Analysis of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows"

So far in my attempt to find the building blocks of the horror genre, I've been looking at just the overall story level, and have not really gotten into the other perspectives.

In Dramatica, every story has four perspectives, called throughlines, that interweave to form a complete view: they, I , you, and we.

• "They" defines the overall story approach and how things look from the omnipotent perspective. At this level characters are treated as types and assigned roles as though the author was describing to you the movie he saw the night before, "It's about this guy and..."
  
• "I" defines the first person perspective and is the main character of the narrative. This is the character we as the reader and audience most identify with.
• "You" is the perspective of what's called the impact character. This is the character that stands in the main characters way or provides an opposing point of view. In some stories this is the antagonist, in others it can be a friend or a teacher who provides a push to the main character. In the case of horror it is usually assumed that the impact character is the unknown other, the killer, the manifestation, whatever the fantastic element is.
• "We" is the perspective reserved for the subjective storyline and the main/impact character conflict. If the overall story is told generically, the subjective story is where the meat is. It is the heart and soul of the story.
  

In every story, each of these perspectives maps to one of the four quadrants. Either Situation, Activity, Fixed Attitudes, or Manipulations. When talking about genre, we're generally just talking about the Overall story perspective. In a Weird Tale, this "They" perspective is mapped to the Situation quadrant (which I defined in horror as Corruption). But to complete the story, you would also have to map the Main Character's view, the Impact Character's view, and the Subjective storyline's view to one of the other three (which in horror I called Mayhem, Decadence, and Madness).

This brings me to Algernon Blackwood's story "The Willows" and what I want to do is analyze the story very briefly based on the four story quadrants and the four perspectives.

There all sorts of cool ways you can do this in Dramatica, and the theory allows you to get into much, much more detail about character goals, problems and solutions, character attributes, etc. ad infinitum. I'm also cheating a bit (OK, a lot) by inventing my own terms but as a thought experiment I think it works.

Overall Story

The Overall story in the Willows is defined by the situation the narrator and his companion find themselves in and their encounter with the supernatural. The story begins with them traveling on the Danube river:

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any
other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved,unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

Here already we have hints of some supernatural intelligence at the heart of nature. Later as the companions travel deeper into the wilderness and farther from civilization:

We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin.

So we see that the known world is being haunted by this other unseen supernatural world. The order of things has been subverted and corrupted by this new situation and "set of conditions."

Main Character Story

The main character perspective is given to us by the first person narrator and his companion, the Swede, is there as a sounding board and counterweight. In "The Willows", the main character is defined by his psychological confusion over the strange situation he finds himself in. As odd things continue to appear and happen the MC struggles to find rational explanations. The Swede's intimations of something more mysterious leave him uncertain of what to believe.

"Look here now," I cried, "this place is quite queer enough without going
out of our way to imagine things! That boat was an ordinary boat, and the man in it was an ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fast as they could lick. And that otter was an otter, so don't let's play the fool about it!"

He looked steadily at me with the same grave expression. He was not in the least annoyed. I took courage from his silence.

"And, for Heaven's sake," I went on, "don't keep pretending you hear things, because it only gives me the jumps, and there's nothing to hear but the river and this cursed old thundering wind."

"You fool!" he answered in a low, shocked voice, "you utter fool. That's just the way all victims talk. As if you didn't understand just as well as I do!" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. "The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you're forced to meet it."

Here, the Swede identifies that the Main Character is defined by the possibility of self-deception which is a clear indication that he is dealing with Madness and head games. Can I trust myself to know what's real and what is not?

Impact Character Story

If this were not a horror story I would assume that the impact character is the Swede. He is after all the one who forces our narrator to face the truth of the supernatural forces they are dealing with. And perhaps he is in the sense that he speaks for The Willows since they do not speak for themselves and he is the one who is able to describe what it is that they are doing, and worse yet what they want. But ultimately I think the Swede is a narrative device, a translator for both the narrator and for the audience.

The impact character storyline is told through a series of odd occurrences which mostly happen unseen and offstage. At one point the narrator says,

"Further disaster! Why, what's happened?"

"For one thing--the steering paddle's gone," he said quietly.

"The steering paddle gone!" I repeated, greatly excited, for this was our rudder, and the Danube in flood without a rudder was suicide. "But what--"

"And there's a tear in the bottom of the canoe," he added, with a genuine little tremor in his voice.

I continued staring at him, able only to repeat the words in his face somewhat foolishly. There, in the heat of the sun, and on this burning sand, I was aware of a freezing atmosphere descending round us. I got up to follow him, for he merely nodded his head gravely and led the way towards the tent a few yards on the other side of the fireplace. The canoe still lay there as I had last seen her in the night, ribs uppermost, the paddles, or rather, the paddle, on the sand beside her.

"There's only one," he said, stooping to pick it up. "And here's the rent in the base-board."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I had clearly noticed two paddles a few hours before, but a second impulse made me think better of it, and I said nothing. I approached to see.

There was a long, finely made tear in the bottom of the canoe where a little slither of wood had been neatly taken clean out; it looked as if the tooth of a sharp rock or snag had eaten down her length, and investigation showed that the hole went through. Had we launched out in her without observing it we must inevitably have foundered. At first the water would have made the wood swell so as to close the hole, but once out in mid-stream the water must have poured in, and the canoe, never more than two inches above the surface, would have filled and sunk very rapidly.

"There, you see an attempt to prepare a victim for the sacrifice," I heard him saying, more to himself than to me, "two victims rather," he added as he bent over and ran his fingers along the slit.

It is unclear who is responsible for these odd occurences or whether to believe the Swede's warnings. Later, the bread goes missing, and finally they find themselves under attack:

There, in front of the dim glow, something was moving.

I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze drop-curtain used at the back of a theater--hazily a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing it differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willow bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface--"coiling upon itself like smoke," he said afterwards.

"I watched it settle downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me. "Look, by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!"--he gave a kind of whistling cry. "They've found us."

I gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the shadowy form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsed backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, to support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and
that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding, extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was losing it altogether, and about to die.

Like the smoke monster in Lost, the Willows manifest themselves to claim their sacrifice. Fortunately our heroes escape the Mayhem long enough for the creature to find another victim.

Subjective Storyline

The Subjective storyline is told through the interactions of the narrator and the supernatural forces he is increasingly beginning to associate with the ever present Willows:

With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different, I felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror.

This sense of awe persists in all of his encounters. Later the narrator sees strange figures:

Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world's history. But, before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go farther out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright. I felt the ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and the sound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar. These things, I knew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally. Yet the figures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a great spiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep emotion of worship. I felt that I must fall down and worship--absolutely worship.

This experience has led him to Decadence and worship of unknown Lovecraftian gods and idols. The subjective view is defined by this otherworldly and obsessive connection between the narrator and the unknown.

Story Structure

If we take all four of these stories together we find the overall structure of "The Willows":

• An overall story of Corruption: Supernatural intrusion into the Natural world.
• A main character story of Madness: Can I believe what I am seeing?
• An impact character defined by Mayhem: The creature in pursuit of its sacrifice.
• A subjective story defined by Decadence: The awestruck worship of evil gods.

This story is artfully interwoven so that it plays as a single narrative throughout, even as it moves from one perspective to the next. In the end the four storylines are resolved as the river calms, nature returns to its normal state, and they discover a body floating down stream:

For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the island.

"Their mark!" I heard my companion mutter under his breath. "Their awful mark!"

And when I turned my eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into mid-stream and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight, turning over and over on the waves like an otter.

The supernatural force, whatever it was, has gotten what it wanted and little doubt remains in the narrator's mind about what he has seen and experienced.

Interestingly, this story reveals a possible outcome for horror stories I hadn't previously considered. With "The Willows", we actually have a story of success. They escape the flood waters and returning safely toward home. They avoid the consequences. But in this case they have to pay a price meted out by the Willows: the death of the unknown person in the river. In order for them to live someone else must die. Oddly, Blackwood allows the river to erase the narrator's crime without comment. We never know how the narrator feels and whether or not it has changed him.

One would assume that we should judge the story outcome as bad. After all someone died, but the victim does not elicit much pity. The Willows claimed their sacrifice and perhaps that seems good enough to us. That is the allure of the Decadent mind set shining through.

For both the reader and the narrator the Willows elicit a sense of awe and worship. That's what we like about this kind of strange fiction: that momentary, elusive, madness enducing vision of the other world. But it is a decadent vision and in "The Willows" this horror mind set is a trap. It leads only to submission and the annihilation of one's will under the awesome power of the unworldly: terror without pity, the horrific equivalent of tragedy. Ultimately, decadence is the consequence the narrator escapes. The ecstatic vision is gone until the Willows return in search of fresh blood.