Primitivism in “The Red Hand”: The Troglodyte and the Lake-Dweller

Arthur Machen's formulation of humanity's relationship to the primitive in “The Red Hand” is indebted to the anthropological theory of survivals expounded first by E. B. Tylor in his most famous work Primitive Culture (1871) and later by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough (1890). Extrapolating from evolutionary theory, Tylor and Frazer regard survivals as customs and traditions from a previous evolutionary phase that are somehow retained in the species long after the context that gave them meaning is gone. In its anthropological context, the theory of survivals was intended as proof that civilized and savage man were related, not as the advanced and degenerate forms of one species but as the more advanced and less advanced, the latter thus having the potential to evolve into the former. However, Machen employs the notion of survivals for a different purpose. He shows not that civilized man is related to primitive man, but rather that civilized man contains traces of a much older, mythic race. Further, the customs retained from this mythic race are not useless baggage but have sustained their effectiveness. For Machen, literature, particularly the supernatural, horrific, or decadent variety, is the key to re-opening the efficacy of these survivals. It offers a relation to the past that differs from the one assumed by the scientific theory of evolution. Reading such tales would not expose the reader to the highly contagious influences of degeneration, as opponents of decadent literature argued, but would offer another type of experience altogether.

In many of Machen's supernatural stories, the scientific and the supernatural or occult battle it out for which discourse more closely or adequately represents reality and humanity. The same two characters appear in most of these stories to duke it out: Dyson, the “man of letters,” who believes that “we live and move . . . in an unknown world” (26), and Phillipps, the scientist/ethnographer, who does “not believe in the insoluble” (36). Although the victory seems to go to the supernatural, to Dyson, every time – as Phillipps, the scientific man, must admit that indeed there is a world beyond or underneath the world of sense that defies rational articulation – there is no story at all without the intimate relationship between the two, between scientific/empirical representation and its literary/figurative counterpart. In fact, one begins to suspect that for Machen the latter takes its cue from the former. The stir created by the biological and social theories of evolution allowed for the birth of Machen's literary monsters, and for those of H. G. Wells, R. L. Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde, among others, suggesting not so much that literature and science were antagonistic but rather, as Ferguson argues, that each reflected the philosophic and cultural move from the Enlightenment's focus on rational unity to the fin-de-siècle obsession with analytic dissection and psychological fragmentation.Footnote ² In “The Red Hand,” we are asked to look beyond the apparent antagonism between the scientific and the literary to see that the two are creating one vision of reality, fragmentary and contradictory as it may be. The literary man's arguments against the scientific viewpoint, and the monsters he evokes as evidence, are only possible given the evolutionary template that science provides. At the same time, scientific certainty proceeds from the repression of elements that cannot be appropriated by it, elements that have a tendency to return as the monsters of horror stories.Footnote ³ The literature that expresses the relationship between the two does not signal a degradation of the classical, as Nordau might contend, but the birth of a new literary form, a hybrid that we now call “science-fiction.”

From the beginning of “The Red Hand,” Dyson accuses the ethnographer, Phillipps, of studying dead artifacts rather than living evidence. Dyson informs us that one does not find primitive man amidst fossils and ancient objects (nor on the outskirts of civilization) but “in this whirling and mysterious city” (11). A survival is thus not an object or custom which simply remains as a curiosity and nothing more; rather, a survival is such only if it has survived, only if it has maintained its effectiveness. Similarly, civilized man's relatives survive not because evidence of their previous existence is discovered by the paleontologist, in the dead ground, but because traces of them are found in the living, breathing, moving human city. These traces are not simply primitive but primordial.

Whereas Phillipps contends that “[p]rimitive man stands very dim and far off across the bridge of years,” Dyson asks:

Neither primitive nor barbarian, the troglodyte and the lake-dweller represent something much older in the history of the human, something that perhaps does not even belong to the track of Darwinian evolution. And while it seems at first as if Dyson is distinguishing between these older species and “frock-coated and finely draped humanity,” later lines suggest otherwise: “Now and then as I walk in Holborn or Fleet Street I see a face which I pronounce abhorred, and yet I could not give a reason for the thrill of loathing that stirs within me” (12). Looking out of the face of civilized man, the troglodyte and the lake-dweller are indistinguishable from him. Dyson's troglodyte does not merely “rub shoulders” with humanity but actually dons its skin and clothes. If Dyson is still speaking of an evolutionary chain at all, then it would have to be one that allowed for the possibility of two radically different evolutionary phases existing in one body.

