Vision and Vacancy: "Schalken the Painter" and Le Fanu's Art of Darkness

"He's dreaming now," said Tweedledee; "and what do you think he's dreaming about?"

Alice said, "Nobody can guess that."

"Why about you!" Tweedledee exclaimed. . . . "And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?"

"Where I am now, of course," said Alice.

"Not you!" Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. "You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a thing in his dream!" (Carroll 145)

Another sort of complementary reversal occurs in certain early specimens of Vanitas painting where the trompe l'oeil death-symbolism appears on the back of a conventional portrait, showing the "other" side of mere appearances.19 The device corresponds with those moments of darkly "interior" vision that routinely penetrate Le Fanu's realism. At such moments in Uncle Silas the heroine thinks she has penetrated her guardian's highly mannered surface:

Through that semi-transparent structure I thought I could now and then discern the light or glare of his inner life. But I understood it not.

...Was, then, all his kindness but a phosphoric radiance covering something colder and more awful than the grave? (352-53)

The placement, in this fashion, of what is "hidden" on the surface of one's art includes not only the Vanitas painter's memento mori and Le Fanu's apparitions of Death-in-Life but representations of "vision's" own other side-vanitasm its sense of emptiness, unreality. In a picture known as "Turned-over Canvas," Cornells Gysbrechts (or Gijsbrechts), a contemporary of Schalcken's noted for his Vanitas paintings, presents on its surface the dusky blankness of the interior into which Le Fanu's spectral figures all dissolve at last.220

"Interior," of course, in its application to nineteenth-century fiction, is always equivocal-a metonym-for the world without that is also necessarily a world within, and the novelist's attention to his characters' domestic arrangements not only conveys something about their inner lives but constitutes the medium through which the author's subjectivity communicates with that of his audience. Early in Père Goriot, Balzac makes the point succinctly. Before undertaking a minute account of the contents of his pension-as-world, he asserts the "truth" of his fiction: "it is so true that everyone [might] recognize its elements in his own home, perhaps in his heart."21 What follows is the descent into a wholly material underworld and a reflexive encounter with "dried-up hearts and empty skulls" ("coeurs desséchés," "crânes vides" [848]).

As for vanitas, the void beneath or beyond the plenum, Le Fanu, on a disarmingly trivial occasion in Wylder's Hand, quite off-handedly acknowledges two important sources: "Vanity of vanities, as Mr. Thackeray and King Solomon cry out in turn" (1: 159).

"Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum!"-the benediction (from Ecclesiastes 1:2) to Vanity Fair, like the title itself, draws attention to the repeated glimpses of emptiness that the novel has given us through the interstices of its busy mise en scène. One such glimpse consists in the construction of a mise en abîme as setting for a merely marginal character, Jane Osborne, left desolate in the her saturnine father's house by her brother's death and the marriage of her younger sister: