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

Schalken's vision in the church at Rotterdam has turned a place of death into a place of sex that serves at last as the subject matter for his, and Le Fanu's, art. When vision gives way to vacancy he finds himself alone with a coffin representing the original object of his journey, the dead father. But the vision, or rather the composite "impression which it wrought upon his fancy," has been preserved in a work of art now valuable as an illustration of those "peculiarities" that have made Schalken's work "sought after" (46).

The historical Schalcken made his reputation as a genre painter, turning his talent, late in his career, to religious subjects in order to satisfy his patron, Johann Wilhelm, Elector of Hanover Qansen 29). Le Fanu's Schalken is introduced as a failed religious artist whose curse on his efforts seems to conjure up from the darkness (without and within) the profane figure that will inspire his later work but will go unrepresented in it. At first Vanderhausen appears to him as faceless, his origin misrepresented and, consequently, like the source of his wealth and power, unknown. At their next meeting he shows his terrible face and reduces Schalken to the role of witness to the document granting him possession of the artist's first and only love. At this moment of impotence, "the stimulus of love" in Schalken yields to "that of ambition" (40).

In return for the loss of his beloved to an absent, or spectral, "father," Schalken has received the gifts of ambition and vision, credentials for the hero of a Kunstlerroman. His Artist's Progress has been accompanied by no fewer than three paternal figures, two of whom act their part within distinctly human limitations. For his sordid treatment of Rose, Douw suffers loneliness and remorse, but the guilt of the transaction, we are told, must be mitigated by a consideration of the time and place:

Marriages were then and there matters of traffic and calculation; and it would have appeared as absurd in the eyes of a guardian to make mutual attraction an essential element in a contract of the sort, as it would have been to draw up his bonds and receipts in the language of romance. (37)

As for Schalken's actual father, he figures in the action only as a coffin at the site of an apparition that remains with the artist to "his dying day" (46). Of the three "fathers," it is the uncanny Vanderhausen alone who occupies a place in Schalken's traumatic construction of the primal scene.

It will surprise no one to find an Oedipal triangle operating as the nuclear image in a fable of an artist's development. But two famous examples of the genre anticipate "Schalken" in sufficient detail to suggest (on internal evidence alone) a possible influence and to indicate a line of succession for fictive treatments of the psychology (and epistemology) of aesthetic representation. They are Hoffmann's "The Sand-Man" (1816-17) and Balzac's "Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu" [1831]).

Like "Schalken," "The Sand-Man" divides the father into a fallibly human and a lethal, demonic figure. The story opens with a letter in which Nathanael, aspiring poet, explains how a recent incident has cut him off from normal relations and filled him with dark forebodings. The incident was a visit from a peddler of weather- and eyeglasses (visions) that triggered a childhood memory of the events leading to the death of his father. In the letter (addressed to his prospective brother-in-law but misdirected to his fiancée, Clara), Nathanael relates how nocturnal visits from the hideous Coppelius estranged his father from his family, involving him in lurid (alchemical?) experiments during which his identity horribly merged with that of his evil collaborator: "Good God! as my father bent down over the fire how different he looked! His gentle features seemed to be drawn up by some dreadful convulsive pain into an ugly, repulsive Satanic mask. He looked like Coppelius" (188). (Hoffmann's own illustration for this scene [facing 186] shows the child Nathanael spying on the nocturnal collaboration in which his father assumes a submissive attitude toward the conspicuously phallic Coppelius.)