copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman
In the “Preface” to his massive tome, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Everett E. Bleiler of Kent State University, examines approximately 7,200 stories, dating from 1800 to 1960, all of which he has read personally, over a quarter century. As a result, he sees both the mosaics--the individual narratives, drawn from myth, legend, fairy tales, pulp and popular fiction, classic literature, and other sources--and the big picture, the “folklore” of supernatural fiction, as he calls the whole. His massive volume not only identifies the various motifs, or recurring themes and topics of such fiction, offering detailed summaries of most of them, but it also provides insights into parallel treatments of these themes and topics.
Bleiler’s massive, painstaking analysis, synthesis, classification, division, and evaluation of so many thousands of stories from such a vast array of sources enables students, scholars, and writers of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and other forms of speculative fiction, both supernatural, or contranatural, and otherwise, to discern the variety of ways in which the same or similar themes have been treated across time by a diversity of authors. It also shows how the same author, writing about the same motif, treats and develops this motif in several different ways. The synopses of the stories enables readers and researchers, as well as writers, to get the gist, at least, of plots for stories that are out of print, and, as Bleiler points out, are unlikely, in most cases, ever to appear again in print. Using his Guide, interested parties can determine what types of characters appear again and again in such stories, compiling a list of the stock characters and the stereotypical characters that are common to the genre. It also permits its readers to discern patterns in settings, conflicts, and other elements of supernatural fiction.
Bleiler identifies three uses of supernatural literature: primary, secondary, and tertiary. According to his analysis, the primary purpose of supernatural fiction is to provide its readers with “thrills” while appealing to their interest in “supernatural motifs taken literally.” The secondary use of such literature is to serve “as a vehicle for something else: satire, analysis of social relations, probing of guilt and conscience,” and “a search for justice.” The tertiary use of this fiction is its “symbolisation of something otherwise perhaps on the edge of ineffability.”
Occasionally, Bleiler’s word choice seems odd and difficult to understand. For example, what does “supernatural motifs taken literally mean”? Does he intend to indicate, by such a phrase, that these motifs are normally regarded as being figurative or symbolic expressions? Other times, the author could have provided more explanations of some such phrases. What topics, for example, might, without the employment of symbolism be “on the edge of ineffability” and why? These occasionally awkward phrases are unfortunate, but, fortunately, they do not occur very often and, in general, Bleiler accomplishes an uncommon feat among intellectuals: his writing is mostly clear and comprehensible.
Bleiler identifies three uses of supernatural literature: primary, secondary, and tertiary. According to his analysis, the primary purpose of supernatural fiction is to provide its readers with “thrills” while appealing to their interest in “supernatural motifs taken literally.” The secondary use of such literature is to serve “as a vehicle for something else: satire, analysis of social relations, probing of guilt and conscience,” and “a search for justice.” The tertiary use of this fiction is its “symbolisation of something otherwise perhaps on the edge of ineffability.”
Occasionally, Bleiler’s word choice seems odd and difficult to understand. For example, what does “supernatural motifs taken literally mean”? Does he intend to indicate, by such a phrase, that these motifs are normally regarded as being figurative or symbolic expressions? Other times, the author could have provided more explanations of some such phrases. What topics, for example, might, without the employment of symbolism be “on the edge of ineffability” and why? These occasionally awkward phrases are unfortunate, but, fortunately, they do not occur very often and, in general, Bleiler accomplishes an uncommon feat among intellectuals: his writing is mostly clear and comprehensible.
Supernatural fiction may use irony, may be symbolic, may be satirical, may be representational without also being symbolic (although it may also be symbolic), is dualistic, allowing the consideration of opposing points of view, is often speculative of other ways of life, is often transformational, and may be humorous. What is common to all these stories is the supernatural, or, as Bleiler prefers, the contranatural, by which he means “a consistent, often studied reversal of a mechanistic universe.”
In his summaries of the many stories he discusses in his Guide, Bleiler sometimes indicates when a particular narrative is ironic, symbolic, satirical, or performs another such duty in addition to their primary, secondary, and tertiary purposes. These pointers are helpful to readers, authors in particular, because they show, again, how various writers of a diverse body of supernatural fiction treat and develop these narrative adjuncts.
Discussing the relationship between stories’ meanings and their cultural contexts, an aspect of stories’ themes, Bleiler suggests that the meaning of a story is lost when the cultural context that informs the story are no longer known and understood. Moreover, the status of a book can change, for this reason, a satire bthecoming understood as an adventure story for adults and, then, later, as a children’s book. This was the fate of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, he maintains.
In the volume’s article concerning “The Phenomenology of Contranatural Fiction,” Bleiler argues that “modern supernatural fiction is ultimately concerned with the impersonal individual and with universals of existence in story abstractions that are sometimes very primitive.”
As mentioned in Chillers and Thrillers post, “Evil Is As Evil Does,” these themes are common in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction and, to a lesser degree, perhaps to the work of such contemporary writers as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Bentley Little. They also appear in the work of many mainstream authors, such as Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, and many others.
