There is something extremely fitting about Tales of Horror being almost impossible to find (buried). The publisher will have it for you two months down the road. Amazon doesn’t have it at all. Prices for used copies soar into the ridiculous (“cash changed hands”). The Notre Dame library lists it as existing—but only in the dark, dark void between checked-out and in-circulation, that ominous, unhelpful: “Not on shelf” (“And then Nothing”). Already a number of us in class are approaching this book as an oddly elusive text, simultaneously bold and impossible to pin down.
And that feels about right. There is too much in Laura Mullen’s Tales of Horror to even brush (“cut by a knife”) in a single blog post, too many mysteries to have a final unveiling or an exorcism, too many opportunities to slip through the solid floor—so I present you instead with a salvo of my most distinct impressions.
Dangerously Genre Savvy: Horror and Sexuality/Suspense and Titillation
True story: a majority of our most enduring classic works of horror claim to be, at their hearts, love stories. Jonathan and Mina Harker’s relationship drove the plot of Dracula. Leroux’s phantom acted out of maniacal lust. Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo was such a shocking character because he was as heartbreaking as he was repulsive. Horror and love are irrevocably linked with each other in the cultural and artistic canon, no matter how you look at it. Or it might be this: horror is not linked with love so much as it is to the gestures of love—to intimacy, to sex, to sexuality “…and so, he smiled, ‘seductive,’ or ‘frightening’” (80).
Horror is all about the body, about how it may be turned into object, broken apart, put back together and most importantly, invaded. Norman Bates stabbing Marion Crane in the shower was intimate invasion; vampires have long been regarded as sex symbol as well as monster; lycanthropy is a disease, perpetrated by a penetration of the body and growing—reproducing—under the skin. Frankenstein’s monster was so abhorrent because it not only stemmed from grave robbing (invasion of the most solemn sort) but because it was a birth outside the normal reproductive cycle, an existence minus the requisite human intimacy. The term “body horror” is virtually repetitive, as there can be no true horror without a physical, human form (“corpses piling up”).
And Mullen knows this. Mullen appropriates this, plays with this, turns this on its head so that it acts out its own cliché and then surprises us anyway. Explicitly, we are told by the Doctor that the story of the house is a “love story first of all” (15), a line which will be repeated and repeated throughout the book—both in questioning (what could possibly a love story about this?) and in reaffirmation, so that we as readers become hyper aware of all possible “love” connotations, attuned to terms of intimate contact both explicit and subtle to the point where the blade through the fog, the “mouths opening all over her body” or “his open palm began its slow crawling towards me” (66) become indicators of sexuality as overtly as “those large, soft, full, white breasts” (80), until every act or image of horror takes on a tone of Victorian romance gone wrong, lust at the forefront and revenge in the wings except that, like any good mystery, we can’t be certain who has done what or who desires whom.
And this lack of knowledge—inability to move forward, to complete—is as vital to the horror genre as it is to the erotic. The monster is most frightening before we see it, the characters are most interesting when we do not know who will live, and every blind corner is another racket on the EKG. See also: love stories are only good before the characters get together, romance novels know that foreplay and titillation are more engaging that what comes after, 97.8 or something like that percent of harlequin plots boil down to “will they or won’t they.” Except Laura Mullen’s will they/won’t they is have they or haven’t they? Are they or were they? And will the floor just open up and swallow them all for before they do?
We’ll never know. Mullen does not allow us to know. The suspense goes on indefinitely, the issue (the main course, the brains, the proof, what everyone wants to say) is skirted, the sentence never ends. These ominous rumors of.
Working within the knowledge of these clichés and elements—that is, dangerously aware of the genres in which she is working—Mullen constructs a Frankenstein’s monster out of every novel moment which made us hold our breaths, the men arming themselves to mount their final assault, the footsteps in the fog before the shape is revealed, the low top of the dress which allows glimpses but fails to satisfy, the hand creeping forward to. It’s marvelous.
TL;DR: Discuss, if you’d like:
- Horror as domination, both sexual and otherwise. In what ways does power over others function in Tales of Horror?
- Other relations between horror and sexuality: i.e., why does the sexy girl always die in slasher films? In what ways does horror as a genre reinforce morality and gender roles, and in what way does Mullen interrupt or disturb these traditions?
- In what ways is Tales of Horror a stereotypical work in the gothic style? In what ways does it manipulate and deviate from this style?
