Happy Halloween to all you folks
who celebrate this holiday. It is one
of my favorite holidays because it gives participants the opportunity, even if
only for one evening, to live in a world of their imagination rather than
everyday reality—the fulfillment of a basic human desire that the short story
as a form has always been most effective in embodying—both because such a
experience must be, by its very nature, a moment out of time, and because such
a moment requires ritualistic precision to evoke.
Reality in the short story is
always seen to be fictional, in the ambiguous double sense of that word. Phenomenal reality, from such a perspective,
is a fictional construct that novelists more often than not take as the only
real. However, true reality for the
short-story writer can only be perceived in those revelatory moments when
fictional reality as fictional reality is perceived. For the short-story writer, hallucinatory
reality is true reality, just as for primitive man, sacred reality is the only
reality; profane, or everyday, reality is just an illusion that makes ordinary
experience possible.
Algernon Blackwood once said that
his primary concern was stories of extended consciousness. "My fundamental
interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us
all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty,” In a preface to a
collection of his tales, Blackwood noted that such was beginning to be revealed
in the work of Eddington, Jeans, and Whitehead, who have built on the new
physics which has wiped matter out of existence and perceives atoms as charges
of electricity which may themselves be symbols of something spiritual or mental
and as yet unknown. "The Universe, thus, seems to be an appearance merely,
our old friend Maya or Illusion, of the Hindus."
Many nineteenth-century stories in
America, England, German, and France, from Poe to Maupassant to Hoffmann to
M.R. James reflected this view of reality. To celebrate Halloween 2012, I have
chosen to discuss a relatively modest “horror” story of the turn of the
century, W. W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw.” Published in l902, it is the
only frequently reprinted story of this prolific short story writer of the
Edwardian period, who critic Walter Allen calls "an exquisite minor
artist.” If you have never read it, you
can find it online and might want to give yourself a little “trick or treat”
thrill before you read my analysis of its short story characteristics. You can
find it here: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/mnkyspaw.htm
Plot is everything in "The Monkey's
Paw," with character developed only enough to sketch the "prosaic
wholesomeness" of the family and the romantic mystery of the soldier as a
"visitor from distant parts," a teller of fanciful stories and the
transmitter of the magical object. In
effect, the soldier is one who brings the magic of fairy tale and the Arabian
Nights into the midst of "prosaic wholesomeness." The story itself is a carefully elaborated
game played by the strict rules which often govern folk tales and fairy tales,
a process suggested in the very beginning by the chess game the father and son
are engaged in.
The story is based on the convention
of the granting of three wishes, in which, as usual in such stories, the means
by which the wishes are granted is tightly controlled by the language of the
wish itself. H. G. Wells makes this
device more emphatic in "The Man who Could Work Miracles." Focus on the end of the wish without due
care taken to the means by which it is expressed can prove disastrous. The stated thematic motif here is that an
Indian fakir put a spell on the monkey's paw, granting three wishes to one who
holds it in order to prove that fate rules people's lives and that people
interfere with fate to their peril.
In this three-part story, the tone
of Part I is one of domestic self-containment, even after the departure of the
soldier, for the son suggests that if his monkey paw is no more truthful than
the rest of his adventures, "then we shan't make much out of
it." The son's good-humored
mocking of the paw, making it equivalent to fictional stories of the soldier,
continues with the suggestion that the father wish for two hundred pounds to
pay off their house after which the son sits down at the piano with a mock
solemn face, "marred by a wink at his mother," and plays a fanfare
for the wish. Even when the paw seems
to twist in his hand, this is attributed to the fancy of the father; and
Herbert, well aware of the conventions of such story motifs, says again
mockingly that they will find the money tied up in a big bag in the middle of
the bed with "something horrible squatting up on top of the wardrobe
watching you as you pocket your ill-gotten gains."
The
tragic fulfillment of the wish the next day, when the company that the son
works for reports he has been killed and that the parents will receive two
hundred pounds as recompense, emphasizes two internal moral motivations for the
tragic event--that the father has wished for something even though he admits
that he already has everything he wants, and that the one who was most ironic
and disbelieving about the efficacy of the paw is the one who is
destroyed.
However, the real issue here
revolves around the means by which the wish is granted--that rather than as
supernatural manifestation, the money comes, as the soldier has said it would,
"so naturally" that one might, if he wished to, attribute it to
coincidence. The fictional problem
being laid bare here focuses on why events in a story occur as they do: by
fate, by coincidence, or by characters interfering with fate. The question the
story hangs on is why the son dies, particularly in the horrible way that he
does, mangled in the machinery at his work.
The statement by the company
representative that Herbert was "caught in the machinery" is, within
the context of fate, meddling, and coincidence that the story is based on,
ironic, for what makes the story work is that Herbert is caught in the machinery
of the story itself. Given the
tradition of the kind of tale that Herbert has mocked, he, of course, must die.
However, it is in the last section of the story that the kind of irony typical
of the tradition of the well-made story is made clear. The mother's desire to use the second wish
to make the boy come alive again is both scorned by the father (who insists
that the first event was coincidence) and feared by him, for he knows of the
danger of the means by which the wish may be fulfilled. His fear that the wish may be granted is
matched by his wife's despair that it may not.
The reader's consequent suspicion that the revived son will return in
his mutilated form establishes the necessary tension when someone knocks at the
door.
Thus, the wishes are all as if they had never been with the exception of the death of the son--a death which the reader still cannot be sure was natural or supernatural. However, regardless of what the tragedy is attributed to, the effect is that the world of the Arabian Nights, brought into the "prosaic wholesomeness" by the soldier, has transformed the prosaic into the purely imaginative. The world of the Arabian Nights has become real within the story itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment