The Deep Zoo

Houses on Fire

Our food is perverse.¹

Werner Herzog’s great film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,² offers a stunning glimpse of all Kaspar lost when, at the age of four, he was isolated in a dungeon. For twelve years he lived like an eel in the twilight. Kaspar was very likely the heir to the throne of Baden, and Herzog provides him with a flickering memory of an exotic and beautiful landscape painted on glass and projected on the wall by the flame of a magic lantern. These ardent images evoke the wealth of beauties lost, the extremity of that loss, and the untenable despair any memory of loss exacted. As when in 1828 Kaspar visited the Veste castle in Nuremberg — so like his childhood home — and fell senseless to the ground. “The dead move among us in our memory,” writes Joy Williams, “and that is the resurrection.”³ But in those savagely eroded years, nothing moved, neither the dead nor the living. Kaspar remembered nothing. He could not dream. Spelled as in a fairy tale, he was suspended in time. Paradoxically, it was this suspension that kept him alive.

“The unconscious spreads its great dark web,” writes Kathryn Davis, “where the villainous agents of our fate lurk side by side with the magical agents of reversal.”⁴ Reversal would come, if briefly. After his release, Kaspar eagerly searched out his memories and began to dream. He longed to be fully alive and aware. He was perplexed and fascinated by the limbo that had for so many years claimed him. When a first attempt was made on his life and he lay in fever and delirium, he cried out to his vanished and unknown aggressor, “You have killed me, before I understand what life is.”⁵ Yet when one looks at Kaspar’s luminous paintings, it is evident he had returned to the world and burned in Beauty’s embrace. Whereas, to evoke beauty in captivity was an impossibility, a lethal risk.

Beauty’s power to rend the heart and sear the mind is the subject of Clarice Lispector’s The Imitation of the Rose, in which the repressed, mousy Laura, who has only just returned from “the perfection of the planet Mars,”⁶ is made to sip milk for safety’s sake, on the hour. Yet she must also relax! “Take things easy. . It doesn’t matter if I get fat,”⁷ Laura thinks, “beauty has never been the most important thing.”⁸ And yet nothing matters more to this woman who was raised in a convent and wears dresses the color of dung. A bouquet of roses undoes her; the roses release her from servitude only to send her careening back to Mars (Lispector’s word for psychosis). “Like someone depraved, she watched with vague longing the tempting perfection of the roses. . with her mouth a little dry, she watched them. Vacantly, sorrowfully, she watched them. . parched by envy and desire.”⁹

The repressed imagination and the renunciation of the beautiful surface again in Lispector’s novel Near to the Wild Heart. Steeped in isolation, the child Joanna wonders, “What’s going to happen now, now, now?¹⁰. . For the silenced dragged out zzzzzz¹¹. . and there was a great still moment with nothing inside it.”¹² When in despair, her face burning, she asks her father, “What shall I do?” he thunders, “Go bang your head against the wall.”¹³

Later, when Joanna has become a woman, her loneliness persists; in solitude she continues “slowly living the thread of her childhood and eyes sparkling, she burns like the air that comes from a stove whose lid is lifted.”¹⁴

Such fevers also spire in the fantastic stories of Jean Ray. In one, a visit to a cannibal house causes the narrator to recall “the bitch who was his mother” serving him a meager supper and crying, “Eat! Who knows who will eat you!”¹⁵ The infernal house will go up in flames; writes Kathryn Davis, “Sooner or later, the house will get the best of you. . Every house in the world, no matter how well built, will eventually catch fire.”¹⁶ If Beauty is dangerous, its danger quickens in the house from which it has been banished.

