Daylight & Nightmare
The Weird Fables & Fancies of G.K. Chesterton
commentary by Adam Walter
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), the great wit & social critic, believed in the most wonderfully preposterous things. With insistent fervor he championed humankind's entire romantic heritage: the existence of God, fairy land, & all the out-worn virtues & ideals of chivalry. Chesterton fulfilled his public destiny by positioning himself as the clownish antagonist of over-intellectualized humanism, costuming himself as Fool in the court of Modern Rationalism.
Chesterton's fiction often rejects altogether the modern obsession with realism, verisimilitude, the art of finely textured detail. Of course, the notable exceptions are his famous Father Brown mysteries, yet even there each passage of careful detail is packaged with a covert wink & nod. A good number of his stories are perhaps best classified as fables, in which enduring truths are discovered, or re-discovered, & infused with a measure of both wonder & horror. Chesterton's fables take his reader by surprise, approaching as they do on two fronts: through the front door as bold common sense, & through the back, to quietly undermine many basic assumptions of contemporary thought. It is little wonder, then, that Chesterton's style should occasionally bend toward the territory of phantasm & the weird tale.
Chesterton's short fables are collected in the little known volume Daylight & Nightmare (1986). The collection's editor, Marie Smith, dedicates the book to Jorge Luis Borges, who died as the book was going to press. Smith quotes Borges: "Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, & blind, & central...." Like many weird tale writers, Chesterton's work reveals the author as a lively anachronist spurning the modern gods of science, progress, & calculated efficiency. What Chesterton respects are life's grand mysteries: the immortal soul, the creative imagination, & the power of the super-rational. In the essay "On Gargoyles," which is used as an introduction to Daylight & Nightmare, Chesterton constructs an allegory to illustrate his worldview. This philosophy of course scorns realism but incorporates the pagan, the romantic, & the gothic. These traditions mix in different combinations throughout the book, which is organized in three sections corresponding to chronological stages of Chesterton's writing career: "A Sense of Wonder," "From the Land of Nightmare," & "Utopias Unlimited."
Daylight & Nightmare shares some distinct themes & fantastic conceits with two schools of fiction, that of the modern weird tale & of the Inklings — the later a group of pious Oxford scholars & mythopoeic authors (including, most famously, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, & Charles Williams), some of whom are often considered Chesterton's direct literary heirs. In "The Angry Street," a businessman has an adventure on a certain London street along which he has traveled daily for forty years on his way home from work. One day the street suddenly betrays him, taking him into strange territory & up an impossible hill that did not exist the day before. Finally he encounters an ominous figure who tells him that instead of going as usual to Oldgate Station, today the street is "going to heaven." For forty years the businessman has neglected the street, abused it, worked it to death. Now the street has rebelled. With this story, Chesterton turns the fixed urban grid into an unpredictable frontier; he conjures magic & mystery from the most unlikely of places, from dull shops & dreary streets. The reliable, familiar city street turns into something as precarious as Hansel & Gretel's forest path. This is a conceit that has also been used, & much more elaborately, by weird tale writers Jean Ray in "The Shadowy Street" & H.P. Lovecraft in "The Music of Erich Zann." Something similar can be found as well in the "The Search for the House," a chapter of Charles Williams' novel War in Heaven.
With "A Crazy Tale," comparisons may again be made to Lovecraft, "The Outsider," & also to C.S. Lewis, "The Shoddy Lands." Each author has crafted a very unusual story which takes place in a psycho-allegorical setting. Against a backdrop of the central character's internal world, an intense vision-like narrative sketches a portrait of the character from the inside. The story ends with a haunting moment of epiphany, revealing the character's naked, vulnerable soul. Each author leaves the reader alone with his confounding creation: Lovecraft with a deformed, wretched pariah; Lewis with a severely narcissistic woman, possibly a parody of Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway; & Chesterton with a wide-eyed Enlightened One, a man who is either a messiah or the prophet of a new age, perhaps both.
