“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a classic Poe story, and helps us define just what it means to be “gothic” in nineteenth-century literature. Conti“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a classic Poe story, and helps us define just what it means to be “gothic” in nineteenth-century literature. Continuous dark, stormy weather, a huge decaying gothic-architectural-style house, continuous pervasive gloom, humans infused with all this, possibly driven mad by it. But there is a reciprocal relationship between the house and the inhabitants; as the house decays to its "fall," so do its inhabitants. You live in the house, but the house lives in you, too!
Roderick Usher, pale and wild-haired owner of the house. Sick, maybe from the waters seeping from the tarn into the house? The fungi on the building? Is Roderick an opium eater? Living with his also pale and wild-haired wraith twin sister Madeline. Mental disorder, nervous agitation, mysterious house. Lead poisoning? (imposing a contemporary theory, here. . .). House, with tall ceilings, dimly lit, decayed and decaying, with a crack in the foundation.
Sonorous, formal language on the verge of the ridiculous: “cadaverousness," “pertinacity,” “phantasmagoric.” Language that matches the house, a little formal and brooding and stuffy.
“An excited and highly distempered ideality.” A romantic vision filled with dread, fear.
[“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.” –Barthes]
The pleasures of the text, satisfying or at least calling up desire: Aching, gloomy, seductive. Tacking between the laughter of desire and the tears of heartbreak, loss. Death and darkness as delicious pleasures. Goth!
[Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.—Barthes]
Rhapsodic painting and music. Presaged by Romantics Coleridge, Wordsworth, Liszt. An imagination intensified by anxiety. Decay. (Presaged themselves by Romeo, Macbeth, Hamlet?) The mad opium- or laudanum-stoned suicidally romantic artist. Looking ahead to Baudelaire, to the Beats, to beat daddy Kerouac! The romantic tradition of wild rhapsodic self-destruction.
“We painted and read together, or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar.”
“A small picture [made by Roderick] presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device.”
“He not infrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations.” [Hey! Flash forward to rap?! Spoken word!?]
The narrator and Usher seem to speak little, and alternately Usher lapses into melancholy, or wild incoherent, rhapsodic talking.
“Manic depression. . . ”—Jimi Hendrix
“A mere nervous affection, he [Roderick] immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off” (as Lady Macbeth claimed about Macbeth, who freaks out at the sight of Banquo’s ghost). The house is, as if it were, his very soul, weighing on him. In contemporary gothic tales, Sylvie and Ruth and Lucie in Housekeeping, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the gothic House is the Soul. And the House seen as a tomb: The Haunting of Hill House.
Or the house is to the human/family constitution as the body is to the mind/soul. When the mind breaks down in gothic tales, so does the body. The house crumbles as does the body.
So Madeline dies, put in a vault in the musty room below our narrator. In grief, agitation, driven to madness, Usher succumbs to “gazing upon vacancy for long hours.”
They write, they draw, they play music, but they also read books, too, to heal, or to further sink into the gloom: The literature of dread. Life echoes the story the narrator reads.
A knocking. What? Who’s there?! But she’s dead! Buried? Madeline buried alive?!
“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” [Shudder]
(As I teenager I saw a B Vincent Price movie, “Premature Burial,” at a drive-in, and I actually screamed from the Big Reveal: SHE WAS ALIVE! SHE WAS ALIVE! ALIVE!)
Wild storm, house cracks at the fissure we early learned about, collapses (no spoiler here, remember that title) into the tarn [a small mountain lake!]. Nature in all its voluptuousness takes the house back into itself. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
So, I like it. There’s too little dialogue in the story, which for me is a fault, but it has its moments. A classic gothic horror story.
Other castles: The Castle of Otranto by Walpole, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. The Ice Palace as gothic castle. Oh, any number of places in nineteenth-century lit: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Turn of the Screw. The Others (2001 film). But you can't talk about gothic castles without this one in the conversation....more
10/31/23: Happy Halloween, (which for horror fans in general or Shirley Jackson fans in particular is b2/27/24: Rereading for my Spring 2024 YAL class
10/31/23: Happy Halloween, (which for horror fans in general or Shirley Jackson fans in particular is basically every day of the year), in conjunction with my having just read The Shirley Jackson Project, a comics tribute collection edited by Robert Kirby.
10/7/21: Always a great read, with an amazing main character, though in this discussion we troubled the issue of her reliability as a narrator. Of course she is unreliable, in many respects, but can we trust her version of the story in any respect? I think we can. I also read an essay that contended that Constance and Mary Katherine are different aspects of Shirley Jackson's personality. I also read more about Jackson's psychopathology, her agoraphobia, her hatred of the working class townies from North Bennington where she and her husband lived, antipathies that make their way out in this novel and in "The Lottery."
9/17/18: Third read for my Fall 2018 YA course, and what has emerged as one of my favorite books of all time. This time I noticed all the food references more than ever.
“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.” “I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”
And loved the strange lyricism of Merricat's deft observations. Are Merricat and Constance really happy in their life in the castle, and should we just leave them alone with their choices of isolation, or are they cases of arrested development, of stasis, of the opposite of "coming-of-age" and maturation that we expect in a YA novel? You get to choose, I think. I'll say that, isnce ths is horror, that there is a sufficient case here that these women need just a leetle bit of help in the mental health arena.
9/12/17: I read this in March of this year for a course I was teaching and read it again for my fall YA course.
A memorable tale of gothic suspense by Jackson, the author of the much anthologized, exquisitely perverse short story, “The Lottery" (1948). Castle is Jackson’s last book, often described as her masterpiece, featuring two of the best sister acts in American literature, Constance and her sister Mary Katherine, or Merricat, who says things like this:
“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”
And, to her sister, Constance:
“Oh Constance, we are so happy.” Who often replies, "Silly, silly Merricat."
