Ray Bradbury's "Love Potion": Learning from the Masters

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Ray Bradbury’s “Love Potion,” one of the flowers of evil in his Summer Morning, Summer Night anthology, is a deceptively simple tale, the unexpected twist at the end of which not only horrifies, but also delights.

Reclusive sisters, “large as sofas. . . and stuffed with time,” Miss Nancy Jillet and her sister Julia take “the air at four in the morning,” when there is no one in the sleeping town in which they live to see them except the policeman walking his beat. While the two old ladies are rocking in the chairs on their front porch at two o’clock in the morning, eighteen-year-old Alice Ferguson, unable to sleep, “happened upon the Jillets.”

The women, after identifying their visitor, both by name and by age, tell her that she’s in love but that “he doesn’t love you,” which is why Alice is “unhappy and out walking late.” Nancy, however, assures her that she has come “to the right place.” Alice says that she “didn’t come,” but the woman shush her, saying that they will help her by giving her a “love potion.” They give her a green bottle, the contents of which Nancy describes as harmless ingredients:

“White flowers for the moon, summer-myrtle for the stars, lilacs for the rain, a red rose for the heart, a walnut for the mind. . . . Some clear water from the well to make all run well, and a sprig of pepper-leaf to warm his blood. Alum to make his fear grow small. And a drop of white cream so that he sees your skin like a moonstone.”

When Alice asks whether such a potion will “work,” Nancy assures her that it will; she and Julia have spent many years determining “why we never courted and never married,” and the results of their long investigation into these matters “boils down to” the potion they’ve given to her. Alice will be the first ever to try the potion, Nancy assures their visitor, because “it’s not just something you give to everyone or make and bottle all the time.” The sisters have too many interests, Nancy implies, for them to spend all their time on any single pursuit, even the manufacture and bottling of a love potion:

“We’ve done a lot of things in our life, the house is full of antimacassars we’ve knitted, framed mottos, bedspreads, stamp collections, coins, we’ve done everything, we’ve painted and sculpted and gardened by night so no one would bother us.”

It was while they were gardening, in fact, that they’d first seen Alice, “looking sad,” and had surmised that she was so “because of a man.” That was the moment that the sisters had resolved to try to help Alice, and they’d straightaway picked flowers from among the plants of their garden. All Alice needs to do to win her beloved is to add three drops to a beverage, “soda pop, lemonade or iced-tea.” Visiting the man of her dreams, he tells her, “I do love you.” Alice replies, “Now I won’t need this,” and shows him the green bottle which contains the sisters’ love potion. Perhaps she has already mentioned the topic, in a joke, to him, because he is not surprised by her production of the bottle and even advises her to “pour a little out. . .before you take it back, so it won’t hurt their feelings.” She does so, returning the rest to the Jillet sisters, assuring them, in answer to their question, that she administered a dose to her beloved. The women surprise Alice by announcing that they themselves will sample the potion, so that they will “have beautiful dreams and dream we’re young again.” The next morning, sirens awaken Alice, and she runs to her window, looks out, and sees “Miss Nancy and Miss Julia Jillet sitting on their front porch, not moving, in broad daylight, a thing they had never done before, their eyes closed; their hands dangling at their sides, their mouths gaping strangely.” They have about them the look of death, and the green bottle is set before them:

There was something about them, something that suggested sheaths from which the iron blade is gone. This, Alice Ferguson saw, and the crowd moving in, and the police, and the coroner, putting his hand up for the green bottle that glittered brightly in the sunlight, sitting on the rail.

Because of the apparent kindliness of the aged sisters and their seemingly sincere desire to “help” their beautiful, young, lovelorn neighbor, Bradbury deceives his reader, as it were, into believing the elderly sisters to be harmless. Reclusive spinsters, the may seem a bit eccentric, believing, as they do, in love potions, but they are also apparently harmless, even lovable, old women. However, the reader’s realization that the “love potion” that they gave Alice was really the same poison that they drank as a means of committing suicide shows that the women were anything but the kindly old ladies they appeared to be. Believing themselves to have committed murder, by killing the young man for whom Alice mooned, but who did not love her in return, the women next kill themselves, apparently to put themselves beyond the reach of the law. Bradbury’s story ends upon an eerie note, and the shock of the ending makes the reader reread the short story for clues as to what would motivate two seemingly nice old ladies to take their own lives after attempting to murder a stranger. It would be disappointing if Bradbury had taken the cheap way out by leaving the story a mystery, but he is too good a writer to rely upon a dues ex machina. His story does, indeed, contain clues that make the sisters’ monstrous deeds intelligible. The women are reclusive. They avoid others, keeping company only with one another. When they go outside their house, it is early in the morning, when the town is “undercover.” Upon meeting them, “in the milky dark of 2 a.m.,” Alice recalls “the tales of their solitary confinement in life,” a phrase which suggests not only isolation, but also punishment. If their self-imposed isolation from others is a form of punishment, for what offense are they enforcing it? Their intuitive understanding of the cause of Alice’s unhappiness is a clue. Upon seeing Alice walking past their garden, “looking sad,” they recognize the cause of her unhappiness, as being “a man,” perhaps because a man, in their past, had caused one or both of them to feel similar sorrow. They have spent a good many years, Nancy tells Alice, trying to “figure out why we never courted and never married,” and, having done so, they have concocted their “love potion.” Although it may be “too late” for them to “help” themselves, they can “help” Alice, who seems to suffer from the same heartache that had such a devastating effect upon their own lives. Whatever the reason for the failure of romance in the days of their youth, it seems that the spinsterish sisters blame themselves, for they have, as it were, sentenced themselves to “solitary confinement in life,” becoming recluses whose only company they keep is one another’s. They have spent the long years, “since 1910,” as they confide to Alice, when, possibly, their hopes for love were dashed, in activities that seem to have been designed to sublimate their sexual drives:

“We’ve done a lot of things in our life, the house is full of antimacassars we’ve knitted, framed mottos, bedspreads, stamp collections, coins, we’ve done everything, we’ve painted and sculpted and gardened by night so no one would bother us.”

