb,
William
Beckford of
Fonthill ( New
Haven: Yale
University
Press, 1960) 61.

-209-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-210-

16
The Underground Journey and the Death and Resurrection Theme in
Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy Films

Donald E. Palumbo

Fantasy and science fiction films employ both literal and symbolic journeys through the
underworld to indicate death and resurrection. While the underground journey appears in
older films such as The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, The Time Machine, This Island
Earth, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, it is especially, even relentlessly prominent in
very recent films, whose creators--since the phenomenal success of Star Wars--seem more
consciously aware of and preoccupied with the manipulation of archetypal images and
themes that will efficiently evoke powerful audience response, and thus box office success.

Although the underground journey motif signals and reinforces the death and rebirth theme in
both fantasy and science fiction films, it does not operate in quite the same way in both. The
confluence of motif and theme is handled more literally and immediately in fantasy films,
where the mystical already has precedence over the rational, but is handled more
symbolically and abstractly in science fiction films, where the rational is superficially
preeminent even though the audience is still affected by the same processes of magical
thinking and by the same onslaught of mythic archetypes. Only in fantasy films, such as
Dragonslayer and Conan the Barbarian, are the deaths and resurrections as well as the
underground journeys literal. And only in science fiction films, such as Blade Runner, Escape
from New York, and The Black Hole, are the underground journeys themselves essentially
symbolic, merely metaphorical descents into Hades, just as the deaths and rebirths are
symbolic and not

-211-

literal. Other science fiction and fantasy films, however, occupy a middle ground where
literal underground journeys are associated with merely symbolic or implicit deaths and
rebirths, as in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, A Boy and His Dog, Logan's Run, and
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In the fantasy film Dragonslayer, the aged Ulrich, who is the last, remaining sorcerer, predicts
his imminent death to his young apprentice, Galen, prior to admitting petitioners who ask him
to kill an "old, decrepit" dragon, the last of another vanishing breed. As prophesied, Ulrich is
slain as he is about to set out on this quest. His ancient retainer, Hodge, who had gathered the
old sorcerer's ashes from his funeral pyre, is also killed, yet with his dying breath he
admonishes Galen to "find a lake of fire, and throw them [Ulrich's ashes] in." The serpentine,
flame-breathing dragon--termed a "devil . . . from hell" by a Christian prophet whom the
dragon later barbecues--inhabits an underground lair that is, indeed, a hellish, flaming,
smoke-belching pit strewn about with the remains of its victims and complete with a
subterranean lake of fire, a specific allusion to the hell of Milton Paradise Lost. On his fourth
descent into the lair and after having risked his life in a futile duel with the dragon, Galen
finally recognizes that this is the "lake of fire" of which Hodge has spoken and throws
Ulrich's ashes into it. Thus had Ulrich planned his own resurrection, to save his ancient legs
for the long hike to the lair. He emerges from the fiery lake, resplendent in white vestments,
and then rises from the pit during a solar eclipse to combat the dragon, who is incinerating the
countryside. Ulrich sacrifices his own life a second time to destroy the dragon but returns
again, this time symbolically, in the form of a milk-water stallion.

Ulrich's literal death and resurrection, which entails immersion in, and emersion from, both
fire and water, is echoed first by the sun's eclipse and return and later by his second death and
implicit return as a horse. It is also foreshadowed in numerous ways. The amulet in which the
sorcerer's power resides is repeatedly placed within or under other objects only to reappear
magically, resurrected through its own power, or to be retrieved repeatedly by Galen. The
dragon itself, due to its advanced age, similar uniqueness, and the sympathy the sorcerer feels
for it, is quickly equated with Ulrich. In its first encounter with Galen the dragon is buried in
his

-212-

subterranean lair beneath an avalanche and declared dead, but only to rise again, as will the
sorcerer. And Ulrich's resurrection is prefigured in each of Galen's first three descents into
and ascents from the underworld of the lair and in his two other underground journeys: his
imprisonment in the king's dungeon, from which he escapes during the earthquake that
heralds the dragon's "resurrection," and his taking shelter during that escape in a hollow in the
earth beneath a blacksmith's anvil. Ulrich's literal resurrection occurs as the climax of the
final descent into the underworld, while the symbolic resurrection follows. Both are
reinforced by the five prior underground journeys (among other death and rebirth emblems),
most of which are also symbolic journeys through hell.

The one literal death and resurrection in Conan the Barbarian is foreshadowed by a symbolic
death and resurrection closely associated with Christian imagery. The various underground
journeys in this film are each more clearly developed as symbolic deaths and rebirths than
those in Dragonslayer. After Conan acquires his sense of self-worth as a gladiator in the "pit,"
he is freed from bondage in his earthen cell by an earthquake. These elements of his history
prefigure subsequent returns from the underworld but are not literally underground journeys
themselves. Later Conan escapes a pursuing pack of wolves by falling through a barrow into
an underground tomb full of skeletons; there he finds a giant's sword, uses it to sever his
remaining shackles, and emerges again from the barrow symbolically reborn as a free man
adequately armed against a hostile world.

Still later, with the thieves Subotai and Valeria, Conan descends into the subterranean bowels
of the Temple of Set to steal a giant ruby, "the eye of the serpent." Here he finds not only
more skeletons but also an enormous snake, which he decapitates. He and his comrades
escape by swimming the temple moat. Finally, the three adventurers enter the snake cult's
hollow Mountain of Power through a cave entrance to discover the hellish scene within;
cultists feast on human remains, and Thulsa Doom, the cult's high priest, transforms himself
into a serpent. After Conan and the thieves kill nearly everyone to abduct a princess, they
escape by swimming an underground river, but Valeria is mortally wounded in the process. In
these last two subterranean journeys Conan encounters not only the memento mori of human
remains, as in the first descent, but also

-213-

the archetypal serpent--another death symbol that is explicitly identified as the emblem of the
death cult of Set. Both escapes also involve immersions in and emersions from water, a
traditional death and rebirth symbol.

Prior to the third descent, however, Conan is captured during a solitary attempt to enter the
Mountain of Power and is crucified on "the tree of woe." Subotai brings his body to a wizard
who agrees to return Conan from the brink of death only after Valeria vows to pay the toll
exacted by the spirits he will invoke. Valeria fights off the serpent-like wraiths who come to
claim Conan's soul, and when he recovers she swears, "Were I dead, and you still fighting for
life, I'd return from the very pit of hell to fight at your side." Her death during the escape
from the Mountain of Power is the toll Valeria finally pays for Conan's restoration to life; yet,
after she is cremated, she too returns. At the climax of the battle against Thulsa Doom's
followers, Valeria briefly returns from the dead to aid Conan. Just as Valeria's prediction
foreshadows her resurrection, the earlier prophecy a beautiful priestess of Set addressed to
Conan--"Shed your skin like the serpent, and like the serpent you will be renewed"--
foreshadows the symbolic resurrection that follows his crucifixion. This metaphorical
triumph over death is echoed in the resolution of his personal quest, when he beheads Thulsa
Doom-the film's personification of death and the man on whom Conan had long sought
vengeance for the deaths of his parents--on the steps of the Mountain of Power in the film's
last scene.

The underground journey is also a recurrent motif in such fantasy films as Raiders of the Lost
Ark and in science fiction films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, A Boy and His
Dog, and Logan's Run, wherein it indicates the death and resurrection theme that informs
these films but is never actualized through a literal resurrection. In Raiders of the Lost
Archetype: The Quest and the Shadow," Lane Roth notes that "a South American temple, the
Map Room, the Well of Souls, and a Nazi U-boat pen are all dark, subterranean, and secret
locations that represent the mystery and danger of the underworld" to archaeologist-
adventurer Indiana Jones. 1 In each of these descents Indy is threatened by sudden death,
premature burial, or both; three out of four descents entail a metamorphosis of the hero; the
subterranean temple and Well of Souls

-214-

contain numerous memento mori; and the Peruvian and U-boat pen episodes entail
immersions in and emersions from water.

Soon after entering the Peruvian temple, from which no man has ever returned alive, Indy
and his native helper, Satipo, discover the remains of the previous intruder, Forrestal, another
archaeologist, impaled on a mechanized death trap. After circumventing other hazards,
including spiders, a bottomless pit, and poisonous darts, Indy snatches the object of their
search, the Chachapoyan Idol, and precipitates a cave-in that threatens to bury them alive.
During the escape, Satipo betrays Indy only to be impaled on the same stakes that killed
Forrestal, while Indy outruns a huge boulder that permanently seals the underground temple a
moment after he emerges from it. The Peruvian adventure concludes--after rival archaeologist
Belloq wrests the idol from Indy, and the latter escapes death at the hands of Belloq's natives
by diving into a river--with Indy's encounter with his seaplane pilot's pet snake. Immediately
afterwards he appears reborn as his alter ego--no longer the ill-shaven, scruffily dressed,
whip-wielding adventurer, but now the clean-shaven, nattily-attired, bespectacled college
professor.