But truly un-merry Merricat also says things like this, about the people of the town:
“I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”
Six years ago, several of the Blackwood family were poisoned, from arsenic sprinkled with sugar on a bowl of blackberries. Constance, who was in the kitchen, was and still is widely suspected of the crime, of which Merricat simply says:
“Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.”
Merricat's distinctive narrator’s voice joins those of Scout and Holden Caufield as unforgettable teen main characters in American literature. At turns creepy, delightful, dark, with a touch of black humor, the book also features Constance, Merricat's caretaker sister, weirdly hilarious Uncle Julian, and greedy Cousin Charles who comes to live in the castle for a time. I was intrigued by the tension between the townies and the Blackwood family holed up in their dark gothic mansion. I loved the chilling moment of the Big Reveal, that dramatic horrific climax, but I also loved the strangely sweet conclusion, colored as always by Merricat’s strange witchy habits:
“All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.”
A masterpiece, revealing more riches at every reading....more
3/5/24: Rereading for Spring 24 YAL class; A queer gothic romance set in sunny California??! But don't worry, there is a kind of castle and an anguish3/5/24: Rereading for Spring 24 YAL class; A queer gothic romance set in sunny California??! But don't worry, there is a kind of castle and an anguished artist in it, for all the sunny skies. . . No one in the class didn't like this book and some people loved it. Two had read it in hgi school and liked it and reread it and loved it.
I read that Nelson is working on another novel.
Printz Award winner, 2015
9/29/21: A rereading with a YA class in Fall 2021. I really think most of the class loves it and we had a great discussion touching on topics such as the function of reading romance in the development of adolescent identity. It's way over-the-top, but so are teens and artists and love generally for some people. Fun stuff.
4/9/20: I read this in my spring Growing Up class that met yesterday via Zoom to talk about YA romances. I gave them several options and most did not read the same one, though a couple of us read this one, one of my favorite YA romances, and all of them said they liked their books and were more inclined to read romances than previously. They loved the page-turner/feelings aspects of it that is highlighted, and though most of us seem to prefer romances that deal with social issues, and this really does not, it was still way enjoyable. I say below that I like for the gothic elements in it, but I tend to agree with student JS in the class that we wish she had gone full-on gothic, that the ghosts would be unquestionably real, not in question, that it be even more irrational (vs. rational).
9/13/18: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination"—John Keats
Re-read for fall YA class with a focus on romance, the gothic, Chicago. This one has some gothic elements, though it is set in sunny California! My students mostly love it, and so I encouraged them to read Emily May's hilariously scathing review, which I love but disagree with, to see if they also agree the book sucks big time. I think I liked this book even more than I did the first two reads.
Revised review 3/29/17:
"Best to bet on all the horses"--Grandma
Precocious. Am I talking about Jandy Nelson? I dunno. Kinda! This is the first (of two) books I have read from her, both bearing similar emotionally intense and verbal tendencies, but her two central twin characters, Noah and Jude, are certainly ecstatic/precocious artist teens, one gay, one straight, who speak endlessly in metaphors, in lusty anti-Hemingway prose. All John Green characters speak like they are all smart and precocious and all speak (humorously, snarkily) like John Green, which at first is breathtaking and then, I say, too much, too Green? Too soon to say for me if this is too Nelson, because I've only read two of her books, and sometimes the talk from the brilliant privileged (SF) Bay Area kids drives me crazy, but after awhile, I was just won over by this story of twins who are connected, then not, then are, and of their hippie art critic mom and their scientist Dad, and Oscar the James Dean hunk, the on again/off again Jude loving Brian, all the rockstar suffering, Heathcliffish seething artist Guillermo Garcia and the ecstatic impulse and "split-aparts" that seem to need to take place in order for people to get together.
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”--John Keats
Oh, and it is young adult literature, so you have to consider the intended audience. Most of my teen and early twenties students love this book.
And there are ghosts, such as Grandma. And a parrot that only says "Where the hell is Ralph?" And aphorisms galore and good luck tokens and psychic convergence and people quoting great literature and "if you give an orange to someone you are going to fall in love with them" (that Jude-Oscar exchange is silly but still adorable to me). Everyone is into color, thinks in color, notices colors of eyes, and so on.
Jude has Raphael's cherubs tattooed on her belly. That's either cute or too precocious for 14, I can't quite decide, but I'm leaning to like if not love.
Noah imagines self portraits constantly for every situation. Funny, cute, too self-involved? Too much, after the 75th one? I can't quite decide, but I'm leaning to being pretty okay with it. Both of these kids are pretty adorable to me, finally. Oh, it's a romance among artists, it's all creativity and self-involvement. No one's trying to save the world here, but okay, not every book has to do that, this is about Love! Like I said:
“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination"--John Keats
So Noah and Jude are twins, very different--Noah's internal and self-focused (see self-portraits, above) and anguished/sad, and Jude is more social. And then those tendencies seem to switch, in doppleganger (or is it just something to do with twins or being a teen?) fashion. So the story proceeds in alternating Noah and Jude chapters, but interestingly, Noah's are at 13-14 before *something important* happens, and Jude's chapters are at 16 after *that* happened. Great effects from this strategy. They become different because of what happens, of course.
I had not wanted to read a book, clearly a YA romance, entitled, sappily, I'll Give You The Sun, but we come to find the exchange of different parts of the universe happens between Noah and Jude, who actually almost never talk with each other. . . except much later in the book and after having hurt each other a lot. You see, after the opening sappy sickly sweet metaphor-fest, we find the kids have an evil streak, they can be very mean, and in fact all the characters are deeply and interestingly flawed. It's not their sweetness that interests me so much (though ecstasy is interesting, seductive, of course), but their bitterness, the Dark Side they represent, finally. California (upper-middle-class) post-"hippies" with (sometimes) attitude.
