[Following up
the weekend’s great Guest Post, for this year’s Halloween series I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of scary stories and their contexts. Hope you all have
a boo-tiful holiday!]
On the limitations and the possibilities of scary stories.
I don’t have any problem thinking
of genre fiction and scholarly conversations about literature in the same
ballpark, or even on the same base—I’m the guy who wrote one of my earliest
posts here about Ross
MacDonald’s hardboiled detective novels, and am also the guy who created an
Introduction
to Science Fiction and Fantasy class and has had an unabashedly good time
teaching it four times now (with a fifth coming up this Spring). When you get
right down to it, it can be pretty difficult to parse out what qualifies as
genre fiction and what doesn’t in any case—Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) owes a lot to
detective fiction, Twain’s Connecticut
Yankee (1889) is in many ways a Jules Verne-esque time travel sci fi novel,
and, as critic David
Reynolds has convincingly argued, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850) has a great deal in common with contemporary
potboiler works of religion, romance, and scandal. So while I’m not averse to
making judgment calls about whether a particular text is worth extended
attention (in a class, in scholarly work, etc), I try not to base those calls
on whether it’s been put in a particular generic box or not.
And yet, I’ll admit that I have a
bit of an analytical prejudice against works whose primary purpose—or one of
them at least—is to scare their audiences. I suppose it has always seemed to me
that a desire to frighten, while very much a valid and complex formal and
stylistic goal—and one brought to the height of perfection I’d say by Edgar
Allan Poe, whose every choice and detail in a story like “The Fall of the House of Usher”
(1839) contributes to its scariness, making it a perfect example of his theory of the
unity of effect—, is nonetheless a desire that requires an audience to turn
off their analytical skills, to give in entirely to primal responses that,
while not insignificant, are to my mind a bit more passive than ideal. (I’d
compare this for example to humor, which certainly does tap into primal
responses as well but which nonetheless can still ask an audience to think as
well as laugh.) This isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to Weird Tale kind of scares,
ones that connect an audience to deeply unfamiliar worlds and force them to
imagine what they might entail and affect; but the more mainstream horror,
tales of vampires and zombies and ghosts and the like, does often ask an
audience mainly to react in terror to the artist’s and text’s manipulations.
But like any reasonable person who
recognizes his or her prejudices, I’d like to challenge and eventually
undermine this perspective of mine, and a text that has very much helped me to
begin doing so in this case is Mark Danielewski’s
postmodern horror novel House
of Leaves (2000). Postmodern is a must-use adjective in any description
of Danielewski’s novel, which features, among other things, at least three
distinct narrations and narrators (one of whom does much of his narrating in
footnotes, and another who does the majority of his narrating in footnotes on those footnotes); pages with only a
single word, located in a random location; elaborate use of colored type to
signal and signify different (if vague and shifting) emphases; and a large
number of invented scholarly works, fully and accurately cited both
parenthetically and in the aforementioned footnotes (alongside some actual
works). Yet—and I know that scariness is a very subjective thing, which is
perhaps another reason why I have a hard time analyzing it, but nonetheless—the
novel is also deeply, powerfully, successfully scary. And moving, for that
matter—certainly to my mind the best horror (and Poe would qualify here for
sure) reveals and sympathizes with humanity even as it threatens and destroys
many of its human characters, and Danielewski’s novel does each of those
things, to each character at each level of story and narration, very fully and
impressively. Yet I believe that the book’s principal purpose, first and last,
is to scare its readers, and for me, at least, it has done so, not only the
first time I read it but the second and third as well (another mark of the best
horror I’d say).
So what?, you
might ask. Well, for starters, you should check out House of Leaves, and also let me know your own potent scary story suggestions below!
But for me, I suppose the ultimate lesson here is that the more I’m open to the
potential power and impressiveness of any work of literature (and art in any
medium), both emotionally and analytically, the more I can find the greatest
works, of our moment and every other one. Nothing scary about that! Next scary
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other scary stories you’d share?
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