Jack Morgan. The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. (pp.272)
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 Romanticism’s heyday. Through its particular narrative strategies, horror awakens thought shockingly to its intimate and inescapable connectedness to the flesh and to pain, to the kind of recognition Astrid, the narrator of Janet Fitch’s recent novel White Oleander, experiences while trying to comfort a friend in a maternity ward (p.5)
Symbols themselves are coming to be recognized as issuing from and circling back to physical embodiment—“meanings arise through body and brain” (Lakoff 495). While there are obviously other dimensions involved in horror, the present book proposes the primacy of this one, positing biomorphic imagination as critically underlying gothic fiction’s Dark Romantic project and of macabre literature in general, and to a degree and depth that goes beyond the conscious, thematic level. (p. 5-6)
Films such as The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Stand, ’Salem’s Lot, and Stigmata, for example, all imagine diabolical assertions upon the physical body of a young woman, suggesting an arch assault on the wellsprings of human life. In the film Seven (1995), the human monster’s obsession with souls stained by the seven deadly sins is enacted in grotesque torture dramas played out on his victims bodies, and significantly, his ultimate prey is a pregnant young woman. Our “psychological” fears are realized in very physical terms. What John Donne wrote in “The Ecstasy” of love might be said appropriately of horror as well: Its “mysteries in souls do grow / But yet the body is his book” (132). (p.6)
Most studies of horror do somewhere reference its bodily focus, of course; feminist criticism almost invariably remarks it, but the concern of most criticism is rarely principally that.4 The over-psychologizing of the horror mode in critical analysis may in part reflect the fallacy earlier noted in terms of which thinking is regarded as functioning “in some ghostly realm independent of the body.” (p.6) Rereading a book outside the gothic field at the same time, C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies, I was struck by Barber’s reference to the fact that those late medieval factions opposed to the Dionysian spirit of spring holidaytended to emphasize “the mortality implicit in vitality” (10). The phrase seemed to situate a critical opposition, one that brought the horror sensibility and logic into focus over against the comic (p. 6-7)
What was referenced here was the body not in an individualistic sense but as part of the larger life schema—diurnal, seasonal, agricultural, all of which, as Barber shows, were bound up in traditional premodern and early modern holiday and festival. An ancient ritual synthesis seemed to suggest itself: the conjunction, as in the couplet quoted, of Thanatos and Eros, the implications of worms and morbidity on the one hand and of women walking delightfully alive and majestic on the other. They are the farthest apart images imaginable, and at the same time they are part of an intimate continuity (p.7)
The Biology of Horror seems to me now largely a gloss or attempted elaboration upon Barber’s phrase in terms of comedy and horror, fertility and its antagonist. His book, which in many respects anticipated the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, which was not to appear in translation until 1968, led me to return to others of a complementary perspective, notably Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form (1953), which had appeared the same year as Barber’s study, as well as to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World itself. I think that horror can be productively analyzed in terms of the kind of model Langer proposes for comedy; horror indeed embodies a dark foil for comic regeneration, subverting Eros and all it implies. If the quest romance, as Northrop Frye argues, represents ritually the victory of fertility over the Waste Land, horror situates dark romance’s inversion of those terms and the privileging of various sinister elements antagonistic to the quest project; Fryenotes, for instance, giants, ogres, witches, and magicians (Anatomy 193). Horror, despite its often obscene depravity, is driven by an antierotic, and fertility-adversarial perspective. Though the Dark Romantic impulse shares the broader Romantic concern with physicality, it is with the menacing aspects of physicality. Increasing freedom in publication has in fact drawn the gothic’s aversion to the organic out to the point of such over-the-top vileness that one hesitates to quote hard-core examples—the loathsome necromancy experiments in Brian Lumley’s Necroscope, for instance. …The scatological extravagance of this surpasses even Grand Guignol reach and is, to be sure, a long way from the restrained subtlety of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, say, but one is not deploring literary decline here; Barker’s writing, in this early novel at least, is of an exemplary elegance for that matter. His work is in a line distinct, however, from that of the genteel ghost story cultivated by writers such as James and Edith Wharton; the menace in Barker’s stories does not take the form of shadows on mansion walls and eerie revenant forms crossing aristocratic lawns in the moonlight. His novel is a contemporary Melmoth the Wanderer, Dracula, or The Monk—visceral, excessive, bloody, and obscene. The macabre author’s study is, like Frankenstein’s laboratory, “a workshop of filthy creation” (32) (p.9)
