Ghost Stories

Beyond Black

| ruthpelletier

By Hilary Mantel

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

‘Beyond Black’ was first published in 2005, four years before ‘Wolf Hall’, the first of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels. The Cromwell trilogy is, of course, the work that made Mantel stratospherically famous: the first two installments each won the Booker Prize, and they are widely considered to be a masterpiece. I certainly think that they are – I have been captivated by the Cromwell trilogy since I read ‘Wolf Hall’; I think it is one of the best works of fiction I have ever read, full stop.

But I’ve never read anything else Mantel has written (my failure, I know). I wasn’t even super aware of the fact that she had written things besides the Cromwell Trilogy – I had her slated in my mind as a sort of one-hit-wonder (ignorant and idiotic, I know). However, her other works have been often mentioned in the coverage after her death; in particular, one called ‘Beyond Black’ was repeatedly singled out for praise.

However, the praise was always tinged with a sort of emotional ambivalence that I didn’t understand, as though the reviewers were made to feel vulnerable while reading it. Slate’s Laura Miller, for example, wrote, “The best and most acerbically Mantellian of these pre-Cromwell novels is 2005’s ‘Beyond Black’.” When Fay Weldon reviewed it in The Guardian, she wrote, “[Mantel is] witty, ironic, intelligent and, I suspect, haunted. This is a book out of the unconscious, where the best novels come from.” Everyone loved it, but everyone was also slightly afraid of it, too.

I was confused by this at first, until I asked some people who had read it. Everyone said the same thing: “This is one of the best trauma novels I’ve ever read.” That’s the crux of it, of course: ‘Beyond Black’ is a trauma novel. Trauma novels are tricky. To be successful, the author must convince the reader of the trauma itself: they must effectively communicate pain. However, too much focus on the pain and the characters get lost. The novel risks becoming alienatingly grim, or, worse, torture-pornographic. It’s a hard line to walk.

‘Beyond Black’s’ pain belongs to Al. Al (short for Alison) is a medium. She can communicate with the dead; in fact, she can’t escape them. They crowd her, speaking to her, messing with her electronics, tripping her and taking her things. Some of the dead are benign, lost souls that only need attention and guidance. But the dead are merely the living, on the other side. And just as some of us aren’t kind, some of them aren’t either. The dead who crowd Alison, they aren’t kind. They taunt and torment her; they move her things, hide or break them. They interfere with the functioning of machines in her home. They assault her friends and drive them away. Worst of all, they remind her of something, something terrible which has happened to her but which she cannot quite remember.

And it’s not just the dead: Alison is surrounded by unkindness from the living, too. Even her business partner Colette (the person closest to her in the world), is almost sadistically mean to Al, especially about her weight. Al works constantly, touring the country and putting on shows, working for private clients, all in an attempt to keep ahead of the memories pursuing her. But it’s not working: the spirits are crowding in, and Al is starting to drown.

If I’m making ‘Beyond Black’ sound trite or formulaic, that is my failing, not the book’s. In fact, ‘Beyond Black’ is strikingly non-trite; on the contrary, it is bleak, almost numbingly dark. As someone (a fan) warned me when I started it, “Try reading it quickly, so you don’t get bogged down in the gloom.” Al is like a woman struggling in quicksand: desperate to keep her head above water, the most she struggles, the faster she sinks.

In the hands of a writer as good as Mantel, Al’s fear and despair are claustrophobic, stifling. This effect is accentuated by Al’s own refusal to remember why she’s traumatized – she is in full flight from something she won’t turn and face.

Hilary Mantel

Mantel’s decision to use spirits as metaphor emerges here as a particularly canny one. Spirits, unlike trauma, pursue – Al is literally followed by the dead that cling to her, the malicious dead. Like trauma, however, the spirits are invisible to most people. Thus, Al is tormented by forces only she can see. This turns out to be a pretty magnificent metaphor for trauma itself. Mantel has literalized traumatic suffering: it is the ghost of our past pain pursuing us. Normal grief dies a healthy death, moves on; trauma dogs our steps, invisible to others, tripping us up and disordering our lives.

