Horror: genre and politics

 

 

“We read in the Salut publique de Lyon: an English photographer, M.s Warner, had the idea of reproducing on the collodion the eye of an ox some hours after its death. Examining that assay with a microscope, he distinctly perceived on the retina the lines of the paving stones of the slaughterhouse, the last object that had affected the vision of the animal, bowing its head to receive the blow of the butcher’s knife.” – Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

Since the Revolution, terror has had a leftward aspect. The Right (for instance, Edmund Burke and Joseph De Maistre) had a strong consciousness of the sublimity of putting the royals on the chopping block, as well as dissolving the very names of the nobility. Terror and shock, in various guises and platforms, was long the effect sought by anarchist and socialist. A healthy shock to the system, for the union leader, and for the poet, an amassing of dynamite underground. The poet-anarchist Laurent Tailhade produced a famous slogan at the time of the bombings in Paris in the 1890s: “Qu'importent les victimes, si le geste est beau!». In due time, those numb to beautiful gestures like to recall, Tailhade himself lost an eye to one of the bombs.

The working class culture of anarchy seems to have died, although its memorials are lovingly preserved on many sites on the internet – see, for example, the Maitron site (https://maitron.fr/). Where once we sympathized with the terrorist, we now – we the entertained – turn to horror for our sublime.

This is usually an intro to some meditation on horror as the defining effect of various fictions. My own sense of things is that horror as a genre can’t be understood without understanding horror in fact, from urban murders to concentration camps, that span the “modern period.” Foucault’s description of the drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens, which of course happened in a public space and was meant as punishment and spectacle, could easily be fitted in an anthology of horror. Even at this time, though, there were enlightenment philosophers that were doubtful of it as punishment but, as well, as spectacle. Napoleon, famously, banished abattoirs to the extremities of Paris because he did not like the populace being dulled to the spectacle of execution – given the populace’s actions during the Revolution. Yet as the spectacle of execution was confined more and more to state enforced restricted areas, printed media was invested in the grotesque and the horrid.

A lot of the literature on horror is devoted to horror as a genre. It is a genre, but what happens when the genre wall comes down is that one misses the capillary connection between the genre and the world outside the genre. Literature – and film and song and painting – are in the street and in the newspapers and the laboratories. Horror as a genre is stylistically marked, so often, by upfronting the capillary source. Poe, for instance, used mesmerism a lot, which made perfect sense in his struggle with the transcendentalist culture of New England. In England, de Quincey’s The art of murder was not just the beginning of modern true crime, but was a way of writing horror that fed on the Newgate tradition of reported crime. Poe’s followers in France picked up on the peculiarly capillary adaptedness of horror. When, in Villiers de L’isle-Adam’s story, Claire Lenoir, the narrator, a horrid savant named Tribulet Bonhomet describes himself as a “Saturnian of the second epoque”, which, as the Pleiade editors have pointed out, is a direct lift from a manual on handreading, Les mystères de la main révélés et expliqués, by Adolph Desbarrolles, which is still in print today. When, more currently, Stranger Things looks for its jump scare, it attaches to the very real MKULTRA program of the CIA, which supposedly ended in the late 60s – but actually just changed its name. To my mind, one of the great resources of genre is this capillarity. It is why it often feels more current, more plugged in, than the mainstream literature forms. The modernist device was to embrace that capillarity – which you see in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ullyses, Mrs. Dalloway, etc. The Lyric Realist homing in on the upper middle suburban or urban household is as wary of this inlet from the outside as the upper middle class burger is of crime.