Matt Sampaio-Hackney
“Rudolf’s Kunstkammer
incorporated both naturalia and artificialia, as a primary goal in
forming a Kunstkammer was to gather objects of great variety, to represent the
world and cosmos in miniature. This ran the gamut from a Renaissance painting
to the horn of a unicorn. Although the actual purpose and meaning of the
Kunstkammer has sparked a scholarly debate, with notions favouring the
Kunstkammer as a political apparatus representing a courtly display of
propaganda and magnificence, or as a private place of refuge, one meaning is
generally accepted: the Kunstkammer as a microcosm of the universe.” - Jacob
Wamberg, Art and Alchemy
A Cabinet of Aickmans
There is a persistent mythology
surrounding Robert Aickman that has disseminated the false belief that his
stories are incomprehensible. They are reported to be insoluble puzzles,
missing endings like limbs, or are baffling performances of stage magic. This
belief has also sprouted a bestiary of contradictory Aickmans. There is Aickman
the magus, who tricks even Neil Gaiman, summoning logical fractures and
classical allusions to blinker and blind his readers. Then there is the
frustrating Aickman, who is more of a poet than a story-teller, and never
learned how to carve a plot from the hard marble of sense. Next is the Freudian
resurrectionist Aickman, whose work grubs with slender hands in the grave soil
of the unheimlich. Following him is
the heroic conservationist Aickman, squinting into the sun from the deck of a
canal barge, clad in a frumpy sweater. Finally comes the traditionalist and
antiquary, R.F. Aickman, who wore spectacles, was fascinated by the Edwardian
period, and neglected a weed-grown and unruly parcel of teeth.
The true Aickman can never be
limited to any one of these personas, as he displayed features of each across
all aspects of his life. Yet, frequently the most dominant persona is Aickman
as trickster – the magician figure. As Gaiman and others have observed, it is
difficult to tell what makes his strange stories tick and what rules govern
their production. But there are indeed rules. The 1968 tale “Ravissante”, first
appearing in Sub Rosa, is more than
anything else a blueprint for the strange story, a sermon justifying its
existence and worth. Read carefully, it becomes clear that it is a direct
apologia for his own aesthetic – an aesthetic not materializing wholly from his own genius, but arising out of a
literary tradition and context.
“Ravissante” is a fictional
thesis, a tale that literalizes Aickman's aesthetic of the strange story with a
temerity that suggests a certain subtle mischievousness in his writing. It is a
hermetic and referential tale, not so much a fiction responding to life as it
is a fiction about the production of a response to life, i.e. art and its
power. It seeks to enact this power at the same time, and to lead by example.
But, moreover, it attempts to channel or divert the power and perceived
legitimacy of symbolist and decadent art into the realm of strange fiction.
“Ravissante” is a literary
cabinet of curiosities, or Kunstkammer
– an assemblage of animals, artefacts, and objects intended to create a
microcosm of the world. Historically, Kunstkammers also demonstrated the power
and wisdom of their owners and in this sense often functioned as a form of
propaganda. “Ravissante” is propaganda for Aickman's aesthetic of the strange
story and his vision of reality. Even topographically, the layout of the house
in Brussels, with its long shadowy hall, resembles a wonder-cabinet toppled
over onto its stomach, splaying out its contents – dogs, paintings, old-gold
lamps, strange women, sculptures of succubi, and furred insect creatures with
eyes as large and wet as oysters. Naturalia,
artificialia.
There are several techniques
Aickman uses in his position as defense attorney for the accused – the strange
story – and how those techniques manifest within the narrative structure of
“Ravissante” must be explored. But first it is necessary to place his work in
literary context.