Possibly to spare Alice such a lonely and unfulfilling life as theirs has been, despite the many hobbies and pastimes with which they’ve attempted to fill their lives--lives which, nevertheless, the narrator characterizes as “stuffed with time and dust and snow”--they gave her a potent poison to administer to the object of her unrequited love. It is a gesture of kindness that is anything but kind, but the spinsters have apparently long since passed beyond rationality, supposing that the murder of the young man who doesn’t share Alice’s love would be justifiable if it brings Alice relief after her initial grief. Believing themselves to have accomplished their mission, they drink the poison themselves, thus adding the crime and sin of suicide to that those of murder. Their own unrequited or failed love, it seems, has twisted them, and, over the years, the lonely spinsters, unable to find fulfillment in one another’s company or in the many activities they have tried to pass the time over the years during their self-imposed “solitary confinement,” have come to see their young neighbor’s own unrequited love as a long-lasting torment which may give some purpose to their lives if they can deliver Alice from the hell that they have had to endure since 1910. Instead, they would have caused Alice untold grief by such an action, since, as the young man confides, he already does love Alice. Their romance, which could lead to marriage, almost ended before it began, in the death of the man of Alice’s dreams, and, blinded by their own torment and grief, neither of the sisters were capable of imagining that their reading of Alice’s unhappiness and its cause was a result not of special insight, as they might have supposed, but of a projection of their own experience onto the life of another person. Their solipsistic self-exile from life and the irrationality that preceded and follows from such “solitary confinement” is the horror that makes them monstrous and villainous, despite their appearances as harmless old ladies to the contrary. Bradbury’s masterful writing allows the horror and the delight that rear, shockingly, at the end of this compact, deceptively simple story of heartache, madness, and seclusion. By emulating Bradbury’s technique, other writers can accomplish similar results.

Summer Morning, Summer Night: A Review

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Ray Bradbury has made quite a career out of nostalgia, and his affectionate respect for the past continues to serve him well in Summer Morning, Summer Night (2008), a collection of short stories unified by the common setting of Green Town, Illinois. Not altogether unlike Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which Bradbury admits influenced the structure, if not the contents, of The Martian Chronicles, this anthology is gentler and more sensitive than Anderson’s gallery of the grotesque tended to be. The characters, however, are often eccentric in their own ways, and most are, like their author, sensitive and understated, even in their eccentricity.

The first story in the collection, “End of Summer,” concerns a sexually repressed schoolteacher, thirty-five-year-old Hattie, who lives with her grandmother, aunt, and cousin, who are equally straight-laced and no-nonsense. Although Hattie fears being found out by one of them, she also defies their narrow, emotionless, sexless lives. She has repressed her own sexuality, but, in this story, she throws caution to the winds. In fact, she has apparently taken some risks even before the story proper commences. She is a voyeur; in this tale, she becomes, also, a seductress. She seems to delight in outraging her family’s stern sense of propriety, even if she does so in secret. It is enough for her, it appears, that she knows that she has violated their taboos.

As the story opens, she lies awake in her room, counting “the long, slow strokes of the high town clock” (9). Judging by her count, it is two o’clock in the morning, and the streets are deserted. She rises from her bed, applies makeup, polishes her fingernails, dabs perfume behind her ears, casts off her “cotton nightgown” in favor of a negligee, and lets down her hair (9). Gazing into her mirror, she is satisfied with the image of herself that meets her gaze:

She saw the long, dark rush of her hair in the mirror as she unknotted the tight schoolteacher’s bun and let it fall loose to her shoulders. Wouldn’t her pupils be surprised. She thought; so long, so black, so glossy. Not bad for a woman of thirty-five (9).

Having donned the uniform of a literal lady of the evening, Hattie sneaks past the closed doors of her grandmother, aunt, and cousin, anxious that one or more of them might choose this moment to exit their bedroom, but, despite her nervousness, nevertheless pauses to stick “her tongue out at one door, then at the other two” (10).

Outside, she pauses to enjoy the sensations of the “wet grass,” which is “cool and prickly,” and, after dodging the “patrolman, Mr. Waltzer,” surveys the town from the vantage point of the courthouse rooftop before sneaking from house to house to eavesdrop and spy upon their residents (10).

One of the men upon whom she spies follows her, and she seduces him--or perhaps it is he who seduces her. In the night, when darkness and shadows rule, passions are abroad in the darkness, and it is difficult to say, sometimes, who is the predator and who the prey. It may be that both are seducers, just as both are seduced.

After the assignation, Hattie returns to the house she shares with Grandma, Aunt Maude, and Cousin Jacob, no longer wearing cosmetics, dressed primly, and behaving properly, except for the smile she seems unable to shed, even in the austere presence of her repressive kinsmen, who chastise her for being late to rise and tardy to work. She leaves their company, still smiling as she runs out of the house, the door slamming behind her.

In this story, the monster is not the typical bogeyman, but the strict propriety of the prim and proper family of which Hattie both is and is not a member. A synecdoche of society itself, the rigid demand for conformity and the repression of personal passion of which has a debilitating effect upon the individual human spirit because it represses the fleshly aspects of human existence, Hattie’s family and its unyielding demands for steadfast respectability, at the very cost of one’s soul, suggests that it is inhuman to deny one’s physical appetites.