- What is the ultimate effect (for you as a reader) of the lines which cannot complete themselves, the events which cannot be expressed, the story that refuses to be told? If the suspense is truly indefinite, how can it be suspense at all?
- For fun: We all have things that scare us; what was the most unsettling element/event for you in this book?
Someone in the Back: Audience, Drama, Identity
In just a few seconds I’ll get around to copious amounts of meta language which work their way into the book, but for now, here’s a slightly different element, connected rather intimately itself to both horror and a meta-awareness of textuality. I was fascinated by the figures which appeared, disappeared, and reappeared (much like ghosts themselves) in the form of the audience/the crowd throughout the book. These figures were not an audience in the direct, broken-fourth-wall sense, as if Mullen (or her characters) were pointing at us, the readers. Instead, they existed as body, a chorus, the spectators to the experiments of a mad doctor, forcing themselves bodily into the text at impossible, private moments: “He stood in the street/ watching the lighted windows go out, one by one./ There is something, he whispered to the fog, that I think you should know./ ‘A love story!’ Someone in the back row gasped in disbelief” (18) and “With one hand I waved the crowd of closely pressed onlookers back” (89) and in the seemingly crucial moment of the “she” waking: “‘It could have happened,’ a voice chimed in (too eagerly?), ‘to anyone’” (97). At any given moment the “we” is capable of bursting into a multiplicity of people—perhaps is constantly that multitude?—distorting the proportions of the room and the fragmenting the sensations of the events until they become spectacle, intensely.
Which works itself quite nicely (read as: eerily) into two other noticeable aspects of the text: the overt use of staging and dramatic terminology, and the collapse of identity and speaker. As Kim’s notes on the first pages point out, the book is brimming with clauses, lines, and silences which seem to indicate attention to the arrangement and movement of characters across a scene/space—even going so far as to state things like “Dr. Silence came on stage again” (16), the back row, the collective referred to somewhere I can’t find now as “characters” (and flimsy ones at that). The horror story, then, takes places inside another dimension, shifting from a retelling or a written account to a living body, violence enacted (re-acted) against the “real” figures, capable then of being enacted against any audience member, barely contained. This is probably why the horror play was a staple of theatre in the past, making the audience into accomplices of victims of invasion. (And yet dramatic productions are also necessarily distancing; we perceive them as production, duplication, falsehood. They are easy to distrust in a way which writing is not—that is, even the truest play is filled with actors, fakers. So, does the existence of dramatic staging and language in the text make us complicit and increase its terrifying nature—or does Mullen use this language to highlight the sensation of spectacle, of artifice, of inability to communicate directly without the need for costuming, on-stage/back stage/off-stage?)
Although this is already getting way, way too long, I don’t feel like any blog post on Tales of Horror would be complete without some mentioning of the destabilization of speaker and character identity, which stems in part of this seeming chorus, from this crowd of voices jammed into the text at any given moment. Are the italics thoughts, or a new voice? Who has the British accent? What role does the gardener really play? Are the doctor and the professor the same people? Is the speaker female, male, both? Different from section to section? Who is the girl who will not wake up in relation to those who describe her? At one point the husband is a late husband, at another he seems alive at the table. At one point it seems as if the female speaker breaks the window, but only a few pages later, it’s the male character’s hand which is bloody. And there is also (blank) to contend with. Nothing felt certain or constant to me.
This, of course, plays directly into horror conventions as well, the destabilization of the self produced as a byproduct of invasion and producing an opening for invasion, the spaces between the surety of self filled by the cacophony from the back row, the echoing ghosts. This again seems to illustrate Mullen’s command of and ability to distort the conventions of the horror/gothic form into something that suits her purpose, erecting a stage and then refusing to clarify who will play each role.
TL;DR: Discuss, if you’d like:
- What is the role of the “back row”? How the crowd which appears and disappears function in your reading of this book?
- Does the use of staging, the attention to scene, character, interlude distance you from the text? Serve as the necessary dimension to bring the violence to bear? How does this book operate as a text which attempts to be drama—not screenplay, but actors already on the stage?
- What did you make of the shifting speakers? (Or am I the only one who thought they were shifting?) What effect does the indefinite use of pronouns have on your reading? What does changing gender of speaker (actor) say about binaries in genre?
