Slade House Blog 3: Hunters and the Hunted

For our third blog on Slade House by David Mitchel we took a look at intertextual codes, like the semic, proairetic, symbolic, and cultural codes. Through looking for these codes in the text, we are working to discover any connotative meanings and see if what we find challenges the controlling values.

As described on our course’s website, the semic code “Defines characters, objects, and places through repetitively grouping a number of signifiers (“semes”: words and phrases) around a proper name.” That is to say that characters, objects, and places are often described by certain words or associated with certain images throughout the text. These words and images carry a connotative meanings or connections to other texts and cultural ideas that help define them for the reader.

For example, the twins call all of their victims “engifted.” This carries several implications from the idea of being academically gifted to perhaps being supernaturally gifted. Another signfier that surrounds these engifted characters are foxes. Every victim begins there journey outside or in a pub called The Fox and Hounds. A fox hairpin is also passed from victim to victim throughout the chapters. At one point Nathan, the first victim, plays a game with Jonah called fox and hounds. In the game, two people start a race on opposite sides of the house and run until someone catches the other. As Jonah explains, “The catcher is the hound and one who’s caught is the fox” (20). While their game gets interrupted, Nathan fails to escape Slade House and gets his soul devoured. He most certainly ends up being the captured fox and the twins are the hounds hunting him. The game also sets up a symbolic code, which consists of opposites in the text, of chaser and the chase, or killer and victim, or the powerful and the powerless. The twins have all the power in their Orison. They literally control everything their victim perceives, while their victims have no control.

Being the fox defines Nathan and the other engifted as prey, but foxes carry a cultural connotation of cleverness and danger. Later, foxes reappear in a much different context. While the fourth victim, Freya, is having her soul devour, the ghost of her sister appears with the fox hair pin and “plunges a six-inch needle into one side of [jonah’s] windpipe” (193). That is the more cunning fox we are used to seeing. So it seems the semic code of foxes defines the engifted as both prey and predator.

The ending of Freya’s chapter, with her escape from the twins, also demonstrates the Proairetic code. The proairetic code “determines the causal (cause and effect), narrative sequence and syntagmatic progression…. which allows the reader to predict subsequent events that follow from their causes.” We can see the proairetic code in the chapters leading up to Freya’s story by the repetition in each victim’s journey. Each victim is lured through the Black iron door, lured into Slade House itself, tricked into eating or drinking the Banjax, and tricked into entering the Lacuna under their own free will. After the engifted is lured through the door, they find themselves paralyzed and kneeling in front of a candle, facing both Grayer Twins and their own reflection in the mirror. Their soul is then pulled out by some type of “jellyfish like” blob with tendrils and devoured by the twins.  So when chapter 4 comes around, the reader is predicting in their mind what will happen. They already assume Freya will follow the steps laid out by those before. And knowing that dreadful outcome builds the tension of the story.  Yet, in chapter 4 when Freya’s soul is about to be consumed, Sally’s after image appears and attacks Jonah. As a result, the Grayer twins are not able to feed on the soul, and the Orison is closed for another 9 years. This deviation before the final chapter alters the proairetic code, but still has some semblance of it. Despite the reversal, it keeps building suspense because now the reader cannot guess where the story will go next.

All of these codes point to a cultural code developing throughout the text. The cultural code “speak the familiar ‘truths’ of the existing cultural order, repeat what has ‘always been already read, seen, done, experienced'” (Silverman 242). The hunter becoming the hunted is a familiar story we all have experienced. The contradicting nature of stories where the side with no hope, no power, but refuses to die, win against those with all the power. However, Freya’s escape is not the end of the story. So we will have to see whether the powerful twins who forsake their humanity win out, or their victims who cling to their humanity conquer their killers from beyond the grave.