Mutable

In the Mutableye

(We’ve written about David Lindsay before, but all the same, this week wanted to present you with some of his own words, a selection from one of Lindsay’s lesser known novels, entitled The Haunted Woman, a book that reads like Victorian Scooby Dooby Doo with a hefty dosage of spiritualism and a good deal of romantic intrigue. Below is a selection from the first chapter.)

In the latter half of August, Marshall Stokes went to New York, in order to wind up the estate of the lately-deceased brother of the lady to whom he was betrothed. As a busy underwriting member of Lloyd’s, he could ill afford the time—he was over there for upwards of a fortnight—but no alternative had presented itself. Miss Loment had no connections in America, she possessed no other relations, except a widowed aunt, with whom she lived, and it was clearly out of the question for either of the two ladies to travel across in person, to examine books, interview lawyers, deal with claims, etc.—they had not the necessary business experience. The task, therefore, had devolved on Marshall. He had not been able to conclude the business, but he had put it in a fair way of being concluded, and had appointed a reputable firm to act as Miss Loment’s representatives. The estate was worth forty thousand dollars.

Gabriel Boyer

We here at Mutable wanted to commemorate George MacDonald this week, and his esteemed lineage. Though he, along with several of his more interesting intellectual progeny are no longer well-known to the world at large, I would suggest that MacDonald is essential in any “secret history” of the industrial and post-industrial mind, not entirely dissimilar to Greil Marcus’ own secret history of the twentieth century, Lipstick Traces, that when we consider the history of revelation in relation to the culture industry and the prefabricated visions it has produced in the form of lighter allegorical fair such as Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within and The Matrix, what we are seeing is a similar degradation of this unacknowledged literary tradition as filtered through Alan Watts’ watered-down buddhism.

It should be obvious to anyone who has read George MacDonald why he has not retained whatever renown he had in the nineteenth century. As vivid and fabulous as the worlds he created are, the message is unabashedly Christian, and not the sort that can live in a suburban library either—like C. S. Lewis would be—a man who called George MacDonald his master. MacDonald is just a little more restrained than Blake in terms of his sometimes bizarre imagery—note the hawthorne tree as an old man in chapter four of Lilith below—and not surprisingly, because Blake was one of his key influences, as well as Novalis, and Swedenborg.

George MacDonald (10 December 1824 — 18 September 1905) may no longer be well-known in the world of fantasy, but besides being the “master” of C. S. Lewis, he was the mentor of Lewis Carroll, it being both Macdonald’s advice, as well as the hearty reception of his daughters, that convinced Lewis Carroll (the pen-name of Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) to publish his manuscript, Alice in Wonderland. MacDonald was admired by W.H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle. G. K. Chesterton cited MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had “made a difference to my whole existence”. Even Mark Twain, who initially disliked MacDonald, eventually befriended him. (As if genius were solely dependent upon likability.)

The Haunted Woman

In the Mutableye

This is Not a Review: of George MacDonald, David Lindsay

Gabriel Boyer

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