38. Edgar Allan Poe - 'Hop-Frog' (1849)

http://watchinghorrorfilmsfrombehindthecouch.blogspot.com/2009/01/masque-of-red-death.html

'Poor fellow! his large eyes gleamed, rather than shone; for the effect of wine on his excitable brain was not more powerful than instantaneous. He placed the goblet nervously on the table, and looked round upon the company with a half-insane stare. They all seemed highly amused at the success of the king's "joke".'
(Edgar Allan Poe, 'Hop-Frog', The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin, 1982, p.504)

Edgar Allan Poe has been a favourite of mine for some years; perhaps ever since I saw the excellent Roger Corman film from 1964, Masque of the Red Death, which combined that story with elements of 'Hop-Frog', creating a richly Gothic tapestry that bore quite an Ingmar Bergman influence. In 2004, I read the marvel that is 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and, more recently, deft exercises in morbidity such as 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar'.

After seeing Corman's film, I decided to read the short-story as part of my English Speaking Board examination - conducted at the end of my first year of Sixth Form College. It should be noted that I was in the last cohort of students to simply do 'A' Levels over two years, before the Advanced Subsidiary (A.S.) came in. One had to chair a debate on a topical issue, do a reading from a work of fiction, poetry etc. and do a short presentation on any topic of interest. At the time, I found the whole thing very difficult, but nevertheless could recognise that it was worth doing; presentation making and public speaking is an area I am now rather well versed in, but then was out of my depth. This forcible projection got me started, inadvertently perhaps leading to where I am today, lecturing after a fashion, engaging an audience of students on topics such as aesthetics, religion / science and changes in modern society. I am also seemingly in demand as a moment's-notice MC at friends' weddings, in lieu of anyone else, although mercifully am one who sticks to the bare essentials of that duty!

The sound of one's own voice; something you have to be comfortable with in many spheres - acting, politics, teaching and foolery. The eponymous Hop-Frog, is, as required by court jesters, silver tongued in his ability to provoke amusement with his jesting. As in Lear, where the Fool imparts sometimes harsh truths with the impugnity accorded by his position and attire, 'Hop-Frog''s titular protagonist lambasts and ribs royalty - but safely, within the confines of a 'game'.

Poe takes this scenario and portrays the nobility going too far, and the jokes becoming less 'safe' as a result and instead leading to a deliciously macabre denounement. There is the eeriness of sounds in Poe's description, conveying a subtle link to Beckett's Embers: 'There was a dead silence for about half a minute, during which the falling of a leaf, or of a feather, might have been heard. It was interrupted by a low, but harsh and protracted grating sound which seemed to come from every corner of the room.' (p.505) Horror - the myserious and unexplainable - seems to reside in this recurring (see p.508), bodiless noise.

This uncanny sound must - though seems not to - emanate from the dwarf Hop-Frog; it goes beyond his corporeal being: ' "The sound appeared to come from without," observed one of the courtiers. "I fancy it was the parrot at the window, whetting his bill upon his cage-wires.' '

I shall not go into the precise manner of the jester's revenge, other than to say that it revolves upon a masquerade - a role's reverse, which shows up the evil and corrupt as they really are. Hop-Frog assumes the role of master of a righteously macabre ceremony; Poe's use of italics indicate the shrill emphasis in this ritual performer's performance, shattering the institutions that bound and abused him:

"I now see distinctly," he said, "what manner of people these maskers are." (p.509)

In the end, the opening sentences reveal themselves astypically sardonic: 'I never knew any one so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking.'

9/10

31. Joyce Carol Oates - 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' (1966)

'The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.'

http://jco.usfca.edu/works/wgoing/text.html

From Gilbert's study in impressionism to a pop art projection here. Apparently inspired by 'It's All Over Know, Baby Blue' (1965) and dedicated 'For Bob Dylan', this won a US short-story prize in its following year. It might be compared with the Allingham I covered last week, a somewhat younger woman in more ambiguous, yet possibly more frightening jeopardy.

The allure of the highway, the American way to... where? Here, there is not infinite promise, but a distinct threat attached to the going away. Connie, a fairly average fifteen year-old, thinks herself in control of a rather aimlessly itinerant (within set perameters) life - much idealised at the time and since. Enjoying casual teenage liaisons and yet clinging on within the home environment. The social side of her life - the going out with boys and girl-friends - is 'this one good thing' for her, which comes to haunt her. This story subverts all of this, with the ironically named Arnold Friend invading home territory, with parents and family away. There is a slight premonition of Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) in the collision of worlds: picket-fenced normality and alluring, yet possibly deadly, low-life.

