Le Fanu was heir to the Gothic novel, a new kind o f literature that appeared in 1764 when Horace W alpole brought together the realism o f the novel and the fantasy o f previous forms o f fiction. This new genre was refined and diversified by Clara Reeve, A nne Radcliffe, Matthew “M onk” Lewis and Le Fanu’s fellow Dubliner, who like him self was o f Huguenot descent, Charles Robert M aturin. By 1820 the Gothic novel had run its course, and alongside novels o f other kinds shorter fiction had begun to rise to prominence.
The modern short story emerged from forms such as the parable, fable, sketch and anecdote. The short story in its m odern literary form first took shape in early nineteenth century A m erica with the work o f Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and above Edgar Allan Poe who not only wrote some o f the first short stories in the modern manner, including the first stories o f m ystery and suspense, but who also gave us a theory o f its most effective com position. In the last decades o f the nineteenth century the short story rose to prominence throughout Europe, exemplified by the work o f Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev and others.
Short fiction was present in Anglo-Irish fiction from its inception.
In fact it has been said that Maria Edgew orth’s Castle Racb’ent may be regarded “as the very first Irish short story” (Kilroy 1984: 3). V.
S. Pritchett has also observed that the short story is a form in which Irish writers have always excelled (ib. 1) as seen in Irish writing from the work o f the early authors o f Anglo-Irish literature through Joyce and beyond. Le Fanu wrote novels and some poetry. It was with his short stories of the supernatural, however, that he excelled as a writer and emerged as a literary innovator.
The supernatural was comm onplace in pre-m odern literature, especially the romance, disappearing for a time in m odern fiction as a result o f the Enlightenment emphasis on science and reason, then reappearing in the Gothic novel (Clery 1999), and it has been thriving ever since in literature and in other m edia o f popular culture.
This resiliency and staying power show that the supernatural is one of those timeless, universal ideas that appear as recurrent them es in both oral traditions and written literature.
The supernatural appears in folklore in different ways in different genres. Max Liithi, examining the supernatural in European oral
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traditions, says that fairy tales (also called folk tale and Märchen) are pure fantasy in w hich action takes place outside normal time and space, in a “ once upon a tim e” realm “ in a place far aw ay”, where fa in 7 godm others, m agical transform ation, m onsters, witches, etc.
routinely appear, elem ents that function, as do ordinary characters, to advance the plot.
Legends and sagas, unlike the folk tale, take place in historical tim e and specific places. Characters and events in these genres are believed, by those who tell and listen to the story, to be real people experiencing real events. In the Märchen the appearance o f the supernatural arouses no particular emotion. In legends, however, a brush w ith the preternatural, or the sudden intrusions o f the other
w orldly into everyday affairs, “arouses in people an uncanny horror”.
One shudders, says Lüthi, “when he hears the roar o f the wild hunt and sees it ghostly progression across the night sk y... his senses w eaken w hen he feels him self suddenly jerked up and pulled away to a distant place.”
The preternatural is all the more disquieting in folk societies, for although the other w orld is im agined as strictly distinct from the profane, it is not far away, and can intrude on our reality at any time.
Indeed its representatives are very close, often living among ordinary people, “in their houses, in their fields, in the nearby woods, river, m ountain or lake” . And when som eone encounters one o f them, even those num inous figures that have come as helpers, the experience is different in kind from encounters w ith fellow human beings; more dem anding, m ore pressing and more relentless than those made on individuals from our side o f reality (Lüthi 1992: 10-11).
The difference between folk and m odem societies is that people living in folk com m unities never question the existence o f the super
natural and thus accept its presence as a natural, although unsettling event, when encountered in legends and sagas. In the modern society, on the other hand, readers no longer believe in preternatural forces and spiritual being, although some still do, and others have their doubts, m ore o f both than one m ight think. In this case the w riter o f supernatural tales, unlike the teller o f traditional legends, m ust entice the reader into the willing suspension o f disbelief, or ask them to indulge what belief may linger, in order for the story to work the way it should.
Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish W riter and Innovator 189 This is the usual way o f looking at fiction going back to Coleridge, not ju st supernatural stories. Perhaps a better way o f looking at it, though, would be to follow Brigid Lowe who maintains that fiction does not ask us to believe anything. O ur prim ary object o f telling a story is “to produce an im aginative experience” (Lowe 2007: 82-83). The skill o f the author o f the supernatural tale, therefore, is to entice us into im agining what it would be like for us if there were indeed such a thing as the supernatural; how we would feel if we suddenly encountered it and through this im aging to arouse a sense o f the uncanny and the thrill o f fear and horror one has felt from primordial days in an encounter with the O ther World.