The presence of the troglodyte and the lake dweller within civilized man might signal a social or psychological degeneration, a regression to a more primitive state. However, Dyson's formulation of this state is unclear at best. He says, “It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution” (26). To return on the track of evolution does not necessarily entail retracing one's steps and thus regressing or degenerating. It might suggest that one has somehow left the track and returned to it, or that the track itself is not linear and unidirectional but rather consists of a looping structure such that the return is not a backwards movement. In this case, the intrusion of an “earlier” phase might be the result of the track folding upon itself.

Further, this ability to return seems to offer scientific advancement and thus to be linked with progress rather than regress. Before going to meet the “Little People” in “The Novel of the Black Seal” from The Three Impostors, Professor Gregg says to Miss Lally, “Vestigia nulla retrorsum” (“No returning footsteps”). This statement reflects the “ever forward” attitude that Gregg adopts and that characterizes scientific progress. However, he qualifies this statement with the following: “though I hope it won't be literally true in my case” (162). On the one hand, Gregg wishes to be able to retrace his steps home, i.e., to not be killed by the Little People, and on the other hand, he wants to “return” in the sense that he wants access to the unique abilities of the Little People; they can make their bodies, whole or in part, morph into those of other “lower” creatures. Despite the characterization of these metamorphoses as “reversions,” they seem to represent not simple degeneration but also the possibility of momentarily transcending the permanence of bodily form at will.

Gregg disappears and is unable to present his findings to the scientific community, suggesting that this “return” cannot be appropriated by scientific logics. The nonhuman others in Machen's works confront the human not so much as another species but rather as an ahistorical and non-scientific way of knowing: “we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. . . . It is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead” (26). Here Dyson does not refer to the extinction of a species but to a type of lore, a wisdom, a form of knowledge, and an awful one at that. These “dwellers in twilight” possess a type of knowledge that does not depend on nor require light. To them, “darkness and gloom were familiar and habitual” (24). Yet what can be said of these dwellers, when the signs of their existence are described as “mere ornament . . . perhaps symbolical ornament, but surely not an inscription, or the signs of any words ever spoken”? (34). Theirs is a knowledge without light and a language never spoken. Phillipps speculates that the artifact that proves their existence “must be some wreckage of a vanished race, almost, I think, a fragment of another world than ours” (36). Yet if this race has vanished, it is not because it no longer exists, as Selby, the original owner of the artifact, informs us: “the keepers are still there, and I saw them” (59). Further, if the artifact is a fragment of another world than ours, it is not a world other than the world we live in, for “we live and move . . . in an unknown world” (26). It must be, then, a fragment of “our” world which is not ours, a part into which our lives sometimes intrude and which sometimes protrudes into our “known” world, sometimes even into our very arteries: “There was the weapon of a vanished race that had pierced the great arteries” (41).

Although this vanished race neither comes from another world nor distinguishes itself physically from the human, it does affect the human body, challenging its integrity through the metamorphoses it imposes and through violent penetration by nonhuman weapons. In addition to the knife in “The Red Hand,” there is a strange ax in “Novel of the Black Seal.” The ax clearly has been used to kill a man, but cannot be wielded by any human being who tries it:

Not only is this weapon “utterly unmanageable,” but it is so because of the direction of its propulsion; it causes the outward force to “return on oneself.” Like the return on the track of evolution, this return challenges the authority of human agency and control. The tool cannot be made to correspond to the will of the human. In human hands it falls “harmless to the ground.” It refuses to be the extension of the human hand, as a tool is supposed to be. Either the tool has a will of its own, or it is only effective in another type of grasp all together. The sign of the Red Hand indicates the latter, as what is distinctly human about the hand is held in abeyance.

