Eros by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Analysis and Commentary

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 

The sense of the world is short,

Long and various the report,—

To love and be beloved;

Men and gods have not outlearned it,

And how oft soe'er they've turned it,

'Tis not to be improved.

“Eros” is a love poem of sorts or, one might say, a meditation on love itself, since Eros is the Greek god of sexual, or erotic, love. The first two lines of the poem present a problem, as it were; the remaining lines provide the solution to that problem.

The problem is that life is short, and it’s meaning is uncertain. “The sense of the world”—its perception, the smell and the taste and the feeling and the sound and the sight of the world”—is short,” the speaker laments, lasting, in most cases, far less than a century. In addition to the brevity of life, the meaning of existence is unclear, although the interpretation of its possible significance is as “long and various” as art, philosophy, and religion can make it.

To the problem of the shortness and uncertainty of life, the speaker offers a solution: “To love and be beloved,” he declares, is an adventure that has defied the learning of both 'men and gods,'” and represents something that, no matter how much it is studied, analyzed, or considered, is “not to be improved.”

The love of which the speaker speaks, as the title of the poem indicates, is physical, or sexual, love—erotic love. It is fitting that the remedy that the speaker suggests—sensual love—is physical, just as the organs by which life itself is perceived are physical. Human beings know the world through their eyes, noses, skin, ears, and tongues. Likewise, through their bodies—or, more specifically, through their sexual organs—they may experience something—love—that is not only meaningful in itself but that has both physical and spiritual dimensions, thereby transcending the merely material world that is, in itself, all too short and uncertain. The same body that perceives a short and uncertain life in the material world within which it exists can, in becoming the vehicle for sex and love, give life a meaning that, derived from physical organs, is, nevertheless, spiritual in its essence, thereby providing a means of transcending the merely material, or animal, basis of existence and experience.

From Complacency to Narcissism

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

For a while, Hollywood milked extraterrestrial creatures as its “other” of the day. Their appearance alone suggested that these alien creatures were not like us. They were huge, gelatinous blobs. They were strange mermen from beyond the stars (or from the bottom of a black lagoon.) They were macrocephlic humanoids with green skin or gray-skinned humanoids with phallic heads. They were crawling eyes. They absorbed prey; devoured prey; and, if their quarry were women, mated with prey.

Something unexpected might bring these otherworldly monsters to their knees. The Blob couldn't stand cold temperatures. The green, big-headed saucer men couldn't bear the bright beams of automobile headlights. Bullets take out the creature from the black lagoon. If there's a theme here, it seems to be that, despite appearances, these otherworldly creatures aren't so tough after all; ordinary, everyday things—cold, headlights, bullets—are too much for them to handle. Sure, such threats may look dangerous, but appearances can be deceiving.

Horror horrifies, until it isn't so horrible, after all, and what makes it not so horrible after all is everydayness. The ordinary deflates, destroys, and dispatches the horrific. We weren't really in much danger, after all. The “otherness” of the other turns out to be not so much different from us, after all; indeed, if anything, we prove more adaptable, more innovative, more powerful—in a word, superior.

That, if anything, was the theme of the movies of the fifties.

What about the themes of the tens—the 2010s?

According to one interpretation, Pathos (2009), set in a dystopian future world in which thought is prohibited and people depend upon artificial intelligence and virtual reality for not only their pleasure, but also their own personal experiences and identities, is a satire concerning consumerism taken to extremes.

Although existentialism suggests that human nature does not exist, but is, instead, created by each individual according to his or her exercise of free will, Loophole (2109) takes something of a Cartesian point of view, suggesting that to be human is to be violent. Instead of Descartes's dictum, “I think; therefore, I am,” Loophole implies, “I am violent; therefore, I am.” According to a film review, these philosophical implications also have religious significance:

Suddenly, mass hysteria takes hold across the major cities of America as people are tested and marked with or without.  In a matter of days, the beginning of a New World Order takes the stage and, quite unexpectedly, we find ourselves in the middle of a Biblical battle that has long been dormant.

For some, the progress of the plot may seem to evangelistic; others are likely to enjoy the movie's religious dimensions.

Two films don't nearly constitute a representative sample, of course, but these movies, alt least, suggest that at least some of the films of the 2010s turn inward for their subject matter, focusing on the eternal questions related to being human: what is human nature and how do human beings fit into the larger scheme of things?

Older sci fi-horror movies were concerned with departures from the status quo: could such deviations endanger the community or even the world? If we lost our place in the grand scheme of things, what would become of us, as individuals? The comforting answer lay in the very everydayness that the extraterrestrial threats threatened. The threats to the existing order were no match for customary, the habitual, the traditional, the routine of people's routine, day-to-day lives.

More recent sci fi-horror films, in part, at least, return to a questioning of the age-old problems of philosophy and religion: human identity, human nature, the human condition, the relationship of the self and other. The eternal quest is undertaken yet again, with the protagonist and the viewer at the center of things; human existence, if not existence-itself, is egocentric. Everything revolves around us; it's all about us. We have gone from complacency to narcissism in only seven decades.

The Incomplete Completist

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In The Cat Pajamas's “Introduction: Alive and Kicking and Writing,” Ray Bradbury offers a clue to the meaning of his short story “The Completist.”

First, he recounts the story's inspiration. He and his wife Maggie, he says, met a “book collector and library founder” during “a voyage across the Atlantic” (xv).

After listening for to him hours, the Bradburys learned of the shocking incident with which Bradbury concludes his story (xv). The story, he adds, wasn't written for twenty years, when Maggie's death prompted him to write it (xv).

The narrative is based upon his recognition that the gentleman he and Maggie had met on their voyage represents a metaphor of sorts (xv), and this connection between the metaphorical significance of a particular person offers us a clue as to how Bradbury, the writer, wrote, or sometimes wrote.

If something is a metaphor, it shares certain characteristics with something else, the tenor, that is not otherwise like it. In doing so, the metaphor conveys a likeness between certain aspects of the otherwise different things.

Although there is no equivalency between the metaphor and the tenor, it is sometimes helpful to pretend that there is, so that a metaphor-tenor relationship may be written, as Bette Midler declares in her song “The Rose”:

Love = river

Love = razor

Love = hunger

Love = flower

She also declares how the metaphor and the tenor are alike: as a “river,” love “drowns the tender reed”; as a “razor,” love “leaves your soul to bleed”; as “hunger,” love is “an endless aching need”; and, as a “flower,” love is the product of a unique seed—the “you,” or listener, to whom Midler sings.

