by S. T. Joshi
There are some enormously potent scenes of horror in this fragment. The first comes when there is seen on the chronoscope a “singularly unattractive” (32) man who is possessed of a peculiar “anatomical absurdity.” Here is the description:
MacPhee says that I am again drawing out my description needlessly; going round and round while the most important thing about the Man remains to be described. And he’s right. The anatomical absurdity—the incredible thing—how can I write it down in cold blood? Perhaps you, reader, will laugh. We did not, neither then, nor since, in our dreams.
The Man had a sting. (33)
It is strange, however, that Lewis is unable to portray horror save as a perversion of the human form. Indeed, in a previous description of an idol in the Dark Tower—where we might have been led to expect some loathsome depiction of a creature akin to the gelatinous Cthulhu or toad-like Tsathoggua—Lewis merely presents us with an “image in which a number of small bodies culminate in a single large head. The bodies are nude, some male and some female. They are very nasty. . . . There is a free treatment of morbid anatomy and of senile sexual characteristics” (31). I must say that this description did not affect me at all; but Lewis’s loathing of perverse sexuality (a thing to be inferred also by the singularly unflattering treatment of women in all the stories of this volume) is such that he seems to regard it as the nadir of horror. Hence in a description of the Stingingman, he opens with a succulent and tantalising line that leads us to expect much—“What followed must be described briefly and vaguely”—but comes through with little: “He—or it—began to perform a series of acts and gestures so obscene that, even after the experiences we had already had, I could hardly believe my eyes” (36). Machen, too, had this horror of perversion (it is the basis for “The Great God Pan” and “The White People,” and enters into many other of his tales), but I fear that we in our sexually calloused age have lost much of the loathing for “obscenity” that so disturbed Lewis.
The other stories in this volume are still more remarkable, and, obviously, much more satisfying for their completeness. “The Shoddy Lands” is perhaps one of the most uniquely conceived tales in the whole of fantasy fiction. It is the seemingly prosaic tale of a professor who receives a visit from an old student and his fiancée (whom the professor does not know and at whose presence he seems somewhat annoyed). Suddenly during their rather idle conversation the professor seems to experience a sort of blackout and finds himself in an anomalous world that bears some resemblance to the “real” world but which is peculiarly “shoddy” trees, grass, sky, flowers a seem to have been devised clumsily and crudely. “I felt as if I had suddenly been banished from the real, bright, concrete, and prodigally complex world into some sort of second-rate universe that had all been put together on the cheap; by an imitator” (106). There are, however, a few things not shoddilly made: jewellery stores, some flowers (daffodils and roses), and, finally, a gigantic human being who is no other than the student’s fiancée, Peggy, although she is radically improved in physical appearance. Finally the man emerges from his hallucination and returns to the real world. What is the explanation? It is at this point that we find that the tale is nothing but a savage satire on the ordinary man (or woman): “My view is that by the operation of some unknown psychological—or pathological—law, I was, for a second or so, let into Peggy’s mind; at least to the extent of seeing her world, the world as it exists for her” (111). Hence the “shoddiness” of everything in which Peggy has no interest, and the gigantism of herself in her own mind: “At the centre of that world is a swollen image of herself, remodeled to be as like the girls in the advertisements as possible. Round this are grouped clear and distinct images of the things she really cares about. Beyond that, the whole earth is a blur” (111). But any charge of arrogance on the narrator’s part—the implication that his view of the world is “truer” or “better” than that of Peggy—is dispelled by the query that ends the tale: “And how if, some other time, I were not the explorer but the explored?”
