Robert Aickman's "The Inner Room": A Personal Response
Jim Rockhill
up a few places at the suggestion of blackfrancis. I apologize if
anyone feels this is self-indulgent. Our response to Aickman is often
so intensely personal, that I could see no other way to deal with this
tale.
Robert Aickman's "The Inner Room": A Personal Response
Everyone's response to fiction or any other work of art is dependent
in varying degrees upon both the work itself and individual
experience. This is particularly true of one's response to the strange
tales of Robert Aickman, where the deeply personal, irrational
response to the images and their conjunction within the tale is as
important as the objective, rational reading of Aickman's elegant
prose.
My father was transferred from Michigan to Kansas when I was 2 years
old. He was transferred back to Michigan 3 years later. My first
memories of Michigan followed my arrival by train into the town in
which I was born. Dropping me off at my godmother's house, my father
disappeared for the remainder of the week so as to prepare the house
into which we were to move once my mother, brother and infant sister
arrived. The trip and layover in Chicago had been an eventful one for
a 5 year old, but what I remember most vividly is that first night in
this strange new place among these friendly, strange people. My
godmother's daughter had recently wed; hence her room was given to me.
In the hurry, the commotion and the fatigue, the only feature that had
stood out for me in that room, at first, was an overabundance of pink
and frills. I did not much care at that point: the bed looked soft and
I was tired. My godmother, concerned lest I experience night terrors
in this new environment, had thoughtfully provided a night-light. She
turned off the overhead light, walked to the wall, then bent to turn
on the light. A moment later, a gentle yellow glow framed her dark,
stooping form. When she stepped away from the wall, stepped to and out
the door, however, the entire room changed. Lined along every wall,
along the floor, on shelves, on the sills and the dresser-tops, were
more dolls than I had ever seen in my life, all turned toward the bed,
each eye and fixed smile now lit from below. There were no dolls in
our house in Kansas City. The only dolls I had seen were life-sized
mannikins in the museum and shop-windows, all wearing the same sly
smile, and the occasional baby doll, eyes rolled backward in feigned
sleep, in the arms of one of the neighbor girls. Surely, there was no
movement, but I sensed the threat of it, and the bulb in the
night-light was wont to flicker now and then, was it not? Did not that
one move, just then, just a little? Few nights since have seemed
longer.
Nearly a year later, settled firmly into our new home, one block
behind that of my godmother, we used to stare at the lone, high window
atop the large, stone house next door. Trees kept it in shadow much of
the year, so we were not entirely sure we occasionally did not see a
light in it. On those rare occasions when daylight did strike those
panes, all that was visible was a uniform steely glare with the hint
of movement behind it. We never thought to ask any of the adults what
lay behind that window. Inside, the house had more than its share of
tortuous hallways and rooms tucked-away where you would not expect to
find any more than closet. Around one bend of the second floor, was
one dark, extremely narrow staircase leading up to a distant door,
beneath which we would see the faintest trace of gray light. The
oldest daughter of the house told us, in a whisper, that we were never
to ascend those stairs or open that door. She smiled at our frightened
assent. One day, alone in the house with the youngest daughter, I did
ascend those stairs. Shifting light and shadow, filtered green through
the opposing trees, swept the small room and its slanting ceiling.
Never had a desk, a sweater slung across a chair and an empty bed,
from which the outline of a recently recumbent body had not been
entirely smoothed, seemed so ominous. And the smell in the room was
almost indescribable - a heavy minty smell just barely covering
another pungent, almost fishy odor as if it meant to disguise it. The
effect was nauseous. At the first sound from below, I ran down the
stairs and away from that stairway so quickly it is a wonder I did not
spill headlong and fracture my neck. The daughter's laughter both
embarrassed and terrified me. What did she know about the denizen of
that room that I did not know?
One day, a month later, the door opened while we were peering at it
and a small seated figure called to us in a thick voice. I had no
intentions of staying, but the youngest daughter proceeded up the
stairs, dragging me by the hand. At the top of those stairs sat a
very old man with a harsh voice and a German accent, making sandwiches
from hard-tack crackers, Limburger cheese and sardines. Now and then,
he would refresh himself with a pinch of snuff. Crumbs of snuff and
crackers, smears of cheese and sardine streaked his broad charcoal
sweater. He offered to share his snack with us, but we said, no, thank
you, we had just eaten lunch. There was nothing menacing about him,
but he did not appear to be quite natural to me. With his bowed
shoulders and curved spine, he seemed to have folded in upon himself;
this and the remarkable economy of movement with which he performed
every task gave me the sense that he held great amounts of energy in
reserve, like a coiled spring. To my child's mind, he was holding
something at bay alone in that shadow-swept room and they were wise
who asked us not to disturb him at it. He asked us one favor before
excusing us by claiming fatigue. His shoulder pained him and he could
not reach the precise spot he needed with the wintergreen oil. Would
we mind? Not too long after this, he was dead. The room now seemed too
empty to have held only that one person; it now seemed to hold a
vacuum. When I dream about that stairway and its distant door, I see
something altering the narrow strip of pale gray light beneath it and
wake myself before I can reach the latch.
