Dark Empathy: Algernon Blackwood and the Aesthetics of Rapture

Processes of becoming, of transformation or transmutation, are central to Algernon Blackwood’s ghostly weird fiction. In the vast majority of his short stories, everyday people, places, and events are rendered potential entryways to other forms of life and consciousness – portals to ‘elsewhere and otherwise’, as he liked to put it. Across his fiction, he explores the possibilities and enmeshments of human and nonhuman psyches, and the rapturous dialectic of joy and terror that follows when the bounded human subject comes undone. Using stories such as ‘A Descent Into Egypt’, ‘The Wings of Horus’, and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ as case studies, this article argues that Blackwood achieves these enmeshments through a Gothic feeling-with – a ‘dark empathy’. This dark empathy accommodates and gives shape to a dis-anthropomorphic aesthetics, one that is ultimately better suited to the entanglements between the physical and the nonphysical that characterise his fiction.