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Monday, January 08, 2007
A Ghost Slayer
I just completed an approximately 40-hour plane trip from D.C. to Singapore. (That 15 hour layover in LA was not optimal.) Got off the plane at noon, giving me time to shower, eat lunch, review notes, answer a ton of email from students. Gave my first lecture - introduction to Plato, to 400+ undergraduates - at 4 PM (subjective time: 4 AM). Slept. Now it’s 4 AM and I’m awake.
On the plane I dipped into A Bottomless Grave: and other Victorian Tales of Terror
There are two basic plots to the Victorian ghost story: he doesn’t really believe in ghosts. But he sees a ghost. Or: she doesn’t really believe in ghosts. But she sees a ghost. Often there is a supporting character who can say ‘I told you so’. Sometimes this can be quite atmospheric, mind you. But styles have changed.
When, exactly - or approximately - did the protagonists of supernatural tales start fighting back on a regular basis? (Insert famous Chesteron quote about dragons, perhaps.)
It’s a somewhat eccentric little collection. It has a moody ‘haunted ship’ tale by Frank Norris. I don’t normally think of the author of McTeague and The Octopus as a ‘Victorian’ author. And a pair by Ambrose Bierce. It has a story called “Battle of The Monsters”, by Morgan Robinson, told from the point of view of - but I don’t want to give away the ending. But it’s all told from the point of view of microorganisms dueling in the body of a sick man. Robinson has the distinction of having written a novel entitled Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan - about a massive, unsinkable oceanliner, the Titan, sunk by an iceberg - 14 years before the sinking of the Titanic.
I see that someone has just made Snowden part of a Yorkshire dialects on CD-Rom project, if that sort of thing interests you. It’s true that parts of the story are a bit hard to follow.
Comments
When, exactly - or approximately - did the protagonists of supernatural tales start fighting back on a regular basis?
Epic of Gilgamesh? And then the Odyssey. And then Beowulf. And Duke Ernst. And so on, until it goes off the rails with Hamlet. Maybe the question should be: why did some people stop fighting monsters for a while?
why did some people stop fighting monsters for a while?
Obviously the answer will have to do with fear of sex.
But more generally: would it be right to say there have always (typically?) been two styles of supernatural tale - one in which you can fight the monster, one in which you can’t? Think: Tolkien on Beowulf and the two monsters. Greek heroes can’t ultimately contend with the gods, who rule their fates. Hmmmm.
I like Karl’s point, but will add a couple data points. William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder takes action in laying ghosts to rest, in the stories where the haunting is real. (Fun stuff: it isn’t always, so you can’t count on the ending being a particular sort just because it’s a Carnacki story.) Those appeared in the first few years of the 20th century; I don’t see where I put my copy of the collection right now, but I believe it was 1913 when they got collected. Whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry seems to agree. And some of Arthur Machen’s protagonists fight back hard and strong, with varying degrees of success. That goes back to the 1890s.
Greek heroes may not be able to contend with the gods, but their attempt to do so is often depicted as a heroic act, and sometimes the god seems to relent because they’re impressed.
There’s a third branch; tales in which people fight back but usually lose. Lovecraft, say.
The collision between literary monster-fighting styles often is played out in role-playing game design. For instance, an RPG was designed in which people play within a Lovecraftian universe. But of course contemporary players, conditioned by _Buffy_, video games, and so on, immediately break out firearms, and on a more general level have a modernist attitude that monsters from the outermost reaches of space are problems to be managed, rather than occasions for Romantic despair. So the game implements an explicit mechanic that the more you know about monsters, the less sane you become, until finally your associates need merely show you a blurry picture of a footprint for you to dive under your desk and start babbling about the fiends from Yuggoth. Your character is forced to follow literary conventions whether you like it or not. (Presumably you do; otherwise you wouldn’t play the game.)
I do think that division is a good place to start, John.
But Greek heroes can certainly fight with monsters. Hydras, Cyclops, Gorgans, Krakens, and so forth.
By the way, if you want to read more about ghosts, Jean-Claude Schmitt’s Ghosts in the Middle Ages is marvelous.
Bruce, thanks for the data. I also thought of Conan, who dates from the 1930s.
Rich, I used to own that game. Funny. In Lovecraft’s fiction, the fighting is the process of investigation itself. Given that whatever is discovered destroys the investigator’s sanity, this fight is one our human hero (or quasi-human: Shadow over Innsmouth) will inevitably lose.
Obviously the answer will have to do with fear of sex.
Or perhaps, with cross-reference to A. Singh’s post below, on secularism (of a sort). Various cultural interventions contrive to make monsters less believable. With Hamlet, for example, the ghost as ghost (rather than demonic apparition) contravenes anti-Catholic doctrine. You don’t fight such a creature; you try not to believe it. And yet it’s still there, perhaps as an uncanny, atavistic remnant of some purportedly dead culture. Borrowing here from some Greenblatt lecture I once saw, ill-remembered.
Why monsters have reentered mainstream culture--perhaps not serious fiction (except as something self-consciously gothic, like Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories); and please determine for yourself whatever artificial homogeneous group I mean by “mainstream culture"--is a question that someone not a medievalist might be able to answer. Maybe that atavism thing might work up to a point.
Dewd, I’ve been thinking of dusting off my old How to Do Things with Ghosts course when I return to the States, so thanks for the tip! A colleague does her version of this world lit course with a Freaks and Monsters twist. I’ll be sure to pass this along to her!