Charles Baudelaire’s “Carrion”

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In a previous post, we shared several relatively short poems that express horrific themes. In this post, we share Charles Baudelier’s “Carrion,” a strange rhyme, indeed, and appalling.


First, the poem; then, the commentary:

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw
that lovely summer day?
On a pile of stones where the path turned off
the hideous carrion--

legs in the air, like a whore--displayed
indifferent to the last,
a belly slick with lethal sweat
and swollen with foul gas.

the sun lit up that rottenness
as though to roast it through,
restoring to Nature a hundredfold
what she had here made one.

And heaven watched the splendid corpse
like a flower open wide--
you nearly fainted dead away
at the perfume it gave off.

Flies kept humming over the guts
from which a gleaming clot
of maggots poured to finish off
what scraps of flesh remained.

The tide of trembling vermin sank,
then bubbled up afresh
as if the carcass, drawing breath,
by their lives lived again

and made a curious music there--
like running water, or wind,
or the rattle of chaff the winnower
loosens in his fan.

Shapeless--nothing was left but a dream
the artist had sketched in,
forgotten, and only later on
finished from memory.

Behind the rocks an anxious bitch
eyed us reproachfully, waiting for
the chance to resume
her interrupted feast.

--Yet you will come to this offence,
this horrible decay, you, the
light of my life, the sun
and moon and stars of my love!

Yes, you will come to this, my queen,
after the sacraments,
when you rot underground among
the bones already there.

But as their kisses eat you up,
my Beauty, tell the worms
I've kept the sacred essence, saved
the form of my rotted loves!

Some time after the incident (“the thing we saw/ that lovely summer day”), still haunted, it appears, by the sight, the speaker of the poem recalls having seen, while walking with his lover, the dead and bloated carcass of a maggot-infested beast. In describing the animal’s “corpse” as he reminisces about the sight to his girlfriend, thus keeping alive in his memory the appalling sight, he mixes distasteful images and adjectives that bespeak unpleasant qualities and states with images and adjectives that express agreeable and pleasant characteristics and conditions:

“thing,” “carrion,” “whore,” “sweat,” “gas,” “rottenness,” “corpse,” “flower,” “perfume,” “flies,” “guts,” “maggots,” “scraps of flesh,” “vermin,” “carcass,” “music,” “water,” “wind,” “fan,” “bitch,” “feast,” “offence,” “decay,” “queen,” “sacraments,” “kisses,” “Beauty,” “worms.”

The negative images and descriptive words and phrases suggest his disgust, but, strangely, it is a disgust that merges with attraction. He is fascinated, it seems, with what he considers the beauty of death as it is represented in the concrete and vivid spectacle of an animal’s decomposing carcass. The rotting nature of the body seems to show life’s dirty little secret, as it were: the reality (death, or nothingness) that is hidden at the center of existence.

Nature does not discriminate in its destructiveness to accord with human perceptions and prejudices of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and value and insignificance, but kills and dismantles all. In doing so, it feeds upon itself, life deriving sustenance from the effects of death, as the flies feed upon the carcass and lay eggs that, as “maggots,” can later “finish off/ what scraps of flesh” remain, the crumbs, as it were, of the flies and dogs’ “feast.”

The speaker next personalizes death by applying the lesson he has learned from having seen the dead animal to the eventual fate of his girlfriend, observing that she, too, “will come to this offence,/ this horrible decay,” despite her religious faith, as indicated by the “sacraments,” and “rot underground among/ the bodies already there.” Death will not spare her, any more than it has spared others of her faith or, for that matter, those of no faith. Again, death is indiscriminate in its destructiveness, and neither faith nor disbelief avails against one's demise.

He ends his reminiscence and commentary upon the experience of having come across the dead animal’s rotten and bloated body by foreseeing, as it were, an ironic future situation, asking his lover to imagine herself, conscious despite her death and being devoured by “worms” whose “kisses eat” her, that he, in having survived her (for a time, at least), has “kept the sacred essence” and “saved/ the form of” his “rotted loves.” Moreover, he makes her, his “queen,” an embodiment of “Beauty,” addressing her as such.

This appellation may refer to the last lines of John Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” Keats wrote. Regardless of what these closing lines of Keats’ poem may mean (critics continue to debate the issue), it is truly chilling to suppose, as Baudelaire’s speaker seems to imagine, that the truth, concerning “Beauty,” is that it must, like a lovely woman, end in death, in nothingness, and in absurdity, just as love itself must end.