“Forms of Things Unknown” is another remarkable short story whose artistry I can again display only by revealing the surprise ending. The point of the tale is that the legend of snake-haired Medusa may not be pure myth, but that a real Medusa exists on the moon. However implausible this summary may sound when flatly told, the tale itself is constructed with consummate artistry. Lewis begins with an epigraph from his own Perelandra: “. . . that which was myth in one world might always be fact in some other.” We are then told that there have been three manned expeditions to the moon where the astronauts’ messages were all terminated in mid-sentence by some unknown cause. (Apparently no cameras or television sets were brought along.) The sole member of a fourth expedition has adduced that the messages all terminated when the men looked behind them. The landing of this man on the moon and his terrified canvassing of the surface raise the tale to a point of nearly unbearable terror and suspense, for of course we do not yet know what nameless cause (whether madness on the astronauts’ part or some lunar entity) has resulted in the deaths or disappearances. Finally the man encounters the stone forms of his predecessors, but he takes them for brilliantly carven statues: “Each was a statue of a man turning to look behind him. Months of work had doubtless gone to the carving of each; it caught that instantaneous gesture like a stone snapshot” (131). Lovecraft attempts to do somewhat the same thing when, in “The Whisperer in Darkness,” he speaks of the “things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance—or identity— . . . the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.”[147] In both cases we are quickly led to believe that these things are in fact no “resemblances” but realities. But the final horror has yet to come. Now the man sees the shadow of some figure behind him:
It was that of a human head. And what a head of hair. It was all rising, writhing—swaying in the wind perhaps. Very thick the hairs looked. Then, as he turned in terror, there flashed through his mind the thought, ‘But there’s no wind. No air. It can’t be blowing about.’ His eyes met hers. (132)
This is the end of the story—and Lewis has shown brilliant restraint in not even mentioning the Medusa by name. There is, incidentally, a similar scene in Machen’s The Terror where a tree is seen to shake and flicker with light although there is no wind about: we are eventually led to believe that the tree is in fact filled with thousands of fireflies, waiting in prey for the human inhabitants of a house nearby. And recall Lovecraft’s “Colour out of Space”:
It is necessary to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense, godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.[148]
It is, of course, unlikely that Lewis was influenced by Machen (much less Lovecraft); rather we are here concerned with a very common principle of horror fiction, where the elimination of a simple detail—i.e., the existence of wind—suddenly turns a seemingly natural phenomenon into something horrifically supernatural.
The other stories in The Dark Tower and Other Stories are either only marginally fantastic (“The Man Born Blind,” “Ministering Angels”) or not fantastic at all (“After Ten Years,” another incomplete tale that vividly retells the end of the Trojan War and its aftermath). But the entire volume suffices to show that fantasy and horror were in fact never far from Lewis’s imagination. And while the last two volumes of the Ransom trilogy (as well as all the Narnia chronicles) are disappointing because of their inane (because clumsy, tran
sparent, and obtrusive) Christian symbolism, The Dark Tower and Other Stories can take its place with Out of the Silent Planet as a brilliant venture into the always dim borderland between fantasy and science fiction. These tales, while certainly not philosophically vacuous (as can be seen in the pungent “Shoddy Lands”), gain their power through the skilful presentation of potent images of horror and fantasy, which links them to the main tradition of fantastic writing. We can only regret the incompleteness of the tantalising Dark Tower and the almost excessive concision and brevity of the other tales in the volume. But Lewis’s urbane, polished, and elegant style will allow many re-readings of these tales long after their initial surprises are known.
A Failed Experiment: Family and Humanity in The Sundial
Misanthropy as a philosophical doctrine has been espoused by a tiny proportion of the human race, even among those intellectuals who are well aware of the overall deficiencies—moral, intellectual, cultural, and physical—of the human race. This is understandable: given the seemingly instinctive urge to perpetuate the species, the espousal of misanthropy—and its practical corollary, the call for the destruction or elimination of the race—is inherently repulsive to the majority of humans, especially as a kind of selective misanthropy leads to such undoubted evils as racism, misogyny, and terrorism.
How, then, does one justify a misanthropic approach to life? There are any number of plausible scenarios whereby the extirpation of our species can be seen as right and fitting,[149] but most misanthropes relent to the extent of pointing to the general contemptibility of the race as a whole while singling out a few individuals for approval or beneficence. Ambrose Bierce, the great American journalist and fiction writer, engaged in this argument on one occasion when defending the harshness of his literary, moral, and political judgments in his newspaper columns against a critic accusing him of a broader-based misanthropy:
John Bonner, does it really seem to you that contempt for the bad is incompatible with respect for the good?—that hatred of rogues and fools does not imply love of bright and honest folk? Can you really not understand that what is unworthy in life or letters can be known only by comparison with what is known to be worthy? He who bitterly hates the wrong is he who intensely loves the right; indifference to the one is indifference to the other thing. Those who like everything love nothing; a heart of indiscriminate hospitality becomes a boozing ken of tramps and theieves. Where the sentimentalist’s love leaves off the cynic’s may begin. You have lived and written to little purpose if you have yet to learn why the good do not make the bad behave themselves.[150]
All this sounds very noble and even morally upright; but in practice it appears that Bierce took great relish in lambasting the “boozing ken of tramps and thieves” and found relatively few individuals who corresponded to the “bright and honest folk” he is claiming to champion.
There is, moreover, a significant overlap between misanthropy (however that term is interpreted or applied) and satire—an overlap that begins at least as early as Juvenal and proceeds down through such figures as Jonathan Swift, Bierce, Evelyn Waugh, H. L. Mencken, Nathanael West, Gore Vidal, and many others. It is at this intersection that we may profitably study Shirley Jackson’s at times inscrutable novel The Sundial (1958).
