The Big Heat (Fritz Lang 1953)

This film has a reputation that may exceed its accomplishments. It is usually credited with bringing such familiar cinema noir themes as revenge, brutality, and pervasive corruption into domestic space. In other words, this film shows us a bit of the home life of both the hero (Detective Dave Bannion) and the villain (Mike Lagana). The entrance of violence into domestic space (the killing of Mrs Bannion), results in Dave Bannion going on a campaign of vengeance. He becomes or nearly becomes as violent and brutal and callous as his adversary, Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), Lagana’s muscle. Bannion proves to be lethal for the women he deals with. First he meets Lucy Chapman (Dorothy Green) in a bar; the next thing we know, Lucy has been tortured and killed. Then his wife (Jocelyn Brando – yes, Marlon’s sister) gets blown up in the Bannion car. Then Debbie Marsh (Gloria Grahame) has a pot of coffee flung in her face, and later her boyfriend shoots her. And we must not forget Mrs. Duncan (Jeanette Nolan) who receives a few bullets courtesy of Debbie Marsh, who thinks she is doing Bannion and the law a favour. We might conclude that Bannion’s reluctant respect for Debbie saves him from shooting Vince and becoming as murderous as the bad guys. In other words, this film shows how deep violent instincts are in the human psyche.

But how can we relate the film to HUAC and the mood of the early 1950s? What we need to look at is the background to the story – and to the infiltration of the public into the private.

1. Background: by “background,” I mean the environment Bannion navigates. Remember the paranoia of films such as Rear Window and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and remember the pervasive corruption in films such as On the Waterfront and Pickup on South Street, and remember the emphasis on individual responsibility in 12 Angry Men. In The Big Heat we have a world in which corruption runs deep. We know that Lagana runs things. We have scenes in which we see Vince Stone playing cards with the Police Commisioner. Remember in On the Waterfront, Johnny Friendly is not the head honcho. In Kazan’s film, we have a mysterious Mr. Upstairs, a faceless man who lives in a posh place with a butler. The point is that corruption is top down, rather than bottom up. This is the world as Senator McCarthy saw it – a place in which even the highest places have been infiltrated by the “bosses.” No place, not the police and not the city government is free from corruption.

2. Public and Private: in the world pervaded with paranoia, no place is immune to invasion by the forces of evil. In The Big Heat, we see Bannion’s home life in all its ideal purity. Husband and wife share things – cigarettes, scotch, beer, a steak, washing up. They have what appears to be an ideal marriage. They banter. They entertain. They go to the movies. But this apparently safe and pure private life is vulnerable to the ugliness from outside. When Dave Bannion asks his wife what the man on the phone said, she replies that he knows the four letter words she listened to. Then Bannion goes to Lagana’s house while Lagana’s daughter is having a party. Lagana says he will not have talk of murder and crime in his house. But we see murder and violence in domestic space throughout this film. The Bannion car blows up in their driveway. The shooting of Bertha Duncan takes place in her house. The scalding of Debbie takes place in her domicile. No place is secure. Even to make his brother-in-law’s place safe for his daughter, Bannion has to agree to have four army buddies stand guard with guns in their belts.

In other words, this film is not directly about HUAC or Communists or surveillance (although we do have shots of police surveillance) or paranoia. But it does fit neatly into the paranoid sensibility of the early 50s. We might recall that Fritz Lang left Germany in 1933 because he felt he could not work to support Hitler’s regime. In other words, he could not support restrictions to basic human freedoms. The Big Heat is a film that examines how corruption and violence lead to more violence. The title of the film evokes the Cold War in its nod to nuclear heat. The Big Heat is what follows a nuclear blast, and it is pervasive spreading far beyond the epicenter of the blast. When corruption begins, it spreads like a virus or like a big heat. We might begin to see the relevance of the heat in such films as 12 Angry Men and Rear Window. The war may be “cold,” but it may heat up. In the film, we have the fire that tears through the Bannion car after the blast, and the scalding heat of the coffee to remind us of just how hot it can be when corruption is everywhere.

Another connection with the paranoia of the 1950s is apparent in the duality of so many of the characters. Note when near the beginning of the film, Bertha Duncan sits in front of her three-paneled mirror in her bedroom, while downstairs the police are going over the scene of her husband’s apparent suicide. When Bannion enters the bedroom, we see a double reflection of him in the same mirror. The moment is crucial because it shows us visually that both Mrs. Duncan and Bannion are two people. They have their exterior, public faces, and they have their interior private selves. Mrs. Duncan is the grieving widow and she is also the blackmailing black widow. Bannion is the upright family man, and he is also the vengeful cop capable of almost anything, even strangling Mrs. Duncan. The duplicity of other characters is also apparent: the Police Commissioner is obviously on the take, Lagana has his good citizen side and his gangster side, Debbie Marsh is both a good-time party girl and a sentimental dame. We do have straight-arrow cops such as Wilks (Willis Bouchey), and thorough-going creeps such as Vince Stone, but the main characters all have their double-sidedness. We might reflect on the paranoia of the McCarthy years when people feared that “they were among us.” Even the person next door could be on the wrong side of the law, and we might never know because he or she looks so normal.

Little Water and the Gift of the Animals

I like the texture of the pictures in this book, and on the whole this, along with Taylor's ability to draw animals, is what makes the book work for me. And so I'll concentrate on texture here. By texture, I am thinking of both the colour and the application of paint. Taylor defines her shapes by colour and brush. Not being trained as an art critic and not being able to draw a stick person successfully, I lack the language to articulate precisely what I am driving at. But I'll work up to what I want to say by stepping back for a moment and noting that in a picture book, the pictures take pride of place. To the person who sees a picture book (as opposed to a person who only hears it read out loud), the eye dominates the ear. Not only this, but the eye will first take in that which is representational and colourful, and then second, it will take note of the printed letters and words. Strangely, we learn to read print before we learn to read pictures, and yet we are capable of identifying pictures before we can read printed words. For example, a young child who cannot read the words on the cover of this book will nevertheless be able to see and identify the head and neck of a person, and above the person the heads of several animals, whether or not he or she can identify these as an eagle (the book says "hawk"), a deer, a bear, a turtle, and a wolf (the otter on the extreme right is hardly available to the sight of anyone who has not read the story inside this book). We may have the illusion of knowing what this picture"says" because we recognize a human head and several animal heads. But what does this cover tell us?

To answer this question, I'll begin with a mechanical listing of the obvious. The cover of Little Water and the Gift of the Animals tells us:

1. the title of the book and the author (this is available only to those who can read printed words).

Note: we may be able to read the name of the author here, but unless we know other books by this same author, books with notes on the author (absent here), or unless we look carefully at the dedication and publishing information page (here at the back of the book), we will not know whether the author is a man or a woman.

2. that the book will feature a main character who has long black hair with feathers hanging from it, brown skin, a necklace with smallish black decorations, and several objects which may or may not be clear to the viewer. Because of conventional associations of Native people with long hair, feathers, necklaces of the kind depicted here, and nature we probably conclude that this person is a Native Canadian or American.