Connie's personality is still forming, with its vague dreams embodied by pop music of the time:

'She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the house—it was summer vacation—getting in her mother s way and thinking, dreaming about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July.'

She is listening to the radio when Arnold Friend and Ellie pull up at her house; Friend has been at the restaurant where Connie was previously enjoying a date - saying 'Gonna get you, baby'. His attire and bearing is similar to all but he does not quite fit, somehow:

'She stared at Arnold Friend. He stood there so stiffly relaxed, pretending to be relaxed, with one hand idly on the door handle as if he were keeping himself up that way and had no intention of ever moving again. She recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even that slippery friendly smile of his, that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn't want to put into words. She recognized all this and also the singsong way he talked, slightly mocking, kidding, but serious and a little melancholy, and she recognized the way he tapped one fist against the other in homage to the perpetual music behind him. But all these things did not come together.'

A chameleon, a chancer, a charmer, Friend appropriately assumes the voice of the radio DJ; a man of thirty living a charade, dressing as and claiming to be a teenager. Oates' descriptions mark him out almost as a Lynchian devil:

'Then he began to smile again. She watched this smile come, awkward as if he were smiling from inside a mask. His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down to his throat but then running out as if he had plastered make-up on his face but had forgotten about his throat.'

This story expresses the all-American macabre, the flipside of youth freedom and pop cultural tropes; the sense that you can go up to anyone and ask 'do you fancy a ride?' I should mention Oates' facility with ratcheting up the tension; this is at times a gut-wrenching read, evoking the end of a sort of innocence. It is notably ambivalent about Connie; she is discernibly no angel, but clearly not deserving of this bullying, disturbing Friendly attention.

8/10

25. Herman Melville - 'The Lightning-Rod Man' (1854)

"Heart-of-oak. From the peculiar time of your call upon me, I suppose you purposely select stormy weather for your journeys. When the thunder is roaring, you deem it an hour peculiarly favourable for producing impressions favourable to your trade."

(Herman Melville, The Complete Shorter Fiction, Everyman's Library, p.130)

This story takes us back to Tynemouth, as the aforementioned volume was acquired there, whilst retaining Ballardian interest - Moby-Dick was cited by JGB as one of his top ten novels. It also takes us much further back than any other tale so far, and across the 'pond', it being a staggeringly American work, despite being instantly set in the Acroceraunian hills, Albania - and it is worth considering where it accords and differs from current U.S. values.

It treads intriguingly between the melodramatic and the allegorical, perhaps showing that their closeness. Melville's style is well poised between the portentous and the dryly amusing; at times one does not quite know how to take this. In an uncanny pre-echo of the Richard Hughes story discussed a few days ago, there is a stranger who enters a house dripping wet, in the midst of a storm. In contrast to the two fugitives in a contingent setting, here we have a strange, unctuous chap intruding within an unnamed gentleman's abode - going so far as to admonish him!

Rather than being 'Jupiter Tonans' - a metaphor for the thunderous weather - as the householder calls him, this chap claims to be able to guard against the effects of the storm, through offering him a lightning-rod - for money. Melville shows acquaintance with the tactics of capitalism; the constant hyperbole deployed to make the case that he needs this product of science. If indeed it is a product of science... Indeed, 'Tonans' develops some odd, presumably spurious hypotheses not backed up by evidence: "Are you so grossly ignorant as not to know that the height of a six-footer is sufficient to discharge an electric cloud upon him?" (p.132)

The salesman's sense of drama would befit an Irving interpretation in theatrical melodrama - there is a sense of the exaggerated tumult of weather mirroring pyschology present in stagings of Leopold Lewis's The Bells (1871), including of course Irving's most revived role, Mathias, the Burgomaster: "I can make a Gibraltar by a few waves of this wand. Hark, what Himmalayas of concussions!" (p.128) False promises, false dawns, as always offered by Kapital? His wares are never truly tested but the implication is strongly that he is fraudulent in his dealings: "Only one dollar a foot." (p.129)

