The Powers that Be

I

 

Washington Irving's A History of New York came out in 1809.  It was a comic account of the times of three early Dutch governors, purportedly written by Diedrich Knickerbocker.  The story was that Knickerbocker had gone missing without paying his bill - Irving even placed real newspaper requests for information about his whereabouts - and the landlord was publishing the manuscript in order to make good his losses.  Irving wrote little in the next ten years, then in 1819 brought out a miscellany, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.   He was now in England, and much of the collection was given over to local occasion-pieces and vignettes - the narrator's journey across the Atlantic, country churches, rural funerals, Christmas customs, Westminster Abbey, Little Britain, the behaviour of writers in the British Museum.  There are a couple of articles of genuine history, and then there are three narratives that today we recognize as short stories - "The Spectre Bridegroom," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and "Rip Van Winkle."  The latter two stories are presented as further New York findings from among the now late Diedrich Knickerbocker's papers.

 

They both take place along the Hudson River - Sleepy Hollow near Tarrytown, and Rip Van Winkle somewhat further north - and today they tend to be remembered together as lightly and pleasantly supernatural, quaint old faux-Dutch legends mild enough to tell children or to be recalled fondly from our own childhood hearing of them.  Irving is an extraordinarily friendly and gentle narrator, a sort of casual host who wants us to feel at ease, and who seems to ask in return only that we go along with his puttering, meandering ways.  But Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle are very different stories - both from the earlier New York narratives and from each other - with very different narrative strategies and residual values.  The New York stories had been relaxed and digressive, exploiting an opportunity as it arose and jogging along to the next, but the new stories have a much more tightly planned architecture.

 

From its beginning, Sleepy Hollow draws a target on its intended comic climax and moves deliberately toward it with an almost syllogistic narrative.  All of the allusions, all of the characterizations, all of the ironies work to the same end.  There are no loose threads, no purpose beyond setting up Ichabod Crane to meet the Headless Horseman; and when the story ends, there are no questions left unanswered.  The lingering impression is only a pleasant sense of Sleepy Hollow and its legends, and a rollicking picture of a terrified schoolmaster.

 

Rip Van Winkle is a much richer story, and its effects are harder to explain.  Most of it proceeds neutrally and rapidly with no foreshadowing but no digressive interludes.  We don't know what is going to happen to Rip when he starts up the mountain.  For all we know of the tale to this point - and of Irving's tales more generally - we might be wondering whether Rip will perhaps discover a secret weapon with which to tame Dame Van Winkle, or some such thing.  The early narration isn't layered over with local legends, hints of supernatural doings; Rip and his dog are simply going hunting.  Then something magical happens, in unexpectedly dense prose, which sews together several elements but whose meaning is never entirely resolved.  It's rather like some of the supernatural interludes in Shakespearean comedy, perhaps even in Macbeth.  When the story ends, there is something left over - we aren't finished with it as we are finished with Sleepy Hollow.  There's more here than another Sleepy Hollow, or a satire on the new America or the new American, or the sentimental, exaggerated recall of an old Dutch village, or the clever ways of a lazy or cowardly man.  We find ourselves thinking that despite its impossibility the central story is somehow true, true in some elusive sense.

 

 

II

 

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" starts by portraying the setting as a place where spirits are seen, and one in particular.  The people "are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air.  The whole neighbourhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions."  "The dominant spirit ... is the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head.  It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannonball ... and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk, hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind."

 

Then in short order we meet Ichabod Crane, deliberately drawn as a credulous Don Quixote figure but with petty qualities substituted for Don Quixote's noble ones.  He is, first, physically the part:

 

He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together.  His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew.  To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

 

For the night that will afterward be so famous, he is even given a Rozinante, but a malign one:

 

That he might make his appearance before his mistress in the true style of a cavalier, he borrowed a horse from the farmer with whom he was domiciliated, a choleric old Dutchman, of the name of Hans Van Ripper, and thus gallantly mounted, issued forth like a knight errant in quest of adventures.  But it is meet I should, in the true spirit of romantic story, give some account of the looks and equipments of my hero and his steed.  The animal he bestrode was a broken down plough horse, that had outlived almost every thing but his viciousness.  He was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck and a head like a hammer; his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burrs; one eye had lost its pupil, and was glaring and spectral, but the other had the gleam of a genuine devil in it...

