An Excerpt from Haunted Houses, Haunted Stories (Under Construction)

[sadoeuphemist]

Orblez’s short story, We Who Have Been Spoken For, presents itself as the documentation of a fictional novel, The Chapterhouse Murders, in which Orblez’s fictional narrator, Andreas Paz, is gradually driven mad by a sort of existential terror over the course of reading the book. The plot of Chapterhouse can be summed up simply enough: twelve people find themselves trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere, and one by one meet gruesome deaths until the novel’s final chapter, in which the unseen narrator of Chapterhouse is revealed to have been the murderer all along. As Paz proceeds through the novel - which he describes in architectural metaphors, as if he is venturing deeper into a structure as he goes - he discovers that previously-read chapters of the book have been defaced in a similar manner in which their occupants were killed: the pages shredded, burnt, waterlogged, blood-soaked, spindled, mutilated, etc., all made unreadable. The nature of the murderous narrator (from hereon used to describe all instances of the narrator of The Chapterhouse Murders), as well as the ambiguity of the story’s ending, and that of the novel-within-the-story, have been the subject of much academic discussion.

As none of the text of Chapterhouse is ever quoted directly within Orblez's short story, all guesses as to its prose structure must be reconstructed through the ramblings a secondary unreliable narrator, Andreas Paz - a meta-narrator, essentially - as he succumbs to madness. From Paz's narration, we can glean several clues as to the nature of the work: Each chapter is told from the point of view of the character who meets their end within it. The characters are called occupants by Paz, but notably only in the sense of them 'occupying' their fatal chapter; i.e. Paz only begins using the term after the first death, and only to refer to characters during their respective POV chapters, or those who are already dead by that point in the narrative. In the infamous final chapter, the last surviving occupant, Herman Silva, begins to hear a mysterious 'disembodied voice' approaching him. Paz identifies the voice as the narrator's, suggesting that Silva is hearing the text of the novel itself spoken out to him. Paz describes the effect as 'echoing', 'maddening', and at one point writes frenziedly that 'the walls [are] closing in!' We are told that Silva, too, dies at the hands of the narrator, but the exact nature of his death, and the ultimate fate of Paz, are left unknown.

Part of the effectiveness of Orblez's short story is the metaphor of novel as haunted house, the suggestion that text itself is inextricably haunted by the 'ghost' of its narrator. The narrator may be read as some sort of malevolent entity capable of extending beyond the limitations of text, tormenting Paz the reader, and then by inference capable of progressing metatextually to potentially haunt the very much nonfictional reader of We Who Have Been Spoken For. On one level, this may literally be true - the nature of the written word, persisting past an author's lifespan, allows a current reader to be piqued, disturbed, aroused, tormented, etc., by the words of an author long since dead. But, then, what are we to make of the narrator's slaughter of the characters - would not all the characters in a story be equally undead, sustained only by the narrator that creates them? 

Much discussion of the short story focuses on the apparent contradiction of its climax, which proceeds as follows: the final chapter is supposedly told entirely from the point of view of the last surviving occupant, Herman Silva, who ultimately also dies at the hands of the unseen narrator. This would seem to be incompatible with the reveal that the narrator is the killer, as surely the final confrontation would have to have been told from the narrator’s point of view. And if each chapter is told from a different point of view, then how can the narrator be considered as a singular entity throughout the entire book, much less the one responsible for the murder of all its characters? 

As one potential resolution to this conflict, consider Paz's repeated descriptions of the final chapter as 'echoing.' Silva, he implies, can hear every word of the narrator, presumably including the descriptions of Silva's own utterances and thoughts, and so we might imagine his final confrontation with the narrator as a sort of feedback loop, Silva forced to constantly react to an accounting of his own reactions. Attempts to reproduce such an effect in various fanworks have achieved varying degrees of success, but we might imagine Silva's torment as that of a consciousness examining itself, turning ever-inward recursively. The ambiguity of the murderous narrator might then be seen as the shifting existence of the self: is self-examination ever truly possible without slipping into a similar feedback loop? If I narrate my own thoughts out loud, is there not then a necessary distance between the spoken word and the thought in my head - a necessary process of editorializing that elides the fact of my own self-examination and instead speaks out my words as if describing a stranger's? Is this shortcoming not present in every attempt at communication? In her review of the story, Piregu imagines the infamous final chapter of Chapterhouse as recursing into smaller and smaller text, overwriting itself, and that it is this glimpse of infinity which drives Paz to madness.

 Brillantes, meanwhile, has made the suggestion that a narrator and a point-of-view character, while commonly considered to be the same thing, need not necessarily apply to the same voice. In Brillantes’ own words:

We imagine that to identify himself as such, the killer must say “I”; must say “my hands around his neck”, must say, “I then slaughtered him.” But such an “I” is merely an identifier, a name as interchangeable as “Andreas Paz” or “Herman Silva” or "Ferdinand Orblez". We can tell stories in the third person, we can project ourselves, look out through a character’s eyes and puppet them as intimately as a self, without saying that incriminating word “I” even once. Who then, is to say that the narrator-as-murderer could not tell the final chapter from Herman Silva’s point of view? Is that not then our fear of colonization, of someone else telling our stories for us? If we recognize some intimate part of ourselves in a story written by a complete stranger, who is the “I” that has spoken? Perhaps we are interchangeable, then. Perhaps we can dispose of each other at a whim.

Brillantes’ proposal has inspired a number of fanworks that attempt to recreate the text of The Chapterhouse Murders, resulting in several truly convoluted narrative attempts to separate the narrator and point-of-view character, all in all of highly varying quality.

On the other hand, perhaps it would be simpler to read the work as if there is no contradiction, and to simply accept Silva the killer all along, the ‘disembodied voice’ of narration that he hears in the final chapter simply an auditory hallucination, Silva talking to himself and envisioning his own death prior to committing suicide. In this reading, Silva/the narrator’s descent into madness then parallels Paz’s worsening mental state, there being no supernatural quality to the novel, the defacement of previously-read chapters easily explained as Paz’s own actions, the knowledge of them subsequently suppressed. We may understand, then, that it is the reader who is the ultimate narrator and interpreter of any story, influencing its tone and meaning through their own preexisting prejudices and assumptions. After all, it is your voice you are hearing now, as you read this. It is you who has brought these words to life. It is you, in the end, who will lay them all to rest.