"Large. . . and Startling Figures," Indeed

copyright 2014 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror hides inside us all, actually or potentially, taking many forms.

What horrifies us is our own demise.

We are horrified, too, by the measures we will take to survive.

In an us-against-them scenario, it is we who will survive—or will to survive—whatever the cost, including the destruction of another person. We are horrified that we may be killed, but we are horrified, also, that we may kill, even if we should be compelled to do so to prevent ourselves from being killed.

We kill or we are killed; therein lies our horror, the secret horror within, which assumes a multitude of disguises, but is always only the same fear, the same loathing.

Sometimes, though, the survival of the fittest is disguised. We compete for laurels and for jobs, for love and attention, for fame and devotion, for men and women, as well as for life and not death.

Each time we win, we kill; every time we lose, we die.

Horror fiction is horrible because it tells this truth about us: we are all both predator and prey, hunter and hunted, stalker and stalked, quick and dead.

Sometimes, we are, simultaneously, one and the same, as when, for example, we commit suicide.

There are several ways to kill oneself, to be both predator and prey, perpetrator and victim: morally, psychologically, and, yes, physically.

When we look the other way, introspectively or with extroversion; when we deny or reject the truth, we die.

Little by little, we die every day.

But slow death is often overlooked, in the moment, at least, when we are too busy with our lives:

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me

EmilyDickinson tells us.

In the literature of horror, death stops for us, and, in doing so, he employs the strategy of Flannery O'Connor:

To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

Blood and gore, deformity and disfigurement, madness and mayhem, death and destruction, disease and pestilence, fear and trembling are “large” and “startling figures,” indeed, but even they may not succeed, in every case, to startle us out of the complacency of ourselves, and, when they are not, we are not.

Surrealism and Horror

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman 

 

Michael Gould’s Surrealism and the Cinema (Open-Eyed Screening) offers several insights concerning surrealism that apply not only to movies, but also to products of the horror genre, whether in print or on film. He says, “The image is the basic element of surrealism for it is an image-conscious sensibility (21).” Seeing represents consciousness; to be is to be perceived, and to see is to perceive. However, surrealism is interested in challenging accepted perceptions, interpretations, understandings, and meanings. To do so, it must dissociate or expunge familiar readings and views, that it might make the familiar strange and novel again; it is only by alienating the viewer from the things that he or she views that the surrealist can renew the objects of perception. For this reason, surrealists are generally more concerned with the representative, or the type, rather than with the individual, because the type is a distillation of individuals which stands for the essence, as it were, of the group that the type represents. In this sense, types are symbols, and symbols obliterate the perception of new truths, or understandings, of the things that, collectively, constitute the world or “reality.” This seems to be Gould’s meaning, when he writes:

For Rene Magritte. . . the bowler hat is the symbol of the bourgeois European man, and Magritte’s men in bowlers are all types, without individual personalities. It is the man-in-the-bowler-hat image that excites Magritte, not the man himself (21).

Surrealists deal with types because the artists want to subvert their meaning in order to make them potentially meaningful again, to make them, as it were, pregnant with meaning. Flannery O’Connor suggested something similar, in a different context, when she wrote, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,” as did Walker Percy, in his use of a dung beetle, in The Moviegoer, to awaken his protagonist Binx Bolling to the wonder of things when they are no longer taken for granted and overlooked. When the world becomes too familiar to us, it is as if it is lost to sight. We have eyes, but we do not see. To be is to be perceived, but we have forgotten how to perceive; therefore, much of the world’s being is lost to us. Surrealists attempt to restore our sight by making the familiar world appear strange again to us, as it is to a young child who lacks adults’ experience:

Surrealism. . . seeks always the. . . revelatory. . . . This calls for a child-like sense of wonderment. Children are so easily surprised because they have so little experience in life. . . (28-29).

How does horror serve the same end? How does horror renew our perceptions of the things of this world, so that we see again that which has become invisible to our jaded eyes? It does so in at least three ways, by offering readers (or viewers) a parade of the bizarre, by confronting them with the monstrous Other, and by whisking them off to a remote, often confining, unfamiliar place.

