The concept of delusion - "delusion" - in the works of A. Beers (on the example of the analysis of female images in the collection "The Fiend's Delight")

Demenyuk Veronika Maksimovna Postgraduate student, the department of Foreign Literature, Institute of Philology and Journalism, Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod  603000, N.Novgorod, Bolshaya pokrovskaya st., 37. demenyuk.veronika@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Menshchikova Mariya Konstantinovna Doctor of Philology Professor of the Department of Foreign Literature of the Institute of Philology and Journalism of the N. I. Lobachevsky National Research Nizhny Novgorod State University 603000, Russia, Nizhegorodskaya oblast', g. Nizhnii Novgorod, ul. Bol'shaya Pokrovskaya, 37, aud. 301 menshikova4@yandex.ru

American novelist and publicist Ambrose Bierce (Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 - 1914?)) first of all gained fame as the author of mystical short stories (short story): in the center of his attention are the borderline states of the human psyche, the horror of a person when confronted with the unknown, with death – including during the war, which A. Beers was an eyewitness to (1861-1865), the impossibility of the harmonious existence of a God–made man in the world, whose life seems to be an absurd coincidence of random circumstances. In this context, A. Beers is logically called "an adherent of Gothic prose and a follower of the traditions of Edgar Poe" ^[1], as indicated by such researchers as, for example, A.B. Tanaseychuk ^[2], I.B. Arkhangelskaya ^[3], K.D. Hall ^[4] and A.A. Miller ^[5], R.A. Wiggins ^[6], analyzing primarily the texts of the collections of the author's "mature" period, "In the Thick of Life" (1892), "Can it Be?" (1893) and "Fantastic Fables" (1899), as well as his opus magnum – a collection of peculiar aphorisms "Dictionary of Satan" or, as it is sometimes translated, "The Cynic's Lexicon" (1911) ^[7].

One of the important topics for A. Beers is the study of the relationship between man and the world, unfolding in the tragic key of a kind of phenomenology of horror, which is pointed out, among others, by G. F. Lovecraft: "... all the stories  Birsa belong to the literature of horror; and if many of them deal only with physical and psychological horror within Nature, then the most significant suggest supernatural evil ..." ^[8] By supernatural G. F. Lovecraft understands a collision with Another, cosmic horror, "lying on the other side of human comprehension", "paradoxical awareness of the concealment of the world as absolute concealment" ^{[9, p. 89]}. Expressed in the case of H. F. Lovecraft in grotesque forms of unthinkable beings from other worlds, supernatural evil in A. Beers has no physical concrete equivalent: it is dissolved in a world whose true nature a person discovers only in moments of "epiphanies" - in states of borderline, including the moment before physical death (dedicated to this, for example, numerous studies of one of the main texts of A. Bierce "The case on the bridge over Owl Creek") ^{[10, 11]}. Thus, the whole life of A. Bierce is presented as an insurmountable distance between the truth of the world order, the meaning of existence and the person himself, who turns out to be a hostage of his subjective "human" perception, and thus the culmination of most of A. Bierce's texts is based precisely on the tragic destruction, the opening of this delusion.

In the early period of his work from 1872 to 1875, which A. Beers spent in England, working as a journalist in such publications as Fun and Figaro and as an editor in The Lantern magazine ^[12], he published his first books: "The Pleasure of the Fiend" (1872), "Nuggets and Dust Washed in California" (1873) and "The Web of an Empty Skull" (1874). All three books are collections of heterogeneous texts, both prose and poetic on a variety of subjects, united by a cross-cutting figure of the narrator. The author himself spoke ambiguously about his English publications ^[1], as a result of which the texts were not included in the lifetime collection of the author's works (The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (New York and Washington, DC: Neale Publishing, 1909-1912)) and remain practically unexplored in literary studies, since they are considered largely "youthful" and the author's independent statement: one can find some works on the specifics of A. Beers' humor, including examples of early texts ^[7] and research on the connection of the author's method in the first collections with the tradition of J. Swift and M. Twain ^{[13, 14]}. At the same time, such disregard for the poetics of the works of an earlier stage of the author's work does not seem to us quite legitimate, since as a result of a closer analysis of these texts, not only the author's systematic movement towards his main conceptual developments is revealed (first of all, here we mean the concept of delusion, "delusion", in which a person resides, limited by its consciousness and way of cognition), but also a certain evolution within its own concepts.  The object of analysis in this article is the first publication of Ambrose Bierce, the collection "The Fiend's Delight", little studied in domestic and foreign literary studies; the subject of the study is the representation of the concept of delusion on the examples of female images in this collection. The image of the family, which acquires the status of archetypal in the texts of A. Beers, was only partially considered in literary works (in the context of the theme of continuity and generations ^[15] and the functional of children's images ^[16]), and female characters, which are its foundation, from the point of view of the author's position on the women's question ^[17]. Thus, the perspective proposed in this study allows us to supplement the existing gaps about the representation of key mythologies for the national consciousness of the United States in the works of A. Beers, such as home and family, in search of which the pioneer frontisman, who serves as the primary foundation of the American nation, is constantly in search.