In demanding that these vital elements of their personalities be repressed, her relatives become more like machines that saintly souls, whereas, because of her covert rebelliousness, which allows her to remain true to herself, including the passions and appetites of her fleshly existence, Hattie shows the monstrosity that hides behind the familial and social demands for sexual repression and emotional rigidity. Ironically, her behavior, which would, no doubt, scandalize her family, as it would her community, is the salvation, rather than the ruination, of her soul. Her actions stand as a silent, even secret, rebuke to the harshness of an overly restrictive and conventional lifestyle. Hattie dares not disturb the universe--or even her own household--but, in private, she finds the sexual release that is denied to her in the public arena of her life, and these nocturnal assignations, brief as they may be, are enough to bring a smile to her lips that does not fade. The private life is all we have, Bradbury suggests, but it is enough when one finds another with a similar attitude and similar needs with whom to share it. Sometimes, heroism is as quiet and as passive-aggressive as the rebellious, but discreet, protagonist of this gentle tale of gallantry and pluck.

This story is itself a synecdoche, as it were, for the entire anthology of which it is the first flower. The other stories are just as delicate, just as beautiful, just as perfumed with the scents of joy and sorrow, reminiscence and lament, magic and wisdom. Most of all, they are instances of poetry, prose poems which assert, each one, in its own way, the enchantments and mysteries of life, as they manifest themselves in things both small enough to go unnoticed by all but the most sensitive and discerning and large enough to shake children and adult alike with laughter or with tears. A slender volume, Summer Morning, Summer Night is as deep and broad as the gray-haired man who, in writing it, packed every page and paragraph with as much Green Haven, Illinois, as would fit. The book shows why Ray Bradbury remains a treasure as much today as he was when he first broached the enchanted wonderland of modern middle America, well over half a century ago.

Horror As Allegory

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Why do we need allegories? Why, instead of beating around the bush, don’t we just come right out with what we mean to say? Why don’t we just say it? One reason might be that allegories allow readers (and writers) to broach subjects that are not discussed openly in polite company. By suggesting that one thing (say, child abuse) is another (say, demonic oppression or possession), horror writers can bring up the issue in disguise, so to speak, making the matter palatable enough to consider without cognitive indigestion, so to speak, among men and women who, otherwise, might prefer not to entertain the topic at all.

In an interesting twist upon the Aristotelian notion of catharsis, Edward J. Ingebretsen, the author of Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King argues that the horror genre serves just such an allegorical function. In ‘Salem’s Lot, for example, Ingebretsen contends, the presence of the vampire Barlow supplies the scapegoat that both the townspeople and the reader need; they can blame the vampire for the wickedness that they themselves do, witness, or imagine--wickedness which is very wicked, indeed:

After about a hundred pages of King’s novel [‘Salem’s Lot], an alert reader asks, how do the predatory and brutal intimacies offered by Barlow the vampire differ from the brutalities exchanged between husband and wife (Bonnie and Reggie Sawyer); between boyfriend and girlfriend (Susan Norton and Floyd Tibbets); between mother and the child she beats (Sandy and Randy McDougal); or, finally, the brutalities implicitly exchanged between author and reader? There is little difference. People feed upon each other routinely for business (like Larry Crockett), and for perverse pleasures (like Dudley). The townspeople are vampiric in the most real of ways. . . consumption is intimacy, and power, rather than love, shapes human relations. . . .

Fantasy gives readers an excuse not to see what they will not face. For example, Reggie Sawyer’s vicious male-rape of Corey, the telephone installer he finds in dalliance with his wife--and then the subsequent brutalizing rape of his wife--is just
a diversion, after all. . . .

King’s readers. . . engage the text much the same way that the townspeople of 'Salem’s Lot engage each other--in vampiric, voyeuristic ways. . . . So long as Barlow could be identified as the vampire, the townspeople--and King’s readers--can consider themselves free of taint (182-184).

In Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim makes a similar claim, from a psychoanalytical point of view.

Those who outlawed traditional folk fairy tales decided that if there were monsters in a story told to children, these must all be friendly--but they missed the monster a child knows best and is most concerned with: the monster he feels or fears himself to be, and which also sometimes persecutes him. By keeping this monster within the child unspoken of, hidden in his unconscious, adults prevent the child from spinning fantasies around it in the image of the fairy tales he knows. Without such fantasies, the child fails to get to know his monster better, nor is he given suggestions as to how he may gain mastery over it (120).

Writers are important, even in--or, perhaps, especially in--an age of looming illiteracy, because it is they who find the words and the images in which and by which to convey the meaning, in human terms, of the perceptions and events that the society of their day experiences. Whether interpreted from a pagan, a Christian, an evolutionary, a materialistic and empirical, an existential, or some other perspective, facts do not speak for themselves. They are mute spectacles, as it were, until the poet, or, in our time, more often, the novelist or the screenwriter, gives them voice. Writers do so by suggesting that “this” can be understood as a new example of “that” (whether “that” turns out to be the world view of the pagan, the Christian, the evolutionist, the materialistic empiricist, the existentialist, or the adherent of some new model of reality).

The curse (and, perhaps, the blessing) of the human species is that we are unintelligible in terms of ourselves, for we are both part of nature and, at the same time, partly transcendent to nature. To attempt to explain ourselves in terms of ourselves would be tautological, not to mention solipsistic. Attempting to explain ourselves in terms of ourselves would be, in effect, to explain ourselves away.

Language is metaphorical; so is thought. We cannot grasp the meaning of a “this” without a contrasting “that” or of a “that” without a contrasting “this.” Therefore, to make sense of our experience, and of ourselves, we need people who can discern relationships among things, who can recognize relationships between things and ourselves, and who can help us to see such relationships. In horror fiction, the relationships are between the Self and the Other, between the hero (or the monster) within and the monster (or the hero) without. Experience changes, but the process of allegorizing what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think, and feel remains the same, providing what unity we can wrest from the multiplicity of perceptions, sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Upon the basis of such a unity, we built--and forever rebuild--our world.

