Horror as tragedy? Pt. 1

A lot of people have asked me to further clarify what I'm trying to do with this blog. Allow me to demonstrate my greater point by way of a few clear examples:


Western narrative is at a strange impasse during the first decades of the 21st century: while, on the one hand, we have the greatest access to as many different narratives in as many different media-forms that anyone has ever had in all of human history, on the other hand, most of this ability is used, it seems, to concentrate on a fairly narrow spectrum of pop-cultural ephemera. Moreover, as the great mythologist Joseph Campbell once put it in an interview with the late Michael Toms on the New Dimensions radio program , "Anything from the past, like an idea of what man of this or that culture might or should have been, is now archaic…”

This presents an obvious problem for philosophy in particular, since it’s one of the oldest academic pursuits. How, then,  is a modern intellectual steeped in the Western philosophical tradition to deal with this problem?

The purpose of this post is to solve this apparent problem by elucidating the philosophical/aesthetic connections between Tragedy and Horror as multi-media narrative genres. These two genres are ideal for this purpose:

on the one hand, there is Tragedy, which, more than any other narrative genre, is the ‘Philosopher’s Genre’ of story; this situation is a product of historicity. Aristotle, in writing The Poetics, not only laid the groundwork for much of Western Aesthetics, Literary Theory, Musicology, etc., but also famously argued for the superiority of Tragedy as a genre of poetry/drama. Following him, a number of Western intellectuals – most notably Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud – took various examples of tragic stories as central to their philosophical programs.

On the other hand, there is Horror, a pop-cultural genre which maintains a perennial popularity not really afforded Tragedy anymore. One of the most groundbreaking text in modern, Analytic aesthetics – Noel Carroll’s seminal 1990 text The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart -  made waves upon its publication for tackling a subject formally alien to many serious, Western academics – one from (God forbid!) the popular culture.

In the nigh-on 25 years since its publication, the book has aged extremely well, even becoming what many would consider to be a central text in a growing field that might be called ‘horror theory’.
I intend here to draw definitive, concrete connections between the aesthetic philosophy of the horror genre put forth by Carroll and other aestheticians in the modern Analytic tradition and philosophies of tragedy – culled mostly from the ancient Greek and German Idealist/Romantic traditions – that so heavily inform the Western Aesthetic Tradition. Though vague/intuitive references to the similarities between genres have been referenced in a variety of different texts, I intended to focus on a much more strictly Analytic approach in the Modes of Aristotle and Carroll.

Goethe ‘s Faust and The Importance of Carroll’s “Overrearcher Plot”

In writing the introduction to The BFI Companion to Horror, acclaimed British genre fiction author and critic Ramsey Campbell lamented the (otherwise rather extensive) volume’s exclusion of entries on the tragedies of both Shakespeare and Goethe, because the topic would implicitly be too large for the scope of that particular book.

For an example of this problem, consider all the ways in which Faust, Part I  might be said to represent the penultimate pre-horror prototypes of what Carroll called “The Overreacher Plot.”

Carroll defines the Overreacher as “…criticizing science’s will to knowledge…the recurring theme of the ovverreacher plot is that there is some knowledge better left to the Gods (or whomever).” Further, Carroll defines the Overreacher plot as having four major plot points:

1. Preperatation for Experiment or Magic Ritual
2. Execution of Experiment or Magic Ritual
3. Results of Experment/Magic Ritual and Karmic Boomeranf
4. Conforntation.

This differs from the more common structure Carroll calls the Complex Discorvery plot in that it is the failure of the protagonist of the story – as stated, usually some kind of Mad Scientist, Black Magician, Machiavellian Tragic King or Pygmalian-type artist – that brings about the final confronatational situation at the story’s climax.

Cynthia Freeland, clearly keeping Carroll in mind, would cite Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein as the root of this trope . But, as I stated, I believe the root of this idea back to further, first to Goethe’s Faust.