The sign of the Red Hand is called the Mano in Fica. Intended to represent female genitalia (“fica” is a vulgar word for vulva), the sign is described as being “seen from the back, with the fingers clenched, and the top of the thumb protruded between the first and second fingers, and pointed downwards, as if to something below” (Machen, “Red Hand” 18). In his comprehensive study of the history of hand gestures in Italy, Andrea de Jorio explains that the gesture has been used in several different ways: 1) as an amulet to ward off the evil eye, 2) as an insult, and 3) as a lewd sexual invitation. For all intents and purposes, then, it seems that this sign should elicit laughter. In a modern scientific age, it is at most an amulet for the superstitious and at the least merely a rude gesture. However, in “The Red Hand,” the symbol is not humorous but instead associated with some unspeakable evil. Phillipps explains: “It's a horrible old sign[,] . . . one of the most horrible signs connected with the theory of the evil eye. . . . It is one of the survivals; you must look for the origin of it in the black swamp whence man first came” (18). Like the dwellers in twilight whose symbol it is, the Mano in Fica is not a part of human history or even pre-history. The sign represents a vanished race that threatens humanity, not from the past but from an adjacent and sometimes internal position, as one of its own potentialities. It is not a survival in Frazer's sense, something that once had meaning but has lost its context and thus its efficacy. As the sign of a language never spoken, the Red Hand never had a context to begin with. It speaks from the darkness and the indistinct, from places that are in the middle of bustling London but that seem nonetheless “all amorphous, without character . . . with vague piles of wood looming shapeless” in a “passage [that] lay all dark and formless . . . where everything hovered indistinct in the uncertain glimmer of the light” (13, 14, 17). Further, the Red Hand has not lost its efficacy, for in the end both Dyson and Phillipps are horrified by it: “The two friends sat silent a little while, facing one another with restless eyes and lips that quivered” (60).

The threatening aspect of the Red Hand lies partly in the positioning of the thumb. In the sign, the thumb is not in its regular place, but instead shoved between the first two fingers, as if captured by these fingers and robbed of its opposability, its ability to be a human hand held in abeyance. Like the ax in The Three Impostors, the Red Hand disallows the possibility of human grasping. Neither evolutionary nor devolutionary, this sign does not point to something pre-human, but rather human-imprisoned, human-deformed, suspended, gagged. The thumb is not only imprisoned, but pointing downwards. In the context of the story, it is pointing at the dead human body on the pavement below it, pierced through and through by another ancient artifact.

When placed in the context of Machen's other supernatural tales, the erotic aspects of the Mano in Fica are also disturbing. Belonging as it does to a nonhuman other, the sexual invitation it offers reminds us of the unnatural couplings in The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors. Like dwellers in twilight in “The Red Hand,” the monstrous births that result from these sexual encounters – the half-woman half-satyr Helen Vaughn of The Great God Pan and the part-snail, part-fairy, part-human Gervase Cradock in The Three Impostors – challenge the integrity of the human form and the stability and comfort of modern middle-class life. Helen Vaughn's sexual exploits turn upstanding middle-class men into suicidal demons, her death a study in unspeakable metamorphoses:

Similarly, when provoked, Gervase Cradock's human body becomes the site of “protoplasmic reversion”: “how man can be reduced to the slime from which he came, and be forced to put on the flesh of the reptile and the snake” (172).

As these stories suggest, to return on the track of evolution is neither to follow a pre-ordained path to humanity, nor to find traces of previous primitive forms within humanity as we know it, but rather to access the primordial “abyss of all being.” The existence of these vanished races and their artifacts in the present and within modern humanity challenges not only the linearity of the track of evolution but also the linearity of history in general, suggesting that the past is not something that is behind the present, as its precursor and support, as its history, but rather something that challenges and threatens the present from an adjacent position, something one might better call the ab-historical rather than the pre-historical, since it is not to be positioned prior to but within and against the historical. The ab-historical past that Machen invokes is that which cannot be claimed by the present or by history because it remains always past, a past with no future, or a past with no present. It is in this past where true savagery resides; and because it lies, unclaimed, alongside human history, it is capable of intruding into the human world, the world in which man has come to define himself as the most imposing figure. In Machen's tales, what has never been human cannot claim man's shape, and yet it is precisely from out of a human face that it peers. Contained within the human form itself is the very real existence of the possibility of never-having-been, or the possibility of another rationality and another physique.

While they seem to challenge some of the basic tenets of evolutionary theory, Machen's monsters represent the imaginative possibilities that emerge from evolutionary theory but which the scientific mode of understanding cannot entertain. His stories offer figures for the ab-historical others haunting homo sapiens. They can reveal themselves only in a literature that grows in the dark places of knowledge. Like the fairies and satyrs that stand as their symbols, they are relegated to fiction, since they have no factual being per se. But this does not make them useless survivals. Their place in literary history does give them a definite existence and hence a real effectivity/affectability in the world. Horror, at least since the popularization of evolutionary theory, both attests to the existence of these ab-historical others, and keeps us in awe of them.