Categories of Horror

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

There are at least four distinctive categories of horror: the ominous, which features an unseen menace, such as a stalker; the eerie, which features that which is strange, such as a monster; the ghastly, which features the gory, the gruesome, and the deformed, such as a hunchback; and the frightening and shocking, which frightens by shocking.

Each category can be referenced by a cluster of synonyms that, perhaps, give a better idea of their meaning; some of the more common synonyms for each category are provided below, along with a few examples of each category, mostly from horror films.

Ominous, threatening, warning, worrying, gloomy, portentous, menacing, boding evil, ill-omened, unpromising, disquieting, unsettling, nerve-racking, distressing, frightening, alarming, bullying, intimidating, looming, startling, harassing, daunting, overwhelming

Ominous scenes include:

• The gathering of blackbirds in The Birds: Out of the blue, birds gather from miles around, many of them perching along a power line across the street from the local grade school, awaiting their opportunity to attack the young coeds and their teachers.
• Freddie Krueger stalking Nancy in the high school boiler room in A Nightmare on Elm Street: After staying awake all night, Nancy falls asleep in class. In her dream, she follows Freddie downstairs, into her high school’s boiler room, where the claw-handed pedophile stalks her in a horrific nightmare.
• The little girl saying “They’re back!” in The Amityville Horror.
• Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest”: As discussed in a previous post, this whole story is extremely ominous because of Stoker’s manipulation of his anonymous protagonist’s consciousness so that it is uncertain as to whether he is hallucinating or actually experiencing the bizarre incidents in which he seems to become involved during a hike in the countryside outside medieval Munich.
• Buffy and Faith walking down a dark alley in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Bad Girls” episode: The alley’s darkness, awash in crimson, suggests death and blood, and the flashing amber light atop the nearby construction sawhorse warns of danger. A moment later, sure enough, vampires attack!

Eerie, creepy, uncanny, strange, weird, peculiar, unnatural, supernatural, ghostly, ghostlike, paranormal, spine-chilling, frightening, sinister, alarming, mysterious, odd, bizarre, unusual, outlandish, extraordinary, irregular, abnormal, atypical, curious, eccentric, aberrant, perverted, twisted, deviant, mystical, ethereal, wraithlike, vaporous, indistinct, spectral, remarkable, surprising, astonishing, nonstandard, uncharacteristic, malformed, nonconforming, different, uncommon, intriguing, unconventional, anomalous, distorted, misused, tainted, altered, warped, cruel, bitter, unwholesome, numinous, otherworldly, unearthly, alternative, avant-garde, quirky, jarring, contaminated, stained, spoiled, soiled, infected, unhygienic, polluted, fouled, corrupted, changed, misrepresented, bent, deformed, pitiless, mean, unkind, nasty, brutal, malicious, spiteful, vindictive, merciless, heartless, ruthless, vicious, harsh, callous

Eerie scenes include:

• As A Nightmare on Elm Street opens, little girls, jumping rope, sing an eerie rhyme in a singsong fashion: “One, two, Freddie’s coming for you;/ Three, four, better lock the door;/ Five, six, get a crucifix;/ Seven, eight, better stay up late;/ Nine, ten, never sleep again.”
• The backs of a kid’s parents’ necks in Invaders From Mars: The sign that one has been possessed, as it were, by invading aliens, is a round wound in the back of the neck; a young boy, aware of this, is horrified to see the injury in the backs of both his parents’ necks.
• In The Shining, Jack, the caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel during its off-season, appears among guests in decades-old photographs posted in the lobby.
• A deranged family of misfits hosts a dinner for terrified captives in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
• A dog with a human head races past the camera in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Ghastly, terrible, frightening, appalling, horrifying, grisly, awful, dreadful, terrifying, horrendous, unspeakable, atrocious, shocking, gruesome, sickening, horrid, repugnant, macabre, hideous, outrageous, vile, deplorable, wicked, disgusting, beastly, revolting, nauseating, repulsive, gross, abhorrent, loathsome, ghoulish, ghastly, chilling, morbid, deathly, shameful, contemptible, despicable, evil, depraved, low, bad, wrong, immoral, iniquitous, sinful, impious, heinous, nefarious, fiendish, hateful, detestable, odious, unnerving, morose, gloomy, dark, melancholic, stony, dishonorable, malevolent, demonic, unbearable, unendurable, dissolute, dishonest, dissipated, decadent, debauched, unjust, irreverent, monstrous, scandalous, sleazy, agonizing, excruciating, insupportable, painful, degenerate, self-indulgent, profligate, unfair, unreasonable, impertinent, grotesque, ugly, wasteful, reckless, unwarranted, ill-tempered, impolite, brazen

Ghastly scenes include:

• The exploding head in Scanners.
• The aliens that burst through a human host’s chest in Aliens.

Frightening/shocking, startling, surprising, amazing, astonishing, astounding, staggering, disquieting, unsettling, alarming, fearsome, upsetting, worrisome, unexpected, unforeseen, unanticipated, unpredicted, remarkable, out of the blue, incredible, miraculous, wonderful, beyond belief, confounding, troubling, distressing, disquieting

Frightening/shocking scenes include:

• Jack hacks down the bathroom door with an axe to get at his wife in The Shining.
• A skull appears, superimposed, on Norman Bates’ face in Psycho.
• The viewer is shocked by the abrupt appearances of the monster in Jeepers Creepers.

The writer who uses these categories, in an appropriate fashion, will generate horror as surely as such individuals as Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Craven, Stuart Rosenberg, Bram Stoker, Douglas Petrie, William Cameron Menzies, Stephen King, Don Siegel, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, and Victor Salva have done in using these same techniques in their movies or novels.