The chapters in The Biology of Horror discuss different thematic elements of the horror invention rubric—malevolent locale, pestilence, lethargy, infertility, and so forth—in terms of their broad biological implications. It is important to emphasize, however, that these elements intercontextualize and reinforce one another; horror categories bleed into one another as it were. The book’s concluding chapter considers the matter of horror’s possible therapeutic function, related to the question of what accounts for the esoteric pleasure we take in reading this species of literature and viewing the analogous cinematic works. (Though the traditional usage, “pleasure” may not be the best word—Emily Dickinson notes, I think more precisely, the tendency of horror to captivate [129]. The question might better be put in terms of why horror does captivate and fascinate, why it can be so hypnotic, seductive, and intriguing). What would lead Sir Walter Scott, for instance, to praise the beneficial qualities of Mrs. Radcliffe’s—for its time—morbid work? I would mention finally that this book casts a wide speculative net and ranges around and about a good deal in space and time; it is not intended to be a narrowly focused literary critical monograph. My main justification for that is the fact that, as Lovecraft notes, some of the most significant horror work is found outside what is usually viewed as the gothic or horror literature canon, in scattered fragments set in contexts not always definable as literary gothic (Supernatural 16).
The notorious Nazi documentary film The Eternal Jew, for example, makes use of the repulsion triggers perfected in landmarks of macabre German expressionism such as F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and Fritz Lang’s 1931 M and manipulates the camera-technical horror savvy such films pioneered.7 It employs the defining gothic strategy discussed earlier— that of bypassing the rational and addressing the visceral instead—and points up the dangerous political and totalitarian possibilities of manipulated horror imagination. The film’s strategy is to go to the heart of elemental dread—the fear of contamination, the central theme of Lovecraft’s classic The Shadow over Innsmouth, for example. Images of healthy, outdoor German life—grazing lambs and so on—are juxtaposed to dreadful scenes of kosher animal slaughter by rabbis, images of cockroaches, and especially—shades of Nosferatu—of rats swarming and scavenging en masse. The Eternal Jew may even have been consciously conceived to be viewed in a mental montage with, and therebyto capitalize on, the lingering horror images the German public retained from Murnau’s film of almost twenty years earlier. That the producers of The Eternal Jew had such associational strategies in mind is suggested by their use of actual footage from M, a terribly disquieting film that, like Nosferatu, had made a deep impression on the public. The famous scene in which Peter Lori (“the Jew Peter Lori” the voice-over says) pleads grotesquely for understanding of the heinous child murders he has committed is included in The Eternal Jew. In the film, the Jew is a vampire, sucking the blood of Aryan Europe, and like the vampire of Murnau’s film, the “Jews” in the 1940 film are meant to evoke rodents and the medieval epidemic associations still vivid in the European imagination. The latter connection is in fact explicitly made in the voice-over. Like Nosferatu, the haunted “Jewish” figures are meant to suggest slippage to a lower order of life—they are drawn as stooped and skulking, sliding along the walls of sordid, sinister places, their eyes derelict and resentful. In fact, the following description of Murnau’s vampire Nosferatu by Gilberto Perez, if one didn’t know better, could be taken as descriptive of the “Jews” in the Nazi production: They are “loomingly thin” presenting a “skeletal aspect” and “monstrously suggest a cross between a human skeleton and a rat.” Their resemblance to rats “makes more pronounced [their] association with pestilence” (Perez 124). By cutting from the haggard “Jews” to teeming rats, and back, the Nazi film suggests their association in squalor—the two are equated with vile, contaminating conditions into which, it is implied, the film viewers, be they less than vigilant (read vigilantes), may slide. The insinuation in The Eternal Jew is that the Jew is like Nosferatu: “rats he carries with him.”8 The present book also references writing in nonfictional epidemic, martyrological (p.10-11)
The bricolage character of the modality itself leads to critical traveling as well. Maggie Kilgour, in The Rise of the Gothic Novel, notes that gothic fiction “feeds upon and mixes a wide range of literary sources out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself. . . . The form is itself a Frankenstein’s monster, assembled out of bits and pieces of the past” (4). The emergence of an energetic film branch of horror invention has further complicated the genre’s profile so that by now discussion of salient horror tropics occasions a knitting together of many sundry strings, often from dissimilar historical locations, which may sometimes need to be discussed in close proximity. (p. 11)
Ezra Pound’s observation that all agesare contemporaneous is perhaps especially true of horror; he added that in terms of literature, “many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries” (6). Recent movie history would seem to bear this out; thanks to the influence of film, exorcism and stigmata, for example, are arguably more a part of the American popular cultural imagination today than they were one hundred years ago, and the currently popular television “crossing over” genre, purporting to contact the dead, recapitulates Victorian theosophy. Recent movie history would seem to bear this out; thanks to the influence of film, exorcism and stigmata, for example, are arguably more a part of the American popular cultural imagination today than they were one hundred years ago, and the currently popular television “crossing over” genre, purporting to contact the dead, recapitulates Victorian theosophy.
