j d worthington
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- May 9, 2006
- Messages
- 13,889
What with the thread discussing horror readings for the month of October; the numerous threads on writers such as King, Campbell, Aickman, etc., not to mention Barker, Lovecraft, and various others labeled (rightly or wrongly) as "horror writers", I have been pondering the subject again. One aspect of this is the perennial debate concerning "horror" versus "terror". Most people don't make that distinction, but there have been a number of very astute commentators on the weird field who have, very cogently, with the general consensus being that what Karloff called "the tale of terror" is actually a much more demanding and artistic form than the "horror tale". One of my personal favorites is the formulation given by Sir Devendra P. Varma in his The Gothic Flame: "The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse". in other words, the difference between subtlety and (perhaps excessive) explicitness.
While I am by no means a prude when it comes to the graphic or explicit, I must admit that I do feel there must be a valid artistic reason for it beyond the simple one of "getting the reader's attention"; else what we are dealing with is, quite frankly, the most meritricious of all motivations when it comes to writing: the desire to shock simply for the sake of the shock. Not only is this, in my honest opinion, cheap and vulgar, but it is, in the long run, self-defeating; for what shocks one generation is utterly banal and boring to the next. What makes such things work, when they do, is that there is something more going on there; the "shock" is also working as a symbol for deeper things which continue to resonate and unsettle readers on multiple layers; while the simple physical repulsion becomes just that (at best): repulsion.
At any rate, this continues to lead me in the direction of feeling rather sad that so many of us, especially among those given to imaginative literature, have become so desensitized to "terror" in favor of "horror"; where it requires too much explicitness to stir a jaded appetite; we have, all-too-often, lost the ability to appreciate the "spiritual" dimension of such a tale, the ramifications which reach beyond the pages of the book and produce an unsettling worldview, even if momentarily; for such a worldview has a tendency to stick with one, when done convincingly, and to unsettle in quiet but profound ways. It questions our understanding of the universe, of "how things work", and gives us a glimpse into a realm far more alien than we imagine, and one in which we are, at best, waifs lost in the midst of a sea whose very vastness is beyond comprehension. This is what Lovecraft was referring to when, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature", he wrote the following:
Yet one does not have to necessarily expend an enormous amount of space in creating this impression (though it has, in much the same way as our reliance on horror rather than terror, become increasingly difficult to achieve without such length), and I would like, as an exercise in what I mean, to put out there what has sometimes been called "the shortest ghost story in the English language", as an example of concision in such matters (by which I mean the maximum effect with the minimum of words), and also as an example of what I think too many of us have lost: the ability to understand, without pondering, but rather on an impressionistic, almost instinctual emotional level, the implications of such subtler forms of the terror tale as our best practitioners have shown themselves capable of producing. I will simply close with the example itself, but what I am looking for is an idea of how many of us manage to "get" the chill of this little piece, and why each one thinks it works (or doesn't work):
A man is alone in his house when a hand touches him on the shoulder.
While I am by no means a prude when it comes to the graphic or explicit, I must admit that I do feel there must be a valid artistic reason for it beyond the simple one of "getting the reader's attention"; else what we are dealing with is, quite frankly, the most meritricious of all motivations when it comes to writing: the desire to shock simply for the sake of the shock. Not only is this, in my honest opinion, cheap and vulgar, but it is, in the long run, self-defeating; for what shocks one generation is utterly banal and boring to the next. What makes such things work, when they do, is that there is something more going on there; the "shock" is also working as a symbol for deeper things which continue to resonate and unsettle readers on multiple layers; while the simple physical repulsion becomes just that (at best): repulsion.
At any rate, this continues to lead me in the direction of feeling rather sad that so many of us, especially among those given to imaginative literature, have become so desensitized to "terror" in favor of "horror"; where it requires too much explicitness to stir a jaded appetite; we have, all-too-often, lost the ability to appreciate the "spiritual" dimension of such a tale, the ramifications which reach beyond the pages of the book and produce an unsettling worldview, even if momentarily; for such a worldview has a tendency to stick with one, when done convincingly, and to unsettle in quiet but profound ways. It questions our understanding of the universe, of "how things work", and gives us a glimpse into a realm far more alien than we imagine, and one in which we are, at best, waifs lost in the midst of a sea whose very vastness is beyond comprehension. This is what Lovecraft was referring to when, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature", he wrote the following:
Yet one does not have to necessarily expend an enormous amount of space in creating this impression (though it has, in much the same way as our reliance on horror rather than terror, become increasingly difficult to achieve without such length), and I would like, as an exercise in what I mean, to put out there what has sometimes been called "the shortest ghost story in the English language", as an example of concision in such matters (by which I mean the maximum effect with the minimum of words), and also as an example of what I think too many of us have lost: the ability to understand, without pondering, but rather on an impressionistic, almost instinctual emotional level, the implications of such subtler forms of the terror tale as our best practitioners have shown themselves capable of producing. I will simply close with the example itself, but what I am looking for is an idea of how many of us manage to "get" the chill of this little piece, and why each one thinks it works (or doesn't work):
A man is alone in his house when a hand touches him on the shoulder.
)
