Treatises on Dust by Timothy J. Jarvis Review by Victor Rees

Treatises on Dust by Timothy J. Jarvis

Review by Victor Rees

Publisher: Swan River Press 

Publication Date: July 1, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-78380-046-9 

Pages: 239

I dreamed I was walking along a black strand beside a vast underground lake, a sunless sea, when I came upon a fane consecrated to dire rites where, on a stone altar, between two black candles set in bone holders, was a triptych depicting a garden of ecstatic transmutation, with above the scene in gilt blackletter a legend, “From the small bones of the middle ear—the hammer, anvil, and stirrup—can be fashioned a key.” 

Treatises on Dust marks the first collection of short stories by Timothy J. Jarvis, bringing together previously published tales and new texts within a single edition from Dublin-based horror publisher Swan River Press. Following on from his first cult book, the furiously dynamic last-man-on-earth novel The Wanderer (2014), Jarvis’s short tales demonstrate his ever-evolving relationship with that slipperiest of modes: the Weird. The Weird is a strange label, one that has managed to become increasingly mainstream without connoting a single clear meaning, and which is all too readily used as a descriptor for works pastiching the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, still the most dominant figure in the field. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher sought to define the Weird as a mode typified by the intrusion of something unfamiliar into our reality, an incomprehensible psychic collage that reveals the instability of everyday experience. China Miéville settled upon a more specific definition, noting the overlap between the Weird and certain forms of ecstatic or visionary writings, whereby the human onlooker encounters a numinous force that blurs previously understood boundaries between the demonic and the divine. 

Jarvis, who like Miéville is both a canny scholar and an audacious author, acknowledges his debt to this particular Weird framework by foregrounding the influence of Welsh horror writer Arthur Machen over Lovecraft’s more celebrated tales of gibbering squid-beasts and sunken underground kingdoms. Seeking to pull the Weird from out of the monopolising shadow of Lovecraft, Jarvis leaves behind the fixation with eldritch monstrosities that so many parodists grow enamoured with, and instead draws inspiration from Machen’s notion of a quasi-mystical perichoresis, a subtler interpenetration of one reality onto another. The texts contained in Treatises on Dust might be seen as a variation on a single conceit, the apparent simplicity of which belies an unfathomable complexity: a human being stands at the threshold of their reality, and endeavours to see “the occulted world” that lies beyond.

[…] if you stood in the sallow cone of light and looked up at the bulb, it would sputter out and you’d see a sky, perhaps clear on an overcast night or lowering on a cloudless, and if clear, a bloated green smear of a moon and an awry spatter of stars, clustered not into the wonted ragtag menagerie, but a writhen horde.

These are tales about the limits of Vision with a capital V, which manifests in both the obsessive iconophilia of the collection (countless references to books, scraps of newspaper, films, graffiti…) and in Jarvis’s repeated references to how Weird experiences activate the pineal gland, provoking a symbolic opening of the third eye. 

Of course, Lovecraft’s tales also dealt with the dawning of new awareness, a form of realisation that more readily leads to madness than enlightenment. The central difference, however, lies in the two writers’ choices of form. One of the through-lines of Jarvis’s collection is the recurring appearance of an unnamed narrator who provides introductions for texts which he claims to have heard or read second-hand. These, he explains, are the titular “Treatises on Dust”, so-called because “dust is the stuff of all things.” The narrator explains that he is not interested in stories, but rather in accounts – curious snippets of subjective experience, texts that read more as images than fleshed-out narratives. These are the forms that many of his tales take. As such, the texts may seem unfulfilling if read in isolation and with the expectation of a clear narrative arc – but if read together, they emerge like individual spots of colour upon a warping canvas, the full scope of which is only revealed when one takes a step back. Many of Jarvis’s jewel-like extracts function as suggestions or invitations. At their most extreme, they thrust language itself into the realm of prose-poetry, resulting in passages of nightmare imagery that meld the artificial and the mythic:

Let it be a blood ape on the prowl and a stooping screech owl, let it have a tapir’s snout, a hagfish’s grisly gape, a fox’s mealy muzzle, a vulture’s ruff and tonsure, a platypus’s venomous spur, a lobster’s claw, a badger’s paw, give it a toad’s throat sac, and armadillo’s plated back […]

The writing here pulls away from Lovecraft, away from even Machen, back into an earlier literary realm. Jarvis’s voice becomes closer to that of Lautreamont’s Maldoror (1868), a proto-Weird masterpiece of crazed Vision that exemplifies Kelly Link’s distinction between narrative logic and “dream logic”, where the poetry of individual images overrides any need for systematic order. 

Even in Jarvis’s more seemingly traditional narratives there remains this element of dreamlike collapse, as the solid structure gradually dissolves to reveal a fractured account of an inexpressible subjective experience. This is exemplified in ‘And Yet Speaketh’, one of the highpoints of the collection. The bulk of the text takes the form of a detailed journey through a deprived English town, merging the psychogeographical journalism of a writer like Iain Sinclair with an intrusion of Lynchian nightmare imagery:

A group of the elderly on mobility scooters went by, going at some speed. Tristram didn’t really get a good look at them, they were gone too quickly, but he had the impression of hollow eye sockets, sparse hair sprouting from carbuncled scalps, skin fine as tracing paper stretched over brittle bones.

In some ways ‘And Yet Speaketh’ functions as a culmination of Jarvis’s concerns, pulling together numerous elements that recur across the other tales: collapsing urban environments, pubs, dreams, academic pursuits that lead down dangerous rabbit-holes… This last element forms a particularly strong spine to the collection, and reminds readers of Jarvis’s personal experience as a scholar – he is clearly enthralled with gnostic quests for arcane knowledge that can only lead to greater mystery. 

Jarvis manages a remarkable tightrope act of acknowledging his debt to the Weird tradition while re-energising the mode through the sheer force of his distinctive Vision. Treatises on Dust is best read not as a collection of scattered tales, but as a series of extracts from a greater “hyper-novel”, a term Dirk W. Mosig coined for Lovecraft’s interconnected mythos. Within the gaps and mysteries at the heart of these accounts, a pattern of recurrences forms to indicate a greater structure which is never fully revealed – one gets the sense that a core secret or truth lies at the heart of these stories, one which remains perpetually beyond our grasp. This is a collection that stands on the threshold between ecstasy and dread, a work of obsessions and echoes that serves to increase the reader’s own Vision – that aims to flood the world, as one of Jarvis’s Weird Visionaries proclaims, “with revelation and darkling bliss.”

Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer and scholar with an interest in the antic, the weird, the strange. His first novel, The Wanderer, was published by Perfect Edge Books in 2014. His short fiction has appeared in The Flower Book, The Shadow Booth Volume 1, The Scarlet Soul, Murder Ballads, and Uncertainties I, among other places. He also writes criticism and reviews, and is co-editor of Faunus, the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen.

Victor Rees is a writer and academic, currently undertaking a PhD at University College London on the novels, sculptures and performance art of Brian Catling. He has been published by Swedenborg House and Albion Village Press, and has a forthcoming publication due to be released by Three Impostors Press in 2024. His work can be found at victorrees.com.

18 September 2024