Joshi on Blackwood
Dec. 25th, 2006 03:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
Reading the chapter on Algernon Blackwood in S. T. Joshi’s The Weird Tale has inspired me to read more of Blackwood’s stories. An especially what Joshi describes as Blackwood’s tales of awe rather than tales of horror. It’s true that in many of these stories you don’t actually get a feeling of evil, it’s more a sense of something beyond our understanding, something that is dangerous because it’s ancient and powerful and indifferent to our purely human fears and hopes. It’s nature, but nature not as something cosy and warm and comforting but nature as something vast and mysterious and capable of engulfing us. But Blackwood isn’t hostile to this force, his peculiar brand of nature paganism worships this force, but it can be frightening and overwhelming.
The Touch of Pan, The Glamour of the Snow, The Transfer and Ancient Lights are all in varying ways stories of this type. I can’t really think of anyone else who could have written these stories. The Transfer is a very strange story, of a patch of ground that seems to be starved of something, and a man who has the quality of sucking the vitality out of everyone he has dealings with, and the encounter of the man with the patch of ground. It sounds like a terrible idea for a story, but in fact it works, but I doubt if anyone else could have made it work. Blackwood’s best-known story, The Willows, is somewhat in this line as well. Ancient Lights tells of a man’s encounter with a wood that seems almost alive. I’ve always liked Blackwood’s fiction, but reading Joshi’s essay has increased my admiration still further.
dfordoom)Reading the chapter on Algernon Blackwood in S. T. Joshi’s The Weird Tale has inspired me to read more of Blackwood’s stories. An especially what Joshi describes as Blackwood’s tales of awe rather than tales of horror. It’s true that in many of these stories you don’t actually get a feeling of evil, it’s more a sense of something beyond our understanding, something that is dangerous because it’s ancient and powerful and indifferent to our purely human fears and hopes. It’s nature, but nature not as something cosy and warm and comforting but nature as something vast and mysterious and capable of engulfing us. But Blackwood isn’t hostile to this force, his peculiar brand of nature paganism worships this force, but it can be frightening and overwhelming.
The Touch of Pan, The Glamour of the Snow, The Transfer and Ancient Lights are all in varying ways stories of this type. I can’t really think of anyone else who could have written these stories. The Transfer is a very strange story, of a patch of ground that seems to be starved of something, and a man who has the quality of sucking the vitality out of everyone he has dealings with, and the encounter of the man with the patch of ground. It sounds like a terrible idea for a story, but in fact it works, but I doubt if anyone else could have made it work. Blackwood’s best-known story, The Willows, is somewhat in this line as well. Ancient Lights tells of a man’s encounter with a wood that seems almost alive. I’ve always liked Blackwood’s fiction, but reading Joshi’s essay has increased my admiration still further.
