by Matt Cardin
“THE SAND-MAN”
“The Sand-man” (a.k.a. “Der Sand-mann”) is a short story by the nineteenth-century German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann. Originally published in German in 1817, it first appeared in English in Tales from the German, Comprising Specimens from the Most Celebrated Authors in 1844. One of Hoffmann’s most complex stories, “The Sand-man” exists in several translations and has different versions of its characters’ names, but the story is at its core one of perceptions, with madness and identity and obsession being several of its themes.
The never-seen titular character is folkloric, a “wicked man, who comes to children, when they will not go to bed and throws handfuls of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads” (Oxenford and Feiling 1844, 141); he then takes the naughty children to his loved ones, where the children’s eyes are plucked out. The Sand-man is one of young Nathanael’s obsessions, and the story begins with his writing a letter to Lothair, brother of his fiancée Clara, in which he describes his childhood memories of the Sand-man and concludes with recounting a disastrous meeting with the domineering lawyer Coppelius. Coppelius is also an alchemist, and his fiery magical experiments almost lead to Nathanael’s death; they do later lead to the death of Nathanael’s father and the disappearance of Coppelius. But Nathanael believes Coppelius has reappeared as Coppola, a seller of barometers. Nathanael’s letter is sent to Clara, however, who offers Nathanael sympathy, then concludes by telling him that his fears are from his own mind and that he should stop obsessing about Coppelius/Coppola. Nathanael’s next letter reveals that he was wrong in his identification of Coppelius with Coppola, for the two are different people. He additionally reveals that his professor, Spalanzani, has vouched for Coppola and has a beautiful daughter, Olimpia. This letter is sent to Lothair and is correctly delivered.
The richness of “The Sand-man,” especially in terms of philosophical and psychological content, comes through in passages like the following, which is one of many that articulate ideas, dreads, and suspicions that often lurk unexpressed in human minds and hearts until someone with Hoffmann’s authorial acumen gives them voice.
If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves. Lothaire adds that if we have willingly yielded ourselves up to the dark powers, they are known often to impress upon our minds any strange, unfamiliar shape which the external world has thrown in our way; so that we ourselves kindle the spirit, which we in our strange delusion believe to be speaking to us. It is the phantom of our own selves, the close relationship with which, and its deep operation on our mind, casts us into hell or transports us into heaven.
Matt Cardin
Source: Hoffmann, E. T. A. [1817] 1999. “The Sand-man.” Translated by John Oxenford. 19th-Century German Stories. http://germanstories.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e.html.
The above motifs and situations being semi-established, there are more narrative complexities. There are issues of obsession, identity, and reality, for a person can be machine-like in behavior, and machines may have the appearance of people. Nathanael’s actions reveal that he has become thoroughly unhinged, ultimately dangerously so, though he fails to kill Clara, Coppola, and Coppelius, and concludes by committing suicide, throwing himself from a balcony and leaving Clara to find happiness with another, which she does.
According to the introduction by the story’s original English translators, “the story of the Sand-man had its origin in a discussion which actually took place between La Motte Fouqué and some friends, at which Hoffmann was present. Some of the people found fault with the cold, mechanical deportment of a young lady of their acquaintance, while La Motte Fouqué defended her. Here Hoffmann caught the notion of the automaton Olympia [sic], and the arguments used by Nathaniel [sic] are those that were really employed by La Motte Fouqué” (Oxenford and Feiling 1844, xii–xiii). At the same time, the story is much more than a simple assessment of behavior, and it remains one of Hoffmann’s most complex and idea-driven tales. Significantly, it was used by Sigmund Freud as a chief focus in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” where he dwells on the living doll Olimpia, the significance of the Sand-man’s violence to eyes, and the theme of the double or doppelgänger, and avers that “E. T. A. Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (Freud 2003, 141).
Richard Bleiler
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Psychological Horror; The Uncanny.
Further Reading
Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 2003. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, 121–162. New York: Penguin.
Mahlendorf, Ursula. 1975. “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sand-man: The Fictional Psycho-Biography of a Romantic Poet.” American Imago 32, no. 3: 217–239.
Oxenford, John, and C. A. Feiling, trans. 1844. Tales from the German, Comprising Specimens from the Most Celebrated Authors. London: Chapman and Hall.
Willis, Martin T. 1994. “Scientific Portraits in Magical Frames: The Construction of Preternatural Narrative in the Work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Arthur Machen.” Extrapolation 35, no. 3: 186–200.
SARBAN (1910–1989)
“Sarban” was the pseudonym under which John William Wall, a British career diplomat, published three books of weird fiction between 1951 and 1953. Sarban’s work is considered a bridge between the work of writers in the classic supernatural tradition, such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, and contemporary weird fiction. His stories are especially memorable for their evocative descriptions of foreign lands and exotic cultures for whom mythic survivals are not uncommon.
Sarban’s first book, Ringstones and Other Curious Tales (1951), collects five previously unpublished short stories. The title tale tells of a young woman, Daphne, who cares for three children in a manor house in the Northumbrian moorlands built near an ancient stone circle. The eldest, Nuaman, expresses a vibrant sexuality seemingly beyond his years. The evidence mounts by the story’s end that Nuaman is the avatar of an ancient god in league with the fairy race who built the ringstones, and that Daphne has submitted to his primitive sexual dominance in dreams, if not in waking life. As Peter Nicholls has noted, dramatic tension in the story derives from the juxtaposition of the forbidden primitive sexuality that Nuaman represents to the repressions of modern life that govern Daphne. Survivals from the past infused with primitive sexuality are also elements in “The Khan” (1951), in which an Englishwoman traveling with her stodgy husband in the Persian desert strays into a mystical forest glade where she is groomed to become the sexual partner of a woodland spirit who assumes the form of a massive bear, and “Capra” (1951), in which a satyr from antiquity becomes the victim of a party of sexually uninhibited modern couples in contemporary Greece.
Sarban’s best-known work, the short novel The Sound of His Horn (1952), is an alternate history tale (with none of the traditional science fiction underpinnings) whose protagonist, a prisoner escaped from a POW camp during World War II, slips into a future in which Germany has won the war. That future is not a futuristic extrapolation of the Third Reich, but rather a throwback to the legendary past in which a master forester, Count von Hackleberg, plays the role of the legendary Wild Huntsman, organizing hunts of members of subjugated races for the benefit of senior members of the Reich. The count’s “harriers”—biologically altered females outfitted as
naked catlike huntresses—gives the book’s treatment of the themes of dominance and submission a patina of perverse sexuality.
Dominance and submission recur again in The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny (1953), which collects three stories, including the title tale, in which a teenage girl discovers that the handsome young man who lives on the estate next door to her boarding school, and who encourages her romantic inclinations toward him, intends to capture her soul magically in a doll to serve as his plaything. In one of the book’s other stories, “The Trespassers,” a reclusive girl in a country estate uses her sexual allure to persuade two schoolboys who have strayed onto its premises to help her capture a unicorn.
The posthumous collection The Sacrifice and Other Stories (2002) collects four stories, of which two capture the same sense of sexual menace that imbues Sarban’s other fiction: “The King of the Lake,” an Arabian Nights–style fable in which two women lost in a sandstorm are taken to an underground lake by a mysterious stranger whose mythic destiny is bound up with his unsavory designs on them; and “Number Fourteen,” about a religious cult’s obsession with a dancer in (then) contemporary London. Discovery of Heretics: Unseen Writings (2010) collects a number of fragmentary and previously unpublished works, including the novella “The Gynarchs,” about a postapocalyptic matriarchal utopia.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Machen, Arthur.
Further Reading
Nicholls, Peter. 1986. “Sarban.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, Volume II, edited by Everett F. Bleiler, 667–673. New York: Scribners.
Valentine, Mark. 2010. Time, A Falconer: A Study of Sarban. North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press.
“SARDONICUS”
“Sardonicus” is a short story written by Ray Russell, originally published in the January 1961 issue of Playboy magazine. It is an example of a Gothic story in both its Bohemian castle setting and damsel-in-distress plot, prompting Stephen King to call it “perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written” (del Toro 2013, xii). The story was later collected in Unholy Trilogy (1967) with two other tales, “Sagittarius,” which takes place in part in Paris at the infamous Grand Guignol (a theater specializing in horror plays, presented with copious gore), and “Sanguinarius,” a fictional account of the murderous Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
“Sardonicus” tells the story of Robert Cargrave, a doctor, who is called to an ancient estate to help a former love interest, Maude, who is now married to Sardonicus, the owner of the impressive manor. Sardonicus is suffering from a rare medical condition that makes it impossible for him to move his face, which has been frozen in a horrific grin ever since he looked upon the corpse of his father in its grave. He is a prime example of a man who has turned into a monster, specifically, a ghoul. Sardonicus proves to be both an unkind host and an abusive husband, and after he psychologically tortures Robert, the doctor finally retaliates, determined to save Maude. Robert uses his own knowledge of psychology to convince Sardonicus that his mouth will no longer open or close, leaving him to die from starvation.
William Castle: Master of Gimmickry
The American filmmaker William Castle, who produced and directed the movie adaptation of Russell’s Sardonicus, achieved lasting fame, albeit of a gaudy sort, for his low-budget thriller and horror films in the 1950s and 1960s (as well as for his one “high-class” producing effort, 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby). The “punishment poll” that he created for Mr. Sardonicus was only one of many gimmicks that he conceived to market his movies. For Macabre (1958), he provided audience members with (fake) life insurance policies in case they died of fright. For The House on Haunted Hill (1959), he had a skeleton fly out over audiences on a wire during the climactic scene (a gimmick given a fond homage thirty-eight years later in director Wes Craven’s Scream 2 [1997]). For The Tingler (1959) he had some of the seats in certain theaters rigged with a vibrating motor to provide a “shock” during the finale, when a monster called “the tingler” gets loose in a movie theater. Today these and Castle’s many other promotional stunts are the stuff of Hollywood and horror movie legend.
Matt Cardin
The same year of its publication, Russell’s story was adapted to film by director William Castle under the title Mr. Sardonicus. The film was released by Columbia in October 1961, with Guy Rolfe playing the titular character. Castle, a master at creating gimmicks to fill theater seats, advertised two endings and let the audience participate in a “punishment poll” to vote on whether Mr. Sardonicus should live or die. The reviews were mixed at best, but even so, Mr. Sardonicus is considered by many to be the best of Castle’s career, due in large part to the makeup effects used to create the horrific smile on Rolfe’s face.
In 2013 Penguin included Russell’s story in Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories, an anthology for Penguin Classics edited by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. In his foreword, del Toro effectively highlighted the significance of “Sardonicus” as both a backward-looking and forward-looking tale when he described it as “a tale of enormous originality that remains, at the same time, a grand homage and a reinvention of the Gothic” (del Toro 2013, xiii).
Lisa Kröger
See also: Monsters; Psychological Horror; Russell, Ray.
Further Reading
Brottman, Mikita. 2004. “Afterword: Risus Sardonicus.” In Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor, 141–153. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Conners, Scott. 2007. “The Ghoul.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 243–266. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Del Toro, Guillermo. 2013. “Foreword.” In Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories by Ray Russell, xi–xix. New York: Penguin.
Staggs, Matt. 2016. “Sardonicus Rising: Horror Master Ray Russsell’s Unexpected Revival.” Unbound Worlds, September 30. http://www.unboundworlds.com/2016/09/sardonicus-rising-horror-master-ray-russells-unexpected-revival.
“SCHALKEN THE PAINTER”
Although Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s (1814–1873) most celebrated work remains the vampire novella Carmilla (1871–1872), and to a lesser extent the supernatural short story “Green Tea” (1869), “Schalken the Painter,” one of his earliest supernatural tales, is considered by connoisseurs of the uncanny to be one of his finest offerings. The story has long been a favorite among anthologists, including Montague Summers, Peter Haining, and E. F. Bleiler. M. R. James, who generally held Le Fanu’s writing in high regard, singled out this story in his introduction to Ghosts & Marvels (1924) as being “one of the best of Le Fanu’s good things” (James 2001, 488).
“Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter,” to give the tale its full title, was first published in the Dublin University Magazine in the May 1839 issue. The story originally bore the subtitle “Being a Seventh Extract from the Legacy of the Late Francis Purcell, P.P. of Drumcoolagh,” and was part of a loosely linked series of tales and poems, collected posthumously under the title The Purcell Papers (1880). “Schalken,” which is set in Holland, is further notable as being Le Fanu’s first story to be set outside of Dublin.
The titular protagonist Godfrey Schalken is based on the Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken (1643–1706), whose chiaroscuro style (an art style that highlights the contrast between light and shadow) informs Le Fanu’s narrative technique, especially the way in which descriptive details are carefully revealed to great uncanny effect. The tale concerns the inspiration for a painting by Schalken depicting a white-robed female figure whose arch smile is illuminated solely by the lamp she bears; in the background is a man with his hand on the hilt of his sword, in the act of drawing it. Whether or not this painting is based on one that Le Fanu had actually seen is a frequent topic of debate among scholars.
Schalken, apprenticed to Gerard Douw (Gerrit Dou, 1613–1675), falls in love with his master’s ward, Rose Velderkaust, who is “possessed of all the dimpli
ng charms of the fair, light-hearted Flemish maidens” (Le Fanu 2014, 78). One evening a sinister stranger appears in the studio—Mynher Vanderhausen, from Rotterdam—whose bluish leaden face is described as “malignant, even satanic” (89). Vanderhausen offers Douw a box of golden ingots in exchange for Rose’s hand in marriage. Despite Schalken’s affection, Douw accepts, and Vanderhausen leaves for Rotterdam with his bride. Some time later, Rose returns to Douw’s house “wild and haggard, and pale with exhaustion and terror” (92). With the aid of an old clergyman, Schalken and Douw attempt to shelter her, but she is taken one night by some unseen hand. Schalken encounters Rose once more in a church in Rotterdam. With an arch smile she leads him to the crypt, where he witnesses a charnel bed and the livid and demoniac form of Vanderhausen.
“Schalken” shares with Carmilla horrific sexual undertones, especially in its climax, in which sexual congress between the living and the dead is strongly implied. This theme of innocence ruined by the otherworldly can also be found in two of Le Fanu’s later stories, “The Child That Went with the Faeries” (1870) and “Laura Silver Bell” (1872). However, “Schalken” remains Le Fanu’s cruelest and most chilling variation on the demon lover theme.
Le Fanu often reworked his stories throughout his career. For his first collection, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), he included a rewritten version of “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter,” with the truncated title “Schalken the Painter,” and accompanied it with an illustration by frequent Dickens collaborator “Phiz” (Hablot K. Browne, 1815–1882). While neither version of the story is considered better than the other—each has its own merits and flourishes of supernatural subtlety—they do have their differences, notably in the rewritten opening paragraphs and the addition of a Bible quote (Job 9:32–34).