Prudence in Hell 009
Varieties of Terrific Experience
I am a terror of a writer. I wrote horror when I was younger, and my writing retains some of that particular ambiance —and humour— but terror is a different creature altogether, and one that I’m unsure can be acknowledged in its magnitude without firsthand exposure.
The two key works that would prepare me for terror —a difficult register, if ever there was one, because it is comically sensitive to timing, and can easily devolve into horror, its domesticated species, or grief, its existential counterpart, when lived— were met in my teens, and kept as a reminder that here was a limit experience I might yet be granted (and so I was). My joint initiations into the unfiltered literary sublime were Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Machen’s The Great God Pan. I have, in fact, long held the theory that Pan’s Helen Vaughn is the closest thing we have to a female Kurtz. Whereas he represents the terminus of polity and civilisation; she liquefies intimacy and domesticity. Both are structural demons: the woman born an aberration, the man made. He is extraordinarily accomplished; she is ungovernably beautiful.
There has to be an openness to terror that horror can emulate and simulate, but which —when confronted with the Thing Itself— it is impossible to mistake for its pure form. Terror is the plausibly unsurvivable aesthetic experience; it is aesthetics served raw. Horror may haunt but terror can kill, and you do not get to choose your dose or to decide what your margins for tolerance are. You will have what is served, as it’s served. Drink deep, and descend.
I have no qualms with horror —Aickman is among my favourite writers, bar none— but his manner is so subtle as to allow for strategically-placed needlings of terror, and his worldbuilding —perchance the most cautious in the English language— makes for a universe where life’s more conventional shapes still manifest as foils to the chilling detailing you’ll blink-and-you’ll-miss in his stories. Henry James, at his best and darkest, takes a similar tone in stories like The Friends of Friends, a work I favour above The Turn of the Screw —arguably the most covered horror story in any genre, an “Unchained Melody” of horror. The ending of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is of course a tragedy, but it is also a relative horror. ‘Man chooses safety over beauty’ is an aesthetic affront of the highest order; Archer’s conformity is didactic in the sense that, even as the strength of his entanglement with the exceptional woman winds down, it also narrows his prolapsed world back into a trained sphincter: “[The affair] is more real to me here than if I went up [to see her]”, he decides on his final occasion to do so: a crowning, if adequate, cowardice. Horror’s quarrel is not with reality, but with order; not with form but with surface.
The bottom line with all of these works is they are, each in their own way, comedies of terrors, where the terror is downplayed, or tempered, by excellent, situational timing that brings the world back into a known and navigable shape. The characters have a sense of what is right and proper. They continue to (at least try) to function within the bounds of what’s expected of them. They have a sense for the plausible outcomes ahead, and a scent for consequences, because horror is not a limit experience, but a confrontation with one’s limits: cognitive, emotional, imaginal. It is as far as each individual can reasonably go (and it may be further than anticipated).
There is often a social aspect —even an interpellation of the social contract—to the horror story; it is an audit of what is justifiably conventional, and a general agreement that it is good that things be as they seem. The protagonist of horror may be marked by his experience of it, but his shock is mostly a passing state; one that can be internalised and, for the most part —whether honestly or not— explained. It is one of the reasons so many of these stories start —and end— with the anecdotal. The horror story is prosocial.
A curious middle-ground, Borges’ tribute to Lovecraft, “There are More Things” —also his only English story title— is like a piano exercise scaling from horror to terror. It shows a wizardly command of intensification where, like a jazzman, he seamlessly demonstrates the range of what is possible along the horror-terror spine-spectrum. What starts as a family affair ends up being something mind-threateningly alien. Nor are we allowed a clear resolution, either. The story ends before it ends. We know the narrator is telling it, but the stop is abrupt and spacious enough for eldritch interpretations. It is also an inquest into form provided through the shape of indescribable furniture, a horridly trite way of nearing terrible conclusions.1
You may wonder why I am harping about form, or the lack thereof again, and it is on account of my distinction of the tragic as aesthetics of expulsion, and the panic as aesthetics of invasion. Horror can and often does have tragic outcomes, including scapegoating and ostracism, but terror transcends tragedy.2 As I have written before:
The tragic arises from a breach against the order of the polis and it is, at least, impertinent, a transgression of the norm. It constitutes an abnormality. The panic is inextricably linked to violations that attack identity and rootedness in form. The [panic] threat is informality.
There may be no better example of this than Helen Vaughn’s astonishing death scene in The Great God Pan. She contains multitudes, and she dissolves into them. But this is not catharsis: it’s cathexis.
Andrzej Żuławski. Still from Possession. 1981.
I wrote a comic riposte, “Domovoi”, to “There Are More Things” in my book of short stories Díptico gnóstico. In it, the intruder and the host finally meet –keeping it ambiguous whom is who—.
Terror originally emanates from a very different power principle, majesty –but that’s a matter for another essay.