Arthur Machen's "N"

 I recently reread the Arthur Machen story, “N,” and have been thinking about its place in the canon of writings that have influenced the modern psychogeography movement, as well as the underlying mystical concepts that Machen employed in writing it. I find it easy to connect those ideas to Novalis’ Magical Idealism, as well as his theories about poetry and the Golden Age.

     The first time that I read “N,” I was initially troubled by what seemed its lack of a central message or point, beyond being a celebration of the streets of London and the pleasures of exploring urban life in general. Lin Carter, the fiction writer and historian of the fantasy genre in literature, praised Machen’s ability to make the streets of London and the stories that he found there into a veritable Arabian Nights. Carter described the world of Machen’s episodic novel, The Three Impostors, as “Bagdad on the Thames.”

    It took me several readings to see beyond the sumptuous urban landscape that Machen describes in “N”, and also, his characters as more than just former or current practitioners of dérive, the term that Guy DeBord and the Situationists used to describe an activity where “one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” [Guy Debord, "Theory of the Dérive," Internationale Situationniste #2 1956] Psychogeography was the name that the Situationists gave to the study of this type of activity, but the term is now commonly used to refer to its practice as well, having superseded dérive, at least in the English-speaking world.

    Machen’s “N” begins with a social gathering of old men who share their glorious memories of the streets of London during the bygone era of their youth. These nostalgic reveries lead to a discussion of a magical park in the (fictional) neighborhood of Canon’s Park, in Stoke Newington, part of an inner London borough. One of the old men mentions that a cousin once visited Canon’s Park and found a place there that possessed unearthly beauty. Another of the participants in the discussion, who grew up in Stoke Newington, insists that no such park exists. A short time later, one of the participants in the discussion, who has been curious about this mysterious park, encounters a mention of it in a book. The author of the book puts forth several strange theories related to the park, which he glimpsed for a moment with his own eyes. At one point, the author of the book writes, “Some have declared that it lies within our own choice to gaze continually upon a world of equal or even greater wonder and beauty…This method, or art, or science, or whatever we choose to call it is simply concerned to restore the delights of the primal Paradise…” An acquaintance of the author, who shows him the mystical park, suggests, based on ideas that he attributes to William Law and Jacob Böhme, that matter itself was, before the Fall, “a soft and ductile substance, which could be moulded by the imagination of uncorrupted man into whatever form he chose it to assume.” I want to remark that this is an idea which somewhat resembles Novalis’ Magical Idealism with its belief in the power of the imagination to mold reality itself, as well as his thoughts on the Golden Age as a state of the individual’s oneness with all things, physical and spiritual, that he derived from Hemsterhuis. It is also important to note that Novalis equated the Golden Age with the innocence of childhood, and to recall that the old men at the beginning of the story reminiscence about the London of their youth as a kind of lost paradise which has passed away forever.

     This may be a moment to comment on something that I noticed about the structure of the story. Aside from my struggling with the unfolding theme, which I came to comprehend only with difficulty, I realized that Machen’s method of piecing together the story by having a character compile its elements from random conversations, careful enquiries, and books, was something that I had encountered before. The slow buildup of evidence of the impossible, or at least the supernatural, leading to an incredible conclusion, reminded me—on a purely literary level—of certain stories of Jorge Luis Borges, “La otra muerte,” for instance. It’s interesting to note that Borges was a huge fan of Machen, and also of Novalis.

    But to get back to the story and its theme: eventually, more reports of the park, which appears to be a veritable Garden of Eden, convince the old man who was part of the original group at the beginning of the story that the place actually exists. He meets a young man one day on the streets of Stoke Newington who verifies its existence as well. The story ends rather abruptly, which I think was partially responsible for my initial feeling that it seemed to end up somewhere, but personally, I couldn’t tell where that was. However, several re-readings finally led me to the conclusion that those who experienced the Edenic park were true psychogeographers. They were all people who experienced and accepted the park as a magical place because they came to it without agendas, certainties, or calculations. As in childhood, they were able to see the world and its wonders with innocent eyes and imagination, in the “ambience of play,” [Debord], and without needing or desiring to commodify or rationalize their experience. The old men who had only their memories of a lost Eden, and who were “now sitting among desolate rocks, by bitter steams,” having lost their way (like the young apostate in Hesse’s Die Morgenlandfahrt [«Er hat es sich schwergemacht, den Glauben wiederzufinden…»]), could not return to innocence. But those who saw and encountered the prelapsarian park were still living the experience of wonder, and the city and the world were still places of “magical habitations, supernal dwellings, more desirable to the eye than the fabled pleasure dome of the Eastern potentate, or the bejewelled hall built by the Genie for Aladdin in the Arabian tale.”