As we have remarked in previous posts, most horror stories start with a series of apparently unrelated, bizarre incidents. This series comprises a break with the ordinary and the everyday, immersing the reader in a topsy-turvy world in which he or she, along with the protagonist, is alienated from the mundane and the familiar. Everyday objects, scenes, and experiences are juxtaposed to the wild, the incongruous, and the bizarre, which shakes up one’s world--or, at least, one’s experience of the world. The alien alienates; the strange estranges; the weird cuts one off from the familiar and the complacency that often derives from an immersion in the ordinary. The world is no longer safe; it has become dangerous, because, suddenly, the old rules don’t apply, and anything is possible. In a previous post, we cited, as an example of the opening parade of the bizarre, the incidents that comprise the beginning of Stephen King’s novel, Desperation, which we repeat here:

In Nevada, a dead cat is seen nailed to a highway sign. An abandoned recreation vehicle (RV) sits alongside a lonely stretch of highway, its door flapping in the breeze. A sheriff, acting crazy, arrests a couple on trumped-up drug charges, threatening to kill them on their way to jail. The nearest town, Desperation, seems abandoned, except for the corpses that litter the streets. The sheriff has arrested several other individuals, also on false charges; among his prisoners are the members of the RV family, whom he supposedly rescued from (non-existent) gunmen. Vultures, scorpions, wolves, and other animals, under the sheriff’s telepathic control, attack people. A preteen prisoner, David Carver, miraculously escapes from jail, afterward performing additional miracles (using a cell phone with a dead battery and multiplying a supply of sardines and crackers). The demon Tak, who is behind the series of bizarre incidents, serially possessing the sheriff and others as he wears out their bodies, fears the preteen. Strange idols cause sexually perverse thoughts and feelings in those who touch them.

This parade of the bizarre--this freak show, comprised of incidents as well as performers--takes us as fully out of the normal, everyday world as the tornado removed Dorothy Gale from the comforts of home, dropping her in Oz. King lets us know, by exposing us to the uncanny and the eerie, apparently unrelated events that have begun, for no apparent reason, that, in having entered Desperation, we are no more in Nevada than Dorothy was in Kansas after she landed in Oz. In other words, the series of bizarre incidents that begin his story alienate us from our ordinary lives and estrange us from our everyday selves. As if we were inside a gigantic existential kaleidoscope, reality has shifted and sifted, and the mundane world is fragmented and redistributed into unrecognizable shards that are no longer known and familiar. Reality, as we have understood it, has become unreal; therefore, it has become pregnant with the possibilities that result from a renewal--or a newness--of perception.

If a confrontation with a series of bizarre incidents reawakens us to the things of the world by shocking us into awareness as a result of a transformation of the familiar into the strange, a confrontation with the monstrous Other reawakens us to the astonishment of things--or of some things--in themselves, without first making them strange. We tend to ignore most of the sensations and perceptions that our bodies and senses relay to our minds. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed by the experience of life that inundates us from every direction at every waking moment. We become not only selective, but highly selective. Therefore, our chances of survival may be heightened, but at the cost of losing sight and sound and scent and taste and touch of many of the things that comprise our environment. We reduce the size of our perceived world so that we can deal with it; in doing so, we obliterate from our consciousness most of existence. However, certain things are undeniable; they have presence, even when other things are absent, and they demand to be perceived and, therefore, to be (to be is to be perceived). No one ignores the sight or sound of a rattlesnake, for example, or a bear or a shark. Threats have immediate and vivid presence, a quality that Emily Dickinson captures well in her poem about a snake; the narrator’s shock is evident in her twisted syntax:

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 Boy, and Barefoot-- I more than once at Noon 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--

Whatever its shape, the monster is always the snake; it is insistently and undeniably present, demanding to be seen and heard (and, possibly, to be smelled and touched or even tasted). Threats stand out to us when nothing else does. By associating the monster with the Other (who is always some rejected aspect of the Self), horror writers confront readers (or viewers) with repressed aspects of their inner selves, with the inner demons of injurious attitudes, self-destructive beliefs, and harmful behaviors. We do not want to look, afraid of what we may see; by embodying those aspects of our inner beings in the forms of monsters that will not be denied, we are confronted with our inner demons; we see them again, and, face to face with the ghost of childhood trauma or a guilty past, with the beast of adulterous desire, or with the vampiric lust for others’ blood, we have the opportunity to see ourselves anew and, perhaps, to overcome the monster within.

The horror film, like surrealist art, breaks the world into fragments in order to make it present and visible to us as something strange and wonderful (or terrible). A series of bizarre incidents leading to a monstrous Other are two ways by which writers of such stories accomplish this feat. The third is the use of a remote, usually confining, setting, which has the effect of cutting the protagonist off from the security of his or her greater community, whether this community is represented by the character’s home, neighborhood, region, nation, or even planet. The protagonist is alone (or possibly with members of a small group), cut off from the police, from military forces, from medical personnel, from fire and rescue teams, from supplies of food and utility services, from communication equipment. He or she is on his or her own, with no one to advise, assist, or intercede. Whether the protagonist lives or dies depends exclusively upon what he or she believes, chooses, thinks, knows, learns, and, in short, does. Moreover, if the isolated space is also sparsely furnished, it may represent a state of existence akin to death, for “clutter,” according to Gould, suggests the opposite state, that of the abundance that is associated with life. In this context, the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, in “Parega und Paralipomena,” as quoted in Surrealism and the Cinema, are extremely evocative:

To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence (36).