CRITICISM ADDRESSING THE LITERATURE OF HORROR IS notoriously lacking in an established terminology. Efforts to elucidate its typological profile can become very nuanced and have tended to cause, as S. T. Joshi notes, “an irremediable confusion of terms such as horror, terror, the supernatural, fantasy, the fantastic, ghost story, Gothic fiction, and others” (2). Chris Baldick, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, having noted that his anthology attempts to set forth “a relatively pure line of shorter Gothic fiction,” adds the following reservation: “I am aware, however, that a broader definition of Gothic is possible and have at some points slackened the line to accommodate this view” (xxii). Noel Carroll writes that in terms of the theory propounded in his book, “most of Poe’s work does not fit into the genre of horror” (215n). Linda Badley calls The Silence of the Lambs a Gothic Romance (144). And so on.1 Early high Gothic literature tended toward a realist or quasi-realist expression, toward the natural supernatural. The supernatural as such was played down or, ultimately, as in Radcliffe, turned out to have been only apparently extra-natural. The uncanny was likely to work up from the grass roots; Count Dracula, for instance, a demon emergent from the central European folk-mind, is living-dead, not dead and returning from a supernatural realm. The character of Satan itself suggests a chthonic derivation and lends itself readily enough to representations such as Stephen King’s Randall Flagg, in The Stand, who is a devil if not the Devil manifested as a suave, or would-be suave, redneck. Frankenstein too is a natural phenomenon, a “creature made of clay,” as it were. 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—Daniel Blank, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter. (p.40)
Symbols themselves are coming to be recognized as issuing from and circling back to physical embodiment—“meanings arise through body and brain” (Lakoff 495). While there are obviously other dimensions involved in horror, the present book proposes the primacy of this one, positing biomorphic imagination as critically underlying gothic fiction’s Dark Romantic project and of macabre literature in general, and to a degree and depth that goes beyond the conscious, thematic level. (p. 5-6)
Films such as The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Stand, ’Salem’s Lot, and Stigmata, for example, all imagine diabolical assertions upon the physical body of a young woman, suggesting an arch assault on the wellsprings of human life. In the film Seven (1995), the human monster’s obsession with souls stained by the seven deadly sins is enacted in grotesque torture dramas played out on his victims bodies, and significantly, his ultimate prey is a pregnant young woman. Our “psychological” fears are realized in very physical terms. What John Donne wrote in “The Ecstasy” of love might be said appropriately of horror as well: Its “mysteries in souls do grow / But yet the body is his book” (132). (p.6)
Most studies of horror do somewhere reference its bodily focus, of course; feminist criticism almost invariably remarks it, but the concern of most criticism is rarely principally that.4 The over-psychologizing of the horror mode in critical analysis may in part reflect the fallacy earlier noted in terms of which thinking is regarded as functioning “in some ghostly realm independent of the body.” (p.6) Rereading a book outside the gothic field at the same time, C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies, I was struck by Barber’s reference to the fact that those late medieval factions opposed to the Dionysian spirit of spring holidaytended to emphasize “the mortality implicit in vitality” (10). The phrase seemed to situate a critical opposition, one that brought the horror sensibility and logic into focus over against the comic (p. 6-7)
What was referenced here was the body not in an individualistic sense but as part of the larger life schema—diurnal, seasonal, agricultural, all of which, as Barber shows, were bound up in traditional premodern and early modern holiday and festival. An ancient ritual synthesis seemed to suggest itself: the conjunction, as in the couplet quoted, of Thanatos and Eros, the implications of worms and morbidity on the one hand and of women walking delightfully alive and majestic on the other. They are the farthest apart images imaginable, and at the same time they are part of an intimate continuity (p.7)