Evolution of the Strange Tale
The popular idea that Aickman
is a singular entity dropped ex nihilo
into the backward fens and fields of supernatural fiction must be replaced with
a more truthful and historical image of him as a writer consciously operating
within a tradition. In this particular case, a sub-tradition: the strange story
living in the basement of the supernatural tale, itself merely renting a flat
from the Fantastic. What constitutes the true lodestone or foundation of what
we call the strange story can be argued about endlessly, but certainly a
forerunner to Aickman's work who must be considered is the American Henry
James. Like Aickman, James favored ambiguity and enigma in his supernatural
fiction. In a remarkable introduction to his own anthology Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday, Italo Calvino says, “With
James… the fantastic genre of the nineteenth century has its final incarnation.
Better put, its disincarnation, since
it becomes more invisible and impalpable than ever: a psychological emanation
or vibration… The ghosts in Henry James’ ghost stories are very evasive.”
(Calvino, xvi)
We can see this trend of
invisibility rippling outward from James in a number of Aickman's predecessors:
Barry Pain, Rudyard Kipling, Madeline Yale Wynne, Walter de la Mare, Oliver
Onions, John Metcalfe, A.E. Coppard, John Davys Beresford. To one degree or
another, all of these writers tended not to hum the standard bars of the
ghostly tale, and chose to pipe on a scale altogether more allusive and
elusive. They drain the blood from their spectres and dry them on hooks, not in
the dining room Uncle Hugh died in, but in the abattoir of their protagonist's
brains. The interior becomes exterior, the fear of death fulminates behind
their eyes and its smoke trails out into what Samuel Beckett called “the faint
inscriptions of the outer world.” (Beckett, 38) This is a literary territory
not of screaming skulls, mephitic puddles of putridity that once were men, or
unctuous things in halls. Here, instead, is a literary topography of tiny
hillside towns much bigger at night than they have any right to be, enticing
attic trunks that swallow children whole, and perfectly non-descript country
homes that might actually be way-stations between this world and the alleged
next. From this fertile loam Aickman sprang.
With this uneven and
provisional history charted – traveling, say, from an outlier prototype in
Prosper Merimee's 1837 tale “The Venus of Ille”; rushing forward to Pain's “The
Diary of a God” in 1901 and Kipling's “They” in 1904; D.H. Lawrence's “The
Rocking-Horse Winner” in 1926; and Edith Wharton's “All Souls” in 1937 – the
techniques and aims in collections such as Sub
Rosa and Powers of Darkness become
much clearer. These pieces are all strange fiction avant la lettre. Much as surrealism can be found in its progenitor,
symbolism, the seeds of strangeness were sown in these earlier supernatural
tales. Explanations are elusive, interpretations are multiple, conventions
subverted, and for the most, blood and gore eschewed in lieu of psychology.
Calvino gave his estimation of Henry James as “the apex of the incorporeal and
ungraspable.” (Calvino, xiii) Since James, that apex has moved ever higher.
But if we consider Aickman’s
supernatural to be a disincarnation of the fantastic, it is a disincarnation
that remains more bodily focused than James, more sexual in its concerns and
manifestations, and never wholly impalpable.
These disincarnations, rather than making the fantastic less strange or more
normalized and domestic (as arguably one could say about James), instead seem
to make it more alien, more incomprehensible than ever. Aickman takes the
corporeal-supernatural and turns it inside out, making it so psychological and
incorporeal that it becomes bodily again, and the inside obtrudes on the
outside. It is like a pig that has been carved and stewed for a feast, then put
back together again on the table as if still alive, a sinister apple clamped in
its mouth. The famous quote from Aickman that “the ghost story draws upon the
unconscious mind, in the manner of poetry” is apt here (Night Voices, 279). Aickman’s description of the unconscious as
“the magnetic under-mind,” is both stylish and punning.
This notion of corporeality and
embodiment is important to the strange tale, because a distinction must be
drawn between it and the ineffable and genteel ghost story often found in
nineteenth century magazines, such as The
Cornhill, Blackwood’s, and All the
Year Round. At the same time it must
also be distinguished from the straightforward horror tale. Two core elements
of embodiment brought to heavy usage in horror fiction are the grotesque and
the horrible. The strange can encompass the grotesque but it is not often the
focus, and horror seldom appears. This is fiction more closely allied to Boris
Karloff's notion of “terror” as opposed to “horror.” One thinks of Aickman's
own “The Swords” for an example of grotesquerie mingling with the strange, but
one does not often find purulent popes, Inquisitional flaying, or rats the size
of horses in the strange. It is a long way from William Mudford's “The Iron
Shroud” to de la Mare's “A Mote.”