3. that animals will feature in the book

4. if we follow the picture round the spine to the back, we will see more people and some dwellings, smoke, pumpkins, and trees in autumn colours, a drummer, along with other things. This may simply confirm our first impression that the book will deal in some way with Native people.

5. that a relationship exists between the human figure on the cover and the animals that appear above him. The title, of course, also tells us this. The animals are a boon to the human being here. They offer a gift. But the picture begins to fill in what this gift might be. We begin to discern that this picture communicates something specific about the relationship between animals and human.

I break off here because I think what I have outlined so far is self-evident to most readers or viewers of whatever age. What I an going on to not will not, I think, be available to the person without a conscious habit of "reading," that is, scanning the picture for what it communicates beyond the most obvious representational level. The six animals above the human's head are actually in the picture twice: once above and behind the human, apparently in the sky and once in front of the human or actually on his body. Even without reading the book, we might notice that objects in front of the human are feathers, antlers, and pouch or bag probably made of skin since we are apparently in the context of Native culture. Once we have twigged to this, we might connect the antlers to the deer in the sky, the feathers to the eagle, and the pouch to an animal skin, say an otter. The necklace might now come into focus as a necklace of bear claws, and the paddle-like object cutting a diagonal across the picture might well relate to the turtle (it is a turtle shell rattle, we will learn when we read the story). In other words, the gifts of the animals appear here in the foreground and the animals themselves appear in the background. Only the gift of the wolf does not appear pictured here.

Okay, so what? Well a number of other things call for comment. The human depicted here is the largest figure in the visual field, placed prominently beside the title and between the animals and the gifts. Although this figure--let's call him Little Water--occupies the right side of the visual field, he appears to be the centre of a compositional field, a circle of sorts formed by his head and then by the animals above and the gifts below. This hint of the circular seems to me to be repeated in the turtle-shell rattle, in the curve of the antlers and the curve of the white feathers, and most importantly in the long curve of the rainbow in the sky behind the animals. In effect, we recede in this picture from the water in the extreme foreground and left of the picture to the gifts, to Little Water, to the animals, to the rainbow. The rainbow wraps the whole image in an embrace of colour.

Now, what does all this signify? Here's where colour becomes important. The blue and white of the water in the lower left finds balance in the blue and white of the sky with its animal clouds. In between we have black, brown, green, yellow, grey, white, and red. In other words, the relatively colourful foreground contrasts with the sky blue. The animals in the sky are not coloured realistically, and they are not real in that they are in the sky. Situated above and behind Little Water, who is presented fairly realistically, the animals are a vision or a dream; they exist in a spirit realm, a realm of blue, colour of mystery and contemplation and coolness and spirit. Shot through, as it were, by the rainbow, the animals represent something spiritual. Here the rainbow nicely revisions the biblical rainbow to represent a convenant between Little Water and the animals. The colours of the rainbow in the sky pick up and connect with the colours of earth and objects below. Blue, green, yellow, and red: things primary and fundamental. This book is about fundamental things. The hope here is the hope of connectedness, the connectedness of human and animal, human and nature. This book will be about the deep connection between all things inside the circle of this world. To put this in a different way, I will say this book looks inward to spirit, rather than outward to the world. Note Little Water's eyes. His eyes appear half closed; he does not look directly at us despite the full frontal view we have of him. He appears to look downward, or better yet, inward. His is a contemplative look. Perhaps he is thinking of the animals we see behind him.

But let's look for a moment at brown. Although blue dominates the overall effect, brown is important and once we move inside the book I think brown becomes the dominant colour. Here we have the brown face, brown neck, brown feathers, and brown shirt. This last is perhaps the key. The brown of Little Water's face reflects the brown of the earth just below the antler. But more significant is the lighter brown of what might be his shirt. I say "what might be his shirt" because this light brown is obvioulsy not just Little Water's shirt; it is also the ground to his right (our left). I might note before I make the point that the edge of the picture assists in this assimilation of Little Water into nature. The white feathers on the lower right curve round and off the page, but if we could follow the line they make, then we would run smack into the water. Another connective between Little Water and the water are the red ribbons that tie the otter-skin pouch. The one strand dangles over the space where the water is. The point I am making is that Little Water is assimilated into nature here; he is a part of nature; he grows, as it were, right out of the earth. He is, in short, of the earth. From a purely conventional point of view, we might say that in this picture Little Water takes his place squarely amid the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. The last of these--fire--is the only element not literally here in the picture, but the red ribbons and the red of the leaves in the upper left at least hint at fire. And then, if we look around the spine we will see the smoke of the camp fire. Only Little Water's hair sets him apart from that which surrounds him, and this too shows the effect of the breeze. His hair wisps to connects with that which is around him.

So before I go on, I will summarize. The force of the story we will read is here on the cover. If we looked no farther, we would nevertheless have a good idea of what this book is about. Once inside the covers, we will see repetitions of what we see here. A few examples will suffice. Most pages have an insistent compositional feature: a circle, sometimes a circle which recedes or funnels inwards as if taking the eye inside, sucking the viewer deeper into the mystery that is nature. The book's title page is dramatic, presenting a circular picture of Little Water and the wolf. Here we are in, as it were, the eye of nature. The first pages do not illustrate this circularity dramatically, but a hint of what I'm observing is here in the open space of brown ground surrounded by trees, wolf and Little Water. Nature is a series of holy spots. The second illustration presents this perhaps as clearly as any page in the book. Here the centre of the composition takes the eye inward through a tunnel of trees to the old man, the lake, and the camp on the opposite shore. Next we have larger images of Little Water and the Old Man with the lake as holy space between and behind them. The fourth illustration, of course, takes us out of sight of holy space--at least it apparently does so. Here is turmoil, storm, conflict. Things are so bad here that Little Water's quiver has fallen off despite the fact that it was on his back and he is falling forwards. Anyhow, he tumbles toward a darkness with rocks. We might see this as a moment in which Little Water falls into nature--he needs to experience nature in an extreme way if he is to be successful in his quest to feed his people. Next we see what I am calling "holy space" in the foreground with water and shore a little omphalos where Little Water has come to rest.

At this point we reach the centre of the book. The center double-page spread has five pages on either side of it. Here we are literaly in the centre, and so although the space of holy ground, the omphalos, not as obvious a feature of landscape here, the large round moon reminds us of the circle of life I am positing as the deep significance of this book. The next page, like the first page in the book has only hints of the space I'm focusing on, but the one following is all circle, a vortex of animal life into which the dreaming Little Water moves. From here to the end of the book, the circle of life has moved inwards, as the final illustration, the one we also see on the cover of the book, makes clear. Strangely, this book is about individual relationship with nature, and about community. Like a folk tale, this Seneca legend, explains the need for the rituals of song and dance to maintain connection to animal life. The music and dance are reflections of the animals' gifts: the shell-rattle, the wolf-song, the peace of the hawk, and so on.

