Todd T. (June 20, 2001)Thanks for this, Jim, it is compelling reading. I find your own descriptions of your experiences quite evocative, and your synopsis of the Aickman story almost as captivating as the story itself. I wasn't completely able to tie all the threads of this triptych together thematically, but I very much enjoyed it. One possible title: "My Life in the Book Of Ghosts".- Todd T.
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blackfrancis (June 20, 2001)
I feel and have said before that I think this is one of Aickman's best tales. A masterpiece not only of horror, but also of humanism. It has a very emotionally impacting quality. The inherent "lostness" of Lene's character echoes back to all the "might-have-beens" and regrets in life. Your drawing the line between 'living' and 'surviving' captures an essence hidden in the shadows and dreams of the tale, Jim. Your personal identification with the feelings the story has aroused in your mind are fitting to this work and by no means self-indulgent, to me anyhow. Like Aickman said: "I do not regard my work as 'fantasy' at all, except, perhaps, for commercial purposes. I try to depict the world as I see it... " Maybe those of us that are obsessively drawn to these strange tales do so because that is how we the reader at times see our world, like a nightmare come to life.Excellent, Jim (again!). I hope almahu likes it.
-blackfrancis
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Adam Walter (June 20, 2001)
A very, very fine piece, Jim. I really enjoyed your approach. Also, regarding the inside/outside dichotomy in this story, all the roaming about outside while looking in, and the line: "Our father was a man of measureless wrath against a slight. It is his continuing presence about the house which largely upholds us." This makes one think of the unseen father character in "The Stains," no?~Adam
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Jim Rockhill (June 21, 2001)
Gee, thanks - Todd, blackfrancis and Adam.> This makes one think of the unseen father character in "The Stains," no?
>
> ~AdamYes. And that is another tale, like this one and "The Hospice" that seems to hit us from so many levels simultaneously. I wonder how long it will be before Aickman establishes a mainstream reputation alongside Henry James and de la Mare? Perhaps Gary William Crawford's critical study, whenever it appears, will assist with that.
Jim
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Mark Dillon (June 21, 2001)
To Jim Rockhill:A fascinating essay, and by no means self-indulgent -- especially from one whose response to an enigmatic work of art is a recollection of enigmas seen and felt in person. Life, like art, is full of echoes, and you evoke yours well.
Any writer obsessive enough will raise echoes from one tale to the next, and whenever I read about the ragged doll leaning from the ground floor window, I always remember Miss Roper's house from "The Trains" --
"... Every time a train passes Miss Roper's house, someone leans out of a bedroom window and waves to it. It's gone on for years. Every train, mark you. The house stands back from the line and the drivers couldn't see exactly who it was, but it was someone in white and they all thought it was a girl. So they all waved back. Every train. But the joke is it's not a girl at all. It can't be. It's gone on too long. She can't have been a girl for the last twenty years or so."
The fates of Lene's brother and surviving parent bring to mind another passage, this one from Aickman's introduction to THE 4TH FONTANA BOOK OF GREAT GHOST STORIES (1967):"Knowledge lies within us. It is to be found nowhere else. It is a matter of delight and of inaccessible horizons, rather than of question and answer. Truth can be found only through the imagination, and those whose imaginations have been cramped with answers will never find it."
When Lene's brother deduces a hidden room within the dollhouse, her mother glares at him "in a way most unlike her."Only sometimes to my father did my mother speak like that. "Show me in the house."I rose too.
"You stay here, Lene. Put some more water in the kettle and boil it."
"But it's my house. I have a right to know."
My mother's expression changed to one more familiar. "Yes, Lene," she said, "you have a right. But please not now. I ask you."
Later, her mother dismisses the topic: "What does it matter?"She wished the subject to be dropped, and we dropped it.
Her brother, too, suddenly feigns a lack of interest:"But what happened?" I pressed him. "What happened when you were in the room with her?""What do you think happened?" replied Constantin, wishing, I thought, that my mother would re-enter. "Mother realized that I was right. Nothing more. What does it matter, anyway?"
That final query confirmed my doubts.
"Constantin," I said. "Is there anything I ought to do?"
"Better hack the place open," he answered, almost irritably.
[ Note the ambiguity of certain phrases that, from a writer of Aickman's precision, seem deliberately skewed -- "Show me in the house. What happened when you were in the room with her?" ]The eventual retreat of Lene's brother from imaginative life into the dead certainties of Jesuit faith, and the retreat of her mother into the killing certainties of Hitler's faith, leave Lene on her own, face to face with the inner room and its irresolvable mystery.
Mark Dillon
Quebec, CanadaoOo
James Michael Rogers (June 22, 2001)
Excellent essay on a great and tantalizing story. Particularly liked the personal anecdotes. I see that I have to re-read "The Inner Room".[later]James
I'm having a hard time laying my hand on my copy of "The Inner Room" so I can't check the text at the moment. Does the story indicate what month the narrator is born in? The fact that the house is in the nature of a birthday gift makes me think that this might cast light on the significance of the birthstone names.The opal is supposedly something of a bad luck omen for those not born in the month of October (perhaps reminiscent of the mingled blue colors of blue, green and red comprising by the sisters clothing. This "legend" appears to have originated with Walter Scott, and would tie in nicely to the moderate to severe Scottish fixation sometimes evinced by Aickman.