One of the key concepts in the work of A. Beers is the concept of delusion, "delusion", etymologically related to the word "illusion", but fundamentally different from it: if the latter is some kind of abstract concept, illusion, fantasy, then the first is a fundamental misunderstanding of the essence of the subject, a person's conviction in the opposite of the real truth ^[18].  The existence of this term in the English-speaking tradition in the field of clinical psychiatry, as corresponding to the term "delirium", a disorder of thinking ^[19], as well as a symptom testifying to this, arising from the fundamental inconsistency of objective reality and subjective beliefs of the patient, is interesting for the analysis of A. Beers' work. There are obvious symbolic parallels between the disease and the present state of society, which in the collection "The Pleasure of the Fiend" with the help of deconstruction of the subject of the narrative feels pathological, ubiquitous; the observed signs of the disease of morality are manifested in people of different genders, ages, social status. The main misanthrope here in this case is not Ambrose Bierce, whom his contemporaries then called Bitter, Bitter Bierce (Bitter Bierce) and accused of cynicism and pessimism, but an ordinary resident of the United States depicted in the collection, who has already accepted violence and cruelty in his daily routine and perceives it as the norm. In our opinion, the fundamentally moral perspective of the texts of the collection, as well as the autopsy of the animal essence of a modern American who is ready to kill, torture and torment even a loved one, levels the mystical component of the concept of fiend, stated in the title (evil spirit, devil, demon), and reveals the true position of A. Beers, which he then clearly verbalizes in his in military stories: evil is the man himself, the monster. In this regard, and since there is no single translation option for the title of the collection (we have encountered the variants "The Delight of the Villain" ^[1], "The Joys of the Devil" ^[15], etc.), as well as in the context of the angle chosen in this article, it seems appropriate to suggest and adhere to the translation option – "The Pleasure of the Fiend".

At an early stage of his creative formation and within the framework of his first collection, A. Beers was interested in topical ethical issues of society, the chronicler of which he had already designated himself in the preface to the book: "the horrors that make up this "cold collection" of devilry are taken mainly from various California magazines" ^{[20, p. 7]}, thereby designating their principled position of non-involvement in the process of creating texts. Hiding behind the pseudonym Dod Grill, which A. Beers uses, among other things, when publishing journalistic texts in the magazine Fun, he thereby increases the distance between the figure of the author and the narrative itself, acting only as a kind of collector of stories: this is confirmed by the subheadings of parts of the collection, "some fiction", "talk, talk", which it can be translated as stories, stories heard in between, chatter. In this collection we will not find a single mystical text: all the plots described in "The Pleasure of the Fiend" are purely everyday sketches about the daily routine of a typical representative of the American middle class, filled with strange coincidences: here a wife can find out that her husband is proposing to another woman ("A Kansas Incident"), a teacher who complained about bullying by students is sent by the school administration to be shot ("The Root of Education"), and the son steals his own father's property ("The Scolliver Pig"). The reason for the dramatic denouement, to which all, at first glance, comic plots come, is the discrepancy between the demonstrated, assumed and its inner content. The gap between these categories demonstrates the fundamental absurdity of the modern social structure and its norms: both the situations themselves and the behavior of the characters placed in them are absurd.

