In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

  I watched Dean’s film with a growing sense that I was seeing something very familiar: the moment when one moves through a space both intimately known and at the same time utterly alien. The artist’s frail collaborator conjures the most moving images out of the tiniest details of the house: details which, for all the historical resonance of the house itself, and the ravishing cinematography which revives it, were invisible to the viewer. Boots, it seems, is seeing ghosts. ‘One has the feeling, or I have the feeling,’ he sighs at one point, ‘that they are still here, but in another dimension … and that this whole house is in another dimension … it’s not … of the moment, if you know what I’m trying to say.’ Not only is the house, as Boots negotiates its remarkable rooms, overpopulated by mid-century ghosts, but the space itself seems to have dropped out of history, drifted off (like the massive ocean liner it resembles) into unchartable seas of memory.

  As this huge, convoluted theatre of memory opened itself up before me on the screen, I was reminded of another, more tangible artistic reflection on the house as an image of recollection and nostalgia. In 1993, the sculptor Rachel Whiteread made a work simply entitled House. The sculpture (if that is what it was: various civic dignitaries rushed to condemn it as an inartistic monstrosity) was a cast of the interior of a Victorian house, ‘exhibited’ in situ at 135 Grove Road, Bow, East London. Whiteread had garnered a certain amount of celebrity from her previous works, in which the interior volume of a single room was cast in blocks, later reassembled in the gallery to form an eerie white ghost of the original space. House was a good deal more ambitious and resonant: an entire phantom building was revealed once the outer shell (which was, after all, the house itself) had been removed and the specially formulated concrete beneath revealed. The sculpture unearthed an impossible volume: the solid replica of an empty interior, the image of a void once enclosed and supported by real bricks, real plaster.

  I have never seen Whiteread’s House: after months of controversy, it was finally demolished, and even the fact that the artist had won that year’s Turner Prize could not save it (might, indeed, have hastened its end). But photographs of it suggest that for a time it must have soaked up the memory of its environs: the surrounding streets which, pocked with derelict houses, had eventually been demolished. Stranded at the edge of the empty park that had replaced them, the sculpture gave the impression of having solidified memory itself. This was an illusion: it was not a solid mass at all, but a collection of vacant concrete boxes, held together by an invisible interior armature. You could have broken through its surface – some local squatters attempted to do just this – but you would not have found a habitable space, just a mass of wooden and metal supports. To the viewer on the outside, however, House made manifest a feeling that only occasionally overtakes one at home: that the substance of the house – the layers of brick, plaster, paint and wallpaper – is quite unreal, that the true house is the space in which we move. It is the empty volume that we get used to, that makes our bodies move in particular ways, that forms habits and physical attitudes which persist, awkwardly, after we have left.

  We often think of nostalgia – which is nothing more or less, etymologically, than the desire for home – as accruing to objects and images (and so it does, as we shall see later). But there is another sort of ache for the past, which has nothing to do with the visible and tangible world and everything to do with the void that abuts it in the most complex ways. If the photographic evidence is to be believed, visitors to Whiteread’s House must have been startled not only by the obtuse volume of the thing, but also by the way that emptiness was so minutely etched and convoluted. A house is not made of flat surfaces, but of odd protrusions, embossed or striated planes. Each tiny recession of the solid world around us is an extension of our own space, and therefore full of memory: a refined and slow-drying medium which covers everything. Nostalgia is no longer the word to describe the moment when we see the space around us for the complicated void it really is. At that instant – the instant, for me, of seeing the house empty for the first and last time – it becomes properly uncanny (which is to say: unhomely). The house no longer looks like itself, and yet it is reduced to its essence for the first time: recognizably a house from which we have been banished. The brilliance of House lay in the way it depended for its existence on a specific, unrepresentable space, and at the same time recalled all those who saw it (perhaps especially those who rejected it as art) to the vanished chambers of their own pasts. No house could be more comprehensively stocked with the detritus of the past than the empty house.

  ¶ Still life

  The house transforms every remembered incident into an arrangement of bodies in a given space. When I recall what happened in our house – or, at least, as much of it as might compose a narrative of sorts – it seems that what has stayed with me is a collection of snapshots: the space frozen into a series of tableaux. I don’t think that the phenomenon is entirely a function of my present distance from the house, from the space which seems to have imposed itself on everything that occurred there, to have mapped our family history according to the coordinates of meaning provided by a room, a doorway, an arrangement of furniture or habit of occupying, each of us, particular places at particular times. The sense one often has that a house is something living (we talk of a house coming to life, or settling) is not wholly fanciful; the house itself had a part in the history I am trying to tell.