- How does the set-up of the book, featuring Overture and Interlude, operate in terms of preparing us to read this a dramatic piece?
(A Word of Explanation): Meta language
This is the very last (full) impression, I promise. And it will be short. The use of meta-language and the existence of that level of self-reflexivity are redolent in this text. I hardly have to point them out: the prologue is labeled “belated,” we get snippets like “’Connected,’ but how?” and “But there didn’t seem to be a beginning” (19), and “I sit here and spin these stories about you (and then undo them of course)” (67), so that work begins to resonate not only as a construction/narrative/poembook about an imagined event but as a work devoted to understanding the very construction of that narrative/work. The book operates out of the gothic tradition and into the gothic tradition, dissecting like an experiment on a table the methods by which clichés have been produced, how characters become stock… even going so far as to dump what seem like slush pile queries onto the page and use book reviews to alert us about the “surprise ending” (which, at least in my eyes, never came, but which should have come if this were a tale of horror).
The meta aspects of the text demand our attention almost as effectively as the horror elements themselves do, insisting that we suspend our suspension of disbelief in order to attention to things we might otherwise have let go—the characters, she insists, are shallow, and yet I did not have that thought until she provided me with it. She intentionally undermines the setting and body built and peopled for this work in order to present us (implicate us, becoming the disembodied hand reaching out to us) readers with a tongue-in-cheek break from the horror, which, in an utterly bizarre and quite stunning way actually pushed me right back into the text by highlighting the “storyteller” dimension, by teasing out the implied and understood meanings of words to materialize (and dematerialize) them, foreignize and make them ominous, calling attention to all the standard failings of language to convey everything we swear it can convey. Lovely.
Discuss, if you’d like:
- What do you make of the inability of characters to express events in writing (particularly the Pastoral Interlude)? What role does the unread yellowing paper play in the book, and why does it ultimately have to be burned?
- How did you read the meta aspects of the book?
And, last, last, last, I promise, just to make sure I’ve covered some extra bases too, more discussion questions:
- In what ways do the “proof” and “cure” language of this book work into last week’s concept of writing as the Pharmakon? How does “proof” (either dead-orphan writing or living logos speech) operate in this text? What is the “cure” here?
- Joyelle suggested that she reads this as a novella, but I read it more like a book of poetry. How do you understand this text? Is it a novella, poetry, occupying the space in-between? Something else entirely? Can this text be read as a narrative, or does it fragment itself, branch off along the web, so many times that it insists on a different reading? If it is not narrative as a whole, what is the significance of the narrative elements?
-How does repetition function in this text? I'm thinking especially of page 54 here. Lines, phrases, images and scenes are repeated over again over throughout the work. Why? In what way do these scenes act like "sites of crises"? What does the repetition say about the ability to reach a conclusion?
- What do you make of the book’s subtitle “A flip-book”? What does that suggest about how we should be reading this? For fun: This book is listed a “Choose your own adventure” in our library. What does that suggest about how we should read it?
- What do you make of the French? Did anyone try to translate any of it? If you didn’t, how do you see it working in the text? As code? As ghost-voice?
Now I’m shutting up. For real.
tales of horror : a choose-your-own response
ReplyDelete1. I don’t like horror: movies, books, rides-at-theme-parks, etc. I sobbed my way through the disneyworld haunted house every time. I wouldn’t watch “Are You Afraid of the Dark” in broad daylight. I don’t think being scared is “fun.” I don’t like that feeling in the pit of the stomach like the floor has fallen out & never existed in the first place. I will scream like a murder victim if someone hides behind a corner to jump out at me. I have five uncles on one side of my family. the hall closet in my grandmother’s house was filled with the horror masks of their boyhoods: jason, goblin, devil, frankenstein, genereally-fucked-up-looking-indiscernible-rubber-facelike-thing, etc. I provided them with hours of entertainment.
the first scare of your life has to be a big scare for scary to signify. I went to the salem witch museum when I was three, watched wax women burned at the stake. a spectre of a room with random lighting cast upon the torture of the too-intelligent.
2. horror-as-genre, a wax figure, a straw man. something to blame for inherent dislike. a riddle; or, an excuse. a form. tales of horror is form, a phantasm. not a book, a reckoning of genre or a text of pure form. horror is an absence, a disembodied body. everything about a horror story except the story – just the scare. the hovering scare that never comes drives the text, like the screams of cute kids make electricity in pixar’s monsters inc. scare is pure; it doesn’t need a story. so tales of horror doesn’t need a narrative it is narrative because it is form. can form be a narrative? the nature of form denatured, disembodied, disengendered. characters without histories with histories that sprawl on infinitely through multidimensionality & a too-real dream.
