• 1  Fitz-James O’Brien, “The Lost Room” (1858), The Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stor (...)

2“The Lost Room” is a first-person narrative in which the unnamed protagonist, sitting in his New-York apartment, makes an inventory of his possessions. His objects (a gothic lithograph, a smoking-cap, a piano, snow-shoes and an old dagger) recall personal memories of his life, friends, love and family. Because the atmosphere is too oppressive, he leaves his room and gets out into the garden. There he meets a strange creature who tells him the other lodgers of the house are "enchanters,” "ghouls,” "cannibals" and that he is now their enemy because he was "of them once" (62)1. When the protagonist gets back into his room, he finds it changed and occupied by half a dozen strange men and women indulging in a bacchanalian orgy and his property curiously altered. Unable to prove to them that it is his own apartment, he is challenged into risking it on a throw of the dice. When he loses, he finds his room vanishing out of existence.

• 2  To the concept of “mimesis” used for instance by Rosemary Jackson in her book Fantasy: The Literat (...)
• 3  From p. 56 to p. 58

4In this short story the objects are not seen in their utilitarian functions: they first appear to have a purely decorative function. Yet the narration manifests the subject’s involvement with them in several ways. First it is a first-person narration and as such it tends to bring together the narrated agent’s experience and the narrating agent’s representation of objects. Furthermore, strategies of internal focalisation blur the distance between experience and representation. The present tense is even used for over two pages3, erasing the time gap between past and present. This strategy suggests the subject’s continuing involvement with his room and possessions. In addition, it is through the descriptions of objects and of what they evoke that meaning is structured throughout the short story. Indeed, the protagonist decides to sit and make an inventory of his possessions, and the logic of enumeration marks not only the first section of the descriptive text but also the representation of the changed room as well as the final glimpse before the room vanishes. The narrator later comments about the organisation of his perceptions and thoughts:

• 4  My emphases

5If, in the first section, the objects are remembered as much as perceived (“my inner vision scrutinized every detail of the picture.” - 56), they are nevertheless represented as existing through hypotyposis. This figure is notably supported by spatial deictics --“There was, imprimis, that ghostly lithograph”; “Those4 snow-shoes that hang”-- or by the use of the present tense --“Next to the picture comes the round blot that hangs below it”—or again by an exclamative style which forcefully emphasises the presence of an object --“How uncouthly the huge piano that occupies the corner at the left of the door looms out in the uncertain twilight!” (56). In fact the objects and the room are seen as both real things and sites for “the most riotous fancies to play at will” (61).

• 5  The term “objective correlative” was apparently first used by the American painter Washington Alls (...)

6Objects are related with the subject because they are his possessions. The protagonist is in the mood to make “a languid inventory of the principal articles of furniture in my room” (55). He does so for unexplained reasons, but finds a certain comfort from the oppressive heat in the spectacle of his property. The narration notes his pleasure of watching without an effort, using an isotopy of control: “from the place where I sat I could command a view of all my possessions without even turning my head.” (55) However the pleasure of owning is counterbalanced by the uncanny pleasure of being possessed. The lithograph by Calame “tells no tale, but there is a weird power about it that haunts one, and it was for that I bought it.” (56) Other objects are endowed with seemingly dangerous or uncontrollable power. For instance, his smoking-cap becomes him well, yet for some reason he never wears it. About the piano, he declares, “It is a comfort for me to look at it, and to feel that the music is there (…).” His sense of possession even extends to the music and the composers that he associates with the piano. Although the narrator mentions he was under a spell, fantasy does not step in at that stage, for the objects simply reflect the protagonist’s feelings and impressions. Thus they are objective correlatives of his mood.5 The presence of modal expressions (such as the verb ‘to seem’ or the hypothetical comparative ‘as if’) testifies to the predominance of subjectivity in the subject/object relation. So if on the one hand the objects constitute extensions of the self, as possessions, on the other hand they impinge upon the subject’s territory because of their haunting power.

