R. P. Fox
Although loosely
categorised under “Horror” (presumably so that bookshop attendants might know
where to shelve him), Robert Aickman's stories are for the most part unbound by
genre. Instead of wheeling out well-worn horror tropes or standard ghost story
fare, Aickman instead experiments with psychological hauntings – subconscious,
murmuring tales, rooted in traumas, that tend to manifest first in the mind,
before feeling their way out into the wider world. An Aickman protagonist
frequently becomes psychologically affected by the events described, and such
experiences often instigate a form of equally estranged empathy in the reader.
“Pages From a Young Girl's Journal”, although ostensibly adhering to Aickman's
signature adumbration of a psychologically-complex narrator threatened by a
malevolent force, represents something of a stylistic departure. As its prosaic
title claims, “Pages” embodies an artefact – an epistolary diary. It is also
Aickman's sole literary acknowledgement of vampires (though the term itself
never appears within the story). The resultant narrative is completely
authentic in shape but, through a calculated deviation, begins to alienate the
reader, as it moves from the innocence of the mundane to the incoherence of
horror.
The fictional document, of
which the epistolary novel is arguably the most rehashed form, has of course
been a particularly popular stylistic vehicle for supernatural tales. Edgar
Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and, of course, Bram Stoker, routinely produced
texts shaped as first-hand “accounts” of supernatural events, chronicled with
exacting detail. Dracula, whilst
inhabiting an intricate bricolage of several document formats (including
professional journals, medical reports, personal diaries, newspaper clippings
and a ship's log), is ultimately a consummately Gothic text, where consistently
rich, sensual description causes the fragmented projection of its myriad
pseudo-documents to seem of secondary concern. Through Dracula the reader comes to understand the maddening horror of how
the vampire passes on his legacy, through the systematic seduction and vampiric
conversion of his victims. The description of events is often chilling, of
course, but also a trifle anatomical. Little is, in actual fact, left to the
imagination. In a similar capacity H. P. Lovecraft's short tale, “Dagon”,
whilst elaborately presenting the mythology of some ancient horror, is
pointedly scholarly in its description of an imminent threat. Despite the
narrator’s claims to be “writing this under an appreciable mental strain,” at
the end of the story he still finds time to comment on a noise at the door, a
sound “as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it.” (9)
In contrast, through
“Pages” readers ultimately find themselves drawn personally closer to the
effects of the horror. The supernatural begins to utilise the medium itself,
perpetuating its own narrative through the journal entries via its victim,
allowing for a brief, private glimpse of its horrific intentions, before
shutting the door of comprehension completely.
Gothic fiction allowed the
madness of reporting to become the poetics of reporting. A potentially
objective narrative form is literary rather than realistic. “Pages” can be read
as a commentary on the fallibility of exchanging one absolute for another – the
poetics of madness of the Gothic era, for the earnest self-consciousness of
Modernism and beyond. In one capacity, Aickman’s tale is a satire of the
perpetuated mythology surrounding nineteenth-century Gothic literary hierarchy.
Through a formal domestication of the vampire via the mimetic authenticity of a
teenage girl's journal, “Pages” harnesses the supernatural using the technique
of the personal narrative, rather than the distancing abstraction often driving
a third-person narrative. In another capacity, “Pages” is a commentary on
twentieth-century literary preoccupation with what Robert Scholes coins the
“monstrous personal chronicle,” (109) and the fallibility of assumed
authenticity. When highlighting the abundance of personal journals routinely
published between the World Wars and beyond (chiefly, but not exclusively by
the Modernists), Scholes describes the narrative of many as constituting
“formal monstrosity,” (110) where the reader needs to expect a looseness of
structure, and a lack of narrative closure, in many circumstances. Regardless
of actual subject matter, during the initial entries of “Pages” the reader will
need to be prepared for any prosodic turbulence. Ellipses, unreliable
narration, assumption and other literary devices encourage schematic discourse.
By pooling together expectations of epistolary form, the reader should potentially
perceive character traits in the narrator, and identify narrative.