Later, Indy, now disguised as an Arab, is lowered into the subterranean Map Room at Tanis
by Sallah, an Egyptian ally, who notes: "Death has always surrounded it [the Ark]."
However, a Nazi orders Sallah away from the entrance, leaving Indy again threatened with
possible entombment until Sallah manages to return and haul him up with a makeshift rope.
Indy, with his "partner," Marion Ravenwood, finally is buried alive in the Well of Souls,
which is guarded by thousands of poisonous snakes and contains racks of skeletons that fall
on the entombed couple. As Roth points out, the Well of Souls is aptly named; while this one
is dry, the term "well" suggests another, symbolic immersion/emersion. Indy creates another
exit from the Well of Souls and, just as their last torch is about to expire and plunge them into
darkness, he and Marion escape.

A literal immersion, while lashed to the periscope of a Nazi U-boat, brings Indy to the
subterranean U-boat pen on the isle where Belloq will release the power of the Ark. He and
Marion once again face imminent death at the Nazi's hands, but are saved when the unleashed
power of the Ark--an immersion in and emer-

-215-

sion from fire prefigured in the fiery destruction of Marion's Nepalese bar--incinerates
everyone on the island except them. After destroying the Nazis, the energies from the Ark
form a pillar of fire and are assumed through a hole in the heavens. Thus, the film's graphic
images of death are followed by a suggestive image of resurrection. The Ark itself is
ultimately interred in the cavernous bowels of a government warehouse.

Another memento mori occurs earlier in the film with the memory of Abner Ravenwood,
Marion's father and Indy's former mentor. Indy learns from Marion in Nepal that Abner had
been buried alive by an avalanche while on a dig, a sometimes specific contrast to his own
numerous escapes. One unexpected return from apparent death occurs when Indy believes
Marion is killed in Cairo in the fiery detonation of a munitions truck in which she seems to be
captive. Soon after he emerges from the Map Room at Tanis he discovers her alive in
Belloq's tent.

While the theme of death and rebirth merely suffases Raiders of the Lost Ark, it relentlessly
possesses Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan from the first scene, the Kobayashi Maru war
game, to the final image of Spock's coffin. Myriad events, symbols, and metaphors suggest
the film's implacable death and rebirth theme: the false deaths and rebirths acted out in the
war game; Chekov's supposed demise and return; the past resurrection of Khan's people from
cryogenic freeze, their ascent from Seti Alpha 5, and the subsequent rescue of the Reliant's
crew; The Genesis Project itself and the related allusions in the film to Melville Moby Dick;
the interment in and escape from Regula, the film's sole but pivotal underground journey;
Kirk's death and rebirth of the spirit; and Spock's literal death with its implications of a future
rebirth.
Immediately after the opening credits, the Enterprise appears to be attacked and destroyed by
Klingon cruisers; all hands on the bridge (including Spock) are apparently killed. This turns
out to be only an exercise in facing death, however, and the crew rises again when the drill is
concluded. On seeing Spock afterwards, Kirk mockingly inquires, "Aren't you dead?" Later
Kirk notes that he and the young crew have "been through death and life together." A second
false death and resurrection involves Chekov. Chekov and Terrel, captain of the Reliant, are
pronounced as good as dead already when Khan implants the nasty, will-draining, parasitic
life

-216-

form indigenous to Seti Alpha 5 in their brains. Later, Terrel commits suicide on being
ordered to kill Kirk; faced with the same order, Chekov passes out and the parasite drops
from his ear. The audience assumes Chekov too is dead, yet he subsequently reappears,
unexpectedly recovered, to man the weapons console in the Enterpise's final showdown with
Khan in the commandeered Reliant.

Both Khan's past and immediate encounters with Kirk entail symbolic deaths and
resurrections. Fifteen years earlier Kirk and his crew had recovered Khan and his followers
from nearly four centuries of cryogenic freeze on discovering their "antique" ship, the Botany
Bay, adrift in space. On deeming them still a danger to humanity, Kirk settled them without
means of escape on a verdant Seti Alpha 5. Six months later, however, the planet veered from
its orbit to become a harsh, cold dustball nearly incapable of sustaining life. Charging that
Kirk had thus left him and his people "buried alive" for fifteen years, Khan engineers his own
second resurrection when he tricks the Reliant's crew into "beaming him up" to their ship.
Khan then dooms that crew to a lingering death by marooning them on Seti Alpha 5 in his
place, but they too are symbolically resurrected when they are rescued by the Enterprise after
Spock's funeral.

The Genesis Project itself, which Khan intends to use as a weapon in his vendetta against
Kirk, "is clearly a science fiction metaphor for the . . . death/birth cycle," as Roth has already
observed. 2 Project Director Dr. Carol Marcus explains that its goal is to create "life from
lifelessness" by reorganizing matter into a new, "life generating" matrix on a planetary scale.
Yet McCoy points out that it is a terrifying weapon as well--truly a death and rebirth device--
because it simultaneously destroys all preexisting life in establishing its own matrix. As his
last vengeful act after Kirk finally defeats him, Khan mutters, "To the last, I will grapple with
thee" and triggers the Genesis effect, which consumes him, in the vain hope of thereby
catching the Enterprise also in the expanding matrix. Khan's last words are "From Hell's
heart, I stab at thee." These dual allusions to Moby Dick, which Kirk is reading in the film's
penultimate scene, further reinforce the concept of the Genesis Project as death and rebirth
metaphor, for in Melville's novel the white whale is likewise developed paradoxically as a
symbol of both death and life.

-217-

Ahab's ghastly resurrection, when he resurfaces lashed to the flank of the whale and beckons
his crew to follow him to a watery death, is echoed in Khan's third and final rebirth: the
Genesis effect does not merely destroy him but transforms him, the Reliant, and the matter of
the Motara Nebula into a lush, verdant Eden.

The Genesis effect had previously been triggered at the barren core of Regula, a "lifeless"
moon and the site of Kirk's crucial descent into the underworld. In investigating what had
become of the Regula I space station's crew, Kirk, McCoy, Saavak, and the zombified
Chekov and Terrel follow Dr. Marcus's trail and "beam themselves down" to a cavern in the
rocky center of Regula, where Marcus had sought refuge from Khan's surprise attack in the
pirated Reliant. Here Khan first threatens Kirk by ordering Terrel and then Chekov to kill
him. When he fails, Khan gloats to Kirk, "I shall leave you as you left me: marooned forever
at the center of a dead planet . . . buried alive, buried alive!" However, echoing Khan's own
resurrection from Seti Alpha 5, Kirk employs a ruse to have the Enterprise crew "beam" him
and the others "up."

This temporary, interment is not merely a symbolic death and resurrection for Kirk, however;
it is also the turning point in his psychic death and rebirth struggle, the inner human drama
that preoccupies him throughout the film and is externalized in its other emblems of death
and resurrection. Following the Kobayashi Maru sequence is a counterpoint scene in which
McCoy tries to help Kirk celebrate his birthday only to lament, "Why are we treating it like a
funeral?" McCoy then advises the demoralized Admiral to "get back your command before
you really do grow old." Later, after Khan declares him "buried alive" beneath the surface of
Regula, Kirk admits to Marcus, "I feel old, worn-out." She replies, "Let me show you
something that'll make you feel young, as when the world was new," and leads him to a huge
cave that her experiment has transformed into a glistening, lush, primeval paradise. Roth
argues that his "metamorphosis of grave into womb . . . recalls the mythic hero's encounter
with a fertility goddess who helps reclaim him from the underworld." 3 After witnessing this
miracle of rebirth, Kirk and the others are "beamed" aboard the Enterprise, Chekov
reappears, and Kirk enjoys his third and final victory over Khan: Like the first encounter with
the Reliant and the escape from Regula itself, this is but another death and rebirth metaphor
in that

-218-

victory, life, is snatched from the jaws of defeat, almost certain death. After Spock's funeral
Kirk tells McCoy, "I feel young."

Spock's resurrection in a subsequent film ( Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) is as good as
promised. To enable the Enterprise to escape the Genesis effect, Spock subjects himself to a
lethal dose of radiation (an immersion in fire) in the ship's engine room and thus sacrifices
himself to save the ship and crew. While dying he notes that he'd never before faced the
Kobayashi Maru test, a reminder of his earlier "death"--and subsequent "resurrection"--at the
beginning of the film. And, as Roth argues, at the film's conclusion "the promise of literal
rebirth is implied through a combination of music, dialogue and voiceover, and imagery," 4 as
well as through the very death and rebirth theme that permeates the film. Scotty pipes
"Amazing Grace" as Spock's coffin is ejected into space, suggesting that Spock is like Christ,
in having sacrificed himself for his fellows, and that, like Christ, he too will be reborn.
McCoy tells Kirk that Spock is "really not dead as long as we remember him." Kirk notes in
his eulogy that "this death takes place in the shadow of new life" and associates it with "the
sunrise on a new world." The trajectory of Spock's coffin in its flight to the newly created
world duplicates the trajectory of the Genesis device to the barren planet shown in the video
simulation screened earlier in the film. The final shot of the coffin resting intact amid the lush
verdure of this new, living world belies any idea that Spock's demise is irrevocable. Spock is
symbolically resurrected in the final, accompanying voiceover, in which it is he, not Kirk,
who speaks the well-known, standard prologue used in each Star Trek episode on television.

A Boy and His Dog and Logan's Run are two science fiction films that depict quite
differently man's existence after a nuclear apocalypse. Yet, in each, literal underground
journeys symbolize mankind's death and eventual resurrection. A Boy and His Dog takes
place around the remains of Phoenix, a city, named for the mythical bird that rises from its
own ashes. In the film's first minutes, Vic (the "boy," whose real name is Albert) descends
into an underground shelter in search of a woman, but discovers instead some freshly
mutilated corpses. Subsequently he does find a female in another underground installation,
but both are first threatened by two dozen bloodthirsty "rovers" (who also want the girl) and
then by the "screamers"--radioactive mutants whose touch means death.

