Decadent Echoes: Arthur Machen, M. John Harrison, K.J. Bishop, and the Ends of Mystery

Abstract

Although he first published fiction during the fin de siècle with John Lane, publisher of The Yellow Book, Arthur Machen denied a Decadent heritage for his work; nonetheless, echoes of Decadent interests and imagery carried through his fiction long after the 1890s, through to his final novel, The Green Round. Decades later, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series of novels and stories nodded to and wrestled with the Decadent legacy, while his interest in Machen became explicit with the short story “The Great God Pan” (the title taken from one of Machen’s most famous tales) and the novel The Course of the Heart, built from the earlier story. Harrison was an initiator of the New Weird literary tendency at the turn of the millennium, and one of the books central to that tendency is K.J. Bishop’s 2003 novel The Etched City, which openly drew on Decadent writings and on Harrison’s own use of Decadent material. Attending to writings by Machen, Harrison, and Bishop, we can see ways that Decadent aesthetics and imagery carried forward, finding a home a century later, not in the literary mainstream but in an experimental corner of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

1. Introduction

In the mysteriously titled “N”, published in 1936, Arthur Machen ended with the idea of “a perichoresis, an interpenetration” (Machen 2019a, p. 344).1 Perichoresis usually holds a theological meaning2, which Machen certainly knew, but he broadens the word’s sense toward something less specifically Christian yet nonetheless mystical: an interpenetration of worlds. “N” tells the story of a mysterious garden park that occasionally appears to people visiting Stoke Newington, London, one of many perichoretic realities in Machen’s fiction. Joseph Wood Krutch astutely, if reductively, observed in 1922 that this was Machen’s great interest: “He has only one theme, the Mystic Vision, and only one plot, the Rending of the Veil” (Krutch 1922, p. 259).3 This idea of interpenetrating realities, based in a fundamentally Platonic metaphysics, first appeared in Machen’s early and most famous works, all written in the 1890s (though some were not published until later), and all long acknowledged by scholars as tales drawing from and relating to the Decadent literature of the decade, despite Machen’s many disavowals of Decadence later in his life.

The worlds Machen interpenetrates into the contemporary realities of his stories are usually myth-laden rural escapes from the corruptions of city life. They may be places of apparent danger, places where demons roam (as in his novella “The White People”, written in the late 1890s), but they are nonetheless usually places of greater purity and coherence than late 19th- or early 20th-century London, where Machen lived the majority of his life. Alongside his commitment to the idea of deeper realities imbricating our own, Machen also advocated for the preservation of mystery—he was fond of “an old scholastic maxim” (Machen 2022, p. 77): “Omnia exeunt in mysterium” (“all things end in mystery”), using it in The Three Imposters (1895), Hieroglyphics (1902), Far Off Things (1922), and, finally, on his gravestone (Valentine 1995, p. 133). Perichoresis plus mystery leads to narratives that mix history, myth, realism, dreams, delusions, and the supernatural in complex but always ambiguous ways. From his experience in the late 1880s and early 1890s as a cataloguer of esoteric books, and then his brief membership in the famed occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at the turn of the century, Machen’s entree into mysterium was the same as his entree into the social and publishing networks of Decadence: the occult. It was the occult fiction he published as part of the Keynotes series from John Lane (“The Inmost Light”, “The Great God Pan”, and The Three Imposters) that initiated his identification with Decadence, an identification solidified with arguably his most fully realized perichoretic work, The Hill of Dreams (written 1895–1897, published 1907), the tragic tale of an aspiring Decadent (or at least Symbolist) writer who believes he has found a portal to a pagan world via the ruins of a Roman fort.

Machen’s habitual mix of occultism, perichoresis, and ambiguity gets picked up and reconfigured by M. John Harrison in numerous books and short stories, most clearly in The Course of the Heart (1992), which built on an earlier story Harrison titled “The Great God Pan” (1988) in obvious, and mischievous, reference to Machen. In a 2002 interview, Harrison said, “there’s no doubt about the fact that, however much I might struggle to get away from [Machen], he’s absolutely influential,” but he noted that the influence was not toward homage so much as response and even contradiction:

Much of what I’ve done in this denial of what’s behind the portal has been done in reaction to Machen; and to start with it was a very simplistic reaction, it was, “Okay, well, if he gives it, I’m going to take it away”. Now it’s a more complicated reaction which tries to understand why he wanted to give it in the first place, and what affect [sic], for instance, the Golden Dawn type of thinking had on him.

(Bould 2005, p. 340)

“Denial of what’s behind the portal” is a signature move in Harrison’s fiction: the use of fantasy to undermine fantasy. In The Course of the Heart and short stories such as “Running Down” (1975) and “The Incalling” (1978), Harrison shows characters drawn to occult practices as an escape from dreary lives in post-industrial Britain, but unlike in Machen, the occult practices do not result even in momentary pleasure and escape; instead, they either fizzle out or strangely complicate the misery, contributing confusion to the entropy of existence. The reality these characters live in is a world of both decay and stasis, where everything only ever gets worse. The systems of the world are decadent—always already degenerating—but the characters have internalized that decadence and carry it with them into their dreams and delusions, polluting any possibility of transcendence.

In some of his earlier writings, Harrison clearly drew from the legacy of the 1890s in quite different ways from Machen. The first stories and novels in his Viriconium series of (anti)heroic fantasy tales portray an imagined “Middle Period of Earth” where various empires constitute the Afternoon Cultures, while later stories and novels change, contradict, ignore, and undo much of the early writing, scouring fantasy out of the series to such an extent that the story “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” (1985) would be reprinted in Harrison’s 2002 collection Things That Never Happen as “A Young Man’s Journey to London” with only the name of the city changed (the original story referred to real London locales as if they were in Viriconium). Nonetheless, the sense of these being tales of people and places dwindling and dying will remain constant—the Viriconium stories are always, regardless of their details or the extent of their fantasy, set in Afternoon Cultures.

The second Viriconium book, A Storm of Wings (1980), is a novel that critic David Pringle called “a lush and involuted fantasy of far-future decadence.” (Pringle 1988, p. 202). Of the Viriconium novels, A Storm of Wings is the most clearly Decadent in its mise-en-scène and language and, as such, points to another way that Harrison’s work employs echoes of British and European fin-de-siècle literature, bringing rich and sometimes archaic language to bear on bohemian scenes of ennui, disease, and decay—scenes not set in any historical era, but rather in a world redolent of the sword and sorcery tales of writers such as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Michael Moorcock and the science fantasy of Jack Vance. While its setting and characters are familiar from genre fiction, A Storm of Wings (like many Viriconium stories) also contains a dense network of allusions to other sorts of writing and art, from numerous quiet citations of T.S. Eliot’s poems to phrases from Bob Dylan’s songs. Such borrowings from the detritus of high modernism and pop culture serve similar purposes as classical allusions did in Decadent writings, weaving a tapestry of associations in the knowledgeable reader’s imagination and expanding the text beyond its own immediate limits.

