Mazes of the Serpent: An Anatomy of Horror Narrative 9781501718472

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Horror Explained (Away)
1. Alternate Worlds
2. Ghosts and Other Monsters
3. Conventions of Absence: The Style of Literary Horror
4. Beyond Realism: Horror Narrative as Parody
5. Horror and the Absence of Redemption
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Mazes of the Serpent

Mazes of the Serpent An Anatomy of Horror Narrative RoGER

B.

SALOMON

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright© 2002 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, NewYork 14850. First published 2002 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Salomon, Roger B. Mazes of the serpent : an anatomy of horror narrative I by Roger B. Salomon. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-404I-6 (cloth: alk. paper) I. Horror tales, American-History and criticism. 2. Horror tales, English-History and criticism. J. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PS374.H67 S36 2002 813' .087J8on the day came you could hardly tell it, it so little differed from the night. All day long it was the same; you could hear the sea-birds piping but you couldn't see them, except now and then you would get a dim glimpse of a great white albatross sailing by like a ghost. (DevW' RaceTrack 33-34)

This environment is a version of the familiar killing ground of horror narrative--the space of emptiness, despair, and ubiquitous death. Twain makes the point patently enough as his description continues: The stillness was horrible; and the absence of life. There was not a bird or a creature of any kind in sight, the slick surface of the water was never broken by a fin, never a breath of wind fanned the dead air, and there was not a sound of any kind, even the faintest-the silence of death was everywhere. We showed no life ourselves, but sat apart, each by himself,

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and brooded and brooded, and scarcely ever moved. In that profound inertness, that universal paralysis of life and energy, as far as sentient beings went, there was one thing that was brimming with it, booming with it, crazy with it; and that was the compass. It whirled and whizzed this way and that, and never rested-never for a moment. (34)

The restless compass merely emphasizes the failure of all human attempts at order, a failure reiterated when, by rowboat, the narrator visits the "mouldy old skeleton" of ship after ship caught in the "Everlasting Sunday" of this death trap. Those on board these ships have been reduced to "leathery shriveled-up eftl.gies" of men, and for the living narrator and his crew the only message is despair. Even writing in a logbook is futile and finally it also lapses: We visited ship after ship, and found these dreary scenes always repeated. And always the logs ceased the third or fourth day after the ship got into this death-trap except in a single case. Where one day is exactly like another, why record them?What is there to record? The world continues to exist, but History has come to an end. (37)

History ends and writing ends and Twain's story remains unfinished, a situation revealing a paradox of horror narrative that we have noted before. All narratives must have some kind of denouement, and certainly v.cith those involving horror it is particularly important that at least one witness survives to report on terrible events. But if death is indeed ubiquitous-not only the last but the only cultural word in a given situation-then the reporters themselves must share in the horrors they record. Survival, in other words, is both utterly gratuitous and absolutely necessary. There is finally, as Twain says, nothing to log in, yet, in this context, nothingness becomes the very subject of discourse. Twain's various experiments are undoubtedly less than satisfactory from the perspective of aesthetic judgment. But his intentions are clear enough: liberation from a culturally defined realism, particularly as it was rather narrowly defined in the United States by critics and editors

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such as his friend William Dean Howells. His late insistence on a "microbe-eye" view of reality is only a more radical extension of the entire drift of his work: the major documents always involve an outsider---some innocent or tenderfoot or ragamuffin boy or Yankee mechanic-coming in contact with a view of reality conventionally defined and firmly held. We are all familiar with Huck Finn's pragmatic dismissal of Miss Watson's theory of prayer and with the cub pilot's learning to read beyond the picturesque surface of the Mississippi River: "the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it ... whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter" (Life 011 the Afississippi 78). However grim, the test remains objective, "dead-earnest," and empirical. Horror narrative keeps the test, insisting, however, even more on a kind of categorical dark seeing of that which is normally repressed or denied outright by the various systems we create to ensure our personal and cultural survival. Maire Kurrik (Literature and Negation) views in the nineteenthcentury novel a negation (subjective and objective) which is a way to new affirmation-a poetics of negation toward new experience that says no to everything old (see especially 183-97). In this context, horror narrative becomes a poetics of annihilation or nullity or death, not so much the reconstruction of the traditional self as its total deconstruction. Horror is our awareness of this annihilation, some categorical other that is beyond irony, an alternative outside of time, space, and language, although, inevitably, in one way or another, expressed only in those terms. As Maurice Blanchot has observed concerning this paradoxical problem: "To write is to be absolutely distrustful of all writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely" (Writing of the Disaster no).

