Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts

Sunday, July 5, 2020

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal by William Wordsworth: Analysis and Commentary


Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman


A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Commentary

 


 In the first stanza, we learn that the speaker was, as it were, asleep to the reality of human mortality. Like a youth who is unaware of death or discounts it, he “had no human fears.” His beloved seemed to be immortal. For many young people, death is not much of a concern. Invulnerable and immortal, many young people believe that death happens only to other people-and, usually, to older other people. Apparently, the speaker of the poem shares these same illusions. For him, as he tells us, his Lucy “seemed a thing that could not feel/ The touch of earthly years.”


When his immature attitude toward death and his unrealistic notions about the immortality of his beloved are shattered by her untimely demise, the speaker is clearly appalled by the inescapable fact that his beloved Lucy, once a vibrant and lovely young woman, has been reduced to a mere object. Horribly, she has become a mere thing among things, motionless, lifeless, deaf, and blind, like all the other inanimate objects that are “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course”:

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.


For anyone, the death of a loved one is terrible. It is perhaps more horrible still for a young man who has believed that death happens only to others and could never touch his beautiful young Lucy. The comparison, in the second stanza of the poem, of the inanimate Lucy to “rocks, and stones, and trees” reinforces the speaker’s sense of shock and horror, echoing the numbing grief that he obviously feels. In having been so rudely awakened, as it were, from the “slumber” that once “sealed” his spirit, he has suffered the death of an illusion. He may be wiser, but he is also sadder. The final lines of the poem suggest, perhaps, the numbness that he now feels-a numbness that is akin to the insensate condition of the deceased Lucy. He, too, has become something of an insensate thing, akin to “rocks, and stones, and trees.”

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth: Analysis and Commentary

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth


She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

Commentary


This is one of several short poems that William Wordsworth wrote concerning the death of a beautiful young woman named Lucy. Like its companions, this deceptively simple piece is a meditation on death and how it affects the loved one’s survivor.


The Lucy of this poem is not famous. She was not celebrated. In fact, she lived an isolated and obscure life “among the untrodden ways.” As the speaker of the poem informs us, there was no one to sing her praises, and only a few loved her during her life. She was, if we were to use a harsher term than the poem employs, a nobody.


If the first stanza of the poem tells us that Lucy lived an obscure, lonely, and isolated existence virtually unknown and uncelebrated, the second stanza tells us that the speaker of the poem, nevertheless, found her to be a rare beauty. He compares her to “a violet by a mossy stone/ Half-hidden from the eye” and then emphasizes that beauty further by pointing to its rarity. As a flower, she was “half-hidden from the eye.” As a heavenly body, so to speak, she was “Fair as a star/ When only one is shining in the sky.” 

Imagine the sky at night, pitch black, even though there are no clouds, with only one star shining in that inky darkness. The eye would be drawn to it instantly, and its solitary brightness would seem all the brighter by virtue of it’s being alone. The implication is that the lonely Lucy had seemed all the more beautiful to her lover because she lived alone, “among the untrodden ways.”


In the poem’s final stanza, the speaker points out that isolated Lucy lived a life that was so seemingly insignificant that only a handful of people even knew that she had died: “She lived unknown, and few could know/ When Lucy ceased to be.” However, for the speaker, the death of his beautiful, beloved Lucy has made a world of difference: “But she is in her grave, and, oh,/ The difference to me!”


Most of us, beautiful or not, do not achieve great fame. Most of us are not praised or celebrated. Nevertheless, a simple, unassuming girl can mean more than anyone, including herself, can imagine, especially when she is no longer one who dwells “among untrodden ways”—or anywhere else. To gain an appreciation of the power of this poem, all one needs to do is imagine that its Lucy is one’s own girlfriend. She may not be a movie star, but her death would hurt far more than that of any sultry siren of the silver screen who, despite her fame and celebrity, was unknown and unloved.

Friday, November 9, 2018

The Covers of Gothic Romance Pulp Fiction Novels: Advertising a Genre

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


The covers of Gothic romance pulp fiction novels tip us off to the nature of the genre's fiction. Often monochromatic, perhaps to set the mood, which can be described as “brooding,” the paintings that grace the covers of such fare tend to feature a woman alone, either framed by the window of an isolated mansion, or fleeing from an unseen threat, often through rugged terrain, frequently with a manor house or castle in the background and a threatening sky above.


Whether indoors or out, the mood of menace is heightened by eerie statues, such as gargoyles or satyrs, strange obelisks, cemetery headstones, stunted or malformed trees, black cats and bats, and skies that look somehow as jagged as a predatory animal's teeth.

Sometimes milady, who's usually in her twenties, stands upon the precipice of a cliff, with the sea below. She might flee headlong down a rocky, snow-covered slope.


Occasionally, her flight takes her through an isolated cemetery. A full moon might hang in a cloudy sky.


Open land and sparse vegetation may expose her flight. The sea, a forest, a cliff, or otherwise impassible terrain features impede or prevent her rescue or escape.


As often as not, the damsel in distress is barefoot, suggesting she took to her heels in a hurry. Full, heavy dresses are likely to encumber her, forcing her to hike her skirts. Almost invariably, she looks over her shoulder, as if in search of a stalker. Fog or Spanish moss hanging from the boughs of a remote estate may lend an air of mystery and menace. One wonders what terror launched her sudden flight.


On the relatively rare occasions that the distressed damsel is shown indoors, she is usually confined by a window frame, a dimly lit staircase, or a shadowy hallway, which she negotiates carefully, perhaps with a flickering candle in hand, looking, all the while, for some lurking menace.


Her adversary is seldom shown, and, when the pursuer or pursuers are included in the painting, they are at a distance, indistinct: a lone figure, small in the distance, silhouetted in a the arched entrance to a castle above and behind the heroine or a small band of nameless, faceless pursuers.


Several covers mention “love” of a problematic or dangerous sort: “The lure of love led her through a jungle of horror to a house of blood” (Candace Arkham's Ancient Evil); “She came to Ravensnest to save a life—and found her own threatened as she sought love in a house shadowed by death” (Caroline Farr's Mansion of Evil); “At Whitehall Mansion, Susan's fairy tale romance became a honeymoon of horror” (Elisabeth Offutt Allen's The Hounds of the Moon).


