October 2013 Issue

The Black SpiderJeremias GotthelfNew York Review Books, 2013A noted advantage books in translation have over books in a reader’s native language is that they can be made perpetually fresh. We can fit ourselves a Dante or Montaigne for each new generation, but Dryden and Defoe must be endured in the original. Knowing this, we’d expect a work like Jeremias Gotthelf’s 1842 shocker, The Black Spider, told in the provincial German dialect of the Swiss canton of Bern, to feel contemporary in modern English, especially in the hands of so smooth and lucid a translator as Susan Bernofsky. What’s surprising about The Black Spider, however, is the contemporary feel not only of the language, but of the narrative itself: a chiller plotted uncannily like a pop horror flick and filled with proto-feminists, class struggle, deep historical memory, and edge-of-your-seat action.Alternatively, as it happens, the work could be read as utterly alien to contemporary consciousness, not to mention conscience, but let’s luxuriate in some creative misreading—where the pleasure of the book lies—and hold off our necessary cold plunge into Gotthelf’s darker purpose.Our story opens in mid-nineteenth-century Switzerland, in a narrow valley flanked by mountains and filled with birdsong. Halfway down the slope sits a “stately and gleaming” farmhouse bustling with preparations for a baptism. Inside, a lovely woman sets a long table:

Piled high on the plates were appetizing little cakes, the yeast cakes called Habküchlein, and Eirküchlein or egg cakes. Warm, thick cream already filled the pretty flowered crockery pitcher that stood ready on the stove, and coffee boiled in a three-legged gleaming pot with a yellow lid.

As guests arrive one by one, the child’s grandparents and parents, the residents of this fine house, attempt to ply them with delicious food. But so as not to make themselves a burden, those guests politely, even stridently refuse the food. The grandparents find they have to insist, even make a show of taking their guests’ refusals personally, before they’re taken up on the offer and plate after plate is consumed.This can be read, of course, as wonderful satire on the kind of society that wants to be seen as more virtuous than it is (“Oh no, I couldn’t, well, okay, gulp…”). A contemporary horror movie could easily begin like The Black Spider: pan of the perfect little town, tea-partygoers refusing cake politely, obnoxiously, before digging in. Then the awful thing bursts out of the cupboard.And so Gotthelf’s guests tuck in and during a break from dinner Grandfather is persuaded to tell the true story of what happened in Sumiswald so many years ago, the horror that descended on the townfolk that seems so far away on a feast day like this, but that might reappear at any moment, with the sudden brandishing of a knife.In the era of the Crusades, the good people of Sumiswald were bound to their lord, a cruel ex-marauder named Hans von Stoffeln of Swabia, companioned by knights who “delighted in making the whip crack,” in a castle built upon a “wild, desolate hill,” above the town. It was the men of Sumiswald, in fact, who built it, compelled on penalty of death to fit stone to stone, while von Stoffeln took “pleasure in the poor men’s sweat and fear.” Once his sinister fortress is compete, von Stoffeln gathers those same weary townspeople about him and puts to them an additional demand: He wants the walk to his castle lined with beech trees, trees transplanted full-grown and whole from the top of Münnenberg. They have thirty days to carry-out this impossible task and “if within a month the hundred beeches do onto stand in their places,” von Stoffeln warns them, “I shall have you whipped until not a trace of you remains and your women and babes shall be thrown to the dogs.”Once they’re safely free of the castle, the men “sat down and wept.” The task could never be achieved in the allotted time, and even if it could, they’d have no time to till their soil. They will be tortured or they will starve.Cue the Danny Elfman music, for in their midst appears “a tall spindly huntsman, dressed in green from top to toe.” His cap is decorated with a red feather, his face and beard are red, his chin is pointy. He has heard their lamentations and, as it happens, he owns a team of horses “the like of which was not to be found in all the land” which could haul those beech trees easily. All he asks in return is … an unbaptized child. “Like a lightning bolt those words shot through the men,” and they beg for more reasonable terms. The green man laughs. He’d made his offer.The men relate the details of this meeting to their wives, who howl and lament. But after days of work, the trees cannot be hauled down. When the whole village finds itself in the same clearing, sobbing over their bread and cheese, quaking over von Stoffeln and the green man, Christine, wife of Hornbachbaur, berates them for their cowardice: “how she scoffed then, calling these fears weak imaginings, and these men weak as women in childbed.”Is Christine deliberately, righteously being drawn here as a model figure—a woman admirably, rightly stronger than the men around her? (“She was not the sort of woman who is content to stay at home, quietly going about her duties with no other concern than household and children.”) Just as we learn to admire Christine and feel nothing but contempt for the men around her, the green man appears once more; this time his offer is final. “In their terror, the men scattered, flying up the slope like chaff in a whirlwind.” Christine remains. He once again demands an unbaptized child, but she is crafty:

Once the green man had kept his promise and the beeches were planted, they wouldn’t have to give him anything at all, neither a child nor anything else; they would have masses ready to shield and protect them and enjoy a hearty laugh at the green man’s expense.

He kisses her cheek. The deal is done.And the beeches go up, von Stofflen is placated, and farm work recommences. Newborn children are rushed to the priest who baptizes them with speed. But all is not well. During one baptism, Christine “felt as if a glowing iron had suddenly been pressed to the spot where she had received the green man’s kiss.” Something is happening to her. (Cue sudden wind in the trees). “The pain continued to sharpen, and the black dot grew larger and blacker, isolated dark streaks radiated from it.” Everything she eats tastes of fire and now the townspeople fear her, for on her cheek, “the black spot swelled stretching distinct legs out from its center and sprouting little hairs: shiny points and stripes appeared on its back, the bump became a head, and from it flashed glinting, venomous glances, as if from two eyes.”This is Charles Hallahan in The Thing, John Hurt in Alien, Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, or, if you prefer, Michael Rooker in Slither. The terrible thing is about to happen, and when it does, it’s every bit as creepy and creepy in the same way as you’d find in a modern book or film. The fearful flee through the forest and are pursued, whole houses are wiped out in a minute by a hell-sent plague of spiders. The scenes of carnage are genuinely horrific: charred, faceless corpses in piles, or frozen into place where they stood. Poe’s and Hawthorne’s stomachs seem weak when measured against Jeremias Gotthelf’s.But the real horror here may not be of the kind to which we’re accustomed. Because it so perfectly, proleptically mimics a contemporary creature feature, we’re slow to identify The Black Spider as a false cognate: a sternly religious tract dressed up as entertainment. Its aim is to frighten us into faith.This becomes apparent when, after the first flush of horror, the story jumps ahead two hundred years to the same house in the same town. Once more, the town’s morals have disintegrated and it is up to an upstanding young man named Christen—shades of Pilgrim’s Progress—to set them right:

… from one generation to generation sons were as pious and honorable as their fathers, but just as the pear tree that is best nourished and watered and bears the most fruit can be struck by the worm that gnaws at its rind, making it wither and die, so it can happen that where the flood of God’s blessings flows most richly over men, the worm can creep its way in, causing men to puff themselves up and grow blind, seeing only God’s blessings and forgetting God, letting the riches they enjoy distract them from their provider, becoming like the Israelites who received God’s succor and then forgot Him, blinded by golden calves.