The Biology of Horror seems to me now largely a gloss or attempted elaboration upon Barber’s phrase in terms of comedy and horror, fertility and its antagonist. His book, which in many respects anticipated the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, which was not to appear in translation until 1968, led me to return to others of a complementary perspective, notably Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form (1953), which had appeared the same year as Barber’s study, as well as to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World itself. I think that horror can be productively analyzed in terms of the kind of model Langer proposes for comedy; horror indeed embodies a dark foil for comic regeneration, subverting Eros and all it implies. If the quest romance, as Northrop Frye argues, represents ritually the victory of fertility over the Waste Land, horror situates dark romance’s inversion of those terms and the privileging of various sinister elements antagonistic to the quest project; Fryenotes, for instance, giants, ogres, witches, and magicians (Anatomy 193). Horror, despite its often obscene depravity, is driven by an antierotic, and fertility-adversarial perspective. Though the Dark Romantic impulse shares the broader Romantic concern with physicality, it is with the menacing aspects of physicality. Increasing freedom in publication has in fact drawn the gothic’s aversion to the organic out to the point of such over-the-top vileness that one hesitates to quote hard-core examples—the loathsome necromancy experiments in Brian Lumley’s Necroscope, for instance. …The scatological extravagance of this surpasses even Grand Guignol reach and is, to be sure, a long way from the restrained subtlety of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, say, but one is not deploring literary decline here; Barker’s writing, in this early novel at least, is of an exemplary elegance for that matter. His work is in a line distinct, however, from that of the genteel ghost story cultivated by writers such as James and Edith Wharton; the menace in Barker’s stories does not take the form of shadows on mansion walls and eerie revenant forms crossing aristocratic lawns in the moonlight. His novel is a contemporary Melmoth the Wanderer, Dracula, or The Monk—visceral, excessive, bloody, and obscene. The macabre author’s study is, like Frankenstein’s laboratory, “a workshop of filthy creation” (32) (p.9)
The chapters in The Biology of Horror discuss different thematic elements of the horror invention rubric—malevolent locale, pestilence, lethargy, infertility, and so forth—in terms of their broad biological implications. It is important to emphasize, however, that these elements intercontextualize and reinforce one another; horror categories bleed into one another as it were. The book’s concluding chapter considers the matter of horror’s possible therapeutic function, related to the question of what accounts for the esoteric pleasure we take in reading this species of literature and viewing the analogous cinematic works. (Though the traditional usage, “pleasure” may not be the best word—Emily Dickinson notes, I think more precisely, the tendency of horror to captivate [129]. The question might better be put in terms of why horror does captivate and fascinate, why it can be so hypnotic, seductive, and intriguing). What would lead Sir Walter Scott, for instance, to praise the beneficial qualities of Mrs. Radcliffe’s—for its time—morbid work? I would mention finally that this book casts a wide speculative net and ranges around and about a good deal in space and time; it is not intended to be a narrowly focused literary critical monograph. My main justification for that is the fact that, as Lovecraft notes, some of the most significant horror work is found outside what is usually viewed as the gothic or horror literature canon, in scattered fragments set in contexts not always definable as literary gothic (Supernatural 16).
