That Beautiful Terror of a Moment in Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Living man! Living Man! I want to be a Living Man!
I am a constant learner, and thoughts may differ on this subject. Feel free to comment, gently correct, or disagree.
My students and I were discussing Ambrose Bierce’s classic short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," a few weeks ago, and some ideas came up that I thought I would ponder here a bit more. If you have not read the story, check it out first. Spoilers abound ahead.
After discussing the reporting style that sets the scene and focus of the story, I asked them for their thoughts on the moment that our main character, Farquhar, lets “his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet.” This is when, “A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move, What a sluggish stream!”
A common enough question, hoping to foster a discussion of psychological realism and how the “sluggish stream” represented the slowing of time that occurs just after. I was happy to hear that most of them, fresh off of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” grasped the movement into the main character’s mind and, at least upon a second reading, saw how the author was depicting what Don A. Habibi calls, “a liminal setting; that is, it happens at the intense sensory threshold between life and death.”
We talked about these ideas for a while when one of the students opined, “I get that moment and how the fantasy Farquhar creates plays out. I just didn’t understand why he sees the world as he does when he breaks from the water. There is something wrong there. How could something so horrifying be so beautiful?”
It’s a great question. One that gets to the heart of my favorite part of the story. The journey home and to death.
When Farquhar comes to the surface of the water, Bierce writes,
He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf--saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies' wings, the strokes of the water-spiders' legs, like oars which had lifted their boat--all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.
Farquhar’s movement into fantasy here starts with both vivid splendor and beauty. He has a new view of nature, one could argue, brought about by his experience (either being saved from death in the fantasy or being near death in reality). This beauty plays off the reader’s notion of what something beautiful means. As Eran Guter states, “beauty is often considered to be an aesthetic property, and also something which is inherently good and pleasurable.”
Readers could also argue that this new vision is one of the sublime. Edmund Burke defines the sublime as, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” Burke argues that his definition of the sublime is in direct opposition to beauty. As Laura Smith states, “Burke associates qualities of "balance," "smoothness," "delicacy" and "color" with the beautiful, while he speaks of the sublime in terms such as "vastness" and "terror."
Yet, Farquhar’s situation (he is caught in that moment where the rope is cutting his air supply) creates a liminal space where both can be seen. The sublime terror underlays the vivid beauty. There is terror in the exalted nature of the scene. Hence, my student’s discomfort.
This is shown so well in Robert Enrico’s 1962 French short film that also aired as an episode of the Twilight Zone in 1964.
Watch the whole film or scan to around nine minutes in to see the scene I am talking about.
As Farquhar breaks the water, the song starts to guide the viewer through his belief that he is a “living man.” The song makes me smile everytime I hear it. Yet, the shifting of blurry and crisp visuals, as well as the image of the spider that is wrapping its prey up to eat later, gives the viewer a glimpse of that terror. The song is overly jovial. It falls into a mocking tone that almost turns the stomach. The movement from the music to the slow-motion voice is the last twist of realization that this is a terrifying scene.
Here, the director really controls the viewer’s movement through beauty and helps one see the underlying terror of the gaze. As “Gilbert-Rolfe says that nature is limited and finite, and that the sublime requires the limitlessness of technology” (qtd. in Smith). The technology of filmmaking makes these connections even more experiential.
This moment of beauty sets the reader up for the journey that Farquhar takes. Bierce writes, “All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman's road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.”
The “uncanny” feeling set up in the disturbing scene of nature continues with the reader, nagging at the terror that all is not as it seems. By the time Farquhar reaches the enclosed path, one knows something is very wrong.
Bierce continues,
The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great garden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which--once, twice, and again--he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.
Here, nature has turned fully into the sublime, and the reader fears the ending. Burke addresses these ideas, stating, “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”
Those “whispers in an unknown tongue” evokes cosmic horror that solidifies the protagonist’s descent into another world. Again this is shown so well in the film adaptation (around nineteen minutes in). As Farquhar runs down the straight path, the terror of the ending grows, and the emotions of the reader/viewer reach a peak.
Of course, Bierce tricks the reader with Farquhar’s arrival at home. The twist ending is effective. Yet, what makes this story such a great one to re-read and discuss is the journey more than the ending. That movement through beauty to terror that holds the reader in the same liminal space as the protagonist, constantly feeling uneasy but not quite wanting to accept that the story will not have a traditionally “happy “ending.
Works not Linked:
"Beauty." Aesthetics A-Z, Eran Guter, Edinburgh University Press, 1st edition, 2010. Credo Reference, https://libauth.purdueglobal.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/eupaes/beauty/0?institutionId=9655. Accessed 04 Nov. 2022.
“Sublime." Aesthetics A-Z, Eran Guter, Edinburgh University Press, 1st edition, 2010. Credo Reference, https://libauth.purdueglobal.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/eupaes/sublime/0?institutionId=9655. Accessed 04 Nov. 2022.
I first saw that episode of the Twilight Zone when I was around 9 years old. I was at my aunt and uncle’s house. All of the adults were in the kitchen playing cards (I think it was Spoons). I wrapped up in a blanket and sat in my uncle’s recliner (which was a rare treat) and watched that episode. It was really disturbing to me. So much so that I still remember it all these years later.
I first read the story as a sophomore in high school. That was such a big year for me when it came to discovering authors who wrote stories like Bierce. It was the first year I read Hawthorne and Stephen Vincent Benet (who really deserves more attention), and many others.
I enjoyed this article. I hope you’ll write more like this in the future.
I haven't read much Benet. I need to dig into his stuff a little.
That is awesome that you saw that episode so early. I only saw it for the first time when I started teaching the story and sought it out. No one that ever had me read it in school talked about the film.