DARK PARODY

In the epigraph from "The Horror at Red Hook" that begins this chapter, Lovecraft suggests that horror narrative is fundamentally par-

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odic: "The paintings were appalling-hideous monsters of every shape and size ... parodies on human outlines ..." (82). I have myself frequently though incidentally invoked the term "parody." I have also commented piecemeal on the various stylistic components of horror narrative. Clearly we must now direct our attention more toward its overall shape, but let us first return briefly to the language of horror, which, let me reiterate, is an antilanguage of negation, a language that deconstructs or otherwise denies all the positive possibilities of language, some sort of metalanguage. In an article dealing with more recent media theory ("On the Legacy of the Avant-Gardes in Carl Einstein and Walter Benjamin"), Andreas Michel speaks of "the loss of referential certainty" (Morris, German Dis/Continuities 737). Maire Kurrik reminds us of what she feels is the liberating linguistic role of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland: "Alice's fall signifies, among other things, her release fi·om this repression [that is, the negations and exclusions of conventionallanguagel and her entry into a new, vaster, and more unconscious language world where language is both more perplexing and gratifying than it is in ordinary usage" (Literature and Negation 19 8). Language, she adds, may be "a nothingness" but it nevertheless has positive possibilities: a source "of order, domination, play, fiction, Eros, and delight" (r98). The "conception of the inevitability of mediated knowledge" (Michel in Morris, German Dis/Continuities 736) is now undoubtedly a commonplace of contemporary criticism, but I cannot overstress its relevance. The issue here, however, is not some postmodern plea for relativity and context, although without question this is one important tendency of the linguistic changes to which I refer. Rather, horror narrative continues to insist on the truth of some (now rewritten) record, while (in Blanchot's terms) "distrustful" even of the implications of the act of recording. Significantly, in Mark Twain's "enchanted sea wilderness" the trapped ships quickly give up recording in their logs. Why should they? "What is there to record?" If language is a nothingness that expresses all, as Durrik argues, then horror narrative might be described as a collective all that literally expresses nothing,

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language in the explicit service of dissolving meaning toward a final vision of disorder, emptiness, and the catastrophic loss of any values recognizably human. Indeed, the language of horror narrative does not so much deny the tmth of objects as, vampirelike, suck from them all living and positive substance. The nullity is categorical; we are "liberated" from meaningful life to living or actual death. All of which brings us back to the issue of parody. Annie Dillard's terrible water bug that "decomposes" frogs has implications that extend beyond individual language acts. Parody is the bloodsucker ofliterature, draining the substance from the more conventional forms that it relentlessly stalks. Of course, with "draining" we are talking about matters of degree; parody always sharply identifies its target, but the result is not always death. In an earlier book, Desperate Storytelling, I argued for the ambivalence of much parody, what I called "mockheroic" parody. On the one hand, it subverts some system of authentic values; on the other, it continues in its own way to affirm these same values in the face of more unpalatable alternatives. Such mock-heroic parody at least partially extends, even promotes the possibilities that Maire Kurrik identifies with language itself after Alice in Wonderland. Lolita, for example, Nabokov's late, brilliant, mordant version ofWonderland, continues to celebrate the imaginative projections of"desire and decision," which, Humbert notes tellingly, are "the two things that create a live world" (Annotated Lolita 73; Desperate Storytelling 212).The strong parodic element of horror narrative, however, invokes various forms of positive affirmation only to deny them more categorically. Those involved steadily claim that they are "in hell," and there is no reason to suggest that such a claim is other than (in one way or another) literally tme. In Paradise Lost Pandemonium exists as a vivid and vigorous (if finally absurd) alternative to Heaven; in horror narrative it is all there is. This is the central signitl.cance of Gothic parody. Like mock-heroic, it presupposes a duality, but here it focuses only on one side, what Maturin calls the "wrong side," of the tapestry. We are always sharply reminded of two worlds, but only to heighten the piercing terror ofloss.

