THE DEEP ONES: "The White People" by Arthur Machen

"The White People" by Arthur Machen

Discussion begins December 28.

ONLINE VERSIONS
http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/whtpeopl.htm
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_White_People_(Machen)

PRINT VERSIONS
The White People and Other Stories
Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales
The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories

MISCELLANY
http://www.machensoc.demon.co.uk/
http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/machen.html

Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_People

I'm reading this one in H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales.

I'm reading it in The White People and Other Stories. My plan is to read the remainder of the volume as well, as I did with "The Great God Pan" in The Three Impostors and Other Stories.

From Joshi's footnotes on "The White People" in The White People and Other Weird Stories (which I want to post before I lose track of them):

"The White People" was written in 1899 and first published in HORLICK'S MAGAZINE (January 1904). It was gathered in The House of Souls (London: Grant Richards, 1906; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). Because of its length, it has not appeared in a great many anthologies, but it was included in Alexander Laing's The Haunted Omnibus (1937), Basil Davenport's Tales to be Told in the Dark (1953), and Jack Sullivan's Lost Souls (1983), among others. H.P. Lovecraft regarded it as the second-greatest weird tale ever written, next to Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows." In the introduction to THE HOUSE OF SOULS, Machen claimed to have composed the work from "odds and ends of folklore".

***

Gilles de Rais (or Retz) (1404-1440) was a French nobleman and soldier who was accused of torturing, raping, and killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of boys and girls. Some (including Aleister Crowley) believe the charges against Gilles were trumped up.

Gilles de Rais should be terrifically interesting to anyone at all attentive to a theory of evil. He was for centuries of European culture what Hitler has since become: the Pure Villain. He was a contemporary and ally of Joan of Arc, and there is a rather novelized historical study of the two called The Saint and the Devil. Crowley's treatment is in The Forbidden Lecture, but the Beast was not well-grounded in any sort of positive history: he was really just looking to twit his Cambridge audience. A more comprehensive evaluation, with a worthwhile philosophical underpinning, is Georges Bataille's The Trial of Gilles de Rais. (Actually, I imagine Bataille's authorship of that book transpiring somewhat after the fashion of the protagonist in Huysmans' La Bas.)

I think "The Great God Pan" works much better as a horror story. That being said, I still enjoyed "The White People" very much, especially as it's Machen's own monster mash in many ways. I had an interesting experience reading this the other night. I was really tired, with drooping eyelids, but for some reason I was compelled to read the story from beginning to end. As soon as the 13 year-old girl begins her narration in "The Green Book", it really becomes a free form, kaleidoscopic hallucination, and I nearly felt like I was experiencing the tale as a fever dream. The best part is that after I did fall asleep, I woke up from a really intense nightmare later on, skin crawling and head buzzing. Thank you, Mr. Machen! That doesn't happen often enough, anymore!

I was familiar with some of the magical beings and folklore conjured by Machen, but not all. The following article really helps:

http:/www.violetbooks.com/REVIEWS/rbadac-numinous.html

One thing which still eludes me is where exactly does the "second look at the uncanny must be blindfolded" idea come from? In the above article, rbadac states "The blindfolded approach of the girl in the epiphanic visit to the image in the wood parallels that of the hooded initiate in the Dionysian Mysteries, the mapless alchemical quest, & any number of notions of taboo." That's fine, but I've never encountered this idea until Machen.

Also, I find "poisoned herself - in time" to be a rather curious line.

I concur that "The Great God Pan" is the better horror story. But "The White People" caught me quite by surprise. I had been expecting something more along the lines of Machen's earlier weird work; in fact I worried that it might be something of a re-tread of "The Shining Pyramid" or "The Novel of the Black Seal." But this one was more like the imagistic "Ornaments in Jade": light on plot, and thick with psychotropic sensory detail.

One thing that impressed me was the extreme (yet subtle) nesting of narratives: Cotgrave and Ambrose form the outermost story, but the main tale is the green MS book, which is full of the girl's personal reminiscences, which themselves include stories, sometimes containing further stories. E.g. the nurse recounts having been told certain things by her great-grandmother, which then become a story-within-within-within-within-within... This method of dropping through narrative frames is actually a reliable technique for hypnotic induction, and it shouldn't be surprising that it literally entrances readers, and possibly has an effect on their dreams!