But what of texture? I have to return to my beginning. As a non-native reader of this book, I must confess to some distance to it. Some of the drawing leaves me unmoved; for example, the face of Little Water on the cover or the pudgy drawing of the otter in the double-page spread in the center or the bowl-like shell on the turtle in the cover illustration. Much of the drawing strikes me as rough and although I suspect this is a deliberate attempt to capture what I can only call a "primitive" quality in the art, I don't find it compelling. But the medium itself I do find attractive for this book (and for all Taylor's work that I have seen). I mean the paint (oil, I suspect). The paint is a very apt medium for Taylor to use since she is interested in nature and a "natural" affect. By "natural" here I don't necessarily mean "realistic." Some pictures seem to me quite unrealistic, but natural nevertheless. The colours are natural and what I refer to as the texture is almost palpable. If we look closely at the painting--on the cover, for example--we can see the weave of the paper or canvas or whatever material Taylor applied the paint to. Look at the face of Little Water here; the texture is visible. This texture, along with the predominant earth tones throughout, give the book the feel of the natural world. Surface is everything here and the surface is textured. The experience of reading this book through its pictures is an experience of a visceral art, an art that communicates mostly through its texture, rather than through its designs or its compositional patterning or its graphic detail. Taylor wants to take her reader into a particular mind-set, one that is not predominant in European art. This is why the rainbow on the cover is so startling. The rainbow is a familiar symbol in much European painting and of course it has Christian significance. Here is takes on a thoroughly new (yet still familiar) role. It is part of the texture of colour, the weave of colour throughout the book that constructs a world connected through that which lies on the surface, the elemental stuff of life.

If I seem to struggle here, this is because I do. I keep trying to get at this book and find it resists my attempts to read it through my limited training. Note the flatness of the cover illustration. Not much in the way of dimension is here, not a lot of depth. Everything is on a surface plane even though reason tells us that the placement of things in the visual field demands that some things are in front and others behind. But the flatness, the surface texture makes everything somehow equal, connected. I keep coming back to the same things: surface, connectedness, elementary things, circle of life.

I note that I have concentrated entirely on the pictures in this book. But this is a picture-story-book, that is, it consists of words and pictures in relation to each other. If I were to argue the priority of one over the other (and I have already done this at the outset by noting that we look at pictures before we read words), I would note that pictures "wrap" the book. By this I mean that the first and last pages of the story contain pictures that occupy more than half of the page, running as they do across the canal pushing the words to the extreme left of the verso. And in the middle, we have the double-page spread that pushes the words to the very bottom of the page. Mostly, in this book the words balance the pictures both in terms of the space they occupy and in terms of the information they contain. Whereas in some picture books words and pictures are in tension, the words often providing information that differs from information in the pictures, here they are balanced. The surface remains unruffled; the connection is clear. And once again I am back to connectedness.

One final note: most of what I've considered here is what we refer to as paratext, that is, aspects of the book as object, not just the diegetic aspect of the book. Any book is more than that which it contains in its narrative. Books have covers, dedications, endpapers, introductions, afterwords, epigraphs, notes, and various other material extraneous to the story or the part that carries narrative or content in the normal sense, that part we usually turn to as we begin to read a book. My arguement in part is that a book such as Little Water and the Gift of the Animals is as much about how we read as it is a story; it is texture and to appreciate texture we need to run our hand or eye over surfaces, complete surfaces.

I'll end with one last example of what I am trying to express. In the double-page spread at the center of this book we have Wolf calling to his "brothers." I might note that females are not greatly in evidence in this book. But I'll not speculate farther on this. The creatures are "brothers," connected, kin, related. Anyhow, Wolf in his large picture occupies the extreme right. I find the drawing here as good as anything in the book. Wolf's mouth, snout, eyes and fur are not only naturalistic; they are also realistic. But the representation of Wolf is not realistic. Wolf rises out of the water, or maybe out of the ground. His fur is either rock or water at the bottom. His snout is a similar shade to the moon. It points to the sky as do the trees outlined in the moon. Wolf here is an elemental creature, of the earth, air, water and maybe fire. Nature and supernature connect. In this picture of Wolf we have a "natural supernaturalism." Perhaps the reason I end by liking this book is that it expresses a deeply felt Romanticism, and this Romantic spirit is nowhere more evident than in this double-paged spread.

As I Lay Dying - some notes 2

It's true, I think, that reading is a dynamic process and that we select after the fact. The shape a book takes in our heads after we have completed the reading of it differs from the shape it takes as we read it. A reading of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury might illustrate this even more dramatically than a reading of As I Lay Dying. Most readers who come to this text for the first time without prior knowledge of it will be profoundly disoriented in the first section of the novel. Only once you come to the second section can you begin to sort out what went on in the first section. And of course when your read the book a second time, this all changes. In As I Lay Dying Darl is an interesting case. The book offers enough gaps for the reader to question whether Darl is sane or not, whether Darl might not "narrate" the entire novel, and whether or not the book is about Darl as he lies dying. As we read we constantly make assumptions about what any given passage means in the light of what has happened in the text and in light of what we expect to happen. How much control any text exerts on these assumptions is what interests both Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser. In effect, both these guys are interested in how texts teach their readers to read. As we enter a text we begin to pick up clues on how to read the text. In fact, these clues are apparent even before we begin reading. Covers usually signal such things as genre or seriousness of the book, and our assumptions begin right here.

It might be sensible to enter here into the discussion of actual and implied readers. This particularizing of readers is not as simple as it may appear. Every text has a real reader, an implied reader, and perhaps a narratee. The narratee is the person addressed by the narrator, say the group on the boat to whom Marlow tells his story about the heart of darkness. In As I Lay Dying, some sections appear to be directed at a particular narratee, vague as this person may be; at other times sections appear entirely inward, directed only to the mind that delivers them. The implied reader is, according to Gerald Prince's Dictionary of Narratology, the "audience presupposed by a text" (43). The implied reader is the reader "inferrable from the entire text," whereas the narratee is the person or persons directly addressed in the text. In other words, the implied reader does not exist in the real world and exists only theoretically in the fictional world. Lastly, we have the real reader who is the bundle of presuppositions and predispositions, resistances and personal quirks who actually holds the physical book and reads it. The real reader is akin to the real author in that each exists, but neither might be visible in the text itself. From the point of view of Stanley Fish real readers are not individuals; rather, they are communities. The only individual reader who exists is the implied reader, and even he or she is an amalgam of the author's idea of a kind of or a general reader (i.e. a reader who represents a community). The distinction between implied and real reader is important for both structuralists and for response critics. A critic such as Iser works from the premise of the implied reader--texts contain gaps and blanks that are put there for a particular kind of reader, and therefore these gaps imply a specific reader, one who comes to the text capable of dealing with the illusions the text creates.