The Value of Literature

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Fiction begins with empathy, as a writer imagines what it would be like to be another individual. He or she puts him- or herself into another person’s shoes, except that, of course, the person is a literary character, rather than a flesh-and-blood man, woman, or child, whom the writer creates. The process works in reverse, too--or is claimed to do so: readers, identifying with literary characters, experience and understand life from these figures’ points of view. For this reason, literature is said to broaden and to deepen human experience.

Since the behavior of fictional characters models that of actual human beings, fiction provides the potential for making ethical decisions and statements about human behavior in general; it allows readers to assess, evaluate, and judge whether a character’s conduct is moral and beneficial or immoral and disadvantageous to him or her and to others, including society in general. Indeed, fiction can be--or has been, at least--a means of transmitting values to present and future generations and societies, as, for example, Beowulf did and as the Bible continues to do for many.

In previous posts, we have considered the types of values that horror fiction conveys. It shows what writers consider to be wrong, or evil, and it demonstrates, through the behavior of the protagonist, how such wickedness can be resisted or overcome, indicating, in the process, that terrible and horrific experiences, including the loss of life and limb, can be endured and that the truly important things in life have nothing to do with such petty pursuits as power, fame, and fortune.

Can the assertions that literature makes--the themes of stories--be proven to be true or false, as a scientist, for example, can demonstrate the truth of the theory that some microorganisms cause disease or that the bonding of oxygen and hydrogen molecules results in the substance we call “water”? No. Are such claims without value, then?

Sigmund Freud

Until relatively recently, Sigmund Freud’s theory of human personality and behavior, psychoanalysis, was not only the predominant school of thought in this domain, but it was the domain, or, to use a different metaphor, it was the only game in town. Carl Jung’s psychology, like that of Alfred Adler’s, Erik Ericson’s, Ernest Jones’, Karen Horney’s, Jacques Lacan’s, Otto Rank’s, Erich Fromm’s, and others in the fold, were mere variations of Freud’s thought. Psychoanalysis was psychology.

Karl Popper

It was not until Karl Popper and other critics asked Freud, as it were, to set his theory’s superego, ego, and id upon the examination table, the better to see and feel, taste and touch, smell and measure them, that psychoanalysis lost its devotees. It was considered unscientific because it consisted of ideas which, by definition, cannot be measured or quantified and, therefore, cannot be empirically verified. In other words, it was a myth, not a science.

Besides the triune composition of personality that Freud posited, other of his ideas were also found to be unscientific and suspect, such as his theory of psychosexual development as being comprised of discreet stages (oral, anal, Oedipal, and genital) and his view of the existence of an “unconscious mind.” His much-vaunted “talking cure” and his attributing all behavioral disorders to unresolved sexual problems related to childhood also came under serious attack, chiefly by feminists, who regard Freudian thought and, in particular, his references to “penis envy” and to women as wannabe men, as highly sexist and offensive. Once the end-all and the be-all of psychology, psychoanalysis took on the appearance of being little more than a modern version of ancient shamanism, with its practitioners considered more witchdoctors than scientists.

How is this related to the value of literature? The themes that literature expresses are of the same type as those which psychoanalysis makes--that is, they are speculative, not scientific; they cannot be quantified or verified. They cannot be scientifically proven or disproved. If, therefore, psychoanalysis is without value, literature would also seem to be without value, for the same reasons.

Martin Heidegger

Those who believe that literature, including, for example, philosophical and religious texts, does have some kind of value have had to reevaluate the matter. Many, in doing so, adopt a position akin to that of the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argues that literature is not about the objective, measurable world of nature, but is, rather, about the inner man or woman.

In short, literary texts are about human experience, as it is understood consciously, by the person him- or herself, and, since people do not exist in a vacuum, but are products of their cultures and societies, literature also provides insights into the nature of such traditions and social groups. Moreover, literature is a means by which authors and readers may share such experiences and it is, as such, a sort of glue that helps to cement individuals and societies together and to suggest personal and social meanings for them that science, by nature, cannot suggest.

Since most other disciplines, scientific and otherwise, impinge upon literature (or literature impinges upon them), it creates a complex network of interrelated ideas which enriches the discussion of the artistic, moral, social, legal, philosophical, political, religious, and theological questions that literature often raises. Although many of these other domains are as unscientific as literature itself, they have value for the same reason that literature does: they unite human beings through shared experience. Men and women are more than natural objects among a world of other things. They are conscious. They think and feel, believe and desire, hope and strive. Science’s importance, notwithstanding, science has little to do with any of these subjective expressions and functions of the human soul.

Soren Kierkegaard

Science may tell us what is, but it cannot tell us what should be, any more than it can tell us how what is feels or how we should think or feel about reality. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that, although, in principle, through science, the universe is known, he himself is left over, as “an unscientific postscript.” The domain of philosophy, religion, and literature in general, including horror fiction, is that of the “leftover” self, and these domains are about sharing the self with the other selves of the world. As long as people believe that they themselves and others have value and that their experience matters, literature and its themes will continue to have value as well.

Besides, literature can be pretty entertaining.

Revisiting the Numinous

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Through images and emblems associated with a vanished craft or practice, a writer of fantasy or horror fiction can, as it were, visit another, mystical and magical world. Such a trip can help him or her to envision, and, therefore, to create an otherworldly setting in which to place historical, fantastic, or horrific characters who, as the mad scientists of their day, ply secret trades.There are several sources of such images and symbols, including alchemy, demonology, Gnosticism, heraldry, Masonry, Rosicrucianism, and various Tarot decks. Links to some of these sources are included at the end of this post, for those who are inclined to step, as it were, into a different time, when a vastly different, pre-scientific mindset held sway.

This article discusses alchemy’s imagery in general. However, much of what is said could apply to any other occult enterprise.

