The Intermedial Experience of Horror

Suspended Failures

J. Toikkanen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137299086
• eBook ISBN: 9781137299093
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is an exploration of the phenomenon of horror from an unusual angle. Focusing on reading specific examples of literature from Romanticism to Modernism, the study brings together the phenomenon of horror with the topical concepts of experience and intermediality and highlights the complex relations they present.

Part I

Concepts

1

Horror

In Thomas Ligotti’s short story ‘The Clown Puppet’ first published in 1996, the anonymous protagonist is visited at night by a strange apparition at the medicine shop in which he works.¹ The creature is described in meticulous detail – starting out from its having ‘all the appearances of an antiquated marionette, a puppet figure of some archaic type’² – and the strings by which it stays suspended vanish into a blur somewhere far overhead. Of the protagonist, we come to know little except for his need for ‘distraction from the outrageous nonsense’ that would overwhelm his mind if he did not occupy it with a ridiculous routine of everyday existence, such as keeping the medicine shop open at an hour when no one would visit it, or even find the place because he keeps it ‘in almost complete darkness both outside and inside’.³ In his world, nonsense is the ruling principle of all thought, the basis of all reflection, broken only by absurd habits designed to the contrary.

What the protagonist calls his ‘medicine-shop visit’ is not the first one he receives from the puppet creature; instead it follows up on a long line of visitations. As a matter of fact, he has come to expect them: ‘It began with an already familiar routine of nonsense.’⁴ However, despite the anticipation and the lack of surprise, together with the fact that he knows the main features of what is going to happen next, the protagonist cannot control how they are going to happen. The thing appears in his sight, and he finds it ‘difficult at first to look directly at the face of the puppet creature whenever it appeared’. He must look elsewhere, at the feet and the wires, shunning the eye contact. Yet he is only too well aware of the puppet’s countenance. He knows it because the puppet’s ‘expressiveness was all in that face’ – ‘simple and bland, yet at the same time so intensely evil and perverse’.⁵ In this way, whereas the person in the story initially manages to avoid looking at the face, the reader does not: on our part, we cannot but see the face and respond. What one might call an intermedial experience is generated on two sides. For the protagonist, the experience is one of having to look away, retrospectively describing in words an image of past visual perception avoided in the present. For the reader, the experience is one of having to look right at the image described in words with no way of avoiding it if one is to read the story at all. As such, looking at the face or, alternatively, not looking at the face shows a loss of control: on both sides, there is a suspended failure of thought and reflection to take hold of the scene. There is an experience of horror.

Of course, it could be claimed that there is no such experience in ‘The Clown Puppet’ and that instead of horror it is a tale about the ridiculous, about ‘nonsense’. It is that too – these qualities are by no means mutually exclusive in a piece of writing. After the puppet creature has fully appeared and the protagonist is past his initial experience, the absurd feel of the story is reinstated. Moreover, it could also be claimed that mere loss of control over events occurring in a fictional world does not really indicate horror, because is it not in the nature of fiction to be uncontrollable and that is part of its appeal? This too is a valid point. In this chapter and the two following, I will sketch a trio of concepts – horror, experience and intermediality – through which it will be demonstrated that, in order to come to an understanding about what makes horror horror, it must be conceived of as a specific kind of aesthetic experience. To weather the task, because my key concepts belong to such a wide field of both current theory and critical tradition, their use will need to be defined carefully before moving on to the case studies. In the process, three main claims will come to the fore:

(1) horror is not limited to a genre or certain subcultural phenomenon;

(2) there has been a traceable line of development from private to public experience in horror since the Romantic era;

(3) horror is an inherently intermedial experience that, in literature, comes across as a suspended failure of words and images.

