Supernatural Horror: Authors and Themes
INTERPENETRATIONS:
Boundary
imagery in the works of Arthur Machen
1
This essay has ended up being a series of reflections and observations on what seems to be an important preoccupation in the work of Arthur Machen: boundaries. For the context of this article the definition of 'work' is Machen's fiction -- by no means the majority of his literary output. (I regret that here I have not been able to make real use of his autobiographical volumes Far Off Things (1922) and Things Near and Far (1923). I remember that when I first read them in 1982 that there were situations and impressions that reappear in his fiction.)
Perhaps the rather disjointed and provisional nature of this article is not inappropriate when considering the work of Arthur Machen. By sheer indomitable will he imposed order on life as he saw and lived it, and sought and showed hints of what he perceived as lying behind its commonplaces and confusions.
The theme of 'boundaries' is central to Machen's work because of this. Boundaries are where chaos and order meet, the ragged edge of reality and illusion (or 'true reality' perhaps) where lives are touched, and perspectives opened to change.
This is Arthur Machen's lasting contribution to literature.
2
Boundaries are where the action is -- both in deed and thought. They express tensions where they count: coexistence, whether easy or not, mutual enrichment, or domination and possible destruction.
The life and work of Arthur Machen shows this. Boundaries exist between states of life, and environments. They also exist between false antitheses, and unreconciled and irreconcilable contradictions.
Machen was born and brought up in rural Gwent, and lived and worked for most of his life in London. He spent his last years in the compromise of Old Amersham, with its surrounding Buckinghamshire countryside, and yet its close proximity to the suburban Metroland of Amersham-on-the-Hill.
3
These differences in background are resolved (or come to terms with) to some extent by Machen's technique of heightening the colour and deepening the shadows of his story settings. He does not have just a simple idea that the rural is good, and the urban bad. Thus rural Wales in Machen's work is often a place of darkness and barely-concealed horror, while London can be a place of charm and glory.
Perhaps, after all, I was wrong to speak of the peace of the country. There, when a tragedy does occur, it is like a stone thrown into a pond; the circles of disturbance keep on widening, and it seems as if the water would never be still again. (1)
And:
...London in September is hard to leave. Doré could not have designed anything more wonderful and mystic than Oxford Street as I saw it the other evening; in the sunset flaming, the blue haze transmuting the plain street into a road ‘far in the spiritual City’. (2)
Machen's work straddles a boundary, or a 'twilight zone' between two more standard and usual ways of seeing and experiencing places.
By design Lucian tried to make for remote and desolate places, and yet when he had succeeded in touching on the open country, and knew that the icy shadow hovering through the mist was a field, he longed for some sound and murmur of life, and turned again to roads where pale lamps were glimmering... (3)
4
As Machen's life seemed to be connected with the idea of boundaries, so this showed in his work. Boundaries are where things happen. In Machen's stories, significant events occur on or near boundaries.
During Machen's lifetime, urbanization as a phenomenon was particularly strong and noticeable. As far as London (as well as most other towns) was concerned, Machen lived through the time of its greatest urban expansion, from the growth of the late 19th Century, through to the tremendous explosion of urban sprawl after the First World War. This led to the swamping of Middlesex and large areas of other surrounding counties. But it was the Victorian expansion of London, especially in the 1880s and 1890s that form the background to so much of Machen's work.
In a confused vision I stumbled on, through roads half town half country, grey fields melting in to the cloudy world of mist on one side of me, and on the other comfortable villas with a glow of firelight flickering on the walls, but all unreal... (4)
This example shows a recurring feature in Machen's work: the place where town and country meet, the interface of a jagged mess of new streets, brickfields, and ravaged fields, the setting for adventures stranger than can be imagined.
About five minutes
later two gentlemen, whom idleness had led to explore these forgotten outskirts
of London, came sauntering up the shadowy carriage-drive. They had spied
the deserted house from the road...
“Phillipps,“
replied the elder... “I yield to fantasy; I cannot withstand the influence
of the grotesque... I cannot remain commonplace. I look at that deep glow
on the panes, and the house lies all enchanted; that very room, I tell you,
is within all blood and fire.” (5)
The house seems to stand as a stable remnant of the past -- pleasant to look at, apparently serene -- but even the house is not what it might seem. The house itself occupies a boundary and is a boundary. It is where past and present meet, and where the future decays into the present and then past. The unmoving house can be seen as enclosing this boundary, and containing within it its own decay as it moves, constantly in transition, from future to past. The house, apparently serene then, is a trap, in reality the setting for strange and terrible happenings.
Suburban London, on the boundary, was above all things for Machen the place where he could not remain commonplace. To be commonplace was anathema to him. Better the darkness or the glory -- or both, of both urban and rural places, or their combination, as in the suburbs.
5
The boundary areas are places of seeking and finding and seeking that which should not be sought, and escaping that which should not have been found.
“Well,” he said at last, “and what was it, after all, that you rescued from the gutter?”...