We know that Goethe was an influence on Shelly’s novel, since the monster, in learning to read, cites the plot of The Sorrow of Young Werther as having much in common with his own story.
But, Goethe’s connection to horror is demonstrated even more clearly in Book I of Faust. Immediately following the “Prologue in Heaven”, the reader is greeted with a scene of Faust in his antechamber, spelling out his reason for turning away from his role as a model enlightenment-era scholar  - a man of rational, logical thought and empirically-based knowledge - back  to, “…the abyss of Magick.”  Faust says,

“I’ve studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine –
And even, alas! Theology, -
From end to end, with labor keen ;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before…

A few lines down, Faust continues,

“…I do not pretend I could be a teacher
To help or convert a fellow creature.
Then, too, I’ve lands nor gold
Nor the world’s least pomp or honor hold –
No dog would suffer on like this!
So mine eyes, turn, now, to the abyss
Of Magick…”

If we recall Carroll’s imperative that, in the horror genre, “…monsters…[are] of supernatural origin…breach[ing] the norms of ontological propriety assumed by the positive human characters in the story”    it becomes perfectly clear how Goethe, in pitting a rationalistic man of letters like the learned scholar Faust against the ideals of what Isaiah Berlin called the “anti-enlightenment” of Romanticism  – here represented, along with Mephistopheles himself, by sundry evil spirits, witches, shape shifting animals, and various other frightening supernatural entities which bare very obvious genealogical connections to the monsters of the horror genre – writes a kind of “proto-Overreacher Plot” right from the very beginning of Faust, Book I.

This example is important here for several possible reasons. The key for us, though, is directly related to Hegel and Aristotle’s respective tragic plot structures.

Starting with an approach to Hegel which may at first seem superficial, we look generally at the logical structure inherent to his dialectal logic, noting, in comparison,  both the stages of Carroll’s Overreacher plot, and the steps in the Scientific Method.

First, we take the “the preparation of experiment” stage as simultaneously equivocal to Hegel’s notion “Thesis” and everything that anyone performing an actual “experiment” would naturally do up until they were ready to form a legitimate scientific hypothesis. That is, we assume that by “preparation for experiment”, Carroll is implying a fairly standard notion of the term, and that character is either implicitly or explicitly

I. Asking a Question,
II. Doing some sort of background research (however revolting or Macabre that might be), and/or
III. Forming an actual experimental hypothesis.

Keeping all of this in mind, we could assert that the “thesis” is “hypothesis” is literally a type of Hegelian thesis.
In our Faust example, the reader is greeted by Faust’s implicit question from the first lines of the scene in which the titular character first appears. A few lines later, he succeeds in conjuring a wayward air spirit. This could counted in the model of the scientific method demonstrated above as (II) Background Research. When he finally does succeed in conjuring Mephistopheles, he thus also finally gets to question him face to face, thus counting as (III) stating his true intention – his ‘experimental hypothesis”, as it were.

The rest of plot of this – or any of the many versions - of the Faust story fall right in place. Step two (2) of Carroll’s Overreacher plot (“Experiment”) aligns perfectly with the scenes in which Mephistopheles ‘shows Faust around the world”. That many aspects of the world which turn out to be quite literally antithetical to Faust’s expectations of them only demonstrates the ways in which Hegel’s “Antithesis” fits neatly into our model. This all having been said, though, what about Aristotle?
Remember that when it came to tragic plots, Aristotle stressed two major plot devices above all else: recognition of errors and reversal of fortunes. So far, neither has happened yet. That is, until the next stage of our plot - the one simultaneously representing what Carroll called “Results of Experiment and Boomerang” and Hegel would call “Synthesis.”