My favorite literary example of this technique is Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare, which itself tacitly points to The Thousand Nights and a Night as a locus classicus for the corresponding experience among readers.

ETA: Other trance induction methods prominent in "The White People": chants and nonsense rhymes, physical spinning and dancing, solitude.

> 6 Also, I find "poisoned herself - in time" to be a rather curious line.

Well, she had united herself to her evil genius -- who knows what sort of Helen Vaughanaughtiness she might have eventually committed?

"The White People" gets no points for transcending Machen's established misogyny. I was certainly struck by this declamation from Ambrose early on:

"We should (feel horror in the presence of true evil) if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. But with most of us convention and civilization and education have blinded and obscured the natural reason."

ETA: Parenthesized phrase inserted by me -- I couldn't use the conventional square brackets for the purpose because of LT coding.

> 6 where exactly does the "second look at the uncanny must be blindfolded" idea come from?

I can't figure out where you get the quoted phrase. I couldn't trace it in the rbadac article (which while wide-ranging and perspicacious of references, sometimes assembles those in a muddled manner) or in "The White People" itself.

Anyway: the "uncanny" can be taken as an irregular encounter with the sacred ("vouchsafed by chance," as Ambrose says). A regular encounter (i.e. one bound by rule, and according to program) always involves a blindfolded approach, as in the ancient mysteries, or more modern analogues, such as Freemasonry. In one sense, this stipulation dramatizes the simple fact that we are incapable of learning unless we admit our ignorance; incapable of community unless we admit our isolation; incapable of freedom unless we admit our bondage; etc. In a more practical sense, the hoodwinking of a candidate prevents them from seeing the proceedings or learning the identities of those in attendance until after they have been introduced to the essential secret of the rite, and sworn to a shared confidence about it. And in a somewhat mechanical manner, the radical alteration of the sensorium (produced by canceling out the visual channel) fosters an altered state of consciousness conducive to non-ordinary experience.

I was delighted to find the origin of "the Aklo letters" in this story. Of course, HPL refers to Aklo in "The Dunwich Horror," but the apotheosis of the notion is in Alan Moore's The Courtyard.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

The "chants and nonsense rhymes, physical spinning and dancing, solitude' you speak of reminded me a bit of the narrator's self-imposed isolation and strange physical spasms (conjurations?) in Klein's "The Events at Poroth Farm", along with Machen's use of the term "ceremonies".

I can certainly vouch for being entranced!

> 11

Good correlation of detail there. The Wikipedia article suggests (without citation) that "The White People" inspired "The Events at Poroth Farm," but other than the notion of walks in the woods, I was having trouble making comparisons. The central characters are so different after all, aren't they?

ETA: I suppose the "traditions" of fairy folklore in Machen's story correspond somewhat to the "traditions" of Gothic literature in Klein's.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

"Helen Vaughanaughtiness " - ha! That's a good way to put it! Or did the girl slowly poison herself figuratively in (or over) time?

>9 paradoxosalpha:

Sorry that's just me in the quotes, wondering where the idea that the girl has to blindfold herself in order to look at the faerie realm (or whatever it is - a "regular encounter") a second time. Since Machen seems to be going through a greatest hits" of occult lore and legend, I'm wondering if this comes from something more specific?

> 12 I'm wondering if this comes from something more specific?

It really is as universal as both Machen and rbadac suggest. But by 1899, Machen might have had his initiation as a Neophyte of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which involves that procedure. I'm not at home with my library, but I can check the date of his Neophyte ceremony later.

>12 paradoxosalpha:

Besides the isolation and strange gesticulations, perhaps the idea of "secret woods" and the different "ceremonies" described by Machen were a direct influence on Klein's short story, not to mention the title of the fleshed-out version found in the novel The Ceremonies. Machen writes:

"I only do this at night in my room or in certain woods that I know, but I must not describe them, as they are secret woods. Then there are the Ceremonies, which are all of them important, but some are more delightful than others--there are the White Ceremonies, and the Green Ceremonies, and the Scarlet Ceremonies. The Scarlet Ceremonies are the best, but there is only one place where they can be performed properly, though there is a very nice imitation which I have done in other places. Besides these, I have the dances, and the Comedy, and I have done the Comedy sometimes when the others were looking, and they didn't understand anything about it. I was very little when I first knew about these things."

