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Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992)

Page 3

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )


  But as Freud remarked in his essay on the uncanny,

  horror shares with humor the aspect of recognition—

  even if an individual does not respond with the intended

  emotional response, he or she recognizes that that material is supposed to be humorous or horrific. Indeed, one common response to horror that does not horrify is

  laughter. Note again the M.R. James comment above.

  The experience of seeing an audience of teenage boys

  at the movies laugh uproariously at a brutal and grotesque horror film is not uncommon. I have taught horror literature to young students who confess some

  emotional disturbance late in the course as the authentic

  reaction of fear and awe begins to replace the dark

  humor that was previously their reaction to most horror.

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  David G. Hartwell

  Boris Karloff remarked, in discussing his preferred

  term for the genre, “horror carries with it a connotation

  of revulsion which has nothing to do with clean terror.”

  Material on the edge of repression is often dismissed as

  dirty, pornographic. It is not unusual to see condemnations of genre horror on cultural or moral grounds. One need only look at the recent fuss over Bret Easton Ellis’

  novel, American Psycho (1990), to see these issues in the

  foreground in the mainstream. Certain horror material

  is banned in Britain.

  And I have spoken to writers, such as David Morrell,

  who confess to laughing aloud during the process of

  composition when writing a particularly horrific scene

  — which I interpret as an essential psychological

  distancing device for individuals aware of confronting

  dangerous material. L.P. Hartley, in the introduction to

  his first collection, Night Fears (1924), said: “To put

  these down on paper gives relief. . . . It is a kind of

  insurance against the future. When we have imagined the

  worst that can happen, and embodied it in a story, we

  feel we have stolen a march on fate, inoculated ourselves,

  as it were, against disaster.” Peter Penzoldt, in his book,

  The Supernatural in Fiction, concurs: “ . . . the weird tale

  is primarily a means of overcoming certain fears in the

  most agreeable fashion. These fears are represented by

  the skillful author as pure fantasy, though in fact they are

  only too firmly founded in some repression. . . . Thus a

  healthy-minded even if very imaginative person will

  benefit more from the reading of weird fiction than a

  neurotic, to whom it will only be able to give a momentary relief.”

  There is a fine border between the horrific and the

  absurdly fantastic that generates much fruitful tension in ■

  the literature, and indeed deflates the effect when handled indelicately. Those who never read horror for pleasure, but feel the need to condemn those who do, like

  to point to the worst examples as representative of the

  genre. Others laugh. But the stories that have gained

  Introduction

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  reputations for quality in the literature have for most

  readers generated that aesthetic seizure which is the

  hallmark of sublime horror.

  Ill

  Category, Genre, Mode

  The modern imagination has indeed been well

  trained by psychiatry and avant-garde novels to

  accept the weird and horrible. Often, these works

  are themselves beyond rational comprehension.

  But stories of the supernatural— even the subtlest

  — are accessible to the common reader; they make

  fewer demands on the intellect than on the sensibility.

  — Jacques Barzun, Introduction to

  The Penguin Encyclopedia o f Horror

  and the Supernatural

  Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social

  contracts between a writer and a specific public,

  whose function is to specify the proper use of a

  particular cultural artifact.

  — Frederic Jameson, Magical Narratives

  A category is a contract between a publisher and a

  distribution system.

  — Kathryn Cramer, unpublished dissertation

  . . . one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real,

  in fact, that we cannot quite be sure that it couldn’t

  exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and

  our awareness, but it does not ask or require our

  consent to use them. Indeed, both at the individual

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  David G. Hartwell

  and collective levels, horror operates with an eerie

  autonomy.

  — Thomas Ligotti,

  “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on

  Supernatural Horror”

  Sir Walter Scott, to whom some attribute the creation

  of the first supernatural story in English, said, “The

  supernatural. . . is peculiarly subject to be exhausted

  by coarse handling and repeated pressure. It is also of

  a character which is extremely difficult to sustain

  and of which a very small proportion may be said to be

  better than the whole.” This observation, while true, has

  certainly created an enduring environment in which

  critics can, if they choose, judge the literature by its

  worst examples. The most recent announcement of the

  death of horror literature occurs in Walter Kendrick’s

  The Thrill o f Fear (1991), which demise Kendrick attributes to the genrification of the literature as exemplified by the founding of Weird Tales: “ Weird Tales helped to

  create the notion of an entertainment cult by publishing

  stories that only a few readers would like, hoping they

  would like them fiercely. There was nothing new to

  cultism, but it came fresh to horror. Now initiates

  learned to adore a sensation, not a person or a creed, and

  the ephemeral embarked on its strange journey from

  worthlessness to great price. . . . By about 1930, scary

  entertainment had amassed its full inventory of effects.

