“…The Eeriness Remains”: Joan Lindsay
They see the walls of the gymnasium fading into an exquisite transparency, the ceiling opening up like a flower into the brilliant sky above Hanging Rock. The shadow of the Rock is flowing, luminous as water, across the shimmering plains and they are at the picnic, sitting on the warm dry grass under the gum trees…
— Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
The last word must go to Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock. Not only because Picnic at Hanging Rock is practically a textbook example of an eerie novel — it includes disappearances, amnesia, a geological anomaly, an intensely atmospheric terrain — but also because Lindsay’s rendition of the eerie has a positivity, a languorous and delirious allure, that is absent or suppressed in so many other eerie texts. Lindsay is the opposite case to M.R. James. Where James, as we saw, always codes the outside as dangerous and deadly, Picnic at Hanging Rock invokes an outside that certainly invokes awe and peril, but which also involves a passage beyond the petty repressions and mean confines of common experience into a heightened atmosphere of oneiric lucidity.
Picnic at Hanging Rock shows that sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition. You could say that, in Picnic at Hanging Rock, nothing happens. Nothing happens, not in the sense that there are no events — although the novel is about an unresolved enigma. No: nothing happens, in the sense that an absence erupts into empirical reality: the novel is about the gap that is opened up and the perturbations it produces.
The disappearance at the heart of the novel happens on a Valentine’s Day picnic at Hanging Rock, in Victoria, Australia. Hanging Rock broods over the novel like one of Oscar Dominguez or Max Ernst’s decalcomania spinal landscapes; it is a geological relic from deep time, a time that preceded the arrival of human beings by many millennia. It can only be seen in fragments, its labyrinthine spaces as intensively treacherous as those of another alien picnic site, Tarkovsky’s Zone. By the end, it seems that certain of the Rock’s terrains — psychic as much as physical spaces — are only navigable by the attaining of a delirium state. This calm delirium is the dominant mood in Peter Weir’s faithful 1975 film adaptation, where time (and narrative) are held in an aching suspension, and a dreamy fatalism dominates.
The picnic is a day-trip organised for the students of Apple-yard College, a private boarding school for girls. The College, an attempt to simulate a small part of Victorian England in conditions that could hardly be more different from Britain, squats in the surrounding landscape like some Magritte non-sequitur. In the contrast between the Rock and the elegantly stifling absurdity of the College’s clothes and rituals, we are made aware of the inherent surrealism of the colonial project:
Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on their solar plexuses, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy wellfed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.
During the course of the picnic, four of the students — Miranda, Edith, Marion and Irma — and the College’s mathematics teacher, Greta McCraw, decide to climb the Rock. The trip up the Rock seems at first to be nothing out of the ordinary — there is idle chatter, gossip, some discussion of the vast age of the Rock. Initially, only a curious statement by Marion breaks with the mood. “Whatever can those people be doing down there like a lot of ants? A surprising number of people are without purpose. Although it’s probable that they are performing some necessary function unknown to themselves.” It is as if Marion is already detached from the world below, as if she has already crossed a threshold. It is after the four see a monolith — “a single outcrop of pock-marked stone, something like a monstrous egg perched above a precipitous drop the plain” — that the atmosphere decisively shifts. All four are immediately overcome by lassitude, and fall into a deep sleep. The focus now moves to Edith’s point of view. She awakes in a panic, demanding to return home. But the others seem now to all have passed over into some altered (trance) state:
‘Miranda,’ Edith said again. ‘I feel perfectly awful! When are we going home?’ Miranda was looking at her so strangely, almost as if she wasn’t seeing her. When Edith repeated the question more loudly, she simply turned her back and began walking away up the rise, the other two following a little way behind. Well, hardly walking — sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were walking on a drawing-room carpet.
Miranda, Marion and Irma slip away, disappearing out of sight behind the monolith. Edith flees down the rock, screaming. By the time she returns to the picnic, “crying and laughing, and with her dress torn to ribbons”, she is unable to give any indication of where she parted company from the other students. The Rock is searched, but neither the three students nor Miss McCraw are found. (A few days later, Edith claims to remember seeing Miss McCraw on the rock, inexplicably stripped down to her underwear.) Initial searches in subsequent days yield nothing. However, a few days later, Irma is discovered at the Rock, her clothes torn and her corset missing. Suffering from amnesia, she is unable to offer any explanation of what happened on the rock. In the rest of the novel, we learn nothing more about what happened. At the end, with the College collapsed because of the scandal associated with the events at Hanging Rock, the disappearances remain unexplained.
Alongside — and I think contributing to — the novel’s feeling of eeriness is its capacity to generate “reality-effects”. Although the novel was entirely fictionalised, it was widely, though mistakenly, believed to be based on a true story. Lindsay invited this reception: she wrote the novel as if it were a factual account, using real locations (including Hanging Rock itself, an actual geological formation). The novel’s trick involved re-telling a classic Faery story — young women abducted into another world — using the conventions of realism. One of these conventions was giving the event a precise date. According to the novel, the three women disappeared on February 14th, 1900. 1900, significantly, is the year which Freud wanted The Interpretation of Dreams dated (this dating is, famously, fictional: Freud’s text was actually published in 1899, but he wanted it to bear a more epochal date). But Picnic at Hanging Rock is not set in our 1900, in which February 14th fell on a Wednesday, not a Saturday.