While the genteel ghost story
features little more physicality than the appearance of chaste skeletons and
anemic materializations, the strange as a genre often possesses sexual organs.
It must be added that this is an innovation largely pioneered by Aickman.
Sexuality in earlier strange fiction was more intimated, with a few notable
exceptions, such as Coppard's “Arabesque, the Mouse” or May Sinclair's “The
Villa Désirée”. Outside of (but also including) erotic feeling, physicality in
the strange tends to be mediated or displaced, through masks, dolls, articles
of clothing, cups, or even weapons. One is reminded of Japanese shunga which emphasize the erotic
charge, not of nudity and bare touch, but nudity and touch mediated through
elaborate, sensuous clothing. In the same manner, physical barriers and visual
opacity heighten the uncanny.
The strange sub-genre does not
so much have unique features as it has commonplace features enlarged to
deformity. The primary characteristics of strange fiction – ambiguity,
dream-logic, and sexuality (repressed or overt) – are all present in traditional
supernatural and ghostly fiction. It is simply that these elements have
metastasized and, as a result, transcend the fireside club-tale conformity
found in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sabine Baring-Gould. Resolution,
conventional sentiment, and standard manifestations of the occult are all
undermined. Mystery and the uncanny are elevated. The text becomes a catafalque
of dream-imagery unencumbered by rationality.
In Aickman’s stories, the
unconscious – the under-mind – undermines. What it undermines is not only generic
convention, but often the narrator’s own conscious self-image, bourgeois
comfort, or belief in materialism. It undermines the trail of mythologies we
make about ourselves, the places where we live and the people we say that we
love. Most notably, it undermines the reader’s expectation for a neat, closed
and readily explicable ending. But this under-mind is not the totality of the
supernatural for Aickman. It is just one agent for it. He stated: “[the ghost
story] need offer neither logic nor moral.” (Night Voices, 279) Yet
there is a logic to the tradition of the strange tale in which Aickman works.
Every literary genre has its
tricks and sleights of hand, its semiotic devices employed to either smuggle
contraband past Reader Customs or to concisely deliver information. As an
example, science fiction has entered, through long usage, into a sort of
common-law marriage with the “info-dump” technique, where a block of necessary
scientific knowledge is didactically given to the reader all at once. But in
fiction of the supernatural, the iconic technique is a form of subliminal
suggestion. One must set up the appearance of the singer’s ghost in the
phonograph, but not make it predictable. Thus it could be said that in
science-fiction it is more necessary to give
the reader information, whereas in horror or supernatural literature it is more
necessary to hide it.
In traditional supernatural
literature, this subliminal suggestion is often obvious and made more so by the
number of structural conventions adhered to: the local townsfolk have heard
whistling coming out of the pond, an innkeeper makes passing reference to a
recent death in one of the rooms, etc. With the antiquarian spin from M.R.
James, these intimations generally come from books, or urns, or washed out
frescoes of demons gnawing on the fragrant toes of saints. At its crudest
level, this subliminal suggestion is nothing more than foreshadowing.
In the strange story, the
subliminal suggestions are more sophisticated and come from a variety of
directions. Misdirection, a technique
commonly associated with mystery fiction, is employed to great extent.
Sometimes in order to hide information it is necessary to give more
information. As Philip Challinor notes in his book Akin to Poetry, Aickman will often discuss plot-irrelevancies at
length and then say something of great significance in passing. This is simple
misdirection of the kind seen on stage, but not often in the pages of ghost
stories. “Relevant details are often so slyly inserted that their significance
is apparent … only on repeated readings” (Challinor, 8). To many readers it is
confusing to find so many red herrings, like soup hairs, nesting in their
fiction. But this evolution of
foreshadowing into misdirected suggestion is one of Aickman's greatest
innovations, and to paraphrase what G.K. Chesterton wrote of Bernard Capes,
Aickman took a penny dreadful technique and made it worth a pound (Lamb, 11).