He constantly shouts "Hark!" during his jerky, distracted speech, marked by Melville with extensive use of hyphens: "Only twenty dollars, dir - a dollar a foot. Hark! - Dreadful! - Will you order? Will you buy? Shall I put down your name? Think of being a heap of charred offal". (p.132) The salesman's tactics are ultimately seen through by the formerly ambiguous householder, who turns out to have the strength of his convictions, being able to cast this charlatan out of his house - almost a Jesus throwing the traders out of the temple moment, with his breaking of the rod: 'I seized it; I snapped it; I dashed it; I trod it'. (p.133) This follows the manipulative trader's descent into violence, following the householder's verbal repudiation and refusal to buy: 'He sprang upon me; his tri-forked thing at my heart'. (p.133) This is a wonderfully melodramatic moment, matching what was on the English stage at the time in its dramatisizing of wrongs being righted; virtue triumphing over evil. The wrongdoer being punished without any compunction, and the comeuppance is depicted in vivid, visual terms.

Melville subverts and problematizes this moral certainty with his last sentence: 'But spite of my treatment, and spite of my dissuasive talk of him to my neighbors, the Lightning-rod man still dwells in the land; still travels in storm-time, and drives a brave trade with the fears of man.' (p.133) Thus, he avoids glibness and homilies; the moral point might stand in the strict confines of the main action, but Melville indicates things may not be so simple in wider society.

I am aware of interpretations that stress a science v. religion theme; there could be something to that, but I would as much emphasise the anti-consumerism. Rugged Individualism, so crucial a theme in American culture and identity, rears its head too. Whilst the allegorical characters are not particularised, the householder stands as an embodiment of individual self-sufficiency, with faith in god and the sanctity of his home. For good or ill - and the ill tends to predominate, economically, at least - these values have defined America; Obama may mark a turn towards greater collectivism, that remains to be seen. The householder certainly represents the male prospector, taking on the mantle of hardy masculinity: 'And why don't he, man-fashion, use the knocker, instead of making that doleful undertaker's clatter with his fist against the hollow panel?' (p.127) Melville is almost in the DH Lawrence position of not backing the standard political or philosophical horses; this is not simply pigeonholed as a right-wing John Wayne Western, as pro-capitalist or pro-collectivist, but simply pro-individualist in a more abstract sense, ballasted by Christianity. If I knew more about U.S. history of the time, I could probably explain more clearly some of the issues he is responding to. One certainly does imagine, however, the horror-struck invective which he would use to depict the ungainly hybrid of Christianity and commerce in the Union of George W. Bush...

In conclusion, a peculiar tale, a fascinating read; about time I read such a distinctive, vivid writer - not afraid of a bit of the old blood and, indeed, thunder coarsing through the veins.

8/10

6. Robert E. Howard - 'The Phoenix of the Sword' (1932)

'But this one is a different,

He knows the pinches of an older hunger,

A greater storm than yours

In his heart rages'

(Jake Thackray, 'The Rain on the Mountainside', 1976)

'the lack of any clear political direction - and who could expect that? - prevents the ballad-outlaw from being a revolutionary; he remains simply a champion of insubordination, and that is already much.'

(A.L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England, Panther Arts, 1967, p.150)

'[...] to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in the formless chaos that was growing about him and engulfing all life and sanity.' (Robert E. Howard, The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition, Gollancz, 2006, p.40)

As his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft states in the inner cover of the leatherbound hardback edition, Howard's stories are 'pure adventure yarns with a touch of weirdness'. This proves to be an intriguing combination, with Howard creating an engaging, semi-Dark Ages world, based around a Europe from time immemorial, establishing political intrigues and rival power centres - and injecting moments of much more inexplicable oddity. Where Atwood's elderly protagonist mirrors nature in his decay, Howard's Conan is instead akin to nature as life-force: 'He seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands.' (p.27) He uncomfortable dealing with 'statecraft'.

There is an interesting reflection upon Conan being at ease battling to gain power, but being almost at a loss now that he has it, installed as King of Aquilonia; a theme that resonates with many leaders past and present in our reality. Conan is not cut out for the machinations and subtleties that go with wielding power, and is an easy target for enemy plotters, as the story relates; for example, the dissident minstrel, Rinaldo in 'jester's garb'. This motleyed japester may not be any different from Conan in being an idealist who dislikes the compromises of the present: 'Poets always hate those in power [...] They escape the present in dreams of the past and future.' (p.25) There is an astuteness also in how the dead King Namedides, defeated by Conan, hardly beloved during his actual reign, is now a rallying point for many on the fringes of Aquilonia.