I understand better now the emotionally cautious admiration for ‘Beyond Black’. I loved it, but it was hard to read it. Al elicited empathy from me. I felt defeated by her pain; I wanted to help her stay afloat but, of course, I couldn’t. I particularly longed to defend her against the living, the people around her who sensed her vulnerability and responded with cruelty.

This is Mantel’s great gift, I think: writing characters who feel real to her readers. It was, of course, the most striking aspect of her Cromwell trilogy: the salience of Cromwell himself. When I finished ‘The Mirror and the Light’, I felt like someone I loved had died. I had lost all sense that I was reading a work of fiction – the story had become emotionally real for me. I had a milder but similar reaction to ‘Beyond Black’: I was absorbed, connected to Al, worried for her. Her pain had been effectively communicated to me.

I don’t know exactly how Mantel accomplishes this. It feels like a magic trick, every time. I pick up a book she’s written, and then immediately forget it’s a book. It’s something in the quality of her writing, how plain and perfect it is. I’m so happy to discover that there is more Mantel to read. I had associated her so strongly with her most famous protagonist, and it’s a pleasure to learn that there are other protagonists to care about. ‘Beyond Black’ will not have the same magnitude of effect for me as the Cromwell Trilogy, but, frankly, that is not a reasonable standard to which to hold any book. I did love it, and I respected it enormously. I thought it was subtle, sad and lovely and brutal all at the same time, but in a good way. In the best way.

The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James

| ruthpelletier

By M.R. James

I’m sorry to tell you, but the title of this post is misleading: I am not going to talk about ‘The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James’ today. Instead, I’m going to talk about the introduction to the 2011 Oxford World’s Classics edition of the ‘Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James’, written by one Darryl Jones.

M.R. James

Remembered best as a horror writer, Montague Rhodes James was also an accomplished medieval scholar and antiquarian. Accordingly, he was a master of what is sometimes called “antiquarian horror”, namely horror that centers around items or students of antiquity (think cursed artifacts, ancient manuscripts with terrible secrets, stuff like that).  Importantly, he seems to have led a largely hermetic and unisex existence: in 1905, he became the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and he served until 1918, when he left to become the provost of Eton College, a position he held until his death in 1936.

Despite being backwards-looking, the creepiness of James’ stories holds up beautifully, and it’s difficult to overstate the influence he has had on the genre. Take, as one example, ‘A School Story’, in which two men compare the ghost stories of their school days.  Here is an image that should be familiar to anyone who saw ‘The Blair Witch Project’:

“First there was the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and had just time to say, ‘I’ve seen it,’ and died.”

Like Lovecraft (writing around the same time), James is at his creepiest at moments like this, when he leaves things unsaid.  The most grisly action, the terrible spectre, always appears offscreen, and is more unsettling because you have to imagine it yourself. James is very deft in this space, in the gesturing to horror, in inviting the reader to participate in designing the frightening thing.

Of course, the danger with leaving too much to your readers’ imagination is that some readers will bring their own, strange baggage to the encounter.  Enter Darryl Jones, Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture at Trinity College Dublin, who wrote the (otherwise) very good introduction to the 2011 ‘Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James’.

My complaint with Jones is a small, but important, one. At one point in his (really very good and helpful) introduction, Jones spends a while dissecting James’ resistance to marriage and preference for male relationships before turning to this passage, from ‘Casting the Runes’:

“…he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far.  What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.”

Jones then calmly makes the following statement: “…this image of the hairy, fanged mouth…is a powerful symbol of sexual terror, a vagina dentata.”

Is it, Darryl? Is it really?

Jones didn’t invent the vagina dentata, or vagina with teeth; it appears in Jungian literature, and in several South American, Ainu, and Hindu folk tales (as well as in the memorably bad horror movie ‘Teeth’).  It’s hardly a common trope, though, and while most of Jones’ analysis seems straightforward and sound, this abrupt veer into genitalia seems more his problem than James’.  Surely, other perfectly normal and astute readers might have read and reread James’ passage without thinking, ‘Oh, yes, that’s clearly a toothed vagina”.