With the third Viriconium novel, In Viriconium, Harrison moved away from the more florid style and toward the sharp, stripped-down writing that would become the hallmark of his work from then on. Although the British hardcover of the book was adorned with an Aubrey Beardsley illustration, In Viriconium is less Decadent in its mode than A Storm of Wings.4 However, it is an important inflection point for later writers who drew inspiration from it and from 1890s writings, especially the writers associated with the early 2000s movement known as the New Weird (which, like Decadence a century before, proved nearly impossible to define and was disavowed by many people on whom the label was bestowed, though, in general, we can say that it was a tendency within a community of science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers interested in mixing genres and exploring the eeriness of fantastical urban settings where strange physical metamorphoses were often common). Critic Paul Kincaid has said that In Viriconium is “perhaps the founding text” of the New Weird (Kincaid 2019, p. 54) and that is as plausible as any other choice, especially given its admitted influence on K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City (Bishop 2003), one of a handful of books central to the New Weird tendency.

The cover of the first edition of Bishop’s novel, which she designed herself, is saturated with Yellow Book yellow and an image that is clearly an homage to Beardsley. In interviews, Bishop has acknowledged the importance of Decadent, Symbolist, and fin-de-siècle writing and art to her aesthetic, and although specific influences are more apparent in her short fiction (e.g., “Maldoror Abroad” (Bishop 2012a)), The Etched City presents a city like Storm of Wings-era Viriconium inhabited by characters who are a mix of 1890s figures and gunslingers, with the overall atmosphere being along the lines of a Beardsley drawing made into a movie by Sergio Leone.

We can see, then, that M. John Harrison’s work is a central node in the distribution of multiple Decadent echoes through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, resonating from both the Decadent traces in Arthur Machen’s writings and, especially in his own early books, a more general air of Decadence. By placing Harrison in the center of a line of Decadent descent, first as the receiver of echoes from Machen’s fiction (and from fin-de-siècle Britain, France, Austria, and Germany generally), then as the purveyor of echoes of his own, we can see some of what reverberated across a century after the 1890s. For later writers, Decadence provided a useful toolbox of language, images, and motifs to employ, as well as useful concepts to oppose. Machen returned again and again to perichoresis, scrubbing it of Decadent occultism and moving it toward Christian mysticism; Harrison found a Decadent but anti-transcendental aesthetics in absurdist perichoresis set in contradiction to Machen; Bishop, like many New Weird writers, sought transcendence less in a perichoresis of worlds than in the possibilities of Decadent aesthetics, ultimately charting a third way between Machen’s mysticism and Harrison’s anti-mysticism: an imaginative space of endless fluidity where past and present, reality and fantasy, and awe and horror all mingle in mysterious metamorphosis.

2. Decadent Structures of Mystery: The Green Round

Arthur Machen’s final novel, The Green Round (1933), is a work he disparaged even more than he disparaged most of his other writing—this was a man, after all, who published a collection of negative reviews of his work, Precious Balms (1924), about which editor S.T. Joshi comments that there is no reason to believe Machen reprinted the reviews to lampoon the reviewers, since “in some passages in his autobiographies he appears to acknowledge the validity of some reviewers’ judgments” (Machen 2020, p. 13).5 The Green Round reportedly did not sell well in the U.K. (Valentine 1995, p. 127), and it was not published in the U.S. until 1968, when the venerable horror publisher Arkham House brought out an edition. It was not reprinted again until Tartarus Press’s limited edition hardcover in 2000, and its only appearance in paperback is in Hippocampus Press’s third volume of Machen’s (2019c) Collected Fiction.6

The Green Round marked a return to Machen’s 1890s presentation of cosmic mystery as inspiring not only wonder but also, and perhaps predominantly, terror. William P. Simmons notes that this “emphasis of the connection between hidden reality and fear informs a good deal of Machen’s early work, and thrived in The Green Round,” whereas in Machen’s previous novel, The Secret Glory (1922), and most of his writing after the 1890s, “the attitude and desired aesthetic reaction focuses more on wonder and possible salvation than on terror.” (Simmons 2007, p. 28). Machen wrote The Green Round at the invitation of publisher Ernest Benn, who wanted a short novel for a series of “New Ninepenny Novels” (Gawsworth 2017, p. 359). At the time, Machen was feeling some financial pressure, and, writing to book collector Montgomery Evans about completing the novel, he claimed “necessity is its only excuse” (Machen and Evans 1994, p. 55). Knowing that his more outré and horrific stories brought the greatest response from readers, Machen likely decided to return to his Decadent roots for mercenary reasons, and he always took a disparaging and even embarrassed tone when portraying himself as writing fiction for any but purely artistic motivations. He seems to have belittled the book so strongly, especially to people like Evans who valued his work for its artistic merits, because he felt that in writing out of a financial need, he was unable to realize the aesthetic purity he desired. This, too, is an echo of the 1890s, when, as Kirsten MacLeod has shown, the tension between art and commerce for Decadent writers was a topic of much argument. Indeed, for MacLeod, the young Machen provides a prototypical example of how commercial and aesthetic considerations melded: “Like other Decadents, Machen developed himself as a more commercial writer by adapting his avant-garde and esoteric interests to a popular medium. Despite his claims, then, that commercial considerations never entered his mind, Machen’s Great God Pan bears all the signs of the compromises characteristic of the writer mediating between the claims of art and the claims of the marketplace in a product that represents a ‘collaboration’ between high and popular art.” (MacLeod 2006, p. 121).

The Green Round is a similar collaboration between high and popular art, but the mix is unsteady, and the ultimate effect of the novel is one of undoing, even hollowing out, the terror that was Machen’s calling card during the fin de siècle. The story the novel tells is relatively simple, and various critics have complained that its simplicity does not justify the novel’s length. Machen structures the story as a series of often fragmentary or inconclusive narratives, conversations, and excerpted documents, a familiar architecture for his work, especially his longer fiction. He initially derived the approach from his great admiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882), and it is perhaps most purely shown by Machen’s The Three Imposters (1895), a dizzyingly complex set of related and often nested narratives first published as the nineteenth book in John Lane’s Bodley Head Press Keynotes series, one of the most prominent Decadent publishing ventures.7 The Green Round is not as structurally complex as The Three Imposters (or even “The Great God Pan”), but it is, if anything, more mysterious.

The Green Round begins with a prologue about Porth and a man who complained in a letter to a newspaper about a loud band, dancing, and a seaside carnival—only to receive a reply from the town manager that the complaints could not possibly have been about Porth, since nothing of the sort had happened there. The man returns to Porth and, to his great confusion, discovers that, indeed, no trace of what he experienced remains. The relevance of this material is not immediately obvious, as the novel shifts to its protagonist’s (Hillyer’s) story, which fills the book between the prologue and epilogue, beginning as an ostensibly objective third-person narrative but eventually including long passages from books Hillyer read and notes he took. The notes end the main part of The Green Round, which focuses on Hillyer’s experiences of mysterious and unsettling sights and sounds intruding into his reality. That central narrative is followed by a chapter devoted to the owner of the boarding house where Hillyer lives and her dealings with the police, then a chapter written in the first-person point of view of the nerve specialist who treated Hillyer, and finally, the novel ends with an epilogue told by a narrator who is an acquaintance of Hillyer (likely the same narrator as the prologue but now with more willingness to write in the first person). The epilogue recounts Hillyer’s fate and returns us to the story of the man who wrote to the newspaper about Porth and then got so confused upon returning there. Repeated from the prologue is the story of Mr. Smith from Wimbledon visiting Porth, getting disturbed, writing to the newspaper, being contradicted by the town manager, and returning to Porth to find his experience to have been impossible.

The story of Mr. Smith is a repetition, but the use of the story at the end is different from its use at the beginning, because the epilogue emphasizes questions of evidence and mystery, and the story of Mr. Smith now becomes one item within the argument, an argument that includes both Smith and Hillyer but is not limited to either. The nerve specialist who treated Hillyer sought out witnesses who confirmed Hillyer’s stories in the details that they knew. The narrator of the epilogue, similarly, is able to confirm some of the experiences, including that “the Green Round by the shore of Porth was evidently the source of all the strange trouble that befell Hillyer.” (Machen 2019b, p. 313). However, evidence only goes so far. Mystery dominates. Repeating the story of Mr. Smith, Machen uses it to support the reality of Hillyer’s experiences (and to let Hillyer’s experiences suggest a reality to Mr. Smith’s). By returning Mr. Smith’s story to the narrative, the epilogue sets us up for the book’s final argument about mystery and lacunae while also helping to broaden our understanding that Hillyer’s experience serves as evidence, not a story beholden only to itself. Whatever meaning we may make of the mystery and lacunae in The Green Round must derive from the patterns the novel reveals—patterns within which Hillyer is important, but of which he is merely one part.

To that purpose, the epilogue ends with more stories of mysteries where time seems to bend or other realities intrude, including in the book itself, since these accounts are not ones from fiction. The epilogue integrates the novel’s fictional stories with reports taken from actual newspapers and journals. First, Machen relates the story of the “Moberly–Jourdain incident” of 1901, related in the book An Adventure by Ann Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain (published under the pseudonym Elizabeth Morison in 1911), where the two women claimed that during a visit to Versailles, they were transported back to the time of Marie Antoinette.8 The second account is a story from the 23 May 1931 issue of the spiritualist weekly Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research, which Machen quotes at considerable length—it was truly an article in the issue he cites—the story of a woman who, in July 1929, was climbing a mountain in western Ireland when one of her companions, another woman, felt that she lost consciousness but in actuality walked away from the group. The companion later described getting lost and seeing what she took to be a child beckoning to her. Other odd events occurred, and, before the companion was found later at a police station, the travelers asked a man in a nearby cottage what might have happened and where someone might have perhaps fallen. The man offered no easy explanation, and when the narrator asked, “What about the Little People?”, the man “became very severe, and turned to go out”, then said, “We do not talk about that.” (Machen 2019b, p. 316).

The Green Round ends with Machen’s narrator (now all but indistinguishable from Machen himself, it seems) wondering at the triviality of the mischief caused by worlds intermingling, finishing with a brief incident from Thomas Besterman’s 1924 book Crystal-Gazing, a prophecy of a woman washing her hands at a hotel, as trivial as any prophecy could be, but also supposedly verified as true. Machen’s narrator then asks “what, who are the powers or forces” that caused all these strange events, including Hillyer’s experience of the Green Round, concluding only: “I believe there is no answer. We had better say, with the man of the cottage: ‘We do not talk about that.’” (Machen 2019b, p. 317).

Machen’s final novel thus ends with the author abandoning fiction and emphasizing mystery. The prologue begins with uncertainty and storytelling—in the book’s first sentence, the writer of the first letter about Porth is identified as “Brown of Clapham or Smith of Wimbledon—the name is of no consequence”, and the letter appears in the vaguely identified “London paper at the beginning of the summer 1929”. By the epilogue, the writer is settled to be Mr. Smith of Wimbledon, and although the London newspaper is never identified, the second half of the epilogue is taken from specific books and newspapers that did, in fact, exist. The stories those books and newspapers relate are mysterious and unexplained, but the fact of the stories being written by actual people and published in the actual world, not the world of Machen’s imagination, unsettles the reader’s sense of fictionality.

In his novel’s architecture, Machen has carried forward structural elements frequently associated with (if not constitutive of) Decadence, employing them for the mystical purposes so important to his 20th-century writing. Exploring the idea of Decadent style, John R. Reed wrote, “It is the revelation of a new order hidden in apparent fragmentation through a style imitating the process of transformation that most characterizes Decadent art,” (Reed 1985, p. 70) and, similarly, exploring various facets of Decadence, Silke-Maria Weineck stated, “On the stylistic level, we find corresponding elements like the interruption of narrative flow through lengthy catalogues and enumerations, conspicuous fragmentation, the renunciation of an ‘organic’ understanding of genre, an excess of decay and castration imagery, the subordination of plot under description.” (Weineck 1994, p. 38). The only thing missing from these descriptions in The Green Round is the “excess of decay and castration imagery” (present in Machen’s major stories of the 1890s) because in the 20th century, Machen’s interest was less in entropy or sexuality than in mystery and transcendence. It is this interest that most deeply connects Machen to the writings of M. John Harrison, whose description of the narrative structure of his own mature work fits the structure of The Green Round well: “the placing side by side of units which have something thematically in common and indeed which are linked solely by the fact that they have that thing in common. It will be the reader’s job to recognise what they have in common.” (C. J. Fowler 1993, p. 23).

Harrison will find powerful and often disturbing new richness for his fiction by bringing Machen’s sense of mystery and transcendence back into the realm of decay (and perhaps castration), recovering into Decadence the later Machen works’ mysticism, thus providing new routes through Decadence for a new century and a new millennium. These routes are delineated less via particular content than by certain commitments of style and form shared not only by Harrison and Machen but by the 1890s writers generally. “Decadent writing doesn’t just make a fetish of form,” Stephen Arata has written. “It makes more or less a crisis of it, and in doing so it helps bring into view what was at stake in the eruption of interest in the formal aspects of literary texts over the last half of the nineteenth century.” (Arata 2014, p. 1009). Harrison would build on Decadent styles to highlight what he saw as the stakes of form and fantasy in the last half of the 20th century and, in doing so, open pathways to other writers at the beginning of the 21st century.

