In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

The serial killer 'Red John' whispered the first stanza of Blake's famous poem to the Mentalist, Simon James as the latter was wrapped in cellophane by murderously inclined college pretenders to Red John's  grotesque 'throne'. Much debate has followed since as to the possible significance of this poem/riddle, especially as the poem seemed to suggest a link to the whereabouts of the missing psychic love interest, Kristin. Interestingly one of  our last glimpses of the Mentalist shows him smiling 'as if ' his worries have somehow been alleviated.

Surely the crux of the poem hands around the phrase 'fearful symmetry' : symmetry is more than 'sameness'...it is reflection and refraction. Perhaps it is not that Kristin's confidence about Red John's intentions originate from arrogance, stupidity or even that 'she' is Red John? Rather than she is his TWIN! Hence she can be understanding, compassionately communicative and provocative? It would also tie in with the Blakean interest in 'fearful symmetry' between the songs of Innocence and experience. Each sequence reflects and refracts the other- even defines the other.

D'Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from the stirrups, turned sideways on the saddle, and enclosed her waist with his arm to support her.

This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one of those sudden impulses of reprisal to which she was liable she gave him a little push from her. In his ticklish position he nearly lost his balance and only just avoided rolling over into the road, the horse, though a powerful one, being fortunately the quietest he rode.

"That is devilish unkind!" he said. "I mean no harm--only to keep you from falling."

She pondered suspiciously; till, thinking that this might after all be true, she relented, and said quite humbly, "I beg your pardon, sir."

Chapter 11 of Hardy's novel is pivotal to the tragedy of tess. In this chapter Alec D'urberville, a supposed distant relation of the beautiful country girl Tess, offers her assistance on her way home, only to take sexual advantage of her innocence and 'sleep' . Whilst Hardy's langauge purposely obscures the extent of the sexual violation later in the chapter, the reader is convinced that his behaviour towards Tess constitutes rape and leds eventually to the execution of Tess for her revenge killing of Alec.

This earlier incident in the chapter reveals the intuitive aspect of Tess, particularly where Alec is concerned. Here her natural physical reaction is to repulse the philandering hands of her so-called helper/rescuer. Tess instinctively recognises his predatory intentions, yet is forced to deny her respsonses.

Alec's affectation of hurt is Freudian in its attempt to mislead her. How appropriate is his self-summary of 'devilish unkind'! This accentuates his villain status and makes his lust still more reprehensible.

The following sentence is psychologically revealing and makes consummate use of free indirect discourse. We hear and observe the process of Tess's thoughts regarding Alec. 'She pondered suspiciously;' - how effective the deployment of the semi-colon which suggest both pause and doubt. Tess is trying to asssimilate the tension here between intuition/instinct and more 'rational' thinking which seems dangerously repectful of Alec's material status. The precariousness  of the verb 'might' highlights the destructive social conditioning which Tess and others have had to endure and accept. We feel it almost an imperative to warn her, to cry out 'No! ' when we hear the verb 'relented'..for this action betrays her own instinct which is 'naturally' alarmed by Alec's duplicitous behaviour.

She yields to Alec's chauvinistic actions 'humbly' and once again addresses him as 'sir' , an action which makes the reader shudder at her victimisation within a system that will eventaully kill her. The class system conspires against her twofold: as a woman and as a member of the working class. Thus, for all her beauty and the novel's use of fre indirect discourse to privilege her point of view and inner life/world, Tess is irrevocably doomed. No one can or will save her from her determined 'fate'.

Before You Were Mine

I'm ten years away from the corner you laugh on

with your pals, Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff.

The three of you bend from the waist, holding

each other, or your knees, and shriek at the pavement.

Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.

I'm not here yet. The thought of me doesn't occur

in the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the fizzy, movie tomorrows

the right walk home could bring. I knew you would dance

like that. Before you were mine, your Ma stands at the close

with a hiding for the late one. You reckon it's worth it.

The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?

I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,

and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square

till I see you, clear as scent, under the tree,

with its lights, and whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart?

Cha cha cha! You'd teach me the steps on the way home from Mass, stamping stars from the wrong pavement. Even then

I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello, somewhere

in Scotland, before I was born. That glamorous love lasts

where you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine.

When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell--or I ought
rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was
nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicion fell--on the man who was
afterwards brought to trial. As no reference was at that time made
to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any
description of him can at that time have been given in the
newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered.

Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of
that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I
read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times.
The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the
paper, I was aware of a flash--rush--flow--I do not know what to
call it,--no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive,--in
which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a
picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost
instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that
I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence of
the dead body from the bed.