For Bradbury, as a metaphor, the book collector and library founder, the “Completist,” seems to personify culture.

Concerning the traveler's fictional counterpart, the story's narrator informs the reader, “At no time did he allow us to speak.” The Completist tells the couple that he travels the world, “collecting books, building libraries, and entertaining his soul (221-222).” He is the very embodiment of art and culture, collecting and distributing it, even as he himself enjoys it (222). Funded by his law firm, he has just “spent time in Paris, Rome, London, and Moscow and had shipped home tens of thousands of rare volumes” (222). Moreover, the Completist has constructed a vast repository of medical texts, novels, and books devoted to art, history, philosophy, and world travel (222-223).

In doing so, it seems that the lawyer seeks to reinvent the world as he would have it to be, a place of culture, education, and entertainment; he tells his listeners that Sir John Soane, “the great English architect” did something similar, reconstructing “all of London in his mind and in the drawings made according to his specifications” (222-223).

The Completist, having discovered some of Soane's “library dreams,” used them as the bases to build his own “university” on more than “a hundred acres” of his own property, where physicians, surgeons, and academics from around the world congregate every weekend.

His estate's “multitudinous centers of learning” allow its visitors to explore the cultural “treasures” of the world, as they stroll its meadows, amid “grand lanterns of education” and “read in an environment that [is] conducive to vast learning” (223-224).

As Bradbury warns in his book's introduction, the story ends with a shocking incident. The Completist, a man of culture, education, and refinement, a world traveler who has delved deeply into the world's cultural “treasures,” seeks to know “only one last thing”: “Why did my thirty-five-year-old son kill his wife, destroy his daughter, and hang himself?”

The couple (stand-ins, perhaps, for Bradbury's readers) is at a loss for words, not that it matters; the Completist does not wait for a response, nor does he appear to expect one. The horrific fates of his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter seem to represent the dilemma known to philosophers as the problem of evil, except, in Bradbury's story, it has more of a secular, than a religious, dimension. 
(In philosophy, the problem of evil is a counterargument to the assertion that the universe is ruled by a God who is both loving and just, and asks how the fact of the existence of evil be reconciled with belief in the existence of a God who is both loving and just.)

The Completist seems to seek his answer in culture and education, in medicine, literature, art, history, philosophy, and world travel, but despite his many superb and expensive “collections,” he still has no answer to the question of why his son killed his wife and destroyed his daughter before taking his own life. It is a mystery as unanswerable as it is consuming, and no amount of cultural “treasures” can compensate for these losses, both of family and of purpose.

Perhaps this is why he calls himself “The Completist.” The term refers to not to a connoisseur of art, but instead, to “an obsessive, typically indiscriminate, collector or fan of something.” Perhaps the story's Completist seeks to fill a void that cannot be filled. By filling himself and his estate and as many others as he can with culture and education, he may suggest that, if not now, if not today, then at some time in the future, the void within himself may be filled, that his thirst for knowledge in general and of one thing in particular may be quenched.

Or perhaps he collects the riches of culture simply to pass the time, merely to have something to do that others believe is significant, even if he himself does not. Until one's own demise, it is best to keep busy, he may think; it is best to pretend to believe that, despite unanswerable questions and horrific events, there is a reason to live and a purpose to perseverance.

It is also possible, of course, that the Completist actually does believe that, despite the absurdity of existence, there is, indeed, still a reason to live. Bradbury's statement, in his introduction, suggests that the story may be interpreted in this manner. Following Maggie's illness and death, he says, “for the first time in seventy years, my demon has lain quiet within me. My muse, my Maggie, was gone, and my demon did not know what to do.” As time went by, he started to question whether he'd “ever write again.” Then, he thought of “The Completist gentleman,” and he found himself eager to write the story of the metaphor with which, for two decades, he'd done “nothing.”

Like other writers, Bradbury writes about his own experiences, but he seems , frequently, to do so by introducing the intermediary of a metaphor. He says what he says by speaking about something else that is similar in some respects but different otherwise. The Completist is a metaphor for the absurdity of existence, it seems, but also a metaphor for the angst that Bradbury felt when the light of his life, his Maggie, was extinguished. For Bradbury, the “university” that the Completist built is the author's return to writing fiction, his stories the works of art and other cultural artifacts that make up the author's own collections, including the stories collected in The Cat's Pajamas.

Bradbury's writing fills, or attempts to fill, the great abyss within him that the death of his muse, his wife, his Maggie, created. Like the Completist, he offers it to the world, for the entertainment and edification of those who desire or need diversion and enlightenment.

Plotting Board, Part 5

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

 

Alternate Histories

 

 

Just as some movies, such a Hide and Seek and 1408, offer alternate endings, some novels get a lot of plot mileage by "overlaying [their] own version[s] of history over actual history," VanDerWerff observes (245).

 

Essentially, such plots offer two stories, the actual historical account of events and the fictional version. Ironically, the latter purports to show what actually happened, after the true events are challenged as spurious, perhaps as the result of a long-ongoing conspiracy by a power elite or another group with vested interests.

 

In The Taking, for example, Dean Koontz suggests that aliens are reverse-terraforming the Earth to prepare for their invasion when, in fact, Satan and his fallen angels are preparing to take over the planet. 

 

We Are (and Do) What We Believe

 

 

The more we believe in something, the easier it is to see how that belief impacts every aspect of our lives, Handlen says:

 

If you believe in God [as Dana Scully does], then everything you do and everything that happens to you is affected [sic] by God . . . . And if you're Fox Mulder--conspiracy enthusiast and fervent follower of little gray men--every calamity is just the latest iteration of a government dedicated to crushing its citizens and consolidating power in the face of a potential alien invasion . . . .

. . . While it may be comforting to believe that everything happens for a reason, and that you can understand what that reason is, it can also be unsettling. It means that nothing is without meaning, that any hiccup [sic] or snag has dark implications (251).

To avail oneself of this method of plotting, simply ask what your characters believe in and have them act accordingly. (Philosophy, theology, biography, autobiography, and history might come in handy as reference sources in investigating world views.)

Bottom Line Plotting

To plot a series of interconnecting story lines that occur over a fairly long time span, create a situation, VanDerWerff suggests, that can "run along in the background and resurface when needed," as in "the idea that the X-Files [department] is just too expensive and ineffectual or irresponsible" and should be shut down (270).

 Motives for Momentum

"At its most basic level," Handlen contends, "plot is just a pretext for momentum." Characters need a reason to keep moving, to keep acting. The X-Files episode "Drive" provides a simple, but effective, motive for Walter White's momentum: "Keep moving, or you die (271).