Lust is everywhere in this book, but interestingly, the issue of minors having sex with slightly older boys is addressed: A girl at 14 with a boy of 16? Girl of 16 and boy 19? Nelson suggests not okay to either of these. And "do you really want to be that girl, Jude?" Mom asks. And well, adultery/an affair happens in the book, speaking of crossing ethical lines, though that line seems more acceptably crossable than sex with minors for Nelson. The heart wants what it wants, Nelson seems to say, unless one is too young. So there are limits to this seemingly boundless commitment to love (or sex, anyway).
In general, an epigraph for the book is a guide to its morality (noting those exceptions):
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there"--Rumi
It's a romance, gay romance, straight romance, much much awarded everywhere, and for good reasons, and as in many of Shakespeare's comedies, everything pretty much works out in the end. Everything. But why EV-ER-Y-THING??! Well, it's a romance, so that is built into the worlds of some romances, it's not literary realism, so sometimes you want everything to work out exactly as you want it to and in books like this you sometimes actually get what you want. It's a book about the heart, and art. Maybe Grandma's right when she says, "Best to bet on all the horses." Because in Nelson's world, everybody wins. I just read The Brothers Karamazov, a book of great feeling I love where mostly people are miserable. Why not more Joy for a change?
Or, as Grandma also says, "Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story." It sure seems like Nelson agrees with Grandma here by making sure all these characters are in her one happy family.
In my second reading of the book I noticed something I had not seen in the first reading: This is not just a YA romance, it is a contemporary YA GOTHIC romance, with tortured Romantic artists Garcia and Noah, with all this highly ecstatic metaphorical language, with this ecstatic impulse, with all the artists, with a Lost Cove and gothic house with dark corridors that Garcia lives in, with ghosts, with magic, and psychic convergence. I liked it better when I began thinking of it as contemporary gothic. That could "excuse" or even justify some of the "excesses" in the text. Were Keats and Coleridge and Liszt "excessive," or is that question somehow beside the point? Were they strictly moral in a religious sense? Of course not. Love is the answer....more
"Every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become "Every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long."
Wow. I knew of this book in 1980 when it came out, and in that year I must have picked it up in Shuler's Bookstore In Grand Rapids and read the opening page and found it rich and deep and I set it back down. About to descend into my own Dark Night of the Soul, in the next 3-4 years, I perhaps anticipated how unprepared I was to read this book. And now I am ready, and it was amazing to experience. This book has some of the most breathtaking and astonishing sentences I have read in a long time. I first read it two years ago and now have reread it again for a class.
Maybe it is because I have been reading so many graphic novels, I have been reading quickly, maybe too quickly, but this book forces you to read very very slowly; you didn't want to miss a single word.
The book takes place in a small western city, Fingerbone, on a lake. Ruthie is the narrator, and for much of the book she is almost inseparable from her sister, Lucille. Early on we learn that their grandfather, Edmund Foster, a trainman, has died, his train plummeting off the bridge into the lake. Then, his daughter, Helen, Ruthie and Lucille's mother, returns from Spokane to Fingerbone to visit her own mother living there, leaves the young girls with their grandmother, and drives her borrowed car off a cliff into that same lake. Grandmother is in no shape to raise two grandkids she doesn't even know. As the story goes, she will later live with two odd and also constitutionally-unable-to-parent great-aunts and then Sylvie, another odd aunt. Seem crazy? But maybe crazy is the wrong word. Robinson herself does not think any of her women are fundamentally crazy, but they do endure some trauma, of course.
What are the ripple effects of this trauma for Helen, Sylvie, Lucille and Ruth, of having lived through tragic death? What is memory and experience in the shaping of a life? In the process of our answering these questions, we meet along the way, usually just briefly, literally dozens of often (seemingly?) broken women, seen by Ruthie and Lucille and Ruth on passing trains, or talked to on trains by Sylvie, who was a drifter, a transient, a hobo. This parade of sad/mad women in the background of the main story provide a kind of thematic or imagistic backdrop to the tale, something I missed in my first reading. This is a book especially for and about women in a world of loss. How do they go on? Men hardly figure in the book, after Edmund's early death. We hardly meet them at all, except by reportage. This is a book about women's survival, coping and sometimes failing to cope with grief. The lake, the house, are also very much alive (and I think female) presences in this book.
Oh, and the crazy night Sylvie and Ruth spend on the boat on the lake, after waiting for the 9:52 train to come through, and reflecting on all those losses: "The lake must be full of people. I've heard stories all my life. And you can bet there were a lot of people on the train no one knew about." Sylvie is referring to the people who besides her father who died when the train plunged off the bridge into the lake. And a ripple effect of grief and loss for all the families who suffered these losses, and some of them, like her, transients, sleeping in the freight cars.
Ruthie, of her departed mother Helen: "She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished." Are we talking of ghosts here? If you like, sure, but this is what we all know, the presence of the departed in our every day lives.
The image of Ruth, our narrator, a young girl, is unforgettable in this book: "It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.” Ruth's ghost-like presence is mirrored in the ghost of her mother and grandfather and all of her female family rendered ghost-like and nearly invisible through tragedy.
There is a Walpurgisnacht scene of burning that happens later in that is both frightening and breathtaking. The pace of the book is slow, very little seems to happen, but then there are these moments of very real drama and remarkable emotional effects in a few places, and in the climax of the book. I thought it was sometimes difficult--I need to read it once again for all the Biblical references--but finally astonishing and empathetic.
What does it mean to live in that house, in Fingerbone, or live on that water, in that town, with that past, with that darkness, with all that waiting, with memories, with that sudden need to leave, to get out, that most of the women come to feel? It took me 35 years to finally read this book, and it was worth the wait. And it was even better and deeper as I read it again.