The narrator in Klein's story may have found himself in (or was deliberately drawn to) an area of hostile magick and entities- a "secret wood". Which of Machen's "ceremonies" would he have been involved in? Sacrlet, no doubt, or a "colour out of space"!

What does the girl mean by "the Comedy" in the above quote? Surely not Dante!

> 15 What does the girl mean by "the Comedy" in the above quote?

Some years later, Aleister Crowley wrote the pronouncement of the "angel" of the 12th Aethyr in The Vision & the Voice:

And this is the comedy of Pan, that is played at night in the thick forest. And this is the mystery of Dionysus Zagreus, that is celebrated upon the holy mountain of Kithairon. And this is the secret of the brothers of the Rosy Cross; and this is the heart of the ritual that is accomplished in the Vault of the Adepts that is hidden in the Mountain of the Caverns, even the Holy Mountain Abiegnus.

Crowley's footnote remarks: "All these mysteries are taught in the O.T.O."

The Wikipedia article on Comedy observes:

The word "comedy" is derived from the Classical Greek κωμῳδία kōmōidía, which is a compound either of κῶμος kômos (revel) or κώμη kṓmē (village) and ᾠδή ōidḗ (singing); it is possible that κῶμος itself is derived from κώμη, and originally meant a village revel. ...

Starting from 425 BCE, Aristophanes, a comic playwright and satirical author of the Ancient Greek Theater wrote 40 comedies, 11 of which survive and are still being performed. Aristophanes developed his type of comedy from the earlier satyr plays, which were shamelessly obscene.

ETA: Since she could do "the Comedy sometimes when the others were looking, and they didn't understand anything about it," we might infer that it is neither "at night in the thick forest" nor "shamelessly obscene." But I think these magical and classical senses are the ones on which Machen is drawing.

>16 paradoxosalpha:

The Crowley in bold could well apply to Machen's story, as would the imagery evoked by the satyr plays. Thanks.

ETA: the girl might have taken things a bit further during her ""Helen Vaughanaughtiness" period.

>5 paradoxosalpha:

You'll be amused to know (if you don't already) that one former pseudonym of Alan Moore's is "Jill de Ray"; another is "Curt Vile". :)

***

"I am trying to get hold of it all," said Cotgrave.

You and me both, brother.

This story is so rich and generates such a multiplicity of possible interpretations that it's difficult to know where to begin talking about it. What I think is most important to do (and what I unfortunately lack the time to do right now) is to make a case for "The White People"'s importantce as a piece of English-language literature. S.T. Joshi does a pretty good job of it in The Weird Tale:

I wonder whether many literary historians have noted the stupendous anticipation of stream-of-consciousness represented by this diary - we are still in 1899, years before the emergence of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. This diary is a masterpiece of indirection, a Lovecraft plot told by James Joyce. (p.22)

Without getting into the literary-history-wonk end of things (something I will attempt on my own at a later date), this is akin to someone constructing and flying a working airplane in the 1880s and never having it discussed in any of the major works on the history of technology.

Joshi says something else that I thought was fascinating in the same book - speaking of "The White People" and Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams, he states that "through their own dynamism {they} escape his conscious control" (p. 38) I was reminded of an interview I read years ago with Quentin Tarantino where he talked about the experience of writing the screenplay for his film Jackie Brown - he said he got so "into character" when he was writing the role of Ordell for the film that he was loathe to hand it over to Samuel L. Jackson when the movie went into production. I think you get a similar sense of loss of self when you read the "Green Book" section of "The White People" - it's almost like Machen has BECOME the young girl narrating the story.

***

>6 gwendetenebre:

As soon as the 13 year-old girl begins her narration in "The Green Book", it really becomes a free form, kaleidoscopic hallucination, and I nearly felt like I was experiencing the tale as a fever dream.

I always fell like I'm on a low dose of some hallucinogenic drug when I read that part of the story. I've heard the work of both Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith described as being closer to an incantation than any standard form of literature; I think that's true of any great work in the weird genre when it's really clicking.

The best part is that after I did fall asleep, I woke up from a really intense nightmare later on, skin crawling and head buzzing. Thank you, Mr. Machen! That doesn't happen often enough, anymore!

LOL - who but a weird fiction fan would thank a writer for giving him nightmares! I feel the same way, though - the last time that happened to me was a couple years back when I was reading Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire.