In such a poem, there is no hope, nor is there any reason to suggest that the repulsive and the beautiful, in the final analysis, signify any difference. If death and destruction are the end of life, of beauty, and of love, death, ugliness, and apathy are no better or worse than one another, and good and evil themselves become but moot and meaningless points.

Poe and King: Two Unlikely Beauties

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Since the term “aesthetics” is generally used in relation to beauty, it may strike one as odd, or even bizarre, to see it associated with horror. A word of explanation is in order.

Structure has beauty. Unity has beauty. Coherence has beauty. Harmony and balance have beauty. A work, even if it treats of the horrifying and the terrifying, is beautiful if it exhibits these qualities. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems show these attributes. Therefore, such narratives as The Raven, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of the Amontillado,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are beautiful. They are works of art. Each word, each image, each figure of speech, and each part of the whole, in each case, builds toward a single effect--fear. Poe means to frighten his readers, and he carefully plots every incident of his story’s action to do just this. In his theory, outlined in “The Philosophy of Composition,” every word has a place in the bigger scheme of things, and every word must be in its place. The fact that his name remains in lights a century after his death is a measure of his success.

In horror fiction, Poe remains the master of masters. In our time, Stephen King is often held up as, well, the king of the horror genre. It’s doubtful that even King himself would claim to be of the same rank as Poe as a literary artist, though, however popular and prolific in output King may be. In fact, he refers to himself as the “literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.” Can it be said, though, that King has an aesthetics of horror? Maybe.

If we regard Aristotle as correct in his judgment that plot is the most important element of narrative, we may charge King with having an aesthetic. King knows how to tell a story, creating and maintaining suspense alongside pace and throwing a curve to his readers at just the right moment to keep them guessing (and reading). If Aristotle was right, King, in plotting his novels, might be said to create things of lasting beauty.

If, in striving for effect, Poe created whole new literary genres, King, in plotting his tales, recreated at least one--the horror genre. He took age-old, moldering themes, such as the vampire, and reenergized them. In bringing the parasitic bloodsuckers from Europe’s Gothic landscapes and installing them in small-town 'Salem's Lot, King not only gave them a local, and an American, home, but he also modernized them, making them, in a willing-suspension-of-disbelief-kind-of-way, believable and, therefore, frightening. King knows that home is not where one hangs one’s hat, but, rather, where one’s heart is, and, by making old world horrors at home in small-town America, he shocked and terrified and repulsed his countrymen, here and now. He also revolutionized the horror genre, which is no small feat in itself.

Home is Eden, King knows, and, so, he brought the serpent back into the garden. He did it by plotting his novels to demonstrate something simple but vital: what threatens one’s local community, one’s hometown, or one’s neighborhood, threatens oneself. That’s what’s scary nowadays, whether the threat takes the form of ancient vampires and werewolves or contemporary shape shifters and extraterrestrial entities beyond human ken.

Of course, some believe that Aristotle is mistaken about plot’s being the most important narrative element, pointing, instead, to character. The creation of memorable and significant literary personages who embody a great and lasting insight into humanity, as Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, or even Scarlett O’Hara, does, is, these critics argue, what counts as great literary art. One Huckleberry Finn or Carrie White is worth any number of plots, they say.

If their point of view is true, King stands, on less certain ground in having developed a horror aesthetic, for, in fact, character doesn’t depend upon horror; stories of all types are peopled, as it were, with characters, many of high artistic quality. Many of Charles Dickens’ novels have little to do with horror as a genre that is represented by Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, King, and the like, but his characters certainly are giants among their peers or, in many cases, hey are peerless.

For many, Henry James solved the problem of plot, raised, on one hand, by Aristotle and of character, raised, on the other hand, by the philosopher’s critics, asserting that the two are but flip sides of the same coin. Action (the incidents of which comprise the plot) represents character, James suggested, just as character determines action. To put it in simpler terms, one is what one does, and what one does is what one is. An alcoholic, for example, is someone who drinks to excess, and someone who drinks to excess is an alcoholic. If James is right, in plotting the action of his novels, King is representing his characters, and his characters, in turn, determine what will happen in his books.