With Aickman situated within
the historical framework of supernatural literature, and with some of the
features and techniques of strange fiction in mind, it is now much easier to
traverse the text of “Ravissante” and observe the magus’ tricks.
“Ravissante” is arguably one of
the most complex works of fiction from the most complex supernatural writer,
yet it uses the old framing structure of the manuscript found within a copper
cylinder/burned house/etc. This may at first seem rather like performing
complex brain surgery with an obsidian knife, but it does demonstrate Aickman’s
sense of his work in literary continuity. It also provides a convenient
distancing effect for what is in some respects a cautionary tale about the
withering of the artistic spirit in a commercial society, and the complicity of
artists in this process.
The Gateway of the Monster
It begins when the typical
Aickman introvert narrator strikes up an acquaintance with a painter at a
forgettable cocktail party. He himself is a dry and forgettable man, “faintly
disappointing,” but a painter of some power (Painted Devils, 3). At the time of their meeting, he has renounced
painting and instead pursues work as a commercial writer. His wife is even
drier and more forgettable, a taciturn matchstick of a woman who says almost
nothing all. Dinners occur at their Battersea flat, hung with the man's
paintings – likened to the abstract spiritual work of later Charles Sims. But
slowly the lifeless and boneless acquaintanceship dwindles. This ex-painter
dies, and bequeaths his entire artistic output to the narrator – as well as a
hundred pounds, the entire measly estate of a curdled life. The narrator meets
with the painter’s wife, who indifferently says she will burn everything he
does not take. He takes one painting and a stack of papers that consist of the
man’s letters and writings. The narrative proper begins when our protagonist
reads one of these papers, a tale chronicling the painter’s stay in Belgium as
a young man, visiting the elderly wife of an unnamed symbolist painter.
A number of symbolist and decadent
artists from the fin de siecle period
are cited as influences for the painter, including James Ensor, William Degouve
de Nunques, and Xavier Mellery – who went on record as saying that he painted
“silence” and “the soul of things.” They all share aesthetic concerns and
imagery with the strange story: the imagery of masks, death, silence, the
landscapes of dreams, and religious icons.
In the course of the painter’s
discourse regarding himself and his ideas about art, it can be seen that there
are a number of similarities between his views of art, and Aickman’s of
literature. At the trial of the strange that is “Ravissante,” Aickman calls to
the stand what appears to an avatar of himself, or at least a humble proxy.
Both are obsessed with the femme fatale
figure, the painter noting his belief that death-by-woman seems a natural
enough way to go. Both pinch pennies in giving admiration, the painter’s
selective character mirroring Aickman's own stated belief that there are only
forty or so top-notch tales of the supernatural. Both create their work in
quasi-mediumistic fashion – as if through a form of communion or séance –
indicated through the anecdotes surrounding Aickman’s approach to writing
bulletins for the Inland Waterways Association. But of highest importance is
their shared valuing of mystery above rationality, and their scorn of
commercialism and scientific positivism. “I most certainly did not want to understand everything. I had
once even told a fortune-teller as much.” (20)
The painter's tale is, of
course, the point at which the story splits itself in two, where the main
narrative shrugs out of the old skin that held it and slouches off somewhere
else. It is important to note here Aickman’s assertion the ghost story should
draw upon the unconscious mind. When the painter enters the house of Madame A,
he is symbolically entering his own unconscious. The transition from mundane
logic to dream logic is signaled when he stands at the front door and, without
performing any action, observes: “There was a bell and I heard it ring.” (13)
This is an abrupt and clear passage into the passive realm of dreams, where
cause and effect speak in different tongues. Yet Aickman performs this invasive
surgery with the lightness of touch of a water-strider, stirring nary a ripple
in the reader's mind.
