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1veilofisis
One of my favorite films is Val Lewton's adaptation of 'The Body Snatcher' with Boris Karloff (actually, all of Val Lewton's films are great favorites: my favorite films ever, really). It occurred to me last night, as I was watching it, that I've never read Stevenson's original story. I'm not absolutely sure if this qualifies as proper Gothic (and we've discussed and attempted to determine the boundaries of the genre many times before, to no avail), but I have a feeling it's closer to the mark than I'm presuming it to be. Also, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is so short that I thought we might do a group read on it in the near future; this should be a fitting precursor...
So here we are!
So here we are!
2alaudacorax
... and now you've got me hankering after the The Val Lewton Collection box set over on Amazon ...
3LolaWalser
You won't be sorry, Paul, great set!
I've never read Stevenson's original story
I did, but I wish I'd read it before seeing the movie. It's all mixed up now, the movie faces overlaying the text.
I've never read Stevenson's original story
I did, but I wish I'd read it before seeing the movie. It's all mixed up now, the movie faces overlaying the text.
4alaudacorax
Ummm ... really not sure what to think of this. The ending just seems too incongruous. And the story seemed to be going quite well - until the ending.
I'll, no doubt, give it another go in a day or two; but I'm really not too impressed with this one.
ETA - By 'incongruous', I meant that the ending, for me, doesn't really fit the rest of the story. It seems somehow 'off-target' - not really satisfying the intrigue (poor choice of word but I can't, offhand, think of a better) set up by the earlier parts.
I'll, no doubt, give it another go in a day or two; but I'm really not too impressed with this one.
ETA - By 'incongruous', I meant that the ending, for me, doesn't really fit the rest of the story. It seems somehow 'off-target' - not really satisfying the intrigue (poor choice of word but I can't, offhand, think of a better) set up by the earlier parts.
5veilofisis
4
'I'm really not too impressed with this one.'
Arrrgh...I have to agree! This just...didn't do it for me, really. I'll have to give it a reread, though, because, to be fair, I was a little sloshed when I read it and I may have missed some choice passages in that over-quick, half-drunk, about-to-fall-asleep mindset I approached it in...
'I'm really not too impressed with this one.'
Arrrgh...I have to agree! This just...didn't do it for me, really. I'll have to give it a reread, though, because, to be fair, I was a little sloshed when I read it and I may have missed some choice passages in that over-quick, half-drunk, about-to-fall-asleep mindset I approached it in...
6housefulofpaper
I can see how, if you love the Val Lewton film, you could be disappointed by the original story.
For a while, I wondered about the 'point' of it, as it doesn't appear to have the same sort of payoff or dramatic closure as the film - in the opening scene, as it were, we meet Fettes and McFarland in old age and McFarland does not appear to have suffered particularly from the events set out in the ‘flashback’ forming the rest of the story.
Fettes is presented as an outsider - a Scotsman living in England (indeed, in Southern England, as he’s evidently close to London), and a relic of the Regency in the Age of Steam - and, as we would say now, ‘damaged’.
I take it that a Calvinist point of view is at work in this story, at least partly - I think Fettes believes he is damned, and that nothing he can do will change that. There is no chance of redeeming himself through good works, for example. Why does he want to remind McFarland that he is in the same position? Presumably McFarland is in the same position. Why does Fettes need to remind McFarland of this? I don’t want to speculate too much on this, as there’s a real danger - in my relative ignorance - of conjuring up a parody, Dad’s Army’s Private Fraser character and presenting it as a true picture of this part of the Scottish character.
I would also say that a great part of the power of the story comes from its psychological study of temptation. McFarland pretty much plays the part of the devil in the scene where he persuades McFarland to take Gray’s murdered body. The story does very well to get inside Fettes' head. It needs to be remembered just how new this kind of writing was, when Stevenson wrote this story.
And then, is it the toast to Gray at the inn, that causes his body to replace the old woman’s in the gig? Presumably this was ‘merely’ a vision and it did not continue to manifest itself - if the horse found it’s way back to the city, I assume the old woman’s body would have been discovered on board.
There’s a vein of the folkloric supernatural too, its inexplicable and inconclusive character.
I think it’s these three elements - religious dread, folklore, and psychological acuity - that give the story its power. The irony and the depth of character (characters with back stories and motivations, and of course the wonderful faces of Henry Daniell and Boris Karloff) that the film boasts, are absent.
For a while, I wondered about the 'point' of it, as it doesn't appear to have the same sort of payoff or dramatic closure as the film - in the opening scene, as it were, we meet Fettes and McFarland in old age and McFarland does not appear to have suffered particularly from the events set out in the ‘flashback’ forming the rest of the story.
Fettes is presented as an outsider - a Scotsman living in England (indeed, in Southern England, as he’s evidently close to London), and a relic of the Regency in the Age of Steam - and, as we would say now, ‘damaged’.
I take it that a Calvinist point of view is at work in this story, at least partly - I think Fettes believes he is damned, and that nothing he can do will change that. There is no chance of redeeming himself through good works, for example. Why does he want to remind McFarland that he is in the same position? Presumably McFarland is in the same position. Why does Fettes need to remind McFarland of this? I don’t want to speculate too much on this, as there’s a real danger - in my relative ignorance - of conjuring up a parody, Dad’s Army’s Private Fraser character and presenting it as a true picture of this part of the Scottish character.