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the soul must traverse a lake of fire in order to reach the afterlife. It has long intrigued me that the dead — whose chambers were stacked with serviceable things — carried no luggage. Their furniture, cosmetics, roast ducklings, and flasks of wine would be spirited across that lake and show up on the other side as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The dubious idea of finding a hot meal waiting reoccurred to me while reading Kathryn Davis’s splendid novel Hell. “If you wrap your dead you can trick yourself into thinking they’re actually headed somewhere like packages.”¹⁷

In this tirelessly brilliant enchantment, something of a fairy tale (think: Memoirs of a Midget), Bildungsroman, roman à clef, murder mystery (all this!), a family home and a dollhouse within it ceaselessly shift places and most often cannot be told apart. (Unless, for example, a baby’s head falls off and topples to the floor.) In fact “all the houses are haunted. Just because the house is a little house inside a big house it doesn’t mean it escapes God’s notice.”¹⁸ Recall that Yahweh chose to make Adam of mud; he hates his children and would gladly banish them from Paradise. Here all the gods haunt these rooms, and some mythic people too: “Beware when you open the front door, Pandora (is always) getting ready to open her famous box.”¹⁹ Like any place of sacrifice, the grill is on, “the gods prefer their food red,”²⁰ and “the smell of scorched meat drifts up the stairs.²¹. . The gods go for the liver,”²² and should you bend your ear to the “kitchen’s ceaselessly muttering exhaust fan you will hear Mrrrt, mrrrt, murder.”²³ Even lying in the safety of one’s bed, one cannot help but “hear the clamor” and feel “the heat of the stars.”²⁴ Considering God’s malevolence, is it surprising we belong to a “family given to the idea of apocalypse, some of us because we know we deserve to die, others because it suggests a convenient way out?”²⁵ Face it! “There is no escaping the house where you were born.”²⁶ Time is never on our side: “The clock strikes, the shadows lengthen and from the dining room comes the sound of stamping, followed by a vague shuffling noise, lax yet oddly precise, as if an approaching mummy’s trying hard not to trip over its unraveling feet.”²⁷

Potential corpses, a family in Hell sits together eating “Devil on horseback.”²⁸ Eating and its outcome are the incontournable evidence of mortality. In the words of Nöelle Châtelet, “The kitchen is the belly of the house.²⁹. . The exquisite afternoon teacakes, served on a porcelain dish along with Chinese tea, are already well on their way to becoming excrement.”³⁰

Which sends me running for Jean Ray’s novella Malpertuis, where another family at table (“marrow soufflé, leg of lamb perfumed with garlic, roast fowl streaming with juice”³¹) shudders when the clock strikes three (and what does time do if not devour everything?), releasing the lead figurines that decorate the pudding dish. A tiny man, his face no larger than a thimble and so ugly as to scorch the eyes, his arms raised in rage, dashes across the table and is smashed beneath the fist of the resident taxidermist. Lastly, let us not forget Ferrei’s Rabelaisian (and Sadean) La Grande Bouffe, in which a feast is taken to horrific extremities by four existentially exhausted friends. Says one of them, “The smell of shit will never leave us.”³²

Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget offers yet another feast fraught with shadows. When the tiny heroine, Miss M, sits down to the birthday dinner given in her honor, she finds a macabre array of dishes that insult her size and sensibilities. The clou du repas, a Suprême de Langues de Rossignols, says everything about the many ways in which she has been nailed down, detongued, and silenced.³³ Sent over the edge by a sip of absinthe, she steps onto the table to cry out to the one she loves, “Ah, Fanny. Holy Dying, Holy Dying! Sauve qui peut!”³⁴ This outburst shocks both her beloved and her hostess, and sends the “fairy,” “pocket Venus,” “knickknack” into exile.

The betrayal of destiny, so present in the fairy tale, resurges in these works, which all reveal the risks of appearing to be rather than being, of containment over release. Just as the little heroines of Davis’s Hell are submerged in bric-a-brac and besotted with gravy, Miss M threatens to drown in torrents of pygmy Venetian glass. . pygmy porcelain, absurd little mechanical knickknacks — piping birds, a maddening little operatic clock.³⁵ “I am sure, Midgetina,” writes Fanny, “in some previous life you must have lived in the tiny rooms in the Palace at Mantua,”³⁶ (a reference to the Duke of Gonzague’s small population of domestic “wonders”). Poor Miss M! “Sunk” all too often “as if in a bog, [in] ignorance of where or who [she] truly was.”³⁷

Fairy tale and gnostical themes alike abound in all these works: God is sick, the world a filthy inn, and the body the cage of the soul. It is no accident that the pudding served up in Hell proves tainted: “And before my very eyes the smooth white shape from which I’ve gone to such pain to remove all impurities has proved ultimately contaminated.”³⁸ No accident when in Joy Williams’s greatest novel The Changeling Pearl says to Walker, “The body is a corpse, just a corpse, and it’s only the soul that keeps it from putrefication.”³⁹ Pearl, whose story it is, sees herself as hopelessly flawed. If the flesh is corrupt, then she, by making a baby, “has punished them all.”⁴⁰ (In gnostical terms, the soul is the body’s capture.)