 

Instead of books of chivalry, he has absorbed accounts of witchcraft; and instead of inspiring him, they frighten him:

 

He had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed ... He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity.  His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary, and both had been increased by his residence in this spell bound region.  No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow.  It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed of an afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover, bordering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and there on over old Mather's direful tales, until the gathering dusk made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes.  Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farm house where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his imagination.

 

Instead of jousting with giants, or liberating chain gang prisoners, his principal activity is beating his pupils.  And instead of being content with the meagre table of a knight errant, he is an absolute glutton for both quantity and quality of food.  "He was a huge feeder, and though lank, had the dilating powers of an Anaconda."  He courts Katrina Van Tassel primarily because she will fall heir to a substantial fortune, which he imagines largely in terms of an unlimited feast:

 

He pictured to himself every roasting pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce; in the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey, but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savoury sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back, in a side dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter, which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living.

 

He wants Katrina, not as a Dulcinea to inspire him and to receive his knightly tribute, but as a bringer of wealth and luxury.  But there is an obstacle:

 

From the moment Ichabod laid his eyes upon these regions of delight, the peace of his mind was at an end, and his only study was how to gain the affections of the peerless daughter of Van Tassel.  In this enterprize, however, he had more real difficulties than generally fell to the lot of a knight errant of yore, who seldom had any thing but giants, enchanters, fiery dragons, and such like easily conquered adversaries ... He had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of real flesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers...

 

Among these, the most formidable, was a burly, roaring, roystering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rung with his feats of strength and hardihood.  He was broad shouldered and double jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff, but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance.  From his Herculean frame and great powers of limb, he had received the nick name of Brom Bones, by which he was universally known.  He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar.

 

Brom Bones, moreover, has even been heard to consider himself and his horse Daredevil more than a match for the Headless Horseman and his steed.  He met the Hessian one night, he said, and challenged him to a race, and he had the race all but won when the headless horseman bolted off in a flash of fire.

Ichabod and Brom Bones become rivals, but not along terms that are satisfactory to Brom:

 

Brom, who had a degree of rough chivalry in his nature, would fain have carried matters to open warfare, and have settled their pretensions to the lady, according to the mode of those most concise and simple reasoners, the knights errant of yore - by single combat; but Ichabod was too conscious of the superior might of his adversary to enter the lists against him; he had overheard a boast of Bones, that he would "double the schoolmaster up, and lay him on a shelf of his own schoolhouse;" and he was too wary to give him an opportunity.  There was something extremely provoking in this obstinately pacific system; it left Brom no alternative but to draw upon the funds of rustic waggery in his disposition, and to play off boorish practical jokes upon his rival.

 

The final ingredient is the party at the Van Tassel house, where smooth-dancing Ichabod monopolizes Katrina while Brom Bones seethes in a corner.  When Ichabod now starts on his long, lonely way home through the dark, windy woods, we know that he is going to joust with the Headless Horseman, that the Headless Horseman will be Brom Bones, and that Ichabod will get what he pretty much deserves.  And sure enough, Ichabod finds himself pursued at the gallop by a horseman holding his head on the pommel of his saddle, who at last hurls the head at Ichabod and knocks him off his horse.  The next morning all that is found of Ichabod is his hat, and nearby, a smashed pumpkin.  Brom Bones is afterward "observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin."  And several years after the incident an old farmer reports having seen Ichabod in a distant part of the country.

 

When we're told that the belief persists among many in the neighbourhood that Ichabod was carried off that night by the Headless Horseman, and that as the schoolhouse decays, it is said to be haunted by Ichabod's ghost, we smile, and that is all.  It is "a favourite story often told about the neighbourhood round the winter evening fire," and the sort of thing that would today make for a tourist curiosity, one that might require for its sustenance at least the appearance of some local credulity.  There is no great lingering mystery; it's not important to us whether perhaps Brom Bones had played the Hessian earlier, or what the real origins of the story were.