It was in no romantic place that I had this curious sensation, but
in chambers in Piccadilly, very near to the corner of St. James's
Street. It was entirely new to me. I was in my easy-chair at the
moment, and the sensation was accompanied with a peculiar shiver
which started the chair from its position. (But it is to be noted
that the chair ran easily on castors.) I went to one of the windows
(there are two in the room, and the room is on the second floor) to
refresh my eyes with the moving objects down in Piccadilly. It was
a bright autumn morning, and the street was sparkling and cheerful.
The wind was high. As I looked out, it brought down from the Park a
quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust took, and whirled into a
spiral pillar. As the pillar fell and the leaves dispersed, I saw
two men on the opposite side of the way, going from West to East.
They were one behind the other. The foremost man often looked back
over his shoulder. The second man followed him, at a distance of
some thirty paces, with his right hand menacingly raised. First,
the singularity and steadiness of this threatening gesture in so
public a thoroughfare attracted my attention; and next, the more
remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it. Both men threaded
their way among the other passengers with a smoothness hardly
consistent even with the action of walking on a pavement; and no
single creature, that I could see, gave them place, touched them, or
looked after them. In passing before my windows, they both stared
up at me. I saw their two faces very distinctly, and I knew that I
could recognise them anywhere. Not that I had consciously noticed
anything very remarkable in either face, except that the man who
went first had an unusually lowering appearance, and that the face
of the man who followed him was of the colour of impure wax.

"Halloa! Below there!"

When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.

"Halloa! Below!"

From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and, raising his eyes, saw my figure high above him.

"Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?"

He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question. Just then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had shown while the train went by.

This story tantalises as it slips away from the reader's grasp at 'truth'. For where is 'truth' in this story? Should we believe the fears of the lonely, isolated signalman who believes he is being haunted by a figure of nemesis foretellling death and destruction? Or should we view such terrible, repetitions of horror as the synptoms of a sick dis-eased mind, and cling to the rational observations of the unnamed narrator and visitor to the signalman's solitary world?

My son is studying this text for his English Literature GCSE and I am very grateful to have a reason to reread this text which refuses to declare its full significance and which evades our ability to locate and name 'truth'.

My first assumption centred around a dislike of the narrator who seemed a rather malignant interloper into the crypt-like wolrd of the signalman. The narrator's words ironically mirror those of the signalman's nemesis and it seemed quite possible to this reader that the narrator IS the nemesis without perhaps even realising this in any conscious or direct way. 

I do wonder too at Dickens' superb ability to explore the tension between repetition and coincidence, and the ambivalence of coinicidence when it becomes symbolically retranslated by an unnerved mind, as fate.  Lives are riddled by patterns( and our desire to discern and recognise patterns) and in this story the bemused and bedevilled signalman finds the revisitations of both nemesis and narrator so unsettling that it seems he chooses to embrace the certainty of literal extinction rather than the  mentally destabilising uncertainty of progressive mental terror.

The Signalman, as the story's title insinuates,  explores the lonely predicament of a railway worker whose daily rituals are primarily concerned with safety. His literal 'signals' avert death. Yet the story's dramatic irony reveals the strange 'signals' that the story's protagonist appears to be receiving from a source unknown; revenant perhaps or just misunderstood manifestations of a lonely mind?

The extract above is taken from the opneing of the sory and I love the disorientating feel of the setting. Where is the narrator and where is the signalman? And how are these geographical positions crucial to our understanding of the story and even its possible resolution? For the dark, deep crypt-like situation of the signalman with the damp, gloomy apsect is suggestive of hell, of a 'fallen' post Edenic world. Such a setting is mirrored by the feverish quality of the signalman's words, who attaches a disturbing fatalism to the actions and utterances of the haunting figure. If Dickens' did rightly ( from direct experience of a railway crash) attach considerable danger to  Victorian Industrialisation and  railway system, then the sinister, monstruous appearance of the steam train hurtling out of its dark, tunnel-lair fulfils many Freudian nightmares as well as contrasting the inhuman and mechanistic against the malleable and human.

The powerful irony of the first utterance of the tale, encapsulates the dilemna and problem of the tale. Who is 'down there' and why is such an utterance shared between several figures, all contributing inevitably to the destruction of the signalman himself? ( who has been lowered into this pit by circumstance and social failure).

I love the playfulness of the title. What are signals after all? Can a signal exist without an audience and even translator? And is it merely a sign of the signalman's mental disorientation that he seeks the origin of the voice in the tunnel or is it in fact a gesture more revealing of the narrator's sinister duplicity? In other words, who can we trust to tell us where the origin of truth lies?!  Everything in the story is created for us by the narrator. Could he create himself to suit his story? Of course! And part of the game of the tale is its slipperiness. Its meaning always seems to slip away, to evade us.

The Signalman is afterall a tale of narrative incarceration and entrapment....whatever you decide you know it is your decision and that other versions or readings haunt every turn of the tale.

How provocative the existential question:

"Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?"

What an ironic metaphor!

What is the answer and who can really respond to this almost Faustian question! Would you follow such a path?