From the publisher’s website: Hallucination was always the ghost story’s elephant in the room. Even before the vogue for psychical research and spiritualism began to influence writers at the end of the nineteenth century, tales of horror and the supernatural, of ghosts and demons, had been haunted by the possibility of some grand deception by the senses. But what is certainly true is that, during the nineteenth century, hallucination took on a new force and significance not just in ghost stories and horror fiction, but in other forms of writing. Authors began to encourage their readers to assess whether the ghostly had its origins in some supernatural phenomenon from beyond the grave, or from some deception within our own minds. This wide-ranging book explores the many factors which contributed to this rise in the interest in hallucination and visionary experience, during the nineteenth century and beyond. Through a series of close and often unusual readings of numerous writers including Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, and Arthur Machen, this original study explores what happened when hallucination appeared in fiction, and – even more importantly – why it happened at all.
As his subtitle indicates, Oliver Tearle looks at the ways in which fiction writers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries utilised hallucinations in their work; more precisely he looks at how the phenomenon lent itself to those authors who were exploring uncanny themes. In this the Society for Psychical Research’s data collection and analyses are shown to have been particularly influential, even if authors often ignored its dry theoretical leanings to increase the dramatic effect of their stories. Ghostly fiction had been growing in popularity during the Victorian period, but the ghosts generally had lives, as it were, of their own. The ghost was being reconceptualised by the SPR, and if no consensus had been reached on its status, it had moved a long way from clanking chains to something more subtle, summed up in the title of Frank Podmore’s 1909 book (not used by Tearle), Telepathic Hallucinations: The New View of Ghosts.
Once these debates within the SPR began to percolate through the wider culture (something else Tearle does not mention is that versions of many of the articles which appeared in the SPR’s Proceedings were first published in the periodical press, thereby reaching a wide audience), there was a similar process of the ghostly shifting from something perceived as external to the viewer to it as an internal process. The resulting fictions, either based on or reacting to the SPR’s case studies and theoretical debates, played on the ambiguities of perception and the difficulties in discriminating between what is ‘in here’ and what is ‘out there’, capitalising on the tension between them to construct suspenseful narratives. There was still the possibility of an external cause, often leading the reader to hesitate between explanations, a hesitation that was not always resolvable one way or the other.
Tearle begins with an overview of how the ghost story relates to the fantastic, problems of interpretation, and the ways in which the notion of hallucination developed within literature during the nineteenth century, with examples of authors who utilised its dramatic potential. The heart of the book is a detailed discussion of five stories, relating each, where relevant, to other works by their authors. The stories are ‘Markheim’ (1885), by Robert Louis Stevenson; ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1887), by Vernon Lee; ‘The Friends of the Friends’ (1896), by Henry James (not the obvious choice); The Hill of Dreams (1907), by Arthur Machen; and ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ (1911), by Oliver Onions. In a coda, Tearle suggests that the indeterminacy in these stories helped to lay the foundations for literary modernism’s emphasis on subjectivity after the First World War, while hallucination’s connection to the ghost story loosened as literary hallucination came to signify a pathological state, but one not necessarily with paranormal overtones.
The importance of the SPR’s work for the writers under consideration makes it all the more disappointing that Tearle tends to rely on secondary sources rather than going directly to the pages of the Society’s Journal and Proceedings. His background is in literature, so that is perhaps understandable, but it does feel that his scrupulously close readings of the novels are not matched by an engagement with the psychical research literature. For example, there are only two references to the SPR’s 1894 ‘Report on the Census of Hallucinations’, which one might consider a key text, and both are referenced by secondary sources: Roger Luckhurst’s The Invention of Telepathy (2002) for one, and an essay in Ivor Grattan-Guinness’s edited collection published to celebrate the SPR’s centenary in 1982 for the other. The Report does not appear in the bibliography. There is a similar paucity of material put out by the SPR’s early researchers – no papers by Myers or Gurney, for example, though Phantasms of the Living is present. Moving outside the SPR, one would have thought that the 1894 book by a critic of the Census, Edmund Parish – Ueber die Trugwahrnehmung, translated and expanded as Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of the Fallacies of Perception (1897), would have been worth at least a mention.
There is some sniffiness about psychical research present, often the case with scholars who use it as their subject matter but who want to demonstrate that they do not have sympathy with its methods and that they harbour no trace of gullibility. So we get Phantasms of the Living’s ‘quasi-scientific approach’ and several references to the ‘pseudoscience’ of psychical research in general and the SPR in particular. Most strikingly, we get Arthur Machen ‘looking forward to a more sophisticated understanding of the human mind than the Society [for Psychical Research] could offer.’ Yet a sustained reading of the papers of Edmund Gurney and Frederic Myers indicates that, whatever one might think about their validity, they were certainly sophisticated, as attested by the resurgence of attention that Myers in particular has received in recent years.
Bewilderments of Vision is adapted from a PhD thesis, and its origin shows in the denseness of the prose, but reading it is worth the effort for the way it illuminates the relationship between the pioneers of psychical research as they grappled with issues of veridicality and hallucination in attempting to tease out the complexities of our understanding of life after death, and the writers who drew on the SPR’s publications as a resource. It will be of value both to those primarily interested in the literature of the period who want to deepen their knowledge of its intellectual context, and to those tracing the ways in which seemingly narrow and rarefied psychical research preoccupations had a broader effect on the culture. The latter group may chafe at the limited number of psychical research sources utilised, but Tearle achieves his aim of examining the role of hallucination in a number of texts, thereby enriching our understanding of them.