  The vertigo that overcame me in my final minutes before leaving that house has its origin in a sense that each room is a separate passage into the past. (In her diary, Virginia Woolf makes this link between memory and space; she describes how, behind the present which each of her characters inhabits, a profound ‘tunnelling’ is going on: an unending excavation of the self.) But numerous chambers of experience come to occupy, bewilderingly, the same space. In my memory, I can stand at a specific spot in the house and feel myself thrust into an endless series of adjacent moments. The house is a Chinese box in which, alarmingly, each newly discovered receptacle is no smaller than those that contained it. It is as if every body that ever moved in a room is jostling for a place at the centre of my recollection, stumbling over others, and themselves, in an effort to claim priority in my memory. But the task of judging which of these figures deserves precedence is quite impossible: they all seem to want to adopt the same poses.

  According to one of my earliest memories, my father stands looking out of the kitchen window, sometime in the autumn of 1974. I am five years old, and I am sitting at the table with my mother. To my distress, I have become aware that my father, his back to us, is crying. When I ask my mother why, she replies that he is still upset because my grandmother, his mother, is dead. I have no memory of her death other than this moment; I have to dig out a photograph of her grave to remind myself that she died on 8 August of that year. In fact, I barely remember her at all, except, in an image which I may very well have invented, as a silent presence in the corner of her living room. In the kitchen, my father must have heard me, but he does not turn around. He says nothing, and I am immediately convinced that my question has angered him. I am unsure, however, in my welter of shame and confusion, whether his silence says that I ought to have known the answer to my question, or whether its very utterance is inadmissible. I seem to have excavated a chasm of quiet between the kitchen table and the window. I’m aware for the first time – or so I now surmise from a distance filled with numerous reminiscences of this moment – of a specific sort of mute unease at the centre of this household. The silence is inseparable – then and now – from an arrangement in space.

  I can no longer reconstruct the prelude or coda to this scene. I cannot even say with certainty whether it occurred before or after my grandmother’s funeral (of which I remember nothing). The image is attached to no chronology other than the immovable evidence of a date (though that date resonates: 1974 being the first year I can say with certainty that I remember; that is, I remember it being 1974, and little el
se). It connects instead to the kitchen itself, and in particular to a recurring dispersal of bodies within that space. A decade later, my mother sits alone at the same table. She has just returned from a brief shopping trip: an excursion cut short by breathlessness and pain. In recent weeks, her active life has contracted to these occasional, hopeless ventures outside the house, as the illness which for years has been gradually constricting her body takes what will turn out to be its final vicious hold. It is not long since she came back from yet another lengthy stay in hospital, and her efforts to remake a semblance of domestic normality have left her, on this grey morning, racked and stranded in a chair, exhausted by a walk of a few hundred metres. She begins, as so often before, to enumerate the sources of her pain: her bone-deep fatigue, the cruel revolt of her lungs against the air, the excruciating torsion of hands which can no longer hold the bags of shopping she has somehow rescued from her aborted journey. As I listen, standing by the kitchen window and looking out on to an empty garden where I hope something will intrude into my field of vision and release me from my locked posture, I know that the lengthening silences between the descriptions of her symptoms are not only the result of her breathlessness, but a sign that she has started to cry. And if I cannot tear myself from this spot and turn towards her to acknowledge her suffering – a movement which would be so alien, so unthinkably intimate that it would surely thrust us both into an atmosphere even more confusing than that which already hovers like a black fog between us – it is partly because I have become rooted to the memory of my father standing in the same place.

  The house, it seems, has a habit of freezing its occupants into familiar attitudes, as if forcing them to sit for a wearying series of family portraits. The body rebels against the pose: the longer it is held, the less able the sitters are to free themselves from it. We are like the subjects of a Victorian studio photographer; an ingenious metallic exoskeleton clamps us into place as we sit through an exposure which can only reveal our agony. Time and again we return to the same patterns and stiff postures. We might even begin to wonder if the house itself has designs on our freedom: why else do we find ourselves trapped in these awful arrangements? If I remember how it felt to move through the house, I recall too how I was periodically crippled by it.

  For years, my mother insisted that the house was cursed, that some nameless power hidden in its very substance was responsible for her debilitating depression and the later onset of a disease which, while it wasted her body, nourished that mental torment back into hideous life. As a child, I sensibly sided with my father’s dismissal of such thoughts as mere superstition, but secretly wondered whether the house might indeed possess a malign memory of its own. I knew little of its history beyond the fact that it had been built in the 1930s and that when my parents bought it, in 1968, it had still borne the traces of its division into flats. These marks would occasionally resurface in the form of a replastered patch on the wall of the sitting room (where there had once been a sink), or the rusted key to the dining room which I would sometimes try in its lock, imagining the house populated by retiring, somewhat shabby tenants eager to hide their adjacent lives from one another. I can still see them: minor civil servants in tweed and gabardine, pleased to have found a quiet suburb in which almost to forget their distance from rural homes, but unsatisfied, doleful, lacking the charm or imagination to negotiate their way out of their solitude to marriage or emigration. Haunted by these antique phantoms, I would try to imagine what tragedy could have occurred here to convince my mother that the house meant her ill. The most plausible and terrible notion with which I would sometimes thrill myself as I passed from room to room was that somebody must have died here, one of those mysterious flat-dwellers. But the vision refused to resolve itself into a question I could put to my parents.