For example, the implied reader of As I Lay Dying is someone who comes to the act of reading fiction armed with a sophisticated sense of literary history. The very title implies a reader who can pick up an erudite allusion. How many real readers know right away that the title alludes to The Odyssey? Likewise, the first page of the book presupposes a reader who understands the first person convention. Most readers will grasp right away that the chapter heading "Darl" refers to the "I" that appears as the third word, but to grasp this the reader needs to have familiarity with a certain narrative convention or at least be willing to have the patience to learn a new narrative convention. Again, certain details in this first paragraph imply a reader with certain knowledge. What's a "cottonhouse"? And what does "Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat" communicate? These details will communicate nothing to a reader who has little or no experience of rural life in southern America. The straw hat implies a reader who has familiarity both with farm life and perhaps with Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Some potential real readers conceivably will not have any experience of these things. Finally, this first paragraph implies a reader willing to think about perspective. It's worth asking whether the change of perspective in this first paragraph--the switching to the cottonhouse to see the two people walking single file, with the one behind looming above the one in front--would have been possible before the advent of film in which this kind of switch (a cut in film) in perspective is common? Faulkner's prose here and throughout the novel implies a reader sensitive to lyric density and to musings of a philosophical sort. References to the Bible imply a reader conversant with the texts upon which the characters draw. In short, the reader implied by As I Lay Dying is a reader willing to accept the challenge of a densely written text, what Barthes calls a "writerly text," a text that sets up barriers to easy comprehension in that its codes are unfamiliar.

We might articulate the difference between Iser and Fish this way: Iser's interest is in the implied reader and Fish's is in the actual or real reader. Iser wants the reader to accept the position of the implied reader; in other words, Iser's reader, in the final analysis, needs to accept the authority of the text. Fish, on the other hand, wants the reader to understand his community context; in other words, Fish's reader needs to accept the authority of a reading community. Neither of these positions looks at the real reader as an individual who might read from private or personal feelings which emanate from his or her psychological make-up.

For Louise Rosenblatt, on the other hand, writers don't write for critics; rather they write for common readers. And doing so, they offer readers both an aesthetic and a pleasurable experience. Here is a democratic approach. This implies, of course, that neither Iser's nor Fish's approach is democratric.

The virtual text, in Iser's theory, is the text that exists in that liminal zone between the text as written object and the reader as an individual with unique thoughts, feelings, and values. In other words, according to this theory one reader's virtual text will not be the same as another reader's. In the virtual text, the original text and the reader come together giving rise to what Ingarden calls "a particular world" (214). The "world" of the text is, then, phenomenological in that it contains both the text and the reader. To read and interpret As I Lay Dying is to enter into Faulkner's world and to have that world enter into ours, although strictly speaking Faulkner's world is the meeting place of text and mind. We get the dynamic situation called the hermeneutic circle. Just as the text influences the reader, so too does the reader influence the text. "She hit the woman with the book." The idea is that this sentence has a meaning which is irreducibly ambiguous. But is it? No sentence lives without a context and a context for this sentence will begin to delimit its possible meanings. This is why we can decode the words outside most elevators on campus: "Do not use in case of fire." The context in which we meet words and sentences affects the way we read these words and sentences. The words by the elevators might, in some context, mean "do not use the elevator in case you start a fire by using it," but of course none of us in our context reads them this way.

Writing from an Anglo-American context (Iser writes from a European context), Fish takes on the formidable positions of the New Criticism. We have already seen that he attacks the new critical position that states that for interpretive purposes the importance of the affect of a literary text on the reader is a fallacy. He also takes issue with the second great fallacy identified by new criticism: the intentional fallacy. Reading Fish here we must accept a sleight of hand. He reinvests the idea of "intention" giving it a twist. Traditionally, the idea of intention had to do with an author, a speaker, or anyone who delivers a message. What is the author's or speaker's intended message or meaning? At one time it was possible both to accept the common sense assumption that anyone who speaks or writes does so with an intention to communicate a specific meaning, and to accept the distinct possibility of a recipient of the speaker's words or a reader of a writer's work being able to understand this intended meaning. The investigations into the arbitrariness of language by psychoanalysis, linguistics, and deconstruction have damaged our ability to believe in this simple possibility of a reader grasping an author's intention, even when that reader is the author himself or herself. The New Critics had another concern; this was the use of an author's supposed intention as a means of evaluation. Was the intention of an author honourable or worthwhile? If the answer was no, then the work could be shelved as bad, tossed aside as an inferior work of literature. Fish wants to take issue with this stand, but he does so not from a position of complete relativity, nor from a desire to reinstate the authority of the author.

Fish's argument sets out with the premise that all readers look for meaning in the texts they read. This quest for meaning is tantamount to a desire to understand what the author meant. And this is what the reader finds--the author's intended meaning. The catch is that the author's intended meaning is no less created in the act of reading as it was in the act of writing. As Fish has it: "interpretation creates intention and its formal realization, by creating the conditions in which it becomes possible to pick them out" (322). Just as the formal features of any text are a feature of our interpretive strategies--for example, a myth critic coming to As I Lay Dying will find the quest motif and the wasteland images clear, whereas a psychoanalytic critic will find the internal monologues and emphasis on desire as formal features of the text--so too are intentions. What we find when we interpret any work of literature is what we take to be the intended meaning. If we did not take the meaning we find to be intended, then we would have no basis for hazarding that the meaning we find is the right one. Our interpretations must be right because they were intended. Another circular argument. Our interpretations verify intentions--nothing more, nothing less. Fish's hermeneutic is, as I say, circular: we look for meaning in a text, but in order to begin our search we bring to the text certain strategies which ensure we will find meaning; consequently we find the meaning our strategies allow us to find and yet we say that those meanings are there in the text before we bring our strategies to bear on it. What gets Fish out of this vicious circle is his notion of interpretive communities since these sanction the strategies readers use and give our interpretations "objectivity." What counts is the interpretive community we belong to, and these change all the time a little like fashion.

As I Lay Dying - some notes

Before we start looking at characters in the novel, we might reflect on the gender of the author. Who wrote this book? Obviously someone named William Faulkner. Would this book be any different had someone named Wilhemina Faulkner written it? This may be a silly question, but let's bear with it for the moment. William, not Wilhemina wrote the book. At first blush, I think, Faulkner seems genuinely sympathetic to women; he seems to understand the difficulties they face, especially in the context of poverty and isolation in a rural community. Addie comes across as something of a tragedy: an intellectually capable woman whose life falls into ruin when she marries Anse or maybe even earlier when she takes to heart her father's (I wonder what advice her mother might have had) wisdom about living being a getting ready for dying. Clearly women are domestic drudges; they keep the home fires burning, as it were. This means they serve their husbands' (or non husbands' if we remember Lafe and MacGowan) desires; these desires are mostly physical: food and sex. I think we can see this with Cora, Addie, and Dewey Dell. But what's going on here? Are these women presented to us as examples of exploited womanhood in order that Faulkner can criticize patriarchy? Or does Faulkner fall into the usual male trap of seeing women as either angel or whore? Before answering this question, some consideration of "angel" and "whore" is in order. These words are, of course, metaphors, ways of categorizing women. The angel refers to a woman who has a spiritual quality. But wait, "spiritual" here means "docile," "pliant," "nurturing," "domestic." The angel combines qualities associated with mother and daughter; she accedes to a man's wishes and keeps him comfortable. In other words, the notion of "spirituality" is somewhat specious here because clearly this angel has a physical function in her duty to comfort man. In this the angel is little different from the whore. The whore is the angel upside down, as it were. She both attracts and repels man. Her physicality is open, candid, above board. Because of this, she is both attractive and frightening. In any case, what I want to point to here is the idea that both angel and whore are really "of the earth." The woman, whatever the metaphor we use to describe her, is under patriarchy asssociated with mother nature.