While the above analysis of ‘The Clown Puppet’ offers a taster for the third claim, and I will next go on to discuss the first one, Ligotti’s story, as it gears up for its climax, also creates a strong sense of the second one. For if the experience of horror was private through and through, like Wittgenstein’s hypothetical language, and if it was based on something utterly subjective that no one could share, there would be little point in trying to vouch for it in public terms. What is more, the meaninglessness would not be limited to horror – no individual experience of any kind would matter to another person except, perhaps, through the kind of absurd habit by which Ligotti’s medicine vendor strives to be occupied. This is not wild hyperbole either. In the chapter on the concept of experience, I will give my reasons why. In ‘The Clown Puppet’, as the encounter proceeds, the protagonist becomes aware that it might not be him, after all, for whom the puppet has come. Mr Vizniak, the medicine shop’s owner, enters his waking nightmare: ‘Another person is about to enter the place where one of these visits is occurring, I thought to myself.’⁶ His somewhat addled and self-indulgent sense of private experience is disrupted at this point, the visitation is extended into the public realm of other individuals, and the horror spreads out. As Mr Vizniak then vanishes into the ‘curtained doorway’ where the puppet awaits, the protagonist waxes metaphysical:

Who knows how many others there were who might that say that their existence consisted of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense, a nonsense that had nothing unique about it at all and that had nothing behind it or beyond it except more and more nonsense – a new order of nonsense, perhaps an utterly unknown nonsense, but all of it nonsense and nothing but nonsense.⁷

In his cracked brain, an awareness of experience, of both horror and the absurd, as something other than strictly private has started to develop: maybe what one senses and feels can yet be shared, even if it was nonsense. However, whereas for the protagonist this experience too is ridiculous because that is what he expects it to be, for Mr Vizniak his final encounter with the puppet is one of ‘profound surprise’: ‘You, he said, or rather cried out. Get away from me.’⁸ Mr Vizniak does know the puppet – but this meeting he did not see coming. There is no absurd habit to stop the horror or save him to the following morning, or any morning after that. He is removed, and so is the reader who never gets to see what actually happened: Ligotti’s words and images end at the nonsensical reflections of the bewildered but newly enlightened medicine vendor. The horror is through for him at that point but what about the rest of us affected by his story?

Horror now

As a genre, ever since the dawn of Gothic fiction with Horace Walpole, Matthew G. Lewis, and others, horror has consistently flirted with the popular while it has also drawn critical evaluation, both positive and negative, from authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ann Radcliffe. Throughout the nineteenth century from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe to the high achievements of the Victorian imagination in Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker, and the American vision in Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers, literature with dark and weird overtones would find its audience, even if financial income was not always guaranteed. In the early twentieth century, some of the most famous work on horror would indeed be published in pulp magazines, including the writings of the cult author H. P. Lovecraft. Moreover, when the film industry started up at full steam, horror movies would soon become a mainstay, and since then their popularity has not really waned, regardless of periodical fluctuations and a perceived lack of sophistication and prestige. This is a history that as such needs little revising.⁹

But what is it about horror that makes it so enduring across the arts in the popular imagination? Referring to horror film as ‘arguably the most robust, pliable, and successful of genres within contemporary cinema’, Ian Conrich offers the following answer:

Contemporary horror cinema provides a transcultural experience, one that demonstrates the striking presence of the genre globally and the levels of influence and crossovers between different national forms and identities.¹⁰

In Conrich’s view, a large part of the universal success and appeal of today’s horror movies comes from the fact that they provide an experience that crosses cultural boundaries and are therefore able to combine various influences from all over the globe. This is undoubtedly true in its own right, but could also be said of a wide variety of other contemporary phenomena. One thus needs to go beyond the ‘transcultural experience’ to find a more specific solution to the question of horror. Consequently, Conrich’s other insight about horror film refers to its ‘strong presence’ in culture as being ‘read as a reflection of a crisis in society’. This thought would indicate that whenever there are ‘times of war’ or ‘periods of economic, political, and moral exigency’, horror film and perhaps the popularity of horror themes in general would hit their peak.¹¹ Again, the claim seems quite reasonable.

