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| Douglas's description of the tale | I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets. "Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too horrible." This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it." "For sheer terror?" I remember asking. He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. "For dreadful- dreadfulness!" "Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women. He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain." Commentary: This is not just an advert for the story's effectiveness as a ghost story. It is that, of course - '..it's quite too horrible..' suggests that the story will indeed deliver what people expect from a ghost story - and sets up an anticipatory excitement (seen in the woman's exclamation: '..oh, how delicious!') But the intention is that that will almost come to seem beside the point when the tale has finally been read. Douglas's comments suggest a kind of difficulty in placing its real effect: ...' it was not so simple as that.' 'Dreadful - dreadfulness' - that puzzled tautology - suggests a kind of giving up of finding words adequate to describe the exact effect. Like the description of Marlow's stories, this is also a way for the author to describe the intended effect of his own work. Both suggest a deliberate and self-conscious ambition to move the reader beyond the kind of story they are expecting into something much more problematic, more troubling in its effects, less confined by the way texts are usually received. |
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