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Important books on the fundamentally religious or at least supernatural dimension of horror narrative seem to me finally to pull their punches. I have already mentioned Victor Sage's work. In Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition he argues that "the cause and the effect of the horror experience in English culture is a form of'theological uncertainty' " (xvii), an uncertainty generated by the melodrama of sin and salvation in Protestantism, by the direct interventions of the voice of God, by, in a larger sense, the Manichaean spirit of Protestantism, its tendency (as I have suggested in my reference to Milton) to divide the universe into categorically light and dark spaces (see especially Sage 70-93). Sage illustrates the sharply split personality ofProtestantism, in part, by direct reference to one of the best known of horror narratives: "This conflict between the self-as-Esau, the hairy man who forfeited his birthright, and the 'justified' self, is very close to Stevenson's Hyde and Jekyll" (28). Sage largely stresses the psychopathological dimension of Protestantism, however, and my own view is that the uncertainty involved is more generalized and more fundamental in its implications, more generative of very dark metaphysical parody of our humanistic possibilities. Hyde is the familiar monster of horror narrative, the "troglodytic" figure (18), sought after by Mr. Utterson, "a lover of the sane and customary sides oflife" (n), for whom no mystery is insoluble. As he says of his quest for "the real Mr. Hyde": "If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined" (14). In fact, in seeking Hyde, Utterson (who is aware of his ambiguous, punning quest, though not its full implications [15)) quickly develops "a nausea and distaste for life" (T9) while pursuing Hyde through the nightmarish landscape of London. The benign Jekyll, in turn, weakens toward death. Again a sharply invoked, initial dualism finally collapses into a monism of categorical horror. Jekyll is more and more directly haunted by his monstrous double Hyde, "not only hellish but inorganic," the energized figure who incarnates death ("what was dead, and had no shape") yet nevertheless "usurp[s) the offices oflife" (roo).

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That all this may have psychological implications is undeniable. Certainly, early in the novel at least, the idea of some mental malady is sufficient explanation for the rationalist Utterson. As he tells Jekyll's servant, Poole, after developing his psychological theory in some detail: "There is my explanation; it is sad enough, Poole, ay, and appalling to consider; but it is plain and natural, hangs well together, and delivers us from all exorbitant alarms" (56). But we, undoubtedly, must seek Hyde further. His final transformation takes place in front of one Hastie Lanyon, another (like Jekyll himself, of course) of those Faustian materialists so much a part of nineteenth-century horror narrative. The transformation is a kind of performance, one meant to prove a point to the dubious Lanyon, whom Hyde/jekyll describes tellingly as "you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine" (76). Lanyon is also shaken and slides toward death: "sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day or night; and I feel that my days are numbered and that I must die" (77). Lanyon is now (as he says) "incredulous" (77); presumably his transcendental denials are among those things fundamentally threatened. Jekyll's "Full Statement of the Case" is, in effect, from beyond the grave, a voice essentially Hyde, Jekyll only in the fiction of himself he has tried to create. Stevenson suggests that whatever positive roles we have (or moral attributes that we and others assign to our various selves) disintegrate finally into chaos and death. In any case, Lanyon's incredulity is appropriate in ways that probably go far beyond his understanding of events. Margaret Carter in her valuable book Specter or Delusion? I11e Supernatural in Gothic Fiction argues that the function of such fiction (she writes almost exclusively about the eighteenth and nineteenth century) is to valorize supernatural experience. It provides "space for speculation about non-material dimensions of existence, without demanding a positive act of either acceptance or rejection" (3). She stresses its tendency to decenter any given cultural norm, its ambiguity; "its essence is 'hesitation' between