3. narrative as dramatic drapery. how to read : “in a peignoir on a chaise lounge whilst daintily nibbling scented chocolates” (88) : places everyone ! outside of location, an obvious & necessary destabilization. who is dead & who isn’t in the theatre of pain. in the true theatre of pain the wound never manifests it’s a threat. horror is the knowledge of impending death, a constant apocalypse perched on the edge of breakfast.
the maid who knows too much can’t write love letters, a chalice of blood hanging over her head. her costume, probably, is very expensive – imported from japan, maybe, with petticoats and bows. a delicate longing to know better than to know. an ornamental heroine lessed of her hero, lessed of her station, lessed of her consciousness – just a dressed up body, just a girl shipped off to nowhere.
4. tales of horror : an infected text. an archetype of itself which is double of absence. the infinite mimic creates itself : : “…parody can serve to reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between a privileged and naturalized gender configuration and one that appears as derived, phantasmic, and mimetic – a failed copy” (judith butler, “gender trouble,” 200) : : a failed copy of a gothic horror novel, a parody of a parody. my reading of this text was haunted by northanger abbey, the only jane austen novel I have ever really enjoyed because it acknowledges its own ridiculousness. it too is genre for the sake of genre, a book that relishes its body-as-book. also, is loosed of it, freed from convention by repetition : of the conventions of genre, the “style,” the key / to [this/a] text is to seek space rather than signification, not to want a mimetic cohesion, accept the disjunction as a function of nonnarrative. not normative & not needing it, not third or distinct but a plausible multiplicity.
My general impressions of this book seem to nicely fall in line with a couple of the posted questions; mainly I enjoyed the flipping nature of this ‘flip-book, the way coherence stutteringly appear (kinda) once the book is finished and one can attempt to mentally flip through the bodily pile of segments one has just waded through, sifting as best as one can. Joyelle mentioned that she read this as a novella and I’m wondering if anyone else did? How does it / does it not correspond to the novella form? I understanding that reading, it’s hard not to think of it considering the prose(ish) form and the length. It’s been butchered though, a body properly being executed / executed by the machine that prepares it for becoming a haunting—the haunted house falling into real (not just creepy) ruin—this book felt to my like The Turn of the Screw once a vocal trance DJ got done mashing it up.
ReplyDeleteSo not just the metaphorical / nearly literal act of ‘flipping’ to see what ghostily appears from all these fractures, but the flipping of the segments themselves, the way voice and perspective and (at least to me) the tableau of whatever is forming the temporal present are all flipping and halting, losing the strings of themselves to catch up later or just be left flapping in the wind.
I mentioned Turn of the Screw and as already observed there does seem to be a very gothic quality to it, very Victorian ghost story, heavily atmospheric and tinged by sometimes comically exaggerated or cliché voices that sometimes made me think of Sherlock Holmes / Jack the Ripper in foggy London—but broken—again, the haunted gothic house but it’s in ruin, even the hauntings don’t all align, have gone to rot (again and again etc. etc.) An interesting idea as the implication is the agent of erasure is the uncaring / neutral passage of time—the fracturing isn’t the result of an artful process or careful selection. This can be enjoyably frustrating perhaps if we’re concerned at any point about tension and things being unable to be told or concluded—unlike Sherlock Holmes the carefully-laid absences (mysteries/whodunit, anyway?) aren’t waiting to be solved. There’s no solving, just experiencing, the atmospheric & aesthetic gestures; the sensory experience seems important to this book and maybe this is the ultimate ‘why’ being answered.
Amanda, enjoyed the post. You bring up many interesting points. And Carina, right there with you at scary stuff. Took me a long time to read, because I kept getting creeped out and had to walk away. It was such well crafted suspense.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if reading it via pdf ( thanks Kim) might have diminished the horror effect a bit. I liked what Ryan said about the book being body-like. It made me question whether the PDF makes the ghost even less tangible and the book adds to the physicality of the haunt? I know I'm going all "the medium is the message" but it would be interesting to read it again actually holding the physical body. It also may help make sense of the part of the book that is driving me nuts.