What has actually endured in literary form, however, is not the supernatural itself, but rather the shock o f encountering it, the same feature indeed that Lüthi tells us stands at the heart o f the legends and sagas o f the oral tradition. Thus the heart o f the m odem literary tale o f the supernatural lies in what Tzvetan Todorov calls the fantas
tic, “the duration o f uncertainty” in the narrative when characters in the story, and the readers, have not yet decided between a natural or a supernatural explanation to the puzzling and frightening events that have so far unfolded in the narrative. (Todorov 1973) We can see how this works in two novels by Le Fanu, Uncle Silas w here the supernatural is used to advance the plot and in The House by the Churchyard that includes a subplot that narrates the shock o f en
countering the otherworldly that can stand on its own as a short story.
Uncle Silas is the story o f a young heiress, M aude Ruthyn, threatened by her unscrupulous uncle, his son and a villainous accomplice, Madame de la Rougierre, who plot her m urder for her inheritance. In the first part o f the novel M aud’s father hires M adam e de la Rougierre as M aude’s governess. From the very start the Madame attempts to establish dom inance over M aude. To that end she exploits a legend associated with M aud’s ancestral home, Knowl.
“There is not an old house in England” says M aude “o f which the servants and young people who live in it do not cherish some traditions o f the ghostly.” Knowl was no exception for it too had its
“shadows, noises, and m arvelous records” . One such specter was the ghost o f Rachel Ruthyn, “the beauty o f Queen A nne’s time, who died o f grief for the handsome Colonel Norbrooke, who was killed in the Low C ountries”, the lady now a ghost that “walks the house at
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night, in crisp and sounding silks. She is not seen, only heard. The tapping o f her high heeled shoes, the sw eep and rustle o f her brocade, her sighs as she pauses in the galleries, near the bedroom doors; and sometimes, on stormy nights, her sobs” .
The other specter was the link-m an “a lank, dark faced, black
haired man, in a sable suit, with a link or torch in his hand. The torch usually only sm olders, a deep red glow, as the link-m an visits his beat. The library is one o f the rooms he sees to ” . This apparition unlike “Lady Rachel is seen only, never heard. His steps fall noiselessly as shadows on the floor and carpet” and by the stories she had heard from others, helping the evil M adam e, as M aude herself tells us, to make M aude nervous and to prepare the way for the “odd sort o f ascendancy” that gradually and seem ingly w ithout effort the
“repulsive Frenchw om an” was establishing over her. There is no
“duration o f uncertainty” here, and no final shock o f encountering the otherworldly. The ghosts in this context serve only to add some atmosphere to the narrative, and as a means o f developing in the narrative the relationship between the villain and the heroine.
The story o f the hand in The House by the Churchyard is another matter. The novel tells a com plicated story unfolding over the span o f a century o f suspense, intrigue and violence involving multiple characters and various plots, punctuated by m urder, blackmail and suicide. A sense o f unease is introduced in the narrative when the mysterious Mr. M ervyn takes up residence in the Tiled House, a house that is rum ored to be haunted. Le Fanu develops the atmosphere and m ystery o f the Tiled House by inserting the story of the spectral hand as a subplot into the narrative.
The hand is first seen by the lady o f the house reaching over the garden wall. She thinks it m ight be the hand o f som eone preparing to climb over into the garden and cries out in alarm. At that point the hand is withdrawn. The servants see it as well and hear strange knocking sounds on the window. Eventually the hand appears inside the house. The m aster o f the house at first dism isses such reports until he too sees it reaching through the curtains o f the four poster bed where he and the lady o f the house are lying. It retreats to the closet when the m aster pursues it, yet when the door is opened and the contents o f the closet examined, there is no one inside. The hand is finally seen reaching for the fam ily’s eldest child in his bed. The quiet and steady intrusion o f the hand from outside the garden into
Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish W riter and Innovator 191 the house and finally to the baby’s crib, along with the fact that at no time did anyone see more than the hand, increases the sense o f horror o f its uncanny appearance.