I would also say that a great part of the power of the story comes from its psychological study of temptation. McFarland pretty much plays the part of the devil in the scene where he persuades McFarland to take Gray’s murdered body. The story does very well to get inside Fettes' head. It needs to be remembered just how new this kind of writing was, when Stevenson wrote this story.
And then, is it the toast to Gray at the inn, that causes his body to replace the old woman’s in the gig? Presumably this was ‘merely’ a vision and it did not continue to manifest itself - if the horse found it’s way back to the city, I assume the old woman’s body would have been discovered on board.
There’s a vein of the folkloric supernatural too, its inexplicable and inconclusive character.
I think it’s these three elements - religious dread, folklore, and psychological acuity - that give the story its power. The irony and the depth of character (characters with back stories and motivations, and of course the wonderful faces of Henry Daniell and Boris Karloff) that the film boasts, are absent.
7naimahaviland
I love Val Lewton's The Body Snatcher and the other Lewton DVDs i have! I'll have to check outthe book :)
8veilofisis
I think it's time to move on; this story did very, very little for me! Our next reading will be a short novel: our first. It's The Island of Dr. Moreau, which is one of the few works that has had a meaningful impact on my actual world-view. It's also just a hell of a story...
New thread is up.
New thread is up.
9alaudacorax
I really should give this another read. I probably didn't re-read because I found it rather a disappointment, but - particularly in light of #6 - I really should before I give up on it. Particularly as I'm sure I've in the past read some quite good Stevenson short stories.
10alaudacorax
Over the last couple of evenings I've been reading Stevenson's Olalla.
That really impressed me. I found it quite absorbing - a quintessentially Gothic story and Stevenson is marvellously subtle at adding-in undercurrents of uneasiness and hardly-noticed misdirections.
In the light of that, I felt I owed it to him to give this one another go. Which I've just done.
I can't get to grips with what's going on - here are two stories, by the same author, made in a year of each other and evidently (from Wikipedia) both produced for the Christmas market for creepy tales - and yet it's almost as if there are two, separate writers at work. The whole 'feel' of the stories is different, with 'Olalla' seeming to belong to an older writer, a contemporary or immediate follower of Mary Shelley, while 'The Body Snatcher' - actually the earlier story - seems to belong somewhere round about M. R. James.
Irrespective of period, though, I think 'The Body Snatcher' really suffers by the comparison.
I grant what houseful says in #6 about the depiction of the psychology of Fettes' knuckling-under to temptation; but, in 'Olalla', Stevenson operates on a wholly different and much higher level: he has a depiction of the shifting emotions and unreliable perceptions of a young man newly in love that gave this reader several little kicks of embarrassed recognition - as well as adding the extra layer of narrator-unreliability to the mix.
I could actually go on about 'Olalla' at some length - there's a lot of depth and food for thought in there, I think - while it seems to me that 'The Body Snatcher' is pretty linear and, dare I say, superficial. There doesn't seem a lot of meat there to chew on.
The biggest problem for me, though, is a lack of 'internal truth' to that ending. That sudden metamorphosis of the final corpse doesn't seem to me to be realistic by any conventions of the genre. It seems to me to be 'outside the rules', somehow. Having Gray's corpse suddenly reappear like that reminds me a little of Bobby Ewing suddenly reappearing in the shower.
To be honest, thinking over what I've written above, I think the ending is most of the problem. If it had a stronger ending, I suspect I wouldn't be bothered by the lack of depth of the whole story. It wouldn't be in the same class as 'Olalla'; but that's not to say that it would be in a 'lower' class - just in a different one.
Having said that, I'm tempted to believe that 'Olalla' was a labour of love that Stevenson really worked on and that happened to be ready when a story was needed, while 'The Body Snatcher' was hurriedly banged-out to order. At the moment, I've no way of proving that, though. I really have to get round to reading some good, detailed biographies of some of these writers, some of these days.
That really impressed me. I found it quite absorbing - a quintessentially Gothic story and Stevenson is marvellously subtle at adding-in undercurrents of uneasiness and hardly-noticed misdirections.
In the light of that, I felt I owed it to him to give this one another go. Which I've just done.
I can't get to grips with what's going on - here are two stories, by the same author, made in a year of each other and evidently (from Wikipedia) both produced for the Christmas market for creepy tales - and yet it's almost as if there are two, separate writers at work. The whole 'feel' of the stories is different, with 'Olalla' seeming to belong to an older writer, a contemporary or immediate follower of Mary Shelley, while 'The Body Snatcher' - actually the earlier story - seems to belong somewhere round about M. R. James.
Irrespective of period, though, I think 'The Body Snatcher' really suffers by the comparison.
I grant what houseful says in #6 about the depiction of the psychology of Fettes' knuckling-under to temptation; but, in 'Olalla', Stevenson operates on a wholly different and much higher level: he has a depiction of the shifting emotions and unreliable perceptions of a young man newly in love that gave this reader several little kicks of embarrassed recognition - as well as adding the extra layer of narrator-unreliability to the mix.