Occasionally, a cover offers a bit of text to characterize the heroine, suggest her plight, and hint at the story's plot: “Innocent and alone, she found herself fighting the forces of Middle Age witchcraft,” reads a blurb on the front cover of Wilma Winthrop's Tryst with Terror. Paulette Warren's Some Beckoning Wraith asks, “Could love and common sense overcome the vengeful spirit that haunted Malvern Manor?” In Lady in Darkness, Evelyn Bond spins a tale in which her heroine's “memory gone, Ellen” cannot tell whether “Whit was her husband—or her jailer.”


Perhaps readers needed to know at least this much about the books they considered buying, but, for me (and perhaps for you), the artwork, which tends to be almost without exception more than simply sufficient and is often splendid, is far more mysterious and intriguing than the bald summaries such text sets forth and needs no explanation or elaboration. In any case, the covers invariably indicate and, indeed, highlight the conventional elements of the Gothic romance genre.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Images of Horror as Not-So-Friendly Reminders


copyright 2014 by Gary Pullman

Bodies severed at their waists. Eyes without irises or pupils. Furry faces full of fangs. Cheeks stitched from the corners of the mouth to the ears. Mouths devoid of lips. Decapitated bodies. Skulls showing through flesh. Bloody necks slashed and slashed. Faces streaming blood. Crowns of skulls cut away. Craniums transformed into slug-like monstrosities. Faces without noses. Eyes become fanged mouths. Flesh pockmarked and riddled with open sores.

The results of special effects, these images of violence horrify because they display death, dismemberment, injury, monstrous transformation, and disease. They are graphic reminders of our humanity—and, thus, our vulnerability—as much as they are mementos mori.

These pictures remind us of the facts: we are not only going to die someday, but we are, in fact, dying day by day.

Life itself reminds us of our mortality, but in much more subtle ways, ways that seem too small to disturb us more than a moment, if at all.

Our skin wrinkles and sags.

Our hair grays, recedes, or thins.

We put on a little weight.

Our joints ache and stiffen.

Our ears and noses sprout hair.

Our ears get bigger.

Age spots appear on our faces and hands.

Our bones become brittle.

Vision or hearing erode.

We become forgetful.

We wear dentures where, once, we had teeth.

We fall and we cannot get up.

But these signs of aging (and of eventual death) occur gradually, giving us time to adjust and to accept the inevitable. We say that we are getting older, not that we are dying.

And, yet, we are dying, day by day, a wrinkle here, an age spot there.

But we become accustomed to our fate.

Images of horror—of death and destruction, injury and pain, madness and loss of control—don't allow us such a luxury. Such depictions shock and frighten.

They get the blood running and the adrenaline flowing, preparing us to fight or to take flight.

In reminding us of death, they also remind us of life.

Such images remind us to stop, to think, to listen, and to smell the roses. . .

. . . while we can.

Before it's too late.

And the bogeyman hiding within emerges, born of blood and flesh, pain and bone, reducing us, at last, to food for worms.




Thursday, March 31, 2011

Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman


I once read somewhere that, although there are many ways to inflict death, there is, ultimately, only one cause of death--cessation of oxygen to the brain.

Something is similar with regard to the ultimate object of fear. Many persons, places, and things instill fear, but they all do it the same way--by threatening us with loss. The loss with which we're threatened is related to a significant possession, to something that we value highly: life, limb, mind, health, a loved one, and life itself are some possibilities.

It's been argued that we fear the unknown. I think that, yes, we do fear the unknown, but only because it may be associated with a possible threat to us or to something or someone else we value.

What is death? Simply annihilation? Or, as Hamlet suggests, is death but a prelude to something much worse, to possible damnation and an eternity of pain and suffering in which we're cut off from both God and humanity? That's loss, too--loss of companionship, friendship, communion, fellowship, and love. Against such huge losses, annihilation looks pretty cozy.

Horror fiction--the fiction of fear--wouldn't have much to offer us, though, if all it did was make us afraid of death and/or hell. It does do more, though, quite a bit more, as it turns out, which is why it's important in its own way.

First, if Stephen King (by way of Aristotle) is right, horror fiction provides a means both of exercising and of exorcising our inner demons. It allows us to become the monster for a time in order to rid ourselves of the nasty feelings and impulses we occasionally entertain. Horror fiction is cathartic. It allows us to vent the very feelings that, otherwise, bottled up inside, might make us become the monster permanently and drive us, as such, to murder and mayhem.

Horror fiction provides us with a way of exercising and of exorcising our inner demons, but it also reminds us that life is short, and it suggests to us that we should be grateful to be alive, that we should appreciate what we have, and that we should take nothing for granted--not life, limb, mind, health, loved ones, or anything else. Horror fiction is a literary memento mori, or reminder of death. In the shadow of death, we appreciate and enjoy the fullness of life.

No one ever wrote a horror story about a man who stubbed his toe or a woman who broke a nail. Horror fiction's themes are bigger; they're more important. They're as vast and profound as the most critically important and most highly valued of all things. Horror fiction, by threatening us with the loss of that which is really important, shows us what truly matters. As such, it's a guide, implicitly, to the good life.

Horror fiction also shows us, sometimes, at least, that no matter how bad things are, we can survive our losses. We can regroup, individually or collectively, subjectively or objectively, and we can continue to fight the good fight.

Chillers and thrillers are important for all these reasons and at least one other. They're entertaining to read or watch; they're fun!

Sources Cited:

Aristotle, Poetics.

King, Stephen, "Why We Crave Horror Movies," originally published in Playboy, 1982.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Not-So-Gratuitous Nudity, Part 2

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman


Context helps to determine how onscreen nudity registers--how, in other words, a moviegoer interprets its significance--and the context depends, in large part, upon the movie’s genre. For example, nudity in a romantic movie will be interpreted quite differently than nudity in a horror movie. However, context is more refined than simply a type of fiction would determine. The setting of the movie and other elements also suggest how onscreen nudity should be interpreted.

