Thursday, April 1, 2021

Slingshot openings in Amelia B. Edwards?

This is a terrible admission to make, but until this week I confused the Amelia B. Edwards stories "The Phantom Coach" (1864) and "The Four-Fifteen Express" (1866). 


Listening to an audio version of "The Phantom Coach" (1864) this week, the mist of confusion cleared.


The Phantom Coach




The Four-Fifteen Express




Rereading both stories again this morning, I was struck by Edwards' handling of the opening of each tale. 


Clute and Langford have an article about slingshot endings here:


A term initially used by Kim Stanley Robinson when attempting to describe the typical ending of a Gene Wolfe tale. The Book of the New Sun (1980-1983 4vols), There Are Doors (1988) and Exodus from the Long Sun (1996) all close as their protagonists begin to move towards a goal which has been anticipated from the beginning. But they move out of frame, out of the end of the book, and the story closes as though before its proper ending. As Robert Frost said in a letter of 1 November 1927 (in Selected Letters of Robert Frost [coll 1964, p344]): "My poems ... are all set up to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless." The effect is similar to the device in classical rhetoric known as enthymeme, where an argument is begun but not ended; the term also describes a syllogism that is left incomplete, with the conclusion to be supplied by the reader. Though unexpecting readers might feel that the consequent affect is one of frustrating truncation, a discomfort at not being told what should be told for proper closure, a true slingshot ending should persuade them that a choice of conclusions has indeed been indicated – and that their task (or joy) is to plunge head foremost towards a finish they will be glad to sanction….


The endings Edwards provides in "The Phantom Coach" and "The Four-Fifteen Express" do not contain much of the majesty or sublimity Clute and Langford describe. But the start of both stories offer modest but electric telescoping motion I could term "slingshot openings."


"The Phantom Coach"


THE CIRCUMSTANCES I AM about to relate to you have truth to recommend them. They happened to myself, and my recollection of them is as vivid as if they had taken place only yesterday. Twenty years, however, have gone by since that night. During those twenty years I have told the story to but one other person. I tell it now with a reluctance which I find it difficult to overcome. All I entreat, meanwhile, is that you will abstain from forcing your own conclusions upon me. I want nothing explained away. I desire no arguments. My mind on this subject is quite made up, and, having the testimony of my own senses to rely upon, I prefer to abide by it.

      Well! It was just twenty years ago, and within a day or two of the end of the grouse season. I had been out all day with my gun, and had had no sport to speak of. The wind was due east; the month, December; the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way. It was not a pleasant place in which to lose one’s way, with the first feathery flakes of a coming snowstorm just fluttering down upon the heather, and the leaden evening closing in all around. I shaded my eyes with my hand, and stared anxiously into the gathering darkness, where the purple moorland melted into a range of low hills, some ten or twelve miles distant. Not the faintest smoke-wreath, not the tiniest cultivated patch, or fence, or sheep-track, met my eyes in any direction. There was nothing for it but to walk on, and take my chance of finding what shelter I could, by the way. So I shouldered my gun again, and pushed wearily forward; for I had been on foot since an hour after daybreak, and had eaten nothing since breakfast....


From there the narrator commences a full report of being lost, then found, in a snow-storm.



"The Four-Fifteen Express"


THE EVENTS WHICH I am about to relate took place between nine and ten years ago. Sebastopol had fallen in the early spring; the peace of Paris had been concluded since March; our commercial relations with the Russian empire were but recently renewed; and I, returning home after my first northward journey since the war, was well pleased with the prospect of spending the month of December under the hospitable and thoroughly English roof of my excellent friend, Jonathan Jelf, Esquire, of Dumbleton Manor, Clayborough, East Anglia. Travelling in the interests of the well-known firm in which it is my lot to be a junior partner, I had been called upon to visit not only the capitals of Russia and Poland, but had found it also necessary to pass some weeks among the trading ports of the Baltic; whence it came that the year was already far spent before I again set foot on English soil, and that instead of shooting pheasants with him, as I had hoped, in October, I came to be my friend’s guest during the more genial Christmas-tide....



I touched on this kind of opening with several other examples here.



The above story quotes are taken from The Phantom Coach: Collected Ghost Stories (1999, Ash-Tree Press).



Jay

1 April 2021











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