THE DEEP ONES: "A Torture by Hope" by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

"A Torture by Hope" by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

Discussion begins January 9.



First published in English in the June 1891 issue of The Strand.

ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.donaldcorrell.com/road/isleadam/torthope.html
http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/tortshil.htm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?871468

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Strange Tales from the Strand
100 Tiny Tales of Terror
Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Horror and Supernatural of the 19th Century
H.P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural

MISCELLANY

http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/villiers.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Villiers_de_l%27Isle-Adam

Strange Tales from the Strand for me.

Google research is kind of murky, but as near as I can tell the story's first publication was in The Strand in 1891 (ISFDB doesn't even mention this), although it was apparently written in 1883. Can anyone verify an earlier publication?

ETA

There seems to have been an 1888 French edition called Nouveaux Contes Cruels, which contains the first printing our story:



For WT purposes, I think I'll let the first publication in English stand.

I'm reading this one online.

>2 gwendetenebre:

The multiple variant titles of the story don't help much either. Does the title begin with a definite article or an indefinite article, or perhaps no article at all? Is it "Torture by Hope" or "Torture of Hope"? Perhaps if someone could provide the title en français we could find info on it more readily.

Well, that was short! I just went to take a brief look at one of the online versions, and before I knew it, I'd read the whole thing!

> 4: "La torture par l'espérance", so "Torture by hope" would be the better translation.

>5 paradoxosalpha:

Lol, me too!

>6 Nicole_VanK:

Merci beaucoup, mon ami. And la is a definite article so it would be "The Torture by Hope", oui?

Yes, but French uses articles much more often than English. At least: "The Torture by Hope" sounds odd to me. But maybe that's just me.

Yes, but French uses articles much more often than English.

Case in point: the l' is also a definite article, but "The Torture by the Hope" is surely not a felicitous English translation.

I'll be reading this one out of H. P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural.

I thought I'd read it from my 100 Tiny Tales from Terror but it turns out I own 100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment so online for me.

:-/

Online in French for me - available several places.

Background: in 1492 (yes the Columbus year) all Jews were expelled from Spain. Those left behind could only practice their belief in secret - but supposedly converted to Christianity the remainder fell under the inquisition, as heretics. Our protagonist must have been one of those.

P.s.: I'm descended of these people, the ones who got away that is, so I may be somewhat oversensitive. Family history getting into the way - sorry.

>14 Nicole_VanK:

I'm descended of these people, the ones who got away that is, so I may be somewhat oversensitive. Family history getting into the way - sorry.

Nothing you have to apologize for. One of the things that I've always loved about this group is that we seemed to be fairly heterogeneous in our backgrounds and cultures, and I think that looking at these tales from the resulting variety of viewpoints is fascinating. Also, you can't be expected to dismiss who you are when reading and discussing these stories - as Alison Flood has perceptively noted in talking about the work of Robert E. Howard (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/may/27/world-fantasy-conan-barbarian), "Howard might be a product of his time, but so am I".

Interesting tale. Definitely not prolix. An Inquistion-era take on the "good cop/bad cop" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_cop/bad_cop) tactic, perhaps? Also, as Lovecraft pointed out, there is no discernible supernatural element, making it perhaps unique among the stories we have thus far selected.

Is l'Isle-Adam's selection of a Jewish torture victim a reflection of his own antisemitism, the antisemitism of his time, or the antisemitism of the Inquisition? Or is it none of the above? Discuss.

I don't think the narrative was antisemitic at all. Abarbanel is described as courageous, a "steadfast soul" who has endured terrible abuses. The historical circumstance of Inquisitorial torture of Spanish Jews is factual, as Matthijs pointed out.

This is more a vignette than a short story. The plot is complete in the title as soon as the setting is established. I, at least, knew what must eventuate as soon as Abarbanel discovered the open door.

I had a real sense of deja vu reading this one. There are several possible explanations beyond the usual mental anomaly:

1) The title-foreshadowed outcome and intrinsic sense of inevitability probably contributed to the feeling I had.