In Re-Animator, Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton) is shown lying on her back, upon a steel examination table that is covered with a light-blue sheet. She could be in a hospital, coming to, or going from, surgery, but her situation is actually far worse: she is in a morgue, an unwilling potential participant in a madman’s quest for reanimation.

Surgery is frightening because its outcome is uncertain. Often, patients survive operations and thrive. Sometimes, however, they die on the operating table or, if they survive a botched surgery, they live out their days horribly disfigured or disabled.

As frightening as a hospital tends to be, however, a morgue is much more unnerving, for morgues are, by definition, associated with death. To be on a metal table in a morgue is anything but reassuring--especially under the conditions in which Megan finds herself.
 

Whether her attacker is a demon or a poltergeist is unclear, but Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) emerges from an assault by an invisible rapist with bruises and injuries (The Entity). Her psychiatrist, Dr. Sneiderman, believes that Carla has caused these injuries to herself and that the “entity” whom she contends attacked her is but a delusion. As a child, she was sexually abused, becoming pregnant as a teenager. She also witnessed the violent death of her first husband. Her psychaitrist believes that these traumatic events have caused Carla to hate herself and to take her hatred out upon herself in violent displays of hostility and rage. However, moviegoers witness the attacks that Carla claims occur, seeing, before their own horrified eyes, the deep indentations in her breasts that the invisible entity makes during one of its terrifying assaults.

The juxtaposition of an invisible predator and a flesh-and-blood victim--and a nude one, at that--creates great tension, as audience members wonder whether they, too, could be similarly attacked by a ghost or demon that no one but they themselves can see--or feel. The indentations in Carla’s breasts, like the bruises and injuries to her body, witnessed by moviegoers, make it abundantly--and horrifyingly--clear that the entity is real, for, if it were not, it couldn’t grip Carla’s breasts, bruise her flesh, or injure her body. By reflecting the reality of the fleshless and invisible monster that assaults her, Carla’s nude and battered body magnifies the viewer’s own fear and dread, for, were the entity’s presence not revealed by these signs of its attendance, it would be easy to suspect, as the psychiatrist does, that Carla is hallucinating. The film does not allow this option. The entity is known by its effects upon Carla’s flesh and is as real, therefore, as she herself. The reality of the entity is the movie’s source of horror.


Evil can appear attractive. This idea seems to be the theme of Innocent Blood, in which Anne Parillaud plays Marie, a lovely, modern vampire. Her lovely, bare body seems to ask, Do bad things come in beautiful packages? Her slender frame, her fetching beauty, and her vulnerable nudity all seem to suggest the same thing: a beautiful young woman--or vampire--is too beautiful to be hazardous to one’s health. Evil is ugly, after all. The beautiful people are not dangerous--even when they are undead. The truth is, of course, altogether different, and much of the film’s horror, revulsion, and suspense is based upon this paradoxical and ambiguous depiction of evil as attractive.
 

In Cat People, legend has it that a werecat transforms into a leopard when it has sex with a person, regaining its original human form only when it kills a person. The film plays upon fears of both incest (the werecats are incestuous) and bestiality, with the nude and sensual bodies of Irena Gallier (Nastassja Kinski) and zoologist Alice Perrin (Annette O’Toole) temptations that Irena’s brother Oliver, who is also Alice’s colleague and boyfriend, is unable to resist. Their nudity gives flesh, as it were, to the horrific temptations of incest and bestiality that haunt the decadent Oliver--indeed, their nakedness may well likewise tempt the viewer who, as voyeur, more or less willingly watches these dark and twisted, if sensual and seductive, sexual obsessions and acts.


Good girls don’t have sex. They don’t get naked, either, except in socially sanctioned places and situations, such as the shower or their doctors’ offices. This belief, whether founded in reality or naiveté, is the basis for the shock that moviegoers feel when an actress with a wholesome image like that of Katie Holmes (The Gift) disrobes onscreen, and this shock, one may argue, is transferred to the girl-next-door character that she portrays--or, at least, appears to embody, as Holmes does in playing the innocent-looking, but sexually promiscuous, Jessica King, the local high school principal’s wholesome (-looking) fiancée. Her nudity and her innocent image contrast sharply, reminding filmgoers, once again, that, far from always inhabiting an ugly form, evil can, indeed, cut a strikingly beautiful figure; appearances can be deceiving.


Mathilda May may look a bit pale, but she also looks the very picture of health. Young and beautiful, she seems far too innocent and lovely to be a bloodsucking fiend, but, as a female vampire in Lifeforce, she is just that--as she proves again and again, flitting bat-like, from one host to another to relieve them of their life force. Beauty is, once again, a red herring, or false clue, suggesting that, in seeking evil, one must look elsewhere than the lovely face and form of Mathilda May, when, in fact, in her beautiful countenance and figure, they have encountered both true and deadly evil.

In horror films, nudity is a reminder of humans' (including moviegoers’ own) mortality; as a blatant exposure of the flesh, nudity can also highlight its opposite, the invisible spirit; nudity can signify the attractiveness of evil; and nudity, especially the nudity of a beautiful young, but wicked, woman, can suggest the absurdity of believing that beautiful people must also be good people.

The display of naked bodies in horror movies can, and does, accomplish more, as I will demonstrate in additional, future posts concerning the genre’s not-so-gratuitous nudity.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Edgar Allan Poe: An Obituary and a Eulogy

Copyright 2010 by Edgar Allan Poe


Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, and an obituary by his mortal enemy and biographer Rufus Griswold appeared three weeks later, on October 20, on page four of the New-York Weekly Tribune. It was another chance for Poe’s foe to lambaste the author, and he did so, claiming that Poe “had few or no friends” and suggesting that he was deserving of none. “Few,” Griswold felt sure, would “be grieved by” Poe’s demise.