  It had recognized its history, begun to establish a canon

  and even started rebelling against the stultification canons bring. Horrid stories would continue to flourish; they would spawn a score of sub-types, including science-fiction and fantasy tales.. . .” But three lines later he

  ends his discussion of literature, and his chapter, by

  declaring that by 1940, films had taken over from

  literature the job of scary entertainment. Thus evolution

  marches on and literature is no longer the fittest. It seems

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  to me very like saying that lyric poetry is alive and well in

  pop music.

  That an intelligent critic could find nothing worthwhile to say about horror in literature beyond the creation of the genre is astonishing in one sense (it

  betrays a certain ignorance), but in other ways not

  surprising. Once horror became a genre (as, under the

  influence of Dickens in the mid-nineteenth century, had

  the ghost story told at Christmas), it became in the hands

  of many writers a commercial exercise -first and foremost. One might, upon superficial examination, not perceive the serious aesthetic debates raging among

  many of the better writers, from those of the Lovecraft

  circle, to Campbell’s new vision in Unknown, to today’s

 
discussions among Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ramsey

  Campbell, David Morrell, Karl Edward Wagner and

  others on such topics as violence, formal innovation,

  appropriate style (regardless of current literary fashion)

  and many others. That money and popularity was a

  serious consideration for Poe and Dickens, as well as

  King and Straub, does not devalue them aesthetically.

  Never mind that Henry James was distraught that he was

  not more popular and commercial, and expressed outrage at “those damned scribbling women” who outsold him— even his so-called “potboilers.”

  The curious lie concealed in James’ last phrase (which

  he used to describe “The Turn of the Screw”), and in the

  public protestations of many writers before and since, up

  to Stephen King, today, is illuminated by Julia Briggs. In

  her Night Visitors, she states her opinion, based upon

  wide reading and study, that the supernatural horror

  story “appealed to serious writers largely because it

  invited a concern with the profoundest issues: the relationship between life and death, the body and the soul, man and his universe and the philosophical conditions

  of that universe, the nature of evil. . . . It could be made

  to embody symbolically hopes and fears too deep and

  too important to be expressed more directly.” She then

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  David G. Hartwell

  goes on to say, “The fact that authors often disclaimed

  any serious intention . . . may paradoxically support

  this view. The revealing nature of fantastic and imaginative writing has encouraged its exponents to cover their tracks, either by self-deprecation or other forms of

  retraction. The assertion of the author’s detachment

  from his work may reasonably arouse the suspicion that

  he is less detached than he supposes.”

  To further complicate the matter, the marketing of

  literature in the twentieth century has become a matter

  of categories established by publishers upon analogy

  with the genre magazines. Whereas a piece of genre

  horror implies a contract between the writer and the

  audience, the marketing category of horror implies that

  the publisher will provide to the distribution system a

  certain quantity of product to fill certain display slots.

  Such material may or may not fulfill the genre contract.

  If it does not, it will be packaged to invoke its similarity

  to genre material and will be indistinguishable to the

  distribution system from material that does. As we

  discussed above, horror itself may exist in any genre as a

  literary mode, and, as a mode, is in the end an enemy of

  categorization and genrification. It is in part the purpose

  of this anthology to bring together works of fiction from

  within the horror genre together with works ordinarily

  labelled otherwise in contemporary publishing, from

  science fiction to thriller to “literature” (which is itself

  today a marketing category).

  I have previously discussed, in the introduction to The

  Dark Descent, my observations that horror literature

  occurs in three main currents: the moral allegory, which

  deals with manifest evil; the investigation of abnormal

  psychology through metaphor and symbol; the fantastic,

  which creates a world of radical doubt and dread.

  Whether one or another of those currents is dominant in

  an individual work does not exclude the presence or

  intermingling of the others. Rather than taking the

  myopic stance that horror means what the marketing

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  system says it does today, I have applied my perceptions

  of horror to the literature of the past two centuries to find

  accomplished and significant works that manifest the

  delights of horror and which mark signposts in the

  development of horror. Horror literature operates with

  an “eerie autonomy” not only without regard to the

  reader, but without regard to the marketing system.