The characters are not specified, and as the action progresses, they hardly talk to each other, but the stories that happen to them and which are recorded by the narrator, as well as the actions they commit, eloquently characterize their moral qualities, revealing to the reader a fundamental fracture: it turns out that in reality there is no social equality and freedom, lawlessness reigns, launched by the state apparatus indifferent to what is happening, contributing to the decline of morals. As A. Beers would later write in private correspondence, "a good writer (let's assume that he was born for this profession) is formed not by reading, but by observation and experience" ^[21]. The reader is offered a certain reading register within the framework of the collection: the author, firstly, as a person is eliminated from the text, designating a certain literary personality, Doda Grill (from the English word "grill" - grimace), as the compiler of the collection, thereby claiming the authenticity of the stories being told, the collector of which he acts. Secondly, each time choosing new strategies for constructing the narrative itself (either from the first person, or from the third), he clearly does not formulate any point of view of his own, and thus transfers responsibility for the formation of the idea and directly for the process of conceptualization of the narrative entirely to the reader, as an active co-creative consciousness.

We observe a similar strategy in many authors who create their works after the 30s of the XIX century, who felt an urgent need for fixing and impartial analysis of social changes. In addition, such technical discoveries as photography and, a little later, cinematography, greatly influenced the speed and method of human perception of information: the editing principle of text organization is becoming more and more evident in literature, since it "corresponds to a vision of the world, characterized by versatility and epic breadth" ^{[22, p. 292]}. In this case, the author's task becomes only the construction of the architecture of the text, the content of which is determined by reality itself; O. de Balzac will write about this in the preface to the Human Comedy: "The French Society itself should have been the historian, I could only be its secretary. By compiling an inventory of vices and virtues, collecting the most vivid cases of passion, depicting characters, choosing the most important events from the life of Society, creating types by combining individual features of numerous homogeneous characters, perhaps I could write a history forgotten by so many historians — the history of morals" ^[23]. English collections under the authorship of Dod Grill, thus, naturally continue the tradition of moral literature, in the mainstream of which the most chronologically close predecessor is Ch. Dickens with his "Sketches of Boz". The closeness of the authors is due not only to purely literary kinship, but also to similar extra-literary tasks: and Ch. Dickens and A. Beers are not interested in the text, as a work of literature itself, but in something more, fundamentally beyond the limits of the text itself, the "product" of the transition between the form of a short journalistic essay to an epic novel on the way to a metaliterary reality (Egorova I.V., 2009).

It is also important to consider the noted features of A. Bierce's texts in the context of national specifics: many American prose writers began their creative career by working in periodicals as a journalist, where later they could also publish their literary texts. In this way, the artwork was initially placed in a single context with the historical events of real reality, thereby becoming not a product of the author's writing, but a process of observation and creation of history, offered to the reader as a playful form of co-creation. A good example of this is the story of the publication of the "History of New York" by Washington Irving on behalf of Diedrich Knickerbocker, which became one of the most striking literary hoaxes of its time ^[24], the task of which was not so much to draw attention to the figure of the author, as to excite the public portrayed by the reality of the United States.

          One of the main problems depicted in the texts of "The Pleasure of the Monster" is the lack of true spirituality in modern man. Alien to any high morality, a person in the art world of the collection is a "social animal" that exists in accordance with social norms and rules, behind which the terrifying truth of spiritual poverty is hidden. A. Beers, using the example of the life of an ordinary American in his daily routine of life, shows its Kafkaesque emptiness - the life of his characters is filled with meaningless events, they happen rather by the will of circumstances than on their own initiative; their behavior is regulated not by internal principles, but by reactionary instincts (in this he turns out to be close to the poetics of naturalism, based on the behavioristic of man as a "social animal", whose nature is determined by belonging to a certain social environment, race and genetic code). All social norms are portrayed by him as meaningless rituals performed out of habit, rather than pursuing some meaningful goal, giving only the illusion of life, but not life itself.

          One of the central images constructed by A. Beers within the framework of this paradigm is the image of the family, which is not only a socially significant primary unit of society, but also the starting point of a person's morality, his upbringing, the responsibility for which in the traditional model of society is assigned to a woman. One of the clearest confirmations of this is the concept of Enlightened Motherhood, popular at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries in the USA, extolling the mother woman as the divine creator of morality: "Every mother should be a real artist. I don't mean painting, sculpture, music or literature, but an artist who paints on the canvas of a child's pure consciousness" ^[25]. After the events of the Civil War, there is a rethinking of gender roles in society, the contradiction between the male and female population of the United States is smoothed out, providing women, on the one hand, previously unthinkable opportunities in the field of social activity and work ^[26]. On the other hand, in society, by inertia, there continue to be prejudices about the inferiority of women and their inability to exist independently; "women who sought to occupy men's positions were suspected of promiscuity and immorality" ^[27]. The main archetypal task of a woman, therefore, is still secretly serving the temple of the hearth: "You can lay the most beautiful laurel wreaths on the head of a real wife and mother; you can give her the reins of civil government in her hands; but the house is still paramount for her, and the crown of her motherhood is more valuable than the diadem of a real queen" ^[25]. The female question is not openly posed by A. Beers, however, the study the nature of the feminine principle, incomprehensible to a man and, therefore, completely opposite to him, is stated by the author on the examples of the described plots - female images are central in most of the texts of the collection.

          Women in the art world of A. Beers are in a fundamental gap with the understanding of reality: on the one hand, they are completely incapable of independent existence, because by their nature they personify an irrational principle that does not allow them to find their place in a material rationalistic society. On the other hand, they are unable to serve their nature as mother and wife, since the institution of sacred marriage in the present turns out to be only a form of physical coexistence of people of the opposite sex, who fundamentally do not hear each other and therefore are not able to understand each other. Already in the preface, the main character of the author's dedication becomes "the unchangeable and infallible goddess of Good Taste" ^{[20, p. 5]}, labeled by the author as a fundamentally feminine figure, "she/her". Following the preface, the opening text of the collection, "One More Unfortunate", is built around the mysterious plot of the pursuit of a woman by a police officer and metaphorically develops the trajectory of the opposition of these two principles set by the preface: "along the deserted pier, a mysterious figure ran to its far end, which the guardian of the night tried in vain to catch up and urged to stay" ^{[20, p. 9]}. Two contrasting images, male and female, are incapable of true communication, since they embody two multidirectional impulses: an emotionally resonating female and a mundane materialistic male, who are doomed not to enter into open communication with each other, but to build some expectations from potential communication, illusions, and inevitably be disappointed in it. A stranger who dramatically intended to commit suicide by throwing herself off the pier quickly ceases to be the object of attention and empathy of a police officer – in pursuit, slipping, he falls and hurts himself, "feels anger and hatred. Instead of getting to his feet, he stubbornly sat down like a dog and began to rub his scratched shin… She retreated a few steps to gather her strength, took one last look at the indifferent officer, jumped onto the terrible edge with a wild scream and almost lost her balance. With an effort, she came to her senses and turned back to face the officer, who was clinging to his baton. Having secured it in place, he began to leave" ^{[20, p. 10]}. The situation ends ambiguously: a remark is given about the real fate of a mysterious stranger, who every time now meeting a police officer demonstrates a silent grimace of disgust. Thus, the conflict of unjustified expectations of the two characters from each other does not get resolved, leaving the reader with an open question: are a man and a woman, in principle, really able to understand each other, or is it just an illusion of understanding, a delusion in which both found themselves? The apotheosis of this distorted communication is the text "A Bit of Chivalry", where the narrator becomes an unwitting witness to the dialogue between a man and a female statue, from which he tries to get an answer in his persistent courtship, doomed to remain unheard.