Yet the question remains: why is it that during such times people would go looking for an experience of horror? What causes the need at its root? Thomas Fahy elaborates:

[H]orror is just as comfortable with the mundane as it is with social, political, and cultural critique. It can slide between highbrow and lowbrow, incorporating a range of genres and tones. It can be serious or kitschy, terrifying or ridiculous, and it can raise profound questions about fear, safety, justice, and suffering. Just as audiences crave the fear it elicits, they also take pleasure in its predictability. It is this safety net of predictability – of closing the book, of leaving the theatre when the lights go back on … that enables us to enjoy the thrilling, horrifying journey. It is this safety net that makes horror so much fun.¹²

The quotation appears very illuminating. When there is a ‘safety net of predictability’ in place for the audience and the reader – just as there was for Ligotti’s protagonist in his own absurd way – horror itself can turn into a pressure valve, a kind of cultural relief provided in the form of a genre with its own expected customs and characteristics. The experience of horror, in other words, becomes displaced as the experience of horror and is instead channelled into another experience, that of pleasure and fun. As such, there is nothing ‘wrong’ in this course of action. Indeed, it will be witnessed in my case studies how, from Romanticism to Modernism, a similar desire is always there, assuming form in various ways. In a study on the experience of horror, in my view, locating these instances should take priority because it is only through them that the workings of horror can actually be observed. For instead of giving up horror to take shelter in another experience, I intend to act the part of Ligotti’s reader: how may the experience continue to affect us even when the story is over, and what does that say about what we have just met?

Before taking that up, there is at least one more claim that could be conceived of in opposition to the kind of inquiry I plan to conduct. As Ken Gelder notes:

[The study of horror] has of course so often staked out its place in the broader field of cultural production in terms of illegitimacy: as an often shocking, spectacular, sensationalist and ‘immoral’ (or amoral) form which can seem to take pleasure from the fact that so many people find it disturbing, distasteful or even downright unacceptable.¹³

While Conrich might have responded to this demeaning estimation with the need to read the ‘crisis’ in society and culture, and Fahy might have reiterated the value of horror both as entertainment and a safe place to reflect on difficult questions, Gelder echoes the worth of analysing the phenomenon theoretically to see what kind of theory horror builds on. The extracts and articles collected in The Horror Reader are said to challenge the ‘illegitimacy’ of the study of horror by seeing ‘horror texts as signifying systems’. Through this ‘primarily semiotic’ approach the texts in the reader draw, among other things, on ‘the “revealing”, decoding methodologies of psychoanalysis’ and ‘provide “deep” readings of a genre that may, to the unsympathetic, seem either superficial or incomprehensible’.¹⁴ The reference to psychoanalysis may be a particularly telling one, as many famous studies in and around horror since Freud have veered off that tangent, including Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982), and Terry Castle’s The Female Thermometer (1995). Feminist and queer concerns, as found in these two examples, have never been far away from this realm either, along with significant political readings such as Franco Moretti’s essay ‘Dialectic of Fear’ (1982) in which Dracula is interpreted as Marxist capital with a psychoanalytical twist. As a matter of fact, many articles in Conrich, Fahy and Gelder seem to gravitate towards these kinds of approaches,¹⁵ so there must be some kind of affinity between them. It will be seen how the thought pans out in my case studies, but it is fairly clear that elements related to these theoretical approaches will be important, even if not primary. There is something else that assumes more pressing legitimacy: the aesthetic experience.

Burke and horror

Edmund Burke first published his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757. It is a work intended to clarify the notions of the sublime and beautiful as regards that where they come from, what gives rise to them, and how they are different from one another. Burke was compelled to write the study because, as he says in the Preface to the first edition, he found himself confused as to the ‘genuine sources’ and lack of ‘any fixed or consistent principles’ in relation to the sublime and beautiful. As Philip Shaw clarifies, the understanding of the notion of the sublime in eighteenth-century Britain, specifically in John Baillie’s An Essay on the Sublime (1747), had reached a point where ‘the contradictory nature of the sublime falls into a crisis’. Slowly but surely, in the modern era the classical Longinian contradiction had come to a head in the thought of authors such as Thomas Burnet, Joseph Addison and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Was the sublime ‘merely a quality inherent in certain words and objects’, as the traditional view would have it, or was it, after all, ‘a function of the combinatory power of language’?¹⁶ In other words, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: The Intermedial Experience of Horror
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Concepts
• Part II Case Studies
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index