I wished I was leading the post just so I could obsess about only this: why, seriously, why were The Tales of Horror so oddly hinged on the French descriptions of Cher's "reconstructive" or "cosmetic" surgeries???
It just seems so random that I feel that the entire story must hinge on plastic surgeries. I'm wondering if the story is one of love that is something other or artificial that gets transplanted into a person than ultimately becomes the ghost in the house of the body. Am I going way out?
Is Cher like her book something that was "flipped." Both are still in the same form, one a human, one a book, but both altered in appearance? I very much agree with Amanda's insights about horror and the body. And if I turn this to Cher and plastic surgery there is a willfulness about this act that brings in the artificial. Is there a willfulness in love that brings ghosts? Is the body ever the same after the willfulness of love? Does the body haunt itself? Like is Cher's former face flying through walls, screaming and throwing things around?
The other strange bit of French for me was Marylyn Monroe's obituary or maybe not a formal obituary maybe just a news story of her death. How are Marilyn and Cher connected beyond the diva/star status? It made me think of death in terms of natural and unnatural beauty, and are these types of beauty as being inherent in both love and hauntings.
grt post amanda - here ares some of my thoughts - as I think it's impossible to talk about this book in anything shorter than a 20 pg paper:
ReplyDeleteI love this book! I think it’s important to note that this book is part of a trilogy – I think that’s part of the reason why this book is so difficult to pin-down. To me, trilogy also says that it’s meant to be read in conversation with the other parts – Mullen set them up as 1. A horror, 2. A murder mystery, and 3. A romance. She’s working on the romance right now… I think all of the pieces are encapsulated in the first – I could see a lot of echoes from Murmur in The Tales of Horror – Mullen is setting up the trilogy in the first book.
I thought of the book as really film-like. I felt like I was playing a game of Clue, perhaps even watching the movie (though I’ve only seen it in bits and pieces), at different points in the text I felt like I was in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Frankenstein, The Amityville Horror, The Shining, Poltergeist, and The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror: Bad Dream House & Treehouse of Horror V: The Shinning.
Bad Dream House: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCrhc9RnYck
The Shinning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yGJGTjV2WE
I don’t know how much of Tales of Horror is based around the body. There are definitely two outstanding moment in the text where she engages the body in a very specific way – modification – I kind of think of it as making the body the body an uncanny puppet/robot. She mentions Cher’s plastic surgery – all in French which I “translated” through google to get a loose idea of what she was saying. Also Kay Kent – whose obsession with Marilyn Monroe led her to get surgery to look like MM, etc. I thought that much of the narrative focused inward on the mind and its trappings rather than focusing on the body so much – though there are clues here and there where we see body parts ala Murmur: “This face / eyes shut, and a bare shoulder / the edge of the sheet slipped away from / in that dawn / light, in that light / the color of dawn” (56). This part reminded me a lot of Murmur – all the moments where we see pieces of bodies reminded me that book rather than this book – surely because I cannot separate them in my mind since I *know* they’re the first and second books in LM’s trilogy. Getting off track somewhat – but I feel like the take-over happens more inside the mind than dealing with the body. Much of the dialogue is fractured just like the memories and observations of the characters. Even the idea of spectrality and ghosts = fracture for me. They make up a fractured afterlife in which their life might seem to mimic “real” life but it is not real life. They are in states of constant flux. The house seems to possess the mind of the its inhabitants, much like The Shining or Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House – the body is just a receptacle for inhabitance – but also the vector for action – but all from the possessed mind rather than emanating from the self – if that makes sense…I think the horror is derived from silence and loss of power over one’s own mind and/or fear of that loss.
I think that there is a lot of fear of silence and what silence can do. The house takes over silently –the fog moves silently – they are often trapped by silence because they cannot recall their memories – not that they want to recall them – but they cannot even utter what has happened. Fire engulfs them silently. Death is silent. KK and MM both died silently. The ghosts are often silent – the characters seem unsure if something is or isn’t there – and throughout the text LM keep repeating/using the word silence. Fracture and dimensionality are silent as well. I felt like I was jumping time a lot in the middle of a line or paragraph – I couldn’t tell where I was or in what time period I was existing – even though LM marks time with the use of JFK, MM, KK and Cher – I still felt often felt like I was in the space of a Victorian gothic horror.
