Shirley Jackson's taut 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House opens with the words "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." The collective dream visions of the four figures who commit themselves to spending a part of a summer at the titular manse range from fireside banter about their imagined lives as a courtesan or a bullfighter to an image of a blood-drenched bedroom; the reader spends most of her time at the elbow of Eleanor Vance who has spent most of her adult life "caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking."
Eleanor's adolescent experience with a poltergeist who had showered her family's house with stones for three days puts her on the radar of the anthropologist who seeks to scientifically document supernatural presences in the house; at Hill House she finds that she has the ability to make up an entirely new life for herself by weaving together stray images and overheard bits of conversation -- a glimpse of two lions standing guard outside a house she passes in the car she has surreptitiously taken, a mother's explanation to a disinterested waitress about her daughter's demand for a cup full of stars -- and finds herself strangely at home in a place where she finds herself literally as well as figuratively in the grip of unseen and restless forces.
One way to read The Haunting of Hill House is as an allegory for the pleasures and perils of wholly giving one's self over to one's imagination: Eleanor Vance could be an eccentric aunt of Alexandra, the central figure in Audrey Niffenegger's graphic narrative The Night Bookmobile who comes across a Winnebago on a deserted Chicago street in the wee hours of the morning as she walks off her anger following a lovers' spat; Alexandra discovers that the RV is a bookmobile that contains everything that she has ever read from Pat the Bunny and Charlotte's Web to cereal boxes and Gravity's Rainbow (which has text only on the first 57 pages, since that is as far as Alexandra was able to get through Pynchon's novel). At dawn, closing time for The Night Bookmobile, the Librarian ushers Alexandra out of the Winnebago and she returns to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, finding him skeptical about her story of The Night Bookmobile, she asks the reader:
"Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: hours spent in airless classrooms, days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -- trying to read -- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love...It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly."
Alexandra's second encounter with The Night Bookmobile kindles a desire to be a Librarian; told that no positions are available at The Library but that she could become a regular librarian, she goes to library school and rises through the stacks of the Chicago public library system and is eventually named the director of one of its branches on the day of her third encounter with The Night Bookmobile; her desire to spend all her time in that realm leads her to suicide, after which she wakes to discover herself in her favorite dress and in her most comfortable shoes in The Central Reading Room of The Library, where her own Librarian congratulates her on having been hired and where she is handed a copy of Goodnight Moon, the inaugural book in the library of her own patron. Alexandra's initial elation is deflated a bit when she discovers that her own library has been deaccessioned, since "only living people can be Readers."
Alexandra's ambivalence over her new position is counterbalanced by the final frame of the book that shows her leaning comfortably against the doorway frame of the Airstream trailer that houses her patron's collection; in The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor's determination to stay in Hill House's realm despite her compatriots' decision to send her back to her drear domestic life sends her careening down the driveway of the house on a straight shot to a large tree that marks the crash site of the house's first mistress who died before ever reaching the front the door. Jackson delivers the reader from the grip of the narrative into a moment of lyric time with the line "In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?" Both stories seem to suggest that in wholly giving one's self over to the imaginative realm, one loses one's traction in one's waking world that, paradoxically, the very ground of one's dreams, yet The Haunting of Hill House suggests that Eleanor's real downfall comes when she began to believe that her imagination could shift the terms of her everyday world, a prospect that frightens her companions more than the elusive beasts and invisible intruders of the house itself, and which compel them to cast her out of their small circle. As the others go back to the comforts and disappointments of their public and private lives, Eleanor's sharp insights and fully realized sensory experiences continue to haunt even when the book is placed securely back on the shelf -- the kind of afterlife that might in fact be actively sought by most Readers.
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