-219-

The girl, Quilla June, soon afterwards convinces Vic to accompany her back to '"Down
Under," a subterranean community that has survived nuclear annihilation and maintains a
sterile, stagnant parody of small-town American civilization. During this third, most elaborate
underground journey, Vic endures his narrowest escapes from death. "Down Under's"
sterility is biological as well as cultural, and Quilla June has lured Vic there so he can be used
to impregnate all the community's fecund females (via artificial insemination) and then be
killed. After escaping first from the "milking" machine and then from "Michael," a robot
executioner, Vic finally escapes to the surface with Quilla June--whom he kills and feeds to
Blood, his dog, who had nearly died of starvation while faithfully awaiting his master's
return.

In some ways reminiscent of "Down Under," the immense, domed city of Logan's Run,
which is "sealed away from the forgotten world outside," contains a stagnant but hedonistic
civilization that rigidly controls birth and death. We are told that "life must end at thirty
unless reborn in the fiery ritual of carouse!" and that, to keep the population constant, the rule
is "one for one: one is terminated, one is born." Every death is followed by a birth. Those
who attempt to prolong their lives past thirty by fleeing the city--"runners"--are executed on
sight by "Sandmen." Logan, a twenty-sixyear-old Sandman, learns that the hope of
resurrection offered by carousel is a fraud, that no one has ever been "renewed." He is then
ordered to leave the dome to seek and destroy "Sanctuary," believed to be a haven outside the
dome for runners who have escaped.

To enable him to pass as a runner and thus find Sanctuary, Logan is "reprogrammed" to age
thirty. Effectively, the remaining four years of his allotted span are cancelled: he is as good as
dead. In the first of his underground journeys, Logan pursues a female runner to Cathedral, a
subterranean area for violent delinquents, but lets her live. He thereby convinces Jessica, a
member of the suspicious runner underground who is supposed to lure him into a fatal
ambush, that he is an authentic runner and not a spy. Subsequently, the couple--who are
advised that "the way is always down" to Sanctuary--escape the city by descending beneath
the dome. While "under the city," however, they are nearly killed by Francis, another
Sandman pursuing Logan. They emerge again, after enduring the

-220-

additional symbolic death and rebirth of a hazardous water passage in the abandoned
"breeding tanks" beneath the city, only to discover that there is no Sanctuary (just as there is
no "renewal" through carousel), but that a robot, Box, has frozen and placed in "Storage" (an
icy catacomb of cryogenic runners) each runner before them who has successfully escaped
the dome.

Yet Logan and Jessica defeat Box to emerge from Storage and witness a sunrise in the idyllic,
but, to Jessica, harsh world outside the city--and to discover that Logan, like this new world,
has been reborn technically as well as symbolically: the "life pod" crystal imbedded in his
palm has changed from red, which signified that he was stated for termination, to clear,
signifying that he has "renewed." Francis's last amazed words, after he finds Logan again and
loses a battle to the death with him, are "Logan, you renewed!" Logan subsequently returns to
the city--entering it this time through its hydroelectric power system, a third underground
journey that entails another watery immersion and emersion--to lead its people out into a
world that has renewed itself during the centuries the Dome has kept them prisoner.

In three other recent science fiction films, Blade Runner, Escape from New York, and The
Black Hole, similarly symbolic deaths and resurrections are reinforced primarily by
metaphorical descents into the underworld that merely represent underground journeys. In all
three the hero endures a journey through a metaphoric hell, though not literally underground,
to emerge symbolically reborn. Logan's Run, Blade Runner, and Escape from New York are
all similar in that the metaphoric underworld in each is a city from which the inhabitants
cannot escape--the Dome, Los Angeles, and New York, respectively--and that the hero of
each is forced into action against his will. Blade Runner is even more similar to Logan's Run:
the hero is also a sanctioned killer who summarily (while in hot pursuit) executes victims
whose life spans are artificially brief, but who is eventually converted to their cause; the city
from which the hero finally escapes is a sterile, mechanized, sunless labyrinth; and
emergence from the city into an unexpectedly verdant countryside signifies rebirth.

The lingering, aerial pan of twenty-first-century Los Angeles immediately follows Blade
Runners opening credits and establishes the city as the film's Inferno, a grim underworld
where the sun

-221-

never shines. Immense balls of roiling flame belch from somber, skyscraping smokestacks
above a perpetually smog-darkened Pandaemonium--a Bosch-like, urban hell of cold, neon
blue, omnipresent acid rain, a maddeningly overlayered complexity of visual detail, and
billowing carpets of dense fog that waft through canyonlike, bonfire-illuminated streets.
Through its overwhelming architecture as well as through juxtaposition to the off-world
colonies that promise a freer, cleaner, better life, the claustrophobic city is presented as an
underworld. The visual allusion to Pandaemonium, capital city of the Miltonic hell, is
reinforced when Batty, the replicant leader, cites Paradise Lost to Chew, the Chinese
scientist, in describing the fall of the rebellious angels. The rebel replicants are like the fallen
angels--superior beings who have descended, literally, from the advertised paradise of the
off-world colonies to Earth and the polluted city (which harbors primarily only those
wretches somehow unfit to escape into space) and who seek redress from or revenge upon
their creator, Dr. Tyrell. On first encountering Dr. Tyrell, Batty sardonically opines, "It is
difficult to face one's maker." A further allusion to Paradise Lost is the snake tatoo that
marks another of the rebel replicants, Zhora; in speaking of Zhora, the snake merchant, Abdul
Hassan, notes that the serpent "once corrupted men."

The replicants are mature androids genetically engineered to die after a four-year lifespan.
Rebelling, they illegally return to Earth, where replicants are forbidden, to force Tyrell to
extend their lives. This theme of premature death is echoed in Sebastian, a genetic engineer
who suffers from a disease that accelerates aging. The female rebel replicants are killed by
Deckard (the Blade Runner pressured into hunting them), who nevertheless falls in love with
Rachel, an experimental replicant with no termination date whom Tyrell has illegally kept on
Earth and who initially believes herself to be human. Batty, after murdering Tyrell, is about
to kill Deckard when his time runs out and he begins to discorporate. In his last moments of
life his sense of reverence for all living things overcomes his hatred for Deckard, who has
stalked him and murdered his fellows, and he saves rather than kills the Blade Runner. As he
dies, Batty is symbolically reborn as a white dove that ascends into the sky; the dove is
specifically an emblem of his "soul" now freed. Reinforcing this rebirth motif is Batty's
development throughout

-222-

the film as a Christ-figure; not only is he Deckard's ironic savior, but he is also referred to as
the "prodigal son" of Tyrell, "the God of bio-mechanics," and at the film's climax he drives a
nail through his own hand, suggesting crucifixion.

Batty's death precipitates Deckard's release from death. Subsequently, Deckard and Rachel
escape the city into an unexpectedly idyllic countryside whose sunniness and openness
provide a marked contrast to the dark, cramped city. While Deckard's emergence from the
city (which is also an emersion from its ubiquitous rainfall) follows his escape from death
and signals his psychic rebirth, Rachel's escape also symbolically completes the death and
rebirth theme as it primarily concerns the replicants. The rebel replicants descend into the city
and die. Unlike the others, however, Rachel is not doomed to a premature death and her
escape from the city ensures that she will not be hunted and killed as a renegade replicant.
Thus her emergence from the symbolic hell of the city signals her rebirth as a human being.

Far more explicitly than the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, the city of Escape from New York
is presented as a metaphorical hell. By 1997 New York has become a walled, maximum
security prison to which criminals (sinners) are condemned for life without possibility of
parole. Snake Plissken, a war-hero-turned-criminal who owes his nickname to the snake tatoo
on his stomach, is informed that "the rules are simple: once you go in, you don't come out."
An attempted escape in a raft on the night-dark river early in the film establishes the Hudson
as the River Styx. In a more specific allusion to Dante Inferno, the middle of Manhattan
always appears as the center of numerous concentric circles on the police tracking screens.
And the way into the city is always down: the terrorist spokeswoman for the National
Liberation Front of America gloats, "nothing can save him now, we're going down" as she
crashes U.S. One, with the president on board, into the city. Police Commissioner Hauk
enters via helicopter, and Plissken later "free falls" in via glider and climbs out over a wall.
Most of the film takes place at night, and the electricity-less city streets are illuminated first
by the flaming debris of U.S. One and thereafter by trash can fires and blazing bonfires.

The first bizarre representative of the city, the Duke's lieutenant, Romero, who displays the
president's severed ring finger, looks like

-223-

a demon, and the first graffito Plissken sees after landing on the World Trade Center reads
"Devils." Plissken has been briefed that "crazies . . . live in the subways" and have "complete
control of the underground." Subsequently, rag-clothed "crazies" emerge from sewers,
manholes, subway exits, and the rotting floor of a "Chock Full O'Nuts" to attack him. The
first words he hears in the city are the lyrics to Everyone's Going to New York," which
inform him directly that "this is hell."

