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Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature
First published in 1902, "Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature" is an analysis of the nature of literature by Welsh author Arthur Machen. Within it, Machen concludes that to be 'true' literature, the work must contain or convey a sense of 'ecstasy'. This fascinating volume will appeal to both writers and readers with an interest in Machen's seminal work, and it would make for a worthy addition to collections of allied literature. Arthur Machen (1863 - 1947) was a Welsh author and renowned mystic during the 1890s and early 20th century who garnered literary acclaim for his contributions to the supernatural, horror, and fantasy fiction genres. His seminal novella "The Great God Pan" (1890) has become a classic of horror fiction, with Stephen King describing it as one of the best horror stories ever written in the English language. Other notable fans of his gruesome tales include William Butler Yeats and Arthur Conan Doyle; and his work has been compared to that of Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.
130 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1902
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About the author
Arthur Machen
1,104 books1,001 followersArthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London.
In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.
Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.
Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales, in 1895. The novel and the stories within it were eventually to be regarded as among Machen's best works. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde later that year, Machen's association with works of decadent horror made it difficult for him to find a publisher for new works. Thus, though he would write some of his greatest works over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A Fragment of Life, the story The White People, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.
At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London.
In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.
Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.
Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales, in 1895. The novel and the stories within it were eventually to be regarded as among Machen's best works. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde later that year, Machen's association with works of decadent horror made it difficult for him to find a publisher for new works. Thus, though he would write some of his greatest works over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A Fragment of Life, the story The White People, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 18, 2021
Of course, I am a huge fan of Machen's ethereal, even oneiric fiction. His non-fiction, at least in the case of his exploration of Art versus Artifice, Hieroglyphics; A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature shows a great level of precision in its arguments, even as the narrator confesses that the largely-inexplicable, but precisely knowable concept of "ecstasy," is difficult to pin down because of the slipperiness of language, or, rather, the slipperiness of our use of the language in trying to describe and categorize that which is nearly indescribable and far from easily categorizable. Still, at least a part of Machen's early career was taken in cataloging (works of the occult, no less), so he brings a level of exactitude to the argument eventually, after circling around the subject, like a whirlpool spinning his interlocutors around in a dizzying series of arguments before pushing them down into the depths of his logic.
This doesn't mean that he is entirely successful. At least not in the end. His assertion that all ecstatic works are "Catholic" is less than convincing, perhaps because I, as a reader, see the capital "C" and assume that he is talking about the institutional church of the same name, rather than the concept of universalism, which might have been a better word choice around which to center his final argument. Yes, I know he didn't mean The Catholic Church, but using the term "Catholic" with that attention-grabbing "C" and all it implies, distracts from what could have been a more elegant argument.
Still, I find it hard to argue with his assertion that: A gold nugget may be as pure and fine as you like, but it is not a sovereign; it lacks the stamp; and it is the business of art to give its stamp and imprint to the matter of life.
And: . . . you must never tell me that a book is fine art because it made you, or somebody else, cry; your tears are, emphatically, not evidence in the court of Fine Literature.
This doesn't make Machen a high-falutin' snob. Far from it. He admits to the enjoyment he takes in reading laugh-out-loud books and enjoying a well-spun yarn, but he does not yield in his argument that Fine Literature is fundamentally different than most "popular" books. I use the word "most," because Machen admits that even within Fine Literature, there are matters of degree. He also says that many of these more popular works might have elements of Fine Literature, but without the ecstasy that he struggles so long to explain (and which I will not explain here), they cannot cross that line. He uses Austen, Dickens, Quixote, Collins, and Rabelais as examples to form his arguments, and with great effect. Now I need to read Rabelais!
Two interesting sub-theses stuck out to me. The first, about poetry, states:
The most perfect form of literature is, no doubt, lyrical poetry which is, one might say, almost pure Idea, art with scarcely an alloy of artifice, expressed in magic words, in the voice of music.
He goes on to argue that lyrical poetry, rather than being artifice, as he has defined it, is highly natural. This seems to contradict his earlier arguments that artifice is largely a manner of structure that lacks true spiritual inspiration. Poetry, however, he claims, is a different matter. Think of children out playing - if they are by themselves, they quite naturally form "poetry" of a sort as they learn that words have cadence, that rhymes can be pleasing, etc. Because these things happen at a very young age, Machen seems to see this kind of structure as emerging from the very soul of innocence, whereas the artificial construction of popular stories, novels, etc., stray from this innocence into a form of connivance.
