copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman
Note: The answers to the "Creepy Crawlies Quiz" are posted at the end of this article.
If you’ve had a chance to read my other posts, you’ve seen that horror writers (perhaps more than writers in other genres of fiction) tend to use metaphors to represent existential and spiritual themes. Often, these metaphors take the forms of the monsters that function as the narratives’ antagonists. The questions naturally arise, Why monsters? Why metaphors?
There are likely to be many answers to these questions. In this installment, I’ll address the two that occur to me at the moment.
First, they have presence.
What do I mean by “presence”? Walker Percy illustrates the idea well in his novel The Moviegoer. His protagonist, Binx Bolling, a soldier at this time in the story, has been injured in a battle. As he lies upon the battlefield, he catches sight of a dung beetle. Normally, he probably wouldn’t have seen the insect and, if he had, he wouldn’t have been likely to devote careful study to it. However, he is not operating under normal circumstances, and he is astonished to see the beetle, in all its glorious detail. It has presence for him; it has become visible. In doing so, it has shed the malaise of everydayness and become real.
Here’s the way that Percy describes the scene:
There are likely to be many answers to these questions. In this installment, I’ll address the two that occur to me at the moment.
First, they have presence.
What do I mean by “presence”? Walker Percy illustrates the idea well in his novel The Moviegoer. His protagonist, Binx Bolling, a soldier at this time in the story, has been injured in a battle. As he lies upon the battlefield, he catches sight of a dung beetle. Normally, he probably wouldn’t have seen the insect and, if he had, he wouldn’t have been likely to devote careful study to it. However, he is not operating under normal circumstances, and he is astonished to see the beetle, in all its glorious detail. It has presence for him; it has become visible. In doing so, it has shed the malaise of everydayness and become real.
Here’s the way that Percy describes the scene:
. . . I remembered the first time the search occurred to me. I came to myself under a chindolea bush. . . . Six inches from my nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves. As I watched there awoke within me an immense curiosity. I was onto something.
Later, a similar experience happens to Binx:
. . . This morning, as I got up, I dressed as usual and began as usual to put my belongings into my pockets: wallet, notebook. . . pencil, keys, handkerchief, slide rule. . . . They looked both unfamiliar and at the same time full of clues. . . . What was unfamiliar about them was that I could see them. They might have belonged to someone else. A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand. Once I saw it, however, the search became possible. . . .
We can all remember the times, usually as a child, during which we could lose ourselves in the contemplation of everyday objects such as a daisy or a drop of dew. We could see each grain of pollen, every glistening color of the rainbow that seemed to emanate from within the clear drop of early morning dew as it shimmered upon a green leaf. All the world was present in a grain of sand.
Then, as we grew older, things changed--or we changed. Saddled with responsibilities and governed by social expectations and conventions, our priorities changed. Eventually, we changed. We no longer had time to appreciate, admire, and embrace the world around us. We became alienated from our environment and estranged from or surroundings. We took for granted the wonders and enchantments of nature. More and more, the world began to disappear as we took birds and brooks, sun and moon, mountains and beaches, and pine trees and breezes for granted. The malaise of everydayness spread until we were nearly blind and deaf to the world around us. Things and people alike began to lack presence.
Occasionally, something happens, and we see again. We hear again. The world becomes present to us again, as the dung beetle became present for Binx. We recover the world or, perhaps, only a tiny portion of the world--maybe nothing more than a dung beetle. But it’s a start. If we can see an insect today, maybe someday we can see a forest or, looking into a looking-glass, even ourselves.
Monsters make us sit up and take notice. They grab our attention. They have immediate and intense presence, even in a world devoid of detail and force. Like a snake, a monster’s hard to miss. Emily Dickinson suggests this quality when she describes a hiker crossing a serpent’s path:
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not?
His notice sudden is.
The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.
Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
The monster, likewise, is noticeable, immediately. That’s one reason that horror writers employ the monstrous. Monsters have presence. They’re bold font, italics, exclamation points, underlining.
Flannery O’Connor, asked why her fiction contains so many grotesque characters--physically, emotionally, or spiritually deformed characters (monsters, of a sort, really)--implied that she wrote for a “hostile audience“ and explained that, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large, startling figures.”
Often, monsters are the horror writer’s way of getting their readers’ attention.
That’s one reason horror writers employ monsters in their fiction. Another reason is that, by doing so, such writers also help their readers to face truths that are even more hideous than the monsters that represent these truths.
It's bad enough to come face to face with a ghost, a vampire, or a zombie, but it’s worse yet to encounter Ted Bundy, a child with cancer, the loss of a limb (or a mind), or sudden blindness. Lots of things are worse than demons and trolls and werewolves--Alzheimer’s, insanity, spinal bifida--but, as a rule, people don’t want to think of themselves or their loved ones succumbing to such real-life bogeymen. Therefore, horror writers use stand-ins--goblins in place of serial killers, witches in lieu of drug addiction, alien parasites instead of heart disease, autism, or intellectual and developmental disabilities. By facing these understudies, readers learn how to face the actual situations, circumstances, and incidents that these monsters symbolize.
That’s one reason horror writers employ monsters in their fiction. Another reason is that, by doing so, such writers also help their readers to face truths that are even more hideous than the monsters that represent these truths.
It's bad enough to come face to face with a ghost, a vampire, or a zombie, but it’s worse yet to encounter Ted Bundy, a child with cancer, the loss of a limb (or a mind), or sudden blindness. Lots of things are worse than demons and trolls and werewolves--Alzheimer’s, insanity, spinal bifida--but, as a rule, people don’t want to think of themselves or their loved ones succumbing to such real-life bogeymen. Therefore, horror writers use stand-ins--goblins in place of serial killers, witches in lieu of drug addiction, alien parasites instead of heart disease, autism, or intellectual and developmental disabilities. By facing these understudies, readers learn how to face the actual situations, circumstances, and incidents that these monsters symbolize.
In the process, we come to understand that we can survive losses more terrible than we want to imagine--or to face.
Note: These are the answers to the "Creepy Crawlies Quiz":
1. B; 2. B; 23. D; 4. B; 5. C; 6. A; 7. B, 8. C; 9. A; 10. C.
1. B; 2. B; 23. D; 4. B; 5. C; 6. A; 7. B, 8. C; 9. A; 10. C.
No comments:
Post a Comment