The kids are definitely not all right: observing the troubling guises of innocence at work in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw

There’s something about the insertion of a child into a tale marked by frightful shadows that “gives the effect another turn of the screw.” In tales of terror, children can pose a special mystery, their consciousness a blank slate more vulnerable to invisible corruption. There’s the ambiguity of their knowingness and the veneer of their innocence to contend with, as well as the absolute power of their fear and acceptance both. And there is also a child’s relative proximity to the imagined other place from which we come and upon death return, a proximity that invites speculation as to the child’s access to that place’s knowledge and occult goings-on.

As the calendar days march their way toward October’s end and I crave some seasonal reading, I find myself snatching Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw from its place on my shelf once more. Few literary works give me the creeps so consistently, so satisfyingly, so eloquently, and given the novella’s length, it can easily be read in a single day –or preferably, a single night– and this somehow intensifies its tenor. Its truly one of those rare books I don’t want to put down once it’s started. Enormously influential and to this day hotly debated with regards to the reliability of its narrator, James’ sharp little masterpiece, originally published in 1898, possesses a singular power, driven by the psychological lucidity of its prose and striking imagery.

The story is somehow all the creepier for starting at a Christmas party, where several eager guests gather to hear one of their own talk of a woman he knew long ago, now dead some ten years, who relayed to him the chronicle of her encounter with sinister forces via a job she’d taken as the governess of two orphaned siblings. The set-up is rather strangely never returned to, and the unnamed governess takes the story’s reigns once it gets started proper, explaining the uncanny degree to which she becomes enchanted with the beatific children under her charge, and the strange figures that begin to appear once she’s settled into the children’s isolated Essex estate.

“I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers on a great drifting ship,” our protagonist tells us long before anything particularly unnerving occurs. The precision of James’ words allow the governess to articulate each step in her journey vividly, gradually drawing special attention to the blood-curdling geometry of gazes that characterize the story’s slipping into the realm of the potentially supernatural.

At one point the governess spots a conspicuously hatless intruder gazing at her through the kitchen window and dashes outside to confront him. Finding he’s vanished, she gazes back through the window from his estimated vantage point, in effect taking his place, and unintentionally scares the beejesus out of her colleague. At another point, little Flora gazes out her bedroom window at night and the governess, wanting to determine what it is Flora’s gazing at, goes to another window facing the same way, whereupon she sees little Miles out in the grounds at night, looking back toward the manor, yet not at her, nor at Flora, but up toward the tower, where the governess is almost certain no one could be.

The Turn of the Screw is an extraordinarily ocular piece of writing. It's visually evocative, but more than that it's compellingly preoccupied by the act of seeing and the impression seeing things makes on our sense of what’s real and what isn’t. James takes us through the governess’ process of trying to come to terms with what she sees, yet he never gives us a comfortable notion of what’s running through the minds of the children, who the governess fears are seeing things “terrible and unguessable and that spring from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past.” Because of this, James’ novella holds a revered niche in the halls of the macabre, implying that children, those little people with their bright, unfinished faces, are inherently intruders themselves, and no matter how much they seem to require our protection, they might just be the last ones we should trust.

Looking for lineage on The Orphanage

The marketing for The Orphanage (El Orfanato) is, unsurprisingly, making much of Guillermo Del Toro's role as executive producer, a fact that no doubt prompted whichever dunderheaded critic it was who declared it "This year's Pan's Labyrinth!" Irksome hyperbole aside, I still enjoyed the film when I caught it on a whim at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, and I went back to see it again this afternoon at a downtown multiplex. It takes little reflection to realize that the story, crammed with innuendo, is of course full of holes, yet none of them seem to actually burrow into the morbidly romantic heart of the material, or take anything away from Belén Rueda's engagingly desperate, sympathetically neurotic performance as Laura, the mother haunted by her missing child long after everyone else has resigned themselves to his almost certain death. Laura and her son Simón share the determining attribute of having both been orphans, and the fidelity and solidarity this imposes on their bond is probably of a nature most of us who've grown up with the security of knowing our birth parents can't truly comprehend. It's this aspect of The Orphanage that I immediately found strangely moving in spite of the film being a bit overcooked by its young director Juan Carlos Bayona.

What drew Del Toro to the film however only became obvious to me after my second viewing. In the largely pedestrian documentary that accompanies Warner's wonderful Val Lewton box set, Del Toro articulates his deep admiration for Lewton, and in The Orphanage we can detect a number of traits that connect directly to Lewton's themes (and in discussing them, there will follow MAJOR SPOILERS). In particular, the film is fundamentally controlled by a very relatable tragedy grounded in reality, while its potentially supernatural elements are finally left ambiguous. As well, the film basically imparts upon the viewer the idea that suicide is a good thing, at the very least a way to resolve an insurmountable emotional wound and make amends with a troubled past. The film's ending is unfathomably gloomy, yet it does imply that the heroine reunites with her son and finds a peace that was otherwise obscure to her. 