Indeed, Jones finds vaginas all over the place.  In ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, the antiquarian Somerton is exploring a ‘dark cavity’ inside a well when he meets “the extremity of terror and repulsion which a man can endure without losing his mind”.  He is “conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and of several – I don’t know how many – legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body.” This story, explains Jones, “is ultimately a tale of uncontrollable sexual terror, a quest which leads Mr. Somerton to this nightmare vagina, and an encounter which he barely survives.”

Jones’ argument, namely that James’ cloistered and all-male life might have indicated a fear of female company, is not unreasonable on its face. Nor is it unreasonable to ask whether that fear may have found its way into James’ writing as, to quote Jones, “a nightmare image of the monstrous-feminine”.

However, I’m not persuaded by the examples Jones gives. I’ll put it more plainly: it’s not obvious to me that every menacing crevice must necessarily be a vagina.

James may well have eschewed female company, and it may be the case that “the lifelong appeal of institutions for James was that they provided the security of all-male environments”.  He may have been a homosexual, but does that really mean that there lurked in every dark corner of his expansive imagination…a vagina? 

I don’t want to make this all about me, but, as a person with a vagina, it’s difficult not to take this a tiny bit personally. I would certainly have hoped that nothing on my body could be described as eliciting “the extremity of terror and repulsion which a man can endure without losing his mind”. The trouble is that Jones seems to assume that every dank environment, every toothed oriface, every bad smell, must be a vagina. Worse, that he assumes it’s obvious. Reading his introduction, one starts to wonder whether, for a certain class of man, all monsters are really just vaginas. Some of Jones’ examples are real stretches, too – I don’t want to speak for other women, but I’ve never heard of a vagina with tentacles.

It’s a minor complaint, in the grand scheme of things, but I would like make this small point: the world is a large place, full of terrible things, and not all of them have to be vaginas. We can imagine other monsters, can we not? Sometimes, a cave is just a cave.

Tales of Mystery and Imagination

| ruthpelletier

By Edgar Allan Poe

All Posts Contain Spoilers

Guys, is it just me, or is Edgar Allan Poe kind of…bad?

I’m having the slightly creepy experience of reading a book which is considered ‘classic’, picking up a work of Great Literature, and finding it to be, well, bad.  And not just a little bit bad, or simply not to my taste – really and obviously bad.  Just crappy.  Indefensible.

I’m sorry to have to say this, but I think that Edgar Allan Poe is a bad writer.  It grieves me, honestly, to pan the most famous author of spooky stories, to turn my nose up at the man who basically invented creepiness, but these are bad stories, badly written!  I can’t be the only person who’s noticed this, can I?

I hate these moments, these The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes-moments, when everyone around you exclaims that a piece of culture is brilliant but, try as you might, you just can’t see it.  It’s obviously not brilliant, but no one will admit it and you wonder, is it me?  Am I crazy?  Am I missing something?  Or is Edgar Allan Poe just a bad writer and no one has the guts to say it?

I’m gonna get of ahead of you here and just slot in a few disclaimers.  First of all, I am not simply having trouble with the normal, more formal English of two hundred years ago.  I have read, and loved, many of Poe’s contemporaries, even his predecessors – I love the fruity olde English of yore.  This is not a problem of idiom, or style.

And I didn’t just read a few bad stories, his early attempts, for example, when he was still learning the ropes.  My copy of ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination‘ contains twenty stories, including all his ‘best’ and most famous ones: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Murders on the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’.  I read this book cover to cover.

The only thing I liked about this book was these creepy illustrations, by Harry Clarke.