***
"The Inner Room" first appeared in THE SECOND FONTANA BOOK OF GREAT
GHOST STORIES in 1966. At first glance, it is one of its author's
simplest and most direct structures.
In true Aickman fashion, the tale opens with a breakdown. Lene, the
narrator, and her family are on a holiday excursion occasioned by
Lene's birthday, when the motor of their automobile begins falling
apart near the middle of nowhere, probably somewhere near the back of
beyond, familiar to us from "The Hospice." Her Father, in his typical
ineffectual fashion - he can pronounce six languages perfectly, but
speak only one of them - waits half an hour before attempting to
summon help, attempts to signal only those least likely to assist,
then allows a man to reach into and snap something off of the engine
before towing them into town on the end of a rope "black and greasy as
the hangman's." Lene, crying desolately at her lost chance to visit
the beach, is led with her brother by her parents to a shop in search
of gifts.
"It was not merely an out of fashion shop, but a shop that at the best
sold too much of what no one wanted." Robert Aickman "The Inner
Room," THE COLLECTED STRANGE STORIES, VOLUME I (Tartarus Press/Durtro
Press: 1999), p. 278.
The window display which attracts Lene's brother Constantin, is for
display only and no amount of cajoling will interest the owner into
selling any part of it. Inside this shop, which Lene's mother
characterizes as "a shop that has died," is an "austere," doll house,
dusty and neglected, rather like "a model for Pentonville gaol," and
nothing like standard doll houses, all of which seem to have been
patterned after the villa in which Lene's successful uncle lives. All
of the windows are shut fast except for one on the ground floor from
which a ragged doll has half emerged. The shopkeeper is none too eager
to sell this item either, mumbling about having received it from an
old woman who had to get rid of it. He agrees to sell it very cheaply
in order to free up space in his shop.
Once installed in the Spare Room, Lene's doll house proves to be
virtually impenetrable. All of the windows are now sealed shut,
including that from which the doll had been sagging in the shop. Has
the doll fallen back inside, fallen out and been lost or has it
somehow escaped? None of the walls will come away, no portion of the
roof will detach in order to provide a view of the house's insides.
The front door opens easily, but Lene has to use portions of a
match-stick to keep it force it closed once again. The place is a
shambles and occupied by at least 9 dolls, 8 in the Drawing Room
dressed in "woolen Victorian clothes" and one, other, her hair in
disarray and her posture clearly deranged, sits with her back to the
window writing. One other room splashed and spotted with ink is
apparently her bedroom. This unnerves Lene as much as the Trophy Room,
every surface of which is covered with the heads and pelts of slain
animals and over the mantelpiece of which is a portrait of "an
aggressive figure menacing the room." As carefully as she examines the
house, she can discover no kitchen or room which could pass for one.
In spite of her terror at the violence of the Trophy Room and the
madness evidenced by the doll in the Writing Room, she pities the
occupants of the house -
"Happy people, I felt even then, would not wear these variants of
rust, indigo and greenwood." p. 282.
- and determines to "be a good landlord."
During a thunderstorm within days of acquiring the house, Lene dreams
of visiting it, "the wooden wedges" she had used to prop the door
closed, set "jagged and swollen" beside the open doors of a full-sized
house. Seemingly awakened from her dream, she hears unfamiliar
footsteps outside her bedroom door and sees the back of the
red-haired doll, life-sized, in the hall. Thereafter, she begins to
hear the dolls tapping, stamping and creeping in the darkness. She
locks up the house in the Spare Room and abandons it.
Her Father, his feelings wounded, because Lene would not allow him to
find a way to open the house with his tools and "unskillful hand," now
complains to her mother that she had been warned she would not retain
interest the house. Her Mother replies, "None of us can learn except
by experience," as if she understands something about the situation
unknown to the rest of the household.
Here appears a curious episode wherein Lene returns home from school
to find the "dining-room table littered with peculiarly uninteresting
drawing" that "curled up on themselves when one tried to examine them,
and bit one's finger."Her brother is producing an axonometric
projection of the house for a school assignment and discovers a hidden
space, an inner room, for which the building's outside measurements
will not account. Lene accounts for these drawings by comparing them
vaguely to her own weak knowledge of geometry, but the passage seems
to imply more than this. The drawings seem to act axonometrically by
converging on their axes and biting Lene when touched, more the
behavior of possible axonomancy - if we recall the use of sucromany in
"A Roman Question" - than mere complex mathematics. Lene feels that
"temporarily, I became a different person: confident, practical,
simple." Furthermore, Lene's mother's reaction to this information
about the hidden is to confirm the existence of the hidden room with
her son and purposefully excluding Lene, as if for her own good. The
next day, the doll house is gone, both parents claiming they had to
sell it because the Father had lost another job.