Images of alchemy capture the romance of a medieval enterprise, wherein adepts sought to transmute base metals into gold. Quaint laboratories, equipped with preposterous apparatuses of all kinds, including furnaces and forges, kilns and fireplaces, both with and without chimneys; stocked with flasks and beakers, bottles and vials; and operated by men in rich capes and robes, recreate a world--and a worldview--that is now long gone.

Woodcuts carved with figures and symbols similar to those of the Masons or those on Tarot decks also romanticize the practice: the hermaphrodite, the dragon, the bare-breasted Gorgon, the demon, the angel, the caduceus, the serpent, the lion, the microcosm and the macrocosm, Artemis with her tiers of supernumerary breasts, personified suns and moons, and hundreds of other images as bizarre and wonderful are catalogued in groups as fanciful as they are fascinating, suggesting secrets long forgotten if, indeed, they were ever really known. These emblems, like the fully equipped and functional laboratories, suggest the popularity of the craft and the devotion to which its practitioners practiced it.

Viewing such images, it is almost impossible not to see the appeal that alchemy had, promising gold, promising moral and spiritual perfection, promising the otherworldliness of both fabulous wealth and spiritual wellbeing, and promising a wonderful and magical, if laborious, time of it along the way. Alchemy promised a better world, both internally and externally, if one persevered, worked hard, and stayed dedicated to the task at hand. It did deliver, of course, on both its pledges, but not the way alchemists believed it would; it gave us chemistry, instead of lead’s magically becoming gold.

It also influenced literature, along the way. According to David Meakin’s Hermetic Fictions: Alchemy and Irony in the Novel, alchemy is featured in such novels as those by Emile Zola, Jules Verne, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Gustav Meyrink, Lindsay Clarke, Marguerite Yourcenar, Umberto Eco, and Michel Butor. Some believe that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz might also be predicated upon alchemy.

Familiarizing oneself with such an outmoded and, indeed, long abandoned, view of the world, both physical and metaphysical, renews one’s appreciation of the modern world, reminding us that our own systems of knowledge and belief have not been the only ones people have embraced and that, indeed, ours may, one day, seem quite as quaint as those we’ve left behind. If one can recreate a sense of the reality in which alchemists (or any other esoteric group) believed in his or her story, when it is appropriate to do so, he or she will, in doing so, have already escorted the reader into another, enchanted world.

But becoming acquainted with alchemy--or demonology, Gnosticism, heraldry, Masonry, Rosicrucianism, or various Tarot decks--also pays other dividends to writers of historical romances, fantasy, or horror. Mostly, these benefits are intangible, but they are no less genuine for that. Revisiting the past, to see the world as it was seen in a time antecedent to our own, helps us to get a sense of what Meakin calls “the sacredness of the living Mother-Earth, in whose womb minerals grow and mature like embryos” (15).

What’s more, according to Carl Jung, steeping oneself in the images and ideas, the attitudes and beliefs, the symbols and concerns of such an enterprise can help to generate a sense of the mysterious, or even the eerie and the sublime. “Any prolonged preoccupation with an unknown object,” Jung says, “acts as an almost irresistible bait for the unconscious to project itself into the unknown nature of the object” (quoted in Hermetic Fictions, 19). Meakin adds, “The alchemical penchant for contradictory images serves to intensify this sense of amazement” (19).

Surely, this is similar to what little girls do in investing their dolls with their own thoughts and emotions in order to give to these inanimate objects, as it were, a bit of personality and life. As children, we are adept at such projections of the self onto external objects, but, as adults, many of us tend to become less adept at doing so, or to forget altogether how to do so (unless, perhaps, we are alone on a dark road or in a cemetery at night). Moreover, such projection recreates the intent of the alchemist himself, for, as Meakin observes, “to project life into things is to invest them with magic” (19).

None of us is intelligible in and of ourselves, but we must seek to explain ourselves in terms of external things, by projecting ourselves onto the objects of the environment, and thereby incarnating the world, as it were, a process which would seem to be have been the origin of pantheism. We spiritualize the world, making it a fellow to ourselves. Then, we use it to explain our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. In doing so, the horror writer, seeing the monster within, projects his or her own, inner demons upon cloud, mountain, forest, plain, desert, or sea. These phantasms then, in turn, return, as it were, to haunt us. The horrors that haunt the dark roadway or the nighttime cemetery haunt these places only because they haunt us.

According to Meakin, alchemy is especially adept as a means by which we can project ourselves onto the cosmos, because it is open not only to the objective world, but it is also open to other “symbolic systems” of thought and belief; its “archetypal centrality,” he says, “is reflected in the breadth of diffusion, the adaptability of alchemical doctrine, and its power to annex other doctrines and symbolic systems: its essential syncretism, in short” (21).

Christianity has proven at least equally adaptable, if less syncretistic, as many have observed, including Camille Paglia, who writes, in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson: “Christianity has made adjustment after adjustment, ingeniously absorbing its opposition. . . and diluting its dogma to change with changing times” (25). Any great system, past or present, must have this capability, if it is to not only survive but also thrive. Paglia believes that Christianity is in peril, due to “the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture,” so much so that it is “facing its most serious challenge since Europe’s confrontation with Islam in the Middle Ages” (25). Christianity seems likely to survive this “challenge,” as it survived that of its encounter with Islam (a “confrontation” that has arisen anew in our own time), in which case it will continue to inspire art, including horror fiction.

However, Christianity lacks the dynamic, numinous character that it had for the Swedes, Danes, Anglo-Saxons, and other Germanic and European worshipers of the Norse deities who were, in their time, as Beowulf suggests to us, themselves confronting the church’s faith during the early Middle Ages. To them, Christianity must have seemed as awesome and strange as alchemy might to modern men and women who acquaint themselves with alchemists’ strange and, indeed, astonishing beliefs, thoughts, hopes, fears, and feelings.