Action, one may quibble, is not the same as plot. Action is what happens; plot is how and why it happens. Action is what a character does; plot is how and why he or she does it. E. M. Forrester (I believe) distinguished between the two with a simple example--or two simple examples, actually. This is an example of action, he said:

The queen died. Then, the king died.

This is an example of plot, he said:

The queen died. Then, the king died of grief.

The addition of the two words “of grief” explain how and why the king died. In the first instance, there is no necessary connection between the incident of the queen’s death and that of the king’s demise. The two incidents are related strictly through chronological sequence: one happens before the other. In the second instance, there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two incidents: the king’s grief, which was caused by the queen’s death, effects his own demise. A plot is a series of causally related incidents, each of which is cause by its antecedent and, in turn, causes its successor to occur.

In King’s fiction, bizarre, horrifying incidents (actions) occur with great regularity, but they don’t occur in a vacuum. They are related by a chain of cause and effect. Moreover, these plots happen in relation to a specific type of character--the man, woman, or child who lives in small-town, modern-day America. In tying together plots that involve strange incidents with today’s small-town residents, King unites past with present, old world with new world, tradition with innovation, childhood with adulthood, monsters with contemporary fears and anxieties. This marriage, whether made in heaven or in the other place, has a structure, a unity, a coherence, a harmony, and a balance that is beautiful to see--and to read. It seems safe to say that King’s horror fiction has an aesthetic; it’s just not lik, e Poe’s.

Not Everyone Loves A Victim

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

America loves victims. Being a victim excuses one from irresponsibility. Victims receive a free pass that excuses them from responsible behavior and from the consequences of their irresponsible actions. Victimization is a marvelous source of self-pity that helps to perpetuate one’s anger at the world and one’s belief that one is justified in doing whatever one likes, since, after all, one has been victimized. Something unjust has happened; therefore, one is entitled to act in whatever fashion he or she wishes to act.

Horror fiction takes issue with this stance. In horror stories, victims are frequently dispatched without mercy, violently and with finality, or are allowed to survive only to be further victimized, even more horribly, before they’re killed in some hideous manner or another, at an appropriately climactic moment.

In the past, most horror victims have been women, a fact that many feminists attribute to misogyny. There may be some truth to this charge, as witness the declaration of Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Philosophy of Composition”: “The death. . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” However, there may be reasons other than simply misogyny. There may be practical considerations.

In American society, women are permitted to cry unashamedly, for pretty much any reason and under pretty much any circumstances, and they tend to do so with regularity, expressing a wide range of emotions that includes both happiness and sorrow as well as anger and fear. In general, women are allowed--indeed, encouraged--to be more emotionally expressive than men, and, again, they tend to do so. This tendency makes them ideal as emotional indicators. In movies (and, indeed, in literary texts), they show the audience (or the readers) how to feel about a situation. The audience, identifying with them, understands that they should feel the same way about what is happening to the characters as the emotive female character, or the emotional indicator, feels.

Although it is not a horror movie, Tank illustrates the use of this technique. At various moments, as circumstances warrant, Jenilee Harrison’s character, Sarah, traveling inside the tank driven by James Garner’s character, Sgt. Zack Carey, at various moments, expresses anxiety, concern, fear, and exultation. Seeing her convey these emotions, the audience understands that they, too, should feel the same way. She’s the film’s emotional indicator.

The same technique is used to good effect in horror films (and literary narratives), although the emotional range tends to be much more limited, restricted, pretty much, to horror and its related feelings, such as anxiety, fear, revulsion, and terror. (That’s why actresses who appear in horror movies are known as "scream queens.") Because American society allows women a freer exercise of emotion, horror fiction often makes women victims. Stalked by a mad killer, abducted by a lovelorn monster, or hunted or attacked by an unspeakable creature, female victims’ expressions of terror, disgust, and panic inspire the same feelings in audiences and readers.

Women are physically weaker than men. Therefore, chivalry demands that men protect them from threats to life, limb, and sanity. In other words, female characters motivate male characters to risk their lives when, otherwise, the men folk might find it more desirable to exercise the better part of valor. In newsreel footage of one of Bob Hope’s USO shows, he brings out a beautiful female celebrity--Ann-Margaret, perhaps--and says to the assembled troops, “I just wanted to remind you of what you’re fighting for.”