I could actually go on about 'Olalla' at some length - there's a lot of depth and food for thought in there, I think - while it seems to me that 'The Body Snatcher' is pretty linear and, dare I say, superficial. There doesn't seem a lot of meat there to chew on.
The biggest problem for me, though, is a lack of 'internal truth' to that ending. That sudden metamorphosis of the final corpse doesn't seem to me to be realistic by any conventions of the genre. It seems to me to be 'outside the rules', somehow. Having Gray's corpse suddenly reappear like that reminds me a little of Bobby Ewing suddenly reappearing in the shower.
To be honest, thinking over what I've written above, I think the ending is most of the problem. If it had a stronger ending, I suspect I wouldn't be bothered by the lack of depth of the whole story. It wouldn't be in the same class as 'Olalla'; but that's not to say that it would be in a 'lower' class - just in a different one.
Having said that, I'm tempted to believe that 'Olalla' was a labour of love that Stevenson really worked on and that happened to be ready when a story was needed, while 'The Body Snatcher' was hurriedly banged-out to order. At the moment, I've no way of proving that, though. I really have to get round to reading some good, detailed biographies of some of these writers, some of these days.
11housefulofpaper
Interesting. I haven't read Olalla yet, so I'm unable to compare it to The Body Snatcher.
Going out on a limb here, and once again risking a caricature, Dad's Army's Private Fraser, picture of the Scottish psyche, maybe the lack of internal truth in the story lines up with, or agrees with in some way, a tension between an (as I've seen it described) rigorous and internally-logical theology (Calvinism) and a looser, older, folkloric fear of "ghosties and ghoulies". Something like, God sees all and has already chosen who are the Saved and who are the Damned, you can't change that - but at the same time you can - you don't know exactly how ( as MR James said, "we don't know the rules") - draw unwelcome attention to yourself from "something".
Going out on a limb here, and once again risking a caricature, Dad's Army's Private Fraser, picture of the Scottish psyche, maybe the lack of internal truth in the story lines up with, or agrees with in some way, a tension between an (as I've seen it described) rigorous and internally-logical theology (Calvinism) and a looser, older, folkloric fear of "ghosties and ghoulies". Something like, God sees all and has already chosen who are the Saved and who are the Damned, you can't change that - but at the same time you can - you don't know exactly how ( as MR James said, "we don't know the rules") - draw unwelcome attention to yourself from "something".
12housefulofpaper
In a nose-pressed-against-shop-window sort of mindset, I subscribe to The Book Collector. The latest issue includes an obituary of Ernest Mehew (1923-2011). Evidently the kind of independent scholar I thought didn't exist any more, while "fulfilling a career as a civil servant" he "establish(ed) an international reputation" as an expert on Robert Louis Stevenson.
He took over the editorship (I learn) of the 8-volume Letters of RLS. His obituarist writes - and this is why I've bothered to mention it - "There is no better short life of Stevenson than his brilliant 18,000-word article in the Oxford DNB, nor long one than that provided by his one-volume Selected Letters/i> (1997) with its linking passages."
The obituary also notes that Mehew was not impressed with a Stevenson biography by Frank McLynn.
He took over the editorship (I learn) of the 8-volume Letters of RLS. His obituarist writes - and this is why I've bothered to mention it - "There is no better short life of Stevenson than his brilliant 18,000-word article in the Oxford DNB, nor long one than that provided by his one-volume Selected Letters/i> (1997) with its linking passages."
The obituary also notes that Mehew was not impressed with a Stevenson biography by Frank McLynn.
13alaudacorax
#12 - So many books, so little time - that 'Selected Letters' sounds like yet another that I just have to read. It must partially depend on the quality of Mehew's linking passages, of course, but I can't imagine a better way of really getting to grips with a personality. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Gong back to this ending, it seems a bit daft, when I come to think on it, that I can happily swallow vampires and Frankenstein's monster and Lovecraft's ghouls and Walpole's giant ghost, and yet draw the line at this. I really can't work up a convincing argument why, but there's just something wrong about a shape-shifting corpse.
Also, and this is something I'd meant to mention in #10, I think the corpse's reappearance suffers from the lack of any particularly strong retributive element. After all, the corpse doesn't actually do anything and all the two men get is a good scare.
Gong back to this ending, it seems a bit daft, when I come to think on it, that I can happily swallow vampires and Frankenstein's monster and Lovecraft's ghouls and Walpole's giant ghost, and yet draw the line at this. I really can't work up a convincing argument why, but there's just something wrong about a shape-shifting corpse.
Also, and this is something I'd meant to mention in #10, I think the corpse's reappearance suffers from the lack of any particularly strong retributive element. After all, the corpse doesn't actually do anything and all the two men get is a good scare.
14alaudacorax
#12 - On the Mehew: I've recently determined not to buy any more books for a month or two; but I found this really cheap new copy of the earlier soft-cover edtion ...
You're a bad influence, h-o-p.
You're a bad influence, h-o-p.
