INEXPLICABLE (1917) by L.G. Moberly

My reading of this story today was instigated by THE UNCANNY by Nicholas Royle that I am currently reviewing here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/the-uncanny-by-nicholas-royle/

I hope I have not distorted the story. Or compressed its slithering into a Joycean day as Freud reportedly did. I shall now return to Royle’s chapter on it. 

***

“We all slept together.”

What happened at “119 , Glazebrook Terrace, in the very unromantic suburb of Prillsbury” is certainly uncanny, but even more arguably an example of THE CREEPY in the true tradition of the Zeno’s Paradox-style fiction I first discovered in Aickman’s edited Fontana anthologies and in Aickman’s own ‘strange stories’ work. Despite its straightforward workmanlike prose and its naivety and its debatable cliché of a plot of haunted furniture, here regarding an occasional table with carvings of alligators or crocodiles (and at one point they are mentioned as if being the same breed, but therefrom referred to as alligators), yes, despite this, the story certainly carries an unbeatable punch of a frisson, if a frisson can have a punch. The punch is in its swampy creepiness, I claim, and the fact that it was destined to be highlighted none other than by Freud when discussing the nature of ‘The Uncanny’, such an eventuality becoming retroactive upon the story itself whereby literary criticism merges with preternatural Fortean forces? Well, one can but wonder.

At first the couple [May (the POV) and Hugh] turn an old house, perhaps appositely ‘by the middle of May’, into a liveable place, despite the dust and the drains. The table came with the house as a sort of fixture and Hugh suffers a twisted ankle in trying to transfer the table from the bedroom to the drawing-room. Note the long drawn out sense of ‘drawing’. The predictable haunting by the alligators scares the servants and extremely worries Hugh’s (who?) friend Jack Wilding who once explored distant swampland as part of his derring-do. Now scared out of his wits. The servants even announcing the uncanny refrain of all of them having to ‘sleep together’ to rid themselves of such fears. The cracking of furniture like a gunshot, notwithstanding.

Here are some quoted moments below to explicate my claims above…

“‘Good heavens, May, the things look so life-like I could almost have sworn one of them squirmed.’ And Hugh stood back from the table, stared at it with round eyes, and then laughed. ‘I shall be seeing rats and snakes next,’ he said, and laughed again as we left the room together.”

“We turned in an army of workpeople, and by the middle of May the house was clean and fresh from attic to basement,…”

And the supposedly drunk Maria, a servant:

“‘The cat?’ Maria flung back her head and laughed hysterically. ‘No cat slides about like that. And there was a great flop, flop. Oh, I couldn’t stop here another night, not if you was to pay me twenty thousand pounds!’”

And Jack Wilding:

“You hear it? And the stench is here too! Good God! if I thought I should ever have to cross that swamp again I should go mad!”

“Something slid from between his feet—I saw a dark shape, a flash of white, and then it had vanished;”

“It was bigger than twenty cats, it slipped over the floor—over the floor— and oh!”

Mrs Jenkins, a servant, takes on a role of a Joycean monologue as if from a MR James servant:

“‘Cats is cats, and dogs is dogs, and troubles though they both may be, and I’m not denyin’ they are, still they’re what you might call human,’ Mrs Jenkins said grandly, but I noticed that for all her grandiloquence she was shaking from head to foot. ‘The animals what come slithering in and out o’ the scullery and kitchen—they ain’t human. Runnin’ on their underneaths, with paws as don’t seem a bit o’ use to ’em.’”

But then, like the ‘flash’ above, the ‘lightning’ below sheds a new contrast of Nemo/Id and Ego with the slow creepiness:

“A frozen horror must have paralyzed his speech, as it prevented me from uttering a syllable, and we stood there clutching each other and looking at the stairs, down which in the dusk we could see a huge shape gliding at lightning speed. Another was coming more slowly out of the drawing-room door, and from amongst the dark shadows of the hall came sounds of sliding and pattering—sounds which made my very blood run cold.”

you?

