"I soon became absorbed in the odd mixture of fact and fancy--light shining on a little space of the world, and beyond, mist and shadow and awful forms." Machen, "The Novel of the Black Seal"
Insect-Headed Tombstone
Worship of Black
Cortazar’s tale tells the story of a brother and sister living in a house in Buenos Aires that has been in their family at least since their great-grandparents’ time, and in which they have lived all their lives. Both are in their forties and live a quiet life alone, the sister having never married and the brother’s fianceé having died before a marriage could be consummated. They subsist financially off of income from their farms, and the main activity of their day is dusting and cleaning the house, a task which is usually finished by eleven a.m. Irene (the sister) spends the remainder of the day knitting, while her unnamed brother (also the narrator) either watches her with adamant appreciation, or re-reads an old French novel from his library. Bland, aristocratic domesticity seems their unending lot, and while the text falls short of significantly implying any undue relationship beyond the filial (though I imagine this could be extruded with a certain amount of rigor and open-reading), they are content with one another’s dry companionship and unaspiring of any enlivening change. That is, until the first ‘take over’ takes place.
The house is rather evenly divided into two living segments. Upon entering, one moves through a vestibule and passes through a “wrought-iron gated door” to enter the atrium of the house, which consists of a living room, a bedroom on either side and, just before the second threshold, a corridor leading off to the left in which are found a kitchen and a bath. The space beyond the atrium, which contains the brother’s library, a dining room, and three additional bedrooms, is entered through an oak door, the massiveness of which the narrator doubly reminds us. The siblings do not venture beyond this door except in order to clean and for the brother to occasionally retrieve a volume from his library.
It is this second part of the house that is first ‘lost’ to the pair when the brother, having ventured to the kitchen to put a kettle on, hears a “muted and indistinct” sound behind the oaken door, that of “a chair being knocked over on to the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation.” This description is curious, because the two varieties of sound are quite dissimilar, and unlikely to be alternative explanations for the same thing. Hearing another sounding considerably closer to the threshold, the brother quickly shuts and bolts the massive door, obviously in order to keep whatever is there from coming through. What is striking about this circumstance is that it is rather unremarkable to the man; he follows through with heating the kettle and bringing the mate out to his sister, at which point he gravely but unexcitedly tells her that “‘They’ve taken over the back part.’” From the sister’s reaction it is clear that “They” are known to her, and it is from her that we learn that Their sudden inhabitation means the back part of the house is no longer suitable for living in or venturing into.
Here ends the brief first part of the story, and here begins the time for a bit of exploration. We are told at the very beginning of the tale the sentimental value this house has for the siblings, being a place dear to ancestral and personal memory, but not much else is made of this fact. The narrator speculates, with some sense of fact, that he and his sister have not been able to consummate any marriage because of their duty to the place, to maintain it and ensure it is not unduly torn down and sold piecemeal by some undeserving inheritor, and he further suggests that they plan either to die there, or, “better yet…topple it” themselves. Due to the failure of the pair to provide a direct descendent who might trustworthily inherit the house, one of these outcomes is likely to occur; this gives us a possible origin of the invading Them: time’s relentless progression, death’s shuffling approach. This attribution is not entirely satisfying, however, as both brother and sister are said to be in their forties, which is rather young for us to assume the calculated hovering of some unsightly maleficence.
Cortazar inflicts the reader with a sort of Maeterlinckean blindness, leaving him to fill in the blankness of the intruder with whatever dread spectres his epistemological nerve can supply. This, despite the ostensibly non-supernatural bent of the tale. Brother and sister know and, without fear, comply with the implied demand that they must exit the house. They do not protest, or suggest a resistance; they do not even lament the sudden overtaking, instead abiding it and, once the rest of the house is just as subtly taken over in the second part, departing in resignation.
In the first take-over, the brother is separated from his books, which appear to be his only form of private entertainment, aside from watching Irene knit. Her knitting is likewise her primary occupation, and she seems to do it for its own sake. It is thus noteworthy that with the take-over of the main part of the house, she is unable to bring her yarn with her and is thereby divested of her knitting. When the brother points this out to her as they crowd in the entryway of the house, she lets what she is working on fall from her hands almost carelessly, without glancing at it.
It seems we can postulate no definite identity for the narrative force that drives the story to its own self-termination. Primary themes here are the impermanence of possession of property and self, the correlated necessity of loss, and the inevitability of one’s spatial and chronological excision. The story is concerned with limitation as it pertains both to agency and sovereignty; it is the strange force, the mutually exclusive Otherness, whose presence is for the most part only negatively manifest in the forcing-out of the characters, that takes over through a sort of stripping, an ousting by suggestion and mere entrance, rather than by force. The true subject of the story, if we may rely on the choice of title to point us to it, is the taken-over house; that is, the emptied, de-inhabited house, presenced-over by a non-humanness in an anti-habitation that enters, intrudes, from the back of the house and gradually insinuates its way forward. The story is weird, certainly, because of the indefiniteness of the intrusion, the agency-without-agent, but it is neither tragic nor horrifying because of the pathetic resignation of the siblings. There is something disturbing in this very disattachment, though, that lends a more subtly unsettling quality to the tale—a nihilism borne out of the siblings’ blasé response to their irrational displacement. Cortazar implies no bright future for the pair; instead, the final image we get is that of the silent, forbidding house, unknown occupants biding, as the brother locks it up and tosses the key in the sewer so that no hapless fellow might come upon to rob the place thus “taken over.” I’m tempted to say as a final word that I think this tale withholds too much that might help to give the plot a more compelling substance; but another part of me enjoys the true abyssal or radically negated quality of this subtly-crafted dispresence.
What exactly I was afraid to say I cannot tell, but I understood that once I began to talk about it to him it would become more definite and more horrible. Instinct told me that the less shape I gave that shadow the better for both of us. Sloane, To Walk the Night, 14.
Carcass flame
swirled and fumed,
they stood round the burial
mound and howled,
as heads melted,
crusted gashes
spattered and ran
bloody matter.
The glutton element
flamed and consumed
the dead of both sides.
On a cosmic level, the universe is amoral and violent. Ordered formations do not cancel out their chaotic heritage, but merely conceal it, perpetuating the illusion that form is prior to process. Certain forms of energy cycle back upon one another to form a generative matrix which remains productive insofar as it does not cannibalize itself. By earthen vision it is all too easy to forget the incredible seas of noxious, roiling plasma composing that cleanly luminous and geometric sphere whose natural majesty heralds our daily emergence. Humans revere centers as engines of regulation, mitigating the radical discontinuity of objects by situating them within an arrangement (systematizing). Basic narrative pattern works by subjecting a normative state to some species of tension that drags it toward a vortex of disorganization. We savor the controlled return of the chaotic, of that which challenges stability by disrupting rudiments—fort/da, ritual displeasure to re-validate the power of the compromised milieu, that of local or prevalent human ordering (egoistic, socio-cultural, legal, cognitive, literary/ludic, philosophical, mythic-religious, etc).
I follow Paglia where she writes that “art…is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic reordering of reality,[…] a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature.” Art is “spellbinding” because its fundamental act is “to tame some uncontrollable aspect of reality” by committing its “daemonic energy” to a manner of “perceptual stillness,” or a frozen form in which it can be submitted to the understanding by ritual conjuring (repeat consumption).[1] Where repetition does not kill the daemon, it at least provides a sense of control by making the chaotic familiar and thus assimilable to an interior (local) milieu in a neutralized form (inoculation).
Heroic sagas like Beowulf directly call to mind this integral function of art by dramatizing the upswing of the disorderly and eulogizing the ability of men to neutralize it by expulsion or subordination. Grendel, the ruthless man-beast of the murky moor, “dwell[s] apart” in a filthy, forbidding mere that defines the center of a peripheral exterior milieu opposed to King Hrothgar’s mead-hall Heorot, sacred center of the Danish warrior culture as tribal gathering-place and locus of communion between lord and retainers. For a span of twelve winters he violates the sanctity of Heorot by nightly reterritorializing it (or threatening to) as a daemonized theatre of anthropophagy wherein the human is reinstated to a position of vulnerability before darkness that chews before it swallows—the grinding gulf of undifferentiation by digestive alchemy.
As long as either lived, / he was hateful to the other. (Beowulf ll. 813-14, Heaney trans.)
Hrothgar had ordered Heorot built as a place where “he would dispense / his God-given goods to young and old— / but not the common land or people’s lives.” As Leyerle writes, “the strength and security of heroic society depend on the symbolic circulation of treasure” (149). In exchange for loyalty and service, the king disperses tokens of respect and acknowledgement which are also of decorous and/or protective value. This “ring-giving” or ritual bestowal of rewards maintains cohesion among retainers and lord by obviating potential anti-social violence rising from unregulated or uneven distribution of wealth. Such giving is also critically important for forging alliances or commitments to peace between tribes, or in atonement for past casualties (weregild: the death-price). It is precisely such that unites Beowulf and Hrothgar, the latter having appeased the Wulfings in a feud involving Beowulf’s father, by the dispatch of treasure.
Metallurgy and craftsmanship create a register that parcels out the flux of perception by anchoring desires to extrinsic materials which endow them with weight and permanence. They allow for dealings among men to be lifted from the stratum of blood and bodies and reconfigured among that of objects, mobile and transferable entities which are able to stand in for (or mediate) complex processes. Like language, such objects constitute a symbolic nexus that unifies by drawing disparate entities into a systematic inter-relationship (arrangement). The weregild, for example, reconstitutes destroyed flesh in terms of transferable objects to heal the unitary rift caused by the slaying of individuals. The Beowulf poet praises words and crafts (mail-coats) alike by the facility with which they are “woven” and “entwined,” testaments to man’s skill in generating ordered systems to fortify and protect him again the disordering currents of the universe.
We need protective walls and sheltering roofs; language is the sternest of the walls we erect against the unknown, and though invisible (except as script or print) it is the most enduring. Conrad, Cassell’s History of English Literature.
The deep boiled up / and its wallowing sent the sea-brutes wild. / My armor helped me to hold out; / my hard-ringed chain-mail, hand-forged and linked, / a fine, close-fitting filigree of gold, / kept me safe when some ocean creature / pulled me to the bottom. (Beowulf recounting his race with Breca, ll. 550-54).
When Beowulf speaks he “unlocks his word-hoard,” an expression that links civil discourse with lordly ring-giving and points to the fundamental importance of releasing or setting things off for the maintenance of socio-symbolic cohesion. There is an important contrast in Beowulf’s ready admission of his nation, loyalty and purpose when questioned upon coming ashore by the Danish lookout, who likewise explains his own position, and Grendel’s refusal to announce himself by declaring his heritage and purpose before entering a realm to which he is not kin. Formal greetings among strangers alleviate the fulminating tension of uncertainty and establish a preliminary bond mediated by the socio-symbolic. They also imply a compact of mutual assuredness in the humanity of the other (that is, the sense that the other is ethically compatible with local (tribal-interior) arrangements), and the capability to expand or augment the local milieu (ie., the accrual of like-minded alliances). Language weaves an overstructuring order that motivates relations between bodies; to lack or eschew it, as Grendel does, is to move asymptotically with respect to the socio-symbolic, approaching and shadowing it but never integrating with it.
Language in Beowulf is socially binding also in terms of poetry, which is not only entertainment but also a creative affirmation and account of man’s place in relation to the universe on the one hand, and local ancestral history on the other—two strands, intricately bound. That Grendel is driven to rage by bardic glorification of man’s privileged status in a divinely-structured universe suggests not linguistic comprehension on his part (as it might appear, though we have no other cause to believe this), but the author’s desire to ground Grendel’s hostility in his estrangement from this order. Bestial spawn of a monstrous genetic pool covertly bled from the human stream by Cain’s fratricide, Grendel is a morphogenetic re-presentation of that primal rift in the continuity of creation whose (Christian) symbolic archetype is the transgression in the garden. But whereas Satan is a substantially alien being, Grendel is a “consanguineous” monster, “the definition of humanity at war with itself” (Phillips, 24). Leyerle anticipates this idea, observing that Beowulf’s monsters “function in part as an outward objectification and sign of society beset by internecine slaughter between friend and kin” (148). Grendel is a figuration of daemonic energy (in Paglia’s sense), himself a cleft that cleaves space for chaos and uncertainty in the human order, but without maiming the robe of divine overstructuring. In a way he opens up a necessary outlet for the superfluous energies granted man by the excess of the natural/divine plenum, “wildness” that “[has] to brim over,” and will seek internal targets if no exterior expedient is present, as is suggested in the saga of Finn (ll. 1069-1157).
The narrative of Beowulf is somewhat problematic in terms of overarching religious perspective, lamenting once how the warriors pray at “pagan shrines” and ignorantly plead oaths to the “killer of souls,” yet painting Beowulf as one guided and favored by the Lord, who he believes sanctions his victories. We are repeatedly and unambiguously reminded of the Lord’s dominion over Grendel, however, it being “widely understood / that as long as God disallowed it, / the fiend could not bear [men] to his shadow-bourne” (ll.705-7), and noted that as “the Lord’s outcast,” he was “kept from approaching the throne [in Heorot] itself.” He cannot occupy a centralized position of power even illegitimately because lordly status is a lower expression of the stratifying Godhead. Grendel is incapable of ascendance because his method of entrance into the world is itself illegitimate, discontinuous, making him extrinsic to the hierarchic continuum linking created to creator. However, he maintains an oblique affiliation with the deity in a way similar to Cain, who is protected even as he is scolded and exiled. After their fight, Beowulf states that “the Lord allowed” Grendel to break from his arm-lock and escape (l. 967), and the narrative ambiguously mentions how Grendel and his ilk “strove with God / time and again until He gave them their reward,” perhaps a foreshadowing of their (merciful) future eradication (ll. 113-14).
Grendel is an inversion of the virtuous lord figure represented by Hrothgar in that he takes things out of circulation and hoards them, specifically the bodies of Hrothgar’s men, and refuses to pay the weregild: “no counselor could ever expect / fair reparation from those rabid hands” (157-8). The circulation of goods among the Danes is predicated on the notion that all property is loan, all worldly wealth conditional upon the beneficence of an approving sovereign. In this context, at least, the Lord maintains the dual aspect of both generous giver (creator) and uncompromising collector (destroyer) which constitutes the exterior plenum. Whatever Grendel carries back to his dank domain (whether human carrion dispatched to his maw, or objects brought back to mere-mother) is critically reappropriated, since it is effectively bled out of the circulatory system of warrior society continuously purged and fed by an exterior theo/geocentric plenum, which becomes in man’s reflections a systematizing force possessive of central gravity that draws into balance disparate arrangements. The center is implicit compact between man and plenum. This bond is conceptual rather than actual, because it depends upon a socio-symbolic gesture that attributes complicity to an aleatory and uncompromising outside—it grants the local (human) milieu access to radical exteriority by conscripting it in terms of the interior (that is, the local milieu). What is God but apotheosis of singularity, of disparate routes between being and not-being, emergence and withdrawal, condensed into a single artery?
[The] Sun is not the heart of darkness but that which cauterizes the gaping wound from which pulverizing contingencies (or climates) of the cosmic abyss bleed into our world. (Negarestani explaining his anti-solar ecology, “Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss”).
[1] Indeed, I find this phenomenally true as I modulate this flux, flinging down planks to move forward over mucky misshapen earth, so many guideposts in the fluttering abyss.
“One Gate there only was, and that look’d East / On th’ other side: which when th’ arch-fellon saw / Due entrance he disdaind, and in contempt, / At one slight bound high over leap’d all bound / Of Hill or highest Wall, and sheer within / Lights on his feet.” (Paradise Lost IV, ll. 178-183)