PS: In this last reading I began to see the gothic influences in this book: the dark, the wild forces of nature, the tinge of the supernatural and the edge of madness. Ruthie says this is a town of murders and accidents, and Sylvie says there must be dozens of bodies in the lake, she's heard stories. Ruthie says she feels like she has become a ghost, like she describes most of the drifters passing through. But I don't think of it primarily as a ghost story; I think of it as a book about the trauma that comes to these women, and many women. And after three readings I am still haunted by and can't fully understand the ending, which I love because Ruthie and Sylvie, fingers crooked, beckon me, back to Fingerbone.
Spoiler alert: I think in the end Ruthie has joined her aunt Sylvie on the road, each traumatized by the death of a parent, not quite able to participate meaningfully in "civilized" society, increasingly invisible and ghostlike to the rest of the world, Ruthie cut off perhaps forever and sadly from her sister Lucille....more
Can a comic--a horror manga, in this case--creep you out or even scare you? You know movies can do it, such as Psycho or Halloween. Stephen King can dCan a comic--a horror manga, in this case--creep you out or even scare you? You know movies can do it, such as Psycho or Halloween. Stephen King can do it. I like some of Joe Hill's work such as Locke and Key, and that works to unsettle me, but this is different, atmospheric, black and white. . . and gory, at times, creepy, nightmare-inducing (maybe). It proceeds less from plot than from images of spirals, of the vortex, proliferating with a growing intensity.
Uzumaki, or spirals, seem to take over a town. Possibly curse it. No real reason why that we can say for sure. Some theories are hinted at: The sort of aesthetic need to see patterns? Or is that OCD? Collective madness centered in a single coastal Japanese town? This pattern is everywhere, though at first you just see it through the eyes of one man, then others see it, and then everyone sees it, and we see it! AUGH!!! Help!! They. Are. Everywhere.
It reminds me of how the threatening bird population seems to grow in Hitchcock's The Birds. And these spirals are artistically powerful, beautiful, horrifying. In Camus’s The Plague a disease strikes a single town, with some possible allegorical purposes, but what can be the purpose for these spirals?!
We get to know adults and kids in this one, and things get increasingly crazy. The central characters are Kirie Goshima (a sculptor's daughter), and Shuichi Sato, who at different times discuss leaving town, which seems like it would have been the best thing. . . but then we would have not had horror, right?! I know they say don't go into the basement, or the attic, but we have to!
In one chapter Azami's swirling scar seems to be a guy magnet, femme fatally drawing them to their doom.
In another chapter Kazunori and Yoriko are in love, living in housing projects, where everyone seems to be insane, and the love relationship seems doomed. There's a nice visual of two intertwined (right, spiraling) snakes they see that. . . let's just say figures in the end. Love and horror.
In another chapter Kiri grows hair into spirals and so does another girl, and their hair does battle! Funny premise? Weird, macabre, initially amusing, maybe, but things turn darker. The visuals, again, are crazy, but amazingly imaginative. Ito is inspired, as he shows in a chapter focused on his creating the series. Top notch, but creepy and kinda gross with body horror in places. But hey, I already told you it is horror, so that's what you're paying for. A masterpiece of the genre!
I read the first volume 2013, the second for a class in 2015 and now again in 2017 I read volume 1 for a class. But the whole series is worth it....more
4/24/20: I for the first time heard Neil Gaiman Himself read this to me via audiobook, his wonderfully mellifluous, seductive voice carrying me along.4/24/20: I for the first time heard Neil Gaiman Himself read this to me via audiobook, his wonderfully mellifluous, seductive voice carrying me along. I once heard him read an excerpt from it when he was on his book tour. A former student had bought me a ticket to come and get a signed copy and hear him read and talk, and that is a wonderful memory, but this was also a fine experience. Of course I can't help but think of certain books as pertinent to the things I (and the world) are going through, and this is no less true for this book, that teaches us how to meet--as best we can--daily, ever-present horror, with courage and hope, through story and imagination.
If you haven't read it yet, there are spoilers in here, but if you are a Gaiman fan, none of it would surprise you.
Neil Gaiman says this is a book for adults (rather than all ages) because it focuses more on helplessness than hope, but I disagree with him, though if what he means is that this might be a little too scary for kids, I might at this point agree. It is told from the perspective of an adult coming home for a funeral, visiting his old neighborhood, remembering a terrifying time in his child hood, that might just make it more an adult book than a children’s story. But it also does have hope in it, lots of it.
I am a Gaiman fan. I teach a graphic novels class and sometimes introduce students to his Sandman series, epic in the field. I like reading his children’s books like Coraline and The Graveyard Book. Ocean is a relatively short book, sort of a stretched out short story, as he claims himself; he was asked to write a story and it just grew, and now is a novella. He says he wrote this for his wife, Amanda Palmer, who doesn't like or understand the kind of writing he does (horror, fantasy), to help explain what he does, to help her see where the stories came from, and where they continue to come from, and where he has always lived. So in this sense it is a teaching book, though much of what I read from Gaiman seems to be teaching us things, not in a didactic way, as in telling, but in an evocative, lovely way, as in showing you what he means, which is just a basic principle of great storytelling.
Gaiman is in this book teaching us, as with other books, about the power of myth, story, language itself, and place, the natural world, community, family friendship--all these good things, in the face of childhood fears, and other, adult fears, since we are all potentially still children inside, at our best, and we have our own fears to face, too. But this book focuses on what it might mean to grow up, centered on a seven year old boy living with his little sister and parents in what would seem to be the area where Gaiman grew up in England; he takes his wife and us there to show us the power and mystery of this part of rural England, where a boy mainly reads to create a foundation of imagination and courage in the face of childhood isolation and scary things. Reading and nursery rhymes and poetry are shot through this book; they are what saves the boy, revives him, protects him, heals him.