Even the author’s reputation as a man of letters was questionable, Griswold implied: “Literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars.” Griswold, assuming the name of “Ludwig,” characterizes Poe as a dissolute alcoholic who lived a penurious and friendless existence at the expense, as often as not, of his benefactors. He was, “Ludwig” all but insists, little more than a freeloader:

His wants were supplied by the liberality of a few individuals. We remember that Col. Webb collected in a few moments fifty or sixty dollars for him at the Union Club; Mr. Lewis, of Brooklyn, sent a similar sum from one of the Courts, in which he was engaged when he saw the statement of the poet’s poverty; and others illustrated in the same manner the effect of such an appeal to the popular heart.
Poe came to the attention of the literati as a result of an accident, Griswold claims. He had entered a literary contest, and his story won not because it had any merit, but because it was the first among the many entries that showed any legibility, and the judges, in selecting it as the winner, might be done as quickly as possible with their responsibility:

Such matters are usually disposed of in a very off hand way: Committees to award literary prizes drink to the payer’s health, in good wines, over the unexamined MSS, which they submit to the discretion of publishers, with permission to use their names in such a way as to promote the publisher’s advantage[[.]] So it would have been in this case, but that one of the Committee, taking up a little book in such exquisite calligraphy as to seem like one of the finest issues of the press of Putnam, was tempted to read several pages, and being interested, he summoned the attention of the company to the half-dozen compositions in the volume. It was unanimously decided that the prizes should be paid to the first of geniuses who had written legibly. Not another MS. was unfolded. Immediately the ‘confidential envelop’ was opened, and the successful competitor was found to bear the scarcely known name of Poe.
Had it not been for the intervention of another benefactor, “the accomplished author” John P. Kennedy, who’d written Horseshoe Robinson, it seems unlikely, Griswold would have his readers believe, that Poe would ever have been likely to have earned himself the position of editor of The Southern Literary Messenger at even the “small salary” that Poe was paid:

The next day the publisher called to see Mr. Kennedy, and gave him an account of the author that excited his curiosity and sympathy, and caused him to request that he should be brought to his office. Accordingly he was introduced: the prize money had not yet been paid, and he was in the costume in which he had answered the advertisement of his good fortune. Thin, and pale even to ghastliness, his whole appearance indicated sickness and the utmost destitution. A tattered frock-coat concealed the absence of a shirt, and the ruins of boots disclosed more than the want of stockings[[.]] But the eyes of the young man were luminous with intelligence and feeling, and his voice, and conversation, and manners, all won upon the lawyer’s regard. Poe told his history, and his ambition, and it was determined that he should not want means for a suitable appearance in society, nor opportunity for a just display of his abilities in literature. Mr. Kennedy accompanied him to a clothing store, and purchased for him a respectable suit, with changes of linen, and sent him to a bath, from which he returned with the suddenly regained bearing of a gentleman.

The late Mr. Thomas W. White had then recently established The Southern Literary Messenger, at Richmond, and upon the warm recommendation of Mr. Kennedy, Poe was engaged, at a small salary — we believe of $500 a year — to be its editor.
In keeping with his image of Poe as a ne’er-do-well who lived off others, Griswold also characterizes Poe as something of a vagabond, mentioning his moves from Richmond to Philadelphia; from Philadelphia to New York; from New York back again to Richmond; and, finally, as it seemed, judging by his death in Baltimore, back again to New York.

In the years following the death of his “poor” wife, whom Poe had married “hurriedly” and “with characteristic recklessness of consequences,” at a time when he was as penniless as she, the author was able to make a meager living on the basis of “an income from his literary labors sufficient for his support.” However, Griswold suggests, Poe continued to keep an eye out for the chance to freeload, for, as “Ludwig,” or Griswold, points out, Poe “was understood by some of his correspondents” to be planning “to be married, most advantageously, to a lady of that city: a widow, to whom he had been previously engaged while a student in the University.”

As a man, Poe didn’t amount to much, either, Griswold’s death notice suggests: “He was at all times a dreamer,” who walked about not with his head so much in the clouds as “in heaven or hell,” communing with imaginary beings, the “creatures and the accidents of his brain”:

He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned), but for their happiness who at the moment were objects of his idolatry — or, with his glances introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms; and all night, with drenched garments and arms wildly beating the winds and rains, he would speak as if to spirits that at such times only could be evoked by him from the Aidenn close by whose portals his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjugated him — close by that Aidenn where were those he loved — the Aidenn which he might never see, but in fitful glimpses, as its gates opened to receive the less fiery and more happy natures whose destiny to sin did not involve the doom of death.

He seemed, except when some fitful pursuit subjected his will and engrossed his faculties, always to bear the memory of some controlling sorrow. The remarkable poem of The Raven was probably much more nearly than has been supposed, even by those who were very intimate with him, a reflexion and an echo of his own history.
The true man is mirrored by his works, Griswold says, and Poe’s works are dark and dreary, indeed:

Every genuine author in a greater or less degree leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. While we read the pages of the Fall of the House of Usher, or of Mesmeric Revelations, we see in the solemn and stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncrasies, — of what was most remarkable and peculiar — in the author’s intellectual nature. But we see here only the better phases of this nature, only the symbols of his juster action, for his harsh experience had deprived him of all faith in man or woman. He had made up his mind upon the numberless complexities of the social world, and the whole system with him was an imposture. This conviction gave a direction to his shrewd and naturally unamiable character. Still, though he regarded society as composed altogether of villains, the sharpness of his intellect was not of that kind which enabled him to cope with villainy, while it continually caused him by overshots to fail of the success of honesty.
A friend of Poe’s, George R. Graham, answers Griswold’s character assassination-disguised-as-an-obituary with a eulogy in which he praises Poe (“The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham’s Magazine, March 1850, 36: 224-226). Adopting the device of writing his eulogy to Willis, a mutual friend of Poe and himself, Graham begins by taking unto himself the task of writing a “defence [sic] of his character” as it was “set down by Dr. Rufus W. Griswold.”