It is when the narrator
begins to report conflicting, seemingly inexplicable events, that schematic
coherence is challenged. During one entry, the narrator claims to have seen
“something unexpected” as she was “going upstairs to bed” one night. She
discovers the contessina (their host’s young daughter) being “hugged by a man,”
whom she assumes “could only have been one of the servants, though I was not
really able to tell.” (Aickman, 100) The contessina and the male figure are
reported as occupying “complete darkness,” and “never moved a muscle” as the
narrator approached. (101) Several entries later, the narrator reports engaging
with a male figure at a social event who appears “quite as if he had emerged
from between the faded tapestries that covered the wall or even from the
tapestries themselves.” (107) The narrator soon becomes infatuated with this
anonymous man, claiming that “everything he said (at least after that first
conventional compliment) spoke to something deep within me, and everything I
said in reply was what I really wanted to say.” (109) Yet, during the party,
and each subsequent time the figure is reported to appear, no other character
seems to acknowledge him. The narrator unconsciously attempts to rationalise
the figure's lack of presence around the others: “It occurred to me that he
might be bashful about showing himself in his full years by the bright lights
of the supper tables.” (110) His ability to return to the invisibility of
shadows is justified as being merely a form of social politeness.
Aickman's anonymous figure
would appear to occupy what Christine Berthin calls the “supernatural Real”
(36) within the Gothic. The vampire remains singular and unique, by giving no
reflection in a mirror and by having no earthly double. He is one of a kind.
Therefore, because Aickman's potentially supernatural figure is acknowledged
solely by the narrator, he remains “Real”.
Any rationalisations
attempted by the narrator soon shift towards purer encapsulations of the
figure's supernatural state. By night the figure regularly visits her private
chambers, and these trysts are recounted in the entries that follow. The
encounters apparently begin to have an intoxicating effect on the narrator, who
consciously exclaims that: “As well as being torn by emotion, I am worn to a
silken thread.” (Aickman, 114) Unspoken vampiric themes – a vulnerable female
preyed upon, seduced by, and gradually “sapped of life” by a mesmeric predator –
are brought to the foreground.
Even the narrator’s
descriptions progressively edge further toward the Gothic. Her metamorphosis
towards vampirism is at first represented corporeally. When the narrator's
mother pricks her finger during needle-work, the narrator pounces and sucks the
finger ravenously, later reporting how “the strangest part was that it tasted
delightful; almost like an exceptionally delicious sweetmeat!” (116)
The transition from the
humanity of accepted belief, to the inhumanity of blasphemy, brings to the fore
the psychological effects too. The narrator is shocked by her own “positively irreverent thoughts.” (117) She finds
herself “wondering how efficacious God's Word could be for Salvation when
droned and stumbled over by a mere uncanonised layman such as Papa." (118)
The narrator's increasingly abstract thinking also begins to exemplify
traditionally Gothic imagery, with themes of blood, nocturnal activity, and
sexual undertones: “The old moon is drenching my sheets and my night-gown in
brightest crimson. In Italy, the moon is always full and always so red. Oh,
when next shall I see my friend, my paragon, my genius!” (121)
Although Aickman clearly
adopts recognisable physical tropes, the intention is to frame psychological
transformation. The features of the “real world” appear to remain mimetically
authentic and, in fact, satirise the classical Gothic “writing of excess,” as
Fred Botting puts it (Punter, 283). Throughout previous entries the narrator
professes admiration for (and adoration of) Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, whom
she understands are currently living in a nearby property. She longs to meet
them, wishing privately that they too had been invited to social events that
she attends. Yet, when the narrator unexpectedly encounters both men out riding
one afternoon, her reports are more anatomical than poetic: “I fear that my
main impression was of both giaours
looking considerably older than I had expected and Lord Byron considerably more
corpulent (as well as being quite grey-headed, though I believe only at the
start of his life's fourth decade). Mr Shelley was remarkably untidy in his
dress and Lord Byron most comical.” (Aickman, 120)
Such caricatures subvert
not only the expectation of idolatry, but also the ever-pervasive draw of
eighteenth-century Gothic literature itself, especially when reliant on its own
cosmetic tropes. Through their underwhelming corporeality, Aickman exposes the
folly of mythologising literary figures, framing their works in such a way as
to reveal their hitherto unspoken, human limitations. In this way, Aickman's
appropriation of Gothic tropes re-frames the Gothic, creating something
opposite to historical interpretation. Instead of reconstituting the semantics
of vampirism in order to write a traditional horror story and, rather than
utilising the appropriate registers of the fictional document for a solely
journal-shaped narrative, Aickman interlaces effects of both genres to create a
new, singular kind of narrative.
