My ex once told me I have a ‘troubled relationship with the concept of audience.’ She was right, of course, I love to write but hate the sensation of being watched, and being a writer now in a professional capacity requires constant surveillance from your audience, other writers, publishing professionals. I’m the next step in four generations of paranoiacs and I hate it. So when I come across a story that is, in part, about weaponized audience reactions, I always really dig it.
‘The Man In The Bottle’ is a deceptively simple story: we are at a rich people’s masquerade party, the host’s wife is rumored to be cheating on him, and said host is planning a grand spectacle. You can kind of guess where this is going just based on that. Man learns he’s been cheated on, man puts wife’s lover in bottle, wife’s lover suffocates inside bottle. It would be a straightforward horror story if not for the rest of it.
One of the elements of the weird as a genre I keep picking out is the deliberate destabilizing of identity. Here, it’s not an unnamed narrator keeping the reader on their toes, it’s the deliberate muddling of personal identity and costume within the masquerade setting. The story begins “Melanchthon was dancing with the Bat….(71)”, and while we learn who the Bat is in relation to other characters, we never do learn her real name, nor do we learn Melanchthon’s. (Sidebar: Upon googling Melanchthon was a 16th century protestant theologian, which sounds like a shitty party costume but I did go to a ‘500 year anniversary of the 94 thesis’ halloween party once so I can’t really say that.)
In fact, the only names we learn are the party’s host, Prince Mohammed Darasche-Koh, and the man his wife is sleeping with, Count De Faast, who’s first name is Miguel, though it’s never used. And even Count De Faast is used interchangeably with his costume.
A brief aside: yeah, it’s pretty chock full of Orientalism. You got the scheming Persian prince and the audience assuming the play is a story from Arabian nights and an elephant and an evil magic trick. It was written in 1912. It’s really on the lower end of vintage racism, in a way that feels almost quaint. But this is me acknowledging it.
Another element of the Weird is that play with story structure I mentioned when discussing Nunth, in that the story doesn’t start with the action, it wanders around the strange world it’s created until it feels like getting there.
And the strangeness of the party both adds to the ‘weird’ of it all, and helps create the perfect environment for Darasche-Koh’s revenge. Early in the story “A rough figure representing a huge knot dashed by them in wild flight to escape a Hellenic warrior in shimmering armor (71), when the play is announced ‘the maskers streamed toward him– harlequins, cannibals, an ibis, and some Chinese, Don Quixotes, Columbines, bayaderes and dominos of all colors (72), a man in a red executioner’s costume distributes the programs (which, perhaps, should clue some people in), a woman dressed as a post reign of terror French aristocrat (figuring this out took some googling, this is a great story for getting distracted while looking up references) tells our central witness (because you can hardly call him a protagonist, he doesn’t do anything) ‘the marionettes will be very gruesome….(72).”
In such an unreal atmosphere, you can almost not blame the audience for not understanding what they’re seeing. And they don’t. They laugh and clap. Even when the scene starts to turn ugly, “The spectators had formed themselves into two camps. The one was speechless under the spell of this vampiric, enigmatic marionette play that seemed to exhale an atmosphere of poisoned merriment; the other group, not sensitive enough to appreciate such a scene, laughed immoderately at the comical capering of the man in the bottle (73).”
Even the audience members who understand something is Up with this performance are incapable of seeing the truth of it underneath the veneer of performance. Even as “He pounded the walla of the bottle as though he would smash them; and to all appearances he was screaming at the top of his voice, although not the slightest sound penetrated the thick glass (73).” It is no coincidence De Faast is dressed as Pierrot, a lovelorn clown. And by the time he’s imprisoned in the bottle, that identity has subsumed his own.
In his final moments “Laughter and applause rose to a tumult. Pierrot had crouched on the bottom of the bottle, his fingers clutching his throat. Then he opened his mouth wide and pointed in wild frenzy to his chest and then to the one sitting above. He folded his hands in supplication, as though he was begging something from the audience (73).” And what does the audience do? They laugh and applaud, making jokes at his expense. They have ceased to see him as De Faast the man, and see him only as the performer.
The performance itself dehumanizes De Faast, renders him a spectacle in the fact of people, who once they discovered the bound and gagged wife of the Prince, suddenly realize what just happened. And then they do it’s still ‘Peirrot (74)!’ they call out in ‘nameless horror (74), not count De Faast. He doesn’t get to be Count De Faast again until ‘the bottle was splintered into bits. And within lay, suffocated, the corpse of Count De Faast, his fingers clawing at his breast (74).” His identity is only returned to him in death, and by then, it’s too late.
It’s hard not to read a lesson into any horror story about art, because it’s artists ourselves who make them. And this one seems to warn ‘do not let yourself become the costume. Do not let the audience conflate you with a lifeless puppet there for your entertainment. Because the minute they do, they’ll watch you die and laugh at your for it.’
Or maybe I’m just a paranoiac who has a troubled relationship with audience. Either way: the your mistress’s husband tells you to get into an enclosed area, don’t do it. Even if refusing will ruin a party. That one, at least, is common sense.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 