Plissken's descent into and escape from this underworld is emphatically a symbolic death and
rebirth. The film's soundtrack, Engulfed Cathedral," is decidedly funereal, and Plissken is
initially offered the opportunity to "terminate" via cremation rather than face a potentially
more unpleasant fate in the city. In fact, he is, in a sense, killed prior to entering it. To assure
Plissken's full compliance and to encourage his timely success, Hauk has implanted in
Plissken's circulatory system small explosive charges that will detonate and cause fatal,
internal hemorrhaging in twenty-four hours unless the charges are neutralized. Hauk then
informs Plissken, "You're dead already."

Subsequently, every major character Snake meets in the city-usually through reference to an
erroneous but widespread rumor of his demise--reinforces the idea that Plissken is dead
already unless he manages to escape with the president and within the time limit. This idea is
particularly reinforced when an anonymous woman in a Chock Full O'Nuts notes, "I know
who you are, yeah. But I heard you were dead." Plissken replies, "I am." After Plissken
emerges victorious from his most graphic brush with death in the underworld, an obligatory
gladitorial fight to the death against a Gargantuan opponent, every major character in New
York except Plissken and the president is killed in the attempt to escape over the mined 69th
Street Bridge. By climbing over the huge wall at the end of the bridge, Plissken ascends out
of the underworld, with the president and within the time limit, and is symbolically
resurrected immediately afterwards when the explosive charges are nullified.

The symbolic hell of The Black Hole is not a city but the astrophysical phenomenon referred
to in the title, which in itself suggests an underground passageway rather than a celestial
body. In fact, Dr. McCrae describes the Black Hole as "that long dark tunnel." As Roth
demonstrates, "In The Black Hole the titular image

-224-

. . . represents unity of . . . water and fire, immersion and emersion, death and rebirth, hell and
heaven." 5 The colors it assumes in the film, blue and red, suggest the association with water
and fire. Metaphorical association of the Black Hole with hell occurs toward the beginning of
the film, when the crew of the probe ship Palomino first observe its holographic image. Harry
Booth gasps, "My God, right out of Dante Inferno," even though the image itself is at this
point not suggestive of anything infernal. As if in exegesis of this unmotivated remark, Dr.
Durant notes, "Nothing can escape it," an aspect of the metaphorical hell also alluded to in
Logan's Run and Escape from New York.

As the Palomino docks with the Cygnus, an enormous ship orbiting the Black Hole, Vincent,
the Palomino's adage-spouting robot, prophetically observes, "Out of the frying pan . . .
hopefully, not into the fire." Master and sole surviving human occupant of the Cygnus, Dr.
Reinhardt is the Black Hole's hubristic, egomaniacal Satan: his salient characteristics are
pride, disobedience, and a desire to play God. Twenty years earlier, considering himself a
genius on the verge of the greatest scientific breakthrough in history, Reinhardt had
disregarded direct orders to abandon his research and return with the Cygnus to Earth. Now
his "robot" crew is the lobotomized remains of his formerly human crew, who thus endure a
grisly form of life after death. As Booth observes, "That Reinhardt sure loves to play God,
doesn't he?" Reinhardt also tempts Durant to be his disciple by promising to reveal to him
"what we call the ultimate knowledge," a parallel to Satan's seduction of Eve with the
promise of knowledge of good and evil. His demonically sinister robot, Maximillian, is
Reinhardt's second-in-command.

The verbal metaphors that associate the Black Hole with hell in the beginning of the film
prefigure the visual metaphors that complete this association at its conclusion. After
Maximillian murders Durant, Booth perishes in the destruction of the Palomino; and the
Cygnus, with Reinhardt and Maximillian aboard, is consumed by the Black Hole; the
surviving Palomino crew members attempt to navigate through the hole in the
preprogrammed Cygnus probe ship. Within the hole they experience a sequence of images:
Reinhardt and Maximillian fall through dimensionless space and merge into one being, who
later appears atop a promontory overseeing a twisting line of damned souls (possibly the
former crew of the Cygnus)

-225-

who drag themselves through a barren, reddish, flame-spewing landscape. The demonic
Maximillian-Reinhardt composite possesses the robot's red, metallic exoskeleton; two of its
limbs extend upward like horns, and the other two are fully extended and tipped with sharp
blades to resemble pitchforks. As Roth concludes, "The image is clearly infernal." 6

This descent is into hell preceded by death and followed by a symbolic rebirth. Early in the
film, Reinhardt informs the Palomino crew, somewhat inaccurately, that all his former crew
members are "dead"; later his "robot" crew performs a macabre burial of one of their number
in deep space. Bob, another robot, subsequently warns Vincent that "this is a death ship" and
eventually expires due to damages incurred in a battle with the robot guards on the Cygnus.
Prior to the deaths of Durant, Booth, and Reinhardt, the Cygnus is caught in a meteor storm
and is transformed into a fiery inferno from which the Palomino crew must navigate their
escape to the probe ship. Their narrow escape through the flaming corridors of the Cygnus
foreshadows their ultimate emergence from the Black Hole, which Reinhardt had boasted
would lead to "life forever" and "immortality." The crew's last, echoing thought on entering
the hole is "dead," but the hellish tableau that follows soon yields to an antithetical sequence:
the camera rapidly tracks behind an angelic figure and through crystal archways as the Black
Hole becomes first Dante's Celestial Rose and then a white hole through which the probe ship
suddenly bursts back into normal space, reborn. The final image in the film is a freeze frame
of the probe, trailed by its blazing exhaust, vanishing into the dazzling brilliance of a sun that
is partially eclipsed by a planet the probe is approaching from below. Roth argues that this
"obvious fertility image, suggesting sperm and egg, is a symbol of rebirth." 7

The underground journey is indicative in film, as it is in literature, of the death and

resurrection theme. In fantasy films, both the journey and the resurrection have a greater
tendency to be literal, while in science fiction films both have a greater tendency to be
metaphorical. Be it literal or metaphorical, however, the underworld always contains
memento mori in the forms of dead bodies, skeletons, or other human remains. The journey
through it always entails a literal, physical threat to life, which sometimes takes the form of
premature burial and often is associated with snakes or

-226-

serpents, specific emblems of satan and death. Sometimes the hero must figuratively die prior
to entering the underworld, and sometimes the literal or symbolic resurrection occurs there.
Yet the underground journey, with its attributes, is always reinforced by a multitude of other
signals--immersions in, and emersions from, fire or water, Christlike imagery, literary
allusions--and is not the sole indicator of the death and rebirth theme in the science fiction or
fantasy films in which it appears.

NOTES
1 Lane Roth, Studies in the Humanities, 10 ( June 1983), 13.
2 Lane Roth, "Death and Rebirth in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", paper
 presented at the Popular Culture Association's Convention, Wichita, Kansas,
April, 1983.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Lane Roth, "Compensating Scientism Through The Black Hole",
Literature/Film Quarterly 14 ( 1986), 59.
6 Ibid., p. 61.
7 Ibid., p. 6.

-227-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-228-

Bibliography
GENERAL

Attebery Brian. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature from Irving to Le Guin.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Bersani Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston: Little,
Brown, and Co., 1976.

Bettleheim Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.
New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Boyer Robert H., and Kenneth J. Zahorski, eds. Fantasists on Fantasy: A Collection of
Critical Reflections. New York: Avon Books, 1984.

Breton André. Manifestes du Surréalisme. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962.

Caws Mary Ann. A Metapoetics of the Passage: Architextures in Surrealism and After.
Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1981.

Cook Elizabeth. The Ordinary and the Fabulous. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1976.

Fredericks Casey. The Future of Eternity: Mythologies of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Higgins James E. Beyond Words: Mystical Fancy in Children's Literature. New York:
Teachers College Press, 1970.

Hume Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis. New York and London: Methuen, 1984.
Irwin W. R. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1976.

Jonas Hans. The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Landow George P. "And the World Became Strange: Realms of Literary Fantasy". The
Georgia Review XXXIII, 1 (Spring, 1979), 7-42. Also

-229-

in the exhibition catalogue, Fantastic Illustration and Design in Britain, 1850-1930.

Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1979, and in Schlobin Roger C., ed. The
Asethetics of Fantasy Literature and Art. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1982, 105142.

Le Ursula K. Guin The Language of the Night. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: G. P. Putnam
Sons, 1979.

Lewis C. S. Of Other Worlds. Ed. Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,
1966.

Manlove C. N. The Impulse of Fantasy in Literature. Kent: The Kent State University Press,
1977.

-----. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Rabkin Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Schlobin Roger C., ed. The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art. Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1982.

Todorov Tzvetan. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Le Seuil, 1970. The

Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard.
Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973; Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1975.

Tolkien J. R. R. Tree and Leaf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965.

1. FROM PROVIDENCE TO TERROR: THE SUPERNATURAL IN

GOTHIC FANTASY

Addison Joseph. Spectator 110 ( July 6, 1711). The Spectator. Edited by Donald Bond.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965; 453-56.

Brooks Peter. "Virtue and Terror: The Monk". ELH 40 ( 1973), 249-63.

Dennis John. "The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry" and "The Usefulness of the Stage",
Critical Works of John Dennis. Edited by Edward Niles Hooker . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1939.

Ehlers Leigh. "The Gothic World as Stage: Providence and Character in The Castle of
Otranto". Wascana Review 14 ( 1979), 17-30.
Fielding Henry. Miscellaneous Writings, vol. III of Complete Works. Henley ed. New York:
Croscup and Sterling, 1902.