 

 

III

 

"Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains."  Thus begins the first paragraph of "Rip Van Winkle," which affords the only early hint that the mountains will play a role in the story.  There's no trace of anything supernatural.  The only possible reference, "magical," is used naturally and even with a scientific reference: "Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives far and near as perfect barometers."  The paragraph simply gives us a lofty view of the mountains as enclosing landscape, which is then narrowed in the second paragraph: "At the foot of these fairy mountains the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape."  Irving moves our attention down from the mountains to the village, to the houses "built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland," and then in the third paragraph to the house of Rip Van Winkle and to the man himself.  It is painterly - distances have a blue hue, then the eye is drawn by the curling smoke down into the more vivid colours and details of the foreground, and finally to its human subject.  It takes it even further than a painting could, in fact, since a viewer might see that the bricks were yellow, but hardly that they were the smaller-size bricks characteristic of older Dutch architecture; the technique is almost cinematic.

 

The paragraphs that follow take up, in short order, Rip's character, circumstances, habitual pastimes, and persecution by Dame Van Winkle.  The closest thing to a digression is the short description of Nicholaus Vedder:

 

A patriarch of the village, and landlord of the inn, at the door of which he took his seat from morning till night, just moving sufficiently to avoid the sun and keep in the shade of a large tree; so that the neighbours could tell the hour by his movements as accurately as by a sun dial.  It is true he was rarely heard to speak, but smoked his pipe incessantly.  His adherents, however (for every great man has his adherents), perfectly understood him and knew how to gather his opinions.  When any thing that was read or related displeased him, he was observed to smoke his pipe vehemently and to send forth short, frequent and angry puffs; but when pleased he would inhale the smoke slowly and tranquilly and emit it in light and placid clouds, and sometimes taking the pipe from his mouth and letting the fragrant vapour curl about his nose, would gravely nod his head in token of perfect approbation.

 

In the New York histories Irving constantly paused for some entertaining caricature, and what he says here about Nicholaus Vedder might seem an abbreviated, paler version of his earlier treatment of Wouter Van Twiller ("Walter the Doubter").  But this isn't just a meandering characterization.  The old innkeeper is compared first to a sundial by whose movements the neighbours have learned to tell the time, then to an instrument which the neighbours have learned to read by the puffs from his pipe.  This recalls the first paragraph of the story, where the mountains were said sometimes to "gather a hood of grey vapours about their summits," by which the mountain barometer was read.  Old Nicholaus Vedder is a gauge of local doings, just as the mountains measure larger phenomena.  When Rip later returns to the village after his sleep, Vedder is specifically mentioned as having died eighteen years previous, as if to say the village's clock had stopped, and the village had been evolving unmeasured.  At this stage in the story the connection is obscure, but connections of this sort accumulate.

 

We then hear that Rip's typical refuge from Dame Van Winkle is a hunting trip, and almost immediately, "In a long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day, Rip had unconsciously scrambled to one of the highest parts of the Kaatskill mountains."  After a few sentences descriptive of the setting, we are directly into the core of the famous interlude.

 

There are elements at the beginning of it that suggest someone falling into a dreamy sleep.  Rip is tired and the couch is soft - "Panting and fatigued he threw himself, late in the afternoon, on a green knoll, covered with mountain herbage."  Things move in slow motion from his perspective on the Hudson, miles away down the valley.  On the other side the mountain glen grows shapeless as the sun sets.  "He saw that it would be dark, long before he could reach the village, and he heaved a heavy sigh when he thought of encountering the terrors of Dame Van Winkle."  Yes, sleep would be preferable.  Then he hears his name called, "Rip Van Winkle!  Rip Van Winkle!"  He sees a crow, and again the cry, "Rip Van Winkle!  Rip Van Winkle!"  The rhythm and repetition suggest that although the sound might originate from without, perhaps from the crow, it is occurring to him in translation as he eases from waking to sleeping.  And henceforth neither this stranger nor any of the others says a word; the calling of his name is confined to the period of transition, which does resemble the onset of sleep.

 

Nothing disturbs this impression in the reader for quite some time afterward.  When Rip awakes and finds no sign of what he seems to recall, we might at first think that he dreamed it all; and we can stick to that story even when we learn that twenty years have passed.  It doesn't explain the twenty years, of course, but that can't be helped - no one really sleeps on a mountain for twenty years.  But until much later in the story, no alternative is offered; in the meantime, we are at the narrator's mercy.