“Sin” in Machen's “The White People”

The relegation of such survivals to the realm of horror has to do with the linkage of their characteristics – amorphousness, contagion, hybridity, transgression – with evil. In “The White People,” Machen explores this link through a conversation between an old “theologian,” Ambrose, and a young skeptic, Cotgrave. Through Ambrose Machen suggests that just as the survival neither comes from a more primitive nor degenerate form of humanity, so real sin is neither a corruption nor degeneration of the good. Rather, “[e]vil, of course, is wholly positive – only it is on the wrong side” (65). The way to re-activate the survival is through its literary resurrection, and the way to access true evil is through its literary representation. Just as the Bible provides a conduit to divine law, so the literature of evil provides access to original sin.

In the science of evolutionary theory, and the theories of social anthropology that followed it, morality is an evolutionary adaptation; the good is such because it helps the species to survive, and evil is that which harms the community and keeps individuals of the species from propagating. Darwin's exposition on human morality in The Descent of Man attests to this. In the second paragraph of his concluding remarks on chapter four, Darwin writes, “As the social instincts both of man and the lower animals have no doubt been developed by nearly the same steps, it would be advisable, if found practicable, to use the same definition in both cases, and to take as the standard of morality, the general good or welfare of the community” (98). Standards of good and evil are contextually determined. What would be considered monstrous and unnatural in one civilization seems quite natural and beneficial in another:

While evil may detract from the evolutionary fitness of a given community, both good and evil are “natural” insofar as there will always be individuals of every species that deviate from the path to survival. As extinction is just as natural as survival, evil is just as natural as good.

In “The White People,” Machen asks us to look beyond this scientific understanding of morality, suggesting that Darwin's examples merely represent mundane crimes as opposed to true Sin. Ambrose explains:

According to Ambrose, true sin has nothing to do with the human community nor with its survival as a species; it has everything to do with the solitary individual. Further, social crime may mark an individual as less-than-human or a lower-order human, closer to an animal, but the true sinner will be distinguished from his fellows in a different way. I will return to this point.

Mundane sin may correspond to the evolutionary model, in which evil is part of a natural process, but there is no place for true Sin in Darwin's world. To account for the existence of true evil, Machen turns to what at first seems to be a Judeo-Christian formulation of evil, in which evil signifies distance from the divine and therefore the unnatural.Footnote ⁴ Ambrose offers the following examples:

Singing roses, a swelling road, and stony blossoms: true sin has more to do with objects taking on unnatural or inappropriate characteristics than it does with social laws and conventions. This characterization of evil finds its echo in the writings of John Ruskin, an evangelical and opponent of evolutionary theory:

In “Ruskin, Darwin, and the Crisis of Natural Form,” Stephen Finley argues that the popularization of the theory of evolution was not as jarring to religious beliefs as it has been characterized. As Finley points out, Darwinian evolution actually coincided with the views of certain religious sects, like Methodism, in their characterization of nature and all of the material world as bestial and subject to brutal mechanistic laws. Those whose beliefs were significantly affected by this view of nature were those who viewed nature as the expression of the divine. Finley characterizes Ruskin as one of these, with his application of “typology” to the relationship between nature and God. According to Finley, those in Ruskin's position struggled to maintain the inviolate character of natural forms as immutable signs of God. Rather than the form-function relationship that characterizes Darwinian evolution, Ruskin argued for a form-significance relation, one that was as unchanging as the divine essence itself. Mutability, as the basis of Darwinian evolution, introduces the diabolical into nature. “Good” nature is reflected in objects that maintain a relationship to a static essence, while “evil” nature is mutable and “mutatable.”

While it seems from his comments cited above that Ambrose embraces Ruskin's definition of evil against the Darwinian formulation, Ambrose's knowledge of evil reaches further back than the beginnings of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Rather than seeing evil as merely the negative or corruption of the good, Ambrose insists that “evil is . . . wholly positive.” The inappropriate “mutatability” that characterizes true sin cannot be thought of as merely a degradation or deterioration of nature, but rather another side of what exists that is positively unnatural.