Hart Francis R. "Limits of the Gothic: The Scottish Example". In Studies in Eighteenth-
Century Culture, vol. 3. Edited by Harold Pagliaro. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Press,
1973, 137-159.

MacAndrew Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1979.

-230-

Otto Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. New York: 1923. Reprint. Translated by John W. Harvey.
New York: Oxford Galaxy Books, 1958.

Punter David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions From 1765 to the
Present. New York: Longmans, 1980.

Todorov Tzvetan. Introduction à la litérature fantastique. Paris: Le Seuil, 1970.

-----. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard

Howard. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973; Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1975.

Varma Davendra P. The Gothic Flame: Being A History of the Gothic in England. London:
Arthur Baker, Ltd., 1957.

Walpole Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. 1765. Edited by W. S. Lewis.
Reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Wesley John. The Journal of John Wesley. 25 May 1768, 6 July 1781. Reprint. New York: E.
P. Dutton's Everyman's Library, 1913; III, 329-30; IV, 215.

2. A LESSON IN XENOLINGUISTICS: CONGRUENCE, EMPATHY,

AND COMPUTERS IN JOAN VINGE'S "EYES OF AMBER"

Sapir Edward. "Conceptual Categories in Primitive Languages," in Language in Culture and

Society. Edited by Dell Hymes. New York: Harper and Row, 1964, 128.

Vinge Joan. "Eyes of Amber." In The New Women of Wonder. Edited by Pamela Sargent.
New York: Vintage Books, 1978, 318.

3. CONTINUITY WITH THE PAST: MYTHIC TIME IN TOLKIEN'S

LORD OF THE RINGS

Calabrese John A. "Elements of Myth in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and
Selected Paintings of Paul Klee." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio University, 1980.

Carpenter Humphrey. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Eliade Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return. Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971.

-----. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. New York: New
American Library, 1958.

Kirk G. S. Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1970.

-----. The Nature of Greek Myths. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974.

-231-

Miesel Sandra. Myth, Symbol, and Religion in 'Lord of the Rings.' Baltimore: T-K Graphics,
1973.

Miller David. "Narrative Pattern in 'The Fellowship of the Ring.'" In A Tolkien Compass. Ed.
Jared Lobdell. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1975.

Noel Ruth S. The Mythology of Middle-earth. Boston. Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Reilly Robert J. Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971.

Tolkien J. R. R. The Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

-----. The Fellowship of the Ring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954; 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1967.

-----. The Two Towers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955; 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1967.

-----. The Return of the King. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955; 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1967.

-----. The Silmarillion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

-----. "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Edited by
Lewis E. Nicholson. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963.

-----. "On fairy-stories." The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.

West Richard. "The Interlace Structure of 'The Lord of the Rings.'" A Tolkien Compass.
Edited by Jared Lobdell. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1975.

4. REMEMBERING THE FUTURE: GENE WOLF'S THE BOOK OF

THE NEW SUN

Böhme Jacob. Sämtliche Schriften. Edited by Will-Erich Peuckert, IX. Stuttgart: Fr.
Frommanns Verlag, 1956.
Heidegger Martin. "The Origin of the Work of Art." In Poetry, Language, Thought.
Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon, 1975.

Husserl Edmund. Zut Phänomenologie des Inneten Zeitbewusstseins, ed. Rudolf Boehm .
Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.

Malekin Peter. "Wordsworth and the Mind of Man," An Infinite Complexity. Edited by J. R.
Watson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983, 1-25.

Stace W. T. Mysticism and Philosophy. London: Macmillan, 1960.

-232-

Wolfe Gene. The Citadel of the Autarch. London: Arrow, 1983.

-----. The Claw of the Conciliator. London: Arrow, 1982.

-----. The Shadow of the Torturer. London: Arrow, 1981.

-----. The Sword of the Lictor. London: Arrow, 1982.

5. THE ULTIMATE FANTASY: ASTRID LINDGREN'S THE

BROTHERS LIONHEART

Bettelheim Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.
New York: Vintage, 1977.

Butler Francelia. "Death in Children's Literature". Children's Literature 1 ( 1972).

Lewis Naomi. "The Road to Fantasy". Children's Literature 11 ( 1983), 201-210.

Møhl Bo, and Maj Schack. Naar Børn Laeser: Litteraturaplevelse og Fantasi [ When
Children Read: Literature and Fantasy]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1983.

Toijer-Nilsson Ying. Tro och Otro i Modern Barnlitteratur [ Belief and Disbelief in Modern
Children's Literature]. Karlskrona, Sweden: Verbum, 1976.

Törnquist Egil. "Astrid Lindgren's Halvsaga: Berättertekniken i Bröderna Lejonhjärta" [

Astrid Lindgren's Semi-Fairy Tale: Narrative Technique in The Brothers Lionheart]. Svensk
Litteraturtidskrift 13.2 ( 1975), 17-34.

Ørvig Mary, ed. En Bok om Astrid Lindgren [A Book about Astrid Lindgren]. Lund, Sweden:
Rabén and Sjögren, 1977.

6. IRONY GROWS IN MY GARDEN: GENERATIVE PROCESSES IN

BORGES'S "THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS"

Bell-Villada, Gene H. Borges and His Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1981.

Borges Jorge Luis. Obra poética, 1923-1967. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1967.
-----. Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952. London: Souvenir Press, 1973.

Jurado A., ed. Genio y Figura de Jorge Luis Borges. Buenos Aires: Universitaria de Buenos
Aires, 1966.

Murillo L. A. The Cyclical Night. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

-233-

7. WHAT WENT WRONG WITH ALICE?

Bandler Michael J. "Childhood Is Always with Him". American Way ( May 1981), pp. 71-76.

Carroll Lewis [ Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]. Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative Texts of

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, The Hunting of the Snark,
Backgrounds, Essays in Criticism. Edited by Donald J. Gray. Norton Critical Edition. New
York: Norton, 1971.

-----. Alice's Adventures Under Ground: Being a Facsimile of the Original Ms. Book
Afterwards Developed into "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," 1876. Reprint. New York:
Macmillan, 1932.

-----. The Diaries of Lewis Carroll. Edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. 2 vols. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1954.

-----. The Letters of Lewis Carroll. Edited by Morton Cohen. 2 vols. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979.

-----. The Nursery "Alice". Introduction by Martin Gardner. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1966.

Clark Anne. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. New York: Schocken, 1979.

Flower Linda, and John R. Hayes. "The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical
Problem". College Composition and Communication 31 ( 1980), 21-32.

Huckin Thomas N. "A Cognitive Approach to Readability". In New Essays in Technical and
Scientific Communication: Research, Theory, Practice. Paul V. Anderson, R. John
Brockmann, and Carolyn R. Miller, eds. Baywood's Technical Communication Series.
Farmingdale, N.Y.: Baywood, 1983, pp. 90-108.

Lanes Selma G. The Art of Maurice Sendak. New York: Abrams, 1980.

Lewis C. S. "On Three Ways of Writing for Children". Proceedings of the Bournemouth
Conference ( London, 1952). Reprinted in Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature,
Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, and L. F. Ashley, eds. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press,
1980, pp. 207-20.

Sadker Myra Pollack, and David Miller Sadker. Now Upon a Time: A Contemporary View of
Children's Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

Selzer Jack. "What Constitutes a 'Readable' Technical Style?" In New Essays in Technical
and Scientific Communication: Research, Theory, Practice, Paul V. Anderson, R. John
Brockmann, and Carolyn R. Miller , eds. Baywood's Technical Communication Series.
Farmingdale, N.Y.: Baywood, 1983, pp. 71-89.

-234-

Sibley Brian. "The Nursery 'Alice' Illustrations". Jabberwocky 4 ( 1975), 9295.

8. THE FIGURE OF THE DECADENT ARTIST IN POE, BAUDELAIRE,

AND SWINBURNE

Baudelaire Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Translated by Richard Howard. Boston: David
Godine, 1982.

Eliot T. S. Selected Essays 1917-1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932.

Gilman Richard. Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1979.

Pierrot Jean. The Decadent Imagination 1880-1900. Translated by Derek Coltman . Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Poe Edgar Allan. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by James A. Harrison . 1902.
Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1979.

Praz Mario. The Romantic Agony. Translated by Angus Davidson. London: Oxford
University Press, 1970.

Schroder Maurice. Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961.

Swinburne Algernon Charles. The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne. New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1904. Volumes I, II, III and IV.

Symons Arthur. Studies in Prose and Verse. 1922; Reprint; New York: AMS Press, 1975.

Wilde Oscar. Intentions. London: Methuen & Co., 1891.

9. ELEMENTS OF THE FANTASTIC IN "LA GRANJA BLANCA" BY

CLEMENTE PALMA

Belevan Harry. Antología del cuento fantástico peruano. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor
de San Marcos, 1977.

Leal Luis. Historia del cuento hispanoamericano, 2a ed. México: Ediciones de Andrea, 1971.

Todorov Tzvetan. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Le Seuil, 1970. The

Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Both editions translated by Richard
Howard. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973; Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1975.
Vax Louis. Arte y literatura fantásticas. Translated by Juan Merino. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1965.

