Beyond the Human Compass - The Curiosity Cabinet of "Ravissante"

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.