Correspondence No. 5: “Wakefield,” a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne // The Exterminating Angel, a film directed by Luis Buñuel
In “Wakefield,” Hawthorne uses a device to cover implausibility – this is a story he read “in some old magazine or newspaper” – and deploys it as a framework for his own speculation. The title character, a respectable, ordinary Londoner, leaves his home and wife (using a business trip as an excuse) and settles down in a house in the very next street, where he stays for the next twenty years. Never once during this period does he return to his home, nor does he try to communicate with his wife. Shortly after leaving, he decides to go back, but on his own doorstep the vagueness of his thinking prevents action: “Such are his loose and rambling modes of thought that he has taken this very singular step… without being able to define it sufficiently for his own contemplation.”
Wakefield’s motivations, as filtered through Hawthorne’s speculative style of storytelling, remain hazy. Circumstances work upon him, essentially turning him into a different person. At one point, he comes face to face with his wife on the street, a brief moment of recognition for both of them. But the crowd sweeps them away from each other, and they go their separate ways again.
In The Exterminating Angel, guests arrive at a mansion for a dinner party and then find, when the party is more or less over, that they can’t leave. The reason for their inertia is never made clear. They express worry and wonderment over the fact that they are stuck in the house as if by some invisible gravitational force. The morning after, several guests announce their intention to leave, but they are interrupted by, of all things, the arrival of morning coffee (“you know, it wouldn’t hurt to have a cup”). The impulse to leave fizzles out, and they are trapped in the house again.
Since Buñuel never tells us why the people are stuck there, we are left to speculate. One possible reason is that the party doesn’t come to a proper end: there is never a moment when the host or other authority figure signals that the party is over, so the guests do not feel free to leave. As they settle down for the night, making themselves as comfortable as they can under the circumstances, the host, though apparently a bit disturbed by the situation, takes no action to get them out of the house, and even tries to accommodate them further. After a while, the guests are slaughtering a goat for food in the living room, and hacking at the plumbing in a desperate search for water. Nobody is preventing them from leaving, yet they stay, becoming more quarrelsome and vicious as time goes by.
At times, Buñuel suggests that the dinner guests are at the mercy of cosmic forces they cannot understand. He repeats certain shots, sometimes from different angles, giving a sense of time playing tricks. A bear suddenly appears out of nowhere for no apparent reason, climbing the walls. The sense of paralysis begins to take hold outside the house, as if it were creating some kind of force field. Soldiers are sent to end the crisis, but fail to enter the house. “But did they actually try to enter?” their commander is asked. “No, and that’s the worst thing about it,” the commander responds.
Both Wakefield and the dinner guests eventually find a way out of their respective predicaments. In the first case, a sudden rainstorm compels action; in the second, the guests replay an earlier scene from the film, picking up a thread they had broken days before. At the end of his story, Hawthorne gives an interpretation that could apply to both works: “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.” One of the dinner guests is a bit more lighthearted: “I find it very original. I love it when things deviate from the routine.”
Jorge Luis Borges was so fascinated by “Wakefield” that he devoted a large portion of his lecture on Hawthorne to it.
If you can summon your resolve, listen to this classic song by The Band, inspired in part by Buñuel’s common theme of the impossibility of doing simple things.