-235-

10. THE PLAY-WITHIN-THE-PLAY: A STUDY OF MADNESS IN

HUBERT AQUIN'S NEIGE NOIRE

Aquin Hubert. Neige noire. Montréal: La Presse, 1974.

Baltrusaitis J. Anamorphic Art. Translated by W. J. Strachan. New York: Harry N. Abrams,

Inc., 1977.

11. THE FANTASTIC DWELLING IN JACQUES CAZOTTE'S LE

DIABLE AMOUREUX

Castex Pierre-Georges. Le Conte Fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant. Paris:

Corti, 1951.

Cazotte Jacques. Le Diable amoureux: nouvelle espagnole. Naples (i.e., Paris): Le Jay, 1772.

Milner Max. Le Diable dans la littérature Française de Cazotte à Baudelaire. Paris: Corti,
1960.

Olson Alan M. Disguises of the Demonic: Contemporary Perspectives on the Power of Evil.
New York: Association Press, 1975.

12. THE LIVING PAST: THE MEXICAN'S HISTORY RETURNS TO

HAUNT HIM IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY CARLOS FUENTES

Burns Archibaldo. "Seis cuentos enmascarados", Revista de la Universidad de México IX,

No. 3-4 (Nov.-Dec. 1954), 29-30.

Carballo Emmanuel. El cuento mexicano en el siglo XX. Mexico:. Empresas Editoriales,

1964, 73-80, 541-549.

Ciccone Anthony Julio. "The Artistic Depiction of Fantasy-Reality in the Uncollected Short
Stories ( 1949-1957) of Carlos Fuentes". Journal of Spanish Studies Twentieth Century, I, 3
( 1973), 127-139.

-----. "The Supernatural Persistence of the Past in Los Días enmascarados by Carlos Fuentes".
Latin American Literary Review, III, ( 1975), 37-48.

Duncan Cynthia. "Carlos Fuentes' Los Días enmascarados", Handbook of Latin American
Studies. New York: The Library of Congress Hispanic Foundation, Octagon, 1968, 259.

Leal Luis. Breve historia del cuento mexicano. Mexico: Ediciones de Andrea, 1956.

-----. "La neuva narrativa Mexicana", Neuva Narrativa Hispanoamericana, No. 1 ( 1972), 90-
91.
 -236-

Reeve Richard. "Los cuentos de Carlos Fuentes: de la fantasía al neorrealismo". In El cuento

hispanoamericano ante la crítica, ed. Enrique Pupo- Walker . Madrid: Castalia, 1973, 249-
263.

Rivera Angel Conzalez. "Los Días enmascarados de Carlos Fuentes", El Buho, 4 ( 1973), 6.

13. DISSOLUTION AND DISCOVERY IN THE FANTASTIC FICTION

OF ANDRÉ PIEYRE DE MANDIARGUES

Bond David J. The Fiction of André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1982.

Haig Stirling. "André Pieyre de Mandiargues and 'Les Pierreuses'." The French Review 39
( 1965), 275-280.

Lowrie Joyce O. "Entretien avec André Pieyre de Mandiargues". The French Review 55
( Oct. 1981), 76-87.

Mandiargues André Pieyre de. L'Anglais décrit dans le château fermé. Paris: Gallimard,
1979.

-----. Dans les années sordides. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.

-----. Le Désordre de la mémoire: Entretiens avec Francine Mallet. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

-----. Deuxième Belvédère. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1962.

-----. Feu de braise. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1959.

-----. Mascarets. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.

-----. Le Musée noir. Paris: Gallimard, 1946.

-----. Soleil des loups. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.

14. SURREALIST AS RELIGIOUS VISIONARY: MAX ERNST'S RÊVE

D'UNE PETITE FILLE QUI VOULUT ENTRER AU CARMEL (1930)

Aragon Louis and André Breton. "The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria", La Révolution
Surréaliste 11 ( 1928), n. p. Reprinted in André Breton: What is Surrealism? Selected
Writings. Translated and edited by Franklin Rosemont. New York: Monad Press, 1978, Book
2, 320321.

Ernst Max. "Some Data on the youth of M. E. as told by himself", View, Special Max Ernst
Issue ( April 1942), 28-30.

-----. Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel. Paris: Editions du Carrefour, 1930.
Reprinted in Max Ernst, Ecritures. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1970, 186-220.
 -237-

Ferguson George. Sign & Symbols in Christian Art. New York: Oxford University Press,
1966.

Görres Ida Friederike. The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. New York:
Pantheon, 1959.

Keyes Frances Parkinson. Thérèse: Saint of a Little Way. New York: Julian Messner, 1950.

St. Thérèse, Sainte Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus: Histoire d'une âme. Lisieux, France: Office
Central ( 1937?).

Sainte Teresa. Life of Saint Teresa: Written by Herself. Translated by Rev. John Dalton.
Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham and Son, 1870.

Waldberg Patrick. Max Ernst. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1958.

15. THE FOULEST TOADSTOOL: REVIVING FRANKENSTEIN IN

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Clarens Carlos. The Illustrated Frankenstein. New York: Sterling, 1980.

Florescu Radu. In Search of Frankenstein. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975.

Forry Steven Earl. "Dramatizations of Frankenstein, 1821-1986: A Comprehensive List".

Forthcoming in English Language Notes.

-----. "An Early Conflict Involving the Production of R. B. Peake's Presumption; or, The Fate
of Frankenstein". Theatre Notebook 39 ( 1985): 99-103.

-----. "The Hideous Progenies of R. B. Peake: Frankenstein on the Stage, 1823-1826"."

Theatre Research International 11 ( 1985): 13-31.

Gifford Dennis. Movie Monsters. London: Dutton, 1969.

Glut Donald. The Frankenstein Catalog. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984.

-----. The Frankenstein Legend. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1973.

Huss Roy, and T. J. Ross. Focus on the Horror Film. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1972.

LaValley Albert. "The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein". In The Endurance of
Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel. Edited by George Levine and U. C.
Knoepflmacher. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, 243-89.

Lenning Arthur. The Count: The Life and Films of Bela "Dracula" Lugosi. New York:
Putnam's, 1974.

Lyles W. H. Mary Shelley: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1975.

Mank Gregory William. It's Alive! The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein. San Diego:
Barnes, 1981.

Stoker John. The Illustrated Frankenstein. New York: Sterling, 1980.

-238-

16. THE UNDERGROUND JOURNEY AND THE DEATH AND

RESURRECTION THEME IN RECENT SCIENCE FICTION AND
FANTASY FILMS

Roth Lane. "Compensating Scientism Through The Black Hole". Literature/Film Quarterly
14 ( 1986), 58-63.

------. "Death and Rebirth in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan". Presented at the Popular
Culture Association Convention, Wichita, Kansas, April, 1983.

------. "Raiders of the Lost Archetype: The Quest and the Shadow". Studies in the Humanities
10, 1 ( June 1983), 13-21.

Black Hole, The. Disney, 1979. Gary Nelson, director. USA.

Blade Runner. The Ladd Co., 1982. Ridley Scott, director. Hampton Fancher and David
Peoples, screenwriter. USA/ UK.

Boy and His Dog, A. LQJaf, 1975. L. Q. Jones director and screenwriter. From a novella by
Harlan Ellison. USA.

Conan the Barbarian. Universal Pictures/Dino de Laurentis, 1982. John Milius , director.
Based on the character created by Robert E. Howard . USA.

Dragonslayer. Paramount/Disney, 1981. Matthew Robbins, director. USA.

Escape from New York. Avco Embassy Pictures Corp., 1981. John Carpenter , director.
USA.

This Island Earth. Universal-International, 1955. Joseph Newman, director. From the novel
by Raymond F. Jones. USA.

Journey to the Center of the Earth. Twentieth Century Fox, 1959. Henry Levin , director.
From the novel by Jules Verne. USA.

Logan's Run. MGM, 1976. Michael Anderson, director. From the novel by William F. Nolan.
USA.

Raiders of the Lost Ark. Kaufman Ltd., 1981. Steven Speilberg, director. George Lucas and
Philip Kaufman, story. Lawrence Kasdan, screenwriter. USA.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Paramount, 1982. Micholas Meyer, director. Jack Sowards,
screenwriter. USA.
Star Wars. Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox, 1977. George Lucas , director and
screenwriter. USA.

Time Machine, The. MGM, 1960. George Pal, director. From the novel by H. G. Wells.
USA.

World, The Flesh, and the Devil, The. MGM, 1959. Ranald MacDougall, director. USA.