On being curtly greeted by
Madame, he observes that the main room of the house is a long living room
replete with symbolist sculpture, erotic works by Félicien Rops, smoked-glass
lamps, and an enormous fireplace sonorously belching with flame. The painter
notes, “Almost as soon as I entered, it struck me that the general coloration
had something in common with that of my own works.” (14) This is Aickman’s deft
handling of a sense of foreboding, and the first incision that will later grow
into a larger wound. Lamps, painting, sculptures - these are the objects in the
painter's unconscious; the curiosity cabinet that is his mind.
Of particular importance in
regard to the artificialia found in
the house is a sculpture depicting childbirth. Its unusual anatomy is explained
by Madame A as being “la naissance d'un
succube.” (14) The birth of a succubus. One could say this succubus, in a
similar process to the leaving of the womb, achieves entrance into the world
through the painter's own actions. This sculpture is the first intimation of
the death of his career.
Madame A is described as being
less than five feet tall, wrinkled and egg-like, but wearing a revealing dress
and possessing a frankly erotic, even predacious, manner. She regales the
painter with lurid, salacious tales of the personal lives of many artists she
knew, saying of one, “I wouldn’t have used him as a pocket handkerchief when I
had the grippe.” She rants and gripes and berates and belittles, and one can
smell the stale hovels, stinking feet, furtively spilled seed, and fin-de-siècle Catholic shame implied in
her harangue. The painter is mortified, feeling that her speech soils the
dignity of the artists he adores, unseating them from their thrones. “An object
of admiration is impaired by hostile criticism of any kind, however ill judged,
and there is nothing the admirer can do to mend the wound, even though his full
reason may tell him that the critic has no case.” (16) An opposition is set up
here, with the painter as priest of art's sanctity and Madame A as the defiler
and iconoclast. One of the unnamed icons appears to be Gustave Moreau who, in
her memory, preferred his bucolic landscapes that would not sell to the lurid
Salomés and burned martyrs he was known for. Lacking finer distinctions, Madame
brings everything to the level of commercial exchange.
While she fumigates her own
memories of the repulsive, insect-like artists she knew, something very odd
happens. A small dog, resembling a black poodle, appears out of a shadowy
corner behind a door. It pokes around the sitting area by the fire, and then
trots away back into the darkness, entirely unnoticed by Madame A. The painter
says that it has “very big eyes and very long legs, perhaps more like a spider
than a poodle.” (19) He relates this to Madame, suggesting that it “must have
got in from the darkness outside,” but she shrugs and replies that animals are
always making appearances in the room, including “less commonplace species.”
(20) It is important to note that just prior to the appearance of the animal,
Madame A had called the painter back to his seat in front of the fire, “as if
she were summoning a small, unruly dog.” (19) The painter stands in front of a
doorbell; it rings of its own accord. He is summoned like a dog; a dog appears.
Such is the logic of “Ravissante,” and the first instance of the house’s naturalia.
The Room of Silence
The strangest part of the story
begins when Madame A invites the painter into the room of Chrysothème, her
adopted daughter who is currently abroad. The invitation's pretext is to view
Chrysothème's clothing, a curious suggestion the painter assents to
hypnotically. Away from the clattering, hissing fireplace, a hush falls over
the text. The room of Chrysothème is a room of silence. The painter has come to
the soul of things, or is at least led to believe so. Madame A makes a number
of curious statements about her alleged daughter, saying that she “is the most
beautiful girl in Europe” and that “if you could see her naked, you would
understand everything.” (20)
This is a statement of some
import, considering the painter's response is an adamant rejection of such an
understanding. Madame A is trying to suggest to the painter that Chrysothème is
a kind of life-giving muse. She is seducing him with the notion that he can
possess the muse, but what she actually intends for him to do is invoke the
company of a succubus – the succubus hewn in marble outside. Once again, this
is the unconscious logic of the strange tale. In a dream, a room from one's own
life is never quite the same, and when one returns to the same room a second
time while dreaming, it is even less so. What was a grandfather clock decorated
with Prussian soldiers becomes a pattern on wallpaper, and in the same manner,
what was hard marble in one room becomes animated spirit in the next.
