SUPERNATURAL AND ENGLISH FICTION

Glen Cavaliero

Oxford University Press, #18.99

THERE'S something strange about this book. It takes possession of

individual spirits and turns them into the plot of a literary landscape

that is forever English.

''English novelists are haunted by the presence of mystery and

strangeness,'' Cavaliero asserts on his first page, then cites ''the

cases of Dickens and James Joyce''. Once you drop the name of Joyce you

cannot make sweeping conclusions about English fiction, for Joyce, it

must be obvious to everyone except Cavaliero, was not only not English

ethnically, but wrote as a man conscious of his own culture -- ''the

uncreated conscience of my race''.

Discussing Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified

Sinner (1824), Cavaliero disputes the influence of Burns's Holy Willie's

Prayer on the novel, so invokes a ''Swiftian inexorability''. Yet Hogg's

text is firmly set in a Scottish context, his religious fanatic coming

from a country of religious fanatics. Like Holy Willie gossiping with

God, or James VI, in Daemonologie (1597), droning on about the Devil.

Cutting off a book from its cultural origins presents Cavaliero with

problems of interpretation. For him, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and

Mr Hyde (1886) is a ''dramatised enactment of schizophrenia'' though

schizophrenia, a term introduced in 1911, was the last thing on

Stevenson's mind when he wrote his allegory of addiction and

imaginatively re-created the low life he had embraced while running

native in his native Edinburgh. It is not necessary for all readers to

know how Stevenson shaped his story, but Cavaliero writes as a critic,

not a casual reader.

When he approaches another native of Edinburgh, Muriel Spark,

Cavaliero discovers ''typical English whimsy'' in a short story, then

goes on to analyse The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) as an example of

Spark's ''grasp on the material world''. Had Cavaliero appreciated the

range of the distinctively Scottish tradition, he would have realised

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is a variant on Hogg's Justified Sinner. Spark

makes her Scottish devil in the image of Hogg's Scottish devil.

Putting Scottish matters aside, let us look at other classics of

''English fiction'' as understood by Cavaliero. Dracula (1897) -- by

Dublin-born Bram Stoker -- is criticised because ''where women are

concerned, Dracula flounders in the morass of Victorian

sentimentality''. Strangely, Stoker's work is a fantasy of sexual

perversion: not only is Count Dracula a bloodsucker, but his opponents

are driven by an irrational desire to abuse female flesh. In order to

free Lucy's soul from her bloody body, some eminent Victorians hammer a

stake into her heart: ''The body shook and quivered in wild contortions;

the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut and the

mouth was smeared with a crimson foam''. With its orgasmic overtones,

this is hardly sentimental.

The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James -- born in New York of

Irish and Scottish ancestry -- is ''one of the most widely discussed

ghostly tales in English fiction''. Never mind that a great American

critic, Edmund Wilson, wisely discussed the tale in an essay honouring

James as ''a classical American writer'' inspired by ''the ideals of the

United States''. For Cavaliero, The Turn of the Screw -- like Hogg's

Justified Sinner -- illustrates an inquisitive attitude which is ''the

distinguishing feature of the English fictive imagination''. A desire to

see beyond the surface of reality may be an admirable creative impulse,

but it is not exclusively English.

Cavaliero comes close to undermining his own argument when he admits

he avoided ''the American supernaturalist tradition'' -- Hawthorne and

Poe and the like -- as this ''would require a whole book to itself''.

Thus American artistic independence is recognised when it suits, whereas

the artistic independence of other nations is ignored for the purposes

of this book. I note this, not to make a narrowly nationalist point, but

to question Cavaliero's imperious, and imperial, use of the epithet

English.

Look at it another way. English critics would be outraged if Scottish

critics described Frankenstein (1818) as a Scottish novel, though it is

more Scottish than English critics like Cavaliero, suppose. From June,

1812, to May, 1814 (minus a seven-month interlude back in London), Mary

Shelley was sent by her father and stepmother to stay in Broughty Ferry,

a town complete with a fifteenth-century castle. In her introduction to

the third edition of 1831, Mary felt it necessary to mention her

familiarity with Scotland.

''I lived principally in the country as a girl,'' she wrote, ''and

passed a considerable time in Scotland . . . on the blank and dreary

northern shores of the Tay . . . where unheeded I could commune with the

creatures of my fancy.'' Eighteen when she started Frankenstein, two

years after leaving Scotland, Mary originally opened her story with the

words ''It was on a dreary night of November'', and the epithet connects

with her memories of Broughty Ferry. Victor Frankenstein's confession is

framed by the letters of Robert Walton, who describes his voyage to the

North Pole, surely prompted by Mary's sea voyage of 1812 to Scotland.

Mary clearly experienced nightmarish moments in Scotland and recalled

them in making the Frankenstein monster.

Cavaliero mentions none of this in a book bound by his simplistic

belief that everything can be explained by advancing English tradition.

As an intelligent man, Cavaliero should have explored autonomous

cultural alternatives.