And it was hard-going, I can assure you.  These are not easy stories to read, or fun.  Poe’s prose is turgid, and purple, arduous and encumbered.  Reading him is like running through wet sand.  Let me give you a few examples, chosen – I swear to God – basically at random:

“‘You behold around you, it is true, a medley of architectural embellishments.  The chastity of Ionia is offended by antediluvian devices, and the sphynxes [sic] of Egypt are outstretched upon carpets of gold.  Yet the effect is incongruous to the timid alone.  Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent.  Once I was myself a decorist: but that sublimation of folly has palled upon my soul.  All this is now the fitter for my purpose.  Like these arabesque censers, my spirit is writhing in fire, and the delirium of this is scene is fashioning me for the wilder visions of that land of real dreams whither I am now rapidly departing’.” (‘The Assignation‘)

That is self-indulgent nonsense.  Here, try another:

“Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts!  How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature!  How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss – saying unto it “thus far, and no farther!”  That earnest mutual love, my own Monos, which burned within our bosoms – how vainly did we flatter ourselves, feeling happy in its first upspringing, that our happiness would strengthen with its strength!  Alas! as it grew, so grew in our hearts the dread of that evil hour which was hurrying to separate us forever!  Thus, in time, it became painful to love.  Hate would have been better then.” (‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una‘)

He sounds like a fourteen year old girl trying her first slash fiction.  Have I broken your spirit yet?  Can you bear another?

“Yet, although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classical regularity – although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed ‘exquisite,’ and felt that there was much of ‘strangeness’ pervading it, yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of ‘the strange.’  I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead – it was faultless – how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine! – the skin rivalling [sic] the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, ‘hyacinthine!'” (‘Ligeia‘)

What incredible rubbish.  Honestly, that is just bad writing – it’s not fancy, it’s not expressive, it’s not sensual or sophisticated.  It’s terrible.

Edgar Allan Poe.  I feel a little bad saying all these mean things about him – he looks so sad.

And my objections to Poe are not merely stylistic.  He is not just a bad crafter of prose – no, worse: he is also a bad crafter of stories.

I know, I know – this is going to be a bridge too far for some people.   But bear with me, because I’m about to make a distinction which is very important to me.  There are two different elements (at least, but let’s stick with two for right now) to a well-crafted plot: the Premise and the Unfolding.  The Premise is the foundation on which the story rests; the Unfolding is how the Premise roles out into the plot.

Greatness, in a book, is most often found in the Unfolding of the plot.  Often, this great Unfolding rests on a magnificent Premise, but it needn’t: a masterful Unfolding can make Great Art of a simple, well-worn Premise.  But it is almost impossible to rescue a great Premise from a bad Unfolding.

Which is a shame, because there is almost nothing as lovable as a great Premise, and when you meet one, you want desperately for it to become Great Art.

But wishing does not make it so.  I have a theory that Edgar Allan Poe is considered a great writer because he is pretty great at the Premise.  All of his most famous stories share this trait: they have great Premises.  A man accidentally walls his comatose wife up in the family tomb.  A brutal, senseless murder stymies the police because it was committed by an escaped gorilla.  A murderer is so haunted by guilt that he cannot escape the sound of the beating heart of his victim.  A man is trapped in the most hideous torture chamber ever devised by the Inquisition.

These are phenomenal Premises, and it’s hard to imagine that their accompanying stories might really be bad.  But, please trust me, they are.  Poe is a terrible writer of plot: he cannot pace, does not construct narrative well.  He tells, and does not show.  His stories are uneven.  He spends way too much time on irrelevant details (pages and pages devoted to the windows in the House of Usher) and rushes the denouement.  Sometimes his stories don’t even have a denouement – they just trail off into nothing, as though he wandered away from the table.

Which, OK, he was sort of inventing a genre.  Some unevenness is expected.  But, not really: people wrote ghost stories before, and novelty is no excuse for bad writing. 

We are lucky: we live in a time of plenty, book-wise.  There is so much to read, too much to ever accomplish in a lifetime, in ten lifetimes.  We must pick and choose, and so it might be time to leave Poe behind, to thank him for his service, to be grateful for what he gave us, for the traditions which he inspired, but to let go of the primary material.

So, if you will allow me, I would like to give you a small Christmas gift: time.  I would like to save you the time you might have spent reading Edgar Allan Poe.  I almost never do this – I believe in reading the Classics for yourself.  But this time I believe I can, in good conscience, free up some time for you.  I think, if you’ll let me, I can give you this time back.

Because, no matter how much I love scary stories, no matter how I grateful I will always be to the man who made them Literature, I cannot tell it other than this: Edgar Allan Poe is a bad writer.

Happy Holidays.