Dream-scribes are notorious for their freewheeling translations, dragging the
lineaments of one thought, like sinuous Beardsley lines, into the frame of
something else.
Still preoccupied with the
spider-like dog, the painter dully exclaims that it is a “beautiful room.” The
reply from Madame A: “That is because people have died in it… the two beautiful
things are love and death.” (21) This is the most transparent instance of
Aickman revealing himself through the tale, speaking not just through his
avatar, but also through the femme fatale
who will destroy him. Nearly a decade later Aickman entitled his 1977
collection of fiction Tales of Love and
Death. He is drawing connections between the aesthetic and ontological
concerns of symbolist artists and the aesthetics and ontology of strange
fiction, thereby granting it greater legitimacy through a variety of character
defense.
Locked in this room of silence
the painter observes: “In the center of the far wall stood a red brocaded
dressing table, looking very much like an altar…the only picture hung over the
head of the bed in the corner behind the door… It looked more like a chapel
than a bedroom. More like a mortuary chapel, it suddenly struck me; with a
sequence of corpses at rest and beflowered on the bier-like bed behind the
door.” (21-22) Here the ambiguous suggestion is made that the bedroom belongs
to someone who is no longer alive, or who was never alive to begin with. Yet
the dresses bear the marks of wear, the body of someone much taller than Madame
A. This is characteristic of his misdirection. Rather than proffering one
interpretation, Aickman gives several that seem to contradict one another.
The bizzarerie worsens when
Madame invites him to touch and examine the clothes of Chrysothème, giving
commands such as, “Lift the dress to your face,” “Kneel on it. Tread on it,”
and “Why don’t you kiss it?” The painter obeys every one, and she notes, “You
could almost wear it yourself…you like wearing blue and you are thin enough.”
(23). Aickman has made much of Madame A’s Pan-like, aged sexuality, and here
she plays dominatrix in a scene with more than a whiff of fetishism. The power
dynamics are unusual; Madame is ordering the submissive painter not to submit
to her, but to dominate another. He, the submissive subject, is dominated into
dominating another. Or to desecrate, more to the point, given the religious
appearance and silence of the room with its bed as both altar and bier. Of note
is Madame A’s earlier interpretation of the painter's astrological sign as
being one of “secrecy and sensuality.” When the painter demurred that only the
first was true, she replied, “Then I must direct myself to awakening the
second.” (15)
Acting under his own volition,
but encouraged by Madame, the painter brings his lips to the blue dress she
offers. He is faintly aware that she is demeaning and ridiculing him, but
concerns himself only with “that other who wore the dresses.” After a brief
affair with this garment, he is handed a black velvet dress. “The moon!” she
exclaims. “And the night.” (23)
This psycho-sexual, fetishistic
examination of Chrysothème’s apparel culminates when Madame A invites him to
open a chest full of her lingerie. Again, compelled both by the Madame and by
his own urges, he obeys, saying that “the scent was intoxicating in itself.”
Tying the ribbon over the double
entendres, Madame enjoins him to “plunge in [his] white arms,” and to “love
them, tear them, possess them.” (24)
Lost in his reverie, he is
unaware of the passage of time until he realizes that he is cold and has lost
his sense of smell. He wakes as if from a fever dream, or the cessation of the
act of love-making: “And at that moment, for the first time, I really
apprehended the one picture, which hung above the wide bed in the corner.
Despite the bad light, it seemed familiar. I went over to it and, putting one
knee on the bed, leaned toward it. Now I was certain. The picture was by me.”