“I knew Mr. Poe well — far better than Mr. Griswold,” Graham writes, and he immediately describes Griswold’s portrait of Poe an “exceedingly ill-timed and unappreciative estimate of the character of our lost friend,” which is both “unfair and untrue.” Graham believes that Griswold demonizes Poe out of spite, or “spleen.” Griswold’s obituary is, in fact, Graham argues, an attempt to avenge himself and his friends upon Poe for Poe’s honest criticisms of their literary works:

Mr. Griswold does not feel the worth of the man he has undervalued; — he had no sympathies in common with him, and has allowed old prejudices and old enmities to steal, insensibly perhaps, into the coloring of his picture. They were for years totally uncongenial, if not enemies, and during that period Mr. Poe, in a scathing lecture upon [[“]]The Poets of America,[[”]] gave Mr. Griswold some raps over the knuckles of force sufficient to be remembered. He had, too, in the exercise of his functions as critic, put to death, summarily, the literary reputation of some of Mr. Griswold’s best friends; and their ghosts cried in vain for him to avenge them during Poe’s life-time.
What Griswold and his friends were incapable of achieving during Poe’s life, Griswold sought to gain after his death, by cowardly accusing Poe of charges against which Poe could not now defend himself. However, Graham suggests, even if Griswold had not had an axe to grind, Griswold would have not been “competent. . . to act as his judge — to dissect that subtle and singularly fine intellect — to probe the motives and weigh the actions of that proud heart” because not only did Griswold not “feel the worth of the man he has undervalued” but he also could not measure Poe’s worth, since Poe’s “whole nature — that distinctive presence of the departed which now stands impalpable, yet in strong outline before me, as I knew him and felt him to be — eludes the rude grasp of a mind so warped and uncongenial as Mr. Griswold’s.”

As a man, Griswold found Poe to have had close friends and to have been “always the same polished gentleman — the quiet, unobtrusive, thoughtful scholar — the devoted husband — frugal in his personal expenses — punctual and unwearied in his industry — and the soul of honor, in all his transactions. This, of course, was in his better days, and by them we judge the man. But even after his habits had changed, there was no literary man to whom I would more readily advance money for labor to be done.” As for his being a ne’er-do-well or a freeloader, Graham says, Poe was of such a rarified genius that his writings found only a small audience, (and literature is an enterprise that seldom pays well, in any case). He drank because he made little at doing what he loved so well:

The very natural question — “Why did he not work and thrive?” is easily answered. It will not be asked by the many who knew the precarious tenure by which literary men hold a mere living in this country. The avenues through which they can profitably reach the country are few, and crowded with aspirants for bread as well as fame. The unfortunate tendency to cheapen every literary work to the lowest point of beggarly flimsiness in price and profit, prevents even the well-disposed from extending any thing like an adequate support to even a part of the great throng which genius, talent, education, and even misfortune, force into the struggle. The character of Poe’s mind was of such an order, as not to be very widely in demand. The class of educated mind which he could readily and profitably address, was small — the channels through which he could do so at all, were few — and publishers all, or nearly all, contented with such pens as were already engaged, hesitated to incur the expense of his to an extent which would sufficiently remunerate him; hence, when he was fairly at sea, connected permanently with no publication, he suffered all the horrors of prospective destitution, with scarcely the ability of providing for immediate necessities; and at such moments, alas! the tempter often came, and, as you have truly said, “one glass” of wine made him a madman. Let the moralist who stands upon tufted carpet, and surveys his smoking board, the fruits of his individual toil or mercantile adventure, pause before he lets the anathema, trembling upon his lips, fall upon a man like Poe! who, wandering from publisher to publisher, with his fine, print-like manuscript, scrupulously clean and neatly rolled, finds no market for his brain — with despair at heart, misery ahead for himself and his loved ones, and gaunt famine dogging at his heels, thus sinks by the wayside, before the demon that watches his steps and whispers OBLIVION.
The solution might have been to sell out and write the hack work that a general audience more interested in entertainment than art seemed to crave, but Poe was too much a man of honor to do so, Graham declares: “Could he have stepped down and chronicled small beer, made himself the shifting toady of the hour, and with bow and cringe, hung upon the steps of greatness, sounding the glory of third-rate ability with a penny trumpet, he would have been feted alive, and perhaps, been praised when dead. But no! his views of the duty of the critic were stern, and he felt that in praising an unworthy writer, he committed dishonor.”

Rather than the idle, half-mad dreamer that Griswold had made Poe out to be, Poe was a man of genius, Graham states, whose thoughts occupied higher regions than those of men of more mundane interests:

He was a worshipper of INTELLECT — longing to grasp the power of mind that moves the stars — to bathe his soul in the dreams of seraphs. He was himself all ethereal, of a fine essence, that moved in an atmosphere of spirits — of spiritual beauty, overflowing and radiant — twin brother with the angels, feeling their flashing wings upon his heart, and almost clasping them in his embrace. Of them, and as an expectant archangel of that high order of intellect, stepping out of himself, as it were, and interpreting the time, he reveled in delicious luxury in a world beyond, with an audacity which we fear in madmen, but in genius worship as the inspiration of heaven.
It should be observed that contemporary critics hold a view of Poe that is much closer to Graham’s estimation of the author than to Griswold’s caricature of him.



Note: Both Griswold’s obituary and Graham’s eulogy may be read in their entireties at “A Poe Bookshelf: Books, Articles and Lectures on Edgar Allan Poe,” courtesy of The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.


Wednesday, September 15, 2010

What’s in a Name?: More (and Less) Than One Might Think

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Anyone who has entered his or her name in an Internet image browser is likely, unless he or she has a truly unique appellation, to have had the rather disconcerting experience of having come face to face, so to speak, with a stranger who shares the same name. This experience is all the more unsettling if the other person is of a different race or ethnic group or (if one bears a unisex name) the opposite sex. Social utility websites allow the same distressing experience.

Sometimes, other media provide the same result. In Las Vegas, a billboard advertises George Wallace, an African American comedian who appears at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Younger folks often miss the irony of the entertainer’s name’s being identical to that of the racist former Alabama governor who resisted the initiation of segregation during the early years of the Civil Rights movement, standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium to bar the 1963 enrollment of the school’s first black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood (“George Wallace,” Wikipedia).

