Arthur Machen: Critical Essays ed. by Antonio Sanna (review)

This eclectic collection of essays on the fiction of Arthur Machen positions itself broadly as an attempt to raise Machen’s profile. Machen, according to the volume editor Antonio Sanna, has been neglected in recent criticism: critical essays have been “relegated mainly to the field of Gothic studies or studies of the occult” or consigned to only one chapter of monographs that treat multiple authors (24). The eclecticism of the volume serves as an answer to this perceived narrowness in Machen studies and is both a strength and a weakness. Arthur Machen: Critical Essays exposes readers to a wide array of approaches to Machen’s fiction, nonfiction, and prose poems published during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, yet its breadth results in uncertainty about the intended audience of the volume—whether it addresses scholars or new potential Machen enthusiasts. Sanna’s introduction to the volume provides a detailed summary of Machen’s literary output, consigning the engagement with current scholarship to a few paragraphs. While a thorough review of the diversity of works that Machen published across a lengthy career, the introduction sometimes gets caught up listing the stories that Machen included in many late-career anthologies.

The volume is organized into three sections: “Human Beings and Their Environments,” “Darwinism and Degeneration,” and “Spirituality.” Some essays ground their argument in the merit of Machen’s writing. Kostas Boyiopoulos’s “Lucian’s Ornaments in Jade : Symbolist Decadence in Arthur Machen’s Prose Poetry” opens with the claim that Machen’s Ornaments in Jade (1924) “can be regarded as the pinnacle of prose poetry in English” (151). Boyiopoulos goes on to hypothesize that the prose poems collected in Ornaments in Jade are the output of the protagonist of Machen’s decadent novel, The Hill of Dreams (1907). This proposition proves interesting, but it is not readily clear what is significant about the idea that one of Machen’s characters can be imagined as the author of another of his works.

Across the volume’s three sections, the most insightful essays are those that foreground their critical approach and remain precise regarding their rationale for discussing Machen. Adrian Tait’s chapter, “‘[A] Mystic, Ineffable Force and Energy’: Arthur Machen and Theories of New Materialism” reads Machen’s The Terror (1917), The Hill of Dreams, and A Fragment of Life (1904) in order to consider how “Machen’s ideas about the reintegration of the spiritual and material worlds” overlap with the agential realism of physicist and philosopher Karen Barad, “a monistic theory of material entanglement” (193). Tait notes, cannily, that Barad’s emphasis on the presence and power of the material world would at first seem to be at odds with Machen’s worldview, which is often described as anti-materialist and mystical. Yet the theories of Machen and Barad end up converging, given that both Machen and Barad depict nature as “infinitely more extensive, heterogenous, and active than any proponent of nineteenth-century science would have accepted” (201). Tait may underestimate the breadth of nineteenth-century scientific approaches here, but the parallels between Barad and Machen are compelling and complement Dennis Denisoff’s recent discussions of Machen in relation to ecodecadence and ecopaganism. In another essay, “Dead Matter: Posthumanism and Stones,” Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Emiliano Aguilar further establish how posthumanism and ecocriticism fit with Machen’s writing, though “Dead Matter” at points conflates stones as sacred fetishes with stones as representing the alterity of the mineral world.

Other theoretical approaches, though invitations to read Machen’s works in a new way, would benefit from additional critical framing. Sanna’s “Heterotopic Spaces in Machen’s Fiction” applies Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to Machen’s stories, but at times the argument struggles to emerge amidst an impulse to catalogue examples of heterotopias in the fiction. Similarly, Francesco Corigliano’s essay on The Terror urges...