3. Realizing Decadent Fantasies: The Course of the Heart

Early in M. John Harrison’s career, echoes of Decadence rang loudly. In his third novel, The Centauri Device (1974), there are spaceships with names such as Driftwood of Decadence, a spacefaring character named Swinburne Sinclair-Pater (“aesthete extraordinary and Interstellar Anarchist” (Harrison [1974] 1980, p. 73)), and numerous allusions to Aesthetes, Decadents, and Symbolists. But these were shallow allusions, items in a textual fabric drawing from a wide variety of references (the book’s epigraph is from Milton’s Comus, for instance), and there is little sense in The Centauri Device or the first Viriconium novel, The Pastel City, that Harrison is using such allusions to engage with past works of art and literature in any but the most superficial ways. These early novels were not books Harrison was satisfied with—as early as 1977, he called The Pastel City “a fairly dishonest sort of a book, since I don’t even really approve of sword and sorcery” (C. Fowler 1981, p. 9) and in 2002, he declared The Centauri Device to be “the crappiest thing I ever wrote” (Chouinard 2002)—but from A Sword of Wings onward, Harrison’s allusions become more integrated in and integral to the ever more subtle and complex effects of his fiction.

By The Course of the Heart, Harrison had mastered his aesthetic. It is a novel where the presence of the literature and art of the British, French, and Austro-German fin de siècle whispers continually between the lines, and it is a novel that, in some ways, rewrites, and even detourns, the thematic concerns of Machen’s later fiction, including The Green Round. This was conscious and deliberate, as Harrison’s 2002 statement (quoted above) that much of what he had done to deny “what’s behind the portal” had been done “in reaction to Machen”. What Machen gives that Harrison takes away is the sense of being able to escape into another reality via perichoresis. In Harrison’s mature fiction, mystery is only valuable for as long as it can remain mysterious; answered, it becomes at best banal, at worst destructive. Rending the veil brings nothing but confusion, ennui, disease, decay, and horror. In such moments, Harrison is an anti-transcendental writer, denying the fantasy of escape, insisting that happiness can only be found in grappling with material reality. As James Machin notes, “While Machen, especially after 1900, produced fables of recovery, Harrison, in dialogue with them, produces fables of resignation.” (Machin 2019b, p. 150). There may sometimes be a path to another reality in Harrison’s stories, but if there is, it is always unpredictable, basically unfathomable, and only a portal into another form of pain.

Harrison’s “cheekily entitled” 1986 short story “The Great God Pan” served as “a rehearsal for The Course of the Heart” (Harrison 2003, p.438).9 Both the story and novel work from the same premise: a group of three friends long ago participated in an occult ritual that they do not remember any details of but which continues to seem to have an effect on their lives, including with visions of ethereal beings, encounters with what might (or might not) be poltergeist events, and perhaps the unnatural acceleration of natural decay. It is all very hazy and uncertain, although, in some ways, it does not matter what actually happened (if anything did); what matters is that the characters interpret their lives to have been blighted by the ritual they participated in. The unnamed narrator set up the ritual, connecting his friends to an occult practitioner named Yaxley. The other two participants, Pam and Lucas, ended up married and separated, and Pam is dying of cancer. Pam and Lucas want the narrator to go back to Yaxley and see if there is a way to counteract the ritual. The narrator claims (untruthfully) that he has not had contact with Yaxley since the event, but he does contact him with Pam and Lucas’s request, and Yaxley, barely sane, is no help. By the end of the novel, Yaxley is dead, Pam is dead, and in the last pages, the narrator’s wife, about whom we know very little except that she is an artist, dies in a car crash. The final paragraph speaks from fifteen years later, with the narrator’s daughter now living in New York, “from where she sends me letters I don’t understand, about politics and AIDS. Pam and Lucas walked away from me somewhat, that scented, dew-soaked morning in Cambridge. I remember them all with such happiness.” (Harrison [1992] 2004, p. 184).

Instead of bringing the characters and us, the readers, toward a vision of life expanded by the mysteries of the universe—one of sublimely interpenetrating worlds—The Course of the Heart scrubs our eyes with caustic reality: disappointment, failure, confusion, death, loneliness. Though Harrison has no interest in using his characters as role models for how to live, his scrupulous delineation of their ungratified desires opens possibilities for readers to imagine both what went wrong and how it might have been otherwise. In The Green Round, Hillyer can escape whatever malevolent forces have attached to him by fleeing to another country (another landscape), but, aside from the narrator’s daughter, the characters in The Course of the Heart are too passive and too inert to find any meaningful way out of the ruin of their lives.

Some time after performing the ritual that they believe ruined their lives, Lucas started constructing an elaborate story for Pam of a lost world of the Middle Ages. He presents it as the work of a writer named “Michael Ashman”, and Harrison (whose own first name is Michael) brings passages from Ashman’s book into the novel much as Machen introduced into his stories passages from fictional books and articles (and, as we saw with The Green Round, sometimes actual ones). The material is convincing; on a first reading, we not only assume that the text is a book the characters discovered, but we also may wonder if it is something in our own world. Eventually, we discover that it is neither and that, instead, it is a fantasy Lucas has created with and for Pam, a vision of a lost reality that Lucas suggests could be recovered. Lucas and Pam call this shared fantasy (delusion) “the Coeur”, and it serves as something of an alternative to what Yaxley calls “the Pleroma”, a Gnostic term meaning “fullness” that refers to the mysterious something or someplace that the occult ritual revealed and that may (or may not) now be interpenetrating their reality. Although Lucas and Pam speak of the Coeur as a reality, they know they made it up, and for that reason, they cherish it. The Coeur is something they can control, a story they can bend to their wishes—unlike the Pleroma, which is beyond even their perception.

With the Coeur, we most clearly see Harrison’s critique of Machen’s optimistic mysticism. Allegiance to the fantasy keeps Lucas passive (even as he thinks he is doing and achieving something by devoting himself to more and more baroque elaborations of the story), with the Coeur as a kind of addiction he and Pam share, a distraction from reality that substitutes fantasizing for doing anything about their decaying lives. Similarly, the narrator has maintained a secret obsession with the Pleroma, keeping in touch with Yaxley, seeking to figure out what happened and how to reverse it, or not; the narrator’s actual motivations are opaque to us, since he is the one telling the story. All we know is that he lies about his involvement with Yaxley, severely underplaying it, while continuing to keep the presence of the Pleroma alive in his own consciousness. He may not be as focused on the Pleroma as Lucas is on the Coeur, but the effect seems to be similar. Mystery that metastasizes into fantasy becomes an obsession that keeps the characters from acting in the actual world they can see, touch, taste, feel, hear. “My swerve against [Machen] and all those other ecstatics and mystic Christians,” Harrison has said, “was to poison his reveries with the quotidian.” (Mathew 2002).

I would argue, however, that at least a few of Machen’s reveries were already poisoned. The Michael Ashman story serves a similar purpose for Lucas and Pam as an obsession with legends of the Fairy Queen serves for Hillyer in The Green Round. Spending so much of his time at the British Museum Reading Room, Hillyer falls into a narrow and lonely life. There is even one particular book that functions for Hillyer much like Ashman’s imagined book does for Lucas and Pam, although Hillyer’s is, in the reality of the novel, one he discovers rather than one he fantasizes: A London Walk: Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis by Rev. Thomas Hampole.10 The anxiety and disturbance that sends him to a nerve specialist could certainly be explained without any recourse to supernaturalism. But unlike the characters in The Course of the Heart, Hillyer finally does something in the world: he flees to Aleppo, leaving his notebooks behind.

At the end of Machen’s The Hill of Dreams, the Decadent writer Lucian Taylor dies in a squalid room where he has been consumed by, as Reynolds and Charlton write, “visions of mounting evil and horror: and he is eventually destroyed by the drugs with which these visions are stimulated.” (Reynolds and Charlton 1964, p. 55). His fate is more melodramatic than that of any of the characters in The Course of the Heart, but it is within the same realm, since one interpretation of the open-ended situation of Lucian’s death is that he substituted dreams and addiction for any engagement with reality and thus neglected to live. It is more common for readers to assume that at least some of Lucian’s visions are real within the world of the novel, but Machen is too committed to ambiguity to insist on this in the text—there is, at most, what Mark Valentine calls “an occult implication” to the events (Valentine 1995, p. 54). If we reject the implication, as it seems to me the text leaves us free to do, The Hill of Dreams works as a bitter critique of Machen’s Decadent contemporaries and a precursor to The Course of the Heart. Viewed as such, Lucian’s death represents the death of meaning that a single-minded commitment to style can lead to, as Linda Dowling has analyzed well: “Lucian’s life of self-curtailment before the implacable page has been existential solipsism. And solipsism has led to the most extreme form of stylistic solecism—a language so perfected in its private symbolism that it will no longer yield its meaning even to the select few, but only to the unique reader, Lucian himself.” (Dowling 1986, p. 160). This was also the danger that Hillyer faced in The Green Round, but, much older than Lucian, Hillyer is able finally to break away and escape before he is completely consumed by a private world of private language.

Harrison’s novel is similarly concerned with self-curtailment, existential solipsism, and private symbolisms. Like The Hill of Dreams, The Course of the Heart might be seen as employing key themes and motifs of Decadence (occultism, disease, ennui), but now, writing many decades after Machen, Harrison is able to infuse his story with the bleak misery of post-industrial British life. The Decadent era itself becomes a perichoretic reality scratching at the underside of contemporary existence, but the temptations the perichoresis offers are distracting, dangerous fantasies smeared with the soporific balm of nostalgia, little better than laudanum.

4. Weird Decadence: A Storm of Wings and in Viriconium

Whereas Decadence echoes through The Course of the Heart toward the evisceration of fantasy, Harrison’s earlier work employs language and imagery that build a mise-en-scène of Decadence. Unlike The Centauri Device, however, the second and third novels in the Viriconium sequence, A Storm of Wings and In Viriconium, go deeper than tossed-off references to Aesthetes and Symbolists, establishing a foundation from which a wide range of allusions effloresce. A Storm of Wings uses a Decadent mise-en-scène as stable as any fantasy setting Harrison has created (and more stable than most), while In Viriconium both invokes and rigorously deconstructs Decadence, a strategy in service to the larger purpose of analyzing the dangers of fantasy as a genre and a habit. If, as Susan Navarette argues, the Decadent text “conveys beauty, disease, or tension not in any traditional sense—strictly by means of characterization or plot, for example—but rather in the contours, shadows, and rhythms created by a language that exposes the reader to a hidden malady,” then Harrison’s great insight is to use such strategies not simply to add a purple air of Decadence to the atmosphere of his stories but rather to use these strategies to make fantasy itself the “hidden malady” to be exposed (Navarette 1998, p. 40). This range of purposes and techniques foreshadows the uses of Decadence among writers influenced by, in conversation with, or responding to Harrison at the beginning of the 21st century, who briefly gathered around the New Weird moniker, a movement that proved to be as multifarious, contested, and uncertain as Decadence had been a century before.

A Storm of Wings does not pick up from where the first Viriconium novel, The Pastel City, left off, nor does it flesh out the events of early Viriconium short stories—instead, it treats them like legends and distant memories, or perhaps like debris that can be swept up and put to new use in its desiccation. With this novel, as Paul Kincaid has said, “Viriconium is starting to change from being a place to being an affect.” (Kincaid 2019, p. 52). What little plot there is reiterates the story of The Pastel City but as if suffering generation loss, distortion, decay. The structure is one of encounters and juxtapositions more than of actions rising toward a climax, though the events are certainly consequential, with characters questing, fighting, and dying. But the atmosphere is always one of dissipation, dream, deferral. In many ways, such effects result from Harrison’s style, which in A Storm of Wings is more lush than it would ever be again, but it is an astringent lushness, an arch fulsomeness that may remind us of Paul Bourget’s famous statement that a “style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word.” (Quoted in Ellis 1915, p. 180).

In “The Decadent Movement in Literature”, Arthur Symons described Stephane Mallarmé’s stylistic innovations not as effete archaism or tinkly obscurity, as some expressions of Decadence might be seen, but as a kind of violence:

Mallarme’s contortion of the French language, so far as mere style is concerned, is curiously similar to the kind of depravation which was undergone by the Latin language in its decadence. It is, indeed, in part a reversion to Latin phraseology, to the Latin construction, and it has made, of the clear and flowing French language, something irregular, unquiet, expressive, with sudden surprising felicities, with nervous starts and lapses, with new capacities for the exact noting of sensation. Alike to the ordinary and to the scholarly reader, it is painful, intolerable; a jargon, a massacre.

(Symons 1893, p. 862)

The force Symons identifies in Mallarmé is one we might locate in Harrison’s A Storm of Wings, which pushes English away from simple sentence structures and vernacular language toward “something irregular, unquiet, expressive”, as for instance in these more or less randomly chosen passages:

• It is only a tiny puff of vapour, a cloud of pollen blown across a single ray of light in some darkened, empty room—gone in the time it takes to blink, to rub the eyes and rearrange the waiting brain—but nothing like this has been seen for ten thousand years; and though all might seem unchanged, and the moon hang never so white and hard over the rim of the cliffs, like a powdered face yearning from a vacant doorway, and the memory decide the eye has played it false—nothing will ever be the same again.
• His accipitrine eyes were fixed on the door, as though Hornwrack still stood there; they were bright with anguish.
• The season now teetered on the cold iron pivot of the solstice, and Viriconium was asleep for once, huddled against the cold; you could hear its catarrhal snores from upper windows. The mosaic of its roofs, whited by moonlight and last week’s frozen snow, lay like the demonstration of some equivocal new geometry.
• The women hooded their eyes and smiled, or else stifled a yawn, raising dove-grey gloves to their blue, phthisic lips (Harrison 2005, pp. 112, 171, 216, 248).