2) I may have actually read this one before. It's easy to imagine it being included in some literary anthology for school use, and maybe I encountered it that way.

3) It really reminded me of certain aspects of the final section of Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and Wolfe may have drawn some conscious inspiration from this story. (Allusion to the persecution of the Jews in the context of "La torture par l'espérance" in fact adds some further richness to Wolfe's implicit reflections on race, assimilation, coercion, and personal identity.)

From a note on the author by editor Jack Adrian in Strange Tales from the Strand:

A descendent of the last Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, de l’Isle-Adam was hailed during his lifetime by fellow writers (such as his friend J.K. Huysmans), but not by the public. He interested himself in devil worship and black magic and wrote a handful of science fiction stories, including L’eve Furure (1886), in which a Britsish nobleman falls in love with an android. He died, in extreme poverty, of cancer.

>18 paradoxosalpha:

I had a real sense of deja vu reading this one

Don't forget reincarnation or the possibility that time flows in different directions.

I agree that this was more vignette than story.

>18 paradoxosalpha:
Givign away the plot in title is to me the most interesting bit of the tale. I too, had the sense I've encountered the plot before, so maybe I would have seen the ending coming anyway. But on the face of it, though, the title totally changes the reading experience. It would have been a story you read rooting for the Rabbi to escape only to be horried by the "twist" ending. With The the title it becomes one of dreading the inevitable or at least rooting for the Rabbi to not give them the satisfaction by falling for it.

More on the Inquisition-era expulsion of Jews and the fate of the conversos (i.e., Jews and Muslims who were to have converted to Catholicism):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Expulsion_of_Jews_and_repressio...

I found this to be particularly tragic (though hardly surprising considering the history of the Jewish diaspora):

At the beginning of the 17th century, some conversos who had fled to Portugal began to return to Spain, fleeing the persecution of the Portuguese Inquisition, founded in 1532.

18 & 21 > I'm sure I've once read a short story with the same basic plot, but I'm almost as sure it wasn't this particular one.

Re the title giving the plot away, the end seemed so obvious that I half started to expect that de l'Isle Adam would defy our expectations, letting the rabbi get away and the titular torture somehow befalling the inquisitors.

Escaping into the arms of one's captor has of course become cliche in a gazillion different written works, movies and TV shows since the late 1880's. The idea of a deliberately engineered false hope of escape designed to torture maybe not so much, but I'd bet it exists out there as a plot device in more than a few scenarios.

the Grand Inquisitor, with a look of distress, an accent of poignant reproach, murmured in his ear, with the burning breath of much fasting:--"What! my child! on the eve, perhaps, of salvation.... you would then leave us?"

Hiss!

Yes, I agree the title of the story almost gives all away. Sad really; reading the story is pretty boring after that.

But no: I don't see any blatant antisemitism (the author may have had such feelings, or not, and I'm likely to be touchy on that subject myself, but I think it doesn't show from this story itself).

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HopeSpot

Includes "Torture by Hope" as one of its examples (along with 1984 and Watchmen).

I agree with everyone about the story's conceit being telegraphed by the title.

>24 gwendetenebre: Yes, it is such a common idea, I wonder who was first with it. (I know there was an episode of The Prisoner where they let Number 6 "escape" to London before dragging him back to the Village.)

In keeping with Lovecraft's description of what makes a conte d'cruel, I will note that in a fairly short story the emotions of being recaptured take up the last four paragraphs in their description. (I've actually read a couple of Villiers d'Adam collections, but, to be honest, I can remember few of the tales, so I don't know how accurate Lovecraft's description is in general.)

I think the creepiest part of the story is that it uses the official reasons for the Inquisition: it's a teaching institution. The Grand Inquisitor seems sincere in his cruel to be kind insistence on more torture to save the Rabbi.

I know the English generally had negative portrayals of the Spanish and the Inquisition (for instance, Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer) and, of course, Poe did "The Pit and the Pendulum", but I would be curious as to how frequently French writers used it as a element in fantasy and horror stories.