“It is all the more strange than I fancied," he said at last... a veil seems drawn aside, and the very fume of the pit steams up through the flagstones, the ground glows, red hot... I see the plot thicken; our steps will henceforth be dogged with mystery, and the most ordinary incidents will teem with significance.” (6)
This seeking yet escaping is another feature of Machen's work. He loved and revered his native rural Wales all of his life: yet he never lived there again after he had left it. His work is largely set in the countryside, yet Machen is as much an urban writer as a rural one. The city is seen as a bright place of challenge to someone from the country. The country is seen as an idyllic place of retreat and escape. In Machen's work, neither is quite the case:
All London was one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones circled about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every initiation eternal loss. (7)
“Yes,” he said, “it
is a strangely beautiful country; and, to me, at least, it seems full of
mystery.” (8)
6
Machen seems to have constantly tried, because of, and/or despite himself, to hold his rural and urban sympathies in tension. To say that it was a creative tension would be an understatement. Perhaps it was the product of an alienation, or a seeking for something that never quite existed in Machen's life. He loved the rural past, but it could be dull. The urban present was lively, and Machen celebrated that in Ws work, but there was still the ever-present danger that London could swallow someone and leave them not quite human:
I can't conceive a greater loneliness in a desert at midnight than there is there at midday. It is like a city of the dead; the streets are glaring and desolate, and as you pass it suddenly strikes you that this too is a part of London. (9)
7
Perhaps the only way to resolve and transcend this was in the idea of interpenetration or perichoresis. Machen's work abounds in ideas of unseen worlds pressing in on ours -- usually in the most unexpected and unlikely places, such as 'ordinary' London suburbs, often with the most dire results.
Old houses and roads in the suburban transition zones between town and country are boundaries between the worlds. This also ties in with Machen's apparent belief in a Platonic view of the universe: that the 'real' world as seen and experienced is in fact only the shadow of an invisible and unknowable true reality. Machen also worked with the ideas of other dimensions of reality sometimes interpenetrating with our own, and being perceived rarely by a few people.
It is in the late story 'N' (1935) that the idea of interpenetration and perichoresis is most strikingly developed. (Perichoresis in Greek literally means the area or space around about: in this case perhaps the boundary between the worlds, between reality and illusion, or two orders of both.)
Some
have declared that it lies within our own choice to gaze continually upon
a world of equal or even greater wonder and beauty...
“Now,”
said he, “look out and tell me what you see.”
Still
bewildered, I looked through the window, and saw exactly that which I had
expected to see: a row or terrace of neatly designed residences...
“Look
again.”
I did so. For a moment, my
heart stood still, and I gasped for breath. Before me, in place of
the familiar structures, there was disclosed a panorama of unearthly, of
astounding beauty....
“I believe that there
is a perichoresis, an interpenetration. It is possible, indeed, that we
three are now sitting among desolate rocks, by bitter streams.
“And
with what companions?” (10)
8
Machen had only one main plot in his fiction, that of ‘rending the veil’ (11). Whether or not there is any reality in anything beyond any veil, the search and possible experience gives a meaning to life, and is the greatest prize to be gained:
...we stand amidst sacraments and mysteries full of awe, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Life, believe me, is no simple thing... (12)
A finding and a losing of ecstasy: its search. In Machen’s Hieroglyphics (1902), in an old house in Barnsbury, then on the boundary of north London, lived a memorable character:
...he had left the world and gone to Barnsbury, an almost mythical region lying between Pentonville and the Caledonian Road... I recall the presence of that hollow, echoing room ...and the tone of voice speaking to me, and I believe that once or twice we both saw visions, and some glimpses at least of certain eternal, ineffable Shapes. (13)
Machen sought ecstasy, that ekstasis, being 'put out of place' which brings the boundary experience home at the deepest level, and makes the world and life within it into a place of darkness and glory, coexisting. The old man of Hieroglyphics was Machen exploring the roots of ecstasy, and using it to define true literature, defining another kind of boundary.
In the final analysis, Machen's best work, his fiction of boundaries, seeks to communicate, to embrace and enhance ecstasy.
NOTES
1. 'The Shining Pyramid', in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural Vol 1, Panther ed., 1975, p 140
2. Ibid
3. The Hill of Dreams, Corgi ed., 1967, p 109
4. The Three Impostors, Everyman ed., 1995, p 47
5. Ibid, p 5
6. Ibid, pp 11-12
7. The Hill of Dreams, p 116
8. The Three Impostors, p 55
9. 'The Inmost Light', in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural Vol 1, pp 110-111
10. 'N', in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural Vol 2, p 142
11. Joseph Wood Krutch, quoted by Wesley D Sweetser in Arthur Machen, Twayne, 1964, p 78
12. The Three Impostors, pp 50-51
13. Hieroglyphics,
Secker, 1926, pp 5, 8. See also my examination of Hieroglyphics,
"The
Secret and the Secrets"
A slightly different version of this article was first published in Machenalia, Vol II, edited by Ray Russell (1990)
Copyright (c) 2002 John Howard