(25)
Clarifying her disdain for the
piece and for him, she drolly says, as if it were the creation of some absent
person: “Not a painter at all. Would have done better as a sweeper out of
cabinets... or a fetcher and carrier in a horse-meat market.” He notices that the
angelic figures from his work have somehow been turned into clowns. Recognizing
the pointlessness of defending his work, he utters a polite formality, perhaps
more addressed to Chrysothème than Madame: “Thank you, madame... for receiving
me.” (25) Let it not be said that Aickman lacked for dirty jokes.
Madame A greets this obvious,
formal plea for freedom as if it were terrifying. She shouts for a souvenir
like a drunken tourist at a gift shop that is closing, and the painter sees
that she holds an enormous pair of scissors. One remembers the earlier bell
that rang of itself. Now the pair of scissors suddenly appears. In dreams,
cause and effect can seem as distant from each other as an old, married couple
that sleep in different rooms and try to avoid each other as much as possible,
within convention. The arrival of these two objects, bell and scissors, are the
beginning and ending signals of the painter's journey into the house. A
journey, it becomes clear at this point, more into the fleshy ontological
tunnel of his own unconscious than anything else.
He understandably flees from
the massive scissors, but out in the hall he finds “squatted on the single
golden light that hung by a golden chain... a tiny, fluffy animal, so very
small that it might almost have been a dark furry insect with unusually
distinct pale eyes.” (25) This last and oddest specimen of naturalia within the cabinet is also the most apparently
supernatural. Small mammals similar to the being described exist (mouse lemurs
and pygmy possums, for instance), but they do not reside in Brussels. He rushes
down the hall and through the big, flaming room, past the art he came to adore,
faint and watery in the dimness, and to the front door. Madame chases with her
scissors, crying for a lock of hair. Victory assured, he bids her good night
and steps out to the Chausèe d’Ixelles.
Writing two weeks after the
occurrence of this event, the painter makes a curious statement, that must be
quoted in full: “Within twenty-four hours I perceived clearly enough that there
could have been no dog, no little animal squatted on the lantern, no picture
over the bed, and probably no adopted daughter. That hardly needed saying. The
trouble was, and is, that this obvious truth only makes things worse. Indeed, it
is precisely where the real trouble begins. What is to become of me? What will
happen to me next? What can I do? What am I?” (26)
This statement presents a
difficulty for a literal interpretation of the tale, until one realizes that
“Ravissante” is primarily a glimpse into the painter's state of mind after he
has been divested of his self. It is the first hint of the emptiness so
apparent in his character years later. Secondarily it forms another piece of
misdirection, along the lines of the earlier statement: “What one remembers is
always far from what took place.” (7) One is taught to expect a tidy summing up
at the end of cosy supernatural tales but, true to form, Aickman, with
“Ravissante”, does not do this.
The Crock of Gold
Throughout the course of
“Ravissante” an impressive number of ironies and contradictions unfold. What
must be admitted, in order to make sense of them, is that the occurrence of the
dresses did not go as the painter thought it did. He was deceived. Instead of
being the possessor, he was himself possessed.
Alan Moore said: “Treat writing
as if it was a god. Treat writing as if it was some immensely powerful deity
that you have to appease.” Chrysothème is the muse, the other, who dictates to
an artist as if they were her amanuensis. She is pure inspiration and, as such,
cannot be directly touched or perceived. It is impossible to drink from the
unadulterated substance of creativity, but Madame A convinces him to make the
same error as Faust. Aickman wrote of Faust: “Faust's error was an aspiration
to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set
beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the
achievement pointless.” (Night Voices,
270-1) By making the same choice, the painter prostitutes himself and his art,
and discovers the duality of artistic endeavour. Keep art holy and it fills you
with life; degrade it, pervert it for commercial purposes, and it will degrade
you, lapping up your life to the lees like a succubus.
With her fixation on the
profitability of the artists, and her overriding concern for their follies and
failures, Madame represents commercialism – the world of tabloid newspapers,
profit margins, outlays, gross sales.
She is an agent of the Enlightenment science and materialism both
Aickman and his avatar loathe. She denudes mystery and blasphemes against the fin de siècle idols. The little painter
pretentiously stands up against this monstrosity, with lance and shield, under
the banner of Art. He stands no chance.