  Critic Gary Wolfe’s observation that “horror is the only

  genre named for its effect on the reader” should suggest that the normal usage of genre is somewhat suspect here.

  IV Short Torms

  Why an ever-widening circle of connoisseurs and

  innocents seek out and read with delight stories

  about ghosts and other horrors has been accounted

  for on divers grounds, most of them presupposing

  complex motives in our hidden selves. That is what

  one might expect in an age of reckless psychologizing. It is surely simpler and sounder to adduce historical facts and literary traditions. . . .

  —Jacques Barzun, Introduction to

  The Penguin Encyclopedia o f Horror

  and the Supernatural

  It is all the more astonishing to find English weird

  fiction the property of the drama in Elizabethan

  days, and later see it confined to the Gothic novel.

  On first reflection this development seems strange

  because the supernatural appears to flow more

  easily into the short tale in verse or prose. The

  human mind cannot leave the solid basis of reality

  for long, and he who contemplates occult phenomena must sooner or later return to logical thinking

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  David G. Hartwell

  in terms of reality lest his reason be endangered. . . .

  — Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction

  A horror that is effective for thirty pages can

  seldom be sustained for three hundred, and there is

  no danger of confusing the bare scaffolding of the

  ghost story with the rambling mansion of the

  Gothic novel.

  — Julia Briggs, Night Visitors

  Commentators on horror agree that the short story

  has always been the form of the horror story: “Thus

  if it is to be successful the tale of the supernatural must

  be short, and it matters little whether we accept it as an

  account of facts or as a fascinating work of art,” says

  Peter Penzoldt. At the same time, most of them have

  observed that some of the very best fiction in the history

  of horror writing occurs at the novella length. Julia

  Briggs, for instance, after having given the usual set of

  observations on the dominance of the short form, states:

  “There are, however, a number of full-length ghost

  stories of great importance. Most of these, written in the

  last century, are short in comparison to the standard

  Victorian three-volume novel, though their length would

  be quite appropriate for a modem novel. More accurately described as long-short stories, or novellas, they include [Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Oscar

  Wilde, Arthur Machen, Henry James]. They are quite

  distinct from the broad-canvas full-length novel of the

  period not only in being shorter, but also in using what is

  essentially a short-story structure, introducing only a few

  main characters within a strictly limited series of events.

  The greater length and complexity is often the result of a

  sophistocated narrative device or viewpoint. In each of

  these the angle or angles from which the story is told is of

  Introduction


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  crucial importance to the total effect, while the action

  itself remains comparatively simple.”

  Only in a collection of this size could one gather a

  significant selection of novellas, and I have included a

  number of them to emphasize the importance of that

  length. I have excluded familiar masterpieces such as

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,”

  Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Conrad’s

  “The Heart of Darkness” in favor of significant works

  such as Daphne Du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now” and

  H.P. Lovecraft’s sequel to Poe’s Narrative o f Arthur

  Gordon Pym, “At the Mountains of Madness,” John W.

  Campbell, Jr.’s “Who Goes There?” (from which the

  classic horror film, The Thing, was made), Gerald

  Durrell’s “The Entrance” and others.

  I have included several examples of horror from the

  science fiction movement by writers such as Robert A.

  Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Philip K. Dick, Octavia

  Butler and George R.R. Martin, wherein horror is the

  dominant emotional force for the fiction, and a sampling

  of horror stories by women often excluded from notice

  in the history and development of horror, such as

  Gertrude Atherton, Violet Hunt, Harriet Prescott

  Spofford and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Contemporary

  masters and classic names in horror are the backbone of

  the book, Peter Straub and Arthur Machen, Clive Barker

  and E.T.A. Hoffmann and many others, but for most

  readers there will be a few literary surprises. Horror

  literature is a literature of fear and wonder. Here, then,

  the Foundations o f Fear.

  This is the third of three volumes, published in

  paperback by Tor Books, that together comprise the

  entire contents of the large hardcover book, Foundations

  o f Fear. The whole work, subtitled “An Exploration of

  Horror,” is a sequel to The Dark Descent, the anthology

  that defies the nature of horror literature for contemporary times. Readers whose interests are piqued by the general introduction and the story notes in this book

  would do well to go back to The Dark Descent, in which

  similar concerns are addressed.

  All of that having been said, the primary purpose of

  this book is to entertain. The devotee of the weird,

 

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