"I began to perceive how relative and instrumental truth could be." p.
288.
Thirty years pass.
"It was, as I say, for two or three months in 1921, that I owned the
house and from time to time dreamed that creatures I supposed to be
its occupants, had somehow invaded my home." p. 289.
At age fifteen, Lene's father is run over by a car and killed. Her
mother has returned to Germany, become increasingly sympathetic to the
new regime and disappeared.
Lene has succeeded in fulfilling her dream to become a dancer, but
soon gives it up after marriage -
"My husband aroused physical passion in me for the first time." p.
289.
He soon complains of her self-absorption, which she ascribes to
remembering the perfection of "beauty, and gentleness, and depth, and
capacity for love" that were her Mother's alone. He enters the
military and disappears during World War II, the second of "two people
who mattered to me in such very different ways, and who so
unreasonably vanished." Soon her brother is lost to her due to his
Jesuit zealotry.
She had wanted to live vicariously through the doll house when it
first arrived, reveling in the prospect of masked balls. Now, after
thirty years, she has no longer believes in anything, but death,
doubting if "there is endurance in anything but suffering."
"I was nearly lost, and this time I could not blame my father." p.
291.
Lene takes an Aickmanesque short cut, ostensibly through a
storm-tossed, marshy wood, but straight out of consensus reality into
the world of her own childhood nightmares. Seeking shelter and
suspecting what she may find, she is led by prenaturally silent,
regular greeny-pink lightning to the life-sized replica of the doll
house. A head bobs out "like Punch from the side of his booth" first
telling her she cannot come in, then inviting her at the prompting of
another resident. As in her dream, wooden wedges lie beside the door.
The floor is rotting away. The women and the house's interior are
even further raddled than her dolls and doll house had been. Each of
the women is named for her birthstone, those who receive her in the
Drawing Room and Topaz who is in another room "keeping the record."
The list of stones, though ancient in tone, follows no recognizable
pattern - Opal, the oldest, Emerald, Diamond, Garnet, Carnelian,
Chrysolite, Sardonyx, Topaz and Turquoise, the youngest. Emerald, who
admitted her, has the same dyed red hair as the figure seen outside
her bedroom door and repeatedly fingers the narrator's clothing. The
occupants speak to her with increasing agitation of how their
negligent landlord "failed in the barest duty of sustenation," an
ominous phrase suggesting both succor and sustenance which will be
reinforced again and again before the tale ends. The house is
sustained by hatred:
"Our father was a man of measureless wrath against a slight. It is his
continuing presence about the house which largely upholds us." p. 294.
Perhaps because she had been most successful in emerging into Lene's
world, "everyone but Emerald can see that the work is done." She
pulls a card from her musty garment and hands it to Lene, who sees a
photograph of herself as a child, through the heart of which someone
has pushed a tiny bobbed needle. Opal responds, as if reveling in
personally wringing the last drop of hope, love and life from her
guest's heart, "Wouldn't you think her heart would have rusted away by
now?" This vaguely vampiric image is reinforced by the increasingly
explicit references to the one room in the house their landlord has
not ruined, the inner room, where they feast. They rejoice at this,
rising from their "spidery bowers" and clapping their hands "like a
rustle of leaves." Opal now invites Lene into this previously hidden
and forbidden room from which her family had attempted to protect her
so many years before. She demurs and Opal leads her out of the house,
saying "Our father would never have let you go so easily, but I think
we have done what we can with you." Pleading her innocence, Lene
leaves the house and takes up her "painful, lost and forgotten way."
If we saw her now, would she resemble the house's previous owner, a
sagging doll emerging from the house, alive but depleted? She has
been left with nothing, as if faced, like Chief Seattle, with "the end
of living and the beginning of survival." Her pleas, "I did nothing.
Nothing!" avails her naught, no matter how small her fault may have
been. That she did nothing is precisely the reason she has been
vicimized by those who perceived themselves victims of her own
self-absorption and indifference. Opal pronounces her guilt and her
doom with a severity worthy of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu:
"It's what you do that counts, not what you feel about it afterwards."
p. 294.
What bothers me most about this tale, aside from the inordinate
harshness of Lene's punishment, is the identity of Emerald and her
sisters. Identified as they are with an odd assortment of months and
of varying age, are they moments in Lene's life she has repudiated?
And could that inner room be some aspect of Lene's self she cannot
face without destroying herself? If this is so, how does that relate
to the previous owner finding it necessary to rid herself of the house
and the doll emerging from the ground floor window prior to purchase?