There are also in this book three women with psychic powers, Old Mrs Hempstock, Ginny--the Mom, and Lettie--the 11 year old girl, who are among the most delightful (and hopeful) characters you will ever meet in a book, three generations of psychic strength against the powers of darkness, three women emanating out of Goodness against a panoply of truly creepy, and sometimes disturbing and sometimes really kind of terrifying emanations of Darkness, living in a house at the end of the lane, a house we are told is registered in the ancient Domesday book, a house with a pond that Lettie calls an ocean, which IS an ocean, finally, and you'll see why her naming it that is crucial for children and the imagination. Names and naming figure in this story powerfully.
So we are led to see that the struggle between darkness and light we read in this book has been at it for centuries, for eternity. And the Hempstocks are So Good as they run warm baths, making delicious warm food Gaiman seems to call up out of memory, recipes of warmth and community. Nostalgia runs through this book, as Gaiman gets homesick a bit for these aspects of his past, and helps us miss and recreate for others such goodness for others. The past is where these stories emanate from, that Gaiman reveres: Narnia, Lewis Carroll, Gilbert & Sullivan. The things that sustained him.
The boy's new black kitten, Fluffy, dies, run over by a boarder, an ex-opal miner, who borrows the boy's Dad's car, drives to the end of the lane and kills himself, unleashing the powers of Darkness all over the place, in part in the form of scary nanny Ursula Monkton who is almost as delightfully frightening as the Hempstocks are delightfully strong and funny and good. We face these dark powers through the boy, and what he learns to do to face them, we learn: We read, we sing and tell ourselves stories, we hold hands with and learn from our friends, we stand strong in the face of fear, we use the potential in our vivid imaginations to overcome what we have imagined, conjured up, that we imagine will leave us hopeless, and yes, sometimes we are overcome by these powers, it happens. Just at the point we might really be scared in this story, we see how the boy quietly copes with the horror. We learn from this boy how young, read-all-day kids, learn to cope with the world as it is. We find ways to hope out of the toolbox of our imaginations, and by binding ourselves to powerful spirits of friendship and community and story and song and beauty.
Childhood for Gaiman is not a place of innocence and simplicity, it is a place of scary, spooky, often frightening and alienating stuff, and we have to figure out how to get out of this maze to adulthood. Gaiman seems to tell us how he did it and others like him--we readers, perhaps?--do or can do it. This book is a myth or allegory Gaiman tells like other myths, and myths always teach us things. And this is essentially a simple myth; a very bad and disturbing set of things happen, a downhill snowball of bad things happening, and with help the boy figures out what to do to overcome this bad scene. And he does, that's what happens in most myths, magic happens, though the ending of this one has lots of questions, or makes you think about various meanings, and this is good, it's not simple, you will have to reread it, as you are supposed to do with myths. I need to reread this for what it seems to say about memory, but I like what he says about the way experience gets integrated into our identities and is even often literally forgotten for a time.
Gaiman can be a really, really great writer. This is a simple story with not a lot happening, one central set of battles, but the language you encounter along the way teaches we writers the power of metaphor and analogy and subtlety. I wasn’t when I first read this really a horror fan, and neither was Gaiman's wife, apparently, so he seems to teach us one reason to read and write and view horror, not to become devastated, not to just become terrified, to get to despair, but to figure out how to conquer the fear, the terrors, the devastation. I liked it very much and recommend you check it out if you haven't read it (or heard it) yet. Some reviewers felt it was "slight" but I disagree; I think it is focused and deft and lean and filled with sweet and scary touches. And it's not about helplessness, Neil, it's about hope, like so many of your scary books also seem to be.
Just reread it for my class, again, and it is even better the fourth time!!! Lovely, lovely book. Read it!
Nate Powell worked for several years with young people with developmental disabilities, something I also did for a shorter tiRevision of review 4/9/17
Nate Powell worked for several years with young people with developmental disabilities, something I also did for a shorter time. He also ran a punk record label and performed in several bands, and oh, yeah, produces these amazing, detailed graphic novels and stories, including the series that took him and his co-authors to The National Book Award in 2016, March, the graphic memoir from Sen. John Lewis of the Civil Rights movement in the US, which Powell illustrated. But Swallow was my very first encounter with him, a story about a family dealing with a dying grandmother who is losing it, and a brother and sister dealing with early onset schizophrenia, something that statistics tell me is something much more common than I had imagined.
The focus in Whole is on the two kids, with primary focus on the girl's more serious, less able to hide, experiences, her visual hallucinations and obsessions. I read this initially and again as a parent whose son has been hospitalized for related issues, so it was scary for me, in the sense that it felt a little more real to me than just any graphic story, of course. In my late teens and twenties, too, I worked in a psych ward with some teens who were schizophrenic, hallucinating, paranoid, what they then called manic-depressive, so I have had some powerful experiences with this stuff. Powell wants us to try to experience what it may feel like to live in two worlds, the "real" world and this hallucinatory one that is unfortunately just as real, and with some folks, this secondary world takes over your “other” life. Sad, and frightening, though Powell also captures the anguish (and some attractions/fascinations associated with it) beautifully, I think. Reminds me a bit of David B's attempt to depict what he imagines his brother's epilepsy to be, which is of course another sad and anguished story, and also Craig Thompson's Blankets, where he tries to mostly visually capture the swirling, romantic falling of first love. What I’m pointing to here is the way comics can attempt to “capture” the emotional aspects of experience, through metaphor.