The notorious Nazi documentary film The Eternal Jew, for example, makes use of the repulsion triggers perfected in landmarks of macabre German expressionism such as F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and Fritz Lang’s 1931 M and manipulates the camera-technical horror savvy such films pioneered.7 It employs the defining gothic strategy discussed earlier— that of bypassing the rational and addressing the visceral instead—and points up the dangerous political and totalitarian possibilities of manipulated horror imagination. The film’s strategy is to go to the heart of elemental dread—the fear of contamination, the central theme of Lovecraft’s classic The Shadow over Innsmouth, for example. Images of healthy, outdoor German life—grazing lambs and so on—are juxtaposed to dreadful scenes of kosher animal slaughter by rabbis, images of cockroaches, and especially—shades of Nosferatu—of rats swarming and scavenging en masse. The Eternal Jew may even have been consciously conceived to be viewed in a mental montage with, and therebyto capitalize on, the lingering horror images the German public retained from Murnau’s film of almost twenty years earlier. That the producers of The Eternal Jew had such associational strategies in mind is suggested by their use of actual footage from M, a terribly disquieting film that, like Nosferatu, had made a deep impression on the public. The famous scene in which Peter Lori (“the Jew Peter Lori” the voice-over says) pleads grotesquely for understanding of the heinous child murders he has committed is included in The Eternal Jew. In the film, the Jew is a vampire, sucking the blood of Aryan Europe, and like the vampire of Murnau’s film, the “Jews” in the 1940 film are meant to evoke rodents and the medieval epidemic associations still vivid in the European imagination. The latter connection is in fact explicitly made in the voice-over. Like Nosferatu, the haunted “Jewish” figures are meant to suggest slippage to a lower order of life—they are drawn as stooped and skulking, sliding along the walls of sordid, sinister places, their eyes derelict and resentful. In fact, the following description of Murnau’s vampire Nosferatu by Gilberto Perez, if one didn’t know better, could be taken as descriptive of the “Jews” in the Nazi production: They are “loomingly thin” presenting a “skeletal aspect” and “monstrously suggest a cross between a human skeleton and a rat.” Their resemblance to rats “makes more pronounced [their] association with pestilence” (Perez 124). By cutting from the haggard “Jews” to teeming rats, and back, the Nazi film suggests their association in squalor—the two are equated with vile, contaminating conditions into which, it is implied, the film viewers, be they less than vigilant (read vigilantes), may slide. The insinuation in The Eternal Jew is that the Jew is like Nosferatu: “rats he carries with him.”8 The present book also references writing in nonfictional epidemic, martyrological (p.10-11)
The bricolage character of the modality itself leads to critical traveling as well. Maggie Kilgour, in The Rise of the Gothic Novel, notes that gothic fiction “feeds upon and mixes a wide range of literary sources out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself. . . . The form is itself a Frankenstein’s monster, assembled out of bits and pieces of the past” (4). The emergence of an energetic film branch of horror invention has further complicated the genre’s profile so that by now discussion of salient horror tropics occasions a knitting together of many sundry strings, often from dissimilar historical locations, which may sometimes need to be discussed in close proximity. (p. 11)
Ezra Pound’s observation that all agesare contemporaneous is perhaps especially true of horror; he added that in terms of literature, “many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries” (6). Recent movie history would seem to bear this out; thanks to the influence of film, exorcism and stigmata, for example, are arguably more a part of the American popular cultural imagination today than they were one hundred years ago, and the currently popular television “crossing over” genre, purporting to contact the dead, recapitulates Victorian theosophy. Recent movie history would seem to bear this out; thanks to the influence of film, exorcism and stigmata, for example, are arguably more a part of the American popular cultural imagination today than they were one hundred years ago, and the currently popular television “crossing over” genre, purporting to contact the dead, recapitulates Victorian theosophy.
CRITICISM ADDRESSING THE LITERATURE OF HORROR IS notoriously lacking in an established terminology. Efforts to elucidate its typological profile can become very nuanced and have tended to cause, as S. T. Joshi notes, “an irremediable confusion of terms such as horror, terror, the supernatural, fantasy, the fantastic, ghost story, Gothic fiction, and others” (2). Chris Baldick, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, having noted that his anthology attempts to set forth “a relatively pure line of shorter Gothic fiction,” adds the following reservation: “I am aware, however, that a broader definition of Gothic is possible and have at some points slackened the line to accommodate this view” (xxii). Noel Carroll writes that in terms of the theory propounded in his book, “most of Poe’s work does not fit into the genre of horror” (215n). Linda Badley calls The Silence of the Lambs a Gothic Romance (144). And so on.1 Early high Gothic literature tended toward a realist or quasi-realist expression, toward the natural supernatural. The supernatural as such was played down or, ultimately, as in Radcliffe, turned out to have been only apparently extra-natural. The uncanny was likely to work up from the grass roots; Count Dracula, for instance, a demon emergent from the central European folk-mind, is living-dead, not dead and returning from a supernatural realm. The character of Satan itself suggests a chthonic derivation and lends itself readily enough to representations such as Stephen King’s Randall Flagg, in The Stand, who is a devil if not the Devil manifested as a suave, or would-be suave, redneck. Frankenstein too is a natural phenomenon, a “creature made of clay,” as it were. 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—Daniel Blank, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter. (p.40)