I suspect Dewey Dell is important here. Her name is redolent of the earth. Once we see this, we might note how the women in the book are associated with the earth. They are the earth; they are that which man plants and from which he gains satisfaction and nourishment. Dewey Dell has associations with the cow, the dark, the breeze. She remarks that she feels "like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth." She will be a mother. I guess what I'm driving at here is the suggestion that Faulkner perceives women as earth mothers--nothing more, nothing less. They may be hard put upon in this terrible world, but they are nonetheless to be perceived as important because of their fecundity, their nurturing qualities, their passivity, their sort-of cow-like acceptance of their lot. You might demur and say, but Addie is different, she has a voice. True Addie has a voice. But I'd prefer to put it this way: Faulkner allows Addie to speak, but only after she is dead. The only woman capable of speech is the dead woman whose words do not reach the living (at least within the novel). Even Rachael, who confirms the male attidtude to women, that they are intractable and fundamentally myterious and irrational, is not allowed to speak for herself. Her words come to us through her husband.

What I'm trying to articulate here is Faulkner's patriarchal view of women. Women are domestic, passive, inarticulate, and irrational creatures. They are associated with the body. They sacrifice for their men and for their families. Is this Faulkner's view and can we deconstruct this view?

What about Cora Tull who does seem to have a voice? She is something of a foil to Addie: pious where Addie is something of a libertine (at least inwardly); a gossip, self-centered and proud, nosy. She is practical and religious. She is also dominated by her husband; she is a good wife. She accepts what the partriarchy tells her; this is evident in the section on pp. 166-167 where she admonishes Addie for being proud and not adhering to the tenets of the church. I'm not certain what to conclude here except to say that Cora exhibits hypocrisy and self-concern just as many of the characters do. She offers the reader little in the way of a critique of patriarchy unless we see her as a representative of what patriarchy produces. She herself has internalized the patriarchal norms. She is, in effect, a spokesperson for patriarchy.

Next came Anse. Here's a buzzard. Anse suppresses women, but then Anse Bundren will suppress anyone he comes in contact with. He must be just about the most no-account character in fiction. He is long suffering. He lets others do for him. He allows Addie to work like a horse. (Jewel's mother is a horse.) He parades his manliness as stoicism when it is really laziness and self-interest. Anse is like Cora in that he spouts the Protestant ethic: "Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit" and "I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth" (pp. 110-111). It's true that Faulkner can't have a lot of sympathy for Anse, although I suspect he has some. Anse Bundren is a type of character fondly paraded before the reader in American culture: the lovable scoundrel, the confidence man. He's Huck Finn's father, Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, the Wizard of Oz, Ralph Cramden, Archie Bunker, Al Bundy, and so on. He is, in short, a survivor. A feminist spin on Anse could not be kind, but I doubt that this is what we have in the novel. Anse is either a misogynistic pig that the reader is supposed to reject, or he is someone who confirms Faulkner's own deeply misogynistic feeling. Note that Anse gets the girl as well as the new teeth as well as the graphophone. One out, one in for Anse Bundren.

Back to Dewey Dell and her "female trouble." Dewey Dell strikes me as important to Faulkner's sense of value. She reminds me of Eula Varner from The Hamlet and Lena Grove from Light in August. These are women who are similar in that they are redolent of the earth and its connections with sex and fertility. Dewey Dell is a sex object. She raises every man's libido into action, even her brother Darl's. Remember when Dewey describes Darl's eyes passing over her body: "They begin at my feet and rise along my body to my face, and then my dress is gone: I sit naked on the seat above the unhurrying mules, above the travail" (121). She is like a tableaux--an earth goddess oozing the attractions of the body. Lady Gadiva. I think Faulkner constructs woman as a sex object or a domestic drudge. As domestic, the woman becomes something of a harridan, as we see in the example of Rachael, wife of Samson. Angela pointed out that everyone uses Addie; the same might be said of Dewey Dell. Even her name smacks of the misogynist's sneer.

Whatever else we might say about these characters, we can't say that any of them would remain unnoticed at Old Miss or better yet at Princeton or Harvard. In other words, they are not the brightest people in the world. Yet they have wisdom of some kind. Even if you don't accept this, you might accept that they grapple with serious and even deep problems. They think. Funny as it might be, and I confess that I find it very funny, the scene in which Dewey struggles with her desire for Lafe in the cotton field presents us with Faulkner's attitude to women. Perhaps we might remember the first page of the novel on which Darl mentions "laidby cotton." We might say the same of Dewey Dell: laid by cotton, so to speak. Anyhow, Dewey seems to me genuinely conflicted as to whether to accede to Lafe's advances. She tries to make a plan, a plan which Lafe foils by picking into her sack. He picks into her sack all right. And the fact that I can make these wry nudge-nudge jokes at Dewey's expense strikes me as an indication of Faulkner's use of Dewey. He sets her up, just as Lafe does, just as I'm doing in the male's inveterate game to one-upmanship the female. When Dewey says, "I could not help it," I think we are to see this as a confession of weakness on her part, but from a feminist perspective I suspect that what we have here is a simple statement of fact. Women in Dewey's world can't help doing what importunate and opportunistic men want.

The rest of the passage is also interesting from a feminist perspective. Dewey goes on to say that an understanding exists between her and Darl: "then I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without words" (27). The passage goes on with more about this unspoken communication between Darl and Dewey. We know from Addie's section that words are "just a shape to fill a lack" 172). Men use words to attempt to repair the gap that opens up between their desire and its satisfaction after the Oedipal stage of development. They also use words as weapons--weapons to attain that which they desire. Women, on the other hand, have less need of language because of their closeness to the mother. We've seen all this before. Communication for a woman is more immediate, more direct, more literal, more honest than for a man. At first this might seem to place Dewey in a position of privilege or to suggest that she has a wisdom not open to men. But we might remember the long-standing connection between women and fools. Darl is this book's fool. Women and fools might have wisdom, but they cannot function adequately in the patriarchal world in which they find themselves. Fools end up in institutions and women end up victimised in one way or another. However we read section I've been looking at we can't but conclude that Dewey gets a raw deal. She may have wisdom, but what good does it do her? Her wisdom is the wisdom of the earth, according to Faulkner, and as noble and sanctified (I'm using Faulknerisms here) as this may be, it doesn't cut much ice in the world Dewey has to deal with. She remains an object in the eyes of men.

Before I leave Dewey, I must mention Dewey's masculine language when she describes a woman's situation. I refer to her remark to the two druggists that she has the "female trouble." I ought to note that Dewey does not report these trips to the druggist; we receive this information from the two men: Moseley and MacGowan. In effect, men speak for Dewey here; she is silenced. The first of these men is a self-righteous prig and a hypocrite. He's willing to judge Dewey: "it's a crime and a shame" (201). Note that he says this before he knows what she means by the "female trouble." For him, the very fact that women have the "female trouble," that is their monthly cycle, is a crime and a shame. The very fact that Dewey is a woman is enough for Moseley to judge her a criminal and a shameful person. He means "crime" literally; Dewey has contravened God's law by being a woman because she is a daughter of Eve who first contravened God's law. Moseley is like many of the characters in the novel in that he spouts Protestant pieties thoughtlessly and self-righteously. He also means "shame" in a similarly literal way; Dewey has shamed herself, that is put herself beyond the pale of respectable and decent people by having the "female trouble." She is marked with sin, set apart, outside community. She is, in effect, cursed. Yet he's also willing to take advantage of her: "but after all, they'll buy it from somebody." Once he learns the truth, that Dewey is pregnant, he assumes a paternal position towards her, advising her to go home and get her father to force Lafe into marriage. For him, marriage is the only answer to Dewey's trouble, and she needs to have recourse to her father to set things right.