In our example text, Faust next meets Gretchen while touring the world with Mephistopheles. He proceeds to seduce her, which ends up sending her to prison, and, ultimately, hell. Backtracking a little, though, we see that, when he first meets he falls in love, and is visibly happy for the first time in the entire poem. As Lane Davis notes,

“Faust meets a young girl with whom he immediately falls in love. Margaret, or Gretchen for short, avoids his advances but cannot help and think about the older, noble stranger she met on the road that day…”

It seems that his fortunes have changed for the better for the first time in the poem. It seems, at least for the moment, too, that the synthesis of everything that has happened to him until this point is also diametrically – and dialectically – in opposition to what has happened up until this point. But, the totality of the synthesis is that Gretchen is not only imprisoned for killing their baby, but also eventually dragged to hell, where Faust must follow; facing Mephistopheles in what Carroll would call “the Confrontation”. In going down into tell – a place from which he knows no own escapes – he is also forced to recognize all the sins he has committed, thus making all Book II of the tragedy conform to both Carroll and Aristotle’s models, while the very fact that Goethe chose to separate the two books at this point in the plot implies the beginning of a brand new dialectical relationship in the plot structure – one which has grown dialectically out of the three previous dialectical steps in the Book I.

These analyses, I think, clearly demonstrate how Carroll’s Overreacher plot compares to Tragic plot structures outlined by earlier philosophers. But what of the actual aesthetic choices made by the creator of a work of Horror? How might they reflect a tradition related to tragedy? Find out in my next blog entry...

Where 'Metonymic Category Jamming' Falls Short

The core of this problem surrounds the question of diegesis as it relates to metonymy. But I start, though, I should like to note two things.

First off, the definition of the word "metonymy" I'm using sticks to a pretty literal reading of the definition Carroll gave in his book. That said, I'm not here to squabble over petty BS about what "metonymy" means in some completely unrelated context. For example, unless we're talking about one of his mystery/suspense films that as such has some actual aesthetic connection to the horror genre, I don't really care about whatever Antonioni's films may or may not prove about the concept of metonymy as it relates to aesthetics, because, with reference to this topic in particular, well...Antonioni didn't make monster movies, and we're talking about the process of creating horrific monsters. The only way that example would ever come is by way of me needing a (mostly likely only briefly discussed) counterexample. Moreover, since Carroll's concept of metonymy is not meant to be tied to any kind of rhetorical analogy, we will proceed here (at least until we get to criticism #5 listed above(in another blog post)) in a way that avoids defining metonym as a type of allegorical structure.

The other potentially confusing issue could stem from the fact that here,  the term "diegesis" is always used as it would be in a discourse on film theory, no matter what medium I'm speaking about; that is, whether I'm talking about literature, film, or anything else, if I use the term "non-diegetic" or "extra-diegetic" (and the two are interchangable), what I mean is, "the concepts phenomenologically, empirically or in any other way perceptible to the characters existing in the world of the story."

For example, most narrative forms that use leit-motifs as musical devices (be they film/television scores, operas, musicals, art rock concept albums, or anything else) tend to be set up in a way that necessarily renders the musical content* of said leit-motifs as being definitively non-diegetic. This is even true of most operas by Wagner (who is widely regarded to have set the standard for the use of this concept). 

The most obvious canditate for the definitively cinematic visual non-diegetic is, of course, editing. Moreover, montage is the one aspect of cinema uniquely its own in that it doesn't borrow it's aesthetic from some previously extant art.

As previously stated, many of the structural techniques used in modern film scores tend to be derived from Wagnerian "Music Dramas". Or, as you might suggest cinematography be the starting point, but it borrows compositional structures not only from still photography, but, logically, then, the whole history of Western, 2-D visual design going back to da Vinci at least.

On the other hand, most of the techniques used by modern film and television editors were invented by individuals who, at least for the first fifty years or so, only had the brand-new concept of cinema and trial and error as reference points. This, taken together with the fact that most of the characters in the large percentage of film(s) are usually unaware of the edits makes montage the perfect place to start.

To that end, one could compare the notion of Category Jamming to the philosophical groundwork behind theories of (to use a very obvious example) Soviet Montage. After all, the notion that film is a kind of "Artistic Frankenstein" is so cliche it's boring, and, anyway, Eisenstein himself declared the true essence of cinema to be in the editing and not the story. 