Mulder, likewise, has a simple, but effective, motive for momentum: his 'compulsion to find the truth" forces him to act (272).

These characters' motives move the story forward. What compels your characters?

Be Your Own Critic

After writing a scene, critique it from the point of view of a critic. To do this, you need to know what critics typically criticize, but, until you've read a few hundred volumes of lit crit (the more, the merrier!), these principles could do as starters:

• Does the scene contain all the elements of a story as a whole: protagonist; antagonist; secondary characters, if necessary; conflict; setting; action; dialogue, if necessary; motive; narrative purpose?
• Does the scene drive the story forward?
• Does the scene provide needed information?
• Does the scene's protagonist act, rather than react?
• Does the scene have its own beginning, middle, and end?
• Does the scene end with a cliffhanger?
• Does the scene evoke a strong, definite primary emotion? (It may or may not also evoke other, secondary emotions.)
• Are the characters well-drawn and believable?
• Is the pace appropriate?
• Does the tone work?
• Could the scene be revised to present its material in a more dramatic manner?
• If the scene uses figures of speech, do they work? Are they subtle, rather than obvious?
• Should the point of view be changed?
• How might a famous author have written this scene?
• How might a famous director shoot this scene?
• How does this scene fit with those before and after it?

 NEXT: To be continued . . . .

 

Edgar Allan Poe: Character Studies or Depictions of Aberrant Behavior?

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Egaeus, the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's “Berenice: A Tale,” which was published in the March 1835 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, was considered, by some of the story's “early readers” to suffer from “monomania.” Indeed, Egaeus identifies this malady as the “disease” that afflicts him; the condition, he admits, is aggravated by his “immoderate use of opium,” a drug the use of which, for recreational or other purposes, was legal in Poe's day (although Poe himself did not use the drug):

. . . my own disease . . . . monomania . . . consisted in a morbid irritability of the nerves immediately affecting those properties of the mind, in metaphysical science termed the attentive. . . . I fear that it is . . . in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the general merely reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied, and as it were, buried themselves in the contemplation of even the most common objects of the universe.

Eventually, his gaze falls upon the teeth of his cousin, who suffers from catatonia and who, Egaeus believes, is dying. As he beholds her wasted image, contemplating “her thin and shrunken lips,” Berenice smiles. For Egaeus, her smile is one “of peculiar meaning, [revealing] the teeth of the changed Berenice.” Egaeus reacts with horror, proclaiming, “Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!”

At the time, psychology, as a science (even today, this classification is suspect among many scientists), was considered a division of philosophy. In Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) Imamnuel Kant (1724-1804) had recognized that psychology is unscientific because the object of its study (first identified as the psyche, or soul, and then as thought, or cognition, and then, later still, as human behavior) cannot be quantified. Later, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper (1902-1994) suggests that any scientific hypothesis should be falsifiable through experimentation or observation (the empirical method), a test that psychology often fails.

Be that as it may, even today, perhaps for the want of anything else, psychology retains authority in courts of law and other social venues. In Poe's time, the better educated among the general public might have been persuaded by the claims of early psychologists, just as they were by the pronouncements of phrenologists. In general, however, many of Poe's readers would have been ignorant even of the rudimentary psychology of their day. To them, Poe's accounts of the effects of certain clusters of behavior now considered to be symptomatic of particular mental disorders to which contemporary psychologists (but not their predecessors) have put a name would have seemed mysterious, because their causes were unknown (as, indeed, is the case with regard to many such conditions even now), which is why therapy frequently avails little as a method of “treatment.” (Drugs have proven a more effective means of treatment, in some cases, a fact which seems to support Dr. Thomas Szasz's contention, in The Myth of Mental Illness, that “mental illness,” as such, does not exist; what does exist, he claims, is aberrant behavior caused by organic problems.)

We may not understand the workings of the soul or cognition or human behavior or whatever psychologists claim to study any better today than our ancestors did, but many members of the general public are satisfied by their belief that we do. By identifying the symptoms Poe's characters display, some contemporary literary critics and others have diagnosed the mental disorders from which these characters seem to suffer. However, again, these concepts and their bases would have been unknown to Poe and his readers.

The narrator of “Berenice: A Tale,” therefore, was not suffering from monomania. Instead, he suffers “from what is now called obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD),” a type of “anxiety disorder” characterized by

. . . recurrent, disturbing, unwanted, anxiety-producing obsessions (insistent thoughts or ruminations that at least initially are experienced as intrusive or absurd) or compulsions (repetitive ritualistic behaviors, or mental actions such as praying or counting, and purposeful actions that are intentional, even though they may be reluctantly performed because they are considered abnormal, undesirable, or distasteful to the subject.) The compulsion may consist of ritualistic, stereotyped behavior or it may be a response to an obsession or to the rules that the person feels obliged to follow. The obsession often involves the thought of harming others or ideas that the subject feels are gory, sexually perverse, profane, or horrifying (Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary, ninth edition).

Admittedly, this summary of the disorder describes Egaeus's behavior almost to a “T.” He is undoubtedly obsessed with the teeth of his cousin, Berenice, so much so that, visiting her tomb, he rips the teeth from her jaws. As horrific as this revelation is, it is not the most horrible shock that awaits Poe's reader at the end of this tale of terror. For that disclosure, one must read the story for him- or herself.

In earlier posts, we've considered how an author, by withholding the cause of the bizarre effects he or she presents at the beginning and middle of a story (and continues to depict well into the final division of the narrative), before revealing, at last, the cause of these effects, can repeatedly generate fear while maintaining or heightening suspense. Partly by sheer luck—being active as a writer during a time when psychology had not yet made an attempt to identify, describe, and categorize mental disorders as a way of diagnosing and treating them—and, possibly, by design (Poe often does not identify the causes of his effects, leaving them mysterious through the lack of a complete context)—Poe accomplishes just these ends. “Berenice: A Tale” seems all the more mysterious, macabre, and horrific to those modern readers among us who are not well-versed in psychology. By dint of the narrator's strange conduct, which is not explained by the outdated concept of “monomania,” we are left in the dark as to the cause of Egaeus's bizarre behavior, making it seem all the more mysterious. (The same is true of those who reject the claim that psychology is a science and continue to regard it as little more than unfounded speculation.) There is no reason that writers today cannot, again, follow in the footsteps of Poe, emulating his genius as a storyteller who was given to the creation of horror stories in a class by themselves: present bizarre behavior without explaining (or explaining away) its cause.

For critics of psychology, including disbelievers in its mythological aspects, who reject the study of the soul, or of cognition, or of human behavior, or of whatever psychologists claim to study, as having a scientific basis, such “disorders” as OCD, can still have value, as types of exercises of the sort that the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus (c. 371-c. 287 BC) developed in his Characters. Its pages describe thirty types of characters, including “The Flatterer,” “The Garrulous Man,” “The Boor,” “The Reckless Man,” “The Gossip,” and “The Superstitious Man.” The descriptions summarize the behaviors of these various characters, much as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (now in its edition) describes the symptoms of various “mental disorders.” Indeed, looking upon the DSM not as a clinical source, but as a writing resource similar to Theophrastus's character sketches, can provide a similar useful resource, minus the DSM's psychological trappings.

In future posts, we will consider more of the character types (i. e., “mental disorders”) among Poe's cast of grotesques.

The Metaphysics of Horror

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

From a religious point of view, the problem of evil, as philosophers call the idea that a loving, omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal God allows evil and suffering, seems to suggest one of these possibilities:

• There actually is no God.
• God is less than he is believed to be (for example, not loving, omniscient or omnipotent).
• God does not intervene in nature or human affairs.
• The devil (or chief evil entity) is equally as powerful as God.

Sooner or later, if only implicitly, horror fiction must grapple with this philosophical conundrum.

Dean Koontz wrestles with the problem of evil in The Taking, Stephen King in Desperation.

In the former’s novel, the arrival of Satan and his minions, mistaken for an extraterrestrial invasion of alien spacecraft, occurs when these dark forces seek to usher in Armageddon. The nature of the problem of evil is not directly assessed, although Koontz’s novel suggests that, despite its opposition to God’s goodness, evil does have a divine purpose, unintended though that effect may be on the part of the devil. Rather as in the book of Genesis (crossed, perhaps, with the Norse concept of Ragnarok, in which a man and a woman, surviving the destruction of Middle-earth, repopulate the planet at the beginning of a new age), a remnant of humanity is preserved against the wholesale destruction that ensues the hellish invasion. In place of Noah’s ark, the protagonist, having been impregnated by her husband, bears the seed of humanity’s hopes for the future within her womb. The old world dies that a new one may be born.

If Koontz’s novel is informed (by way of Norse mythology) by the Genesis account of the flood and the survival of Noah and his family (and two of every other species on the planet), King’s story seems to take, as its foundation, the Old Testament story of Job.

In King’s novel, God has summoned protagonist David Carver and several others to stop the demon Tak, who has recently escaped from a caved-in mine. In the process, David loses his entire family and concludes that “God is cruel.” However, another character, writer John Marinville, gives the teenager a note that he, Marinville, found while he was in the demon’s lair, a get-out-of-school-early pass that David had left nailed to a tree in his backyard, hundreds of miles away, before he and his family undertook the vacation that ended in Desperation. On the note is a message that wasn’t on the note originally, a message that, presumably, is from God himself: “God is love.” To effect the greater good, love must, at times, take a harsh and unbending stand toward evil, even at the cost of great sacrifice. David is too young to know the ways of God, but, King suggests, like longsuffering Job, the protagonist must trust in the goodness of God and take the deity at his word that he is a God of love who intervenes in human affairs for purposes which are inscrutable to human beings but are just, nevertheless, and, on some greater scale, probably merciful as well.

Koontz, a Roman Catholic, and King, who grew up in the Protestant tradition but claims to subscribe to no “traditional” religious faith and to have a non-traditional idea of God, both offer a view of the problem of suffering which is rooted, at least in part, in the Judeo-Christian faith (and, in Koontz’s case, perhaps Norse mythology), as it is expressed, respectively, in the book of Genesis (and the Eddas) and the book of Job. Although neither author presents an original thesis concerning the problem of evil, each draws attention to the issue in an entertaining and inventive fashion. (A recent film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, also enquires as to the basis of evil and suffering, leaving the answer open.)

The mystery of iniquity is perhaps unsolvable, but it clearly still retains a powerful interest upon the imaginations of writers and readers today, just as it has for several millennia now.

Fiction For Thought

Copyright 201 by Gary L. Pullman

Although it isn’t necessary to have a fully developed, systematic philosophy of life to be a writer, some writers of fiction--Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre come to mind--did have such a worldview and wrote novels and short stories, in fact, to popularize their beliefs. Others’ fiction--the short stories and novels of Flannery O’Connor and the novels of Walker Percy, for instance--are informed by religious traditions.

Whether one has a well-thought-out worldview, his or her fiction may be based upon, and reflect, the values and traditions of the society of which he or she is a member. In Dean Koontz’s fiction, brotherly love saves the day against natural, paranormal, and even supernatural threats, and Stephen King’s work suggests that it takes a village, so to speak, to put down the types of threats that horror stories typically involve.

It seems fair to say that a well-thought-out philosophy of life, a religious tradition, or a set of social mores is likely to add depth to, and enrich, popular fiction, including the horror story. Sometimes, such concerns create themselves in the telling of the tale, but, more often, to be enduring and fulfilling, such philosophical, religious, and social underpinnings must be either the outcomes of protracted and systematic deliberation or sustained religious and emotional conviction. The difference is one of quality such as is seen, in horror fiction, for example between Child's Play or The Happening and Psycho and The Exorcist.

The Value of Literature

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Fiction begins with empathy, as a writer imagines what it would be like to be another individual. He or she puts him- or herself into another person’s shoes, except that, of course, the person is a literary character, rather than a flesh-and-blood man, woman, or child, whom the writer creates. The process works in reverse, too--or is claimed to do so: readers, identifying with literary characters, experience and understand life from these figures’ points of view. For this reason, literature is said to broaden and to deepen human experience.

Since the behavior of fictional characters models that of actual human beings, fiction provides the potential for making ethical decisions and statements about human behavior in general; it allows readers to assess, evaluate, and judge whether a character’s conduct is moral and beneficial or immoral and disadvantageous to him or her and to others, including society in general. Indeed, fiction can be--or has been, at least--a means of transmitting values to present and future generations and societies, as, for example, Beowulf did and as the Bible continues to do for many.

In previous posts, we have considered the types of values that horror fiction conveys. It shows what writers consider to be wrong, or evil, and it demonstrates, through the behavior of the protagonist, how such wickedness can be resisted or overcome, indicating, in the process, that terrible and horrific experiences, including the loss of life and limb, can be endured and that the truly important things in life have nothing to do with such petty pursuits as power, fame, and fortune.

Can the assertions that literature makes--the themes of stories--be proven to be true or false, as a scientist, for example, can demonstrate the truth of the theory that some microorganisms cause disease or that the bonding of oxygen and hydrogen molecules results in the substance we call “water”? No. Are such claims without value, then?

Sigmund Freud

Until relatively recently, Sigmund Freud’s theory of human personality and behavior, psychoanalysis, was not only the predominant school of thought in this domain, but it was the domain, or, to use a different metaphor, it was the only game in town. Carl Jung’s psychology, like that of Alfred Adler’s, Erik Ericson’s, Ernest Jones’, Karen Horney’s, Jacques Lacan’s, Otto Rank’s, Erich Fromm’s, and others in the fold, were mere variations of Freud’s thought. Psychoanalysis was psychology.

Karl Popper

It was not until Karl Popper and other critics asked Freud, as it were, to set his theory’s superego, ego, and id upon the examination table, the better to see and feel, taste and touch, smell and measure them, that psychoanalysis lost its devotees. It was considered unscientific because it consisted of ideas which, by definition, cannot be measured or quantified and, therefore, cannot be empirically verified. In other words, it was a myth, not a science.

Besides the triune composition of personality that Freud posited, other of his ideas were also found to be unscientific and suspect, such as his theory of psychosexual development as being comprised of discreet stages (oral, anal, Oedipal, and genital) and his view of the existence of an “unconscious mind.” His much-vaunted “talking cure” and his attributing all behavioral disorders to unresolved sexual problems related to childhood also came under serious attack, chiefly by feminists, who regard Freudian thought and, in particular, his references to “penis envy” and to women as wannabe men, as highly sexist and offensive. Once the end-all and the be-all of psychology, psychoanalysis took on the appearance of being little more than a modern version of ancient shamanism, with its practitioners considered more witchdoctors than scientists.

How is this related to the value of literature? The themes that literature expresses are of the same type as those which psychoanalysis makes--that is, they are speculative, not scientific; they cannot be quantified or verified. They cannot be scientifically proven or disproved. If, therefore, psychoanalysis is without value, literature would also seem to be without value, for the same reasons.

Martin Heidegger

Those who believe that literature, including, for example, philosophical and religious texts, does have some kind of value have had to reevaluate the matter. Many, in doing so, adopt a position akin to that of the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argues that literature is not about the objective, measurable world of nature, but is, rather, about the inner man or woman.

In short, literary texts are about human experience, as it is understood consciously, by the person him- or herself, and, since people do not exist in a vacuum, but are products of their cultures and societies, literature also provides insights into the nature of such traditions and social groups. Moreover, literature is a means by which authors and readers may share such experiences and it is, as such, a sort of glue that helps to cement individuals and societies together and to suggest personal and social meanings for them that science, by nature, cannot suggest.

Since most other disciplines, scientific and otherwise, impinge upon literature (or literature impinges upon them), it creates a complex network of interrelated ideas which enriches the discussion of the artistic, moral, social, legal, philosophical, political, religious, and theological questions that literature often raises. Although many of these other domains are as unscientific as literature itself, they have value for the same reason that literature does: they unite human beings through shared experience. Men and women are more than natural objects among a world of other things. They are conscious. They think and feel, believe and desire, hope and strive. Science’s importance, notwithstanding, science has little to do with any of these subjective expressions and functions of the human soul.

Soren Kierkegaard

Science may tell us what is, but it cannot tell us what should be, any more than it can tell us how what is feels or how we should think or feel about reality. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that, although, in principle, through science, the universe is known, he himself is left over, as “an unscientific postscript.” The domain of philosophy, religion, and literature in general, including horror fiction, is that of the “leftover” self, and these domains are about sharing the self with the other selves of the world. As long as people believe that they themselves and others have value and that their experience matters, literature and its themes will continue to have value as well.

Besides, literature can be pretty entertaining.

The Here, the Now, and the Eternal

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Paintings and illustrations are, of course, visual modes, whereas fiction is a narrative form. A painting or an illustration may suggest a story, but fiction must tell a tale. In the process, it will suggest images, through description. However, in doing so, its purpose will be ever the same: to tell a story. Paintings and illustrations are under no such obligation; they may or may not tell a story, as their creators please. For visual artists, the picture is the point; for writers, pictures are means, not ends, and the end that they do serve is to contribute to the tale’s overall effect and theme.

In “The Premature Burial,” Edgar Allan Poe describes, from the point of view of one who has suffered the fate suggested by his story’s title, what it would feel like to be buried alive. In doing so, Poe puts his reader alongside his living corpse, as it were, heightening the horror and the terror of the protagonist’s situation. Before reading his story, one may have dimly understood the horror and the terror of such a situation, but Poe ensures that his reader shall comprehend, in full, the emotional and even the visceral significance of such a situation. The author makes the reader live, as it were, inside the coffin for much of the duration of his story.

The tale is horrific, and its great fear deepens as one returns to the tale when he or she has advanced in years and the story’s potential threat looms larger--or closer. The victim’s struggle inside the coffin seems to suggest the ordinary person’s fear that life may be ultimately without meaning or value, that eternity reduces a life lived in time to insignificance. (Art, as represented by “The Premature Burial” itself, it may be argued, transcends time and, thereby, may give value and significance to temporal human existence.)

A visual artist might depict the living corpse’s situation, as, for example, Buffy Summers’ having been buried alive is depicted in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which, having died, she is brought back to life by a spell cast by her friend, the witch named Willow Rosenberg: the viewer sees Buffy’s somewhat skeletal remains take on flesh, as it were, as her corpse reverts to life, and her eyes, having reformed, snap wide in abject terror.

It’s a disturbing scene, to be sure, but it’s over almost as soon as it begins, Buffy’s reversion to life taking but a few seconds, and, thereafter, we only hear of her sustaining lacerations and bruises to her hands (and, presumably, a few broken nails) as she clawed her way out of her premature grave. In a couple of later episodes, Buffy performs in a mechanical fashion, merely going through the motions of living, before finally confiding to the vampire Spike that Willow’s spell had snatched her out of heaven, returning her to this world, which seems, by contrast to the bliss she’d experienced, rather like hell to her. Nice touches, but they are far removed from her plight as one who has been, as it were, buried alive. Poe keeps the pressure on his reader by focusing his entire story on the trauma that his story’s victim experiences as one who has been buried alive.

A story, as Aristotle taught us, long ago, is a sequence of causally-related incidents which comprise a single, unified action theoretically divisible into a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a destination, in other words; having started somewhere, it goes somewhere, that it might, as it were, arrive somewhere. It moves (as do our eyes, from left to right, as we track the text down the page). A painting or an illustration may suggests a sort of narrative flow, but, of course, it is not going anywhere; it is, even if it does draw and move the eye, a static picture, a snapshot of life, eternally memorializing a moment rather than an experience.

The significance of the painting or the illustration is the moment which it captures in paint or ink. The significance, in fiction, is not in the momentary image, but in the relationships among a series of such images and the incidents which give rise to these images. It is as if the visual artist is saying, “Behold the moment; in it is the meaning of life,” whereas the author is proclaiming, “Behold the experience; in it, is the meaning of life.” One artist is seized by the particular moment; the other, by the relationships among a series of moments in which he or she discerns a cause-and effect or a logical sequence.

For the visual artist, meaning is fragmented and brief, here one moment, in this or that instance, and gone the next. Life is a transitory and temporal affair. For the literary artist, meaning is whole and long-lasting, if not permanent. Life is enduring and eternal. One artistic form is not necessarily better than the other, for painters and illustrators remind us that the here and the now are important, that much of life is lived in the instant, and that what happens today shall happen just this once and, therefore, should be appreciated and, where possible, enjoyed and prized, and writers remind us that it is important to understand relationships among the momentary and fleeting parade of sensations and perceptions, to interpret them together, whenever possible, and to take away from our experience an understanding that transcends the moment and can be recalled again, in some sense, independent of the moments themselves, out of which the understanding arose.

Visual art immerses us in the moment; narrative art lifts us above the present. To remain immersed forever in the present would cause one to tire of the assault of impressions upon his or her flooded senses, but to remain, as it were, on the dock, looking out to sea, would be never to bathe one’s soul in the refreshing ebb and flow of life and to be as much alive as one of the stationary planks or posts of which the pier is built.


In horror fiction, a series of seemingly unrelated incidents of a bizarre and horrific nature occur, and the protagonist seeks to understand the reason or the cause of these incidents. In other words, he or she seeks to fathom their meaning, their significance, their importance. When something--even something horrible--can be understood in such terms, it may remain horrible, but it also becomes consequential; its importance recognized, it becomes known and familiar, and it may also be understood to have some benefit, despite the pain and suffering it causes in the moment, in the here and now. An early narrative of such a theme is the story of Job, who learns, as a result of the horrific and undeserved suffering he undergoes, that “the just shall live by faith.”

But let’s have an example from the horror genre. In The Exorcist, the protagonist, Father Damien Karras, has come to doubt his faith because of the suffering that his dying mother endured before her death. Since, in Christianity, an unbeliever goes to hell after dying, the priest is in danger of losing his immortal soul. According to William Peter Blatty, the author of the novel, it is in the hope of bringing about the priest’s damnation that the demon possesses the soul of young Regan MacNeil.

In doing so, the demon sets up the occasion of the exorcism which involves Father Karras and so now has the opportunity to tempt the priest to renounce his faith by showing him the work of the devil, up close and personal, so to speak, as the demon torments the innocent girl whom it has possessed. Father Karras’ suffering now has meaning. It has importance beyond itself. It has value, for it has become the means by which, in the exercise of his own free will, he will retain or lose his faith and, thereby, his soul.

Other horror stories depict sets of circumstances or series of incidents which also find meaning and value by pointing beyond themselves, to the eternal realm of value, of reason, of faith, of beauty, and, in doing so, point the way to something like the possibility of Platonic forms or (less abstractly) the enduring value of life, or, for the religious reader, the reality of God. (“The just shall live by faith,” as both Job and Father Karras learn.) Along the way, such stories often also criticize many of the fallacies and idols, philosophical, theological, personal, cultural, and otherwise, that we hold in false esteem or false reverence.

The good life, horror fiction suggests, lies not in misery, madness, mayhem, suffering, and sin, but in the significance that such experiences may have beyond themselves, as stories, so to speak, that lead one from the temporal to the eternal. Without the hope of meaning within and beyond the moment, we would be mired only in sensual and perceptual experience; we would be lost among the phenomena of subjective experience, forever an image among images in a painting or a drawing of the here and now.

As Buffy’s Watcher, Rupert Giles, once quipped, concerning his protégé, “Buffy lives very much in the now.” Her philosophy, as Buffy herself tells Willow, is carpe diem, or seize the day--that is, live for the moment--because life is short. The series itself, however, rises above the discrete incidents of pain and suffering, of beauty and joy, that make up the protagonist’s day-to-day existence to show the series’ viewer that the meaning of life lies (as it is understood in the context of the series as a whole) in the acceptance of responsibility and the answer of the call of duty, even when doing so requires the sacrifice of oneself. Life may be short, but the consequences of one’s behavior can have lasting effects on others, including those generations which are yet to come.

Horror and Magritte’s Visual Koans

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Imagine men in suits and ties, wearing bowler hats and holding valises and umbrellas, raining from the sky as they maintain the same stationary, upright posture that they might adopt while standing at a bus stop; behind them, there is an apartment building.


Imagine the leaves of a plant turning into birds or, if you prefer, birds becoming the leaves of a plant.


Imagine a man in a suit, his head replaced by a circle of radiance.

Imagine a bird, wings spread against a stormy sky--but, where its avian shape appears, the sky is azure rather than gray and the clouds are fleecy white, not overcast.

Imagine a locomotive engine steaming through a chimney, below a mantle piece occupied by candlesticks flanking a clock, a mirror on the wall above.


Imagine a glass of water balanced perfectly upon the canopy of an open, upright umbrella suspended in midair.

Imagine Napoleon Bonaparte’s head--or death mask--colored blue, with white clouds scattered across his head, his brow, his cheek, his chin, his jaw, and his throat.

Imagine a painter at his easel, an egg his model, painting a bird with its wings stretched wide in flight.

Imagine ankles and bare feet transformed into boots, complete with veins, nails, and shoelaces.

Imagine a diner with four arms and four hands known, rather than as The Glutton, as The Sorcerer.

Imagine.

In doing so, you have stepped, as it were, into the sometimes whimsical, sometimes horrifying world of the surrealist Rene Magritte.

By his own admission, his work is intended to convey ideas, which makes his art philosophical enough to have captured the attention of Michel Foucault, who offers this explanation concerning Magritte’s art--or some of it, at least:

Magritte knits verbal signs and plastic elements together, but without referring them to a prior isotopism. He skirts the base of affirmative discourse on which resemblance calmly reposes, and he brings pure similitudes and nonaffirmative verbal statements into play within the instability of a disoriented volume and an unmapped space (Foucault, “To Paint Is Not To Affirm”).

No one, perhaps, can offer a definitive understanding of the artist, one that captures the entirety of what the surrealist intends and accomplishes, nor, certainly, will this post.

Fortunately, that’s not our intention. What we mean to do is to look at Magritte’s art as representing a sort of visual koan the answer to which, inasmuch as koans can be answered, has to do with David Hume’s critique of causality.

A koan is a riddle or a fable that is meant to inspire satori, or enlightenment (that is, insight, as through an epiphany), by demonstrating the insufficiency of reason to provide understanding. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a brief example. The Online Dictionary, Language Guide, Foreign Language and Etymology website provides a longer example:

Zen master Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A young novice began to imitate him in this way. When Gutei was told about the novice’s imitation, he sent for him and asked him if it were true. The novice admitted it was so. Gutei asked him if he understood. In reply the novice held up his index finger. Gutei promptly cut it off. The novice ran from the room, howling in pain. As he reached the threshold, Gutei called, "Boy!" When the novice turned, Gutei raised his index finger. At that instant the novice was enlightened.

Magritte said that his paintings were attempts to inspire ideas from the perception of phenomena by divorcing them from their ordinary context. In other words, he meant to make objects that we’d come to take for granted so much that they had become familiar and understood in a specific, set way and make them present and visible to us again in a new context that denied them the familiarity we’d assigned them. As a result, we could recover both the mystery of existence and the ability, once again, actually to see that at which we look, much as a young child, looking at something for the first time, actually sees it.

Magritte understood that most of us have lost the ability to observe in any true sense of the word. It was his self-assigned task to cure our blindness, to make us see again. To this end, his paintings are visual koans. They depict riddles, demanding that we try to figure out the meaning of the puzzles. His titles, which were often made up--frequently by friends, rather than by the artist himself--after the paintings themselves had been created, usually bear only a tenuous relationship, if any, to the images that Magritte painted; sometimes, the titles are intentionally and entirely ambiguous. The answers to his visual koans, the artist said, must come from within the viewer’s mind. The art itself is a mere catalyst for epiphany, somewhat as Socrates’ questions were verbal midwives through which the philosopher brought to birth, as it were, the enlightenment of his students.

How does this apply to Hume’s critique of causality?

According to Hume, the idea of cause, like the idea of effect, is a thought in the mind, not an object in the world. Therefore, causality cannot be confirmed through observation. In observing a sequence which is alleged to involve cause-and-effect relationships, all one may actually observe is the occurrence of an incident, “A,” followed by the occurrence of another incident, “B.” We see a guillotine blade sever the neck of a condemned prisoner, and we ascertain that the person dies. Whether we watch this same event once or a million times, all we will ever see is incident “A,” the falling of the guillotine blade severing the head of the condemned prisoner, followed by incident “B,” the death of the executed person. Never do we see a cause or an effect as such, because they are in the mind, if anywhere, not in the incidents themselves--the phenomena--that we observe. Delusions, dreams, hallucinations, illusions, mistaken impressions--all show that perceptions and our interpretations of them are subject to doubt. The concept of causality is also subject to doubt.

What if there are uncaused phenomena? What if the very idea itself of cause and effect is bogus? The world of science comes crashing down around us. The impossible becomes possible. Order becomes chaos. Metamorphoses become likely, if not inevitable. We can imagine men in suits and ties, wearing bowler hats and holding valises and umbrellas, raining from the sky as they maintain the same stationary, upright posture that they might adopt at a bus stop, behind them an apartment building. Wonders can materialize; miracles can appear. Existence regains the mystery it had in pre-scientific times. Science’s “dull realities” are extinguished. The Hamadryad is back in the wood, the Naiad in “her flood,” the Elfin in the “green grass,” and Poe’s “summer dream beneath the tamarind tree” is restored!

We are no longer “unscientific postscripts,” and the world lies open before us, full of potential for discovery and pregnant with discoverable meaning. We no longer know it all (or think we know it all); we are humbled, having discovered, as Socrates and Albert Einstein knew, that we know virtually nothing. The world, returned to us, returns us to both the world and to ourselves. If we are not careful, we may entertain “Intimations of Immortality.”

Of course, in reality, Hume’s critique of causality did not overturn science. If anything, it applied the brakes to a then-runaway scientism. It made scientists more cautious and caused them to forego speaking of certainties in favor of probabilities. Weather phenomena were no longer certainties, and meteorologists would say not that rain was inevitable, for example, but, rather, that there was a 98 percent chance of rain. (One was still well advised to postpone the backyard barbecue.) Hume’s critique humbled the scientists of his day and of every day. Hume showed that there is doubt at the very root of the empirical method. If this is so, others have since argued (notably, most recently, Soren Kierkegaard) that there may be other ways by which to understand reality and by which to relate oneself to the world and to the cosmos. Art is such a way, the Danish thinker insists.

Art allows us to posit possibilities, to consider alternatives to the way things are--

--which brings us to horror.

Most horror stories start with the occurrence of a series of wonderful, albeit bizarre, incidents that could easily be portrayed in the images of a Magritte painting (or those of an Hieronymus Bosch, a Salvador Dali, or an H. R. Giger, for that matter). The reader (or moviegoer) wonders what is behind these mysterious incidents, what is causing them, so, yes, the concept of cause and effect is alive and well, even in the world of horror, but it is a concept that allows Samuel Taylor Cole ridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”; it is a much more loosely woven concept of causality than that which scientists are wont to claim. It is an embracing of the possibilities of otherness, of strangeness, of weirdness, and it is this openness to both the grotesque and the appalling that allows the types of forays into the unknown--and, perhaps, the unknowable--that scare the hell out of horror fans and delight such accomplished practitioners of the art as H. P. Lovecraft, who confessed:

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best--one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or "outsideness" without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.

The next time you read a narrative poem, a short story, or a novel or see a movie devoted to horror, its premise is apt to be the same as the basis for Magritte’s art, and, especially if it happens to be a narrative by the likes of an Edgar Allan Poe, a Stephen King, or an Alfred Hitchcock, it may also suggest, as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (and Rene Magritte) does, that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”--some of them horrible, indeed.

Fictional Stories as Thought Experiments

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

According to James Robert Brown’s article in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, thought experiments are “devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things.” (This definition makes fiction itself a grand and complex thought experiment, we may argue.) Among the more famous of such experiments are “Newton’s bucket, Maxwell’s demon, Einstein’s elevator, Heisenberg’s gamma-ray microscope, and Shrodinger’s cat”:

Schrödinger's cat. . . does not show that quantum theory (as interpreted by Bohr) is internally inconsistent. Rather it shows that it is conflict with some very powerful common sense beliefs we have about macro-sized objects such as cats. The bizarreness of superpositions in the atomic world is worrisome enough, says Schrödinger, but when it implies that same bizarreness at an everyday level, it is intolerable. . . . Einstein's elevator showed that light will bend in a gravitational field; Maxwell's demon showed that entropy could be decreased. . . . Newton's bucket showed that space is a thing in its own right; Parfit's splitting persons showed that survival is a more important notion than identity when considering personhood (“Thought Experiments”).

Thought experiments are just as important to philosophy, Brown observes, as they have proven to be to science: “Much of ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind is based firmly on the results of thought experiments,” and, to illustrate his observation, he identifies several of the more important philosophical thought experiments: “Thompson's violinist, Searle's Chinese room, Putnam's twin earth, Parfit's people who split like an amoeba.” (We might add the example of the philosophical zombie, discussed in a previous post, as well.)

Describing an early thought experiment, which appears in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Brown identifies three “common features of thought experiments”: “We visualize some situation; we carry out an operation; we see what happens.”

Like special effects, thought experiments can be conducted even when actual conditions or moral considerations make an actual experiment impossible or objectionable.

Occasionally, thought experiments might help to revolutionize scientific theory as well, according to Thomas Kuhn: “a well-conceived thought experiment can bring on a crisis or at least create an anomaly in the reigning theory and so contribute to paradigm change” (Brown). For additional benefits from, and some objections that scientists and philosophers have advanced concerning the use of thought experiments, those which were conducted by the likes of Newton and Einstein notwithstanding, check out Brown’s article (liked above).

We suggest that, before science, there were also thought experiments, called fiction (or, before fiction was recognized as invented rather than of an inspired or an empirical origin), as myths, folktales, and legends. Ancient Greek (and Egyptian and Norse) myths were of special significance in establishing the ways by which storytellers and their audiences (pretty much all of any society of the time) understood, thought about, and interpreted themselves and the world around them. Such stories, from time to time, also sought to investigate the possibilities of human existence and of nature. At such times as these, the myths became what we could call narrative or dramatic thought experiments. Even today, stories, especially in the fantasy and science fiction genres, continue to pose and conduct thought experiments about all aspects of human existence and nature itself. Horror fiction also conducts such experiments on occasion (as the popularity of the mad scientist, for example, suggests).

Brown’s analysis of Lucretius’ thought experiment led him to posit three features characteristic of all thought experiments: “We visualize some situation; we carry out an operation; we see what happens.” The what-if mode of envisioning stories (an abbreviated way of saying “What might happen if”), common, once again, to fantasy and science fiction (and to alternate history stories) virtually demands such an approach, at least at times, but horror fiction and literature in other genres can do so, too. In horror fiction, we might ask, “What if a chemical compound could, when ingested, cause abnormally large growth in the animals that had consumed it?” The result of this visualization of a specific situation, carried out by the telling of the tale, might be H. G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, in which the result is shown to be an imminent war between the haves (the “Children of the Food” and the have-nots (the “Pygmies”) to determine whether growth shall win out over the non-growth of the status quo.

Unhampered by modern science’s knowledge of natural laws, Greek myths (as well as those of other ancient nations) asked what-if questions with the abandonment that can result only from the naiveté of the abysmally ignorant:

• What if a person (or maybe a demon) could assume whatever shape it chose, for as long as it chose to do so?
• What if a person were of gigantic size and had a single eye in the middle of his forehead?
• What if a creature were half-man and half-horse?What if a creature were half-woman and half-fish?
• What if a horse, having wings, could fly?
• What if men and women lived forever and could rule over various aspects of nature?
• What if one man had the strength of twenty men?
• What if women could fight as good as--no, better than--men?
• What if a woman had a baby after being raped by the devil?
• What if God mated with a mortal woman?
• What if a house were haunted by a vengeful ghost?

Horror fiction asks similar (or, indeed, on occasion, identical) questions, but with an emphasis on the horrific:

• What if a person (or maybe a demon) could assume whatever shape it chose, for as long as it chose to do so? (It)
• What if a demon could animate a corpse? (Dracula)
• What if the spirits of the dead exist in some shadowy manner and can interact with humans? (The Turn of the Screw)
• What if a scientist could cause a body constructed of parts from corpses to live again? (Frankenstein)
• What if a man could change into a wolf and back again into a man? (The Howling)
• What if a woman, raped by the devil, gave birth to a son? (Rosemary’s Baby)
• What if a child abuser, torched by his victims’ parents, returned as a vengeful bogeyman? (Nightmare on Elm Street) \
• What if an extraterrestrial female came to earth, seeking a mate? (Species)
• What if vampires came to a small town in modern America? (‘Salem’s Lot)
• What if a modern-day Cinderella with telekinetic powers had a terrible time at the ball? (Carrie)
• What if myths were based upon true incidents or creatures? (Dominion)
• What if the earth were invaded by a Martian military force (The War of the Worlds)
• What if a scientist tried to create an intelligent, hybrid human-animal species? (The Island of Dr. Moreau)
• What if a brain could survive inside a decapitated head on life-support? (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die)
• What if an extraterrestrial creature, trapped in a block of ice, were thawed out by a group of scientists operating an arctic research laboratory? (The Thing)

These and countless other what-if questions allow writers to envision a situation that is improbable or impossible in nature or because of moral concerns, carry out a thought experiment (writing or reading the resulting story), and see what happens. Different genres appeal to different concerns and respond to different issues:

• Adventure appeals to the desire to escape and to explore new worlds.
• Detective and mystery stories appeal to the desire to solve a puzzle and to see that justice is served.
• Fantasy appeals to the desire for experience wonder and awe.
• Horror appeals to the desire to survive against seemingly impossible odds and to endure great losses and suffering.
• Science fiction appeals to one’s innate curiosity about the world and the desire to discern the realities behind appearances.
• Romance appeals to the desire to meet and marry Mr. Right.
• Westerns appeal to the desire for law, order, and justice, especially for the underdog.

Each genre of fiction is apt to pose imaginary (and imaginative) situations that, peculiarly appropriate to their own purposes, allow writers and readers to “carry out an operation” and “see what happens” with regard to the genres’ own special interests and concerns. As much as the myths, legends, and folktales of yesteryear, contemporary fiction, including horror stories, remains a vast and complex series of never-ending thought experiments that can draw upon not only science and philosophy but also theology, art, and all other cultural realms and practical aspects of human existence.

Source cited

Brown, James Robert. "Thought Experiments.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2007.