In other words, alchemy (or, again, any other esoteric tradition, especially if it is distanced by time as well as by doctrine) can help the writer of historical romances, fantasy, or horror regain a sense of the numinous, of the uncanny, of the eerie, of the sublime, thereby enriching his or her own bizarre, perhaps supernatural, fictional worlds, much as C. S. Lewis, in his coming to the Christian faith, like Beowulf’s readers, from the pagan world, saw, in the cold Northern wastes of Teutonic mythology, the shadow of joy he was to experience more fully in “mere Christianity,” enriched the world of Narnia or J. R. R. Tolkien enriched the world of Middle-earth.

For those who’d like to visit such a world, here are a few links that will take you there:

The Alchemy Web Site

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction
Gallery of Alchemy and Magic

History of Art: From Paleolithic Age to Contemporary Art
The Vessel of God

Bon voyage!

Sources

Meakin, David. Hermetic Fictions: Alchemy and Irony in the Novel. Bodmin, England: Keele University Press, 1995.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.

Man Overboard: Questioning Nature and Its Creator

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

It is not generally known, but Sir Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain during World War II, not only painted landscapes and other paintings, but he also wrote short stories, one of which, “Man Overboard” (1899), is the subject of this post.

Sir Winston Churchill

The story is similar, in some ways, to Stephen Crane’s short story, “The Open Boat,” and to the 2003 film Open Water. Perhaps we shall consider these other stories in future articles.

Churchill’s first short story, “The Open Boat,” appeared in this magazine.

In “Man Overboard,” the anonymous protagonist falls overboard from a “mail steamer” that is sailing east through the Red Sea. It is “a little after half-past nine,” the omniscient narrator informs us, “when the man fell overboard.” He’d left the ship’s “companion-house,” where a concert was in progress, to “smoke a cigarette and enjoy a breath of the wind,” when, leaning back upon a railing which gave way, he “fell backwards into the warm water of the sea amid a great splash.”

The story’s second paragraph describes sights, sounds, and tactile sensations that could be discerned from either the deck or the sea itself, and is, therefore, ambiguous as to the man’s whereabouts. Is he still aboard at this time or has he already fallen overboard? The story shifts back and forth, between the interior and the deck of the ship and the water:

The night was clear, though the moon was hidden behind clouds. The warm air was laden with moisture. The still surface of the waters was broken by the movement of the great ship, from whose quarter the long, slanting undulations struck out like feathers from an arrow shaft, and in whose wake the froth and air bubbles churned up by the propellers trailed in a narrowing line to the darkness of the horizon.

The painter’s eye is discernable in the writer’s imagery; Churchill paints a clear picture, terrible in its simplicity. This paragraph is an example of something that literature can do that would be difficult, if not impossible, for film to accomplish. Its ambiguity provides a double perspective, allowing the reader to see and hear and feel the sky, the air, and the water both from the ship and from the sea at the same time. These shifts between the cozy comfort of the ship and “the blackness of the waters” heightens the horror of the story, producing uncertainty as to the man’s location and representing both the possibility of his safety as well as that of his peril.

Although his fall produces “a great splash,” the noise is not enough, over the distance and the sound of the musical instruments, to be heard, and the concert to which he’d been listening, mere moments ago, with pleasure now becomes something of a mocking and terrible reminder of his separation from the ship and its passengers and crew. Separated from the group, he is all alone in the sea. His absence goes unnoticed as the band plays “a lively tune,” the first verse of which is, rather ominously, “accompanied” by “the measure pulsations of the screw,” or ship’s propeller.

Churchill employs the passive voice throughout much of his story, an unusual technique, which heightens the impersonal character of the sea and the shock of the protagonist who has fallen overboard. His actions are automatic, desperate, and “inarticulate.” His terror has robbed him of his ability to think or to speak in an articulate fashion:

For a moment he was physically too much astonished to think. Then he realised he must shout. He began to do this even before he rose to the surface. He achieved a hoarse, inarticulate, half-choked scream. A startled brain suggested the word, “Help!” and he bawled this out lustily and with frantic effort six or seven times without stopping. Then he listened.

He listens, but he hears only the chorus of the song that the ship’s distant passengers and crew sing, their very singing proof that they are as unaware of the man overboard as if he didn’t exist.
Nor does the sea respond to his desperate cries for help. Nature has no heart, no mind, no soul; it is utterly indifferent, so to speak, to the fate of the man overboard, and he is more acted upon, both by nature and his own instinctive drives, than he is active. Free will means little when one is alone in an impersonal ocean.

Technology, as represented by the mail steamer--a ship that carries human correspondence, representing connection and communication among men and women--is of no avail in the world of nature. The narrator, stripped, as it were, of humanity’s technological capabilities and armor, is mere flotsam, no better or more valuable than any other detritus afloat upon the seas. Men may value themselves and one another; the sea, a synecdoche of nature as a whole, does not, a theme that “The Open Boat” and Open Water share with Churchill’s story and which is well expressed by Crane in a short poem, “A Man Said to the Universe,” that could stand as the epigraph to any of these stories:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

As the ship continues to steam away from the man, the music and the vessel’s lights dim, the ship seeming to get smaller and smaller in the distance, heightening the horror of the protagonist's situation and the terror he feels, even as the increasing silence and the lengthening gap emphasizes his aloneness, his vulnerability, and his desperation:

The chorus floated back to him across the smooth water for the ship had already completely passed by. And as he heard the music a long stab of terror drove through his heart. The possibility that he would not be picked up dawned for the first time in his consciousness.

As he hears, again, the chorus, he screams again for help, “now in desperate fear,” only to hear, as if it is mocking him, the chorus’ refrain, its “last words drawled out fainter and fainter.”