-239-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-240-

Index
Addison, Joseph, 11 - 12 ; antisupernatural, 11 ; on ghosts, 11 12 ;
traditional belief in Providence, 12
Aquin, Hubert, 123 -31; Neige noire, 123 -31; suicide, 125 ; theme of
individual madness, 125 -30; use of Hamlet, 125 -30; use of Holbien The
Ambassadors, 123, 130 ; use of playwithin-the-play (mise-en-abyme), 123
-30
Baudelaire, 103 - 104, 107 - 110 ; Les Fleurs du Mal, 107 - 109 ; cult of the
dandy, 107 - 108, 112 ; decadent aesthetic, 103, 109 ; championed Poe, 107
; quality of imagination, 108 ; spleen, 104
Beckett, Samuel, 75, 81
Bettelheim, Bruno, child's thoughts and fantasy, 68
The Black Hole, 211, 221, 224 -26
Blade Runner, 211, 221 -23
Böeme, Jacob, 52
Borges, Jorge Luis, 73 - 86 ; games in, 79 ; "The Garden of Forking Paths,"
73 - 86 ; interaction of narratives, 76 ; phenomenological reading of, 83 - 85
; structures of possibility, 78 ; use of detective format, 75 ; use of
multiplicity of narratives, 80
A Boy and His Dog, 212, 214, 219 20
Breton, André, 161 -62, 168 -69; La Lampe dans l'horloge, 162 ; Nadja, 169
; Second Surrealist Manifesto, 161 ; high opinion of hysteria, 168 ;
surrealism's "pope," 169
Carroll, Lewis, 87 - 101 ; Alice's Adventures Underground, 87 - 90, 97 98 ;
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 87 - 101 ; audience for, 89 ; changes,
effective, 89 ; changes from Underground to Wonderland, 87 - 90 ; changes
from Wonderland to The Nursery Alice, 90 97 ; illustrations, compared, 96 ;
narrator condescension, 93 - 94 ; narrator didacticism, 94 - 95 ; narrator as
guide, 97 ; intrusion, 92 93

-241-

Cazotte, Jacques, 133 -40; Le Diable amoureux, 133 -39,

revised ending of, 139 ; initiator of the fantastic in French
literature, 133 -34, 139 ; mockery of realism, 139 ; supernatural,
use of, 134
Cirlot, J. E.,
Dictionary of
Symbols, the
cave, 135
Conan the
Barbarian, 211,
213 -14
The Dandy,
107 - 108, 112
Dante
Alighieri, the
Celestial Rose,
226 ; Inferno,
223, 225
Decadence, 103
- 112 ; as
countermyth to
progress, 112 ;
and literary
modernism,
109 ; Salome,
goddess of, 107
; as spiritual
crisis, 109
Decadent
aesthetic, the,
103, 109, 115 ;
anatomized by
Baudelaire, 103
; illustrated in
Roderick
Usher, 103 -
104 ; Clemente
Palma's roots
in, 115
Decadent artist,
104 - 107 ; in
"The Black
Cat," 106 ; in
Edward Burne-
Jones, 106 ; in
Poe
( Baudelaire's
view), 107 ; in
Swinburne, 111
-12;
exemplified by
Des Esseintes,
103 ;
exemplified by
Roderick
Usher, 104 ;
historical
context of, 108
; quest for the
unattainable,
105
Dennis, John,
12 ; religious
grounding of
art, 12
Devil, the,
elusive quality
of, 138 39; pact
with, 133 -39;
seducing
humans, 133
-39
Dodgson,
Charles L., See
Lewis Carroll
Dracula,
Hamilton
Deane's
dramatization
of Bram
Stoker's novel,
193 -95
Dragonslayer,
211, 212 -13
Eliot, T. S., on
Baudelaire, 109
110 ; on
Swinburne, 111
Ernst, Max 167
-81; and
Catholicism,
167 -80; death
of sister Maria,
174 ; death of
St. Theresa of
Avila, 170 -71,
177, 180 ; death
of St. Theresa
of Lisieux, 168
-71; La Femme
100 têtes, 59 ;
Rêve d'une
petite fille qui
voulut entrer
au Carmel, 167
-81; use of
Eugène Sue,
174 ; visionary
experience of,
168
Escape from
New York, 211,
221, 223 -25
The fantastic, 1
; in Catholic
thought, 167 ;
child's
thoughts, 68 ;
dualistic
tensions in, 149
; escapist
literature, 141 ;
metamorphosis,
161 ; recurrent
themes in, 160 ;
requirements
for, 1, 115, 160
; self-conscious
use of, 63 ;
theory of
fantastic
narrative, 152 ;
trapped in
(motif), 144 ;
uncongenial in
Mexican
 literature, 141
-47
The Fantastic:
A Structural
Approach to a
Literary Genre,
8, 150, 158 ;
explaining
away the
fantastic, 158 ;
Faust theme,
119 ; replacing
fantasy with
psychoanalysis,
8
Faust theme,
119 - 120
Frankenstein,
183 - 210 ;
John
Balderson's
revisions of
Webling, 195 -
203 ; early
stage version,
203 n. 1 ;
Edison film,
184 -88, 206 n.
9 ; The Last
Laugh
(adap&shy:

-242-

tation), 188 -95; minor film versions 204 - 205 n.3; Mary Shelley's novel,
183, 203 - 204 n.1; Universal film, 183, 195 - 203, 209 n.29; Peggy
Webling's stage play, 193 - 203, 207 n.15, 207 208 n.21, 209 n.28
Freud, Sigmund, 167
Fuentes, Carlos, 2, 141 -47; "Chac Mool", 143, 145 -47; the living past, 141
-42, 144 -45, 147 ; Los Diasenmascardos, 143 -47; Tlactocatzine, of the
Flemish Garden," 143 -45; trapped in the fantastic (motif), 144
Ghosts, 11 - 13 ; Addison's disbelief in, 11 - 12 ; Locke's doubt, 11 ; in
Rasselas, 13
Gnosticism, 157
Gothic novel, 7 - 18 ; Clemente Palma's roots in, 115 ; and numinous awe,
 10 ; supernatural elements in, 11
Grimm, The Brothers, "The Death of Partlet", 59
Husserl, Edmund, 47 - 48 ; 56 - 57 n.3
Inferno, 223, 225
Jung, Karl, 49 - 50
Kirk, G. S., Categories of mythic functions, 33, 44 n. 4 ; charter myth, 37 ;
creative-era myth, 39, 41 ; eschatalogical myth, 41 - 42 ; etiological myth,
39, 41 ; narrative myth, 33
Leal, Luis, 141
Lewis, Matthew, 17, 18 ; the Monk, 18
Lindgren, Astrid, The Brothers Lionheart, 59 - 68 ; controversy over, 61 ;
political struggle, 66 67 ; time in, 61 - 62 ; Pippi Longstocking, 60 ; use of
the fantastic, 63
Logan's Run, 212, 214, 219 -21, 225
Magical Realism, 2
de Mandiargues, André Pieyre, 149 -64; "Adive" ( "Adive"), 161 ; "The
Archeologist", ( "L'archéologue"), 158, 160 ; belief in surrealist rêverie, 151
-52; "The Capital Vision" ( "La Vision Captale"), 158 -59; "The Diamond",
( "Le Diamont"), 156 -57, 162 ; "During the Sordid Years" ( "Dans les
annés sordide"), 158 ; "The Englishman Described in the Enclosed
Chateau" ( "L'Anglais décrit dans le château termé"), 154 -55; Fire of
Embers (" Feu de Braise"), 149 -57; the Gnostic tradition and surrealist
rêverie, 157 ; "The Little Stone Women" ( "Les Pierreuses"), 149 -53;
Manichean ideas, 153, 157, 161 ; Memory's Disorder ( Le Disordre de la
memoire), 155 -56; "Parc Monceau Man", 161 ; nostalgia for synecdoche,
160, 162 ; "The Pommeraye Passage" ( "Le Passage Pommeraye"), 161 ;
precludes dichotomies, 153 -54; the resolution of opposites, 162 ; Second
Belvedere ( Deuxième Belvedère), 157, 160 ; The Student (L'E-

-243-

Mandiargues (cont.) tudiante), 151 -52; surrealist artists,

151, 157 -59; use of metamorphosis, 161
Manicheanism,
153, 157, 161 ;
battle with in
Frankenstein, 200
Manlove, Colin
N., 160
Otto, Rudolph, 8 -
10, 12 ; belief in
numinous, 9 ;
definition of
numinous, 9 ;
numinous and the
Gothic, 10 ;
numinous and
terror, 14, 18 ;
numinous and
wrath, 15
Palma Clemente,
La Granja
Blanca," 115 -21;
Faust theme in,
119 -20; irresolute
reader, 120 21;
narrative structure,
118 -19; roots in
Gothic and
Decadent
aesthetics, 115 ;
use of anonymous
first-person
narrator, 117
Paradise Lost,
187, 202, 212, 222
Poe, Edgar Allan,
103 - 112 ; "The
Black Cat", 106 ;
"The Cask of
Amontillado", 106
; decadent
aesthetic, 103 -
105 ; "Eureka",
112 ; "The Fall of
the House of
Usher", 103 ; first
modern writer, 109
; "Ligeia", 121 n.9;
"The Masque of
the Red Death",
105 ; "The
Philosophy of
Composition", 106
; "The Poetic
Principle", 105
Potter, Beatrix, 98,
99 n.1
Rabkin, Eric,
theory of fantastic
narrative, 152
Radcliffe, Mrs.
Ann, 17 ;
Udolpho, 17 - 18
Raiders of the Lost
Ark, 212, 214 16
Reader, active and
inactive, 85 ;
converging with
text, 78 ;
irresolute, 120 -21,
146
Reading,
fundamental issues
in, 74 ; necessity
for active
participation, 73 ;
phenomenological,
83 ; as process, 74
; uncertainty in, 77
Reeve Clara, The
Old English
Baron, 17
Resurrection in
The Brothers
Lionheart
( Lindgren), 65 -
66 ; in La Granja
Blanca ( Palma),
117 120 ; in
science fiction and
fantasy films, 211
- 227 ; in The
Shadow of the
Torturer ( Wolfe),
49
Robbe-Grillet,
Alain, 73 - 77, 81,
84
St. Theresa of
Avila, 170 -71,
177, 180
St. Theresa of
Lisieux, 168 -71,
177, 180, 181 n.2;
 "Histoire dune
âme" ( The Story
of a Soul), 168 70;
Sister Céline, 174
Sapir, Edward, 26
Sendak, Maurice,
98, 100 n.10
Star Trek II: the
Wrath of Kahn,
212, 214, 216 -19
Star Trek III: the
Search for Spock,
219
Surrealism, 167
-81; chief aim of,
161 ; and fetish
objects, 157 ; and
hysteria, 168 ; in
Mandiargues, 157
-58; use of
dismemberment,
157 -59
Swinburne,
Charles Algernon,
110 -12; champion
of Poe and
Baudelaire, 110 ;
cosmogony, 112 ;
as decadent artist,
112 ; style, 110 -
111 ; "Thalassius",
112
Tolkien, J. R. R.,
31 -43;
anachronistic
beings in, 33 ;
calendars,

