THE DEEP ONES: "Mr. Arcularis" by Conrad Aiken

"Mr. Arcularis" by Conrad Aiken

Discussion begins April 27

First published in the March 1931 issue of Harper's Magazine.



ONLINE VERSIONS

https://archive.org/details/31stories00unse (free eBook)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?69754

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
Perchance to Dream
The Big Book of Ghost Stories
Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills
Haunted New England: Classic Tales of the Strange and Supernatural

MISCELLANY

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1957/3/1/conrad-aiken-revivifies-mr-arcularis-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4283/the-art-of-poetry-no-9-conrad-aike...
http://tinyurl.com/h2rdpds

The Archive.org ebook is probably best read online, because the epub is funkily formated and bits of it look quite weird on my ereader. Said ereader is an oldish iRiver Story HD, so perhaps it works better on newer gadgets.

I downloaded the Kindle, but haven't looked at it yet. It'll be that or online for me, though.

I'm off to the public library this morning, to get one of the print versions (probably American Fantastic Tales).

I think I actually know where my copy of American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps is, but the ebook up above is working swell for me right now so I'll probably stick with it.

>2 AndreasJ: Not just you, the epub doesn't seem to have been cleaned of any page numbers, headers or OCR mistakes.

If anyone happens to be a Harper's subscriber, it appears they can DL a pdf or microfiche of the story here:

http://harpers.org/archive/1931/03/mr-arcularis/

>7 AndreasJ: The archive.org .pdf works fine, it's just a pity to download a 22 m file when just the text amounts to maybe 1/50th of that.

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps for me.

Probably American Fantastic Tales for me as well.

>2 AndreasJ:
>6 Jarandel:

Yeah, it looks like crap on my (newish) Kindle, too.

I enjoyed this rather old-fashioned tale. The dialog flows naturally and really helps to define the characters. I'm not surprised that Harper's chose this. Mr. Arcularis himself turns out to be an intriguing character and the eroticism of the story is as unexpected as it is welcome. I was happy to find that the turn in to Bradburian nostalgia I was expecting was mostly avoided.

I nominated this story, and I have to admit I hadn't read it before. I don't recall how I arrived at my gloss in the planning thread: "Quiet horror: dreams in a hospital." Maybe just by skimming the opening and closing paragraphs. So, as I got about three or four pages in, I figured, "I'll have to apologize in the discussion for my misrepresentation of this story." And then when I got to the end, "Oh, I didn't misrepresent it. I just spoilered it!"

Anyway, I liked it a lot. If you haven't already read a short bio of Aiken (such as the one in the end matter of American Fantastic Tales), be sure to check out the wikipedia article, especially the bit about his childhood. (The Miscellany link in the OP is defective.) I was previously familiar with Aiken as the literary mentor to Malcolm Lowry, and it was that, along with my trust in Straub's selections for American Fantastic Tales, that made me propose the story in the first place.

I note that TVtropes classes the Dying Dream as a subset of the Shaggy Dog story, which I find a bit questionable. In fact, this story would be a good counter-example. The death of Mr. Arcularis does not deflate or dismiss the experiences of his dream, but actually explains and enhances their menacing and liberating qualities.

Of our previous reads, this one put me most in mind of "Horrible Imaginings."

From TVtropes:

George Orwell, in a notebook kept during his final illness, wrote about "Death Dreams": "Sometimes of the sea or the sea shore but more often of enormous, splendid buildings or streets or ships, in which I often lose my way, but always with a peculiar feeling of happiness and of walking in sunlight. Unquestionably all these buildings, etc. mean death - I am almost aware of this even in the dream..." He did not believe in an afterlife, and wondered why death, which he wasn't afraid to think about while awake, had to be represented as something else in a dream.

Dreaming about somnambulism, and being afraid of it in the dream, is intriguing all on its own.

>15 paradoxosalpha:

Sounds like a good way to approach Dreyer's 1932 film VAMPYR!

>12 paradoxosalpha:

The beginning at hospital and especially Mr. Arcularis's wound-on-the-mend (or is it?) cast an uncomfortable pall over the rest of the story.

I think an argument could easily be made that there is nothing supernatural in this story.

In March 1931 HPL had recently finished "The Whisperer in Darkness" and was writing At the Mountains of Madness (soon to begin "The Shadow over Innsmouth"). Given that timing, I find it interesting how much "Mr. Arcularis" relies on motifs of oceans, cold, and depths of interstellar space.

