Morgan, Jack. The Biology of horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Illinois, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2002.

Morgan, Jack. The Biology of horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Illinois, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2002.

            The author builds a biological model of the Gothic, revealing a dark inversion of comic regeneration, that is, an organic interpretation of the form and function of horror, emphasizing its close relation to comedy. (Transhistorical conception). His conclusions of the gothic reality are aligned with J. Kristeva theories, which address horror’s existential and cultural significance in an uncanny positive and therapeutic key.

·         Detachment of body and mind: “Mentality meanwhile is off on its quasi-independent career as if our physical organism were, except in the case of eating and sex perhaps, a vestigial evolutionary issuance” (p.1) the thought tends to regard itself above the biological, nature is characterized as perishable. 

·         Method and classification: “It proceeds for the most part inductively, working as much as possible from examples, and follows from my impressions that a case might be made that horror invention, loosely designated as “gothic” over the past 2 centuries or so, merits, even demands, consideration as a primary fictional form” (p.4) horror emerges from our bio-existential situation, reflecting our agonies and exigencies of physical life.

·         “ Classic  “high” literary Gothicism, with its assertive physicalness, may then be viewed as a modality within the historical Romantic project, though grotesque imagining was alive of course well before the Romantic sensibility took it up and has continued to flourish well after, horror awakens thought shockingly to its intimate and inescapable connectedness to the flesh and to pain…” (p.5).

·         Gothic strategies: “by passing the rational and addressing the visceral instead, pointing up to the dangerous political and totalitarian possibilities of manipulated horror imagination” (p.11). Horror was used as political manipulation of the masses, ex: Nosferatu – Jew – rats – pestilence. Maggie Kilgour say gothic is a bricolage of other references (Rise of the Goth Novel p.4).

Comic – Horror Double Helix

·         Aesthetics of Horror Þ Aike and Barbauld’s “On the Pleasure derived from obj. horror”.

·         There is a begrudging acceptance of horror into the standard literary canon until the late 18^th century. (Usual vehicle is melodrama, sensational elements and adjectives that may be applied to the comic).

“I think a ‘loose’ definition of the literary gothic in fact comes closer to the mark than does a ‘purist’ historical one. Horror literature has arguably itself been somewhat too codified, too identified with it high gothic expression with the result that its visceral generic nature has been obscured. An alternative view would see literary horror issuing from an informal vernacular tradition and, as earlier suggested, greatly antedating the ‘high’ gothic literary expression it would receive in the 19^th century. Marginal expressions of a horror mythos might have been traditionally anti-comic term with scholarly currency.” (p.24).

           The Italian is quoted as example of a gothic story that entails relief, rather than joyous affirmation, ending in a comic fashion.

·           Horror would then be the opposite of comedy: “Whereas the comic mode, granted sometimes its grim moments, is pervaded by images of vitality and insurgence, horror is pervaded by virtually unrelieved vision of dissipation, menace and decline.”

The Muse of Horror: Traditions of dreadful Imagining.

·           “The ability of horror to function in the physical without resort to the deus ex-machina possibilities of the supernatural is evident as well in films such as the First Deadly Sin, Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs, with their human monsters”. (p.40)

·      “The high gothic romance mode in this context represents a powerful and dramatic refinement and codification of a horror imagination boated in fleshy peril; gothic artifices embody apprehensions reflective of the treacherous adventure biological live is involved moment by moment”. Long before the novel of gothic romance the generic horror tradition was constituted by catastrophic pestilences, martyrdom, religious terrors, sadistic criminality, public torture, execution, etc.

·      Metaphor of the house/body decay: fall of the house of usher, horror fiction in the protestant tradition (Hugenot see text), shared archetype of mortality. (p.42)

·      Protestant confrontation with the pagan myths of the Roman tradition, chance to access mythic, folk, iconographic, non-textual energy of  Catholicism, however on Protestant terms. Uncanny submerged they feared would return.

