β€œOmbra”, the chivalrous arabesque of the poet who anticipated the fantasy-quest and… Jung

The short story "Shadow" by the poet Sarah Dana Loring, originally contained in the "Arabesques" published in 1872 under the name of her husband Richard S. Greenough, is emblematic of the author's foresight in anticipating certain literary strands such as Sword & Sorcery and even some conceptions of the philosophy of the deep Jungian. Now available in Italian thanks to Dagon Press.

di Marco Maculotti

Cover: Arnold BΓΆcklin, β€œMoonlit Landscape with Ruins”, 1849

Among the recent releases of the small but always hard-working Dagon Press, thanks to the curatorship of his factotum Pietro Guarriello and the translation by Caterina Paris, the publication of Ombre, short story from the collection arabesques (Boston, 1872) by Richard S. Greenough, actually a pseudonym of the poet Sarah Dana Loring (1827-1885), who at the time of publishing some of her horror and fantastic stories - which probably, at the time, were considered unsuitable for a writer with ambitions mainstream - decided to use her husband's name.

In the original work there were four short stories: in addition to Ombre, which will be discussed shortly, the work also included Monar, in which a knight-errant, came into possession of a magical ring thanks to a monare of the title (a kind of Egyptian dwarf witch used as a spirit-helper), undertakes an initiatory journey to the East, where he faces human antagonists dedicated to black magic and non-human creatures, such as werewolves and doppelganger; Apollona, where a young man during an excursion in the Pyrenees comes across a witch who magically leads him to the subterranean kingdom, to keep him prisoner as a lover, a witness to infinite wonders that in reality are nothing more than an illusion hatched by the demonic entity; in the end, Domitia centers on the transmigration of the soul of an evil pagan priestess into the body and mind of a Roman matron [1].

Already from these brief hints one can guess the great passion of Loring for the chivalrous literature and for the folklore, often linked to ancient myths, of both Western and Eastern ecumune, but above all the revival in the various short stories of exquisitely initiatory structure of the hero myth, centered on his journey to the Other World and on the clash with the chaotic forces that harbor there; a plot that, in recent centuries, passed from the bed of knightly sagas to the much more popular one of children's fairy tales, as demonstrated at the time by the Russian linguist and anthropologist Vladimir Propp [2]. With these premises, it is easy to understand the stylistic framework that Guarriello makes of the author, defining her fantastic work as a version Baroque of the prose of Clark ashton smith [3].


True ghost stories

In the recent publication of Dagon Press, as mentioned, of the four short stories originally published by Loring in the arabesques we find the only one Ombre; but on the other hand, several have been added in the appendix 'True' ghost stories written by another important female pen contemporary to Loring, that is, the journalist and spiritualist Jessie Adelaide Middleton (1861-1921), first published in 1907 on the Pearson's Magazine and then inserted together with many others in the historic trilogy (The Gray Ghost Book, 1912; Another Gray Ghost Book, 1914; The White Ghost Book, 1916) which collected "a whole sampling of ghost stories, precognitions, apparitions, vampirism, haunted houses and other supernatural events collected from the voice of those who [...]" have crossed the threshold that separates us from the realm of the invisible and have returned back to tell the story Β».

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Among the testimonies of unresolved spirits, psychometrics and appearances of the astral double, this selection is halfway between Ambrose Bierce's frontier tales and casuistry fairy collated by folklorists such as Reverend Kirk (The Secret Commonwealth, 1692) and Evans-Wentz (The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, 1911). These are the titles of the episodes reported:

  • The Haunted House of Notthing Hill
  • The Old Lady in Black
  • Three Strange Stories:
    • The Steps on the Stairs
    • The Orange Girl
    • The Gravediggers
  • The Ghost with the Evil Face
  • The Mysterious Visitor
  • The Ghost of Nell Gwynn and Other Mysterious VisitorsΒ Β 

La quest-fantasy of Loring 50 years before Sword & Sorcery

What about the writing that gives the title to this publication? Ombre it is considered by critics to be one of the first quest-fantasy never published: that is to say a narrative work that, like the quest classic, unfolds along the stages of an initiatory journey that has the trappings of a mission, undertaken by a protagonist typically ascribable to the "chivalrous" order, to achieve a very specific purpose, often mystical or sacred; here we can talk about quest-fantasy for Loring's casual use of expedients typical of fantastic literature and precisely of the vein Fantasy, as a continuous series of supernatural events and the use of magic in all its forms, elements that will then become essential in the Sword & Sorcery which will develop half a century later. In this, Loring must be recognized with a certain far-sightedness, which appears even more deserving if one takes into account the fact that the genre, apart from the brief parenthesis mentioned here and a few other exceptions, was always interpreted with more success by male authors.

If of the plots of the other short stories originally contained in the Arabesque (1872) we have briefly mentioned (a more detailed description is given in the preface of the book reviewed here), that of Ombre it could be defined at first glance as a potpourri of the aforementioned, starting from the brief description made by the editor and translator Peter Guarriello [4]:

The protagonist is a lone knight who embarks on a perilous journey in dark and wild lands, between ruined castles and abandoned cemeteries, where he will meet diabolical necromancers and witches reanimartici of corpses. He also has to contend with a magically created double of himself, a topos author's favorite.