The second argument I find extremely intriguing is how Machen ties in drinking in literature with Dionysian worship, of a sort, man becoming divine through wine. He points out that if we miss this, we might be missing the entire point of some Fine Literature. This, to me, is a very interesting take on the Mysteries, that sacramental truths can be revealed in the drunken-ness of the characters of Fine Literature. Perhaps he sees this as akin to returning to child-like innocence and, thus, the shedding of the shackles of "civilization"?
If so, I'll accept his "catholic" views, so long as they remain with a lower case "c". Case matters.
This doesn't mean that he is entirely successful. At least not in the end. His assertion that all ecstatic works are "Catholic" is less than convincing, perhaps because I, as a reader, see the capital "C" and assume that he is talking about the institutional church of the same name, rather than the concept of universalism, which might have been a better word choice around which to center his final argument. Yes, I know he didn't mean The Catholic Church, but using the term "Catholic" with that attention-grabbing "C" and all it implies, distracts from what could have been a more elegant argument.
Still, I find it hard to argue with his assertion that: A gold nugget may be as pure and fine as you like, but it is not a sovereign; it lacks the stamp; and it is the business of art to give its stamp and imprint to the matter of life.
And: . . . you must never tell me that a book is fine art because it made you, or somebody else, cry; your tears are, emphatically, not evidence in the court of Fine Literature.
This doesn't make Machen a high-falutin' snob. Far from it. He admits to the enjoyment he takes in reading laugh-out-loud books and enjoying a well-spun yarn, but he does not yield in his argument that Fine Literature is fundamentally different than most "popular" books. I use the word "most," because Machen admits that even within Fine Literature, there are matters of degree. He also says that many of these more popular works might have elements of Fine Literature, but without the ecstasy that he struggles so long to explain (and which I will not explain here), they cannot cross that line. He uses Austen, Dickens, Quixote, Collins, and Rabelais as examples to form his arguments, and with great effect. Now I need to read Rabelais!
Two interesting sub-theses stuck out to me. The first, about poetry, states:
The most perfect form of literature is, no doubt, lyrical poetry which is, one might say, almost pure Idea, art with scarcely an alloy of artifice, expressed in magic words, in the voice of music.
He goes on to argue that lyrical poetry, rather than being artifice, as he has defined it, is highly natural. This seems to contradict his earlier arguments that artifice is largely a manner of structure that lacks true spiritual inspiration. Poetry, however, he claims, is a different matter. Think of children out playing - if they are by themselves, they quite naturally form "poetry" of a sort as they learn that words have cadence, that rhymes can be pleasing, etc. Because these things happen at a very young age, Machen seems to see this kind of structure as emerging from the very soul of innocence, whereas the artificial construction of popular stories, novels, etc., stray from this innocence into a form of connivance.
The second argument I find extremely intriguing is how Machen ties in drinking in literature with Dionysian worship, of a sort, man becoming divine through wine. He points out that if we miss this, we might be missing the entire point of some Fine Literature. This, to me, is a very interesting take on the Mysteries, that sacramental truths can be revealed in the drunken-ness of the characters of Fine Literature. Perhaps he sees this as akin to returning to child-like innocence and, thus, the shedding of the shackles of "civilization"?
If so, I'll accept his "catholic" views, so long as they remain with a lower case "c". Case matters.
June 20, 2017
Fascinating mystical and artistic creed and a good-natured marvel of circumlocution. Practically everything Machen wrote in the 1890s had the touch of genius, and this even applies to his non-fiction, though this is actually presented as a fictional account from Machen's familiar of imagination.
Here Machen vaguely details how he separates high literature from mere reading material, and whilst such an essay may sound haughty and pretentious, it makes more sense when you realise he isn't making a critical separation based on quality, but is espousing his hearty belief that art should exist to portray those unknown spheres of the infinite and ourselves.
I didn't agree with all of Machen's conclusions, but such rambling rants as these were a big influence in shaping my own views on art, and it remains a criminally underlooked book. Buy this if you loved Machen's classic dark fiction of that decade (The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors, The White People and The Hill of Dreams), but perhaps weren't able to articulate why you felt their beckoning mysteries so deeply.