• 6  In Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris, Seuil, Points, 1970, 29), Tzvetan Todorov dec (...)

9The shift into fantasy occurs when the protagonist meets an individual “of extremely small stature” (61) in the garden. From then on, the room and its objects are perceived in a completely different way. Fantasy has stepped in, breaking the accepted laws of verisimilitude and leaving the reader wondering about a possible explanation and hesitating between a rational one and a supernatural one.6

• 7  On this question see Edward Saïd, Orientalism, (1979), Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1995

11Otherness has invaded the room in the form of new occupants, Roman couches, “a prodigality of luxuries” (fruits, vases, dishes, bottles, drinking-glasses). People and objects are also endowed with such marks of otherness as orientalism7 (luscious eastern fruits, the Orient sun, Turkish objects), a different civilisation set in the past (the paraphernalia of Roman bacchanals), references to various continental European cultures through objects (Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain and France). What adds to the otherness in objects is their metonymic connections with the strange occupants of the room. Indeed objects and people share the same characteristics of sensuality, luxury, weirdness: “The inhabitants of my room seemed beings well suited to so sensual an atmosphere.” (64) In addition, the room and its objects have undergone a metamorphosis. Familiar objects have been transformed into strange ones. The protagonist’s piano has become an organ, his dagger a Turkish yataghan, his smoking-cap a knightly casque, and his snow-shoes strange up-curled Turkish slippers. Orientalism and medievalism mark the metamorphosis. Strange disconnections now separate the room and objects from the protagonist. And disquieting connections with the unknown, the remote, and the past, have set in. Reality (aesthetically represented according to the laws of verisimilitude, and particularly through the assumption of the solidity of objects, one of the most basic tenets of experience) is questioned in its stability. The uncanny destabilises the very essence of things.

• 8  See Rosemary Jackson, op. cit., 19

13What used to be artistic representation receives the attributes of actual existence. This process reverses the accepted notion of mimesis: art no longer imitates life; it becomes life, crossing the forbidden frontier between representation and existence. What used to be ekphrasis (the description of a painting) is turned into hypotyposis (a description producing a reality effect). The real is under scrutiny.8 The difference between reality and representation is also blurred by the fact that the altered objects retain some of their past existence, and that their metamorphosis seems transient:

• 9  My emphasis

16If the modes of relation between subject and object are perturbed in this fantasy tale, the positions they respectively hold are also questioned. The subject’s initial immobility as he watches his articles of furniture compared with the change and even the life of objects suggests a reversal in their attributes. If he subsequently walks out of the house and comes back in, he is overwhelmed, as though petrified by what he sees: “I stood, I suppose, for some three minutes, with my back against the wall, staring vacantly at the bacchanal vision (…)” (64). Most of the time, he is fascinated to the point of physical and mental stasis. Verbs of perception and the descriptive quality of the text emphasise his position as a passive witness. A form of reification is used to describe his attitude when the women take him by the hand and lead him to the table: “I obeyed their motions mechanically9. I sat on a couch between them as they indicated. I unresistingly permitted them to wind their arms about my neck.” (64) Conversely, objects --and particularly the lithograph-- actually come to life.

• 10  Op. cit., 42.
• 11  My emphasis.
• 12  My interpretation is based on Sigmund Freud’s concepts in his essay entitled “Das Unheimliche” (19 (...)

18Metamorphosis in fantasy reveals the collapse of the metaphorical process. In the mode of verisimilitude the metaphorical process maintains a difference between representation, endowed with the quality of actuality, and what it stands for. In fantasy this difference collapses since the very notion of actuality is questioned. The figurative distance is abolished and meaning is taken literally. As Rosemary Jackson puts it, “one object does not stand for (her emphasis) another, but it literally becomes that other, slides into it, metamorphosing from one shape to another in a permanent flux and instability.”10 In “The Lost Room,” the collapse of the metaphor turns the objects into symptoms of the subject. In other words the subject’s desire is projected in an uncanny manner onto the real. The real is the site in which meaning is actually11 encoded, while neither the narrated agent nor the narrating agent are able to account for it. Thus the real (and objects in particular) can be seen as a place for the subject’s symptoms, a site for the return of the repressed. A psychoanalytic reading of the narrative discourse will be used to try and decode the objects as symptoms12.