The instinct for self-preservation is strong within him--at first; however, his desire to live soon weakens as, after setting “out to swim after it [the ship] with furious energy, pausing every dozen strokes to shout long wild shouts,” he stops, as “full realisation” comes to him that he is “alone--abandoned.” This “understanding” of his predicament, the narrator remarks, causes his brain to reel, and he has a second burst of determination to save himself, praying, this time, rather than shouting. Instead of depending upon his fellow human beings for assistance, he has turned to God, pleading for divine assistance.

Almost immediately, as if Churchill intends his story’s theme to be that God helps those who ask for his help, after the steamer’s having become nothing more than “a single fading light on the blackness of the waters and a dark shadow against the paler sky,” the ship seems to stop so that it might return. His prayer, it seems, has been answered. God, it appears, has heard him, and “a surge of joy and hope” flashes “through his mind” as he gives thanks to the deity.

A moment later, his hopes are dashed, and he despairs as he sees the ship’s light become “gradually but steadily smaller,” and, where, before, he’d given voice to his gratitude, he now curses his fate: “Beating the water with his arms, he raved impotently. Foul oaths burst from him, as broken as his prayers--and as unheeded.” It seems clear that, whether he pleas for deliverance, gives thanks, or curses God, neither nature nor its Creator hear or respond. They are as indifferent to his gratitude as they are to his need and his thanksgiving. As he becomes exhausted, his “passion” gives way to “fear,” and after only “twenty minutes” have “passed,” he resigns to his fate. Rather than attempt to “swim all the way to Suez,” he decides to drown, and he throws “up his hands impulsively,” sinking, only to find that his instinct to survive takes over, preventing him from committing suicide:

Down, down he went through the warm water. The physical death took hold of him and he began to drown. The pain of that savage grip recalled his anger. He fought with it furiously. Striking out with his arms and legs he sought to get back to the air. It was a hard struggle, but he escaped victorious and gasping to the surface.

He has fought the sea and won. Nature has been vanquished. Even without God’s help, he has managed to escape the “savage grip” of “physical death,” but his is a short-lived, hollow victory, for, as he bursts through the surface of the water, “despair awaited him.” He realizes that it is futile for him to struggle, that his fate is sealed. He pleads, once more, to God, praying, “Let me die.”

The narrator describes the appearance of a shark, a maritime angel of death, as it were, as beautiful and awesome as any other terrible messenger of God. The creature’s beauty seems, from a human perspective, incongruous and inappropriate, but the story is being told from the omnipotent point of view, as if it were God himself who tells the tale of the man overboard, and human attitudes are irrelevant. As the moon drifts out from the cover of the night’s cloud, symbolizing divine revelation, an epiphany occurs, for the reader, if not for the man overboard, courtesy of the narrator’s concluding observation concerning the significance of the shark’s appearance:

The moon, then in her third quarter, pushed out from the concealing clouds and shed a pale, soft glimmer upon the sea. Upright in the water, fifty yards away,was a black triangular object. It was a fin. It approached him slowly.

His last appeal had been answered.

Significantly, it is the man’s “last appeal” that has “been answered.” He had made an earlier appeal, praying that God would deliver him, but those pleas had fallen, as it were, upon deaf ears. Only his prayer that he be allowed to die is answered. He will be allowed to die, but not by drowning. Instead, he will be ripped apart, alive, and devoured. The moon, shedding the light of revelation, as it were, upon this final incident of the story, suggests that, if God is not altogether indifferent to man’s fate, he is, if anything, a sadist.

Just as the ship is a synecdoche for technology; music, for art and the pleasures it brings; the mail, for human contact and communication; and the sea, for nature itself, the anonymous man is a synecdoche for humanity itself. Not only is the nameless, faceless man of the story alone and abandoned by God in an uncaring and impersonal universe which is equally indifferent to the man’s happiness and welfare, but, in him, all humanity is overboard, awash in a sea of cosmic unconcern and disregard.

Is the tone of the story (and, therefore, of the narrator’s final observation, that “his last appeal had been answered”) sincere, ironic, or cynical? There is some ambiguity in the story’s wording, as there is in its structure and its incidents--and enough uncertainty, perhaps, to make all three interpretations of the tone possibilities. The answer to the question of whether the tone is ultimately sincere, ironic, or cynical is up to each reader to decide, and his or her answer will be determined by the views that he or she holds concerning nature and its Creator.

The Christian might consider the shark’s appearance, in answer to the man’s prayer that he be allowed to die, to be a sincere response on the part of God; the Deist might suppose the shark’s appearance to be mere coincidence, since God, although he exists and did create the universe, takes no current interest in his creation; the atheist might consider the shark’s appearance also a matter of nothing more than mere blind chance, since there is no God to hear or respond to the man’s--or anyone else’s--prayer.

The story is marvelously short, just as it is marvelously uncanny. Despite its brevity, it presents amazingly complex questions concerning the character of nature, the problem of evil, and the nature of God. Although one opinion concerning the story’s tone and the narrator’s final observation may seem more likely than others, each remains a possibility, and God may not be the sadist he at first appears to be. Death by shark would be horrible, to be certain, but would drowning be any quicker, more merciful, or dignified? On the other hand, if God exists, maybe he is as capricious and even as sadistic as the story can be interpreted to imply. For that matter, why did the man fall overboard?

To universalize the question, we might ask, instead, Why did humanity, in the Garden of Eden, take a similar fall? Is there a grace behind both “falls,” discernable only to the eye of faith, as Job suggests? Is the fall overboard a test of one’s trust in God, even when one faces his own mortality? Is the story a repudiation of the very idea of a merciful and loving God? Is he, instead, merely just and inscrutable? Does he exist at all?