It was a case of nothing-ness assuming corporeality, an invasive outside suddenly aware of the innate hostility of the other. The narrative seems unsure whether the whole thing was a dream, but “He” is sanguine that there will be a payback. “He” calls the police while watching the swath of blood on the wall and floor slowly fading away, and the whole episode is dismissed as false alarm. The window severs the figure, two halves landing on either side of the glass. The figure stopped abruptly … heading toward the other window, the one that was open … in his rush to shut the window, he managed to close it right on the figure itself.” (Evenson, 185). The book struck but went through, not even slowing down, and struck the window behind it, making it shiver before then falling to the floor. “Almost without knowing what he was doing, he hurled the book at it. There is no latent theme of vendetta, dogged persuasion or unfinished business, at least not till the protagonist decides to react against this invasion: The classical genre tropes of “haunting” are subverted, because Evenson is invested in a perennial alienation between two worlds - none knows the other, one sees but does not understand, the other feels but does not bother - both captured at an inconceivable overlapping between the two. The non-description of this “partly shadow rather than body” (Evenson, 183) shows a failure of the rational for the protagonist and the author alike as Evenson visibly struggles with his own writing: “It was the shape and size of a human but indistinct, it is edges blurred somehow, as if it were not existing here precisely at all, but instead existing somewhere else, in a place that happened, somehow, to overlap with this space” (Evenson, 184). It bumps into furniture but never changes its course, and does not seem to hear the protagonist gasping. The man is not sure what he is seeing, not even whether he is in his senses, and Evenson dissociates the spectral even further from reality as the shadow lumbers through the room perfectly unaware of anything else in the surrounding. It basically takes the story several hundreds of words to figure out the source of the disturbance - a disembodied, vaguely shining anthropomorphic figure at the corner of the darkened room, floating through. He is confused, and confusingly opaque in his slow cognition. The protagonist - “He” - wakes up hearing a sharp rap on the window. The story itself, as will be clearer later, is a meditation on incertitude. Or he was dreaming and never awoke at all” (Evenson, 181). Or he was asleep and then the sound woke him. The modern American true-weird has repeatedly negotiated with the indescribable through similar dissociative fashion, as will be shown shortly.Ĭonsider, for example, a story on the invasive Weird - instead of a quiescent eldritch (which is in most of Lovecraft and directly Lovecraft-inspired literature), the Large makes its presence felt in a classic supernatural fashion: a rap on the window, a shadow in the corner, a spectral disquietude in the heart of an urban setting.īrian Evenson’s ‘The Window’ tells the story of an unnamed protagonist whose account might or might not be a trance: “He was all but asleep. He sees yet he does not, maybe because the “I” and the “eye” lose synchronicity facing the cosmic eldritch. (18) The reader looks at the unthinkable, yet he is made partially blind. Lovecraft, according to Harman, half-disclaimed the shape of the aberrant as possibly a feverish imagination, then obfuscated the essence of the monster further by inviting the reader not to ponder on the minute details of its body, but on a more “general outline”.Īn octopus-dragon-human hybrid is thus rendered “something over and above the literal combination of its elements”.
This, I feel is again a silent homage to Lovecraft, as Graham Harman (2012), analysing the object-oriented philosophy in Lovecraft’s literature, notices the “de-literalising gesture” as his major stylistic trait.
Postmillennial horror authors - Michael Wehunt, Laird Barron (2014) or Brian Evenson (2016a, b) treat this concern through what I call a dissociative writing.
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