 

Rip sees "a strange figure slowly toiling up the rocks and bending under the weight of something he carried on his back ... Supposing it to be some one of the neighbourhood in need of his assistance he hastened down to yield it."  Then:

 

On nearer approach he was still more surprised at the singularity of the stranger's appearance.  He was a short, square built old fellow, with thick bushy hair and a grizzled beard.  His dress was of the antique Dutch fashion, a cloth jerkin strapped round the waist, several pair of breeches, the outer one of ample volume decorated with rows of buttons down the sides and bunches at the knees.  He bore on his shoulder a stout keg that seemed full of liquor, and made signs for Rip to approach and assist him with the load.  Though rather shy and distrustful of this new acquaintance Rip complied with his usual alacrity, and mutually relieving each other they clambered up a narrow gully apparently the dry bed of a mountain torrent.  As they ascended Rip every now and then heard long rolling peals like distant thunder, that seemed to issue out of a deep ravine or rather cleft between lofty rocks, toward which their rugged path conducted.  He paused for an instant, but supposing it to be the muttering of one of those transient thunder showers which often take place in mountain heights, he proceeded.  Passing through the ravine they came to a hollow like a small amphitheatre, surrounded by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which impending trees shot their branches, so that you only caught glimpses of the azure sky and the bright evening cloud.  During the whole time Rip and his companion had laboured on in silence, for though the former marvelled greatly what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe and checked familiarity.

 

The stranger looks like something from out of the past.  His communication with Rip is limited, rudimentary - he "made signs," and will do exactly the same shortly by way of asking Rip to distribute the flagons he fills from his keg.  The sounds Rip hears are like distant thunder, the muttering of a transient thunder shower, but in fact they issue from nearby, from a hidden, closely walled little amphitheatre to which the stranger will guide him.  It seems almost a farcical reminiscence of Dante's first encounter in the woods with Virgil.  Rip, like Dante, meets a stranger who guides him to a strange and otherwise inaccessible place.  Virgil is more talkative - he is a poet, after all - but he doesn't tell Dante much more at first than the strange little gnome tells Rip - it is "best for you to follow me, and I shall guide you."  Then in both cases, "passing through the ravine they came to a hollow."   Then Dante enters Hell, while Rip goes to a nine-pins party with an open bar; it is the sort of contrast any humourist would enjoy.  Rip and his guide continue:

 

On entering the amphitheatre new objects of wonder presented themselves.  On a level spot in the centre was a company of odd looking personages playing at ninepins.  They were dressed in a quaint outlandish fashion - some wore short doublets, others jerkins with long knives in their belts and most of them had enormous breeches of similar style with that of the guide's.  Their visages too were peculiar.  One had a large head, broad face and small piggish eyes.  The face of another seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was surmounted by a white sugarloaf hat, set off with a little red cock's tail.  They all had beards of various shapes and colours.  There was one who seemed to be the Commander.  He was a stout old gentleman, with a weatherbeaten countenance.  He wore a laced doublet, broad belt and hanger, high crowned hat and feather, red stockings and high heel'd shoes with roses in them.  The whole group reminded Rip of the figures in an old Flemish painting, in the parlour of Dominie Van Schaick the village parson, and which had been brought over from Holland at the time of the settlement.

 

The figures have an almost cartoonish appearance, and it would be interesting to know whether Irving had a particular painter or painting in mind.  The style doesn't seem to have been particularly common in Flemish painting, even if we look from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries and consider more northerly, Dutch works as well - but millions of canvasses were painted, and we can't be sure.  Exaggeration and cartoon were typical in Hieronymus Bosch and especially Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and were later characteristic of Dutch painters such as Hendrick Avercamp and Jan Steen; and they were no doubt imitated by lesser painters whose works have not survived.  One of the most noticeable features of the subjects of the surviving paintings, incidentally, is that almost no one in any of them has a beard - beards are concentrated in the later and more realistic portraits of such painters as Anthony Van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens and Franz Hals.  Again, there were millions of paintings, and some of them might well have featured cartoonish little men who did have beards "of various shapes and colours."  And taken in the round, it doesn't matter much - the people described are certainly like something from old paintings in the manner of Brueghel's peasant weddings and dances.  Then we pass along to what Rip at last sees and does:

 

What seemed particularly odd to Rip was, that though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed.  Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene, but the noise of the balls, which, whenever they were rolled, echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of thunder.