The key passage which takes this tale into the realms of the Weird is on p.39 where, after the fairly prosaic dispatching of southern dissidents, Conan (and before him his rival Ascalante) is confronted by an unspeakable 'thing', a more physical manifestation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror - although it its form is flexible and hardly solid: 'he twisted his head about and stared into the face of Nightmare and lunacy. Upon him crouched a great black thing which he knew was born in no sane or human world.' This thing is beyond the bestial, and leaves a much more unsettling undercurrent behind at the end of the story than I was expecting.

Conan is strongly drawn as a formidable 'primordial', his great reserves and limitations drawn from his barbarian background. He comes from 'reaver' stock, clearly drawn from the northern border country, along whose borders there was 'continual war' - Howard clearly making some associations with the lawless Northumbrian border reivers, as depicted in the Border Ballads. (p.28)* There is a hint of the Viking and a British northern kind in these decriptions of the northmen: 'They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night.' Geographically, they are shaped: 'A gloomier land never was - all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys. / 'Little wonder men grow moody there'. (p.29)

'The Phoenix...' does not allow me to draw specific political links with 1932 , but, like a strong seventies Dr Who story (penned by Robert Holmes, say) the internal politics are concisely, entertainingly conceived and achieve a simplicity in their complexity, if such a thing can be envisaged. I cannot help but bring to mind Holmes's medieval robber baron Irongron (David Daker) and Bloodaxe (John J. Carney) from 1974's The Time Warrior - real blood and thunder types, melodramatic but played with real feeling and intensity. That sense is evoked by this story; some of the happenings and the descriptions ratchet things up to a nearly absurd level, but you are carried along by the conviction and verve of REH's style: 'The red ax lurched up and crashed down and a crimson caricature of a man catapulted back against the legs of the attackers.' (p.39)

There are no female characters who play any significant part in the Conan saga at this early stage; this story seems to share this gender imbalance with the M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft I have read - no sense of The New Woman, or indeed, women at all for the most part. It will be interesting to see how further tales in this lineage, from the nineteenth-century to the present-day project women. One certainly imagines the New Wave (Moorcock, Le Guin etc.) of Science Fiction will redress this.

Notwithstanding this, 'The Phoenix of the Sword' is a pleasing mix of what was old and new; from archaism - 'quoth Prospero' indeed - and Border Ballads to the Lovecraftian abyss, befitting its inclusion in the pages of the pulp magazine, Weird Tales.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_ballads

8/10

4. Isaac Asimov - 'The Segregationist' (1967)

'The surgeon said stolidly, 'To me, it is a matter of the fitness of things.''
(Isaac Asimov, The Complete Robot, 1995, p.158)

There are of course parallels with racial segregation, restricted as it had been by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The distinction, in this science fiction tale, is between the human and the robot. This story was selected as episode 3 of the A Bite of Stars, A Slug of Time series on Resonance FM, the first series of which was focused on science fiction between 1935-65. It concerns a sixty year-old Senator who wishes to take on robotic features through an operation replacing his worn-out heart with a metallic one. Society more broadly is only sketched in; with robots, or 'Metallos', recently having been granted citizenship and thus gaining more cachet in the eyes of humanity. Whether the robot is a class or race metaphor is not necessarily important; Asimov leaves it up to the reader.

The twist in the tale is right at the end - that the surgeon turns out to be a robot himself. In itself, neatly worked up to, and on a second read (or listen, as I read it first myself and then played the ABOS broadcast on MP3) the knowledge allows one to pick up more of Asimov's playfulness with his Laws of Robotics.

There is thus an odd fierceness from this metallo who develops a thesis perceived as logical, that ends almost passionate: that humanity and robots should maintain their own unique identities and not develop as hybrids between the two. The human (?) MedEng (something of a mouthful of a character name!) sees the potential of hybridisation to be positive - the best elements of both could be combined - whereas the surgeon believes that such a creation would be nothing in itself, a fabrication without any of the good points of either.