Here Machen vaguely details how he separates high literature from mere reading material, and whilst such an essay may sound haughty and pretentious, it makes more sense when you realise he isn't making a critical separation based on quality, but is espousing his hearty belief that art should exist to portray those unknown spheres of the infinite and ourselves.
I didn't agree with all of Machen's conclusions, but such rambling rants as these were a big influence in shaping my own views on art, and it remains a criminally underlooked book. Buy this if you loved Machen's classic dark fiction of that decade (The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors, The White People and The Hill of Dreams), but perhaps weren't able to articulate why you felt their beckoning mysteries so deeply.
April 12, 2018
What this, Machen’s (Daimon’s) articulation of his views of Art and its purpose, brings to mind, more than anything else, are Mircea Eliade’s comments on literature as one of few ways in which modern man can obtain an exit from profane time, can experience the Sacred. I know not if Eliade read Machen, let alone this work in particular, but I suspect that he would be more than a little sympathetic to it.
It is, by the way, bound to be misunderstood in spite of its honest attempt to avoid such misunderstandings and to, as clearly as is possible, state his purpose. Going by one other review here, one would think that, for Machen, real literature needs be overtly fantastical as well as dogmatically Catholic. Neither is true – in fact, his arguments are to the contrary. Writer can evoke the Numinous without employing any „fantastical“ device (Machen provides examples of this). Likewise, this text argues, quite heartily, against didactic in literature. If one understands not what is really meant when, eventually, Art is described as the "expression of the dogmas of the Church", then one has missed the point of all that has preceded that statement and the entirety of this text is wasted on him or her.
(and FFS guys: "No literal compliance with Christianity is needed, no, nor even an acquaintance with the doctrines of Christianity. The Greeks, celebrating the festivals of Dionysus, Cervantes recounting the fooleries of Don Quixote, Dickens measuring Mr Pickwick's glasses of cold punch, Rabelais with his thirsty Pantagruel were all sufficiently Catholic from our point of view, and the cultus of Aphrodite is merely a symbol misunderstood and possibly corrupted, and if you can describe an initiatory dance of savages in the proper manner, I shall call you a good Catholic.")
It is, by the way, bound to be misunderstood in spite of its honest attempt to avoid such misunderstandings and to, as clearly as is possible, state his purpose. Going by one other review here, one would think that, for Machen, real literature needs be overtly fantastical as well as dogmatically Catholic. Neither is true – in fact, his arguments are to the contrary. Writer can evoke the Numinous without employing any „fantastical“ device (Machen provides examples of this). Likewise, this text argues, quite heartily, against didactic in literature. If one understands not what is really meant when, eventually, Art is described as the "expression of the dogmas of the Church", then one has missed the point of all that has preceded that statement and the entirety of this text is wasted on him or her.
(and FFS guys: "No literal compliance with Christianity is needed, no, nor even an acquaintance with the doctrines of Christianity. The Greeks, celebrating the festivals of Dionysus, Cervantes recounting the fooleries of Don Quixote, Dickens measuring Mr Pickwick's glasses of cold punch, Rabelais with his thirsty Pantagruel were all sufficiently Catholic from our point of view, and the cultus of Aphrodite is merely a symbol misunderstood and possibly corrupted, and if you can describe an initiatory dance of savages in the proper manner, I shall call you a good Catholic.")
December 3, 2022
3.25⭐
Essay in which Arthur Machen espouses his manifesto concerning his mystical creed on literature and what is it that makes up fine literature from just popular or regular material. First published in 1902, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature is an analysis of the nature of literature by Welsh author Arthur Machan. Within it, Machan concludes that to be 'true' literature, the work must contain or convey a sense of 'ecstasy'.
To quote Machen's own words " . . .that fine literature is simply the expression of the eternal things that are in man, that it is beauty clothed in words, that it is always ecstasy, that it always draws itself away, and goes apart into lonely places, far from the common course of life. Realize this, and you will never be misled into pronouncing mere reading-matter, however interesting, to be fine literature . . . " (p. 80)
In answer to his quandary of whether the result of the author of fine literature is conscious or unconscious of his product Machen writes "Perhaps it would be a perilous dogmatism, on the other hand, definitely to pronounce it to be unconscious; and I expect we had better take refuge in the subconscious, that convenient name for the transcendental element in human nature. For myself, I like best my old figure of the Shadowy Companion, the invisible attendant who walks all the way beside us, though his feet are in the Other World; and I think that it is he who whispers to us his ineffable secrets, which we clumsily endeavor to set down in mortal language." (p.145) "But art is always miraculous. In its origin, in its working, in its results it is beyond and above explanation, and the artist's unconsciousness is only one phase of its infinite mysteries. (p. 151)
Essay in which Arthur Machen espouses his manifesto concerning his mystical creed on literature and what is it that makes up fine literature from just popular or regular material. First published in 1902, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature is an analysis of the nature of literature by Welsh author Arthur Machan. Within it, Machan concludes that to be 'true' literature, the work must contain or convey a sense of 'ecstasy'.