An incipit that recalls that of The devil's elixirs by ETA Hoffmann (1817) immediately introduces us to a world of fantasy and yet gloomy hues, in which dream and nightmare alternate seamlessly. TO Mazitka, cruel necromancer, alchemist and astrologer dedicated to unmentionable rites, he contrasts the female character built on leitmotiv folkloric of the Β«supernatural brideΒ»Who, after luring the protagonist with his elven music through a ruined city, leads him to the ogre's house, left wunderkammer in which wonders and disturbing artifacts are accumulated. If the first, "archenemy of mankind" [5], exhibits from the clarity of her features a diabolical and at the same time enthusiastic wickedness, the profile of the second seems "changeable and wavering", the only certain things being "her delicate and deep eyes and the glory of her hair" [6]. His likes are, by his own admission, "the morning clouds, the splashes of the waterfall, the drops of dew on the grass, the waves of the sea" [7]. His name is Ombre.

And it is she, of course, a iniziare, in the moonlight, the protagonist to the mysteries of what we could define the Cosmic Chorus, with an exhibition that presents singular points of contact with the visionary descriptions of the saint Hildegard of Bingen, recently re-read by the theologian Matthew Fox and the biologist Ruper Sheldrake in correspondence with the most modern concepts of physics and astronomy [8]:

The stars have asked me […] their voices fill all the space. Don't you hear them? […] Their songs may not be able to be translated into human speech […]. They speak of the mysteries that existed before the world was born, that exist, and that always will exist. Each in his own way, in his appointed place, raises his voice and sings of the Glory of God, of the wonders of those secret laws through which Beauty has spread through the greatness of creation and thanks to which love has filled solitude. of space.


From the "underground" reintegration of Ombra to the anabasis with the double-daimon

With the recovery of the leitmotiv initiatic of the supernatural bride, Loring reintegrates the feminine element in a mythopoeic vision that goes beyond the purely Romantic vein, in which the virginal figure of the beloved shone almost solely for its purity (except, perhaps, for the Lamia Keatsiana), both the Decadentist one which, on the contrary, slavishly exalted its dark and chaotic elements, as for example happens in the stories of Poe, in the Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire (1857), in Carmilla by Le Fanu (1872) or in Great god Pan of Machen (1890)

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In this we distinguish the feral female presence of the Loring novel from the muses and fatal females of contemporary literature: the Shadow of the homonymous novel - character who embodies the sacral mystery of femininity like a few of her contemporaries - she does not abdicate the ambivalent elements inherent in female nature but, far from giving them free rein, places them at the service of the protagonist's mission, to whom she whispers, like a siren, "the sweet melodies of persuasive and irresistible charm" [9]. Impossible not to notice how the choice of the name Shadow anticipates Jung's theories of depth psychology in a peculiar way (who was born three years after the publication of the arabesques and matured his conceptions several decades later), which connected in a symbolic network the feminine and "aquatic" element of the Soul to the nocturnal and selene element of the Unconscious. Theories then resumed, with splendid studies on the symbolism of fairy tales, also by a pupil of the Swiss psychologist, Marie-Louise von Franz.

Unlike the Homeric epic, here the songs do not lead the traveler to perdition, but rather magically and analogically connect him to the rest of creation, leading him first on the mountain on which stands a Pine, then in the lives - all symbolisms, as amply demonstrated by the studies of Mircea eliade, the center and the axiality of the dimension other and sacred time [10] - to finally access the underground crypts, symbolizing the "subtle" dimension behind the veil of reality, which the knight enters by passing through the proverbial narrow passage [11]. From katabasisfinally the hero resurfaces side by side with his doppelganger, double-substitute for Shadow, having purified himself by mystically uniting with hers Shadow-Soul (feminine), which in the concluding part of the novel takes on the contours of the daimon of the Platonic and Socratic Greek tradition; that daimon, effectively dashed by james hillman in its Soul's Code (1996), which leads us through the katabasis and the anabasis of existence, as a kind of guardian angel [12]:

It seemed my firm purpose, in flesh and blood, manifesting itself to my common sense. It was my will that walked beside me on the burning sand with an unshakable gaze turned towards the far south.

Just as it finds a counterpart in Greek wisdom, as well as in the poetics of Edgar Allan Poe, shadowy and dreamlike nature of the human being which emerges in the conclusion of the story, when the protagonist questions himself about the actual reality of everything he has experienced [13]:

Had that silent tower ever been inhabited by an earthly being? Was Mazitka just an illusion? Was Shadow just a dream? And I who have told these stories, what am I, too, if not a ghost, unreal, transitory, which vanishes quickly even in uttering these words?

Sarah Dana Loring

Note:

[1] Β S. Greenough (aka SD Loring), Ombre, Dagon Press, Pineto (TE) 2020 p. 8

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[2] See V. Propp, The historical roots of fairy tales (1949)

[3] P. Guarriello, preface a Ombre, cit., p. 7

[4] Ibid, pp. 8-9

[5] Ombre, cit., p. 47

[6] Ibid, pp. 42-43

[7] Ibid. p. 47

[8] Ibid, p. 46

[9] Ibid, p. 50

[10] See M. Eliade, The sacred and the profane (1957)

[11] Ombre, cit., p. 59

[12] Ibid, p. 66

[13] Ibid, p. 80

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