These observations notwithstanding, however, the comparison between Category Jamming and dialectical montage falls flat, since Soviet cinema rarely, if ever, sought to create the affect(s) associated with the modern horror genre. Furthermore, as stated above, we are trying to avoid allegory, and soviet montage is basically to cinematic metaphorical allegory what the above mentioned Antonioni's films are to cinematic metonymic allegory. Even so, I feel it was important to clarify this idea now, because montage/editing (for our purposes here, the two are used interchangeably) and it's status as the 'uniquely cinematic art' still play a huge part in problematizing this issue, and though I will not get to that until the post following this one, I thought it would be helpful to clarify this concept early on.  That said...what are some examples of the visual non-diegetic in horror cinema?

If we wanted examples of non-diegesis in cinematic works of horror, it seems we actually have to avoid talking about montage for a moment and point to things like, for example, the color schemes in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or Suspiria, Kubrick's eerie use of radical symmetry in The Shining, or any of Hitchock's pioneering ideas about the nature of cinematic suspense. All of these notions are unknown to the characters in each of these respective films, therefore they are termed non-diegetic. But, these eerie/revolting/surreal/etc. visual devices still surround the character a la the way Carroll describes in his definition of metonyny. 

It is in this fact that we see the first of Carroll's short-comings: do non-diegetic surroundings count as metonymic in the way diegetic ones (like fog or vermin) surrounding the monster do? Carroll never even attempts to answer this question.    

Perhaps we could try to clear up some things by looking at examples from horror literature rather than horror film. In the interest of keeping everyone one the same page (rather than constantly referencing this or that text many will not have read or even heard of), let's make up a little story that borrows some easily understandable tropes from a well know horror author, and then use said story as the basis for a thought experiment:

Let's pretend there's a guy named 'Bob'. Bob is new to the horror genre, but he likes it a lot so far. In particular, he has recently become familiar with the works Algernon Blackwood, and is now inspired to write a prose story that, as Mike Ashely put it, seeks to emulate Blackwood's "...explor[ations of] the unseen powers of Nature." (Ashely, Mike The Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels,  Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, NY, 1988. Pg.103)

In Bob's story, Character 'A', a city-slicker, joins an expedition team on its way to northern Canada. Late one night, deep in the woods, he sees Character 'B', an American Indian he has yet to realize is actually some kind of malignant, supernatural forrest-geist incognito, carrying not only a tomahawk, but what also appears to be a dead body that looks identical to himself,  Character 'A'.

He runs back to base camp, where he confronts Character 'C', the expedition's leader. But, because 'A' is so sheltered from having lived in the city his whole life, he doesn't know the word 'tomahawk' and instead describes the small ax carried by 'B' as being a, 'hatchet', screaming, "I saw a man walking through the woods, carrying a hatchet!" as soon as 'C' is within ear shot.

Now, seeing anyone carrying an ax in the forrest is pretty mundane, so 'C' stops listening to 'A', because he assumes 'A' is a fucking lunatic. Thus, 'A' can't finish filling 'C' in with the other details. The end result of all of this is that the whole expedition team is massacred in a torture-porn-esque finale conducted by some kind of evil, anthropomorphized 'Will-of-the-forrest' who,  after  having shed his suit made from the flesh of dead Indian braves, then precedes to vanish into an invisible miasma of gong-like humming (or something). 

So, what we glean from the preceding example is a point about the difference between artistic forms that is actually very important here: first of all, though it may seem so obvious as to render the point unnecessary to state, it still makes a huge amount of difference that this is prose writing and not a movie, as in my earlier examples.