Protected: Dear Interested Party

Aware only of the merest chance of a ghost pandemic, I did not take much care with the equipment I took with me when asked, as a ghoster, to exorcise any ghosts that had become pestilential. I felt like a doctor who pursued viruses with medical unctions. But at that stage, nobody had predicted the nature of such an analogy to explain what I did, until what I did do became an analogy of what doctors did, too. You see, viruses were soon discovered to have ghosts of their own that equally required being exorcised rather than being hosed down with antiseptics or bombed with antibiotics. The long and the short of it were (yes ‘were’, not ‘was’) that I found myself fighting two analogies ganging up on myself as the only ‘firefighter’ they feared. Medicine or religion they feared not in equal measures. As an official ghoster, I wielded a form of exorcism that had nothing within it based on either medicine or religion; it simply was a technique involving the power of fiction-against-infection. This meant any infection caused by medical negligence or wishful panacea or quack remedy needed to be dispersed and dispensed from its effect on the human body or human mind by an art form of which this missive as fiction is only one example. And if you examine the underlying DNA structure within every word in this missive as my main weapon against the ghosts of people or the ghosts of viruses, even the ghosts of ghosts, you should also take into account that such a structure needed at least one typo or a wrongly employed semi-colon (not both!) as a trigger for the infection to be sufficiently combated by the therapeutic function of fiction. But such a method needed to be used judiciously in order to be efficacious against the increasing number of tangible monsters that masquerade as ghosters like me. Wordplay tricks, on the other hand, were said to be counterproductive to this goal. And neologisms have always been a definite no-no when trying to combat the conspiracy against the human race about which this missive is intended to give due warning without undue recourse to revisionary or proofing work upon the words and the syntax that bound such words together in the first place. On the face of it, a failed missive is much better than a snail-mailed one. So, I shall make this work of fiction electronically available to friends only and use a carefully chosen password when publishing it on my site.

The Sandman

I have now today brainstormed this Hoffman story as triggered by my reading of Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Uncanny’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/the-uncanny-by-nicholas-royle/

(My review of E.T.A. Hoffman’s HARD NUT story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/07/05/the-big-book-of-classic-fantasy/#comment-16259)

THE SANDMAN by E.T.A. Hoffman

“phenomenon as the omen”

“He even went so far as to say that it is foolish to think that we do anything in art and science according to our own independent will; for the inspiration which alone enables us to produce anything does not proceed from within ourselves, but is the effect of a higher principle without.”

Royle’s essay on this story and on Freud’s study of this story in Freud’s own essay called ‘The Uncanny’, and I can visualise how mad and horrific it is to sense this story filling the reader with the same madness as the story contains both in spirit and substance, and it seems pointless even to try to wring meaning or synchronicities or gestalt or even deeper meaning in occult brainstorming examination etc. of the actual shape of the words in the text (it is a translation into English from its original text) or to try to derive anything from its apparent multi-levelled absurdity of evil versus the main protagonist, via a childhood threat in the shape of the Sandman and of two characters, including a salesman of barometers and lenses, who masquerade as (or actually are) the Sandman, and in the shape of the two women whom the increasingly mad protagonist loves at different times, i.e. his official sweetheart Clara and a female automaton (whether ai or not) called Olympia, and a plot involving his eyes torn out, and his hands mashed, plus his narrative letter gone astray from intended recipient to the latter’s sister who is the aforementioned sweetheart. And much more in the plot is impossible to repeat or recur in this available space I have perversely allowed myself. And the protagonist’s belief in the monster is tantamount to creating the monster in the first place, as the plot’s central theme portrays. And, so, in turn, my own belief or suspension of disbelief in this wildly nightmarishly structured story makes it even more nightmarish and uncanny, but equally, when in a different mood, all my efforts to scry this story seem arguably as worthless as knowing that ‘Coppola’, i.e. one of its characters, is an anagram of ‘alcopop’! But after I have slept tonight on what I have written about this story just now above, I dread the story coming back to haunt me tomorrow night. A hard nut to crack, like a knuckle on a mashed finger.