The second druggist, MacGowan, is even worse. He sees Dewey only as an opportunity to satisfy his libido. He treats her with no respect, no feeling, no honesty, no humanity, no fairness. He tricks her. He takes advantage of her. And I could go on. The question is: what are we to make of this? Clearly, Faulkner cannot have sympathy for these men, especially the second. On the other hand, giving us the narrative from their point of view allows Dewey no voice here. We are allowed to think of her as Moseley and MacGowan do: a simple gullible, even ignorant, country girl easily dubed, stupid when it comes to dealing with men. We have little or no idea what goes on in her head during these encounters. Can we even imagine what she is thinking here? Anyhow, Dewey's world is a masculine world. She has few female role models. Is she an example of a woman who has internalized the values and language of patriarchy?

Perhaps the most spectacular instance of male appropriation of the female occurs right at the end when Anse returns to the wagon and ends the novel with the words: "Meet Mrs. Bundren." Who is this person? What is her name? What does she think? For Anse, she's just another acquisition, like his new teeth. Hey, look what I've got, a new wife. When did they get married? Faulkner's point here tells us a lot about Anse; it confirms his selfishness and his devious ways. but might it not also tell us a lot about Faulkner? To make this comic point about Anse's hangdog will to conquer, Faulkner uses a woman. And I say "uses" deliberately. The woman has no voice, no history, no identity. She's a mere object, chattel. Women, children, black people--these are the disenfranchised in Faulkner's world and we might argue of these three groups women are the most disenfranchised.

Demonic, Parodic and Young Goodman Brown

1. Why do I like Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"? Because the story reminds me of those many stories, now unremembered in detail and name, which turned up in the old E.C. Comics, on such TV programmes as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and even Star Trek, and which deal with the weird edges of unconscious experience in which the familiar people and places of our waking life appear in parodic forms of themselves. The story also brings to mind Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street where the dream world is a dangerous place. I think I like this kind of story because it is so foreign a form to me. I mean 'foreign' in the sense of unfamiliar. Goodman Brown's experience, horrific as it is, is possibly a dream experience, and dreams are a part of my life I rarely, if ever, touch. From what those who know these things tell us, all of us dream; I, however, cannot recall my dreams. Reading "Young Goodman Brown," I wonder whether this psychic mechanism of dream amnesia is fortuitous, a form of gloom management. Are my dreams so unspeakable, so unrememberable because they depict desires as wicked as those of Goodman Brown? Frankly, I don't know and I don't care to know. I would rather share the dreams of a Goodman Brown than my own, if these are similar.

2. Perhaps this resistance on my part to my own dreams explains another difficulty I have: entering a fiction in a visceral way. I rarely have what I suppose to be an emotional response to story. Well, this is true to a point; obviously I like some things more than I like others, and also obviously this is because some stories speak to me more powerfully than others. The truth is that poems speak to me more intensely than stories. When I like stories, the reason is usually attached to a poetic element in the story. In the case of "Young Goodman Brown," I react to the story's language. Hawthorne invests his prose with the intensity of poetry. Why I should like this, is unclear to me, although I suppose this is my substitute for ritual and ceremony. I have no interest or liking for the usual rituals of our culture, but I do react more strongly to the forms of literature--what I here refer to as its ritual power--than to its content. But this too is probably not entirely genuous.

3. I guess that Hawthorne has tapped into something universal in this story. That is, he not only presents material which is quintessentially American--an expose or a satire on the Puritan ethos--but he also enlarges on what is distinctly historical and Puritan to give us insight into the workings of human desire. In other words, I don't think the story depends upon the reader having knowledge of its historical dimensions. It may be appreciated for its internal structures. From the beginning, this story sets up a contrast between male and female--the male is about to depart from home, while the female (and wife) remains homebound. Male desire takes the man on a journey into the depths of consciousness and of experience. But what is it that the male desires? Well he desires everything he does not have, everything he lacks: knowledge, the power to transgress, to break away from all that restricts such as home, community, and personal history. That this is the perennial quest of the male is indicated by references of one kind and another to Goodman Brown's father and to his grandfather. It is the son's destiny to desire release from the wearying and uncanny repetition of the father's lot. Ironically, however, his journey away from home, away from his origins, away from the maternal (whether mother or wife) can lead only into the father's footsteps. And recall the father's relationship with the mother. In other words, what the son quests for is the mother. His journey into the forest, at night, to find a demonic and parodic ceremony redolent of snakes, phallic staffs and trees, flames, and fatherly encouragement to accept the authority of wicked power structures, is a journey into the law of the father. Goodman Brown is doomed to repeat the journey of his father and of his father before him.

4. If this sounds as if Goodman Brown is trapped, that's because he is; Goodman Brown is caught in the necessary repetition of male desire. He cannot think his way--either in consciousness or unconsciousness--out of a belief in power structures. He cannot think his way out of male modes of thought. Either he accepts the invitation of the devil to take part in the wickedness of the world's sexual, social, and political tyrannies, or he retreats into a world of gloom in which he perpetuates individual need for power anyway. Either way, he is doomed to fail because what the mind wants--fulfillment--is beyond reach. Fulfillment is beyond reach precisely because to be fulfilled is to establish oneself in a place where language is no longer necessary, where experience is one of unity rather than uniformity, and where separation from others is no longer. The journey to the forest is the demonic version of this fulfillment. Brown descends into a dark, enclosed space where initiates into the ways of wickedness appear unified by laughter and by the ceremonies of desire. This is, of course, a false laughter and a false desire.

5. The only way for Goodman Brown to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of group power or individual power (social conformity or solipsistic projection) is for him to embrace Faith at the beginning of the story, to stay home in compliance with her wish. So as you can see, I don't read this story in any theological, spiritual, or religious sense. Rather I read it psychologically. The story is for me a powerful reminder of the mind's workings. We might, if we so desired, read the story from a Jungian point of view and see Faith as Goodman Brown's anima forever split from him by his failure to overcome selfhood as manifested in the Shadow figure of the elder man, the devil, the demonic father. Finally, all I am really saying in this brief exercise is that I find stories which use such psychologically charged images as the forest, the father, the fire, the anima, the crone, the shadow, the journey, the underworld experience, and so on powerful.