• 13  My emphasis

19What “The Lost Room” first reveals is the subject’s anxiety about loss. The fear of dispossession is illustrated by the theme of the short story, its title, and its structure marked by the emphasis on the presence, the transformation and the final disappearance of the protagonist’s property. In addition, the continuous focus on objects, the comments on the house, the room and the articles of furniture, the intense emotional charge attached to them --notably emphasised by exclamative forms--, the dramatised argument about the room being his or not, to name the main devices used, all underline the subject’s personal involvement, which culminates in the expression of his anxiety as he loses everything. The closing of the door finally throws him into despair: “(…) and I was left standing in the corridor stunned and despairing.”(70) In the narrator’s words the profound disturbance even climaxes in madness: “I rushed madly to the door (…)”; “I rushed downstairs shouting madly.”; “The lonely garden resounded with my cries as I strode madly13 through the dark walks (…)” (70) Losing his place seems to equate with a loss in the self. Not to have is not to be, or at least not to be complete. Indeed when the protagonist finds his belongings drastically altered, the narrative voice brings together the loss of possessions and the loss of self-possession:

• 14  My emphasis.
• 15  My emphases
• 16  O’Brien is reported to be prone to suicide and to have declared : “With such a fascinating problem (...)

24If the protagonist’s inability to wear his smoking-cap has been traced to its symptomatic link with the work of mourning, the reason explicitly mentioned is different: “It has my coat of arms embroidered on the front, and for that reason14 I never wear it (…)”(56) A very curious reason indeed! The reference to ancestry is subsequently used about another object, the dagger. One of his maternal ancestors --Sir Florence O’Driscoll-- was an “old sea-king” and the story of his “stormy life” takes up a whole page. It tells how he left his estate to plead his own cause in London before Queen Bess, and “the English Queen evinced a preference for the Irish chieftain, of other nature than that usually shown by monarch to subject.”(58) When Sir O’Driscoll returned to his island he found that Hull, the man whom he had entrusted with his vast estates during his absence, refused to yield them. Eventually the sea-king had to “content himself with his castle by the sea and the island of Inniskeiran.” (59) The remembrance of this story about a loss of property functions like a comment on the protagonist’s sense of loss, especially because of the similarities between the ancestor and his descendant. Indeed, the narration recalls the first and only time the protagonist wore his smoking-cap in the following words: “(…) and I, king-like, immediately assumed my royal prerogative after the coronation and instantly levied a tax on my only subject, which was, however, not paid unwillingly.”(56) The parallel between the protagonist and his ancestor brought about by the lexical field of monarchy highlights a fantasised similarity of situations: if Sir O’Driscoll appears to have lost his estates because of sexuality, the protagonist’s anxiety bears on the fantasised risk of losing his place and identity, and displaces the anxiety onto the smoking-cap, a subconscious emblem of his similarity with his ancestor’s crown. His inability to wear it is symptomatic of a subconscious fear of punishment by loss of property. Ironically, it is his denial of sexuality that brings about the loss of the room and objects, and results in frustration to the point of near-madness. What has been repressed returns, not in explicit discourse, but in objects which thus can be seen as symptoms of the subject’s subconscious frustrations and anxieties. In the mode of fantasy used in this short story, the sense of loss is not in finesymbolised by the lost room, it returns really15 as “a cold and solid wall” in the place of the door (70). What the play of associations suggests (through the juxtaposition of apparently separate objects and underlying connections) is that it is Thanatos (through the work of mourning) which represses Eros.16 In other words, mourning and the sense of loss impose a prohibition on the subject’s drives.