The same principle is behind horror fiction’s employment of the weak, but luscious, female victim. Whether she lives or dies, she’s an inspiration to the fighting man. If she survives, he succeeds. If she dies, he fails. Therefore, her survival (or death) is an indicator of the heroic male character’s success (or failure) as a hero as well. The female victim or potential victim, as the case may be, both inspires the protective male and shows the audience that he’s a winner or a loser, depending upon whether his intervention on her behalf merits her trust. If she lives, her trust was merited; if she dies, it was not. If her protector succeeds, and she lives, he earns the audience’s respect and, if he already has their respect, it increases. If the macho man is to triumph, ultimately, over the monster, his doing so will be more believable because he has been able to defend the life of the potential female victim. If he fails, the audience accepts his failure because, earlier, he was unable to protect the female victim. In either case, the question as to whether the female character will live or die (and whether the male character will win or lose) provides suspense.

Not only do women, as victims, suggest how the audience or the readers should feel, motivate male characters, and indicate the manliness (or lack thereof) of their masculine protectors, but, when they meet their doom, they also heighten the horror of the story. This is probably what Poe had in mind when he stated that “the death. . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” We want to believe that life has purpose, meaning, and value, and that all is not for naught. We want to believe that life is not “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We feel that beauty indicates an interest on the part of the Creator in his creation, for beauty is not a quality that needs to be present in order for the universe to exist and operate. After all, despite the presence of any number of unattractive people, the universe seems to function according to impersonal “laws of nature.” Although most people would not want to do so, we could, if we had to, get by without beauty.

The death of a beautiful woman is a reminder that something we value highly--beauty (and not just beauty of any sort, but beauty in the flesh, or feminine beauty)--is unnecessary, perhaps even accidental. If it’s accidental, rather than bestowed, there may be no Creator. There may be no God. We may be on our own. If so, the world that seems, at times, at least, to be meaningful and purposeful and valuable may be simply absurd. We may be absurd! The death of a beautiful woman reminds us of this possibility. Therefore, the death of a beautiful woman is horrible, both in itself and beyond itself.

Of course, female victims also add a dimension of sexuality to horror stories, which, in the past and, to a large extent, even now, depict the monstrous as being male. The metaphor is simple: monsters (males) = rapists. The exclusive or primary victims of the creature of the black lagoon, King Kong, the xenomorphs in Alien and its sequels, Freddy Kreuger, Michael Myers, and even the devil in The Exorcist (and many other monsters with male appendages) were female rather than male. The implication is that the monsters were interested in women not solely because they’re good screamers. Critics have also seen the monster-as-disguised rapist as being an embodiment of a racist white patriarchal society’s fear of and revulsion toward miscegenation. It was because Rosemary’s baby is a “half-breed” of sorts, such critics contend, that makes him a devil’s child.

The sexualization of the male body that followed the feminist movement resulted in more than the Chippendales. Men became sexual objects. Therefore, they became potential victims of sexual predators. Not only did female high school teachers begin to sexually assault teenage boys, but female monsters began to rape and kill male victims in movies such as Species and Alien and in television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What had formerly been good only for the goose became good for the gander as well, as victimization became an equal opportunity condition. Likewise, the metaphor of monsters (females) = rapists entered the American and the international psyches. Accompanying this development was another role reversal. If men were now acceptable as victims, women were now acceptable as protective heroines. It is not only the male Marines in Alien and its successors who fight against the monster; Lt. Ripley also protects and defends her crew. The only difference is that she succeeds, whereas her male comrades fail.

The male victim is unsettling because of these role reversals. Sex and gender are basic to the human condition, and it is disturbing when assumptions that are taken for granted as being true are challenged or overturned. In a society that has regarded women as weaker and dependent upon men for protection, the depiction of men as weak and dependent upon women for protection runs counter to convention and is, therefore, distressing. Horror fiction capitalizes upon anything that is disturbing, and the use of the male victim provides another means of effecting disquiet that can, with a shove at the right moment, effect horror.

In horror fiction, weakness of any kind--physical, emotional, spiritual, or even of gender identity--is punished swiftly, violently, and, frequently, lethally. The implication that being a victim is not a good thing and that it does not give one immunity from personal responsibility or the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” whether the universe is of divine origin or not, is a censure to the permissiveness of a society that has come to all-but-idolize victims. In horror fiction, one had better not pout and had better not cry, for the Santa Claus who’s coming to town might just be a sociopathic killer in disguise.