Horror and the Tragic Sense of Life

Previously I'd been thinking about the horror genre as including stories in which one or more elements in the story have gone horribly wrong: there is something wrong with the physical world; there is something wrong with actions and behaviors; there is something wrong with the way we are perceiving and understanding things; there is something wrong with people's attitudes and sensibilities regarding life and the world.

In most types of stories we focus on the protagonist's efforts to solve the problem and restore things to their original state, but in horror the emphasis is on the damage done. If E.T. kills Eliot, E.T. is a horror story. If Cary Grant murders Audrey Hepburn, Charade is a Giallo. Horror is what happens when the hero in a Fantasy or Suspense story (or any other genre) fails to reach his goal. Horror is where the conventions are turned upside down and darkness replaces the light.

So this got me thinking about drama and tragedy and how they differ from Horror. After all in drama things often go poorly and in a tragedy the hero dies in the end. Hamlet is a story that begins with a supernatural intrusion and ends with the death of its hero. Yet the play is not considered horror, and indeed there isn't anything at all scary about it. What's the difference?

In Hamlet it's pretty easy to see that the ghost is not an intrusion but the memory that sets him on his path. More importantly over the course of the play we see Hamlet struggling with his own personal feelings and inner demons which are ultimately the source of his self-destruction (the play's obviously more complicated than that, but we'll let it slide). So perhaps in drama we see characters dealing with personal crises, and in horror the crisis is alien and impersonal? Comes from somewhere else? It's not clear.

The first thing to do is clarify what a Tragedy actually does. I turn to my old copy of A Handbook To Literature, Sixth Edition by C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon:

In drama a tragedy recounts a causally related series of events in the life of a person of significance, culminating in an unhappy CATASTROPHE, the whole treated with dignity and seriousness.

I like the way they pack this sentence with lots of provocative terms. First is the "unhappy catastrophe" which we've noted is found in both horror and tragedy. But, in tragedy, the story is treated with "dignity and seriousness." This sounds stuffy, but it appeals to me because in a previous blog I noted that the four ur-genres are non-fiction, comedy, drama, entertainment where drama is the serious player nestled between funny and fun. So tragedy is an unhappy catastrophe treated seriously, while horror (as genre fiction) is an unhappy catastrophe treated as entertainment?

Let's continue,

According to Aristotle, who gave in the Poetics a normative definition of tragedy, illustrated by Greek plays, with Sophocles's Oedipus Rex as the best example, the purpose of a tragedy is to arouse pity and fear and thus to produce in the audience a CATHARSIS of these emotions.

(We're getting to the bottom of things now! You can't go back an further than Aristotle.)

Here we reach that dangerous and poorly understood word catharsis. What is meant by the arousal of pity and fear? And how does one achieve the "proper purgation" of these emotions? Is it meditative or ecstatic? Are we called upon to pagan sacrifice by proxy? Is the tragic hero a stand-in for the fallen and resurrected god? We'd be much closer to horror if we were. But no, this is erasing the clear differences between the two because we don't experience the death of Hamlet in the way we experience the terror of a ghost story.

"Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have," says Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I will defer to Joyce and his alter ego for a better understanding of the tragic emotion:

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.

Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

I have separated the two sentences to make them easier to read and to highlight the elegance of their parallel structures. In both, Joyce emphasizes that these feelings are intended to stop us dead in our tracks so that we'll see things with utmost clarity. Second the audience is meant to stand as witnesses for we are "in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings." The terror and pity we feel is not reactionary, it is not an unfocused response, but a clear understanding that death is universal and inescapable. This fact is meant to unite us. It is meant to release us from fear and sentimentality by demonstrating that even kings and demi-gods suffer the fate of the common mortal man. With pity we empathize with the sufferer because he does not deserve his fate. With terror we experience the knowledge that we share his fate as does all humanity.

Next Stephen (Joyce) attempts to clarify his position:

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is.

As I noted above, the power of catharsis is its static nature. It does not take us from point a to point b. It forces us to stop and focus. He continues:

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing.

So now we move from drama and tragedy, to other forms of art in which instead of terror and pity we move in one of two directions, toward desire or loathing:

Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.

These are poles of attraction and repulsion. We are either drawn toward something or pushed away from it. In pornography we are enticed, in didacticism we are taught a lesson.

The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

Working backwards, we see that Stephen (Joyce) is arguing that stories in general inspire in us either desire or loathing. They represent wish fulfillment or inspire disgust. In tragedy we are elevated to a level above base reactions and achieve a sense of empathy, a connection between our selves and the whole of humanity.

But what of horror? Does it achieve this purifying state? Is its catharsis static or kinetic? Do we pity the victim or does he fill us with loathing? Do we share the terror of mortality, or do we desire images of death?

Here is Michel Houellebecq quoting H.P. Lovecraft:

I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.

From this bold and decadent perspective, humanity is loathsome and its extinction is desired. Human suffering is not meaningful because humanity has no meaning. They are a great cosmic joke, an accident, owing their existence to those alien forces and cosmic gods that "leer down from the external universes."

What we have in horror is not tragedy but an inversion of the purifying catharsis brought about by pity and terror. It is an esthetization of loathing and desire in which the mind is simultaneously drawn to what disgusts it and repelled by what inspires lust in it (attraction to violence, hostility to eroticism, for example). Horror desires the suffering of the human sufferer and loathes that which unites us in the secret cause (our common mortality).

In the end catharsis is replaced by awe, the feeling of wonder and dread that accompanies our encounters with monstrous creatures and monstrous deeds. Pity and terror bring us in touch with the experiences of others, wonder and dread are felt only for ourselves. It represents the perfectibility of selfishness, the desire to stand apart from the mass of humanity. In its kinetic form it is simultaneously self-loving and self-loathing. It represents reclusiveness and dreams, a withdrawl into a world of personal fantasy. As Hoellebecq writes, "Those who love life do not read." More specifically, those who love life, do not read horror.

This may all sound very unkind, but I am not trying to criticize horror. I am trying to describe it as accurately as possible. Not just its escapist thrills and terrifying beauty but its misogyny and pornographic brutality. Horror as a genre is a failed form of fantasy where the monsters win. As art, horror is a failed form of tragedy where catharsis does not release us from suffering but opens us up to the dread and wonder of "whatsoever is grave and constant." It does not purify, it corrupts.

That which could unite us is replaced with the knowledge that the universe is cold and indifferent, and that death is a solitary journey into nothingness. There is terror (for ourselves), but there is no pity.

Hoellebecq writes:

The paradox, however is that we prefer [Lovecraft's] universe, hideous as it is, to our own reality. In this, we are precisely the readers that Lovecraft anticipated. We read his tales with the same exact disposition as that which prompted him to write them. Satan or Nyarlathotep, either one will do, but we will not tolerate another moment of realism. And, truth be told, given his prolonged acquaintance with the disgraceful turns of our ordinary sins, the value of Satan's currency has dropped a little. Better Nyarlathotep, ice-cold, evil, and inhuman. Subb-haqqua Nyarlathotep!