But as much as the film benefits from its evocation of Lewton's enduringly seductive horror classics, it also works away at the same creeping psychological schisms found at the heart of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, perhaps my favourite horror story ever, one that found its finest cinematic adaptation in 1961's The Innocents. Frustrated maternal urges, isolation and obsession, the veneration if not fetishization of children: all of these factors figure into the mental landscape of The Orphanage (not to mention Guy Maddin's  Brand Upon the Brain! to which The Orphanage bears several curious resemblances). Perhaps this calls for the delineation of a subgenre: manic surrogate mother and child chillers? ...Let me work on that one.

Slaves to the Rhythm: Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia

Though I’ve spent my life largely involved with other forms, I’ve always subscribed to the Romantic notion that all art should aspire to the conditions of music. Music seems to possess a unique power, penetrating our interior world of dreams, memories and desires with inexplicable immediacy, yet simultaneously able to provoke flights of solidarity between individuals who might otherwise never feel united. If I have a single overriding bias when assessing the books or films I write about, it’s most certainly my attraction to anything that has some shape, rhythm or tone that works like music. 

Much as I love music however, I find myself becoming increasingly curmudgeonly in my attitude toward our easy access to and/or abundance of music in every aspect of daily public life. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera has a character lament one’s inability to sit down for a meal in a restaurant without being bombarded with music. Luis Buñuel, in his contemporaneous memoir My Last Sigh, lamented how difficult it was for him to find a bar where music was not always being played. He liked to devise his films in bars, and found that incessant background music interfered with his ability to daydream freely. 20 years and several leaps in technology later and the protests made in these books now seems quaint: the thoughtless battery of music has virtually conquered modern life. Like anything of beauty, when the presence of music becomes total it becomes taken for granted: it plays and plays, but no one hears it.

I’m getting too gloomy. The point of this column is in fact to call attention to a new book that I think functions as a welcome antidote to this musical malaise, one that celebrates the enduring bond between our species and the infinite varieties of music that haunt us. Oliver Sacks is among the world’s most successful popular science writers for a good reason. He conveys the study of neurological science through narratives that seize upon struggles with the business of living that anyone can relate to. In a voice that’s always as compassionate as it is curious, he reveals our vulnerability to the dictates of biochemistry, yet as he does so, the science to which he surrenders so much enthusiasm suddenly begins to expand life’s possibilities rather than shrink them.

Musicophilia (Knopf, $34.95) is Sacks’ latest, and in some ways –though I’m not even sure if Sacks himself is aware of it– it feels like a summation of his previous books. It frequently draws upon case studies from those books to help flesh out his concentrated exploration of our strange contract with music, a force that alone seems to break though countless barriers raised by defects of our brains. Sacks explains how the brains of talented musicians are physically distinctive from those of non-musicians, yet he spends more time marveling at the musical abilities of people whose brains might seem to promise no special talents whatsoever.

Sacks tells of 42-year-old man with no previous special interest in music who after being struck by lightning became obsessed to the point of throwing everything away for a career as a concert pianist. He tells of a man fully gripped by Alzheimer’s who remembers the baritone part of every song he ever sang in his 40 years with an a cappella group. He tells of a man with the worst case of amnesia on record, a man who doesn’t recognize the wife who’s cared for him daily since his debilitating brain infection 20 years ago, yet who can sit down at a piano and play a Bach Prelude with grace. He may not remember who Bach is, but once the notation is placed before him, he “remembers” how to play and for that time and only that time does he truly have a present.

But Sacks also relays fascinating anecdotes about those for whom music has been a sort of curse: victims of musical hallucinations, overwhelming musical sensitivity, or, perhaps most disturbing of all, a complete lack of affect toward music. (He counts William and Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Freud among those famed artists and intellectuals seemingly uninterested or even hostile toward music.) As already evidenced in Awakenings, Sacks’ famous book on his experiences with encephalitis sufferers, music has often been a tremendous therapeutic tool for treating numerous severe neurological disorders, yet it can also be the bane of some, such as the 19th century music critic Nikonov, who eventually became so painfully afflicted by musical antipathy that any music, however soft, would send him into convulsions. (Nikonov authored a pamphlet entitled Fear of Music, a title eventually appropriated by Talking Heads for one of their very best records.)

Sacks strings together his tales and observations by theme, leading to no sweeping thesis aside from the sum of his book’s parts, which seem to me to work just fine, since it’s the very mystery of music that makes these readings so compelling. The final scene described in Musicophilia features several individuals, each of them confined largely to the island constructed from their own severe dementia, suddenly brought together by music which they had no idea was coming, nor will they recall after it disappears. And it’s such moments that remind us eloquently of music’s special ephemeral quality, one so seductive and so heartbreaking.