MACABRE AESTHETICS

·      “The rhetoric of horror is constructed toward summoning up and underscoring a readership’s visceral sense of embalmment among these forms, of being situated in the treacherous landscape of physical life, in a dimension we are unable to comfortably rationalize.” (p.68) Literary horror seeks to put readers in touch with a morbid sense of their own physicalness.

            The gothic imagination uncovers aspects of the organic environment we find repulsive or unsettling, conjuring “the repugnance the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and muck”. [Kristeva]. The lack of clear light, water and fresh air inverts the entire system of the biologically wholesome and vital.

·      Gothic as a Bricolage: Maggie Kilgous, it “feeds upon and mixes the wide range of literary sauces out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself… the form is thus…assembled out of it and pieces of the past”. Gothic literature exploits what mythic possibilities are at hand, be they Egyptian forms, medieval Christian, folkloric or others. (Organic focus or fertility)

THE ANXIETY OF ORGANISM

Horror is the most psychological/physiological of all genres, Linda Badly, “with the possible exception of pornography”.

·       Sartre’s Nausea: (Roquetin) – “I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of flabby messes which move spontaneously” (p.24).

·      Sebastin’s garden in suddenly lost summer. (Gothic mansion/tropical garden)

ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE NIGHT: AMERICA AND THE MUSE OF HORROR

Horror mode into a new region. A migration that tends to call into question attempts to strictly historicize the gothic genre or confine its genius geography cally. American landscape was considered inhospitable to literature in general and specially so to the dark dramtic need for decadent tradition and antiquarian setting. Also antagonist to the gothic morbidity was the Enlightment reason and optimism from which the USA cultural identity largely emerged. The body is the gothics essential landscape. Maurice Levy (p.36) criticizes the lack  of old houses  and castles in  A. horror Ensaontrism.

DARK CARNIVAL: THE ESOTERIC OF CELEBRATION.

Joker is the nefarious jester figure that haunts Gotham. Horror - comic synergy. Gothic is the excessive, transgressive dynamic of carnivals “looseness”. Montessori takes advantage of the carnival season in cask. Festive horror generated by the carnality, blasphemy, scatology, from a comic discourse to a pathological. (See Black Film Orphen’s 1959) (See The Italian p. 273). Carnival is a part of the Romantic grotesque of which the gothic was an extension.

LANGUISHMENT: THE WOUNDED HERO

  The mythic restoration task cannot be accomplished; the healing venture has failed – Thanatos, the death force, not Eros reign. Body as squalor. 

SINISTER LOCI: THE PROPRIETIES OF TERROR

·      Properties remote and private – the ideal gothic setting – where one may indulge    dark practices. Patterned aristocratic dwelling above the vulgar village, out off from scrutiny, moral conventions, ordinary reach of law. A casa de Mariz is not a medieval fortress, but it retains the gothic remoteness, seclusion that lends themselves to grotesque ocurrences.

·      Unhomely: the Gothic “outside” familiar words provides no relief from an inner hauting, instead, “inner” terror flicker in structures, objects and landscape.

APOTROPAION AND THE HIDEOUS OBSCURE

Burke: to make anything veru terrible, obstcurity seems in general to be necessary … (p.54). Blur or obscured sense of danger. The Fall of the House of Usher: reader disoriented, no coordinates of time and place [Schedoni in Radcliffe’s The Italian whose intemperate intellectualism the other priests are rather awed by, though they “observed that he seldom … undisguised before him] Excess, lack of moderation, humility, obsession.

THE SOUL AT ZERO: DARK EPIPHANIES

Mortality implicit in vitality. Conciousness correlative to physical organism. Kristeva: theraupetical horror to stimulate bodies healthy energy, like arsenic in homeopathy (Kristeva, p. 208). Horror provokes rational ordered civilization, will be indispensable to the aesthetics of terror (p. 229).