          It is curious that the statue from this story bears the name of Pandora, which in ancient Greek mythology became the reason for the existence of death and disease in the human world. The narrator of the collection draws attention to the irrational, chthonic nature of the female nature especially often in contrast with the male rectilinear logic: for example, an unnamed woman from the text "A Tale of the Great Quake" during a terrible cataclysm refuses to be rescued from a collapsing house, and the heroine of "The Heels of Her" stuck heels in a drain grate prefers to tear off from shoes to the sole, than to agree to the help of a man. The independence shown by A. Bierce's heroines seems to be an unmotivated and even theatrical gesture depicted by the narrator in an ironic way: "God only knows why this captured female refused the help offered by her own race — why she chose to ruin her shoes instead of taking them off her feet. On the day when the dead will rise from their graves and the secrets of all hearts will be revealed, I will know everything about it; but how I would like to know it now" ^{[20, p. 24]}. The narrator Dod Grill refers to such declines in female images through analogies with animals quite often, especially when he talks about female behavior in society: he calls them snakes seeking to absorb a gawking man ("The Strong Young Man of Colusa"), ants capable of attacking representatives of their own species because of the outfit they liked ("Insects"), and even compares suffragettes with "a drunken rhinoceros among tulip beds" ("Le Diable est aux Vaches") ^{[20, p. 75]}. A single woman seems to lose her own human face, in which, of course, the conservative notes of the narrator's position are heard, showing her inconsistency and stupidity in such comic situations.

          However, the second line of female characters in the collection completely destroys this ironic distance: most women in marriage, who should have become representatives of a happy quiet fate under the patronage of a patriarchal spouse in the context of the depicted social lack of independence, turn out to be deeply tragic figures. One of the most shocking aspects of family life, which A. Beers demonstrates in the collection, are horrific scenes of domestic violence, for example, in the texts "A Comforter", "A tale of two feet", "A retribution", where a woman becomes a hostage of her marriage and is suppressed by an aggressive masculine principle. The center of the illusorily mythologized space of the house, where married heroines of A. Bierce find themselves, becomes a patriarchal male character, often labeled by the narrator according to his direct function - as a father or husband. It is worth noting that in American culture, with the strengthening of the masculine heroics of the mythological frontier, each of these characters implies a well–defined number of characteristics, such as strength, will to act and high moral principles, but literally every one of them is consistently destroyed by Bierce in his heroes, including through female characters. The man here is a tyrant who takes advantage of his physical superiority over his wife and his position in the family, which, despite the immorality of his behavior, remains dominant from a social point of view, and the utopian space of the house itself is a screen behind which there is an unsightly, terrible truth. Both partners within the couple and society prefer to adhere to this misconception, conservatively supporting this idea of a "good life" and a blissful "family hearth", where an easy-going wife is waiting for her husband's protector surrounded by children. It is about such a tragic delusion that A. Beers writes in the text "Margaret the Childless", which tells the story of a barren woman whose husband picks up homeless children on the street and brings them home, leaving them to raise an unhappy spouse. The name of the spouse remains unnamed and is replaced by the laconic "her lord and master" (her lord and master) ^{[20, p. 51]}, than A. Beers demonstrates at the same time the unconditional status of the spouse in the family, the rules of the game in which the woman accepts as a hostage of her status. It is no coincidence that there are notes of religious symbolism in this: in the hero's indifference to the feelings of his own wife, God's indifference to what is happening in this society, which allows a catastrophic distortion of the main human values, is hinted at.

Thus, the female images in the first collection "The Pleasure of the Fiend" already demonstrate the movement of the author's thought to the concept of a fundamental human error, which, due to its limitations, it is not able to overcome. At this, the first stage of creativity, A. Beers is limited to a purely social framework, and the delusion of his characters is limited to specific illusions about their purpose and social structure. His heroes prefer not to think about the illusion of well-being in which they are; a collision with its unsightly underside leads his heroes to a catastrophic end, an absurd death, which on the scale of public well-being remains completely unnoticed. The incident with the heroes of the text "A cow-country pleasantry" becomes the pinnacle of absurdity, where after the brutal murder of her husband, the spouse commits suicide and shoots herself in the head with a gun, which is then published in newspapers as a story about two drowned people. "I don't know when I've enjoyed a more sincere laugh" ^{[20, p. 46]}, the narrator sums up at the end of the story, thereby summing up public indifference to private tragedies within one private family. However, this becomes the starting point for further author's reflection on more global topics (which, of course, can become the basis for future research of later texts by A. Beers): subsequently, a person's delusion acquires an ontological status in him, exposing not only the emptiness of social constructions, but also the meaninglessness of human existence in the world.