I've now taught/read this book several times. I had the occasion to meet Powell, who said this was his favorite, his most personal book. Some students don't like it for the very reason I do like it: his almost indecipherable hand lettering, which I think helps you understand auditory hallucinations in a way as happening sometimes just on the edge of “normal” hearing, and also helps you recall the mumbling of quiet, alienated young people, their sometimes disjointed, fanatical and unexplained experiences, which are told here to help us understand the experience of hallucinations.
Some of the images are very scary, the stuff of horror, which is what schizophrenics may regularly wrestle with. It's not fun to read, but there's a kind tenderness to the relationship between the brother and sister, who both suffer from the disorder in different ways. The fear, and the coming to terms (in part) with themselves as humans possessing these unwanted perceptions, that's heart wrenching. Powerful, I thought. Not for everyone, maybe. But as I said, I connect with it in part for family and work reasons. As a teacher, you know you have kids in your classrooms that hear voices and have hallucinations, and are medicated, but you don't always know this.
The medication can help a lot, by the way, and very much has helped my son, I write years later.. It's a muh better world for schizophrenics than in the seventies when I worked in the hospital,or even when Powell worked with folks decades later. Oliver Sacks in Hallucinations makes it clear that what we think of as misperception (think: mirages, and so on) is much more common than most people think.
This last reading, completed April 9, 2017, feels like the grimmest time I have read this book, because in part the future seems scary for my now-17-year old son (and now repost it in July 2024). It's like looking deeply into the heart of darkness, into madness itself. It’s terrifying, really, though. I sometimes ride the trains to work here in Chicago with plenty of homeless people, some of whom I see are having psychotic episodes, who used to be better protected in and by institutions. The world seems like a meaner, less supportive place to me for people that Powell writes about, for people like my son, than when I worked in the psych hospital in the seventies....more
The Yellow Wallpaper, first published in 1892, is now a staple of middle and high school English classes and college (Gender and )Women’s Studies progThe Yellow Wallpaper, first published in 1892, is now a staple of middle and high school English classes and college (Gender and )Women’s Studies programs, linked to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Ibsen’s The Doll House and similar texts reflecting on the damage patriarchy does to society, especially to women. Gilman wrote a lot of fiction, and also Women and Economics, was a friend of feminist and social reformer Jane Addams, and was increasingly a feminist critic of society.
Gilman also experienced a series of what have been called “nervous breakdowns,” and was treated for her condition in one of the “best practices” known at the time for women with “melancholia” with a “rest cure,” denied access to reading and writing (or basically any kind of stimulation), a (terrible) practice she features in this autobiographical fictional story.
There are a lot of theories about what is going on in the story: it could be seen as an example of the gothic, worthy of Lovecraft or Poe, a woman driven slowly mad by the patterns in the wallpaper in the room where she is kept isolated by her doctor husband. She thinks it is a former nursery because there are bars on the windows, and one idea is that the large room is a gymnasium, because there are iron rings on the walls, or wait, is this really a sanitarium her husband has put her in, where previopusly patients were chained the walls? She, who has just recently given birth to a baby, may have Post Partum Depression, which would not have been a diagnosis 100+ years ago.
She may have been "driven crazy" by her infantilizing, hyper-rational husband, who might be seen as an emblem of the patriarchy, which has become the conventional reading, and is also basically mine. It is a convincingly chilling story, regardless of your interpretation, whether you see it as psychological horror, feminist allegory, or anything else.
I've read it several times over the years, most recently for a class I am teaching on madness in literature. Lots to talk about here....more
Some of what we read here has become commonplace in the world of ideas, but this is where it started for many thinkers of the twentieth century. In thSome of what we read here has become commonplace in the world of ideas, but this is where it started for many thinkers of the twentieth century. In this volume Foucault illustrates how notions like madness are socially and culturally constructed in any given age and place. The criteria for madness are made up, by us, they in part invented for particular social and political purposes. Leper colonies housed/confined/kept from society those with this disease, and when leprosy largely died out there were these places of confinement we could use for the poor, criminals, and anyone we didn't like, and this is what we do today, though our ideas about madness--what it is and how to treat it, how to exclude those that have it in various ways--are changing constantly.
Foucault goes on to write what he calls "archeaologies" of other disciplines and institutions, but he begins here. This was his dissertation, or a version of it, written on the basis of his study in a variety of clinics, his study of philosophy and psychology, and his own experience with therapy. It's his first big book, maybe his masterpiece. There are books on the history of madness, done in sort of chronological fashion, getting to some sort of accumulative notion of what it is. This is how arguments are usually made since the Enlightenment, according to the rules of Reason. But Foucault isn't trying to write in this fashion, he has in mind exploring the varieties of madness (as with William James, not what religion is, but The Varieties of Religious experience), showing how madness is depicted in art in various periods, in the Renaissance for instance as a part of the world, as a source (sometimes) of insight and wisdom and difference and mystical or just creative vision, then shifting dramatically in the classical period to horror, to something we need to fear and confine. As I said, in the forty years since it was written, ideas of the social construction of reality have become sort of now commonplace, but it was groundbreaking then, work from one of the 2 or 3 greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, maybe, from someone who may have begun this journey in the late forties when he was taken by his parents to a therapist who suggested a "cure" for his being gay (something that was indeed considered a disorder by psychiatry until relatively recently, though as we know, some people in the world still think it is something one can "cure").
Madness & Civ. is also a work contending with the universalist assumptions of Grand Theory (such as psychoanalysis or Marxism) as One Central theory for understanding How the World Works. Later, he would himself explore the structures and language (or discourse) of institutions and disciplines to see the pervasive presence of Power operating everywhere, which many would see as his own Grand Theory of the World. Foucault wants to show how power is bound up with knowledge. What we understand knowledge to be is a political consideration, sometimes.