The distinction between natural and unnatural happened, according to Ambrose, in the event termed the Fall by the Judeo-Christian tradition. In distinguishing between holiness and sin, Ambrose states that “[t]he saint endeavors to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall” (67). Real sin does not involve a regression to a more primitive state. Rather, it involves a different sort of “descent”:

Decrying the materialism of his age, which makes people in general too comfortable, so that they fail to cultivate the human ability for transcendence, Ambrose embraces those who make the effort, saints and sinners alike. Each is a transgression – the one natural and the other unnatural – insofar as it requires the individual to step outside of him/herself, to sacrifice individuality, agency, and authority for an ecstatic union with the elemental. Evil, no less than sainthood, requires this sacrifice. This is why evil must be unconscious and why so few, in the age of materialism, are willing or able to “ascend or descend.” The true sinner is, like the saint, an ascetic, unlike the mundane sinner, who is merely a beast, a lower creature who cannot control himself and is a slave to bodily pleasures. True evil is not horrifying but sublime; it strikes us with awe because it exceeds what it is possible for us to know and experience.

This notion of unconscious sin goes against both the Enlightenment notion of individual will and responsibility and the notion, more contemporary to the story, of biologically-determined crime. It is more like Freud's theory of the unconscious, that illegible story of the individual's Fall into the social, which can be read only indirectly, through symptoms that are merely symbols of the true meaning underneath. While Freud would seem to be allied with the scientists and the social anthropologists, his theory of the unconscious opens a dynamic relation, within civilized man, not to the primitive but to the primordial. For Freud, one can indeed be a very great sinner and never do an evil deed. “[T]he normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows” (Freud 57).

Just as the Freudian unconscious manifests itself in signs/symptoms, so true evil manifests itself through figurative language. The two descriptions of evil above, Ruskin's and Machen's, highlight not only mutability and the possibility for corruption in natural forms but also the insidious nature of figurality. Whereas the nature-divine typology is a direct and unchanging symbolism, other types of figurality represent a departure from this immediacy and immutability. Ambrose suggests that the relationship between what we call sin, that is, man's moral failings, and real sin is one of personification, “a resemblance such as enables us to use, quite legitimately, such terms as the ‘foot of the mountain’ and the ‘leg of the table”’ (69). Animating the inanimate, endowing it with body parts which do not naturally belong to it, language allows for an understanding of sin through its tropic relation to the world. Through figurative language, the flowers can sing and the rock can break out in stony blossoms. Such utterances are a central part of literature, and great literature, for Machen, is supposed to produce an experience of ecstasy for the reader on par with a religious experience. Literature of this sort becomes the site of revelation, not of divine judgment but of the true nature of sin.

While Ambrose refers to real criminals and real criminal acts in his description of sin in “The White People,” sin, being largely unconscious, is not something that one can take on as a project. If one wants to experience its power, one need only turn to its literary representation. For most, an experience of true sin is only possible through a text, through the metaphors that allow it to be figured at all. As proof of the existence of true evil, Ambrose does not enact some ancient ritual of sacrifice nor does he attempt to conjure the devil. Instead, he offers Cotgrave a little green book, the writings of a young girl who was apparently very evil indeed in the true sense, though she never committed a crime against anyone. What this suggests is that such literature is itself a form of sorcery; it conjures up figures of the unknown, of the formless and shapeless deep out of which all things emerge. Machen suggests that through such figures we can experience these mysteries and in so doing gain access to the world of true sin, a world of transgression and transcendence always present beneath the known and the civilized.

The popularity of Machen's supernatural tales among fin-de-siècle readers attests to their ability to fascinate and horrify, but his importance as a writer of horror and fantasy goes beyond the telling of good tales. Within those tales, he offers another, hybrid perspective on the issue of evolutionary theory. He challenges the simple dualisms that theories indebted to Darwinian evolution or to the Judeo-Christian tradition set up between the human form and its degeneration, the moral and the deviant, instead suggesting that the more important, more primal, relation does not involve degeneration or regression at all but rather the occasional intrusion of an ever-present potentiality for transgression into the comfort and relative stability of materialist life. From the perspective of such materialist comforts, such an intrusion can only be represented as a great evil. However, rather than viewing this potentiality for transgression as a negative quality, Machen gives it a positive existence within the soul of the human, maintaining that it is a relation that needs to be preserved just as much as sanctity. If true saints and sinners are becoming more and more rare, supernatural horror at least keeps the door open to the mysteries of the human soul, and offers the reader access to her own ecstatic experience, an experience that, however momentarily, takes her out of herself and offers her a glimpse of “the darkness of darkness beyond the stars” (Machen, Impostors 4).