Their father, that "furious old man," with his multitude of trophies
suggests the Greek hero, Orion, who boasted of being able to kill any
animal on earth, or Nimrod who appears in GENESIS as "a mighty hunter
before the Lord." Both are men of great power and even greater pride.
The latter is associated in some traditions with the building of the
Tower of Babel. Unfortunately, I have not been able to link either
figure with at least 9 daughters, not that the dream logic in
Aickman's tales always necessarily follows such a direct progression.
***
One final personal connection with the events in this story presents
itself - my own childhood encounter with Emerald. When I was 3 years
old, we visited the beach cottage of family friends in Kansas. After
paddling and running around like savages all day in the hot sun, my
brother and I were so tired we could barely stand, but irritable and
still very wound up. Therefore, my mother put my brother and me onto a
bed in one of the cottage's back rooms for a nap until the adults were
ready to call it a night and we could all go home. I remember lying
on a broad white towel with a large pink flamingo printed on it,
watching my mother turn down the lighted hallway and head down the
hall. The adults droned on in another room. After a short interval, a
shadow moved up the hall, I heard the rustle of a skirt and saw the
shape of an attractive young woman standing in the doorway. I thought
at first it was my mother come to check on us, but the aureole of lit
hair round the top of her head was the wrong color - my mother's hair
was red and this woman's was dark. Even though her back was to the
light, I could see her eyes as she stared into mine - the darkest,
deepest, widest eyes I had ever seen, with glints of pale yellow
light round the irises. A gentle smile crossed her lips. She stood at
the door for a long time, with one hand at its edge, then moved
forward to stand at the side of the bed before lying down beside me,
placing her face on a level with mine.. I told myself that if I lay
very still and did not make a sound, she could not really notice me,
even though her eyes had never left mine once she first appeared in
the doorway. She too lay still once she reached the bed. I tried
holding my breath until the air in the room swam with gray spirals,
but she remained at my side, always staring, always close, but never
quite touching me. This seemed to go on for hours, until the sound
from the other room changed timbre. At this, my companion rose from
the bed and walked to the door, still regarding me over her shoulder.
The faint light was now being disrupted by movement in the hall. The
shape at the doorway entered the room, looked down at the bed and
touched my face. It felt as if something broke inside my chest at that
touch and I cried out in panic, only to find that this shape was my
mother who denied meeting anyone in the hallway on her way to the
room.
"I do not say that the whole of what goes before is so heavily
filtered through later experience as to be of little evidential value.
. . All I can do is to tell something of what happened, as it now
seems to me to have been." p. 288.
Like Lene I am left wondering some days how fine is the line between
waking and sleeping, or how what we view in one world might come to
effect this other in which we live and breathe and love.
Jim Rockhill
6/20/01
Jim Rockhill
>
> Like Lene I am left wondering some days how fine is the line between
> waking and sleeping, or how what we view in one world might come to
> effect this other in which we live and breathe and love.
>
Sorry, I allowed spell-check to correct "wffect" into "effect" instead of "affect".
Todd T.
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.
"Jim Rockhill" <jr...@locallink.net> wrote in message
news:da490663.01062...@posting.google.com...
blackfrancis
> up a few places at the suggestion of blackfrancis. I apologize if
> anyone feels this is self-indulgent. Our response to Aickman is often
> so intensely personal, that I could see no other way to deal with this
> tale.
>
> "I do not say that the whole of what goes before is so heavily
> filtered through later experience as to be of little evidential value.
> . . All I can do is to tell something of what happened, as it now
> seems to me to have been." p. 288.
>
> Like Lene I am left wondering some days how fine is the line between
> waking and sleeping, or how what we view in one world might come to
> effect this other in which we live and breathe and love.
>
>
> Jim Rockhill
> 6/20/01
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 draw 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
Adam Walter
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
think of the unseen father character in "The Stains," no?
~Adam
Jim Rockhill
Jim Rockhill
Yes. 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 Crawfor's
critical study, whenever it appears, will assist with that.
Jim
Mark Dillon
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, Canada
James Michael Rogers
personal anecdotes. I see that I have to re-read "The Inner Room".
James
--
James Michael Rogers
jed...@home.com
James Michael Rogers
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.
blackfrancis
"James Michael Rogers" <je...@ionet.net> wrote in message
news:4PKY6.94360$aA5.5...@news1.rdc1.tx.home.com...
>
>
>
> 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.
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
Jim Rockhill
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.
James Michael Rogers
>
> 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.
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.
Jim Rockhill
> To Jim Rockhill:
>
(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?" ]
>
> 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, Canada
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 work such a delight to re-read.
Jim
Randy Money
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
Randy Money
>
> 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