> 27

Ah, The Prisoner! How could that have slipped my mind?

Although France is a "Catholic" country, French secularism has also produced its own especially aggressive stream of anti-Catholic sentiment. Nobody expects likes the Spanish Inqusition, but English letters are more likely to romanticize medieval Catholicism, as contrasted with the attitude of a 19th-century writer like Jules Michelet.

>28 paradoxosalpha:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt0Y39eMvpI

:D

I read the story in French in Fantastic French Fiction of Mystery and Emotion, edited 1929 by James Burton Tharp. This is a reader for students of French, with vocabulary and a few footnotes.

Some of the footnotes are useful. Tharp says that 'the Official' means the residence of the head of the Holy Office (Tribunal of the Inquisition) of Saragossa and that 'familiars' were officers of the Tribunal.

The strength of the story is the sudden revelation of a different meaning to prior events. The key turned improperly so the door did not lock was not an accident; the two Inquisitors deep in discussion who did not see the Rabbi were presumably acting roles assigned by the Grand Inquisitor.

The ambiguous ending is excellent. Pedro Arbuez d'Espila is or pretends to be motivated by charity. He acts as if the torture of hope were a final step to break the Rabbi's obstinacy to give him the chance to abjure and save his soul. One would think that the planned use of the quemadero would be sufficient for that purpose, so one concludes that the Grand Inquisitor is having a bit of sophisticated sadistic fun. Since the torture required a conspiracy and everybody played their roles faultlessly, it seems he had done this before.

I see that M. P. Shiel's translation online omits the epigraph from Poe: "Oh!, une voix, une voix, pour crier! ...", Le Puits et le Pendule. The epigraph from Poe is significant. My guess is that de L'isle-Adam was trying to one-up Poe by giving us a story of the Inquisition without a happy ending.

Joshi in Unutterable Horror Volume 1 p. 283 says the story is "certainly a keen and meticulous analysis of sadism; and much of Villier's other work reveals keen psychological analysis of this sort."

> 30

Thanks for the further references and perceptive observations!

>30 bertilak: Thanks for the information on the Poe epigraph. I was wondering if Villiers was inspred by "The Pit and the Pendulum"

My take on this is that the Grand Inquisitor is sincere in his beliefs, and this is arguably more chilling than the alternative, if for no other reason than that there would be no arguing with someone so dogmatic.

The description of him as an ascetic and his "burning breath of much fasting" (if these weren't additions of M. P. Sheil's) add weight to this reading, I think.



Edited to remove a superfluous word - eleven years later!

>33 housefulofpaper:

I'm not so sure about the Grand Inquisitor. A good sadist would be fully cognizant of his needs and would be constantly coming up with self-fulfilling methods to attain them. In this case, he's hiding behind the Holy Office like a lizard under a rock. A dream job for a highly creative sadist.

That phrase "burning breath of much fasting" is wonderful. Whatever the hell it means, it works!

Apparently, fasting can cause bad breath. Googling on "fasting bad breath" brings up lots of pages about the phenomenon.

> 33

Shiel didn't add anything here. The phrase is "d'une haleine brûlante et altérée par les jeûnes" which google translate renders literally as "a hot breath and altered by fasting". Needless to say, Shiel's version is better.

> 35

It's the ketones, right?

36 > Seems so. Acc'd to a webpage called netdoctor:

Crash dieting or fasting can also lead to halitosis. When the body no longer has a supply of carbohydrates, it first breaks down glucose stored in the muscles and liver.

After a few hours, the body begins to break down its fat stores. The waste products of their metabolism, known as ketones, give breath a distinctive sweet and sickly smell.

link

And only this morning I read in the newspaper that online communities are good for getting deeper into one's interests but not much good for widening one's views. Yet here, of all things, a discussion group about weird fiction is making me learn about the metabolism of fasting ...

> 37 I read in the newspaper

Talk about a medium that fails to widen one's views! They just want to sell your eyeballs to advertizers, not challenge your ideas or supply you with new ones.