"There comes a moment in the life of every individual
when reality must be faced."
I.
They say that dog owners gradually begin to resemble their pets, and people smile at the idea.
But what if everyone were to suddenly lose their human features and be seen with the head of the creature that best expresses their inhuman qualities; not so much their true nature, as what might be termed their molecular animality - would we still find this gently amusing?
I suspect not: in all likelihood, initial astonishment would quickly give way to horror, as the writer Daphne du Maurier brilliantly demonstrates in her extraordinary short story 'The Blue Lenses' (1959) ...
II.
Marda West is recovering in a nursing-home, following an operation on her eyes. The day has finally arrived for the bandages to be removed and for a pair of blue lenses to be fitted. Her surgeon reassures her that she will see more clearly than ever before.
As someone who has also undergone restorative eye-surgery, I can vouch for Marda's anxious anticipation; the hope that patience would be rewarded at last; the fear that the anonymity of darkness will continue. To see again, is to be born again. To rediscover the wonder of the world in all its glamourous objecthood: a wardrobe, a chair, a wash-basin, a window, a vase full of flowers ...
"The dim light caused by the blue lenses enhanced the charm, the softness of all she saw. It seemed to her, rejoicing in form and shape, that colour would never matter."
What does concern Mrs. West, however, is the fact that her nurse, has the head of a cow! The head of a cow - with wide horns, large eyes, and broad nostrils - atop the uniformed body of a woman, carrying a tray with a glass of milk.
She thinks at first that Nurse Brand must be wearing an animal mask - but, no, she isn't. And nor is her surgeon wearing a mask when he comes into the room with a dog's head, ears pricked, and looking as if he might at any moment begin to yap and wag his tail. Marda begins to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.
However, when she looks down the corridor leading from her room and sees that everyone is in on the deception (as she believes it to be) - including a weasel-headed maid and a pig-headed porter - then "the first sharp prick of fear came to Marda West."
Bovine Nurse Brand leads her back to bed and gives her a sedative. But when she wakes up, things remain just as queer. She finds reassurance in the fact that the inanimate objects of her room have remained what they were: the chair is still a chair, not a mushroom; the table is still a table, not a haystack; and there is nothing false about the carnations, as fragrant and as graceful as always.
But the people have all become-animal: Nurse Sweeting is a kitten; Matron is mutton-headed in every sense of the term. "Why was it only people had changed? What was so wrong with people?"
Marda decides that, either she has gone insane, or it's the lenses that must be to blame; they were faulty in some way and creating an optical illusion. Or magical, and bestowing upon her some kind of hypervision. And yet why then had her own face remained unchanged in the mirror? They had to be wearing masks; masks designed by some genius mask-maker "that merged with the body, blending fabric to skin" - for there was no obvious join to be seen.
She awaited the arrival of her favourite nurse, Nurse Ansel, the bewitching night-nurse. She trusted Nurse Ansel above all others; Nurse Ansel wouldn't lie to her. It was quite a shock then when Nurse Ansel entered her room and slid slowly into view - with the head of a snake on a long, twisting neck: "Marda West felt sickness rise in her stomach, choking her ..."
And she knew that what she saw was real: but it was real with the reality of evil. Thus, it's not coincidental that Deleuze and Guattari speak of man's becoming-animal as a demonic process that challenges the idea of human being as something essential. Nurse Ansel didn't resemble a snake and she wasn't identifying as a one; she was a viper.
However we choose to describe it, du Maurier's tale is not simply an imaginative fantasy and she, like D. H. Lawrence, is "another of the writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration" precisely because she was able to tie her work to "real and unheard of becomings". Hers is a genuinely black art.*
Marda awaits her husband. Naively, she thinks he will save her from the waking nightmare in which she finds herself. But husband Jim, for all his familiar trappings - umbrella and bowler hat - now has the unmistakable head of a vulture:" The brooding eye, the blood-tipped beak, the flabby folds of flesh." Seeing the vulture and the serpent-nurse in conversation together, she knows that they are intimate and in collusion against her: "The two communicated in silence, sympathy between them."
In a fabulous passage, du Maurier reveals Marda West's fears of what horror is yet to come: would the bodies begin to change too, "hands and feet becoming wings, claws, hoofs, paws, with no touch of humanity left to the people about her"? And what about Jim's steady and reassuring voice? "When the human voice went, there would be no hope." Then she would be all alone, surrounded by the savage cruelty of beasts on all sides, making their jungle noises and cries.
Marda decides she has to escape. And so she creeps out of the nursing-home in the middle of the night, passed the fish-faced night-porter, and out on to familiar streets of central London. But alas, there is no escape for the woman with the blue lenses:
"When she came to Oxford Street she paused, wondering of a sudden where she should go, whom she could ask for refuge. And it came to her once again that there was no one at all [...] No one was human, no one was safe [...] Down Oxford Street she ran [...] the night all darkness and shadow, the light no longer with her, alone in an animal world."
This is the breaking point for Marda West: the moment when the link between emotion and reason is stretched to the point beyond endurance, and something snaps. Of course, this isn't as rare as people think - and you don't need to see the people around you suddenly transformed into beasts.
Indeed, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote twenty years earlier: All life is a process of breaking down ... One that combines big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside with blows from within that you don't feel until it's too late (i.e., until you realise with finality that in some regard you'll never be the same person again).**
Having evidently collapsed in the street, Marda wakes up back in the nursing-home. The porter, she's told, had luckily decided to follow her and was there when she needed him.
The blue lenses had been removed and replaced with another pair that enable her not only to see the world in colour, but as it was - as it should be - fully human and free from animal-headed monsters. The doctors reassure her all will now be well; they talk about a trapped optical nerve or some such thing as having caused her terrible ordeal.
Nurse Ansel was there to hold her hand and to smile at her with understanding. Marda admires her hazel eyes, clear olive skin, and beautiful dark hair: "How could she have seen Nurse Ansel as a snake!" She was so pretty, so gentle - a woman whose very presence promised friendship and loyalty.
All, then, was well, as the sun came "streaming through the window, throwing light on the roses, the lilies, the tall-stemmed iris". Even the hum of traffic outside sounded friendly. "Instead of darkness, light. Instead of negation, life."
But of course, this being a horror story - which is to say, true to the transparence du mal that shines through the moment you rub the surface of the world too hard, in a vain attempt to make it ever-more ideal - it doesn't end here ...
Marda West decides to apply her face-cream and powder and to paint her lips; to dab some scent behind her ears:
"The fragrance filtered, becoming part of the warm, bright day. She lifted the hand-mirror and looked into it. Nothing changed in the room, the street noises penetrated from outside, and presently the little maid who had seemed a weasel yesterday came in to dust the room.She said, 'Good morning', but the patient did not answer. Perhaps she was tired. The maid dusted, and went her way.
Then Marda West took up the mirror and looked into it once more. No, she had not been mistaken. The eyes that stared back at her were doe's eyes, wary before sacrifice, and the timid deer's head was meek, already bowed."
And that, gentle readers, is just about the most perfect ending to a near-perfect short story that you could ever ask for.
Notes
Daphne du Maurier, 'The Blue Lenses', The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 44-82. All lines quoted and paraphrased above are from this edition.
* Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 244.
** F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Crack-Up', in The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories, (Penguin Books, 1965), p. 39.