  I know now that the ‘curse’ my mother referred to emanated not from the submerged history of the house, but from its living walls: from the accumulated residue of a life unfolding into chaos and fear at the same time as it became imprisoned in this space which never seemed to change. Apart from the upheaval of an extension to the kitchen when I was twelve, all my parents’ attempts to redecorate the house resulted, oddly, in the reinstatement of the same glum decor. Wallpapers seemed, no matter how new, to be sodden through with the pattern of the old; my bedroom’s eccentric combination of sky-blue walls and mud-brown carpet was stripped and substituted with a more vivid, less attractive simulacrum of the same scheme. For my mother, the house must have become, as it would eventually for me, too laden with years: the years of her struggle with depression, the years of uncertainty as the diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disorder gave way to ever more alarming, though not yet crippling, symptoms. And finally: the years of an at last solid and unremitting pain, of a desperate effort to accommodate her failing body to the demands of the space around her, to cook, wash or even sleep without the physical world turning on her, harsh and exigent.

  ¶ From the depths

  ‘To those who have never visited the Whispering Gallery, nor have read any account of it amongst other acoustic phenomena described in scientific treatises, it may be proper to mention, as the distinguishing feature of the case, that a word or question, uttered at one end of the gallery in the gentlest of whispers, is reverberated at the other end in peals of thunder.’ So wrote the great Romantic autobiographer and critic Thomas De Quincey in 1856, in the revised version of his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, originally published in 1821. Beneath the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, this peculiar auditory phenomenon is said to startle visitors standing at opposite ends of the gallery. It is nowadays untestable to the general public, whose massed presence deadens the air and ensures that they will never encounter the ghostly voice that De Quincey claims to have heard. He seems, anyway, to have vastly exaggerated the volume of his interlocutor: a boyhood friend who stood, in 1800, at one end of the Whispering Gallery, ‘breathing in the softest of whispers a solemn but not acceptable truth’ that ‘reached me as a deafening menace in tempestuous uproars’. De Quincey doesn’t tell us what the ‘solemn truth’ was; the point of the anecdote is in the image of the gallery itself, which provides him with a resounding metaphor for his own memory. Two years later, sitting in his Manchester Grammar School study, aged seventeen, looking for the last time at his chair, hearth, writing table ‘and other familiar objects’, he resolves to run away to London. At that moment, he recalls the Whispering Gallery, and it seems like a warning: his leaving will echo, in later years, like an uncannily amplified voice from the past:

  And now, in these last lingering moments, when I dreamed ominously with open eyes in my Manchester study, once again that London menace broke angrily upon me as out of a thick cloud with redoubled strength; a voice, too late for warning, seemed audibly to say, ‘Once leave this house, and a Rubicon is placed between thee and all possibility of return. Thou wilt not say that what thou doest is altogether approved in thy secret heart. Even now thy conscience speaks against it in sullen whispers; but at the other end of thy long life-gallery that same conscience will speak to thee in volleying thunders.

  De Quincey was obsessed by the relationship between memory and space: he frames it first of all in the most spectacular (and often imaginary) architecture, and later in domestic interiors. Memory, in his most personal formulation, seems to be governed by the image of a room: a room which keeps changing but which remains, terribly, the same. But before he lights on this picture from his past that is also an allegory of the workings of his memory, he must first negotiate some outlandish spaces of his own contriving. In an extraordinary passage in his Confessions, he recounts the horrors of his opium addiction. (De Quincey was an addict for almost all of his adult life: half a century in which he struggled daily with a drug he spent rather a lot of his writing career announcing that he had conquered.) The chapter is entitled ‘The Pains of Opium’, and mostly concerns the dreadful effects of the drug on his dreams, his imagination and his memory. In his
dreams, long-forgotten incidents from his childhood loom up again, fragments of the past which, he says, his waking self would not have been able to recognize. There is, he concludes, ‘no such thing as forgetting possible to the human mind’. Even more unsettling than these revenant events, however, is the fantasized space out of which they emerge:

  In the early stage of my malady, the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural: and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. … The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time.