The novel tells the superficially absurd story of an aristocratic family, the Hallorans, who become convinced that the entire world will be consumed by fire and that their spacious home will be all that is left standing, and that they will thereby become the source for a newer and presumably better human race. The novel ends inconclusively, and we never learn whether the impending cataclysm has occurred or will occur. In my judgment, the novel is a pungent exploration of a nearly universal misanthropy that is a central element in Jackson’s philosophical and aesthetic outlook.
Misanthropy in various shades and overtones colors a substantial portion of Jackson’s literary work. Her most famous story, “The Lottery” (1948), could on one level be interpreted as a condemnation of the kind of “mob mentality” that we also see, in more limited form, in The Sundial: a tradition of stoning selected individuals in order to ensure good crops is continued down to the present day, long after the folly of such sympathetic magic and ritual has been exposed by scientific advance. “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” (1955) is the seemingly bland tale of a couple, one of whom spends the day performing only good actions, the other only bad ones; the next day, they reverse their roles, as if it is of little consequence whether they do the one or the other. Jackson’s later novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) is perhaps her most bitter exposition of misanthropy, where the members of the Blackwood family express a scorn for the neighbouring community that Jackson herself clearly shared.
Jackson’s biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, states that The Sundial grew directly out of an unpleasant incident in her adopted home of North Bennington, Vermont, where she led a campaign to oust an elderly schoolteacher who had been physically and emotionally abusive toward her daughter Sally; but in the course of her campaign against the teacher, Jackson aroused the hostility of the town, who largely took the teacher’s side and made Jackson feel even more isolated in the close-knit community than before.[151] While it is unlikely that this single incident was the catalyst for The Sundial, it is evident that Jackson’s general sense of isolation from the community of North Bennington had much to do with the bitter and cynical tone of the novel.
From the point of view of genre, The Sundial occupies a kind of middle ground between such clearly supernatural works as The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and such tales of psychological aberration as The Bird’s Nest (1954) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The matter of the “truth” or reality of the impending destruction of the world remains unresolved to the end; and, although there are a few incidents in the novel that might be interpreted supernaturally, I believe we are to see the prophecy—ludicrous on its face—as fundamentally false, and false in a way that augments the essential misanthropy underlying the entire work. Although Jackson (as Gore Vidal did in the novel Kalki [1978]) would no doubt take great relish in the extirpation of nearly the whole of humanity, the overwhelming likelihood that the world will remain intact even as the Hallorans calmly await its destruction augments the misanthropic element by refusing to single out the Hallorans as any better than the ignorant townsfolk they scorn.
Jackson may have given a subtle nod to the genre implications of the novel by a disquisition about Strawberry Hill, the eccentric neo-Gothic mansion built by Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century.[152] Jackson was no doubt well aware that Walpole was also the originator of the Gothic novel with The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the rambling, multi-story Halloran house is indeed a miniature “Gothic castle” in much the same sense that the Blackwood house is in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And, as in many works of Gothic fiction, the convoluted byways of these “castles” suggest the unstable mental and psychological states of their inhabitants.
It is of interest to note that some reviewers of the novel detected the misanthropy that underlies it—but they did so in a naively censorious manner that reflects the conventional view that such a philosophical stance is itself morally evil and unjustified. Harvey Swados, in tones of magisterial condemnation, wrote:
Why is it then that the book finally leaves such a small impression? For one reader it is primarily because, while Miss Jackson is an intelligent and clever writer, there rises from her pages the cold fishy gleam of a calculated and carefully expressed contempt for the human race.
Pleasure in the vileness that human beings can commit one upon the other soon palls, particularly [if] it is unaccompanied by any imaginary representation of the specific moral gravity of a good human being. The result is that the figures in this literary landscape become less and less human and more and more simply the vehicles for an extended bitter joke that ends after several hundred pages by being merely tedious.[153]
This is a moral criticism masquerading a
s an aesthetic judgment; and the fallacy of the latter paragraph is that it is entirely plausible to assume that there simply are no “good human beings” to form a counterweight to the bad ones. Somewhat less judgmentally, David L. Stevenson noted that the novel “is a macabre and comical morality of the human id, in which all the characters are articulate and capable of decision only at the level of their most primitive wishes for power, their subliminal feelings of hate, greed, lust.”[154] William Peden wrote disapprovingly: “For all its wry humor, the novel seems to me to be primarily a bleak inquiry into what can only be called the idiocy of mankind.”[155]