Though a list of several birthstones is reeled off in the story, kind of like Santa's reindeer or the Seven Dwarves, the two sisters who have the largest role in the story are Emerald and Opal. These gems both are associated with fertility. Emerald, in particular, is known as "the Venus stone". These stones are also both credited with improving vision, both in the literal sense and in the sense of providing enlightenment. Certainly enlightenment or self-knowledge (the latter being the self-proclaimed theme of RA's strange stories) seems to be what is being offered by the sisters.
So why only nine sisters instead of 12? Well, I may be going off a cliff here....it's happened before, y'know....but I am guessing that it might have to do with the term of birth. Might this explain the significance of "The Inner Room" (i.e., a womb) which has never been used or defiled by the "landlord". Would this have anything to do with the narrators focus on her own mother? To say nothing of Lene's resistance to having her father open her dollhouse with his clumsy tools, etc. How does all of this match up with her missing husband and her near-non sequiter regarding the awakening of physical passion?
Adam Walter mentioned the absentee father in the terrific story "The Stains", and I too am struck by this connection as well as to the similar father figure in Blackwood's "The Olive" (a story which I never tire of flogging until I find someone who likes it as well as I do). In both "The Stains and "The Inner Room" the father is pretty clearly a missing figure of great supernatural and perhaps sexual dimension. I am also reminded of the missing mother and wife in "The Fetch".
Sorry if that seemed a painful and unnecessarily literary stab at interpretation. I've got to get my kicks from that english degree somewhere.
Part of the torture, and part of the fun, in reading Aickman is in trying to find these mythic, literary, and historical allusions. In my experience it is usually a goose chase and the story remains as tantalizingly out of reach as it did before....or even more so. You wail, "But what does it mean? I feel that I _almost_ understand....." Since this was the same feeling you had when you read the story for the very first time, it doesn't seem much help to spend a lot of time analyzing it, any more than it does to wonder what "All Along The Watchtower" really "means".
Still, it is fun, and it probably beats stealing hubcaps, unless they're really nice ones.
James
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blackfrancis (June 22, 2001)
"James Michael Rogers" wrote
>
> Does the story indicate what month the narrator is born in?Lene was born in the summer. The opening of the scene, the breakdown in the car on the way to the beach happens during "...the famous Long Summer of 1921." on her birthday.
-bf
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Jim Rockhill (June 22, 2001)
Interesting. Unfortunately, the closest thing to a birthdate Aickman gives us is Summer - at least explicitly. There may be another implicit date in there somewhere.oOo
James Michael Rogers (June 23, 2001)
Drat. Well, I still like the fertility riff. As our late, lamented corespondent once pointed out, you can't go too far wrong on these Aickman thingies if you just assume they are all about sex from the get-go.oOo
Jim Rockhill (June 23, 2001)
"Mark Dillon" wrote
>
(Reluctant snips)> [ Note the ambiguity of certain phrases that, from a writer of
> Aickman's precision, seem deliberately skewed -- "Show me in
> the house. What happened when you were in the room with her?" ]
>Thanks, Mark. I like the points you make, especially this one about ambiguous phrasing. I await the day when Aickman is accorded 1/10 the respect given Henry James. Whereas in James, I always get the impression that the author is struggling to get the language to do exactly what he wants it to do, in Aickman the language is always precise and elegant, despite the ambiguity of its message = a paradox that helps make his work such a delight to re-read.
Jim
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Randy Money (July 16, 2001)
As always, late to the dance:James Michael Rogers wrote:
> [...]
> So why only nine sisters instead of 12? Well, I may be going off a cliff
> here....it's happened before, y'know....but I am guessing that it might have
> to do with the term of birth. Might this explain the significance of "The
> inner room" (i.e., a womb) which has never been used or defiled by the
> "landlord". Would this have anything to do with the narrators focus on her
> own mother? To say nothing of Lene's resistance to having her father open
> her dollhouse with his clumsy tools, etc. How does all of this match up with
> her missing husband and her near-non sequiter regarding the awakening of
> physical passion?
James, if I were working on a dissertation, I would consider this a fertile (*cough*) line of investigation. Probably all the moreso because Lene mentions she cannot abide Freudian interpretation. It's been my experience that when an author in her/his fiction pooh-poohs something, you should start looking high and low for it.
I would also do some comparison to the premise's near inversion of the situation in "The Hospice". There the "sustenation" is so complete the inhabitants are rather vegetable-like. Here, it was so incomplete the dolls feel neglected and spiteful toward the -- er -- susentator (a title for a new Ahnold movie, maybe?).
Would I be wrong in thinking Aickman was looking for something like balance? That he found either extreme worrisome?
Would I be wrong in thinking he's one of those authors who, once infected with a notion, have to turn it this way and that, left and right, upside and downside, exploring as many lines of intersection with that notion as possible?
Randy
Mark Dillon wrote:
>
> To Jim Rockhill:
>
> A fascinating essay, and by no means self-indulgent -- especially
> from one whose response to an enigmatic work of art is a recollection
> of enigmas seen and felt in person. Life, like art, is full of echoes,
> and you evoke yours well.
Couldn't have said it better, Mark. And your own contribution offered much food for thought, too. Thanks.
Randy
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