Decadence peeps out in the occasionally Latinate vocabulary (accipitrine, catarrhal, phthisic), but what is most notable about this style is the syntax and sentence structure, which lightly evoke Walter Pater or even the prose of Aubrey Beardsley. In the most complex paragraphs and sentences of A Storm of Wings, Harrison achieves the deferral that Linda Dowling identifies in Walter Pater as an “aesthetic of delay”: “Pater, that is to say, puts off the moment of cognitive closure… And he does this not simply by writing long sentences, but by so structuring his sentences as to thwart—at times even to the point of disruption—our usual expectations of English syntax.” (Dowling 1986, p. 130). Harrison does not go as far as Pater, certainly, but the effect is roughly the same, since Harrison is writing one hundred years later and, importantly, for an audience primarily composed of readers of popular fiction—readers who generally prefer clear, simple syntax and familiar vocabulary (as negative reviews of Harrison’s Viriconium books typically demonstrate).11

A Storm of Wings went as far as Harrison wanted to go with a story set entirely in an imagined world. With In Viriconium, he began the process of stripping the fantasy away not only from his characters but from his readers as well, making In Viriconium, despite its setting, feel more like A Course of the Heart than like its predecessors. In many ways, this is because, more deliberately than in his previous books, Harrison let In Viriconium meld its Decadent echoes with reverberations of Modernism, particularly the work of T.S. Eliot. “The Waste Land” opens numerous allusive pathways through In Viriconium (including ideas of King Arthur, the Fisher King, and the Grail that Arthur Machen returned to frequently in his later writings).12 Eliot did much to try to hide his debt to Decadence, but, as Vincent Sherry has shown at length, his early poems, and “The Waste Land” in particular, use the idea of Decadence (if not always the Decadent movement) as “a primary determinant” in “the age of the secondary and the circumstance of the posthumous, which takes the deathliness of print as its representative image and the sensibility of decadence as its prevailing temper” until the Eliot of “The Waste Land” has “moved from intimation to realization of [the] historical reality [of decadence] as the establishing condition of his poetry.” (Sherry 2015, pp. 278–79). Similarly, it is the historical, metaphysical, and imaginative reality of Decadence that serves as the establishing condition for Harrison’s Viriconium novels. “The Waste Land” is one of many bits of cultural detritus floating through the words, images, and concepts of these stories, but unlike other passing allusions, Eliot’s poem resounds strongly throughout In Viriconium, persisting across many of the book’s pages.

Allusion is itself a kind of perichoresis, a slipping of one textual reality into another. Where the allusions in Harrison’s earlier work were mainly decorative effects not ultimately essential for the reader’s understanding, In Viriconium relies on allusion to point readers both to texts outside this text (the Decadents, “The Waste Land”, Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps, Bob Dylan songs, etc.) and to the world of the novel’s writing. The allusions, whether to Eliot or others, remind us of the world of reading, while other elements of the story encourage us to remember the world itself—especially the world of the United Kingdom in the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s reign.

The intrusion of that reality is clearest with the figures of the Barley Brothers, creatures of power and chaos within the world of Viriconium who have traveled through some sort of crack in space and time:

When he first saw them they were sitting on each side of the stair, throwing a bruised melon back and forth between them. They were singing tunelessly,

“We are the Barley brothers.

Ousted out of Birmingham and Wolverhampton,

Lords of the Left Hand Brain,

The shadows of odd doings follows us through the night,”

but they soon stopped that.

(Harrison 2005, p. 263)

The brothers are drunken louts from our own world, deposited in Viriconium by ways and for purposes unknown, given mysterious but tremendous power within this fantasy land. Their presence could productively be read as a parody of the wish-fulfillment elements of portal fantasy (where readers project themselves out of the humdrum circumstances of their lives and into the land of Narnia or Hogwarts), but the brothers provide a view of the opposite side of perichoresis, showing us what happens when a figure from one world arrives in another, here told from the point of view of the place to which they arrive rather than the point of view of the place from which they leave.

The Viriconium to which the Barley Brothers arrive is not the Viriconium of A Storm of Wings (just as the Viriconium of that novel was not the Viriconium of The Pastel City). The fantasy has been worn down more, and the city feels less like a fantasy land than an imagined European city at the end of the 19th century. Instead of a jeweled style rendered with snaking syntax and remnant traces of Latin, Harrison builds In Viriconium with elegant, clear, modern sentences. The heroes are even less heroic now, the events more mundane. It is a novel less concerned with subverting the archetypes of epic stories than with exploring ideas of art, politics, and power. Its main characters are artists and bohemians rather than knights, queens, or a questing fellowship.

Distinguishing A Storm of Wings from In Viriconium, Paul Kincaid writes that the latter version of the city is not, as in the earlier book, one of “disintegration and fragmentation but of romantic decay”, and this is what he sees as the primary connection between In Viriconium and the New Weird (Kincaid 2019, p. 54). Certainly, the trio of A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and the story collection Viriconium Nights (1984 U.S., 1985 U.K.) has been variously cited in discussions among writers, critics, and readers of the New Weird. However, no one text by Harrison is as important to those discussions as is the movement across his books toward a deconstruction of fantasy and an interpenetration of familiar reality and imagined worlds.

K.J. Bishop has said that the first stories providing seeds for her novel The Etched City, which is among the central works of the New Weird, “owe plenty to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium Nights, which amazed and haunted me, and probably more than any other book made me want to stop mucking around with writing and try to do it properly.” (Bishop 2012b, p. 238). The Etched City brings questions of fantasy, perichoresis, and Decadence together in the new millennium, tying together the strands of influence we have been exploring, while also serving as an exemplar of a new literary/arts movement, mode, or moment infused with echoes of Decadence.

5. New Weird Decadence: The Etched City

The echoes of Decadence in the New Weird were not only the result of some individual authors’ own interests (unlike Harrison or Bishop, not all writers associated with the New Weird had much, or any, interest in the era and its arts) but also an inevitable, if sometimes unrecognized, inheritance from the Old Weird. In Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939, James Machin wrote that “what came to be regarded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as weird fiction can be credibly and revealingly discussed as a persistence of Decadence (rather than the result of a post facto influence).” (Machin 2018, p. 72). Machin points out that in two influential anthologies edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, The New Weird and The Weird, the word decadence is repeatedly invoked, and Machin himself shows how often Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson served as touchstones for many writers in this lineage (including Arthur Machen, for whom Poe and Stevenson were lifelong interests).