He distinguishes between supernatural and contranatural fiction by observing that the former “dealt very largely with beings that were in some way superior to mortals or to living men,” whereas the latter is more concerned with “a world view that is in direct opposition to that of materialism,” and, he says, “My thesis is that modern fiction has erected a mirror world based on direct contradiction to what most of us believe, related through the strong principle of positive negation.” This perspective is discernible in the fiction’s “subject matter. . . man and the universe.” Contranatural fiction, Bleiler maintains, “cares little about man as a social being or as a lesson in biochemistry or psychology” and is “not always concerned with exact geography, with the orderly progression of time, or with the immutable law,” and “instead, things are added to, subtracted from, and modified away from reality.”
It is debatable, perhaps, as to whether “most of us believe” in a dualistic world of spirit and matter rather than a materialistic universe, as Bleiler contends. If anything, the opposite state of affairs seems to be the rule. However, it may be true that many continue, in the words of the FBI’s Special Agent Fox Mulder, to “want to believe” in a spiritual realm that is both immanent and transcendent to the natural world in which matter and energy, as interchangeable expressions of the same basic substance, hold sway, and, in that sense, emotionally rather than rationally, the dualistic world view of the “primitive” is still influential in modern and contemporary human life.
In the volume’s article concerning “The Phenomenology of Contranatural Fiction,” Bleiler argues that “modern supernatural fiction is ultimately concerned with the impersonal individual and with universals of existence in story abstractions that are sometimes very primitive.”
As mentioned in Chillers and Thrillers post, “Evil Is As Evil Does,” these themes are common in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction and, to a lesser degree, perhaps to the work of such contemporary writers as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Bentley Little. They also appear in the work of many mainstream authors, such as Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, and many others.
He distinguishes between supernatural and contranatural fiction by observing that the former “dealt very largely with beings that were in some way superior to mortals or to living men,” whereas the latter is more concerned with “a world view that is in direct opposition to that of materialism,” and, he says, “My thesis is that modern fiction has erected a mirror world based on direct contradiction to what most of us believe, related through the strong principle of positive negation.” This perspective is discernible in the fiction’s “subject matter. . . man and the universe.” Contranatural fiction, Bleiler maintains, “cares little about man as a social being or as a lesson in biochemistry or psychology” and is “not always concerned with exact geography, with the orderly progression of time, or with the immutable law,” and “instead, things are added to, subtracted from, and modified away from reality.”
It is debatable, perhaps, as to whether “most of us believe” in a dualistic world of spirit and matter rather than a materialistic universe, as Bleiler contends. If anything, the opposite state of affairs seems to be the rule. However, it may be true that many continue, in the words of the FBI’s Special Agent Fox Mulder, to “want to believe” in a spiritual realm that is both immanent and transcendent to the natural world in which matter and energy, as interchangeable expressions of the same basic substance, hold sway, and, in that sense, emotionally rather than rationally, the dualistic world view of the “primitive” is still influential in modern and contemporary human life.
Additions result in an increase of human powers by assigning “a host of paranormal abilities,” to which “evolution can bring further changes.” Contranatural fiction is characterized by “worlds of if, magic lands, unrigorous futures. . . objects that contain manna in themselves” and “manipulative techniques like magic and wish.”
Subtractions, he says, “indicate limitations” such as “loss of personal essence, deprivation of powers, destruction of time and space, new principles of causality of more limited range than the old, and restrictions on man and the gods.” In general, he believes subtractions to be “less important” than additions, but both additions and subtractions to reality are “modifications of the mechanistic universe” which can be “most easily recognized and understood” as antitheses of “the basis of mechanism,” as represented by various statements:
- Man is alone in the universe--there are supernatural beings.
- Man is the most powerful force--there are gods.
- The universe is amoral--there are forces concerned with morality, gods, demons, rewards, punishments.
- The universe is an uncaring place--there are temptations, prayer, faith.
- Death is final--there are ghosts, heavens, hells, reincarnation.
- Change can be effected only by rational means--there is magic. . . .
- Existence is material--there are fairies, vampires, little people of various sorts.
- Essence is inalienable--there are transformations of various sorts, personality interchange, possession, breaking the rule of one man-one personality.
- Reality is closed and separate from things imagined--there are solipsistic universes, entry into literary worlds, characters coming to life.
- The animate and the inanimate are rigidly separated--life may be created, inanimate things may be brought to life.
- Man’s senses have limitations--there are paranormal abilities, dream worlds, foreknowledge.
- According to Bleiler, such additions, subtractions, and modifications to reality result from “psychological factors that lie behind” his “typological scheme--fear and hope, desire and despair, acceptance and wonder.”
- Bleiler believes that, as human knowledge “expands,” so does “contra-knowledge,” and the latter expands more quickly and broadly than the former, since “it is possible to have more than one opposition to a basic idea.”
In Part Two of "The Guide to Supernatural Fiction: A Review," we’ll consider Bleiler’s six statements from which “countless stories can be generated.”