For example, movies are typically described as being made via a 'double-system' - that is, they are record by virtue of the fact that separate visual (the camera) and audio (the recorder) devices are made to operate together via a system like SMPTE Time Code. Comparatively speaking, then, prose fiction operates in a 'single-system' mode (that single system being written language)**. Thinking of it this way simplifies the whole-to-part relation implicit in the concept of 'metonymy' in a way that is much more conducive to Carroll's original definition of the term than otherwise might be the case, since it, for reasons to involved to explain here, allows us to compare works in different artistic mediums with relative ease. Getting back to our story,  though:

we see that Bob, who is obviously outside the world of the story, is able to describe Character 'B's ax as being both a tomahawk and a hatchet, even while Character 'A' (inside the world of the story) is completely ignorant to the existence of the concept denoted by the former of the two synonyms.

Here, we are referring to the literary element your high-school English-Lit teacher called 'tone'. To borrow a slang term used by members of my parents' generation, the tone of a piece of literature is sort of like the "vibe" the text puts out; it is the affect produced by the entirety of possible semiotic connotations, psycho-phonetic signals, etc. contained within the words and phrases used to compose the concrete visage of the text.

The "hatchet" vs. "tomahawk" discussion is a good example of this, because while the two words denote what is basically the exact same tool, a tomahawk is something that is designed specifically as a weapon of war used to scalp people. A 'hatchet', on the other hand, is, for most people, probably just a tool they'd be likely to see sitting around their garage. Thus, it can be said that a sentence that uses the word 'tomahawk' is already leaning toward a much more menacing tone than the exact same sentence written using the synonym 'hatchet'.

If Bob, as a writer, were to make use of all the conations implied by the word "tomahawk" and attempt to get them to operate with other elements of the text, he might also choose to use many other loanwords taken from American Indian languages as opposed to their English language synonyms. Thus, he would create a tone that, for example, might be described as making the already desolate image of the northern Canadian wilderness conveyed by the text feel even more 'foreign' or 'alien' to the English language reader who is probably more familiar with terms from Anglophile and Romance languages that s/he is with ones from, say, Eskimo–Aleut languages***.

And all of this relates back to our discussion of diegesis by virtue of the fact that, just like the edits or shot-compositions that form the basic elements of a film are largely unknown to the characters in that film, the character in the work of fiction cannot possibly have complete epistemological access to the form through which her fictive world is being rendered.

The, for example, 'unsettling', 'revolting', 'eerie', or 'menacing' tone of the words that are the basic building blocks of a prose horror story still "surround" the monster in that work of horror fiction in a way not dissimilar from the way in which the monster is simultaneously surrounded by the type of diegetic elements to which Carroll was referring. Following from that, it can only be said that they have to be read as performing a similar operation to the one Carroll calls "Metonymy".

So, to recap:

"Metonymy" (at least, in terms of the narrowed-down definition Carroll provides with relevance to both his and the present discussion) should be able to work in terms of both the form and the content of a work existing within the horror genre, but the way Carroll defines/problematizes it, it would appear as though this idea only applied to the content of the work exclusively. This fact, while far from showing Carroll's analyses to be bunk, merely shows them to be incomplete.

*'Musical content' being defined in almost any way you can possibly think of, (timbres, rhythms, melodies, harmonic progressions, tragic choruses, Deleuzian Refrains, The Basie Ending, The Tritone Interval, The Amen Break, The Tristan Chord, gay German disco 12"s, overrated guitar riffs, auto-tuned arm-pit fart noises, samples of that 'crashy-buzzy-explody' noise that happens whenever Sarah Palin names a baby, etc., etc.) 

**Because I want to keep all the things I talk about on this blog relevant to mass-media culture, I will tend to start from the vocabulary of film theory (as opposed to the art, theatre and/or literary that forms the basis of most film theory and modern mass media aesthetic discourses by simple virtue of the fact that those in the former category predate those in the latter historically speaking). 

***I would strongly advise against actually applying this sort of operation to a story you're writtng unless you are a part of the culture from whence said loanwords came, or you have spent a lot of time seriously studying and engaging with said culture. Otherwise, you run a real risk of reiterating potentially detrimental stereotypes on minorities too small in numbers, influence, and/or monetary prowess to effectively counteract them or do anything about it.