I have used this book in a class I teach which is a sort of literary inquiry into madness. How is it depicted? How is it defined in various settings, in certain stories? How is related to the psychic, paranormal, fantasy, horror, faith? Why is magic not considered knowledge in most settings? I also use the book in a course on language and literacy. We inevitably talk about our families, our own experiences with madness/psychiatry/how we treat madness today/the homeless crazies that ride public transportation, largely untreated today.
Foucault, with Thomas Szasz and others, were seen as part of an anti-psychiatry movement. Maybe the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill came about in part because of this movement. I think in general Foucault, following the Renaissance view of madness, romanticizes it as a kind of alternative truth. And I worked in a psych hospital for a number of years and worried about the over-medicalization of people. I still do. But I have a son who sometimes experiences psychotic episodes; I think without some treatment he would not be able to fully function in the world. I live in Chicago where there are thousands of mentally ill folks on the streets, inadequately treated, in my opinion. And in my view you can romanticize all of that. These folks aren't just free; many of them are actually homeless. So while I think Foucault's book is brilliant--I really do; I like Kind Lear's wise fool and the art of Bosch and the poetry of sweet mad John Clare--it also has to be understood with some caution....more
8/25/23: Rereading with a class I am teaching with a focus on ghosts/liminal space. And also witches, which are kind of related entities. And appariti8/25/23: Rereading with a class I am teaching with a focus on ghosts/liminal space. And also witches, which are kind of related entities. And apparitions, visions, smoke and fog and filthy air. And another kind of liminal space of sorts: Madness, a kind of alternative way f experiencing the world involving hallucinations (such as Lady Macbeth's handwashing of "blood" we never see). You don't believe in ghosts? You may also not believe in witchcraft or witches. Well even the most hardened rationalist believe that hallucinations happen. And dreams.
Are the witches even there? In Kurosawa's version of Macbeth, Throne of Blood, the witches appear to be ghosts, and the Lady Macbeth stand-in seems increasingly to become one. The chief ghost in Macbeth is Banquo, and that ghost becomes an instrument of guilt. Macbeth, out of control, fears his friend's ascent to the throne instead of him, foretold by the witches. But the ghost comes back to haunt him.
But I was just talking to a friend about this ghost theme and he eagerly opened his computer to show me the opening of the Michael Fassbender filmed version of the play, which opens with a funeral: The death of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's child, a daughter. The theory in this adaptation is that Macbeth/LM may be driven, not primarily by ambition, or greed, but by grief! "I have given suck. . ." LM says to Macbeth, and she makes other references to a child, so we know there was one, ignored by critics, largely? And me? So it's an interesting theory, one of many, about what drives the action (okay, violent murders).
I saw the film last night and was very moved by it. It's violent, but there's some ambivalence about it from Macbeth I hadn't seen before in any production. As he at battle, he sees and is dismayed by the death of so many young men. This is a grim interpretation of the (grim) play, but I have never seen so many kids highlighted in a production. At Duncan's party, a girl choir; at the killing of MacDuff's family (which historically takes place off stage), Macbeth, the grieving father, kills children, and in this production, Lady Macbeth more than hears about it: She is there, watching the slaughter, pushing the grieving mother off the edge into madness.
So we see reasons for the mental and moral decline of the Macbeths. Even the final swordfight to the death between Macbeth and MaCduff seems close to being suicidal for Macbeth. And I like the appearance of Fleance at the end, watching Macbeth die and taking his sword (Fleance, Banquo's son--who watched Macbeth kill his father in this version--was prophesied to be one day King).
So the usual interpretations highlight one of the usual motivations for the tragedy: Macbeth is ambitious and even ruthless for power; Lady Macbeth is a crazed madwoman who crazily pushes him to do what they both know is wrong; the witches manipulate the Macbeths to do all the killing. But in this one it is grief that is the driver. It's a new and exciting interpretation, which made me (more, not wholly) sympathetic to the grieving parents. It's not an excuse, but it's an explanation.
And this is the foggiest, smokiest version of the play I have ever seen. I loved it.
"Double, double, toil and trouble"--those pesky witches
3/26/19 update: In preparing to see a production of Macbeth as a chaperone on a class trip with my eighth grader, I dug out lots of materials to help him understand what is going on. Macbeth is my favorite Shakespeare, I have taught it many times, seen it many times; in other words, this is a recipe for disaster for my poor son, who might justifiably fear professorial pontification at every page he turns. To work against this tendency (in me) I just dug up guides to the play, such as MacBeth: For Kids (Shakespeare Can Be Fun series), Nina Packer's Tales from Shakespeare, a few dvd adaptations of the play, and oh, yeah, the play itself. And just left them casually strewn around the house, you know, IF you’re interested. . .
Luckily he is a very good reader, has seen a lot of plays performed, and was independently interested in the play without me breathing down his neck: “Oh, you know, I saw a Stratford [Ontario] production in 1979 with Macbeth AS one of the three murderers!” “In this Australian film version, the witches do drugs with Macbeth, obscuring his judgment!” and so on. . . which could, I know, have led to “Da-aaad!” The Chicago Shakespeare production was great, one of the yearly productions they do, done in fewer than 90 minutes with the witches at the opening dancing a kind of medieval hip hop, with strobe lights and surround sound, and a bloody (nearly headless) Banquo. My son loved it, and so did his classmates. And so did I, proud to see his first Macbeth with him (he’s seen one other Shakespeare play so far).
