Coming to writing, putting the first words of a sentence onto the blank page, is like breaking ground and starting a new path: everything proceeds from this point and will course towards an end. As readers, the same is true for coming to a book. We usually start with page-one don’t we? But for a moment, imagine starting somewhere else, or without a path. Imagine choosing a random place in the narrative and literally dropping yourself into it without knowing ‘what has happened’ in the previous pages or without any means of understanding what comes next. Disorientation.
Ambrose Bierce’s An Inhabitant of Carcosa is a disorienting story but it can also serve as a metaphor for writing and reading. In the span of a just a few pages he tells the story of a person lost in a bleak landscape and manages to imbue the reader with a distinct sense of bewilderment. It is as if the first few pages have been cut-off and the important introductory pages have gone missing. The effect is like being caught in the middle of the story instead of the beginning, and it draws attention to how we, as readers, rely on a certain amount of guidance while suspending our disbelief in the bounds of a story.
Our narrator is lost. He finds himself in an unfamiliar place and is struggling to find his way back home to the city of Carcosa. Wandering around this desert(ed) landscape, he can’t find anyone to help or any reference to lead him in the right direction. What he does find are constant references to decay: dry grass, bare branches, and weather-worn stones. The scene sets an ambient sense of dread, ‘a hint of evil, an intimation of doom’ where everything is ‘ruined.’ While he feels detached and lost in this space, we find out later that, he is in fact, strangely connected to it.
Ruins. Bleached-white bone and the remains of old buildings, like Bierce’s ‘somber-colored rocks’ and ‘tall overgrowth of sere grass,’ are evocative clues to previous civilizations and lives lived. For archaeologists, these cultural fragments are tools to reconstruct and learn about the past. And so while ruins are often used to establish a link with the past, they are full of possibility as well. After all, ruins never disappear. They are always on the verge of disappearing. Being caught in this state of transition, ruins are more than questions waiting for answers. While ruins seem to provide direct access to the past they still reside inextricably within the present and in relation to here-now. Drawing a line between the present and the past is only the beginning. Now, we must ask ourselves, what is to be done with it?
“How came I hither?” The narrator remembers being ill and suffering from a fever. His family was by his side but he was restless and asked for air. Now, suddenly awake, he can only partially interact with the landscape; he tries speaking to a decayed hunter-spirit that rises out of the ground; he hides from a mysterious lynx that approaches then disappears behind a rock; he looks up to guide himself with constellations in the afternoon sky. Stopping for a moment to rest by a tree, he notices how the tree has grown through the grave and the roots have slowly consumed the gravestone. The narrator laments the grave that has been lost, focusing particularly on how the edges of the stone have been worn by time and weather. It is another decaying remnant of the landscape that is both eroding and held firmly to the ground. But this marker is so much more: the narrator reads his name carved in the stone and suddenly finds himself.
This scene upends the notion that gravestones are fixed indexes. Disturbed by the roots, this gravestone no longer marks a burial place by stating a name, birth, and death. Unhinged from the coffin buried beneath, the gravestone has been swallowed but not completely digested by the roots. The gravestone is in a process of slowly being overgrown but also held firmly in place at the same time. This situation signals a form of burial that is locatable yet has become unresolved, a space where people and things are located but not bound to. Our narrator, who wanders unattached to his past, the present, or a future, represents this sort of troubled position between presence and absence: he wanders through Carcosa but is absent from his grave.
It may not come as any surprise when we read that our narrator is a ghost haunting the ruins of the ancient city of Carcosa, or that his story has been recounted through a spiritual medium. Suddenly it becomes clear how Bierce’s narrator practices a kind of haunting movement, whereby the ghost finds itself tied to a location but uniquely absent from it, placed yet on the border of perception. This is where I think Bierce’s narrative sets itself apart from other ghost stories; it explores a notion of a haunted space and movement, not haunted places and locations. More than a haunting narrative, An Inhabitant of Carcosa becomes a metaphor for writing, and possibly, if we can overcome the anxiety of disorientation, a way of being.