ReplyDeleteLike I said earlier – I felt like I was playing a game of Clue. I couldn’t figure out if the audience was an actual audience and this is a stage performance or if the audience was the group of people at the house that are engaged in the story-telling of the horror. There are moments – esp when we get the shorter lines – where I felt like I was observing a play being performed and other moments when I felt like the line was meant as some kind of stage direction. I think this also firmly puts the reader outside of the text – we are reading as observers of this crime – of this investigation but we are not a part of it.
Taking a little look at the book from the POV of Murmur – I think that one of the most important parts of the book is the mentioning of the mother. This comes early on – pages 12-13. I think as much as Murmur investigates LM’s relationship with her mother and her mother’s identity – Tales of Horror engages with this relationship as well but perhaps in a different way – a different kind of silence that cuts the tongue out and shuts up any sort of opening/utterance. Whereas Murmur is the actual murder.
Coleen Fava interview w/ LM on Murmur 2007: http://www.lauramullen.biz/_i_murmur__i__63629.htm
Thanks, Amanda, for posing so many interesting questions to consider (and thanks, everybody, for the great posts thus far). I too am interested in the “flipbook” nature/description (description seems appropriate if genre itself is a kind of presence, a textual crowd or crowding, perhaps?) of the work. If this is a flipbook, it is also a text “scored for old and familiar voices”; it insists on tactility as well as a cadence.
ReplyDeleteCarina makes an interesting point about the text (a work of horror) doubling (absence)—as she suggests, “the infinite mimic creates itself.” While I know that the kind of “retelling” that happens in fairy tales is not necessarily akin to the genre parody (parody) happening in this text, I do think some of Kate Bernheimer’s points in her discussion of the fairy tale genre on Friday are pertinent here. Fairy tales, she argued, are “dangerous” because they mimic themselves and infiltrate all kinds of texts/literature. If all writing is a kind of “rewriting,” the webs comprising the horror (body of) Mullen’s text continually break down/build up. Just as the characters in fairy tales (“depthless” texts) are “set off as reactors” (launched into “possibility spaces” instead of achieving “self-knowledge”), horror registers (materializes?) in “almost-invisible” shudders, murmurs, mutters (not clear articulations) across bodies, including that of the text (leaving—or constituted by—traces: “the marks at the throat”; “I’m just a bundle of nerves,” says the speaker on 52).
“Disease” is both an ill-at-ease sense permeating (or creating or spanning, as there is a certain depthlessness—to) this text/genre—as well as a process contained in the (disappearing) body. Just as “gaps in the evidence” “become themselves the evidence,” I think Ryan is right to suggest that there is no solving there; the text is cobwebby—an impression (“The delicate web of cuts scored deep into the skin gave the impression of some/ fine and unusual lace”)—the constant presence of “disturbances,” a “succession” rather than a “series” of occurrences/repetitions? (77,43, 54). Here I’m tempted to think of the work of genre as a kind of “strain”—a sensation running across/through (and taxing) a body (some kind of genetic, generic code identifiable only after death?), producing in this case, an almost-recognizable music (a not-quite chord?)—in the “flipping” of the book, an object of distance and intimacy at once.
I liked watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? Though the plot lines horrified me I think I also love being frightened because horror is destabilizing: it is a threat to you. The unintelligible, the failure to represent and give materiality to what it is that endangers your existence. “It’s no use,” says the doctor, “she may not be able to tell us what she saw,” then there’s a brief pause for dramatic/suspenseful effect, before the definite and irrecoverable, “ever!” Terror defies discourse, it cannot be named or categorized. This is why I’m congenial to the horror genre: it’s the possibility of something else, of something more than what is empirical. But I think this is why it threatens so many people and lots would rather not deal with it. You cannot observe it, so it can be anything, like poison or a live grenade. What is poison? Who invented it? I want to know: it’s so powerful. Being scared is a threat to the body’s hegemony, it signifies something more powerful than people, beyond the Person-Planet, something that cannot never be located or fit neatly into the human ideology. Poison is not human. Neither are Ghosts, witches, or dead people. Murderers, though they look like humans, are not human, because a TRUE human, a GENUINE subject, doesn’t kill or terrify humans by writing them notes that read “I know what you did last summer.” You’re supposed to be nice to them and pet them and say, “Hi, how are you today.” But I suppose that gets rather dull after awhile, being stuck in the human world, which is NOT a horror movie, because you can say what you saw, like “Look, there’s girlish boy with a highlighter.” I know what these things are, and they’re not a threat to me: you’re not SCARY, girlish boy! You’re NOT poison!