In the final entries, the
formerly gradual narrative disintegration grows ever more swift. The reader’s
empathy towards the narrator lessens as she explicitly differentiates between
the familiar narrative of the corporeal world and the unsettling narrative of
her seducer’s nocturnal realm. Although written as a personal journal, the
final few entries feel censoriously private, as the narrative recedes further
from reality. She begins to find less reason to write, claiming, after three
days without an entry, that there was “nothing to relate but him, and of him
nothing that can be related.” (127) The fragmentation of time during these
final entries emphasises, and distorts, the space between - as Todorov
identifies it - the Erzählzeit (time
of narration), and the Erzählzeit Zeit
(time of narrated action) (123). Although the events are written down in
present-tense at this stage, it is impossible to determine the immediacy of the
reporting. The text, therefore, exists in temporal limbo, where it is relative
to innumerable moments, yet none can definitely be accounted for or
contextualised as a particular moment in time.
Ultimately, “Pages”
becomes an uncanny text due to the same fragmentation and layering of space and
time which gave it a sense of authenticity in the first place. As the narrator's
humanity diminishes, so does our ability to relate to her and the events that
she plays a part in. She begins to adopt an atavistic point of view, commenting
of the wolves, which now encircle the grounds below her balcony at night, as
being “prominent among my new people. My blood will be theirs, and theirs
mine.” (130) According to Jules Zanger, an important effect of diminishing “the
role of the human” in vampire fiction is that “the sympathies of the reader or
viewer no longer have a human locus to which they can attach themselves, no
human character with whom to identify.” (Gordon & Hollinger, 21) In the
final entry of “Pages”, the narrator is alone, seemingly abandoned by the other
characters, but content with her solitary state. She becomes a spectre,
effectively haunting her own narrative. The text abruptly ends in a
long-abandoned property, as destitute as the narrator herself: “Somehow I have
found my way back to bed. It has become exceedingly cold, almost icy. For some
reason I think of all the empty rooms in this battered old palazzo (as I am
sure it once was), so fallen from their former stateliness. I doubt if I shall
write any more. I do not think I shall have any more to say.” (130)
This final entry
emphasises the narrator's spectral doubling. The transformed narrator uses the
conduit of the original narrator one last time, and finds it wanting. She has
fully entered the realm of the Supernatural Real, which cannot be represented
through traditional narrative. “To speak the Real,” claims Berthin once again,
“is to avoid the Real by turning its unrepresentability into an image, a
concept or an approximation.” (36) In the final sentence, the concept of the
reader as voyeur is brought into focus. We witness the very moment the narrator
abandons the narrative and, as a consequence, are left exposed, desiring some
form of explanation or continuation. Here, Aickman indicates not only
discursive limitations of that most “human” of forms of documentation, but also
the limitations of human comprehension regarding the absolutely alien.
Steven J. Mariconda
describes Aickman's approach to horror as “free-floating.” (Joshi, 293) It can
apparently have no locus. In “Pages From a Young Girl's Journal” Aickman
highlights the free-floating reality of comprehension. The well-worn tropes of
the literary Gothic, and the modern literary journal, can create something that
is, ultimately, more myth than reality. Idolatrous and unreasonable
expectations inevitably breed disappointment when the actuality of something is
revealed. Yet, used outside of eighteenth-century literary methods, and
narrated with contemporary psychological authenticity, the use of the literary
vampire “at the end of an unprecedented secular century,” (Joshi, 240) (as
Aickman himself deemed it) can achieve a much more intimate effect. This is
made possible through the simulated realism of the artefact and, in so doing,
exposes “the void behind the face of order.” (Gordon & Hollinger, 3)
Works
Cited
Aickman, Robert. Cold Hand in Mine. Leyburn: Tartarus
Press, 2011.
Berthin, Christine. Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and
Textual Ghosts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Gordon, Joan &
Veronica Hollinger, (ed.). Blood Read:
The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Joshi, S. T. (ed). Icons of Horror and The Supernatural: An
Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares Vol. I & II. London: Greenwood
Press, 2007.
Lovecraft, H. P. Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P.
Lovecraft. Ed. Stephen Jones. London: Gollancz, 2008.
Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in
Late-Twentieth-Century Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press,
2011.
Miller, J. Hillis. Reading Narrative. Oklahoma: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
Punter, David (ed.). A Companion to The Gothic. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001.
Scholes, Robert. The Crafty Reader. London: Yale
University Press, 2001.
Smith, Andrew. The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural
History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a
Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Cornell University Press,
2008.
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