Already lost at the novel’s beginning, Pearl explains, “I feel my soul is gone now. . I feel that all those children have it in some way.”⁴¹ Just as God has chosen to make his children of mud, incomplete and angry, Pearl’s brother-in-law, Thomas, models the children he has acquired in his own flawed image. The children, each one abandoned somehow, have been swept up and emptied by Thomas, who, in the guise of saving them, feeds upon them. And the children, morbidly fascinated by werewolves, feed upon the helpless Pearl. Pearl suspects “God didn’t love human beings much. . what he loved most was nothingness.”⁴² Later, feeling wretched, she thinks, “Perhaps the human race has yet to be born.”⁴³

“I will be true to you, whatever comes,” says the mother of three sons in the opening scene of Terence Malick’s deeply imagined film Tree of Life.⁴⁴ She is speaking to the god of love and she is speaking to her sons, those sons who in their infancies “shouted for joy.”⁴⁵ She is speaking to Nature, which matters to her greatly, and to Grace — which she embodies. But she cannot fulfill her promise. She will prove powerless in the face of her husband’s incomprehension and jealous rage, a man who, like Jehovah, would betray his sons.

At the film’s opening, we learn of the suicide of the youngest — the one who was musical and in this way closest to his father; the one who also most resembles him. Malick then takes us on an extraordinary journey to the beginning of time, from the first spark to majestic images of the yeasting universe, the beginning of life, and, with real fearlessness (for the scene leaves the film vulnerable to ridicule and incomprehension), to the first gesture of compassion and awareness of loss and loneliness on the part of a living creature, and one of our most distant ancestors. From there we are brought back to the human family and the birth of a child. The trajectory is thrilling and serves to remind us just how extraordinary the human species is and how important the promise of its children. This child is the film’s central character, Jack — the one who will bear witness and the one who finds the words to express the progress of his own alienation.

If in their early years the three sons thrive in the warm glow of an Edenic infancy, shadows gather; the dining room becomes a Star Chamber where the mother shrinks to near invisibility as the father swells to ominous proportions. He becomes an ogre, a giant, a demon unleashed, an eater of souls. Round as marbles, the food on the plate eludes the fork, the teeth. The “bread of life” is nowhere near this table. Disorder takes over. First the boys are silenced; then they are banished. Having tasted of the world’s bounty and glimpsed their own capacities, they grow fearful, angry, and withdrawn. When Jack says to his mother, “What do you know?” he might as well be saying, “What do you know of love?”

Fascinated by a beautiful neighbor, Jack enters her house and sees a magnificent dinner table set out with crystal goblets and fine china. Everything is in place, yet the room is as still as a tomb. Having stolen a slip from a dresser drawer, he is overcome with shame and grief and wonders, “How do I get back?”⁴⁶ Words that recall Kaspar Hauser’s own terrible acknowledgment of alienation and solitude: “Mother, I am so far away from everybody. .”⁴⁷

Kaspar’s life was a “Holy Dying”; like Miss M and Kafka’s K, he is punished for being born. In Herzog’s film, Kaspar is dreamed, a dream of people of all ages struggling up a mountain littered with rubble and rock. It is a vision of fallen angels, scattered and stumbling forward in isolation. Kaspar explains that what they will find at the top of the mountain is only death. His dream is the ecstatic revelation from one whose life was broken by those who believed the mountain lead to glory, and so immortality. Kaspar lived out a compounded tragedy; his tragedy is the mirror of our species’ failure. For like all human children, he entered the world as a vehicle of light, a flame too hot, it seems, to handle. Kaspar’s dream is the premonition of his end, and his end foretells the end of us all. Of his dream he says, “It seems to me my coming into the world was a terribly hard fall.”⁴⁸ Writes Kathryn Davis, “Something is wrong with the house, the window you washed only yesterday. . reflects the treacherous face of the world.”⁴⁹