ReplyDeleteThere is space in the human world, room to breathe and stretch out your legs and lift your armpits and smell them as to make certain that you don’t offend other humans with your noxious odors. But this is not so in Horror Movie Land. THERE IS ALWAYS A KILLER ON THE LOOSE. When Sarah Michelle Gellar is in her nice upper-middle-class home (with her daddy downstairs) asleep in her bed, the killer still has access to her – he cuts her beautiful hair and diminishes her chances of wining the pageant. Is the killer immune to Obama-Boehner-George-Washington ideology? Does he not understand the value of humanity? Where are his morals and ethics? I don’t think he has any. I don’t think the killer is restrained. Maybe that’s why Genet loved them so much, because he loved things that aren’t restricted by a mundane system.
Mullen’s book is “cramped and shaky” (60). It’s unstable. The lines shift from long enjambs to (33-4) to lyrical clipped ones (39-40). We cannot depend upon her to maintain a constant line length. The line is a monster. It’s inconstant, it’s indefinable: it can look anything and be anything. There is no place that’s safe. Eventually the lines totalize the whole entire page (60-4), and there is no spot to hide, except the space between the lines. But I would not hide there. Because even though those places seem uninhabited by the girl-ghost, they’re probably applicable to her. If Mullen is not careful, then everything will “fog, fade, and blur.” The text will merge into the white space, and the white space will merge into the text. Just when you thought you had a nice hiding spot (like in the bathroom in a haunted hotel), Jack Nicholson comes in with an axe. No boundary is secure against the monster. He can go anywhere.
ReplyDeleteTrish wondered about the difference between reading on PDF and book, and since I had the ability to read the book, I think the book would be the desirable state. The black on white adds to the horror. Black is witches, nighttime; while white is ghosts. Certainly, the black and white is still there in PDF, but when you read it on computer you are removing it from its original form, and that’s being disloyal to the horror genre. Because the humans can’t control anything, they’re at the mercy of the monster or the book. Jack Nicholson cannot be transported to PDF. You could try and subdue him, like the boy’s black friend did, but it won’t work, no human can shake him for his crazed pursuit of his family, something OTHER THAN HUMAN has to doom him, because only something OTHER THAN HUMAN is on his level, which is why Jack freezes to death in the snow.
Horror comes from not being able to know/see and storytelling comes from the Witness-author; and the audiences are receptacles of the Witness, who see through the story, the eyes of witness. When kids form circle to hear a scary story, the Storyteller-author begins by indicating authentic source of the story, defining the voice. “My brother’s friend told me…”there has to be a Witness who could not tell the story oneself, like the maid in the Tale of Horror who cannot “just say it” what she saw. There are stutters, there are silences, there are (blank) in the Witness, and Story-telling elaborates/glues things together.
ReplyDeleteThe vivid detail—detail is knowledge, or the guise of knowledge, construction—is the obligatory thing for the Storyteller-author to provide, or so Workshop says; Unless the storyteller bears the responsibility of seamless construction, the storyteller will be discredited. “Let me tell you a better story”. Dethroned.
Although the Storyteller-author usually does not carry the mark/stigmata on oneself, he/she has to be possessed to tell the story, see what the protagonist sees, and what the monster sees, to build the story. Horror story is told in the darkness, it has to stand between the knowability and known. This absorptive process is constantly disrupted by shiftiness of language: “But these words he said, looking up from the page, mean nothing to me”. There are holes in the story, and that hole wakes us up from this nightmare but also makes us see/dwell in the nightmare.
ReplyDelete“I don’t buy it”; it’s strange how such language of commerce is so prevalent in workshop. Kate Bernheimer said.[paraphrased]
This is one of the concerns (perhaps performed one) in the Tales of Horror. Constant questioning whether the listener believes this, and there are impulse/demand for “shed light on” and clarity. The memory can possess clarity, the tune that one can hear can ring in the air with the definite presence. But when it could not be shared with audience, those are madness, hallucination, and somebody in the back yells, “I don’t buy it.”