According to Wikipedia’s “disambiguation” list for “George Wallace,” no fewer than eleven more-or-less famous men share this name, among them the former governor; his son; the American comedian and two other such entertainers; a football player; several politicians; foreign and domestic; an actor; an army officer; and a politician. No doubt, there are several less-famous men with this name as well.
 


Occasionally, people also change their names, Norman Jean Baker becoming Marilyn Monroe and Marion Mitchell Morrison becoming John Wayne, for example, and others who would not have shared the names with such celebrities now having their names in common with such an entertainer. (One thinks of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, for example, sharing a name with the Western film star but not with the actor previously known as Marion Mitchell Morrison.)



To most of us, our name is a representation not merely of syllables of sound but of who we are, of ourselves. We think of ourselves as unique. Indeed, we are told, in our youth, that there is no other person quite like us, that we are in a class by itself, the one and only of our kind. Discovering that we share a name with someone else or that we can change our names or that our names can come from other names, even from names that are associated with the opposite sex, is surprising; it is also a bit disconcerting, suggesting that our identities might not be as fixed and permanent as we had previously supposed them to be. If we can share our names with others, maybe we could also become other. We could become a member of the opposite sex. We could become a serial killer. We could become a bigot. We could (if we are women) lose our own identities to those whom we wed. The truth of the matter, of course, is that our identities are not as fixed and permanent as we might believe. Over time, our attitudes, our beliefs, our feelings, our tastes, our values all change; we change. Nevertheless, we believe (or hope) that, at the very core of our being, our hearts and souls remain unchanged. We trust that the essence of ourselves remains unique and incorruptible, both to time and to events. Otherwise, we fear, at some point, we would cease to exist. The loss of identity is the loss of the self to madness or to death. Eve on our gravestones, our names remain--for a time. When the elements have finally obliterated our names, it shall be as if we never existed. There will be no remnant of our identities, of our being, or ourselves.

Therefore, we are jealous of our names, and we guard them zealously, fearing identity theft as much because it is a violation of who we are as because it promotes financial disaster for us as individuals.

Prisoners abhor the loss of their names, which occurs when they are issued numbers in place of their names. They feel that they have been made less than human by being designated numerically rather than alphabetically, as if their identities have been reduced to the nomenclature of mechanical parts and assemblies. Marines also dislike drill instructors’ refusal to allow them, as recruits, to refer to themselves in the first person, as “I” or “me,” and the demand that, instead, they speak of themselves only as “the private.” They perceive the dehumanization that such attempts at resocialization have upon them as individuals.

Horror fiction plays upon our fears of transformation, of loss of identity, and of life itself. Horror writers and filmmakers know what is and is not in a name and how to translate these fears onto a printed page or onto the silver screen. Human beings undergo terrible transformations, becoming werewolves or vampires. They lose themselves to madness. They suffer agonizing deaths at the hands of others who have lost their own minds and souls.

Such films as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), a remake of the 1958 version directed by Kurt Neumann; Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982); the several versions of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Norman J. Warren’s Inseminoid (1982), John Carl Buechler’s Troll (1986), and Laurence Huntington’s The Vulture (1967) are just a few of the many, many titles of horror movies involving transformation that Buried.com lists for this category.

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories often feature protagonists who suffer a loss of themselves to madness, but this is a current theme among writers and filmmakers today as well, as is attested by such stories as John Fowles’ 1963 novel The Collector, the Friday the 13th movie series, the 1995 John Carpenter film In the Mouth of Madness (based upon the 1936 H. P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness), and, of course the classic 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho (based upon Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same title).

Why should our sharing our names with strangers be disconcerting? I think it is because we invest symbolic value in them. Our first names are given to us by our parents. Our last names identify our families and, therefore, our lineage. Perhaps it is unsettling for those women who opt to take their husbands’ names in lieu of the surnames by which, until they marry, they have been known all their lives. Certainly, the custom alters their perspective--and that of society’s--to some degree as to married women’s identities. Women are seen as more fluid than fixed in their identities. Not only do they shift shape (during pregnancy), but they are also likely to change their very identities, Miss Emily Jones, for example, becoming Mrs. Emily Smith. In formal correspondence, married women may be stripped even of the very remnant of their personal identity and their femininity that their first, or given name, provides them, becoming the “Mrs. John Smith” whose name appears after her husband’s: “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith.” Even women who remain single often derive their identity from another person of the opposite sex: Paulette and Paula both owe their names to the masculine Paul, for instance, just as the name Denise is derived from the masculine name Dennis. It must be disconcerting, indeed, for a Samantha to realize that her feminine name is based upon a variation of the masculine Samuel.


Death is a staple of horror stories, novels, and films. Virtually every one of them alludes to or, more often, features at east one (and usually several, or even many) savage murders. However, the so-called slasher movies, wherein nubile hotties for the most part, are sliced and diced for audience members’ vicarious viewing pleasure, is perhaps the most extreme sort of this type of fare. Slasher titles include Jack Sholder’s Alone in the Dark (1982), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Jim Gillespie’s I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) (based upon the 1973 Lois Duncan novel of the same title), Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers (2001), Kevin Connor’s Motel Hell (1980), Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp (1983), Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn (2003) (reminiscent of my own 2008 Blue Mountain Detour), and a host of others.

While writers and filmmakers are careful to disguise the fact that they are playing with readers’ and moviegoers’ identities by casting their treatments of this theme in terms of other “people’s” names (those of the characters who populate their pages or screens), make no mistake about it: a reader or a moviegoer by any other name would suffer the same existential angst as the characters who experience physical transformation, madness, or death in place of their voyeuristic audiences.

What’s in a name? More (and less) than one might think!

Friday, July 30, 2010

Disappointment "Under the Dome"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


To say that the ending to Under the Dome is anticlimactic is an understatement. To say, moreover, that it is sophomoric is to put the matter mildly. It is both a letdown and a disappointment.
King’s characters have suffered, most of them greatly; many of them have died. Were they real, flesh-and-blood people, the survivors would be traumatized, probably for life, by the death and destruction they have seen. Their friends, neighbors, and families, children included, are dead; their homes and businesses have been destroyed; their lives are in ruins. Why? What has caused this wholesale loss?