The voice that rolls and envelops us grows a bit loud for the room somewhere around that “blind.” And then before we can breathe we’re caught up in a harangue, with a touch of anti-Semitism thrown in to sour the pot. Once we begin to search out the prose for this kind of proselytizing, we find it everywhere.Jeremias Gotthelf, pen name of Albert Bitzius, was a deeply religious man, and his books, though artful and entertaining (and, in the case of The Black Spider, genuinely terrifying) were as much religious propaganda as Left Behind is today. Knowing this, the description of Grandfather’s house, for example, at the beginning of the story, becomes something out of Sunday school. The house is, we are told, a clean one, so clean that we can safely conclude it is not merely cleaned on Sunday: “like a family honor [that cleanliness] must be upheld day after day, for a single unguarded moment can besmirch it for generations with stains as indelible as bloodstains, which are impervious to whitewash.” What we might have read as a mild social satire—all of the guests refusing the good food they were offered—reveals itself as an exemplary illustration of virtue, a scared-stiff avoidance of the deadly sin of greed.Christine’s dirty dealings, in this context, seem less the bold self-assertions of a feminist icon and more, quite literally, those of a Jezebel and Baal. The good fortune of the peasants at the story’s end is due only to their meekness (they are more slavish to their god than their ancestors ever were to von Stoffeln) and the only hero we have to speak of, Christen, is more of a paragon than a person. The green man, like Milton’s devils, is a throwback to an old mythology—he’s Loki or Thor (thunderclaps accompany his arrival, rainstorms his displeasure).This is a Manichean world, and that Gotthelf should choose to plant his dark mysteries in such a world is decidedly more a question of temperament than epoch. Take a near-exact contemporary like Hawthorne: there is a reason none of his own creepy tales have been adapted into successful horror films; they’re too complex. Shakespeare’s Tempest is the literary touchstone for “The Birthmark,” and the dark secret of Salem in “Young Goodman Brown” is that fraternizing with evil exacts earthly punishments only for those whose consciences are vulnerable to them. Elsewhere sin goes undisciplined, unless of course, sin itself is no more than an illusion, inborn and masterless.If The Black Spider feels eerily contemporary, that is because our own horror stories don’t have much complexity to communicate either. Their values are populist instead of religious—the most likeable teenager survives the ghoul—but they’re still purification rituals. Echoing Northrop Frye’s definition of comedy, these stories describe a world out of joint, and the emotional catharsis of the action consists of the removal of “obstructing characters” so that a new society may be “crystalized.”In the case of The Black Spider, those characters are Christine and von Stoffeln, struck down for their pride. The rest of the village is collateral damage. Gotthelf, like the God of Noah, spares not one living thing:

When the sun rose the peasants saw that the stables where their livestock had fallen swarmed with innumerable black spiders … as soon as a crow set foot in a meadow, the ground began to teem with life: black, long-legged spiders sprouted from the earth, horrific Alpine flowers that crept up the animals’ legs, and dreadful cries of anguish resounded from mountain to valley.

In the architecture of Northern Europe, a green man is a decorative gargoyle carved to resemble a human face emerging from the confluence of leaves or flowers (a kind of stonework Arcimboldo). Note how the spiders above emerge from the earth like flowers. The things of this world are dark things, ennobled only in their aspirations to the world above, as “all the world’s vegetation burgeons heavenward … providing a symbol, renewed each year, of human destiny.”But just as Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it, so too is Gotthelf, whose world of subcutaneous arachnids and evil knights and laughing daemons is a hundred times more colorful than that of the pious weaklings acting coy about crumb-cake at a baptism.There is a long, secret tradition of delighting your audience with the bad stuff in order to preach the good news. The genre may have reached its apogee with Parson Weems’ The Drunkard's Looking Glass: Reflecting a Faithful Likeness of the Drunkard, in Sundry very Interesting Attitudes: with Lively Representations of the Many Strange Capers which He Cuts at Different Stages of his Disease … Today, even as the heroes of our horror celebrate the indomitability of the human spirit rather than the immortality of the human soul, we have evolved no further in inducing fear. Indeed, Gotthelf is such a master of that evocation because of his faith: he’s making a case, and in his mind every reader who frantically scrambles to re-light the bedside candle will presently fall to his knees at the side of that bed.Contemporary readers, on the other hand, will not shut out the light until the last page of The Black Spider has been breathlessly turned. And he may not shut out the light for a good while after.____John Cotter is a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly. His criticism has appeared in The Quarterly Conversation, Sculpture, and Bookforum. Under the Small Lights, his first novel, is available from Miami University Press.