6. I also like Hawthorne's refusal to be clear on such things as dream and reality, truth and falsehood, and narrative position. This story seems plain enough on the surface: for some mysterious reason newly married Goodman Brown has agreed to meet an elderly man in the forest; he leaves his wife to fulfill his agreement; he meets the elderly man and walks with him for a while; then he walks by himself seeing familiar people in unfamiliar circumstances until he arrives at a strange place in the woods where a kind of black mass is being celebrated. Here Goodman Brown sees his wife Faith; the vision prompts him to stop his slide into wickedness. The whole thing seems a dream, but Goodman Brown takes it as a reality and his days are herafter darkened. Was it a vision or a dream? What does the whole thing mean? How did Faith get into the forest? Was Goodman Brown's mother there? Was the old man the devil? These questions and more beg to be asked, but answers remain, for me, elusive. I like stories that leave more questions unanswered than answered. I like stories that remain uncanny, mysterious, open-ended, incomplete in the sense that they refuse simple reduction to paraphrase. I don't mind living with doubts and uncertainties. Goodman Brown is a person who needs certainties and look where that need leaves him.

The Divided Self: William Hope Hodgson on the Borderland

Published in 1908, The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson is as incoherent a book as we could imagine. It comes apart thematically, formally and generically. Is this a love story, an adventure story, a horror story, a supernatural story, an eschatological story, a science fiction story? Are we to take it seriously or parodically? Does the book deal with psychology or history or both? Does it indeed have a "cogent, coherent scheme of ideas" as the narrator says it does, or is it merely the ravings of a lunatic mind? The nearly non-existent critical history of the book might suggest its intractibility. This book is well-nigh impenetrable; trying to interpret it is like trying to see through mist. It speaks with a "glutinous and sticky" voice, despite its eagerness to sound rational and definite.

To find a hinge for this literary portal, I take my cue from Hodgson and choose the idea of a borderland. We can articulate the border in several ways: literary and historical, geographical and national, spiritual and theological, emotional and psychological. I'll take each of these in turn and hope that an exploration sheds some light on this murky book.

First the literary and historical. Hodgson takes the general shape of his book from a number of narratives that pretend to be found documents presented to the public by a rational and scholarly editor: examples of such texts are Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Poe's A Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1837-38), James DeMille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1874). Such narratives are the legacy, perhaps, of literary hoaxes of the like perpetrated by writers such as James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in the eighteenth century. By 1908 no one could take this literary device (the hoax) as anything more than a convention, but as a convention it sets up a contrast between a rational, even scientifically-minded editor and a story that concerns the irrational and bizarre. Both the editor-narrator of the frame and the narrator of the manuscript are scientificaly-minded men. In the case of the editor, this scientific focus is evident from many of the footnotes in the second half of the book. The rationale for this emphasis on science is twofold: 1) to lend the incredible events of the story credibility, and 2) to provide a comment on the inability of science to explain all phenomena. Some things remain in the realm of the mysterious and inexplicable. Stranger things exist in the universe than philosophy can account for.

This second point deserves some historical context. The House on the Borderland comes at the border of two centuries (or nearly so), published as it is in 1908. The turn of the century saw many books that speculated on time and possibility. For example, fairies were in the air, perhaps not literally but certainly figuratively, as the final chapter of Borderland indicates with its reference to the great house having been "given over to the fairies" (137). The literature at the turn of the century that presented a case for the reality of fairies is extensive, and it culminates in the so-called Cottingley fairy photographs which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle championed as real (see Silver). Science also raised the possibility of dimensions beyond the four that we accept as our reality. Writers such as George MacDonald and H. G. Wells speculated upon the possibility of multiple dimensions opening passages to an infinite array of realities or worlds. Such interest in possible worlds sometimes took an apocalyptic or even eschatological expression. Such is the case with MacDonald's Lilith (1895) which offers a vision of the new heaven and new earth, and with Wells's The Time Machine (1895) which takes its protagonist to the end of earth's history. The War of the Worlds (1898) is another of Wells's texts with an end-to-the-world theme. The House on the Borderland partakes of this end of time sensibility. The anxiety manifested in an end of time narrative just might have an explanation more local and disturbing than the quasi-theological fin de siècle theme we might first find in these books. In other words, what looks like apocalyptic fear might be something more sinister, at least in the case of Borderland.

What this more sinister fear might be leads me to geographical and national borders. Hodgson is the son of an English clergyman. This is about the extent of my knowledge of his biography. But this tidbit of information is enough for me to begin an investigation of the book's setting. The action takes place in Ireland, or more specifically in an isolated location in the west of Ireland. An Englishman writing about Ireland: we might approach such writing carefully. The most obvious function of the setting is for Hodgson to locate the action of the narrative in a place redolent of mystery and fear. He draws upon aspects of the sublime in his evocation both of an isolated, unmapped spot and in his descriptions of the house and the Pit and the cosmic flights. The sublime denotes the vast and unsettling; it is awesome in its scale and implications. It suggests unknown forces and immeasurable spaces. Relative to the sublime, humans are small and ineffectual. To face the sublime is to face that which transcends normal materiality; it is to bring the human into the domain of the supernatural. The face of God or of the Devil shines from the sublime. Hodgson's design is to flag the sublime in order to keep the reader's focus on otherworldly things. We might, however, see this as a feint.

If we return to Ireland and the Irish, we might view the action of the novel in a different--even darker light. England and Ireland have a long history of anatagonism. We don't know who "Messrs Tonnison and Berreggnog" are, but we know something of what they (or at least Tonnison, who has an English name) think of the Irish. Tonnison is adamant that he and his companion not take lodging with the local people because "there was no joke in sleeping in a room with a numerous family of healthy Irish in one corner, and the pig-sty in the other, while overhead a ragged colony of roosting fowls distributed their blessings impartially, and the whole place so full of peat smoke that it made a fellow sneeze his head off just to put it inside the doorway" (14). This is slight evidence, but perhaps enough for us to continue investigating the book's anxieties. What I'm driving at is simple: zenophobia. The Irish are the other, even in Ireland if we take the English perspective. To the English, the Irish are the brutes and barbarians and primitives. If we accept this, then we do not have to make much of a leap into the book's main narrative where a nameless recluse suffers from the relentless attacks of brutish swine-creatures who are discernably human and yet grotesquely cannibalistic and animalistic. They have a language, but a language that is close to gibberish. They communicate as a group, but their group loyalty seems to depend soley on self-interest. They are hideous creatures of pure desire and appetite, Wells's Morlocks without the Morlocks' industrial abilities. What I am saying is this: The House on the Borderland expresses Hodgson's deep zenophobic anxieties. This is a book about the fear of otherness. The Swine creatures reflect Hodgson's own fear of the foreign. What makes this at all palatable is the implication that the fear of the foreign includes a fear of the self. We are strangers to ourselves, just as the narrator is a stranger to himself and to his sister. The fear of the self as different from other selves haunts this book. Or perhaps more accturately I ought to say that the fear of the schizophrenic self haunts this book. But before I take up psychic themes, let me pursue otherness.

