THE BIOLOGY OF HORROR

Gothic Literature and FilmBy Jack Morgan

Southern Illinois University Press

Copyright © 2002 Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8093-2471-2

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………..xiIntroduction: “The Body Is His Book”………………………………………..11. Mortal Coils: The Comic-Horror Double Helix……………………………….142. The Muse of Horror: Traditions of Dreadful Imagining……………………….373. Macabre Aesthetics……………………………………………………..674. The Anxiety of Organism…………………………………………………905. Acquaintance with the Night: America and the Muse of Horror…………………1136. Dark Carnival: The Esoterics of Celebration……………………………….1327. Languishment: The Wounded Hero…………………………………………..1588. Sinister Loci: The Properties of Terror…………………………………..1799. Apotropaion and the Hideous Obscure………………………………………20010. The Soul at Zero: Dark Epiphanies……………………………………….224Notes……………………………………………………………………235Works Cited………………………………………………………………243Index……………………………………………………………………253

Chapter One

Mortal Coils: The Comic-Horror Double Helix

I am running from the breath Of the vaporing coves of death. I have seen our failure in Tibia, tarsal, skull, and shin. -John Ciardi, “Elegy for a Cave Full of Bones”

Battalions of the accursed … will march … some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering…. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns … some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows. -Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

I reason, earth is short,

The best Vitality Cannot excel decay. -Emily Dickinson

SOMETHING EDITH WHARTON DESCRIBES IN HER Autobiography suggests the uncanny currents that run from body chemistry to the literary horror sensibility and its expression. When she was nine and living in Germany with her family, Wharton contracted typhoid and lay near death for weeks. This experience, in which her body was in effect violated and overrun by an alien force, left her, she notes, “prey to an internal and unreasoning physical timidity…. It was like some dark, indefinable menace, forever dogging my steps, lurking and threatening … and at night it made sleep impossible” (italics added, Ghost Stories 301-2). The disease episode apparently brought home to her the realization from which horror invention flows, that she was a physiological creature and thus subject to physical assault and even overthrow at any time, and that this takeover would be an occult matter occurring on a level other than that of her quotidian concerns and awareness; she could be blindsided at any moment. Wharton’s body would frequently remember and revisit its experience of biological peril, the fear, “internal and unreasoning.” She notes that the sense of menace was most severe when she was returning home from walks with her father or governess and had to pause liminally at the entrance of the house and wait for the door to be opened: “I could feel it behind me, upon me; and if there was any delay in opening the door I was seized by a choking agony of terror” (301-3). This suggests the workings of biomorphic imagination, and the translation process whereby the experience of traumatic physical jeopardy may achieve later symbolic form.

While tragedy has traditionally been regarded as preoccupied with fate, horror, it might be argued, is driven by the recognition Camille Paglia articulates, that “biology is … Fate” (italics added, Personae 104). She writes of Melville’s weird tale “The Tartarus of Maids” that it is “grotesque with biomorphic allegories” (590). Any extensive review of The X-Files television episodes will confirm that a similarly physiological disposition shapes its plots, the emphasis frequently being on postmortem work, for example, a field in which Scully has expertise, having done a post-M.D. residency in forensic pathology. The introduction to the Frankenstein 1818 edition noted that Mary Shelley had not merely woven “a series of supernatural terrors” but that the kind of event at the heart of the novel had been judged credible by “some of the physiological writers of Germany” (italics added, 5). But it would be surprising of course if such an elemental reality as our biological peril were not prominently represented in art and ritual. The central myth of Christianity involves Christ’s choice to participate in the adventure of incarnation and the dark earthly consequences that unfolded from that choice, culminating in a drama of bodily torture and blood atonement unique in the literature of religions. Our own faces lightly veil the classic memento mori, the skull. John Donne recognizes this in the Devotions, noting the redundant nature of medieval religious articles such as skulls set in rings as reminders of mortality: “Need I look upon a death’s head in a ring,” he asks, “that have one in my face?” Tracing the continuity of biomorphic imagination in literature, this line of Donne’s is used by Thomas Harris as an epigraph to his extraordinarily macabre novel The Silence of the Lambs (1988).

The gruesome implications of human mortality are of course much more disturbing than the neat term death implies. It is characteristic of horror fiction that in it mortality is played out graphically. It is one thing to concede in the abstract that “we all owe God a death”; it is quite another to address “the bitter hug of mortality,” to entertain, as horror literature and film do, scenarios in which Death’s servants-Wasting, Sickness, Pain, and Decay-carry out his projects. Such literature privileges tropes going to the physical repulsion and pain associated with dying. Indeed pain as such may involve as primal a repression and fear as any, including the Freudian castration one-no wonder that only veryrecentlyhasthecontemporarymedicalcareestablishmentbeguntoaddress what would seem to have been forever the most obvious of urgencies, pain management. And the ancient idioms of pain connect us with the remote biological past. In pain, as Emily Dickinson notes, “Ages coil within / The minute circumference / Of a single brain” (452). We ordinarily avoid this and other loathsome implications of mortality by any number of sublimating strategies, including word choice. Dickinson muses regarding the word death:

It don’t sound so terrible-quite-as it did-I run it over-“Dead”, Brain, “Dead.” Put it in Latin-left of my school-Seems it don’t shriek so-under rule.

(203)

Macabre literature works in reverse of the strategy Dickinson considers ironically here, however, foregrounding the very grim realities that do shriek. Organic apprehension is a privileged theme in fairy tales and children’s rhyme as well. “Humpty Dumpty” recites a narrative of the body’s fall and irredeemable fragmentation; “Ring Around the Rosy” recites the relentless course of bubonic plague concluding in bodily collapse. “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Hansel and Gretel” evoke Hannibal Lecterish nightmares of being eaten. The literature of terror insinuates itself physically-its implications get under one’s skin, in parallel with the fate of its characters who are biologically assailed. Ellen Moers notes that in general, “the earliest tributes to the Gothic writers tended to emphasize the physiological” (214). And Victor Frankenstein’s own presumptuous aspirations, as pointed out earlier, are biocentric; his investigations are not in the realm of physics or astronomy but narrow to an obsession with biochemistry and physiology, notably with the study of bodily deterioration. His proto-cloning adventures steer him along the gothic mortuary track: “Now was I led to study the cause and progress of … decay, and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses” (30).

Despite the designation morbid tale, rarely is a fine point put on the sick preoccupation of horror literature in the way Noel Carroll does in his Philosophy of Horror, for example, noting that the genre’s monsters are “impure and unclean. They are putrid or moldering things, or they hail from oozing places, or they are made of dead or rotting flesh … or are associated with vermin, disease” (23). Those associations arguably apply not only to monsters from Grendel to Godzilla but to the horror genre’s whole inspiration. The cloying associations of the Black Lagoon are finally the disturbing thing, not the after all rather pathetic creature that serves to figure forth the slimy atmosphere of the stagnant organic recesses that have bred him. Focus upon the vile and abhorrent things of gothic imagination raises the familiar question of why people are attracted to such subject matter at all and, as I mentioned in the introduction, what it is they get from it. In actuality, it is inconceivable that organic affliction, the body’s loss of its physical integrity, could be of anything other than clinical interest. A focus upon sickness for other than medical purposes is considered aberrant in ordinary life; it is essentially and understandably taboo. The distinction between disease and decay on the one hand and their employment in art is all important to the question of horror’s function and appeal. It must of course be recognized regarding repulsive subject matter that it is not repulsive things as such that literature and film address but those things symbolically realized. No sane person, that is, is drawn to real world instances of rot, corruption, and putrefaction. We can probe our aversions and their implications, however, through the mediation of art, through what Kenneth Burke calls “symbolic enactment,” wherein our fears and repulsions are materialized in a virtual form (20). The death of Christ enacted in the Catholic mass is not literal carnage; it is a framed ritual pageant for the purpose of contemplation and meditation.

A ritual hunt-dance, similarly, is not to be confused with the hunt in fact-the ritual is art and has its own energy, function, and potency. The danse macabre is thought to have developed as street performance reflecting medieval plagues, but as art, it becomes a thing in itself, a mainstay of later weird literary conjuring long after the literal contagion that begot it has passed. The dance has served lately, for example, as the title of Stephen King’s valuable treatise on horror literature Danse Macabre (1983). Literary and filmic horror is not horror itself; as Ernst Cassirer emphasizes, “the image of a passion is not the passion itself…. At a Shakespeare play we are not infected with the ambition of Macbeth, with the cruelty of Richard III, or with the jealousy of Othello” (Essay 147). Viewers of The Blair Witch Project participate in a ritual summoning of terror-they are “aware” that the film’s horrors are virtual just as they are aware that this “documentary” is actually not one at all. That [awareness] is bracketed, however, so that the illusion may work its way. When Wendy, in The Shining, looking out on the breathtaking vista at the turnoff just short of the Overlook Hotel, literally loses her breath in reaction to the awesome beauty of the Rockies, the reader does not lose his or her breath (King 75). Nor does horror literature in truth provoke adrenalin production in the body or fight-flight reaction. If there are even traces of those things involved in reading Dracula, for instance, it is in an aesthetic version distinct from the emotions that would attach to real life horror-the reader’s or film viewer’s reactions are more in the nature of emotion about emotion. When Frederick Shroyer refers to the “peculiar nervous pleasure” horror fiction affords (ix), he is referring to an emotion aroused by a literature of a certain kind. The concern with horror throughout the present book represents an aesthetic interrogation therefore, one addressed to the experience of the virtual morbid-a form of essential play or performance in literary space and time.

Horror texts, literary or cinematic, address organic states of siege, whether the organic unit under siege is the cell, the house, the city, or some other expression of the human biological matrix. Given the modality’s essentially somatic coding, it is not surprising that the medically grounded best-sellers of Robin Cook, for instance, whatever their literary shortcomings, provide one of the popular contemporary versions of horror invention and are part of a medical pathology subgenre that may well become a major gothic branch in time as it becomes evident that the viral and bacterial menace medical science thought it had virtually banished has in fact turned and counterattacked, auguring neomedieval plague scenarios, pandemics, exotic contagions, and draconian quarantines. Not only the formidable danger posed by these elements through their own agency threatens these days, but human agency has been added-conscious plague agents may enter cities carrying God-knows-what horrors in aerosol form. Given bio-terrorism, the image of National Guard troops medievally digging long burial trenches on the outskirts of American cities unfortunately seems not quite the far-fetched thing it would have forty years ago.

Medical research may be sliding into the pattern of the transgressive quest prefigured in horror works such as Frankenstein and Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” as efforts to conquer a given medical scourge trigger more virulent iatrogenic versions of that scourge or a near neighbor to it and as we lose track of our poisons. The gothic nightmare of scientific overreach endures, current optimism regarding genome research notwithstanding. Films such as Mimic, The Stand, and Outbreak are part of a growing genre of contagion horror. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the World Health Organization in Geneva may become mainstays of contemporary macabre literature in the way earlier horror fiction had its ghostly, superannuated mansion on a forsaken hill. Werewolf and vampire narratives are of course themselves versions of contagion horror. David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977) typifies the way in which the macabre possibilities of the contagion theme may be played out in a contemporary setting as rabies carriers, suddenly seized, leap on and bite Montreal pedestrians, subway riders, mall shoppers, and so on.

Current genetic mapping meanwhile re-enables the “horror of heredity” theme, which, in a nurture-oriented psychology was, until recently, beginning to be regarded as folkloric. It is becoming increasingly possible to discover, not unlike the narrator of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the cryptic and possibly dreadful fate implicit in one’s chromosomes. Jurassic Park, The X-Files, Millennium, and so on, tap fears of errant cloning experiments, and disastrous genetic tampering shapes plots like that of Cook’s novel Mortal Fear (1989). Richard Preston’s nonfiction The Hot Zone (1994) is a chilling profile of Ebola, the viral monster that, Preston notes, “flashed its colors, fed, and subsided into the forest. It will be back” (411). Anorexia nervosa, at the same time, represents a contemporary malady of likewise gothic-biological implications: one’s daughter, seemingly possessed, turns daily, inexplicably, more skeletal and cadaverous, as if she were being courted nightly by a vampire. And psychology becomes evermore neuropsychology, a matter of biochemistry, neurotransmitters, and so forth, rather than one of autobiographical analysis. Elaine Scarry, remarking the way in which Renaissance medical texts narrate the track of sickness through various body parts until the whole is devastated, notes:

Dangerous diseases in the twentieth century also elicit from us a ritual recitation of body parts … cancer of the bone, cancer of the lungs, cancer of the throat, of the mouth, of the prostate, of the pancreas. … AIDS has reoccasioned this same reanatomization of the body: over the course of several years, our collective attention has moved relentlessly from body part to body part-genitals, anus, blood, veins, lungs, saliva … even tears. (102-3 n22)

Such a focus touches upon the vital sources of the horror mode, its prevalent organicism. It is deeply, and it would seem transhistorically, significant that we are perishable, that disease may come and rains and harvests may not, that slaughtering enemies raid, that community coherence wanes and formerly settled, assured populations may become wanderers in desolation. All expressions of vitality have their opposing possibilities to provoke dreadful imaginings. Lazarus, raised from the dead, merely resumed his journey deathward. The passage of time has not altered the fact of our contingent corporeality, our organic realization and its prescribed extinction. Ultimately, “all fall down.”

(Continues…)

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