True to the form of the strange
story, Aickman layers Madame A with multiple coats of textual reference. In
addition to her materialist function, he likens her to a leprechaun, creatures
known to hoard crocks of gold. It should be observed here that the Greek word chrysos means “gold.” The painter
ravishes Chrysothème expecting gold, only to receive base lead in return. But,
of course, Madame does not just resemble the Irish faery. She is just as much a
witch from German Märchen, living in
a tantalizing ginger-bread house of decadent artwork. And so, too, she
resembles the Pied Piper. Like Aickman's vision of reality, Madame A is meant
to be irreducible, bewildering.
If the room of silence is a
devotional chapel to the gods of art, it has been perverted as well as inverted
into a scene akin to black mass. The recurring angel figures from the painter’s
work are twisted on the canvas into clowns. The muse is transfigured into a
demon. Madame A draws the painter towards his own desecration, lures him on to
his own creative and spiritual dissolution. As an agent of the painter's
unconscious or under-mind (a mind tempted by the commercial, for all its hatred
towards it), she has undermined the recurring figures of his art and even his
own sense of self. “What am I?” he asks. Not an artist, is the answer. And so
to glossy, mass-produced commercial art criticism he goes, violating his animus
in the pursuit of such a career. This is a form of death.
When the original narrator
meets the painter at the cocktail party, he is a man without much in the way of
viscera. He might just as likely tell a joke as a butterfly pinned to a board.
If he smells of anything, it is likely formaldehyde. Yet in his manuscript he
describes himself as being a raconteur of a kind, capable of amusing and witty
remarks. But, he adds, “it is almost as if someone else were talking through
me.” (9) This charming cad stands in marked contrast to the ineffectual,
repressed, boring nobody who is “unable to make a hole in the wall that
presumably enclosed him.” (3) Like a praying mantis, when the muse turns on her
mate, she leaves very little left. The other from Rimbaud's “I am another” has
fled, leaving behind only a hollow and ever diminishing “I am.” This is the
price, Aickman suggests, for those who are not strong enough to keep their art
pure – a fear he perhaps possessed.
Aickman is himself engaged in a
Faustian pursuit: the construction of a story that mirrors reality's
irreducible complexity, where all interpretation is provisional. The creation
of fiction that eludes the science of textual analysis, though it dares one to
try. The development of a story “set beyond the human compass.” The slippery
aspects of his performance of the strange are not just aesthetic, but philosophical.
They are not intended to frustrate and swindle the reader, like a clever junk
seller touting turnips as fob-watches. Rather, they are intended to immerse the
reader in the impenetrable mysteries of existence, its contradictions entangled
within the petals of a rose as wide as a universe. But fiction’s mirror is
always a cheap antique made of burnished copper, stained and scarred, as
cracked as its creator. Aickman nonetheless endeavors to give us a glimpse, and
his Kunstkammer is both universal and unconscious. In a way, the absent
Chrysothème represents the true meaning behind “Ravissante”, a view of
Aickman's reality that will always present more mysteries. She is distant,
untouchable, and intoxicating, and all the more so because we know that we can
never see her naked.
Works Cited
Aickman, Robert. Night Voices. Leyburn: Tartarus Press,
2013.
Aickman, Robert. Painted Devils: Strange Stories. New
York: Scribner’s, 1979.
Beckett, Samuel. More Pricks than Kicks. New York: Grove
Press, 1970.
Calvino, Italo. Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1997.
Challinor, Philip. Akin to Poetry: Observations on Some Strange
Tales of Robert Aickman. Baton Rouge, LA: Gothic Press, 2010.
Lamb, Hugh. The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard
Capes. Wellingborough: Equation, 1989.
Moore, Alan. Alan Moore Interview Part 1. Northhampton
College, 26 February 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCPZdLgOXUY.
Wamberg, Jacob. Art and Alchemy. Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum Press, 2006.