Asimov's prose and narrative style is straightforward compared to the others I have read so far; it lacks that element of the macabre or absurd conjured at different times in the previous three stories. One is not thrown off-balance in quite the same way; the subtext is made plain in the story's nomenclature, and the twist is intended for gently comic as well as for philosophical effect. As a short-story it is not especially gripping, yet exerts a methodical pull in its empirical way. If Dahl could be characterised as a sardonic anarchist, Barthelme a media-cultural theorist channelling Kafka and HPL as a purveyor of the unutterable, then Asimov is by comparison a staunch rationalist. It is chiefly interesting for the way that Asimov suggest cracks in the facade of his Three Laws of Robotics; the metallic surgeon can be seen to be struggling with the ambiguities implicit in Law One: 'A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.'

7/10

2. Donald Barthelme - 'Me and Miss Mandible' (1964)

'How carelessly they stack the ammunition
In the magazines'

(Peter Hammill, 'Skinny', Clutch, 2002)

8 November

'Everything is promised my classmates and me, most of all the future. We accept the outrageous assurances without blinking'.

(Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2003, p.25)

Like the previous ASSAD entry, there is a theme of childhood, but here tackled in direct comparison to adulthood. A first-person diary format lends the narrative, which unfolds from 13 September to 9 December, an 'authentic' immediacy.

The 'card index' system and blinkered convention allows the bizarre spectacle of a thirty-five year old in a class of eleven year-olds at Horace Greeley Elementary to go unmentioned, until the climactic events. The central scenario has an incongruity and absurdity in common with Beckett or Kafka: 'I have finally found the nerve to petition for a larger desk. At recess I can hardly walk; my legs do not wish to uncoil themselves.' (p.25)

This chap is thurst into his 'new role', seemingly - though ambiguously - as a reassignment after a perceived failure in his previous job role; back to school, as a 'Gulliver'. (p.22) Problems in the adult world have their root in the schoolroom, he discovers: 'Napoleon plods through Russia in the droning voice of Harry Broan, reading aloud from our History text. All of the mysteries that perplexed me as an adult have their origins here.' (p.27) Childhood and adulthood are alike - 'the distinction [...] is at bottom a specious one.' (p.25) Although as an adult, or within the adult world one is subject to the 'whimsy of authority' - he appreciates the safety of having a place, even if the place is within a roll-call of numbers, like in The Prisoner.

Barthelme, like Dahl and the writers mentioned above, portrays bleakness in the arbitrary; of life and death, of adulthood switching back into childhood. Homilies do not hold; like in Dahl and so much good writing for children, the image of childhood is one of contingency and disorder - not the bland comfort pervasively etched in the media.

Give me the child and I will give you the man; words which resonated across the channel in Granada's 7 Up documentary, which premiered on May 5th of 1964. The children that the carefully depersonalised narrator (his name is rarely if ever given) encounters are products of a society that values products and the packaging of celebrity - as exemplified by the Movie-TV Secrets magazines that Sue Ann Brownly brandishes, in an effort to win his heart: 'she pulls from her satchel no less than seventeen of these magazines, thrusting them at me as if prove that anything any of her rivals has to offer, she can top.' (p.23)

One gets a sense of Mark Kermode's righteous railing against Heat magazine a month or more ago on BBC2's The Culture Show, in the narrator's disgust at the litany of headlines he transcribes: 'Who are these people, Debbie, Eddie, Liz, and how did they get themselves in such a terrible predicament?' Sue Ann knows, I am sure; it is obvious that she has been studying their history as a guide to what she may expect when she is suddenly freed from this drab, flat classroom.' (p.24) Celebrity Culture 2009 writ large; its miseducation of the public diagnosed.

Barthelme portrays our reliance on signifiers, of patterns of thought that would discern a prospective wife, for example, in signs like 'cooking, perfume'; we talk and relate to one another at cross-purposes, never truly connecting: as in Pinter, The Caretaker being an example.

It may be worth noting that this story was published in the year before Johnson's government passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act 1965 - one of many measures that comprised the Great Society programme, clearly the closest post-WW2 America came to socialism. This was designed to provide greater government funding for average American schools, providing more resources for those in the 'common run', as the diarist of 'Me and Miss Mandible' describes his fellows at Horace Greeley Elementary. The story certainly does not paint a glowing picture of the previous status quo, a haven of routine that the narrator wilfully sinks into. Until the rather droll resolution, which I won't spoil. Suffice to say that it baits the tabloid ideas and ideals of chasteness with a jack-knife.

8/10