Machin ends his book with a chapter devoted to “Weird Tales and Pulp Decadence”. In his careful outline of how the American Weird Tales magazine, in its first incarnation (1923–1954), reprinted stories and poems from 19th-century Britain and France and published new stories by writers such as Clark Ashton Smith, who were fascinated by that work (Smith translated various Baudelaire poems for the magazine), Machin suggests that the strongest echoes of Decadence into the present day have not been through the highest of modernisms but through the more esoteric and literary traditions of popular fiction exemplified by H.P. Lovecraft. In Weird Tales, “canonical, highbrow work was presented alongside original genre work by contemporary authors. Arguably, among at least some of these authors—Lovecraft and Smith being good examples—these two strands were imbricated in new fiction which demonstrated a distinct Decadent lineage as well as displaying and sometimes pioneering genre trappings associated with the twentieth century: science fiction, fantasy, and horror.” (Machin 2018, p. 223).

The idea of weird fiction as a genre or mode draws from more than Weird Tales (which primarily had distribution and influence in the United States), but the magazine serves well as evidence for how Decadence would carry into the popular culture of the last 100 years. It was in Weird Tales that Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery stories of Conan the Barbarian first appeared, as well as many of Lovecraft’s most important tales of cosmic horror, twin traditions of writing that would be invoked, retrofitted, reconceived, and critiqued by many New Weird writers. Equally important, however, is Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), which established something of a canon of classic weird fiction, drawing a line from Edgar Allan Poe through to, among others, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers, and A. Merritt (all of whom were reprinted in Weird Tales at least once), finally concluding that “there is [now] unquestionably more cordiality shewn [sic] toward weird writings than when, thirty years ago, the best of Arthur Machen’s work fell on the stony ground of the smart and cocksure ’nineties.” (Lovecraft 2012, p. 96).

When M. John Harrison posted to the Third Alternative magazine’s message board in 2003, “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything? Is it even New?”, the term had barely reached beyond the private conversations of a few writers.13 Over the course of the message board arguments, however, the term gained traction for a brief time and has maintained an indistinct but real shadow life since. Jeff VanderMeer (who had originally resisted the term) opened his introduction to the 2008 New Weird anthology by declaring that “The ‘New Weird’ existed long before 2003… For this reason, and this reason only, it continues to exist now, even after a number of critics, reviewers, and writers have distanced themselves from the term”, but the anthology ultimately seems to have served as a kind of gravestone. Harrison, Miéville, Bishop, and other writers associated with the movement (if it was a movement) had moved on to other arguments. By the time the VanderMeers’ massive anthology The Weird (2011) was released, proposing a broad scope and international heritage for Weird Fiction, the adjective New seemed less useful and less relevant.14

Though from the current position of hindsight, there is good reason to think of the New Weird less as a separate movement and more as a manifestation of The Weird writ large, if we look at Bishop’s The Etched City, we can see a prototypical New Weird novel, one that includes most of the features generally agreed as common, if not essential, to the movement’s fiction—an urban setting in a fantasy world, an attention to realistic (often “gritty”) detail, writing that draws from multiple genres, some element of horror or monstrosity.15 We can also see the importance of British and European fin-de-siècle Decadence. In fact, it may be the conscious use of Decadence that distinguishes the New Weird, because although, as Machin has shown, Decadence was important to weird fiction generally, it is in the New Weird that we most distinctly hear the echoes of Decadence among the writers’ chosen instruments.

Speaking of her influences in 2013, Bishop said, “Definitely Decadents. J.K. Huysmans’ A Rebours, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus and Beardsley’s Under the Hill are my main Decadent influences. The Surrealist influence comes mainly from Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, which is a treasure trove, and Rikki Ducornet.” (Mills 2013). Most of these inspirations are more clearly visible in her short fiction than in The Etched City, where Decadence echoes primarily in the setting (and Surrealism in some of the imagery of human–animal hybrids). Bishop’s novel is aesthetically and thematically more restrained than her influences; there is, for instance, little of Rachilde, Wilde, or Beardsley’s interest in gender and sexuality, nor the ambiguities and fragmentations of narrative common to so much Decadent and Decadent-inspired fiction. Though episodic and without the action-rising-to-a-denoument plot structure common to popular fiction, narratively The Etched City is closer to fantasy novels of its era than it is to the experiments of Decadence, Surrealism, or Modernism, or, for that matter, to the more experimental wing of the New Weird (e.g., Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen [2001–2004], which draws from, among other influences, Decadence, Surrealism, and the writings of Vladimir Nabokov).

Overall, The Etched City resembles the most commercially successful New Weird novel, Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, which, like Bishop’s work, takes some inspiration from Harrison’s Viriconium sequence, but ultimately rejects the later Viriconium books’ remorselessly anti-fantasy theme. Indeed, where Harrison would later (in)famously criticize the idea of “worldbuilding”, both Miéville and Bishop have been celebrated for the imaginative depth and detail of their worlds.16 In a promotional blurb printed on the back of the Prime Books edition of The Etched City and the first pages of the Bantam edition, Jeffrey Thomas (author of the New Weird-associated Punktown books) makes the connection explicit: “K.J. Bishop’s world-building skills call to mind the likes of China Miéville.” The differences are useful to note, however. Miéville imagined the New Weird to have a political potential that Bishop does not take up, while the world Bishop builds in The Etched City is more clearly and consistently Decadent than the world of Perdido Street Station and its sequels.17

Aside from the stock features of artists, decay, disease, etc., that appear in these works, the most salient inheritance from Decadence may be structural. It is rare to find Decadent, Weird, or New Weird fiction with a strong and straightforward plot. As in much classic Weird fiction, events are often subservient to atmosphere rather than a point-to-point line of causality, and descriptive writing serves to strengthen or extend the atmosphere over any other element. In Decadent, Weird, and New Weird writing, there is often a loose and associational connection between narrative components, and Harrison’s previously noted description of the construction of his own writing as “the placing side by side of units which have something thematically in common and indeed which are linked solely by the fact that they have that thing in common” (C. J. Fowler 1993, p. 23) generally fits The Etched City, although Bishop provides more of the expected events of popular fiction.

Like the Viriconium books, The Etched City is shaped around a series of encounters that do not lead to a unified climax. There are certainly many eventful moments, since Bishop’s protagonists are a bounty hunter/sword-for-hire, Gwynne, and an unlicensed itinerant surgeon, Raule. The first of the book’s three sections sets us up to think of the story as being about two characters seeking adventure as they travel through the wild frontier of the Copper Country, but this section functions as a prologue, and the rest of the book describes Gwynne and Raule in the city of Ashamoil, where, aside from a few brief encounters, their lives are separate. The dominating subject of the book is the network of relationships between people (some powerful, some marginalized) in the city, while in the background of the action, a biological transformation is occurring, with humans and animals intertwining. As the city decays, a new physical reality arises, but unlike in Machen, where it is inorganic objects such as streets, buildings, and gardens that interweave, or in Harrison, where figures from one world end up in another, in Bishop, the perichoresis occurs in people’s actual bodies. Some of these are quiet powers that characters have tried to hide away, such as the Reverend who reveals he “can hatch insects from my hands and scorpions from my feet” (Bishop [2003] 2004, p. 358), but the primary evidence is what Raule has tracked in her work as a surgeon and midwife: the growing incidence of children born in strange and hideous shapes, some mixed with the features of animals such as crocodiles. The sense of strange transformation hums behind the events, a sense of an always-fluid reality that produces varied effects. People who seek power can take advantage of the slow but constant unraveling of one reality into another, while artists such as Gwynne’s occasional lover Beth Constanzin can find inspiration within the new metamorphoses of mutable life. In such a world, decadence is an always-present process in a cycle of existence where the old decays into the new and change is the only constant.