The wikipedia article on Aiken says he was a friend of T.S. Eliot's. I guess that might account for the extent to which this whole story (inspired, Aiken says, by a man he actually met on a ship voyage) might be read as an expansion of the opening lines of The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….

I started to suspect that Mr Arcularis would turn out to be somehow dead when he prima facie metaphorically refered to himself as a dead soul in his first conversation with Clarice Dean, but for most of the story I expected the twist to be a first person ghost story, not a dying dream.

Arcularis is Latin for something like "of the little box". I imagine "of the coffin" is intended.

>12 paradoxosalpha:

Menacing AND liberating is possibly the thing that makes this story stand out. The passage about Mr Arcularis drifting out into 'space' (=death), "He felt like a Christmas tree. Icicles on his fingers and icicles on his toes. He tinkled and spangled in the void..." read, to me, like Ray Bradbury in his breathlessly rhapsodic mode.

>22 housefulofpaper:

I should clarify, that's what particularly stood out for me, on this reading. I didn't mean to suggest that it's the story's only merit.

>12 paradoxosalpha: "Dying Dream" is a good description for what I would call a peri-mortem fantasy.

The ending didn't totally surprise, but I didn't expect it starting out, and I liked the poetic language, especially "The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death."

Finally got around to reading this late last night. Very good story - well-crafted, creepy, subtle - this is how you do foreshadowing! I knew something was amiss when the beautiful young Miss Dean starts falling for our ailing, middle-aged protagonist. And that thing about a corpse being on board! How did I not see the ending coming?

Does anyone else here know Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow"*? Brilliant story - I remember being out of sorts for days after reading that one. Not really weird/supernatural, though. If I put it up for Deep Ones noms, will anybody here vote for it?

* http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?94834

ETA: URL

A really successful story, and I'd forgotten the gloss in the nomination so nothing spoilered for me! I'm also notoriously dense when it comes to predicting plot twists and endings, so I went along happily intrigued and had no forebodings whatsoever until Mr Arcularis himself wondered about that coffin in the hold.

As noted by several of you, the writing is really good: dialogue as well as narrative, and I think Aiken avoided entirely the Bradburian ending, even acknowledging some parallels. I've found I'm less impressed with Bradbury now than I was as a teen, but I can't really put that into words so much as in making contrasts such as to this story.

I especially like Aiken's combination of menace and liberation a la >22 housefulofpaper:, and the ambivalence as to whether there is any supernatural influence a la >18 paradoxosalpha:. At the end, I was immediately struck by the parallel to a film I have mentioned several times in this group, Jacob's Ladder. There, and especially in the screenplay, the supernatural is pronounced and decisive. I wonder if Rubin was aware of this story, perhaps even acknowledged it in his introduction. I'll try to remember to look it up when I get home.

Aiken notes Arcturus near the end, prompting a quick review of the star name. From space.com:
With its ruddy orange-red glow, Arcturus is easily visible to the naked eye and thus made it quite visible to astronomers from many cultures. The Inuit in Canada's north, for example, called the star Uttuqalualuk, or "the old man," and the Lakota Sioux referred to it as Itkob u, meaning "going towards."

Old man? Going towards? How curious.

ETA From the gallery in the last Miscellany link, someone else pointing out the resonance ("totally ripped off") with Jacob's Ladder.

>19 paradoxosalpha:

That TV adaptation sounds interesting, especially the switching of roles between staffs of hospital and ocean liner. I don't get the commenter's point that Mr Aiken brings the idea of Arcularis having to resolve something from his past, though. Unless that's in the play, I didn't recognise that from the story. Did I miss something?

>12 paradoxosalpha: If you haven't already read a short bio of Aiken (such as the one in the end matter of American Fantastic Tales), be sure to check out the wikipedia article, especially the bit about his childhood.

From the Harvard Crimson (linked above under Miscellany), it would appear the play has a bit more material than the story. Specifically, the parallel to his bio with respect to the discovery of his Mother's body, though the circumstances are quite different in play compared to his life.

I guessed something like that might be up quite early, but I was probably helped by another much more recent short story I read not too long ago that involved a similar situation with the protagonist a person being revived after cardiac arrest.

The imagery in it was quite good though the language & subtlety were light-years from what we have here, can't remember the title just now.