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two or more alternative interpretations of events" (r4). I am focusing rather on the thematic implications of radical decentering, the loss of meaning generated by the relentless mockery of various discourses of order. For me ambiguity remains in the service of more categorical horrors. To be sure, horror narrative endlessly invites us to read the various kinds of secular opacity in metaphysical terms. Frankenstein is an obvious case in point. I have already pointed out that Mary Shelley explicitly relates the withholding of Frankenstein's love from his creation and the catastrophic implications of that withholding to Milton's Paradise Lost. S. L. Varnado describes Frankenstein as the very type of modern, rational, profane, desacralized man (Haunted Presence 48) and notes that "Frankenstein's limited view of reality leads him to undertake a truncated form of creation that parodies the sacred" (50). The monster himselfVarnado calls "a counterfeit of true life" (53). But can we really limit the subversive implications of parody in this fashion? Are we so convinced that we can distinguish between a limited reality and something more substantial, between the counterfeit and true? Ambrose Bierce, at least, clearly thought otherwise. In "Moxon's Master," his own version of the Frankenstein story, Bierce suggests that we can make no serious distinction between man and machine, life and death: "There is no such thing as dead, inert matter; it is all alive, all instinct with force, actual and potential" (Complete Short Stories 9r). Moxon, in fact, creates a mechanical monster, and the machine kills him horribly in a scene of apocalyptic chaos. Bierce simply views creation as the transformation of force from potential to actual. This sounds Emerson ian, but Bierce's version of the release of power omits any identifiable moral dimension. Life, in short, is nothing more than the parodic mask of ubiquitous death; we are back to the undead of vampirism, which goes beyond the subversion of romantic love to include all the possibilities of positive living. If (as Varnado suggests) sacrilege is the central experience of horror narrative, then it serves only to remind us of some holy and inviolate center

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that, at this point at least, has been lost. I have already noted the episodic and anticlimactic nature of Gothic plots; reality unravels to no discernible end beyond its further unraveling. Violation of various kinds is the principal action of horror narrative (arguably the only significant action). Under the circumstances, narratives, in one way or another, could scarcely be other than incomplete and fragmentary. In her thoughtful commentary on Wuthering Heights, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes that "the hands [of Catherine Earnshaw] battling through the smashed window are a figure for many of the kinds of violated separation we have been calling Gothic" (Coherence of Gothic Conventions 99). She describes Catherine as someone yearning for the "univocal and unmediated" and notes further "her impatience with the oblique or symbolic" (n8). Sedgwick herself puts these and similar observations finally in the service of feminist and psychoanalytic explanation, but nevertheless she has acutely recorded the categorical nature of the Gothic or horror vision. If the novel in general operates within the boundaries of secular, worldly ambiguities or, like Don Quixote, mediates between reality and illusion (absolute vision now only an illusion, however passionately affirmed), then horror narrative in all its forms resolutely denies mediation, reconciliation, any positive resolution to possible ambiguities. Horror is categorical negation, categorical death-a universe without (essentially) positive options, nothing to escape to except further nothingness. The mirror world of horror precisely describes an environment that is hermetically sealed to every positive alternative: despair inside (or equivalent psychological monstrosities) matched by external monstrosity. To have only one monster (inside or outside) would suggest some better alternative-the possibility of escape and certainly explanations. In other words, to take a familiar example,Jackson's Hill House is not a metaphor for some internal state or the nature of external reality but rather the living and active embodiment of both: ubiquitous horror, horror within and without, not horror symbolic of or caused by one or the other.

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Promoted by endless parodic echoing, any religious approach to horror narrative is compelling, undoubtedly significant, but all too often misleading. Another person who makes the case for such an approach is Marshall Tymn, the historian of Gothic I have already mentioned, who writes concerning eighteenth-century origins that "the essence of a Gothic work is fa l crossover from a safe and orderly deistic universe into a strange and fearful region presided over by demons and circumscribed by twisting passageways and 'far-winding vaults.' " And he adds, relying on the theories of Edmund Burke, that "Gothic originates in a desire to displace reason and to surrender one's rational will to moments of sublime dread that are nearly equivalent to religious possession or mystic illumination" (Horror Literature r2-r3). But it is just here that we must be particularly careful, even if we remember Fiedler's warning about the world of "absolute atrocity" toward which we are heading. Dread may be sublime only in categorical intensity; near equivalents may in fact involve substantial differences. Jack Sullivan alerts us to possible dangers: The fundamental darkness of this fiction needs to be asserted to counteract the erroneous claim, perpetuated in numerom anthology introductions, that the horror story is not really horrible and docs not really mean business, but instead is a form of allegory about the triumph of good over evil-or at worst a roundabout means of implying the existence of good by showing us evil. (Horror Literature 228-29)

"Crossovers," as Tymn and Burke use the term, may just as easily bring us to emptiness and despair in the face of nullity and universal death. Paradoxically, all horror narrative affirms an absolute ontology, describing the ineffable even when the inefE