To quote Machen's own words " . . .that fine literature is simply the expression of the eternal things that are in man, that it is beauty clothed in words, that it is always ecstasy, that it always draws itself away, and goes apart into lonely places, far from the common course of life. Realize this, and you will never be misled into pronouncing mere reading-matter, however interesting, to be fine literature . . . " (p. 80)
In answer to his quandary of whether the result of the author of fine literature is conscious or unconscious of his product Machen writes "Perhaps it would be a perilous dogmatism, on the other hand, definitely to pronounce it to be unconscious; and I expect we had better take refuge in the subconscious, that convenient name for the transcendental element in human nature. For myself, I like best my old figure of the Shadowy Companion, the invisible attendant who walks all the way beside us, though his feet are in the Other World; and I think that it is he who whispers to us his ineffable secrets, which we clumsily endeavor to set down in mortal language." (p.145) "But art is always miraculous. In its origin, in its working, in its results it is beyond and above explanation, and the artist's unconsciousness is only one phase of its infinite mysteries. (p. 151)
November 29, 2020
I stumbled into this essay on what makes great literature by one of my favorite Victorian scribblers of Gothic thinking I was about to read an entirely different book by him--this is a Kindle problem, no book covers, and a muddled middle aged man far away from his library during a forced sabbatical. Although it's kind of absurdly reductionist to attempt to define great literature as having only one particular element which makes it great literature, Machen makes a superficially acceptable case for ecstasy (a kind of code for the artistic impulse itself, which, if taken wholly literally, would then make all art great by virtue of being born of the artistic impulse) as the stuff upon which great texts are built. I appreciate his chutzpah and how unabashed he is, but of course I think his findings are rather absurd. And although he tells us again and again it has nothing to do with taste, I fear it has everything to do with taste--always has and always will.
October 28, 2025
Söt och rolig. Bäst i sin naivitet, sämst i sitt systembygge. Underlägsen hans skönlitteratur. Superduperbra vederläggande av ”common sense”-approach till vad som utgör bra böcker.
4/5
4/5
October 27, 2020
Machen is one of the most underrated writers in the history of literature, having written some truly excellent books. I was intrigued when I heard about this book, and was able to recently read it. I found that in some ways this book had some really profound insights into what truly makes good literature. Having said this, I often found myself bogged down in the numerous tangents that seemed to show up, and that didn't always seem relevant to the point that the author was trying to convey. Nonetheless, this work does bring up good points in the ways we read and enjoy literature.
May 28, 2025
Hieroglyphics is Arthur Machen's theory of literature (and art more broadly), a piece of literary criticism dressed up by the 'editor' as the ramblings and lectures of an 'obscure literary hermit'. The approach to literature here is a selective one. Machen draws a distinction between 'fine literature' (which eventually becomes simply 'literature') and reading matter, and that also extends also to the process of writing, where 'artifice', the technical craft of sentences, characterisation, plots, etc., is contrasted with 'art', genuine inspiration, vision, and insight. These distinctions for him are in the presence or absence of what he calls ecstasy. This is that mystical sense of capital-S Something that sits beyond realism (which Machen takes here for his natural enemy, with its social commentary and representations of ordinary life). It could've as easily been called Sehnsucht, soul, maybe a type of the sublime, or any number of similarly ineffable things. Machen himself proposes a bunch of synonyms:
Whatever it is exactly, it is emphatically not just the presence of fantastical elements in the text. I took it as a quality that infuses a text with something like myth, a largeness that, for example, elevates its characters from specific people the author might've gleaned from lived experience to types, people that could never exist but nevertheless feel like a true depiction of something. The distinction between reading matter and literature is ostensibly not about quality of execution so much as they are just entirely different things with different purposes (though it's still obvious which one is more important). To say that Pride and Prejudice is not as good as the best of Shakespeare makes no sense; to compare them at all is to commit a category error. For Machen, reading matter deals in the specifics of what goes on in our everyday lives (and it can be very very good at depicting or analysing these things), and literature deals in essences, where its sentences and images symbolise fundamental ideas that we have about life, which in turn are symbols ('hieroglyphics') pointing to something beyond human knowledge.
Hieroglyphics is a deliberately provocative book, and some of its judgements can feel borderline silly at times -- but nevertheless, for me personally, it was hard not to sympathise to an extent with the fundamental impulse here. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Jane Austen isn't literature, but it feels self evident to me that most of her books are an entirely different type of literature/art from the stuff that's built around that ineffable spark. This kind of thing is easy to dismiss as a lot of hand wringing and pointing significantly somewhere yonder (Aaron Worth wrote in a review for the TLS that D. H. Lawrence did exactly that, reading Machen's ecstasy as a sort of 'crying about the mysteries and possibilities') -- because it has little or nothing to do with logic and rational judgement. But I don't know, I feel like there is something to it. It's probably an inevitable part of how I judge art, even if I try to push against it. That 'something' is why I love Karen Blixen and bounce off Angela Carter, to take a particularly similar and resonant pair of writers, and I've never been able to analyse it in a fully satisfactory way. So for me personally, that distinction between the essential and the particular still feels like one that may sometimes be worth making, whatever the past 100 years of literary criticism and theory have to say about it.
Substitute, if you like, rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown. All and each will convey what I mean; for some particular case one term may be more appropriate than another, but in every case there will be that withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness which justifies my choice of "ecstasy" as the best symbol of my meaning.
Whatever it is exactly, it is emphatically not just the presence of fantastical elements in the text. I took it as a quality that infuses a text with something like myth, a largeness that, for example, elevates its characters from specific people the author might've gleaned from lived experience to types, people that could never exist but nevertheless feel like a true depiction of something. The distinction between reading matter and literature is ostensibly not about quality of execution so much as they are just entirely different things with different purposes (though it's still obvious which one is more important). To say that Pride and Prejudice is not as good as the best of Shakespeare makes no sense; to compare them at all is to commit a category error. For Machen, reading matter deals in the specifics of what goes on in our everyday lives (and it can be very very good at depicting or analysing these things), and literature deals in essences, where its sentences and images symbolise fundamental ideas that we have about life, which in turn are symbols ('hieroglyphics') pointing to something beyond human knowledge.
Hieroglyphics is a deliberately provocative book, and some of its judgements can feel borderline silly at times -- but nevertheless, for me personally, it was hard not to sympathise to an extent with the fundamental impulse here. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Jane Austen isn't literature, but it feels self evident to me that most of her books are an entirely different type of literature/art from the stuff that's built around that ineffable spark. This kind of thing is easy to dismiss as a lot of hand wringing and pointing significantly somewhere yonder (Aaron Worth wrote in a review for the TLS that D. H. Lawrence did exactly that, reading Machen's ecstasy as a sort of 'crying about the mysteries and possibilities') -- because it has little or nothing to do with logic and rational judgement. But I don't know, I feel like there is something to it. It's probably an inevitable part of how I judge art, even if I try to push against it. That 'something' is why I love Karen Blixen and bounce off Angela Carter, to take a particularly similar and resonant pair of writers, and I've never been able to analyse it in a fully satisfactory way. So for me personally, that distinction between the essential and the particular still feels like one that may sometimes be worth making, whatever the past 100 years of literary criticism and theory have to say about it.
May 1, 2024
A stimulating, if idiosyncratic, idea of how to winnow the unworthy literature from the worthy. It's based on what inspires ecstasy, and as I said, it's idiosyncratic: even Jane Austen is cast out with the goats, whereas odd, unknown, or otherwise inferior books that inspire ecstasy are welcomed among the sheep.
Unfortunately, I haven't read many of the works cited, and those like me who are unfamiliar with Vanity Fair or the books of Rabelais won't really be able to judge Machen's system fully. Okay, yes, I've read Poe and RLS's Jekyll and Hyde, but it's been a long time. Perhaps, if Machen had excerpted a list of passages he says inspire ecstasy, I would feel like I fully absorbed his thesis and would award this book it's fifth star.
Unfortunately, I haven't read many of the works cited, and those like me who are unfamiliar with Vanity Fair or the books of Rabelais won't really be able to judge Machen's system fully. Okay, yes, I've read Poe and RLS's Jekyll and Hyde, but it's been a long time. Perhaps, if Machen had excerpted a list of passages he says inspire ecstasy, I would feel like I fully absorbed his thesis and would award this book it's fifth star.
February 23, 2018
This is one of Machens more challenging reads, mostly because it has aged so dreadfully.
Not a horror story this time, but instead an extended essay on Machens thoughts on writing, literature and the quality of the written word.
Whilst it offers some interesting and very useful advice in places, it none the less relies on the reader having a classical education circa 1880. This makes it almost impossible to read at times, and requires a keen eye to wade through it.
Definitely worth reading for Machen completists (like me), but not if you want to get to the bottom of the mans brain.
Not a horror story this time, but instead an extended essay on Machens thoughts on writing, literature and the quality of the written word.
Whilst it offers some interesting and very useful advice in places, it none the less relies on the reader having a classical education circa 1880. This makes it almost impossible to read at times, and requires a keen eye to wade through it.
Definitely worth reading for Machen completists (like me), but not if you want to get to the bottom of the mans brain.
April 13, 2019
A tough read.
October 26, 2019
After having read Machen's Hieroglyphics, I'm still trying to get my head around the specifics of the arguments forwarded by the "hermit" who speaks the narrative (presumably a stand-in for Machen himself).
In general terms, the appeal to "ecstasy" in literature makes perfect sense, but the waters get muddied right at the end of the Appendix, when (for the first time) the character of ecstasy in literature is explicitly tied to religious experience:
"I will give you a test that will startle you; literature is the expression, through the aesthetic medium of words, of the dogmas of the Catholic Church, and that which is any way out of harmony with these dogmas is not literature."
Not being a Catholic myself, it's hard to completely parse that statement, although I do understand that the argument leans on the mysteries of Catholic dogma, rather than the complete package of the Catholic Church itself.
Nonetheless, the majority of the book is fascinating, and even the repetitiveness of the hermit's argument is bearable since Machen is such a fine prose stylist. And because it's a novel explicitly granted the gold standard of literary ecstasy, completing Hieroglyphics has prompted me to finally begin reading Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, and I count that as a good thing!
In general terms, the appeal to "ecstasy" in literature makes perfect sense, but the waters get muddied right at the end of the Appendix, when (for the first time) the character of ecstasy in literature is explicitly tied to religious experience:
"I will give you a test that will startle you; literature is the expression, through the aesthetic medium of words, of the dogmas of the Catholic Church, and that which is any way out of harmony with these dogmas is not literature."
Not being a Catholic myself, it's hard to completely parse that statement, although I do understand that the argument leans on the mysteries of Catholic dogma, rather than the complete package of the Catholic Church itself.
Nonetheless, the majority of the book is fascinating, and even the repetitiveness of the hermit's argument is bearable since Machen is such a fine prose stylist. And because it's a novel explicitly granted the gold standard of literary ecstasy, completing Hieroglyphics has prompted me to finally begin reading Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, and I count that as a good thing!
July 17, 2015
A consistently interesting and occasionally persuasive collection of essays, written in the second-person, all pertaining to the distinction between "literature" and fine literature, between artifice and art. It mostly helps to illuminate Machen's own aims with his fiction, his emphasis on what he calls ecstasy, or wonder-- exemplified by literature that stands apart from the prosaic, the facts of everyday life. If a book has no sense of awe or the eternal, it's not worth much, according to the author. He clearly loves the mystical, rather than the rational, and only goes off the rails a little at the end when he asserts that all fine literature must, consciously or otherwise, embody Catholic dogmas. Much of his argument hinges on his analysis of three esteemed works, Dickens' Pickwick Papers, Cervantes' Don Quixote, and Rabelais' Pantagruel. Could have been a lot more forward-thinking, however, and he misses the point completely when he tries to defend religion and art in the same breath.
November 12, 2011
There were moments - long moments - of almost unendurable boredom. On the other hand, his judgements - why, for example, The Pickwick Papers is literature whereas Pride and Prejudice is mere reading matter - were a delight.
October 25, 2014
Interessant essay in monoloogvorm over de ziel van 'echte' literatuur. Jammer alleen dat Machen aan het eind deze ziel wil koppelen aan katholicisme.
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