Thursday, November 27, 2014

Metzengerstein (1832)

by Edgar Allan Poe

One of the fascinating aspects of Edgar Allan Poe’s first published story, “Metzengerstein,” is the thematic similarity to H.P. Lovecraft’s first story, “The Tomb.” They both deal with the idea of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul into another being after death, Poe’s overtly and Lovecraft’s indirectly. Poe begins his tale by discounting the idea of metempsychosis and at the same time hinting that there is some validity to it. In this, the unreliability of the narrator is echoed in Lovecraft’s story as well, with his narrator dictating the story from an asylum. The context of Poe’s story is the feud between two wealthy Hungarian families, the Berlifitzings and the slightly more affluent and influential Metzengersteins. And while the specifics of the feud are no longer something either family remembers, there is an ancient curse that pertains to them that the narrator relates which winds up being the key to the entire story.

          A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the
          mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing.

The narrator rightly calls into question the coherence of this statement. Which “lofty name” is going to fall is definitely left unclear, and exactly how “mortality” triumphs over “immortality” doesn’t seem to make sense, which he dismisses by saying, “To be sure the words themselves had little or no meaning,” before moving on to more of the history between the two clans. The patriarch of the Berlifitzing family is Wilhelm, an old man at the end of his life while young Frederick, all of fifteen years old, has inherited the Metzengerstein fortune after the death of his mother and father. For three days after the funeral Frederick unleashes unbridled debauchery on the estate, which the narrator compares to the excesses of Caligula, much to the dismay of the neighboring Berlifitzing clan. On the fourth night the Berlifitzing stables are set on fire, which everyone assumes was arson and instigated by Frederick.

But Frederick is actually in one of the upper rooms of the mansion. He becomes enthralled by the tapestries on the wall that tell the history of his family, one scene in particular of a large horse owned by the Berlifitzings and whose master is being killed by a Metzengerstein. Though lost in thought, he becomes increasingly aware of the commotion outside, but as he makes for the stairs he notices that the head of the horse has suddenly changed positions and is now looking directly at him. Unnerved, he pulls open the door and when his shadow assumes the exact shape of the murderer on the tapestry he becomes even more shaken, almost glad to get outside to be dealing with whatever tumult awaits him. It seems that the servants were able to capture a large horse that had escaped from the Berlifitzing stables, but when they tried to return it they were informed that the other family had no such horse. And that isn’t even the strangest part; the horse looked exactly like the one in the tapestry. Add to that a servant informing Frederick that the horse in the tapestry had burned to ash and it is clear something very bizarre is happening.

What it is, of course, is that the old baron Wilhelm had died during the night and his soul is now in possession of the horse. From that night onward the horse manages to compel Frederick to ride him constantly, at all hours of the day and night. The climax of the story is equally strange, but also involves another fire--as does Lovecraft’s story--and actually makes sense of the ancient curse as it seems to have come to pass exactly as foretold. The example of metempsychosis in Lovecraft’s “The Tomb” is not as clear-cut, and there is room for doubt, especially as the narrator himself is the one who has taken on the attributes of his ancestor and yet still seems to retain his own personality. Poe’s story has no such ambiguity. In fact, the horse has the initials of Wilhelm Berlifitzing seemingly burned on his forehead, and as a result Frederick refuses to even name the horse. But where the transmigration of Berlifitzing’s soul to the horse is explained, what remains unclear is Frederick’s obsession with the horse, his inability to stay away from it, attempting to break it when all the while it is actually doing the same to Frederick instead.

The aspect of Poe’s story that is very different than the way Lovecraft would approach his later tale is the inability of his protagonist to escape history or to alter his destiny. Frederick, at only fifteen years old, has inherited the entirety of his parent’s estate and the onus of baron hood along with it. Poe’s narrator tries to deflect this fact by going out of his way to say that Frederick hasn’t suffered because of this. “In a city, fifteen years are no long period; but in a wilderness—in so magnificent a wilderness as that old principality, the pendulum vibrates with a deeper meaning.” But in an essay on the story by Jerome DeNiccid, he makes a particularly cogent point when he identifies the real effect this has on Frederick. “Childhood, as a time of forging identity, does not exist; rather, identity is bequeathed, intact, from the past.” Frederick isn’t just fifteen-year-old Frederick anymore, he is now the Baron Metzengerstein and he is suddenly a part of history rather than someone living in it. Thinking back, now the prophesy about the families becomes something that Frederick can’t escape, and this explains his fixation on the tapestry. When the shadow places him over the murderer, he has become as woven into this fabric as his ancestors are.

What’s interesting is the narrative shift that Poe engages in at this point in order to achieve his most chilling effects. The opening section of the narrative is from the point of view of a modern narrator telling the story of the Metzengersteins and the Berlifitzings, conveying the curse complete with its incoherencies, much as an historian would have to do. But when the story shifts to Frederick himself, in the upper tapestry room, suddenly the narrative changes to his viewpoint, and the reader is now able to share his thoughts and feelings. After he has encountered the horse, however, with its transmigrated soul of Wilhelm Berlifitzing inside, the narration shifts back to a completely objective point of view in order to present the frightening and dramatic conclusion. And this fits beautifully into the unreliability of the narrator as a whole. Whenever the narrator becomes dismissive of anything, that is what the reader should pay attention to which is, of course, exactly the effect that Poe is going for. It’s an effect Poe would use often, and its use in his first published story is only fitting. “Metzengerstein,” while seemingly simplistic, is nevertheless an engaging and artfully crafted tale of the macabre.

