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, a organic interpretation of the form and function
of horror, emphasizing its close relation to comedy. (Trans historical
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 two and a half 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 Gothic 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 18th 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 19th
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 the 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 embalment 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 dramatic need for decadent tradition and antiquarian
setting. Also antagonist to the Gothic morbidity was the Enlightenment 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 Orphan’s 1959) (See 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.