-244-

use of, 32 ; charter myth in, 37 41 ; chronologies in, 31 - 32 ; creative era

myth in 39 - 41 ; eschatological myth, 41 - 43 ; etiological myth in, 39 - 41 ;
The Lord of the Rings, 31 - 43 ; mythic time in, 32 - 43 ; narrative myth in,
33 - 37 ; premythic state of races, 38 ; prophecies in, 38 - 39 ; rituals, use of,
37 - 48
 Underground journey in recent science fiction and fantasy films, 211 -27
Vinge, Joan, communicating with aliens, 22 - 26 ; communicating with
Xenolinguistics, 22 - 30 ; definition of, 22 ; "Eyes of Amber", 21 - 29 ;
machine processing of languages, 23 - 26 ; necessity for computers, 23 - 26 ;
recognition of alien languages, 23 - 24 ; reproduction of alien languages, 24
; theme in "Eyes of Amber", 22 ; translation of alien languages, 25 - 26 ;
understanding alien languages, 26 - 27
Walpole Horace, The Castle of Otranto, 7, 13 - 18 ; the supernatural and
Christian belief, 14
Wolfe Gene, The Book of the New Sun, 47 - 57 ; cosmic time and narrative
structure, 56 ; spatialized time, 53 ; time as effulgence, 51 ; time as linear,
50 - 51 ; undermines conventional reality, 48, 55
Xenolinguistics, 22 - 30 ; definition of, 22 ; machine processing of
languages, 23 - 26 ; necessity for computers, 23 - 26 ; recognition of alien
languages, 23 - 24 ; reproduction of alien languages, 24 ; translation of alien
languages, 25 - 26 ; understanding alien languages, 26 - 27

-245-

[This page intentionally left blank.]

-246-

About the Editor and Contributors

JOHN A. CALABRESE, Assistant Professor of Art History, Aesthetics, and Drawing, Texas
Woman's University, is interested in the interrelationship of the arts and in the development
of new courses. His publications center on the mythic elements in Tolkien's work and in the
paintings of Paul Klee. He is also a practicing fantasy artist.

A. R. CHADWICK has been teaching French at Memorial University of Newfoundland since

1967. His principal academic interests have been in the French novel of the first half of the
twentieth century, but in recent years he has expanded his scope to include the nouveau
roman and the realm of the fantastic. He has collaborated on a number of articles and
conference papers with V. Harger-Grinling.

BEVERLY LYON CLARK, Assistant Professor of English, Wheaton College in

Massachusetts, teaches writing, children's literature, and contemporary fiction. She is the
author of Reflections of Fantasy: The Mirror-Worlds of Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon and
of a forthcoming monograph on Lewis Carroll.

CYNTHIA DUNCAN, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Tennessee at

Knoxville, has published articles on the fantastic and magical realism in the short stories of
contemporary Mexican writers Elena Garro and José Emilio Pacheco and on the

-247-

Brazilian author, João Guimarés Rosa. She is currently writing a book entitled Magical
Realism and the Fantastic in the Mexican Short Story.
STEVEN EARL FORRY, Lecturer in English, Columbia University, received his Ph.D. in
1986 from Columbia with a dissertation, "Frankenstein on Stage: 1821 to 1986", which
discusses dramatizations of Mary Shelley's novel, from the first play, a French melodrama, to
the present. For the dissertation he also edited the texts of seven pre-1931 dramatizations.

ROBERT F. GEARY, Department Head and Professor of English at James Madison

University, is a specialist in Augustan literature. During a 1979-80 National Endowment for
the Humanities seminar, he extended his interests to the Gothic. From this work have
developed a number of papers and articles, and an undergraduate course on the Gothic
supernatural.

JULIETTE GILMAN, Associate Professor of French, Northeastern University, has published

Anatole France et les Autels de la Peur. Her area of scholarship is French literature of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is presently engaged in research on Anatole France
as a literary critic.

V. HARGER-GRINLING is presently teaching in the Department of French at Memorial

University of Newfoundland. Her recent publications concern the New Novel of France and
Québec, literature of the fantastic, and comparative studies in the modern novel.

CLARA JUNCKER, Lecturer in English at University of California--Los Angeles, was born

in Denmark and has degrees from the University of Aarhus and Tulane. Her research interests
include southern American literature, women's fiction, children's literature, and Afro-
American literature.

NANCY M. KASON, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Georgia, has

published articles on the fantastic in the work of Gabriel García Márquez and Felisberto
Hernández; on science fiction of Vicente Huidobro; and on the political ideology of

-248-

Fray Servando Teresa de Mier. Her current research interests include science fiction in
Argentina, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Luis Borges.

ROGER C. LEWIS, Associate Professor of English at kAcadia University in Nova Scotia,

Canada, and Director of the Wombat Press, has edited The Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth
Siddal and has published articles on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and the Pre-
Raphaelite movement.

JOYCE O. LOWRIE, Professor of French at Wesleyan University, has written articles on

Pieyre de Mandiargucs and taught a course entitled "Realism and Supra-Realism in
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French Literature". Currently she is preparing a book on
chiastic structures in French literature, which will include studies of repetition and the double
in French texts.

PETER MALEKIN has taught in Germany, Iraq, and Sweden. He is now Senior Lecturer in
the School of English, and Director of the Centre for Seventeenth-Century Studies at the
University of Durham, England. His main interest is in the fantastic and the theory of
consciousness.

DONALD E. MORSE, Professor of English and Rhetoric, Oakland University, Fulbright

Lecturer at Kossuth University, Hungary, 1987-1988, and Conference Chair for the
International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, developed his interest in the fantastic
while on a sabbatical year in Ireland. From that experience he inaugurated an undergraduate
course, established a graduate summer institute in fantasy, has presented a number of
scholarly papers and conducted several national workshops. He has presented at every
conference on the fantastic in the arts, beginning with the second one.

DONALD E. PALUMBO, Language and Humanities Chair at Lorain County Community

College, and Treasurer of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, has
published forty articles, nearly half of them on the fantastic in literature, film, and comic art.
He recently edited Erotic Universe: Sexuality and FantasticLiterature

-249-

Literature and Eros in the Mind's Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film, and
Spectrum of the Fantastic. Currently he is writing books on Marvel comics as fantasy
literature and on existential philosophy and modern fiction.

GREGORY M. SHREVE, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University and

former Dean of its Geauga Campus, spent 1985-86 as an exchange professor at Karl Marx
Universität in Leipzig, East Germany. He has extensive interests in information science,
semiotics, and science fiction criticism and has earned a certificate of advanced study in
computer and information science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of a two-
volume work, Genesis of Structure in African Narrative, as well as several papers and articles
on science fiction and fantasy.

CHARLOTTE STOKES, Associate Professor of Art History at Oakland University in

Michigan, has concentrated her scholarly and research efforts on the surreal world created by
Max Ernst, who was fascinated by old illustrations, modern science, and Freud. Her articles
on Ernst have appeared in American and European journals, such as Art Bulletin, Arts
Magazine, Simiolus, and Leonardo.

RALPH YARROW teaches drama and European literature at the University of East Anglia,
Norwich, England. His publications include articles on the functioning of consciousness in
relation to reception theory, modernist writing, and fantasy in The Scope of the Fantastic--
Theory, Technique, Major Authors, Modern Fiction Studies and the Journal of European
Studies. He devised and edited a Nouveau Roman Handbook for teachers and students and is
co-writing a book on improvisation.

-250-

Recent Titles in
Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Series Editor: Marshall Tymn
Some Kind of Paradise: The Emergence of American Science Fiction
Thomas D. Clareson
The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing: A Study in Narrative Tech-
nique
Katherine Fishburn
Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature
Donald Palumbo, editor
Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Confer-
 ence on the Fantastic in Literature and Film
William Coyle, editor
Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Con-
ference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film
Jan Hokenson and Howard Pearce, editors
Eros in the Mind's Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film
Donald Palumbo, editor
Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by
Women
Thelma J. Shinn
Reflections on the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fourth International
Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
Michael R. Collings, Editor
Merlin's Daughters: Contemporary Women Writers of Fantasy
Charlotte Spivack
Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy
Lance Olsen
Foundations of Science Fiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution
John J. Pierce
Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory
Marleen S. Barr
[This page intentionally left blank.]