Ligotti and ‘The Uncanny’

I am most grateful to today’s chapter of THE UNCANNY by Nicholas Royle for the alert to many things that may have already been part of me by means of some angel guardian or daemon muse or unknown kindred spirit as ‘concursor’ of which I have, until now, been unaware, one of these many things being the word ‘concursor’ itself here connected with D.H. Lawrence, whose ‘Women In Love’ novel invoked in me an essay in 1967 of which I was most proud as a student. More recently, I reviewed (with two further links to my reviews of ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Daughters of the Vicar) HERE: ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ story by Lawrence that is mentioned in this chapter.

Also while absorbing this chapter’s thoughts about returns, recurrences, repeats, doubles, silences, blanks etc. (also see the aforementioned Nemonymous) in connection with the DEATH DRIVE contextualised by the subject matter and references in this Royle book on the uncanny and the eerie as now differentiated (and dare I also mention a further slant known as the ostranenie?), I thought of the work of Thomas Ligotti, a great writer of Weird Fiction, comprising Horror and Ghost Story and Uncanny and Philosophical Anti-Natalism, the latter Emil Cioran type aspect actually denying the experience of the death drive by not being born at all! Something here seems to generate the ultimate gestalt of the Uncanny and Literature and La Vie Inconnu and the Blank of Silence, i.e. this inability to repeat or return by not doing it once? (I started reading Ligotti many years before the Penguin Classics edition of his work and my reviews are linked HERE.)

From my review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/the-uncanny-by-nicholas-royle/

Ablutions

You somehow expect yourself to be already sitting there as part of the ritual of your own ablutions, a double of yourself starting the process before the real you arrives to attend to such a natural urge. This seems to be an out-of-body experience especially when you believe you are dreaming that you are doing what you see you are doing or, more likely, you are beset by a pre-empting ghost that should need no bodily ablutions at all but, by this means, it is trying desperately to return to carnal existence by mimicking your ablutions even before you reached the space it is already occupying, as if it can read the future or return from the dead to ambush your time in the tiled necessarium.

I had one such dream last night, and it all seemed logical, and I was confident, upon waking, that I would be able to write it all down in a coherent and believable fashion so that anyone reading it would understand what I had dreamt. How wrong could I have been! Even my power over language seems to be on the brink of fluid elision. And I know this is becoming a half-baked attempt at describing the erstwhile rationale of the dream, while I listen to strange noises upstairs in the bathroom intermittently throughout the day. Even now, having finally put pen to paper, I hope I can gather my thoughts before I finally pluck up the courage to go upstairs and check whether the damned thing has
dared leave the bathroom wet wi’ water
‘cos that’s a thing it never oughtta.

Hartnell’s Law

IMG_2024-01-08-144645I tried my best by an adept use of foresight, but my best turned out to be not quite good enough. Meddling with the middle, and trying to topple its top, then rooting out rot at its fundaments seemed enough kinetic manhandling to deal with the upright thing but it stayed tantalisingly out of range, a thing that looked like a Dalek all wrapped up in an old pink tarpaulin, standing in the garden of a derelict house in Aickman Road, evidently without any interference to it, perhaps literally for centuries. Whether the colour was exactly pink did not seem to be important at the time, but now, in hindsight, any doubt expands until such doubt becomes all consuming. Time as a phenomenon entails that colour must stay out of kilter with monochrome, and I am old enough to remember the colour injections in the early 1950s to which we were all made to submit and then airbrush from our memories, except for the odd person like me who somehow recalled it all happening, with the repeated assurance that further injections would not be needed and new babies from then on would not be colour blind at all by dint of some other process the details of which even I myself have forgotten. The long and the short of it is, I doubt it is a Dalek at all. But I hope to have enthralled you with its truncated tail.