Reading Group #24 ('The Wendigo')

See post 36 in thread #23 for details. :)

This is spooky stuff!

In his notes to “The Wendigo” in the Penguin collection Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Tales, S. T. Joshi explains that the sources for this story are two voyages to Canada that Algernon Blackwood undertook in the 1890s. Blackwood hunted for gold during his first trip in 1892, and for moose in 1898. The details of the Canadian backwoods are certainly detailed and convincing, as far as I’m able to judge (not all that far, as I’ve never been anywhere that remote in my life).

Blackwood is noted for setting many of his stories “outside” rather than “inside” - by which I mean in the open air, in untamed environments, his characters away from civilization and away from other people.

Usually, the gothic (if not horror in general) makes enclosed spaces dangerous: characters are incarcerated in a castle, or a crumbling mansion or a convent, trapped inside by, or with, the menace. However, as Glen Cavaliero puts it in his 1995 study The Supernatural & English Fiction, “Blackwood’s speciality was to render exposure as terrifying as earlier writers had enclosure”. At the same time, Blackwood focuses very much on the psychological states of his characters, so there is a sense in which his stories are set “inside”, too - inside their heads.

It’s just occurred to me that this emphasizes the characters‘ self-consciousness: an earlier writer (Dickens, say) may well have described the early scene around the campfire as “very like the conventional stage picture of Western melodrama” (if such scenes had indeed become conventional during Dickens‘ lifetime) but as the “Omniscient Narrator” he would have pointed it out to the reader directly. Blackwood reports Cathcart noting it to himself, so it doesn’t just paint the scene for the reader, it shows Cathcart stepping out of the moment and observing it as it’s happening. This is of course common in Modern prose, and might simply be Blackwood writing as a man of his time, but it might also be telling us about the character of Cathcart as a modern, civilized man. I expand on this idea below.

First though, “The Wendigo” is the story, briefly, is of a small party hunting for moose in the Canadian backwoods. The party is made even smaller when they break up into two groups, and the narrative follows one group (two men) as the Wilderness works on them, firstly in a realistic way, and then with the irruption into their world of the supernatural, in the shape of the Wendigo.

Although “shape” isn’t quite right, because the Wendigo is a sound, a smell, footprints. It’s possibly not a physical being but it’s more like a ghost or, better, a spirit - the spirit of the Wilderness, in fact.

When I was thinking about what happens next, the phrase “the Call of the Wild” came to mind, because it is precisely this that works on Défago and leads to his being taken away and subject to a sort of lycanthropic change (it’s what Défago changes into that matches the common image of the Wendigo, but as I suggested in the last paragraph this may not be accurate - insofar as Blackwood’s story is concerned, at least).

I gather that it has been strongly suggested, if not proven as a fact, that Blackwood was a student of the Occult or Esoteric tradition in his earlier years. I would tentatively suggest that this background has influenced “The Wendigo”, even though Blackwood moved from the Hermetic tradition to Nature or Pan worship.

This is what I mean:

the dangers of “meddling” with magic, the idea that you can get yourself noticed by “Powers”, and that this can be dangerous;
in Blackwood’s cosmology, these Powers are not “Supernatural” but “Natural”, i.e. Nature itself;
someone attuned to Nature is therefore vulnerable to it in a different way from someone who, for example, may be stranded in the forest with inadequate survival skills.

This is why, I think, at the start of the story Blackwood describes the characters in terms that read uncomfortably today. It is to set up Défage and Punk as the two characters who are most at risk from the Wendigo.

That, I know, was even more long-winded and disjointed than usual, Apologies for that.

'Long-winded and disjointed?' No way, houseful! That was one of the best posts I've seen on this group in a long while! Keep them coming, please!

I'll be back with thoughts later. This is one of my favorites. Real quick, though: as far as I know Blackwood WAS a member of Golden Dawn, at least for a time, and you can see the influence on more mystical yarns like 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved.' I think his Hermetic leanings also permeate the spookier tales, though: his terror is always a terror of the soul, even in something as entirely sinister as 'The Wendigo' or 'The Listener.' Along with Gustav Meyrink (for similar reasons) he's my favorite writer, and I think it's that more spiritual rendering of dread that most appeals to me. Lovecraft is too much an observer of his own fictions, and other 'Weird' authors share that same flaw; though I admire they're work greatly, I find Blackwood the most refined of them. I leave his stories with a sense of awe before Nature (and the things that exist beyond Nature); and though he nourishes a kind of cosmic malice in his work, it's never hollow or maudlin. I find that remarkable.

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Thanks!

Great post, houseful.

I finally got round to reading this, late at night, while I was away for a few days for Christmas and, thus, it's a bit vague in my memory. However, I do remember thinking vaguely along the lines of your second and third paragraphs and wondering if this could legitimately be categorised as 'Gothic'. I remember having the same confusion when I read 'The Willows' recently, but I never followed up on it; so I can't say I've given any real thought to the matter.

I've talked before about Blackwood's singular use of architecture (esp. staircases) as a means of communicating dread ('The Listener,' 'Keeping His Promise,' 'The Empty House'), and so I think it's interesting that his less Gothic technique of utilizing exteriors to bring about the feeling of terror is so successful. As houseful mentioned, it has to do somewhat with his 'interiorizing' of exteriors: the backwood becomes a sort of 'haunted castle' of sorts, and all the more frightening because of its seeming limitlessness. I think the reason I find this story so truly spooky has something to do with that notion of making the sheer limitlessness of something claustrophobic, if that makes sense (and if ever there was a word for Blackwood's terror, I think 'claustrophobic' is the chief adjective). He uses similar devices in 'The Willows,' but I find that story less creepy than 'The Wendigo.'

(Sorry if this post seems a bit scattered or the syntax a little tortured; I'm having trouble communicating exactly what I mean...that and I've been reading a bit too much Huysmans lately (talk about tortured syntax)!)

#2 & #6 - Just a little idle musing:

I was trying to make the story fit typical Gothic convention by imagining it as a Gothic tale 'writ large'. So: the wilderness would be the ancestral family home; the human species would be the family; the old, dark, family secret would be this tendency to succumb to Blackwood's version of 'the call of the wild' (I suppose there might be a racist edge there, with the more 'backward' family members being the most susceptible).

But then it all fell apart. Blackwood seems to be writing from the old 19th, early 20thC concept of humankind as something separate and distinct from nature; which makes a nonsense of my musings.

I suppose the best and most imaginative writers often can't be neatly bound by genre.

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Totally off-topic, houseful, but I just realized that we share a $%#-load of the same books! Weird stuff, too, like Stefan Grabinski and The Jewel of Seven Stars. Interesting...

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This one was the real surprise, though:

http://www.librarything.com/work/563264/book/74112504

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One of my favorite books! I probably spend an hour or two a week with that one...

I wanted to go into Botany before I settled on Lit. Ah, dreams...

Alright, time to move on to our first read of the new year! I'd like to revisit Lovecraft. We'll do a double read of two very different, very well-known stories and have a go at comparing his seperate styles...

New thread is up.