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.
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