According to Gould’s assessment, the effects of such isolation will result in the isolated surrealist’s attempt to “fill” the resulting “void” in his or her knowledge with his or her own “subject-being”:

Once our old attitudes to the reality around us are removed, the confronting pablum of their presence is also gone, leaving us with new fears, which appear in the form of a lack of definitive answers (a fear of the unknown). It is with his own subject-being that the surrealist tries to fill that void. . . (37).

The fragmentation of, and estrangement from, ordinary, everyday “reality” that surrealism accomplishes is only its first, preliminary work; its task, like that of horror fiction, is completed when it then allows the reader or the viewer to synthesize his or her experience, creating a new interpretation, a new impression, or a new understanding of his or her world and of his or her place in the world, or, as Gould puts it:

Because surrealism makes the mind puzzle and search, it is basically a constructive sensibility, which is bent on tearing down old values and opening up new horizons, and as such, it is a political sensibility (38).

Source:

Surrealism and the Cinema (Open-Eyed Screening) by Michael Gould, A. S. Barnes and Company, New York, 1976.

Horror is (Undesirable) Otherness

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror is . . . .

What? Disfigurement. Dismemberment. Death.

Loss of innocence.

A journey truncated, or even bisected, by violence or madness (or both).

A girl (or boy) interrupted.

Blood. Guts. Gore.

Monsters.

The needle’s drip.

The headless doll.

All of this, and much more.



As Stephen King implies in It (and the ancient Greeks, long before), horror--or the monster, at any rate--is one’s worst fear, one’s most terrible nightmare, come true, come to life. . . as the bogeyman, who’s after you!

Horror’s many monsters, as we have observed, are metaphorical. This (evil thing) = that (existential threat). Like all fiction, in this sense, the horror genre is formulaic (for equations are formulaic). As Emily taught us, “The differences are where the meanings are.”

Life is what we make it, what we want it to be, more or less, whether we consciously and deliberately intend it to be or just follow the paths of least resistance. (We are what we do, and we do what we are.) It is a journey, life, the middle way between extremes. Conflict is mediation: in the collision of opposites, the bearing away of (and the baring away by) the violent, we are taken by force. The Tao of horror is the middle way between the extremes of being and nothingness and of everydayness and the divine (or, more often, since it’s horror we’re talking about, the demonic). We create ourselves by reconciling (or avoiding the reconciliation of) the polar opposites of our being or of our becoming.

We are surrounded by foils (and by fools, but that’s a different story). If we don’t want to become the monster, we must become its slayer; if we don’t want to turn into a demon, we must turn into an angel--or, more often, something between these two extremes. Of course, the other may be anyone or anything we are not, any opposite to ourselves or to the directions we are taking in our journeys through life. Sometimes, the other is anima or animus; sometimes, shadow; sometimes, wise old man; sometimes something new and unnamed, a monster born of our own individual (rather than a communal) existential and personal crisis. This is a rarity, indeed, however: most of our monsters are readymade, waiting for the scripts we are writing by virtue of our living out our lives to call for some off-the-rack monster from central casting that will fill the bill. In horror fiction, the fashionable monster is the rare exception to the rule.

In short, horror is undesirable otherness. It is that which we are not (at least, not yet) but are in danger of becoming.

Horror is envy. It is greed. It is gluttony. It is lust. It is pride. It is sloth. It is wrath.

Horror is ignorance. It is moral weakness, or timidity. It is indifference. It is threat to the local community. It is loss of life, of limb, of mind. It is despair. It is fear of the dark.

We would envy; we would be greedy; we would be gluttonous. We would be proud. We would be full of wrath. We would be ignorant. We would be timid. We would be indifferent. We would threaten family or town or nation or world. We would lose ourselves, part by part, or a mind at a time. We would despair. We would fear the dark.

Therefore, these are “others,” sirens calling to us from the deeps, bidding us to come to them.

Horror stories are cautionary tales.

In lucid dreams, believers in dream analysis and dream therapy believe, a dreamer can confront the stalking monster and demand to know its name. Names are powers. They can be used against the one who is known by them. Identified, a monster loses its mystique and becomes knowable, if not known; it has stepped out of the darkness, into the light. Who are you? we may ask our dreaming selves’ monsters (for all monsters are aspects of ourselves or our species), and the monster must reply.

In the truest nightmare, the monster’s name is Legion, for he or she is many.

The worst nightmare of humanity is humanity, and humanity is protean. We undergo metamorphoses, becoming, always becoming, that which we are not (or avoiding such becoming at all costs when the change isn‘t desirable).



Prophase
Metaphase
Anaphase
Telophase

In which phase are you?

Why Monsters? Why Metaphors?

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:

. . . 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.

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.