 

As Rip and his companion approached them they suddenly desisted from their play and stared at him with such fixed statue like gaze, and such strange uncouth, lack lustre countenances, that his heart turned within him, and his knees smote together.  His companion now emptied the contents of the keg into large flagons and made signs to him to wait upon the company.  He obeyed with fear and trembling; they quaffed the liquor in profound silence and then returned to their game.

 

By degrees Rip's awe and apprehension subsided.  He even ventured, when no eye was fixed upon him, to taste the beverage, which he found had much of the flavour of excellent hollands.  He was naturally a thirsty soul and was soon tempted to repeat the draught.  One taste provoked another, and he reiterated his visits to the flagon so often that at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head - his head gradually declined and he fell into a deep sleep.

 

A game of nine-pins would typically involve conversation and merriment, but these players seem completely serious and never talk.  They're surprised to see him, and they stare ominously, but their attention quickly moves on when Rip's guide as much as tells them that he's here to serve the drinks.  They drink, but there's no indication that it has any effect on them.  By and by Rip gets to feeling bolder, and he has a few drinks of what turns out to be a sort of jenever that he finds very tasty, and in a short time he is asleep.

 

The world of the bowlers is very different from Rip's, and both sides seem surprised that there should be any intersection at all.  Rip seems as strange to them as they do to him.  There are some similarities but they are all isolated from their usual accompaniments - games without enjoyment, interaction without conversation, drinks without intoxication.  There is a "commander" whose sole discernible function is to "seem to be" the commander; he is introduced but plays no role.  It is dream-like.  It's as if a transcription has been made but something has been lost in the copies; quasi-familiar things have been reproduced but without any of the underlying qualities that make them what they are in their home world.  The characters are as silent as characters in a painting except for the rumbling of the balls they roll.

 

When Rip wakes up, the bowlers and their world are gone; the ravine no longer opens through the cliffs; there is now water running down what had been a dry gully.  The small furniture of his own world has likewise changed - the flintlock has rusted, his dog is gone.  "He was only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows" - rather like the closing of a parenthesis that had opened as he was falling asleep.  He starts down the mountain toward the village, and the strangeness of the night before is replicated.  He doesn't know the people, and they don't know him; they're dressed very differently; he stares at them and they stare at him; and when they stroke their chins, he strokes his, and finds that he has a beard.  He is again out of place, but in what had been his own world.  The tone of the narration is casual and straightforward, but it rapidly reveals, as if reversed in a mirror, striking symmetries between the morning and his night before.

 

Differences mount from what he thinks was only the previous day.  The village children used to love him; now they mock him.  The dogs don't know him now, and they all bark at him.

 

The very village was altered - it was larger and more populous.  There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared.  Strange names were over the doors - strange faces at the windows - every thing was strange.  His mind now misgave him; he began to doubt whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched.  Surely this was his native village which he had left but the day before.  There stood the Kaatskill mountains - there ran the silver Hudson at a distance - there was every hill and dale precisely as it had always been - Rip was solely perplexed - "That flagon last night," thought he, "has addled my poor head sadly!"

 

And so it goes.  He finds his house empty, the village inn replaced by another, George Washington in place of George III, and his old cronies gone.  He doesn't understand the political talk.  He discovers the current young Rip Van Winkle, meets his own grown daughter, and learns that his wife has died.  At last someone is able to identify him, and "Rip's story was soon told, for the whole twenty years had been to him but as one night."  Some believe it, others do not.  He goes to live with his daughter, and falls into relaxed, retired ways, spending much of his time at the inn.

 

Then, just before the story ends, we learn that Rip told his tale often and that "he was observed at first to vary on some points, every time he told it, which was doubtless owing to his having so recently awaked.  It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related."  What we have taken for third-person omniscient narration turns out not to have been that, and everything we have heard about Rip's trip alone to the mountain must now, in retrospect, be recharacterized as a version that has emerged after Rip's redaction.  We don't know exactly what he actually said when he first reappeared in the village after twenty years; that isn't covered by the account we've just been reading; the story thus now argues about its own details, rather in the manner of Don Quixote.  The suggestion emerges that Rip has invented the main elements of his story, and afterward refined them for his own purposes.  This interpretation is then itself conditioned in an appended note purportedly written by Diedrich Knickerbocker:

 

Indeed I have heard many stranger stories than this, in the villages along the Hudson; all of which were too well authenticated to admit of a doubt.  I have even talked with Rip Van Winkle myself, who when I last saw him was a very venerable old man and so perfectly rational and consistent on every other point, that I think no conscientious person could refuse to take this into the bargain - nay I have seen a certificate on the subject taken before a country justice and signed with a cross in the justice's own hand writing.  The story therefore is beyond the possibility of a doubt.