Above all else, though, the illusion of factuality is produced by the lack of any solution to the mystery. The story about the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios, referred to by Lacan, offers a parable. Zeuxius painted a bunch of grapes so convincing that birds attempted to eat them. Parrhasios, meanwhile, painted a curtain, which Zeuxius asked him to pull aside to reveal what he had painted. The lack of explanation makes Picnic at Hanging Rock into an analogue of Parhassios’ painting. It became a veil, an enigma whose very irresolution produced the illusion that there must be something behind the curtain.
The novel seems to justify the idea that a sense of the eerie is created and sustained simply by withholding information. In the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, this literally happened: the form in which the novel was published was the result of an act of excision. In her original manuscript, Lindsay provided a solution of sorts to the enigma, in a concluding chapter that her publishers encouraged her to remove from the published version of the novel. This “Chapter Eighteen” was published separately, as The Secret of Hanging Rock.
There is no doubt that the original Chapter Eighteen would have somewhat undermined the novel’s “reality-effect”. The excised chapter is marked by a clear change in tone. The suggestiveness that has characterised the earlier parts of the novel — the hints of an outside, of something beyond the ordinary world — gives way to what is by now quite clearly an account of an anomalous experience. The chapter begins at more or less the point that Edith runs away. Miranda, Marion and Irma feel that they are being “pulled from the inside” by the monolith. They fall asleep, and when they awake it is with a heightened, hallucinogenic sensitivity to their surroundings. An older woman appears, in her underclothes — it seems to be Greta McCraw, but she is not named as such in the novel, nor is she recognised by the other characters. When the older woman faints, Miranda loosens her corset. This prompts Marion to suggest that they all “get out of these absurd garments” — so the three students remove their corsets and throw them from the Rock. In what is perhaps the most arresting image in Chapter Eighteen, the corsets do not immediately fall to the ground, but float in mid-air at the side of the Rock. Has time stopped? Certainly, we are beyond clock-time now: perhaps in dream-time. (In her essay “A Commentary on Chapter Eighteen” — included in The Secret of Hanging Rock — Yvonne Rousseau points to a pun — a dreamwork-compression — involved in the image of the corsets hanging in the air, arising from the fact that the alternative name for “corset” is “stay’”) A “hole in space” appears: “About the size of a fully rounded summer moon, coming and going. She saw it as painters and sculptors saw a hole, as a thing in itself, giving shape and significance to other shapes. As a presence, not an absence …” After this hole fades, they see a snake crawl into a small hole. The older woman says that she will follow it; somehow, she transforms into a crab and passes into the tiny space. After a signal, Marion follows (there is no mention of any animal-becoming here, nor any account of how she is able to fit her body into the hole). When it is Miranda’s turn to cross over, a frightened Irma begs her not to go, but Miranda does not understand her fear and reluctance, and she too passes into the hole. Irma is left on her own, waiting. After an indeterminate period of time, a boulder rolls over the hole. The final image in the chapter is of Irma — presumably now aware that she will not be able to make the crossing — desperately tearing at the boulder.
The published version of the novel — the one without Chapter Eighteen — not only leaves the enigma without solution; it also leaves open the question of the novel’s genre (does it belong to literary realism? To murder-mystery? To fantasy? To science fiction?). The inclusion of Chapter Eighteen would not have settled the question of genre, but it would have eliminated certain possibilities. It would not now seem possible to, say, read the novel as a murder-mystery. But Chapter Eighteen produces as many enigmas as it solves. What is the status of the experiences on the Rock? Are they to be taken literally, such that, for example, Greta McCraw actually turns into a crab? Are they to be understood as a consequence of some state of intoxication? (If this is the case, then the events could still be recuperated for a realist reading of sorts.) The suggestion that the women have passed through a gateway to the outside invites us to read Picnic at Hanging Rock as a weird tale, and the inclusion of Chapter Eighteen pushes the novel into some space between the weird and the eerie. What is certain is that Chapter Eighteen does not offer any simple kind of solution to the puzzles the novel poses. As Yvonne Rousseau put it, “Joan Lindsay’s original intention is finally disclosed — but her intention was not to dissolve the mystery. The Picnic geography is clarified, but the eeriness remains.”
The eeriness is partly a question of the affective atmosphere that hangs over the experiences on the Rock. Justin Barton has called this atmosphere “solar trance”, and it is manifested in a kind of positive fatalism. Initially, this fatalism registers as a seeming lack (there is nothing where there should be something). As they fall under the thrall of the Rock, the characters seem to be denuded of their passions. Yet these passions, which very much include fear, are attachments to the everyday world. It is Irma’s fear, her inability to let go of these everyday attachments (Lindsay’s final description of Irma refers to her skill at embroidery), which ultimately prevents her from making the crossing. She is unable to see through what was promised in the act of the casting aside of the corsets. Marion and Miranda, however, are fully prepared to take the step into the unknown. They are possessed by the eerie calm that settles whenever familiar passions can be overcome. They have disappeared, and their disappearances will leave haunting gaps, eerie intimations of the outside.