SAGE, Victor. Horror
Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. Basingstroke, Macmillan, 1988.
PREFACE
There is something about horror fiction which has
always provoked readers to account for it. The extremity of the genre, the
recurrence of its symbols, and déjá vú
effect of its language seem to demand a broader explanation than other,
apparently more self-justifying, literary forms. Contemporary reviewers of the
“Gothic novels” although they differed sharply as to what interpretation to
give them, were in no doubt that they were a species of political writing. The
Marquis de Sade was perhaps the most influential of these commentators. He took
the novels of Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe as a response to the political trauma of
the French Revolution “let us agree that…”
In 1930 the French surrealist André Breton developed
this view of the Sade’s, integrating it with a Freudian perspective:
è Ruins, return of the past, subterranean passages
representing the perils of the path towards the light, storms as roar of cannon
extract of the human hecatomb the glorious restoration of life.
(A. Breton. “Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism”. IN: Surrealism. London, 1936, pp. 108-109)
A direct connection is made between the essentially
random activity of the individual subconscious and the determining pressure of
the political culture. Surrealism, thought Breton, worked in an analogous
fashion, subversively exposing the collective myths of the modern period, and
this is in part why he sees the English Gothic novelists as such an important
precedent for his own artistic programme. His remarks are important and
influential in modern views of the subject but also unnecessarily reductive his
insistence on a purely unconscious response by these writers lacks a certain
explanatory power. Why does the genre survive, for example, as a demonstrably
recurrent strain in 19th century fiction long after the French
Revolution?
And if we are to accept the unconscious factor, how
exactly do the materials of this tradition become available to the individual
writer’s imagination? The idea in itself that the unconscious is a timeless
activity, unmediated by other cultural and ideological factors, yields no
really possibility of giving a convincing, or even a detailed, account of the
interaction between this kind of writing and the cultural context in which it
may appear.
The availability of literary materials is a
notoriously difficult question, especially when one has the problem of a
species of writing that appears over a vastly extended historical period.
Breton’s reductivity is perhaps even more inhibiting
in seeing the horror genre as a “fantasy”, and it is opposed, on the analogy of
the pleasure and reality principle, to realism. Thus Breton comments on the
choice of genre, as if it too were an unconscious factor. This view is still
quite widespread. The horror novel is portrayed as the dark unconscious of the
19th century, which surfaces periodically in a struggle with an
“official”, “dominant” or “bourgeois” mode of realism.(the handiest most recent
account of this position is Rosemary Jackson. Fantasy, the literature of subversion. London, 1981).
The curious effect of this is to confine discussion to
a new kind of literary formalism which again fails to take account of real
complexity of determining factors in the culture.
The psychoanalytic dichotomy (conscious x unconscious)
has become crude a–historical metaphor for competing literary forms. This loose
adaptation of Freud defeats its own ostensible purpose it gets rid of the
nation that anxiety is common to art and life. In the act of trying to open up
discussion of the subject, we find at the outset that horror fiction is sealed
into an opposition with other literary forms. The notion of “subversive” is
robbed of its efficacy by the implication that the only major thing it subverts
is “realism”, another literary genre.
But Sade, Breton and Freud were originally right, to
this extent: that horror is not a literary genre, in the narrow sense, at all
It is a cultural response, which implies a broad series of relationships with
the whole culture in which it is produced. The narrower the conception of a
genre, the more one is moving away from the possibility of explaining it. (See
for example, F. Jameson “Magical Narratives: Romance as a genre”. IN: New Literary History, Vol 7, # 1, 1975)
è Protestant tradition, a common set of doctrines which
hold English culture together.
POSTCRIPT
Gothic writing has a greater unity and a greater
rhetorical sophistication than readers sometimes give it credit for; however,
this is not claiming that it is a form of literary self- consciousness.
We must call a political reflex into play if we are to
speak of heresy, and often the images of the monstrous, the proscribed and the
alien are precisely this - an imaginative play with heresy. Heresy in political
terms is not the same as from a merely emotional or psychological point of
view. It is a part of a way culture witnesses itself. Much of the horror
novel’s concern with “superstition” in one form or another carries the
implication of unstated orthodoxy. The typical rhetoric “feint” of the gothic
writer is to provide striking images of the unthinkable with a false discredit.
In the relative nature of credibility will come a flash of horror usually from an
earlier, sometimes from a more primitive, part of contemporary culture. The
peculiar rhetorical form of horror discredits and authorizes the unthinkable at
the same time. Values admitted by the canons of “rationality” are paraded
before the reader but it’s then discredited. The key to this form is what is
unpacks about a particular concept of rationality. (Epistemological doubts are
a hallmark of protestant faith with the assimilation of “faith” to “reason”
accomplished as a result of the attacks of Hume and the Deists). Gothic as a
cultural experience of the 19th century reader horror fiction is,
essentially, fantasy about history. It is a special form of the historical
romance, in one sense.
The narrative form in gothic is often fragmented. The
function is to concentrate the reader’s experience in particulars; discontinuity
(Calvinist attitude towards history and providential modes of thinking) horror
fiction is itself symbol of a resistance to the organic process of history, the
breaking down of experience is a method of revealing its essential unity. (?)
Hence, the frequent puzzling are close in method to empiricism, almost
satirically close. The horror in the novel turns to the nature of the empirical
concentration on random or accidental events that reveal an invisible structure
from the fragments to the whole.