This episode is only an aside in the twists and turns o f the novel and Le Fanu apologizes to the reader for “loitering so long” over it.
Yet the tale is a model m odem ghost story and as such has been extracted from the novel and published in anthologies. It is an example o f the most effective narrative realization o f the recurrent theme o f the shock o f an encounter with the preternatural in the short story form.
It is difficult to extend the duration o f uncertainty for very long.
The classic Gothic novel, therefore, included the fantastic not as a central theme but rather as a narrative elem ent or a subplot, m uch as did Le Fanu in his own novels. Also the reading public eventually became weary o f page after page o f ghosts and goblins. Eventually the theme o f the encounter left the novel, shedding all the trappings and melodrama o f the Gothic novel and settled into a kind o f tale
“wholly and uniquely devoted to the supernatural, returning”, as Peter Penzoldt says “to its most logical form, the short story” (1965:
5).
The short story and the novel, says Boris Ejxenbawm (variously spelled Eichenbaum and Eikenbaum), are two types o f prose fiction that differ not only in kind, but that are “also inherently at odds” with one another. The novel, he says, derives from history, from travels;
the short story from folklore and anecdote. The novel m ust m ake room for the development o f characters. It must accom m odate diffe
rent episodes and conduct parallel intrigues with different centers o f concentration, requiring authorial skill in deploying those elem ents and in binding them together into a coherent narrative. The short story, on the other hand, “must be constructed on the basis o f some contradiction, incongruity, error, contrast, etc. ...am assing its whole weight toward the ending”. In the case o f the m odern tale o f the supernatural, the incongruity o f bizarre events and the contrast o f the ordinary and predictable on the one hand and the disconcerting on the other leads to the shock o f the otherw orldly intrusion w hich is its ending. There are no parallel intrigues in the short story, says Ejxenbawm “no digressions or episodes. There is com plete unity o f time, place and action” (1968: 7, 4).
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This was ju st the kind o f story that Le Fanu was w riting in the m iddle o f the nineteenth century, within the evolving Irish tradition o f short fiction, refining it in his own m anner and thus preparing the way for the rise to predom inance o f this form o f fiction in the last decades o f the century. Le Fanu has been called the inventor o f the m odem tale o f the supernatural, and it has even been claim ed that he wrote the first ghost story in the short story fo rm a t/ Leaving aside questions o f firsts, Le Fanu did introduce som ething new into the short story o f the supernatural; his accurate description o f psycho
logical details, especially the details o f psychological abnormalities, and his own vision o f the supernatural as inspired by the Swedish mystic Em m anuel Swedenborg.
The supernatural in Le F anu’s fiction is im agined in terms o f powerful forces that exist parallel to ordinary reality, forces usually unconnected with our ordinary affairs, but that can occasionally intrude unbidden into our realm o f reality. Such intrusions may occur when individuals undergo physical or psychological stress when the path is open for psychic forces to w ork their way into the inner self and m anifest them selves in the form o f what we m ight call mental disturbances. With this view o f the O ther W orld, Le Fanu has, in other words, provided a supernatural explanation o f psychosis. He presents this explanation in a scientific m anner in the form o f case studies from the practice o f the fictitious Dr. Hesselius. With this air o f authenticity Le Fanu heightens the contrast between what we know, what we believe and w hat we have confidence in on the one hand, and the m ysterious and threatening other dim ension on the other, a contrast effective for the modern reader for the drama of events and the eventual shock o f encountering the otherworldly.
Le Fanu’s stories anticipated or directly influenced later writers such as M. R. James, A lgernon Blackwood and A rthur Machen. He also anticipated the psychological dram a that would later flourish under the influence o f Freud and others. He also introduced the infallible scientific detective later appearing in Bram Stocker’s Dr.
Daniel D efoe’s “A Relation o f the A pparition o f Mrs. V eal” published in 1705 is usually considered the first ghost story in English written in the short story form at. That story, how ever, although using narrative devices typical o f fiction, was intended not as fiction but rather as an account o f a true incident (Search 1959: 9).
Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish W riter and Innovator 193 van Helsing in Dracula, and Sir A rthur Conan D oyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It is “not so much in the subject-m atter” how ever as
“as in the m anner o f its expression” (Brown 1951: 121) that we see Le Fanu’s art and craft, the way in which he uses language to create a sense o f plausibility and drama and to bring to us with a greater force the shock o f the inevitable encounter.