As already noted, several factors have kept Chesterton from being remembered as even an occasional dabbler in the weird tale. Chief among these factors are the contrasting fable quality in his stories & the strong air of satire. The work of Franz Kafka shares these qualities, for which he is also generally considered to be above the genre. Ironically, however, "In the Penal Colony" is both one of Kafka's most gruesomely satirical works & possibly his story most frequently collected in anthologies of dark fantasy. Gustav Meyrink also bears mentioning. Though not as well-known as Kafka in the English-speaking world, Meyrink is another notable Eastern European author of expressionist dark fantasy, & Meyrink dedicated much of his short fiction to weird satire. In such stories as "The Ardent Soldier" & "The Violet Death," Meyrink contrasts the narrow-mindedness of scientific & governmental "authorities" with the inescapable supremacy of mystical reality.
In "Utopias Unlimited," the final section of Daylight & Nightmare, Chesterton's satire is most pronounced, railing against commercialism, socialism, & materialistic rationalism. It is here that Chesterton comes closest, as well, to such disillusioned anti-realists as Meyrink & Kafka. The story "Concerning Grocers as Gods" tells of William Williams, a grocer's assistant disgusted with his corrupt employer, Mr. Stiggles, who puts sand in the store's sugar & sea-water in the lemonade in an effort to stay competitive. Williams quits his job & journeys to America where he is disappointed to find the New World utopia at war with the individual. He then returns home only to find that the sickness has spread, & "Stiggles Universal Stores" has overrun the entire village. The whole world, it seems, now caters to mass consumption. In an ending that recalls such Kafka stories as "The Judgement" & "The Hunter Gracchus," Williams flees the corrupt, reductive, anti-individualistic world & attempts to throw himself off a bridge. He is stopped, however, & taken to an official suicide organization. Finally, he is laid in a Stiggles Coffin & buried in Stiggles Cemetery.
What works to occasionally transport these fables & satires into the realm of the weird is Chesterton's relentless passion for paradox. The end is in the beginning, the thing that binds also frees, & the person who wishes to save something must first lose it — these are the strange truths which fuel most, if not all, of Chesterton's fiction. Perhaps never has an Englishman been more enamored of such typically Eastern, but also proto-Christian, sentiments. For Chesterton, paradox can be an intimation of the inscrutable designs & obscure patterns which lie beyond the scope of human reason, & these are the ideas which add an uncanny hue to the odd brand of fable found in Daylight & Nightmare.
Very often these paradoxes simply illuminate that common weird tale scenario of a character resisting the inevitable, holding out against both the natural & supernatural worlds. As Thomas Ligotti writes: "To perceive, even if mistakenly, that all one's steps have been heading toward a prearranged appointment, to realize one has come face to face with what seems to have been waiting all along — this is the necessary framework, the supporting skeleton of the weird." An example of this is "Homesick at Home." Here the reader meets an archetypal Chesterton protagonist, a family man living in an idyllic farmhouse with a comfortable home life that has become stagnant & finally unendurable. Everything has somehow become unfamiliar to him. Even his home has lost its essential character: "Now he seemed to be able to see other homes, but not his own. That was merely a house. Prose had got hold of him: the sealing of the eyes & the closing of the ears." One day the man suddenly rises to his feet & tells his family that he does not recognize them. He then walks straight out of the house & embarks upon a long quest to find his true home. After many travels & many adventures, he finally encounters the most startling of all sights: "There was what seemed to his swimming eyes a white cloud. No, it was a marble palace. No, it was the White Farmhouse by the river." He has found what he was searching for, & it is the place where his quest began. Now, though, his eyes have been opened by trial & hardship, & the ordinary has become magical.
In these stories, Chesterton makes it his task to marry the domestic with the exotic, to fuse the Self with the Other. Chesterton proposes, as do many authors of the weird, that humanity stumbles through life with a blindfold obscuring the eyes of its soul. Lovecraft, Meyrink, Kafka, & Chesterton would disagree over the nature of that blindfold & the best method for removing it, but they do agree that all worthwhile experience lies beyond that veil. Like the most convincing of weird tale authors, Chesterton sees the journey toward true sight as an intensely personal one. No grand existential schemes or social experiments will do the job. In the end, each brave knight must alone dare to conquer his own backyard for king & country, & all earnest individuals must, one by one, risk rediscovering the ordinary & all the wonders therein.