The Etched City reconstructs an idea of the mystical that The Green Round points toward and The Course of the Heart deconstructs. It becomes explicit in the later chapters of the book as Beth explains her ideas of art and the numinous, but it is also clear in statements such as when the Rev (as he is called) tells Gwynne that “ghosts are the result of human negligence; they’re like rubbish in the streets. As for monsters and all things that transgress the laws of nature, they are God’s doing. Through marvels, the holy presence manifests its power, for the benefit of particularly blind humans.” (Bishop [2003] 2004, p. 313–14). This is not at all what Gwynne himself believes (he is skeptical and cynical), and Bishop’s multiperspectival structure keeps us from ever being able to say that one particular character is speaking an absolute truth. Instead, they are all seeking ways to reconcile their experiences and beliefs with the changes around them—the undeniable weirdness of the world. However, unlike Machen or Harrison, Bishop does not express multiplicity through fragmentation; The Etched City’s narrative is loose and episodic, but aside from a jump in time between the first and second sections, it is coherent and consistent, with the multitudinous ideas, events, and perspectives unified (or at least collected) within the imaginary city and between the covers of the actual book.

The second section of The Etched City opens with the first appearance of the artist Beth Constanza. As this section begins, readers will inevitably recalibrate their idea of what the text is doing, since the characters we thought we were following are now nowhere to be seen. Bishop provides a clue with some of Beth’s thoughts:

Certain philosophers of the late antique period had proposed the theory that every person functioned as the centre of a universe, a permeable world—the individual being likened to the idea of the eye of a storm or whirlpool—which could intersect with the realms carried by other people or spin far away from them. According to one of the antique sources, this theory had been proposed in response to the question of why, when two philosophers who were old friends had a bad falling out that both were too proud or too genuinely offended to try to mend, they suddenly ceased to see each other even in passing, even though they lived in neighbouring streets. As much as she believed in anything, she was inclined to believe in this conception of existence.

(Bishop [2003] 2004, pp. 58–59)

Beth has been fascinated by observing Gwynne, whom she does not yet know, and she wonders if their worlds might intersect again. Perhaps to encourage it, or at least to memorialize the past moment, she creates an etching of Gwynne, and this etching does, indeed, later bring him to her after he sees it and grows curious about the artist. Art in The Etched City has a mystical power, a power both to reflect and, in unpredictable ways, shape reality.

Like Viriconium, the fantasy world of The Etched City draws from various real histories and locations, as well as from various genres of narrative, rendering an imaginative space where readers are encouraged, even required, to hear resonances and to speculate on intertextualities. However, the instabilities of Bishop’s world are less metaphysical than those of Machen or Harrison; instead, and in common with other New Weird-associated writers like Miéville, Bishop emphasizes physical—specifically, biological—transformations. Often, this emphasis on physical change and even monstrosity brings such writing closer to the familiar realms of horror fiction than to the more ethereal or intellectual unsettlings of Machen’s later writings and much of Harrison’s work. In their own ways, the New Weird writers who found some inspiration in fin-de-siècle literature and art returned to the gothic strain that ran through Decadence, embracing the tendency that Machen (among others) ultimately fled. What many New Weird writers found useful in Decadence was its transmutation of gothicism, preserving the gothic’s dark aesthetics while rendering its antiquarian props and imagery into more urban and industrialized forms. Thus, writers like Bishop are able to use elements from Decadence to explore questions of mystery, art, and reality that still feel relevant long after the 1890s.

Late in the novel, Beth says the following:

Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena… We modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting.

(Bishop [2003] 2004, p. 297)18

Decadence echoes through these sentences, but these are not sentences of pure Decadent pastiche—rather, like the later works of Arthur Machen and much of M. John Harrison’s writing, Beth Constanza’s philosophy draws from the deep well of Romanticism, Aestheticism, Decadence, and Symbolism to reach transcendent mystery. Gwynne senses this as he looks at some of Beth’s sculptures, wherein he perceives “unveiled theophanies, intelligences not constrained by death, and infinitely superior to man” (Bishop [2003] 2004, p. 325). Beth’s art has come to reflect the strange metamorphoses of the world in a way similar to the biological specimens collected by Raule, and the mystery, at least as perceived by Gwynne, is similar as well, because nobody has an omniscient view from which to assess what is happening. Gwynne perceives mystery to be tied to the imagination of a creator’s animating power, thinking that the sculptures are unable to speak and explain themselves while “their creatrix slept” (Bishop [2003] 2004, p. 326). What this suggests in its content and language is primarily Gwynne’s own limitations—the archaic creatrix and “intelligences … superior to man” are not accidental usages but gendered forms of language outdated in the world into which The Etched City was published. Even if we ignore the intentional fallacy Gwynne seems to cling to, we, as the readers, know that once Beth wakes up, her creations are not going to speak in any informational way that might answer the mysteries of the world any more than Raule’s specimens could if they suddenly came back to life or the Rev’s theology will. All things end in mystery, but they also start in mystery and remain in mystery. Where Machen sought and Harrison denied transcendence “beyond the veil”, Bishop proclaims the veil to be an illusion. In a world of flux, the fact of flux is all that can be known—metamorphosis is neither salvation nor damnation; it simply is.

Between them, Machen, Harrison, and Bishop share a similar uneasiness with the implications of unrestrained Decadence. Machen sought an escape from morbid obsessions via mystic metaphysics and dreams of a mythic past, while Harrison condemned the desire for escape as itself a morbid symptom, the disease having no cure once it is contracted, though of course Harrison, in his many references to Decadence, recognizes the attraction, the desire for the disease preceding the desire for any cure. Bishop’s tombs garlanded with poetry and painting are not so far from Decadence at its gloomiest, and the implicit critique Bishop offers in that image suggests that the dangers of Decadence recognized by Machen and Harrison remain salient and relevant more than a century later—dangers seen in any imaginative work too enamored of decay (making it likely to pollute dreams of transcendence), too hospitable to avoiding and depleting reality with fantasy, too determined to solve the mysteries. But unlike the critics who condemned Decadence, particularly in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials, Machen, Harrison, and Bishop seek to preserve at least some of its valorization of mystery. Writing from post-Decadent decades, they could look back on the innovations that Decadence offered with fascination, skepticism, sympathy, and no small bit of fondness, seeking not to quell the numinous but to enliven it, not to let the fire of life sputter into ashes but to summon the words, images, and ideas necessary to find a phoenix in the remaining sparks.