Original review, updated periodically:
Probably most works of literature can be read again and again to both recapture that experience you had when first reading it and become something new, given your changed life circumstances, theoretical and other reading you are doing, and so on. The basic English teacher's writing prompt about this great play is "who is responsible for the tragedy of Macbeth?" It fits the current call for making arguments in school, too. Yet the play is not just a summary of arguments you might make. It's a living, breathing entity. But this question of whodunnit is still an interesting question, because it causes you to make commitments about beliefs and what it is the play has to say about the world. This time around, I am interested in the insights the play provides about the nature of “madness”: Psychological instability, paranormal phenomena, altered states of consciousness, dream life, the foul/fair confusion of good and evil. I have kids with variously different minds: one with autism, one possibly with schizophrenia, one who would appear to possess psychic faculties, two have night terrors, go sleepwalking, strange phenomena that might have got you put in a dungeon for madness a few centuries ago. I’m interested in this play in part for personal reasons. As well as its being just damned good theater.
Shakespeare wrote the witches that open the play into the story he borrowed from Holinshed's Chronicles in part to honor (in exchange for his patronage from) King James, who had written a popular scholarly study of witchcraft, so the play purports to take witches and the darker side of the spiritual realm seriously. To contemporary, sophisticated audiences, the three weird sisters seem to be there for entertainment purposes, mainly, yet they also seem to know stuff—have paranormal knowledge—about what is going to happen to Macbeth and Banquo's son Fleance (who preceded James on the throne), so something is going on we have to either acknowledge or dismiss as fantasy.
But, as I find out from my working class students, almost every one of them seems to have someone in the family that believes in or is actively involved in some way in psychic phenomena such as the prescience Shakespeare's witches seem to possess, sometimes in conjunction with their beliefs in more conventional religion. In other words, some who are religious also have experience with extra-religious ideation.
But Macbeth is more than witches, when we think of challenges to conventional thinking: Macbeth, which mostly takes place in the dark, is one of four Shakespeare’s plays that features ghosts, and has both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth envisioning daggers and bloody hands and other things. What’s the relationship between the dark spiritual realm, psychic phenomena and "madness"? Lady Macbeth seems to drive her hubby to kill Duncan, and yet then seems to disintegrate, seeing blood on her hands, unable to get that damned spot out. And Macbeth sees the ghost of his murdered friend Banquo (because who had him murdered?). Do the witches make that happen, these ghostly images? Are they guilt-induced hallucinations? All these questions interest you more than a mere whodunnit. Fait is foul and foul is fair! The world is turned upside down!
How do we limit the world when we limit our view of it to our (flawed) sense perceptions and rational deliberation? There are plenty of extra-sensory issues in the play to consider. The porter is drunk, and alters his perception through it. No one is sure what is happening because of the skewed relationship between appearance and reality. Stormy weather. . . Macbeth has murdered sleep, and sleep loss itself creates hallucinations. Visions abound. This is a dark and richly strange play in one sense about the madness of misplaced ambitions, ambitions possibly influenced by witches and/or a turn from good to “evil.”
My college Thespians put on a production in 1973 that featured a Macbeth that seemed to resemble “Tricky Dick,” Richard Nixon. A recent production here in Chicago featured Macbeth as Donald Trump with the witches as strippers he consults as life coaches. Rude? Funny? Macbeth is a canvas on which many theatrical productions have been painted....more
The Metamorphosis was written in 1915, close to the time when The Trial was written, and they bear some resemblance in tone and impact. In both, a maiThe Metamorphosis was written in 1915, close to the time when The Trial was written, and they bear some resemblance in tone and impact. In both, a main character who is a pretty conventional functioning member of society is the victim of a dramatic change in their lives. K, in The Trial, awakes one morning to be is accused of a crime that is never named, and what follows is an absurd and increasingly horrible series of events at the hands of a bureaucratic legal system; in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa awakes to discover he has turned into a bug,. Once the provider for his father, mother and sister,
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
This line is a kind of turning point in literary history, shaping generations of writing after it. Nabokov found The Metamorphosis the second greatest work of twentieth century literature, only behind Joyce’s Ulysses. I’m reminded of Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener,” too, in its depiction of alienation and paralysis.
“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
The perfect blend of the absurd, the surreal and the every-day helps us see Kafka’s view of the incommunicability of internal experience in modern life. 'I gotta use words when I talk to you' complains Sweeney in T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agoniste, and in Kafka they inevitably fall short. You need images, you need metaphors, to illustrate absurdity, and in this case the alienation Gregory feels from ordinary existence takes the form of a man transformed into an insect. Though he dearly loves and appreciates what his younger sister, Grete, does to support him in his transformation, and he loves his mother, he can’t face the future anymore. At the same time, Grete metamorphosizes into a fully realized woman even as her brother withers away.
I hadn’t read it in many years, though I found I really liked it again. It’s still for me powerful and darkly affecting, with—like The Trial, and “Bartelby”—absurdly comic elements running through it.
Christopher Plummer playing Vladimir Nabokov teaching “The Metamorphosis” at Cornell University:
In Ira Glass' public radio documentary series This American Life, a man named Samsa, who believes he's turning into a cockroach, reaches out to Dr. Seuss for advice. The doctor, however, will only respond in rhyme. It originally aired on the CBC show Wiretap.
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson references The Metamorphosis in several story arcs, including one where Hobbes references "Kafka dreams" prior to discovering a gigantic bedbug.
Once a year, if you observe the horror holiday Halloween, you should read one or more of Poe’s chilling stories. Why not “The Tell Tale Heart”? I justOnce a year, if you observe the horror holiday Halloween, you should read one or more of Poe’s chilling stories. Why not “The Tell Tale Heart”? I just this evening heard my neighbor Ann read it aloud before a gathering of block party neighbors in my street.
“True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.”
The incomparable Vincent Price reading the story in its entirety:
“And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? --now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.”
“I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief --oh, no! --it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart.”
You want to read it for yourself or frighten your friends and family? Here you go:
When I was first a high school English teacher I used to tape poster board over my classroom windows to keep the light completely out, dress in a long black choir robe, dab dark makeup near my eyes and read it over a single candle. Boo! Happy Halloween!...more
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