Storytelling is inevitably an act of exchange, perhaps that is why such commerce language insidiously trickles in: “Unbelievable price”(when the word “believe occurs so often, this common phrase sounds eerie like a knowing voice without origin), “Real”…“estate”, a real estate agent who did not tell about the condition of the house, “his” need for “Human Agent”. the agency/agent should liberate us, but that’s what got us here, trapped.
Audience is the terror: not only they transmit terror, the presence in the story-- somebody in the back, their gasp, laughter that reverberates—are inevitably the presence of watcher, listener. The house in The Tales of Horror works in the way a haunted house should, containing unknown presence. And those are the ones that drag the readers back into the story, despite antiabsorptive moments that lays out the narrative devices, labeling certain things to be “(grocery list)” or “personal ad” or indicate the presence outside of the story being told, the recurring “breath”, the very sign of presence, makes the readers turn their head to look over their shoulders.
But Witness is not here, not Present, thus story telling is a perpetual paraphrase: In the process of story-telling horror reproduces in strange rapidity, but without accuracy (even its genetics/ formulas get lost through transmission), like the monster/woman that walks in strangely clumsy manner which only make them even more terrifying. The tombstone with the name effaced is scarier, its origin unknown. Story comes from damage, teeth mark on the neck, unknown “this” (11).
But there are attempts at closures, such as genre, personal ads, letters(but without signature, maybe the (blank) actually merged into the white space?) , and, obviously, horror story. we are dwelling in the mid-space, the opening. And this narrator who is not quite Witness-author or Storytelling-author is hesitant to tell a story “I think it is safe to say we all were. Ok , we all were”, he/she lacks the certainty. The punctuation marks, the logics of the syntax and writing disorients the world for the permanent dweller such as the storytelling voice and the presences and the readers altogether.
I found this to be somewhat similar experience with reading Bolano. I wonder what other people think.
Rad post Amanda. There is a way that the entire book functions in the suspenseful manner of a horror movie because it refuses to reveal itself, it wants to be the cheap jump scare waiting just around the corner. This is constantly enacted by the blanks that the text gives us, unfinished sentences which seem semantically to suggest something greater, to gesture to a monster constantly obscured in a dark room.
ReplyDeleteThere is also a way that the text gestures towards multiple sub genres within the designation of horror. To take up your strain Amanda about the pronouns and tracing characters out, I felt the way characters were sketched gave the impression of a ghost story. Pronouns never acted as if they need correspond to someone specific (perhaps from page to page, but is it the same ‘she’ from pg 15 to pg89?) And so the characters became ghosts, enacting a haunted house of their own creation. At the same time, the built up but ultimately undiffused suspense felt like that part of a slasher flick before the main characters have found out about the existence of any killer, so minor characters are subject to scares (the killer killing, in this case off screen) and false scares (ie a cat jumping out of a closet).
For me the most terrifying part of the book might be the story that refuses to be told, that the threat, whatever it is, is unknown. Like the ominous presence of communists and traitors in McCarthy’s 1950’s, the horror is hidden among us. It is the threat from within, but good luck parsing out the threatening part.
I really like what CJ says about the book enacting horror in its resistance to reveal itself, and I also think that the book evokes horror also in its cling to the mundane, particularly in the beginning. Popular songs and grocery lists and a house and a maid all seem to me like these things that are able to be adulterated because of their everyday-ness. A big difference, naturally, between horror in general and something like sci-fi/fantasy is that, once you bring in the outer space factor, terror tends to diffuse because we know we aren't in the middle of a landscape we could ever possibly be in.
ReplyDeleteI've been a big horror obsessive for as long as I can remember. Growing up, every weekend a horror movie was rented, sometimes a real one, sometimes a kid one, but our houses were always infected with ghosts and monsters and murderers through the VCR. So, not much tends to scare me in these regards anymore (though once in a while, a good one pops up) and even then, but one of the ones that always got me when I was a kid was 1992's Secrets in the Attic, about a dollhouse that acts as a catalyst for the haunting of a home, and, naturally, the little-girl protagonist's name was Amy, and it was all very relatable, and this is where horror comes from. When houses are involved, shelters, homes, etc., the infection of that vital human need/basic human possession, terror escalates infinitely. Page 40 does this very well--suddenly the house, the ultimately explainable, is unexplained, people start to melt, and the speaker doesn't know how to feel. The uncertainty of how to respond to one's own body.