 

Even a country justice, of course, would have to be able to read and write, and would hardly attest to a document by "making his mark."  And Rip's attested rationality would count just as much in support of the conclusion, as against it, that Rip has invented and worked up the story.

 

A narrative which was, until almost its end, apparently straightforward, has become in hindsight much more complicated.  It first enticed us into a sort of tentative belief.  When Rip wakes up and goes down the mountain, we are as puzzled as he is portrayed to be.  Then at the end, the narrator's openly ironic assessment - his citing of Rip's changing the story and of the outrageous "testimony" of the country justice - seems clearly intended to frame the story as merely a conscious invention on Rip's part, or at best an elaborate delusion whose details he has consciously or unconsciously massaged.  We no longer pretend the literal truth of his adventure with the little old Dutch bowlers.  Perhaps he ran away from his wife.  Perhaps he was an uncommitted colonial who went somewhere else to sit out the revolutionary war.  Perhaps he doesn't really know what happened.  Still, the impression of something marvellous lingers, something more than the pleasant scenic recall of Sleepy Hollow.

 

It isn't just that we're especially charmed by the mere idea that someone might sleep for such a long time.  That device had been used before - in Greek, German, Irish and middle eastern folktales, for instance - but without anything remotely as powerful as the effect Irving achieves.  In Diogenes Laertius's version, for instance, a shepherd, Epimenides, "went to sleep in a cave, where he slept for fifty-seven years.  After this he got up and went in search of the sheep, thinking he had been asleep only a short time."  He "found everything changed," was "in utter perplexity" until he "learnt the truth," and afterward "was believed to be a special favourite of heaven."  In another version the sleeper is asleep only for a year.  In the "seven sleepers" stories, a group of people escapes religious persecution by falling asleep for more than three hundred years - several lifetimes.  And so on.

 

Could it be that we can't quite put aside the trust we had for so long in our narrator?  It is true that we get a good distance into the core of the story - the strange little men and the way they interact with Rip, their peculiar demeanour at their games, Rip's tastings from the flagon - before anything impossible occurs.  We might even, at the end of the story, continue to fancy that Rip did meet some strange people on the mountain, that that much is true.  But that isn't the charm, and we know that the continuation to a twenty years' sleep is impossible.  Somehow, though, the twenty years' sleep remains the central part of what we take away from the story.  How is that possible?

 

Irving attaches questions of history, and of time and personal identity, directly to the fulcrum of the story in several ways.  When Rip comes down the mountain, from his perspective he is seeing the future, looking into a time not his own.  Not surprisingly, he doesn't understand it, and it doesn't understand him; he can't communicate with it; his sense of identity is undermined.

 

I'm not myself. - I'm somebody else - that's me yonder - no - that's somebody else got into my shoes - I was myself last night; but I fell asleep on the mountain - and they've changed my gun - and everything's changed - and I'm changed - and I can't tell what's my name, or who I am.

 

How can he be Rip Van Winkle, if Nicholaus Vedder, and Brom Dutcher, and Van Bummel and the rest have vanished?  And - what is crucial - it is the same kind of experience that he had had the night before, but with the near future instead of the more remote past.  The night before, he had been placed as a direct actor in some past action, serving drinks to strange little men from long ago, the sort of men seen in old paintings.  He couldn't talk to them, and they couldn't talk to him.  The only sounds he could hear from their world were "long rolling peals like distant thunder," "the muttering of one of those transient thunder showers which often take place in mountain heights," the way perhaps the past might be said to be still rumbling or muttering or reverberating to us today.  Everything seems distant, yet he is unaccountably in direct contact with it.  The very notion of time is peculiar, magical.

