Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Who's that howling? : Why some ghost stories are bad
Who knew Nathanael Hawthorne had a son who made a career as a writer? Julian - and his bio in the Straub's notes to Library of America "American Fantastic Tales" is one of the most interesting entries in the book. I'm sure there've been dissertations on Julian Hawthorne, the anxiety of influence, etc. (The Hawthornes are one of two father-son duos in this 2-volume set; guess the other.) All that said, Julian Hawthorne appears to be a shadow of the old man; you could say about his story (Absolute Evil): You're no Young Goodman Brown. The little twist here is a group goes to visit not a haunted house but a haunted island (shades of Lost?), but the problem is it's one of those stories where, first, we know way more than the characters so who cares?, there's no dramatic tension, we know which character is "possessed" and causing the midnight howlings, etc., even if the narrator, stupidly, doesn't. Second, the weaker ghost/haunting/possession stories simply posit the existence of the ghost, or in this case a werewolf, without any sense of where, how, or why this character? The narrator, a very independent Boston "spinster," as she calls herself, has suspicions about a minister who's "courting" her - she sees a glint of something evil in his eye. She goes off to a remote island for a vacation, and there are strange howling noises, then a wolf appears, then the wolf snatches a child - she gives chase, shoots the wolf, wolf escapes, later she meets the minister back in Boston and he's dying of a gunshot wound. Okay, in the story these things all happen, in a story anything can happen, but do they make sense, do they compel us, do they leave us with a sense of awe or wonder? The best ghost stories leave even the skeptics peeking over their shoulders at night, thinking, yes, maybe I'm missing something, maybe there's more to life (and death).
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I thought "Absolute Evil" was first-rate -- one of the better pieces in the collection in fact -- although I did think the ending was a little weak. The strongest things about the story were the island atmosphere and the character of the (female) narrator, who is very capable of looking out for herself, even if she seems a bit like a man writing his idea of how an independent woman would think and behave. And I liked Hawthorne's straightforward style very much. But ending the story in Boston was a mistake; maybe today we would just expect a more dramatic or "cinematic" ending on the beach.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that as far as I can tell Hawthorne never tells us how the minister/wolf gets on the island, although it's implied that it has something to do with that curious shipwreck. Nor do we know how he gets off the island. Perhaps we're just supposed to think that he has acquired some unspecified supernatural abilities. You could argue that that's a flaw in the plotting, but sometimes it's better to leave a few things unexplained. Anyhow, I'll read more JH if I can find more stories.