If the book is about the fear of otherness, it is also about the threat of otherness. When otherness becomes a threat, we usually perceive the other as evil. Once the word "evil" pops up, we are in the realm of my third category, the spiritual and theological. So if the other is evil and the self is good, we have a pretty clear indication that the narrative fits cliche: it is about the battle between good and evil. The question is: how does the narrative define good and how does it define evil? Obviously, the good guys are the brother and sister and also the ethereal woman/lover who appears to the narrator at least twice in his out of body experiences; they are good because they live quiet and unassuming lives, and because they rather vaguely signal relationship and love. They do not hurt others; they live rather contemplative lives apart from the common herd. They care for each other. True, the narrator is something of a misanthrope, but misanthropy need not be an evil. What is evil is the desire to invade someone else's space and violate someone else's body--both of which the Swine creatures appear eager to do. But we might refine this rather general sense of evil if we connect the Swine creatures with the Arena and its various mythological references.

When the narrator has his out of body experience early in the narrative he floats over a great plain to a place he calls the arena, "a perfect circle of about ten to twelve miles in diameter" (28). In the centre of the circle is the House. The configuration of House and arena suggests a mandala, a circle (often with a square inside) that has deities placed strategically about the periphery. The shape symbolically and in this instance ironically represents the universe. In this mandala, the narrator finds the god-figures Seth (male god of Egyptian origin) and Kali (female god of Hindu origin), plus around the place "Beast-gods, and Horrors, so atrocious and bestial that possibility and decency deny any further attempt to describe them" (29). The Arena represents the universe as a place of death. Could Hodgson here equate evil not only with death, but also with religions that are "other," foreign, not English? He first sees a Swine creature here in this mandala-like place, and later the swine creatures are associated with the "greater, more stupendous Pit that lies far down in the earth, beneath this old house" (78); this Pit surely reminds us of Hell. And that something tempting emanates from this Pit is clear:

Sometimes, I have an inexplicable desire to go down to the great cellar, open the trap, and gaze into the impenetrable, spray-damp darkness. At times, the desire becomes almost overpowering, in its intensity. It is not mere curiosity, that prompts me; but more as some unexplained influence were at work. (80)

At the very least, what we have here is the death drive. As we might expect, the death drive has its counterpart in the instinct for life, what we might call, after Freud, Eros. In the novel, Eros finds its figure in "Her." The narrator's description of the appearance of this female figure invokes the birth of Venus: "Then, as I stared, it seemed that a bubble of white foam floated up out of the depths, and then, even now I know not how it was, I was looking upon, nay, looking into the face of Her--aye! into her face--into her soul" (82). The invocation of Venus raises a pagan mythology, but one that is Western European, and one that has its counterpart in the religion Hodgson would know best. I think of the Sophia of Kabbalistic lore and of course the Virgin-Bride of Revelation. We might think too of Dante's Beatrice, the woman who leads him to his Heavenly vision. Late in the book, after the narrator has told us that he had begun "to take a growing interest in that great and ancient book [the Bible]" (84), this woman appears out of a green globe and brings the narrator to feel he is "in Paradise" (114). After he sees and speaks with her, he asks himself whether he has "come upon the dwelling-place of the Eternal" (117). The harmony suggested by this woman of love and peace may have spiritual implications, but she also most definitely has psychological ones.

And so I come to my last category, which as you can tell, I've been approaching already: emotional and psychological. The House on the Borderland is a book written in the shadow of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams which had its first publication in English in 1905, three years before Hodgson's book. For me, the best way to approach this book is through psychoanalysis. The House on the Borderland is the story of a disintegrating personality, a descent into madness. Despite all the potential Jungian material--mandala, anima, grotesque creatures, astral projection, enabling dog--this is not the account of a successful individuation. Rather, it is the account of a person losing control of reality. The loss of his lover is traumatic, and the trauma results in deeper and deeper melancholia to the point of dislocation from self and reality. This is the story of someone who isolates himself so intensely that he comes apart mentally. We've already seen that he is something of a misanthrope, and we know from the opening poem "Grief" as well as from the central chapter, "The Sea of Sleep," that the narrator suffers from the loss of his lover. His sense of loneliness--"in all space am most alone" (11)--is exaggerated to cosmic proportions. He has come to envisage, as he says, "the end of all things" (84). This guy is what you might call, using an understatement, an over-reactor. He loses his girl and then for him all hell breaks lose until the world itself comes to an end. How melodramatic can you get?

Aside from the general wackiness of the book, we have lots of hints that this guy is over the top, gonzo, loopy, around the twist, out in left field, over the top, out there in the intense inane. He's nuts. From the very beginning of his narrative, we should sense his misanthropy is not your normal anti-social behaviour, but rather an isolationism taken to the nth degree. Then we have his sister. She appears not to experience the same horrors as her brother does. No, the horror she seems to experience is her brother. She grows progressively frightened of him until he decides that she is the crazy one (55). Her fear of him might well serve as the reader's clue to the narrator's madness. Right to the end of the book, she "has seemed unconscious of anything unusual occuring" (132). Her brother's "mad act" of exploring the subterranean pit (69) is a reminder of Feudian spatiality: the cellars and pit are the unconscious and the swine-things represent the return of the repressed, that welter of desire that tries and tries to find entry to our conscious mind. So what we have are two isolated people, a brother and a sister, one of whom is going crazy and the other of whom is either downright stupid or powerless to do anything to help her brother.

All this is well and maybe even convincing, but does it explain the wild flights into the cosmos during the second half of the narrative. What happens here reminds me of the ending to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when Keir Dullea takes his psychedelic trip through the galaxies until he either becomes or comes across a foetus wrapped snuggly in a small orb. In Borderland, this happens when the green globes pass and the narrator enters one (112-113). This precedes his reunification with his loved one. Images in this part of the book are a sort of cosmic pastoral, suggesting a new beginning. We've just had the black sun and end-time imagery, and now we have the hope of a new beginning. In psychological terms, I guess this is false clarity before a fall back into the darkness of paranoia and fear of dissolution. The end of the narrative takes us back to the raving of a lunatic who fears his own absorption in some luminous green fungoid substance. And we are reminded of the image of the house as a plague-spot (110). The fear here is a sort of body-snatcher fear.

Once again, this is all well and good. But as I said at the beginning, the novel falls apart. It has no center or if it does, then the center cannot hold. Things fall apart. What are we to make of the two dogs, Pepper and his successor? Their function in the novel is, in part, to lend credibility to the materiality of what happens. We can assume that Pepper really does receive a wound in the garden, and then later when we find that he is a pile of dust, we might ask whether that bizarre flight into the future actually took place. As for the second dog, this one too has a wound, this time a luminously green wound. We are disposed to accept this wound as a reality rather than a fancy on the part of the narrator. So if we do take the swine things, the flight into the future, and the luminous green wound as realities, then the narrator is most likely not crazy. And if he is not crazy then what in the name of Aunt Grady's neckerchief is going on here? About the only thing I can fall back on is Todorov's notion of the fantastic. What we have here is a narrative that refuses to allow its reader either to explain away in a rational manner what happens or to take resort to the marvellous. Instead, we hesitate between saying this is all bunk, hokum, or unexplainable marvels and saying it is definitely the slide into mental collapse of an extreme paranoiac. This book defies interpretation. Hodgson remains resolutely on the borderland between clarity and obfuscation, beween rationality and irrationality, between the canny and the uncanny.