 

Rip's return to the village is also not unlike mundane confrontations with our own temporal location and its limitations.  As children, our view of old people is as beings who have emerged from some distant and unknowable time, a time teeming with alien and sometimes alarming events.  We can barely believe in it.  The idea that anything at all happened eighty years ago is incomprehensible; the further idea that we are talking to an eyewitness of it is overwhelming.  As we get older, the edges of the perception are softened; we are old hands not easily abashed; but something of the original shock remains.  Somehow, when we ourselves become the old people, we still think of the old people from our youth as the real old people - Nicholaus Vedder is old, but Rip Van Winkle can't be.  But then, visiting a place, or an occupation or profession or role, that we left behind twenty or thirty years ago, we know that it really has happened.  We see how much both we and our former setting have changed.  Its concerns are no longer ours; even simple communication can be awkward; the points of intersection are crude and of limited use.  Rip Van Winkle's experience is common, not rare.  Interacting with our adult children we find small, sudden moments like that.  We realize, if only in formal terms, what must have happened with our own parents, and what will happen with our children when their children have grown up.  If we stretch just a little, we can imagine fitting in, understanding and being understood.  The distance is only partly illusory.  It really can be rather like looking at a painting.  The old painting we see, or the old writing we read, exists today; we are looking at something in the present; and yet in some sense we are looking into the past.  We can get to know it so well that we forget the distance.  When we read or listen to a good historian, the liveliness of his knowledge can make it seem almost that he must have been there.  He speaks of the people as familiars, of the events as if we have all been following their development this week in the newspaper.  And yet, how often we are surprised by the simplest facts that we have overlooked or ignored in the thrill of a sense of connection.

 

The continuing impact of Rip Van Winkle derives from its confronting the reader with some simple but persistent mysteries, mysteries of time and history and personal identity.  The elements that reinforce them accumulate quietly in undercurrents - mountains and people as clocks and barometers; seeing the past in the strange men and the future in the new village; the genuine lapse of perceived time that occurs every time we sleep; the question of who is really old; the question of what we see in a painting.  And when we think again of the very beginning of the story, of the people and the village and the mountains, themselves "a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family," the places could just as easily be times, as the village becomes, at the end, a time to Rip Van Winkle.  It's a story that asks us how we perceive time - and asks us whether, after all, it is really so impossible that twenty years of it could elapse without our noticing.

 

 

IV

 

The narrative procedure in Sleepy Hollow can properly be called a technique, a learnable piece of art.  It creates an expectation, builds suspense, and at last delivers what it has made the reader crave.  It exhibits repeatable methods.  We could elaborate an Aristotelian analysis of it - what suspense is, how tragic and comic suspense differ and what objects are appropriate to each, what devices are common and why some are more satisfying than others, and so on.  We could extract a rudimentary recipe for creating other works like it.  We could cite similar structures, not only in Irving but in Dickens, Trollope, Henry James, and we could show why some are better than others.  I rather expect someone has already worked up a specialized Poetics along these lines, but I don't know.

 

The same isn't true of Rip Van Winkle.  There aren't any useful generalizations that capture a technique, that extract a recipe.  If my account of it is roughly right, we might say that it achieves its effect by attaching a series of related impressions to the thread of the story.  But we can't go much further than that without being impossibly vague, or making evaluative terms part of the recipe itself.  "Choose a deep but simple philosophical mystery, such as time or consciousness or the one and the many.  Choose a simple but gripping plot line, and conduct the thread of that plot through elements that effectively invoke the philosophical mystery and cause it to become closely associated with the plot."  We simply don't know at all whether similarly powerful stories would really follow those lines in any meaningful sense, or conversely, whether a story thus constructed could possibly achieve a similar power using plot and background content different from those in Rip Van Winkle.

 

No, Rip Van Winkle is a literary singularity, and it has something of the feel of a happy accident.  Washington Irving was certainly an accomplished storyteller, but nothing else in his work prepares us for Rip Van Winkle; the right storyteller found the right story.  There are other examples, some on a much larger scale, and not always as difficult to explain as Rip Van Winkle.  Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, for instance - nobody but Mark Twain could have written the story, but nothing else in his corpus approaches it.  Cervantes and Don Quixote - "For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; he knew how to act, and I to write."  Perfect as Sleepy Hollow is, Irving and others have written stories much like it and just as good.  And, as skilled and tasteful a narrator as he was, Irving was generally charming rather than subtle, glancing rather than probing, encyclopedic rather than scientific.  He didn't have the depth of material to write stories that could be consistently compared with those of the best short story writers.  But in Rip Van Winkle he brought to the surface a piece of magic that appeals to nearly all short story readers.  It is a curious and compelling monument.