>18 artturnerjr:

The girl's voice is definitely believable in Machen's story, which is key to its success. That's no mean feat for a male writer. Alan Bradley has done so even more successfully in his recent series of mystery novels narrated by 11-year-old Flavia de Luce (highly recommended, btw).

I just posted my review of the full volume of The White People and Other Stories.

Good stuff, as always, paradoxosalpha. I was especially intrigued by the observations about drugs and drug-like effects in Machen's work. This comes up a lot in weird fiction (for an example, we have to look no further forward than to this week's "Hounds of Tindalos"), which I find particularly amusing in light of the fact that the man generally held to be the central figure in the genre is teetotaler Lovecraft!

> 21

Thanks. I was quite surprised to find Machen referring to Anhalonium Lewinii (the now-obsolete botanical name for the mescaline cactus), even at a time when Aleister Crowley had recently been using it to dose ritual attendees in London. The brief passage in Machen reminded me of nothing so much as Aldous Huxley's Heaven and Hell (the sequel to his Doors of Perception), a book first published in the 1950s. I wonder if Huxley had been reading Machen?

>20 paradoxosalpha:

Nice review. I liked your detailing of some of Machen's stylistic changes. You've also reminded me that I still need to read "A Fragment of Life".

>22 paradoxosalpha:

The brief passage in Machen reminded me of nothing so much as Aldous Huxley's Heaven and Hell (the sequel to his Doors of Perception), a book first published in the 1950s. I wonder if Huxley had been reading Machen?

I don't know, but it would be strange if he hadn't - the resemblance that their descriptions have to one another are uncanny:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZZnn3p3N-BwC&lpg=PA133&dq=aldous%20huxl...

Either that or the mescaline user's experience is much less subjective than that of someone tripping on LSD or psilocybin. My own research in the area is too clouded by the passage of time to be of much use here. ;)

> 24

No wonder it "reminded" me of the Huxley (which I last read about 20 years ago)! Maybe the two had a common source, though: Weir Mitchell, whom Huxley was citing could be the author of the journal article whom Machen failed to name.

>25 paradoxosalpha:

Yeah, that would explain it.

I love Huxley. His fiction can get a bit on the didactic side, but I still enjoy it (and his other work as well).

> 26

Huxley's Devils of Loudon has been idling near the top of my TBR pile for too long!

Ape and Essence is on my list this year. The nice thing for me about Huxley is that, unlike most authors, it seems like you can get pretty deep into his bibliography without beginning to exhaust all the interesting things he had to talk about. It also doesn't hurt that his favorite topics to write about coincide pretty closely with several lifelong interests of mine.

ETA: Devils of Loudon sounds pretty damn fascinating, too. Like I said... :)

More on drugs in weird and speculative fiction: a PDF of a booklet apparently commissioned by The National Institute on Drug Abuse Research Issues in 1974 entitled DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION, penned by none other than Robert Silverberg:

http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED112299.pdf

Includes discussion of the work of Huxley, Clark Ashton Smith, and Colin Wilson.

> 29

Love the choice of Blake for the cover.

Manly Wade Wellman's "Dream-dust from Mars" and R.A. Lafferty's "Sky" are both intriguing bibliography entries of which I was not previously aware.

>29 artturnerjr:

How the heck did you dredge this one up? 1974! Good year for the subject. This is a really interesting find. I especially like the annotated bibliography entries!

I have only started reading Machen recently. Initially I read The Novel of the Black Seal and the Novel of the White Powder and was very impressed with them, the former being my favourite, but no more than impressed. I read The White People over the last few days and, for me, it is in a class of its own. Really blew me away with its intricate structure of stories within stories, the steady poetic repeating of certain rhythms to create the nightmarish cadence and imagery that put me in mind of my childhood in places as well as fragments from almost-forgotten dreams. I feel I will be devouring the rest of Machen's tales in a short time.

>32 gryeates:

Hey, Greg. Nice to see someone else has caught the Machen bug. 8)

Devils of Loudon is wonderfully written.

>33 artturnerjr: - Oh yes, big time. Making my way through the rest of the collection and I'm loving the atmosphere and implicit horror of stories like The Inmost Light and The Shining Pyramid. I wasn't so impressed by The Great God Pan though, which surprised me as it is so highly rated. The White People reigns supreme for me overall though.

Machen is 65 years dead today. A toast to his memory!

>37 mazadan:

So's your mother, you hilarious troll.