Monday, November 24, 2014

The Tomb (1917)

by H.P. Lovecraft

It’s incredibly fitting that this is the first Lovecraft story he wrote as an adult. "The Tomb" is written from the point of view of a mental patient who has seen something incredible and unbelievable, and in the prologue Lovecraft virtually sets out his vision for writing, a mission statement of sorts about the kind of horror stories he wants to write.

        It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental
        vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena,
        seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its
        common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp         distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do
        only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through
        which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the
        majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate
        the common veil of obvious empiricism.

This is a wonderful statement that gets to the heart of Lovecraft’s fiction, that the visible world represents only one aspect of the universe and that so much more unexplained phenomenon and, indeed, worlds of madness and destruction lie beyond. His characters, then, through diligent study or curious circumstances, find themselves peering into a doorway to another dimension and rarely emerge unscathed.

The tale itself is of one, Jervas Dudley, son of a wealthy couple who live next to a ruined mansion that was destroyed by a lightning bolt that burned it to the ground killing the inhabitants. Adjacent to the property is a crypt that is surrounded by a gate and covered over with growth. Dudley as a youth was not interested in the physical world and studied ancient texts and wandered around the grounds of his home pondering them. It was on one of these walks that he stumbles across the tomb and finds it locked by a rusty lock and chain. Beyond the gate, however, he sees that the door to the vault is tantalizingly ajar. Too big to fit through the gate, from that day forward he becomes obsessed with discovering what is in the tomb and sits for hours outside the gate trying to figure out how to get inside. “In that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement.”

Essentially this is a ghost story. The only real horror--and it’s not all that horrifying--is when Dudley grows to young adulthood and is given a message from inside the crypt. In following its direction, leads him to a key. “I must have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it was with a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices . . . I was greatly and permanently changed that night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.” When he goes into the tomb the next day, he descends the stairs and looks around at the coffins in various states of decay. The horrific element of the story comes when he finds an empty coffin and begins spending his days lying inside of it. “Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never reveal.” At first he was alarmed because there was someone watching him as he came and went from the crypt, but since the man didn’t tell his parents he figured that somehow he wasn’t actually being seen, invisible from the watcher.

The climax of the story takes place not in the tomb, but in the ruins next door. When a storm rolls in one night, the destruction of the mansion is relived by Dudley in the midst of ghostly dinner party. This is the reason for his eventual incarceration as his father and the watcher accost him on the ruined property and have him committed. But it’s the denouement that is the real chilling aspect of the tale and a fitting ending. If there’s a flaw in the story it’s probably the bawdy song that Lovecraft inserts in the middle that supposedly is something Dudley picked up from the ghostly entities in the tomb, but in the conceit of the story it is more likely that Dudley is somehow a reincarnation of the ancient family destroyed in the fire. It’s easy to be critical of a story like this, especially considering that it’s Lovecraft’s first. But few critics have ever attempted to write anything of their own. What "The Tomb" lacks in polish it makes up for in inventiveness, and the Lovecraft style and narrative touch that imbue it with the kind of eldritch flavor he’s so well know for. Ultimately it’s a solid early tale that is a harbinger of greater works to come.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Sepulchral Stories

As someone who had attempted to be a writer of horror novels at one point in my life, I had read most of Stephen King and Peter Straub up to that point, with liberal excursions into the older works of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe as well as British writers like Stoker and Stevenson. But I haven’t read a horror novel in fifteen years and I have mostly lost interest in a genre that has degenerated into teen vampire stories and poor writing overall. What has begun to interest me lately, however, is short fiction of many different varieties. And with the proliferation of so many public domain works for e-readers, there is much more available than there used to be, which was primarily relegated to Dover thrift editions in the past. One of my recent finds while sifting through public domain horror on my Kindle is Oliver Onions. Great ghost stories like these are what make up the small amount of fiction reading I do these days, as well as an interest in going back through the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe in chronological order.

While I have many irons in the fire at this point in my life, I did want to carve out a small amount of time to comment on the weird fiction that I occasionally read. My writing about horror films is elsewhere on my own personal blogosphere, and I don’t have much interest in any modern horror fiction at all. Nor am I interested at all in science fiction, except where it crosses the border into the unexplainable. My primary goal is to analyze these works and, as such, there will be what in today’s vernacular are called “spoilers.” Within this framework, however, I do want to maintain some shock value for the reader and not give absolutely everything away. Still, there will be times when I feel that “what” happens in the story is less important to preserve than “how” the author tells it. So, be forewarned. In general, this will not necessarily be an ongoing concern, but from time to time I’ll drop in and write about the horror stories I read and share my observations.