It could be argued that much of the death and destruction stems from the machinations of the greedy, self-serving, power-mad, criminal Big Jim Rennie and his cohorts. In the guise of doing what is best for the town, Big Jim has caused more than a good deal of mischief. He has abused his constituents, neglected the community’s real needs, and capitalized by pandering to the townspeople's weaknesses and fears. He has profited from the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine; he has ordered others to commit arson and violence; he has encouraged the incitement of a riot; he has murdered people with his own hands and has covered up the murders of others by his son. He has set friend against friend and neighbor against neighbor. His ordering of a raid against the drug addicts who hold hostage the propane tanks that he stole from the local hospital and other businesses to fuel his illegal drug operation resulted in a conflagration that decimated the homes and businesses of the thousands who also perished in the inferno, burned alive. Throughout the crisis that began with the descent of the dome and the many others that he himself created, Big Jim prospered while others suffered and died.

The townspeople are not blameless; both as children and as adults, they, too, have participated in the evils that befall themselves and others. Even the heroes and heroines of King’s novel have past sins for which to atone.

There are few true innocents under the dome, apart from infants such as Little Walter Bushey and the canines Horace, Clover, and Audrey.

Some citizens are guiltier than others: Big Jim Rennie, Junior Rennie, Pete Randolph, Georgia Roux, Frank DeLesseps, Melvin Searles, Carter Thibodeau, Stewart and Fern Bowie, Roger Killian, Joe Boxer, Phil Bushey, Lester Coggins, and Sam Verdreaux.

A few, the children, are innocent or relatively innocent: Joe McClatchey, Norrie Calvert, Benny Drake, Judy and Janelle Everett, Ollie and Rory Dinsmore, Alice and Aidan Appleton. However, as Julia Shumway’s account of the “watershed moment” in her own girlhood indicates, even children are capable of cruelty and evil.

Other characters are not developed enough for the reader to determine their guilt or innocence: Rose Twitchell, Anson Wheeler, Marty Arsenault, Rupert Libby, Stacey Moggin, Ron Haskell, Ginny Tomlinson, Dougie Twitchell, Gina Buffalino, Harriet Bigelow, Jack Cale, Johnny Carver, Lissa Jamieson, Claire McClatchey, Alva Drake, Tony Guay, Pete Freeman.

Finally, still other characters are guilty not because of corruption or meanness, but because of personal weaknesses or a significant, but lone, moral failure: Andréa Grinell, Andy Sanders, Dale Barbara, Angie McCain, Dodee Sanders, Freddy Denton, Piper Laurie, Rusty and Linda Everett, Romeo Burpee, Samantha Bushey, Stubby Norman, Brenda Perkins, Thurston Marshall, Carolyn Sturges.

King is careful, in most cases, to indicate his characters’ various moral offenses or failings, which include drug addiction, alcoholism, child abandonment, sexual promiscuity, adultery, henpecking, negligence, a reluctance or unwillingness to involve oneself in social and political conflicts and the duties of citizenship, assault (physical, sexual, and verbal), murder, malfeasance, theft, arrogance, a greater concern for economic advancement than for ending human suffering.

King suggests a practical means of distinguishing good from evil. Moral actions help others (or, presumably, oneself); immoral actions hurt others (or, presumably, oneself). In addition, in quoting Jimi Hendrix, the author suggests another, more nebulous criterion for determining what behavior is good and desirable and what behavior is bad and undesirable: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the earth will know peace.” For the most part, his characters’ deeds and misdeeds fit into one or the other of these classification systems. Clearly, Big Jim’s actions are motivated by a love of power rather than by the power of love; likewise, his behavior has a harmful, more than a helpful, effect on others, including his son (and, ultimately, himself). In other cases, the classifications are not as clear cut, but the moral theory that King suggests seems applicable to their conduct, nevertheless. Human behavior’s effects, whether good or evil, desirable or undesirable, right or wrong, continue beyond individuals' lives, effecting the lives of their posterity. Police Chief Howard Perkins’ collection of evidence against Big Jim certainly influenced the events that transpired in the town long after his own demise. Likewise, the lesson in humility that Julia Shumway learned when she was abused as a child by her classmates at the Commons’ bandstand had a definite effect upon her behavior in begging the alien child for mercy at the end of the novel and was critical in the salvation of the remnant of the townspeople.

In his exploration of moral and immoral behavior and the effects of both upon the human community, both present and future, King’s novel offers penetrating insights and a good deal of food, as it were, for thought and is a rewarding read. The story itself is also a fairly suspenseful, almost always intriguing, and entertaining experience. Like most of King’s other novels, this one is apt to stay with the reader, to become part of who he or she is. This is certainly a test of effective, even of good, literature.

The test, perhaps, of which characters King finds worthy of salvation is indicated in his catalogue of final survivors, which appears on page 1066 of his novel. If this is true, one can extrapolate from what the omniscient narrator and the characters themselves have revealed concerning these characters’ past deeds and misdeed:

(On page 997, according to the omniscient narrator, “on Saturday morning. . . “just thirty-two” survivors remained of the town’s population:
  1. Aidan Appleton
  2. Alice Appleton
  3. Dale Barbara
  4. Harriet Bigelow
  5. Gina Buffalino
  6. Romeo Burpee
  7. Little Walter Bushey
  8. Ernest Calvert
  9. Joanie Calvert
  10. Norrie Calvert
  11. Ollie Dinsmore
  12. Alva Drake
  13. Benny Drake
  14. Linda Everett
  15. Janelle Everett
  16. Judy Everett
  17. Rusty Everett
  18. Pete Freeman
  19. Tony Guay
  20. Lissa Jamieson
  21. Piper Libby
  22. Thurston Marshall
  23. Claire McClatchey
  24. Joe McClatchey
  25. Big Jim Rennie
  26. Julia Shumway
  27. Carter Thibodeau
  28. Ginny Tomlinson
  29. Dougie Twitchell
  30. Rose Twitchell
  31. Sam Verdreaux
  32. Jackie Wettington
By page 1066, seven others (Aidan Appleton, Ernest Calvert, Benny Drake, Thurston Marshall, Big Jim Rennie, Carter Thibodeau, and Sam Verdreaux) have died, bringing the total number of survivors to twenty-five. 
  1. Alice Appleton (child)
  2. Dale Barbara (Army colonel; cook)
  3. Harriet Bigelow (elderly woman)
  4. Gina Buffaloing (volunteer nurse)
  5. Romeo Burpee (department store owner)
  6. Little Walter Bushey (baby)
  7. Joanie Calvert (mother)
  8. Norrie Calvert (child)
  9. Ollie Dinsmore (child)
  10. Alva Drake (mother)
  11. Linda Everett (police officer)
  12. Janelle Everett (child)
  13. Judy Everett (child)
  14. Rusty Everett (physician’s assistant)
  15. Pete Freeman (news photographer)
  16. Tony Guay (sports reporter)
  17. Lissa Jamieson (librarian)
  18. Piper Libby (pastor)
  19. Claire McClatchy (mother)
  20. Joe McClatchy (child)
  21. Julia Shumway (newspaperwoman)
  22. Ginny Tomlinson (nurse)
  23. Dougie Twitchell (nurse)
  24. Rose Twitchell (restaurant owner)
  25. Jackie Wetting ton (police officer)
Barbie did not stop the torture of war prisoners that his team was interrogating in Fallujah. Romeo is an adulterer. Initially, Linda was willing to believe false testimony and bogus evidence against Barbie. As a boy, Rusty tortured ants, burning them alive. Piper still preaches, although she has become an atheist. As a child, Julia was arrogant toward her classmates, thinking herself superior to them. The other adults are unlikely to be blameless (what adult is?), but the narrative does not provide enough information concerning their backgrounds to identify any specific wrongdoing on their part. As the abuse that Julia suffered at the hands of her classmates shows (and as the torture of the residents of Chester’s Mill by the young alien also indicates), children can also be guilty of wicked, cruel behavior, but, again, the reader is not made privy to enough information regarding the children who survive to know exactly what wrongs they may be guilty of having committed. Because of Julia’s humiliation, she learned humility, and she pleads with the young alien who has imprisoned her and the other residents of Chester’s Mill under the dome to release them so that they may live out their “little lives” in a scene reminiscent of both her own abuse (as punishment for her arrogance toward her fellow students) and Rusty’s realization that ants have “little lives” that should not be wantonly destroyed any more than any other life. The alien’s sparing of them may be regarded as a sort of redemption for them, a pitying, if not a forgiveness, of them. Just as one of Julia’s tormentors returned and gave her a sweater to wear home, the extraterrestrial child removes the dome to allow her and her fellow survivors to live out their “little lives,” an act that the novel’s protagonist attributes not to love, but to pity: “Pity was not love, Barbie reflected. . . but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction” (1072).

King’s morality (helping others = good; hurting others = evil) is a survivors’ morality. It does not depend upon God or love or anything else but the assumption that helping others is morally proper, whereas hurting them is morally improper. All of the survivors, despite the horrific experiences they have undergone and whatever their faith, if any, may be, or their philosophy of life, may agree to accept this most basic definition of righteousness. It is virtuous to help and depraved to hurt others. King’s characters pass or fail the morality test depending upon whether they help or hurt their friends, neighbors, and families. In quoting Jimi Hendrix (“when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the earth will know peace”) and in suggesting that, while it is not love, pity for another is “a step in the right direction,” King implies that, beyond the simple morality of survivors, there is a deeper, more mature standard for determining right and wrong, or good and evil, which is whether one loves and is loving; he also suggests that, for the majority of human beings, who are morally immature, such an understanding awaits the humility and wisdom that may follow from horrific and traumatic suffering.

The disappointment is the cause of the dome or, at least, of its descent. Earlier in the novel, several possible causes for this phenomenon were suggested, including that the dome was a living entity, that it is the invention of rogue scientists, that it is a means of terrorist attack, that it is a government experiment using the Chester’s Mill residents as guinea pigs, and that it is the work of extraterrestrials possessed of superior technological sophistication. It turns out to be a toy of sorts, and the ones who use it, children. Granted, they are children of extreme intelligence, but children, nevertheless, with no more compassion or love for the human beings whom they torture than children who set fire to anthills have for the ants they thereby kill. The problem with this premise is that it creates a context--a dome, if one pleases--in which adult behavior is perceived by immature, alien beings. They are cosmic creatures, but without the wisdom and love of the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent God in whose existence Piper Libby comes to disbelieve and, finally, to deny, accepting, in its stead, a belief in the aliens:
Piper Libby. . . was thinking of all those late-night prayers to The Not-There. Now she knew that had been nothing but a silly, sophomoric joke, and the joke, it turned out, was on her. There was a There there. It just wasn’t God (934).
The absurdity of a pastor rejecting the traditional idea of God for one in which the deity is a group of extraterrestrial “kids” is ludicrous. For greater minds than that of King’s own, such as those of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, Soren Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich, to mention but a few, such a revision of faith would be not only ludicrous, but also blasphemous. By reducing the complexity of human behavior, predicated as it is, to some degree, upon free will, to conduct that parallels the simple, instinctive, and probably completely determined behavior of ants is itself ridiculous, but then to make human existence a plaything of amoral and sadistic (albeit cosmic) children is to vacate any suspension of disbelief the reader is capable of extending to the author’s work. A belief in the God of the Jews, the Christians, or the Muslims is a basis for understanding human nature; substituting extraterrestrial children for such a deity is simply incredible and silly. Under the Dome is an entertaining novel, to be sure, but, one may be confident in the belief that neither William Golding nor T. S. Eliot need fear having their work confused with King’s novel, the master of horror’s allusions to their respective novel and poem notwithstanding.


NOTE:  Be sure to visit Chester's Mill's website!

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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